US Economy Flies into “Coffin Corner,” But We Don’t Mind!
Every year, Wall Street economists see a spike in a few indicators and announce an imminent boom. This slowly fades away, leaving another year of slow growth — preventing full recovery from the crash. Readers of the FM website have seen this accurately reported since the crash, avoiding the boom-bust cycle of of crushed euphoria. Here’s a new update, as we start another slowing cycle. Eventually, inevitably, we will hit a bump that pushes slow growth to outright decline. Then, when we no longer can prepare, economic news will become exciting.
Seeing the US economy as it is
Slowly economists see the dilemma facing the Fed’s governors): they’re desperate to raise interest rates, but the US economy can grow only slowly, and so remains vulnerable to a shock that knocks it into a recession (probably a severe downturn, given its weakness).
Seven years of the Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP, since December 2008) have distorted America’s large and dysfunctional capital markets. Not just in the obvious bubbles in the stock market (e.g, biotech and social media stocks), in equity investors’ mad belief that bad news is good news (small cap stocks up 5% after the ugly jobs data), but also in ways we can only dimly see today.
Worse, ZIRP means that in the next recession the Fed will have to take America to negative interest rates — with consequences impossible to foresee (so far only small nations have crossed this Rubicon). Long experience in the US, Europe, and Japan has proven the ineffectiveness of their only other tool, quantitative easing.
On the other hand, the data suggests that raising rates now would be insane: near-zero inflation, a too-strong US dollar (already depressing exports), and slow growth (even slower on a per capita basis).
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