What Is Wrong With Republicans???

Who didn't watch with amusement yesterday as Republicans refused to vote for Boehner's bill to make permanent the Bush era tax cuts for all Americans earning less than $1 million per year. It would seem that the Keystone Cops are alive and well in the Republican wing of Congress. As Gerard van der Luen of American Digest is wont to say, "Republicans, they thirst for death."

Republicans have precisely zero leverage on tax rates. Come January 1, all of the Bush era tax cuts expire and all the tax rates will go up automatically - and quite unfairly, Republicans will get the blame. Moreover, the centerpiece of Obama's tax plan was to raise tax rates on "the rich." It is time to give the people what they voted for. If four years of gross economic incompetency wasn't enough to convince the electorate, well, let's let them have the next four years good and hard indeed. Obviously, more lessons are needed.

In this instance, Republicans prepared to die on the hill of stopping higher taxes is much like Picket's charge - a suicidal act that did nothing beyond sealing the doom of Lee's Army of the Potomac. One of the first rules of warfare - don't reinforce failure, reinforce success - or at least where you have the greatest likelihood of success.

Where House Republicans hold absolute power is on spending. Give Obama whatever tax increase he wants, but then shut down the government over the budget ceiling. Moreover, refuse to pass anything but a life support budget until all sides agree on - and pass into law - a grand bargain that in real terms, sans the usual accounting gimmicks, will decrease the debt by 25% over the next four years.

Debt is where the real issue lies. Sure, Obama's tax increases will hurt the economy - but they won't kill it. Our continued accumulation of debt will. Between Obama's world record profligate spending and Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke, who is keeping our printing presses spinning at a record pace, they are placing our nation in mortal peril. Obama and Bernanke are setting the stage for runaway inflation and the devaluation of the dollar. That is where Republicans need to draw the line in the sand - this far, and no further.

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QE3: The Fed Gambles With Our Economy

In order to boost job growth, Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced the other day the start of a third round of quantitative easing - QE3. It is creating money out of thin air. This from Q&O:

The Fed will increase its holdings by an estimated $85 billion per month in securities, about half of which will be long-term Treasury bonds, and the remaining $40 billion or more will be agency mortgage-backed securities. The agency paper will be purchased with new cash, while the long-term Treasuries will be acquired in exchange for short-term Treasury paper, as a continuation of Operation Twist.

There is no ultimate target amount or end date specified for this round of easing. Essentially, the Fed will buy or exchange $1 trillion in securities per year, until chairman Bernanke says to stop. It is completely open-ended. Additionally, the Fed expects to keep interest rates at or near 0% until sometime in 2015.

Let’s be clear about what this announcement means: The Fed will print $500 billion per year in new money, and inject it into the economy by buying agency paper (Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, et al.), while also flooding the market with $500 billion of short-term paper in exchange for long bonds. That new money is not based on any realistic estimate of economic growth, or economic requirement to expand the money supply. It is pure, Keynesian monetary stimulus.

This is the fed trying to use monetary policy to solve problems that are not "monetary" in origin under the Obama economy. Credit isn't sluggish because interest rates - today at historic lows - aren't low enough. Being able to borrow more money does nothing for overleveraged consumers trying to shed their debt. The fed action does nothing to assuage the concerns of businesses regarding new taxes and regulations. The fed action will do nothing to bring down the price of energy. Actually, as to the price of energy and other commodities, these will skyrocket as the Fed's balance sheet grows to $4 trillion and the dollar is devalued.

Whatever minimal benefit the fed action will have on our economy, its potential downsides are far more significant. The first and most obvious is that this will eventually cause run away inflation. Zombie at PJM has a good primer on this - Quantitative Easing, Wiemar Edition. And as Gerri Willis wrote at Fox Business:

Now, the federal government promises a blank check, printing unlimited money to pull us out of the ditch. How will they ever unwind all this stimulus? Who will pay? What will be the unintended and inevitable consequences?

Economist John Taylor recently wrote that sky-high inflation will be the ultimate result of the federal government’s moves, before today’s action.

And, almost undoubtedly, he sure seems right.

Two, this act of the fed threatens the bond market

Thierry Apoteker, chief economist at TAC Financial, . . . tells CNBC that a QE3 program could turn into a disaster for bonds.

"If you have fiscal policy that is loose and monetary policy that is loose, and commodity prices rising, then you have the recipe for a very lethal cocktail on the bond market," Apoteker says.

The bond market is crucial to our economy, as it is what allows every level of our local, state and federal government, not to mention businesses, to borrow money from the public.

Lastly, as Zero Hedge points out, this is the fed firing the last bullet in their gun. Moreover, by announcing it as an open-ended program, the Fed loses the ability to impact the markets in response to a future crisis. That is a terrifying proposition.

The economy is stagnant - neither getting worse or better at the moment. Its ills and the solutions thereto are all in the political realm. Trying to use monetary policy - with all its potential downsides - to solve the political problems of the Obama economy is just wrongheaded in the extreme. One wonders whether it is not time to reconsider the independence of the Fed and its ability to act unilaterally.

Update: Well, that didn't take long. In response to QE3, ratings firm Egan-Jones has downgraded its rating of U.S. government debt:

In its downgrade, the firm said that issuing more currency and depressing interest rates through purchasing mortgage-backed securities does little to raise the U.S.'s real gross domestic product, but reduces the value of the dollar.

In turn, this increases the cost of commodities, which will pressure the profitability of businesses and increase the costs of consumers thereby reducing consumer purchasing power, the firm said.

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Depressing (& Depression) News

The Great Depression began in June, 1929 and lasted until the early 1941. FDR didn't solve it with his "New Deal", WWII did. By 1933, unemployment had risen to 24.9%, average incomes contracted by 40%, global trade fell by half in volume, and millions lost their homes and farms. How do we compare to the Great Depression?

We are now running a budget deficit closing in on two trillion dollars. Unemployment is at 9.4% and seems headed only upward. Our bond rating is on the cusp of being downgraded - an occurrence that promises a whole host of problems. The fed is printing money as never before:



Even with no new deficit spending, new and heavy taxes seem inevitable to service this debt. Plus, with such an increase in the money supply, massive inflation and devaluation of the dollar seems inevitable.

But much more is waiting in the wings to hit, some sooner rather than later. Obama is doing nothing to rein in spending or to avoid taxation. Indeed, to the contrary, Obama has not even begun to tax and spend. In an Orwellian move, he is calling for institution of "pay as you go" legislation that will make future tax cuts next to impossible but will not apply to any of the massive new deficit spending he has planned in his pet projects.

Social Security - a massive ponzi scheme that the left utterly refused to attempt to reform during the Bush years, is now running in the red. Medicare isn't being fixed, its being subsumed in a plan that will only expand care to 1/3 of the uninsured, yet cost us trillions in extra dollars. Cap and Trade is another massive regressive tax.

We are on the cusp of an energy crisis that Obama is ignoring. The price of oil is set to skyrocket from a host of contributing causes. The green energy Obama has promised us is not even cost effective, nor can it possibly be scaled up as quickly as it would need to be to provide a realistic alternative to oil and coal.

Global trade, already under extreme stress, is set to experience far more stress. Some 80% of all goods traded internationally are shipped. David Smick, writing at the Washington Post, notes "[t]he U.N. agreement last October on sulfur-burning levels for ships . . . is expected to send shipping costs skyrocketing." Thus the price of the vast majority of goods traded internationally will be effected, all in the name of global warming.

Then to top it off, we have Obama, instead of fixing the issues that led to this global economic meltdown, proposing a massive new regulatory regime for our financial sector. This is precisely what the respected Harvard economist Niall Ferguson warned against a few weeks ago.

Could this news get any more dire? Well, . . . yes. We now have sufficient data to make a reasonable comparison of where we are as compared to the same time frame after the start of the Great Depression. And the news is depressing indeed. Even without this next round of price increases, massive spending and high taxation, we are at or below the same economic indicators in the same time frame as existed during the Great Depression. This from the Financial Times:

Green shoots are bursting out. Or so we are told. But before concluding that the recession will soon be over, we must ask what history tells us. It is one of the guides we have to our present predicament. Fortunately, we do have the data. Unfortunately, the story they tell is an unhappy one.

Two economic historians, Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley . . . [document] that this recession fully matches the early part of the Great Depression. . . .

First, global industrial output tracks the decline in industrial output during the Great Depression horrifyingly closely. Within Europe, the decline in the industrial output of France and Italy has been worse than at this point in the 1930s, while that of the UK and Germany is much the same. The declines in the US and Canada are also close to those in the 1930s. But Japan’s industrial collapse has been far worse than in the 1930s, despite a very recent recovery.

Second, the collapse in the volume of world trade has been far worse than during the first year of the Great Depression. Indeed, the decline in world trade in the first year is equal to that in the first two years of the Great Depression. This is not because of protection, but because of collapsing demand for manufactures.

Third, despite the recent bounce, the decline in world stock markets is far bigger than in the corresponding period of the Great Depression.

The two authors sum up starkly: “Globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression ... This is a Depression-sized event.” . . .

You can read the rest of the article here. The authors go on to discuss the fact that Obama is attempting to rely on both Keynes and Friedman to guide his acts. Keynes theorized that massive public spending could be used to stimulate an economy while Friedman concentrated on monetary supply. The authors conclude hopefully that this will stop the full spiral into depression.

What gives me great pause is that these authors give no consideration to all of the additional taxes and the rising costs that we are about to have imposed upon us, plus what looks like new draconian regulation of our financial sector. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned a few weeks ago that we needed to taking steps now to rein in spending and borrowing or we face severe problems in the foreseeable future. Obama is doing anything but that. I have never been so pessimistic about America's future. This could easilly go from bad to castrophically bad.

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