Sunday, September 15, 2013

House of Cards

Recent key US economic prints telegraphed a wilt for Q3; and equities erupt. What?  To regular folk this appears to be the theater of the absurd. They’re right.

Many of us understand it is something else - a house of cards.

Recall the normal cycle of expansion, contraction; then a re-birthing and then expansion anew – all very healthy.  Planners have aborted that process.

Some are beginning to catch on (after trashing a system that worked very well before they came along) that to interfere with the natural pricing mechanism will backfire. For example, some Fed staffers are worried about the chasm between equity prices and economic reality; some staffers in fact very close to Bernanke. This is why QE will be eased despite a “surprisingly” slower Q3 - because of the threat of an abscess.

Bernanke has unplugged the normal pricing mechanism. Thus the equity market takes off after weak data because one man at the Fed says it should. In the meantime, another sector, say normal, everyday retired folks who’ve got to keep the little they have safe and sound, get knifed because planners have decided that fate for them.

Background:  We know from the works of Friedman, Taylor, von Mises, Rueff, and others that rule-based policy making creates more prosperity than discretionary policy making. For example, US economic performance during periods of rule-based policy making has eclipsed periods of discretionary policy making; that is, the 60’s – 70’s was discretionary, then ‘85 – 2003, rule-based; and then  2003 to present - discretionary. Performance during the ‘85- 2003 period blew away the other two.

Planners at the Fed have rigged the system. They, the anointed, have selected certain sectors of the economy to fire, and others, to extinguish. This practice – the distribution of favors - is immoral.

For an anchor, recall the incestuous relationship between the Fed and the banks. This reality explains a lot (and why most of these guys who hatched the ’08 debacle are not under house arrest beats us). As fund manager Seth Klarman put it recently, when referring to Bernanke’s Fed, “What kind of ….entity cajoles savers to spend…tricks its citizens into paying higher and higher prices to buy stocks…and drives the return on retirees’ savings to zero… in order to rescue poorly managed banks?”

Guess.  And it can come to no good; meaning that what could have been a vigorous recovery will be instead, anemic; all due to the Fed’s meddling.


Robert Craven

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