The Great Debate

Last week’s ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional has thrown conservatives into consternation. Rick Santorum says he is “very disappointed … It was a folly of a mistake.” Conservative radio host Michael Savage suggests Roberts must be on mind-altering medication. Even those, like John Boehner, who said they respected his jurisprudence disagreed with his decision.

Roberts now finds himself in the same bad standing with conservatives as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Bernanke’s credentials as the heir to Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan’s monetarist guru, have not been enough to save him from abuse either. When good conservatives like Roberts and Bernanke are traduced by their own side for being closet liberals, letting Barack Obama introduce European social democracy through the back door, something strange is afoot in the conservative universe.

The definition of a conservative used to be someone who values institutions above all as the bulwark against tyranny. That is the lesson left by the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke. But America’s most valued institutions, and those who operate them, are under attack from the very people who at one time would have been their stoutest defenders. People who like to call themselves conservatives, and set themselves up as arbiters of who is a true conservative, now despise the very institutions that safeguard our fragile freedoms from tyranny.

It’s hard to find a “conservative” today who has anything good to say about the Office of the President. The current head of state and chief executive, chosen fairly by the American people, suffers a daily barrage of personal attacks by those who question everything about him: his name, his nationality, his religion. His integrity is impugned as if he were a common criminal. Not long ago true conservatives would think such vicious attacks upon any president tantamount to treason.

The same people have little time for members of Congress, whom they accuse of venality and theft. Once it was the guiding principle of votes taken in either chamber that a simple majority was majority enough, a clear reflection of the wishes of the majority of Americans. No more. Now, to frustrate the operation of the federal government, votes in the Senate routinely need a two-thirds majority, and the system of representative democracy that has served the nation since the Founding Fathers is dismissed as “the tyranny of the majority.”

By Nicholas Wapshott
The views expressed are his own.

There is one thing every Republican candidate agrees on. Once in the White House, the first thing they’d do is fire Ben Bernanke. His crime is to follow the legal brief of the Federal Reserve to maximize jobs and keep prices stable. To this end he has been printing money to keep interest rates low to boost business confidence to invest and thereby create more American jobs. For many conservatives and libertarians, who dominate the early GOP caucuses and primaries, Bernanke’s cheap money policy has dangerously devalued the dollar’s worth.

Guaranteeing cheap money is a Keynesian way of restoring health to an economy in recession, though Keynes himself was aware that low interest rates do not automatically lead to jobs. However cheap money is, you can’t force people to invest. Or, as he put it, “You can’t push on a string.” He compared it to buying a bigger belt to gain weight. The fact that Keynes backed easy credit is enough to make the policy treacherous in the eyes of many con-libs. (They are far more tolerant of another Keynesian remedy–slashing taxes.)

Bernanke, however, owes his allegiance not to Keynes but to Milton Friedman. To encourage growth without hyper-inflation, Friedman prescribed gradually increasing the money supply. That way, prices would rise slowly and predictably. Bernanke is also an expert on the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression, catastrophes he, like Friedman, attribute to the 1920′s Fed keeping money too tight for too long. As Bernanke told Friedman on the father of monetarism’s 90th birthday, “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But, thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

By Peter Navarro
The opinions expressed are his own.

Ben Bernanke is about to play the biggest poker hand in global monetary policy history: The Federal Reserve chairman is trying to force China to fold on its fixed dollar-yuan currency peg. This is high-stakes poker.

Although Bernanke will not be sitting at the table to play his quantitative easing card when all the members of the G-20, including China, meet this week in South Korea. Every G-20 country is suffering from an already grossly under-valued yuan pegged to a dollar now falling rapidly under the weight of Bernanke’s QE2. In fact, breaking the highly corrosive dollar-yuan peg is the most important step the G-20 can take for both robust global economic recovery and financial market stability.

Regrettably, China continues to believe — mistakenly — that the costs of a stronger yuan in terms of reduced export-led growth outweigh three major benefits: increased purchasing power to spur domestic-driven growth, significantly lower costs for raw materials and energy, and a dramatic reduction in speculative hot flows rapidly pushing up inflation.

Britain’s new coalition government likes to remind voters we are all in this together. The phrase is rather glib. But in an important sense savers and borrowers around the world are finding the costs of reckless lending are falling on the innocent and guilty alike.

Few people this century will have experienced what it is like to turn up at their bank and be told they cannot withdraw deposited funds because the bank has “suspended” payments.

Suspension sounds harmless. But before the spread of deposit insurance, the word was enough to strike fear into the hearts of depositors, who risked losing much if not all their life savings, and being made to wait months or years for access to what remained.

In a compromise, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has approved a cautious and conservative second round of quantitative easing (QE2) which may satisfy nobody but should prevent internal splits from widening.

It is designed to provide some marginal stimulus to asset markets and economic recovery without further undermining the confidence of foreign investors.

The best way to characterize the $600 billion bond-buying program implemented over eight months is “QE-lite”. The total is slightly higher than expected, but spread over a slightly longer period. The Fed has done almost exactly what it signaled over the last few weeks — no more (there was no “shock and awe”) and no less.

- The opinions expressed are the author’s own-

FOMC meetings are usually a strange combination of formality and easy-going familiarity but levity may be in short supply this week. The Fed’s institutional credibility is on the line, and the normal decorum that characterizes relations among committee members has become increasingly strained over the summer.

Divisions between proponents and opponents of a second round of quantitative easing (QE2) have been on display as never before. It is not clear what members will say to one another to fill two days since all the arguments have already been rehearsed in detail and in public over the last six weeks.

In a thinly veiled swipe at his colleagues, Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig has stumped around his patch on the Great Plains denouncing QE as a “dangerous gamble” and “a bargain with the devil”.

Central banks around the world are facing the worst crisis of confidence since the 1930s, as investors, households and firms question their commitment and ability to deliver price stability.

Whether it is inflation or deflation, outsiders question whether the major central banks will be able to regulate prices in the next few years.

TOO HOT ….
Bank of England Chief Economist Spencer Dale last week lashed out at what he branded “dangerous talk” the Bank had gone soft on inflation and was choosing to ignore price increases persistently above the target.

In a thoughtful article published this week in the Financial Times, PIMCO Chief Executive Mohamed El-Erian and Columbia Economics Professor Richard Clarida explore the implications of a shift in the shape of investors’ and policymakers’ expectations about the future.

“It seems that, wherever we look, the snapshot for ‘consensus expectations’ has shifted: from traditional bell-shaped curves — with a high likelihood mean and thin tails (indicating most economists have similar expectations) — to a much flatter distribution of outcomes with fatter tails (where opinion is divided and expectations vary considerably).”

They do not go quite as far as Bank of England policymaker Adam Posen, who suggested in a recent speech that the distribution of outcomes has inverted and become U-shaped. But their focus on a bell-curve with fatter tails agrees with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s characterisation of the economic outlook as “unusually uncertain” at present.

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own. —

Plotting an exit strategy and shrinking the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has become a hot topic as policymakers try to underscore their commitment to price stability and markets ponder the risk of inflation.

But micro-managing the reserve base is a curiously inadequate way to respond to medium-term concerns about inflation. Interest rates (the cost of credit) and supervision (leverage) are broader, more appropriate tools.

– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

Unable to rely on the wounded consumer, the outlook for U.S. growth in the next three years depends on business investment and exports to take up the slack when stimulus programmes wind down.
Ultra-low interest rates will help. But with the economy struggling to work off a huge overhang of unused real estate assets, and not much sign of investment elsewhere, investment spending is set to remain sluggish, condemning the economy to a weak recovery in the medium term.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other senior U.S. officials have already warned the rest of the world can no longer rely on over-indebted U.S. consumers as the principal source of global growth. There is no choice but to rely on investment and exports to take up more of the burden.