Posted on 04/09/2019 4:47:47 AM PDT by Kaslin
What caused the financial crisis and Great Recession? A decade later, economists still don't have a good answer. Of course, the financial bubble in the housing market was the proximate cause, but this begs the question of what inflated the bubble that burst in the first place.
This isn't just an academic exercise for the history books. It's critical that we never repeat the mistakes that liquidated more than $7 trillion of wealth and sent unemployment rates to their highest levels in three decades.
The real estate bubble was certainly exacerbated by half-witted national housing policies that offered low-down-payment mortgages with near 100 percent taxpayer guarantees to non-credit-worthy borrowers. The government made it easy for families to buy homes they couldn't afford. And when the defaults rolled in, the taxpayers picked up the tab. But the role of low interest rates and inflationary monetary policy is underappreciated.
My colleague Louis Woodhill has crunched the numbers here. Woodhill finds that from October 2001 to July 2006, the Fed inflated and inflated with artificially low interest rates. The CRB commodity price index, which includes everything from aluminum to zinc, nearly doubled (up 84 percent). Oil prices more than doubled, to almost $75 a barrel.
These rising prices encouraged Americans to invest in inflation hedges -- like houses. The Case-Shiller 20-Cities Home Price index rose in tandem with commodities, both peaking in July 2006. Then the Fed finally noticed the inflation and violently reversed course by raising interest rates, pushing the CRB index down by 14 percent in just six months.
This popped the housing bubble for sure, but there was no soft landing. The Fed's shift from inflation to deflation inadvertently crushed the mortgage-backed securities markets. This made the recession that began in December 2007 inevitable. Then, a second course-reversal by the Fed in June 2008 created a severe scarcity of dollars that contributed to the collapse of the real economy.
If the Fed had been watching commodity prices and had held them stable, as Woodhill and I recommend in a recent Wall Street Journal article, these wild gyrations in prices would have been avoided. A housing correction might still have happened, but the economic carnage would have been limited.
In a March 27 article in The Wall Street Journal, economics columnist Greg Ip argued that critics of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell -- like Woodhill and I -- are wrong to recommend that the Fed keep prices for commodities stable.
Ip asserts that if the Fed had been targeting commodity prices in the 2000s, this would have made the recession worse by "tightening monetary policy in 2008 as the U.S. slid into its worst recession since the 1930s."
Ip doesn't get it. The financial bubble (which, by the way, the WSJ editorial page, where I worked, accurately warned of at the time) would have never been allowed to so severely overinflate if the commodity index had been held stable all along. The Fed would never have gotten itself into a position where it had to finance $1 trillion in bailouts.
The two-decade growth boom from 1983-2000 was characterized by relatively stable commodity prices. Economists now call this period "The Great Moderation," because growth was high and prices flat. That is what the Fed should be attentive to today. Other prices (e.g., consumer, producer and asset prices) should also be closely monitored, but stable prices and a stable economy require stable commodities. When it comes to inflation, commodity prices are the canary in the coal mine because this information is available to policymakers in real time.
If the Fed targets stable prices on top of the pro-growth tax, regulatory and energy policies the Trump administration has implemented, 3 to 4 percent real growth with continued rising wages for workers and low inflation is easily achievable over the next several years at least.
I think it was manipulated to get Obama into the White House.
Meh. An analyst noted that we need not prevent it, we need these recessions to knock off weak entrepreneurs and let the strong thrive. All this easy interest rate is a subsidy for low growth cash cows that do not inovate and choke up better companies.
Keep the radical rats out
I know folks with houses in the 2 to 3 hundred grand range who are paying five figures in property taxes annually.
Carnage is coming.
The rampant inflation in commodity prices was caused by the collapse in the value of the U.S. dollar. This was not caused primarily by artificially low interest rates. It was driven by a flood of U.S. cash in the global market as our government financed the Iraq war with hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures that never showed up in our military budget. It's no secret that the U.S. military was shipping pallets of paper currency overseas to bribe Iraqi tribal leaders in the mid-2000s. That money has been flooding the Middle East for years, as most of these people took it and bought real estate assets outside Iraq so they could flee to more stable countries.
If Steve Moore doesn't understand this -- or (even worse) -- knows it well but refuses to mention it in a column like this -- then I'm going to suggest that he's not the right guy for a position on the Fed board.
Bingo.
In 2009, the Pentagon issued a report that the US was subjected to economic terrorism in 2008. “Financial subversion arrived out by unknown parties.” The report described a 3 phase attack perpetuated on our financial system. The media didn’t care, and Congress didn’t care. The Fed certainly didn’t care. To this day, the full truth has not seen the light of day. I predict the powers that be will try a similar attack prior to the 2020 election.
“arrived” = “carried”
we need these recessions to knock off weak entrepreneurs and let the strong thrive.
~~~
But when half the people in your corporation are from DC, and vice versa, then you get trillion dollar bailouts, and the only weak entrepreneurs who get knocked off are the political outsiders who probably only adopted ‘weak’ (risky) investment trategies because the market was too competitive not to.
The two-decade growth boom from 1983-2000 was characterized by relatively stable commodity prices. Economists now call this period “The Great Moderation,” because growth was high and prices flat. That is what the Fed should be attentive to today. Other prices (e.g., consumer, producer and asset prices) should also be closely monitored, but stable prices and a stable economy require stable commodities. When it comes to inflation, commodity prices are the canary in the coal mine because this information is available to policymakers in real time.
If the Fed targets stable prices on top of the pro-growth tax, regulatory and energy policies the Trump administration has implemented, 3 to 4 percent real growth with continued rising wages for workers and low inflation is easily achievable over the next several years at least.
...
In other words, economic growth doen’t cause inflation.
In classical economic theory, inflation is the result of an imbalance between supply and demand. In the modern world, inflation is now almost universally a currency valuation issue. In other words, inflation doesn’t occur because of excess demand vs. supply, but because the value of the currency declines due to government monetary policy.
Don't elect liberals.
Of course we know... Democrats caused it with a combination of the Affordable Housing Act, twisting bank arms to lend subprime, giving the banks a way to profit from subprime loans by having Fannie & Freddie buy the mortgages and gave regulatory permission to create Mortgage Backed Securities. This caused a feedback loop of no-documentation loans and skyrocketing prices. When the you-know-what hit the fan they instituted the suicidal rule of “mark to market”.
They don’t want you to know that, though. So they blame “greedy banks and mortgage brokers”, who are so highly regulated they can’t sneeze without permission.
Why not just say it? The above was a Clinton debacle. Forcing Fannie May and Freddie Mac to guarantee mortgage loans to people with bad credit. Then we saw, once again, why they have bad credit. Because they buy more than they can afford and they don't pay their bills.
Clinton was a doofus, only a step above Cortez who, is absolutely economically retarded.
O'Bummer? As per economics, he never made it out of ChiCongo's south side.
“I know folks with houses in the 2 to 3 hundred grand range who are paying five figures in property taxes annually.”
Lake County IL is an excellent example of that. Home prices are dropping like stones there. And a huge percentage of those taxes are going to pay pensions for retired public employees.
“Carnage is coming.”
When the first wave of Chapter 9s are filed here that will open the floodgates.
L
Public debt is the albatross around all our necks.
>What caused the financial crisis and Great Recession?
Democrats.
Jamie Gorelick got paid $25,000,000 to look the other way.
Barney Frank got a young piece of male ass to fight George W. Bush’s calls for oversight of Fannie and Freddie.
And yes it was a plot to tank the economy to put Rats back in control off Congress.
But the “economy” is good.
Ha ha ha ha.
The FED tightened the money supply to cause the depression and the FED admitted they caused the depression. They need a reset now form a war or depression to reset their books to continue their skimming of the American economy.
A women in my extended family is a good example of the stupidity of the banking orders.
She had a degree in enviromental science from the University of Maryland. She moved to Raleigh where there were said to be jobs for persons “in her field” . She managed to get a job collecting water samples to be delivered to the lab.
Rather than pay rent, she ws encouraged to buy a house and develop equity. She lacked the resources but got a 100% loan. She quickly discovered the place was not up to her upbring nor expectations. Being totally without any skills or the desire to develop skills she was in trouble.
She didn’t earn enough to make ends meet. She took on a waitress job. Her father was concerned when he couldn’t get her on the phone. He came to NC to discover that not olny was he phone out, but her electricity was out. And on and on and on.
Salvation came in the form of a military officer in need of a wife. Being a let winger, she would not accept being a military wife and would never live on post. As a matter of fact, she would tell people she lived and he worked in a city near the post.
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