Chicken Little

I haven't fully digested the past four days of stock market Armageddon -- a fancy way of reporting that,  whatever I say,  I am not  at all confident that I know what the Hell I am talking about.

But I want to get something out early, before the markets open this morning so that, if I'm right,  I can claim vast powers of economic analysis.

It is this: The recent stock market losses come to about 10 per cent, (give or take because economics is the only discipline I can think of this morning where arithmetic is not an exact science). Ten per cent  amounts to an awful lot of money, enough to ulcerize most everyone, from the 1 per centers down to the poor slob who bet some rent money on the rosy Wall Street chatter of a few months ago.

My prediction: The panic will continue until the central banks announce, or strongly hint, that problem is simply liquidity, a problem they can easily solve by printing more money. My prognosticated time line runs from right now until the Gnomes of Everywhere have had several three-martini lunches.

When they do so, all the world will sigh, giggle, and start pouring all that fresh cash back into Amalgamated Phuckall, Inc.  and its corporate kin. APA will rise again, and the three-piece suiters  will resume strutting  and crowing about the conquests of their big swinging dicks.

So, that's just the latest of Jim's hard-money rants, right?

Maybe. Maybe not.

There's a guy named James Grant who is reputedly an expert on money and markets. Three months ago he weighed in on central banks, especially their mania for fiat trillions. The article is worth a read, but the nut is here, in a quotation going back a century and a half. Grant writes:


Walter Bagehot, a wonderful Victorian journalist who served in the 1860s and 70s as the editor of The Economist, once said that John Bull — the proverbial personification of Great Britain — can stand anything, but he can’t stand two percent. Meaning very low interest rates. Why? Because they instigate a lot of unwise speculation and a lot of misallocation of resources: people who find that money costs nothing to borrow do silly things with it. And when Bagehot said that, he meant positive two percent. In Denmark, for example, they now pay you to borrow and you pay them to save.

John Bull, Janet Yellin's Fed, the European banker/bureaucrats, the gnomes of Peking, the Bank of Japan. Do you doubt for a moment they're about to override the governor on their high-speed presses?  They'll call the resulting new bubble "wealth," and in a small way it will be, until next time.