Sunday, August 7, 2011

Decade of Stimulus Yields Nothing But Mountain of Debt; What to Do About It?

"Is there any kind of stimulus the US did not try in the last 10 years?
  1. We had 1% interest rates from Greenspan fueling housing.
  2. We had wars from Bush and Obama fueling defense industry employment.
  3. We had two rounds of Quantitative easing from the Fed.
  4. We had cash-for-clunkers.
  5. We had two housing tax credit packages.
  6. We had an $800 billion stimulus package from Congress for "shovel-ready" projects.
  7. We had stimulus kickbacks to states.
  8. We had HAMP (Home Affordable Mortgage Program).
  9. We had bank bailouts out the wazoo to stimulate lending.
  10. We had Small Business lending programs.
  11. We had central bank liquidity swaps.
  12. We had Maiden Lane, Maiden Lane II, and Maiden Lane III
  13. We had Single Tranche Repurchase agreements
  14. We had the Citi Asset Guarantee
  15. We had TALF, TARP, TAF, CPFF, TSLF, MMIFF, TLGP, AMLF, PPIP, and PDCF
  16. We had so many programs the Fed must have run out of letters because they were not given an acronym.

That is a partial list. Other than bailing out bondholders what exactly do we have to show for any of it? The one-word answer is "debt".

Decade of Stimulus Yields Nothing But Debt

Caroline Baum wrote an excellent article on this theme. It was so good I asked if I could reproduce it in entirety.

With permission please consider Decade of Stimulus Yields Nothing but Debt: Caroline Baum

When George W. Bush took up residence in the White House in January 2001, total U.S. debt stood at $5.95 trillion. Last week it was $14.3 trillion, with $2.4 trillion freshly authorized by Congress Tuesday..." 
at  http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/08/decade-of-stimulus-yields-nothing-but.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MishsGlobalEconomicTrendAnalysis+%28Mish%27s+Global+Economic+Trend+Analysis%29

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