…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Home » Posts tagged 'alan greenspan' (Page 4)
Tag Archives: alan greenspan
This Is What Happens To Gold When Citizens Lose Faith In Fiat Currency
This Is What Happens To Gold When Citizens Lose Faith In Fiat Currency
It appears, first slowly and now quickly, the world is realizing that Alan Greenspan was right after all: “Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency. No fiat currency, including the dollar, can match it.”
As Nick Laird exposes, gold prices are running away in the weakest countries first…
The US Economy Has Not Recovered And Will Not Recover
The US Economy Has Not Recovered And Will Not Recover
The US economy died when middle class jobs were offshored and when the financial system was deregulated.
Jobs offshoring benefitted corporate executives and shareholders, because lower labor and compliance costs resulted in higher profits. These profits flowed through to shareholders in the form of capital gains and to executives in the form of “performance bonuses.” Wall Street benefitted from the bull market generated by higher profits.
However, jobs offshoring also offshored US GDP and consumer purchasing power. Despite promises of a “New Economy” and better jobs, the replacement jobs have been increasingly part-time, lowly-paid jobs in domestic services, such as retail clerks, waitresses and bartenders.
The offshoring of US manufacturing and professional service jobs to Asia stopped the growth of consumer demand in the US, decimated the middle class, and left insufficient employment for college graduates to be able to service their student loans. The ladders of upward mobility that had made the United States an “opportunity society” were taken down in the interest of higher short-term profits.
Without growth in consumer incomes to drive the economy, the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan substituted the growth in consumer debt to take the place of the missing growth in consumer income. Under the Greenspan regime, Americans’ stagnant and declining incomes were augmented with the ability to spend on credit. One source of this credit was the rise in housing prices that the Federal Reserves low inerest rate policy made possible. Consumers could refinance their now higher-valued home at lower interest rates and take out the “equity” and spend it.
The debt expansion, tied heavily to housing mortgages, came to a halt when the fraud perpetrated by a deregulated financial system crashed the real estate and stock markets. The bailout of the guilty imposed further costs on the very people that the guilty had victimized.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Betting on the Wall Street Crash
Betting on the Wall Street Crash
If you read Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short or see the movie by the same name, you won’t find much about how the financial crisis of 2008 was set in motion more than two decades earlier. You won’t learn much about the roles of Ronald Reagan and his disdain for big government or about Bill Clinton’s faith in neo-liberalism, trusting that the modern markets and the supposedly sophisticated investors would keep excesses in check.
Nor will you find much about economist-turned-politician Phil Gramm who incorporated many of Reagan’s and Clinton’s beliefs into legislative actions, slashing taxes on the rich in the 1980s (and thus incentivizing greed) and, in the 1990s, brushing aside Franklin Roosevelt’s painfully learned lessons from the Great Depression about the need for firewalls between the speculation of Wall Street and the hard-earned savings of Main Street.
Also out of Lewis’s narrative frame is Brooksley Born, the federal commodities regulator who foresaw the looming danger from the exotic new financial instruments that sliced and diced risky subprime mortgages and packaged them in bonds with ratings far above what they deserved – and the even riskier tendency to lay bets on how the bonds would perform.
But Born was out-muscled by bigger financial stars with larger egos, the esteemed Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (originally a Reagan appointee) and Clinton’s brash Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a rising star in the neo-liberal establishment which treated the market’s “invisible hand” as a new-age god.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bob Janjuah Warns The Bubble Implosion Can’t Be “Fixed” This Time
Bob Janjuah Warns The Bubble Implosion Can’t Be “Fixed” This Time
Having correctly foreseen in September that “China’s devaluations are not over yet” it appears Nomura’s infamous ‘bear’ Bob Janjuah has also nailed The Fed’s subsequent actions (hiking rates into a fundamentally weakening economy in a desperate bid to “convince markets that strong growth and inflation are on their way back”). In light of this, his latest note today should be worrisome to many as he warns the S&P 500 will trade down around 20% to 25% from current levels in H1, down to the 1500s and for dip-buyers, it’s over: “I now feel even more certain that debt-driven asset bubble implosions cannot merely be ‘fixed’ with even more debt and another round of central bank-driven asset bubbles.”
As Janjuah said in September (excerpted):
I believe there is more weakness ahead – both fundamentally and within markets – over Q4 and perhaps into Q1 2016.
I repeat my view that the Fed does not need to hike based on fundamentals, but I would not be at all surprised to see the Fed hike in late 2015, in an attempt to convince markets that strong growth and inflation are on their way back. Any such hiking cycle by the Fed would I believe be extremely short-lived and quickly give way to renewed dovishness.While I think a US recession is merely possible rather than probable, the evidence is growing in my view that a global recession is more probable than possible.
Where is the Fed “put”, and what would such a “put” look like? It is very early in the process and lots will depend on global policy responses and data outcomes, but I am happy to declare my view: the next Fed “put” is not likely until the S&P 500 is trading in the 1500s at least (so more likely to be a Q1 2016 item rather than Q4 2015); and in terms of what the Fed could do, clearly QE4 has to be in the Fed’s toolkit.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Big Short is a Great Movie, But…
The Big Short is a Great Movie, But…
Paris — Michael Lewis is the chronicler of Wall Street. He takes the complexity behind which the inhabitants of the financial world hide and weaves a tale that is both understandable and compelling. Starting with the classic “Liars Poker” (1989), Lewis has produced a number of books about the financial markets including “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” (2014) and “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (2010). Working with director Adam McKay and some great actors and screen writers, Lewis has managed to produce what is perhaps the most accessible and relevant treatment of the mortgage boom and financial bust of the 2000s, and the subsequent 2008 financial crisis.
The beauty of “The Big Short,” both as a movie and a book, is that it provides sufficient detail to inform the general audience about events and issues that are not part of everyday life. Wall Street is a secretive place, but “The Big Short” manages to convey enough of the details to make the story credible as a journalistic effort, yet also enormously entertaining. Lewis does this with two essential ingredients of any film: a simple story and compelling characters.
Images of greed and stupidity are presented like Italian frescos in “The Big Short,” pictures that are memorable and thought provoking. Indeed, what many people know and remember years from now about the 2008 financial crisis will be shaped by creative efforts such as “The Big Short” for the simple reason that Lewis has simplified the description into a manageable portion. Unlike hedge fund manager Michael Burry (played by Christian Bale), most people lack the patience and expertise to sift through and understand reams of financial data.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is the US Heading for an Economic Bust
Is the US Heading for an Economic Bust
On Wednesday December 16 2015 Federal Reserve Bank policy makers raised the federal funds rate target by 0.25% to 0.5% for the first time since December 2008. There is the possibility that the target could be lifted gradually to 1.25% by December next year.
Fed policy makers have justified this increase on the view that the economy is strong enough and can stand on its own feet. “The Committee judges that there has been considerable improvement in labor market conditions this year, and it is reasonably confident the inflation will rise over the medium term to its 2 percent objective”, the Fed said in its policy statement.
Various key economic indicators such as industrial production don’t support this optimism. The yearly growth rate of production fell to minus 1.2% in November versus 4.5% in November last year.According to our model the yearly growth rate could fall to minus 3.4% by August.
Although the yearly growth rate of the CPI rose to 0.5% in November from 0.2% in October according to our model the CPI growth rate is likely to visibly weaken.
The yearly growth rate is forecast to fall to minus 0.1% by April before stabilizing at 0.1% by December next year.
So from this perspective Fed policy makers did not have much of a case to tighten their stance.
Fed policy makers seem to be of the view that the almost zero federal funds rate and their massive monetary pumping has cured the economy, which now seems to be approaching a path of stable economic growth and price stability, so it is held.
On this way of thinking the role of monetary policy is to make sure that the economy is kept at the “correct path” over time.
Deviations from the “correct path”, it is held, occur on account of various shocks, which are often seen as of a mysterious nature. We suggest that the present Fed is following the footpath of Greenspan’s Fed, which was instrumental in setting in motion the 2008 economic crisis.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Weekly Commentary: Monetary Fiasco
Weekly Commentary: Monetary Fiasco
All great monetary fiascos are forged upon a foundation of misperceptions and flawed premises. There’s always an underlying disturbance in money and Credit masked by supposed new understandings, technologies, capabilities and superior financial apparatus.
During the nineties “New Paradigm” period, exciting new technologies and “globalization” were seen unleashing a productivity and wealth miracle. The Greenspan Fed believed this afforded the economy an accelerated speed limit. With inflation and federal deficits believed conquered, there was little risk associated with low rates and an “asymmetrical” policy approach to support the booming economy and financial markets. The Fed significantly loosened the reins on finance precisely when they needed to be tightened.
The nineties were phenomenal from a financial perspective. Total system Debt about doubled to $25.4 TN. Remarkably, Financial Sector borrowings surged more than 200% to $8.2 TN. Outstanding Agency (GSE) securities ballooned from $1.267 TN to end the decade at $3.916 TN, for growth of 209%. Securities Broker/Dealers (liabilities) jumped 212% to $1.73 TN. “Fed Fund and Repo” expanded 112% to $1.655 TN. Wall Street “Funding Corps” rose 387% to $1.064 TN. Securities Credit surged 414% to $611 billion.
And the most incredible aspect of the nineties boom in “Wall Street Finance”? Pertinent to today’s backdrop, the 1990’s Bubble unfolded over years with barely a notice. Everyone was mesmerized by the Internet, exciting new technologies and the white-hot IPO market. I was fixated on what I was convinced was evolving into epic financial innovation and a historic Credit Bubble. Yet attempts to explain this backdrop to other financial professionals, academics, economists, journalists and even Fed officials went absolutely nowhere. Repeatedly I heard frustrating variations of “Doug, you don’t understand.” “Only banks create Credit.” “The Federal Reserve controls the money supply.” “Fannie and Freddie are only financial intermediaries – they don’t impact system Credit.” “Financial system borrowings don’t matter. Doug, you’re double-counting debt.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Trouble With Financial Bubbles
The Trouble With Financial Bubbles
Very soon after the magnitude of the 2008 financial crisis became clear, a lively debate began about whether central banks and regulators could – and should – have done more to head it off. The traditional view, notably shared by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, is that any attempt to prick financial bubbles in advance is doomed to failure. The most central banks can do is to clean up the mess.
Bubble-pricking may indeed choke off growth unnecessarily – and at high social cost. But there is a counter-argument. Economists at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) have maintained that the costs of the crisis were so large, and the cleanup so long, that we should surely now look for ways to act pre-emptively when we again see a dangerous build-up of liquidity and credit.
Hence the fierce (albeit arcane and polite) dispute between the two sides at the International Monetary Fund’s recent meeting in Lima, Peru. For the literary-minded, it was reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver finds himself caught in a war between two tribes, one of which believes that a boiled egg should always be opened at the narrow end, while the other is fervent in its view that a spoon fits better into the bigger, rounded end.
It is fair to say that the debate has moved on a little since 2008. Most important, macroprudential regulation has been added to policymakers’ toolkit: simply put, it makes sense to vary banks’ capital requirements according to the financial cycle. When credit expansion is rapid, it may be appropriate to increase banks’ capital requirements as a hedge against the heightened risk of a subsequent contraction. This increase would be above what microprudential supervision – assessing the risks to individual institutions – might dictate. In this way, the new Basel rules allow for requiring banks to maintain a so-called countercyclical buffer of extra capital.
Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/central-bankers-financial-stability-debate-by-howard-davies-2015-10#fXsDH7ISW0ku2b5s.99
Two Outs in the Bottom of the Ninth
Two Outs in the Bottom of the Ninth
The housing market peaked in 2005 and proceeded to crash over the next five years, with existing home sales falling 50%, new home sales falling 75%, and national home prices falling 30%. A funny thing happened after the peak. Wall Street banks accelerated the issuance of subprime mortgages to hyper-speed. The executives of these banks knew housing had peaked, but insatiable greed consumed them as they purposely doled out billions in no-doc liar loans as a necessary ingredient in their CDOs of mass destruction.
The millions in upfront fees, along with their lack of conscience in bribing Moody’s and S&P to get AAA ratings on toxic waste, while selling the derivatives to clients and shorting them at the same time, in order to enrich executives with multi-million dollar compensation packages, overrode any thoughts of risk management, consequences, or the impact on homeowners, investors, or taxpayers. The housing boom began as a natural reaction to the Federal Reserve suppressing interest rates to, at the time, ridiculously low levels from 2001 through 2004 (child’s play compared to the last six years).
Greenspan created the atmosphere for the greatest mal-investment in world history. As he raised rates from 2004 through 2006, the titans of finance on Wall Street should have scaled back their risk taking and prepared for the inevitable bursting of the bubble. Instead, they were blinded by unadulterated greed, as the legitimate home buyer pool dried up, and they purposely peddled “exotic” mortgages to dupes who weren’t capable of making the first payment. This is what happens at the end of Fed induced bubbles. Irrationality, insanity, recklessness, delusion, and willful disregard for reason, common sense, historical data and truth lead to tremendous pain, suffering, and financial losses.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Currency War That Few Economists and Analysts Notice, Much Less Understand
A Currency War That Few Economists and Analysts Notice, Much Less Understand
“The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.”
Michael Parenti
Most economists and financial analysts think that ‘currency war’ merely refers to the competitive devaluations that nations sometimes engage in to help boost their domestic economies, as they had done in the 1930’s for example.
This time the currency war is a much more profound confrontation of differing agendas revolving around the historically unusual role of the US dollar, based on nothing more than the will of the Federal Reserve and the ‘full faith and credit’ of the US, as the reserve currency for global central banks and international trade.
When a single nation begins to wield such an ‘exorbitant privilege’ to underwrite the speculative excesses of a crony capitalist banking system, and perhaps even more importantly, as an instrument in support of their international policy, one ought not be surprised that the rest of the world will begin to resist it.
A currency must be policy neutral, without regard to any party if it is to be a true medium of exchange. Can this still be said of the US Dollar as it has been managed, especially since 1990?
As Alan Greenspan once correctly pointed out, but certainly did not heed when he was at the Fed, if a fiat dollar is managed by monetary policy such that it emulates gold, then it will be perceived as fair, and will certainly be above the particular domestic issues or international policy biases of a single nation that de facto wields the reserve currency status.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Riding ZIRP Into The Doom Loop—–Monetary Central Planning’s Dead End
Riding ZIRP Into The Doom Loop—–Monetary Central Planning’s Dead End
What the Fed really decided Thursday was to ride the zero-bound right smack into the next recession. When that calamity happens not too many months from now, the 28-year experiment in monetary central planning inaugurated by a desperate Alan Greenspan after Black Monday in October 1987 will come to an abrupt and merciful halt.
Why? Because Keynesian money printing is in a doom loop. The Fed’s ZIRP policies guarantee another financial crash, which will trigger still another outbreak of panic in the C-suites of corporate America and a consequent liquidation of excess inventories and labor on main street. That’s the new channel of monetary policy transmission, and it eventually leads to recession.
This upcoming recession, in turn, will prove beyond a shadow of doubt that in today’s financialized global economy you can’t manage the GDP of a single country as if it were isolated in an economic bathtub surrounded by high walls; nor can you attain domestic macro-targets for employment and inflation through the blunderbuss instruments of pegged money market rates and wealth effects levitation of the stock market.
Instead, the Fed’s falsification of financial asset prices simply subsidizes gambling in secondary markets; enables daisy chains of collateral to be endlessly hypothecated and re-hypothecated; causes vast misallocations and malinvestments of corporate resources, especially stock buybacks and other financial engineering; and sends money managers scrambling for yield without regard to risk, such as in junk bonds and EM debt.
What it doesn’t do is get households all jiggy, causing them to boost their leverage and spend up a storm. That’s because they reached “peak debt” at the time of the financial crisis, and have been struggling to reduce debt ever since. In the most recent quarter, in fact, household debt posted at $13.6 trillion or 3% lower than in early 2008.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An Almost Perfect Predictor of GDP Growth and Bernie Lays the Boots…
An Almost Perfect Predictor of GDP Growth and Bernie Lays the Boots…
I recently watched a video clip of Bernie Sanders laying the boots to Alan Greenspan back in 2003, for Greenspan’s seemingly out of touch perspective of the average American. Now while we do have a repentant banker in Greenspan, a rare phenomenon for sure, I found the scolding interesting in that essentially every accusation Sanders lays on Greenspan could be repeated today to our subsequent central banking gods. During the video notice that all the figures Sanders explicates not only remain true today but have gotten far worse. Particularly note the national debt figure which has now increased by more than 400% since then!!! The clip is well worth the 5 minutes.
But so let’s dig in a little to what Bernie is really saying to Greenspan. The overall theme of the trouncing is that the Federal Reserve, the keeper of American monetary policy, had implemented policies that clearly had done significant damage to the vast majority of Americans. Specifically Sanders is suggesting that the policies were a cancer to the economic prosperity of Americans and all the while creating extreme wealth for a select few. And while that is bad in and of itself, what Sanders finds despicable is that the Fed seems to not only deny the harm they were responsible for but Greenspan seemed to be alleging success by focusing solely on the massive wealth it had provided to the very few on top.
Now in a recent whitepaper by Stephen Williams, VP of the St. Loius Fed, a case is made that the Fed’s ‘recovery’ policies have not helped to boost the economy. And while I agree with that conclusion, I feel the paper is a fraud.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Greenspan Imagines Better, Alternate Universe in Which Greenspan Was Not Fed Chair
Greenspan Imagines Better, Alternate Universe in Which Greenspan Was Not Fed Chair
Alan Greenspan, the policy failure whose tenure at the Federal Reserve helped create the conditions for the largest financial crisis in nearly a century, was inexplicably given a major newspaper platform on Monday to opine about regulation, which he ideologically abhors.
So it came as a surprise to read the second paragraph of his Financial Timesop-ed, wishfully describing an alternative history of 2008, if only there had been robust regulation.
“What the 2008 crisis exposed was a fragile underpinning of a highly leveraged financial system,” Greenspan writes. “Had bank capital been adequate and fraud statutes been more vigorously enforced, the crisis would very likely have been a financial episode of only passing consequence.”
Greenspan must have temporarily forgotten that he had the power to accomplish both of these priorities as Fed chair.
Before the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Fed had primary responsibility over consumer protection, including rule-writing, supervision, and prohibition of unfair and deceptive practices. They even were charged with resolving consumer complaints.
Greenspan famously did none of this during the inflating of the housing bubble from 2002 to 2006, instead extolling the virtues of adjustable-rate loans andmortgage securitization, even as fellow Fed governors and the FBI publicly warned about looming fraud. The responsibility for vigorously enforcing fraud statutes, then, fell to Greenspan, and he ignored it.
Greenspan also laments that Wall Street firms carried too much debt before the crisis, and not enough capital. More capital – in the form of stock or cash reserves – would have made sure banks, rather than taxpayers, covered their own losses. But Greenspan could have enacted this at the time, being the head of the most powerful financial regulatory agency from 1987 to 2006.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fed Admits Economy Can’t Function Without Bubbles
In short, the dot-com bust was the last chance for the Fed to pivot and liberate the American economy from the corrosive financialization it had fostered. A determined policy of higher interest rates and renunciation of the Greenspan Put would have paved the way for a return to current account balance, sharply increased domestic savings, the elevation of investment over consumption, and a restoration of financial discipline in both public and private life. Needless to say, the Fed never even considered this historic opportunity. Instead, it chose to double-down on the colossal failure it had already produced, driving interest rates into the sub-basement of historic experience. This inexorably triggered the next and most destructive bubble ever. – David Stockman, The Great Deformation
Over the course of the roughly twelve and a half years from Black Monday to the beginning of the end for the dot-com bubble, the Fed effectively engineered a mania by facilitating the explosion of bank loans, GSE debt, and the shadow banking complex, which together grew from under $5 trillion in 1987 to $17 trillion by the beginning of 2000.
For evidence that this expansion was indeed the work of monetary authorities and was not funded by an increase in America’s savings, look no further than the following chart which shows an accommodative Fed and an increasingly savings averse American public:
When the Nasdaq collapsed, the Fed was given an opportunity to restore some semblance of order and discipline to a market that had learned to rely on the Greenspan put. Instead, it chose to inflate a still larger bubble and now, courtesy of Janet Yellen’s friends at the San Francisco Fed, we know precisely why.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Gold and the Grave Dancers
Gold and the Grave Dancers
The Asset They Love to Hate …
Back in the 1960s, Alan Greenspan wrote a well-known essay that to this day is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the present-day monetary and economic system (which is a kind of “fascism lite” type of statism, masquerading as capitalism) and especially the almost visceral hate etatistes harbor toward gold. Greenspan’s essay is entitled “Gold and Economic Freedom”, and as the title already suggests, the two are intimately connected.
Alan Greenspan in the mid 1970s – although he later turned out to be a sell-out, his understanding of economics undoubtedly dwarfed that of his successors at the Fed (and we are not just saying this based on the essay discussed here).
Photo credit: Charles Kelly / AP Photo
What makes Greenspan’s essay especially noteworthy is that it manages to present both theory and history in a concise, easy to understand manner. There isn’t a word in it we would change. At one point, Greenspan provides a brief history lesson. Yes, the (relatively) free banking era in the United States in the 19th century involved fractional reserve banking and as a result, there were frequent boom and bust cycles. However, since there was no “lender of last resort” with an unlimited money printing capacity, these business cycles were sharp and brief, and the market economy quickly righted itself every time:
“A fully free banking system and fully consistent gold standard have not as yet been achieved. But prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
