PARIS – We promised to end the week with a bang!
You’ll recall that Fed policy always consists of the same three mistakes… 1) Keeping interest rates too low for too long, resulting in too much debt; 2) Raising interest rates to try to gently deflate the debt bubble; and 3) Cutting rates in a panic when stocks fall and the economy goes into recession.
Well, here comes the Big Bang: Mistake #4 – rarely seen, but always regretted.
Mistake #4 is what the feds do when their backs are to the wall… when they’ve run out of Mistakes 1 through 3.
It’s a typical political trade-off. The future is sacrificed for the present. And the welfare of the public is tossed aside to buy money, power, and influence for the elite.
Apocalypse Now!
Every debt expansion ends in a debt contraction. Stocks crash. Jobs are lost. The economy goes into reverse, correcting the mistakes of the previous boom.
Investors see their money entombed. Householders await foreclosures. The authorities scream: Apocalypse Now!
The more the feds falsify price signals in the boom, the more mistakes there are to correct. For example, this week, a report in The New York Times described the big mistake in the shale oil boom.
You’ll recall that it turned America from a big importer of oil to a major exporter… and revived much of the heartland with big fracking projects in woebegone regions of Texas and North Dakota.
The shale oil boom was even credited with having scuttled the oil market, which dropped from a high of around $130 a barrel in mid-2008 to under $30 in late 2016, thanks to so much new supply.
But guess what? The whole boom was fake. It didn’t add to wealth; it subtracted from it. Accumulated losses over the last five years tote to more than $200 billion, with $36 billion lost in the Bakken shale fields in North Dakota alone.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
