저자: PeterSchiff · 외국인
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연준이 2019년 금리를 인상 대신 3차례 인하했고, 이는 버블을 터뜨린 뒤 되돌린 것일 뿐 근본 문제는 해결되지 않았다는 주장. 과거 상황 정리: 2018년 12월 미국 증시는 대공황 이후 최악의 12월을 겪었고, 연준이 긴축을 계속했다면 2008년보다 더 큰 하락과 침체가 왔을 것이라고 봄. 연준의 정책 전환 배경: 연준은 이전 금리 인상으로 버블을 스스로 터뜨렸고, 이후 다시 완화 정책(버블을 부풀린 정책)으로 되돌아가 위기를 연기했을 뿐이라고 주장. 트럼프 효과: 트럼프 당선 후 규제 완화·감세 기대로 낙관론이 형성돼 연준이 추가 인상의 명분을 얻었고, 실제로는 정부지출과 재정적자가 크게 늘어 GDP 수치가 왜곡됐다고 평가. 예측 적중 주장: 2019년 말 이후 연준이 양적완화(QE)로 복귀할 것이라는 예측이 맞았다고 강조하며, 단기 국채 매입 등 명칭만 바꾼 사실상의 QE이며 대차대조표는 과거 QE 때보다 빠르게 증가한다고 주장. 부채와 정책 한계: 현재 부채는 금융위기 때보다 훨씬 많아 정상 금리로 복귀할 수 없고, 연준은 제로금리와 무기한 QE에 갇혔다고 봄. 정치적 고통 회피 때문에 중앙은행이 독립적이지 않다고 주장. 마이너스 금리 비판: 트럼프의 마이너스 금리 선호를 비판하며, 유럽중앙은행·일본은행 같은 중앙은행만이 마이너스 금리 채권을 사는 상황을 지적. 결론: 고통을 미루는 정책은 정치적으로는 유리하지만 경제적으로는 나쁘며, 외국 중앙은행이 채권을 사며 금리 상승을 막아도 달러 붕괴는 막을 수 없다는 경고.
다듬은 글
last year when i gave my talk the federal reserve had raised interest rates in december of 2018 and pretty much everybody believed at least everybody whose opinion counts that the fed was going to raise rates another three times in 2019. well they got the number right right the fed did move interest rates three times except the direction was the opposite of what everybody thought instead of hiking interest rates three times the fed cut interest rates three times now of course all the people who were completely surprised by exactly what i said was going to happen right they act as if something must have changed that well the fed was going to raise interest rates three times they were going to normalize rates but then they just didn't that somehow circumstances changed that they necessarily couldn't foresee and so they had to do this about face but none of that is true nothing changed the only thing that changed if you want to call it a change is that the market started to react to the prior rate hikes precisely the way anybody should have been able to figure was going to happen the fed pricked its own bubble by raising interest rates the first time it just took a while before the air really started to come out in a way that made everybody scared because remember in december we had the worst december in the u.s stock market since the great depression and had the fed not reverse course had the fed continued on its trajectory we probably would have already had a worse market decline than the one we had in 2008 we would probably already be in a greater recession than the one that we had in 2008 but the federal reserve did not cancel that recession or market crash it simply postponed it by reverting to this very policies that inflated the bubble in the first place now it never made any sense to me that you had so many people that just believed that the fed could normalize interest rates how anybody could feel that normal rates were possible when you have an abnormally large amount of debt and i knew that this journey was impossible to complete before the fed even embarked on it before the fed raised interest rates for the first time in december 2015 i spent the entire year saying they wouldn't raise rates and the reason i said they wouldn't is because i said they were smart enough to know if they ever attempted to normalize rates they could never complete the process and i thought that revelation would be more problematic for the fed than just never trying to do it at all and proving that i was correct and of course when 2014 came to an end much like when 2018 came to an end everybody believed the fed would raise rates three or four times in 2015 except for me and the fed waited until the last possible minute they didn't raise rates until december of that year that wasn't an accident the fed didn't want to raise rates it just didn't want to admit that it wanted to pretend that it could raise rates without actually proving that it couldn't by raising them but it backed itself into such a big corner that it kind of felt pressured to do something and so they raised rates and my initial reaction was okay it's one and done right the fed is not going to raise rates anymore and i believe that forecast would have been accurate but for the election of donald trump i think had hillary clinton won the fed never would have raised rates a second time we would have gone back to zero already and the fed would have restarted qe sooner than it did but because donald trump was elected that provided the fed some cover because it created a lot of false optimism for the markets right that trump was going to somehow make america great again he was going to slash regulation he was going to cut government spending or cut taxes and pay off the national debt and all sorts of you know promises and things that people attributed uh to trump created a lot of enthusiasm especially among republicans and of course a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of small business owners they tend to be republican so they became more optimistic about the economy and so that created another boost and of course the tax cuts themselves provided another shot of keynesian fiscal stimulus late in this in this cycle because we had tax cuts but we actually also had spending increases a lot of people overlooked the fact that government spending increased dramatically uh since trump was elected not just on the military which trump brags about all the time how much money we borrowed to buy more military equipment but we also borrowed a lot of money to provide for more social spending so we had this huge increase in deficit spending you know that temporarily skewed the gdp numbers to get people to think that the economy was actually doing better since trump was elected than before he took office when the reality is we're simply continuing the same failed policies that obama had who's continuing the same failed policies uh that bush had i mean you know if you look at the popularity of president trump right now with republicans he's extremely popular among republicans even though the only real difference between trump and any other republican president or even democratic president for that matter because he's a very liberal uh republican it's all it's all style it's not substance his style is different his delivery is different but if you look at what's actually happening it's just massive government spending massive massive deficit spending and so the big fat ugly bubble that he inherited from obama is simply bigger and fatter and uglier than when he took office but people are not paying attention to that to the problem and you know now that the fed has done precisely what i said it would do and in fact you know the my one of my my last appearance but i was on fox business on a two days before the fed's last rate hike and during that appearance i was asked you know what the fed was going to do and i said well they're probably going to raise rates but i think this is the last hike i think after this december rate hike the next thing the fed is going to do is cut rates and that's exactly what they did but i also made another prediction on that interview i said that after the fed cut rates they would go back to quantitative easing of course nobody expected the fed to do that because the fed was talking about quantitative tightening it was supposed to be on autopilot it was supposed to be like watching paint dry and that prediction has also come true the federal reserve is back to quantitative easing now the federal reserve doesn't want to admit this because they specifically have stated over and over again in fact every chance they get they say we're not doing qe except that's exactly what they are doing see they've created a distinction without a difference see when they were officially doing qe the fed was concentrating its debt monetization on longer term government bonds now it's concentrating its debt monetization on short government bonds what's the difference they're still monetizing government debt the balance sheet is actually growing faster now when they now that they're not doing qe than it was when they were doing qe so this is the biggest qe they've ever done of course it's open-ended it's never going to stop and the fact that they are monetizing a lot of short-term debt which of course there's a lot more short-term debt out there to be monetized than there is long-term debt that's part of the problem the way we finance the national debt but because they're so active at the short end that just means they're going to have to step up the amount that they're monetizing more frequently because everything they monetize is going to have to be remonetized when it matures and the reason the fed is back to quantitative easing the reason the fed is cutting interest rates right is because they helped create an economy that was completely addicted to cheap money we have much more debt now than we did before the fed first started qe we have much more debt now than when we had a debt crisis and that caused the fed to slash interest rates but instead of allowing the debt to be liquidated in the crisis we have even more debt than we've ever had before you know i'm even starting to read a lot of articles in the mainstream media about how the fed kind of has no choice now right how the fed is kind of in a position and not just the fed but other central banks where they have to keep the monetary spigots open indefinitely right where uh the fed has to go back to zero or stay near zero wherever it is that they're gonna have to continue to do quantitative easing forever and this is not something that people should just be discovering this was obvious from day one but what all the you know the writers are getting wrong when they talk about that now the fed has no choice is first of all they do have a choice right it's just that there's no pain-free choice see the fed can do the right thing and then we have to deal with the pain now or they can keep doing the wrong thing so we have to deal with even more pain in the future see that's the problem it's politically they don't have a choice because when it comes to politics nobody wants pain now they'd rather postpone it to somebody else's watch now of course the central bankers are supposed to be independent they're not supposed to care if politicians feel some pain if they're held accountable for their extravagance by the voters but this should really set aside any kind of illusions that any central banks anywhere in the world are politically independent because the only reason they're pursuing this reckless policy is because of politics you know i thought it was funny when donald trump uh gave his uh signing speech when he when he put his john hancock on a completely meaningless phase one china trade deal and during this his acceptance speech he went off on a tangent where he started talking about negative interest rates and how great it was and how lucky the europeans were that they could go out and borrow money at negative rates and you know us dumb americans we actually have to pay to borrow and he thought that this was a great thing and he really lamented the fact that we don't have negative interest rates yet in the united states and he really wants them but then he kind of posed this rhetorical question he said but i always wondered who's dumb enough to buy these bonds i mean i understand you know borrowing at negative rates but lending i mean who's dumb enough to lend money at a negative rate well the answer to trump's question is the ecb is the bank of japan it's central banks that are dumb enough to buy negative yielding bonds and donald trump wants the fed to be as dumb as all the other central banks now he's probably going to get his wish but the reality is why are central banks doing stuff that is so dumb they're doing it for politics it's smart politics to postpone the pain but it's lousy economics it's lousy monetary policy but one of the things too that people just don't get is how bad this crisis is going to be now because the fed can't do this indefinitely the foreign central banks can't do this indefinitely sure they can buy bonds all they want they can create dollars out of thin air and buy up bonds to pretend prevent interest rates from rising but what they can't prevent is the dollar from collapsing you
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