Last week, Ben Bernanke got the nod for another stint as head of the world’s most important central bank. Yes, he completely misunderstood the implications of the hugely negative US trade balance, believing that America did the world a favor by spending its “global saving glut.” And, yes, he missed the approach of the biggest financial disaster in three generations. Then, when it arrived, he mistook it for a routine recession, until finally, panicked by the collapse of Lehman Bros., he insisted that Congress pass a $750 billion spending bill – or “we may not have an economy on Monday.”

But except for things that really matter, he’s been a pretty good Fed chief. Besides, he has the right credentials. He was a professor of economics at Princeton and holds a Ph.D. from MIT – just like the most recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman.

The United States has just averted the Second Great Depression, say the papers. “What saved us?” asks Krugman in a recent New York Times editorial. “Big government,” is his answer. Specifically, the big government of Ben Bernanke.

But the ghost of Milton Friedman haunts the central bank. Bernanke borrowed a phrase from Friedman, saying he’d even “drop money from helicopters,’ if necessary, to prevent deflation. This led to one of the surest trades of the Bubble Era was the so-called on the ‘Bernanke Put.’ Investors thought they could count on him. Buy stocks. If they went down, Ben Bernanke would make sure you didn’t lose. He’d add liquidity until the market bounced back. But the Bernanke Put trade went bad in ‘07. The market fell. Ben Bernanke added liquidity. But so far, stocks have yet to regain 50% of what they lost. Meanwhile, consumer prices are falling. And yet, he does not drop money from helicopters. Why not?

Few people would have more authority on the subject than the group gathered at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles earlier this year. Michael Milken, the Junk Bond King, gathered them thither and picked up the tab for Gary Becker, Myron Scholes, and Roger Myerson…each of their names is preceded by ‘Nobel Prize winner.’ With that kind of brainpower on hand, you’d think you could come up with a good explanation. But the best they could do was a simple analogy. Gary Becker (Nobel awarded ‘92) took the Friedman line; he argued that by putting out the little forest fires, the recessions of the ’90s and the early ’00s, the feds inadvertently created the conditions for an even greater conflagration. Instead of burning off the underbrush, the tinder built up until a huge blaze was inevitable. And in a speech honoring Friedman, Bernanke accepted Friedman’s criticism of the Fed in the ’30s. Yes, Bernanke admitted, the Fed made mistakes; but we won’t do it again, he said. The burden of today’s rumination is that he was wrong; he will do it again.

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” said Friedman. But deflation doesn’t seem to be a monetary phenomenon at all. Despite huge inputs of new money from the Fed, prices are still going down. The Fed’s balance sheet more than doubled in the last 18 months. It will probably double again – to $4 trillion – before Bernanke’s next term is over.

Friedman won a Nobel Prize for his work. And he drew around him a community of scholars that won so many Nobel Prizes they ran out of room in the University of Chicago trophy cabinet. But it only makes you wonder about the Nobel committee. Friedman’s acolytes won their prizes for elaborating a series of mathematical proofs for things that were either self-evident or self-evidently absurd. Most of them were later shown to be wrong, irrelevant or misleading. Modern Portfolio Theory, Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model, Dynamic Hedging – the farther afield the scholars went, the more they lost touch with home. The more scientific their work became, the more it resembled alchemy or phrenology.

Friedman’s work itself was flawed in the same way. The general principle was correct – that the government that governs the markets least governs best. But when he got into the mechanics of ‘monetarism,’ he got lost. He believed that if the Fed kept its eye on the money supply; the free market would take care of everything else. But the free market didn’t take care of everything, at least not as people hoped. Economist Murray Rothbard explained why in 1971. You cannot expect the free market to function perfectly if you leave in the hands of the government the power to control money. Either markets are free or they aren’t, was Rothbard’s point. If they’re not free, you can’t blame freedom when they fail.

But free market economists are now blamed for everything. The free- market Chicago boys are out. The MIT crowd is in. And investors are buying the Bernanke Put again, confident that the Fed chief will keep pushing money into the system and stocks will continue rising. But Ben Bernanke, for all his bluster, is a victim of the trade. Everyone knows what he is up to. They can’t help but look ahead and see where it leads.

As soon as Bernanke starts his helicopter engines, bond buyers get out their missiles; the Chinese – the biggest single customer for US debt – have warned that they will shoot him down. What can Bernanke do? He is damned if he doesn’t. But even more damned if he does. He can’t guarantee increases in either CPI or stocks. All he guarantees is that Big Government will play a larger role in the economy…and that Milton Friedman’s history of the Great Depression will turn out to be prophecy:

“The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession… into a major catastrophe…”

Ultimately, Bernanke does what his predecessors at the Fed did in the ’30s…and what the Japanese did in the ’90s. He hesitates. He makes mistakes.

And he wonders why he took the damned job in the first place.

Regards,
Bill Bonner

September 1, 2009

Bernanke to Keep Blocking the Free Market was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Predictably, we’re likely going to see the addition of another big bureaucracy in reaction to a crisis partially caused by a poorly structured banking system and toothless enforcement of existing regulations. The answer to the sloppiness of bureaucratic regulators is, apparently, another layer of bureaucratic regulators. Regulatory reform will not be effective if its architects incorrectly diagnose how the system blew up under the existing system of oversight.

The popular narrative is that that the financial crisis was a failure of the free market, but this narrative glosses over the fact that banking is far, far from a free market. Those who describe the banking business as a wild, woolly free market simply do not understand how banks operate — especially how, with government subsidies and backstops giving them the confidence to make insane loans, banks had grown large enough to blow up the entire global economy.

Last year was less of a failure of free markets than it was the failure of the “shadow” banking system built on a weak foundation: bankers’ lack of connection with the risks they underwrote, government guarantees and tax incentives for mortgages, and misapplication of statistics to exotic fixed income securities, to name just a few things. The shadow banking system could not have grown as large and dangerous as it did without banks’ subsidies from taxpayers and the Fed’s manipulation of the price of money. The Fed’s interest rate targeting creates illusions about default and liquidity risks and distorts the natural relationship between savings and capital investment.

The banking system shares much in common with the federal government, especially in their common isolation from the discipline of the free market; Free market discipline refers to the fact that if you make mistakes, your customers will let you know about it by leaving, and if you don’t reform and improve your product or service, you’re out of business. By promoting competition, free market discipline imposed on business has done more for “the little guy” than any government handout by spurring advances in productivity and living standards.

The banking system hasn’t been subject to free market discipline for decades, and it’s still not. Case in point: Bank bondholders and shareholders were bailed out — at taxpayer expense — from the consequences of their poor lending and investing decisions.

Unlike most businesses, banks don’t earn their profits by serving customers, but mostly by extracting huge economic rents from savers and borrowers. Otherwise, the financial system couldn’t have grown to be such a large percentage of GDP.

Banks are supposed to be intermediaries between savers and borrowers, allocating credit in a manner at prices (interest rates) in line with default risk. But they largely failed in this role. Most banks — especially the “too big to fail” banks — did a horrifically poor job of pricing credit risk at the peak of the credit bubble. Credit spreads were ultra low in early 2007, when it was one of the riskiest times in history to be making loans.

How did the banking system make such colossal errors in judgment about credit risk? I described a few critical weaknesses in the banking system in a September 2007 Whiskey & Gunpowder article (see link here). It wasn’t rocket science to figure out how interest rates were sending a distorted signal about credit risk; all you needed to do was follow the new credit back to its ultimate source and ask the right questions about the connections (or lack thereof) between saver and borrower. One would think thousands upon thousands of federal banking regulators — and those responsible for designing our financial regulations — would have the resources at their disposal to identify the structural weaknesses in our financial system.

Unfortunately, instead of providing a road map to designing a system that connects savers with borrowers in a more sane, responsible manner, it looks like the proposed banking reforms will give us more of the same. Such economic power concentrated in the hands of banks not subject to enough free market discipline is a problem, and the real economy will likely suffer from it.

Regards,
Dan Amoss

June 23, 2009

Banking, the Federal Government and the Free Market was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Richard Layard from the London School of Economics, offered a way forward:

“We should stop the worship of money and create a more human society,” he writes. “Happiness has not risen since the 1950s in the US or Britain,” he points out, despite big increases in wealth. “Modern happiness research can help find answers,” he believes.

“Old fashioned socialist planning is the only coherent alternative to a collapsing capitalist economy,” an alert FT reader added.

Given the depth of these insights, we decided not to dive into this discussion headfirst. Instead, we will simply mock the swimmers from the bank. Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, for example, could only come up with a campaign slogan: “The future of human beings is what really matters.” But who can blame them? They want a capitalism that makes people happy…fairer, gentler, greener… they want to reform it…to housebreak it…to cut its balls off so they can safely put it on a leash and introduce it to their daughters.

But they miss the point of it altogether: we can’t reform capitalism; it reforms us. Capitalism punishes mistakes and rewards virtue (or good luck) – not necessarily quickly or gently…but roughly and imperfectly, like a hanging judge in a frontier town. On paper, of course, we can do better. Imagine a world where public employees are saints and geniuses who do such a swell job of allocating capital that we want for nothing. But then, when we get a chance to see them in action, we find that they are bigger rascals than the capitalists themselves.

This week, under pressure from its new proprietor – the U.S. government – AIG released a list showing who had gotten more than $100 billion of its bailout money. At the top of the list of recipients was a familiar name – Goldman Sachs. In a truly astonishing co-incidence, Goldman is the firm that had been run by the very person who headed up the AIG rescue – former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And what serendipity! Lloyd Bankfein – Goldman’s top man now – was actually in the room with the feds when the AIG rescue plan was put together.

In the room; in the deal. But the big scalawags ducked out of the press almost immediately. Instead, the headlines focused on the small fry. AIG paid bonuses of $450 million – some charged it was $1 billion – to its executives. These guys shouldn’t get bonuses, came the popular outcry; they should get a firing squad.

You’ll recall the story. The insurance giant AIG lost money on a series of gambles. For example, it gambled that it could insure the mortgage payments of people who couldn’t afford to buy a house. During the bubble years, people bought houses at outrageous prices. They could borrow 80% of the purchase price from government-backed debt mongers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Buyers were supposed to put up the other 20% themselves, giving lenders a margin of safety in case the transactions didn’t work out as planned. But, if an insurance company would guarantee the other 20%, Fannie could cover 100% of this “enhanced” mortgage loan. AIG found that insuring this part of the loan was profitable – as long as nobody asked questions. But then the market price for the collateral dropped – by as much as 50% in some areas. Suddenly, people were walking away from their houses. Defaults on these “enhanced” loans ran at 5 times the rates on normal Fannie-backed mortgages.

An ordinary person would look at these facts and pronounce the same judgment as the capitalist market: AIG and Fannie both deserve to go broke. But give him enough higher education in the economics department, or a job in government, and the fool rushes in –with someone else’s money.

In the theory of bailouts, an ailing firm is given a helping hand when it needs it. This gives it time to get back on its feet, and prevents it from dragging down its employees, lenders, investors and counterparties. But what actually happens is much simpler. Money goes from the pocket of the person who earned it…to the pocket of someone who didn’t…from the innocent bystander to the fellow who caused the accident. Capitalism takes money away from erring capitalists; the capitalism improvers give it back to them.

And who decides who gets the loot? Ah…as soon as you hold them up to the light, the angels’ wings fall off. By and large, these are the same cherubim and seraphim – such as Hank Paulson – who were supposed to be leading…regulating…and controlling capitalism when it ran into a ditch. Not a single one raised a warning. Instead, they whooped for the free market and passed the whiskey bottle to the driver! And now, thanks to their bailouts, AIG continues writing insurance against mortgage loans. Seventy-three AIG executives continue getting $1 million bonuses. A long line of reckless counterparties goes unpunished. And Hank Paulson offers advice to Financial Times readers on how to make capitalism work better.

But that is always the problem with improving capitalism…even in the slapstick American way. The reformers promise a ‘new deal,’ but they’ve always got an ace up their sleeve somewhere.

Enjoy your weekend,
Bill Bonner

March 27, 2009

The Capitalism Reformers Caper and Prance was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Obama as Prime Mover will have to turn the chaos in America’s housing and mortgage market into harmonious order. Then He has to single-handedly leap a tall legacy of toxic assets in a single bound, freeing up banks to lend by buying all of their dodgy assets.

It’s a big ask. But if anyone can do it, He can. Especially when He’s got America’s credit rating to abuse!

Reordering the financial universe is not cheap. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of matter in the form of new U.S. dollars. Reuters reports that, “Goldman Sachs estimated that it would take on the order of $4 trillion to buy troubled mortgage and consumer debt. That number could shrink if the program were limited to only certain loans or banks, but it could also grow if other asset classes such as commercial real estate loans were included.”

How much is $4 trillion? “At $4 trillion, that would be the equivalent of nearly 1/3 of U.S. gross domestic product. If the government had to fund that amount by issuing additional debt, it would intensify investor concerns about massive supply scaring off demand.”

Yes. You can imagine the world’s main owners of dollar-denominated reserve assets (China, Japan, the Petro states) would be intensely concerned about a $4 trillion increase in dollar denominated debt. But wait a tick…

It’s one thing to say you might need to float as much as $4 trillion in debt to fund your bad bank. It’s another thing to sell that debt? Who will buy it? Even these days, $4 trillion is a lot of capital to loan. Maybe that number has been floated to make a smaller number, say $2 trillion, look small by comparison.

Good news everyone! The Bad Bank is going to cost us half as much as we thought!

If the ‘big bang’ goes off this week, what will it mean for Planet U.S. Dollar? Or Planet Gold? Well, as our friend Steve Belmont in Chicago reported on Friday, gold is moving toward a day of reckoning after trading in a range for the last ten months. It will either break out much higher, Steve says, or buckle. We’ll be watching.

Did you notice the obnoxious change in political rhetoric this weekend? You knew Barrack Obama was going to give it to Wall Street, calling executives “shameful” for getting bonuses while their firms received TARP money. Remember, by the way, the TARP money was forced on some firms in an effort to boost confidence in the overall plan.

We normally try to keep a reserved, ironic, and sceptical air when reading the statements of politicians. Most of them are not worth taking seriously. But every once in a while, you get the scent of something so noxious and dangerous that you have to put aside humour and call it what is. Today is one of those days.

Now, the populist shame game is to be expected. That’s not a big deal. What’s more alarming is the bilge and claptrap spilling from Kevin Rudd’s gob and what it may mean for your ability to preserve and create wealth in the coming years.

In The Monthly, Rudd plants a Neo-Marxist flag in the ground of the current debate with the kind of jargon-laden elitist preening that makes academic critics of the free market (who’ve never spent a day in the business world creating value) so nauseating.

Specifically, Rudd writes that, “The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes. Neo-liberalism, and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy.”

Why not proclaim, since he is apparently in the position to make such proclamations, that the experiment in paper money and the deliberate policy of inflation it implies is theft? It is bureaucratic lust for power and authority disguised as monetary policy? It’s also, at its heart, the belief that one or a few people in government know better than you how you should lead your life.

Leave it to Rudd and the resurgent global Left to use the present crisis as an occasion to expand their political ideology of government power and wealth confiscation. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marxism never really went away. It ensconced itself in Western universities and colleges, and in the careerism of the political class, which believes it is entitled to govern by virtue of its intellectual superiority and the moral justness of its anti-market position.

Their strategy, as always, is to control the rhetorical high ground by framing the discussion in populist terms and making an enemy of “greedy capitalists.” Don’t get us wrong. There are plenty of greedy capitalists to go around, or to go to jail. In fact, many more of them would be going out of business if the government would quit propping them up with taxpayer money. This generation of corporate executives shares plenty of blame for playing fast and loose with the corporations they were supposed to be stewards of. They over-levered, over-speculated, and over-paid themselves.

But Rudd is an ignoramus of the lowest order to say that current events somehow negate the last thirty years of globalisation, or three hundred years of economic growth and the division of labour. Tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty. Hundreds of millions have more economic and political freedom than ever before.

These results can only be the product of a system in which risk taking entrepreneurs have access to capital and savings, allocated through competitive markets where firms that deliver real value to consumers thrive and those that don’t fail. That system has worked for 300 years of Western history to create wealth, choice, and opportunity.

Shame on Kevin Rudd for calling that “market fundamentalism”, as if belief in the institutions that create wealth and liberty is akin to the same kind of religious fundamentalism that permits suicide bombing. If there is a more offensive use of rhetoric to equate two vastly different things, we haven’t seen it.

But the Neo-Marxists are back on the march. And they are probably coming for your wages and pension sometime soon. Make no mistake about it. 2009 is the year the Neo-Marxists have been waiting for.

It is their chance to undo all the perceived evils of Thatcher and Reagan. There would be plenty of those to undo, of course, not least the idea that deficit spending is morally permissible. But the real push by the Neo-Marxists is to use the present occasion to expand the scope and reach of government power into your private life, so they can tell you what to do, what to watch, what to eat, what car to drive, and ultimately, what to think or say.

This will be disguised as better more “parental” regulation to achieve more equality and social justice. But behind the false populist outrage and the elevated language of idealism, it’s just another push for government elites to expand their ability to compel you to live the life they think you should lead.

The simple regulatory response to all this is to reduce the amount of leverage available to financial players. Reduce margin lending in shares. Let bankers get back to making prudent loans in the housing market based on what a buyer can actually repay, rather than letting the government subsidise subprime lending because it’s politically desirable.

There are other sensible regulatory responses to the mess. But they will be discarded in favour of grandiose and over-reaching plans to redesign the entire world in some utopian image. A “big bang”? Really. Does that mean they’re going to blow things up and call it a “fix?”

What we’re getting at is that it’s going to be a tremendous challenge to withstand this push in the next few years, mostly because it will have so much popular support from people with no brains who believe in fine sounding speeches and appreciate getting tax rebates/credits/handouts from the government. The first battle in the war on wealth creation is wealth redistribution, whether you like it or not.

It would be more honest if the Left just came out and said something like, “The last ten years have been a huge wealth transfer from the middle class to Wall Street and from the developing world to the developed world. We’re going to try and reverse all that now because we know it’s our best shot in the last thirty years to get some back. So here we come! Open your wallet and shut your mouth!”

Neo-liberalism isn’t the culprit in all this. What does that word even mean? Isn’t Rudd using it because it sounds like Neo-Conservatism? And everyone knows that Neo-conservatism is evil, therefore Neo-Liberalism must be evil too!

The real evil of the last thirty years is the vast expansion of credit in the world that changed personal and corporate incentives. The plunge in the cost of capital-encouraged by governments and Central Banks-set of an orgy of bad risk taking, quietly condoned by regulators and politicians who all benefitted in some way from housing/commodity/trade booms.

But now the credit cycle has turned. The Credit Depression is upon us. And Comrades Rudd and Obama will try and use it for the next great push in the Neo-Marxist dream, one world government with one world currency. More on that tomorrow!

Regards,
Dan Denning

February 4, 2009

Marxism Marches On was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

John Maynard Keynes, an early 20th century economist, was the most influential advocate of government influence in the economy. Thanks to him, an entire generation of voters thinks the president “manages” the economy. Keynes’ followers, who populate the halls of government and academia, think the government needs to act when the free market “fails.” They propose government solutions to problems like “liquidity traps” and “insufficient demand.”

These alleged problems became so feared that the U.S. government decided it was necessary to move the dollar to a completely paper, faith-based system — despite historical evidence that every paper money system fails. The Federal Reserve has cemented its role as price fixer for short-term interest rates. It fuels speculative bubbles when the economy slows, and denies all responsibility when bubbles burst. The cycle then repeats.

The New Deal was Keynes’ idea. The era of colossal government — the New Deal — began as a popular reaction to the Great Depression. The Depression started when an inflation-fueled bubble popped, and worsened in the mid-1930s, when the government taxed capital away from entrepreneurs and reinvested it into “make work” programs.

This is one of many examples in which government power grew at the expense of the more efficient free market. These ideas, and the proposed solutions to them, distort the free market’s investment cycles and have gotten the U.S. to the point where it simply cannot function without asset inflation.

Today, the government proposes solutions to problems caused by government interference. Specifically, it and the Fed are throwing more money and credit at a problem that was caused by their own past initiatives to stimulate money and credit. Even a mere recession has become politically unacceptable.

China’s Success Hinges on Its Support for Free Markets

Keynesian economists tend to deny the free market the respect it deserves. It has had an amazing track record in recent centuries. Despite the destructive influences of nutty paper money schemes, deficits, taxation, regulation, and wars, most countries have progressed from subsistence farming to modern living standards at a stunning pace.

The free market rests on a foundation of mutual trust, price signals, profits, free trade, and property rights. It’s important for government to respect this foundation. Communist governments simply destroy it and, predictably, get chaos and poverty. Even in some capitalist countries, popular support for this foundation is shaky.

The Chinese, still Communist in name, but hardly in action, have gained some respect for the foundation of free markets. Their leaders are executing policies that promote better living standards, and they are using free market principles to achieve it. As a result, they prosper. But prosperity doesn’t advance without occasional setbacks. China is dealing with one right now: A shortage of above-ground coal.

In China’s highly publicized winter storm delays, we see an example of how slower economic growth can lead to higher consumer price inflation. Most economists would have you believe that growth causes inflation, when in reality, it’s the opposite. Real economic growth increases the supply of goods and services. So consumer prices would fall if the money supply were held constant. The Wall Street Journal recently reported:

The coal shortage has rippled through other commodity markets, hurting China’s output of steel, copper, zinc, and aluminum as electricity is being diverted for domestic industry and household heat and electricity. China’s largest copper producer, Jiangxi Copper Co., shut down some plants, contributing to higher U.S. copper futures:

Even though the Chinese government supports free markets to achieve its political goals, it still distorts investment cycles with monetary inflation and regulation. Its manufacturing capacity has grown beyond its power grid capacity. This slows real economic growth, which is cutting the supply and raising the price of copper in the U.S. futures market.

Chinese monetary policy, like that in the U.S., ensures that money supply can grow limitlessly at zero cost. No wonder prices for nearly everything are going up. Central banks have pushed inflationary policies beyond all reasonable limits. A recent issue of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer explains why this could be the top financial market story in 2008:

In the dollar and its institutions, there is a deep-seated contradiction. The Fed is America’s central bank, but the dollar is the world’s currency. More than a billion people work and save and spend in the non-American portion of the U.S. dollar bloc. It seems fair to guess that more than a few of them are fed up, if not with the distant institution that sets an interest rate, then with an inflation problem over which they seem to be powerless.

One of the top financial stories for 2008 just might be the dawning of this unwelcome truth on the average American central banker, bondholder, and consumer. Recently, The New York Times, in a dispatch from Shanghai, speculated that China was now exporting inflation, not deflation, and that, on account of this sea change, the American CPI would presently begin to tick higher.

The onset of recession would likely push back the return of what economists will eventually learn to call the “21st century secular inflation” (mark my words). A friend of mine muses that the dramatic re-pricing of ultra-cheap oil transformed the markets and economies of the 1970s. So, too, he speculates, will the dramatic re-pricing of ultra-cheap Asian labor deliver a seismic jolt to the markets and economies of the present day. If so, the dollar, no less than the euro, is likely to suffer impairment against the kind of assets that central banks just can’t print.

If you’re a regular reader of Whiskey & Gunpowder, you probably agree that individuals make better spending and investing decisions than governments. Yet Keynesian plans to “fix” the economy — whether through regulation or inflation — remain uncomfortably popular. The conditions are set for a dramatic consumer price inflation reawakening — if not in 2008, then over the next decade. Long-term bonds are priced to provide negative real after-tax returns over the next decade. Invest accordingly.

Regards,
Dan Amoss, CFA
March 19, 2008

How Paper Money Distorts Investment Cycles was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder