Goldman is back on gold betting on QE2 http://www.zerohedge.com/article/go...-market-poised-rally-us-real-rates-head-lower I havent gone back to my full gold position because I'm still afraid of a decline in commodities and risk assets. I'm going to risk being patient here
You seem to forget the axiom that its the boom that causes the bust. We are in a grinding deflationary scenario because of what happened in the previous years (much of it courtesy of the G-man), not because of what the Fed is or isn't doing right now. Japan has its problems because of its boom from the 50s to the 80s, which we can now see relied on failed economic ideology. They can't snap out of it, because they continue to rely on statism (they also have severe demographic issues, see Bill Gross' latest). Where is it written that its healthy for this price correction to be prevented? Asset prices (i.e. houses) need to fall to a spot where they bear some relation to the income of the folks who own them. Redundant malls and office parks need to revert back to the corn fields they once were. College dorms, which now bear resemblance to luxury hotel suites, need to revert back to the threadbare and simple places to crash and shag that they once were. CNBC needs to return to the dry business news channel it once was. Artificially trying to prop up this system is what got us into this mess.
I think he's referring to the crowding out effect excessive govt supply has. Basically, too little money available to fund productive economic activities, since it's all being used to fund govt borrowing. So it's not a money supply argument, per se. He makes the good ol' point (which I completely agree with) that no deleveraging has actually happened so far.
Rogoff responded to the Krugman criticism with a new paper http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5395 Krugman responded to that http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/reinhart-and-rogoff-are-confusing-me/ Yet failed to answer this "Put differently, our âhigh vulnerabilityâ region for lower growth (the area under the curve to the right of the 90% line) comprises only about 8% of the sample population. The standard considerations about type I and type II errors apply here.6 If we raise the upper bucket cut-off much above 90%, then we are relegating the high-debt analysis to case studies (the UK in 1946-1950 and Japan in recent years). Only about 2% of the observations are at debt-GDP levels at or above 120% â and that includes the aforementioned cases. If debt levels above 90% are indeed as benign as some suggest, one might have expected to see a higher incidence of these over the long course of history." The reason there is a limit of how high debt to gdp grows is because economic agents are aware that high debt to gdp ratios are destabilizing due monetization, default, high interest rates, etc Obviously there a ceiling on how high they can go before disruptions occur(or become more likely), markets tend to respond by raising interest rates(which hurt growth) and sometimes governments respond by cutting the deficit(which hurt growth, in order to prevent the market from hurting growth), there could be other ways as well, but the fact the Krugman questions that is amusing to say the least
He was referring to the M of the quantity theory of money equation. I dont see how the government deficit can affect that(negatively) given that the borrowed money is send back to the private sector through wages to public workers, contracts with private companies, transfer payments, etc He argued that the deficit was deflationary, which is strange to say the least
Bubbles existed before the Fed was created. There was about a dozen housing bubbles through the world in the last years, that is because LONG-term interest rates were low, which central banks have limited control(even less in the last decade, check the correlation numbers)
I'm not sure what this reply has to do w/my comment. I said that booms cause the busts. I had a () comment about Greenspan having a hand in the bubbles that occurred on his watch. Are you saying that he bears zero responsibility?
He bears some responsibility, but what if he prevented a deflationary japanese trap during the 2003-2004 cycle?Thats one thing he wont get credit for(because nobody sees crises that were prevented) but all that easy money might have just done the trick that prevented inflation expectations from unanchoring. Thats the 'risk management' approach they adopted during his years, you risk creating bad outcomes in order to prevent worse tail outcomes from occurring. Its mathematically correct but its a political disaster as the Fed learned with all the criticism, interestingly enough sound logic might the just what causes the Fed(in its current form) to abolished over the next 30 years
"WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Brazil and the U.S. have reached a debt-reduction agreement that will let the South American nation commit funds for the protection of its tropical forests. The debt-for-nature agreement signed Thursday reduces Brazil's debt payments to the U.S. by nearly $21 million over the next five years, the U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday. In return, Brazil has committed the funds to support grants protecting lands that are home to a variety of wildlife, including blue-bellied parrots and Brazilian gold frogs. The agreement was made under a 1998 law, designed to help the U.S. protect the environment of developing countries through debt reduction." UST owns Brazilian debt?I was not aware of this, I wonder where can you get data of all assets owned by the US government