Home » Posts tagged 'monetary expansion'

Tag Archives: monetary expansion

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Yellen Challenges Powell’s Unlimited Control of the Markets

February 21, 2021

Yellen Challenges Powell’s Unlimited Control of the Markets

Yellen Challenges Powell's Unlimited Control of the Markets

Source: Federal Reserve

The Fed attempts to maintain control of various rates (including inflation, unemployment and long-term interest rates) through its monetary policy decisions. In the past, poor choices arguably led to both the dot-com bubble and the Great Recession. But that’s old news.

Today, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is trying to get the U.S. economy moving. A combination of near-zero interest rates and “quantitative easing,” which means buying bonds directly. Both these interventions increase the amount of money in circulation. Ultimately, this would lead to inflation, as you’d expect.

And of course, inflation is closely tied to market rates. In response to the pandemic, the Fed rate policy that Powell currently advocates is keeping money market rates close to zero for an extended period of time. The Fed also seem to intervene quite a bit, attempting to maintain tight control on those rates.

Powell has to balance economic recovery and employment against market bubbles and excessive inflation. That’s a lot of balls in the air… What if one drops?

Unleashing a “tsunami” of cash

Enter Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who just threw a big monkey wrench in Powell’s plans to maintain any semblance of tight control over rates. What did she say? As Newsmax reported:

Already low short-term interest rates are set to sink further, potentially below zero, after the Treasury announced plans earlier this month to reduce the stockpile of cash it amassed at the Fed over the last year to fight the pandemic and the deep recession it caused.

That sounds sensible, right? There’s just one problem: the Treasury is planning to “unleash what Credit Suisse Group AG analyst Zoltan Pozsar calls a ‘tsunami’ of reserves into the financial system and on to the Fed’s balance sheet.”

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

 

Markets are all about flows

January 5, 2019

Markets are all about flows

This article looks at prospective supply and demand factors for financial assets in the New Year and beyond. Investors should take into account money flowing into and out of financial assets as well as stock flows, particularly escalating government bond issuance, which looks likely to accelerate significantly in the coming years. It adds up to the fundamental case for physical gold and silver.

At this time of year, the thoughtful soul considers prospects for markets. Pundits are laying out their forecasts, and they fall into two broad camps. There are brokers and fund managers who talk of value. Their income and assets under management depend on continually inflating prices. Then there are the pessimists, a ragbag of doom-mongers who sweepingly point to risks on a grand scale. The collapse of Italy, Deutsche Bank, China, Brexit… take your pick. Very few engage on the subject that really matters, and that is the underlying monetary flows into and out of financial markets.

We must assess the pace of monetary expansion relative to the demand for money and credit, and where that expansion goes. Early in the credit cycle, there is little demand from the non-financial sector for monetary expansion, so excess money and bank credit go into the financial sector, pushing up financial asset prices. As the cycle progresses, it begins to be demanded by the non-financial economy and money then flows from the financial sector to non-financials. This is why we have observed that just as business conditions in the real economy start improving, just as valuations begin to be vindicated, interest rates and bond yields start rising and shares enter a bear market.

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

Market crash? Another red card for the economy

October 13, 2018

Market crash? Another red card for the economy

A few months ago I wrote this article at the World Economic Forum called “A Yellow Card For The Global Economy“. It tried to serve as a warning on the rising imbalances of the emerging and leading economies. Unfortunately, since then, those imbalances have continued to rise and market complacency reached new highs.

This week, financial markets have been dyed red and the stock market reaction adds to concerns about a possible impending recession.

The first thing we must understand is that we are not facing a panic created by a black swan, that is, an unexpected event, but by three factors that few could deny were evident:

  1. Excessive valuations after $20 trillion of monetary expansion inflated most financial assets.
  2. Bond yields rising as the US 10-year reaches 3.2%
  3. The evidence of the Yuan devaluation, which is on its way to surpass 7 Yuan per US dollar.
  4. Global growth estimates trimmed for the sixth time in as many months.

Therefore, the US rate hikes – announced repeatedly and incessantly for years – are not the cause, nor the alleged trade war. These are just symptoms, excuses to disguise a much more worrying illness.

What we are experiencing is the evidence of the saturation of excesses built around central banks’ loose policies and the famous “bubble of everything”. And therein lies the problem. After twenty trillion dollars of reckless monetary expansion, risk assets, from the safest to the most volatile, from the most liquid to the unquoted, have skyrocketed with disproportionate valuations.

(courtesy Incrementum AG)

Therefore, a dose of reality was needed. Monetary policy not only disguises the real risk of sovereign assets, but it also pushes the most cautious and prudent investor to take more risk for lower returns. It is no coincidence that this policy is called “financial repression“. Because that is what it does. It forces savers and investors to chase beta and some yield in the riskiest assets.

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

We’ll Pay All Those Future Obligations by Impoverishing Everyone (How to Destroy Our Currency In One Easy Lesson)

August 6, 2018

We’ll Pay All Those Future Obligations by Impoverishing Everyone (How to Destroy Our Currency In One Easy Lesson)

The only way to pay all these future obligations is by creating new money.
I’ve been focusing on inflation, which is more properly understood as the loss of purchasing power of a currency, which when taken to extremes destroys the currency and the wealth/income of everyone forced to use that currency.
The funny thing about the loss of a currency’s purchasing power is that it wipes out every holder of that currency, rich and not-so-rich alike. There are a few basics we need to cover first to understand how soaring future obligations–pensions, healthcare, entitlements, interest on debt, etc.–lead to a feedback loop which will hasten the loss of purchasing power of our currency, the US dollar.
1. As I have explained many times, the only possible output of the way we create and distribute “money” (credit and currency) is soaring wealth/income inequality, as all the new money flows to the wealthy, who use the “cheap” money from central and private banks to lend at high rates of interest to debt-serfs, buy back corporate shares or buy up income-producing assets.
The net result is whatever actual “growth” has occurred (removing the illusory growth that accounts for much of the GDP “growth” this decade) has flowed almost exclusively to the top of the wealth-power pyramid (see chart below).
2. Much of the “growth” that’s supposed to fund public and private obligations is fictitious. Please read Michael Hudson’s brief comments for a taste of how this works: The “Next” Financial Crisis and Public Banking as the Response.
The mainstream financial media swallows the bogus “growth” story without question because that story is the linchpin of the entire status quo: if it’s revealed as inaccurate, i.e. statistical sleight of hand, the whole idea that “growth” can effortlessly fund all future obligations goes up in flames.

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

Here’s Why Rip-Roaring Inflation Is Inevitable

August 4, 2018

Here’s Why Rip-Roaring Inflation Is Inevitable

The stability of America’s status quo is illusory.

One of the enduring mysteries of the past decade is why inflation has remained tame while the central bank and government have pumped trillions of dollars of newly created money into the economy. Millions of words have been written about this, and so some shortcuts will have to be taken to make sense of it in one essay.

Let’s start with the basics.

1. Adding newly created money but not generating new goods and services of the same value reduces the purchasing power of existing money. To keep it simple: say the economy of a country is $20 trillion. (Hey, the US GDP is $20 trillion…) Say its money supply is $10 trillion.

So banks and/or the government create $2 trillion in new money but the value of goods and services only expands by $1 trillion. the “extra” $1 trillion of newly created money (either “printed” or borrowed into existence) reduces the value of all existing money.

In effect, the new money robs purchasing power from all existing money.Those holding existing money have lost purchasing power while the recipients of the new money receive purchasing power they didn’t have prior to receiving the new money.

We can see how this works by looking at a chart of GDP to debt. As debt has soared (and remember, debt is “new money” that was loaned into existence), GDP has risen at a much lower rate, so the ratio of debt to GDP has skyrocketed. (see chart below)

2. Where “inflation” (higher prices for the same item) shows up depends on who gets the newly created money: the wealthy few or the wage-earning many. As I have explained many times, in our system, all newly issued money goes to banks, financiers and corporations–the super-wealthy few.

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

What is Optimal Monetary Policy, Anyway?

February 21, 2018

WHAT IS OPTIMAL MONETARY POLICY, ANYWAY?

Ever since the important contributions of new classical economists Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott during the 1970s and 80s, modern macroeconomics seeks optimal rules for monetary policy. Indeed, Milton Friedman had previously emphasized the importance of a binding rule for monetary policy. He recommended a constant but moderate expansion of the money stock over time as well as the abolition of fractional reserve banking in order to improve the central bank’s control over the money stock. Neither of these two measures has ever been implemented over an extended period of time.

Creating Rules for Monetary Policy

Many modern macroeconomists have come to reject the idea of a constant growth rule in favor of a more complex rule that incorporates feedback effects from other macroeconomic aggregates. According to their rationale, political discretion in the form of unexpected accelerations of the money growth rate may lead to short-term benefits. Yet, the latter would come at long-term costs of either permanently too high price inflation or a consecutive readjustment to lower money growth rates that goes hand in hand with real economic losses in output and employment. This is what economists would refer to as the sacrifice ratio. Optimal monetary policy thus requires abstention from reaping some of the potential short-term benefits for the sake of long-term financial and economic stability.

The most famous monetary policy rules that have been deemed optimal are named after John B. Taylor. According to such Taylor rules the central rate of interest should be set in response to changes of actual price inflation, the natural rate of interest, as well as the output gap. There is one obvious practical problem, namely, that the output gap and the natural rate of interest are non-observable theoretical concepts that have to be estimated or replaced by more or less arbitrary empirical proxies.

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress