Global Economic Crisis

It appears that the ECB is abandoning its policy of monetary prudence, and imitating U.S. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in running its printing press wildly. Mario Draghi, ECB boss, has made available cheap loans to European banks experiencing liquidity problems. In response, more than 500 European banks stampeded to the ECB discount window, and have borrowed nearly 490 billion euros, equivalent to $643 billion USD at current exchange rates. Clearly, the European banks had desperate need for new capital, while the Eurozone politicos hope the banks will use the newly minted euros to buy European sovereign debt.

Nouriel Roubini I think described this rather nicely as in essence quantitative easing and stealth debt monetization. As with Ben Bernanke’s repeated bouts of money printing, I don’t think this new loose monetary policy by Mario Draghi will avail itself of any meaningful results. Since the global financial and economic crisis was unleashed in 2008, money printing by central banks has been a symptom of the problem, not its solution.

WALL STREET POLICE: GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS

Officer Larry of the NYPD is on his way to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to arrest peaceful protesters involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Being a public spirited member of the New York Police Department, Officer Larry does remind us that there is a global economic crisis underway that rivals the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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As all but the most gullible no longer have faith in the European politicians to resolve the increasingly deadly sovereign debt crisis among the PIIGS nations in the Eurozone, the last ditch hope is now resting with the European Central Bank. The new president of the ECB, Mario Draghi, is under increasing pressure to abandon the bank’s defined mandate to maintain price stability, and to instead become the Eurozone’s lender of last resort. It can only do that by firing up its printing press, and conjuring new euros out of thin air.

Only Germany, with a long historic memory dating back to the massive monetary inflation of Weimar Germany in the early 1920s, remains in opposition to the ECB unleashing its printing press. Otherwise, politicians, hedge fund managers and investors are demanding that the ECB flood the world with euros. In their eyes, inflation is preferable to a deflationary recession, and the inevitable devaluation of the euro resulting from monetary creation would cheapen European exports. All a good thing, so they claim. No wonder Mario Draghi is being cajoled into becoming the savior of the European monetary union, and possibly the global economy.

My take on the ECB becoming the lender of last resort? I think we have the evidence of what would likely occur right in front of us. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve under the direction of its chairman, Ben Bernanke, has been in the money printing business since the onset of the current global financial and economic crisis in 2008. The Fed has been in many cases the lender of last resort in America, buying everything from U.S. Treasuries to toxic assets from banks and companies, while flooding the land with instantly manufactured liquidity and maintaining a zero interest policy at its discount window. We have all seen how effective such a policy measure has been in the United States. Bernanke’s record includes unprecedented fiscal deficits, many state and local authorities in the U.S. tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, unemployment levels not witnessed since the Great Depression of the 1930s and an economy functioning at stall speed and about to enter a double-dip recession, despite unprecedented levels of monetary, not to mention fiscal stimulus.

 If the European Central Bank follows in the footsteps of Bernanke, I don’t see how the results will be any different for the Europeans. Printing money may sound attractive to the desperate, but it is at best a short-term panacea, which solves nothing in the long run, and creates its own set of complications and economic distortions. Ultimately, a printing press cannot correct the flawed concept of a single currency for a multitude of different political cultures and economies.

WALL STREET POLICE: GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS

Officer Larry of the NYPD is on his way to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to arrest peaceful protesters involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Being a public spirited member of the New York Police Department, Officer Larry does remind us that there is a global economic crisis underway that rivals the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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The global economic crisis that erupted in 2008, and was supposedly “cured” by the massive public debts incurred by the policymakers, is apparently evolving into a terminal tailspin. A growing number of reputable economists, including Nouriel Roubini, are frankly stating that advanced economies, in particular the United States, the Eurozone countries and the United Kingdom, have entered a double-dip recession. The economic outlook is so bleak that even establishment institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, and to a lesser extent the U.S. Federal Reserve, are candidly acknowledging the dire state of the global economy and the precariousness of its financial architecture. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was forced prematurely to hint at some level of policy intervention; the result, the so-called “Operation Twist,” a macabre arrangement whereby the Federal Reserve’s short-term purchases of U.S. Treasuries are swapped for long-term government debt instruments. The resulting plunge in equity values demonstrates that the market is no longer easily fooled by Bernanke and his clowns.

In a starkly candid statement, the new managing director of the IMF said that the world’s economy was entering a “dangerous place.” Given that the leaders of major global economic bodies do not seek to erode market confidence during turbulent economic times, it must be surmised that Christine Lagarde would not have issued such a pronouncement as the leader of the IMF unless the data she is privy to shows that things are actually much worse than what is being publicly discussed.

Will my prediction of economic catastrophe in 2012 hold true? Based on current developments and increasingly grim talk by economists and policymakers such as the IMF’s managing director, I think the chances that I am wrong are weaker than the likelihood that my forecast is correct.

 

                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 Today the Dow Jones rose by more than 300 points. This was not due to positive economic news; to the contrary, negative news drove the NYSE up. How is it that the cascading torrent of appalling economic data would raise cheers on Wall Street? In the bizarre economic and financial world of today, the computer program traders and investors on Wall Street are convinced that the worsening economic situation globally will compel Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, to unleash a third bout of quantitative easing. In the myopic universe of the Wall Street crowd, this is considered the most wonderful  thing that can happen on our planet.

The two bouts of quantitative easing already engaged in by the Fed have been, by consensus of most credible economists, ineffectual. What this mad money printing did accomplish was to inflate commodity prices, creating a drag on the global economy. But if at first you don’t succeed, try again, so say the Wall Street oligarchs. And so when the central bankers convene for their annual conclave in Jackson Hole, Wyoming the Wall Street oligarchs will be hoping and praying for QE3.  Only a clique infused with short-term greed and distorted illusions could believe that bad economic news leading to Bernanke unleashing another round of printing money will end the global economic crisis.

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Alan Greenspan, former Fed Chairman and a prime facilitator of the U.S. housing bubble, appears in retrospect a scion of fiscal prudence in comparison with his successor, Ben Bernanke.  This disaster-prone Fed Chairman presided over the financial collapse of 2008, which came in the wake of his prediction that the housing bubble would not cause a recession, let alone a global financial meltdown. And this man is still the most powerful architect of U.S. monetary policy?

 In his recent speech delivered at the International Monetary Conference in Atlanta, Bernanke blamed everything but himself for what he concedes is anemic economic growth, which he knows all too well is being artificially propped up by the most expansive monetary and fiscal policies in human history. In the Fed Chairman’s world, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, weather conditions and other unpredictable “acts of God” are to blame, not the Federal Reserve’s polices, for the utter disaster that the U.S. and many other advanced economies are coping with.

While in Atlanta, Ben Bernanke made passing reference to the sharp rise in commodity prices, though without admitting that this was due largely to the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing. He then added the illogical assessment that inflation is “not broad based” in the economy. Really?

As he has done before, Bernanke made perfunctory remarks about the need for the policymakers to eventually bring down the U.S. federal government’s budget deficit. As he and his colleagues continue to propel the United States towards a fiscal train wreck, he holds the politicians with no power to rein in Bernanke with responsibility for preventing the future shocks that the Fed’s policies have in store for everyone.

The disconnect this man has with the real world is mind-numbing. One thing, however, we can be thankful for. At least Bernanke has avoided the personal behavior issues that led to the recent resignation of the head of the IMF. With Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the question is all about his performance as Fed Chairman, and nothing else. On that score, history will probably judge President Barack Obama harshly for reappointing Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman.

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If anyone really believed that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was not deliberately destroying the intrinsic value of the American dollar through his recklessly loose monetary policies, the current downward spiral of the greenback is abundant evidence to the contrary. Most telling, despite severe fiscal problems in the Eurozone, even the wobbly euro is gaining strength in significant measure against the U.S. dollar.

It is not only against the basket of foreign currencies, including those considered weak, that the American dollar is winning the dubious race to the bottom. Commodities across the globe have risen sharply against the dollar. This is reflected not only in the price of known hedges against price inflation and currency manipulation such as gold and silver. A diverse range of resource commodities, including oil and natural gas, minerals and basic foodstuffs have increased in their dollar price. With the U.S. dollar remaining (for now) the global reserve currency, the morbidly inverse ratio between the plummeting value of the dollar and rising cost of commodities has had severe negative repercussions across the globe, both economically and politically. The current unrest sweeping the Arab world is at least in part due to rising food prices precipitated by Bernanke’s deliberate policy of eroding the value of America’s dollar.

My read of this situation is that the Federal Reserve is in a panic. They know that the American fiscal imbalance is unsustainable, and it seems Bernanke and company are deliberately eroding the value of America’s currency in order to default stealthily on the nation’s massive foreign debt, which the Fed knows can never be repaid, at least in terms of real value as opposed to nominal repayment. Inflation is the direct outcome of the Fed’s quantitative easing and monetization of the debt. The American taxpayer and consumer is being sacrificed, at whatever the cost, in order to inflate away that portion of the U.S. national debt which cannot be repaid.

The fools at the Federal Reserve really believe that China, OPEC and other foreign creditors are going to accept the destruction of their investment in U.S, Treasuries lying down, and that the U.S. dollar will forever remain the world’s reserve currency. I think that sooner rather than later future developments will render inoperative all the flawed assumptions of Ben Bernanke and his wrecking crew, otherwise known as the Federal Reserve.

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As a new year is about to dawn,  despite (and perhaps because of) massive government and central bank intervention in advanced and major economies, worrying signs are proliferating along with the contrived optimism about a supposed rebound  in global economic growth. Among the many clouds on the horizon regarding the global economic outlook for 2011, here are three:

1. Greek sovereign debt crisis not cured by the massive Eurozone and IMF bailout. Knowledgeable observers have pointed out that mathematically, it is not possible for the Greek state to deflate its economy in line with deficit reduction commitments required under terms of the bailout package, while simultaneously engineering a miraculous return to robust economic growth at a level sufficient to service the exploding public debt. There is already word being leaked to the Greek press by government officials that after the current bailout package expires in 2013, Athens will seek to restructure its sovereign debt.

2.  Irish banking crisis far from over. After receiving a staggering level of bailout assistance from the EU and IMF to cover the country’s insolvency due to guaranteeing the obligations of Anglo Irish Bank ( along with all other banking institutions in Ireland), the Dublin authorities were forced to inject nearly $5 billion into Allied Irish Banks, another bankrupt institution. As with Greece, it seems almost a certainty that Ireland will eventually seek to restructure its public debt.

3.  China, the one ray of hope in the global economy due to massive government injections of liquidity that have led to high levels of supposed growth during the global economic crisis, is now beginning to raise interest rates in a frantic effort aimed at reining in  burgeoning levels of price inflation. This could lead to a tightening in the Chinese economy, combined with a catastrophic deflation in the Chinese real estate market. Any downturn in China will reverberate with dire impact on the overall global economy.

Other than these three items, no need to worry, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and a horde of policymakers assure us that their bouts of quantitative easing  and unprecedented levels of sovereign debt will somehow usher in a nirvana of good economic times. Unless, of course, you like I have no confidence in those who currently are the masters of our economic destiny.

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There is an imponderable dichotomy between the economic forecasters on Wall Street and the ugly reality on Main Street. With the Dow Jones having surged more than 60% since the lows that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the global financial and economic crisis in the fall of 2008, there is increasing banter by Wall Street talking heads that the rally in equities reflects a logical analysis of the economic health of America and the conviction that the Great Recession is truly over and a return to robust economic growth is just around the corner. Call it the Street’s version of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s proverbial “green shoots,” laced with steroids.

That is Wall Street’s prediction of where the U.S. and global economy is headed. As for myself, I will stick with my own look into the economic future, found in my book, “Global Economic Forecast 2010-2015: Recession Into Depression.” The essence of my forecast was that 2010 would give an illusory impression of an exit from the Great Recession, fueled by a massive explosion in public indebtedness, the so-called stimulus spending engaged in by most major advanced and developing economies. However, I also forecasted that unemployment would remain at historic highs; that and the rising level of public debt in many advanced economies would lead to a worsening sovereign debt crisis in 2011, culminating in a catastrophic collapse in public finances in major economies, especially the United States. This, I surmise, will transform a recession into a global depression.

So we are left with two contradictory views of the economic future, with no room in between. According to Wall Street, 2011 will be a bumper year for the global economy, with impressive levels of quarterly growth in the United States. As for myself, I believe that 2011 will be an “Anus Horibilis,” as the Romans would say during the years of decline of their empire; a truly appalling bummer of a year in terms of global economic health.

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It is not the “Road To Morocco” ( for those who remember the classic film with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope) but he proverbial road to ruin that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is leading the U.S. economy towards, at flank speed. Under his leadership, the last meeting of the Federal Reserve’s FOMC of 2010 confirmed the zero interest rate policy being maintained, and the policy decision to purchase $600 billion in long-term U.S. Treasury debt. This, despite claims by many punch-drunk economists that the American economy is recovering, and at a heightened pace. Give Bernanke credit for one thing; he knows the supposed economic growth is not real, but rather marginal increments painfully extracted through massive public borrowing. But his solution, in effect creating even more public stimulus, this time through monetary policy, is totally antithetical.

Supposedly, Bernanke’s stratagem is to force down long-term interest rates through his $600 billion second round of quantitative easing. However, the bond market is reacting in a manner contrary to expectations. With Europe already mired in a deep sovereign debt crisis, the prospect of a surge in now record low interest rates on U.S. sovereign debt is becoming increasingly likely, due to the Fed’s policies. Should the U.S. encounter anything remotely like the spike on bond yields currently plaguing Europe, the game is up. Not even Bernanke could print enough money to cover the ruinous implosion an increasingly likely sovereign debt crisis will have on the already fragile American economy.

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The American housing industry is once again in free fall. The latest figures, just released, indicate that in July existing home sales plunged by 27%, reflecting an annual pace of 3,830,000 home sales, according to the  National Association of Realtors. This is a fifteen year low, which had only been temporarily delayed by the Obama administration’s deficit-financed home purchase tax credit, now expired.

These figures are a disaster for the American economy of such a staggering level, not even Timothy Geithner or Ben Bernanke can put a positive spin on it. The housing industry is the center of gravity for the entire American economy, and its earlier demise was what unleashed the current global economic crisis. The gloomy data now out on existing home sales is another flashing red light, warning not only of a double-dip recession, but even more ominously, a prolonged economic depression.

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