Sometimes numbers can unravel truths never told, and probably this is why numbers are so often forged, faked, and altered - no one is really concerned about telling you the truth, especially when these numbers are linked to money figures.
Projections and rates are frequently misinterpreted or mistakenly used as a quick fix-up to much larger wounds. That’s what professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Allan Meltzer, had repeatedly warned in his work throughout the past 25 years.
Even though Meltzer wasn’t noted by the masses while alive, he is considered among many American economists as a significant expert in monetary policy, and his work still causes impact in recent days.
Born in 1928, on the verge of the Great Depression, Meltzer had seen enough to understand how institutions work in times of crisis. He wrote the three-volume analysis “A History of the Federal Reserve” as he chaired the Shadow Open Market Committee, a group that would regularly meet to discuss the policies of the Federal Reserve.
The economic policies that were developed since 2008 were definitely not approved by his views, as he states that it was definitely the biggest economic collapse he had seen since the 1930s, and later on affirming that America has never had such a problematic future.
In June 2010, in an opinion piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal called “Why Obamanomics Has Failed”, Meltzer has pointed on how the uncertainty about future taxes and regulations was the most dangerous obstacle of the economic growth.
In his studies, he explains how the administration’s stimulus program had bumped. The two main reasons he uses to justify Obamanomics’ fiasco are related to the neglect of the long-term costs and its consequences by the administration economists and their outside supporters, and also due to the Congress and administration behaviors which had lead to more uncertainty about the economic future.
Meltzer unfolds that the earlier spending was a short-term exit in a long-term path. Using part of the financed money to direct into temporary tax cuts didn’t seem effective unless these cuts were expected to last enough, so consumers could save the proceeds and had payed down their debt, but even so, it disregards the role of expectations in the economy.
The other cut of the stimulus was intended to relieve state and local governments of their budget deficits, transferring a deficit from the state to the federal government, but only creating a very small change, because despite delaying the incoming rise of unemployment rates for a while, all benefits that were given back then had enormously increased the public debt.
On the other hand, investors had been pushed towards riskier assets because of their low-interest rates, but when these rates rise again, which is only a matter of time - as we well know, the value of these risky investments will drop and the investors are going to be deeply injured by that. On top of all of this, there is still the fact that interest payments on the public debt will rise, increasing the budget deficit even more.
There is no doubt that prices have been rising rapidly in some sectors of the economy and the marketplace is facing major distortions. However, it is concerning that large "too big to fail" banks like Goldman and Bank of America - as they're referred to by economy website ZeroHedge; reported they had made profits in the market on approximately 95% of trading days in 2012, which makes us wonder about how manipulated this game is, because - let's face it: it's almost impossible for a trader to be that competent.
If we compare the Obama administration with Kennedy's and Johnson's in the '60s and Reagan in the '80s, the opposite course was taken. The late presidents used to promote growth first and redistribute it later. However, by sacrificing growth for redistribution, the Obama administration has got none.
In spite of the attempts to increase redistribution to favor middle and lower-income groups, the policies adopted by the Obama administration and supported by the Fed had accomplished the complete opposite.
That is to say, inflation is in our future. Allan could see years ago that the food prices were flowing, as they did in the mid-'60s, this was way before the current health crisis appeared in the picture. The economic collapse is being announced for years and it finally hit our door. The Trump administration has been a continuation of deficit spending. Meltzer predicted that postponing the day of reckoning would probably make things worse in the future. And the future is now.
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