Thursday, November 04, 2010

And So It Begins

There is simply no way now that another stimulus bill is going to pass. The spending spree by Congress at the behest of the Messiah is over. But that doesn't mean that the process of dismantling America has ended. The campaign will continue by alternative means.

Traditionally one way to pump up an economy has been to lower interest rates. The way to slow economic inflation is to raise them. It isn't really that simply, but the essentials are there. If you lower the cost of loans people will be able to qualify and buy homes (See, there is some of the complication! Congress had eliminated the need to qualify because everyone has a "right" to home ownership.) But, in the simple form, lowering interest rates means you can buy a car, buy a home, buy a television, buy furniture, expand your business, HIRE NEW WORKERS, and all of that grows the economy, fuels demand for goods, and stimulates.

What do you do when lowering the interest rate again and again and yet again, doesn't get the results you want? Where do you go after you've gotten to one quarter of one percent interest on federal funds?

How does a government which can't hand out money anymore because they have regulated the economy into stagnation and there is drastically declining tax revenue; how do you then hand out still more?

You borrow initially. You ask other people to invest in your future on their own behalf. We've done that and the efficacy of paying real interest to other nations in the world to finance our policies of charging virtually no interest is obviously counter-productive.

Then you go to the monetarist solution. You adjust the money supply by other means than interest rate adjustment or borrowing against tomorrow. You create money out of nothing.

Once upon a time, money was an exchange medium with intrinsic value. The valued item was usually portable, universally desired, commonly accepted and sufficiently rare to have the required value. Precious metals are perfect examples of that. Gold is good. Give me a piece of gold for my bushel of corn and I can take it to the tailor and trade it for a suit of clothes. We have a common medium of exchange.

But if you delink the symbolic money from an item of intrinsic value, you then are no longer constrained. You are the government and if the need arises you can simply fire up the printing presses. That was the solution of the late 1920's and early 1930's in Weimar Germany.

The Treaty of Versailles had been punitive and the winners of the war demanded reparations from the loser, Germany. A devastated Germany, attempting to create a stable republic, rebuild a shattered nation and also pay the punitive reparations took a gamble. They printed more money. More paper in higher denominations. The school yard equivalent is that you have $1.00 and you owe $10.00. Simply write in the required zero on that bill. Voila! You've paid.

Fed To Redeem T-Bills and Pump Up Money Supply

It isn't REAL money! It is paper signifying value but with more certificates claiming a chunk of the same pie, the value of each certificate becomes less. That is inflation.

A bit of inflation is good. A healthy economy inflates at about 2% per year. That makes us feel good when we get a raise every year in our pay and prices don't seem to run away from us.

In Weimar, however, the solution got out of hand. A Reichsmark, became a hundred Reichsmarks and then the same purchase took a thousand, then a hundred thousand then millions of Reichsmarks. A loaf of bread took a wheelbarrow full of money, literally. Savings became worthless. Workers were paid hourly. Not an hourly wage, but actually received their money each hour for their labor because the value was declining so rapidly.

Relatives waited at the factory door for the workers to rush out with their stacks of Reichsmarks, then hurry to the shops to buy something before the pile of money became inadequate.

They've got a comfortable name for this move now. It's called "quantitative easing" not printing money or inflating the currency. They are going to "ease" the "quantity" of money out there. Each unit in this larger quantity will be worth less than the day before, but that doesn't matter any more.

Weimar collapsed, you may recall and a World War I veteran of the trenches with a funny mustache and a gift for emotional rhetoric made a remarkable rise to power.

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