Irrational Beliefs Are Ruling Markets

To understand the consequences of the credit cycle, we must dismiss pure opinion, and examine the evidence rationally. This article assesses the fate of the dollar on the next credit crisis, a subject of increasing topicality. It concludes that the late stage of the credit cycle has important similarities with 1927, when the Fed eased monetary policy, following evidence of a mild recession.

Contemporary financial markets are inherently emotional, mainly because they are awash with government-issued currencies. Investors and speculators would never be as careless with sound money as they are with infinitely-elastic fiat. Instead, they are ready to gamble with it, partly because they know that standing still guarantees a loss of purchasing power and partly because rising asset prices, which is actually the reflection of a falling currency, makes selling currency for assets an appealing proposition. Furthermore, credit for speculation is freely available through futures and options.

Financial markets are also irrational due to modern economics, the explanation for it all, having become a belief system. If all central banks pursue economic beliefs, as an investor you will probably do so as well, otherwise you are out of step in a world that follows trends. That works until it doesn’t. Central bankers pursue policies which are a mishmash of neo-Keynesianism and monetarism, the balance between the two setting the fashion of the day, with an overriding assumption that unregulated markets are the source of all our economic and systemic troubles. But there is one element of monetary policy that does not change, and that is a conviction that everything can be cured by monetary inflation.

Is this condemnation of monetary policy over the top? Well, only last week Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, was authorised by the UK Treasury to issue a further £1.2bn of capital, which according to press reports will allow the Bank of England to create further loans totalling more than £750bn.[i] Nice work if you can get it: create some sterling by a few strokes on a keyboard and gear up on it by issuing a further 625 times as much, only backed by the myth that the central bank’s capital is real. What is the purpose? To banish all risk emanating from the private sector, of course.

You can only justify monetary policies of this sort by supposing they are the right thing to do. But it tells us something important: deflation, however you define it, is not the problem.

- Source, James Turk's Goldmoney

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