Wednesday, October 29, 2008

 

The Fed Really Wants to Test Whether Low Interest Rates Mess Up the Economy

Ironically, just after I posted (below) that Brad DeLong has finally come around to questioning whether Greenspan made the right move in cutting interest rates so much, I see the headlines that the Fed has once again lowered rates down to 1%.

Let me say it once again, for the record: Suppose that Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were right, and that really low interest rates (caused by the central bank flooding the market with artificial credit) screw up the market's coordination over time. Then that means we are now sowing the seeds for an even bigger crisis four or five years from now.

It's true, many people would say, "That's irrelevant. Right now the pain is so bad, we need to stop the bleeding and deal with future problems down the road."

However, that's exactly what people were saying in light of the "unacceptable" pain that would have occurred due to the dot-com crash and 9/11 attacks. It never occurred to people back then, how bad the housing boom would end up being.

Oh, another little twist: Keep in mind we will probably have very liberal Democrats running all branches of government when the chickens come home to roost. So on top of the Fed distortions, let's throw in some tax hikes, and maybe some explicit price controls too. And maybe some more concessions to unions--why not?



Comments:
The Blackadder Says:

Okay, but what exactly is the alternative? The Friedman/Bernanke position, as I understand it, is that the Great Depression was caused by a contraction in the money supply. The Austrian position, again as I understand it, is that it wasn't the monetary contraction per se that was the problem, but rather the contraction combined with government efforts to keep nominal wages from falling.

Let's assume that the Austrians are right here. Does anyone think that the government wouldn't act to keep wages from falling if there was another contraction? Given that government isn't going to adopt a laissez faire approach to an economic downturn, why isn't avoiding a contraction the second-best option?
 
I'm not sure I follow you. Do you think it was the second-best option for Greenspan to avoid a downturn in 2002?
 
The Blackadder Says:

If Greenspan hadn't inflated in 2002 would we have had another Great Depression? I'm not aware of anyone who thought that was likely.
 
Right, but I'm operating on the assumption that Fed distortions make things worse. So we can have "great depression II" now, or "even worse great depression II" in 5 years.
 
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