Alan Greenspan, 1926-2026: 'The Undertaker' passes away

Alan Greenspan, dubbed by Ayn Rand as "The Undertaker."  
Ultimately, he took the job that John Galt refused: economic dictator

"Alan Greenspan died [earlier this week], and the man who spent two decades inflating bubbles will be eulogised as a maestro. Fitting, because he understood exactly what he was doing. 

"In 1966 a younger Greenspan wrote an essay called 'Gold and Economic Freedom.' [In it, he states that the gold standard is essential for economic freedom.] He laid out the case with precision. The gold standard protected savers from confiscation by inflation. Welfare statists hated gold because it stood in the way of their deficits. He wrote that the abandonment of gold made deficit spending a "scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth." He was right. He knew it. Then he took the job running the printing press.

"From August 1987 to January 2006 Greenspan sat atop the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything that essay defended. After the 1987 crash he flooded the banks with liquidity and taught a generation of traders that the central bank would catch them every time they fell. They named the reflex after him: the 'Greenspan put.' He cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent by June 2003 and held it there, and you watched housing prices detach from any sane relationship to income. Mortgage credit gushed. He went on television in February 2004 and suggested Americans consider adjustable-rate mortgages, roughly eighteen months before he started hiking rates into those very borrowers. The man who warned in 1966 about the hidden confiscation of wealth engineered the largest credit distortion in postwar history. 

"Then came the apology that wasn't one. In October 2008, sitting before Congress as the wreckage smoked, Greenspan confessed he had found 'a flaw' in his model of how the world worked. He was 'shocked' that lenders [licensed to print money] had not policed themselves. You don't get to spend twenty years pricing risk at zero and then act surprised when men respond to the incentives you built. Any committee of economists cannot set the price of money better than a market can. 

"Greenspan knew the answer at 40 and spent the next half century pretending he'd forgotten it. The savers he warned about in 1966 paid for that performance. ..."

"Every Fed chair since Greenspan has discovered this truth the hard way. Bernanke cranked rates to zero after 2008, then Yellen kept them pinned there, then Powell printed $4 trillion more during COVID. Each crisis demanded bigger interventions than the last."

~ Handre

 

"Greenspan was the Dr. Robert Stadler of our age: the brilliant man who knew the right principles and betrayed them, certain his own genius could control the evil he agreed to serve. 

"He was a member of Rand's inner circle. His essay "Gold and Economic Freedom" appeared in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. He argued, correctly, that the gold standard protected savers from confiscation, that statists hated gold because it blocked their deficits, and that abandoning it turned deficit spending into a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. 

"He even understood that Social Security was a Ponzi fraud that would help bankrupt the nation. He knew all of it. Then he took command of the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything he had written. 

"The 'Greenspan put,' rates held at one percent, the housing bubble, the very confiscation he had warned of, engineered by his own hand. 

"Here is the irony. Greenspan knew 'Atlas Shrugged' intimately. He watched Rand create Stadler, the genius who lent his mind to the looters' Institute believing he could outwit them, and who lived to see his knowledge weaponised as Project X. Greenspan studied that warning at the source, from the author herself. He understood the character completely. Then he walked the identical road and became the man the novel was written to expose. 

"When the wreckage came in 2008, he told Congress he had found 'a flaw' in his model. There was no flaw in the model. The flaw was in the choice to abandon what he knew. Some men meet the virus and are consumed by it. Greenspan had the answer at forty and spent the next fifty years pretending he had forgotten."

~ The Rational Animal

"Q: Alan Greenspan passed away [this week]. Alan Greenspan was a close associate of Ayn Rand for a while, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve … these things did not overlap, as people familiar with Ayn Rand’s ideas wouldn’t be surprised to hear. So, Keith, I’m sure you’ve read [Greenspan’s essay] ‘Gold & Economic Freedom’ many times; so let’s get your thoughts on Greenspan’s passing…

"A: For anyone who’s read that essay, which was published in 1966 as part of [Ayn Rand’s] book 'Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,' and therefore endorsed by Ayn Rand, he had to evade everything he knew in 1966 in order to take the job at the Fed. And ultimately, he took the job that John Galt refused, which was economic dictator.

"Now … everybody is confused about capitalism … but … there is no greater area of confusion than the concepts around money. Both the critics of capitalism and of gold, and the FANS of capitalism and gold will tell you that he was 'a Maestro' — and if you ask “a master of what?’ you’ll be told he was a master of central planning of our economy, and of managing our little lives for us. …

"They’ll say ... ‘he managed a sound money regime’— and the problem with the concept of sound money they use is an anti-concept, that is, [it’s a notion] that destroys and obliterates a legitimate concept in order to smuggle something else in. And what they mean by ’sound money’ is an irredeemable fiat currency jammed down our throats by the government forcing us to use it as if it WERE money, but ‘sound’ because it’s somehow managed to avoid consumer prices going up [by no too much].

"So I’d like people to think about a simple fact, that in every industry seeking greater efficiency, that is, they want to produce more with less — with less cost, with fewer inputs, with less labour, land, physical commodities etc. — and of course that’s happening relentlessly across the entire economy in every sector (unless regulation prevents it…).

"So suppose the average across the entire [economy] is a 2 percent gain in efficiency every year, all else being equal, you’d expect consumer prices therefore to be falling comparatively across industries, as costs are falling. SO your expect consumer prices tl be falling roughly 2 percent per year.

"So imagine it it were possible as the manager of the currency to debase the currency at a matching rate. Now, this is pure fantasy [hoho!]; this is only interesting as a thought experiment … but suppose it were possible to debase the currency at a matching rate so that every company from Intel to US Steel to Rolls Royce making aircraft engines is cutting costs at 2 percent, [while] you are debasing the currency at a matching 2 percent, and the nett result is CPI = zero. Would anybody call that SOUND?

"I wrote an article called ‘Sound Money is Not What You Think It Is,’ and I had a picture that I took from Norman Rockwell [above, with customer and butcher both cheating] … and I asked if that would be considered a sound measurement of the weight of the chicken, and therefore a sound price to pay … And at best, that’s what Greenspan did."

~ Keith Weiner from Monetary Metals, interviewed on the 'Daily Objective'

"Of course you can 'speak ill of the dead' ...  After all, wrote Shakespeare, 'The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.'

"Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve System, just died at age 100. The general public wants to blame the United States president for the health of the U.S. economy, but the Fed chairman has much more influence over economic conditions. 

"Greenspan spent some time early in his career as an Ayn Rand acolyte, and in fact three chapters of Rand's book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, were written by the future Fed chairman.... Greenspan's opponents on the left therefore interpreted his whole career through a Randian lens, which serves to remind us how stubbornly they refuse to understand the world. 

"Had Greenspan wanted to run the Federal Reserve in such a way as to approximate a gold standard as much as possible, he could certainly have done so. Instead, he used it as an instrument for central planning, with disastrous results.

"Initially, Greenspan could do no wrong. He became known as 'The Maestro' ....  Meanwhile, Greenspan's contempt for the public was legendary: he confessed to Lesley Stahl of CBS that before congressional committees he would speak gibberish -- a tactic he called 'syntax destruction.' The next day the headlines would report two different things about what he had said, and for Greenspan that meant he had succeeded. Greenspan's policy moves (like arranging for a bailout of Long Term Capital Management in 1998) gave rise to the belief in a 'Greenspan put,' according to which investors could be assured that the Fed chairman was prepared to use the tools at his disposal to backstop the market if it should ever fall below a certain level. 

"And of course his monetary stimulus after the dot-com bust in 2000-2001, which looked to some observers at the time as a brilliant move, only delayed the reckoning, and transformed that bust into a real estate bubble (and eventual bust). When the lights of the economy should have turned red, Greenspan made them all green. That was the only recession on record in which housing starts rose rather than fell. 

"The Federal Reserve, like the government itself, has no real goods at its disposal, so while its various tricks can redistribute resources and simulate prosperity, it cannot generate real wealth. It simply arranges the economy into an unsustainable configuration that has to come apart. 

"Because of Greenspan's earlier association with Ayn Rand, and because the general public knows so little about the Fed, when the 2008 crash occurred, people generally went along with blaming 'capitalism' -- even though the Federal Reserve is a non-market institution created by act of Congress and enjoying a government-granted monopoly, and even though Greenspan's manipulations overrode what the market was trying to say. 

"Greenspan's legacy is 2008, and the undeserved reputational damage that the market economy suffered as a result."

~ Tom Woods

King of Debt Seeks Presidency

 

Guest post by Peter Schiff

During a lengthy interview on CNBC the week before last, Donald Trump, fresh from becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, came as close as any major presidential contender ever has to saying that America is not capable of repaying her debts in full, and that our path to economic recovery might involve some pain for our creditors. This moment of candor earned Trump almost as much condemnation as his earlier suggestions to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

To many, the idea that U.S. debt obligations involved even the slightest risks to investors was both the height of financial naiveté and the epitome of political recklessness. The pressure was so great in fact that The Donald, who has consistently refused to engage in even the most sensible strategic retreats, appeared on CNN last Monday to “clarify” his earlier remarks. However, he ignited another firestorm when he inadvertently let slip another unspoken truth, namely, that the United States can always print however much money she needs to “repay” her debt. Apparently the only acceptable position to hold on this issue is to completely deny reality.

Despite his public image as a premiere pitchman, marketeer, and builder of glitzy gold towers, Donald Trump owes his business success to his ability to walk into a roomful of people to whom he owes money and, through the use of threats, bluster, and hardball negotiations, convince them to accept less than what he owes. Time and again he has used competitors' prior lending mistakes as a lever to get what he wants. That's why he has said repeatedly that he is "the king of debt." Evidently he thought that this private experience and common sense could help in the counterintuitive arena of public debt.

Death of a tax martyr

When people talk about courage in defence of principle, the name of Irwin Schiff (right) should be foremost among them.

Irwin Schiff was imprisoned for his lifelong resistance to the American federal income tax, and over the weekend in a federal prison, a martyr to that resistance. Efforts by his son, Peter Schiff, to secure his release from prison so that he could die with his family were not just unsuccessful, but actively resisted. Schiff's sad passing illustrates two essential truth about taxation and the state: 1) if you resist the state’s orders, you will be dealt with by force; and 2) like it or not, behind every tax code lies a gun.

Peter Schiff posted this eulogy to his dad, calling it: Death of a Patriot.

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My father Irwin A. Schiff was born Feb. 23rd 1928, the 8th child and only son of Jewish immigrants, who had crossed the Atlantic twenty years earlier in search of freedom. As a result of their hope and courage my father was fortunate to have been born into the freest nation in the history of the world.  But when he passed away on Oct. 16th, 2015 at the age of 87, a political prisoner of that same nation, legally blind and shackled to a hospital bed in a guarded room in intensive care, the free nation he was born into had itself died years earlier.

My father had a life-long love affair with our nation’s founding principles and proudly served his country during the Korean War, for a while even having the less-than-honourable distinction of being the lowest-ranking American soldier in Europe.  While in college he became exposed to the principles of Austrian economics through the writings of Henry Hazlitt and Frederick Hayek. He first became active in politics during Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential bid. His activism intensified during the Vietnam Era when he led local grass root efforts to resist Yale University’s plans to conduct aid shipments to North Vietnam at a time when that nation was actively fighting U.S. forces in the south. Later in life he staged an unsuccessful write in campaign for governor of Connecticut, then eventually lost the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination to Harry Brown in 1996.

In 1976 his beliefs in free market economics, limited government, and strict interpretation of the Constitution led him to write his first book The Biggest Con: How the Government is Fleecing You, a blistering indictment of the post New Deal expansion of government in the United States. The book achieved accolades in the mainstream conservative world, receiving a stellar review in the Wall Street Journal, among other mainstream publications.

But my father was most known for his staunch opposition to the Federal Income Tax, for which the Federal Government labelled him a “tax protester.”  But he had no objection to lawful, reasonable taxation.  He was not an anarchist and believed that the state had an important, but limited role to play in market based economy.  He opposed the Federal Government’s illegal and unconstitutional enforcement and collection of the income tax.   His first book on this topic (he authored six books in total) How Anyone Can Stop Paying Income Taxes, published in 1982 became a New York Times best seller.  His last, The Federal Mafia; How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully collects Income Taxes, the first of three editions published in 1992, became the only non-fiction, and second and last book to be banned in America.  The only other book being Fanny Hill; Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, banned for obscenity in 1821 and 1963.

His crusade to force the government to obey the law earned him three prison sentences, the final one being a fourteen-year sentence that he began serving ten years ago, at the age of 77.   That sentence turned into a life sentence, as my father failed to survive until his planned 2017 release date. However in actuality the life sentence amounted to a death sentence.  My father died from skin cancer that went undiagnosed and untreated while he was in federal custody.  The skin cancer then led to a virulent outbreak of lung cancer that took his life just more than two months after his initial diagnosis.

The unnecessarily cruel twist in his final years occurred seven years ago when he reached his 80th birthday. At that point the government moved him from an extremely low security federal prison camp in New York State where he was within easy driving distance from family and friends, to a federal correctional institute, first in Indiana and then in Texas.  This was done specially to give him access to better medical care.  The trade off was that my father was forced to live isolated from those who loved him.  Given that visiting him required long flights, car rentals, and hotel stays, his visits were few and far between.   Yet while at these supposed superior medical facilities, my father received virtually no medical care at all, not even for the cataracts that left him legally blind, until the skin cancer on his head had spread to just about every organ in his body.

At the time of his diagnosis in early August of this year, he was given four to six mouths to live.  We tried to get him out of prison on compassionate release so that he could live out the final months of his life with his family, spending some precious moments with the grandchildren he had barely known.  But he did not live long enough for the bureaucratic process to be completed.  Two months after the process began, despite the combined help of a sitting Democratic U.S. congresswoman and a Republican U.S. senator, his petition was still sitting on someone’s desk waiting for yet another signature, even though everyone at the prison actually wanted him released.   Even as my father lay dying in intensive care, a phone call came in from a lawyer and the Bureau of Prisons in Washington asking the prison medical representatives for more proof of the serious nature of my father’s condition.

As the cancer consumed him his voice changed, and the prison phone system no longer recognised it, so he could not even talk with family members on the phone during his finale month of life.  When his condition deteriorated to the point where he needed to be hospitalized, government employees blindly following orders kept him shackled to his bed.   This despite the fact that escape was impossible for an 87 year old terminally ill, legally-blind patient who could barely breathe, let alone walk.

Whether or not you agree with my father’s views on the Federal Income Tax, or the manner by which it is collected, it’s hard to condone the way he was treated by our government.   He held his convictions so sincerely and so passionately that he continued to espouse them until his dying breath.  Like William Wallace in the final scene of Braveheart, an oppressive government may have succeeded in killing him, but they did not break his spirit.    And that spirit will live on in his books, his videos, and in his children and grandchildren.  

Hopefully his legacy will one day help restore the lost freedoms he died trying to protect, finally allowing him to rest in peace.

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Peter Schiff is the son of Irwin Schiff.  CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, best-selling author of six books, including How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse, and The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy---How to Save Yourself and Your Country, he is host of the syndicated Peter Schiff Show—and one of the few who famously predicted the collapse of the American housing bubble.
This tribute first appeared at Peter’s Euro Pacific Capital blog, and appears by permission.

The Punch Bowl Stays

Guest post by Peter Schiff

It is well known that I don’t 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 economists from their U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, the “Fed,” have consistently overestimated the strength of the economy ever since their forecasts became public in 2008 (see my previous article on the subject). But there is one former Fed and White House economist who has a slightly better track record...which 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.

Back in the late 1990s, Lindsey 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’s $100-$200 billion forecast proved way too conservative - the final price of the invasion and occupation is expected to exceed $2 trillion).

Now Lindsey is speaking out again, and this time he is pointing to what he sees as a painfully obvious problem: That the Fed is creating new bubbles that no one seems willing to confront or even acknowledge.  Interviewed by CNBC on June 8th on Squawk Box, Lindsey offered an unusually blunt assessment of the current state of the markets and the economy. To paraphrase:

“The public and the political class love to have everything going up. We had “Bubble #1” in the 1990s, “Bubble #2” in the 00s, and now we are in “Bubble #3.” It’s a lot of fun while it’s going up, but no one wants to be accused of ending the party early. But it’s the Fed’s job to take away the punch bowl before the party really gets going.”

To his credit, however, Lindsey sees how this is sowing the seeds for future pain, saying:

“The current Fed Funds rate is clearly too low, the only question is how we move it higher: Do we do it slowly, and start sooner, or do we wait until we are forced to, by the bond market or by events or statistics, in which case we would need to move more quickly. By far the lower risk approach would be to move slowly and gradually.”

In other words, he is virtually pleading for his former Fed colleagues to begin raising rates immediately. I would take Lindsey’s assertion one step further; the party really got going years ago and has been raging since September 2011, the last time the Dow corrected more than 10%. (That correction occurred at a time when the Fed had briefly ceased stimulating markets with quantitative easing.) Since then, the Dow has rallied by almost 58% without ever taking a breather. With such confidence, the party has long since passed into the realm of late night delirium.

As if to confirm that opinion, on June 8th the Associated Press published an extensive survey of 500 companies (using data supplied by S&P Capital IQ) that showed how corporate earnings have been inflated by gimmicky accounting. Public corporations, upon whose financial performance great sums may be gained or lost, are supposed to report earnings using standard GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) methods. But much like government statisticians (see last month’s commentary on the dismissal of bad first quarter performance), corporate accountants may choose to focus instead on alternative versions of profits to make lemonade from lemons.

Using creative accounting, bad performance can be explained away, moved forward, depreciated, offset, or otherwise erased. Given the enormity and complexity of corporate accounting, investors have deputized the analyst community to sniff out these shenanigans. Unfortunately, our deputies may have been napping on the job.

The AP found that 72% of the 500 companies had adjusted profits that were higher than net income in the first quarter of this year, and that the gap between those figures had widened to sixteen percent from nine percent five years ago. They also found that 21% of companies reported adjusted profits that were 50% more than net income, up from just 13% five years ago.

But with the fully spiked punch bowl still on the table, and the disco beat thumping on the speakers, investors have consistently looked past the smoke and mirrors and have accepted adjusted profits at face value. In a similar vein, they have looked past the distorting effect made by the huge wave of corporate share buybacks (financed on the back of six years of zero percent interest rates from the Fed). The buybacks have created the illusion of earnings per share growth even while revenues have stalled.  

So kudos to Lindsey for pointing out the ugly truth. But I do not share his belief that the economy and the stock market can survive the slow, steady rate increases that he advocates. I believe that a very large portion of even our modest current growth is based on the “wealth effect” of rising stock, bond, and real estate prices that have only been made possible by zero percent rates in the first place. In my opinion, it is no coincidence that economic growth and stock market performance have stagnated since December 2014 when the Fed’s QE program came to an end (it has very little to do with either bad winter weather or the West Coast port closings).

Prior to that, the $80+ billion dollars per month that the Fed had been pumping into the economy had helped push up asset prices across the board. With QE gone, the only thing helping to keep them from falling, and the economy from an outright recession (which is technically a possibility for the first half of 2015), is zero percent interest rates. Given this, even modest increases in interest rates could be devastating. Lindsey’s gradual approach may be equally as dangerous as the rapid variety. But the quick hit has the virtue of bringing the inevitable pain forward quickly and dealing with it all at once. Call it the band-aid removal approach; it may seem brutal, but at least it’s direct, decisive and makes us deal with our problems now, rather than pushing them endlessly into the future.

The last attempt made by the Fed to raise rates gradually occurred after 2003-2004 when Alan Greenspan had attempted to withdraw the easy liquidity that he had supplied to the markets in the form of more than one years’ worth of 1% interest rates. But by raising rates in quarter point increments for the succeeding two years, Greenspan was unable to get in front of and contain the growing housing bubble, which burst a few years later and threatened to bring down the entire economy. In retrospect, Greenspan may have done us all a favor if he had moved more decisively.

Today, we face a similar but far more dangerous prospect. Whereas Greenspan kept rates at 1% for only a year, Bernanke and Yellen have kept them at zero for almost seven. We have pumped in massively more liquidity this time around, and our economy has become that much more addicted and unbalanced as a result. Arguably, the bubbles we have created (in stocks, bonds, student debt, auto loans, and real estate) in the years since rates were cut to zero in 2008 have been far larger than the stock and housing bubbles of the Greenspan era. When they pop, look out below. Unfortunately, the gradual approach did not save us last time (worse, it backfired by making the ensuing crisis that much worse), and I believe it won’t work this time.  

In fact, the current bubbles are so large and fragile that air is already coming out with rates still locked at zero. However, unlike prior bubbles that pricked in response to Fed rate hikes, the current bubble may be the first to burst without a pin. It appears the Fed fears this and will do everything it can to avoid any possible stress. That is why Fed officials will talk about raising rates, but keep coming up with excuses why they can’t.  

Lindsey will be right that the markets will eventually force the Fed to raise rates even more abruptly if it waits too long to raise them on its own. But he grossly underestimates the magnitude of the rise and the severity of the crisis when that happens. It won’t just be the end of a raging party, but the beginning of the worst economic hangover the U.S., and perhaps the world, has yet experienced.

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Peter Schiff is the CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, best-selling author of six books, including How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse, and The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy---How to Save Yourself and Your Country, and host of the syndicated Peter Schiff Show—and one of the few who famously predicted the collapse of the American housing bubble.
This post first appeared at Peter’s Euro Pacific Capital blog.

Japan’s Abenomics Death Spiral

The Berlin Wall hasn’t been the only near-scientific experiment in recent decades testing political and economic ideologies to destruction. As Peter Schiff writes in this Guest Post, in recent years Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe (pronounced Ar-Bay) has turned his country into a virtual petri dish of Keynesian ideas. The result, as even he has now had to concede -- and as has been reported many times here at NOT PC --  is a rolling economic disaster.

As Japanese Prime Minster Shinzo Abe has turned his country into a petri dish of Keynesian ideas, the trajectory of Japan's economy has much to teach us about the wisdom of those policies. And although the warning sirens are blasting at the highest volumes imaginable, few economists can hear the alarm.

Data out this week shows the Japanese economy returning to recession by contracting for the second straight quarter (and three out of the last four quarters). The conclusion reached by the Keynesian apologists is that the benefits of inflation caused by the monetary stimulus have been counteracted, temporarily, by the negative effects of inflation caused by taxes. This tortured logic should be a clear indication that the policies were flawed from the start.

Although the Japanese economy has been in paralysis for more than 20 years, things have gotten worse since December 2012 when Abe began his radical surgery. From the start, his primary goal has been to weaken the yen and create inflation. On that front, he has been a success…

Governments Need Inflation, Economies Don't

Guest post by Peter Schiff

In an article in the UK's Telegraph on October 10, veteran economic correspondent and central bank shill Ambrose Evans-Pritchard laid bare the essential truth of the nearly universal current embrace of monetary inflation as an economic panacea. While politicians, CEOs and economists talk about demand stimulus and the avoidance of a deflationary trap, Evans-Pritchard reminds us that monetary inflation is all, and always, about debt management.

Most especially government’s debt management.

Every year the levels of government debt as a percentage of GDP, for both emerging market and developed economies, continue to go higher and higher. As the ratios push out into uncharted territories, particularly in Europe's southern tier, the ability to "inflate away" debt through monetisation remains the only means available to postpone default.

Evans-Pritchard quotes a Bank of America analyst as saying that even "low inflation" (not to mention actual deflation) is the "biggest threat to the dynamics of public debt." IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde ramped up the rhetoric further when she recently told the Washington Press Club that "deflation is the ogre that must be fought decisively." In other words, governments need inflation to remain viable. It's the drug they just can't do without.  [And “deflation” – falling prices -- My God! -- how would they ever pay back those trillions! – Ed]

But because this simple truth is just too embarrassing to admit, politicians and central bankers (and their academic, journalistic, and financial apologists) have concocted a variety of tortured theories as to why inflation is not just good for overly indebted governments, but an essential economic good for all.

Piketty's Envy Problem

French rockstar economist Thomas Piketty has responded to his critics, mostly to the Financial Times who claimed his data is shoddy, cherrypicked and some of it “made up out of thin air.” Tyler Cowen reports:

There are 4,400 words here, mostly on the FT kerfluffle, and Neil Irwin summarizes it here: “The short version: He doesn’t give an inch.”

In this Guest Post by Peter Schiff, Schiff argues Piketty has an envy problem – and it’s this most fundamentally that explains his popularity.

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Piketty's Envy Problem

There can be little doubt that Thomas Piketty's new book Capital in the 21st Century has struck a nerve globally. In fact, the Piketty phenomenon (the economic equivalent to Beatlemania) has in some ways become a bigger story than the ideas themselves. However, the book's popularity is not at all surprising when you consider that its central premise: how radical wealth redistribution will create a better society, has always had its enthusiastic champions (many of whom instigated revolts and revolutions). What is surprising, however, is that the absurd ideas contained in the book could captivate so many supposedly intelligent people. 

Guest Post: Debt Ceiling Delusions

Guest post by Peter Schiff

The popular take on the current debt ceiling stand-off is that the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has a delusional belief that it can hit the brakes on new debt creation without bringing on an economic catastrophe. While Republicans are indeed kidding themselves if they believe that their actions will not unleash deep economic turmoil, there are much deeper and more significant delusions on the other side of the aisle. Democrats, and the President in particular, believe that continually taking on more debt to pay existing debt is a more responsible course of action. Even worse, they appear to believe that debt accumulation is the equivalent of economic growth.

If Republicans were to inexplicably prevail, and the federal government were to cut spending so that its expenditures matched its tax revenues (a truly radical idea), the country's financial mess would be laid bare. The government would have to weigh the relative costs and benefits of making interest payments on Treasury debt (primarily to foreign creditors) or to trim entitlements promised to U.S. citizens. But those are choices we will have to make sooner or later anyway. In fact we should have dealt with these issues years ago. But generations of mechanistic debt ceiling increases have allowed us to perpetually kick the can down the road. What could possibly be gained by doing it again, particularly if it is done with no commitment to change course?

The Democrats' argument that America needs to pay its bills is just hollow rhetoric. Paying off one's Visa bill with a new and bigger MasterCard bill can't be considered a legitimate payment of debt. At best it is a transfer. But in the government's case, it doesn't even qualify as that. Treasury debt is primarily bought by the Fed, by foreign central banks, and by major financial institutions. None of that will change with a debt ceiling increase. We will just go to the same people for greater quantities. So it's like paying off your Visa card with a bigger Visa card.

Peter Schiff was right … again. [updated]

Peter Schiff famously gave warning about the collapse of the American housing bubble .. and was laughed at by others who were less prescient.  [If you haven’t done it before, then Google “Peter Schiff was right.” Go on, do it. Do it now. I’ll wait.]

He did it again with the non-ending of QE…

Over the last few weeks, as the overwhelming majority of economists, reporters, and Wall Street insiders expressed certainty that the Fed would begin to taper its QE program, I did my level best to make the public understand that the Fed would do no such thing. As a result, last week's "surprise" announcement provides us with fresh confirmation that most market pundits remain clueless about the true state of our economy. I knew, as they seemed not to, that the Fed is caught in a stimulus trap that will require them to keep the monetary spigots wide open. For my efforts I was treated to another round of snickers, eye rolls, and outright dismissals. You would have hoped that they would have learned better by now.

Fortunately all their dazzlingly wrong predictions are caught on tape. In retrospect it makes for hilarious viewing. Click below to view.

Unfortunately, they have failed to learn anything from their mistakes. The same pundits that were revered before their colossal miscue are still afforded equal respect. The markets still believe the popular consensus that a Fed taper will arrive in October, or maybe by January at the latest. In contrast, I believe that we are now stuck in a state of permanent QE.   But these views remain in the lunatic fringe. How many more times will the markets have to get it wrong before an alternate reality is considered?   In the end it will not be the Fed that voluntarily tapers by easing up on the monetary gas pedal, but an adverse reaction in the currency and bond markets than forces the Fed to slam on the breaks.

UPDATE: Who doesn’t love it when two of your heroes interact? So check out Yaron Brook, entrepreneur & president of the Ayn Rand Institute, talking to Peter Schiff on the Peter Schiff Radio Show—talking on Ted Cruz's filibuster, why California's latest “living wage” hike could sink the state into the Pacific, and about the new off-Broadway Ayn Rand play, Anthem. [Hat tip Paul Van D.]

The Taper That Wasn't

Guest post by Fed-watcher Peter Schiff, who reckons the U.S. Central Bank, whose non-decision yesterday left financial markets in all sorts of confusion, have dug themselves a hole we won’t easily climb out of.

The Fed's failure yesterday to announce some sort of tapering of its QE program, despite the consensus of an overwhelming percentage of economists who expected action, once again reveals the degree to which mainstream analysts have overestimated the strength of the U.S. economy. The Fed understands, as the market seems not to, that the current "recovery" could not survive without continuation of massive monetary stimulus. Mainstream economists have mistaken the symptoms of the Fed's monetary expansion, most notably rising stock and real estate prices, as signs of real and sustainable growth. But the current asset price bubbles have nothing to do with the real economy. To the contrary, they are setting up for a painful correction that will likely be worse than the one we experienced five years ago.

Peter Schiff on David Stockman

Peter Schiff talks about the impact and arguments of former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman, and his new book The Great Deformation: Corruption of Capitalism in America.  Because it was written by a former insider, it’s been making waves, Stockman’s critics “shooting the messenger” rather than dealing with his severe criticisms …

In reference to an op-ed piece by Stockman in the New York Times, for example, “Corruption of Capitalism in America,” Krugman dismissed the ex-congressman as a "cranky old man" without even reading the book.

Actually, I was disappointed in Stockman’s piece. I thought there would be some kind of real argument, some presentation, however tendentious, of evidence. Instead it’s just a series of gee-whiz, context- and model-free numbers embedded in a rant — and not even an interesting rant. It’s cranky old man stuff…

Naturally, Stockman fired back.

Peter Schiff: Inflation propaganda exposed

“The CPI is no longer a tool to accurately measure inflation,” says Peter Schiff in his latest video blog, “but an instrument of propaganda the government uses to hide accelerating inflation from the public and financial markets. Modest CPI increases over the past several years do not reflect an absence of inflation, but a design flaw in the index that fails to fully capture the magnitude of price increases. Central bankers drawing economic conclusions regarding inflation and monetary policy based on this highly flawed data point are making a major policy error.”

Have prices been inflating in recent years? While they do their best to ignore the effect of monetary expansion on house and stock prices, if alleged economists like Paul Krugman bought their own damned groceries sometimes they might better appreciate that they have been.

There are much bigger threats than the “fiscal cliff” [corrected]

In 35 days the US Government goes off the so-called “Fiscal Cliff”—tax cuts expire, spending cuts kick in, the debt ceiling is broken, and all hell is (allegedly) loosed on the world.

Maybe.

Marc Faber says no. There are much bigger problems out there, including the enthusiasm of politicians and investors to continue faking reality.

Peter Schiff also says no. There are two much bigger threats to the US economy than the immediate “fiscal cliff,” he says: debt, and Ben Bernanke.

The biggest risk is not that “we go over this phony fiscal cliff,” Schiff said in a recent interview. “It’s [that] the government cancels the spending cuts, cancels the tax hikes,… [and] instead we end up going over the real fiscal cliff further down the road.”
“In fact,” he added, “the real fiscal cliff comes when our creditors want their money back and we don’t have it.”

SCHIFF: “Damn The Torpedoes” [updated]

Guest post by Peter Schiff

Last week in an interview on CBS Network News, Economist Mark Zandi, the chief economist for ratings agency Moody’s, unwittingly revealed a central error of the global economic establishment. Zandi has made a career out of finding the middle ground between republican and democrat economic talking points. As a result of this skill, he has been rewarded with large quantities of airtime from media outlets that want to appear non-partisan, despite the fact that his supposedly neutral analysis often leaves listeners frustrated.

When asked about the recent deterioration in the global economy, Zandi said that “the worst possible scenario” at present would occur if Greece were to leave the Eurozone. He claimed that the economic gyrations and liquidations of bad debt that would result from such an exit would be sufficient to create a vicious cycle that could drag the global economy back into recession. As a result, he urged policy makers to take whatever steps necessary to maintain the current integrity of the 17 nation Eurozone.

Given what most economists now know, few would actively argue that Greece’s entrance into the Eurozone back in 2001 was a good idea. In fact most concede it was a terrible idea based on bad forecasting and outright fraud. There is little disagreement over the fact that Greece grossly misrepresented its financial position in order to gain initial entry into the monetary union. It is also widely agreed upon that in the ensuing decade Greece exploited its monetary advantages to borrow irresponsibly.

Much has been written about how the fundamental misfit between Greece’s economy and currency gave birth to a deeply flawed system that was destined to run off the rails. Most also agree that the countries like Greece and Germany are too economically and culturally disparate to exist under the same monetary umbrella. But despite all this, Zandi wants to maintain the status quo. In his opinion, it is so imperative to prevent the deflationary consequences of an economic restructuring that it is preferable to prop up a failed system, perhaps indefinitely, rather than allow a newer, healthier system to replace it. In the process, the moral hazard created not only assures that Greece will become an even greater burden on Europe, but so too will other nations whose leaders will be emboldened in their profligacy by the anticipation of similar help.

From Zandi’s perspective (and he is certainly in the majority on this point) the goal of economic policy is to keep GDP growing. It follows then that he will oppose large-scale debt liquidations which drag down GDP in the short term. But sometimes debt needs to be liquidated. Bad ideas need to be abandoned. Once economies stop throwing good money after bad, capital is freed up to flow into more economically viable purposes. But economists and politicians never look at the long term. Their job seems to be to manage the economy for the next election.

The same “damn the torpedoes” mentality dominates economic thinking with respect to the U.S. economy as well. Years of artificially low interest rates, and government subsidies that direct capital towards certain sectors and away from others, has created an economy with too little savings and production, and too much borrowing and consumption. The ultra-low interest rates currently supplied by the US Federal Reserve serve to perpetuate this unsustainable artificial economy. Higher rates would work quickly to redirect capital to the more productive sectors. But high rates could bring deflation and liquidation, which few economists are prepared to risk.

The US has too many shopping malls selling stuff, but not enough factories making stuff. It has too many kids in college studying liberal arts, and not enough in the workforce acquiring skills that will actually increase their productivity. Banks are loaning too much money to individuals to buy houses, and not enough money to entrepreneurs to buy equipment. There are too many tax-takers riding in the wagon, and not enough taxpayers pulling it. The list is long, but the solutions are short.

The US needs interest rates to rise to market levels, and the economy to restructure without government interference—to stop beating a dead horse and hitch its wagon to an animal that can really pull. The process will be painful for many, but like ripping off a band-aid, the pain will be over relatively quickly. However, since a painful restructuring means recession, politicians resist the cure with every fiber of their beings. So instead of a genuine recovery, one that will provide productive jobs and rising living standards, we see only a phony recovery that produces neither.

Preserving a broken system merely to avoid the pain necessary to fix it only makes the situation worse.  Propping up sectors that should be contracting prevents resources from flowing to other sectors that should be expanding. Keeping workers employed in non-productive jobs prevents them from gaining productive employment elsewhere. Encouraging activity or behaviour the market would otherwise punish discourages alternatives that it would otherwise reward.

Unfortunately, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic put politics above economics, and economists like Mark Zandi provide the cover they need to get away with it.

Peter Schiff is CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital and host of the internationally syndicated Peter Schiff Show,  www.schiffradio.com. First posted Friday, June 8, 2012 at Europacific Capital

UPDATE: Meanwhile…

• In the too-stupid-to-make-up category, embattled Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy defends ‘victory’ for EU credibility—the eurozone’s €100bn backstop to Spanish banks “is a credit line,” he says, not a bailout.
  Yeah, right.

Image from Zero Hedge

• In more “too stupid to make up” news: Rojay insists "Spain Is Not Uganda."  That’s true.“Spain is Greece.”
  

And in Ireland they’re not just mourning their team’s embarrassing non-performance on Saturday night. Like iwi off to the trough for a new payout on the same claims,  the Irish government demands renegotiation of its bailout terms to match Spain:

            Congrats Germany: you have now opened the Pandora's box of infinite moral hazard, bailout renegotiations
         and unconditional rescues. Anything less than a pari passu bailout to Spain's, which the economy minister 
         touted as having no political strings attached, will incite a revolution.
         Oh, [but in the good news], the IMF has just been made obsolete.

And the three-quarters of Ireland not off work mourning Saturday night’s loss are over at Euro 2012 celebrating further losses by the German taxpayer:

Image from The Daily Capitalist

Peter Schiff: “The real crisis will occur not if we *fail* to raise the debt ceiling, but if we **succeed**”

Peter Schiff on the U.S. debt ceiling. There’s a more important ceiling staring the U.S. govt in the face than the one they’re trying to fake right now, he reckons: a lending ceiling…

Peter Schiff et al: The Day After [update 7]

The day after the Republicans forced the resignation of Speaker Pelosi and gained the biggest political turnaround since the War, Peter Schiff asks, which bums will the voters throw out in 2012?

And the day after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (“Helicopter Ben” to his friends) announces it’s about to start spraying around a half-trillion dollars worth of paper out of his whirly-bird, Schiff ponders whether this golden shower from the Fed presages an even bigger paper shower from the government—and wonders how that will sit with the people who just voted out last year’s big-spending bums.

UPDATE 1: PaulHsieh tells America’s newly-elected representatives that they should Celebrate Tuesday's election results, “but don't forget who put you in office and why — namely, the independent-minded Tea Party voters.” If they’re going to “dance with the one that brung them,” he says, they need to stay true to three basic principles…

1) Americans don’t want “ObamaLite”…
The 2010 vote was a powerful message from Americans rejecting the socialist policies of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid — including the bailouts, the out-of-control federal spending, the higher taxes, and the nationalized health care scheme.
Voters elected Republicans to halt and reverse these policies — not compromise to pass watered-down versions of those same bad ideas…
2) Don’t mistake this as a mandate to pursue a divisive “social conservative” agenda
The Republicans’ electoral rebound has been driven by millions of independent voters like the Colorado small businessman Ron Vaughn, who told the New York Times, “I want the Democrats out of my pocket and Republicans out of my bedroom…
3) Respect the Constitution
The newly elected (or re-elected) congressmen and senators must remember that rightful authority flows from the U.S. Constitution…Nothing enraged Tea Party protestors more than seeing elected officials betray this solemn promise … and although some pundits like Dahlia Lithwick think it’s “weird” for legislators to consider whether a proposed bill is constitutional, that is indeed one of their primary responsibilities.

Read the whole article: GOP: Dance With The One Who Brung You.

UPDATE 2: Fresh from celebrating victories with “a couple hundred U.S. patriots at the Tea Party Patriot's election night party at the Capitol Hyatt in Washington, D.C.,” invigorated Christchurch blogger Trevor Loudon counts off some of the wins and losses.  “A Good night Was Had by Freedom Lovers - Dems and Communists, Not So Much.” He concludes:

The G.O.P. now controls Congress and has made big gains in the Senate and Governor's races. It's goodbye to your favorite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and hello John Boehner the new Republican House Majority Leader!
This is the Republicans' last chance to prove they can be trusted to live up to their own principles.
If they don't , they will be finished - and so may we be all.

UPDATE 3: Scott Holleran reckons that it’s now time for the Tea Party movement “to shed its dingbats,” and for everyone else to begin choosing up sides in the power struggle(s) to come.

Having lost its highest profile races partly due to their blatant proselytizing for religion in government , the Tea Party movement, which represents a rejection of Big Government, should oppose the mixture of religion and state.
    Whatever else Tuesday’s election results may mean, the Tea Party movement clearly has the potential to shed its dingbats, to paraphrase Harry Binswanger, sponsor candidates who stand for man’s rights and capitalism, and restore the Republicans to the ideals of Lincoln, Jefferson, and reason. In the meantime, watch for strange, sudden alliances, power struggles, and a political shift in conflict from left/right to religious/secular.
    With the core principles of the GOP in play, a radically restructured Congress, and an overwhelmingly rejected but strikingly dishonest and divisive American president, it’s best to choose a side now; the battle has not yet begun.

UPDATE 4: David Galland from Casey Research tosses more cold water on the fresh blossoms of economic and political hope that many American readers may be feeling today, “I’m more convinced than ever that we’re about to go through a crash of epic proportions,” he says. “It won’t just be bad, it’s going to be horrific, worse than even I can imagine.”  And there’s really nothing even the few newly elected energiser bunnies can do about that. America has already made its fiscal bed—and now it’s too late. It’s already flat broke.

The debt problems are now so extreme that the Republicans, tea partiers, and desperate Democrats now rediscovering good old fiscal sanity have no feasible way of making a dent.   Even the stingiest Republicans are only talking about freezing spending at 2008 levels. For the record, that still means an annual federal budget deficit of just shy of half a trillion dollars.
Add to that approximately $150 billion in annual state budget shortfalls. And that’s before the economy is knocked sideways by the onrushing tidal wave of retiring baby boomers… or body slammed by the inevitable increase in U.S. interest rate expenses, as rates move up sharply from today’s unsustainable historic lows.
    The point is that, even to get back to 2008’s budget deficits, will require cutting almost a trillion dollars in federal spending. And that’s just for starters.

Sorry folks. Few Republicans, tea partiers or Democrats are even thinking in those terms. Which they would need to do to avert America’s coming sovereign debt tsunami, which is already tens of trillions of dollars underwater, and climbing fast. 

UPDATE 5:  Kris Sayce comments:

    Welcome to America’s Lost Decade
   …Or should that be Last Decade?
    This morning’s decision by the US Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is the final act in American global economic dominance.
    If the US economy wasn’t already terminally ill, then this morning’s news from the FOMC has pushed it into terminal illness……
    I tell you what, for a bunch of people who are supposedly super-bright, what they’ve done is nothing short of criminally comical….

UPDATE 6: Here’s a nice parable explaining what all Ben Bernanke’s counterfeit trillions are doing.

UPDATE 7:  Congressman Ron Paul suggests that both he and his son, new Senator Randall Paul, will introduce 'End the Fed' legislation first day in office! (HT Capitalism)

The Fed’s new “super-stimulus” will not stimulate but destroy. UPDATE 2: “Plan A” for wealth destruction. UPDATE 3: “The US Fed has now laid its monetary cards on the table… its new mandate is to create inflation.” UPDATE 4: Bernard Hickey is a moron.

The global monetary and economic crisis has reached its next phase.  With a world economy already seriously out of whack, into which the first trillion-dollar tranche of economic “stimulus” was poured without effect, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is about to press the button to print around three trillion new paper dollars to further devalue the American currency, further dislocate a world economy out of whack (and desperately trying to recover), and potentially initiate the final destruction of the American economy.

If the first “stimulus” merely printed enough paper to keep afloat those zombie malinvestments that were built up over the boom that needed to die in the bust, this last desperate mega-printing will so dilute the American currency that it will no longer even be able to do its job internally of lubricating the division of labour it once made possible, and externally of allowing the American dollar to be virtually the world’s reserve currency.

That he will be pressing the button with the full blessing of virtually every one of the world’s mainstream economist is a measure of just how far mainstream economics is from having a clue what’s going on at this stage of the crisis, any idea of the role that the application of their theories had in causing the global monetary and economic crisis, and any figment of a notion now of any Plan B to remedy what they’ve caused.

Instead, we’re just about to get more of the same, by the truckload.

The world crisis was caused by an enormous worldwide increase in the money supply—around twenty percent year-on-year for more than a decade, compounding—which flooded into credit markets, distorting the capital structure and giving finance companies what they thought would be a never-ending spigot, and spilled over into the world’s housing market, creating the world’s most expensive and biggest-ever housing bubble. 

It is being now “fixed” by nothing less than the same again—only this time on steroids. More cash pouring out of the Fed’s printing presses.

Injecting huge tranches of counterfeit capital into the economy to stimulate the boom was what initially inflated the bubble and caused all the dislocations. Injecting huge tranches of counterfeit capital was the so-called solution wheeled out in the first tranche of bailouts and “stimulus.” Now, with no Plan B even under consideration, the only call we hear from the mainstream is “the same again, only more so.”

If the first hit was like feeding a person crack, and the second hit of bailout crack was like trying to revive the patient with a bigger dose once their come-down started, then this last hit is like trying to revive a dying patient by making their heart explode.

There’s only one word for it. It’s insane.

Whether this massive emission of new money by the central bank is brought about through direct purchases from the central government (“Quantitative Easing”) or from the politically connected banks (“Credit Easing”) is immaterial. The results are exactly the same: they both involve "an expansion of the central bank's balance sheet," as Ben Bernanke himself puts it. Both engender a surge in available money and credit. Quantitative easing, again according to Mr. Bernanke, "is most common in poor countries or in countries wracked by war or natural disasters."[1] Or, the jaded might add, in a country wracked by economic illiteracy.

There really is no Plan B being considered, you know. This bailout crack  is being shovelled straight into the patient’s heart at the very same time as the economic doctors are strapping the patient to a gurney with enough financial regulation to ensure any restructuring is virtually impossible in any place—and the existing regime uncertainty is compounded.

There can only be one result. Economic destruction.

But there really is a Plan B, you know, and it’s the very opposite of the plan being followed. 

The money pumping is an attempt to “fight” falling prices. But rather than pumping the money supply to attempt to make falling prices impossible, and putting in “price floors” and minimum wage laws to make falling prices illegal, economists might realise instead that in falling prices are the very seeds of recovery—opening up the very springs of profitability that will allow viable businesses to lower their own costs and get back on a profitable footing again.

Frankly, "Falling Prices Are Not Deflation but the Antidote to Deflation." 

And Economic Recovery Requires Capital Accumulation, Not Government 'Stimulus Packages'.

And rather than the slide to regulation, and to the protectionism and economic nationalism which is the almost inevitable counter reaction to collapse (phenomena perfectly reflected in yesterday’s call locally to ban the sale of NZ farmland to foreign investors—and calls worldwide for rising protectionism and for new governmental and supranational agencies aimed at global governance of the world economy) what’s needed instead is just what Czech President Vaclav Klaus was recommending yesterday to the United Nations.

I am afraid we are moving in a wrong direction. The anti-crisis measures that have been proposed and already partly implemented follow from the assumption that the crisis was a failure of markets and that the right way out is more regulation of markets. This is a mistaken assumption. [“A big increase in financial regulation...will only prolong the recession,” he earlier told the Financial Times. “The best thing to do now would be temporarily to weaken, if not repeal, various labour, environmental, social, health and other 'standards,' because they block rational human activity more than anything else."]  It is not possible to prevent any future crisis by implementing substantial, market-damaging macroeconomic and regulatory government intervention as it is the case now. It is only possible to destroy the markets and together with them the chances for economic growth and prosperity in both developed and developing countries.
    The solution to this or any other crisis does not lie in rising protectionism [Can you hear that, Bill English?] … The solution doesn’t lie in “more bureaucracy” either, in creating new governmental and supranational agencies, or in aiming at global governance of the world economy. On the contrary, this is the time for international organizations, including the United Nations, to reduce their expenditures [and] make their administrations thinner…

Sadly, there is less than no chance of any Plan B along these lines being adopted anywhere outside the Czech Republic. Which means that the process of rapid economic and capital destruction is now under way.

I’d recommend you do whatever you need to do to protect what you have.

UPDATE 1: Did I say mention the worldwide housing bubble the central banks created?  Australians are still in denial about their housing bubble—a bubble fuelled by their Reserve Bank’s irresponsible credit expansion—a bubble they still refuse to recognise, but which is nearly about to pop.

As  said above, I’d recommend you do whatever you need to do to protect what you have.

UPDATE 2: In a more rational world, one in which there was a rational Plan B, the world would have been out of economic depression in February last year.

instead, we’ve had the same Plan A used by the likes of Hoover and Roosevelt to extend the 1929 correction for another fifteen years of crisis—the same remedies I was warning back in October 2008, before the last election, would be responsible for extending this one.

If you were devising a Plan to ensure that when  markets need to correct, they can’t; that when real savings are being consumed on malinvestments that urgently need to be extinguished, they won’t be; that when an economy needs to be restructured, it won’t be; then this is the plan you’d come up with to extend the collapse and make sure the necessary correction won't happen, just as the Hoover-Roosevelt Plan A did in the thirties:

1. Prevent or delay liquidation by propping up shaky businesses and shaky credit positions. (Better to flush out the malinvestments quickly, so recovery can get under way.)
2. Further inflate the money supply, creating more malinvestments and delaying the necessary correction. (Better to maintain the the purchasing power in your pocket rather than dilute it.)
3. Keep wage rates up --or keep money wages constant when prices start falling (which amounts to the same thing) -- which in the face of falling business demand is a sure recipe for unemployment. (Better to take your cut now, and give your business a chance to restructure.)
4. Keep prices up (by means of the likes of green-plated building regulations) or add new costs to struggling businesses (such as the dopey Emissions Tax Scam), delaying the necessary corrections that will make businesses profitable again. (Better to let prices fall to the new level they need to post-crash. Trying to help recovery by artificially re-inflating prices is like backing over someone you’ve run over in your car, hoping that it will make the patient better.)
5. "Stimulate" demand by spending on "infrastructure" projects just to make it look like the government is doing something -- when what that something actually does is to take money from profitable businesses and bid resources away from struggling businesses. (Better if government cuts its coat according to its new cloth, without competing with struggling businesses and raising the prices of now-much-scarcer resources.)
6. Discourage saving and investment by increasing government spending (all of which is consumption spending) and maintaining high tax rates. (Better if government cuts its coat according to its new cloth, without taking now-much-scarcer resources away from struggling businesses.)
7. Subsidise unemployment with make-work schemes paid out of money from profitable businesses that will bid resources away from those struggling businesses, delaying the shift of workers to fields where genuine jobs would otherwise be available. (Better to abolish all minimum-wage laws, so everybody who wants to work can work—and work in a job that pays its own way.)

As Murray Rothbard points out in America's Great Depression (from which I draw the above seven points) when you list logically the various ways that government could hamper market adjustments and hobble the adjustment process, you find that you have precisely listed the favourite "anti-depression" arsenal of government policy.

And you’ve listed the “Plan A” that they’re still following.  They have no Plan B.

I said in 2008 all these variants of stimulunacy would be used, and would fail, just as they did in the First Great Depression. They have, and they are. So fasten your seatbelts, because their use now, on steroids, will be responsible for creating the Second Great Depression.

UPDATE 3: Buy gold?  Watch talking heads including Peter Schiff on The Kudlow Report:

“You’re seeing currency destruction going on around the world… The one currency you can’t print more of is gold.”

“The US Fed has now laid its monetary cards on the table… its new mandate is to create inflation. The old mandate was to create ‘price stability,’ but the Fed now views stable prices as a problem that its’ gonna cure by creating inflation.”

“If you’re an American citizen and you own US currency, you’ve got a bullseye on your back and you’re in Ben Bernanke’s cross-hairs.”

UPDATE 4: Bernard Hickey has contrived not to notice that the government’s own central banks have been front and central in pumping up the boom; that their flawed and relentless pursuit of  bogus price stability is at root responsible for both boom and collapse; and he’s now abandoning what he calls the “free market orthodoxy” and plumping instead for protectionism, nationalism and braindead big governmentism.

Fuck him.

He’s an easy read of how bad economic education leads to dire economic reporting.

He rightly derides our high debt, and the fact NZers did so little productively with it in the boom years.  Yet he is oblivious to the place wherein the vast majority of that credit was created: the world’s central banks.

He says we need “measures to control our currency.” Hasn’t he noticed that the Reserve Bank has been pumping and un-pumping our currency for the last decade? With what measure of success we can already see.

He seems to have bought wholesale the idea advanced by Alan Greenspan and elaborated by Ben Bernanke that what was actually responsible for the bubble was an excess of global saving—an “excess” from which Bernard now thinks we should wall ourselves off from. But as George Reisman pointed out when Greenspan and Bernanke advanced this alibi to distract from their own culpability, “the very notion of a saving glut is absurd, practically on its face.”

And he seems to have bought the idea that for the last decades we have had “completely free markets and capital flows”  Free markets! What is he smoking! This hot-shot economics reporters is apparently blind to the fact that in the markets of the last decade there is virtually no price or profit relationship left untouched. You think the age of Muldoonist price controls and interference with profits are dead?  In the last few decades the “orthodoxy” worldwide has overseen:

• interest rates controlled by an economic dictator with powers Muldoon would have killed for;
• specific interest rates, such as home mortgages, manipulated through subsidies as well as price controls;
• indirect currency controls virtually everywhere;
• direct government manipulation of the gold market by both world govts and the IMF;
• asset price floors—in addition to the ‘Greenspan put,’ we’ve had money printed and “toxic” assets bought, anything to keep asset values raised ;
• wage floors, essentially a guarantee of widespread unemployment in a downturn;
• wage ceilings, especially for executives;
• direct price controls, especially in medicine and education;
• good old-fashioned protectionism—not just currency manipulation, but outright tariff and non-tariff barriers;
• the dismissal of business bankruptcy and liquidation as “old-fashioned”;
• pumping up illusory profits by inflating the money supply, creating an inflationary illusion of profitability and prosperity;
• the grant of virtual monopoly powers to the very credit agencies that didn’t know a bad thing even when it was held right under their nose.*

These are just a few of the means by which govts ran price controls and interference with profits in recent decades—and still are.  But Bernard, and hundred of thousands of others trained to view all this as part of a “free market” are too braindead to see them for what they are, and now with the failure of this system of control calls instead for the controls to be tightened!

He has the frankly braindead notion that somehow the people in govt responsible for creating, overseeing and extending this economic disaster need to take back the reins.  He has apparently either lost the brains he once had, or has now reached the point (as it has with most educated in mainstream economics) where the real world has now outstripped his learning, so has resorted to the siren cry of the braindead everywhere: “Bring me more big government! Now!!”

Bernard Hickey is a fucking moron.  That’s all that’s left to be said.

_ _ _ _ _ _

* This list comes from Hunter Lewis’s book Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles and Busts. It’s exactly the sort of book that braindead fools like Hickey should be reading, but don’t. Or won’t.