The Fed has done it again, purporting to manage our expectations with yet more, excruciatingly public dithering over the timing of a rate hike. The central bank is now saying there will be no policy change before June at the earliest. This latest little piece of kabuki can only add to the credibility of our own forecast, which is that that the Fed will never raise rates. Okay, we were being facetious when we first made that prediction a couple of years ago; never is indeed a long time. But what kind of odds would you take to wager that there will be no rate hike for at least another ten years? You could probably get thirty-to-one from economists, editorialists, pundits and other useful idiots who never seem to tire of telling us that a rate hike is imminent. Realize that you would be within a year of collecting on the bet if you’d made it back in 2006, when the last rate hike was announced.
Things were different then, as readers will recall. For one, the danger of crashing the financial system with a small turn of the monetary screw was not as great. The dot-com crash was a distant memory, and, outside of the doomsday blogosphere, the gestating housing bubble was not a concern. These days, however, the banking system is as shaky as a drunk on a high wire. Still worse is that the drunk has much farther to fall, since the financial leveraging that has occurred since 2009 is so vast as to be almost beyond calculation. The derivatives bubble is estimated by some to be as large as a quadrillion dollars. But even if you accept more conservative valuations of around $300 trillion, you’re still talking about a highly flammable gas-bag of digital money that dwarfs global GDP fourfold. The clear implication is that the main business our planet, economically speaking, is creating financial instruments, not providing actual goods and services.
This post was published at Rick Ackerman on Sunday, October 11, 2015.
Follow on Twitter
Recent Comments