Cutting interest rates now could set the stage for a collapse in the financial markets.
To widespread applause in the markets and the news media, from conservatives and liberals alike, the Federal Reserve appears poised to cut interest rates for the first time since the global financial crisis a decade ago. Adjusted for inflation, the Fed’s benchmark rate is now just half a percent and the cost of borrowing has rarely been closer to free, but the clamor for more easy money keeps growing.
Everyone wants the recovery to last and more easy money seems like the obvious way to achieve that goal. With trade wars threatening the global economy, Federal Reserve officials say rate cuts are needed to keep the slowdown from spilling into the United States, and to prevent doggedly low inflation from sliding into outright deflation.
Few words are more dreaded among economists than “deflation.” For centuries, deflation was a common and mostly benign phenomenon, with prices falling because of technological innovations that lowered the cost of producing and distributing goods. But the widespread deflation of the 1930s and the more recent experience of Japan have given the word a uniquely bad name.
After Japan’s housing and stock market bubbles burst in the early 1990s, demand fell and prices started to decline, as heavily indebted consumers began to delay purchases of everything from TV sets to cars, waiting for prices to fall further. The economy slowed to a crawl. Hoping to jar consumers into spending again, the central bank pumped money into the economy, but to no avail. Critics said Japan took action too gradually, and so its economy remained stuck in a deflationary trap for years.
Yet, in this expansion, the United States economy has grown at half the pace of the postwar recoveries. Inflation has failed to rise to the Fed’s target of a sustained 2 percent. Meanwhile, every new hint of easy money inspires fresh optimism in the financial markets, which have swollen to three times the size of the real economy.
In this environment, cutting rates could hasten exactly the outcome that the Fed is trying to avoid. By further driving up the prices of stocks, bonds and real estate, and encouraging risky borrowing, more easy money could set the stage for a collapse in the financial markets. And that could be followed by an economic downturn and falling prices — much as in Japan in the 1990s. The more expensive these financial assets become, the more precarious the situation, and the more difficult it will be to defuse without setting off a downturn.
The key lesson from Japan was that central banks can print all the money they want, but can’t dictate where it will go. Easy credit could not force over-indebted Japanese consumers to borrow and spend, and much of it ended up going to waste, financing “bridges to nowhere” and the rise of debt-laden “zombie companies” that still weigh on the economy.
Today, politicians on the right and left have come to embrace easy money, each camp for its own reasons, both ignoring the risks. President Trump has been pushing the Fed for a large rate cut to help him bring back the postwar miracle growth rates of 3 percent to 4 percent.
At the same time, liberals like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are turning to unconventional easy money theories as a way to pay for ambitious social programs. But they might want to take a closer look at who has benefited most after a decade of easy money: the wealthy, monopolies, corporate debtors. Not exactly liberal causes.
By fueling a record bull run in the financial markets, easy money is increasing inequality, since the wealthy own the bulk of stocks and bonds. Research also shows that very low interest rates have helped large corporations increase their dominance across United States industries, squeezing out small companies and start-ups. Once seen as a threat only in Japan, zombie firms — which don’t earn enough profit to cover their interest payments — have been rising in the United States, where they account for one in six publicly traded companies.
All these creatures of easy credit erode the economy’s long-term growth potential by undermining productivity, and raise the risk of a global recession emanating from debt-soaked financial and housing markets. A 2015 study of 17 major economies showed that before World War II, about one in four recessions followed a collapse in stock or home prices (or both). Since the war, that number has jumped to roughly two out of three, including the economic meltdowns in Japan after 1990, Asia after 1998 and the world after 2008.
Recessions tend to be longer and deeper when the preceding boom was fueled by borrowing, because after the boom goes bust, flattened debtors struggle for years to dig out from under their loans. And lately, easy money has been enabling debt binges all over the world, particularly in corporate sectors.
As the Fed prepares to announce a decision this week, growing bipartisan support for a rate cut is fraught with irony. Slashing rates to avoid deflation made sense in the crisis atmosphere of 2008, and cutting again may seem like a logical response to weakening global growth now. But with the price of borrowing already so low, more easy money will raise a more serious threat.
By further lifting stock and bond prices and encouraging people to take on more debt, lowering rates could set the stage for the kind of debt-fueled market collapse that has preceded the economic downturns of recent decades. Our economy is hooked on easy money — and it is a dangerous addiction.
Why Are Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump Trying to Weaken the Dollar?
A strong dollar makes America strong. Any campaign to devalue it is likely to backfire.
Elizabeth Warren’s “economic patriotism” differs in style and content from Donald Trump’s economic nationalism, but they have found common cause in vows to weaken the dollar. That is a strangely self-defeating agenda for patriots or nationalists of any political fashion.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Warren argue that China and other emerging rivals weaken their currencies to promote exports and gain jobs, so why shouldn’t America follow a similar policy? Here’s why: Because America is not an emerging country. It’s an unrivaled financial superpower, a position built in large part on hard-won trust in the dollar, which is an enduring source of American power and prosperity.
When the dollar strengthens and weakens in response to buying and selling in the global currency markets, foreign countries don’t protest. Occasionally they have cooperated with the United States to stabilize the dollar. But nothing will destroy trust in American financial leadership, and the benefits that go with it, more surely than for the United States government to start unilaterally manipulating the dollar for its own competitive advantage.
If Vietnam or South Korea manipulate their currencies in a bid to improve their exports, a few of their trade partners may retaliate; if the financial superpower plays the same game, the whole world will respond, because the dollar is the international standard. A record high 60 percent of countries now measure, or “anchor,” the value of their own currencies against the dollar. Any campaign to devalue the world’s anchor could set off a destructive wave of competitive devaluations.
After World War I, when America challenged Britain as the leading global empire, the dollar began gaining on sterling as the currency that most central banks preferred to hold in reserve. Reserve currency status had long been a perk of imperial might — and an economic elixir. By generating a steady flow of customers who want to hold the currency, often in the form of government bonds, it allows the privileged country to borrow cheaply abroad and fund a lifestyle well beyond its means.
Other countries watched the United States assume this role with dismay. In the 1960s, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then finance minister and later president of France, called the dollar’s powerful status America’s “exorbitant privilege.” And for nearly a century now this privilege has helped to keep United States interest rates low, making it possible for Americans to buy cars and homes and, in recent decades, run large government deficits that they could not otherwise afford.