Sen.-elect Rand Paul, R-Ky.According to a pre-election Bloomberg poll, 60 percent of likely voters who self-identified as Tea Party members said they want to see the Federal Reserve either reined in or abolished. Rand Paul, the Republican senator-elect from Kentucky, campaigned in part on an anti-Fed platform. Fed-bashing is often shrugged off as something that oddballs do whenever the country hits hard economic times. But if that's the case, then why is Jeremy Grantham railing against the Fed too?
Grantham, the chief investment officer of the big Boston money management firm GMO, is nobody's idea of an oddball; he is a well-respected longtime professional. Yet he just wrote a report titled "Night of the Living Fed." The cover page resembles a poster for a horror flick, complete with a subhead"”"Something Unbelievably Terrifying!""”and scary captions: "Homes Destroyed! Runaway Commodities! Currency Wars!"
The thought process behind the anger at the Fed isn't uniform. If Dante had nine circles of hell, then the Fed has three circles of doubters. The first circle is critical of the Fed's current policies. The second circle thinks that the Fed has been a menace for a long time. The third circle wants to seriously curtail or even get rid of the Fed.
Let's start with the first circle. The Fed recently announced that it will purchase $600 billion in longer-term Treasury bonds. This is known as "quantitiative easing." The idea is that the Fed's buying binge will increase demand for Treasuries and drive down interest rates, which in turn will encourage more borrowing, get the economy's gears moving, and ultimately, if indirectly, chip away at the 9.6 percent unemployment rate. The current round of quantitiative easing is called "QE2" because the Fed previously purchased some $1.75 trillion in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities starting in early 2009, when the credit markets were frozen stiff. According to Paul Sheard, the chief economist at Nomura International, by the time the Fed completes QE2 (and assuming no changes in other asset levels) it will have expanded its balance sheet by a remarkable 221 percent from precrisis levels. That is a really big deal.
To some extent, QE2 has already worked: On Nov. 4, the day after the Fed confirmed its plans, the Dow finally surpassed the level it had hit before Lehman Bros.' collapse two years ago. But the plan has also created an outpouring of skepticism. When the Fed launched QE1 in early 2009, markets were locked up. Today, rates are already shockingly low. Is another tiny reduction going to convince debt-laden consumers to spend or get companies that already have oodles of idle cash ($1 trillion, according to some estimates) to start investing? Do higher asset prices create the confidence we so desperately need"”or are higher asset prices just another bubble that is destined to pop?
Those who worry that QE2 will lead us down a dark path include bond king Bill Gross, the founder of the giant bond management firm Pimco, who told Reuters that the Fed's plan could lead to a "debasement of the dollar." Gross fears that QE2 will weaken U.S. currency by as much as 20 percent over the next few years. Kansas City Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig, who voted against the Fed's plan, told the Wall Street Journal that QE2 was a "bargain with the devil." Hoenig thinks it could create inflation and future financial instability. Many foreign countries, including China, Brazil, and Germany, are complaining about QE2 because they fear a falling dollar will wreak havoc on their economies. (Fed chief Ben Bernanke defended QE2 in a Nov. 4 Washington Post op-ed; it's worth noting that other countries are hardly innocents when it comes to currency manipulation.)
Grantham occupies the second circle. He sees the repeat of a familiar pattern in which the Fed's low-interest-rate policies create bubbles. In the 1990s, the bubble was in tech stocks. In the aughts, the bubble was in housing. Now the bubble might be in junk bonds and commodities. What typically happens, Grantham argues, is that the Fed disavows any responsibility for spotting or stopping the bubbles before they wreak havoc. (Remember both Greenspan's and Bernanke's insistence that there was no nationwide housing bubble? Greenspan called it "froth.") The madness in housing, Grantham writes, "was a direct outcome of a policy that is clearly still in place." The Fed's "complete refusal to learn from experience" makes it harder to create "a healthy, stable economy with strong [i.e., low] unemployment," Grantham concludes.
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