Deleveraging: The Real Crisis
Michael Kinsley asks Republicans to make a choice: You can have less debt or you can have more jobs:
Now, you can criticize this policy from many perspectives. You can say, with liberal economists like Paul Krugman, that the stimulus wasn’t big enough. The economy is still wobbly at best. We should have spent double or triple what we did. You can say (as I do) that the stimulus will lead to disastrous inflation unless we offer a more convincing plan about how we’re going to pay it all back in the long run. You can say, as the Republicans do, that we should have cut taxes more and increased spending less. You can get a similar bounce either way.
But you can’t say with any hope of being taken seriously that the stimulus of $4 trillion of deficit spending destroyed jobs.
Let’s stop arguing about what creates more jobs: supply side tax cuts or Keynesian government spending. Let’s start focusing on the real issue that will come to define our generation, namely deleveraging. Politicians can’t have their cake and eat it too. We can’t reduce the deficit while still preserving growth, something has to give. To take a very concrete example, the upcoming “fiscal cliff” of automatic spending cuts and tax increases that is set to become a reality will shrink our GDP by as much as 4%-5% from it’s current measly <2% growth (Wall Street Economists). Remember, this fiscal cliff is also the watered down deficit reduction plan that came due to a failure to reach a broader deficit reduction program. The contraction could have been much worse.
If we are to take solace in anything it is that the Fed can offset any fiscal cliff GDP contraction with further quantitative easing, which is the most probable solution. If the stock market tanks enough you can rest assured that the Fed will print enough money to keep your 401k afloat. The real issue isn’t another American cataclysmic financial meltdown, it’s runaway inflation. It’s foolhardy for anyone to claim that Keynesian spending, deficit inducing tax cuts, or QE does not create inflation. Who is to say that the inflation we experienced in the late 1970’s wasn’t a result of WWII and post-WWII spending? No one really knows. If I had to pick the lesser of two evils, a Japanese style slow-growth deflationary environment seems preferable to an inflationary spiral.
On a related note, the ECB came out today with a highly anticipated statement regarding peripheral debt yields. Their leaked proposal is an “unlimited, sterilized bond buying” of peripheral debt, hoping to contain the crisis and give the local government time to decrease their debt burdens and increase competitiveness.
There are a couple of major issues here. First, it seems that ECB President Mario Draghi and his fellows don’t understand the concept of sterilized bond buying. Similar to the Fed’s Operation Twist, sterilized bond buying is simply money supply neutral, meaning that the ECB has to sell (non-peripheral) debt from its balance sheet to offset the purchases in Spanish and Italian bonds. The issue is that the ECB’s balance sheet is currently at 3 trillion Euros, some of which is already peripheral debt. So ignoring the fact that selling peripheral debt in order to buy peripheral debt has zero effect on markets, we can see the issue with claiming that this program is “unlimited” in nature. It is simply mathematically impossible for them to buy more than 3 trillion in peripheral debt. The ECB has essentially created a bazooka that shoots water balloons. Underlying this decision is the ECB’s need to calm markets, hence the need for language such as “unlimited,” yet also appeasing the German inflationary hawks by sterilizing the program.
It’s pretty much a non-starter, and with the Fed unwilling to act ahead of the upcoming U.S. election, I think the markets will be in for a pretty ugly month of September.