Author predicted crisis, predicts inflation

Discussion in 'Economics' started by Eight, Apr 9, 2009.

  1. Eight

    Eight

    I have not read the book yet, it's on order for sure..

    http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE53790N20090408

    Author who predicted crisis sees inflation ahead
    Wed Apr 8, 2009 5:56pm EDT Email | Print | Share | Reprints | Single Page [-] Text [+]
    By Daniel Trotta

    NEW YORK (Reuters) - An author who saw the global financial crisis coming fears the next bubble will come in the form of inflation and has little confidence U.S. President Barack Obama's team is up to the challenge ahead.

    "The Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the big benefactors to the financial community," said Kevin Phillips, author of "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism."

    "The financial community is donating more to Democrats than ever before and you've got more Democrats in the financial community, creating a very powerful pattern there. I don't think you're going to see the Obama administration and Congress willing to be tough enough in dealing with these things," he told Reuters.

    Phillips, a former strategist in the Nixon White House who has turned highly critical of the Republicans and voted for Obama in 2008, published "Bad Money," his 13th book, a year ago.

    The paperback edition came out March 31 with a revised preface and afterward, interpreting the events of the past year, but the prescient body of "Bad Money" remains unchanged.

    A year ago, he warned of a the pending explosion of a 25-year "multibubble" that started in the 1980s, when the financial sector accounted for 10 percent to 12 percent of the U.S. economy had started metastasizing into an "arguably crippling" 20 percent to 21 percent by the middle of this decade.

    Overleveraging and easy credit was bound to create disaster, he warned.

    Phillips assigns much of the blame to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, but perhaps even more on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who he calls a "disaster," and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan.

    Phillips calls Paulson a Wall Street insider who was looking out for his own, and Bernanke an academic misguidedly trying to refight the 1930s Great Depression. Together they formed the wrong team at the wrong time whose ad hoc approach threw away hundreds of billions of dollars and more than doubled the Fed's balance sheet, he says.

    "What you're seeing Bernanke do is he's trying to create a bailout reflationary bubble, which he can't describe as a bubble, just as Greenspan couldn't describe the housing mortgage bubble as a bubble. What we're seeing by Bernanke is a covert attempt to rebubble," Phillips told Reuters.

    Moreover, a commodities cycle probably started early in this decade and is only being masked now by recession, Phillips says, presaging a repeat 1970s style inflation, he said.

    "The danger is that the great unwind -- the unraveling of the mammoth buildup of debt -- is under way. If that predominates, Bernanke's theory is you're going to have deflation," Phillips said.

    "My theory is that if we are in a commodities cycle, what you will get will be more like 1973-74-75 ... where as soon as the recovery begins you get rising inflation because you're going to play havoc with all money supply and liquidity that's been unleashed " he added.

    Meanwhile, the taxpayer and small investor have little defense.

    "The average person is going to be on the periphery of concern and I think that's rotten," Phillips said.
     
  2. So far all data -- industrial production, debt to GDP, commodity prices, global trade, unemployment etc. etc. speaks in favor of "Bernanke's theory" (if that really is his theory).

    Arguing this is a cyclical contraction alongside 1974 driven by excess capacity and rising input prices, I am not sure what planet this guy is living on.
     
  3. Everything he says is truth. The guy's sharp and honest.

    I knew who he was because he spoke of the 'realignment of the south' as one of the factors that would most greatly influence politics from the 80s onward.

    Paulson's a piece of shit criminal, Bernanke is incompetent, and Geithner is Paulson's little lackey.

    Obama has sold his soul to the devil, along with Rahm Emanuel and much of his staff.
     
  4. LOL ! Where are all these guys coming from ? Inflation ? ROFL !!!! London and Manhattan real estate prices beginning to plunge and they are talking abot Inflation !! BUAHAHAHAHAHAH
     
  5. j1900q

    j1900q

    I think this guy is right longer term. Ignore at your own risk.
    thanks
    Keith
     
  6. Longer term, eh?

    So how long term are we talking about? Doesn't exactly take a lot of smarts to say "in the long term, we can expect prices to rise".

    ...?
     
  7. Uhm no he's not right "longer term." Comparing 1974 and 2008/2009 has nothing to do with a "long term outlook", it's simply factually wrong.

    One of the key things Bernanke is actually getting right is respecting the "great debt unwind" aspect of things; something this author says is "wrong headed" because this is "just another excess capacity and commodity cycle". So blatantly wrong that it's not even funny anymore.
     
  8. The book came out a year ago, how significant is his prediction of economic crisis when his book was written after the first economic shocks were hitting us in AUG 2007?
     
  9. Eight

    Eight

    Ten+ years ago Martin Armstrong predicted an international credit crisis followed by hyperinflation. One down, one to go...
     
  10. Cutten

    Cutten

    Long-term, noun:

    A period of time after you exit your position, in which you miss the move which would have brought you back to breakeven.
     
    #10     Apr 9, 2009