{"id":8965,"date":"2015-06-10T05:52:08","date_gmt":"2015-06-10T10:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8965"},"modified":"2015-06-10T05:52:08","modified_gmt":"2015-06-10T10:52:08","slug":"the-punch-bowl-stays-and-the-bubble-keeps-inflating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8965","title":{"rendered":"The Punch Bowl Stays And The Bubble Keeps Inflating"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Punch Bowl Stays And The Bubble Keeps Inflating<\/a><\/h3>\n

It is well known that\u00a0I don\u2019t think much of the ability of government officials to correctly forecast much of anything. Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have made famously clueless predictions with respect to stock and housing bubbles, and rank and file Fed economists have consistently overestimated the strength of the economy ever since their forecasts became public in 2008 (see my previous article<\/a>\u00a0on the subject). But there is one former Fed and White House economist who has a slightly better track record\u2026which is really not saying much. Over his public and private career, former Fed Governor and Bush-era White House Chief Economist Larry Lindsey actually got a few things right.<\/p>\n

Back in the late 1990s,\u00a0Lindsey was one of the few Fed governors to warn about a pending stock bubble, and to suggest that forecasts for future growth in corporate earnings were wildly optimistic. He also famously predicted that the cost of the 2003 Iraq invasion would greatly exceed the $50 billion promised by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a dissent that ultimately cost him his White House position. (But even Lindsey\u2019s $100-$200\u00a0billion forecast proved way too conservative \u2013 the final price of the invasion and occupation is expected to exceed $2 trillion).<\/div>\n
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Now Lindsey is speaking out again, and this time he is pointing to what he sees as a painfully obvious problem:\u00a0That the Fed is creating new bubbles that no one seems willing to confront or even acknowledge.\u00a0 Interviewed by CNBC on June 8th\u00a0on Squawk Box,\u00a0Lindsey offered an unusually blunt assessment of the current state of the markets and the economy. To paraphrase:<\/div>\n
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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Punch Bowl Stays And The Bubble Keeps Inflating It is well known that\u00a0I don\u2019t think much of the ability of government officials to correctly forecast much of anything. Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have made famously clueless predictions with respect to stock and housing bubbles, and rank and file Fed economists have consistently overestimated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[952,68,1806,964,303,305,451,6252,963,6251,6253],"class_list":["post-8965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-alan-greenspan","tag-ben-bernanke","tag-bubble","tag-cnbc","tag-fed","tag-federal-reserve","tag-janet-yellen","tag-larry-lindsey","tag-peter-schiff","tag-punch-bowl","tag-squawk-box"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8966,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8965\/revisions\/8966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}