Saturday, July 16, 2011

America could default even if the debt ceiling is raised....


America could default even if the debt ceiling is raised....

One of the big, government-sponsored American rating agencies has just confirmed this....


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2uxb0oIfnE&feature=player_embedded


QE just consists of swapping one asset for another (cash for bonds). Worse still, it’s the rich who receive the cash, and the rich tend not to spend a significant proportion of cash windfalls. Thus QE has little effect.

For a decent anti-recessionary effect, it’s indebted households who ought to get the cash. I wonder if the ars*holes inside the Washington DC beltway will ever realize this?

Specifically, Standard & Poor's announced today:

ckquote>

[We're putting U.S. debt on] CreditWatch with negative implications ... owing to the dynamics of the political debate on the debt ceiling, there is at least a one-in-two likelihood that we could lower the long-term rating on the U.S. within the next 90 days ....

The political debate about the U.S.’ fiscal stance and the related issue of the U.S. government debt ceiling has, in our view, only become more entangled.

***

We may lower the long-term rating on the U.S. by one or more notches into the 'AA' category in the next three months, if we conclude that Congress and the Administration have not achieved a credible solution to the rising U.S. government debt burden and are not likely to achieve one in the foreseeable future.

The Washington Post adds:

S&P managing director John Chambers said in an interview ... even if the parties agree to raise the debt ceiling, it may not be enough to avert a downgrade. Chambers said the country must implement a plan to reduce the annual budget deficit by roughly $4 trillion over 10 years, which makes the debt manageable over the long term.

The White House and Congress have discussed a plan that big, but negotiations have more recently centered on a smaller deal, at $2 trillion or less.

That could still lead to a downgrade,” Chambers said.

Knee-jerk conservatives may say, "yes, we have to slash all social support programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps".

Knee-jerk liberals might say "raise taxes instead of cutting any spending".

But the truth is that plugging the major holes in our economy is more important than either cutting spending or raising taxes.

And stopping bailouts and giveaways for the top .1% of the richest elite (which weaken rather than strengthen the economy, and slashing spending on unnecessary imperial wars (which reduce rather than increase our national security, is what the budget really needs.

As of last year:

Why aren't our government "leaders" talking about slashing the military-industrial complex, which is ruining our economy with unnecessary imperial adventures?

And why aren't any of our leaders talking about stopping the permanent bailouts for the financial giants who got us into this mess? .

And why aren't they taking away the power to create credit from the private banking giants - which is costing our economy trillions of dollars (and is leading to a decrease in loans to the little guy) - and give it back to the states?

If we did these things, we wouldn't have to raise taxes or cut core services to the American people.
If there's any shortfall, all we have to do is claw back the ill-gotten gains from the fraudsters working for the too big to fails whose unlawful actions got us into this mess in the first place.

The blood pressure of the patient in the emergency room drops precipitously.

The ER docs have already given 15 pints of f-blood over the course of many hours. But the patient is still on the verge of dying.

Medical rules and regulations say that more than 15 pints of blood should never be given, as too much transfusion can cause other fatal problems.

The "liberal" doctors want to give the patient more blood. After all, this is a life-or-death emergency ... and if they can just buy more time, they might be able to figure out a way to save the patient.

The "conservative" doctors want to stop with the transfusions. After all, giving too much blood could kill the patient ... and maybe he'll be able to pull out of it on his own.

Who is right?

Well, the "liberal" and "conservative" doctors are so busy arguing their point of view that they haven't noticed that one of the patient's legs has been half chewed off. He's bleeding out through the huge open wound.

Unless the doctors suture up the wound, the patient will bleed out no matter how much blood they give him.

I've previously described this fact using water as an analogy:

"Deficit hawks" like top economic historian Niall Ferguson says that America's debt will drive it into a debt crisis, and that any more quantitative easing will lead our creditors to pull the plug. See this, this and this. Indeed, PhD economist Michael Hudson says (starting around 4:00 into video):

If the problem that is grinding the economy to a halt is too much debt, and if no one in the government - in either party - is looking at solving the debt problem, then ... we're going to go into a depression as far as the eye can see.
Yet the U.S. hasn't reined in its profligate spending. While modern economic theory shows that debts do matter, the U.S. is spending on guns and butter.

As PhD economist Dean Baker
points out, the IMF is cracking down on the once-proud America like a naughty third world developing country. the IMF performed a complete audit of the whole US financial system during Bush's last term in office - something which they have only previously done to broke third world nations.)

Indeed, economics professor and former Senior Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers Laurence Kotlikoff wrote yesterday:

Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt.

***

Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy.... The IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt.

***

Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt.

***

This is what happens when you run a massive Ziocon Ponzi scheme for six decades straight....

***

Bond traders will kick us miles down our road once they wake up and realize the U.S. is in worse fiscal shape than Greece.

On the other hand, as I also pointed out last month, the government isn't even stimulating in an effective way:

"Deficit doves" - i.e. Keynesians like Paul Krugman - say that unless we spend much more on stimulus, we'll slide into a depression. And yet the government isn't spending money on the types of stimulus that will have the most bang for the buck: like giving money to the states, extending unemployment benefits or buying more food stamps - let alone rebuilding America's manufacturing base. See , this and this.

(Yes, Congress has just thrown twenty billion dollars at jobs and the states, but it is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the many tens of trillions of dollars in handouts to the giant banks.)

Keynes implemented his policies in an era of much less debt than we have today. We're now bankrupt, with debt levels so high that they are dragging down the economy.

Even if Keynesian stimulus could help in our climate of all-pervading debt, Washington has already shot America's wad in propping up the big banks and other oligarchs.

More important still, Keynes implemented his New Deal stimulus at the same time that Glass-Steagall and many other measures were implemented to plug the holes in a corrupt financial system. The gaming of the financial system was decreased somewhat, the amount of funny business which the powers-that-be could engage in was reined in to some extent.

As such, the economy had a chance to recover (even with the massive stimulus of World War II, unless some basic level of trust had been restored in the economy, the economy would not have recovered).

Today, however, [politicians] haven't fixed any of the major structural defects in the economy [update]. So even if Keynesianism were the answer, it cannot work without the implementation of structural reforms to the financial system.

A little extra water in the plumbing can't fix pipes that have been corroded and are thoroughly rotten. The government hasn't even tried to replace the leaking sections of pipe in our economy.

Quantitative easing can't patch a financial system with giant holes in it.
(Note: If you're sure that your side of the aisle is right and the other side is wrong, .)

What are the giant holes?

Some of the biggest are:
  • Rampant fraud
  • Worse-than-third-world inequality
  • Insanely high levels of leverage
  • Warping of the economy and the political process by a handful of monstrously bloated banks
  • Focusing on policy objectives other than reducing unemployment (which has the net effect of actually increasing unemployment)
Of course, the loss of America's manufacturing base, encouraging jobs to be shipped abroad, out of control derivatives and other shenanigans are giant holes as well. And the government has been throwing money at the big banks instead of the little guy, which - as Steve Keen as demonstrated - is not an effective way to stimulate the economy.

I've used a third analogy to describe these problems.

As I wrote in 2009 in a post called "Why the Patient Is Not Getting Better: Government is Strengthening the Parasite and Poisoning the Real Economy":

Why isn't the economy getting better, even though the government is pumping trillions of dollars into bailouts and stimulus packages and intervening in markets left and right?

Because the government is treating the wrong patient.

Let's say you travel to the tropics and pick up a parasite. You go to your doctor who gives you very powerful drugs that make you sick. You go back to the doctor, he looks you over, and then adds more potent drugs to your prescription.

You go back a third time and say "Doctor, I'm getting sicker and sicker, why isn't it working?"

He responds "Oh, I thought the parasite was the patient. The drugs are making it healthier".

The Government is Strengthening the Parasite

The real economy is:

(1) People making things or providing real, useful services

(2) People saving money

and

(3) People investing the money they saved into productive businesses which will make more things or provide needed services.

According to top federal reserve officials and economists, the government's actions will encourage big financial players to make even riskier gambles in the future.

Indeed, the government is
in the process of giving hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars and guarantees to hedge funds (hedge funds are some of the biggest speculators of all). Indeed, the various bailout programs are giving huge sums to companies that make money by pushing paper around without actually producing any useful goods or services.

The heads of the big banks and financial companies are also getting huge bonuses even though they have driven their companies so far into the ditch that they need government bailouts. Even Paul Volcker says the incentive system is broken. Indeed, the government is making the CEOs richer by giving them billions of dollars of bailout money with which to feather their own nests.

And credit derivatives [at least to the extent they are naked, unregulated and opaque] act as a parasite on the real economy: credit default swap buyers bet that the referenced company will go down the tubes (see this ). And yet the government is allowing the credit default swap trades to increase, driving CDS spreads against many companies and governments to reach all-time highs.

The Government is Poisoning the Real Economy

Not only is the parasite being boosted by government actions, but the patient - the real economy - is being poisoned.

Manufacturing has been shipped out of America for decades, and the government is still actively encouraging companies to move manufacturing abroad.

Taxpayers will be on the hook for trillions of dollars of obligations through taxes/or inflation (even Bernanke has admitted that inflation is a tax, because people have less money in their pockets after buying necessities). So Americans will be able to save less.

And government has not only failed to require that companies accurately report their finances - so that investors can know which companies are stable and productive - but it has actually thwarted such accuracy. For example:

  • A government agency prevented the SEC from investigating multi-billion dollar Ponzi-schemer Stanford
  • As of 2006:
    "President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar ... broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations."
  • One or more treasury department officials actively allowed banks to "cook their books"
The government has been strengthening the parasite and poisoning the real economy. No wonder the patient is getting worse.
a couple of months later:

Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. He is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund.

Hudson has frequently described Wall Street as "parasitic". For example, in a 2003 interview, Hudson said:

The problem with parasites is not merely that they siphon off the food and nourishment of their host, crippling its reproductive power, but that they take over the host's brain as well. The parasite tricks the host into thinking that it is feeding itself.

Something like this is happening today as the financial sector is devouring the industrial sector. Finance capital pretends that its growth is that of industrial capital formation. That is why the financial bubble is called "wealth creation," as if it were what progressive economic reformers envisioned a century ago. They condemned rent and monopoly profit, but never dreamed that the financiers would end up devouring landlord and industrialist alike. Emperors of Finance have trumped Barons of Property and Captains of Industry.

More recently, Hudson said:

You can think of the financial sector as being wrapped around the real economy, almost like a parasite, and that's why it's been called parasitic for so long. The financial sector extracts interest from the economy, the property sector extracts economic rent, as do monopolies. Now the key thing about parasites, is that it's not simply that they extract nourishment from the host. The parasite takes over the
host's brain, to make it think it's part of the economy, to make it think
it's part of the host's own body, and, in fact, that's it almost like a child of the host, to be protected. And that's what the financial sector has done today.

You have Obama coming out and saying, "We have to save the banks in order to save the real economy". The fact is, you can't serve both the parasite and the host.

And see this.

On August 10th, Hudson went even further. Specifically, he said:

  • The giant financial institutions have already killed their host - the real American economy
  • Since they realize that the American economy is dead, they are trying to suck as much blood out of America as possible while the corpse is still warm
  • Because the American economy is dead, their plan is to soon jump to another host. They will ship all of their money overseas
To come back to my original analogy, the dying patient has a horde of leeches inside the gaping wound in his leg, and the transfused blood has done nothing but fed the leeches. [Sorry for the gross analogy.] The doctors have been helping the parasites, not the patient.
Unless the doctors clean out the parasites and close the gaping wound, the patient has no chance.

As Dennis Kucinich
writes today:

We have to realize what this country's economy has become. Our monetary policy, through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, privatized the money supply, gathers the wealth, puts it in the hands of the few while the Federal Reserve can create money out of nothing, give it to banks to park at the Fed while our small businesses are starving for capital.

Mark my words -- Wall Street cashes in whether we have a default or not. And the same type of thinking that created billions in bailouts for Wall Street and more than $1 trillion in giveaways by the Federal Reserve today leaves 26 million Americans either underemployed or unemployed. And nine out of ten Americans over the age of 65 are facing cuts in their Social Security in order to pay for a debt which grew from tax cuts for the rich and for endless wars.

There is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to the hands of a few and it's going on right now as America’s eyes are misdirected to the political theater of these histrionic debt negotiations, threats to shut down the government, and willingness to make the most Americans pay dearly for debts they did not create.

These are symptoms of a government which has lost its way, and they are a challenge to the legitimacy of the two-party system....

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:

"It is very scary: the flight to gold is accelerating at a faster and faster speed," said Peter Hambro, chairman of Britain's biggest pure gold listing Petropavlovsk.

"One of the big US banks texted me today to say that if QE3 actually happens, we could see gold at $5,000 and silver at $1,000. I feel terribly sorry for anybody on fixed incomes tied to a fiat currency because they are not going to be able to buy things with that paper money."

China, Russia, Brazil, India, the Mid-East petro-powers have diversified their $7 trillion reserves into euros over the last decade to limit dollar exposure. As Europe's monetary union itself faces an existential crisis, there is no other safe-haven currency able to absorb the flows. The Swiss franc, Canada's Ziocon loonies, the Aussie, and Korea's won are too small.

"There is no depth of market in these other currencies, so gold is the obvious play," said Neil Mellor from BNY Mellon. Western central banks (though not the US, Germany, or Italy) sold much of their gold at the depths of the bear market a decade ago.

***

Step by step, the world is edging towards a revived Gold Standard as it becomes clearer that Japan and the West have reached debt saturation. World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said it was time to "consider employing gold as an international reference point." The Swiss parliament is to hold hearings on a parallel "Gold Franc". Utah has recognized gold as legal tender for tax payments.

A new Gold Standard would probably be based on a variant of the 'Bancor' proposed by Keynes in the late 1940s. This was a basket of 30 commodities intended to be less deflationary than pure gold, which had compounded in the Great Depression. The idea was revived by China's central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan two years ago as a way of curbing the "credit-based" excess.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is hinting at a third round of quantitative easing.

But Dallas Federal Reserve Bank president Richard Fisher said today:

I firmly believe that the Federal Reserve has already pressed the limits of monetary policy. So-called QE2, to my way of thinking, was of doubtful efficacy, which is why I did not support it to begin with. But even if you believe the costs of QE2 were worth its purported benefits, you would be hard pressed to now say that still more liquidity, or more fuel, is called for given the more than $1.5 trillion in excess bank reserves and the substantial liquid holdings above the normal working capital needs of corporate businesses.

Indeed, Bernanke knew in 1988 that quantitative easing doesn't work:

Ed Yardley notes:

Two economists, Seth B. Carpenter and Selva Demiralp, recently posted a discussion paper on the Federal Reserve Board's website, titled "Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist?" [Here's the link.]

[The study states:] "In the absence of a multiplier, open market operations, which simply change reserve balances, do not directly affect lending behavior at the aggregate level. Put differently, if the quantity of reserves is relevant for the transmission of monetary policy, a different mechanism must be found. The argument against the textbook money multiplier is not new. For example, Bernanke and Blinder (1988) and Kashyap and Stein (1995) note that the bank lending channel is not operative if banks have access to external sources of funding. The appendix illustrates these relationships with a simple model. This paper provides institutional and empirical evidence that the money multiplier and the associated narrow bank lending channel are not relevant for analyzing the United States."

Did you catch that? Bernanke knew back in 1988 that quantitative easing doesn't work. Yet, in recent years, he has been one of the biggest proponents of the notion that if all else fails to revive economic growth and avert deflation, QE will work.

(Indeed, a large percentage of the bailout money went to foreign banks (and see this). And so did most of money from the second round of quantitative easing.)

in January:

The stated purpose of quantitative easing was to drive down interest rates on U.S. treasury bonds.

But as U.S. News and World Reported
noted last month:

By now, you've probably heard that the Fed is purchasing $600 billion in treasuries in hopes that it will push interest rates even lower, spur lending, and help jump-start the economy. Two years ago, the Fed set the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks lend to each other) to virtually zero, and this second round of quantitative easing--commonly referred to as QE2--is one of the few tools it has left to help boost economic growth. In spite of all this, a funny thing has happened. Treasury yields have actually risen since the Fed's announcement.

The following charts from Doug Short update this trend:

Click to View
Click to View
Click to View

Of course, rather than admit that the Fed is failing at driving down rates, rising rates are now being heralded as a sign of success. As the New York Times reported Monday:

The trouble is [rates] they have risen since it was formally announced in November, leaving many in the markets puzzled about the value of the Fed’s bond-buying program.

***

But the biggest reason for the rise in interest rates was probably that the economy was, at last, growing faster. And that’s good news.

“Rates have risen for the reasons we were hoping for: investors are more optimistic about the recovery,” said Mr. Sack. “It is a good sign.”

Last November, after it started to become apparent that rates were moving in the wrong direction, Bernanke pulled a bait-and-switch, defending quantitative easing on other grounds:

This approach eased financial conditions in the past and, so far, looks to be effective again. Stock prices rose and long-term interest rates fell when investors began to anticipate the most recent action. Easier financial conditions will promote economic growth. For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower corporate bond rates will encourage investment. And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.

As former chief Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg writes today:

So the Fed Chairman seems non-plussed that Treasury yields have shot up and that the mortgage rates and car loan rates have done likewise, even though he said this back in early November in his op-ed piece in the Washington Post, regarding the need for lower long-term yields:

“For example, lower mortgage rates will make housing more affordable and allow more homeowners to refinance. Lower corporate bond rates will encourage investment.”

But the Fed Chairman is at least getting what he wants in the equity market. Recall what he said back then — “higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.”

So now the Fed has added a third mandate to its charter:

1. Full employment
2. Low and stable inflation
3. Higher equity valuation

The real question we should be asking is why Ben didn’t add this third policy objective back in 2007 and save us from a whole lot of pain over the next 18 months?

And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending.

Indeed, leading economic consulting firm Trim Tabs (25% of the top 50 hedge funds in the world use TrimTabs' research for market timing) wrote on Wednesday:
The Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing programs have helped stock market participants, financial institutions, and large companies but have done little to address the structural problems of the economy, according to TrimTabs Investment Research.

“Quantitative easing is supposed to produce stronger economic growth and lower unemployment,” said Madeline Schnapp, Director of Macroeconomic Research at TrimTabs. “While QE1 and QE2 have worked wonders on the stock market, their impact on GDP and jobs has been anemic at best.”

Similarly, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote today:

The Fed no longer even denies that the purpose of its latest blast of bond purchases, or QE2, is to drive up Wall Street, perhaps because it has so signally failed to achieve its other purpose of driving down borrowing costs.

Unfortunately, a rising stock market doesn't help the average American as much as you might assume.

***

The bottom line is that quantitative easing is not really helping the average American very much ... and is certainly not worth trillions of dollars.

quantitative easing creams the little guy:

Graham Summers points out that food prices have also skyrocketed [during both rounds of quantitative easing]:

In case you’ve missed it, food riots are spreading throughout the developing world Already Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, and even Laos are experiencing riots and protests due to soaring food prices.

As Abdolreza Abbassian, chief economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), put it, “We are entering a danger territory.”

Indeed, these situations left people literally starving… AND dead from the riots.

And why is this happening?

A perfect storm of increased demand, bad harvests from key exporters (Argentina, Russia, Australia and Canada, but most of all, the Fed’s money pumping. If you don’t believe me, have a look at the below chart:

[Summers shows the share price of Elements Rogers International Commodity Agriculture ETN as a proxy for food prices generally.]

As you can see, it wasn’t until the Fed announced its QE lite program that agricultural commodities exploded above long-term resistance. And in case there was any doubt, QE 2 sent them absolutely stratospheric.

This isn't really unexpected.

Last November, David Einhorn
warned:
It is quite likely that QE2 will slow the economy by raising food and energy prices [because it is easier to generate these price increases]. [These price hikes] would act as a tax on consumers and businesses.
Also in November, Karl Denninger wrote:
We have a Federal Reserve that, in the last two years, has printed and debased the currency of this nation by more than 100%, taking their balance sheet from $800 billion to more than $2 trillion. They now threaten, today, to do even more of that. This has resulted in insane price ramps in soft commodities ....
("soft commodities" means food crops).

As the
Wall Street Journal, Tyler Durden, the Economic Policy Journal and others note, inflation in food prices isn't limited to developing nations, but is coming to the U.S.

But - - it helps the big boys:

when the government started bailing out the big banks:

[The] Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry.

Yesterday, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich pointed out that quantitative easing won't help the economy, but will simply fuel a new round of mergers and acquisitions:

A debate is being played out in the Fed about whether it should return to so-called "quantitative easing" -- buying more mortgage-backed securities, Treasury bills, and other bonds -- in order to lower the cost of capital still further.

The sad reality is that cheaper money won't work. Individuals aren't borrowing because they're still under a huge debt load. And as their homes drop in value and their jobs and wages continue to disappear, they're not in a position to borrow. Small businesses aren't borrowing because they have no reason to expand. Retail business is down, construction is down, even manufacturing suppliers are losing ground.

That leaves large corporations. They'll be happy to borrow more at even lower rates than now -- even though they're already sitting on mountains of money.

But this big-business borrowing won't create new jobs. To the contrary, large corporations have been investing their cash to pare back their payrolls. They've been buying new factories and facilities abroad (China, Brazil, India), and new labor-replacing software at home.

If Bernanke and company make it even cheaper to borrow, they'll be unleashing a third corporate strategy for creating more profits but fewer jobs -- mergers and acquisitions.

Similarly, Yves Smith reports that quantitative easing didn't really help the Japanese economy, only big Japanese companies:

A few days ago, we noted:

When an economy is very slack, cheaper money is not going to induce much in the way of real economy activity.

Unless you are a financial firm, the level of interest rates is a secondary or tertiary consideration in your decision to borrow. You will be interested in borrowing only if you first, perceive a business need (usually an opportunity). The next question is whether it can be addressed profitably, and the cost of funds is almost always not a significant % of total project costs (although availability of funding can be a big constraint)…..

So cheaper money will operate primarily via their impact on asset values. That of course helps financial firms, and perhaps the Fed hopes the wealth effect will induce more spending. But that’s been the movie of the last 20+ years, and Japan pre its crisis, of having the officialdom rely on asset price inflation to induce more consumer spending, and we know how both ended.

Tyler Cowen points to a Bank of Japan paper by Hiroshi Ugai, which looks at Japan’s experience with quantitative easing from 2001 to 2006. Key findings:

….these macroeconomic analyses verify that because of the QEP, the premiums on market funds raised by financial institutions carrying substantial non-performing loans (NPLs) shrank to the extent that they no longer reflected credit rating differentials. This observation implies that the QEP was effective in maintaining financial system stability and an accommodative monetary environment by removing financial institutions’ funding uncertainties, and by averting further deterioration of economic and price developments resulting from corporations’ uncertainty about future funding.

Granted the positive above effects of preventing further deterioration of the economy reviewed above, many of the macroeconomic analyses conclude that the QEP’s effects in raising aggregate demand and prices were limited. In particular, when verified empirically taking into account the fact that the monetary policy regime changed under the zero bound constraint of interest rates, the effects from increasing the monetary base were not detected or smaller, if anything, than during periods when there was no zero bound constraint.

Yves here, This is an important conclusion, and is consistent with the warnings the Japanese gave to the US during the financial crisis, which were uncharacteristically blunt. Conventional wisdom here is that Japan’s fiscal and monetary stimulus during the bust was too slow in coming and not sufficiently large. The Japanese instead believe, strongly, that their policy mistake was not cleaning up the banks. As we’ve noted, that’s also consistent with an IMF study of 124 banking crises:

Existing empirical research has shown that providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often abuse forbearance to take unproductive risks at government expense. The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred in the absence of forbearance.

Cross-country analysis to date also shows that accommodative policy measures (such as substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantee on financial institutions’ liabilities and forbearance from prudential regulations) tend to be fiscally costly and that these particular policies do not necessarily accelerate the speed of economic recovery. Of course, the caveat to these findings is that a counter-factual to the crisis resolution cannot be observed and therefore it is difficult to speculate how a crisis would unfold in absence of such policies. Better institutions are, however, uniformly positively associated with faster recovery.

But (to put it charitably) the Fed sees the world through a bank-centric lens, so surely what is good for its charges must be good for the rest of us, right? So if the economy continues to weaken, the odds that the Fed will resort to it as a remedy will rise, despite the evidence that it at best treats symptoms rather than the underlying pathology.

And , no Keynesian economics can work when the economy has major structural defects which have not been addressed:

Keynes implemented his New Deal stimulus at the same time that Glass-Steagall and many other measures were implemented to plug the holes in a corrupt financial system. The gaming of the financial system was decreased somewhat, the amount of funny business which the powers-that-be could engage in was reined in to some extent.

As such, the economy had a chance to recover (even with the massive stimulus of World War II, unless some basic level of trust had been restored in the economy, the economy would not have recovered).

Today, however, Bernanke ... and the rest of the boys haven't fixed any of the major structural defects in the economy. So even if Keynesianism were the answer, it cannot work without the implementation of structural reforms to the financial system.

A little extra water in the plumbing can't fix pipes that have been corroded and are thoroughly rotten. The government hasn't even tried to replace the leaking sections of pipe in our economy.

Quantitative easing can't patch a financial system with giant holes in it.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard points out today:

Mr Bernanke himself was grilled by Congress this week on the role of gold. Why do people by gold? "As protection against of what we call tail risks: really, really bad outcomes," he replied.

Indeed.

I've previously documented numerous ways in which the Fed is working against its stated goals, such as:

  • Reinforcing cyclical trends (when one of the Fed's main justifications is providing a counter-cyclical balance);
  • Increasing unemployment (when the Fed is mandated by law to maximize employment); and
  • Encouraging financial companies to make even riskier gambles in the future (when it is supposed to stabilize the financial system).

And I've repeatedly pointed out that the Federal Reserve has been intentionally discouraged banks from lending to Main Street - in a misguided attempt to curb inflation - which has increased unemployment and stalled out the economy.

As last year:

[T]he Fed has been paying the big banks high enough interest on the funds which they deposit at the Fed to discourage banks from making loans. Indeed, the Fed has explicitly stated that - in order to prevent inflation - it wants to ensure that the banks don't loan out money into the economy, but instead deposit it at the Fed:

Why is M1 crashing? [the M1 money multiplier basically measures how much the money supply increases for each $1 increase in the monetary base, and it gives an indication of the "velocity" of money, i.e. how quickly money is circulating through the system]

Because the banks continue to build up their excess reserves, instead of lending out money:

(Click for full image)

These excess reserves, of course, are deposited at the Fed:

(Click for full image)

Why are banks building up their excess reserves?

As the Fed notes:

The Federal Reserve Banks pay interest on required reserve balances--balances held at Reserve Banks to satisfy reserve requirements--and on excess balances--balances held in excess of required reserve balances and contractual clearing balances.

The New York Fed itself said in a July 2009 staff report that the excess reserves are almost entirely due to Fed policy:

Since September 2008, the quantity of reserves in the U.S. banking system has grown dramatically, as shown in Figure 1.1 Prior to the onset of the financial crisis, required reserves were about $40 billion and excess reserves were roughly $1.5 billion. Excess reserves spiked to around $9 billion in August 2007, but then quickly returned to pre-crisis levels and remained there until the middle of September 2008. Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, however, total reserves began to grow rapidly, climbing above $900 billion by January 2009. As the figure shows, almost all of the increase was in excess reserves. While required reserves rose from $44 billion to $60 billion over this period, this change was dwarfed by the large and unprecedented rise in excess reserves.

[Figure 1 is
here]
Why are banks holding so many excess reserves? What do the data in Figure 1 tell us about current economic conditions and about bank lending behavior? Some observers claim that the large increase in excess reserves implies that many of the policies introduced by the Federal Reserve in response to the financial crisis have been ineffective. Rather than promoting the flow of credit to firms and households, it is argued, the data shown in Figure 1 indicate that the money lent to banks and other intermediaries by the Federal Reserve since September 2008 is simply sitting idle in banks’ reserve accounts. Edlin and Jaffee (2009), for example, identify the high level of excess reserves as either the “problem” behind the continuing credit crunch or “if not the problem, one heckuva symptom” (p.2). Commentators have asked why banks are choosing to hold so many reserves instead of lending them out, and some claim that inducing banks to lend their excess reserves is crucial for resolving the credit crisis.

This view has lead to proposals aimed at discouraging banks from holding excess reserves, such as placing a tax on excess reserves (Sumner, 2009) or setting a cap on the amount of excess reserves each bank is allowed to hold (Dasgupta, 2009). Mankiw (2009) discusses historical concerns about people hoarding money during times of financial stress and mentions proposals that were made to tax money holdings in order to encourage lending. He relates these historical episodes to the current situation by noting that “[w]ith banks now holding substantial excess reserves, [this historical] concern about cash hoarding suddenly seems very modern.”

[In fact, however,] the total level of reserves in the banking system is determined almost entirely by the actions of the central bank and is not affected by private banks’ lending decisions.

The liquidity facilities introduced by the Federal Reserve in response to the crisis have created a large quantity of reserves. While changes in bank lending behavior may lead to small changes in the level of required reserves, the vast majority of the newly-created reserves will end up being held as excess reserves almost no matter how banks react. In other words, the quantity of excess reserves depicted in Figure 1 reflects the size of the Federal Reserve’s policy initiatives, but says little or nothing about their effects on bank lending or on the economy more broadly.

This conclusion may seem strange, at first glance, to readers familiar with textbook presentations of the money multiplier.
Why Is The Fed Locking Up Excess Reserves?

Why is the Fed locking up excess reserves?

As Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said in a speech on April 18, 2009:

We are paying interest on excess reserves, which we can use to help provide a floor for the federal funds rate, as it does for other central banks, even if declines in lending or open market operations are not sufficient to bring reserves down to the desired level.
Kohn said in a speech on January 3, 2010:
Because we can now pay interest on excess reserves, we can raise short-term interest rates even with an extraordinarily large volume of reserves in the banking system. Increasing the rate we offer to banks on deposits at the Federal Reserve will put upward pressure on all short-term interest rates.
As the Minneapolis Fed's research consultant, V. V. Chari, wrote this month:
Currently, U.S. banks hold more than $1.1 trillion of reserves with the Federal Reserve System. To restrict excessive flow of reserves back into the economy, the Fed could increase the interest rate it pays on these reserves. Doing so would not only discourage banks from draining their reserve holdings, but would also exert upward pressure on broader market interest rates, since only rates higher than the overnight reserve rate would attract bank funds. In addition, paying interest on reserves is supported by economic theory as a means of reducing monetary inefficiencies, a concept referred to as “the Friedman rule.”
And the conclusion to the above-linked New York Fed article states:
We also discussed the importance of paying interest on reserves when the level of excess reserves is unusually high, as the Federal Reserve began to do in October 2008. Paying interest on reserves allows a central bank to maintain its influence over market interest rates independent of the quantity of reserves created by its liquidity facilities. The central bank can then let the size of these facilities be determined by conditions in the financial sector, while setting its target for the short-term interest rate based on macroeconomic conditions. This ability to separate monetary policy from the quantity of bank reserves is particularly important during the recovery from a financial crisis. If inflationary pressures begin to appear while the liquidity facilities are still in use, the central bank can use its interest-on-reserves policy to raise interest rates without necessarily removing all of the reserves created by the facilities.
As the NY Fed explains in more detail:
The central bank paid interest on reserves to prevent the increase in reserves from driving market interest rates below the level it deemed appropriate given macroeconomic conditions. In such a situation, the absence of a money-multiplier effect should be neither surprising nor troubling.

Is the large quantity of reserves inflationary?

Some observers have expressed concern that the large quantity of reserves will lead to an increase in the inflation rate unless the Federal Reserve acts to remove them quickly once the economy begins to recover. Meltzer (2009), for example, worries that “the enormous increase in bank reserves — caused by the Fed’s purchases of bonds and mortgages — will surely bring on severe inflation if allowed to remain.” Feldstein (2009) expresses similar concern that “when the economy begins to recover, these reserves can be converted into new loans and faster money growth” that will eventually prove inflationary. Under a traditional operational framework, where the central bank influences interest rates and the level of economic activity by changing the quantity of reserves, this concern would be well justified. Now that the Federal Reserve is paying interest on reserves, however, matters are different.

When the economy begins to recover, firms will have more profitable opportunities to invest, increasing their demands for bank loans. Consequently, banks will be presented with more lending opportunities that are profitable at the current level of interest rates. As banks lend more, new deposits will be created and the general level of economic activity will increase. Left unchecked, this growth in lending and economic activity may generate inflationary pressures. Under a traditional operating framework, where no interest is paid on reserves, the central bank must remove nearly all of the excess reserves from the banking system in order to arrest this process. Only by removing these excess reserves can the central bank limit banks’ willingness to lend to firms and households and cause short-term interest rates to rise.

Paying interest on reserves breaks this link between the quantity of reserves and banks’ willingness to lend. By raising the interest rate paid on reserves, the central bank can increase market interest rates and slow the growth of bank lending and economic activity without changing the quantity of reserves. In other words, paying interest on reserves allows the central bank to follow a path for short-term interest rates that is independent of the level of reserves. By choosing this path appropriately, the central bank can guard against inflationary pressures even if financial conditions lead it to maintain a high level of excess reserves.

This logic applies equally well when financial conditions are normal. A central bank may choose to maintain a high level of reserve balances in normal times because doing so offers some important advantages, particularly regarding the operation of the payments system. For example, when banks hold more reserves they tend to rely less on daylight credit from the central bank for payments purposes. They also tend to send payments earlier in the day, on average, which reduces the likelihood of a significant operational disruption or of gridlock in the payments system. To capture these benefits, a central bank may choose to create a high level of reserves as a part of its normal operations, again using the interest rate it pays on reserves to influence market interest rates.
Because financial conditions are not "normal", it appears that preventing inflation seems to be the Fed's overriding purpose in creating conditions ensuring high levels of excess reserves.

***
As Barron's
notes:
The multiplier's decline "corresponds so exactly to the expansion of the Fed's balance sheet," says Constance Hunter, economist at hedge-fund firm Galtere. "It hits at the core of the problem in a credit crisis. Until [the multiplier] expands, we can't get sustainable growth of credit, jobs, consumption, housing. When the multiplier starts to go back up toward 1.8, then we know the psychological logjam has begun to break."
***

It's not just the Fed. The NY Fed report notes:
Most central banks now pay interest on reserves.
Robert D. Auerbach - an economist with the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee for eleven years, assisting with oversight of the Federal Reserve, and subsequently Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin - argues that the Fed should slowly reduce the interest paid on reserves so as to stimulate the economy.

Last week, Auerbach
wrote:
The stimulative effects of QE2 may be small and the costs may be large. One of these costs will be the payment of billions of dollars by taxpayers to the banks which currently hold over 50 percent of the monetary base, over $1 trillion in reserves. The interest payments are an incentive for banks to hold reserves rather than make business loans. If market interest rates rise, the Federal Reserve may be required to increase these interest payments to prevent the huge amount of bank reserves from flooding the economy. They should follow a different policy that benefits taxpayers and increases the incentive of banks to make business loans as I have previously suggested.
In September, Auerbach explained:

Immediately after the recession took a dramatic dive in September 2008, the Bernanke Fed implemented a policy that continues to further damage the incentive for banks to lend to businesses. On October 6, 2008 the Fed's Board of Governors, chaired by Ben Bernanke, announced it would begin paying interest on the reserve balances of the nation's banks, major lenders to medium and small size businesses.

You don't need a Ph.D. economist to know that if you pay banks ¼ percent risk free interest to hold reserves that they can obtain at near zero interest, that would be an incentive to hold the reserves. The Fed pumped out huge amounts of money, with the base of the money supply more than doubling from August 2008 to August 2010, reaching $1.99 trillion. Guess who has over half of this money parked in cold storage? The banks have $1.085 trillion on reserves drawing interest, The Fed records show they were paid $2.18 billion interest on these reserves in 2009.

A number of people spoke about the disincentive for bank lending embedded in this policy including Chairman Bernanke.

***
Jim McTague, Washington Editor of Barrons, wrote in his February 2, 2009 column, "Where's the Stimulus:" "Increasing the supply of credit might help pump up spending, too. University of Texas Professor Robert Auerbach an economist who studied under the late Milton Friedman, thinks he has the makings of a malpractice suit against Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, as the Fed is holding a record number of reserves: $901 billion in January as opposed to $44 billion in September, when the Fed began paying interest on money commercial banks parked at the central bank. The banks prefer the sure rate of return they get by sitting in cash, not making loans. Fed, stop paying, he says."

Shortly after this article appeared Fed Chairman Bernanke explained: "Because banks should be unwilling to lend reserves at a rate lower than they can receive from the Fed, the interest rate the Fed pays on bank reserves should help to set a floor on the overnight interest rate." (National Press Club, February 18, 2009) That was an admission that the Fed's payment of interest on reserves did impair bank lending. Bernanke's rationale for interest payments on reserves included preventing banks from lending at lower interest rates. That is illogical at a time when the Fed's target interest rate for federal funds, the small market for interbank loans, was zero to a quarter of one percent. The banks would be unlikely to lend at negative rates of interest -- paying people to take their money -- even without the Fed paying the banks to hold reserves.

The next month William T. Gavin, an excellent economist at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, wrote in its March\April 2009 publication: "first, for the individual bank, the risk-free rate of ¼ percent must be the bank's perception of its best investment opportunity."

The Bernanke Fed's policy was a repetition of what the Fed did in 1936 and 1937 which helped drive the country into a second depression. Why does Chairman Bernanke, who has studied the Great Depression of the 1930's and has surely read the classic 1963 account of improper actions by the Fed on bank reserves described by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, repeat the mistaken policy?

As the economy pulled out of the deep recession in 1936 the Fed Board thought the U.S. banks had too much excess reserves, so they began to raise the reserves banks were required to hold. In three steps from August 1936 to May 1937 they doubled the reserve requirements for the large banks (13 percent to 26 percent of checkable deposits) and the country banks (7 percent to 14 percent of checkable deposits).

Friedman and Schwartz ask: "why seek to immobilize reserves at that time?" The economy went back into a deep depression. The Bernanke Fed's 2008 to 2010 policy also immobilizes the banking system's reserves reducing the banks' incentive to make loans.

This is a bad policy even if the banks approve. The correct policy now should be to slowly reduce the interest paid on bank reserves to zero and simultaneously maintain a moderate increase in the money supply by slowly raising the short term market interest rate targeted by the Fed. Keeping the short term target interest rate at zero causes many problems, not the least of which is allowing banks to borrow at a zero interest rate and sit on their reserves so they can receive billions in interest from the taxpayers via the Fed. Business loans from banks are vital to the nations' recovery.

The fact that the Fed is suppressing lending and inflation at a time when it says it is trying to encourage both shows that the Fed is saying one thing and doing something else entirely.

Today, Ellen Brown adds some details:

In a June 30 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Smaller Businesses Seeking Loans Still Come Up Empty,” Emily Maltby reported that business owners rank access to capital as the most important issue facing them today; and only 17% of smaller businesses said they were able to land needed bank financing. Businesses have to pay for workers and materials before they can get paid for the products they produce, and for that they need bank credit; but they are reporting that their credit lines are being cut.

***

Bruce Bartlett, writing in the Fiscal Times in July 2010, observed:

Economists are divided on why banks are not lending, but increasingly are focusing on a Fed policy of paying interest on reserves — a policy that began, interestingly enough, on October 9, 2008, at almost exactly the moment when the financial crisis became acute. . .

Historically, the Fed paid banks nothing on required reserves. This was like a tax equivalent to the interest rate banks could have earned if they had been allowed to lend such funds. But in 2006, the Fed requested permission to pay interest on reserves because it believes that it would help control the money supply should inflation reappear.

. . . [M]any economists believe that the Fed has unwittingly encouraged banks to sit on their cash and not lend it by paying interest on reserves.


At one time, banks collected deposits from their own customers and stored them for their own liquidity needs, using them to back loans and clear outgoing checks. But today banks typically borrow (or “buy”) liquidity, either from other banks, from the money market, or from the commercial paper market. The Fed’s payment of interest on reserves competes with all of these markets for ready-access short-term funds, creating a shortage of the liquidity that banks need to make loans.


By inhibiting interbank lending, the Fed appears to be creating a silent “liquidity squeeze” -- the same sort of thing that brought on the banking crisis of September 2008. According to Jeff Hummel, associate professor of economics at San Jose State University, it could happen again. He warns that paying interest on reserves “may eventually rank with the Fed's doubling of reserve requirements in the 1930s and bringing on the recession of 1937 within the midst of the Great Depression.”


The bank bailout and the Federal Reserve’s two “quantitative easing” programs were supposedly intended to keep credit flowing to the local economy; but despite trillions of dollars thrown at Wall Street banks, these programs have succeeded only in producing mountains of “excess reserves” that are now sitting idle in Federal Reserve bank accounts. A stunning $1.6 trillion in excess reserves have accumulated since the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008.


The justification for TARP -- the Trouble Asset Relief Program that subsidized the nation’s largest banks -- was that it was necessary to unfreeze credit markets. The contention was that banks were refusing to lend to each other, cutting them off from the liquidity that was essential to the lending business. But an MIT study reported in September 2010 showed that immediately after the Lehman collapse, the interbank lending markets were actually working. They froze, not when Lehman died, but when the Fed started paying interest on excess reserves in October 2008. According to the study, as summarized in The Daily Bail:

. . . [T]he NY Fed's own data show that interbank lending during the period from September to November did not "freeze," collapse, melt down or anything else. In fact, every single day throughout this period, hundreds of billions were borrowed and paid back. The decline in daily interbank lending came only when the Fed ballooned its balance sheet and started paying interest on excess reserves.


On October 9, 2008, the Fed began paying interest, not just on required bank reserves (amounting to 10% of deposits for larger banks), but on “excess” reserves. Reserve balances immediately shot up, and they have been going up almost vertically ever since.

By March 2011, interbank loans outstanding were only one-third their level in May 2008, before the banking crisis hit. And on June 29, 2011, the Fed reported excess reserves of nearly $1.57 trillion – 20 times what the banks needed to satisfy their reserve requirements.


***


John Mason, Professor of Finance at Penn State University and a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve, wrote in a June 27 blog that despite QE2:


Cash assets at the smaller [U.S.] banks remained relatively flat . . . . Thus, the reserves the Fed was pumping into the banking system were not going into the smaller banks. . . .


[B]usiness loans continue to “tank” at the smaller banking institutions.

Ronald Reagan's budget director said that the tax cuts for the wealthy were "the biggest fiscal mistake in history".

yesterday:

Plugging the major holes in our economy is more important than either cutting spending or raising taxes.

And stopping bailouts and giveaways for the top .1% of the richest elite (which weaken rather than strengthen the economy, as shown here, ) and slashing spending on unnecessary imperial wars (which reduce rather than increase our national security, as demonstrated ) is what the budget really needs.

As last year:

Why aren't our government "leaders" talking about slashing the military-industrial complex, which is ruining our economy with unnecessary imperial adventures?

And why aren't any of our leaders talking about stopping the permanent bailouts for the financial giants who got us into this mess? .

And why aren't they taking away the power to create credit from the private banking giants - which is costing our economy trillions of dollars (and is leading to a decrease in loans to the little guy) - and give it back to the states?

If we did these things, we wouldn't have to raise taxes or cut core services to the American people.
the next month:
If there's any shortfall, all we have to do is claw back the ill-gotten gains from the fraudsters working for the too big to fails whose unlawful actions got us into this mess in the first place. .

Dennis Kucinich wrote in a post entitled "Debt Political Theater Diverts Attention While Americans’ Wealth is Stolen":

The rancorous debate over the debt belies a fundamental truth of our economy -- that it is run for the few at the expense of the many, that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few.

***

We have to realize what this country's economy has become. Our monetary policy, through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, privatized the money supply, gathers the wealth, puts it in the hands of the few while the Federal Reserve can create money out of nothing, give it to banks to park at the Fed while our small businesses are starving for capital.

Mark my words -- Wall Street cashes in whether we have a default or not. And the same type of thinking that created billions in bailouts for Wall Street and more than $1 trillion in giveaways by the Federal Reserve today leaves 26 million Americans either underemployed or unemployed. And nine out of ten Americans over the age of 65 are facing cuts in their Social Security in order to pay for a debt which grew from tax cuts for the rich and for endless wars.

There is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to the hands of a few and it's going on right now as America’s eyes are misdirected to the political theater of these histrionic debt negotiations, threats to shut down the government, and willingness to make the most Americans pay dearly for debts they did not create.

These are symptoms of a government which has lost its way, and they are a challenge to the legitimacy of the two-party system.

And Michael Hudson - who is as far from a knee-jerk conservative as possible - hits the same theme with both barrels blazing:

[Interviewer]: So, what do you think? Good versus evil. We’re playing out the debt struggle and the debt ceiling issue. And if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, we’ll be in the apocalypse. What do you make of it all?

HUDSON: I think it’s evil working with evil.... If you have to choose between paying Social Security and Wall Street, pay our clients, Wall Street.

***

What’s inefficient? Paying for people on Medicaid. Got to cut it. What’s inefficient? Medicare. Got to cut it. What’s inefficient? Paying Social Security. What is efficient? Giving $13 trillion to Wall Street for a bailout. Now, how on earth can the administration say, in the last three years we have given $13 trillion to Wall Street, but then, in between 2040 and 2075, we may lose $1 trillion, no money for the people?

***

It’s not about the debt ceiling. It’s about making an agreement now under an emergency conditions. You remember what Obama’s staff aide Rahm MOSSAD Emanuel said. He said a crisis is too important to waste. They’re using this crisis as a chance to ram through a financial policy, an anti-Medicare, anti-Medicaid, anti—selling out Social Security that they could never do under the normal course of things.

***

They’re not going to cut back the war in Libya.

***

They’re going to have to decide what to cut back. So they’re going to cut back the bone and they’re going to keep the fat, basically. They’re going to say–they’re going to try to panic the population into acquiescing in a Democratic Party sellout by cutting back payments to the people–Social Security, Medicare–while making sure that they pay the Pentagon, they pay the foreign aid, they pay Wall Street.

[Interviewer]: Yeah. But what–I hear you. But what I’m–I’m saying, what could be an alternative policy? For example, don’t raise the debt ceiling. Number two, raise taxes on the wealthy. Number three, cut back military spending. I mean, there are ways to do this without having to borrow more money, aren’t there?

HUDSON: Of course.

***

Of course they could cut back the fat. Of course what they should do is change the tax system. Of course they should get rid of the Bush tax cuts. And the one good thing in President Obama’s speech two days ago was he used the term spending on tax cuts. So that’s not the same thing as raising taxes. He said just cut spending by cutting spending on tax cuts for the financial sector, for the speculators who count all of their income that they get, billions of income, as capital gains, taxed at 15 percent instead of normal income at 35 percent. Let’s get rid of the tax loopholes that favor Wall Street.

***

Mr. Obama has always known who has been contributing primarily to his political campaigns. We know where his loyalties lie now. And, basically, he promised change because that’s what people would vote for, and he delivered the change constituency to the campaign contributors...

"Niall Ferguson says [...] that any more quantitative easing will lead our creditors to pull the plug."

That's a perfect example of someone with a basic misunderstanding of how the economy works. Our government creates money out of thin air with a computer. We don't fund our government with taxes nor "borrowing" from China or anyone else nor will these non-existent "bond vigilantes" create a crisis.

The problem, as you correctly point out, is "the government has been throwing money at the big banks instead of the little guy, which - as Steve Keen as demonstrated - is not an effective way to stimulate the economy."

We need a works program just like we had back in the Great Depression to fix our infrastructure. Jobs are what drives the economy and until we reach full employment, inflation from government spending will never be a problem (speculation from the rich on the other hand is).

As always, the economists at UMKC have it right and if people are truly interested in learning the truth about the economy, they can find everything they need to know at places like
pragcap.com and neweconomicperspectives.com, along with this blog of course.

The US is not bankrupt. Anyone who states this has zero clue about our economy and even less of a clue about monetary policy. The US has monopoly power over its currency in a floating exchange rate system, thus bankruptcy is a falacy. The only way we go bankrupt is through hyperinflation and that is simply not in the cards as the country is running a balance sheet recession. This is why there is no inflation in Japan after 20 plus years of easy monetary policy. Congress is a joke. The reason we have a deficit is because of Congress. For them to not raise the deficit ceiling is bottom-line asinine. They okeyd the spending now they don't want to authorize additional outlays? It was Congress that authorized two wars, two tax cuts, medicare part b, endless bailouts. Absurd is the only word to describe these nitwits in DC.

U.S. Federal Reserve: Getting Ready For The Unthinkable, potential default....

The Federal Reserve is actively preparing for the possibility that the United States could default as a deadline for raising the government's $14.3 trillion borrowing limit looms, a top Fed policymaker said on Wednesday.

Charles Plosser, president of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank, said the U.S. central bank has for the past few months been working closely with Treasury, ironing out what to do if the world's biggest economy runs out of cash on August 2.

"We are in contingency planning mode," Plosser told Reuters in an interview at the regional central bank's headquarters in Philadelphia. "We are all engaged. ... It's a very active process."

Plosser said his "gut feeling" was that President Barack Obama and Congress will come to an agreement to increase the Treasury's borrowing authority in time to avert a default on government obligations.

Obama was due to meet with top Republicans in Congress on Wednesday to discuss the latest attempts to end the dispute over raising the country's debt ceiling, a row which has raised the prospect of the Treasury Department running out of money to pay its bills next month.

The Treasury has repeatedly said default was unthinkable and that there was no alternative to raising the debt ceiling. Plosser's remarks marked the most extensive public comments yet on preparations for a default from a U.S. official.

A Treasury spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment.

One aspect of the Fed's contingency planning is purely operational: the Fed is developing procedures about how the Treasury would notify it on which checks would get cleared and which wouldn't, Plosser said.

The Fed effectively acts as the Treasury's bank -- it clears the government's checks to everyone from social security recipients to government workers.

"We are developing processes and procedures by which the Treasury communicates to us what we are going to do," Plosser said, adding that the task was manageable. "How the Fed is going to go about clearing government checks. Which ones are going to be good? Which ones are not going to be good?"

"There are a lot of people working on what we would do and how we would do it," he said.

Plosser added that there are difficult questions that the Fed itself had to grapple with.

The Fed lends to banks at the discount window against good collateral. But what happens if U.S. Treasuries no longer fit that bill?

"Do we treat them as if they didn't default, in which case we would be saying we are pretending it never happened? Or do we treat them as if they defaulted and don't lend against them?" Plosser said. "Those are more policy questions."

Plosser, who was a vocal critic of some of the Fed's extraordinary lending during the financial crisis -- which he said veered into fiscal policy and risked the central bank's independence -- warned it would be crucial for the Fed not to do the Treasury's work for it.

"We have to be very careful that we don't become, that we don't conduct fiscal policy in this context," he said. "That we don't substitute for the inability of the Treasury to borrow in some circumstances."

INCLINED TO TIGHTEN

Plosser, a noted policy hawk on inflation, argued the Fed might need to raise interest rates before the end of the year, despite recent evidence of renewed economic weakness.

He said he expects the economy to grow at a 3-3.5 percent annual rate over the second half of 2011 with the jobless rate declining to around 8.5 percent by year's end.

"The more my forecast comes to fruition the more I'm going to feel like we may have to act," said Plosser, who is a voting member of the Fed's monetary policy-setting committee this year. "I'd like to have a little more confidence in that forecast."

Plosser pinned the slowdown in economic growth over the first half of the year to "easily identifiable" factors, such as weather, a spike in oil prices and supply disruptions from Japan's earthquake. He also cited uncertainty stemming from Europe's fiscal morass and the wrangling over U.S. debt in Washington.

"I don't see the fundamentals of the economy as changed that much," he said. "Yeah, there's been some shocks and disruptions, but the underlying forces that are going to cause us to continue a slow, moderate recovery are still in place."

That said, the Fed, which is charged with ensuring financial stability, would clearly feel the responsibility to step in as a lender of last resort if markets seized up after a U.S. default, he added.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last week warned that a default could have "catastrophic" effects on financial markets.

Plosser, a former dean of the Simon School of Business at Rochester University, was more circumspect.

"It could be very bad. At some level we don't really know what the consequences could be. It could be very serious. It could be less serious. Do we really want to run that experiment?"

After years and years of warnings that we would end up in a crisis of too much debt.... the realization is now dawning on everyone that such a crisis may happen sooner than we think.

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