After Central Bank Financial Bubbles, Comes Liquidation And Industrial Deflation

Wednesday, October 15, 2014
By Paul Martin

by David Stockman
ZeroHedge.com
10/14/2014

Nearly two decades of central bank financial repression have created huge distortions and imbalances in the world economy. Now they are coming home to roost as the impossibility of ZIRP forever dawns on even our mad money printers. Having created yet another round of ebullient financial bubbles, they are now getting palpably nervous.

Even the lady with the perpetual tan and unfailing call for “moar” monetary and fiscal stimulus, IMF head Christine Lagarde, said something sensible over the weekend:

“There is too little economic risk-taking, and too much financial risk-taking.”

She got the “too much financial risk-taking” part right, but here’s the thing. The apparatus of state policy—-fiscal borrowing and central bank money printing—-can not cause enterprise to flourish. Free market capitalism is the milieu in which business enterprise, invention, risk-taking and labor productivity thrive best. So, yes, reducing market impairments—such as tax rates on production and capital which are too high or regulations, protectionist laws and subsidies which are too onerous—-is always helpful.

These latter steps are now coming into fashion under the heading “structural reform” and they make sense as far as they go. But central bankers like Draghi and international monetary bureaucrats like Lagarde pushing this agenda fail to recognize that their own policies on the fiscal and monetary side currently dwarf the ill-effects of, for instance, over-zealous EPA regulation in the US or protectionist labor laws in Europe.

The Rest…HERE

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