Is the Federal Reserve going to keep raising interest rates until something—the bond or stock market, bank runs, currency crises—breaks? From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:
Stagflation, sinking labor productivity, severe levels of public and private debt, a splintered real estate market… You name it. The economy’s crashing and burning like an old Cutlass Supreme.
There’s nothing the central planners can do to fix it. No plans or schemes will get the tired jalopy to fire on all cylinders. A blown head gasket is replaced and the very next day the spark plugs are fried. Replace those and a piston ring blows.
At some point, it’s beyond salvage. The only sensible choice left is to scrap the old buggy at the junk yard.
Similarly, scrapping the central planners that are responsible for this economic mess is the right thing to do. They’ve created a very disagreeable situation. One that will take several generations – or more – to reconcile.
In this vein, the time has come to purge the rot. To reckon the mistakes of the past. To burn off the many distortions that have piled up like dead forest wood. We’ll have more on this in just a moment. But first some context is in order.
The past 40 years have been an era of heavy handed central economic planning by way of interventionist monetary policies. The past 14 years, ever since Ben Shalom Bernanke let the QE genie out of the bottle, has taken this intervention to the extreme.
From the death of Lehman, and through the Great Recession, repo madness, and the coronavirus panic, the Federal Reserve’s created upwards of $8 trillion in credit out of thin air. The economy and financial markets have come to depend on it.