QUESTION: Marty you recently said that “the entire problem of lowering interest rates to ‘stimulate’ the economy demonstrates that central banks cannot really manage anything.” Is this statement really true?
BG
ANSWER: Absolutely. There is a basic presumption in all human activity that somehow we possess the power to do anything be it end Global Warming or managing the economy. Yet neither has ever been accomplished. We assume that we MUST do something even if there is nothing we can actually do to reverse the trend. It is like what I just wrote about the Plunge Protection Team. Do you realize that every empire, nation, and city-state at some point realizes the end is near, yet they cannot prevent their own demise any more than we can prevent our own death.
“The Rediscovery of the Business Cycle – is a sign of the times. Not much more than a decade ago, in what now seems a more innocent age, the ‘New Economics’ had become orthodoxy. Its basic tenet, repeated in similar words in speech after speech, in article after article, was described by one of its leaders as ‘the conviction that business cycles were not inevitable, that government policy could and should keep the economy close to a path of steady real growth at a constant target rate of unemployment.’
Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker in his Rediscovery of the Business Cycle clearly stated the theory of managing the economy with Keynesian tools failed. When he tried sending interest rates cascading higher into 1981, he really altered the economy forever. There was a capo on interest rates known as the Usury Laws. On April 1st, 1980, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 became effective.
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