Zero percent interest rates have created the largest bubble in human history, when it bursts it will be worse than 1929.
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How Do People Destroy Their Capital?
How Do People Destroy Their Capital?
I have written previously about the interest rate, which is falling under the planning of the Federal Reserve. The flip side of falling interest rates is the rising price of bonds. Bonds are in an endless, ferocious bull market. Why do I call it ferocious? Perhaps voracious is a better word, as it is gobbling up capital like the Cookie Monster jamming tollhouses into his maw. There are several mechanisms by which this occurs, let’s look at one here.
Artificially low interest makes it necessary to seek other ways to make money. Deprived of a decent yield, people are encouraged (pushed, really) to go speculating. And so the juice in bonds spills over into other markets. When rates fall, people find other assets more attractive. As they adjust their portfolios and go questing for yield, they buy equities and real estate.
Dirt cheap credit is also the fuel for rising asset prices. People can use leverage to buy assets, and further enhance their gains.
And it’s wonderful fun. A bull market, especially one that is believed to be infinite—if not Fed-guaranteed—seemingly provides free money. All you have to do is buy something, wait, and sell it. You can get your capital back plus something extra.
Many people spend most of this extra. This is their gain, their income. Their brokers, advisers, and other professionals also make their income off of it.
However, there’s a contradiction. Common sense tells us that it should be impossible to consume without first producing something. How can this be possible? How can an entire sector of economy get away with it?
It can’t. There is no Santa Claus. Something else is happening, something insidious.
The falling-rate-driven bull market is a process of conversion of someone’s wealth into your income.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An ‘Austrian’ Economist’s Advice For Greece and the EU
An ‘Austrian’ Economist’s Advice For Greece and the EU
For months, now, the mass media and the financial markets have anxiously watched and waited to see the outcome of a war of words, accusations, and threats that have been fought between Greece and its Eurozone and European Union partners.
Over several decades Greek governments accumulated a fiscally unmanageable debt and have been unwilling to introduce any meaningful, long-term economic and budgetary reforms to get the country’s political-economic house in order.
Greece’s Euro and EU partners have warned that Greece may be formally or informally expelled from the common currency and, perhaps, from the economic union if the terms for a new series of loans based on domestic Greek reforms and some debt restructuring cannot be agreed upon.
However, in the whirlwind of often sensational and uncertain daily new events, it is sometimes useful and even necessary to step back and try to take a look at the wider context of things in which those current events are occurring.
Greek and European Union Crisis is the Result of Collectivism
The fiscal and other economic policy problems that are plaguing Greece are simply the highly magnified and intensified problems that are affecting many of the other European nations
Many of them have accumulated large national debts that press upon the fiscal capacities of their taxpayers. They all have highly regulated markets and restricted labor markets. They all have aging populations expecting generous government-funded pensions as the years go by. They all have costly welfare state “entitlement” programs that must be financed through taxes and deficit financing.
They also share a generally anti-capitalistic mentality. Intellectuals, politicians, many in the electorates, and most certainly the national and EU bureaucrats neither understand nor advocate the classical liberal ideal of truly free markets or the wider political philosophy of individualism and individual rights to life, liberty, and honestly acquired property.
– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/07/an-austrian-economists-advice-for-greece-and-the-eu/#sthash.Eg4lkJYV.dpuf
