We have seen the enemy and he is us; the enemy(us) being zero interest
rates and unlimited easy money round the globe that could become a
worse bubble than the 2008 credit bubble. The only thing we have to
fear is QE that lasts forever.
In the spring of 2008 the
IMF
predicted that the economy of the developed nations would grow by
3.8% in 2009. Instead, due to the global financial crisis and the Great
Recession, the economies of the U.S., Europe, Japan declined by 3.9%.
That is a major mistake of prognostication. This preposterously
optimistic forecast by the central bankers and establishment economists
was shockingly wrong by a margin of almost 8%, indicating economists
were totally unaware of the perfect storm of financial crisis descending
on them.
These are the reputed establishment types who dominate enclaves like
the IMF, as well as the Federal Reserve who are supposed to be measuring
reality. The whole absurd farce reminds international economist
William White (recommended to me by the soon-to-be Vice Chairman of the
Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer) of the comic strip Pogo. Pogo’s
mantra was “We have seen the enemy and he is us!”
The “enemy” were the brains of the global economic system and they were
duping themselves and each other, White suggests. They were so far
inside the system they did not see the crisis that was on top of them.
It takes an “outsider” to see that, White believes. As to the Bank of
International Settlements, the BIS, where White once was a top
economist, “we put out both public warnings as to the dangers as well
as in our private reports to clients,” White tells me. ” But, the
warnings were ignored.”
The problem is cultural and the result of the denial of the elite,
according to White; a tale of seduction amongst the creators of 2008: “
borrowers, lenders, regulators, central banks, academics and
politicians, [who] were each seduced into believing different things
that were not true.” The relationship between these various parties also
contributed to them having “no eye to see and no ear to hear,” White
told a distinguished audience on October 24 in London, at a
presentation entitled
What Has Gone Wrong With the Global Economy? Why Were Warnings Ignored? What Have We Learned From the Experience?
I mean to tell you what lessons White has learned, and even though he
is not a regular on CNN or columnist for the FT, Stanley Fischer
(you’ll be hearing a great deal more about Fischer, once he becomes Vice
Chairman of the Fed) assured me that White saw 2008 coming as early as
2003 in a paper White, then at the BIS, gave at the Jackson Hole,
Wyoming conclave of central bankers. He had the vision and the
intelligence to see the disaster coming. And he is predicting odds on
another problem sooner or later.
So, what disaster did White warn me and you about that could be coming down the road? “Expansionary monetary
policy…has
its shortcoming… such policies have undesirable unintended
consequences,” White explained in London. By undesirable, he means a
much larger ‘too big to fail’ problem than we had before.
He means the creation of “zombie companies and zombie banks” that “have
contributed to more risk taking and unjustified increases in asset
prices.” To sum up, the crisis is not over.
White fears another catastrophe from the knee-jerk, ever more
aggressive, overly long-lasting easy money policies espoused by Alan
Greenspan and
Ben Bernanke, to be inherited by
Janet Yellen and Fischer once they are in place.
Here’s the gist of his warning. In the financial market crises of the
past many decades — 1987, 2000, 2008 — the solution has always been the
same, increase money supply and maintain rock-bottom low interest
rates, says the former BIS economist and Canadian central banker. He is
plainly worried about the outcome of a policy that just keeps printing
more money aggressively with increasingly less positive results on
economic growth than before.
White strongly questions his friend Ben Bernanke’s devotion to
Quantitative Easing. What if the roots of fragility and accidents are
just waiting to happen from being wrong about repeating over and over
again the same excessive easy money policy? What if the Greenspan Put
and the easy money that resolved crises in 1987, 1991, 1994, 2000, and
2008 are only a prologue for an even worse crisis that additional QE
won’t solve?
White’s most intense fearsome nightmare is that the boom and rising
bubble of home prices in Canada, Poland, Israel, Germany, Australia and
New Zealand will eventually burst just as they did in the U.S. in
2007-2008, triggering another worldwide recession that the elite finance
opinion makers will meet with an even more aggressive easing of money
and lowering of the cost of money.
“Why do people believe what they believe?” White asks me on our
hour-long transatlantic phone call. “People with influence over the
system want us to believe that the system they prefer–more and cheaper
money–is the best of all solutions for every crisis.”
What’s gone wrong is that ultra easy money policy is seen as a
risk-free solution, even though the forecasting records based on easy
money create forecasting records that are just too damned optimistic.
“What if Bernanke’s faith in QE is the root of fragility and accidents
waiting to happen?” White asks me. He has come to understand that there
has grown an unstated alliance between economists and powerful
interests, who have seduced each other into an unannounced alliance over
a policy that benefits them in the short run, but may create more
severe crises and disasters down the road.
In his October 24 London talk, White put it another way: “The Great
Moderation, as Hyman Minsky would have predicted, generated the belief
that the world had become a permanently less risky place.” The result of
this mutual seduction was the manipulation of LIBOR, the reckless
selling of toxic assets to unsuspecting buyers, and the hiding of highly
leveraged risky activities in the off-the balance sheet shadow banking
system.
As Pogo said: “We have the seen the enemy and he is us.”
The Financial Elite Who Gave Us 2008 Had No Eye to See and No Ear to Hear - Forbes
