zwischen Richter und Martenson:
Chris Martenson: Now, the theory was, you know, starting in 2007, if we just slap another 50-60 trillion of new debt into the world, we will get this economy going again. Of course, being over 200 trillion just debt, not liabilities, but just debt, is a claim saying that, hey, we are expecting rapid growth to return. Isn’t there some nervousness out there now that, hey, where is the growth? I know like Jeremy Grantham said structurally, we are not going to have growth for a long time, you have Steve Keen, an economist, saying of course you are not, look at the debt levels. But for a variety of reasons, hasn’t enough time passed where we can go, wow, we are not seeing the former levels of global growth and that should be causing some nervousness in the markets that I have not seen priced into stocks or bonds yet.
Wolf Richter: Yeah, that is correct and, unfortunately, and I think that was one of the biggest mistakes the central banks made during the financial crisis, they stopped the debt from blowing up so we never had that cleansing. In a recession, normally companies de-leverage. They go through bankruptcy, they shed their debts, and you have this big wave of debt restructuring and this is painful for bondholders and banks, but it clears out the crap that is clogging up the pipeline. And so these companies reemerge or get bought out and the debt just disappears, same with consumers. They unload their debts through various methods, and so when the recovery starts, you are not suffocating under this huge load of debt. And that has not happened in the United States particularly, but in other countries, too. That debt never got fully blown out, so then the recovery started with 0-percent interest rates and Q-e, which encouraged companies and individuals and governments to take on even more debt, so now we are burdened with such an enormous amount of debt that I think it is very hard to even breathe for the economy.And I think there are a lot of people out there that are worried about this, and you hear now voices saying we need a serious reflation. They need to come up with a lot of inflation to wipe out that debt, and of course, that will be a fiasco for our economy, because if you have any uptick inflation without an equivalent uptick in wages, which we have not been getting, then you will destroy the consumer. And so, this is not a great solution either, but everybody sees that there is too much debt out there and we are still encouraging—we are still solving the too-much-debt-problem with too much debt. I mean, the Fed is still saying we will make money for free and you just need to borrow more money and that is the solution to having too much debt. It is insane when you look at it. The Fed would never use the word insane, but that is what they are doing.
Chris Martenson: Well, the beatings will continue until morale improves, and if 0-percent will not do it, how about we lock all your money down, take cash away and give you negative interest rates and we will just set that dial to max pain. What is it, -3-percent, -4-percent? Tell us, what will it take for you to take your money out and go and spend a bit, as if that was the cure for everything, if we could just all spend more and of course, my view, my work in the world, is to say yes, you could possibly goad people into spending more this quarter and you would have a couple of good years maybe, but longer-term, where are we going with that story, because you cannot grow infinitely forever. There is some limit to this that has to make sense and where I get concerned is that the central bank has somehow adopted the dogma that whatever is good for finance and whatever is good for Wall Street is obviously the same thing, transitively, what is good for the rest of the country, and it is not really true. And so, at some point, we are going to have to admit that the tail is wagging the dog. We are growing the financial system simply because that is what it wants...
