Friday, December 19, 2014

What money printing?

The Hayekians claim we have boat loads of excess money. lets list the 'new money'

QE purchases of 4 Trillion?

Those were purchases of bonds from the bond market and paid for with a neutral transfer from savers to taxpayers in the form of interest rate subsidies, an implicit tax on the bond market.  That tax causes the net size of the bond market to decrease and so is price neutral at equilibrium.

Government debt?

The total additional debt of 8T is divided into the 4T in bond purchases above, which is indirect taxation.  The rest new debt paid directly by the taxpayer of 4T.  That is paid for by the budget of which 12% is reserved for interest costs.
 Congress cannot let that number go much beyond 18% under the current regime, else government collapses.  Reagan was able to handle interest costs of near 25% of the budget for a short period, mainly because he was just starting to run up the debt.  Clinton was able to handle 20% of the budget devoted to interest costs but he was taxing more and running a surplus.  The limit is now around 18%, most likely, so Congress is bound to limit interest costs and eventually must run a surplus.  The room for runing Congress on the credit card is about gone, and interest payments, some 2.5% of the economy, cannot go much higher without a recession.

Real money printing?

What free and unencumbered cash has the Fed released? Not much, the interest on reserves and member bank dividends are about all, and they come to less than $120 billion since the crash. Yet the economy has grown by some $1.8 T since the crash, so the amount of free unencumbered money needed to support price neutral growth is short some 1 T, that is disinflation, soon to be deflation.

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