Central Bank QE - USD money supply will have to increase as it becomes the only viable currency

 

Posted Oct 3, 2022 by Martin ArmstronG

 

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; Nobody knows history better than you. Will QE continue if we end up in war? It seems there would be no choice.

Thank you for your very enlightening blog.

PG

ANSWER: Yes. The Fed was “directed” by the White House to carry out QE during World War II. They were to prevent interest rates from rising and the debt rose. That finally led to the Federal Reserve breaking with the White House after the war when they expected it to continue for the Korean War. That is when the Fed asserted its independence.

This time, we may have a different problem. As the war unfolds in Europe, the capital will flee as usual to the States. But the money supply will have to increase because the dollar will become the only viable currency still standing. That is why you are witnessing the pound and the euro collapse. Things will unfold differently this time. The Fed has been raising rates to fight inflation that will fail because this has to do with shortages – not speculation.

The October 3, 2022 Emergency Meeting was closed to public observation by Order of the Board of Governors because the matters fell under exemption(s) 9(A)(i) of the Government in the Sunshine Act (5 U.S.C. Section 552b(c)), and it was determined that the public interest did not require opening the meeting. That said, the Fed is faced with a triple crisis – liquidity, banking stability, and an inevitable Sovereign Debt Crisis. As interest rates have risen based on domestic inflation rates, simultaneously, the higher rates have undermined both European banks as well as Emerging Markets. The Federal Reserve has become the DEFACTO central bank of the world.

This is a crisis similar in part to 1927 when the European central banks lobbied the Fed to lower rates because of their debt crisis. They lowered rates to accommodate Europe and that was then blamed on the Fed for creating the 1929 boom. This is also why FDR then seized control of the Federal Reserve and move the head to Washington and made the Chairman subservient to the President.

I know so many blame the Fed for everything. They are actually facilitating Congress. The Fed has no control over fiscal spending or the debt level. In the end, it is really the debt that has become the money supply that simply pays interest.

There was no US paper money before the Civil War. The first issues of paper money were actually a hybrid bond – they paid interest. The term “greenback” developed for “demand notes” that came later as the cost of the war rose. They no longer paid interest so what was on the back was just green ink – no interest rate table to show what the note was worth.

I will be doing a full report on this subject for the WEC. It is complex, yet exceptionally interesting for what we face.

Federal Reserve to Return to its Original Design - lend now on commercial paper

Posted Mar 15, 2020 by Martin Armstrong

The Federal Reserve will return to its origin and it will do what it was originally designed to do. They will lend now on commercial paper rather than just government. As everyone knows,  this has been my strongest recommendation and criticism of Quantitative Easing. The Fed was originally designed to create Elastic Money buying corporate paper to prevent a recession and job losses. World War I saw government interfere and directed the Fed should be buying government debt.

Injecting cash into the banks FAILED because the banks lacked the confidence to lend money. They turned and placed money at the Fed in Excess Reserves. Not that that bottomed in September 2019 with the Repo Crisis and is back on the rise again as banks are not lending.

Lowering rates FAILED because people will not borrow if they lack confidence in the future, Hence, Europe and Japan have destroyed their government bond markets and now they talk about nationalizing companies and eliminating paper money while seizing cryptocurrencies. They have no monetary power left in the central bank. All they can do now is turn draconian and seal the fate of their economic future.

The Fed will take a different path and lend directly to corporations because the bankers will hoard the cash and NEVER help the economy. This has been my #1 recommendation to save the economy and the central bank.

This is the REAL Crisis – not the coronavirus which has been at best the catalyst to set everything in motion for the monetary crisis and the Mother of All Financial Crises.

QE v Managing Benchmark Rates

Posted Nov 20, 2019 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: The Fed buying $60 billion in T-Bills each month is obviously not long-term QE. They are expanding their balance sheet, but this is clearly not the QE as before. As a professional institution we can see the difference. Would you elaborate on the difference?

FH

ANSWER: The Fed is buying $60 billion of Treasury bills per month for an entirely different purpose. They are trying to prevent short-term rates from rising. The 2007-2009 QE was an attempt to “stimulate” the economy by encouraging banks to lend, which it failed to accomplish. Here the Fed is trying to prevent repo rates from rising to 10% again because the banks do not trust banks.

We are witnessing the Fed trying to maintain control over the benchmark short-term interest rate it uses to guide monetary policy. They are NOT “stimulating” the economy, bailing out banks, buying US debt because others will not, or anything of the like. Buying T-Bills is short-term not long-term. They are trying to artificially prevent short-term rates from rising which our model shows in underway.

The crisis has NOTHING to do with the economy domestically and it is not Quantitative Easing trying to stimulate the economy by buying in long-term debt. They are trying to keep short-term rates from rising which is being instigated by an entirely different type of financial crisis that has NEVER before been witnessed.

I cannot go into elaborate detail on this blog. I do not want to be accused of starting a financial panic for the way things always work is they need someone to blame. I get calls from those involved so anything I would report would not be opinion or speculation. Hence, I must respect what is unfolding and it has to be in a report or at a conference, not on this blog where we do not restrict who comes in or out

Quantitative easing is not responsible for increasing the money supply- It is a swap of bonds for cash

Is Quantitative Easing the Same as Printing Money?

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong;

Thank you for coming to Athens. After the presentation, there were so many questions that the moderator did not have time for. You answered some for the crowd afterwards that I had never heard anyone ever explain. You said Quantitative Easing was not money printing nor did it really increase the money supply. You also said to the crowd that fiat is not paper money, but anything declared by government including pegs.

Could you elaborate on those statements.

Thank you for your enlightenment.

GP

ANSWER: Quantitative easing is not responsible for increasing the money supply or printing money. It is a swap of bonds for cash so they are not outright printing money. It is a swap transaction. This combined with the idea that paper money is fiat and precious metals are tangible are all seriously wrong. Fiat is the attempt by government to decree the value of money. This is no different from a peg that broke, such as the Swiss/euro peg, or the Bretton Woods attempt to fix gold in terms of dollars. ANY attempt to flat line the value of money by decree is fiat, regardless of whether the instrument is paper or seashells.

This idea that Quantitative Easing is printing money is very pre-1971 thinking and is a throwback to Bretton Woods. Such an assumption focuses on the differentiation between debt and money or cash. Pre-1971, you could not borrow against government debt so there was a clear difference between debt and money. The theory that it was less inflationary to borrow than print made sense only when there was a real difference between debt and cash or money.

Today, debt and cash are the same. If you trade futures, you deposit cash and to earn some interest you buy T-Bills, which are deposited and used as collateral. The distinction between debt and cash has vanished. This means that Quantitative Easing does NOT actually stimulate the economy. The giant assumption was that the cash would be spent within the system. But the banks complained and the Fed created the EXCESS RESERVE window which has about $2.5 trillion on which the Fed pays 0.25% interest. They only swapped bonds for the right to deposit cash at 0.25%, so where was the stimulus? Nothing was stimulated and there was no inflation since there was no actual increase in private spending.

These theories are very primitive to say the least. Nobody looks at them closely or follows the money to see if they are doing anything what the theory pretends should happen. The ECB bought 25% of the bonds and inflation still turned negative. They have stated that they will increase that to 33%. They never review their actions when something fails to work. All government ever does is move further in the same direction because government employees will NEVER admit a mistake.

This is akin to physicians in medieval times who assumed that bleeding a person would heal them because an illness was seen as if it were a poison in the bloodstream. If the patient died, they never assumed the death to be the result of taking too much blood. Instead, they would state that they did not bleed the patient soon enough and that caused their death.

Welcome to the plague of thinking among humankind. Why learn new ways as long as you can just accelerate the current failed process? It’s safer because you do not have to admit mistakes that way. This is why we must crash and burn. They will never look at their actions and are incapable of admitting an era. Anyone who challenges the status quo becomes the “fringe” element that should be ignored.

Banks will be a giant short as they will not be supported by government

A Question of Money – Interest – Bankers

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: 

Mr Armstrong, interesting article today, the story of the store of value (at least long term) has always confused me. One can look at saving accounts also as an asset as it yields the interest payment and one relinquishes the access to the money. No difference to bonds.

But your article causes some questions: as you stated before the FED buying bonds does not increase real money supply, so what caused the decline of purchasing power of money in the asset class of equities? Is it that the manipulating of interest rates distorted the actual confidence and time preference in the economy which can be measured by the velocity?

You posted earlier that the velocity has declined. People do not want to invest but save which is not an option for big money as it doesn’t yield any or very little return. Hence enterprises buy back shares and smart money has no other option.

Interest rate hike by the FED, eventually increasing retail participation, a cooling world economy, sovereign debt crisis and the flight to the Dollar. The outcome of your computer, a rise in US stock markets including a possible phase transition, seems comprehensible.

The only thing what leaves me with amazement is what do they really intend? I don’t believe that the families who run the banking system, operating for centuries in money business, do not understand that. I can only assume that for being protected by government the banking cartel buys the governments time and keep financing the deficits.

Best regards,

G

ANSWER: The problem in so many areas is that we can focus on one issue, but the answer is a complexity of variables. The history of interest rates has been provided on this site. Interest rates in a developed economy reflect the “option” value on the expected decline in purchasing power of money. If I expect it to decline by 5%, then I expect a profit and say want 8%. You in turn will pay the 8% only if you think you also can make a profit above 8% perhaps 10%+.

In an UNDEVELOPED economy, we transpose the depreciation risk of money with risk in general. Lacking any developed economy, one will lend only based upon the risk of getting repaid. Therefore, without a legal system, the risk is either the person or the political climate. When we look at the history of interest rates, I demonstrated that the rate of interest even within the Roman Empire increased the further you moved away from Rome. Hence, the lowest interest rates are in the dollar and they rise in other countries based upon perceived political risk. Greece’s interest rates are significantly higher than those in Germany. This is a reflection of political risk, not simple the future inflation rate in the Euro.

The Fed did not increase the money supply with QE easing and we have see that 9 months of QE in Europe has also failed to create inflation. What happened to the whole theory of the quantity of money impacting inflation? The problem lies in the definition. When US government debt was illegal to borrow against using it as collateral, then issuing debt DID NOT increase the money supply. When that was changed and you can post T-Bills as collateral to trade, then there is no longer a difference between debt and money.

The US government did not issue paper money after the Revolution until the Civil War. To encourage people to accept it (CONFIDENCE), it paid interest. In reality, this was a form of circulating bond. The term “greenback” referred to the issues that did not pay interest and were not purportedly backed by silver or gold. You turned it over and it was just green ink with no promises.

So the Fed buying in bonds did not increase the money supply and it failed to create inflation as expected BECAUSE it merely swapped bonds (money paying interest) with non-interest paying money (electronic entries). The bankers then complained so the Fed created the Excess Reserve Facility, where banks have nearly $3 trillion in cash. The SF Fed argues Milton Friedman said they should pay interest on reserves. That was only on the required reserves. The creation of the Excess Reserves totally negated the entire idea of stimulating the economy for the banks never lent the money out. It became a giant swap of bonds for cash deposits at the Fed which it then had to pay 0.25% interest.

So now turning to the VELOCITY of money, a decline here demonstrates that people are HOARDING cash (rising in purchasing power as assets decline), as well as banks (Excess Reserves). We have companies buying back their own stock further shrinking the supply of equities also fueling the deflationary spiral. The Excess Reserves at the Fed show just how much banks are hoarding cash.

Therefore, we can see the deflationary trend and the contraction right here. The US share market has been at the high-end of trading, but it did not breakout beyond our second target which was the 18500 on the Dow. The market indeed doubled as we warned coming out of the hold in the 6,000 level passing 12,000, which is the MINIMUM requirement to start a Phase Transition. We nearly tripled by the 2015.75 target beating our minimum doubling requirement, but this was still not a Phase Transition. Why? Retail participation has been at record lows in stocks. This is a bubble in government debt and why we are at 5000 year lows in interest rates.

Now top the conspiracy. “The only thing what leaves me with amazement is what do they really intend? I don’t believe that the families who run the banking system, operating for centuries in money business, do not understand that. I can only assume that for being protected by government the banking cartel buys the governments time and keep financing the deficits.”

Banking establishments are some of the WORSE investors throughout history. They always go bust and it is government that devours them every single time. Yes, the government has been protecting the bankers for they have also been fueling the debt assisting governments to borrow. Therein lies their own demise. EVERY major banking house have been destroyed by this very same flirtation with power. They are like moths attracted to the flame of a candle, hoping to dance by the light never realizing their wings may get burned.

The cycle has changed. The wheel of fortune has completed its revolution. Governments are turning against the banks and looking to electronic currency. The days of rumored banking conspiracies is coming to an end as it always has. The banks will be a giant short. When the Sovereign Debt defaults become a contagion, the banks will not be supported by government.