Leading German Keynesian Economist Calls For Cash Ban
It’s official: the world has gone central-planner crazy.
Monetary policy, whether in the form of “conventional” methods such as the micromanagement of policy rates or so-called “unconventional” measures such as QE, has proven utterly ineffective when it comes to both “smoothing out” the business cycle and reigniting economic growth in the wake of severe downturns. If anything, recent history has shown the exact opposite to be true. That is, the Fed helped to engineer the housing bubble and has now succeeded in inflating a similar bubble in stocks and fixed income. Meanwhile, the Japanese experience with QE has plunged the country into what we have affectionately dubbed “The Kuroda Zone”, wherein the BoJ has cornered both the stock and bond markets while failing to promote wage growth or meaningfully raise inflation expectations. In China, the PBoC has taken to cutting policy rates at the first sign of weakness in the stock market, helping to sustain what will perhaps go down in history as the second coming of the tulip bulb mania, while the ECB has taken the insane step of adopting a trillion euro bond buying program while simultaneously demanding fiscal discipline, meaning the central bank’s bond monetization efforts are set against a backdrop of meager supply.
In sum, the collective actions of the world’s most influential central banks have done wonders when it comes to inflating asset bubbles but have done very little to revive robust economic growth. In fact, far from smoothing out the business cycle and resuscitating DM demand, post-crisis monetary policy has actually had the exact opposite effect: it has set the stage for an even more spectacular collapse while simultaneously creating a worldwide deflationary supply glut.
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