Who is the stubborn child?

Who is the stubborn child ? President Trump continues to harrangue the Fed, with his latest line being that the Fed is behaving like a ‘stubborn child’. I take a different view, in an oped for DowJones/Marketwatch I argue that over accommodative monetary policy stores up financial risks for the future and gives politicians the cover to engage in bad policy.. https://lnkd.in/eYmWJ7g

As the dust settles on last week’s market-moving, dovish communications from the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, commentators continue to debate the Fed’s independence and the ECB’s wisdom.

Yet, beyond the shorter-term noise of markets and the sting of tweets from President Trump, there is a much deeper issue — that the comfort blanket the Fed and other central banks extend to stock and bond markets is enabling reckless politicians to do and say reckless things.

While the majority of central bankers have engaged in quantitative easing and super-low interest rates out of necessity rather than choice, this is a policy experiment that has arguably reached the limits of its usefulness. Politicians are beginning to take advantage.

In particular, quantitative easing is very much like a doctor administering morphine — it will dull pain but won’t cure that patient. Quantitative easing dulled the pain of the aftermath of the global financial crisis, but it has done little to fix the eurozone, and has done much to extend wealth inequality and encourage indebtedness, not just in the U.S., but in Europe, Japan and by extension in some emerging markets.

The Leviathan-like bargain central banks appear to have struck is to buy financial and economic stability in exchange for an inordinate level of influence over world affairs. The costs of this bargain are growing, in the dulling of market sensitivities to economic and financial imbalances, to wealth inequality and to the numbing of the urgency for politicians to address a litany of critical issues.

A much more profound concern relates to the intersection of central banks and politics, against the backdrop of what political scientist Larry Diamond has called a “political recession.” The widespread political volatility, agitation and generalized voter dissatisfaction we witness today are manifestations of lower expectations of income growth caused by the threat of structurally lower growth, and arguably the poorly distributed gains of globalization.

Very few politicians have responded to these threats in a thoughtful way, perhaps because the outsize presence of central banks and their willingness to calm markets removes a vital source of pressure on those politicians. For example, populist parties in Italy would show much less bravado if the European Central Bank hadn’t been buying billions of euros of its debt over the last seven years.

Equally, the White House might be much more careful and strategic in how it dealt with China if there was a sense that the Fed would not automatically respond to the collateral damage created by the trade dispute.

There are growing signs that because central banks are the only game in town, policy makers are less coherent in their thinking. For instance, in the not-so-recent past it might have been expected that a large cohort of Republicans and Democrats would resolutely oppose both a burgeoning fiscal deficit that is expected to total $897 billion this fiscal year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, has and a near-record-level of U.S. debt to GDP. The fashion for MMT (Modern Monetary Theory, or the idea that government debt should be monetized) is another indication of how giddy the policy community become when they contemplate the full range of the monetary toolkit.

The longer the major central banks worry about the economic consequences of poor policy the longer populistic policy will continue. That inflation is dead in many countries, and 20% of the world’s bonds have zero to negative yields should alert central bankers to the growing faultiness in the world economy and the futility of using monetary policy to fix these. For investors, it is hard to escape the sense that asset prices are over inflated, and that we are at peak wealth and that the long-run returns   will be lower than we have seen in the last 10 years.

Central bankers must push the risks and responsibility associated with inequality, indebtedness, a half-baked eurosystem and low productivity back to elected politicians. If they don’t, then akin to the rising risk of global climate damage, the long-term negative consequences of these faultlines will grow.

Long-run financial stability is badly served by overgenerous central banking. The world’s major central banks should agree to use extraordinary measures like quantitative easing only under preset conditions (great market and economic stresses).

In reality, today’s central bankers risk caring more about data dips, market volatility and bad trade policy than the threat of burgeoning financial imbalances and the eventual damage these imbalances will do to the economy.