By now it is no secret that the primary beneficiary of the over $7 trillion [5]pumped by global central banks into the financial system in just the past 4 years, and countless other trillions in miss-spent fiscal stimuli has been the stock market. But what about the global economy: after all five years after BNP Paribas stopped withdrawals from their investment funds - the unofficial start of the Great Financial Crisis - whose primary beneficiaries have been corn, gold, silver and brent [6] - we should have seen at least some sustained impact in the economy if all Econ 101 teaches us about the virtuous business cycle is true, and if any of this countless money out of ZIRP air actually made its way into the economy instead of just the stock market. Well, let's take a look shall well. Courtesy of Bridgewater we present a chart of coordinated interventions and their impact not on the stock market, but on the economy. What we find is that it was, is, and will be a centrally planned world after all.
[7]
Bridgewater's take:
The three contractions in global growth that have occurred since the financial crisis were offset by heavy blasts of fiscal and monetary stimulation by global governments and central banks. But each wave of support has also had less impact on global conditions than the previous wave. We remain concerned that the ability of those policy responses to stabilize the situation is diminishing. The third wave stabilized global growth after last summer’s dip and allowed for the bounce in global conditions and markets over the early part of this year – but its impact on global conditions was more modest than that of earlier waves of stimulation. As the third wave has ended, global growth has again rolled over.
The scariest thing about the above chart? The ever lower global growth bounce as a result of ever increasing, or exponential, central bank intervention.
[8]
In other words, not only is conventional economics wrong about virtually everything, but the impact of whatever the real underlying story is, certainly not one that can be captured by econometric models which continue to falsely model out what is essentially a system of infinite complexity and soaring fragility [9], has increasingly diminishing returns.
Also, when we get to the point on the chart above where global growth is at or below zero irrelevant of how much "money" is pumped into the system, that will be the moment to shut the lights out, because it is then that the central planning fat finger which has to date mostly impacted various intraday inflection points [10]in the S&P, will simply press CTRL-P. And not let go.