Austerity or Money Printing?
by ilene - February 14th, 2010 3:41 pm
Austerity or Money Printing?
Courtesy of Chris Martenson
I was asked to write a once-a-month Market Observation for Financial Sense. Here’s the first one (posted today, Feb 10):
From time to time, I think it’s a good idea to stop squinting at the short-term market wiggles and pull our heads back for a wide-angle view. Now would be a good time, so that’s what we’re going to do. For the record, I also happen to believe that close-up market analysis loses some of its potency during times of immense official intervention. As with any subsidy program, prices become distorted and often fail to tell the real story, which is absolutely true with respect to interest rates and, by extension, the risk premium for stocks.
Back to the story. Where the current crisis has been described using millions of words in thousands of articles packed with arcane acronyms (such as TALF, CDO, and CMBS), perplexing regulatory lapses and with a degree of complexity that dwarfs the Apollo moon mission, I can explain why the whole thing happened using just three words.
Too. Much. Debt.
Total credit market debt in the US doubled between 2000 and 2008, while incomes stagnated and jobs were not created.
When your debts are skyrocketing, but your means of servicing those debts are not, you are on a path to a credit crisis. And that’s exactly what we got.
That’s all there is to it, and we’d have a better shot of crafting an enduring recovery if we better understood the difference between causes and symptoms. Too much debt was the cause; virtually everything else was either a symptom or a contributory factor. The main contributory factor was Alan Greenspan’s monkeying around with interest rates between 2002 and 2004 to create ultra-cheap money to fight the effects of his prior monetary and regulatory mistakes.
Which entirely explains why I am so dismissive of world efforts to stoke an economic recovery by deploying even cheaper money and even more debt. As earnest as these efforts are, they spring from the very same flawed thinking and practices that got us into the mess in the first place. Plus, they’ve never worked before.
I’ve analyzed this situation nearly to death, and I arrive at this one very simple conclusion: The US is insolvent (and so are many other governments around the world).