Power & Market

If you’re into finance, you may have seen this chart:

cosgrove_chart_1.jpeg

Fed hiking cycles end in crisis - every time. The chart also illustrates that, since the 1980s, the Fed has been unable to achieve a Fed Funds Rate (FFR) at or above the peak of the preceding tightening cycle. 

It’s not a mystery why this happens: lower-for-longer rates allow for greater debt accumulation and create an ever-increasing dependency on cheap rollover costs.

While the above chart isn’t a very large data set, it appears that crises manifest when FFR reaches 50 percent to 80 percent of the immediately preceding FFR peak. Given today’s effective FFR has been jacked up from nearly 0 to 66 percent of the 2018 peak in a matter of four months (for reference it took over 3 years for the previous cycle to cover the same relative ground), the likelihood of “something breaking” seems high.

cosgrove_chart_2.png

Before gobbling up VIX futures, it’s important to check the thesis.

Many are pointing to the huge sums parked the Fed’s Reverse Repo (RRP) facility, excess cash earning overnight yield from the Fed, as one reason why “things may be different this time”. Translation: there’s too much cash for a liquidity crisis. 

cosgrove_chart_3.png

First, the majority (88 percent) of RRP participants are Money Mutual Funds. This is A LOT of cash that would otherwise be chasing T bills, commercial paper, or lent in the repo market. This means an inter-bank lending crisis is unlikely.

That is not to say we will not see “something break”' in the private sector - in the form of margin calls, mass layoffs, or bankruptcies - due to the rapid uptick in costs of capital. Ironically, the high RRP balance may be giving false confidence to FOMC members that further tightening can be sustained.

Let’s look more broadly at money supply:

cosgrove_chart_4.png

The interesting thing to note here is the vastly greater increase in money supply (both nominal and percentage wise) post-GFC as compared to post-Dot Com. When comparing the “success” of each hiking cycle that concluded these two eras (see below), it appears that money supply and economic robustness are inversely correlated. This is especially odd given that post-GFC was supposedly when regulators cleaned up the financial system with stricter collateral and lending criteria.

cosgrove_chart_5.png

So, the suggestion that excessive liquidity will save us from a crisis is not supported by the data (and in fact the opposite may be true).

I know the recession-will-force-a-Fed-pivot trade is becoming popular now, but I would be careful. The pace of this tightening cycle dwarfs those of the last three bubble bursts shown above, and our economy is more dependent on cheap debt than ever before. Short duration debt (< 1 year) has also seen an unprecedented surge during the COVID era - meaning our countdown-to-crisis could be much shorter than previous cycles. Something may break before the Fed even has time to pivot. 

Or, let’s say the Fed cautiously pauses hikes. The markets would undoubtedly smell blood and rally on Fed capitulation. But we’re forgetting that our economy has been nursing at the test of 0 percent rates for roughly a decade - we can’t even handle 2 percent! Maybe David Hunter will finally be right and such a scenario will be the catalyst for his melt-up and subsequent crash.

On June 19, 2022, geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer posted the following on Twitter:

us: left govt, high inflation
uk: right govt, high inflation
germany: centrist govt, high inflation
italy: everyone in govt, high inflation

wild guess it’s not the govt

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) June 19, 2022

In a follow-up tweet the next day, Bremmer wrote:

1 - independent central banks:
printing like crazy

(powell: the one man trump and biden agree on)

2 - pandemic causing massive swings in supply and demand

3 - russia war disrupting supply chains

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) June 20, 2022

It’s possible that Bremmer is being sarcastic. In which case, I would like to be the first to welcome him to the Austrian Club.

But my reading of Bremmer’s tweets is that he’s quite serious. If I’m right to read Bremmer straight here, then it’s worth pointing out that the premise of just about everything Bremmer wrote in these two short bursts is wrong.

Let’s take the first tweet first. Bremmer apparently wants to say that all kinds of governments exist, and there is inflation everywhere, so clearly it’s not the government that’s causing inflation. This is fallacious on its face. Logic just doesn’t work this way. “All x are doing y, therefore x is not the cause of y,” is, well, silly.

That’s hardly the only problem. As some of the people replying to Bremmer’s weird logic also indicated, the “left-right-center-everyone” mapping which Bremmer applies is bogus. Government is government is government, and it doesn’t matter which slogans get slapped onto which campaigns. On that narrowcast reading alone, Bremmer’s assertions don’t hold water. The globalist Boris Johnson is a rightist? That’s comical, but one has to suspend disbelief on this score to make Bremmer’s tweet work even on this low level.

We can strip the phony politics away and go even deeper, however. Indeed, the reason why all governments are alike is where we get to the heart of Bremmer’s fallacy. Take a look at the first claim in his second tweet. Bremmer thinks that central banks are “independent.” His proffered reasoning is that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is “the one-man Trump and Biden agree on.” Ergo, for Bremmer, Powell must be an “independent”—he serves two masters in a way pleasing to both. It can’t be government that’s causing prices to skyrocket. Must be something else.

But Bremmer raises a question. And in doing so he sets up a tautology. That tautology is precisely the reason why Bremmer (if he’s being serious) is wrong that governments don’t cause inflation.

The implied question is: Does Powell’s being “the one-man Trump and Biden agree on” make him independent, or does it make the government monolithic? The answer is behind door number two. Powell is not independent. He’s just one head of a Hydra with a Georgetown address. Powell without government, and government without Powell—neither is possible. There’s your tautology.

The central bank of the United States (and the same is true in every country) is a purely political institution. Powell isn’t some monastic who stumbles in from his desert retreat to soothsay the economic future. He’s neck deep in the Washington swamp. He just happens to be very good at what he does, which is why he still has his leather chair in the Fed building. Like all Fed chairmen, Powell is a paid alchemist who transmogrifies, with magical economics-sounding incantations, the usually stupid ideas of politicians into seemingly de-politicized policy positions. Powell is good at reading a room and coming up with a number pleasing to his boss (and it makes zero difference whether the boss is with Team R or Team D). He’s like the oracle at Delphi. Or like Dylan. He doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

You have “elections.” You have a clueless citizenry. You make it all work out, and you do so with a look of high-economic gravitas, as though the gods had ordained the chicanery you are peddling. That’s what makes you the Fed chair.

And it isn’t just that central banks are not independent of governments. It’s that, much more consequentially, governments are not independent of central banks. Governments as we know them in the twenty-first century would not, could not, exist without central banks. Without the “printing like crazy” phenomenon that Bremmer bemoans, there would not only be no inflation. There would be no fiat money, period. No fiat money, no government. No government, no Powell. Can it be that Bremmer truly doesn’t understand this?

Bottom line: Government spending doesn’t “cause” inflation. Government spending isn’t to inflation what, say, reading in low light is to ruined eyesight. It isn’t as though, over time, whoops, all that government spending caught up with you and, dang, you’ve got some inflation. Government spending under modern monetary theory (fiat money) regimes is inflation. There is no difference. It’s total identity. A is A. When a government prints fake cash, that’s inflation. From the get-go. There is no non-Ponzi Scheme way to understand the mechanism.

This is why governments can do nothing but make inflation worse and worse. The more cash an “independent” central bank prints (and on whose behalf does a central bank print cash if not the government’s? —even in the case of Fed, which is a private cartel designed to enrich globalist bankers, the get-out-of-jail-free card for counterfeiting American currency comes from the government), the more inflation chokes us. You can’t get something out of nothing. But that’s just what governments do—all of them.

Of course, governments can play with systems and inflate asset prices (with more fake money) to keep the downstream effects of inflation from biting for a time. But there’s only so high you can build a dam. One day, whoosh. And then Joe Sixpack can’t afford to fill up his truck.

That’s when politicians start blaming everyone but themselves.

Now, armed with these insights, we can handily dismantle claims 2 and 3 from Bremmer’s second tweet. The pandemic? Who owned the Wuhan lab where the virus was made, pray tell? Was it a private-citizen mad scientist cooking up superbugs in his spare time? Of course not. It was the Chinese Communist Party, a government institution if there ever was one. Statism on creatine, the CCP is. The Wuhan virus is the Wuhan virus because it came from a Communist-owned and -operated government lab in Wuhan.

And who paid for the Wuhan bug? Why, we did. Our taxes—siphoned out of our phony-currency bank accounts by the same rapacious government which can’t control its own spending in the first place and so needs to go on April Viking raids every year—were sent to Wuhan so a real mad scientist (with a New York accent) could skirt American laws and concoct a virus to fulfill his statist overlords’ dream: a lockdown. Under a lockdown, everyone begs the government to print more money. Everyone clamors for a “stimulus.” The people ask for inflation.

And, boy, do the politicians give it to them. Only too happy to oblige. It almost got Trump re-elected. (He wasn’t counting on another kind of inflation—ballot inflation. But that’s a story for a different day.)

Finally, Russia? That’s the least swallow-able excuse of them all. It asks us to assume a hundred years of history that just isn’t true. Has the United States of America been minding its own business all this time, not getting caught up in useless foreign wars and not, say, pushing a neo-imperialist Cold War Museum relic right up to a distant country’s doorstep? Um, no. After years of warnings about that old Cold War stunt, the distant country’s leader had enough and pushed back. Supply chains disrupted. What did Washington expect—that Putin would destroy the wavefront of NATO politely, perhaps with a strongly worded letter to the UN?

And anyway, for a century Washington has been pouring money into idiot crusades in the Middle East and Central Asia, in Africa, in Europe, in Latin America. In Southeast Asia, if you’ll recall. All of that cost buckets of fake money. To the best of my knowledge, Gerald Ford didn’t blame inflation in the 1970s on the Viet Cong. Then again, apparently Americans five decades ago weren’t quite as gullible as we are now.

Today, there seem to be geopolitical analysts who seriously believe that none of the above has any bearing on the price of sweet tea in Alabama. That “independent” central banks are to blame for printing all those dag-blasted hundred-dollar bills. That no one can afford a steak dinner anymore and it must be—yet again, for the eleventy-seventieth time—Vladimir Putin’s fault.

How I wish Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were alive today. I would love to see what they would have written on Ian Bremmer’s Twitter page.

On June 22, President Joe Biden called for a tax holiday for the next three months. As of this writing, it still has to be approved by congress. Many critics have come out in response to this. Among them, Nancy Pelosi has called it nothing more than “showbiz” as she doesn’t expect the 18 cents per gallon savings to be meaningful, Reason magazine has argued that it is taking away a tax for roads that was levied somewhat proportionally on individuals based on how much they drove, but perhaps most interestingly of all - at least from an economics standpoint - was this criticism brought by NPR:

Biden also called on state governments to take similar actions with their gas taxes. He wants oil refiners to boost their capacity so there’s more gasoline on the market - another way to bring down prices. But there’s no way to force those tax cuts to be passed through to the consumers.

In October 2021, I wrote almost the exact inverse of this point: Why Business Owners Can’t Just “Pass on'' Tax Costs to Consumers. Then White House press secretary Jen Psaki had claimed that American consumers would not stand for large companies passing on tax costs to consumers. I claimed that - while probably for the wrong reasons - she was right. The logic stemmed from Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market:

The most popular example of a tax supposedly shifted forward is the general sales tax. Surely, for example, if the government imposes a uniform 20-percent tax on all retail sales, and if we can make the simplifying assumption that the taxes can be equally well enforced everywhere, then business will simply “pass on” the 20 percent increase in all prices to consumers. In fact, however, there is no way for prices to increase at all! As in the case of one particular industry, prices were previously set, or approximately so, at the points of maximum net revenue for the firms. Stocks of goods or factors have not yet changed, and neither have demand schedules. How then could prices rise?

We now find ourselves in the opposite position. Can the removal of a tax drive down a price? The answer is a little more complicated. Rothbard explains above that taxes cannot be shifted forward to the consumer and goes on to explain that instead taxes are shifted backwards to the original factors of production. Less can be spent on them and thus - as Per Bylund has explained:

Entrepreneurs are forced to abandon some of their efforts to generate new value by satisfying customers, or to redirect their efforts into less value-producing channels. The potential output of their creativity goes Unrealized.

It is here that a tax holiday is able to help. Because less cost will be shifted backwards to original factors, original factors will be able to be better allocated to projects that will actually generate new value by satisfying customers.

As a result, to a very large extent, this specific criticism of the gas holiday is right. There is no guarantee that the savings from the holiday will be passed on to the consumers. This, however, does not ultimately discredit the tax holiday itself as the savings will still benefit consumers. Original factors could be better allocated in such a way that does in fact make gas prices cheaper as market competition drives prices down in the absence of these taxes in a very happy go lucky solution that ties this all up in a nice little bow as we look back on it.

But even if that is not the case, the original factors would still be put to a preferable use on the market when they are not hampered by the restrictions on their prices by the government. So, while it is correct that we may or may not see these savings passed on to the consumer, it is also undoubtedly correct that the removal of this tax would in face benefit the people.

Central bank “stimulus” is a nonsensical policy approach which caused prices to surge over the last two years. Look at the charts below:

The Fed’s balance sheet is currently at $8.9 trillion:

fed_balance_sheet.png

Since January 2020 it has increased by nearly $5,000,000,000,000, meaning the central bank created 5 trillion dollars so the world could “buy more stuff.”  The $8.9 trillion balance is not money in the Fed’s bank account; rather, entities such as large banks and financial institutions owe this money to the Fed (i.e., accounts receivable). Typically, the new money raises the prices of stocks, bonds and real estate first.

Also consider M1 and M2, as they are the most commonly used measures of the money supply.

m1_money_supply.png

The above is the M1 money supply, currently at $20.6 trillion. Part of the large spike is due to a revision of the definition of M1 occurring in May 2020. However, since then, M1 increased by over $4 trillion dollars, still a large amount.

From January 2020, the M2 money supply increased by over $6 trillion, per below:

m2_money_supply.png

Included in these trillions of newly created dollars are various Fed/Government programs, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, which has forgiven over $700 billion of “loans” to business owners. As I wrote in April of 2020, they were literally “paying people not to work.”

There were also several stimulus check programs congress approved that approached $1 trillion.

It cannot be stressed enough, these trillions of dollars were created “out of thin air,” and given to people across the country. A large portion of the money went into the traditional inflationary channels such as big Wall Street firms to inflate asset prices, but several trillions of new dollars also went to pay individuals on Main Street. The money received by individuals could have been spent anywhere: crypto, gold, guns, gambling, drugs, alcohol, eating out at restaurants, clothes, or on Austrian economic books.

The thought of receiving “free money” from the government may initially sound appealing. But eventually the money mirage stops and society discovers these government giveaway programs carry grave consequences such as currency debasement, and therefore, more poverty. Ironic because the stated aim of these policies is to help society; yet the result is the exact opposite.

The COVID monetary relief schemes couldn't have been more poorly timed as large swaths of the economy were shut down in 2020. Imagine the unsurprising result: increasing the money supply (via stimulus checks) increases the cash balance for millions of people, enticing recipients to spend more money. But shutting down the economy decreases the amount of goods available to purchase. In such a world, prices invariably rise.

Removing the closure of the economy from the equation, the problem with central bank stimulus still exists. If the government gives $1,000 to enough people, this new money enters the economy, increasing demand for goods. One of the many factors mainstream economists fail to include in their models are the stages of production. In the real world, production takes time. It is not instantaneous. It also carries a cost. Even if the economy were running “smoothly,” entrepreneurs could not automatically increase the supply of goods to meet the new (monetary induced) demand. To increase production, they’d have to incur more upfront costs, drawing upon savings, credit or obtaining alternative financing methods.

Shutting down the economy while giving stimulus checks only added gasoline to the dumpster fire. Forget about Trump or Biden. The Powell era of central banking must stand as one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, eras of American economic history. Increasing a nation’s money supply to stimulate demand historically impoverishes nations. Yet, that is precisely what they did.