The Fed Resumes “Printing”

One conclusion from the Fed’s actions is that it doesn’t care as much about its inflation target as it does about improving the unemployment rate. Thus, it will err on the side of letting inflation rise, if it would improve unemployment. But holding rates too low too long fueled the housing bubble. Repeating the same game will have consequences of malinvestment in the form of new bubbles in the economy. The Fed hopes to restore employment before the negative consequences of loose monetary policy show up

On building debt

I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years ago, but one myth, I think, is that most of the overinvestment excesses in China are concentrated in the real estate sector. I have always argued that it is infrastructure where the most amount of investment has been wasted

On the Collapse of the Shanghai Composite

Shanghai’s channel surfing Panda bears are speaking with a little higher pitch this weekend after getting their ‘hood caught in a vicious squeeze and reversal. The stock index has bounced 8.7 percent off its January 6th lows after falling 31 percent from last April’s 12-month high. The Shanghai was down 39 percent from its August ‘09 post-crash high before reversing earlier this month. Hugh Hendry nailed it

PBOC Easing To Continue In 2012

With the Chinese New Year holiday period approaching, it becomes a bit harder to discern PBOC’s policy intentions. It typically adds liquidity aggressively ahead of the holidays, but this year it comes at a time when the central bank is embarking on what we see as a protracted easing cycle

My comments on MMT’s job guarantee idea

Over the holidays, a debate broke out in the blogosphere about the so-called job guarantee idea that the MMT folks have bandied about. I call this controversial idea “Unemployment Insurance for the 21st Century”, something I first addressed in 2009, based on a post by Randall Wray.

My view: a job guarantee will never happen in the US unless we have a deep Depression like the one that began in 1929. Politically, this idea is a non-starter on this side of the Atlantic

The 2012 Blind Side: China’s Housing Bust

Foreign Affairs has just posted a must read piece, “China’s Real Estate Bubble May Have Just Popped”, which will sound very familiar to Global Macro Monitor readers. We’re going to be spend a lot time over the holidays thinking how this plays out in China’s financial sector and the implications for markets

Stephen Roach on the IMF bailout, Chinese banks and US consumers

Here’s a good all-encompassing Bloomberg TV video with Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach from Friday. He is not impressed with the IMF plans that the Europeans are working on, calling the numbers “chump change”. Roach also talks about the US and Chinese economies as well.

The video is below followed by the copy from Bloomberg

How do we know that China is overinvesting?

For years I have been arguing that the Achilles heel of the Chinese growth model is the unsustainable rise in debt that comes as a necessary consequence of capital misallocation fueled by bank lending. Capital misallocation, I argued, was the nearly inevitable consequence of high investment growth over many years in a system in which price signals are severely distorted and there is political incentive to maximize economic activity in the near term. If capital misallocation is funded by debt, the increase in debt is necessarily unsustainable

China: Continued Boom or Bursting Bubble?

In a February 2010 Casey Report article titled Is China’s Recovery a Fraud?, my thesis was the $2.1 trillion stimulus package rolled out by Chinese authorities after the 2008/2009 financial crash was leading to enormous malinvestment. As with all monetary and fiscal stimuli, however, the initial high is always followed by a hangover

Manufacturing inflation in a wage deflationary environment

How does manufacturing CPI inflation benefit an economy in which incomes are falling? When inflation rises and incomes are stagnant or falling, the economy rolls over

Jim Chanos: China has tons of contingent debt via state-owned enterprises

The overall gist of Jim Chanos’ comments on Bloomberg yesterday were that China has off-balance sheet contingent liabilities due to its implicit commitment to state-owned enterprises which are kneee-deep in land and property speculation. See Michael Pettis piece on The debt-financed investments of Chinese state-owned enterprises for a comprehensive analysis of this problem

Monetary Policy and the Future of China

There is a road open for China involving controlled inflation that would lead to re-balancing, both domestically and internationally, which has some uncertainties. These must be compared to those of sustaining the export-led growth model, basically an even bigger currency mismatch in the PBoC balance sheet and ever more unproductive capital investments