Het is mij echt een raadsel waardoor mensen nog steeds denken dat deflatie, wat juist een gezond fenomeen is, slecht is. Iedereen wordt immers slapen rijk. Geld onder je kussen anyone?
Je moet wel heel erg doorgeleerd hebben in Keynes om dit simpele economische feit om te draaien.
Ik kan me wel voorstellen dat banken en vooral overheden daar slechter van worden. Je kan namelijk niemand meer chanteren met geld wat er niet is.
Waarbij je je af moet vragen waar je je scholing aan te danken hebt. Inderdaad. Die zelfde overheid.
In een gezonde economie is het goed dat schulden duurder worden. Sparen is juist gezond. Met sparen creëer je kapitaal waardoor bedrijven dit kapitaal weer kunnen investeren.
Ik raad eenieder aan om, als men dit interessant vindt, de Austrian Business Cycle te bestuderen.
"In het kort"
This is the two minute, layman's breakdown (510 words):
Interest rates matter. They aren't arbitrary numbers we are free to bend to our wishes. They play a vital coordinating function in the economy. Tinker with them and you introduce discoordination.
Interest rates coordinate investment and consumption across time. When they are artificially lowered as they have been over the past 20 years, they introduce malinvestment and overconsumption.
When you look across the time horizon, investments and consumption more long term in nature are more interest rate sensitive and will demonstrate the problems of interest rate manipulation more clearly. Even small rate changes can have a dramatic effect on people's analysis of their economic viability.
Think of the three areas of an average American's life that is the most interest rate sensitive. Their home mortgage, their car loan, and their bank/credit lines.
Are we to believe the fact that all three industries collapsing at the same time is merely a coincidence? It isn't hard to see the role interest rate policy played in their problems.
When interest rates come down naturally it is because people are saving more. Banks become flush with cash which causes them to lower rates to stimulate loans.
Entrepreneurs are receiving two signals from the market when this happens: 1. That new resources are available to make new investments. 2. That demand exists that is not currently being satisfied (people are forgoing purchases for the future).
When investment is made in this environment, it has the important backing of actual saved resources to be utilized as well as the support of pent up consumer demand to make it profitable upon completion.
Compare that to what happens when interest rates are brought down artificially by the fed. Entrepreneurs still receive and act upon the same economic signals, but no new investable resources exist to complete the new projects, and no pent up demand exists to justify their undertaking.
But the situation actually becomes much worse than that. The lower rates encourage people to take out what savings they have and spend it now. As a result actual demand will be even lower when the completed projects are ready to enter the market than even accurate economic information would have originally predicted.
This is what is meant by malinvestment and overconsumption from changing interest rates. It creates an artificial boom in economic activity followed by a bust when the economic realizes the errors it made.
During the past 20 years the U.S. economy got hooked on these artificial booms. Alan Greenspan led the public to believe he could jumpstart the economy any time it needed it by simply cutting the rates and increasing the level of investment in long term projects. But there is no free lunch. All of those rate cuts have to eventually be increased, at which point all of the stimulative forces reverse and the bad investments reveal themselves. People criticize Greenspan for increasing rates too soon and ending the party, but the rate increases are inevitable unless the public is willing to endure inflation from all the cash being printed keep them forced down
[Reactie gewijzigd door jsspanjer op 23 juli 2024 04:32]