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Guest Post: Bizarre Updates From 'The New Normal' School Of Economics
Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum of Acting-Man blog,
Bernanke: Spreading Money Printing Bliss Globally, Whether or not Anyone Asked for it
Last week saw a full court press in defense of the current money printing exercise. It started with Bernanke telling us the Fed is making the whole world happy … even if the world hasn't asked for it:
“The Federal Reserve's bond-buying program is not a "beggar-thy-neighbor" policy designed to spark a devaluation of the dollar to spark the U.S. exports at the expense of other countries, said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on Monday. Rather, the Fed's policy is an "enrich-thy-neighbor" action because strong growth in the U.S. would spillover to trading partners, Bernanke said in a speech to a conference at the London School of Economics. Some emerging market economies have complained about the Fed's quantitative easing program, and some have called it the start of a "currency war." But Bernanke said a return to solid growth in the U.S., Europe and Japan would ultimately benefit smaller countries.”
(emphasis added)
One should not let this man loose in front of innocent students. It is certainly true that the dollars Bernanke prints are spilling over into the world at large – where they distort price signals everywhere. In most foreign nations mercantilist thinking predominates, and some even have currency pegs or quasi currency pegs. In any case, they all feel they must inflate right along with the Fed, so as to avoid that their currencies appreciate too much against the dollar. As an example, Brazil's minister of finance has been complaining for years about 'QE', and the central bank of Brazil has begun to run a very risky and far too loose policy, which has in the meantime led to a noticeable increase in money prices. The one thing money printing can definitely not achieve is 'solid growth', even though it may temporarily appear so on paper on a purely quantitative basis. Misdirecting scarce resources into bubble activities may well look like 'growth' to Bernanke, but in reality it can only weaken the economy structurally.

Ben Bernanke: spreading happiness far and wide.
(Photo via nanopress.it)
Rosengren's Cost-Benefit Analysis of Money Printing
Next up to bat was Eric Rosengren of the Boston Fed, who similar to most of his colleagues is of the 'John Law School of Economics' (i.e., what the economy needs to 'get better' is 'more of the circulating medium'). Rosengren is a proponent of Anglo-Saxon central banking socialism at its finest and always likes to decorate his speeches with reams of statistics to buttress his case, but unfortunately one cannot prove or disprove points of economic theory by means of statistical data.
Here is an excerpt from his assessment of what the money printing exercise achieves that is fairly typical for Rosengren's explications:
“The Fed’s purchases of long-term securities are intended to lower longer-term interest rates, like rates on home mortgages and auto loans, in order to promote faster economic growth. These purchases also encourage households and businesses to shift somewhat from riskless low-yielding short-term government securities to investments that bear a sensible degree of risk and have a stronger economic effect, like corporate bonds and stocks.
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston staff use two different models to estimate the impact of asset purchases on the economy. One explicitly articulates household and business behaviors and the other is a purely statistical model. Reassuringly, both models give similar results. Our best estimate implies roughly a one-quarter-point decrease in the unemployment rate for a $500 billion asset-purchase program.”
(emphasis added)
In so many words, nothing can go wrong because our 'models' say so. One may well feel compelled to ask Mr. Rosengren what the economic models of his staff were saying about the economy in 2006 and 2007, but as far as we are aware nobody present at the delivery of his speech actually asked that. That would no doubt be considered impolite.
However, we know what the Fed heads were talking about in their meetings at the time, and that they were laughing a lot in 2006 (the details of the 2007 meetings are due to be released this year – there is an inexplicable five year delay associated with these releases). In other words, their 'models' evidently told them that everything was just going swimmingly. By contrast, anyone with even an ounce of common sense could see that the economy was cruising toward a disaster. Now the same people who didn't see this coming are laying the foundations for the next disaster by doing the same things all over again, only at an even grander scale. Meanwhile they are defending their actions with the same means that they undoubtedly used to justify their previous catastrophic policy decisions. And the whole world is seemingly pretending that all of this is completely normal!
The tinder for renewed bubble activities: assorted interest rates (from Rosengren's presentation) – click for better resolution.

Eric Rosengren – guided by models that tell him nothing can possibly go wrong.
(Photo via bostonglobe.com)
Former “Hawk” Wheeled out in Trial Balloon
A few years ago Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota was among the handful of dissenters on the FOMC board, refusing to go along with the ultra-easy monetary policy proposed by Bernanke and others. At the time he provided a qualitative assessment of the labor market which we actually greeted with a few approving words in these pages.
Here is what he said back in 2010:
“The job openings rate has risen by about 20 percent between July 2009 and June 2010. Under this scenario, we would expect unemployment to fall because people find it easier to get jobs. However, the unemployment rate actually went up slightly over this period. What does this change in the relationship between job openings and unemployment connote? In a word, mismatch. Firms have jobs, but can’t find appropriate workers. The workers want to work, but can’t find appropriate jobs.
There are many possible sources of mismatch — geography, skills, demography — and they are probably all at work. Whatever the source, though, it is hard to see how the Fed can do much to cure this problem. Monetary stimulus has provided conditions so that manufacturing plants want to hire new workers. But the Fed does not have a means to transform construction workers into manufacturing workers.”
(emphasis added)
Got it in one. As an example, companies in the US are looking for experienced welders and cannot find enough of them. For reasons unknown, Kocherlakota has completely abandoned this largely qualitative approach to analyzing the labor market. Now he is attempting to out-dove the doves.
As we have pointed out here many times, we do not believe for one second that there is anything to the frequent 'exit' talk. Here is Kocherlakota's latest, where he notifies us that he now believes that $85 billion in additional money printing per month while keeping the overnight interest rate at a big fat zero is still not enough – and more importantly, he wants to see the threshold at which the policy is ended lowered even further.
“As I described earlier, the FOMC has a second mandate: to promote maximum employment. In March, most of the 19 FOMC participants believed that the unemployment rate will converge to a level between 5.2 percent and 6 percent within five to six years. But, under the current formulation of monetary policy, I see the rate of convergence to this long-run rate as likely to be slow. In particular, I expect that the unemployment rate will still be close to 7 percent by the end of 2014. The FOMC could facilitate a faster return of the unemployment rate to its lower long-run level by adopting a more accommodative monetary policy that puts more upward pressure on employment. Thus, I would say that my outlook for unemployment and my outlook for inflation both point to a need for more accommodation than is currently being provided by the FOMC.
Based on my outlook for the next two years, I’ve concluded that the FOMC would better fulfill both of its congressional mandates by adding more monetary policy accommodation. How could it do so? I think that there are several possible approaches available to the Committee. For example, the FOMC could reduce the public’s level of policy uncertainty by clarifying the nature of the economic conditions that would lead the Committee to reduce or stop its current asset purchases. Alternatively, the Committee could communicate to the public that, once the removal of monetary accommodation eventually commences, the rate of withdrawal will be slower than is currently anticipated.
Both of these kinds of changes in communication could potentially provide needed monetary accommodation. However, they would require the FOMC to make relatively complex changes to the language of its current communications. My own preferred approach is considerably simpler. In its current forward guidance, the FOMC has stated that it expects the fed funds rate to remain extraordinarily low at least until the unemployment rate falls below 6.5 percent. The FOMC could provide additional needed stimulus by lowering the threshold unemployment rate from 6.5 percent to 5.5 percent—that is, by changing one number in the existing statement.”
(emphasis added)
In other words, not only has the skills mismatch magically disappeared from his deliberations, and the Fed is suddenly able to 'create employment' by printing money, but he also offers the first public trial balloon in favor of extending the money printing exercise way past its current official sell-by date. You couldn't make this up.

Narayana Kocherlakota: from now on, 2 + 2 shall be 5.
(Photo via umn.edu)
Pseudo-Scientific Justifications
To round things out so to speak, the NY Fed's economics staff is now putting out something that is resembling long discredited Philips Curve nonsense to justify higher inflation (note that some seven Nobel Prizes in Economics have been awarded for papers debunking the nonsense Samuelson et al. had cooked up in the context of the Philips curve. This happened not long after Henry Hazlitt showed in an analysis of the 1947 to 1976 period that the probability that the alleged connection between inflation and employment existed was no higher than simply flipping a coin). Admittedly Nobel Prizes in Economics don't prove much and are often even a contrary indicator (see Krugman), but in this particular case they seem to have been on the mark.
It should be noted that while there can be short-run effects on employment if prices rise faster than wages, such seeming gains are perforce ephemeral, as they A) assume that workers will forever be accepting lower and lower real incomes without demur and B) lead invariably to a misallocation of capital that ultimately weakens the economy's ability to generate real wealth. In other words, to recommend higher inflation in order to lower unemployment ranks among the worst economic policy ideas ever. That the Fed's board members are all such big fans of it is quite ominous. Now their staff is evidently providing the pseudo-scientific ammunition to justify it. Note here that when these people speak of 'inflation' they are not referring to the massive growth in the money supply, they are referring to one of its eventual effects, namely rising prices on a broad front.
“In times like these, a rise in inflation expectations could do the economy some good, argues research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The paper argues that when traditional forms of monetary policy, such as cutting short-term interest rates, can go no further, central bankers can goose economic activity higher if they can convince the public the future pace of inflation is likely to rise.”
In short, the Fed should actively seek to lower the demand for money, a task it is undoubtedly capable of fulfilling. Unfortunately such 'goosing of economic activity' by means of inflation is precisely what John Law's playbook recommended and was later tried again by the revolutionary assembly of France and many others. In all cases it appeared to 'work' for a while, and every time when the juice was switched off, the depression immediately returned. This then caused the monetary authorities to opt for dispensing the next 'coup de whiskey'. Often this went on until the ultimate catastrophic demise of the entire underlying monetary system. That is in fact the only choice there is: one either allows the economic adjustment (a.k.a. bust) to occur early and fast, or one postpones it by printing money and thereby ensures an even bigger catastrophe down the road. That is the only long-run outcome that can be expected from this type of policy.
Conclusion
As we have frequently pointed out, modern-day economic policy is evidently in the hands of utter quacks. It matters little to them that their prescriptions have failed time and again for hundreds of years – they do the same thing over and over again, as though they were escapees from an insane asylum.
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Krugman? What do you mean he went to the bathroom? That was an hour ago....
Krugman vs. Feldstein
Just waiting for the next suckerpunch.
http://www.planbeconomics.com/2013/04/am-summary-krugman-vs-feldstein.html
Murray Rothbard demolished these deluded central planners thirty years ago.
The planners keep on pluckin', and the chickens keep a-cluckin'.
Fuck you Bernanke!
Obviously the question becomes...When is this nation going to finally do something different in response to these assholes? Probably like always...when it has to.
Love, 'ya, Bernanke and associated quacks! Keep this debt Ponzi going as long as possible. Pile-it-on. I need more prep time. Eventually, all scores will be settled.
I hope one (or all) of these guys gets his penis caught and ripped off in the printing press. A fitting accident for the post industrial economy.
No problem.
Thanks to a little 'casting' exercise that all FOMC members undergo as a rite of initiation, a lifelike prosthesis is readily available.
http://www.createamate.com/
I give you two chances to capture your member!
I'd prefer to keep these dicks out of the printing press. However, I'm with you if getting them in is the only way to get them out.
Penis bonds sound pretty good. At east there would be something backing them.
*Hard* currency?
when you add a toxic vagina to a penis bond you get a bag full of derivatives!
I do, however, think Bernanke is technically right that it isn't beggar thy neighbor. Each neighbor is beggaring the other, or buggering as the case may be. Since every fiat is trying to gain advantage simultaneously, none actually do. The Euro, Yen and Dollar rates are not really any different than they have been for years. Gold, however, is the tell. They are all debasing. Gold is buggering all of them.
+1/2 Gold will eventually bugger them when the comex defaults.
Bitcoin buggery ftw.
http://evoorhees.blogspot.com/?m=1
The great rotation....
"Axa Equitable Life Insurance Co. last month notified clients that it will drop 26 investment options from its Accumulator variable annuity contract, shifting dollars to less risky fund choices starting May 20. Eleven new options will take their place".
http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20130401/FREE/130409996
Looks like the equities train is heading for the bond market tracks.
From fonzanoon's link:
the next realm of product innovation won't necessarily be in annuities, noted Ann Hughes, vice president and head of business and sales development at Sammons. Rather, mutual funds will be the next area of creativity.
Mutual funds -- shee-it!
Next thing ya know, we'll all be reverting to analog computers to monitor our 'Disco Inferno' mutual funds.
Muscle cars, bItCHeZ!
Two interesting tidbits from there. First, those products were originally designed and pitched to investors as a way to invest in equities with a safety net (guaranteed income etc.) The fees are pretty substantial but hey you are getting to play with stawks and still have a parachute. Well now they are cutting off the fun part and sticking you with a potential time bomb (bond funds) as your parachute and charging you up the ass for that privilage.
Somewhere, somehow, this all makes sense to some actuaries who get paid a lot of money to manage risk.
Probably not all that complicated, Fonz. Insurance companies like to include funds in their VA products that "revenue share" back to the insurance company. They find a fund that's willing to share more and push the assets over to them.
The "charge you up the ass" part is a given, of course. I dissect those piles of junk for clients all the time. Add up all the costs in a VA and you quickly understand why it's better to just buy the investments on the open market directly and buy a separate life insurance policy. It's not fun to push against a 250+ bps cost headwind when the investments are only yielding you 350 bps.
What's really killing them is ZIRP. Everything that was offered by them at some guaranteed minimum rate to the annuitant they're losing their asses on. All those guarantees have numbers on them that have gone nowhere but down for years now, but that's only on new contracts. The old business they're still bound by the contract numbers. A mini version of what's hammering DB pension funds. Unrealistic assumptions on future investment returns. Especially when the "safe" stuff yields zero.
god only knows the hedges they have on. It's probably only a matter of time
good eye. "these things never stop" so long as we live in a fiat world. clearly Europe is given new definition to the term "have i got a scam for you." i'm sure this will get America's "competitive juices flowing" as well. i think it's easy to Monday Morning quarterback the Fed here...interest rates were moving dramatically higher in 2008-09 actually...and if that trend had continued we sure would be talking about something far different than this more...prosaic...article. (Zombie apocalypse comes to mind.) but that's what the "success" (in the sense of keeping the interest rate bazooka from blowing up the USA) of "zero percent financing for Uncle Salami" means. "we get to talk about it." quite honestly i don't see the "new normal" at all. this still strikes me as a fairly boilerplate "government response" to a problem that the Fed itself created ("no there is no housing bubble.") the problem now is "how the hell do i print taxpayers?" and the answer of course is "you must make Wall Street do that." Can the Federal Government do that? Yep. that Stockton bankruptcy is a big deal...if that becomes a "template" then clearly a way forward such that new credit can be created can at least be seen. it ain't like CNBC isn't extolling the virtues of the new bubble economy...so what's the problem "ex creditor"? you want on board the new gravy train? well..."that's why they call them judges." it's not like the Government was pounding the table on higher interest rates back in 2006-2007. we shall see of course....there's always some sneaky "tax 'em with one of these" tricks up somebody's sleeve.
These guys just kill me, have they no sense of history?
1922 Weimar
1790 France
1917 Russia
250 Rome
All these circumstances, which are easily enough researched with a simple tool called Google, provide more than ample evidence that forced devaluation of currency leads to catastrophic political change. And ultimately war and death and destruction along the way.
Who in their right mind would want the world to go through any of these again? Hitler? Napoleon? Lenin/Stalin?
We know where the printing press leads, why are these guys not swinging from a lamp post for these crazy actions?
This is Satan’s handy work, without question. Bennie etal has made a deal with the evil one, this we know for sure.
sschu
Jews are satanic. Their own G-d (a self-projection) told them so.
Please take your nasty anti-semitism somewhere else.
sschu
The new normal school of economics, is when some old guy farts and then decides oil or gold should go up or down today.
George Soros Predicts Economic Collapse WE WILL HAVE A DOUBLE-DIP:http://xrepublic.tv/node/2753
See above. If the good die young, Soros will live forever.
Bernanke: printing money leads to growth.
Not in real terms, or else Zimbabwe's real economy would be booming.
EPIC FAIL.
These people are despicable. They know what they are doing. They are not stupid.
Fed Governors make $250,000 per year base for spouting these lies. Consulting fees add more.
See Fred Mishkin.
Tar and feathers would be too kind.
Oh, by the way, FUCK YOU BERNANKE, FUCK YOU FED
END THE FED
ROB-Ben HOOD should be strung up by his wee willie and burned alive.
Yes - I said it.
He has hurt far too many innocents with his lies and theft to go unpunished.
+10 Give that man a prize!
Here's one I stumbled across the other day that literally made my mouth fall open...
"Roads, bridges and other infrastructure in the U.S. are steadily growing older and weaker. Given low interest rates and elevated unemployment, this is an ideal moment to invest in fixing them."-Peter Orzag
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-26/it-s-the-perfect-time-to-fix-our-roads-and-bridges.html
Orzag was one of the key architects of "shovel ready infrastructure jobs" wasn't he? If it was such a dire state of affairs why siphon debt bomb dollars off into such wonderfully myopic things like Solyndra, Fisker Roadsters, mosque minarets, "new & improved" AGW NASA computer models and A123?
Fucking puke.
That would actually improve unemployment and push it below 6.5%, and stop the POMO gravy train. No way they can do that now.
He's a Rubin acolyte...I trust him as far as I could throw him...with no crumbling bridge involved ;-)
I have always viewed everything he has ever said as "whats in it for me?" Now he's at a bailed out Citi suggesting more public debt.
If they can't raise the money through our gas taxes, licensing, registration etc. maybe they need to cut some DOT brass or don't do it. As an aside, we don't need 2013 "enviromental impact studies" when they were just done two years ago...for an example of cost savings.
I guess those shovel ready jobs aren't quite as good at siphoning off and funneling taxpayers money into the desired crony coffers, compared to the likes of Solyndra, A123, et al.
"I guess those shovel ready jobs weren't quite as shovel ready as we thought they were." -Obama
And "Orzag" would be a
1) Sioux Indian
2) Patagonian
3) ____________ (fill in blank)
It's just plain wrong to say the Fed has failed. Their policies have been quite successful for a few of us, the people who really matter to them. For the other 99.99% of us, if trickle down doesn't work that's just tough shit.
It isn't beggar thy neighbor assuming that you live in a very wealthy fascist neighborhood.
Just a few aciditc observations:
That fat fuck Kocherlakota would be a tasty treat for the Nile crocs at the DC Zoo.
Caption for Bernanke's pic:
"It was this big... and it had corn all through it."
they keep pushing on the string with no view of the other end of the string.
it is bad enough that they are trapped in the fiat money scheme but they have no clue how the game needs to be played. a huge cash dump on the 99% would solve everything, including the need for inflation.
a tax break on the first 100 grand of income financed by the fed's balance sheet would be a great start but these dumbasses think people will just create their own money like a bank does and start buying shit again.
I'm starting to find it bizarre to sit here and read about counterfeiting going on, on an astronomical scale, year after year, seemingly endlessly. Am I a masochist?
I've said it before "I can stop reading ZH any time I feel like it -- I just don't feel like it."
Trips to the right, Hail Mary pass on 2....line hold your blocks. That means you Kocherlakota and Rosengren.
Hitler was right.
The truth is unpalatable: the "greatest generation" fought so that Jews could take over America and the world.
nope, so that the MIC, the WS/City and Rocky oil show could take over the world. The Jews were just the facilitators of that construct; like Rothy was for Rule Britannia.
Don't confound kings n queens with Merlin the Magician and his paltry stock.
Now Zionism in another kettle of fish; its like Wahhabism or Ayatollahism and it serves a political grand purpose; nothing to do with race but with power and ideology.
Its called Pax Americana and it was built on the backs of that great generation blood bank. Its imperial and its now totally political hubris. Inevitably it has ONLY surrogates as friends and defiant ideologues as foes; thats the nature of hegemony.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
... bernanke fed thinks the height of bubble should be the economic norm. Anything else is just an excuse to print.
Perhaps their prescriptions have not failed time and time again for hundreds of years, but have functioned exactly as designed and have been wildly successful time and time again beyond their dreams. In each iteration it is refined and improved. It all depends on what their true objective may be. These people are hardly stupid and are, in fact, among the cleverest of us all and certainly not insane in the Einsteinian sense, with perhaps that extra fillip of sociopathy to give them an added edge of utter ruthlessness and fearlessness. They pull this program out every 80 years or so and run it to our ruin and each time we are surprised. We are sheeple indeed.
Xcept for one thing: "they" are no more proof against radioactivity than the rest of us. Never discount the importance of ideology/stupidity in human affairs.
IM SO TIRED OF THIS SHIT.... QE IS NOT "MONEY PRINTING" I don't agree with it, but stop misleading people......FUCK. Do you people READ?
BONDS to DOLLARS
think of it as
SAVINGS ACCOUNT to CHECKING ACCOUNT
THE NET FINANCIAL ASSESTS = 0 = NO NEW FINANCIAL ASSETS CREATED IN THE SYSTEM!!!!!!!
IF ANYONE SAYS QE IS "MONEY PRINTING" THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM....STOP LISTENING TO THEM IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!
dooty = shit. Yes it is money printing you feckin idjit.
Lose your caps and exclamation marks ya feckin stooge.
Fed buys treasury bonds = money creation (printing)!
As per above, Fuck You Bernanke!