Crasht die Fed die Märkte und die Wirtschaft? The Telegraph sagt laut: “Ja“.
- „The New York Federal Reserve’s internal model is flashing an 80pc risk that the US economy will enter a sustained contraction in the second half of this year, much sooner than presumed just weeks ago. The chances of a ‘soft landing’ have dropped to 10pc. If so, you can stop worrying about an inflationary spiral.“ – bto: Aber eine Stagflation können wir auch nicht ausschließen, gibt es doch einige inflationäre Faktoren.
- „The institution’s ‘dynamic stochastic general equilibrium’ model (DSGE) points to an outright fall in GDP of 0.6pc this year and a further fall of 0.5pc next year. It likens the current picture to the 1990 recession under George Bush senior, triggered by the First Gulf War.“ – bto: Das wäre erheblich und hätte natürlich entsprechend negative Wirkungen für die Weltwirtschaft.
- Dann kommt noch das Argument von Tim Congdon & Co. (siehe Podcasts): “Monetarists think the DSGE model understates the danger since it entirely ignores the role of money in the economy. It treats the abrupt switch from extreme quantitative easing to extreme quantitative tightening – a $2.4 trillion reversal, annualised – as mostly background noise. This New Keynesian blind spot on how QE works (through the banking multiplier) has misled the Fed before, and may be misleading the Fed now.” – bto: Das hatten wir schon diskutiert. Es ist eigentlich auch durch den Staat getrieben, der weniger Schulden macht, und es kommt bekanntlich auf das Delta an!
- „The New York Fed’s backhanded mea culpa has not chastened Fed rate-setters, still outdoing each other with blood curdling war cries. ‘I don’t care what’s causing inflation, it’s too high, it’s my job to get it down,’ said Governor Christopher Waller. He called for a further 75 point rise in July, to be followed by fast and furious tightening through the autumn.“ – bto: Wenn das zuvor Gesagte stimmt, denke ich eher, dass es der Versuch ist, über Rhetorik die Inflationserwartungen zu drücken.
- „Large parts of the US equity market have already priced in a light recession, as have European bourses. They have not come close to pricing in a severe recession, and that is what we may soon get if the Fed and other western central banks allow themselves to be stampeded into overreacting: first to the legacy effect of a one-off Covid price shock; and now to the imported raw materials shock caused by Vladimir Putin, abetted by OPEC dictatorships.“ – bto: Der monetäre Überhang ist die Folge der Notenbankpolitik der letzten Jahre. Das gehört dazu.
- „Michael Hartnett from Bank of America said that in normal circumstances this would be an enticing moment for contrarian investors to feast on equities at bargain prices. But be careful. Markets are defending a ‘one-yard line’ just above a wicked cluster of technical levels. (…) Mr Hartnett said the ratio of US financial assets to GDP bottomed at a multiple of 2.8 in the early 1980s under Paul Volcker, the last time the Fed pursued a scorched-earth policy against inflation. The ratio is 6.3 today, still close to an all-time peak.“ – bto: 40 Jahre Notenbank befeuerte die Assetpreis-Inflation. Nur auf 2.8 werden wir es nicht bekommen. Denn dann droht eine Depression und davor steigen die Helikopter auf.
- “The Fed risks becoming a captive of its muscular language. (…) The more it escalates the rhetoric, tossing red meat to hard-money Republicans soon to regain Congress, the harder it will be to do a timely U-turn before it is too late. (…) Chairman Jay Powell is haunted by the ghost of Arthur Burns, the money-printing accomplice of the Great Inflation in the 1970s. ‘Jay has no intention of going down as Arthur Burns 2.0. If anything, he will go down as Volcker 2.0. He is prepared to do whatever it takes,’ he said.” – bto: eine Analyse, die – wenn sie denn zutrifft – in der Tat für eine Rezession spricht.
- „The Fed got into its current difficulties by willfully refusing to look at US money supply signals. The error was to continue monetising the gargantuan Trump-Biden fiscal deficits during Covid-19 with purchases of US Treasuries, almost dollar for dollar, after a V-shaped recovery was clearly underway. Perhaps chairman Jay Powell had no choice. The Biden White House would have been outraged had the Fed ‘sabotaged’ its New Deal experiment. ‘The progressives came into office breathing fire with their wacko MMT theories (ie, debt has no cost). The Fed had to let them have their chance,’ said Harvard professor Ken Rogoff.“ – bto: Damit ist bewiesen, dass zu viel Nachfrage zu Inflation führt. Gemäß MMT hätte die Politik die Steuern erhöhen müssen, um die Inflation zu verhindern bzw. zu dämpfen. Wenig verwunderlich ist, dass sie es nicht getan hat.
- „But this experiment let loose a 40pc increase in M3 money and flooded the system with liquidity. It fuelled annual inflation of 20pc in the US home price index – greater than the subprime peak – as well as the Bitcoin Ponzi scheme and algorithmic eyewash like Terra. The Powell Fed now risks the opposite mistake. It is ignoring an accelerating contraction in real money growth: just as it did, lest we forget, before the Lehman crisis in mid-2008.“ – bto: Den Punkt hat er schon vorher gemacht und er entspricht den Aussagen Tim Congdons.
- „Simon Ward from Janus Henderson says his early warning indicator – the growth of real six-month M1 (annualised) – turned steeply negative in the US early this year. It is much the same picture in the UK, Europe, and the largest emerging economies, bar China. He says the current rate of contraction of ‘real narrow money’ in the G7 bloc has occurred just twice before over the last half century: in 1973 and 1979, both on the cusp of severe recessions. Furthermore, the rate of contraction of ‘broad’ M3-M4 money is even faster today in real terms than during those episodes.” – bto: Dennoch hatten wir in den 1970er-Jahren mit Inflation zu tun. Stagflation. Ich habe mal nachgesehen: 1974 lag die Inflation in den USA bei 11 Prozent und 1980 bei 13,55 Prozent. Es kann also doppelt schlimm kommen.
- Und es mehren sich die Rezessionssignale: “The US homebuilders index went into freefall and is now down 40pc this year, not surprisingly since the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has doubled to 5.8pc since December. Lumber prices have fallen 70pc over the last three months. Retail inventories are rising at the steepest rate since the Fed’s data series began in the early 1990s because shoppers are tightening their belts, to the point where the store chain Target is slashing prices to offload stock.“ – bto: Was ja wiederum gut ist, bedeutet es doch eine Dämpfung des Preisdrucks.
- „The puzzle is why the Fed is vowing to crush inflation with Volckerite zeal, whatever the cost in lost jobs and broken businesses, just at its own model screams recession. Much of the price shock is from energy costs beyond Fed control. Higher energy prices are arguably deflationary for other parts of the economy. One Ben Bernanke argued exactly that in a famous Princeton paper.“ – bto: Das stimmt natürlich und trifft auch auf Europa zu. Deshalb hat die EZB sich auch so zurückgehalten. Andererseits sehen wir in der Schweiz, dass doch gehandelt wird. Es ist eine Gratwanderung und letztlich wird die Politik der Fed entscheiden, wohin die Reise geht.
- „The benign view is that the Fed has to act after inflation expectations suddenly became unhinged, (…) Slowing money growth will bring down inflation gradually without the need to devastate so many people’s lives. The Fed itself published a paper last September debunking the theory of inflation expectations, calling it one of many notions in mainstream economics ‘that ‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense’.“ – bto: So ist es leider.
- „The less benign view is that the Powell Fed is deliberately engineering a slump because that is the easiest political path in dealing with a truculent Congress and inflation apoplexy on Fox News. What we are seeing is the fatal politicisation of monetary management at the world’s superpower central bank, with variants of the same story playing out in Britain and Europe.“ – bto: In Europa ist das Geldmanagement anders politisiert. Da geht es um die Rettung des Euro.
