Central Banks in Liquidity Action...Not Solvency Action

Here we go again!

The central banks acted yesterday and the markets went wild!  Six central banks acted in concert to make sure that European banks…and others…could get dollars if they wanted them.

This is a liquidity action!

It is an act to keep the flow of short-term funds flowing in world financial markets…just as these six central banks did after the Lehman Brothers failure. 

Once again, the definition of a liquidity crisis is that there is a short term need for “buyers” in a market because, for the short term, the “buyers” that are usually there are not there.  The “sellers” want to sell assets and obtain dollars.

“Buyers” without dollars are not what is wanted.  So the central banks are making sure that there are plenty of dollars available so that the “sellers” can sell their assets.

The emphasis, however, should be on the short-term nature of a “liquidity” crisis. 

The fundamental problem is still the solvency problem facing several of the sovereign nations of Europe. (See my post from yesterday, “European Debt Must Be Restructured,” http://seekingalpha.com/article/310994-european-sovereign-debt-must-be-restructured.)

Providing liquidity to the market will not resolve the solvency problem.  As almost everyone except the officials in Europe know, the efforts of the last two years or so to treat European debt problems as a “liquidity” issue has resulted in the situation we now find ourselves in. 

As in the past, central bank action has gotten a favorable response from stock markets around the world.  In the past, the quick, dramatic response to the central bank action has been followed by a retreat.  If nothing is done on the sovereign debt restructuring need, the stock markets will, in all likelihood, retreat once again.

The word out is that this liquidity action on the part of the central banks gives the officials in Europe some time to deal with the restructuring. 

But, the restructuring is also only a short-term response for eventually the eurozone must deal with the whole question of how the fiscal affairs of the eurozone will be handled.  The concern is that restructuring of the debt without reforming how the nations of the eurozone discipline their fiscal affairs just creates a situation in which fiscal irresponsibility can survive into the future.

Revising how the eurozone conducts its fiscal affairs, however, cannot be done overnight.  Yet, the financial markets must be given some kind of credible assurances that fiscal discipline will be forthcoming before they will really settle down. 

This seems to be the unknown…for the single currency framework will not last without the eurozone achieving some kind of fiscal unity.  Is this what Germany is holding out for?

So, is the problem going to be resolved now…or, are we just going through another cycle?

I still am not convinced that the Europeans, at this stage, possess the backbone to do what is necessary!

Oh, and once all these dollars get out into world markets…will they be withdrawn once the “liquidity” crisis is over?

The "New" Liquidity

This is the age of the “New” liquidity.  This new liquidity is driven by two things: first, information technology; and second, by the free flow of capital throughout the world. 

Finance is nothing more than information.  A dollar bill can be exchanged for another dollar bill.  A demand deposit can be exchanged for dollars and is nothing more than 0s and 1s on some bank’s computer.  A bond provides you with a series of cash flows, which are nothing more than electronic blips, 0s and 1s.  Mortgage-backed securities are nothing more than different cash flows cut into streams that suit the needs of whoever buys them…0s and 1s.

Information can be “sliced and diced” any way that you want it and can be stored and transmitted instantaneously almost anywhere in the world.   This latter point is where the free flow of capital throughout the world enters the picture.

This free flow of capital throughout the world is where the “new” liquidity comes in.  Financial assets, in today’s world, are extremely liquid.

 That is, these assets are liquid…until they aren’t liquid!  They remain liquid until something changes, like the price of the real estate behind certain assets ceases to rise continuously. 

And, this is the new world that the Federal Reserve has to operate within. 

The financial innovation of the last fifty years has been truly exceptional.  Information technology has aided this advance.  There are derivative instruments everywhere.  International capital markets have meant that financial assets can be placed all over the world.  The finance industry has become a huge part of the global economy, both in terms of wealth produced and in terms of employment.  Even manufacturing firms like General Motors and General Electric have gotten into the game and in recent years their finance wings have produced a majority of their profits.

The volume of financial assets that have been produced in this environment has relied on the liquidity of international capital markets to facilitate and expand the flow of these assets into every corner of the world.  The ease of the flow has been truly remarkable.

But, it is the very ease of the flow that has created problems here and there.  The problems I am alluding to are called “bubbles.”  Because capital can flow so freely from market to market and this flow can take place almost immediately, capital can move rapidly from various segments of the capital markets into other segments as sentiment or information changes.  And, as long as the markets remain “liquid” the movements can continue until the situation is played out.

This is a different environment from the one that the current model of monetary policy is based upon.  That model, originally created through the Bretton Woods agreement in the 1940s, assumed that there would not be a free flow of capital internationally.  Thus, with a gold standard and fixed exchange rates, the economic policy of a government could be focused on maintaining high levels of employment, low levels of unemployment. 

Of course, the credit inflation of the 1960s destroyed the underlying assumptions of this international monetary agreement and this was institutionalized on August 15, 1971 as President Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard and floated the value of the dollar.

The subsequent period of credit inflation and the consequent explosion of financial innovation has taken us into another realm.  And, it is this new environment we are dealing with now.

Money can now flow almost anywhere at extremely rapid speeds.  Money can flow almost instantenously into different sectors of the financial market.  Thus a change in investor sentiment or the introduction of new information or a change in the stance of monetary policy can create “bubbles” in different sectors of the economy. 

We saw a growing occurrence of bubbles over the past 20 years.  We saw the dot,com bubble in the 1990s followed by its collapse in the early 2000s.  We saw the housing bubble in the early 2000s, followed by the collapse in the housing market in the latter part of the decade.  We seemed to have had stock market bubbles in both decades. 

Recently we seem to have had a bubble in international commodity markets due to the quantitative easing of the Federal Reserve system along with bubbles in certain emerging nation stock markets.  One can also make the argument that the recent behavior of the Treasury bond market represents a bubble.  How else can you explain the fact that the yield on Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) has been negative.  Participants in the financial markets were not interested in TIPS for their yield but as a price play connected with the “rush to quality” in international financial markets.  (See Jeremy Siegal and Jeremy Schwartz, “The Bond Bubble and the Case for Stocks,” http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903639404576516862106441044.html?KEYWORDS=jeremy+siegel&mg=reno-wsj.)

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan continues to claim that a bubble cannot be perceived before-the-fact, that is, before the bubble has burst.  Hence, the Federal Reserve could not fight off bubbles in financial (or commodity) markets because they could not be identified.  This seems to be the reigning philosophy of the current leadership at the Fed.   It is the old model of monetary policy.

Yet, the liquidity of international financial markets is a reality and the existence of bubbles is a fact of life.  I believe that these facts are being accepted by the people running our governments and central banks.   Yet, their thinking still has a ways to go and their model of how central banking should be conducted has not been completely formed. 

For one, these “leaders” seem to think that every problem they are facing is a liquidity problem.  I have addressed this earlier. (See http://seekingalpha.com/article/288610-the-debt-crisis-it-ain-t-over-until-it-s-over.) Thus, their solutions are systematically based on the maintenance of liquidity in international capital markets.

The fact that the market for an asset may be illiquid because it is related to cash flow problems, say as in real estate investment, and that no amount of liquidity will bring the value of the asset back to previous levels seems to escape these “leaders.”  That is, an asset is liquid, until it is no longer liquid.

Second, the model being used by these “leaders”, a model that places high economic growth to achieve low levels of unemployment, leads these “leaders” to adopt policies, like QE2, that are totally inappropriate for the current economic situation.  Providing liquidity in these cases may create further bubbles, as presented above, but may have little or no effect on economic growth or employment.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is a very creative person.  He has been improvising monetary policy for the last three years.  The old model does not seem to fit any more.  Yet, a new model has not been created.  But, any new monetary policy must be based on the reality of today, a reality dominated by instantaneous flows of money to almost any where in the world.   

Keynes knew that you could not focus a nation’s economic policy on its own employment situation when capital flowed freely throughout the world.  That is why he created his macroeconomic model.  His followers, especially the fundamentalists Keynesians, don’t seem to understand this reality.   It is time to move on.  It is time to accept the reality of the “New” liquidity.

Credibility--Two

Donald Kohn, Vice-Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System gave a speech yesterday at the International Research Forum on Monetary Policy in Frankfurt, Germany. (See http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/kohn20080626a.htm.) In that speech, Mr. Kohn spoke about “Global Economic Integration and Decoupling.” Decoupling, according to Kohn, “refers to apparent divergences in economic performance among different regions of the world economy.”

Kohn references three different aspects of this. First, “the business cycles of the United States and other industrial economies are becoming less synchronized…” Second, “economic growth in the emerging market economies is holding up, even as growth slows substantially in the United States and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the industrial world.” Third, “even as the financial markets of many industrial countries have been roiled by turmoil that emerged last August, conditions in the traditionally volatile financial markets of emerging market economies have proved surprisingly resilient.”

To me, this speech misses the point and represents one of the major reasons why the Federal Reserve and the leaders of the Federal Reserve are facing a real crisis of credibility. (See my post on “Credibility” of June 23, 2007, http://maseportfolio.blogspot.com/.) The Federal Reserve is ignoring any role it has played in the decline in the value of the dollar over the past six years and the dislocations in world markets that this has caused. By continuing to ignore the role it has played in the decline in the value of the dollar it is undermining any remaining trust that might exist in its leadership.

And, the Fed is ignoring the role it is playing in the current financial turmoil. Concern over the behavior of the Federal Reserve is being expressed around the world. See for example the editorial comment in the Wall Street Journal, “The Fed at Ease”, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121443727459905199.html?mod=todays_us_opinion. Also see the editorial comment in the Financial Times, “Fed cannot ignore global inflation”, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5cd50c4-42e4-11dd-81d0-0000779fd2ac.html. Yet, policymakers in the United States seem to turn their eyes elsewhere.

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee met on Tuesday. It presented the results of that meeting Tuesday afternoon and the statement made was, if anything bland and tepid. The statement basically said…we really aren’t in the mood to do anything at this time.

That was sure a confidence builder!

This Federal Reserve leadership has introduced more innovation into the world monetary system than any before it. It has broadened the scope of financial oversight tremendously, even assisting in the Bear Stearns takeover, and is seeking more and more responsibilities. It is now looking at opening up the banking sector to private equity investment.

We are walking in new territory…never before explored. For example, we don’t know what all the new innovations mean for the future. We have been told that many of the actions taken will be removed in the future when the need for them recedes. Yet we see that there exists $150 billion in Term Auction Credit outstanding, $64 billion in “Other Credit Extensions” which includes swaps to central banks in Europe, $8.5 billion credit extension on the “Primary dealer credit facility” and $111 billion in securities lent to dealers in through the “term facility” window. What do all these billions mean for the financial institutions and financial markets? How will they be removed?

We don’t know what these innovations mean. We have nothing to compare them with!
And, then we seem to have leaders that are doing little or nothing to help their credibility in world financial circles! Where should the confidence come from?

Let me just say that if this attention on the credibility of Fed leadership is getting into the newspapers then we need to be concerned. In my experience, newspapers tend to be a lagging indicator of how participants in the market feel. If the newspapers are expressing concern over the credibility of the leadership of the Federal Reserve, then the rest of the world must be really concerned!