Quote:
Originally Posted by Buehler445
You've got it backwards. They shifted to high gear and burned up the clutch.
Theory is if there are low interest rates industry will expand because money is cheap. Unemployment will fall GDP will rise. Extended periods of growth leads to inflation. Raising interest rates will cause businesses to slow expansion and cook off the economy and wait for the market to catch up with GDP growth.
There are a series of interrelated curves (labor, money supply, GDP, and some other shit) that proof it all out but that is the 30,000 ft overview of intermediate macroeconomics.
So what Japan did was try to spur growth through interest rates and it didn't do anything. So they've fired their bullets.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I'd postulate that what happened here was interest got cheap and business did things other than directly increase production
1. Sit on the cash (see apple)
2. Invest in automation - not sending money home, wrecking the velocity of money
3. Invest overseas - taking it out of the equation completely thus thoroughly wrecking the velocity of money.
|
Right now the economic trend has been Quantitative Easing (QE) to stimulate the economy. This involves the central bank's buying Mortgage Backed Securities to infuse the market with cash. This isn't a bad idea, but at least in the US, the consequence has run into a political obstacle.
With all of the capital requirement changes that occurred after 2008, banks are required to keep more cash on hand in case of emergencies. Their Tier 1 Capital Ratios for small banks was 5.5-7%, and for large banks it was even less. Now they are required to maintain over 10%.
What this means is that a huge bank with 10s of billions of dollars of assets are no longer allowed to lend those 10s of billions. It is required to be dead money. This added to more stringent requirements in lending, so banks can only lend to superbly qualified businesses/individuals makes for a disaster that was really unforseen.
Money multiplier theory says that a dollar lent can be multiplied something like 27 times. So if a bank is required to keep 30 billion in dead money, this would have otherwise been an 810 billion dollar infusion into the economy, which would have spurred economic growth. (Imagine your small business getting a small chunk if that).
So the banks are taking the money that is being infused by QE and putting it straight towards their reserves, instead of injecting it into the economy. This is why no one has seen any real effect of QE until recently, now that the reserves are topped off and in compliance.
I know no one likes big banks, but they are an integral part of our economy, and by handcuffing them it hurts everyone. But Bernie and the like don't recognize this and just want more regulations. They need to be loosened up so the banks are allowed to lend.
I know this is kind of long, but it may be the first time anyone has explained to you WHY these new bank regulations are so bad, rather than just saying that big banks are bad and greedy and they deserve to be punished.