What makes him so annoying is his unquestioning, reflexive and almost childlike enthusiasm for state intervention, even in the face of its obvious failure, and his apparent unwillingness to probe any deeper into the real causes of our present economic problems or to show any willingness to investigate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of his particular medicine. His Keynesian convictions are presented as articles of faith that no intelligent person can seriously question.

A Krugmanesque argument is always built on a number of assumptions that are beyond doubt:

1) Recessions, depressions and crises are the result of the unhampered market. We actually do not have to investigate if markets were really free when recessions occurred or what really were the specific causes of whatever threw the economy off track. When there is a recession, depression or crisis, there must have been too much of an uncontrolled market.

2) The Great Depression was caused by uncontrolled markets.

3) Recessions, depressions and crises are practically the result of one problem: a lack of aggregate demand. People, for whatever reason (and who cares about the reason; let’s not get hung up on those details!) don’t spend enough. If everybody were to spend more, people would sell more. Problem solved. It is the role of government to get people spending again. This is done by printing money and causing inflation so that people spend the money rather than save it. Or by the government running up deficits and spending it on behalf of the stupid savers.

4) The Great Depression was solved by the government spending lots of money and the central bank printing lots of money.

5) This explains ALL economic problems.

6) If there are recessions, depressions and crises, they can all be solved by printing money and by deficit spending.

7) If after many rounds of money printing and deficit spending there is still a recession, then only one conclusion is permissible: There was obviously not enough money printing and deficit spending. We need more money printing and deficit spending.

If after another round of money printing and deficit spending we still have a recession, then….well, are you stupid, or what? We obviously have NOT PRINTED ENOUGH MONEY and we are NOT ACCUMULATING ENOUGH DEBT!

(And, by the way, remember (7) above.)

Krugman is practicing Keynesianism as a religion. The 8 commandments above are not to be questioned. Whoever questions them is not worthy of debate. Consequently, Krugman has turned down requests to debate people like Peter Schiff or Bob Murphy. Interestingly, he agreed to debate Ron Paul on TV. The link is here.

I have to say that Ron Paul did not do as well as I had hoped he would. He did not sufficiently attack Krugman in my view, for the failure and ultimately disastrous consequences of his policy prescriptions. Krugman is the one who should be made to explain his policy recommendations. After all, t’s policies like the ones he is recommending got us into this mess in the first place Krugman needs to explain why his policy ideas have been implemented for years to no effect.

Yet, Krugman succeeded in putting Paul on the defensive, something in which he was greatly helped by the following: While Krugman may be the most outstanding, unashamed and fundamentalist of the celebrity Keynesians, the attitudes of the general public, the other journalists and thus most of the TV viewers are predominantly shaped by Keynesianism as well, and this means that Krugman, more than Paul or any ‘Austrian’ debater, can rely on some sense of intellectual sympathy.

Maybe the viewers don’t quite share the unquestioning, almost vulgar dedication to the Faith, that Krugman epitomizes. Maybe they feel queasy about printing trillions of paper dollars and running trillion-dollar deficits. Of course, a true believer like Krugman will never allow himself such feelings. But in general, the public, too, believes that the free market (and greedy bankers) caused the financial crisis; that we need low interest rates and other government measures to stimulate the economy; and that inflation is really not our main concern. Krugman, I think, cleverly used these attitudes to present himself as the safe and rational choice, and Paul as the weirdo who wants to pour out the state-policy baby with the crisis bath water.

Ron Paul started strongly by pointing out that Krugman’s policy is based on the idea that a bureaucratic elite can set interest rates and decide how much money should be created, and that this involves an arrogant and dangerous pretence of knowledge. Very good point.

Immediately, the apostle Krugman raised his head. “You cannot get the state out of money.” “The Fed has to set interest rates.” “You cannot go back 150 years.”

I think this is where Ron Paul should have dug in and put Krugman on the defensive:

“Why not? There was no Fed before 1913. That the Fed made things more stable is your assumption. But is it true? People like you and Bernanke tell us that the gold standard was to blame for the Depression. In the run-up to the Depression we had a gold standard but we also had a Fed. How can you say that the gold standard was to blame and the Fed was ultimately the solution?

“Dr. Krugman just said, ‘history told us’. That is nonsense. History doesn’t tell us anything. You need theory to interpret history, and your theory is wrong. You assign blame for the depression according to your Keynesian theory. If that theory is wrong – and I think it is completely wrong – your interpretation of history is hopelessly wrong.

“Dr. Krugman, we do no longer live in the 1930s. Why is it that you are harking back to those days? Are we still solving the Great Depression?

“Fact is that the monetary and economic institutions of America were shaped by people with your beliefs, Dr. Krugman. We have your system today. We have conducted and are conducting your policies. And, Dr. Krugman, do you really want to tell the American public that these policies and these institutions, such as the Fed, are working?

“We have no gold standard. Since 1971, the Fed is entirely free to print as much money as it likes. That is your system, isn’t it? That is what you recommend. – You say the Fed needs to keep interest rates low and print money to stimulate growth. That is what the Fed did in 1998 after LTCM and the Russia default, just as you recommended. That is what the Fed did again after the NASDAQ bubble burst and after 9/11 – surely, that was not an Austrian policy but a Keynesian one. It was straight out of your rule book, Dr. Krugman. You say the uninhibited market is to blame for the financial crisis. I say your policy is to blame. The mortgage bubble was blown by the ‘stimulus’ policy of the Fed – low interest rates and plenty new bank reserves – between 2001 and 2005. That was your recommendation, right? And those of your Keynesian buddies, such as Paul McCulley at Pimco.

“Since 2007, the Fed is conducting your policy. So is the US government. You demanded monetary stimulus and you got it. The Fed created $2 trillion dollars out of thin air. Interest rates have been zero for years. The US government is conducting stimulus policy to the tune of $1trillion-plus every year. Are you telling me, these are not Keynesian policies? What is it, Austrian policy?!

“What you are recommending has in fact been the guiding principle of global economic policy for years. What you are recommending is a systematic distortion of the market place. It is persistent price distortion. That is why we had an unsustainable housing boom. That is why we had a mortgage boom. That is why we had a financial industry boom. And whenever these artificial booms – that you create with your policy – falter, the American public has to pay the price. And what do you suggest then? More of the same. More cheap credit. More government debt. In the hope that you can generate another artificial boom for which a later generation will again have to pay the price.

“Dr. Krugman, you just answered the question of this journalist about how much more debt we should accumulate, by saying maybe another 30 percent but that nobody can say for sure. I agree that nobody can say how much debt the system can still take. But tell us, why do you think that the next 30 percent of state debt will magically stimulate the economy and that these 30 percent will thus achieve what the previous 30 percent obviously failed to do.

“Dr. Krugman, you have me worried here. And I think our viewers too. The only response you have to the abject failure of your policies is that we should do more of them. Whatever Keynesian stimulus is being implemented and whatever money the Fed prints, all you ever say is that it is not enough. We need more. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the problem is the policy itself? Maybe your medicine is making things worse and not better.

“And something else worries me, Dr. Krugman. When do we ever stop printing money and borrowing? I think that you are stuck in a failed paradigm, a failed economic theory and a failed policy program. This has happened to scientists and politicians before. You cannot admit that failure. When you are confronted with the failure of modern central banking, of Keynesian stimulus and of moderate inflationism, your only answer is that nothing is wrong with any of it, it is just not implemented forcefully enough. Dr. Krugman, you remind me of a doctor, who misdiagnosed the disease and prescribed the wrong medicine and who is now unwilling to look at the situation objectively. All you want to do is increase the dosage.

“If the viewers really want to understand what is going on, they should not buy Krugman’s new book but go to the website of the Mises Institute and look for some excellent Austrian School literature, in particular anything written by Ludwig von Mises himself. But if you don’t have time to do this, an excellent start is a book by Detlev Schlichter, with the title Paper Money Collapse.”

Well, I guess this is how it could have unfolded.

Regards,

Detlev Schlichter

How To Debate Paul Krugman was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

All they can offer is a description of symptoms, such as with their favorite phrase: lack of “aggregate demand.” Which, if you think about it, doesn’t really explain anything. How come demand dropped? Why did it drop now and not at any other time? Whose demand dropped? (Hint: Mine didn’t.)

Sigmund Freud Meets Dr. Ruth

But hey, when faced with a lack of proper economic explanations, you can always fall back on some amateur psychology. Everything must be down to what goes on in people’s heads, right? People just get all mixed up. Too pessimistic. (Animal spirits, anybody?)

That’s why it is always up to those coolheaded guys and gals in government to use their policy tools to change expectations, change the psychology of people, cajole everybody into some elevated state of positive thinking and, hence, more economic activity. Save the masses from their own silly notions in their tiny heads, like saving and getting rid of debt. They all just clam up and save? Pitiful. But most importantly, why even worry about explaining the recession if you are confident, if you simply know, deep down in your heart, how to get out of it?

Most politicians don’t know any better. They certainly don’t know any economics. So the same toxic policy mix of Keynesian deficit spending and monetarist money printing has been implemented around the world since this crisis started four years ago. Just as in any other recession of the past 40 years, ever since Nixon cut the last link to gold and fulfilled every interventionist’s wildest fantasy: unlimited paper money under full control of the state! Yeah, baby, no more recessions!

Alas, it is not working, is it?

Rates were cut, and the state not only spent money it didn’t have…as usual, it spent much more money it didn’t have. But the economy did not recover. So more of this policy was implemented. And then, more again. In fact, by any standard, never before in modern times has the economy been “stimulated” more through Keynesian and monetarist government intervention than over the past four years.

Balance sheets of major central banks have tripled. Banks have been receiving limitless funds for free and will continue to do so forever, and governments are running deficits the likes of which mankind has only ever seen at the height of major wars, and which are increasingly funded by the printing press.

It is still not working.

You would probably guess that the interventionists of Keynesian and other ilk would be a bit more humble by now. Maybe check a few of those premises in their models? Or maybe start thinking again about those elusive explanations for what’s wrong with the economy in the first place? Are we really suffering from a lack of paper money and government spending? Maybe it is not simply down to all of us being too depressed, morose and in need of some policy Prozac. Maybe something else is broken.

Alas, no. The academically trained Keynesian economist is too committed to his or her beliefs to let the facts get in the way. Why has policy not worked? Because we have been too timid. We need the same policy. We just need more of it. A lot more.

More monetary madness

In her recent op-ed piece in The New York Times, High Priestess of Keynesianism Christina Romer suggests a radical policy “change” at the Federal Reserve: toward more money printing.

Rather astutely, she calls for Helicopter-Ben to embrace a Volcker-moment. Maybe by quoting the poster boy of the Reaganites and the hard-money crowd, she hoped to reach a new audience for her tiring and dreary, old policy recipe of more and bolder interventionism. She almost had me fooled.

Wait a minute, I thought. Volcker? He is the guy who abruptly stopped the printing press and allowed high real market rates to cleanse the system of the dislocations of previous booms, and to squeeze inflation out of the system, thus, giving the paper dollar another lease of life — albeit one that is quickly running out.

I thought, has Christina finally seen the light? Has she begun to realize how massively disruptive a constantly expanding supply of fiat money is for an economy? Is she calling, as I do, for an end to this monetary madness of zero policy rates and quantitative easing?

Well, no, she isn’t. She wants the Fed to print more money, much more. She wants the Fed to adopt a nominal GDP target. This will allow the Fed to become even more aggressive in its monetary policy and to communicate this aggressiveness better. Make people trust in that aggressiveness. And this communication is important for Romer.

As we have seen, for the good Keynesian, the policy was never wrong. The policy was just not ambitious enough. All it needs is a more-ambitious goal and better communication. People just have these bad thoughts and wrong expectations. The public is just not playing ball, not going along with this enlightened economic program. Well, says the Keynesian, we’ll teach them.

The Volcker analogy works like this for Romer: In 1979, inflation was too high, and small rate hikes didn’t work. So Volcker implemented a much tighter policy and crushed inflation. And it worked, because people believed him. Today, unemployment is too high. Gradual policy easing (not sure what planet Christina is on, but from where she is sitting, monetary policy in the U.S. must have appeared to be gradual) is not working, either.

So Bernanke needs to become more aggressive, and publicly so. Because people believe that if you stick to your policy, which — please remember — was, of course, the right policy to begin with, then the policy will really begin to work. You just need to drill it into those blockheads.

Every first-semester economics student, not only those at Berkeley — where Romer is economics professor — should be able to tear this apart with ease. The analogy with Volcker is silly. Volcker used monetary policy to fix a monetary problem: inflation. Stopping inflation by not printing money anymore is pretty straightforward. The link is kind of direct.

To be honest, it doesn’t even matter what the public believes or not. If you stop printing money, inflation will drop. Period. The link is that direct. You don’t need the accompanying belief system.

Was there full employment in Weimar Germany?

However, unemployment or the level of ‘aggregate demand’ is decidedly not a monetary phenomenon. Only in the airy-fairy dreamland of macroeconomic models is there a direct link.

To assume that we can simply and straightforwardly establish whatever nominal growth rate and level of employment we desire by means of the printing press is precisely the type of naive “building block economics” that got us into this mess in the first place. According to this worldview, the economy is just a machine, and all we need to do is to pull the right levers. Or it is like a cooking recipe, in which we need to simply change the ingredients a bit and — voila! The souffle will rise!

It is precisely because (a certain type of) economists have been telling us…that we can have more growth and high employment by constantly debasing money. This is how we created this highly levered economy over the past four decades. One that is so thoroughly addicted to ever larger fixes of cheap credit and that is now choking on excessive debt and weak banks.

By printing money and artificially lowering interest rates we have, again and again, bought near-term economic growth at the expense of long-term economic imbalances. That this was bad economics everybody is now learning the hard way. Everybody, that is, except Christina Romer. Her simple worldview is unshaken.

It is this weird combination of childlike belief in the simplicity of the problem (aggregate demand, lack of optimism) and the striking arrogance of the notion that the government can and should control the economy by simply pulling at the right strings hard enough that makes Romer’s article such an illustrative example of the intellectual dead end that is mainstream economics today.

Romer has apparently no notion of relative prices and of the importance, in particular, of interest rates for coordinating saving with investment. She cannot see that lowering interest rates administratively and injecting new money into the financial system will have many additional effects, other than lifting some statistical measure of aggregate economic activity. Easy money will always change resource use and capital allocation. Cheap credit encourages borrowing and debt accumulation, and will cause additional problems for the economy later.

Romer cannot perceive of these complexities. In her ivory tower, the world is one of simple statistical aggregates and large wholes that you can direct and mend to your liking. You just add the desired real growth rate (2.5%) and the acceptable inflation rate (2%) and stir it nicely to come up with the nominal growth rate (4.5%). How hard can it be?

We have some indication that Bernanke is not very sympathetic to this proposal at present. It doesn’t look like this will become official policy anytime soon. But who knows? A lot of what is now accepted monetary and fiscal policy in major countries and debated dispassionately by financial market economists would only a few years ago have been the mark of the economic crank, or the populist policy program of some economic backwater just before it was put under IMF surveillance.

But what is striking is this: Such rubbish emanates from the highest echelons of academic economics in America. Christina Romer is economics professor in Berkeley, Calif., and I fear that a lot of very bright young people burden themselves and their families with student loans and waste valuable time absorbing such drivel. If Romer is all that economics in Berkeley has to offer, why not emulate the late Steve Jobs and drop out?

Regards,

Detlev Schlichter

Christina Romer’s Toxic Cookbook was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

When will the world finally begin to understand that we have reached the point of no return and that “the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)? Sadly, we are probably not very far from that point. It is already starting to happen in many countries.

The latest EU and IMF package of $1 TRILLION (Euro 750 billion) is yet another futile attempt by governments to abolish poverty by printing paper. Let’s be absolutely clear, this money does not exist and the EU governments are hoping by declaring such a large amount that they can con the Wolfpack speculators. At this point the EU has just picked a large round figure out of the air. But when their bluff is called by the Wolfpack and the next attack happens, EU governments will after initial huffing and puffing start printing unlimited amounts of paper.

So the world is now on its road to ruin and there is no action, no leader and no new amount of printed money that can save the world or prevent a hyperinflationary depression.

Never in history has the world been in a situation when virtually all industrialised countries are bankrupt. Therefore there is no precedent for what will happen in the next few years. What we can be quite certain about is that events will happen in a seemingly random pattern and that it will be impossible to forecast where the next crises will start.

But although we will not be able to predict in what order events will take place, we can expect much of what is outlined below to happen.

Wolfpack Attacks

Already back in 2007 we warned about the very high risk of the CDS (credit default swap) market. This is now one of the primary instruments used by the Wolfpack (expression coined by the Swedish Finance Minister Borg). The Wolfpack, speculators with enormous fire power such as hedge funds and investment banks, use the CDS market to attack any weak financial sector, be it a country, a bank or a company. The combination of the leverage of the CDSs and the massive capital available to the Wolfpack makes it possible for them to bring down or badly maul whatever they attack. It was not the Wolfpack that caused the problem in for example Greece but they can bring down a weak victim quickly and profit immensely and immorally from it.

There are so many weak potential victims that the Wolfpack can attack and they will start with the most vulnerable ones like, Portugal, Spain and Ireland etc. But when the time is right they will also attack the US and the UK.

So in the coming year we will see country after country coming under attack from the Wolfback which will lead to acceleration in money printing and higher interest rates.

Iceland – Ireland – Greece – Who Is Next?

The EU support package of $ 1 trillion is supposed to be sufficient to protect the rest of Europe from another Greek tragedy. The dilemma with such a massive EU commitment is that no government expects to have to pay the money out. If they did the voters in the respective EU countries would throw out their government. Why should the German people, who are also having hard times, pay for the Greeks, Portuguese or the Spaniards, especially since these loans will never be paid back?

Greece is bankrupt but is still taking on additional EU loans of € 140 billion. In addition, their austerity measures are supposed to bring the deficit down from 12% of GDP today to 3% in a few years time. But who can be so stupid as to lend to a bankrupt nation which will sink into the Ionian and Aegean Seas in the next few years. With massive cuts in government expenditure, with major falls in output, with unemployment rising fast, with tax revenues collapsing how can Greece possibly be expected to improve the economy and pay a high interest rate on their exploding debt? In addition, as long as they have the Euro they will be totally uncompetitive. So if they couldn’t manage their economy in the so called good times, it is absolutely guaranteed that they have no chance of surviving in bad times. So Greece will default and so will Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, the UK, the US and many more. But before that there will be the most colossal worldwide money printing exercise which would have used up most of the trees in the world but for electronic fiat money.

So, if virtually bankrupt nations don’t cut their deficits, they will definitively go under and if they try to cut, they will also go under due to collapsing output and tax revenues and colossal debts. Thus whatever actions governments take or don’t take, they are damned.

The table below shows debt as a percentage of GDP for various OECD countries. The official debts (in red) are massive and unlikely to ever be repaid in real money. Total debts (grey bars) include unfunded liabilities such as pensions and health care. Spain has the lowest total debt to GDP of 250%. Germany and the UK have around 400%, the US over 500% and Greece over 800% debt to GDP. These figures are absolutely astronomical and prove that most governments in the world will be totally incapable of repaying their debts or funding the pensions or medical care which they have committed to. It doesn’t matter however much governments cut expenditure or raise taxes, all these countries are insolvent and nothing can save them.

The World Must Permanently Readjust

Most governments still believe that deficit spending and money printing is the solution to all their problems. Because the world economy’s expansion in the last 100 years and particularly in the last 40 years has been primarily based on credit and not real growth, governments live under the false impression that money printing will work this time too. But we have reached the point when investors will no longer buy worthless government debt that will never be repaid with real money. We will first go through a period when governments issue and buy their own debt thus monetising the debt or print money. This will be the hyperinflationary phase. Thereafter the world will realise that none of the government debt and very little of the bank debt will ever be repaid. Credit will then implode and so will also the assets financed by credit. Eventually there will be a new monetary and financial system and the world will start afresh. The adjustment period will be very long and will involve economic and human misery, leading to social unrest and major political change. It will be a horrible experience for the world during this extended period of adjustment. But it will be like a forest fire that clears out the deadwood and creates the conditions for strong new growth. Once the new era starts it will therefore be from a very much lower level and individuals will be rewarded for hard work with little or no social security safety net. Credit will only be granted for sound capital investment projects, not for consumption or speculation. Ethical and moral values will return and the golden calf will not be worshipped. But before that, the period of readjustment will be very long and extremely difficult for the whole world.

Regards,
Egon von Greyerz
Gold Switzerland
Whiskey & Gunpowder

May 24, 2010

Hyperinflation Guaranteed was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Like snow at high altitudes, the central banks’ new money is piling up. As reported last week, all the world’s major central banks have turned on their snow machines. The U.S. Federal Reserve has been authorized to “print” $1.75 trillion worth of new money in order to buy Treasury bonds. The Bank of England has its own program — worth 75 billion pounds, so far. Even Switzerland has been printing money — so much that its money supply, as measured by M2, is growing at 30% per year. And two weeks ago, the European Central Bank announced that it too would begin creating money in order to buy corporate bonds.

“Quantitative easing” it is called. As a refresher for readers with real lives and better things to do, QE is how central banks describe what is essentially an act of counterfeiting. They buy bonds with money created — electronically — specifically for that purpose. Abracadabra — “money” comes into being.

The feds aim to provide liquidity for the cities and farms. But so far, only a trickle is coming down. Instead, chilly weather in the upper reaches of the financial sector holds it frozen in place. Hundreds of billions come down from central banks, but there it stays…waiting for spring.

Today, here on the back page, we ask ourselves a simple question: What will happen to it?

The feds’ counterfeit money does such a good imitation of the real thing, you can’t tell them apart. But the problem with all money is that it is as fickle and unreliable as a bad girlfriend. One minute she goes along with the flow. The next minute she turns silly and bubbly. And then, she gives you the cold shoulder.

According to theory, an increase in the supply of something leads directly to a decrease in the price of it… That is, if other things remain constant. Despite the credit crunch, the banking freeze-up, and the economic recession, the money supply in the U.S. as measured by M1 is actually rising at 14% per year. Yet consumer prices are not keeping pace. The latest report shows them actually going down slightly over the last 60 days.

Turns out, causing inflation is not as easy as it looked; controlling it probably will be even harder. It’s not enough to manage the quantity of money; you also need to be able to control its behavior. Money can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas depending upon the temperature of the economy. At normal temperatures, money runs freely, watering the economy. And when things really get hot, it vaporizes, creating gaseous bubbles such as those of the late Bubble Period. But when the temperature falls, money shivers in wallets and bank accounts — reluctant to go out into the cold.

Economists refer to the “velocity of money” to describe the magnifying effects of motion. When the same dollar bill appears in three different places in the same day, it is as if the money supply has been multiplied threefold. In a freeze, on the other hand, it comes to a dead stop.

When the thaw will come we don’t know. But the authorities are ready for it. When consumer prices begin to rise, they’ll stop adding to the money supply. Then, they’ll withdraw liquidity, as need be, to keep it under control.

They know that runaway inflation would cause problems — the collapse of the dollar…and the U.S. Treasury bond market, for example. So at the first signs of inflation, they will move quickly to remove excess liquidity from the system. How? Their emergency plan is simple enough. Now they are buying bonds. When their inflation targets are met, they will begin selling them.

We thought the Bubble Epoch was the peak in claptrap and illusions. But we were only in the foothills. The feds now pretend to bail out the economy by giving money to companies that pretend to be concerned, run by people who pretend to know what they are doing. And when they run short of money, they create more of it, pretend it is real…and pretend they can tell it what to do.

What is likely is that money will have a mind of its own. First, the markets will react…and the authorities will not. They will remember their own critiques of Japanese and Roosevelt-era monetary policy. In both cases, they believe central banks removed the punch bowl too early — before the party really got rolling. In both cases, the recovery was cut off.

Then, while they are hesitating, money will turn on them. Inflation rates will rise further. The velocity of money will pick up. And investors — including foreign governments — will become eager sellers of government debt. Suddenly, it will be too late. In order to remove the monetary inflation they previously added, central banks will have to sell bonds, instead of buying them, trying to reabsorb money from the economy. The extra cash will then disappear back into the central banks. But in order to bring inflation under control, the biggest bond buyers in the world must turn into the world’s biggest sellers. Bond prices, already falling as investors fear the worst, will collapse immediately. An avalanche of dollars will fall upon the world markets — as dollar holders all over the world become desperate to get rid of them.

We don’t know what day it will happen. But we have a good idea as to what time of day central bankers will realize that they are doomed. About 4 AM is our guess. That is the moment when Ben Bernanke and other central bankers begin to feel like members of the Donner Party. That is, like imbeciles.

Regards,
Bill Bonner

May 29, 2009

Treasury Bond Avalanche was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Ah yes, the future. What does it hold? Well, apparently more lay-offs and CEO pay raises. Judging by Sol Trujillo’s $20 million goodbye handshake and the actions of the board at Pacific Brands (giving themselves raises while sacking workers) it looks like there are some people out there doing their level best to run the good name of their corporation into the ground.

Don’t they know that’s bad for business?

Kevin Rudd is headed over to America this month to speak with Barrack Obama about climate change, the global financial system, and other ways to save the world and improve on human nature. Perhaps he might ask him if America’s US$1.75 trillion annual deficit for next year should cause global investors to worry about America’s credit quality.

Again from Eric, “The cost of buying a five-year credit default swap (CDS) to insure against the possible default of U.S. Treasury bonds reached 100 basis points for the first time yesterday. In English, the price of insuring $10,000,000 worth of Treasury bonds for five years now costs $100,000 – up from just $5,000 one year ago.”

We’ve said before it’s nearly impossible to default on your debt when you can print the money to pay it back. But what this normally does is send interest rates up on new short-term borrowing, of which there is a lot lately in America.

Keep in mind, the Obama budget includes about US$3.5 trillion in Federal spending, much of it to be financed with short-term borrowing. In fact, this week the U.S. Treasury is selling $94 billion in debt. The Treasury is even bringing an old-friend back from the dead. The seven-year Treasury note (which had been discontinued in 1993) will be reissued beginning with an auction of $22 billion worth today.

Can you see how government borrowing needs begin to crowd out lending to the private sector? Can you see also how we are speeding into an era where more of national cash flows are redirected to central governments for redistribution and/or the service of interest payments to foreign lenders? Can you see how directing national cash flow toward wealth re-distribution does not lead to more capital formation and wealth generation?

Ron Paul is still the only man in Washington who can see all this. He made a great point the other day that no one wanted to listen to. “Credit is not capital,” he told Ben Bernanke. You can’t recapitalise the banking system by printing new money or extending credit.

Credit comes from available savings. That’s why a high savings rate is essential the formation of future capital. We’re not making it up. It’s even the first sentence of the Treasury White Paper on the Capital Assistance Program.

“The financial system plays the critical role of channeling funds from savers in the economy to the investors with the ideas and ability to turn those funds into productive economic resources,” the paper begins. This is exactly how recessions prepare the way for the future boom. As households reduce consumption they increase savings.

Banks can become solvent again by retaining earnings (cutting dividends like ANZ did earlier this week) and increasing their depository base (and, of course, writing down bad investments and making more prudent loans). Or, the bad banks go belly up and the good banks are able to come in and scoop up the remaining assets.

Losers fail. Winners win. Or, as Rothbard puts it, an increase in savings reflects an increased desire for cash from consumers. This is actually good for banks in the long run. But we won’t run on and on about it below, although we’ve provided a fuller quotation for you below.

Incidentally, as we expected a couple of weeks ago, the gold price (in U.S. and Aussie dollars) has given up some of its ground after streaking ahead. But we wouldn’t be too worried.

One last quote for the day from Eric Fry on the matter, “The credit crisis does not study technical charts or read investor sentiment indicators. It does what it does. And what the credit crisis does best is destroy credit-based enterprises…and reward the buyers of non- credit-based assets like gold.”

Huzzah.

Still with us? Good! How about a quick revisit of the “baseline” and “more adverse” assumptions that are embedded in the CAP plan (son of TARP) released yesterday by the U.S. Treasury. The table listing the assumptions is below. But let’s give you the analysis first: crrraaaaaazzzzy!

After reading it, you’ll be more convinced than ever that falling stock and house prices this year are going to be followed by a blizzard of paper money that will send inflation soaring.

Government Assumptions That Guarantee Inflationary Disaster Ahead

How about some analysis? First, the GDP assumptions are for-at worst-a 3.3% contraction this year and a recovery in 2010. It’s probably more realistic to expect a GDP contraction of between 5 and 10% this year (based on the cliff diving GDPs of Asia and Europe) and a smaller contraction of 2-5% in 2010. Although either could be much worse, as the fourth quarter GDP figure in the U.S. was already a little fishy to begin with.

Second, the unemployment projections appear to have been generated on Planet Fantastic, where the laws of gravity and reality do not apply. Has anyone generating these U.S. statistics taken a look at the economy lately?

Or are these statistics pure propaganda and fabrication, designed to obscure from ordinary Americans (and Westerners) everywhere that real wages have been falling for thirty years and will continue to do so as global production shifts to low-wage labour markets?

Finally, how is it no one in the media picked up on the fact that the Treasury’s “baseline” forecast is for an 18% decline in house prices over the next two years (under rosy assumptions about GDP growth and unemployment)? Or that the “more adverse” forecast has house prices falling 29% in the next twenty-four months?

And here’s a question…how could house prices fall and unemployment continue to rise without having a further massively negative effect on bank loan books?

If TARP and CAP are designed to shore up bank capital by taking some a snapshot of how banks will perform under certain scenarios, then the plans are almost certain to fail if those scenarios fail to account for increased default and foreclosure rates in residential and commercial real estate that would come in the next two years (not to mention poor performance in securitised credit cards, student loans, and auto loans…all of which would deteriorate as unemployment rises.)

And how is simply raising taxes and transferring money to the newly unemployed going to solve this again?

All we can think of now is a supernova. In the rush to repair the broken financial system (which was broken by the explosion in credit and the enormous misallocations and distortions it caused) liberals and conservatives and professional politicians of every stripe (without brains or spines) are launching every conceivable spending plan they can think of. Their goal is to tag the culpable private sector for all the blame, shift the burden for losses on to the public balance sheet and future generations, and replace the private sector with the government as the prime mover of economic life in the modern world.

Or have we missed something?

A supernova, of course, is the death of a star. It unleashes a giant amount of light, heat, energy, and radiation in one brilliantly beautiful moment of destruction. But let’s not forget it’s a moment of death, as pretty as it might be.

Perhaps that’s where we’re headed. Instead of seeing a recession as the method of re-establishing the efficient allocation of an economy’s resources and capital, the banksters and pollies are going to give us an even bigger global system of paper, as Ron Paul suggests.

With the dollar-standard in tatters, the only place left to go in the artificial evolution of paper money is a global fiat standard on top of the dollar standard. We have no idea what it would look like. But you can bet there are some other folks who’ve been thinking long and hard about it and are more than willing to use the current crisis as an excuse to inflict it upon you.

Finally, the last (and longish) word from Rothbard on why booms require busts.

“The ‘boom,’ then, is actually a period of wasteful mal-investment. It is the time when errors are made, due to bank credit’s tampering with the free market. The ‘crisis’ arrives then the consumers come to re-establish their desired proportions.

“The ‘depression’ [ed. note, Rothbard uses the word 'depression' in place of 'recession'] is actually the process by which the economy adjusts to the wastes and errors of the boom, and re-establishes the efficient service of consumer desires.

“The adjustment process consists in rapid liquidation of the wasteful investments. Some of this will be abandoned altogether (like the Western ghost towns constructed in the boom of 1816-1818 and deserted during the panic of 1819); others will be shifted to other uses. Always the principle will be not to mourn past errors, but to make the most efficient use of the existing stock of capital.

“In sum, the free market tends to satisfy voluntarily-expressed consumer desires with maximum efficiency, and this includes the public’s relative desires for present and future consumption. The inflationary boom hobbles this efficiency, and distorts the structure of production, which no longer serves consumers properly.

“The crisis signals the end of this inflationary distortion, and the depression is the process by which the economy returns to the efficient service of consumers. In short, and this is a highly important point to grasp, the depression is the ‘recovery’ process, and the end of the depression heralds the return to normal and optimum efficiency.

“The depression, then, far from being an evil scourge, is the necessary and beneficial return of the economy to normal after the distortions imposed by the boom. The boom then requires a bust.”

Some people don’t want a return to normal. Bankers don’t want it because it means a lot of them would be out of business for good. Investors in credit-backed bonds don’t want it because it means taking losses. And politicians certainly don’t want it because the sense of continual crisis is the perfect mechanism for the relentless expansion of government power in private life.

The only who want things to be normal are normal people. And they are stuck right now living on Planet Death Star; a spaceship captained and crewed by a bunch of morons who will be the financial death of us all. Or are we just whistling a bizarre Dixie?

Regards,
Dan Denning
Australian Daily Reckoning

March 2, 2009

The Fed Prints, The Government Borrows: Welcome to Planet Death Star was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.