(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

Auditing the Federal Reserve may or may not be a good idea, but one thing seems pretty sure: just discussing it seriously will tend to drive the price of gold higher.

The U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee last week voted to approve an amendment that would bring about an audit of the Fed, its monetary policy and lending programs, since when gold has gone its merry way higher, hitting an all-time high of $1,174 per ounce on Monday.

The amendment, a provision to a broader financial services reform bill that is still under consideration, was co-sponsored by Republican Representative Ron Paul, author of the book “End the Fed,” and the man least likely to be found chairing a panel at Jackson Hole or Davos.

The Fed, understandably, hates the idea, saying it will compromise its hard-won independence, the administration loathes it, and really it will almost certainly never become effective in a recognizable form.

Even so, and even interpreting the vote as a populist cry of the heart against Washington and Wall Street, the fact that it has gotten this far will cause some serious people without an ideological dog in the Federal Reserve fight to buy a bit of gold, which is really a sort of anti-currency, as a hedge against increased political influence in the process of making monetary policy.

Undoubtedly many people who think keeping the Fed on a short leash attached to an elected body is a good thing also think the Federal Reserve should have been much less aggressive in creating money and risking inflation. History shows that the risks are actually skewed the other way: tighter political control of central banks more often means more inflation and a higher risk of a debased currency.

In other words, the people who support this because they think the Fed shouldn’t debase the currency are probably raising the risk that the currency is debased. This just adds to the bid for gold, which is already being supported by concerns that current monetary policy and deficits put inflation and the dollar at risk. These risks are not high, they are tiny, but they are disturbingly more worth discussing now than two years ago.

Thus we are in the bizarre situation of watching the price of gold being driven higher both by people who don’t trust the Federal Reserve and people who don’t trust the people who don’t trust the Federal Reserve.

HOW HIGH IS HIGH?

It has to be said; the very idea of buying gold, which adds nothing to the creation of wealth or innovation and is only conceivably a hedge against bad actions of other people, is dispiriting. If you buy gold you cannot tell yourself that you are doing well by doing good, as perhaps you can with a biotech or fertilizer company. You are simply limiting the damage that can be done to you, and then only in very particular circumstances. What’s more many of the people who advocate it as an asset show a disconcerting monomania; the type who if they sit next to you on a commuter train makes you consider pretending the next stop is yours.

Gold’s real virtue is negative. It is not used for much industrially but there is limited supply and real physical constraint on producing more. Unlike, say dollars, you can’t simply flip a switch and make more.

Dylan Grice, strategist at Societe Generale in London (who, by the way, I’d happily sit next to on a train) points out that the value of the gold held by the Fed only equals 15 percent of the U.S. monetary base and that the price would have to rise to $6,300 per ounce to make the currency fully backed by gold reserves.

Of course, gold is not just going up against the dollar, it is going up against an array of major and minor currencies, indicating that the worries are not simply about the Federal Reserve or U.S. policy but about the interplay between fiat currencies and policy around the world. A tremendous amount of debt has been created and socialized and a lot of money has been created.

Which brings us back to the Federal Reserve and the politics of monetary policy, or as perhaps we will begin to see it the politics of politics. The betting has to be that the Federal Reserve emerges with its independence intact, if not its power as a regulator. From a markets point of view the Senate confirmation hearings for Ben Bernanke’s second four-year term as chairman kick off next week and offer the next opportunity for populist fireworks.

I am looking forward to having fewer conversations about gold, but I am not expecting it.

(At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

Emerging markets could be the first to suffer destabilizing inflation, courtesy of a strong economic rebound, a weak dollar and extremely loose monetary policy in the developed world.

Inflation, in faster growing emerging markets, was not high on the list of worries even months ago, but the speed and strength of the rebound and red-hot asset markets in some places show that it may be a rising threat.

“The surprise could be that inflation in emerging markets really takes off,” Amer Bisat of hedge fund Traxis Partners said on Tuesday at a Euromoney foreign exchange conference in New York.

It is not yet a central case, but should price pressures in countries like China, Korea and Brazil take hold, it will leave policy makers in a bind and would roil financial markets.

Interest rate hikes might only attract more hot capital and may be only partially effective. Rising currencies can be self-fulfilling and higher interest rates in emerging markets make carry trades — borrowing in dollars, for example, and reinvesting in something like Korean won — all the more attractive.

Other methods of stemming currency appreciation, which stokes inflation, may also become more popular; Brazil in October imposed a 2 percent tax on foreign inflows into equities and fixed-income instruments designed to keep the real from appreciating too quickly.

Emerging market central bankers can expect no help from colleagues in the developed world any time soon. The Federal Reserve will find it economically and politically difficult to hike with unemployment near 10 percent.

“Inflation in emerging markets will be U.S. inflation exported,” said Maxime Tessier of Canadian state asset manager Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec.

This might actually argue for China to acquiesce to U.S. calls for it to increase the value of the yuan, which will fight inflation at home and would win it friends and influence abroad. It would not be a surprise for China to return to a “crawling peg” under which the yuan is allowed to appreciate upward slowly. That won’t happen immediately; a negotiation and wooing period will allow China to extract maximum value from the United States for implementing a policy it may well need anyway.

And of course, with significant spare capacity, the decision will not be easy as inflation in the Chinese economy will not be evenly distributed.

RED HOT

While the data on inflation is still fairly tame, asset markets in many emerging markets are now red hot.

The World Bank this week raised its growth forecast for developing east Asia to 6.7 percent this year from 5.3 percent, but said the strong recovery brought with it new dangers in booming asset prices.

“As liquidity is working its way through the system, and demand is relatively low, the credit is finding its way to stock exchanges and real estate markets. It’s a danger,” said Vikram Nehru, the World Bank’s chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific. The IMF chimed in, citing surging property prices in Hong Kong and “a risk that prices could become driven more by short-term liquidity conditions, divorced from fundamental forces of supply and demand.”

Authorities in South Korea have also reacted to a surge in real estate price in and around Seoul, imposing regulations to tighten access to mortgage finance.

Officials have taken some steps to slow the flood of loans they unleashed via Chinese banks this year, but not entirely effectively. Loans by Chinese banks have disproportionately found their way into property and financial speculation, but moves over the summer to limit lending sent the stock market into a tailspin which may have scared off officials. China’s  four largest banks extended about 136 billion yuan ($20 billion) in yuan-denominated new loans in October, up 23.6 percent from September’s 110.4 billion yuan, the China Securities Journal reported on Tuesday.

And it’s not just property — the MSCI Emerging Markets Index is up more than 60 percent this year and currencies in many emerging markets have recorded strong returns.

All of this comes with one very large caveat; if, as is very possible, the recovery in the United States and Europe falters in the new year, then the risk of actual inflation in emerging markets will recede along with their exports to the West. A relapse lower too might bring with it a recovery in the dollar, which would inflict huge pain on speculators who are running dollar carry trades and investing in emerging markets assets and property.

Taking a very long view, strong emerging markets make good sense. Capital should flow to emerging markets. Returns there over the long run will be better, at least if the rule of law prevails. Unless policies can tread a very narrow path, that growth will bring with it inflation and rising volatility.

(Editing by James Dalgleish)
(At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

Don’t expect the year-long rally in risky assets to be undermined any time soon by the Federal Reserve becoming concerned about inflation.

The old metaphor — that the Fed’s job is to take away the punchbowl just when the party starts getting good — just doesn’t apply in the current circumstances. That’s not to say inflation isn’t a threat in the medium term — it is virtually a promise.

But punchbowl thinking dates from a time when firstly the Fed was presumed to have a degree of control over events we now know is not true and secondly to an era when asset prices were the caboose rather than the engine of the economic train.

Even with an economy that is now growing, the risk of a self-reinforcing de-leveraging spiral is enough to ensure that the Fed will not pull the trigger on tightening any time soon.

“Asset prices are embedded not only in our psyche, but the actual growth rate of our economy. If they don’t go up, economies don’t do well, and when they go down, the economy can be horrid,” Pimco bond chief Bill Gross writes in his most recent letter to investors.

Gross argues that leverage inflated the price of assets even as investment in the U.S. real economy flagged. As this happened the U.S. economy became ever more dependent on asset prices and on the sectors, such as finance, which intermediated the borrowing. When the debt and asset bubble is pinched, the whole edifice is threatened, leading to a response like the one we’ve seen: massive and overwhelming aid trained on markets irrespective of the costs.

Pimco data shows that the prices of assets in the United States over the past 50 years have gone up 1.3 percent a year more than would have been expected given nominal growth in the economy, leading to a putative 100 percent overvaluation if you reason that the assets which depend on the economy for income shouldn’t outgrow it.

Unsurprisingly, the real outperformance of asset prices against economic growth has come in the past 30 years, since when debt growth has accelerated.

There are other explanations for why asset prices have outpaced economic growth. For one thing, off-shoring and outsourcing have both suppressed wages in the United States, leading to higher returns on capital, and increased the income that U.S. assets receive from overseas.

It’s obvious that the past 25 years have not been kind to labor, and as its share of GDP has declined the share going to asset owners has increased. In that sense increasing asset prices make economic sense, though there seems to be every chance that workers start to recapture some of what they have lost.

GROWTH, DEFAULT OR INFLATION?

Taxes on capital and profits have also fallen in the United States, and, like wages, this is a trend that could easily be reversed in coming years, especially given the huge amount of public debt that will have to be paid back.

This brings us to the other very strong reason the Fed may have for not pulling away the punchbowl — or water bowl as perhaps we had better see it — even when the party turns inflationary: public debt.

Since the United States have taken a decision to not allow too much of the private debt to default, it has taken on a corresponding increase in public debt which will have to be repaid ultimately. U.S. debt as a percentage of GDP will exceed 60 percent, a level not seen since World War II.

But unlike the post-war period, Europe doesn’t need  rebuilding and though Asia will grow hugely those profits won’t flow to U.S. coffers.

So, if growth doesn’t allow the United States to repay debts, there are two options, neither pretty; default or inflation.

“No policymaker in the developed world — and, by now, few in the developing world — would want to countenance default as an option,” writes economist Spyros Andreopoulos of Morgan Stanley in London in a note to clients.

“This leaves inflation.”

To be sure, the Federal Reserve takes its mandate to control inflation and its independence seriously, but it is going to find itself in a very difficult squeeze, partly of its own making. The debt is high, growth will be poor and the time for private defaults is past. Threats to its independence will only grow.

Given that, and the dependence of the economy on asset prices, it’s not hard to bet that the evil we will be left with is inflation. Whether it is engineered or just kind of happens is less interesting than the reasonably high likelihood that it will happen at all.

For a time at least, that would argue that risky assets, particularly real assets and emerging markets, do well.

Longer term, things get stickier and stickier.

(At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

Would inflation be good for stocks?

With the monetary and fiscal spigots open wide, some investors say equities are a good place to be. But David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital has warned that inflation could compress price-to-earnings multiples. A look back to history suggests his fears are warranted.

(Click chart to enlarge in new window)

The Federal Reserve has lowered rates to virtually zero and expanded its balance sheet significantly, stuffing banks with excess reserves that are available to lend. If the market picks up, banks will find themselves surrounded by creditworthy borrowers again and excess reserves could quickly flow into the real economy, increasing inflation.

In the meantime, many analysts argue that the government is likely to keep printing money to finance runaway fiscal deficits and large unfunded obligations for Medicare and Social Security, increasing inflation.

The Fed will tell you that deflation is the primary risk facing the economy as the private sector continues to de-lever. And inflation is hardly guaranteed. There's still time for the Obama administration to get America's fiscal house in order and the Fed can choose to tighten monetary policy. Highly unlikely both, but nevertheless possible.

If inflation is in the cards, why might that be bad for stocks? One reason is that investors will pay less for future earnings.

Historically, according to Howard Silverblatt of Standard & Poor's, investors have valued stocks of the S&P 500 at about 17 times earnings. If a company stands to earn a dollar per share in a given year then investors will tend to pay $17 for a share of its stock.

But if you add inflation to the mix, future earnings lose their purchasing power, which means investors won't pay as much for them.

Einhorn, at the Value Investing Congress on Monday, said that if we wind up with significant inflation, distant earnings will be discounted at higher rates, meaning "P/E ratios will collapse."

We see this relationship in action if we compare the average P/E multiple of the S&P 500 with inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index. In the 1960s, when inflation was low, P/E multiples were high. In the 1970s, when inflation was high, P/E multiples were low. After Paul Volcker beat back inflation in the early 1980s, P/E multiples began a two-decade expansion.

To be sure, investors use expected inflation rates when discounting future earnings. That said, when building their models they tend to extrapolate the future based on the present.

Depending on its relative impact on revenues and costs, inflation may or may not be good for company earnings, but it will certainly shrink the multiple investors are willing to pay for them.

For most policymakers, deflation is the stuff of nightmares -- scarier even than bank failures and stock market collapses. As the economy stumbled, deflation became Lords Voldemort and Sauron rolled into one.

In recent months, however, this economic supervillain seems to have lost its power to intimidate.

With growth reviving, many economists now believe that deflation is highly unlikely to materialize.

Another group suggests that deflation is not nearly as nefarious as often portrayed. Since falling prices are not generally associated with depression, we were wrong to be frightened in the first place.

Sadly, both of these reassuring premises are wrong. We should still be afraid of deflation.

First, the notion that deflation is a misunderstood and potentially benevolent economic force is only partially true. Supporters of this theory often cite research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which showed that falling prices seldom coincide with depression.

Looking at data for 17 countries over more than a century, the Minneapolis Fed concluded that "nearly 90 percent of the episodes with deflation did not have depression."

A swelling dollar can clearly be good news for shoppers as well as for those who are sitting on cash. Deflation is often a result of economic progress -- productivity improvements that increase spending power. This was the friendly species of deflation caused by surging Chinese output from the 1990s onwards.

The current variety of deflationary pressure is far less benign. It stems not from efficiency savings but rather from weak demand. Worse still, it is accompanied by record levels of debt.

Despite frantic efforts to pay off loans, household debt is still around 130 percent of disposable income. This was precisely the combination that Irving Fisher warned about in his celebrated 1933 article on debt deflation.

Under these conditions, the rising real value of debts encourages households and businesses to sell their assets to pay down loans. As fire sales reduce asset prices -- stocks and property -- real net worth declines further. Output and employment decline, accelerating the slide in prices.

To add to the pain, real interest rates increase whether central bankers like it or not, discouraging borrowing and promoting even more savings.

"The more debtors pay, the more they owe," Fisher wrote, since "the liquidation of debts cannot keep up with the fall of prices which it causes."

But with the U.S. economy clawing its way out of recession, surely the danger has passed? Not quite. Prices are the ultimate economic straggler.

In Japan, for example, the country only started to experience falling prices roughly three years after the start of the recession in 1991. Wages didn't start to fall until 1997. The United States could still follow Japan's lead.

Downward pressures on prices in the United States continue to intensify, according to the latest research by Capital Economics. Core inflation may have held at a respectable 1.5 percent, but this is deceptive. U.S. goods inflation has defied gravity in part because of hefty increases in tobacco taxes over the past six months. A 28 percent increase in tobacco prices from a year ago is adding one percent to core goods inflation, according to Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics.

"Without this, core inflation would already be matching the lows reached at the end of 2003," he says. The tobacco effect will soon fade.

Services inflation, meanwhile, has been very weak. Here the key factor has been weak rental prices, which account for about 40 percent of the total core index. Unemployment and foreclosure will continue to put relentless downward pressure on rents. Already the rental vacancy rate is at a record 10.6 percent.

So we are right to be afraid of deflation -- very afraid. It still has the potential to sap energy from the American economy for years to come.

The Federal Reserve is preparing to lay down its unorthodox monetary policy instruments. But it may have to dig deep into its tool box before too long if deflation takes hold.

– Jeff Rubin is Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets. The views expressed are his own. –

Fighting the recession will not be without its costs.

Washington has already racked up nearly a $2 trillion deficit to ensure that America’s credit crisis does not lead to a replay of Japan’s lost decade of economic growth. But it’s not the specter of Japanese deflation we should fear. Far from it. History shows unequivocally that it is reflation, not deflation, that is the dancing partner to these size public deficits.

Saddled with a deficit that will mortgage the future of a generation of taxpayers, Washington will turn to what it has always done to alleviate such fiscal burdens. It will monetize the deficit, using the subsequent burst of inflation to rob bondholders of their real return. While the bonds will mature at par, what that buys may be a whole lot less than what the bondholder expected, thanks to the inflation trail that always follows in the wake of financing such mega-deficits.

Bondholders who financed America’s World War Two deficits saw their bonds lose nearly 15 percent of their real value in the ensuing inflation that peaked at around 17 percent in 1947. Bondholders who financed the Korean War also lost from inflation, which quickly went from negative territory to almost 10 percent. And twenty years later investors were once again swindled by reflation out of their return from financing the deficits that arose during the Vietnam War. Inflation robbed those bondholders of nearly a third of their real return. The later two deficits were less than half today’s in relation to the size of the US economy.

Monetizing deficits, which is simply printing more money to pay for them, is particularly attractive for a country like the United States, whose greenback is still the reserve currency of the world. The fact that other countries want to hold your money allows you to sell them bonds that are denominated in your currency. That obviously gives the borrower a huge advantage, because the creditor is at the mercy of the borrower’s exchange rate. The easiest way to stiff a foreign creditor is through devaluing your currency. And the higher the inflation rate that a country runs, the more its currency will devalue.

Monetization seems to be even more attractive now. In the past Washington’s debt was owned by Americans. If Uncle Sam was going to cheat on its creditors, it was by and large American taxpayers that were lending Washington the money. Today half of America’s debt is owned abroad, much of it by central banks like the People’s Bank of China, which is the single largest owner of Treasury bonds in the world.

Why default on your own taxpayers when you can default on someone else’s taxpayers?

For the People’s Bank of China the risk lies with the future value of the greenback. While the Treasury bond will always mature at 100 cents on the dollar, a dollar could buy a lot fewer Yuan by the time a 10-year bond matures. Just ask the Japanese.

The greenback lost 40 percent of its value against the yen between 1971-1981. All of a sudden those once juicy Treasury yields weren’t so appealing after you took your foreign exchange losses into account. If the dollar could lose 40 per cent against the yen over the lifetime of a 10-year bond, who is to say that it couldn’t lose 60 per cent against the currency of the ascending Chinese economy over the next 10 years.

Of course that prospect is not lost on the Chinese. Their appetite for Treasury bonds is not aroused by the allure of earning rich returns but by the need to keep their Yuan undervalued against the greenback, and hence supportive of China’s huge trade surplus with the US. But the need to protect export-led growth is already becoming less important and it will become even less so in the future.

Already it is apparent that it is the Chinese economy, not the American economy, that will lead the global recovery. And what are driving the Chinese recovery are not shipments to Wal-Marts but sales in its own vast internal market. Already Chinese vehicle sales have surpassed the US numbers, and soon the Chinese auto market will leave the ever-shrinking North American one in its dust.

And when a full recovery comes, and with it the return of triple digit oil prices, exports to the US will become even less important to China as the exploding cost of transoceanic transport will more than offset China’s wage advantage in everything from steel to refrigerated food.

If China is no longer going to rely on exports to the US, it doesn’t have to worry about the Yuan appreciating against the greenback. And if it doesn’t have to worry about the Yuan appreciating against the greenback, it doesn’t have to show up at the record sized Treasury auctions that will soon lie ahead.

The world of zero inflation and zero interest rates will very quickly come to an end.

– Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own –

While China has been outspoken in expressing concern about the United States printing too much money, those worries might be better focused at home. No country beats China when it comes to effective monetary easing.

Beijing has scrapped lending quotas, adopted a loose monetary policy and kept interest rates at a four-year low to boost liquidity and promote growth. The policy has worked. China has lent out more money in the first four months of this year than the whole of 2008. Money growth in China is up more than 25 percent this year, versus about 10 percent in the United States.  Click here for a related graph.

Beijing’s “monetary emissions” will have major consequences, and China might suffer from inflation before other countries in the world. The flood of liquidity that has been injected will almost certainly overwhelm the country’s seemingly indestructible overcapacity. History has shown that China can have inflation even during times of severe overcapacity, such as in 2008.

So far, China remains in a honeymoon period. Cheap money is sloshing about but thus far it has only generated asset price inflation — the sort of inflation that investors like. Meanwhile consumer prices are still falling — by 1.4 percent in June versus the same period last year. Factory gate prices were down 7.2 percent.

These price declines must be seen in context. They reflect a high base of comparison last year, showing China needs to worry more about inflation than deflation. Chinese policy makers might have misread the symptoms — the big drop in manufacturing activity late last year has been exaggerated by a sharp destocking process, which means end demand did not fall as much as the authorities thought.

Beijing has prescribed a strong remedy in flooding the market with liquidity. And businesses, banks and local governments are only too happy to swallow it, for commercial as well as political reasons. Banks make money when they lend, businesses like cheap money, and local government officials get promoted when local economies perform well.

As one might imagine, equity prices have been the first to respond to this liquidity injection. Chinese stocks  have been a top performer this year, up some 63 percent, while the Dow is down 3 percent over the same period.

Next in line is the property market. House prices in America are still falling, but in Chinese cities such as Shenzhen and Shanghai, they have risen by up 20 percent since April. Long queues increasingly form when new apartments go on sale, and the government is talking about increasing the supply to help cool the market.

BLAME THE PIG

It will not be long before asset price inflation starts to infect the real economy. People buy televisions and refrigerators to go with their new apartments and a buoyant stock market prompts investors to order shark fins and hairy crabs for lunch.

In China, the first signs of real economy inflation will almost certainly be seen in pork prices. Over the past decade, pork prices have acted like a coal mine canary in predicting inflation. In 2004 and 2007, inflationary bursts were preceded by spikes in pork prices.

A jump in pork prices in 2007 and 2008 prompted the authorities to introduce new incentives to promote pig farming, which increased supply. As a result, pork prices have dropped by 39 percent from the high seen in early 2008. Pig farming has become unprofitable and farmers have cut hog numbers as a result. This simply paves the way for another round of pork price increases. Click here for a related graph.

It will only be a matter of time before inflation is transmitted to the country’s factories. After sharp de-stocking during the last quarter of 2008, Chinese companies have started restocking in anticipation of higher commodity prices later this year, which in turn has helped drive global commodities higher.

The price of some manufactured goods such as clothing and toys has already risen as the export slump forced thousands of factories to close, causing supply to drop more than demand.

When inflation reaches consumers and factories, policy makers will start to raise interest rates again. Asset prices might then experience a last round of euphoria as a wider spread between domestic and international interest rates attracts foreign inflows. But higher interest rates will reduce corporate earnings and home buyers’ spending power, and asset prices might start to fall.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, as monetarists like to say. China is on a money-go-round ride that can only end with higher prices. Watch out for the next export from China — inflation.

– At the time of publication Wei Gu did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. She may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund –

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Higher taxes? Lower public spending? Devaluation? Inflation? Investment in green growth?

European governments are pointing in very different directions as they debate an exit strategy from the global financial crisis. Despite European Union efforts to coordinate economic policy, there are clear signs that the main European economies will charge off in disarray towards separate exits.

Germany is stressing an early return to fiscal discipline despite economists’ warnings against a premature withdrawal of fiscal stimulus. Berlin has just amended its constitution to anchor a timetable for a balanced budget, and is holding down labour costs to promote an export-led recovery.

“This means that the German constitution now forces a very harsh austerity stance on Germany for the coming years,” economist Sebastian Dullien wrote on the Eurozone Watch blog.

“For the rest of (the euro area) this means that after the crisis, Germany will consolidate its budget much earlier and much quicker than the rest of Europe,” he said, arguing it would weaken domestic demand and hurt growth.

German and EU officials say the amendment merely enshrines existing European budget rules and note that a get-out clause allows parliament by a simple majority to set aside the target.

By contrast, French President Nicolas Sarkozy outlined plans last week to raise a big public loan to finance investment in “tomorrow’s growth”, despite warnings from the European Central Bank and the Bank of France against any increase in debt.

France’s deficit is set to remain higher than Germany’s. But with an eye to re-election in 2012, Sarkozy explicitly ruled out austerity or tax increases to pay off mounting public debt, although he talked of cutting wasteful spending, controlling health costs and possibly raising the legal retirement age.

In Britain meanwhile, the opposition Conservatives, scenting victory in a general election due within a year, are preparing to roll back public spending to curb a runaway deficit incurred partly to rescue wayward banks and combat the recession.

Conservative finance spokesman George Osborne has been quoted as telling business leaders: “After three months in power we will be the most unpopular government since the war.”

The Europeans face a common challenge — adapting to lower trend growth while coping with mass unemployment, an aging population and overstretched public finances after the deepest recession since the 1930s.

Different national economic cultures, as well as election timetables, explain the wide diversity of policy responses.

Britain has let the pound slide on foreign exchanges to help restore competitiveness after its banks were hard hit by the credit crunch. The British are more sanguine about the prospect of higher inflation after the crisis to work down public debt.

Influential French officials, such as Sarkozy’s political adviser Henri Guaino, see higher inflation as inevitable, and not necessarily unwelcome, and worry about too strong a euro.

Germany is allergic to inflation out of bitter historical experience in the 1920s and wants a strong currency.

Its Bundesbank president, Axel Weber, has said the ECB will not be influenced by politics in withdrawing liquidity once recovery is under way.

ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet has made clear that his institution, which defines its mandate of maintaining price stability as keeping inflation below but close to 2 percent, will not allow prices to surge.

Despite these deep-seated differences, there is one key area on which the Europeans ought to be able to agree.

The EU has taken global leadership in the last decade in moving towards a low-carbon economy based on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and promoting renewable energy. Under President Barack Obama, the United States is also pushing for the green economy as a source of growth and jobs.

If European leaders joined together in a continent-wide investment and tax incentive programme to promote clean energy, energy efficiency and low-carbon innovation, they could boost the growth potential on which sound public finances depend.

(editing by David Evans)

– Agnes T. Crane is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are her own –

Call it a battle for beginnings and endings, and the Federal Reserve is smack in the middle.

As Fed policymakers convene for a two-day meeting starting on Tuesday, the lines are growing more defined between those who want the Fed to do more to stimulate a still fragile economy, and those who are calling for a defined exit strategy to prevent the global economy from going into an inflation-inducing overdrive.

There’s a way to placate both camps, at least in the near-term, and that’s for Ben Bernanke and his colleagues to retire some of the temporary short-term lending facilities put in place at the height of the financial meltdown last year.

It would show good faith that the U.S. is serious about exiting some of those emergency facilities, and it would give the central bank breathing room to keep its ultra-easy monetary policy in place until it’s ready to call the all clear.

Bernanke, as a scholar of the Depression, is all too aware of what can happen should the central bank move too quickly and forcefully in removing stimulus.

One program in particular is a ripe candidate - the Commercial Paper Funding Facility.

Introduced last year, the CPFF made sure that highly-rated companies could get access to short-term funding at a time when traditional commercial paper lenders like money market funds, spooked by losses caused by the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, shunned such borrowing. By the end of 2008, the Fed’s commercial paper lending added $334.1 billion to its balance sheet.

Since then, the demand for short-term government financing has waned. For one, the program bought companies precious time to cut their dependence on short-term markets as they found financing elsewhere, such as the longer-term corporate bond market. The sharp slowdown in the economy also curbed companies’ need for short-term borrowing, which was often used to cover payrolls, rent or other basic expenditures.

In the latest week, the Fed reported that its facility had shrunk by $6 billion to $132.1 billion in a sign that companies were choosing to pay down their debt before next July when a good portion of the loans begin to mature.

Barclays Capital money-market strategist Joseph Abate expects the commercial paper facility, along with another facility that gives loans to banks so they’ll buy certain types of commercial paper from money market mutual funds, could fall below $50 billion by the time the programs are due to expire in October.

These programs have already been extended once, so they are still in play despite the stated end date.

While practically speaking there would be no harm in keeping facilities like the CPFF open indefinitely just in case financial markets should swoon again, there are pragmatic considerations that should be taken into account.

It’s better to show a commitment to exit strategies with a program that has largely run its course than to start tinkering with interest rates and quantitative easing that can have an outsized impact on the U.S. and global economy, which are still by no means out of the woods.

The World Bank reiterated on Monday its forecast for world economic slump this year, with output contracting by 2.9 percent rather than the 1.7 percent decline predicted in March.

The rise in Treasury yields earlier this month and the quashing effect they had on mortgage lending activity also should be a reminder that the Fed needs to stay flexible when it comes to its unorthodox policies. But it’s time to show the world that it’s also ready to put aside some weapons in its arsenal when the time is right.

Megan McArdle is unhappy with the state of green consumption:

When I look back at almost every "environmentally friendly" alternative product I've seen being widely touted as a cost-free way to lower our footprint, held back only by the indecent vermin at "industry" who don't care about the environment, I notice a common theme: the replacement good has really really sucked compared to the old, inefficient version.

(Scare quotes Megan's, natch.)

The problem, as Megan admits, is that she's looking at the "cost-free" replacements: the bottom-of-the-line green products which can be used to replace legacy products which are the result of decades of development and economies of scale. It's hardly surprising that these first- and second-generation products can't compete on price.

But my feeling is not that the new products are too expensive, so much as that the old products are too cheap. That's certainly the case with food: chicken, beef, and other corn byproducts -- including the famous high-fructose corn syrup -- are so underpriced that their cultivation is destroying the planet and causing mass obesity.

And more generally, the story of both Greenspan bubbles is that the Fed was happy to bring interest rates down to extremely low levels because of the massive amounts of disinflation being imported to the US by China (again, at huge environmental cost).

My hope is that the world which emerges from the present crisis will be one where goods, in general, have a price which is commensurate with their cost. I remember walking down Broadway last year, in Soho, and overhearing a woman coming out of H&M explaining to her friend that the clothes there were great: they were so cheap that you could wear them once and simply throw them away, without having to worry about how they stood up to washing or dry-cleaning. And although it was easy to conjure up lots of high moral dudgeon to direct at the woman in question, the fact is that incentives matter, and the prices at H&M were clearly incentivizing her to feel that way: as a general rule, it's not good for the planet when a frock costs roughly the same as the cost of dry-cleaning it.

So it would be great to have some targeted inflation here: not just to help solve the housing mess, but also to bring the cost of many everyday products up to a point at which people become much more careful about using them -- and much more inclined, too, to pick a green alternative.