Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Trump, The Federal Reserve and the Looming Recession

“Here’s the point I make in my book, in 1998 Wall Street got together and bailed out a hedge fund. Then in 2008 the central banks and bailed out Wall Street. In the next crisis, who is going to bail out the big banks. In other words, each crisis gets bigger than the one before. Each bailout gets bigger than the one before. We’re now to the point where we’ve exceeded the capacity of the central banks to “save the day.” When the next crisis hits… where’s the money going to come from next? The Fed balance sheet has expanded from $800 billion to $4 trillion to deal with the last crisis. The problem is they have not normalized and are still at the $4 trillion mark. What are they going to do in the next crisis… Go to $8 trillion? What’s the limit? There is an invisible limit. The Fed knows it. They’re not prepared for the next crisis right now.”

“Where is the money going to come from if you have to reliquify the system? It has to come from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They have the only clean balance sheet left. We’re focused on trillions of Special Drawing Rights (SDR’s), or world money, that they will print. These outcomes are very predictable based around the models and complexity theory.”

When asked about the Federal Reserve plan to reduce its balance sheet by the Modern Wall Street host, Rickards responded, “I wish they had done it eight years ago. Creating liquidity to deal with the crisis in 2008 was what they were supposed to do. I’ll give them credit QE 1 (quantitative easing), but QE 2 and QE 3 were just experiments by Ben Bernanke. I’ve spoke to Ben Bernanke about this and those are his words, not mine. He indicated that thirty years from now scholars will look back and tell us if we did a good job.”

“Right now, it’s not working. We never got growth [in the economy]. The Fed in 2009 and 2010 when it set out on QE 2 never thought we would be in 2017 with a $4 trillion balance sheet and less than 1% growth – but here we are. I’ll give Janet Yellen for starting the process – but it should’ve been done seven or eight years ago.”

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