The Unwind
It’s my overarching thesis that the world is in the waning days of a historic multi-decade experiment in unfettered finance. As I have posited over the years, international finance has for too long been effectively operating without constraints on either the quantity or the quality of Credit issued. From the perspective of unsound finance on a globalized basis, this period has been unique. History, however, is replete with isolated episodes of booms fueled by bouts of unsound money and Credit – monetary fiascos inevitably ending in disaster. I see discomforting confirmation that the current historic global monetary fiasco’s disaster phase is now unfolding. It is within this context that readers should view recent market instability.
It’s been 25 years of analyzing U.S. finance and the great U.S. Credit Bubble. When it comes to sustaining the Credit boom, at this point we’ve seen the most extraordinary measures along with about every trick in the book. When the banking system was left severely impaired from late-eighties excess, the Greenspan Fed surreptitiously nurtured non-bank Credit expansion. There was the unprecedented GSE boom, recklessly fomented by explicit and implied Washington backing. We’ve witnessed unprecedented growth in “Wall Street finance” – securitizations and sophisticated financial instruments and vehicles. There was the explosion in hedge funds and leveraged speculation. And, of course, there’s the tangled derivatives world that ballooned to an unfathomable hundreds of Trillions. Our central bank has championed it all.
Importantly, the promotion of “market-based” finance dictated a subtle yet profound change in policymaking. A functioning New Age financial structure required that the Federal Reserve backstop the securities markets.
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