Saturday 27 December 2008

How not to fix a recession

Truly, these experts cook up some insane plans which are then duly reported as if they were sensible.

Here are some snippets from a recent FT article:
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Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the ECB ... did not rule out the possibility of the ECB buying government debt at some stage, even though such an option was not currently being considered.

... The BoJ cut rates to nearly zero on Friday, stepped up its purchases of government bonds and said it would buy commercial paper...

... senior Fed officials do not think quantitative easing was a big success in Japan. The Fed says its own strategy is to stimulate the economy by driving down actual borrowing rates – increasing reserves only as a by-product– and it prefers to call this credit policy or credit-based easing.

Even the BoJ does not think quantitative easing was an enormous success, and denies that what it is doing now amounts to the same thing.

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Take it from me, all these central banks are now trying what Japan has been trying for the past ten years or more, it hasn't worked so far, it won't work now.

The idea that you can fix a recession by allowing the central bank to buy government bonds appears to be without any merit whatsoever. That's just government departments swapping bits of paper with numbers written on them.

Even worse is the idea that governments should lend directly to or invest in businesses, that's taxpayers' money straight down the toilet, and we'll end up with a load of loss-making nationalised and subsidised businesses (the State hates admitting it's backed the wrong horse).

3 comments:

Gregg said...

Keep up the good work in 2009 Mark, my grasp of things financial is improving thanks to your blog.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Ta, will do.

AntiCitizenOne said...

The best way to improve the economy is to stop punishing economically successful people!