It's been a nice run that's for sure....
Central bankers have a well-worn playbook for handling recessions. Cut interest rates, increase liquidity, and otherwise make more capital available to the private sector. This helps businesses hire more workers and raise wages. Then gradually remove all the stimulus as growth recovers. (Usually, at least. Greenspan waited too long to tighten after the 2001 recession and begin raising rates, creating the dynamics for the subprime crisis.)
The playbook truly fell apart in 2008. The system had so much debt that adding yet more of it didn’t have the desired effect. As noted, easy money from the last crisis had created the situation. Even dropping short-term rates to effectively zero didn’t help because it was creditworthiness, not interest costs, that kept people and businesses from borrowing.
The Bernanke Fed’s answer was quantitative easing—essentially a way to stimulate lending at longer maturities. It had an effect but not the intended one. Instead of going to productive use, the new stimulus helped banks deleverage and public companies leverage up and repurchase their own shares, or as we will discuss below, simply buy their competition and short-circuit the “creative destruction” cycle. This pushed asset prices, i.e. the stock market, higher and made it appear recovery was underway. Unfortunately, the “recovery” was the slowest recovery on record.
All that cash eventually trickled through the economy, not to people who would spend it on useful goods and services, but to yield-starved investors. Why were they starving? Because the Fed was keeping rates low. They had little choice but to take more risk, which is what the Fed wanted them to do in the first place. So they plunged money into venture capital, private equity, IPOs, emerging markets, and everything else they could find with potentially decent capital gains and/or yields.
The result was a massive wave of investment, some good and some, well, let’s just say based on hope and little else. And as we know, hope is not a solid investment strategy. Some businesses that had good stories (the so-called unicorns) found themselves covered with cash by investors for whom hope sprang eternal. Eager to show they could turn the cash into gold, the companies sought to emulate the Amazon model, using money to buy growth without profit. In the hopes of going public at some point and cashing in, they kept the game alive. Think Lyft. (Note: I like Lyft and wish them nothing but success. But still…) Investors, because they wanted to believe the story they were investing in was true, watched and waited.
They’re still waiting. And here we are.
https://www.mauldine...alism-gone-wild
Edited by robo, 06 April 2019 - 05:28 PM.
