No communist was ever as dedicated to economic suicide as the current class of idiots who rule us…
High inflation, over-regulation, and a general sense that things are going in the wrong direction remind us of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But today the underlying problems that were responsible for our woes in that time are vastly worse. The coming reckoning for Washington’s insanely irresponsible monetary policy may dwarf the troubles from all recent recessions and periods of inflation.
The Federal Reserve has created a doom loop between the housing market and inflation. For years it has printed tens of billions of dollars each month to buy sketchy securities meant to subsidize the housing market and favor bond traders. This continues even now, in spite of inflation and a red-hot housing market. But the housing market has become dependent on unearned, newly printed money, and stopping the flow might cause a catastrophic correction. If it doesn’t stop, however, inflation will explode.
Let me walk you through some of the math.
Inflation closes the gap between money earned and money spent. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve expanded M2 money supply from just under $8 trillion to around $22 trillion today. During that time GDP has increased from around $14.6 trillion to around $24.5 trillion today. We’ve gone from a ratio of one dollar chasing $2.20 in goods in services to an almost 1 to 1 ratio today. Inflation during the same period, according to the government, has eroded the dollar by a mere 33 percent.
You think 8 percent inflation is high? Prices need to double to restore any semblance of balance between currency and the things you can buy with currency. We have a long way to go.
To understand how dire the situation has become, we need to review a curious practice the Fed began shortly after the 2008 crash. In November 2008, the Federal Reserve began an extraordinary program of purchasing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) Using newly created money (not tax dollars or private investments), the Fed dumped billions of dollars per month with the stated goal of helping the government stimulate the economy.
A mortgage-backed security is simply a pool of mortgages. As homeowners pay their mortgages, the money then flows to bondholders. The 2008 financial crisis resulted from problems valuing these securities. In order to sell a MBS, the buyer had to gain some confidence in the likelihood of repayment. Because this involved so many complex and unknowable factors relating to each of the individual mortgages, the debt could sometimes turn “toxic” or drop in value quickly when buyers lost faith in the future performance of homeowners.
Years passed and a recovery seemed to abate the emergency. Yet the Fed just kept buying more and more. Traditionally, the Fed stimulated the economy by purchasing U.S. treasuries. This avoided the sticky problem of establishing a fair price for the security because the treasury’s value is relatively easy to establish. An MBS, however, cannot be easily valued because reasonable minds can make different predictions about the likelihood of individual homeowners repaying their loans. Thus, unlike purchases of treasuries, bulk purchases of mortgage-backed securities are ripe for waste, fraud, and abuse. There’s no easy way to audit whether the Fed is overpaying for the securities.