Historically this is usually coupled with run-away inflation, however since it was isolated to the wealthy sectors of the economy (rather than the typical economy as a whole) there is only inflation among goods in that sector (housing etc). The big red flag is that stocks and VC are in that pool as well.
So while there was 20 trillion dollars of growth over the last 10 years, there was also 21 trillion dollars of debt generated.
The way I see it, QE successfully generated economic growth, however none of that economic growth was "real" growth. There were new innovations, particularly in the tech space, but a huge swath of them have no method to generate real sustainable profit.
All this means we should see a MASSIVE correction in markets. Due to financial rules, banks likely won't exit the market like 2008, but the massive number of companies that took out cheap debt will be at risk.
Basically we have a potential repeat of 2008, but swap out sub-prime homeowners with corporations.
This is actually inherently necessary and the fact that the government hasn't been doing it more has been the cause of the debt crisis.
Money is created both by the government (directly) and by banks (whenever they make loans with less than 100% reserves, i.e. whenever they make loans). As the economy expands, the money supply needs to increase with the demand for currency to use for transactions, or there would be deflation (very bad).
When that money is created by banks, it necessarily leads to an increase in outstanding debt. And paying the debt back destroys the money that was created by borrowing it, so the only way to maintain the money supply at that level without the government creating any is for the amount of outstanding debt to never go down. Which, of course, means that it only goes up.
If you print unlimited money at some point it causes inflation, especially when people use it to buy stuff. But if, instead, they use it to pay down debt -- which is what happens when people have a high debt load -- all it does is replace the bank/debt money with the government money.
Which is actually really healthy, because it it gives people the few bucks back in interest-not-paid on the debt they no longer have. That has a much smaller immediate effect on prices (interest-not-paid per year is only a fraction of the principal paid down), but a very beneficial long-term effect because it leads to more wealth in the hands of people rather than lenders.
It also has immediate positive knock-on effects because with less debt, people are more financially stable. If you're leveraged to the hilt and an emergency comes up, no one will lend you anything more. You also pay lower interest rates if you can e.g. make a bigger down payment, which reduces the lender's risk (the asset is worth the whole loan amount even if it depreciates some), enhancing the positive outcome of people paying less in interest.
It did create inflation, and basically offset the natural tendency of the market. The fact that the money was inserted directly into the capital markets, instead of the consumer market probably caused a huge loss of efficiency on the deflation containing goal, a bubble at the capital markets and the requirement of collecting the money back once it starts flowing in a non-controlled fashion into the goods. All that probably caused some instability down the line, but the US seems to be dealing with it just fine.
I don't think we have seen the full consequences as of yet.
The problem we didn't solve IMHO is the massive housing bubble. To be fair, solving the housing bubble involves lots of winners and losers, so the government would rather kick this can down the road. Obama was able to keep kicking this can for 8yrs.
While there were pops in many places, the steady state price has become whatever a two-earner household can afford with massive debt living paycheck-to-paycheck on a 4% mortgage. That isnt sustainable and causes numerous problems:
- Everyone not already in "the game" loses (youngsters)
- Moving is difficult due to transaction costs (poor job mobility)
- Selling will be impossible (underwater) once rates go up
- Disposable income for spending is reduced, causing people to borrow further.
On top of that, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continue to stay in an uncertain state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_takeover_of_Fannie_Mae...
On the other side of the fence, low rates are horrible for pension funds, pensioners relying on fixed incomes, etc. Pension funds and asset managers with return expectations struggle and reach for riskier assets yielding more. (Tech, to some extent has been a winner here as one result of this has been diversification of pension assets into VC.)
Honestly I didn't look at your numbers for a couple of years, so I don't even know if you got out of that deflation already.
Before QE, central banks mostly influenced the market via interest rate targets. If the "market" rate is higher than the "target" rate, that means printing money to buy debt in the market). (And before interest rate based policy, some central banks explicitly targeted money supply measures).
QE extended that from short rates (overnight secured) to long rates (long-dated government bonds at first, then other high quality collateral), because once short rates were near-zero all they could do was to target long rates (well, some central banks have experimented with negative rates but I think the jury's still out on whether that's really worth trying or not).
The thing is, that's not what people (at least used to) mean when they talk/talked about "printing money".
"Printing money" is normally shorthand for "printing money to give to the government to spend". This is generally viewed as "bad" because if government simply prints money to finance itself then it suffers none of the short term negative political or practical consequences of doing so via taxation. This means it also faces comparatively little pressure to spend efficiently, which results in serious misallocation of resources over time.
It is only a short step from QE to "printing money" in the "government spends it" sense though, and some central banks have gone at least some way down that path. If the central bank provides a significant bid into auctions of government bonds, either directly or because market participants know the central bank will immediately purchase bonds in the secondary market at a known, or fairly easy-to-guess price, then the government is really financing itself by selling to the central bank who is printing money.
It still has to pay interest, but it's no longer worried about being unable to raise the money, or the impact raising too much money will have on the rate of interest it pays.
But it can also absolve itself of responsibility for paying the interest bill, by giving the government a claim over the "profits" made by the central bank, including interest income on its government bond portfolio. So the government pays interest to itself on bonds it sold to the central bank. Some governments/central banks have done this.
That only leaves the government concerned about principal repayment, and the theoretical view that QE is temporary and will be wound down still constrains behaviour here.
As a separate point though, I don't think QE is the sole cause of the asset bubble we're arguably experiencing. I'd put much more blame on the ultra-low short rates of "conventional" policy personally. QE being withdrawn is much less of a problem than short rates going up for that.
If you proxy government for companies in this sentence I would argue that is what is happening now. A large number of companies borrowed as much money as they possibly could during QE because they viewed it as "free money" with the low interest rate.
The impact being "money is cheap" and a large number of ventures have been engaged in that do not have real value.
Ultimately the "price of money" is always going to have a counter-balance of inelastic goods aka raw assets. While I agree that QE is not the sole cause (low interest rates are also to blame), I do believe it has had a net negative impact, particularly by inflating the price of assets among those who had access to excess (often times QE involved) funds to acquire them.
On the other hand, Australia was also exporting coal and iron ore to insatiable (at the time) India and China. We also didn’t have the same real estate bubble (at the time).
Hard to prove either way, but Aus did move first and injected a lot of capital into the system, we didn’t enter a recession (unlike rest of OECD), and we didn’t end up having to bail out banks.
900 dollars, or even $2100 for a small family isn't the sort of cash that would inflate an auction for a home anywhere, let alone in one of the australian cities affected by the current bubble.
An analysis of the breakdown of the contributors to the Australian housing bubble in 2018 would be cool to see, though. Probably some kind of even split between significant foreign investment in property, negative tax gearing, zoning laws, transport infrastructure issues and a one-off $900 payment that went to middle and low-income earners a decade ago.
Damned trickle-up economics.
The wealthy did not sell assets at above market prices, they in fact sold them at bellow market prices. Remember when they were trying to sell assets, they were exchanging these for cash. The problem was that the cash that they were getting in exchange had above market returns.
What was happening during the financial crisis is that even the safest private assets were risky illiquid and had low expected returns.
Some estimates say that marginal "safe" private assets had a expected real returns of around -4% after adjusting for risks and liquidity.
But since central banks were not aggressive enough, not creating enough inflation and unwilling to use negative interest rates, the returns on cash was like -1.8%, way above what you could get with safe and liquid private stores of value.
Investors wanted to get their hands on this government paper having above market returns so they attempted to sell private assets and stockpile cash. This is clearly visible in the shooting up of excess reserves in banks. Investors were hoarding cash. The low inflation and relatively high 0% interest rates (compared to market rates) was a huge subsidy to those who wanted to get out of the private markets, stop investing in the real economy and hold government paper to protect their savings.
Destruction of the economy, throwing workers to the curb was basically subsidized. Investors were being shielded from the markets by the government. They kept their government paper promises to be redeemed in the future when private markets looked more favorable. Central banks allowing cash to have returns above market put the private investment markets in a gridlock and economic activity slowed down significantly.
Cash is effectively an IOU from non cash holders to cash holders. This means that the above market returns investors got by hoard cash was a implicit subsidy from poor unemployed to rich savers. The unemployed and underemployed effectively subsidized the destruction of their own jobs.
When jobs returned and workers could buy stuff again, the savers' cash, now worth above what they could have gotten in the private markets, also flowed back into the asset economy and bid assets prices up and made them more expensive to those who were just starting to have money again, at just the time when they were buying again. People who had been the poorest during the crisis were effectively paying the bill for the subsidy that destroyed their past careers.
It is crucial that central banks run a counter cyclical monetary policy and that inflation is kept higher than usual during a crisis to avoid all this from happening. It is crucial that cash doesn't become a subsidy to divestment and crowd out private investment like it did. When the private markets return -4% (risk and liquidity adjusted), government paper should return less than -4%.
Historically, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or required hard labor to get production out of.
Even in societies with financial systems, getting low risk, hassle free, liquid, positive real returns has been difficult for most of history. This just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. In general, most things require maintenance to keep their worth.
The 20th century was probably the most notable exception. Because of unprecedented demographic and technological growth, positive risk free real returns were easy to find. The recency effect probably explains some of the confusion people have about this. It is possible that under favorable conditions, wealth can have positive returns and even compound into very good long run returns but it is not a guarantee and there is nothing natural about it. It may not continue forever, particularly amidst an aging and retiring population in a world no longer as rich in easy to exploit natural resources.
While people are used to get negative returns on very short term purchases, you buy fresh vegetables at the supermarket, even if they degrade over time, many can’t seem to accept the normalcy of negative returns on longer term assets. In nature, squirrels’ nut caches have a certain percentage of losses from theft and spoilage. Real returns tending towards the negative is natural even if they can seem unusual for people just out of the 20th century.
For one thing, QE was a massive handout to debt holders (banks, asset managers, hedge funds) which took (essentially public funds c/o inflation) and indirectly gave it to the wealthy by purchasing assets at prices way higher than "market" at the time.
Perhaps it worked, but it also created a lot of resentment. In some ways, giving money directly to individuals would have been more fair, perhaps we wouldn't have the current radical shift right in the US, resulting from people fed up with the elite coastal beneficiaries of the past system.
Unfortunately, giving money directly to individuals would not have solved the past crisis because a lot was about the downward spiral of asset prices and how that forced more collateralization and reduced bank equity. However, a more balanced approach that solved the mortgage issues for the common person would have been better.
As for the country's economy being screwed. In some ways, we are now. Just that there are winners and losers. Holders of real assets won (massive home inflation continues.) And paycheck-to-paycheck individuals / renters / youngsters lost. Speak to a young person now [who doesnt work at a FAANG] and you'll find someone coming to terms they may never own a home or put down roots. Its a massive turn away from the classic American dream and social contract. Thats pretty screwed up.