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The Fed is Battling Debt Deflation with More Debt—an Essay in Lunacy.

The Fed is Battling Debt Deflation with More Debt—an Essay in Lunacy.

 

The Fed has panicked and is struggling to fight deflation with more debt, the very item that caused the problem in the beginning. Bush has just agreed to bail out Detroit with 17.4 bln of your money and that will fail as the auto business is in a depression world-wide. GM owes 60 bln and cannot recover no matte what.  O’Bozo plans to spend a trillion or two more and tax carbon.

 

From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph.

 

Today we call this "Gladwell's tipping point". Once it goes, you can't get back up. This is why the Federal Reserve has resorted to emergency measures that seem mad at first sight.[1]--Federal Reserve is damned either way as it battles debt and deflation By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Last Updated: 6:34PM GMT 18 Dec 2008 [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]

 

There is a critical timing point whereby the deflation will suddenly reverse violently and become hyper inflation as we read here from the same link:

 

Brian Reading from Lombard Street Research has revived this neglected thesis and come up with some disturbing figures. US household debt is now $13.9 trillion, down just 1pc from its peak last year. Meanwhile household wealth [This was at 57 trillion last month, ed] has fallen 14pc as property crashes, a loss of $6.67 trillion. The debt-to-wealth ratio is rocketing.”

 

Now, the bond markets are in jeopardy as their might be a bond bubble. As if we haven’t seen enough bubbles in this Lawrence Welk Freak Show[2] already.

 

For now, the bond markets are quiet. Futures contracts are pricing five years of deflation in the US. Yields on 10-year US Treasuries have halved since early November to 2.09pc, the lowest since the Fed's data began. Three-month dollar LIBOR has plummeted to 1.53pc.

It is the same pattern across the world. 10-year yields have fallen to 1.27pc in Japan, 3pc in Germany, 3.2pc in Britain, and 3.49pc in France.

 

The bond markets seem to be betting that emergency action by central banks will take a very long time to work, if it works at all. By cutting to zero, the Fed has come close to shutting down the US 'repo' market that plays a crucial role in providing liquidity. It has caused havoc to the $3.5 trillion money markets - as the Bank of Japan, burned by experienced, had warned. It has become even harder for banks to raise money. Some argue that extreme monetary policy is already doing more harm than good.”

 

The world has never been in this kind of mess before. We wonder why gold has not soared. Who knows what a ‘bond bubble’ might look like?

 

This is not the fault of Bush2 or the US entirely. The world is having a real estate market drop and equity is vanishing so the debt ratio is rising. Many people have mortgages that are above the value of their real estate.

 

People better think again what Dave Ramsey is saying about debt. Today, the dollar is stronger and gold went down a bit. Strange.

 

I am not sure anybody knows how the system works.

 

rycK

 

Comments to: ryckki@gmail.com

 



[1] Federal Reserve is damned either way as it battles debt and deflation

We know what causes a recession to metastasize into a slump. Irving Fisher, the paramount US economist of the inter-war years, wrote the text in 1933: "Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions". http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/3834108/Federal-Reserve-is-damned-either-way-as-it-battles-debt-and-deflation.html  

 

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