Home » Posts tagged 'Ben Bernanke' (Page 5)

Tag Archives: Ben Bernanke

For several years now the small coterie of Keynesian academics and apparatchiks who have seized nearly absolute financial power through the Fed’s printing presses have justified the lunacy of unending ZIRP and massive QE on the grounds that there is too little inflation. The bureaucrats at the IMF even invented a lame-brained catch-phrase, calling the purported scourge of money which retains most of its value “lowflation”.

This whole consumer inflation targeting gambit, of course, is an inherently preposterous notion because there is not a scrap of evidence that 2% consumer inflation is better for rising living standards and societal wealth gains than is 0.2%. And there is much history and economic logic that points in exactly the opposite direction.

Between 1870 and 1913 in the United States, for example, real national income grew at 3.5% per year——the highest gain for any 43 year period in history. Yet the average inflation rate during that long period of capitalist prosperity was less than 0.0%. That was real “lowflation”, and it was a blessing for the average worker, not a scourge.

But this week the BLS itself let out a screaming, never mind! The core CPI for the 12 months ended in January rose by 2.21% and that’s actually a tad higher than the 1.98% annual average since the year 2000.

Please forgive the spurious accuracy of reporting the BLS’ noise-ridden, dubiously constructed CPI to the second decimal point, but it’s meant to underscore a crucial truth. Namely, there ain’t no inflation deficiency problem and never has been!

The whole 2% inflation mantra is just a smokescreen to justify the massive daily intrusion in financial markets by a power-obsessed claque of monetary central planners. They just made it up and then rode it to ever increasing dominance over the financial system—-even though as recently as 15 years ago the 2% inflation theory was unknown outside a small circle of neo-Keynesian academic scribblers led by Ben Bernanke.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

637 Rate Cuts And $12.3 Trillion In Global QE Later, World Shocked To Find “Quantitative Failure”

February 12, 2016

637 Rate Cuts And $12.3 Trillion In Global QE Later, World Shocked To Find “Quantitative Failure”

2016 is shaping up to be the year that everyone finally comes to terms with the fact that the monetary emperors truly have no clothes.

To be sure, it’s been a long time coming. For nearly 8 years, market participants and economists convinced themselves that the answer was always “more Keynes.” Global trade still stagnant? Cut rates. Economic growth still stuck in neutral? Buy more assets.

It was almost as if everyone lost sight of the fact that if printing fiat scrip and tinkering with the cost of money were the answers, there would never be any problems. That is, policy makers can always hit ctrl+P and/or move rates around. But in order to resuscitate anemic aggregate demand and revive inflation, you need to tackle the core problems facing the global economy – not paper over them (and we mean “paper over them” in the most literal sense of the term).

Well late last month, central banks officially lost control of the narrative. Kuroda’s move into negative territory reeked of desperation and given the surging JPY and tumbling Japanese stocks, it’s pretty clear that the half-life on central bank easing has fallen dramatically.

And so, as the market wakes up from the punchbowl party with a massive hangover, everyone is suddenly left to contemplate “quantitative failure.” Below, courtesy of BofA’s Michael Hartnett is a bullet point summary of 8 years spent chasing the dragon… and a list of the disappointing results.

* * *

From BofA

Whether the recent tipping point was the Fed hike, negative rates in Europe & Japan, or simply the growing market dislocations and macro misallocation of resources and wealth, the deflationary theme of “Quantitative Failure” is stalking the financial markets. A multi-year period of major policy intervention & “financial repression” is ending with weak economic growth & investors rebelling against QE.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Janet Yellen Admits Fed Is Evaluating Possibility Of Negative Rates

February 11, 2016

Janet Yellen Admits Fed Is Evaluating Possibility Of Negative Rates

One week before the BOJ shocked the world by adopting negative interest rates and unleashed the next leg lower in global risk assets, it warned everyone “please not to worry, all is under control”

Moments ago at least Yellen had the courtesy of “warning” market participants in general, and banks and savers in particular that legal, logistical or monetary concerns aside, the Fed is already evaluating the possibility of negative rates.

“We had previously considered them and decided that they would not work well to foster accommodation back in 2010. In light of the experience of European countries and others that have gone to negative rates, we’re taking a look at them again because we would want to be prepared in the event that we needed to add accommodation.“

As Bloomberg reported first earlier this week, a Fed staff memo posted on the central bank’s website last month showed Fed economists grappled with a number of issues related to implementation of negative rates at the time, including possible legal obstacles. Yellen said Thursday that negative rates might be legal, but the question remained open to further examination.

Among the other concerns were whether the Fed has the logistical capacity to implement NIRP:

… the Federal Reserve computer systems used to calculate and manage interest on reserves do not currently allow for the possibility of a negative IOER rate, although these systems could be modified over time if needed.

And a further concern about NIRP is the potential lack of physical cash:

DIs might opt to shift a significant quantity of their reserve balances into currency. Present Federal Reserve inventories of currency, at about $200 billion, would not be adequate to cover large-scale conversion of the nearly $1 trillion in reserve balances to banknotes.

This is what she added today:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Negative Interest Rates Already In Fed’s Official Scenario

February 2, 2016

Negative Interest Rates Already In Fed’s Official Scenario

Over the past year, and certainly in the aftermath of the BOJ’s both perplexing and stunning announcement (as it revealed the central banks’ level of sheer desperation), we have warned (most recently “Negative Rates In The U.S. Are Next: Here’s Why In One Chart”) that next in line for negative rates is the Fed itself, whether Janet Yellen wants it or not. Today, courtesy of Wolf Richter, we find that this is precisely what is already in the small print of the Fed’s future stress test scenarios, and specifically the “severely adverse scenario” where we read that:

The severely adverse scenario is characterized by a severe global recession, accompanied by a period of heightened corporate financial stress and negative yields for short-term U.S. Treasury securities.

As a result of the severe decline in real activity and subdued inflation, short-term Treasury rates fall to negative ½ percent by mid-2016 and remain at that level through the end of the scenario.
And so the strawman has been laid. The only missing is the admission of the several global recession, although with global GDP plunging over 5% in USD terms, we wonder just what else those who make the official determination are waiting for.

Finally, we disagree with the Fed that QE4 is not on the table: it most certainly will be once stock markets plunge by 50% as the “severely adverse scenario” envisions, and once NIRP fails to boost economic activity, as it has failed previously everywhere else it has been tried, the Fed will promtply proceed with what has worked before, if only to make the true situation that much worse.

Until then, we sit back and wait.

Here is Wolf Richter with Negative Interest Rates Already in Fed’s Official Scenario

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Negative Interest Rates Already in Fed’s Official Scenario

February 2, 2016

Negative Interest Rates Already in Fed’s Official Scenario

But forget QE-4.

The Germans, with Teutonic precision, call them “Punishment Interest.” Negative interest rates are spreading from the ECB’s negative deposit rate across the bond market and to some savings accounts in the Eurozone. The idea is to enrich existing bond holders and flog savers until their mood improves. Stock prices are allowed to get crushed by reality.

Negative interest rates destroy one of the most essential mechanisms in an economy: the pricing of risk. Investors end up taking huge risks with no reward. Many of them will get cleaned out down the road.

In Switzerland, punishment interest already causes “perverse unpredictable effects,” as mortgage rates have started to soar. It’s wreaking havoc in Denmark and Sweden. Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz let the idea float that he’d unleash punishment interest to destroy the Canadian dollar. The Bank of Japan announced Friday morning – timed for maximum market effect – that it too would inflict negative interest rates on its subjects.

In the US, Ben Bernanke has been out there preaching to the choir about them. Over-indebted corporate America, except for the banks, would love this absurdity; it would allow them to actually make money off their mountain of debt.

“Potentially anything – including negative interest rates – would be on the table,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen told a House of Representatives committee in early November.

Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer has been publicly obsessing about them for a while. Monday, during the Q&A after his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said that negative interest rates are “working more than I can say I expected in 2012.”

It seems to be just talk. But negative interest rates are already baked into the official scenario for 2016.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hong Kong Housing Bubble Suffers Spectacular Collapse: Sales Plunge Most On Record, Prices Crash

February 1, 2016

Hong Kong Housing Bubble Suffers Spectacular Collapse: Sales Plunge Most On Record, Prices Crash

Two months ago, we observed the record plunge in Hong Kong home sales when according to Land Registry data, a paltry 2,826 registered residential transactions were record, down 14.4% from October and what we thought was an amazing 41.7% less than in November last year. This was the lowest print in the history of the series.

Little did we know just how bad it would get just two months later.

As we said in our last check on the HK housing market, the weakness was sharp and widespread, with sales of new homes declining to a three-month low. In the primary residential market, the number of home sales also declined 26.4 per cent month on month to 1,023 last month, according to Centaline. The total value reached HK$8.97 billion, down 15.4 per cent from October’s HK$10.6 billion.

Latly we presented some comments from local analysts, who perhaps unwilling to accept the reality, remained optimistic:

“The fall in transaction volume and value for new home sales due to an absence of big project launches early last month,” said Derek Chan, head of research at Ricacorp Properties. He expects to see an obvious increase in sales of new homes this month given more major projects are due to be offered for pre-sale. Most of new projects launches will focus in the western New Territories ,” he said.

We concluded in early December that while “optimism is good… if and when this global housing luxury weakness mostly due to the withdrawal of the Chinese marginal “hot money” buyer crosses back into the Chinese border, all bets about the so-called tepid Chinese economic will be off, and since it will be just the moment when China resumes cutting rates, devaluaing its currency and maybe even officially (as opposed to the ongoing unofficial iterations) launching QE, that will be when one should buy commodities, as China does everything in its power to keep the house of $30 trillion in cards from toppling and sending a deflationary tsunami around the entire world.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End Of Plan A: The Big Reset & $8000 Gold

February 1, 2016

The End Of Plan A: The Big Reset & $8000 Gold

Willem Middlekoop, author of The Big Reset – The War On Gold And The Financial Endgame, believes the current international monetary system has entered its last term and is up for a reset. Having predicted the collapse of the real estate market in 2006, (while Ben Bernanke didn’t), Middlekoop asks (rhetorically) -can the global credit expansion ‘experiment’ from 2002 – 2008, which Bernanke completely underestimated, be compared to the global QE ‘experiment’ from 2008 – present? – the answer is worrisome. In the following must-see interview with Grant Williams, he shares his thoughts on the future of the global monetary system and why the revaluation of Gold is inevitable…

Middlekoop predicts the real estate crash in 2006… (ensure English Subtitles – Closed Captions – are enabled)

Bernanke did not… (stunning!!)

And now today, Middelkoop has some even more ominous concerns about the end of Plan A and where Plan B begins…

“By revaluing gold to a much higher level, to over $8000 an ounce, central bankers solve quite a lot of problems”

17:00 – “But we know Plan A – the current financial system – will end soon, we can’t go on this way… so we need a monetary reset… and a revaluation of gold has helped central bankers in the past, such as Roosevelt in the 1930s. It would help to restore the balance sheet of The Federal Reserve.”

But there are problems…

21:00 – “It always ends in inflation.. certainly in 2016, we can expect more QE… and when that does not defeat deflation (driven by global over-indebtedness), further unorthodox measures will be taken (helicopter money).. and eventually a gold revaluation.”

In this episode of the Gold series, Willem Middelkoop, founder of the Commodities Discovery Fund, dives into the history of monetary shifts and explores a scenario where the US dollar could be debunked as the global reserve currency.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Bank of Japan – Ringing in the Endgame?

January 30, 2016

The Bank of Japan – Ringing in the Endgame?

Let’s Do More of What Doesn’t Work

It is the Keynesian mantra: the fact that the policies recommended by Keynesians and monetarists, i.e., deficit spending and money printing, routinely fail to bring about the desired results is not seen as proof that they simply don’t work. It is regarded as evidence that there hasn’t been enough spending and printing yet.

BoJ governor Haruhiko “Fly” Kuroda: is that a windshield I’m seeing?

Photo credit: Yuya Shino / Reuters

At the Bank of Japan this mantra has been gospel for as long as we can remember. Japan has always exhibited an especially strong penchant for central planning. We still recall that many Western observers were beginning to wonder in the late 1980s whether the Japanese form of state capitalism administered by the powerful Ministry of Trade and Industry and the BoJ wasn’t a superior economic system after all. Then this happened:

The Nikkei Index from 1989 to 2003. Japan’s seemingly never-ending boom coupled with forever rising stock prices, carefully administered by Tokyo’s powerful bureaucrats, suddenly became an intractable bust – click to enlarge.

This sudden change in fortunes should perhaps have been taken as a hint that central planning of the economy wasn’t such a good idea after all. That was not the conclusion of Japan’s movers and shakers though (or anyone else’s, for that matter). Instead it was decided that what was required were better planners, or at least a better plan.

For decades Japanese policymakers have been inundated with well-meaning advice by prominent Western economists. Even Ben Bernanke famously admonished them to just print more. According to Bernanke, holding interest rates at zero and implementing several iterations of QE were indicative of “policy paralysis” – after all, these efforts were obviously just not big and bold enough!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Time For Torches & Pitchforks——-The Little Guy Is About To Get Monkey-Hammered Again

December 30, 2015

Time For Torches & Pitchforks——-The Little Guy Is About To Get Monkey-Hammered Again

The reputations of Ben and Janet are going to be eviscerated in 2016. That’s because the US economy will slide into recession in defiance of every claim they have made for their snake oil monetary policies. The plain fact is, massive falsification of financial markets via their “wealth effects” doctrine did not levitate main street prosperity at all; it just fueled another giant speculative mania in the Wall Street casino.

The prospect that the leaders of our monetary politburo are about to be tarred and feathered by economic reality might be satisfying enough if it led to the repudiation of Keynesian central planning and a thorough housecleaning at the Fed. Unfortunately, it will also mean that tens of millions of retail investors and 401k holders will be taken to the slaughterhouse for the third time this century.

And this time the Fed is out of dry powder, meaning retail investors will never recover as they did after 2002 and 2009. Moreover, the overwhelming share of main street losses will be the among baby-boom demographic——sixty and seventy something’s who will be down for the count.

As Jim Quinn so graphically put it an the adjacent piece,

Investors are lazing around the waterhole like unsuspecting gazelles. This herd will be running for their lives in the near future, as danger is lurking.

With each passing day the evidence mounts, and this morning’s trade data was a doozy. During November exports shrank by 2% and are now down 12% from the peak, and at the lowest level since March 2010.

Yes, you can count on the Keynesian paint-by-the-numbers crowd to insist that exports don’t matter that much. Goods exports are just 8% of GDP and total exports including services are 12%.

So what is 12% when Janet is busy at the Fed’s dashboard, tweaking the dials and thereby goosing the labor market back to the pink of full employment health?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deja Vu All Over Again

December 14, 2015

Deja Vu All Over Again

Janet Yellen will increase interest rates for the first time in nine years on Wednesday. She isn’t raising them because the economy is strengthening. The economy just happens to be weakening rapidly, as global recession takes hold. The stock market is 3% lower than it was in December 2014, and has basically done nothing since the end of QE3. Wall Street is throwing a hissy fit to try and stop Janet from boosting rates by an inconsequential .25%. Janet would prefer not to raise rates, but the credibility and reputation of her bubble blowing machine is at stake. The Fed has enriched their Wall Street benefactors over the last six years, while destroying the real economy and the middle class.

The quarter point increase will be reversed in short order as soon as we experience market collapse part two. It will be followed with negative interest rates and QE4, as these academics have only one play in their playbook – print money. They created the last financial crisis and have set the stage for the next – even bigger collapse. John Hussman explains how their zero interest rate policy has driven speculators into junk bonds as the only place to get any yield.

Over the past several years, yield-seeking investors, starved for any “pickup” in yield over Treasury securities, have piled into the junk debt and leveraged loan markets. Just as equity valuations have been driven to the second most extreme point in history (and the single most extreme point in history for the median stock, where valuations are well-beyond 2000 levels), risk premiums on speculative debt were compressed to razor-thin levels. By 2014, the spread between junk bond yields and Treasury yields had fallen to less than 2.4%. Since then, years of expected “risk-premiums” have been erased by capital losses, and defaults haven’t even spiked yet (they do so with a lag).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can’t Argue With a Confident Man

December 12, 2015

CAN’T ARGUE WITH A CONFIDENT MAN

“I can say therefore with confidence – and without any complacency – that we will secure the return of inflation to 2% without undue delay, because we are currently deploying tools that we believe will achieve this, and because we can, in any case, deploy our tools further if that proves necessary.”

– Former Goldman Sachs employee and ECB President Mario Draghi, 4 December 2015.

“You have what degree of confidence in your ability to control this [inflation] ?”

“100%.”

– Ben Bernanke being interviewed on ’60 Minutes’, 5 December 2010.

“Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz ! ..Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

– The Wizard of Oz.

In economics, the fancy-sounding ‘general equilibrium theory’ holds that in a complex economy, a set of prices exists that will result in an overall (general) equilibrium. This theory was brought to you in large part by the economist and idiot Léon Walras, whose principles only exist in the first place because he stole them from the world of physics.

But ‘general equilibrium theory’ is not the only economic theory addressing order, or the lack of it, in markets. George Soros advocates an alternative which he terms ‘reflexivity’:

“..financial markets can create inaccurate expectations and then change reality to accord with them. This is the opposite of the process described in textbooks and built into economic models, which always assume that financial expectations adapt to reality, not the other way round.”

Walras spent his last years lonely, bitter and afflicted by dementia. George Soros is a billionaire. Draw your own conclusions as to which of these theories is more likely to be correct.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Money Disappears in a Fractional-Reserve Money System

December 10, 2015

HOW MONEY DISAPPEARS IN A FRACTIONAL-RESERVE MONEY SYSTEM

Most experts are of the view that the massive monetary pumping by the US central bank during the 2008 financial crisis saved the US and the world from another Great Depression. On this the Federal Reserve Chairman at the time Ben Bernanke is considered the man that saved the world. Bernanke in turn attributes his actions to the writings of Professor Milton Friedman who blamed the Federal Reserve for causing the Great Depression of 1930s by allowing the money supply to plunge by over 30 percent.

Careful analysis will however show that it is not a collapse in the money stock that sets in motion an economic slump as such, but rather the prior monetary pumping that undermines the pool of real funding that leads to an economic depression.

Improving the Economy Requires Time and Savings

Essentially, the pool of real funding is the quantity of consumer goods available in an economy to support future production. In the simplest of terms: a lone man on an island is able to pick tewenty-five apples an hour. With the aid of a picking tool, he is able to raise his output to fifty apples an hour. Making the tool, (adding a stage of production) however, takes time.

During the time he is busy making the tool, the man will not be able to pick any apples. In order to have the tool, therefore, the man must first have enough apples to sustain himself while he is busy making it. His pool of funding is his means of sustenance for this period—the quantity of apples he has saved for this purpose.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It Begins: Desperate Finland Set To Unleash Helicopter Money Drop To All Citizens

December 7, 2015

It Begins: Desperate Finland Set To Unleash Helicopter Money Drop To All Citizens

With Citi’s chief economist proclaiming “only helicopter money can save the world now,”and the Bank of England pre-empting paradropping money concerns, it appears that Australia’s largest investment bank’s forecast that money-drops were 12-18 months away was too conservative.

Over the last few months, in a prime example of currency failure and euro-defenders’ narratives, Finland has been sliding deeper into depression. Almost 7 years into the the current global expansion, Finland’s GDP is 6pc below its previous peak. As The Telegraph reports, this is a deeper and more protracted slump than the post-Soviet crash of the early 1990s, or the Great Depression of the 1930s. And so, having tried it all, Finnish authorities are preparing to unleash “helicopter money” to save their nation by giving every citizen a tax-free payout of around $900 each month!

Just over two years ago, when the world was deciding who would be Bernanke Fed Chair replacement, Larry Summers or Janet Yellen (how ironic that Larry Summers did not get the nod just because a bunch of progressive economists thought he would not be dovish enough) we wrote about a different problem: with the end of QE3 upcoming and with the inevitable failure of the economy to reignite (again), we warned that there remains one option after (when not if) QE fails to stimulate growth: helicopter money.

While QE may be ending, it certainly does not mean that the Fed is halting its effort to “boost” the economy. In fact… the end of QE may well be simply a redirection, whereby the broken monetary pathway, one which uses banks as intermediaries to stimulate inflation (supposedly a failure according to the economist mainstream), i.e., “second-round effects”, is bypassed entirely and replaced with Plan Z, aka “Helicopter Money” mentioned previously as an all too real monetary policy option by none other than Milton Friedman and one Ben Bernanke. This is also known as the nuclear option.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The FED v Bias & Prejudice

December 2, 2015

The FED v Bias & Prejudice

COMMENT: If the Fed is so smart and understands the problem with low/negative interest rates, then why didn’t it hike rates in September? Better yet, why didn’t they raise rates YEARS ago? The Fed has kept rates near zero for seven years but now suddenly realizes that this is a problem?

I am surprised that you think so highly of them. The Fed consists of a bunch of academics with no real-world experience, no different than the ECB.

REPLY: Your bias and prejudice blind you. The ECB is run by Mario Draghi who is ex-Goldman Sachs. Mario Draghi faces a currency that is collapsing and a power structure that is fundamentally flawed. This is entirely different from the problems facing the Fed. Europe is in deep recession that is intensely deflationary. That is not the case yet in the USA.

Yellen has inherited a nightmare. It was Ben Bernankewho made the mess we are in today. He lowered rates, bought in long-term bonds the Fed cannot now sell and must wait for them to simply mature. Yellen is trapped for she cannot reverse QE and sell the bonds Bernanke bought and she is facing a meltdown in pension funds because rates are too low for too long. Yellen has no escape. You are also blind to how politics functions and all you are doing is listening to the bullshit that is spun by pretend analysts who know nothing about what really goes on behind the curtain.

The mere fact that the IMF came out publicly to ask the Fed not to raise rates in June was a political maneuver to counteract Yellen. Things of this nature are discussed behind the curtain – never in front. The IMF turned to the press to STOP Yellen because she would have raised rates back in June. It was Ben Bernanke who listened to the bankers and created insanity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fourth Turning–Social & Cultural Distress Dividing the Nation

November 28, 2015

FOURTH TURNING – SOCIAL & CULTURAL DISTRESS DIVIDING THE NATION

I wrote the first three parts of this article back in September and planned to finish it in early October, but life intervened and truthfully I don’t think I was ready to confront how bad things will likely get as this Fourth Turning moves into the violent, chaotic war stage just over the horizon. The developments in the Middle East, Europe, U.S., China and across the globe in the last months have confirmed my belief war drums are beating louder, global war beckons, and much bloodshed will be the result. Fourth Turnings proceed at their own pace within the 20 to 25 year crisis framework, but there is one guarantee – they never de-intensify as they progress. Just as Winter gets colder, stormier and more bitter as you proceed from December through February, Fourth Turnings get nastier, grimmer, more perilous, with our way of life hanging in the balance.

In Part 1 of this article I discussed the catalyst spark which ignited this Fourth Turning and the seemingly delayed regeneracy. In Part 2 I pondered possible Grey Champion prophet generation leaders who could arise during the regeneracy. In Part 3 I focused on the economic channel of distress which is likely to be the primary driving force in the next phase of this Crisis. In Part 4 I will assess the social and cultural channels of distress dividing the nation, Part 5 the technological, ecological, political, military channels of distress likely to burst forth with the molten ingredients of this Fourth Turning, and finally in Part 6 our rendezvous with destiny, with potential climaxes to this Winter of our discontent.

The road ahead will be distressful for everyone living in the U.S., as we experience the horrors of war, economic collapse, civil chaos, political upheaval, and the tearing of society’s social fabric. The pain and suffering being experienced across the globe today will not bypass the people of the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: Ben Bernanke

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Improving the Economy Requires Time and Savings

Post navigation

Latest Posts