Gold News

Debt Ghouls Still Here

The US Fed really isn't stimulating the economy...
 
HALLOWEEN was last week, writes Bill Bonner in his Daily Reckoning.
 
We saw hobgoblins and scarecrows...6ft tall rodents...and at least one crow that weighed 200 lbs.
 
A few days ago, investors were sure it was QE (quantitative easing) from Here to Eternity. Now, they're not so sure. The US Federal Reserve seemed to leave some uncertainty on the matter when it made its remarks on Wednesday.
 
However, we have little doubt. The Fed will undertake no serious program of tapering off. It is determined to increase 'demand.' And the only kind of demand it knows is the kind you get from cash and credit.
 
As to real demand – what you get from actual increases in real wealth and real prosperity – the Fed knows nothing, except that it can't help.
 
The US Federal Reserve is not really stimulating a recovery. But it is simulating one...with phony demand coming from phony asset prices based on phony low interest rates. And now it can't take off the mask.
 
Because then, all the disguises, false beards, and fraudulent get-ups will have to come off – like the day after Halloween. When we see things for what they really are.
 
Then we realise that much of our stock values, our standards of living, our earnings, our balance sheets are all based on a lie – the lie of constantly expanding credit.
 
Credit has been increasing roughly twice as fast as the real economy was growing since the early '80s. That's when everyone came to believe that 'deficits don't matter.'
 
But they do matter. Because when you increase your debt faster than your income for 30 years you end up with a lot more debt than income. You also find yourself in a dead end.
 
Because your whole economy has come to depend on something that can't continue. You can't run up your debt levels forever. Eventually forever comes. And then, the masks drop...the beards fall to the ground...and the costumes come off.
 
In short, the US economy is living on borrowed money and borrowed time. And when the Fed stops adding new credit, its time will be up.

New York Times best-selling finance author Bill Bonner founded The Agora, a worldwide community for private researchers and publishers, in 1979. Financial analysts within the group exposed and predicted some of the world's biggest shifts since, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, to the collapse of the Dot Com (2000) and then mortgage finance (2008) bubbles, and the election of President Trump (2016). Sharing his personal thoughts and opinions each day from 1999 in the globally successful Daily Reckoning and then his Diary of a Rogue Economist, Bonner now makes his views and ideas available alongside analysis from a small hand-picked team of specialists through Bonner Private Research.

See full archive of Bill Bonner articles

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