Keep Pushing Until Something Really BIG Breaks?
The minutes of the FOMC’s March meeting make clear just how hard it is for the Fed to even think about the possibility of unwinding what they’ve wrought. After six-plus years of interest-rate repression, absurdity has become the established norm. Now they can’t even figure out how to get out of it without bringing down the whole construct.
They handed the fruits of their monetary policies to folks who bought assets with them. Assets values have skyrocketed, yields have plunged, and risks have disappeared from the calculus. You can still get run over by a car, but you can’t lose money in stocks or junk bonds. That’s the established norm.
This stream of money created asset price inflation and funded the fracking boom, the tech bubble, and a million other things that produced a lot of supply. But demand remained lackluster because they didn’t hand this moolah to the folks who’d spend it on gadgets or food or gasoline, the folks who’d actually create demand. The economy languished, and consumer price inflation, though bad enough for consumers, remained mostly below the money printers’ lofty goals.
Now the Fed is trying to figure out how to unscramble the omelet. Meanwhile the ECB and other central banks are adding to it, accomplishing an absurd feat: even the crappiest sovereign bonds – except those of Greece – are soaring, and yields are plunging, many of them into the negative.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
