CODE RED: Central Banks Will Frantically Pound The Panic Button And Eventually Become Executioners To The World’s Currencies
JOHN MAULDIN
BusinessInsider.com
APR. 27, 2014
(It is especially important to read the opening quotes this week. They set up the theme in the proper context.)
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”
– Ludwig von Mises
“No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future.”
– Ludwig von Mises
“[Central banks are at] serious risk of exhausting the policy room for maneuver over time.”
– Jaime Caruana, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements
“The gap between the models in the world of monetary policymaking is now wider than at any time since the 1930s.”
– Benjamin Friedman, William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, Harvard
To listen to most of the heads of the world’s central banks, things are going along swimmingly. The dogmatic majority exude a great deal of confidence in their ability to manage their economies through whatever crisis may present itself. (Raghuram Rajan, the sober-minded head of the Reserve Bank of India, is a notable exception.)
However, there is reason to believe that there have been major policy mistakes made by central banks – and will be more of them – that will lead to dislocations in the markets – all types of markets. And it’s not just the usual anti-central bank curmudgeon types (among whose number I have been counted, quite justifiably) who are worried. Sources within the central bank community are worried, too, which should give thoughtful observers of the market cause for concern.
The Rest…HERE
