Hopefully, Bloomberg true to itself, features some great reports. The vocabulary used in the article has changed, and what used to be considered a mathematical science (Keynesian economics and monetary policy) is now betting, gambling, experimenting.
Bernanke Bet on Keynes Has Meltzer Seeing 1970s-Style InflationPrevious posts:
April 13 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is siding with John Maynard Keynes against Milton Friedman by flooding the financial system with money.
If history is any guide, says Allan Meltzer, the effort will end in tears. Inflation “will get higher than it was in the 1970s,” says Meltzer, the Fed historian and professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. At the end of that decade, consumer prices rose at a year-over- year rate of 13.3 percent.
Bernanke’s gamble that the highest jobless rate in 25 years and the most idle factory capacity on record will hold down inflation is straight out of the late British economist Keynes. Should late Nobel-prize-winner Friedman’s dictum that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” prove right, the $1 trillion or more in liquidity Bernanke has pumped into the financial system by expanding the Fed’s balance sheet may leave him to cope with surging consumer prices.
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And Meltzer, 81, who has written an 800-page history of the Fed’s first 38 years and is now working on volume two, isn’t alone in seeing a return of sky-high inflation as a result of Bernanke’s policies.
Behind investors’ caution: a ballooning Fed balance sheet that has climbed $1.2 trillion in the past year to $2.09 trillion and expanded the nation’s money supply. It is poised to increase even further after last month’s Fed decision to buy an additional $1.15 trillion worth of assets, including $300 billion in Treasury securities.
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Meltzer says political pressure will prevent Bernanke, 55, and fellow policy makers from withdrawing liquidity quickly enough as the economy recovers. That’s similar to the pattern that occurred back in the 1970s, he says. Then-Chairman Arthur Burns allowed excessive money-supply growth because he was unable or unwilling to resist pressure from President Richard Nixon’s White House to hold down unemployment, leading to the “great inflation” of that era, he says.
Now, Bernanke and fellow policy makers have “squandered their independence” by becoming involved in bailouts of financial firms and by taking long-term and illiquid assets onto their balance sheet, Meltzer says. “They don’t have the political ability to control inflation.”
John Ryding, founder of RDQ Economics LLC in New York and a former Fed economist, agrees that the central bank will be slow to soak up all the cash it has injected into the financial system, in part because policy makers will be fixated on still- high unemployment. The rate rose to 8.5 percent in March, compared with 7.2 percent in December.
“They pay lip service to inflation being a monetary phenomenon,” he says. “But they’re too much concerned with the Keynesian explanation of inflation.”
There are signs that the Fed’s stimulus -- combined with the efforts of central banks and governments elsewhere in the world, including China -- is starting to lift some commodity prices. Copper rose to a five-month high and platinum reached a six-month peak on April 9.
“All that money is going to find a home,” says Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics LLC in Pepper Pike, Ohio. He sees oil prices increasing to “$80, $90, $100 before the end of next year” from $52 a barrel now.
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Some Fed policy makers seem more worried about deflation than they do about inflation. [...]
“For some time to come, disinflation, and even deflation, will represent greater risks than inflation,” San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen said in a speech on March 25.
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The Fed is “running a laboratory experiment” on what drives inflation: the money supply or the output gap, says Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor and now vice chairman of St. Louis-based Macroeconomic Advisers
“How it turns out will do a lot to influence the economic debate,” he says, adding that his money is on Bernanke.
- 2009-03-19 Bernanke doing his best to crash the US dollar
- 2009-03-05 Nothing but lies from Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner
- 2009-02-25Bernankerama
- 2008-12-16 Bernanke has lost it
- 2008-12-16 Bernanke is out of control
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