who can magically fix the economy? no one....
Posted by
x (aka dmuck)
Oct 15 '10, 04:38
|
"Let is tell you an ugly truth about the economy, a truth that no one in power or who aspires to power wants to share with you, at least until after the midterm elections are over.
It's this: There is nothing that the U.S. government or the Federal Reserve or tax cutters can do to make our economic pain vanish overnight. There are no all-powerful, all-knowing superheroes or supervillains who can rescue or tank the economy all by themselves.
From listening to what passes for public debate in our country, you'd never know that. You'd think that the federal government could revive the economy quickly if only Congress would let it be more aggressive with stimulus spending. Or that the Fed could fix it if only it weren't overly worried about touching off inflation. Or that the free market could fix it if only we made deep and permanent tax cuts. Watch enough cable TV, listen to enough talk radio, read enough blogs and columns, and you'd think that they -- the bad guys -- are forcing the country to suffer needlessly when a simple and painless solution to our problems is at hand.
But if you look at things rationally rather than politically, you'll see that Washington has far less power over the economy, and far less maneuvering room, than many people think. "It's endemic in our type of society that we always think there's a person who holds the magic wand," says Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), a fiscal conservative who isn't running for reelection, so he can, well, be blunt. "But this society and this economy are far too complex to be susceptible to magic wands."
Heaven knows we could use such a wondrous fix. Even though the Great Recession ended 16 months ago according to the business-cycle arbiters at the National Bureau of Economic Research, that means only that the economy started to grow in June 2009. It doesn't mean that the economy's healed. It certainly doesn't mean that the recession's victims have healed. Tens of millions of people are still economically wounded from declines in their home values and investment accounts. Worse, despite some modest employment growth we're down almost 8 million jobs from the end of 2007, when the Great Recession officially began. Now, on to the real problems in the economy: why they've been so resistant to the traditional cures of lower interest rates and higher government spending. And we'll show you that, when you talk to them in private (albeit on-the-record) forums, people from across the political and economic spectrum agree that there's no magic cure for what ails the economy.
The fact is that our nation has suffered a huge financial trauma, in the double-digit trillions, and it's going to take years to get well again. This isn't exactly unknown in Washington -- but it's not something people in power go out of their way to emphasize.
.
.
.
The closest we're likely to come to free money is the Fed's proposed quantitative-easing moves to buy Treasury securities. Let us show you how it works -- and the problems with it. Let's say the Fed buys $1 trillion of Treasury securities in the secondary market. Out of thin air, it creates $1 trillion in credit balances in the sellers' accounts. The sellers have $1 trillion more cash than they did, increasing the money supply. There is now $1 trillion less of publicly traded Treasuries, which props up their price. By contrast, if Goldman Sachs wanted to buy $1 trillion of Treasury securities, it would have to find $1 trillion of cash to pay for them. Sellers would have $1 trillion more cash than before, Goldman would have $1 trillion less. There would be no increase in the money supply or decrease in the Treasury supply.
If the Fed could buy endless amounts of Treasury securities without any side effects, it would be almost like free money. The securities would cost the Treasury little or nothing in the way of interest, because the Fed turns over its profits -- $53 billion last year, $40 billion in the first half of 2010 -- to the Treasury. So if the Fed buys $1 trillion of 2.5%, 10-year Treasury notes, Treasury's $25 billion annual interest expense is offset by the $25 billion of extra profit the Fed would make, all (or almost all) of which would be turned over to the Treasury. See? Isn't that grand?
There is, however, a problem. The Fed can't do that indefinitely without touching off inflation, debasing the dollar, or both. Markets are bigger and more powerful than the Fed. Consider the reaction of people like veteran Wall Street value investor Hugh Lamle of M.D. Sass to quantitative easing. "It's one thing to do $800 billion once," he says. "But if the federal government is going to print $1 trillion a year for five years, maybe I don't want to be in dollars." A second factor is that long-term rates are already so low that it's not clear how much stimulus you get from cutting them more. It's a big deal to cut interest rates to 5% from 8%. But at lower levels, the result is less dramatic. Do you think the difference between 3% and 2.5% is going to matter? Meanwhile, these ultralow rates are penalizing American savers -- especially retirees relying on CD income to supplement Social Security. They tend to spend all their income, and it's down sharply. That's one reason the economy is weak.
Don't get us wrong, there are plenty of winners in this game -- just not the ones who need help. Cash-rich corporations are issuing billions of dollars of cheap debt for purposes such as buying back stock rather than expanding and creating new jobs. Corporations have record cash on hand but aren't using it to expand in the U.S. Banks, too, are profiting mightily from quantitative easing. They can borrow short-term money for essentially nothing, then buy Treasury securities, knowing that the Fed will support the securities' prices by buying them in the market. Playing the yield curve is easier, less risky, and more lucrative than what the government wants the banks to do: make loans.
.
.
.
When will house prices get back to where they were? John Burns of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, one of the nation's savviest real estate analysts, invokes the seven-and-seven rule. In previous local-market bubbles, Burns says, "the rule of thumb is seven years down and seven years up" after the bubble pops. Apply that rule to the national market, where the bubble popped in 2006, and we're talking about a sustained recovery starting in 2013, and taking until 2020. That's pretty grim, but probably realistic.
So when are we going to know when things are getting better? They may, in fact, be getting better now, but it's going to take a long time for the wound to heal completely. We need to take care of people who have lost their jobs and lost their hope. But after the midterm elections, when there's going to be immense pressure to adopt everyone's programs, we can't just throw money at everything, searching for magic cures and magic sound bites. If we do, it will take us that much longer to climb out of the hole."
|
Replies are disabled on threads older than 7 days.
|
|