Brian Brown

Yesterday, when the Treasury announced buybacks, and the bond market rallied…I got sick to my stomach. It’s rearranging the chairs on the decks of the Titanic. The real problem - Deficits (all over the world). Governments have lost their minds. No amount of financial engineering will fix this. The only thing that will fix it is to stop spending. If governments actually raise taxes to levels needed to fund their current drunken largesse, they will kill all growth and make problems even worse. The other problem with all this spending, is that we are borrowing from savers and giving it to consumers. We are eating our seed corn. In addition to all this, we are not hearing about the losses in pension funds, insurance companies, banks, and central banks in Europe or Japan or the US. They are huge. Pension funds bought debt at negative interest rates and now face huge losses. To repeat: The only way to fix this is to stop spending. Or, somehow miraculously to lift growth rates. But, governments are larger as a share of GDP and this has reduced growth rates. Keynesianism works in the reverse way people are taught in school. It’s crushes growth in the long-term even though it feels good in the short-term. The US’s $40 trillion in debt is a long-term problem…issuing 3-month T-bills doesn’t make it a short-term problem. Buying back long-term bonds doesn’t make it a short-term problem. Governments have to start facing reality and stop pursuing short-term, feel-good, nonsense solutions. Again: Cut the size of government…it’s the only real solution.