Central Banking and the Destruction of Free Markets

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider of Atlantic Capital Management
Volatility Is The Price Of Real Progress
As we all ponder what may come at us in 2012, the ongoing volatility in almost every corner of every marketplace is certainly concerning, as it should be.  This record volatility has enormous implications for any investor, but especially those in leveraged ETF’s.  Volatility is the anathema to these vehicles, as has been well discussed, but that does not diminish their targeted usefulness.
As a portfolio manager I use leveraged inverse ETF’s as hedges against the dramatic downside.  They have a very narrow window and only perform when the market more or less moves in a straight-line down – just as it did in early October 2008, May 2010 or July/August 2011.  Other than those sustained sell-offs, they are a drag on portfolio performance, a cost of doing business in this risk-on, risk-off “marketplace”. 
I willingly pay that cost because I have no concrete idea when another fit of sustained selling will actually take place, but I have more than an inkling that it will.  Instead, this massive and growing volatility, even though it is costing me some short-term performance, is a good sign that there is actually progress being made.  What we are witnessing is a titanic battle between the world as it really is and the one central banks need you to believe it might be (if only you would set aside your own perceptions and self-interest).  The fact that volatility has risen is a clear indication that the central bank-inspired anesthesia is no longer as effective as it was in 2009, or even in the QE 2.0 inspired insanity of 2010.  Reality, and the free market, is being imposed – and that means there is a place for even narrowly-useful hedging vehicles.
The current market battle is nothing more than the extreme measures of the rational expectations theory and a form of the fallacy of composition, combined with the political aspirations of a century-old theoretical notion of how the economic system should be ordered.  Mainstream economic “science” has developed in a relatively straight line since the Great Depression, starting with the idea that the economy must be governed in emergencies.  Executive Order 6102 and the subsequent devaluation of the dollar solidified the place for the entire field of economic management, marking perhaps the last time it would be challenged by mainstream thought.
Without the guiding hand of the educated economist, capitalist, free market economies are believed to be wrought with the danger of total collapse, unable to escape from their own emotional whimsies.  At the most primal level of modern economics is a deathly fear of deflation, a fear that is best summed up by Fisher’s paradox.
In 1933, Irving Fisher published a paper in the Federal Reserve’s Econometrica circular that amounted to a point-by-point logical deduction of the string of events that led to the unusual collapse of the economic and banking systems.  The scale and pace of the disaster confounded “experts” of the era (it seems experts have trouble with inflections in every era), so his deduction offered a highly plausible, well-reasoned and “logical” explanation. 
For Fisher, the combination of over-indebtedness and deflation was the toxic mix from which the calamity grew.  But within that mix lay a paradox that formed a trap by which no self-made recovery was possible:

“…if the over-indebtedness with which we started was great enough, the liquidations of debts cannot keep up with the fall of prices which it causes.  In that case, the liquidation defeats itself.  While it diminishes the number of dollars owed, it may not do so as fast as it increases the value of each dollar owed.  Then, the very effort of individuals to less their burden increases it, because the mass effect of the stampede to liquidate in swelling each dollar owed.  Then we have the great paradox which, I submit, is the chief secret of most, if not all, great depressions:  the more the debtors pay, the more they owe.  The more the economic boat tips, the more it tends to tip.  It is not tending to right itself, but is capsizing.”

The lessons of this paradox are interwoven into the fabric of modern/conventional economics, that whenever deflation might be present a recovery has to be forced since it cannot start on its own.  But it is extremely curious that only one half of the equation was chosen as an outcast:  deflation.  Over-indebtedness has, obviously, been warmly embraced in the decades since Fisher’s proposition.  The development of the mainstream of economics has led to the belief that intentional inflation can always defeat deflation, and therefore debt can assume a role, even a primary role, within the schematic of economic stewardship.
Fisher’s paradox survives in many forms, but among the most important was a logical derivation, namely the idea that economic participants can do what they believe is best for themselves, but in doing so harm themselves through systemic processes.  This is known as a fallacy of composition; that what is good for individuals is not necessarily best for the whole.  It overturned the traditional economic notion of an economy at its most basic level, from the time of Adam Smith describing individual self-fulfillment.  Sure, this idea had been around for awhile before Fisher’s paper, but the Great Depression “proved” that the fallacy was real and potentially cataclysmic.  Originally it was confined to the narrow interpretation of depression economics, and so the evolution of unquestioned economic management started from there.
The economics profession truly believes that there exists economic states where individual self-maximization no longer benefits the larger societal association of economic actions, so it “logically” follows that some process (or entity) has to step in and enforce conditions contrary to individual notions of self-maximization.  In other words, there are times when people must be forced to do what they perceive is against their own best interest.
In the context of depression avoidance this seems to be rather innocuous, but in the displacement of political thinking since the 1930’s, it was a slippery slope.  What Fisher’s paradox essentially required was a benevolent authority to administer and visit a kind of beneficial tyranny upon the economic population.  In the constant forward roll of history, though, the slippery slope of needed benevolence has been applied to a larger and larger cohort of economic circumstances – emergencies breed human desire for such authoritarianism.
It is important to remember that the Federal Reserve was a secondary institution for much of the post-Depression period.  After the monetary debacles of the Great Depression, especially the unnecessary reserve requirement hike in 1936 that initiated the depression-within-a-depression in 1937, the Fed was relegated to being simply a monetary check-writer.  The Treasury Dept. was the economic powerhouse, especially during a time in which the dollar was the primary tool of economic management.  The Fed was consigned to managing the money supply around treasury debt auctions to ensure the federal government’s uninterrupted ability to borrow (in some ways things never change).  When that borrowing exploded in 1965, the money supply went with it and the seeds of the Great Inflation were embedded.
Paul Volcker changed this with his “heroism” in defense of the dollar, a dramatic departure from the previous era of Treasury Dept. domination.  Conventional wisdom posits that it was Volcker’s Fed that vanquished the inflation dragon, in doing so he “created” another pillar of the fallacy of composition (high interest rates were not good for individuals, but seemed to be good for the larger system).  The chastened Fed of 1965 that allowed inflation to begin building was dropped for the activist Fed of 1980 that could apparently do no wrong (the monetary history of the 1970’s was completely and conveniently ignored).  The Fed’s reputation soared with the perceived economic success of the 1980’s, handing Alan Greenspan an amount of power unparalleled in human history. 
But how much economic success in the 1980’s was earned?  Again, conventional wisdom sees the Great Inflation ending in 1982, giving way to the Golden Age of Economic kingship – the Great Moderation.  What I see is simply a transformation of inflation from consumer prices to asset prices.  Instead of overwrought money creation circulating within the real economy in the form of wages and higher consumer prices, new credit production capabilities allowed a secondary circulation of credit money into assets, indirectly feeding into the real economy – first as interest income, second as debt – as the notorious “wealth effect”.  The economy in this age would transform from one based on earned income to one based on paper movements of created money, with the irony of the “wealth effect” being its tendency to incrementally create economic activity without actually creating productive wealth.  The global economy was increasingly reliant solely on money creation, a transformation that cannot be understated and a prime cause for re-evaluating the whole of the Great Moderation.
We see this quite clearly in the consumerism of the period.  In 1975, household spending was still largely a function of wage income.  If we adjust Disposable Personal Income by subtracting asset income (interest and dividends), we see a modest deficit in spending sources of about 3.5%.  Households spent more than they brought in from wages, benefits, government transfers (net of taxes) and rental income. Consumer/household spending needed asset income to make up that small funding shortfall (and to go beyond to generate a positive savings rate).  By the midpoint of the Great “Moderation” in 1990, the spending deficit was a chasm, 19.3%.  Without the $898 billion (nominal dollars) in asset income there was no way that consumer spending would have grown so far so fast.
That interest/asset income was a leftover effect of the Great Inflation when monetary creation found its way into growing stockpiles of “safe” financial assets for the household sector.  By 1990, US households had accumulated $5.1 trillion in deposits and credit market assets (largely US treasury bonds) against only $3.6 trillion in debt (including mortgages).  But that was a huge “problem” for the growing acumen of an activist Federal Reserve.  As the 1980’s progressed, interest rates were declining with consumer inflation (and providing a helping hand to asset prices running wild with credit now focused in that direction).  The mainstream of economics took this as a sign of success, but it was really just a marked decrease in monetary efficiency since new money was now circulating heavily in asset prices (the junk bond bubble and the new, great bull market in equities).
Concurrently, economic management had evolved in the 1980’s with the innovation of the “rational expectations” theory.  It was hailed as a huge advancement in monetary thinking coming out of the Great Inflation.  In many ways it was an adjunct to the fallacy of composition.  The rational expectations theory holds that the economic children of modern society can be fooled into undertaking activity that might be against their own best interest if some benevolent authority simply makes it look like everything will be better in the not-too-distant future.  If the Fed screws with the price and cost of money (for debt accumulation), manipulates the price of gold (for inflation expectations), or “nudges” stock or real estate prices in the “right” direction (the notorious wealth effect), the population will act today on those conjured expectations of good times tomorrow.
By the end of the 1980’s, the S&L crisis (a stark warning that economic management might not have been all that it was advertised to be, a warning that has largely been ignored) threatened to plunge the world back into depression.  The Fed and Alan Greenspan feared the consequences of a banking crisis and any attendant deflation.  The Fed funds rate was pushed from around 8.25% in April 1990 to a ridiculous 3.25% by July 1992 – staying at that low level well into 1994.  Alan Greenspan was trying to save the entire banking system from the S&L crisis by reducing the cost of funds so dramatically (hoping to see an increase in bank profits, leading to higher retained earnings and therefore equity capital upon which to pyramid more debt).  The pressure on household spending because of the collapse in interest rates necessitated a marginal change in spending, but not back toward earned income.  Instead we got the wealth effect and the myth of Greenspan’s genius.
Despite a persistently weak recovery (just ask George HW Bush) from a relatively mild recession, the Fed’s management of the economy into a “soft landing” was hailed as a new form of a New World Order.  The business cycle could be smoothed (or even eliminated) by the marginal attraction to debt and the wealth effect.  If expectations were properly managed, the public would suppress their base emotional instincts and dance to the tune set by the monetary kingship. 
It was hubris of the highest order, of course.  By the time the tech bubble finally burst (another warning of the dangers of an artificial economy) the Fed doubled down to save itself and its primacy.  The results have been disastrous as the marginal economy progressed further and further away from the fundamental foundation of wages and earned income.  The savings rate fell to zero by 2005.  Worse than that, US households added $10 TRILLION (+269%) in debt between 1990 and 2007, with $7 TRILLION coming after 2002 alone.  The household funding deficit reached a high of 24%!  Even worse than that, households had shifted preferences out of “safe” credit market assets or bank deposits and into much riskier price assets simply because the systemic cost of risk was intentionally held artificially low.
The economic foundation of the Great Moderation was an illusion, nothing more than asset prices and debt; wealth effect and rational expectations.  None of this describes a free market, capitalist economy.
Central banks and economists love to talk about economic potential, spending so much time trying to calculate it with their complex modeling capabilities and elegant mathematical equations.  But the hard truth of economic overlordship is rather simple.  The Federal Reserve, in cooperation with global central banks, Wall Street and the interbank wholesale money marketplace, simply substituted credit for earned income.  And the reason is also very simple, because debt accumulation is far more easily manipulated.  As long as households remained attached to earned income and “safe” savings assets, economic management was nearly impossible.  The rational expectations theory needs a system more attuned by asset prices and malleable debt levels.  And so marginal consumer spending shifted away from the solid foundation of jobs and wages right into the hands of the fallacy of composition and the rational expectations theory.
It is more than a little ironic that the Fed so willingly embraced indebtedness in light of their history with Fisher’s paradox.  But mathematical advances in modeling along with a growing commitment to steady inflation allowed the Fed to really believe it could stave off deflation.  So they made a deal with the debt devil to obtain the keys to the marginal economic castle and its grand artificial economy, and in the process dangerously surrendered to the over-indebted part of the Fisher’s paradox equation.  Thus the housing bubble to mediate the tech bubble since the tech bubble had some potentially deflationary consequences.  Even today, everything the Fed has done since 2007 can be seen in these terms:  the fallacy of composition, rational expectations and the preservation of the benevolent stewardship of the economic, academic masters. 
Somewhere in all this transition from Fisher’s paradox to Greenspan’s genius to debt-slavery, the system ceased to function as a free-market, capitalist system.  The free market values the bottom-up dispersal and divergence of billions and billions of free opinions, freely associating together as unfettered price discovery.  A central bank devoted to the fallacy of composition and rational expectations is a top-down system committed to manipulating price discovery to achieve ends that seem to be, and very often are, contrary to the perceptions of the vast majority of doltish economic participants.  The monetarist system is forced upon the population, no matter how much they resist. 
Indeed, the idea of an economic fallacy of composition is itself a logical fallacy.  I have no quarrel with the idea of a fallacy of composition or any logical fallacy for that matter, but logic holds no special place in social interactions.  There are no logical deductions from economics no matter how much math is applied.  It is, and will remain, a subjective interpretation of events.  Even the vaunted Fed and its accumulation of Ivy League PhD’s performs no leaps of logic.  Like anyone else with an opinion, whatever fallacy of composition it thinks it sees is still just subjective interpretation. 
And that is the real danger.  Cloaked in the apparent objectivity of math, the economic elite have gained unlimited economic power.  When you stop and think about it, you can create a fallacy of composition pretty much anywhere (and write and enforce rules based on it) – from the steep tax on savers with five-plus years of zero interest rates to mandating everyone has to purchase health insurance even if they don’t have the need for it.
The volatility of today is nothing more than a fight between the active perceptions of participants trying to maximize self-interest within the classical, traditional concept of a free economy, and the opposing forces of overlordship of the landed economic elite, trying to get the uninitiated to simply follow orders.  The elite really believes that if everyone would gladly pile on even more debt and spend with reckless abandon, the Great Moderation would once again be within reach.  Consumers should only stop thinking for and of themselves since common sense is dangerous to the controlled economic system.  To get more debt “flowing” requires active price manipulation to make the world seem like it will be better in the near future so that people will start acting like it.
Economic potential to the Fed is the level of economic activity of 2006.  To them, this is a cyclical recovery from a cyclical interruption in their normal smoothing of the business cycle.  Sure it veered way off into panic, but that was just more confirmation that human emotion needs to be managed.  But if we view the economy from the historical perspective, the lack of a cyclical recovery is not at all surprising.  The Fed spent decades building up so much monetary inefficiency, so many artificial monetary channels for indirectly “stimulating” economic activity, that it will simply take an enormous amount of new money to get it all moving in the “right” direction again (Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman at least have that part right). 
The fact that resistance is growing, that investors are not drinking the economic Kool-Aid as much as 2009 or late 2010 is a sign of growing discord.  The efforts in the realm of rational expectations are simply not working.  That is the ultimate danger because the entire central bank gameplan is based on only that.  Without willing adherents (useful idiots?) to the central authority of economic management, everything falls back to the true potential – earned income and boring cash flow of un-manipulated dollars or euros.  With such a massive chasm between marginal economic activity and earned income sources of spending, it is not likely to be a shallow or short transition (this explains most of the inability of the economy to create jobs – so many jobs in the central planning era were based on money creation and financial “innovation”).
That is both the opportunity and danger of a system reaching its logical end.  Put another way, there is a growing realization that while free markets are messy and somewhat unstable, central planning is not really a cure for those symptoms.  In fact, it has created more harm ($13 trillion in debt is only US households) than good, more illusion than solid results.  Volatility means that the free market is at least attempting to impose itself at the expense of central planning’s soft financial repression and control.  By no means is such a beneficial outcome assured; rather the other half of all this volatility (the risk-on days) is the status quo desperately trying to hang on through any and all means (even those less than legal, like bailing out Europe through cheapened dollar swaps).
So the cost of using leveraged ETF’s as insurance against the failure of soft central planning necessarily rises, but that just may mean their ultimate usefulness is closer to being realized.  Unless you know exactly when this transition might reach its conclusion, it is, in my opinion, a cost worth bearing.

Three Competing Economic Theories

By Lacy Hunt, Hoisington Asset Management
The three competing theories for economic contractions are: 1) the Keynesian, 2) the Friedmanite, and 3) the Fisherian. The Keynesian view is that normal economic contractions are caused by an insufficiency of aggregate demand (or total spending). This problem is to be solved by deficit spending. The Friedmanite view, one shared by our current Federal Reserve Chairman, is that protracted economic slumps are also caused by an insufficiency of aggregate demand, but are preventable or ameliorated by increasing the money stock. Both economic theories are consistent with the widely-held view that the economy experiences three to seven years of growth, followed by one to two years of decline. The slumps are worrisome, but not too daunting since two years lapse fairly quickly and then the economy is off to the races again. This normal business cycle framework has been the standard since World War II until now.
The Fisherian theory is that an excessive buildup of debt relative to GDP is the key factor in causing major contractions, as opposed to the typical business cycle slumps (Chart 1). Only a time consuming and difficult process of deleveraging corrects this economic circumstance. Symptoms of the excessive indebtedness are: weakness in aggregate demand; slow money growth; falling velocity; sustained underperformance of the labor markets; low levels of confidence; and possibly even a decline in the birth rate and household formation. In other words, the normal business cycle models of the Keynesian and Friedmanite theories are overwhelmed in such extreme, overindebted situations.

Economists are aware of Fisher’s views, but until the onset of the present economic circumstances they have been largely ignored, even though Friedman called Irving Fisher “America’s greatest economist.” Part of that oversight results from the fact that Fisher’s position was not spelled out in one complete work. The bulk of his ideas are reflected in an article and book written in 1933, but he made important revisions in a series of letters later written to FDR, which currently reside in the Presidential Library at Hyde Park. In 1933, Fisher held out some hope that fiscal policy might be helpful in dealing with excessive debt, but within several years he had completely rejected the Keynesian view. By 1940, Fisher had firmly stated to FDR in several letters that government spending of borrowed funds was counterproductive to stimulating economic growth. Significantly, by 2011, Fisher’s seven decade-old ideas have been supported by thorough, comprehensive and robust econometric and empirical analysis. It is now evident that the actions of monetary and fiscal authorities since 2008 have made economic conditions worse, just as Fisher suggested. In other words, we are painfully re-learning a lesson that a truly great economist gave us a road map to avoid.

High Dollar Policy Failures

If governmental financial transactions, advocated by following Keynesian and Friedmanite policies, were the keys to prosperity, the U.S. should be in an unparalleled boom. For instance, on the monetary side, since 2007 excess reserves of depository institutions have increased from $1.8 billion to more than $1.5 trillion, an amazing gain of more than 83,000%. The fiscal response is equally unparalleled. Combining 2009, 2010, and 2011 the U.S. budget deficit will total 28.3% of GDP, the highest three year total since World War II, and up from 6.3% of GDP in the three years ending 2008 (Chart 2). Importantly, the massive advance in the deficit was primarily due to a surge in outlays that was more than double the fall in revenues. In the current three years, spending was an astounding $2.2 trillion more than in the three years ending 2008. The fiscal and monetary actions combined have had no meaningful impact on improving the standard of living of the average American family (Chart 3).

Why Has Fiscal Policy Failed?

Four considerations, all drawn from contemporary economic analysis, explain the underlying cause of the fiscal policy failures and clearly show that continuing to repeat such programs will generate even more unsatisfactory results.
First, the government expenditure multiplier is zero, and quite possibly slightly negative. Depending on the initial conditions, deficit spending can increase economic activity, but only for a mere three to five quarters. Within twelve quarters these early gains are fully reversed. Thus, if the economy starts with $15 trillion in GDP and deficit spending is increased, then it will end with $15 trillion of GDP within three years. Reflecting the deficit spending, the government sector takes over a larger share of economic activity, reducing the private sector share while saddling the same-sized economy with a higher level of indebtedness. However, the resources to cover the interest expense associated with the rise in debt must be generated from a diminished private sector.
The problem is not the size or the timing of the actions, but the inherent flaws in the approach. Indeed, rigorous, independently produced statistical studies by Robert Barro of Harvard University in the United States and Roberto Perotti of Universita Bocconi in Italy were uncannily accurate in suggesting the path of failure that these programs would take. From 1955 to 2006, Dr. Barro estimates the expenditure multiplier at -0.1 (p. 206 Macroeconomics: A Modern Approach, Southwestern 2009). Perotti, a MIT Ph.D., found a low but positive multiplier in the U.S., U.K., Japan, Germany, Australia and Canada. Worsening the problem, most of those who took college economic courses assume that propositions learned decades ago are still valid. Unfortunately, new tests and the availability of more and longer streams of macroeconomic statistics have rendered many of the well-schooled propositions of the past five decades invalid.Second, temporary tax cuts enlarge budget deficits but they do not change behavior, providing no meaningful boost to economic activity. Transitory tax cuts have been enacted under Presidents Ford, Carter, Bush (41), Bush (43), and Obama. No meaningful difference in the outcome was observable, regardless of whether transitory tax cuts were in the form of rebate checks, earned income tax credits, or short-term changes in tax rates like the one year reduction in FICA taxes or the two year extension of the 2001/2003 tax cuts, both of which are currently in effect. Long run studies of consumer spending habits (the consumption function in academic circles), as well as detailed examinations of these separate episodes indicate that such efforts are a waste of borrowed funds. This is because while consumers will respond strongly to permanent or sustained increases in income, the response to transitory gains is insignificant. The cut in FICA taxes appears to have been a futile effort since there was no acceleration in economic growth, and the unfunded liabilities in the Social Security system are now even greater. Cutting payroll taxes for a year, as former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers advocates, would be no more successful, while further adding to the unfunded Social Security liability.
Third, when private sector tax rates are changed permanently behavior is altered, and according to the best evidence available, the response of the private sector is quite large. For permanent tax changes, the tax multiplier is between minus 2 and minus 3. If higher taxes are used to redress the deficit because of the seemingly rational need to have“shared sacrifice,” growth will be impaired even further. Thus, attempting to reduce the budget deficit by hiking marginal tax rates will be counterproductive since economic activity will deteriorate and revenues will be lost.
Fourth, existing programs suggest that more of the federal budget will go for basic income maintenance and interest expense; therefore the government expenditure multiplier may become more negative. Positive multiplier expenditures such as military hardware, space exploration and infrastructure programs will all become a smaller part of future budgets. Even the multiplier of such meritorious programs may be much less than anticipated since the expended funds for such programs have to come from somewhere, and it is never possible to identify precisely what private sector program will be sacrificed so that more funds would be available for federal spending. Clearly, some programs like the first-time home buyers program and cash for clunkers had highly negative side effects. Both programs only further exacerbated the problems in the auto and housing markets.

Permanent Fiscal Solutions Versus Quick Fixes

While the fiscal steps have been debilitating, new programs could improve business considerably over time. A federal tax code with rates of 15%, 20%, and 25% for both the household and corporate sectors, but without deductions, would serve several worthwhile purposes. Such measures would be revenue neutral, but at the same time they would lower the marginal tax rates permanently which, over time, would provide a considerable boost for economic growth. Moreover, the private sector would save $400-$500 billion of tax preparation expenses that could then be channeled to other uses. Admittedly, the path to such changes would entail a long and difficult political debate.
In the 2011 IMF working paper, “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances,” authored by Nicoletta Batini, Giovanni Callegari, and Julia Guerreiro, the options to correct the problem are identified thoroughly. These authors enumerate the ways to close the gaps under different scenarios in what they call “Menu of Pain.” Rather than lacking the knowledge to improve the economic situation, there may not be the political will to deal with the problems because of their enormity and the huge numbers of Americans who would be required to share in the sacrifices. If this assessment is correct, the U.S. government will not act until a major emergency arises.

The Debt Bomb

The two major U.S. government debt to GDP statistics commonly referred to in budget discussions are shown in Chart 4. The first is the ratio of U.S. debt held by the public to GDP, which excludes federal debt held in various government entities such as Social Security and the Federal Reserve banks. The second is the ratio of gross U.S. debt to GDP. Historically, the debt held by the public ratio was the more useful, but now the gross debt ratio is more relevant. By 2015, according to the CBO, debt held by the public will jump to more than 75% of GDP, while gross debt will exceed 104% of GDP. The CBO figures may be too optimistic. The IMF estimates that gross debt will amount to 110% of GDP by 2015, and others have even higher numbers. The gross debt ratio, however, does not capture the magnitude of the approaching problem.

According to a recent report in USA Today, the unfunded liabilities in the Social Security and Medicare programs now total $59.1 trillion. This amounts to almost four times current GDP. Modern accrual accounting requires corporations to record expenses at the time the liability is incurred, even when payment will be made later. But this is not the case for the federal government. By modern private sector accounting standards, gross federal debt is already 500% of GDP.

Federal Debt – the End Game

Economic research on U.S. Treasury credit worthiness is of significant interest to Hoisington Management because it is possible that if nothing is politically accomplished in reducing our long-term debt liabilities, a large risk premium could be established in Treasury securities. It is not possible to predict whether this will occur in five years, twenty years, or longer. However, John H. Cochrane of the University of Chicago, and currently President of the American Finance Association, spells out the end game if the deficits and debt are not contained. Dr. Cochrane observes that real, or inflation adjusted Federal government debt, plus the liabilities of the Federal Reserve (which are just another form of federal debt) must be equal to the present value of future government surpluses (Table 1). In plain language, you owe a certain amount of money so your income in the future should equal that figure on a present value basis. Federal Reserve liabilities are also known as high powered money (the sum of deposits at the Federal Reserve banks plus currency in circulation). This proposition is critical because it means that when the Fed buys government securities it has merely substituted one type of federal debt for another. In quantitative easing (QE), the Fed purchases Treasury securities with an average maturity of about four years and replaces it with federal obligations with zero maturity. Federal Reserve deposits and currency are due on demand, and as economists say, they are zero maturity money. Thus, QE shortens the maturity of the federal debt but, as Dr. Cochrane points out, the operation has merely substituted one type for another. The sum of the two different types of liabilities must equal the present value of future governmental surpluses since both the Treasury and Fed are components of the federal government.

Calculating the present value of the stream of future surpluses requires federal outlays and expenditures and the discount rate at which the dollar value of that stream is expressed in today’s real dollars. The formula where all future liabilities must equal future surpluses must always hold. At the point that investors lose confidence in the dollar stream of future surpluses, the interest rate, or discount rate on that stream, will soar in order to keep the present value equation in balance. The surge in the discount rate is likely to result in a severe crisis like those that occurred in the past and that currently exist in Europe. In such a crisis the U.S. will be forced to make extremely difficult decisions in a very short period of time, possibly without much input from the political will of American citizens. Dr. Cochrane does not believe this point is at hand, and observes that Japan has avoided this day of reckoning for two decades. The U.S. may also be able to avoid this, but not if the deficits and debt problem are not corrected. Our interpretation of Dr. Cochrane’s analysis is that, although the U.S. has time, not to urgently redress these imbalances is irresponsible and begs for an eventual crisis.

Monetary Policy’s Numerous Misadventures

Fed policy has aggravated, rather than ameliorated our basic problems because it has encouraged an unwise and debilitating buildup of debt, while also pursuing short term policies that have increased inflation, weakened economic growth, and decreased the standard of living. No objective evidence exists that QE has improved economic conditions. Even before the Japanese earthquake and weather related problems arose this spring, real economic growth was worse than prior to QE2. Some measures of nominal activity improved, but these gains were more than eroded by the higher commodity inflation. Clearly, the median standard of living has deteriorated.
When the Fed diverts attention with QE, it is possible to lose sight of the important deficit spending, tax and regulatory barriers that are restraining the economy’s ability to grow. Raising expectations that Fed actions can make things better is a disservice since these hopes are bound to be dashed. There is ample evidence that such a treadmill serves to make consumers even more cynical and depressed. To quote Dr. Cochrane, “Mostly, it is dangerous for the Fed to claim immense power, and for us to trust that power when it is basically helpless. If Bernanke had admitted to Congress, ‘There’s nothing the Fed can do. You’d better clean this mess up fast,’ he might have a much more salutary effect.” Instead, Bernanke wrote newspaper editorials, gave speeches, and appeared on national television taking credit for improved economic conditions. In all instances these claims about the Fed’s power were greatly exaggerated.

Summary and Outlook

In the broadest sense, monetary and fiscal policies have failed because government financial transactions are not the key to prosperity. Instead, the economic well-being of a country is determined by the creativity, inventiveness and hard work of its households and individuals.
A meaningful risk exists that the economy could turn down prior to the general election in 2012, even though this would be highly unusual for presidential election years. The econometric studies that indicate the government expenditure multiplier is zero are evidenced by the prevailing, dismal business conditions. In essence, the massive federal budget deficits have not produced economic gain, but have left the country with a massively inflated level of debt and the prospect of higher interest expense for decades to come. This will be the case even if interest rates remain extremely low for the foreseeable future. The flow of state and local tax revenues will be unreliable in an environment of weak labor markets that will produce little opportunity for full time employment. Thus, state and local governments will continue to constrain the pace of economic expansion. Unemployment will remain unacceptably high and further increases should not be ruled out. The weak labor markets could in turn force home prices lower, another problematic development in current circumstances. Inflationary forces should turn tranquil, thereby contributing to an elongated period of low bond yields. The Fed may resort to another round of quantitative easing, or some other untested gimmick with a new name. Such undertakings will be no more successful than previous efforts that increased over-indebtedness or raised transitory inflation, which in turn weakened the economy by directly, or indirectly, intensifying financial pressures on households of modest and moderate means.
While the massive budget deficits and the buildup of federal debt, if not addressed, may someday result in a substantial increase in interest rates, that day is not at hand. The U.S. economy is too fragile to sustain higher interest rates except for interim, transitory periods that have been recurring in recent years. As it stands, deflation is our largest concern, therefore we remain fully committed to the long end of the Treasury bond market.