Zero percent interest rates mean a weak currency. The U.S. Dollar is getting hammered. See these charts from the last day and a half of trading. Even the British Pound is cleaning up!

I recently wrote a post about U.S. Treasury securities which have been rising in price as interest rates have come down. In the post, I called the Treasury rise a bubble and I stick by that moniker despite protests from some astute readers.

However, I do want to point out one reason why Treasurys are rising. Inflation.

To my mind, lowering interest rates in the aftermath of an enormous credit bubble where institutions have just destroyed $1 trillion in capital is wrong. It distorts lending decisions such that yet more money will eventually be lent out imprudently. The only way to increase credit availability is by getting reserves into the system. And normally you do that by making a profit. However, profits are hard to come by for financial institutions right now.

Recently I wrote a post which claimed that Keynesian stimulus is what we need in the global economy right now. These ideas are considered heresy in Austrian School circles because trying to stimulate the economy out of recession only puts off the day of reckoning and often worsens that day of reckoning. This is exactly what we saw when Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates to 1% after the last recession.

So what exactly does Ludwig von Mises, the most revered Austrian School economist, say about this?

The yield on he three-month U.S. treasury bill went below zero for the first time ever. This seems to be an unprecedented move where investors are actually paying the U.S. Government to borrow money. In my estimation, this is not just a flight to a safe haven in turbulent times. Negative interest rates in U.S. treasuries reveal a bubble that will pop and end badly for all concerned.

First the Fed and now the ECB and Bank of England are talking about some form of quantitative easing! Of course, if they are all going to do it, do we have a dollar crash or is it more of a crisis of confidence in fiat currencies in general? The only obvious [...]

One feature that is peculiar to the present downturn is the accumulation of reserves at the U.S. Federal Reserve. I imagine it is no different at other central banks, though I have not seen the data. Let me tell you what this reserve accumulation means and show you a chart of excess reserves compiled by the St. Louis Fed.

The US and the global economy are at risk of a severe stag-deflation, a deadly combination of economic stagnation/recession and deflation. Only very aggressive and co-ordinated policy actions will ensure the global economy recovers in 2010 rather than facing protracted stagnation and deflation.

Japan’s policy makers generally procrastinated considerably in terms of implementing any kind of stimulative measures, as well as prematurely reversing the benign impact of policies which had some earlier success. In terms of monetary policy, the BOJ did not actually embrace quantitative monetary easing until 2001, eleven years after their bubble had burst.

Recently, I have written quite a few posts demonstrating the U.S. Federal Reserve has a ballooning balance sheet as it increases its purchases of assets at an unprecedented clip. In fact, that balance sheet had $800 billion in assets just this past August. By year’s end, we should expect it to have risen nearly four-fold to $3 trillion. This is a wild experiment without parallel in modern history.