Archive - Nov 21, 2009 - Story

Alan Greenspan's economic legacy is slowly but surely deteriorating from that of one created by a "Maestro", to the deranged hungover flashbacks of the most inept monetarist dilettante and plutocrat puppet in the history of fiat capitalism. And with ever increasing honest and truthful observations as those shared by Naomi Klein and Joseph Stiglitz in the 1 hour + program attached, courtesy of Fora TV, only the remnants of the quickly evaporating close circle of Bernanke and Co., will have anything favorable left to say for the man who took the mundane task of building bubbles and converted it into rocket science so complex that only a few people at Goldman Sachs figured out how to benefit from it. We encourage all readers to spend some time watching the program before, just like Barney Frank and other bribed politicans, deciding that changing the status quo vis-a-vis the Fed is a step in the "wrong direction."

A topological representation of the shadow banking system, which as many may have already forgotten, smiled upon such lunacy as infinite leverage. The recreation of the latter is the ever elusive (so far) holy grail for the Federal Reserve.

There are about $1.4 quadrillion of them. So why not tax them? As Tim Geithner says "That's not something we are prepared to support." Some are curious, who is this editorial "we" in this case. According to a co-sponsor of an upcoming bill, he has been called three times by none other than Jamie Dimon to promote the party line...guess which side of the fence the JPM CEO is on.

Could it be that the fundamental economic indicator that is gospel not only to Goldman Sachs, but to Ben Bernanke in estimating and determining monetary policy, the output gap, provides a flawed reading of the economy? As a reminder, Ben Bernanke has repeatedly expressed little regard for either commodity inflation or US dollar exchange as having an impact on overall US inflation. As Askari and Hochain state: "according to [Bernanke's] theory, inflation was related only to the output gap. As long as the output gap was negative, that is, if actual gross domestic product was below potential GDP, the economy was at no risk of inflation. Hence, he argued that the central bank had to adopt an aggressive money policy until the output gap closed. Such is the policy prescription from what is called the Taylor Rule or the Phillips Curve. Because potential GDP is not a measured macroeconomic variable, it can be estimated in millions of ways. There are, therefore, millions of ways for estimating an output gap, making the concept difficult to use as a policy tool." The problem with these millions of estimations, is that especially courtesy of the Greenspan created bubble over the past 20 years, the American economy is, ironically, not a true representation of itself. And thus, the output gap estimates need to be normalized for a "bubble free" GDP environment. It is precisely this issue that none other than the St. Louis Fed addresses in its latest paper: "Has the Recent Real Estate Bubble Biased the Output Gap?" The conclusion is startling: based on a production function output gap normalization (an approach "based on a relation between available productive inputs (such as capital and labor), their current utilization rates, and aggregate production"), Bernanke could be fatally wrong about the economy's "capacity for inflation" courtesy of the CBO's overestimated output gap, and that his loose monetary policy could end up being a disastrous precursor to rampant (and not distant) hyperinflation, due to his blatant avoidance of simple logic when interpreting the economic output gap.

A big picture perspective of why the American public, and the world, should be very concerned about the fate of the U.S. dollar courtesy of one grotesquely irresponsible act by the Federal Reserve after another.