Once upon a time, there was a thing called a ‘free-market’ and for a time nations strove toward this ideal. To wit, a free market economy was a market-based economy where prices for goods and services would be set freely by the forces of supply and demand and allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without intervention by government policy, and it typically entailed support for highly competitive markets and private ownership of productive enterprises.
But power and belief shifted and faith now resides in governmental fiscal policy (spend more, tax less) and central banker interest rate policy (make money ever cheaper) to avoid the free markets down-cycles and extend its up-cycles infinitely. The central bank high priests have determined free markets are better replaced by command economies and further the priests’ purport they know appropriate levels of demand and supply…and absent the achievement of these levels, they will enforce their will even if the Fed’s programs are the likely cause that retards the Fed’s from achieving their stated goals!
But this has gone so far that now all we have is fiscal imbalances (the true nature is hidden by accounting fraud) and central bank centralized command of financial valuations. And I’m not being dramatic… I truly mean the Fed and central bankers are controlling the pricing of nearly everything financial (including sovereign debt / bonds, stocks, real estate, commodity prices, etc.) via interest rate targets and bond purchasing programs. The politicization and centralized control has turned the economic indexes into the central banks gauges which they actively ‘manage’.
This post was published at SRSrocco Report on August 29, 2014.
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