from Casey Research via
(snip)"Alex Daley: Hello. I'm Alex Daley. Welcome to another edition of Conversations with Casey. Today our guest is former Reagan Budget Director and Congressman David Stockman. Welcome to the show, David.
David Stockman: Glad to be here.
Alex: So we're here in Florida talking at the Recovery Reality Check Casey Summit. What do you think: is the United States economy on the road to recovery?
David: I don't think we are at the beginning of the recovery. I think we are at the end of a disastrous debt supercycle that has gone on for the last thirty or forty years, really. It started when Nixon defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods and closed the gold window. Incrementally, year after year since then, we have been going in a direction of extremely unsound money, of massive borrowing in both the private and the public sector. We now have an economy that is saturated with debt: $54 trillion or $53 trillion 3.5 times the GDP way off the charts from where it was for a hundred years prior to the beginning of this. The idea that somehow all of that debt is irrelevant, as the Keynesians would tell us, is fundamentally wrong and the reason why the economy can't get up off the mat.
We're doing all the wrong things. We're adding to the problem, not subtracting. We are not allowing the debt to be worked down and liquidated. We're not asking people to save more and consume less, which is what we really need to do. And so therefore I think policy is just making it worse, and any day now we will have another recurrence of the kind of economic crisis we had a few years ago.
Alex: You paint a very stark picture, but if people just stop spending, start saving, won't companies like Apple see their earnings hurt? Won't the stock market then start to tumble, people's net worth fall? Isn't that a negative cycle that feeds on itself?
David: Sure it does, but you can't live beyond your means because it's pleasant. It's not sustainable. Clearly the level of debt that we have is not sustainable. We have a whole generation the Baby Boom that's about ready to retire, and they have no retirement savings. We have a federal government that is bankrupt, literally. Its [debt is] $16 trillion and growing by a trillion a year. Something's going to give. We can't pay for all these entitlements. There won't be the revenue generation in the economy to do it.
So as a result of that, we are deluding ourselves if we think we can just continue to spend. Look at the GDP that came out in the first quarter of this year. It was only 2.2%. Most of it was personal consumption expenditure, and half of that was due to a drawdown of the savings rate, not because the economy was earning more income or generating more real output. It was because of a drawdown of savings. That is exactly the wrong way to go an indication of how severe the crisis is going to be.
I'm not saying the economy should stop spending entirely. I'm only saying you can't save 3% of GDP and spend 97% if you are going to get out of this fix. As the savings rate goes up both in the public sector (which means reduction of spending and the deficit) and the household sector (to seriously reduce debt burden, which has not really happened) we are going to, on the margin, spend less, save more. It will slow down the economy. It will undermine profits, I agree. But profits today are way overstated. They're based on a debt-bloated economy that isn't sustainable.
Alex: So we can only live beyond our means for so long, as any family knows.
David: Yes.
Alex: Now, the government can reduce its expenses at any time by simply reducing spending, and it can reduce debt if it brings in more tax revenue. That's austerity I think that's how they refer to it. But won't austerity cause massive joblessness? Won't there be millions more people in this country not receiving a paycheck?
David: Yes, but the critique, the clamoring and clattering that you hear from the Keynesians (or even mainstream media, which is pretty clueless economically) that austerity is bad forgets the fact that austerity isn't an elective course. Austerity is something that happens to you when you're broke. And yes, it is painful and spending will go down and unemployment will go up and incomes will be impaired, but that is a consequence of the excess debt creation that we've had for the last thirty years. So austerity is what happens when you break the rules.
And somehow we have this debate going on. They're making a mistake. They chose the wrong strategy. Do you think Greece chose the wrong strategy with austerity? No. No one would lend them money. That's why they ended up in the place they were. Do you think that Spain today is teetering on the brink because they said, "Oh, wouldn't it be a good idea to have austerity?" No, they had a gun to their head. They were forced to do this because the markets would not continue to lend, and even now their interest rate is again rising. The markets are losing confidence, and unless the ECB prints some more money and bails them out some more, they are going to have austerity. So the austerity upon us is the backside of the debt supercycle we had for the past thirty years. It's not discretionary.
Alex: Austerity hasn't been forced upon us yet. The dollar is up, people are continuing to buy Treasuries both nations and banks are buying Treasuries. To all extents and purposes, people are continuing to show massive confidence in the US government, lend it money at extremely cheap interest rates, and letting it build up its debt.
So you are advocating that, unlike Greece or Spain taking it to the edge and having austerity forced on them, we should volunteer for austerity today? Instead of just kicking the can down the road and living high a little bit longer, until the bill collectors finally come knocking? Why go today, why start austerity now instead of doing what Greece did and going as long as you possibly can?
David: Because Greece is a $300 billion economy. Tiny. A rounding error in the great scheme of things. It's last time I checked about eight and a half months' worth of Walmart sales. Okay? That's a little different than when you have the $15 trillion heartland of the world economy, and the $11 trillion Treasury market which is at the center of the whole global financial system buckle and falter. That's the risk you're taking if you say, "Maρana. Kick the can; let's just wait for something good to happen."
This market isn't real. The two percent on the ten-year, the ninety basis points on the five-year, thirty basis points on a one-year those are medicated, pegged rates created by the Fed and which fast-money traders trade against as long as they are confident the Fed can keep the whole market rigged. Nobody in their right mind wants to own the ten-year bond at a two percent interest rate. But they're doing it because they can borrow overnight money for free, ten basis points, put it on repo, collect 190 basis points a spread, and laugh all the way to the bank. And they will keep laughing all the way to the bank on Wall Street until they lose confidence in the Fed's ability to keep the yield curve pegged where it is today. If the bond ever starts falling in price, they unwind the carry trade. They unwind the repo, because then you can't collect 190 basis points.
Then you get a message, "Do not pass go." Sell your bonds, unwind your overnight debt, your repo positions. And the system then begins to contract exactly what happened in September and October of 2008. Only, that time it was an unwind to the repo on mortgage-backed securities and CDOs and so forth. That was a minor trial run for the great unwind that is going to happen when the Treasury market is finally shattered with a lack of confidence because, on the margin, no one owns a Treasury bond: they just rent it on borrowed money. If the price starts falling, they'll get out of that trade as fast as they got out of toxic CDOs.
Alex: So when people run away from the US, they will run away all at once.
David: Well, if they run away from the Treasury, it sends compounding forces of contagion through the entire financial system. It hits next the MBS and the mortgage market. The mortgage market then scares the hell out of people about the housing recovery, which hasn't happened anyway. And if there isn't a housing recovery, middle-class Main-Street confidence isn't going to recover, because it is the only asset they have, and for 25 million households it's under water or close to under water.
Alex: We saw something much like that in 2008. All the markets correlated. Stocks went down. Bonds went down. Gold went down with them. It sounds like what you're saying is that the Fed is effectively paying bankers to stay confident in the Fed, and that the moment that stops either because the Fed stops paying them or something else shakes their confidence this all goes down in one big house of cards?
David: Yes, I think that's right. The Fed has destroyed the money market. It has destroyed the capital markets. They have something that you can see on the screen called an "interest rate." That isn't a market price of money or a market price of five-year debt capital. That is an administered price that the Fed has set and that every trader watches by the minute to make sure that he's still in a positive spread. And you can't have capitalism if the capital markets are dead, if the capital markets are simply a branch office branch casino of the central bank. That's essentially what we have today.
Alex: Last night you told our audience that if you were elected president, the first thing you would do is quit. Or at least demand a recount, I believe were your words, which I thought was telling. Are you saying there are no policy changes we could make today that would get us out of this? Or at least that wouldn't get you assassinated?
David: Yeah, there is a paper blueprint. People who believe in sound money and fiscal responsibility, that you create wealth the old-fashioned way through savings and work and effort and not simply by printing money and trading pieces of paper there is a plan that they could put together. One would be to put the Fed out of business. You don't have to "end the Fed," although I like Ron Paul's phrase. You have to get them out of discretionary, active, day-to-day meddling in the money markets. Abolish the Open Market Committee.
The Fed has taken its balance sheet to $3 trillion. That's enough for the next 50 years. They don't have to do a damn thing except maybe have a discount window that floats above the market, and if things get tight, let the interest rate go up. People who have been speculating will be carried out on a stretcher. That's how they used to do it. It worked prior to 1914. That's the first step: abolish the Open Market Committee. Abolish discretionary monetary policy.
Let the Fed, if you're going to keep it I don't even know that you need to do that, but if you are going to keep it be only a standby source. As Bagehot said (Walter Bagehot, the great 19th-century British financial thinker): provide liquidity at a penalty rate to sound collateral.
Now, that's what J.P. Morgan did in 1907, in the great crisis of 1907, from his library. He didn't have a printing press. He didn't bail out everybody. He didn't do what Bernanke did and say: "Stop the presses, freeze everybody, and prop up Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and all the rest of the speculators." The interest rate, the call-money interest rate, which was the open-market interest rate at the time, some days went to 30, 40, 70% and they were carrying out the speculators left and right, liquidating margin debt, taking out the real estate speculators. Eight or ten railroads went bankrupt within a couple of months. The copper magnates got carried out on their shields.
This is the only way a capital market can work, but it needs an honest interest rate. And we have no interest rate, so therefore we solve nothing and we have the kind of impaired, incapacitated markets that we have today. They're very dangerous, because they're all dependent on twelve people. It is what I call "the monetary Politburo of the Western world," and they are just as dangerous as the Politburo in Beijing or the Politburo of memory in Moscow.
Alex: A twelve-person Open Market Committee determining the future of our economy by manipulating rates. Sounds like central planning to me.
David: It is. They are monetary central planners who are attempting to use the crude instrument of interest-rate pegging and yield-curve manipulation and essentially buying debt that no one else would buy, in order to keep this whole system afloat. It's Ponzi economics. Anybody who had financial training before 1970 would instantly recognize this as Ponzi economics. It is only because of the last twenty years we got so inured to prosperity out of the end of a printing press and massive incremental debt that people lost sight of the fundamental principles of sound money, which, there's nothing arcane about it. It's just common sense. It is not common sense to think that 50, 60, 70% of all the debt that's being created by the federal government can be bought by the Federal Reserve, stuffed in a vault, and everybody can live happily ever after."(snip)



Reply With Quote

Bookmarks