Christopher Whalen

“The U.S. can pay any debt because we can always print more money.”

–Alan Greenspan
Meet the Press
August 7, 2011

Last week, Nouriel Roubini released a paper, “A Radical Policy Response to the Rising Risks of a Depression and Financial Crisis.” He writes: “Data suggest that developed and emerging markets alike are heading for a massive slowdown in growth, with advanced economies already slumping to stall speed.” Roubini is right, but for the wrong reasons.

Government intervention is the root cause of the financial crisis and the maladies identified by Roubini. Many of his proposals, such as debt restructuring and maintaining liquidity to solvent borrowers, are common sense initiatives that ought to be followed immediately. But the proposals by Roubini and others that governments should borrow and print even more fiat currency to fuel further fiscal stimulus are badly considered. Economists from Paul Krugman in the US to Adam Posen in the UK all call for more stimuli. They are all wrong.

First, when Roubini, Posen et al call for additional fiscal stimulus, we need to ask them why. The vast fiscal stimulus already attempted in the US failed miserably in terms of creating permanent jobs. More fiscal stimulus funded with debt will not generate real growth. Remember the idea of public deficits “crowding out” private investment? Huge public deficits actually kill private investment and increase inflation, but you will never hear the neo-Keynesians admit to it.

Second, when Roubini and Posen call for the Fed and the ECB to run the monetary printing presses, what they are saying implicitly is that the excessive debt currently killing growth in the industrial nations cannot be repudiated. To the point made in my earlier post on Roubini, we should no longer speak of “capitalism,” but instead of the tyranny of the fascist creditor-technocrats and their captive economists. While Greece faces seemingly inevitable default, many economists continue to believe that avoiding deflation in the larger industrial nations is the chief policy goal. Here again they are wrong.

Years ago, as an earnest young staffer for Congressman Jack Kemp, I expressed worry to my father Richard J. Whalen over the mounting federal debt. An adviser to several presidents and Fed chairman, he looked at me and smiled. “The duty of this generation is to pass the bubble onto the next generation, intact,” he quipped, reflecting the mainstream view in the US today. But as the quote from Alan Greenspan suggests, inflation is the sure result of this strategy. And deflation is the cure.

Deflation does hurt debtors and lenders, but it also advantages savers and institutions with cash to buy assets cheaply. The buyers of dead banks and bad assets generate real growth and jobs. When Roubini, Posen and other mainstream economists call for measures to avoid deflation, they actually cut off one of the few ways that consumers and private business have to offset the ill-effects of secular inflation — the real culprit behind the financial crisis.

But for the inflationary policies of the Fed and the ECB to stimulate pseudo “growth” over the past several decades, there would have been no financial bubble and no mountain of housing-related debt. Why do economists like Roubini and Krugman say we need more of this medicine? Such pathetic proposals for more-debt-driven government intervention are what pass for mainstream economic thinking today in the G-20 nations.

Keep in mind that there are still hundreds of billions in bad debts in the US and EU tied to real estate and other speculative endeavors — debt which must eventually default. Until the global financial system is cleansed of these bad debts, market volatility and uncertainty will remain high. Unless we bite the bullet and write down debts to levels that will allow private growth and employment, there will be no recovery.

Printing money and deficit spending hampers private credit creation. Higher inflation scares private investors and business leaders who refuse to hire new employees and invest in new capital stock. Fear of inflation is driving private capital flight into gold and other non-dollar assets. If the Fed wants to boost the US economy, then it should swear-off further monetary ease, raise interest rates gently, and provide ample volumes of credit to solvent banks.

Roubini is entirely right to focus on providing capital and liquidity to solvent banks, but he does not go far enough. Try this instead: restructure Bank of America and other insolvent US and EU banks and government agencies; Sell bad assets to solvent banks and private investors; Raise new private and public capital to create new, private financial vehicles to support leverage and new credit creation. Think of US Bancorp becoming the largest lender in the US as the zombie banks wither away.

The citizens of the US and EU states need to reject the siren songs of economists who wrongly advocate more debt-funded spending and inflationary monetary expansion. Only by restructuring bad debt, cutting public deficits and limiting the monetary policy caprice of the Fed and ECB can we create a sustainable environment for economic growth. Indeed, the one sure way to ensure the collapse of the fiat dollar system and the return of the gold standard is to follow the advice of Roubini, Posen and Krugman when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy.

“Before I speak, I have something important to say.”

–Groucho Marx

In a clip from a longer interview with WSJ’s Simon Constable, Dr Nouriel Roubini claims Karl Marx was right about capitalism eventually destroying itself. While not quite yet at the breaking point, Roubini observes, we are headed down the road to disaster as predicted by Marx.

Roubini echoes my view that debt reduction and restructuring is the only way to restore real growth to the US and other economies. Breaking up a few zombie banks and cartels probably would not bother him either. But let’s focus on Roubini’s somewhat provocative comment that Marx correctly predicted the present global debt bust and economic deflation.

When I hear people talking about Marxism in reverent tones it makes me nauseous. Marx was not right at all about class being the key determinant of human action. Yet despite America’s pretensions to being a free market, democratic society, the Marxian world view won the battle for ideas in the 20th Century. The New Deal and Great Society efforts to increase the scope of government in America all stem from the socialist ideas of FDR and his political heirs in both parties.

So much of our economic discourse in America today is entirely Marxist in nature — a reference to both Karl and Groucho Marx, as noted above. The legacy of FDR and the two world wars was to kill the American republic and put in its place a cheap imitation of France with platonic regulators pretending to moderate the bad old ways of greedy private business.

The Cold War in particular left Americans more Marxist in their economic thinking than we care to admit. We discarded the focus on individual liberty and the rule of law espoused by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as the drivers of economic activity in a free, democratic society. Instead we have modern day robber barons, faceless corporate managers openly allied with corrupt politicians in Washington and guarded by phalanxes of vicious lawyers.

The fact of our intellectual reliance upon the work of Karl Marx to benchmark our economic success show humans to be creatures of habit, not reason. Marx embarked from a position of dialectical mysticism borrowed from Hegel and then attacked the classical economists, the enlightenment thinkers such as John Staurt Mill and Adam Smith who elevated the role of the individual. Those who laud Marx disparage all things American.

Ludwig von Mises writes in his book Human Action, that Marx stigmatized the economists as “the sycophants of the bourgeoisie.” He notes that Marx was “the son of a well-to-do lawyer,” and Engles, “a wealthy textile manufacturer, never doubted that they themselves were above the law and, notwithstanding their bourgeois background, were endowed with the power to discover absolute truth. It is the task of history to describe the historical conditions which made such a crude doctrine popular.”

Not only was Marxism crude, but it missed most of the major developments of the 20th Century. Revolution occurred not in bourgeois Germany but in brutal, backward Czarist Russia. More important, the class-centric view of Marxism proved incorrect in a world of greater openness, mobility and individual choice. The act of conscious choice driven not by greed, but the desire for betterment; of human action as von Mises coined the term, rejects Marxist class determinism.

But with the world facing global recession or worse, and the children of the New Dealers demanding blood and higher taxes from the greedy capitalists, the question put to Roubini still comes: has the growth possibility of the “capitalist” world, as we inaccurately label the socialist western economies, reached a logical limit as predicted by Marx? I do not believe so.

Nations which adopted Marxist or other types of authoritarian systems have performed abysmally, while nations that focused on individual freedom and openness thrive. The US and EU have lessened their prospects through over-reliance on government and public debt. The answer in both cases is debt reduction and restructuring, and shrinking the size of the public sector.

Since the end of WWI, the nations of the global economy have faced a difficult paradox: the greater openness of trade and finance have created serious economic imbalances, shortfalls in employment and growth in public debt. John Maynard Keynes was no free trader, as we have discussed previously in this blog, precisely because he feared the destabilizing influence of large trade and financial flows.

The fact that advances in technology cause unemployment in older industries has nothing to do with Marxism or any of the political narratives of the 19th or 20th Centuries. Nor does the fact of global over-capacity confirm the Marxist dialectic as to the inevitability of world socialist revolution. What these ills do point out is that the world needs to revisit not tired Marxism, but the Keynesian concept of a competitive currency system and thereby better govern global flows of capital and commerce.

All nations, regardless of supposed economic creed, now face a more basic series of choices: how to balance employment and economic stability with economic openness and the relentless pressure of competition and new technology. The future is not about class warfare as Marx predicted, but is about maximizing the potential and opportunities for every individual.