Solutions for Everything, Answers to Nothing
Friday, 10/31/2014 18:49
Could one day's Financial Times
be the best £2.50 humanity ever spends...?
WEDNESDAY we picked up an issue of the
Financial Times,
writes Bill Bonner in his Diary of a Rogue Economist – the so-called pink paper due to its distinctive color.
We wondered how many wrongheaded, stupid, counterproductive, delusional ideas one edition can have.
We were trying to understand how come the entire financial world (with the exception of Germany) seems to be singing from the same off-key, atonal and bizarre hymnbook. All want to cure a debt crisis with more debt.
The
FT is part of the problem. It is the choirmaster to the economic elite, singing confidently and loudly the bogus chants that now guide public policy.
Look on practically any financial desk in any time zone anywhere in the world, and you are likely to find a copy. Walk over to the ministry of finance...or to an investment bank...or to a think tank – there's the salmon-pink newspaper.
Yes, you might also find a copy of the
Wall Street Journal or the local financial rag, but it is the
FT that has become the true paper of record for the economic world.
Too bad...because it has more bad economic ideas per square inch than a Hillary Clinton speech. It is on the pages of the
FT that Larry Summers is allowed to hold forth, with no warning of any sort to alert gullible readers. In the latest of his epistles, he put forth the preposterous claim that more government borrowing to pay for infrastructure would have a 6% return.
He says it would be a "free lunch" because it would not only put people to work and stimulate the economy, but also the return on investment, in terms of GDP growth, would make the project pay for itself...and yield a profit.
Yo, Larry, Earth calling...Have you ever been to New Jersey?
It is hard enough for a private investor, with his own money at stake, to get a 6% return. Imagine when bureaucrats are spending someone else's money...when decisions must pass through multiple levels of committees and commissions made up of people with no business or investment experience – with no interest in controlling costs or making a profit...and no idea what they are doing.
Imagine, too, that these people are political appointees with strong, and usually hidden, connections to contractors and unions.
What kind of return do you think you would really get? We don't know, but we'd put a minus sign in front of it.
But the fantasy of borrowing for "public investment" soaks the
FT.
It is part of a mythology based on the crackpot Keynesian idea that when growth rates slow you need to stimulate "demand".
How do you stimulate demand?
You try to get people to take on more debt – even though the slowdown was caused by too much debt.
On page 9 of Wednesday's
FT its chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf (a man who should be roped off with red-and-white tape, like a toxic spill), gives us the standard line on how to increase Europe's growth rate:
"The question [...] is how to achieve higher demand growth in the Euro zone and creditor countries. [T]he Euro zone lacks a credible strategy for reigniting demand [aka debt]."
It is not enough for people to decide when they want to buy something and when they have the money to pay for it. Governments...and their august advisers on the
FT editorial page...need a "strategy".
On its front page, the
FT reports – with no sign of guffaw or irony – that the US is developing a "digital divide".
Apparently, people in poor areas are less able to pay $19.99 a month for broadband Internet than people in rich areas. So the poor are less able to go online and check out the restaurant reviews or enjoy the free pornography.
This undermines President Obama's campaign pledge of giving every American "affordable access to robust broadband."
The
FT hardly needed to mention it. But it believes the US should make a larger investment in broadband infrastructure – paid for with more debt, of course!
Maybe it's in a part of the Constitution that we haven't read: the right to broadband. Maybe it's something they stuck in to replace the rights they took out – such as habeas corpus or privacy.
We don't know. We only bring it up because it shows how dopey the pink paper – and modern economics – can be.
Quantity can be measured. Quality cannot. Broadband subscriptions can be counted. The effect of access to the internet on poor families is unknown.
Would they be better off if they had another distraction in the house? Would they be happier? Would they be healthier? Would they be purer of heart or more settled in spirit?
Nobody knows. But a serious paper would at least ask.
It might also ask whether more "demand" or more GDP really makes people better off. It might consider how you can get real demand by handing out printing-press money. And it might pause to wonder why Zimbabwe is not now the richest country on earth.
But the
FT does none of that.
Over on page 24, columnist John Plender calls corporations on the carpet for having too much money. You'd think corporations could do with their money whatever they damned well pleased.
But not in the central planning dreams of the
FT. Corporations should use their resources in ways that the newspaper's economists deem appropriate. And since the world suffers from a lack of demand, "corporate cash hoarding must end in order to drive recovery."
But corporations aren't the only ones at fault. Plender spares no one – except the economists most responsible for the crisis and slowdown.
"At root," he says of Japan's slump (which could apply almost anywhere these days), the problem "results from underconsumption."
Aha! Consumers are not doing their part either.
Summers, Wolf, Plender and the "pink paper" have a solution for everything. Unfortunately, it's always the same solution and it always doesn't work.
Email us