Janet Yellen

Current policy coming from the Fed seems to be geared to create a never-ending series of booms and busts, with the hope that the busts can be shortened with more debt and easy money. Yet one major driver behind the financial crisis in 2008 was too much debt - much of which led to taxpayer-funded bailouts. In spite of this, the best the Fed can come up with now is to lower interest rates to boost demand to induce households and governments to borrow even more. Interfering with interest rates, however, is by far the most damaging policy. The economy is not a car, and interest rates are not the gas pedal. Interest rates play a critical role in aligning output with society’s demand across time. Fiddling with them only creates an ever-growing misalignment between demand and supply across time requiring an ever larger and more painful adjustment.

Now we can see the real tragedy of negative interest rates: they not only have the perverse effect of reversing the flow of time, but they demonstrate that borrowers are not acting with the good faith incentives normally associated with someone who needs money. Rather than paying forward, borrowers are paying backwards because they are effectively trying to return something they don’t want. Such an arrangement renders it impossible for an economy to grow. By destroying the temporal and moral structure of money, negative interest rates destroy the economy. When tomorrow cannot be paid, the current regime must fail. The only question to be determined is the form that failure will assume. This may sound like philosophy but it is cold, hard reality.

Blogger Ben’s work is already done. In his very first substantive post as a civilian he gave away all the secrets of the monetary temple. The Bernank actually refuted the case for modern central banking in one blog. The truth is the real world of capitalism is far, far too complex and dynamic to be measured and assessed with the exactitude implied by Bernanke’s gobbledygook. In fact, what his purported necessity for choosing a rate “somewhere” actually involves is the age old problem of socialist calculation.

"The utterances of the Yellen/Zhou duo who kicked off yesterday’s rip make absolutely clear why the central bankers will never stop stimulating. They have embraced a spurious “inflation deficiency” doctrine, and have thereby, in effect, lashed themselves to the wheel of a doomsday machine."

Despite what may look to be "cheap" valuations, JPM calls the EM contrarian approach “tactically challenging” thanks to leverage, a difficult environment for economic growth and Janet Yellen. "Each of these is a problem, in our view. In combination, they could be a serious problem," the bank notes.

In all the annals of investing, few seemingly innocuous phrases incorporate as much by way of grave implication as those four words, “a shift to banknotes”. 2008 was bad. With central bank policy now at the outer reaches of the possible and even of the theoretical, the outlook is certainly uncertain. Not wishing to participate in the terminal stages of a momentum-driven bubble is not bearish so much as simply sane.

The Fed has finally come to terms with the realization that control is no longer an option. It's been a mirage that's held up far longer than originally anticipated. The monster has now grown far too big and dangerous while possibly exposing, to their dismay, the only way they might have a shot of regaining some stability for future control is to let it fall apart: as they stand by and watch hoping to 'thread the needle' for further intervention just in time. Along with trying to have some C.Y.A. assurance to the 'In Crowd' that "Hey – we tried to warn you!" if it indeed does exactly that.
Which is scarier? A Fed that may be signalling they’ve lost control? Or, a Fed that still believes "Don't worry – we've got this!"

Intended warning or unintended slip? After Alan Greenspan's confessional admission that "Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency. No fiat currency, including the dollar, can match it," we found it remarkable that during the Q&A after her speech today that Janet Yellen, when asked about negative rates, admitted that "cash in not a very convenient store of value," seemingly hinting at Bernanke's helicopter and that there will be no deflation in The US ever... Rick Santelli then sums it all up perfectly... "deflation is clearly the boogeyman... and the only thing that will save the middle class."

Over the past 2 years the Obama administration has been desperate to boost minimum wages, usually over tedious bickering with republicans and corporations who have resisted such an increase, with neither party realizing that such a measure would not do much to actually boost aggregate spending. Instead, what Obama should have been focusing on was to limit the maximum number of hours worked per week, because as the following chart shows, the reason why weekly pay is rising and aggregate earnings is not due to an increase in hourly wages but because Americans are simply working longer hours every week: not quality but quantity.

In a few minutes, Janet Yellen will address a lunch session in her native SF Fed (the same place that last week finally figured out what debt is) during a conference whose topic is The New Normal for Monetary Policy (the typo from "Paranormal" is easy to make). The informal agenda will be Yellen's explanation of how she plans on achieving the yield curve which we predicted back in 2010 is just a matter of time.

It's a day of ‘master of the universe,’ central bank speeches as both Bank of England governor Mark Carney and Fed chief Janet Yellen preach their ultra loose policies and certain market participants lap up the Gospel according to Mark … and Janet ...

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