The Bailout is Bad

The Rescue Package Will Delay Recovery by Frank Shostak

In his testimony to the Congress on September 24, Fed Chairman Bernanke urged the legislators to quickly approve the bailout of the financial sector with a package of $700 billion. Bernanke echoed Treasury Secretary Paulson's view that the bailout expense, while hefty, is needed to remove from banks' balance sheets the mortgage-linked assets, which are paralyzing the flow of credit...

Conventional thinking presents economic adjustment — also labeled as "economic recession" — as something terrible, even the end of the world. In fact, economic adjustment is not menacing or terrible; from an economic point of view, it is nothing more than a time when scarce resources are reallocated in accordance with consumers' priorities...

If central bankers and government bureaucrats can fix things in difficult times, why not in good times too? Why not have a fully controlled economy and all the problems will be fixed forever? The collapse of the Soviet Union's centralized system is the best testimony one can have that controls don't work. A better way to fix economic problems is to allow entrepreneurs the freedom to allocate resources in accordance with society's priorities.

In this sense, the best rescue plan is to allow the market mechanism to operate freely. Allowing the market to do the job will result in some activities disappearing all together while some other activities will in fact be expanded...

Hence the rescue package cannot prevent so-called economic disruptions. If anything, government intervention would make these disruptions much worse. Again, a better alternative is to let the market do the job. The market's ability to make swift adjustments without much drama was vividly illustrated only a few weeks ago when the very large investment bank, Lehman Brothers, was allowed to go belly up. The world did not come to an end. Instead, this was a healthy development. A money loser was eliminated from the market. This freed up resources to promote growth...

Only a few weeks ago, we saw that the liquidation of a large bank such as Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch did not cause massive disruptions. In fact, the adjustment was swift and almost invisible. The reason for the smooth adjustment is that the market was allowed to do its job. If government and Fed bureaucrats had tried to intervene with bailouts, the whole process would have taken much longer and would have been very costly in terms of real resources.

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Frank Shostak on the Current Economic Situation

The Fed's New Tricks Are Creating Disaster
Frank Shostak

The Federal Reserve is trying a range of new tricks to push new forms of lending as a means of preventing what they fear may otherwise be a major collapse in financial markets. What all these strategies have in common is an unwillingness to come to terms with the reality that the crisis is based on real factors and can't be merely papered over without grave consequence to economic health...

Bernanke is of the view that by means of aggressive monetary policy the credit markets can be normalized. Once credit markets are brought back to normalcy, this will play an important role in preventing serious economic crisis. Remember Bernanke's financial accelerator model: a minor shock in the financial sector could result in large damage to the real economy.

In short, Bernanke, by means of his so-called "innovative" policy of fixing the symptoms of the disease, believes he can cure the disease.

What is the source of the disease and why are investment banks so heavily infected by it? The root of the problem is the Fed's very loose interest rate policy and strong monetary pumping from January 2001 to June 2004. The federal funds rate target was lowered from 6.5% to 1%. It is this that has given rise to various malinvestments, which we label here as bubble activities...

Obviously, then, if the pool of real saving is still healthy, Bernanke's policies might "work." In short, after a time lag, financial markets might start zooming ahead and the real economy will follow suit. We suggest that if this were to happen, the recovery shouldn't be attributed to Bernanke's policies but, rather, understood to have happened despite his policies.

In the alternative scenario, to which we assign a fairly high likelihood, the pool of real savings is actually falling or stagnating. In the framework of the alternative scenario, Bernanke's policies will only do further damage to the stock of savings and sound capital investment, and plunge the economy into a severe and prolonged crisis.

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The markets responded favorable to more rate cuts yesterday. However, the fundamentals are largely unsound. The solution to the problem is not rate cuts, which caused the current crisis.