• 287 days Will The ECB Continue To Hike Rates?
  • 287 days Forbes: Aramco Remains Largest Company In The Middle East
  • 289 days Caltech Scientists Succesfully Beam Back Solar Power From Space
  • 689 days Could Crypto Overtake Traditional Investment?
  • 694 days Americans Still Quitting Jobs At Record Pace
  • 696 days FinTech Startups Tapping VC Money for ‘Immigrant Banking’
  • 699 days Is The Dollar Too Strong?
  • 699 days Big Tech Disappoints Investors on Earnings Calls
  • 700 days Fear And Celebration On Twitter as Musk Takes The Reins
  • 701 days China Is Quietly Trying To Distance Itself From Russia
  • 702 days Tech and Internet Giants’ Earnings In Focus After Netflix’s Stinker
  • 706 days Crypto Investors Won Big In 2021
  • 706 days The ‘Metaverse’ Economy Could be Worth $13 Trillion By 2030
  • 707 days Food Prices Are Skyrocketing As Putin’s War Persists
  • 709 days Pentagon Resignations Illustrate Our ‘Commercial’ Defense Dilemma
  • 710 days US Banks Shrug off Nearly $15 Billion In Russian Write-Offs
  • 713 days Cannabis Stocks in Holding Pattern Despite Positive Momentum
  • 714 days Is Musk A Bastion Of Free Speech Or Will His Absolutist Stance Backfire?
  • 714 days Two ETFs That Could Hedge Against Extreme Market Volatility
  • 716 days Are NFTs About To Take Over Gaming?
How Millennials Are Reshaping Real Estate

How Millennials Are Reshaping Real Estate

The real estate market is…

Zombie Foreclosures On The Rise In The U.S.

Zombie Foreclosures On The Rise In The U.S.

During the quarter there were…

Market Sentiment At Its Lowest In 10 Months

Market Sentiment At Its Lowest In 10 Months

Stocks sold off last week…

  1. Home
  2. Markets
  3. Other

The Private Sector Is Borrowing Again - And That's Not Good

Since at least the 1980s, US policy has been to convince us to borrow as much as possible on pretty much anything we could think of. This worked brilliantly until 2008, when homeowners, consumers and businesses hit a wall and private sector defaults began to exceed new loans. Another Great Depression was imminent.

But instead of allowing this natural cleansing process to run its course, governments around the world stepped into the breach themselves, borrowing tens of trillions of dollars to replace evaporating private sector debt. The idea, to the extent that there was one, was to buy time for traumatized consumers and businesses to relax a bit and start borrowing again.

This appears to be happening. The latest Fed Z.1 report shows overall US debt growing again, with the private sector leading the way.

US debt growth percent change 2013 v1

It's not surprising that near-zero interest rates and trillions of dollars of newly-created currency would get people borrowing again. What is surprising is that anyone thinks this is a good thing. In 2013 total US debt, equity prices, household net worth, large-bank assets and derivatives books, and a long list of other debt-related measures pierced the records they set in 2007. In other words we've recreated the conditions that prevailed just before the world nearly fell apart.

Will the result be different this time? It's hard to see how, especially since developed-world governments now have roughly twice as much debt as they did back then, so their ability to ride to the rescue will be limited.

As this is written the Fed is announcing that it will scale back its debt monetization to only $75 billion a month, or $900 billion a year. Its balance sheet, which just hit $4 trillion, will grow by nearly 25% in 2014, to nearly $5 trillion, which is a measure of how much new currency it is creating and pumping into the banking system.

The next stage of the plan is to get the banks to start lending this money, which would, through the magic of fractional reserves, produce loans in some large multiple of the original amount. So we might be on the verge of trading a nasty-but-comprehensible Kondratieff Winter for something a lot wilder.

 

Back to homepage

Leave a comment

Leave a comment