Ist die Geldpolitik zu straff?
Die Frage ist doch: Straffen die Notenbanken jetzt zu viel und laufen Gefahr, der Inflation eine (unnötig schwere?) Rezession folgen zu lassen? Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argumentiert im Telegraph in diese Richtung:
- „Monetary tightening is like pulling a brick across a rough table with a piece of elastic. Central banks tug and tug: nothing happens. They tug again: the brick leaps off the surface into their faces. (…) We know today that the US economy went into recession in November 2007, much earlier than originally supposed and almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But the Federal Reserve did not know that at the time.“ – bto: Wir wissen auch, dass Lehman die Krise nicht ausgelöst hat…
- „The Fed’s ‚dynamic-factor markov-switching model‘ was showing an 8pc risk of recession. (Today it is under 5pc). It never catches recessions and is beyond useless.“ – bto: Dann ist es doch gut, dass die Notenbank dieses Instrument verwendet.
- „One might retort that had central banks paid more attention, or any attention, to the drastic monetary slowdown underway in early-to-mid 2008, they would have known what was going to hit them.“ – bto: Aber auf die Geldmengen achten wir doch nicht mehr. Das ist doch out – oder?
- „Monetarists are again crying apocalypse. They are accusing central banks of unforgivable back-to-back errors: first unleashing the Great Inflation of the early 2020s with an explosive monetary expansion, and then swinging to the other extreme of monetary contraction, on both occasions with a total disregard for the standard quantity theory of money.“ – bto: Aber wir haben doch gelernt, dass es zwischen der Geldmenge und der Inflation keinen Bezug gibt – so zumindest die Kritiker dieser Sicht.
- „The growth rate of broad M2 money has turned negative – a very rare event – and the indicator has contracted at an alarming pace of 5.4pc over the last three months. It is not just the monetarists who are fretting, though they are the most emphatic. To my knowledge, three former chief economists of different stripes from the International Monetary Fund have raised cautionary flags: Ken Rogoff, Maury Obstfeld, and Raghuram Rajan.“ – bto: … weil natürlich das Risiko ausgehend von einer Rezession deutlich höher ist für die hoch verschuldeten Volkswirtschaften der Welt.
- „Adam Slater from Oxford Economics said central banks are moving into overkill territory. ‚Policy may already be too tight. The full impact of the monetary tightening has yet to be felt, given that transmission lags from policy changes can be two years or more,‘ he said. Mr Slater said the combined tightening shock of rate rises together with the switch from QE to QT – the so-called Wu Xia ‚shadow rate‘ – amounts to 660 basis points in the US, 900 points in the eurozone, and a hair-raising 1300 points in the UK.“ – bto: Die Wu-Xia Shadow Rate quantifziert die Wirkung der Bilanzverlängerung/-verkürzung der Notenbank auf den Zins und zeigt so die Gesamtveränderung der Geldpolitik.
- „Is the Fed’s Jay Powell right to fear a repeat of the 1970s when inflation seemed to fall back only to take off again – with yet worse consequences – because the Fed relaxed policy too soon the first time? Yes, perhaps, but the money supply never crashed in this way when the Fed made its historic mistake in the mid-1970s. Critics say he is putting too much weight on the wrong risk.“ – bto: Die Börsen gehen ja davon aus, dass alles gut geht.
- „All measures of the US yield curve are flagging a massive and sustained inversion, which would normally tell the Fed to stop tightening immediately. The Fed’s preferred measure, the 10-year/3-month spread, dropped to minus 1.32 in January, the most negative ever recorded.“ – bto: Die inverse Zinskurve ist ein recht zuverlässiger Indikator für Rezessionen.
- „Broad divisia M4 is in outright contraction. He said the fall now dwarfs the largest declines seen during Paul Volcker’s scorched-earth policy against inflation in the late 1970s.“ – bto: Interessant ist aber, wie lang der time-lag ist.
- „Simon Ward from Janus Henderson says his key measure – non-financial M1 – has fallen in outright terms for the last four months. The three-month rate of contraction has accelerated to 6.6pc, the steepest dive since the data series began in 1970. The equivalent headline M1 rate is contracting at a rate of 11.7pc.“ – bto: Da das Geldmengenwachstum klar mit der wirtschaftlichen Aktivität zu tun hat, muss das entsprechende Auswirkungen haben.
- „These are startling numbers and threaten to overwhelm the windfall relief from tumbling energy costs. The sharpest contraction is now in Italy, replicating the pattern seen during the eurozone debt crisis. Eurozone bank lending has begun to contract too in what looks like the onset of a credit crunch. This did not stop the ECB raising rates by 50 basis points last week and pre-committing to another 50, as well as pledging to launch QT in March.“ – bto: Nun, wenn die EZB zuvor zu locker war, ist es durchaus möglich, dass sie überreagiert.
- „One can argue that the economic convulsions of Covid have been so weird that normal measures no longer have much meaning in any of the major developed economies. The whole nature of employment has changed.“
- „(…) the monetarists were right in warning of an unstable asset boom in the mid-Noughties, they were right in warning about the pre-Lehman contraction of money that followed, they were right about pandemic inflation, and I fear that they about right the monetary crunch developing in front of our eyes. (…) let me recall the news piece that we ran in The Telegraph in July 2008. It cites several leading monetarists. ‚The money supply data from the US, Britain, and now Europe, has begun to flash warning signals of a potential crunch. Monetarists are increasingly worried that the entire economic system of the North Atlantic could tip into debt deflation over the next two years if the authorities misjudge the risk,‘ it began. That was two months before the sky fell. The monetarists most assuredly saw it coming. So tread carefully.“
