Showing posts with label fiscal deficit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiscal deficit. Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Our economies are bloated by QEs, low interests and other stimuli, and the lack of real risk-taking.

Tarps, fiscal deficits, QEs and minimal interest rates, in an economy where regulators have by means of risk-weighted equity requirements de facto prohibited banks to take real risks, like lending to SMEs and entrepreneurs, only to take on false risks, like leveraging too much on what is "safe", has created a bloated economy full of assets with inflated values... and helped finance the permanence of inefficiencies that should have been long gone.

The economy now needs to fart, urgently, but boy is it going to be embarrassing smelly… and painful!

That deflation is not curable with factory produced inflation but only with the type of sturdy growth that can justify the relative values of all assets. You do not live on existing assets alone.

You cannot grow muscles by staying in bed just eating fats and carbs... you need exercise and proteins... even if "risky" 

But who knows, Mario Draghi and his colleagues might all just be Chauncey Gardiners too :-( 


And what could lead to less inequality: to inflate the value of assets that are already owned or to try to create new assets?


Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Is there a point at which a Nobel Prize must be recalled so as to avoid reputational and other damages?

How much can Nobel Prize winners be allowed to ignore facts relevant to what they are discussing?

Facts: 

1. The pillar of current bank regulations is the risk-weighted capital requirements for banks

2. These because regulators cannot differentiate between ex ante and ex post risks, allow banks to leverage their shareholder´s capital much higher when lending to “the infallible” than when lending to “the risky”. 

3. And that results in that banks can earn much higher risk-adjusted returns on their equity when lending to “the infallible” than when lending to the risky.

4. And that distorts and makes it impossible for medium and small businesses, entrepreneurs and start-ups to have access to bank credit in fair market conditions.

5. And that makes it impossible for the liquidity or stimulus provided by quantitative easing (QEs), fiscal deficits or low interest rates, to reach what needs most to be reached.

6. And all that for no good reason at all since bank crises are never ever the result of excessive exposures to what is ex ante perceived as risky.

And so when time and time again I read that a Nobel Prize winner asks for more economic stimulus and less austerity, without the slightest reference to the need of removing that huge regulatory boulder that stands in the way of job creation and sturdy economic growth, I can´t help but to ask… is there a point at which a Nobel Prize must be recalled so as to avoid reputational damage?

Of course I do understand the difficulties for the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. That prize was endowed by the Swedish central bank… and the current president of Sveriges Riksbank, Stefan Ingves, is also the current chairman of the Basel Committee, the committee responsible for creating the regulatory boulder that stands in our way... and that is a huge reputational risk in itself.

How dangerous it can be when reputational risks intertwine so much... in mutual admiration clubs.
  

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Our slowing hybrid real economy is running out of gas... and is in a shutdown mode!

Our economy is like a hybrid car. It accelerates using a motor fueled by risk taking, and then, playing it safe, breaking, it draws energy which it stores in a battery that can be used to further move forward, for a while.

Unfortunately, with current perceived risk-weighted capital requirements for banks, banks are not financing the future, only refinancing the past… and so we are running only on batteries, risking running out of all risk-taking!

In other words, our real economy has been placed, by dumb regulators, in a real shutdown mode.