FEDWATCH
How Trump Bailed Out Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve — For Now
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Questions Remain as the Fed Finally Begins to Reverse QE
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Money-Supply Growth Drops Again — Falls to 108-Month Low
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Why Is the Euro Still Gaining Against the Dollar?
The primary purposes of the incorrectly named “unconventional monetary policies” are to debase the currency, stoke inflation, and make exports more competitive. Printing money aims to solve structural imbalances by making currencies weaker.
In this race to zero in global currency wars, central banks today are “printing” more than $200 billion per month despite that the financial crisis passed a long time ago.
Currency wars are those that no one admits to waging, but everyone wants to fight in secret. The goal is to promote exports at the expense of trading partners.
Reality shows currency wars do not work, as imports become more expensive and other open economies become more competitive through technology. But central banks still like weak currencies — they help to avoid hard reform choices and create a transfer of wealth from savers to debtors.
The Euro Rallies
So how must the bureaucrats at the European Central Bank (ECB) feel when they see the euro rise against the U.S. dollar and all its main trading currencies by more than 12 percent in a year, despite all the talk about more easing? The ECB will keep buying 60 billion euro a month in bonds, maintain its zero interest-rate policy, and keep this “stimulus” as long as it takes, until inflation growth and GDP growth are stable.
Contrary to the wishes of the ECB, however, a strong euro is justified for several reasons. First, the European Union’s trade surplus is at record highs, and 75 percent of Eurozone trade happens between eurozone countries. Higher exports and the continued recovery of internal demand in European member countries strengthen the euro.
The third is the perception of weakness of the U.S. government and its inability to push through key reforms. This has weakened the dollar and by definition strengthened the other two large trading currencies, the euro and the Japanese yen.The second important factor is the relief rally after the French and Dutch elections. The fears of a euro breakup have been eliminated, or at least delayed, as pro-EU political parties won.
The Problems With a Strong Euro
However, a strong euro has very significant implications for the EU economy and the ECB’s policy.
The strong euro puts exports to its main outside trading partners — the United States (20.8 percent of exports in 2016) and China (9.7 percent) — at risk. Despite the ECB’s extreme monetary policy and a euro trading almost at parity with the dollar, exports to non-EU countries have stalled since 2013. GDP growth estimates for 2018 are falling due to a lower contribution of net exports.
The currency also has a high impact on tax revenues in Europe. The correlation between the euro–dollar exchange rate and the earnings estimates of the largest multinationals represented in the Stoxx Europe 600 Index is very high.
According to our estimates, a 10 percent rise of the euro against the dollar is equivalent to an 8 percent drop in earnings and leads to lower corporate tax revenues. From an investment perspective, as earnings drop, the European stock market goes from being relatively cheaper to becoming more expensive.
Investors and economists need to pay attention to these factors. If the euro continues to strengthen, the EU economic recovery is at risk. So the eurozone is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It cannot stop the stimulus because deficit spending governments cannot live with higher financing costs, and increasing the stimulus to weaken the currency simply doesn’t work anymore.
The only way out is structural reforms, but most governments are afraid of them even in good times, let alone when the going gets tough.
Originally published by Epoch Times. Reprinted with permission.
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Stanley Fischer’s Well-Timed Fed Exit
Fed vice-chair Stanley Fischer’s surprise announcement of early retirement triggers the obvious question as to whether this could be the fore-runner to a serious market and economic deterioration ahead. Monetary bureaucrats, even if signally bad at counter-cyclical fine tuning, sometimes have a reputation for intuition about how to time their own career moves ahead of crisis. In this case, such suspicion may be wide of the mark given the personal circumstances. Even so, the exit of a Fed Vice-Chair, who in many respects has been the pioneer and the dean of the prevailing doctrine in the global central bankers club, is pause for thought.
The Early Years
When Professor Fischer published his famous paper “On Activist Monetary Policy with Rational Expectations” (NBER working paper no. 341, April 1979), the fiat money world was well into the third stage of disorder following the collapse of the international gold standard in 1914. But things were at a temporary resting point where the skies seemed to be getting clearer. After the violent terminal storms of the gold exchange standard (early 20s to early 30s), and then of the Bretton Woods System, it seemed to many that the “monetarist revolutionaries” had found a better practical monetary navigation route. The Bundesbank, the Federal Reserve, the Swiss National Bank, and even the Bank of Japan were pursuing an ersatz gold rule of low percentage increases in the monetary base or a related aggregate.
Fischer vs. the Monetarists
Despite the optimism at large, Fischer issued a challenge. The monetarist rules (x per cent growth of the chosen monetary aggregate) were doomed to fail when the underlying demand for money and monetary base in particular was so unstable.
Fischer rejected the new popular view (in the late 1970s) of the fashionable “classical economists” (for example Robert Barro) who argued that under market rationality monetary policy was powerless to influence the real economy. All the various trade-offs hypothesized by the Keynesian economists of the previous decade and pursued in part had been based on a view that central bankers could take the public by surprise (who would not realize what they were “up to” until later on). But once the public knew all Keynesian manipulations could not be effective.
In contrast, Fischer purported to demonstrate that if wages were rigid (most likely due to the existence of long-term contracts), then even given rational expectations, monetary policy could stimulate the real economy.
And so Professor Fischer, on the basis of his pioneering neo-Keynesian creed, preached that, yes, central bankers could and should pursue activist contra-cyclical strategies, especially when shocks were large and obvious. But yes, he also recognized that fine-tuning had its dangers and could morph into a long-run rising inflation rate, and so he recommended that policy be bound by the setting of a low inflation target. These ideas were in turn taken up and worked on by leading disciples (students) of Stanley Fischer, including Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi.
The Birth of the 2% Inflation Standard
And so the fourth stage of fiat money disorder was born — what we may describe as the “global 2% inflation standard”. The prior monetarist experiments faded away in the decade following publication of Fischer’s paper (Paul Volcker abandoned monetarism by 1982, and the Bundesbank was the last hold-out in the year before the launch of the euro). At a stretch we could call this fourth stage the “Fischerian age of monetary policy”. Even though its author is now retiring, the outlook is for this stage to move eventually into a much more vicious sub-stage in which inflation rises far above the levels which the central bankers are purporting to target and the forces of rationality greeted by the classical revivalists have been completely trumped by powerful irrational forces which typify asset price inflation..
And all of this does not depend on who exactly President Trump decides to nominate in Fischer’s and Yellen’s place in coming months, even though there are reasons to speculate that the choice is likely to be pro-3% growth with the near-term target of avoiding defeat in next year’s mid-term elections. The bigger issue is that the so-called 2% inflation target belongs to a collection of fables under the title of the Emperor’s New Clothes. In today’s monetary environment where monetary base has been totally dislocated from the pivot of the monetary system (e.g., there's no stable demand, distinctive qualities of base money are virtually eradicated, and both supply and demand are boated by QE) there is no basis – other than expectation inertia – to view prices of goods and services as anchored.
At the best of times no one knew the precise relationship between monetary aggregates and prices — and indeed under the gold standard or monetarism no one pretended to have the price path under control; at best money was under control and that should foster some long-run tendency for prices to return to the mean, but there was no assurance of this. Strikingly the “Fischerians” have lost all sight of the natural rhythm of prices as responding to fluctuations in the pace of globalization, productivity growth, and of course the business cycle.
There is every reason to believe that expectation inertia will snap at some point in the future. And the root combination of monetary disorder — a Federal budget deficit of 4-5-6% of GDP at a cyclical peak, a Federal Reserve determined to hold down rates and manage the government bond markets, an administration favoring a weak dollar — there are grounds for fearing a lurch of the monetary train towards high inflation, albeit possibly beyond the next business cycle trough. And all of that despite the pride of Stanley Fischer in his resignation letter to President Trump:
During my time on the Board, the economy has continued to strengthen, providing millions of additional jobs for working Americans. Informed by the lessons of the recent financial ciris, we have buildt upon earlier steps to make the financial system stronger and more resilient and better able to provide the credit so vital to the prosperity of our country’s households and businesses.
Power corrupts, and Washington corrupts absolutely. How can anyone pretend to have learnt the lessons and achieved the results until at least one long business cycle under the given monetary regime has been completed? Only then can all the mal-investment be counted and the financial quake or hurricane damage assessed.
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Trump's Historic Opportunity with the Federal Reserve
And then there were three.
Today Stanley Fischer submitted his letter of resignation from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, effective next month, the second such resignation of Donald Trump’s presidency. While Fischer’s term as Vice Chairman of the Fed was set to end next year, he had the ability to serve as a governor through 2020. Along with Trump’s decision next year on whether to replace Janet Yellen as the Fed’s chair, this means Trumps will have the opportunity to appoint five of seven governors to America’s central bank.
Given that the position holds a 14-year term, it is unusual for a president to have the opportunity to make so many appointments. As Diane Swonk of DS Economics noted, “It’s the largest potential regime change in the leadership of the Fed since 1936.”
Of course the question is now whether a change in personnel will lead to a change in policy.
Trump has already taken steps to fill one of the vacancies, nominating Randal Quarles earlier this year. Quarles, a former Bush-era Treasury official turned investment banker, will be taking the specific role of Fed vice chair of supervision. As a vocal critic of Dodd-Frank, and the Volker Rule in particular, Quarles may help relieve some of the regulatory burden on financial institutions, but his views on monetary policy are less clear. He has also voiced his support for rules-based monetary policy, though he has distanced himself to the specific proposal of the “Taylor Rule.” Given the growing consensus building for NGDP-targeting, and Republicans in Congress advocating for rules-based Fed reform, Quarles could become a supporter from within the central bank. All in all though, Quarles is seen by many observes as a bland Fed-appointment.
More concerning are the views of Marvin Goodfriend, who has been reported to be a front runner for one of the Fed vacancies. An economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and former director of research at the Richmond Fed, Goodfriend has a traditional central banker background and the dangers that comes with it. In 2016, Goodfriend made an impassioned plea for the Fed to consider negative-interest rates:
The zero interest bound is an encumbrance on monetary policy to be removed, much as the gold standard and the fixed foreign exchange rate encumbrances were removed, to free the price level from the destabilizing influence of a relative price over which monetary policy has little control—in this case, so movements in the intertemporal terms of trade can be reflected fully in interest rate policy to stabilize employment and inflation over the business cycle.
Since negative interest rates usually coincide with greater use of cash (and personal vaults), Goodfriend went so far as to suggest the Fed should consider devaluing the value of printed bank notes. A $10 bill would buy less than a $10 debit card transaction, opening up a new front in the ongoing war on cash.
Given his radical views on monetary policy, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that Goodfriend’s nomination would represent a genuine danger to the economic wellbeing of every American citizen – or at least those outside of the financial services industry.
Unfortunately, even if Goodfriend doesn’t get the nod, it’s unlikely Trump will nominate anyone who understands the negative consequences of our artificially low interest rate environment. Though Candidate Trump demonstrated remarkable savvy when it came to how the actions of Bernanke and Yellen hurt Americans, as President Trump he has consistently indicated a desire to keep the “big fat bubble” going. Such a desire obviously fits the self-interest of the White House, but with long-term consequences for the base that elected him.
The only hope for a change in direction from the Administration is for Trump to stop listening to his Goldman Guys and instead lean on the team that helped get him to the White House. As Tommy Behkne noted last November, Trump had managed to surround himself with a number of Fed skeptics during his campaign, and even considered Austrian-friendly John Allison for Treasury Secretary.
Given the historic opportunity he has with the Fed, if Trump chooses to return to those roots, he could do severe damage to the swamp — all without passing a single piece of legislation through Congress.
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Stanley Fischer Is Out at the Fed
Fed Vice Chair and Yellen ally Stanely Fischer announced his unexpected resignation today, citing “personal reasons.” His term as a Fed governor wasn’t to be over until 2020 and his vice chairmanship was to end June of next year.
Fischer was one of the three most important Fed members, the other two being Yellen herself and the New York Fed’s William Dudley. The WSJ reports:
Mr. Fischer came to the Fed in 2014 a luminary in central banking, having taught many leading policy makers during a more-than two decade career as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in international economics. His students included European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Mr. Fischer also ran a central bank—the Bank of Israel—from 2005 to 2013, held a senior post at the International Monetary Fund and served as a Citigroup vice chairman.
In terms of the insider status of these central bankers, Mr. Fischer was “Mr. Establishment.” Well educated in the machinations of how to control an economy from the top, Fischer was an expert bureaucrat. On paper, Fischer was among the most qualified in the world to be tasked with impossible role of making us more prosperous by diktat.
In reality, Fischer, to the extent he had a marked influence on central bankers like Draghi, Bernanke, Yellen, and so many others, was a key player in the boom-and-bust system of modern monetary economics. Under his watch, we had two major and devastating recessions— the cause of which was not Fischer’s failure individually, but the inflationary framework that pervades them all.
Fischer was considered to have leaned “hawkish” by the financial press. In the old days of Paul Volcker, a hawk was one wary of dangers of rising inflation. This was juxtaposed to a dove, who would downplay the dangers of inflation and advise greater monetary expansion. But in the post-crisis era of the so-called “new normal,” where interest rates are to remain absurdly low and inflation must be targeted at 2%, the hawks have long gone extinct. Fischer was no hawk, he was a cheerleader of the quadrupling of the Fed’s balance sheet, an advocate of unprecedented credit creation, and a hater of sound money.
It remains to be seen where Fischer will go next. But his undying advocacy of the use of central banking to tinker with and manage the economy will live on.
See also:
- "The Fed Wants to Test Drive Negative Interest Rates" by Joseph Salerno
- "Stanley Fischer's Eureka Moment" by C.Jay Engel
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Bank of Canada Raises Interest Rates … Again
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Bank of Mexico: Bread Today, Hunger Tomorrow
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here
Mario Draghi’s Fatal Conceit
On 23 August 2017, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) gave a speech titled “Connecting research and policy making” at the annual assembly of the winners of the Nobel Price for Economics in Lindau, Germany.1 What Mr Draghi talked about on this occasion — and especially what he didn’t talk about — was quite revealing.
Any analysis of the causes of the latest financial and economic crisis is conspicuously absent from Mr Draghi’s remarks. One gets the impression that the crisis came basically unexpected, out of the blue. There is no mention of the role of central banks, the monopoly producers of unbacked paper (or: fiat) money, played for the crisis.
No word that central banks had for many years manipulated downwards interest rates — accompanied by an excessive increase in credit and money supply — causing an unsustainable “boom.” When the bust set in — triggered by the spreading of the US subprime crisis across the globe — the ugly consequences of this central bank monetary policy came to the surface.
In the bust, many governments, banks and consumers in the euro area found themselves financially overstretched. The economies of Southern Europe especially do not only suffer from malinvestment on a grand scale, they also found themselves in a situation in which they have lost their competitiveness.
Mr Draghi, however, doesn’t deal with such unpleasant details. Instead, he lets his audience know how well the ECB pursued a policy of "crisis solution." His narrative is straightforward: Without the ECB’s bold actions, the euro area would have fallen into recession-depression, perhaps the euro area would have broken apart.
The analogy to such a line of argumentation would be praising a drug dealer, who provides the drug addict (who became a drug addict because of him) with just another shot. Repeated consumption of drugs does not heal but damages drug addict. Who would applaud what the drug dealer does? Likewise: would it be appropriate to praise the ECB’s action?
Mr Draghi presents himself as a fairly modest, intellectually ‘undogmatic’ central bank president stressing the importance of the insights produced by economic research for real life monetary policy making (thereby dutifully applauding the output of the economics profession). But the policy maker’s approach is far from being scientifically impartial.
Draghi's Flawed Methods
Today’s economics research — as it is pursued, and taught, by leading mainstream economists — rests on a scientific method that is borrowed from natural science and builds on positivism-empiricism-falsificationism.2 This approach, used in economics, does not only suffer from logical inconsistencies, its embedded skepticism and relativism has, in fact, has let economics astray.
Under the influence of positivism-empiricism-falsificationism economic theory – in particular monetary theory and financial market theory – has become the intellectual stirrup-holder of central banking, legitimizing the issuance of fiat money, the policy of manipulating the interest rate, the idea of making the financial system ‘safer’ through regulation.
In this vein, Mr Draghi praises especially the independence of central banks — for it would shield central bankers from destabilizing political outside influence. One really wonders how this argument — one-sided as it is — could find acceptance, especially in view of the fact that independent central banks have caused the great crisis in the first place.
The Central Bank's Many Friends
Why is there hardly any public opposition to Mr Draghi’s narrative? Well, a great deal of experts on monetary policy — coming mostly from government sponsored universities and research institutes — tends to be die-hard supporters of central banking. The majority of them would not find any fundamental, that is economic or ethic, flaw with it.
These so-called “monetary policy experts,” devoting so much time and energy for becoming and remaining an expert on monetary policy, unhesitatingly favor and accept without reservation the very principles on which central banking rests: the state’s coercive money production monopoly and all the measures to assert and defend it.
The upshot of such a mindset is this: “Once the apparatus is established, its future development will be shaped by what those who have chosen to serve it regard as its needs,”3 as F.A. Hayek explained the irrepressible expansionary nature of a monopolistic government agency – like a central bank.
Experts, keenly catering to the needs of the state and the banks, will make monetary policy increasingly complex and incomprehensible to the general public. Just think about the confusing abbreviations the ECB uses such as, say, APP, QE, CBPP, OMT, LTRO, TLTRO, ELA etc.4 In this way central bankers effectively sneak themselves out from public and parliamentary control.
Has the ECB Violated its Mandate?
It comes therefore as no surprise Mr Draghi hails “non-standard policy measures” such as quantitative easing through which the central bank subsidizes financially ailing governments and banks in particular. Mr Draghi, however, does not leave it at that. He also suggests that monetary policy should shake off remaining restrictions that hamper policy maker’s discretion:
[W]hen the world changes as it did ten years ago, policies, especially monetary policy, need to be adjusted. Such an adjustment, never easy, requires unprejudiced, honest assessment of the new realities with clear eyes, unencumbered by the defence of previously held paradigms that have lost any explanatory power.
These remarks come presumably because the German Constitutional Court has found indications that the ECB’s government bond purchases may violate EU law and has asked the European Court of Justice to make a ruling. The German judges say that ECB bond buys may go beyond the central bank's mandate and inhibit euro zone members' activities.
The issue is no doubt delicate: If the ECB is prohibited from buying government bonds (let alone reverse its purchases), all hell may break loose in the euro area: Many government and banks would find it increasingly difficult to roll-over their maturing debt and take on new loans at affordable interest rates. The euro project would immediately find itself in hot water.
Without a monetary policy of ultra-low interest rates and bailing out struggling borrowers by printing up new money (or promising to do so, if needed) the euro project would already have gone belly up. So far the ECB has indeed successfully concealed that the pipe dream of successfully creating and running a single fiat currency has failed.
The crucial question in this context is, however: What has changed in economics in the last ten years? Unfortunately, economists that follows the doctrine of positivism-empiricism-falsificationism feel encouraged to question, even reject, the idea that there are immutable economic laws, preferring the notion that ‘things change’ that ‘everything is possible’.
However, sound economics tells us that there are iron laws of human action. For instance, a rise in the quantity of money does not make an economy richer, it merely reduces the marginal utility of the money unit, thus reducing its purchasing power; or: suppressing the interest rate through the central bank must result in malinvestments and boom and bust.
In other words: Sound economics tells us that central bankers do not pursue the greater good. They debase the currency; slyly redistribute income and wealth; benefit some groups at the expense of others; help the state to expand, to become a deep state at the expense of individual freedom; make people run into ever greater indebtedness.
What central bankers really do is cause a "planned chaos." Unfortunately, the damages they create — such as, say, inflation, speculation, recession, mass unemployment etc. — are regularly and falsely attributed to the workings of the free market, thereby discouraging and eroding peoples’ confidence in private initiative and free enterprise.
The failure of such interventionism — of which central bank monetary policy is an example par excellence — does not deter its supporters. On the contrary: They feel emboldened to pursue their interventionist course ever more boldly and aggressively to achieve their desired objectives. Mr Draghi made a case in point when he said in July 2012:
“[W]e think the euro is irreversible” and “the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”5 Hayek’s warning in his book Fatal Conceit (1988) goes unheard: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."6
Mr Draghi’s speech should not convince us that monetary policy rests on sound economics, or that the ECB works for the greater good. If anything, it shows that economics has been twisted and deformed to service the needs of the state and its central bank – which increasingly erodes what little is left of the free market to keep the fiat money system going.
Holding up the fiat euro will result in a coercive redistribution of income and wealth among people, within and across national borders, to an extent historically unprecedented in times of piece. As a tool of an effectively anti-democratic policy, the single European currency will remain a source of interminable conflict, injustice, and it will be a drag on peoples’ prosperity.
- 1. See Draghi, M., The interdependence of research and policymaking, speech at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Lindau, Germany, 23 August 2017.
- 2. For a critical analysis see Hoppe, H.-H. (2006), Austrian Rationalism in the Age of the Decline of Positivism, in: The Economics and Ethics of Private Property. Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2nd edition, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, US Alabama, pp. 347 – 379.
- 3. Hayek, F. A. v. (1960), The Constitution of Liberty, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 291.
- 4. APP = Asset Purchase Programme, QE = quantitative easing (issuing new money by purchasing bonds), CBPP = Covered Bond Purchase Programme, OMT = Outright Monetary Transactions, LTRO = Long-term Refinancing Operations, TLTRO = Targeted Long-term Refinancing Operations, ELA = Emergency Liquidity Assistance.
- 5. Draghi, M., Verbatim of the remarks made by Mario Draghi, speech held at the Global Investment Conference in London, 26 July 2012.
- 6. Hayek, F. A. v. (1988), Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism, edited by W. W. Bartley, III, Routledge, London, p. 76.
When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here


When commenting, please post a concise, civil, and informative comment. Full comment policy here