Is Judgment Day At Hand?
What is Judgment Day?
It is like ancient times that the Feds, under Greenspan, somehow decided that US needed to follow a zero interest rate policy, a policy now known as the ZIRP. It was 2008 when Bernanke gave birth to the term Quantitative Easing, QE. QE was followed by Operation Twist, and its sequels – QE2 and QE3.
The new buzzword is “normalization”. Normalization is the reversal of the QE operations and the raising of interest rates to above zero. Whether we agree or disagree is irrelevant. The fact is that the BLS just declared the unemployment rate is at 5%, a level that should justify initiating the normalization process starting with the next FOMC meeting in December. In other words, judgment day is at hand.
Batten down the hatches, judgment day approacheth
Image credit: World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)
The following two charts summarize the Fed’s policies nicely. The first shows the Federal Funds rate. It dropped from over 5% in 2007 to zero today. So we are making a big deal over a possible 25 basis points hike? I will leave that question for later.
Effective Federal Funds rate. It may be hiked from nothing to almost nothing soon, but what difference would it really make? – click to enlarge.
The second chart shows the Fed Balance Sheet, also starting in 2007. It went from $875 billion in 2007 to $4.5 trillion today, an increase of $3.625 trillion.
Total assets held by the Federal reserve. This unprecedented intervention has delivered “the weakest economic recovery of the entire post-WW2 era”. This result should be no surprise to anyone, except perhaps the monetary mandarins themselves – click to enlarge.
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Looking at the two charts above, they beg the question: How do you normalize the extreme policies of the last 8 years? If normal means a return to a 5% federal funds rate and reducing the Fed’s balance sheet back to under $1 trillion, we have a hell of a long way to go.
