Tag Archives: Federal Reserve

End The Fed’s Money Monopoly–The Only Escape From Monetary Central Planning & The Wall Street Casino, by Sean Fieler

Posted on November 2, 2015 | 1 comment

Sean Fieler with a valuable look back on the well-founded fears of central banking that attended the launch of the Federal Reserve in 1913. See also The Golden Pinnacle, by Robert Gore. Although it is a historical novel, it makes the 1913 case against the Fed in Chapter 27, “Fools Gold.” From Fieler, at The Wall Street Journal, via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

History suggests that the only way to rein in the sprawling Federal Reserve is to end its money monopoly and restore the American people’s ability to use gold as a competing currency.

The legislative compromise that created the Fed in 1913 recognized that the power to print money, left unchecked, could corrupt both the government and the economy. Accordingly, the Federal Reserve Act created the Federal Reserve System without a centralized balance sheet, a central monetary-policy committee or even a central office.

The Fed’s regional banks were prohibited from buying government debt and required to maintain a 40% gold reserve against dollars in circulation. Moreover, each of the reserve banks was obligated to redeem dollars for gold at a fixed price in unlimited amounts.

Over the past century, every one of these constraints has been removed. Today the Fed has a centrally managed balance sheet of $4 trillion, and is the largest participant in the market for U.S. government bonds. The dollar is no longer fixed to gold, and the IRS assesses a 28% marginal tax on realized gains when gold is used as currency.

The largest increases in the Fed’s power have occurred at moments of financial stress. Federal Reserve banks first financed the purchase of government bonds during World War I. The gold-reserve requirement was dramatically reduced and a central monetary policy-committee was created during the Great Depression. President Richard Nixon broke the last link to gold to stave off a run on the dollar in 1971.

This same combination of crisis and expediency played out in 2008 as the Fed bailed out a series of nonbank financial institutions and initiated a massive balance-sheet expansion labeled “quantitative easing.” To end this cycle, Americans need an alternative to the Fed’s money monopoly.

To continue reading: End The Fed’s Money Monopoly

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Something Happened, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on October 26, 2015 | Leave a comment

James Howard Kunstler takes well-aimed shots at Ben Bernanke. From Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Ben Bernanke’s memoir is out and the chatter about it inevitably turns to the sickening moments in September 2008 when “the world economy came very close to collapse.” Easy to say, but how many people know what that means? It’s every bit as opaque as the operations of the Federal Reserve itself.

There were many ugly facets to the problem but they all boiled down to global insolvency — too many promises to pay that could not be met. The promises, of course, were quite hollow. They accumulated over the decades-long process, largely self-organized and emergent, of the so-called global economy arranging itself. All the financial arrangements depended on trust and good faith, especially of the authorities who managed the world’s “reserve currency,” the US dollar.

By the fall of 2008, it was clear that these authorities, in particular the US Federal Reserve, had failed spectacularly in regulating the operations of capital markets. With events such as the collapse of Lehman and the rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it also became clear that much of the collateral ostensibly backing up the US banking system was worthless, especially instruments based on mortgages. Hence, the trust and good faith vested in the issuer of the world’s reserve currency was revealed as worthless.

The great triumph of Ben Bernanke was to engineer a fix that rendered trust and good faith irrelevant. That was largely accomplished, in concert with the executive branch of the government, by failing to prosecute banking crime, in particular the issuance of fraudulent securities built out of worthless mortgages. In effect, Mr. Bernanke (and Barack Obama’s Department of Justice), decided that the rule of law was no longer needed for the system to operate. In fact, the rule of law only hampered it.

To continue reading: Something Happened

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Wall Street’s Latest Bounce——Ostrich Economics At Work, by David Stockman

Posted on October 18, 2015 | Leave a comment

From David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

It is more evident than ever that the world economy is heading into a deflationary conflagration, but today’s generation of house trained bulls wouldn’t recognize a warning if it slapped them upside their horns. They refused once again last week to exit the casino because they got another signal from Hilsenramp that the Fed is on “hold” until at least next March.

That means we are heading for 87 straight months of ZIRP. So you have to wonder if these fearless robo-machines and day-trading punters by now have come to believe that central banks have abolished time itself—-to say nothing of the law of supply and demand.

As to the latter, any rational investor should have headed out of dodge long ago in the face of the mother of all bond bubbles——a monumental worldwide distortion of debt pricing and “cap rates” which will bring down the entire financial system when it inexorably bursts.

After all, how is it possible that sovereign debt prices and yields have not been drastically repressed by $19 trillion of central bank bond-buying during the last two decades?

The central banks have vast powers, of course, but repeal of the law of supply and demand is not among them. Their big fat bid, therefore, has dominated debt pricing on the margin for most of this century. Yet all that financial purchasing power was conjured from thin air by central banks.

Stated differently, these massive central bank debt purchases did not arise from society’s legitimate pool of savings set aside from current income. Instead, they amounted to a gargantuan fraud of the state, meaning that the financial system is infected with a monetary rot in its very foundations.

Accordingly, the idea that historical (pre-1995) interest rate patterns over the course of the business cycle are relevant to today’s outlook is complete Wall Street flim-flam. Absurdly low interest rates, such as last week’s 60 basis points for two-year treasury notes or 210 bps for 10-year money, do not represent a surfeit of private savings; nor do they reflect business and household “hoarding” of cash in the face of a weak economy or near-term uncertainty, as the talking heads insist day after day.

No, they represent a giant surplus of finance—credit made from whole cloth by the central banks and collateral based Wall Street dealers and lenders. Unlike honest capitalist savings, these vast, meandering pools of liquidity slosh around in money markets, but never become permanently deployed in capital assets such as machinery or software.

Instead, they provide funding for financial market gamblers and carry traders. That is, these central bank generated finance pools provide the transient wherewithal of leveraged speculation; they are not permanent capital itself nor are they invested in long-term claims upon it. Accordingly, the price of financial assets is now artificial and wildly inaccurate—– set by speculators front-running central banks, not price discovery among investors and savers.

Mispriced debt is at the heart of the global financial bubble. That is what allowed the US business sector to raise $2 trillion of net debt since the 2008 financial crisis, yet to deploy all of it on a net basis to financial engineering, especially stock buybacks. The proof that it has not gone into real productive assets is unassailable. Real net business investment is still 17% below its turn of the century level.

To continue reading: Wall Street’s Latest Bounce–Ostrich Economics At Work

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Look Back in Anger, by Doug Nolan

Posted on October 17, 2015 | Leave a comment

Doug Nolan eviscerates a commentary in The Wall Street Journal from mainstream economists Alan S. Blinder and Mark Zandi. From Nolan at creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com:

October 16 – Wall Street Journal (Alan S. Blinder and Mark Zandi): “Don’t Look Back in Anger at Bailouts and Stimulus…”

Logic dictates that the size of any stimulus be proportional to the expected decline in economic activity—which was enormous in the Great Recession. The Recovery Act and other stimulus measures were costly to taxpayers, and thus much-maligned. But the slump would have been much deeper without them. The Federal Reserve has also come under attack for its unprecedented actions, especially its quantitative easing or bond-buying programs. Yet QE lowered long-term interest rates and boosted stock and housing prices—all to the economy’s benefit. Yes, QE has possible negative side-effects, but for the most part they have yet to materialize. Policy makers who botched the regulatory job before the crisis and shifted to fiscal restraint prematurely in 2011 can hardly be considered flawless. Yet one major reason why the U.S. economy has outperformed the plodding European and Japanese economies is the timely, massive and unprecedented responses of U.S. policy makers in 2008-09. So let’s get the history right.

Getting “history right” has been a CBB focal point From Day One. In last week’s media barrage, Dr. Bernanke repeatedly stated that fiscal policy had turned contractionary – (or at best neutral) suggesting that fiscal stringency was a key factor in the Fed sticking with ultra-loose policies. In Friday’s WSJ op-ed, Blinder and Zandi write: “Policy makers who botched the regulatory job before the crisis and shifted to fiscal restraint prematurely in 2011.”

Since the end of 2007, outstanding Treasury Securities (from Fed’s Z.1) have increased $8.302 TN, or 137%. As a percentage of GDP, outstanding Treasuries almost doubled to 83% (from 42%) in seven years. By calendar year, Treasury borrowings increased $1.302 TN (8.8% of GDP) in 2008, $1.506 TN (10.4%) in 2009, $1.645 TN (11.0%) in 2010, $1.138 TN (7.3%) in 2011, $1.181 TN (7.3%) in 2012, $858 billion (5.1%) in 2013 and $736 billion (4.2%) last year.

In nominal dollars, Federal expenditures increased from 2007’s $2.933 TN, to 2008’s $3.214 TN, 2009’s $3.487 TN, 2010’s $3.772 TN, 2011’s $3.818 TN, 2012’s $3.789 TN, 2013’s $3.782 TN and 2014’s $3.897 TN. Federal expenditures spiked during the crisis and remain about a third above 2007 levels.

“US Post Smallest Annual Budget Deficit since 2007” was a Thursday WSJ headline. “The deficit declined 9% from the prior year to $439 billion—around 2.5% of gross domestic product and below the average the U.S. has run over the past 40 years.”

I remember all too clearly the jubilation that surrounded federal budget surpluses in the late-nineties. Supposedly, a disciplined Washington had made tough choices and finally put its house in order. There was even talk of Treasury completely paying off its debts. It was, however, all a seductive Bubble Illusion. In particular, receipts were inflated by Credit excess-induced capital gains taxes (on inflating stock and asset prices) and booming incomes (especially tech and finance related!). Actually, it all seemed obvious even at the time. It didn’t make sense to me that the Fed and analysts were so prone to misinterpreting underlying dynamics.

Blinder and Zandi: “Yes, QE has possible negative side-effects, but for the most part they have yet to materialize.”

There are myriad deleterious side-effects, and anyone paying attention would agree that many have begun to materialize. One prominent consequences of Federal Reserve rate manipulation has been the loss of the markets’ ability to discipline policymaking. How does it ever make sense to allow politicians access to years of virtually free “money”? Ominously, despite Treasury paying basis points to service a large chunk of our outstanding debts, the federal government is still running significant deficits. While outstanding Treasury debt has increased almost 140% in seven years, 2014 interest payments were up only 8% from 2007 (to $440bn). Government social payments, on the other hand, were up 48% from 2007 levels to $1.897 TN.

To continue reading: Look Back in Anger

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They Said That? 10/15/15

Posted on October 15, 2015 | 3 comments

A headline at the top of the front page of the Wall Street Journal:

Fed Doubts Grow on 2015 Rate Hike

This might have been news last month when the Fed decided not to raise rates and Goldman Sachs, the most connected investment bank on the planet, stated flatly that the rate rise would not come until 2016. At best this should have been a one or two-paragraph piece on one of the back pages of the Money and Markets section. The statistics, including the September unemployment report, have been nothing but disappointing. Commodity and emerging market equity and currencies have been in the toilet for months at the mere prospect of a rate hike, and its given US equity and junk bond markets heartburn as well. However, with the Fed, nothing is official until it has been confirmed by the Journal‘s Fed flack in residence, Jon Hilsenwrath. This headline tells market participants what they already know: free money for many more months. Reading the article would be a waste of time. The stock market rallied today, but as SLL has said: if all equity markets have going for them is Fed freebies, look out below.

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We Should Have Known Something Was Wrong, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 10, 2015 | Leave a comment

Good for Bank of America for figuring out that QE 2 may not have been a good idea and QE3 was definitely a bad idea, but they are about seven years too late. QE1, which Bank of America endorses, was just as bad as its successors. Central banks are bad ideas and so is quantitative easing (“Herd Extinct,” SLL, 9/24/15) and Bank of America gets no credit for finally seeing a glimmer of the truth. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Remember when stuff such as the following was written exclusively on “conspiracy” tin-foil blogs by deranged lunatics who could not appreciate the brilliance of the neo-Keynesian system and central-planning by academics, in all its glory? Good times.

Here is Bank of America’s Athanasios Vamvakidis channeling Tyler Durden [and Straight Line Logic] circa 2009

The real cost of QE

QE was not a free lunch after all

If only it was that easy to print our way out of a global crisis. Eight years after the crisis, we are still debating about whether the recovery has gained enough of a momentum to allow exit from crisis-driven policies and start hiking rates from zero. The world economy has actually lost momentum this year (Chart 1), deflation risks have increased (Chart 2), and EM indicators and overall market volatility have reached crisis levels (see Chart 3). All this is despite unprecedented expansion of central bank balance sheets (Chart 4). Things may have been worse otherwise, but in hindsight we believe relying too much on unconventional monetary policies was not a free lunch after all.

We should have known something was wrong

The Fed “taper tantrum” could have been the first warning that QE had gone too far. The Fed’s announcement in June 2013 that they would consider tapering QE, contingent upon continued positive data, triggered a sharp market sell-off, particularly in EM. The aggressive search for yield, which intensified after the Fed announced QE3—or QE infinity as markets called it—came to a sudden stop. QE was not for infinity after all. The Fed tried to reassure markets that QE tapering was still policy easing and that its end would not imply rate hikes immediately, but the markets apparently thought otherwise. A key takeaway was not that QE had already gone too far, but that announcing its tapering may have been a mistake. The Fed waited until December to start tapering, although the market had already priced its beginning in September.

To continue reading: We Should Have Known Something Was Wrong

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Bernanke’s Balderdash, by David Stockman

Posted on October 7, 2015 | Leave a comment

SLL wishes David Stockman wouldn’t waste his talent and valuable time swatting flies, but at least he saves SLL the trouble. From Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

The US and world economies are drifting inexorably into the next recession owing to the deflationary collapse of commodities, capital spending and world trade. These are the inevitable “morning after” consequence of the 20-year global credit binge which has now reached its apogee.

The apparent global boom during that period was actually a central bank driven excursion into the false economics of household borrowing to inflate consumption in the DM economies; and frenzied, uneconomic investing to inflate GDP in China and the EM.

The common denominator was falsification of financial prices. By destroying honest price discovery in the financial markets, the world’s convoy of money-printing central banks led by the Fed elicited a huge excess of financialization relative to economic output.

The central manifestation of that was $185 trillion of debt growth during the past two decades——a stupendous explosion of credit which amounted to 3.7X the expansion of global GDP.

And even that ratio is an understatement. That’s because measured GDP has been artificially bloated by the monumental worldwide malinvestment and excess capacity arising from the credit bubble. That is, phony “growth” which under the laws of economics will be liquidated in due course.

To continue reading: Bernanke’s Balderdash

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