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B-Dud Explains The Fed’s Economic Coup (Or Why Every Asset Price Influencing Monetary Policy Transmission Is Now Manipulated)
Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
Keynesian economists are annoying enough when they are pitching inflated financial assets on Wall Street or the supposed curative powers of fiscal deficits on Capitol Hill. But they become positively dangerous when they populate the Eccles Building and usurp control of the nation’s capital and money markets lock, stock and barrel in the name of “monetary accommodation”.
Needless to say, the Fed is presently over-run with Keynesian money printers led by Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer. Both of these famous PhDs are actually proponents of a primitive macroeconomic doctrine that should be called “bathtub economics”. In their wisdom, these doctors of economics have simply postulated that the nation’s economic output “should” be at aggregate levels which far exceed current production, and that the resulting shortfall from “potential” output, incomes and jobs is due to insufficient “aggregate demand”.
This purported “output gap” is conveniently self-serving. It has been interpreted to mean that the Fed has a plenary mission to fill-up the nation’s economic bathtub by generating sufficient incremental aggregate demand to off-set the shortfall. This demand plugging function, in turn, is to be accomplished by the constant intervention of the Fed’s open market desk into money and capital markets. So doing, it is empowered to manipulate, massage, twist, bend and pump any financial variable that in its wisdom is deemed to influence the transmission of its monetary policy (i.e.”aggregate demand” stimulus) into the real economy.
Except this is all a fiction. There is no such economic ether called “aggregate demand”; it is an utterly artificial construct of Keynesian economic models. What actually exists out in the real main street economy is nothing more than the total spending by households and businesses; and the latter does not pre-exist as an independent variable. Instead, it is derived from either current income or from incremental borrowing—that is, extending the pre-existing leverage ratio of business and household balance sheets to steadily higher levels.
But here’s the thing. The Fed can do only do two concrete things to influence these income and credit sources of spending—–both of which are unsustainable, dangerous and an assault on free market capitalism’s capacity to generate growth and wealth. It can induce households to consume a higher fraction of current income by radically suppressing interest rates on liquid savings. And it can inject reserves into the financial system to induce higher levels of credit creation.
But the passage of time soon catches up with both of these parlor tricks. When household savings decline to the vanishing point, as has occurred since the turn of the century, there is no more incremental spending to be extracted from current income.

Likewise, when balance sheets become totally exhausted with leverage—as is also the case at present—there are no more one-time increments to spending available from the simple expedient of ratcheting-up household and business leverage ratios. That condition amounts to “peak debt” and it characterizes upwards of 90% of US households today.
The fact is, the Fed’s modern regime of inducing lower savings and higher leverage was not only an unsustainable, one-time proposition that prevailed roughly from 1971 to 2007, but also was only good on the margins of Keynesian GDP accounting. It was the booster shot which stimulated a simulacrum of prosperity and out performance on the measured macro variables.
Still, none of the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen era financial market interventions and manipulations by the Fed could impact the foundation of spending—-that is, current period organic income. The latter comes from production, invested capital, entrepreneurial activities and labor hours and productivity.
Stated differently, income is the fruit of the economy’s supply side operations. But the central banking branch of the state has no tools to grow the supply side. The latter is the unplanned result of workers, entrepreneurs, savers, investors and inventors interacting on the main street market.
Take the case of labor hours. The crucial variable here is not some academic concoction called “full employment” or an arbitrarily chosen unemployment rate of say 5.2% measured against an artificially designated proxy for the work force collected by the BLS.
Instead, what matters is the price of labor; the quantity supplied everywhere and always follows the price. Accordingly, if at current production and income levels, the price of labor on the margin is too high, there will be elevated levels of unemployment. But the Fed can do nothing about millions of wage arrangements in the main street economy—-except to make over-pricing of labor worse by inducing households to live beyond their means on cheap credit.
To be sure, the Keynesian money printers claim they are boosting labor inputs by enlarging demand for the services of unemployed workers. But this just another case of the economist who tumbled into a 30-foot hole, but quickly assured his colleague of an escape plan: Assume we have a ladder, he airily intoned.
In a similar manner, the Keynesian economists who run the Fed have no ability to create the fictional ether called “aggregate demand”, yet they have seized control of the entire capital and money market pretending to do just that. However, not withstanding the fact that the Fed has pumped $4 trillion of new reserves into the financial system since the year 2000, there has not been a single hour of gain in private non-farm labor inputs supplied to the US economy during the past 14 years. Self-evidently, all their “assumptions” to the contrary, the Keynesian economists at the Fed do not have a magic ladder called “aggregate demand” that can pull idle labor hours into production.

Yet here is where the Wall Street connection enters the picture. While the modern Fed’s incessant manipulation of money market rates, the yield curve and the price of risk assets generally can have no lasting effect on household and business spending, it does cause massive financial bubbles. The latter, in turn, can be harvested by adroit speculators during the 5-7 year intervals between the inevitable busts which result from central bank financial repression and artificial inflation of risk asset values.
That essentially is the reason for the present universe of some $3 trillion of hedge funds, and the trillions more of mutual funds and institutional investors which surf on their momentum driving waves. Their assigned function in the scheme is to be the first-in and first-out as these central bank financial bubbles inflate and bust.
Naturally, it was only a matter of time before Wall Street sought to institutionalize these beneficent policies by developing a financial market overlay on the bathtub economics of the academic Keynesians. This new element originated during the Greenspan era with the expansion of staff to include Wall Street economists and traders. But the arrival seven years ago of William Dudley straight from the top economics job at Goldman Sachs took the matter to a whole new level.
In effect, under Dudley’s supervision the New York Fed has been transformed from a dabbler in the money markets to the plenary master of the entire financial system. Thus, during the early Greenspan days the nearly exclusive tool of Fed policy intervention was the Federal funds rate, but that was a crude and imprecise lever for managing the flow of incremental demand into the nation’s economic bathtub.
Accordingly, the doctrine of “monetary accommodation” was evolved by the Wall Street contingent at the Fed led by Dudley. By the lights of this new dispensation, any financial variable that might conceivably encourage more mortgage borrowing or corporate stock buybacks or “wealth effects” driven household consumption (albeit by mainly the top 10%) was fair game. Such variables were declared to influence “the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy”.
Thus, when Ben Bernanke averred a few years ago that the Fed’s success in stimulating the economy was evident in the soaring levels of the Russell 2000, he was merely noting a particular instance of this new monetary accommodation doctrine at work.
Yet the monetary accommodation doctrine surely does amount to an economic coup d’état by the unelected bureaucrats and academics who run the nation’s central bank. To be sure, they rationalize it in the name of their statutory mandate to achieve maximum employment and price stability, as contained in the Humphrey-Hawkins Act.
But read the act and the legislative history. Not even Hubert Humprhey himself ever envisioned a Fed which would target the Russell 2000 or deliberately punish main stream savers in order to inflate financial assets and encourage wealth effects driven levitation of the GDP and jobs count. The Fed’s plenary manipulation of prices across the warp and woof of the financial system thus amounts to the greatest instance of “mission creep” ever undertaken by an agency of the state.
Now in a recent forked-tongue effort to deny the existence of a Fed “put” under the stock market, Goldman’s plenipotentiary at the Fed, perhaps better referred to as B-Dud, has told us exactly that. If the monetary politburo deems that the nation’s economic bathtub is not full to the brim and therefore requires “extremely accommodative” policy, the central bank will indeed deliberately pump-up the S&P 500 to achieve its misguided ends.
A few weeks ago, the Fed’s hapless school marm and chair person lamented publicly about the severe shift of income and wealth to the top 1% during recent decades. Perhaps it is time for B-Dud to explain to her that its all about filling James Tobin’s economic bathtub with the requisite “aggregate demand”.
It goes without saying that Keynesian economists have always been a threat to free market capitalism. But now that they have hooked up with Wall Street agents like B-Dud they have become a clear and present danger.
….. we focus on how financial market conditions influence the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy. At times, a large decline in equity prices will not be problematic for achieving our goals….. (if) it does not conflict with our objectives. In contrast, when we want financial market conditions to be extremely accommodative—as has been the case in recent years when we have been far away from our employment and inflation objectives—then we will take into consideration a broad set of developments with respect to interest rates, the stock market and other measures of financial conditions in choosing the appropriate stance for monetary policy.
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NEWSFLASH: Neither "free market capitalism" nor any other system can create wealth. If you disagree, define it and state your assumptions.
Individual actors create wealth, period. No system and certainly no government has ever created wealth.
However, individuals are better incentivized to create said wealth in a system/government that doesn't penalize them for doing so.
Free market capitalism would seem to be the best system to facilitate such an environment, but it's never been allowed to exist for an extended period of time, so we really don't know.
Having said all that, I dunno whether I disagree or not. You built the strawman, I'll leave it to you to defend it.
wealth is created through social participation x social competence - if everyone participates and everyone is competent, massive wealth results - the opposite is also true - notice that a zero in either area leads to zero wealth - and a low number on either sides leads to low wealth also, despite the other side - there is no system that creates wealth, only a competent and willing population - capitalism claims to create wealth but capitalism is a piece of clothing - and in this case, it is a size small inadequate piece of clothing on a fat bloated body - ugly by all accounts - except of course to the wearer
WTF is wrong with us, shuckster? You got two reds right now for stating obvious truths.
Maybe they don't like the word social?
WTF is society if not social?
I see the word social and I cringe I relate the word social with "someone is lazy and wants me to feel guilty and do work for them while they go drink a beer on a stoop, and im probably not even going to break even on my time and material for the task".
The word social implies that each individual is indebted to the other.
I think no one is in debt to anyone.
and
That everyone is in debt to their own wants and needs.
and
My definition of Socialization
Is the sharing of wants and needs, with an un-even distribution of cost....
I think...
(everyone should bear the cost of their own wants/needs) and that no man owes another their labor without fair compensation from the benefactor, but charity, where charity is due is not a bad thing... and there is nothing wrong with it, but charity under duress is slavery (doesn't matter how much perceived good it does imo).
Dread, it's all good w/us. Words have been re-defined in the global lexicon. Social has been paired with welfare. It's fucked-up, because in real life your welfare is dependent on your ability to benefit the other individuals in society.
Today, so many people work for the state or their contractors a condition exists that they cannot see any way to be free.
So, they construct a facade, and fight fake wars, against manufactured enemies in order to prove how free they are.
Ain't this a fine kettle of fish!
Any system other than a free market system would in itself still be a system.
The goal is to have no system at all (which is essentially what free markets are).
To interfere or prevent a free marketplace would be to essentially put in place your own "system" and your argument would be cyclical.
Ideally your perceived world would be a machine world where no human being is greedy or hungry or has any wants or tastes or dreams.... obedient worker drones that "love to work".
Your world can not exist.
So the basis of your argument why a Free Market system can not create wealth is that , your impossible utopia would create more wealth. . . ..
So since we are talking about intangibles my argument why free market capitalism sucks as a system is. . . because
My ideal world would be one where it rains Cheeseburgers every sunday and the planet increases in size every few years and mansions and cars grew on trees and god dropped by occasionally to checkup on us and make sure we are all happy, and since this world is the best possible world, free markets suck.
I agree that a competent society would produce more wealth.
but
I disagree that it is possible to have a competent society any time soon so the best you can do is get out of the way and let all the monkeys fling poo at eachother and hope half of them find a way to farm bananas and give them a casino to distract them so they don't kill eachother.
The strawman was created 'for' you, before you even had the ability to speak and has been used against you ever since.
I don't want to defend it, I want to get away from it - not an easy thing.
Yup, it's probably not even possible, to get away, that is.
It's amazing, when you think about it.
Almost everyone thinks of the courts and their system of "law" as sacrosanct, when in fact it is a system of persistent fraud upon mankind.
My Mother did not give birth to a legal fiction, she gave birth to the asshole who's typing this reply.
That asshole will stand in front of the administrator (there are no judges) and declare his status.
The attorneys (there are no lawyers) will protest, but the administrator will rule in favor of the individual, most times.
Markets Create a place where Supply of Wealth and Demand for Wealth can exchange value.
The Free Market system "creates" wealth, by allowing users to convert various forms of wealth into a unified currency/value exchange system, which lets them accumulate wealth.
Accumulated wealth (concentrated wealth) is excess wealth that an individual has, the individual in a free market system can take notice of a rising price in an asset (say for example oil) a wealthy individual sees a rising oil price and is tempted to go produce an oil field and extract oil.
This new oil is sold into the system, and increases supply relative to the demand, this lowers the price of the demanded good and "creates wealth" for the participants of the market.
When the market becomes saturated with sellers of oil, the price of oil decreases, and as such approaches the cost of production (so what was once 100% profit on a gallon of oil produced is now say 10% profit on a gallon) (as the market is saturated with oil producers).
This signals to the market that the "demand" from society has been filled and its time to move onto the next asset/product and drive the cost of that down.
As such this pattern repeats, until once impossible to afford things like (cars, boats, airplanes, gallons of gas, home computers, laptops, smart phones, clothes) etc... are all saturated by "producers" and "sellers" and the cost of all these goods get driven down to a small margin of profit above production costs.
This enriches society because the market signals to producers and entrepreneurs "what everyone WANTS AND NEEDS" and the producers rush to "FILL DEMAND" when a demand is filled society is satisfied and "richer".
This is how free markets create wealth, in the most efficient, practical and fair way possible.
The temptation of profit, forces individuals to satisfy a need of society (like food and fuel) by producing those goods, in satisfying society wants and needs, the entrepreneur/producer can thereby satisfy his/her own needs/wants... and everyone is richer/happier.
Remove the incentive of profit, and people will inevitably become poorer or stagnate at the level of wealth they already have accumulated/produced.
TLDR: GREED IS GOOD.
Also, the Free market system is really by its definition, the system where there is no system.... just people doing what they want to do , when and how they want to doit... the Free market system is by definition "the lack of a system".
Because when you put constraints on people , it is inevitable that they will be less productive (IE: if you tax a farmer, he has less incentive to produce food for society, if you fix prices of the farmers goods below his cost of production, the farmer again goes broke and stops producing food for society).
The best system is no system (AKA Free Market).
Now that I have made these points ask yourself this.
What happens when a central bank counterfeits money and buys a specific asset? thereby driving the price of that asset up? say"stocks"???? it forces people to "MAKE MORE STOCKS!!!" and thus you have a bunch of worthless IPO'S launching all the time... (Dot Com Bubble???).
Central banks interfere with the free market by sending false signals to the wealthy/producers/entrepreneurs that "this is what people want because look at the price its rising!!!" when really thats all the central bank "wants".... this actually HARMS THE ECONOMY because it pulls capital and resources and productivity away from asset classes that SOCIETY ACTUALLY WANTS AND NEEDS like goods/services.
So by definition a Free Market system can not exist under a system where a central bank "owns" the markets and inflates asset prices (bailouts, picking winners and losers).
Think about all the successful banks that failed because bailouts of bigger firms that were not functioning in line with the wants and needs aka demand of end users (people)... banks that were doing the right thing and providing a better customer value were gobbled up by 2b2F banks which turned them around and made them crappier banks with poorer service.
This is why bailouts SUCK.
Free market capitalism exists only in the mind of idealogues. The ultimate business goal is to crush competition so that profits can be maximized at will.
This is a function of the free market, that minimizes waste.
The goal of "crushing competition" serves the purpose of increasing efficiency.
Since the firm that has increased efficiency of production (say for oil) will be able to sell their oil cheaper than the firm that is less efficient.
This drives inovation and inovation in itself is wealth.
The goal is not to take over the world by killing off your competition, its to create the most value for the most people, as cheaply as possible for all parties involved with as minimal expenses as possible (efficiency).
Letting the less efficient producer DIE is a function of free markets.... because to bail out that company would be to double down on a wasteful form of production instead of just letting the more efficient producer take over.
The problem comes when you have hit peak production (the point where no amount of inovation or competition can produce the same good/service more efficiently) and you endup with a Monopoly, at that point, the price is at the whims of the owners of the company, but if society is smart, they will all have a share in that company and be rewarded by their own greed (which means money travels in a circle) if enough people own a share.
The problem is Monopolies are usually controlled by very few people and usually the profits of the Monopoly are very concentrated and go to only a few people.
This "flaw" in the system is not really to be blamed on the system, but by the ignorance of the participants in the society.
As such the free market begins to influence the genetics of the society, and the less intelligent people die and the more intelligent people reproduce.... making society smarter and less populated.
Its strange.
In a way on a long enough timeline, a true free market system that allowed monopolies would actually breed a smarter human race (or a more evil one) I don't know which yet.
This is almost entirely incorrect.
To start with, there are many different kinds of 'intelligence'.
There are also many intelligent people in our society. The bulk of these people make up the 'middle class'... Then there are the sociopaths, who are almost invariably the ones who are not only intelligent, but who wish to use that intelligence to create monopolies within the society and concentrate wealth and power over others for themselves. Whether they wish to monopolise money, power, or the market in a particular product or industry is not important.
These are the people that are also attracted to politics.
As a collective, whether knowingly working together or not, through government, business, and our institutions, these people have created a system whereby it is now almost impossible for anyone else to have upward mobility from the lower classes, into the top % of wealth holders.
For this reason, those in the lower classes now spend their whole life in the pursuit of never eventuating upward mobility. All the while their cost of living rises, whilst their income in real terms falls, leaving little desire or time to take on such burdens as a 'family' or 'children'.
These are the intelligent, hard working people who are arguably the ones who should be breeding.
The only people who are now 'breeding' are the top 1% (sociopaths) and those who are content with a life on welfare (morons), as they are the only ones who don't have to worry about such time consuming tasks as 'working'.
So our society as a whole is evolving by positively selecting genetic traits that produce entitled morons and sociopaths.
None of what is happening is going to produce a morei 'ntelligent' society.
Double post
Free Market Barter system can create wealth. By which I mean a system without Government.
In such Barter system you have no choice but to create wealth that someone needs.
But once you create a layer above the barter system with a paper or note or currency, you get a system that encourages corruption.
While the majority will trust any system given to them and work hard. A small but growing group (of players) will learn the purpose of Capitalism or Socialism or any other form of Government, that is Corruption. When this small group becomes big, the system collapses.
The central Banks were created to pretend that the corruption by the financial institutions can be controlled. That the interest rates which indicates inflation can be controlled. This Central Banks only extended the duration of time before the system collapsed. Which means Western Capitalism should have collapsed way back in 1917.
When all such attempts fail, Government tends to resort to tyranny to make people continue working hard. That mostly starts by giving security personal more money to control the people who create real wealth. In USA this is already starting.
And when the heat is on, the wealth stolen has to be transfered out. The US manufacturing and production has already been moved out to China.
While we are still debating about merits of system. :-)
Its not really practical to expect people to pay off their debt.
You borrow 200K$ from your house over 30 years its like 400K to pay back over 30 years.
So whatever you borrow, you are paying 100% interest on.
And you are essentially paying interest on money the bank counterfeited.
Which means that your loan is inflationary.
Which means you owe more money and you are going to spend more money on everything you buy from that point on from when that loan was created because of inflation (loans are inflationary).
So for a people in a society to go out in mass and borrow money from these fraudulent banks is like the entire population deciding all together to shoot themselves and their offspring in the foot for a quick one night party spending spree that quickly ends with everyone going broke (eventually).
The way loans SHOULD WORK:
Borrow 100K over 30 years
Pay 5% interest.
Which means that over 30 years, the bank earns 5000$ in interest.
Which works out to 3500$ a year or 291.66 $ a month.
Instead of the system we have now which is like 537$ a month 6400$ a year and 193,000$ payed back total at the end... (193% what you borrowed or 93% interest)
This would bring banks in line with markets, because lets face it when YOU LOAN the bank money they pay you no interest or 0.25% or some crap (so if you have 100K in the bank (loaned to the bank) you make like what? few hundred bucks??? over a long term???)
Banks should get in what they give out.
Our system is messed up...... the people who fund the banks get hosed, and the people who the bank funds with fake money they print out of thin air also get hosed.... its a completely broken model.
Why does the bank pay-out such crap interest, yet demand such high interest in return??? does that sound like a functioning market to you??? an equation is supposed to be balanced on both sides... what goes in, should come out or eventually one side runs out of "stuff" to leverage and the equation breaks down into crysis.
How is paying 5% rather than 100% on counterfeit money better?
If you force the counterfeiters (banks) to make 5% simple interest they will just counterfeit more of it.
I suggest banks should make perhaps 0.25% while paying the depositor 4.75% on their deposit and charging the borrower 5%. No counterfeiting allowed.
"Wealth comes but from the labour of Man."
The perversion of this principle by the contrivance known as financialisation is the single biggest cause of the destruction of society.
Exactly.
Currency should just enable exchange. Once you give a small group control over currency corruption and chaos are bound to follow.
Also important is the difference between money and currency.
The debasement of either should carry heavy penalties.
I guess you are not a number!
Portmerrion or bust!
Strange place.
So...FED buying stocks and mortgage backed securities directly in proportion to any rate raises they might make?
Abject insanity - unless they are doing their best to crush the middle class and destroy the U.S.A.
It's the only way they can have a kinda soft (in reality just not comet smashing earth hard) landing. They have to raise the rates to give the illusion of a functional economy and to prick Housing Bubble 2.0 before it blows up on it's own. Hot money that was working the Housing Bubble flows back to the stock market keeping levitated as long as it can. REITs are liquidated and some price discovery (finally) happens in residential RE. Banks, Fannie and Freddie get to charge fees (and the higher interest) for processing a wave of new mortgages as affordability increases. This downward pressure on RE prices and rents frees up some consumer dollars which combined with the hot money gives CNBC the more fodder as PEs should come down from the current insanity.
It looks like they're shooting for a mid 90's scenario. Not saying they can pull it off but thats what it looks like.
Atlas Shrugged....
Scatched his balls, broke wind and rolled over and went back to sleep.
This economy is starting to really remind me of my exchange student days in Leningrad back in the late 70's.
Aggregate demand/ supply of wealth. Man, I love Z/H.
I know I was Cherry Picking, but it sure felt good. yuk yuk
Dear David,
No one can sustain a debt-usury system in perpetuity. One fine day, total outstanding debt, due to constantly accruing interest, will overwhelm the society upon which it was perpetrated.
Do you fail to grasp this, or are you trying to baffle us with bullshit?
Once a .gov apparatchik, always a .gov apparatchik, I reckon.
I am really past accepting the now proven fake idea that we live in a market capitalist system in the USA. We all know stocks, bonds and metal, the bloody lot are manipulated. Interest rates are not market driven, but Fed manipulated. Even the S&P 500 is bought by the Fed to drive it up. So what do we make of a Central Bank driven communism? It is communism really, there is no market, except the wealth effect manipulated market, that the Fed uses to transfer money printed wealth into the hands of the top 1% who hold most equities. We can't even trust gold, it is heavily manipulated.
How long does America last when price discovery is dead? Is it not market driven price discovery that determines where, when and how much investment capital flows to what busnesses and industries? Seriously, nothing is allocated anymore by markets, thus it is pure communism. Although this brand of communism is all power to the bankers, not all power to the soviets of workers.
Can we call it the "Soviet All Bankers Union?" The "SABU" Instead of USA? From 1%'er communism will spring the death of what was once a productive capitalist America. The past made us wealthy and free, the future is making us poor and debt slaves to an all powerful union of government and bankers.
I agree that "a system" does not create wealth.
When I look about I see that in some places human labor looks to bring about material prosperity, though in other places it does not.
I observe that if one exploits or appropriates the labor of others one can increase one's own material wealth quite a bit.
I also observe that there are those who can increase the productivity of others and thereby share in the increased wealth.
I see people sometimes group together and use specialization which sometimes leads to rather substantial wealth multipliers.
When I see people managing their own labor for their own gain, I see that they tend to manage it pretty efficiently.
When I see people exploiting or appropriating the labor of others for their own gain, I see they tend to manage the labor of others pretty poorly.
When I see people voluntarily specializing and exchanging labor and goods for their own benefit, I tend to see rather happy people.
So I propose anarchy.
Which some years ago was called Liberty.
Stockman rocks. Unless and until the investment happens in the real economy and the Fed stops distorting factor costs, employment and real wages will not recover and there can be no sustainable aggregate demand growth. Ironically, our "aggregate demand" problem is actually distributional constraints born of financialization.
Interesting take in inducing households to consume by dropping savings interest rates. I think the exact opposite is true. Households no longer get any savings income right now so they end up spending LESS! In households approaching retirement, the poor savings interest actually means that those households are going to save more - knowing that they cannot live on the interest from their savings - such that they need more total savings so that they can pull out interest and principal each year.
I totally agree. I know many people who have retired, and some like myself who aren't even close to retiring, who have drastically slowed spending or completely stopped altogether due to the losses incurred in '08. Because the yields have been so low for so long the fixed income folks are struggling to find ways to think of better places to invest money for their future needs. They don't want to put it into a stock market where they'll be buying in at levels netting them only small amounts of shares, so they're just parking it in the bank. This is also screwing them because the banks are only giving them minuscule interest rates, while piling on random fees.
So they feel like they're damned if they do or damned if they don't.
Spend or gamble -- your only permitted choices.
happy 100th birthday federal reserve.
we will miss you
Bullshit! The only reason for money printing is to keep interst rates low by buying up treasury paper and money debasing to try to inflate away the debt. The rest is hollow rhetoric.
The coup happened way before the FED's creation.....wake up slave
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