Loading ...And, this brings us full circle to the reality of the past decade: credit binges are always popular because while the benefits of leverage come today, the costs of bad debt come tomorrow. Improving a business or learning a skill requires dedication and hard work. Monetary “stimulus” offers a siren like promise of effortless prosperity yet ignores the reality that credit binges always sow the seeds of their future destruction.
If this sounds a tad abstract, consider September 15 last. On that day, the normally dull as dishwater overnight repo lending rate soared to an astonishing 10% annualized rate. A shocked Fed felt compelled to “do something,” which these days invariably means adding still further to the pool of loanable funds. The size of the add (via the Fed’s T-bill purchases and expansion of its repo facility) has been nearly a cool half-trillion, well over half of the total size of the Fed’s pre-crisis balance sheet. The Fed justified adding this tidal wave of liquidity notwithstanding its characterization that what happened was a mere “technical” glitch in the repo market. Technical, really? A practical take is that the market is talking to the best and brightest minds in central banking, and the Fed doesn’t like what it’s hearing: the repo market wants to clear at rates above the Fed’s IOER fiat rate, which, if allowed to do so, would likely invert the front-end of the yield curve. Inverting curves sounds a bit too much like ending a credit binge, leading to recession, and so the Fed’s response function is to “veto” (Latin for “I forbid”) the market’s signal. Now, who’s fooling whom?
And, so the Fed continues to continue to pretend the cycle need never end. But markets will be what they must be, and investors must face the consequences of the last decade’s credit binge…tomorrow.