Once in a great while an insider either tells the truth and quits or is fired, or, more commonly, quits and tells the truth. Danielle DiMartino Booth left the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank after 9 years and has engaged in one of those rare instances of truth-telling. From Ms. Booth, at The Liscio Report:
The business cycle is dead! Long live the business cycle!
Not too long ago, in a land not so far away, the business cycle was declared to be defeated. Policymakers at the Federal Reserve were credited with slaying the pesky beast that featured recessions as part of its nature. Such was the faith in the permanence of business cycle’s demise that the era was given its own label, The Great Moderation, a perfect world in which inflation ran not too hot or too cold and profit growth was accepted as the steady state.
As is so often the case, reality rudely disturbed nirvana’s prospects. The Great Moderation devolved into the Great Recession precipitated by one of the most devastating financial crises in U.S. history. The veneer of calm advertised over the prior years was stripped away. In its stead, economists had to concede that an era of benign monetary policy had encouraged malinvestment, the scourge that Austrian Ludwig von Mises warned of in the early 20th century. An overabundance of debt, if left unchecked, inevitably leads to the misallocation of resources. In the case of the first years of the 2000s, the target was, of course, the housing market.
The hope today is that the current era of easy monetary policy will have no deep economic ramifications. Such thinking, though, may prove to be naive. It goes without saying that the heat of the financial crisis merited a monumental response on policymakers’ part. That said, the most glaring outgrowth has been politicians’ exploiting low interest rates to their benefit. While it’s conceivable that well-intentioned central bankers want no part in encouraging Congressional malfeasance, the fact remains that the lack of action on politicians’ part would not have been possible absent the Fed’s allowing Congress to abdicate its responsibilities to the manna of easy money.
Of course, we all appear to have been spoiled over the last 25 years. A funny thing happened when the Fed placed a floor under stock prices with assurances that investors’ pain and suffering would be mitigated – recessions faded from the norm. Over the past 25 years, the economy has contracted one-fourth as often as it did in the 25 years that preceded this benign era. Hence the illusion of prosperity, one that has rendered investors complacent to the point of being comatose. That’s what happens when entire industries are able to run with more capacity than demand validates simply because the credit to remain in operation is there for the taking. To take but one example, capacity utilization is at 78.1 percent, shy of the 30-year average of 79.6 percent some six years into the current recovery. The downside is that the cathartic cleansing that takes place when recession is allowed to play out all the way to the bitter end of a bankruptcy cycle never occurs – winners and losers alike stay in business.
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To continue reading: The Great Abdication
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