"We're Going To Kill The Dollar" - The Fed's Plan B

[Jan Klimkowski]

But if the Fed can buy mortgage bonds, then why can't they buy infrastructure bonds? What's the difference?

The difference is that mortgage bonds boost profits for bankers, whereas infrastructure bonds merely provide jobs for people who need them. In other words, the difference is not between fiscal and monetary, but between the "haves" and the "have nots", which is the same as saying that the Fed's policies are based on class interests. And, that brings back to our original comment by Kyle Bass, who wonders how the US can grow its way out of its present predicament (big budget deficits and weak exports) without more "private sector credit demand"?

Great question. But you can see that Fed chairman Bernanke has already tipped his hand. The Fed is going to keep waving that "$45 billion per month" carrot in front of the banks until they rev-up the credit flywheel and create a new regime of toxic mortgages. (The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule on "Qualified Mortgage", which requires neither a down payment nor credit scores, makes this prospect even more likely.) Bernanke is playing the role that the repo market played before the Crash of '08, that is, the Fed is promising to buy all the complex bonds (MBS) the banks produce off balance sheet to keep money flowing to the banks. It's just like the free market, except there's nothing free about it. It's all fake and Bernanke doesn't care if you know it.

$45 billion per month isn't chump change. It's enough to inflate housing prices, to employ more out-of-work construction workers, to grow the economy, and to save bank balance sheets that are deep in the red. At the same time, the Fed's ballooning balance sheet will put downward pressure on the dollar which will increase exports while lowering real-inflation adjusted wages. Like the man said, "We're going to kill the dollar."

This is the Fed's plan: Bail out the banks, transfer the banks bad bets onto its own balance sheet, hammer the greenback, slash wages (via inflation), boost exports, and pump as much money as possible into the unproductive, overbuilt black hole we call the US housing market.

Of course, President Obama could avoid all this nonsense and just launch a government-funded jobs program that would snap the economy out of its coma, increase demand, and turbo-charge GDP, but that would be way too easy. And probably bad for profits, too.

Yup. Mike Whitney outlines a highly likely scenario and its rationale.

Of course you won't usually hear this from BBC or CBS or Fox or Bloomberg economic correspondents.

Back in 2001, I made a BBC film called "The Great Dot.Con" which exposed the internet pump and dump Wall Street/City of London scam, featuring interviews with insider whistleblowers and thieving analysts. The programme boss bollocked me off for daring to make an investigative film which took a hostile editorial line towards crooked investment bank behaviour.

That was the last film I made for that particular, and particularly asinine, part of the BBC....