{"id":148077,"date":"2019-05-20T11:58:41","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T15:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.countingpips.com\/?p=148077"},"modified":"2019-05-20T11:58:41","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T15:58:41","slug":"fed-encourages-runaway-debt-as-minsky-moment-approaches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2019\/05\/fed-encourages-runaway-debt-as-minsky-moment-approaches\/","title":{"rendered":"Fed Encourages Runaway Debt as \u201cMinsky Moment\u201d Approaches"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"inves-2851652184\" class=\"inves-below-title-posts inves-entity-placement\"><div id =\"posts_date_custom\"><div align=\"left\">May 20, 2019<\/div><hr style=\"border: none; border-bottom: 3px solid black;\">\r\n<\/div><\/div><p><b>By Money Metals News Service<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Federal Reserve officials like to pretend they can use interest rates like a motorcycle throttle on the U.S. economy. They can either rev things up by dropping interest rates or slow things down by moving rates higher.<\/p>\n<p>The public has been led to believe the central planners can do whatever is needed with rates to keep things purring along.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-reponsive content-img-right\" src=\"https:\/\/www.moneymetals.com\/uploads\/content\/national-debt-growth-sm.jpg\" alt=\"National Debt Growth\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The truth is the central planners at the Fed are meddling with forces beyond their control. They are encouraging consumers, companies, and government to take on debt. Soon, the nation will choke on it.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S. government is once again running trillion-dollar annual deficits. That\u2019s enough to terrify anyone who believes in balanced budgets and limited government.<\/p>\n<p>However, in just a few years, virtually all of what the federal government borrows will be needed just to make interest payments on existing debt. Zerohedge refers to this as the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/news\/2019-05-01\/minsky-moment-starting-2024-all-us-debt-issuance-will-be-used-pay-interest-debt\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u201cMinsky moment.\u201d<\/a><\/p><div id=\"inves-2755030711\" class=\"inves-in-content inves-entity-placement\"><hr style=\"border: 1px solid #ddd;\">\r\n<div id=\"inpost_ads_header\">\r\n<p style=\"font-size:10px; float:left; color:#666;\">Free Reports:<\/p><\/div>\r\n<div id=\"inpost_ads\"> \r\n<p style=\"font-size:15px; float:left;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/goo.gl\/1ApBOV\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/investmacro.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/graph_techs_PD.png\" align=\"left\" width=\"80\"  height=\"55\"\/><\/a>\r\n\t     <a href=\"https:\/\/goo.gl\/1ApBOV\"><b><u>Get Our Free Metatrader 4 Indicators<\/u><\/b><\/a> - Put Our Free MetaTrader 4 Custom Indicators on your charts when you join our Weekly Newsletter<\/p><br><br>\r\n<br>\r\n<br>\r\n<p style=\"font-size:15px; float:left;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/goo.gl\/f3RrHX\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/investmacro.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/cot_pie_80.png\" align=\"left\" width=\"80\"  height=\"55\"\/><\/a>\r\n\t    <a href=\"https:\/\/goo.gl\/f3RrHX\"><b><u>Get our Weekly Commitment of Traders Reports<\/u><\/b><\/a> - See where the biggest traders (Hedge Funds and Commercial Hedgers) are positioned in the futures markets on a weekly basis.<\/p><br><br>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<hr style=\"border: 1px solid #ddd;\">\r\n<br><\/div>\n<p>If politicians want to continue spending money they don\u2019t have on other programs (and you can bet they will), a lot more will need to be borrowed on top of what is needed to pay interest on the debt.<\/p>\n<p>Fed officials will utterly fail at stopping the expansion of the debt bubble by moving interest rates higher. Their feeble attempt at hiking rates ended rather quickly when the equity markets began tanking late last year, and political pressure from President Donald Trump mounted.<\/p>\n<p>The central bank\u2019s control over the economy is an illusion. Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the other wizards there won\u2019t be fine tuning economic growth by adjusting the cost of money up and down.<\/p>\n<p>They can push short-term rates around directly and try to indirectly control long-term rates through bond purchases. Even that amount of control could be stripped from them when the market asserts itself.<\/p>\n<p>The truth is that risk associated with lending money to the insolvent U.S. government has been way underpriced for years. This will eventually dawn on Treasury buyers.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-reponsive content-img-right\" src=\"https:\/\/www.moneymetals.com\/uploads\/content\/debt.jpg\" alt=\"Debt\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Giving a long-term loan at 2-3% interest to such an organization as insolvent as the federal government is a risky bet.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the realization will strike when deficits double or triple again in the not-too-distant future. Maybe it will be when foreign buyers, such as the Chinese, decide they have had enough.<\/p>\n<p>The latter could happen a lot sooner than the market expects.<\/p>\n<p>The Chinese have pointedly said they may dump Treasuries in retaliation for increased tariffs.<\/p>\n<p>When legitimate buyers of U.S. debt at artificially low rates vanish, the Fed is likely to step back in as the buyer of last resort. The central bank got away with that once before. The debt monetization program was called Quantitative Easing.<\/p>\n<p>Will officials be able to pull it off again \u2013 on an even larger scale?<\/p>\n<p>The Fed needs confidence at very high levels to support interest rates at these historically low levels. It will be difficult to maintain confidence as the debt levels continue accelerating up the exponential curve.<\/p>\n<p>The day is coming when those with capital to lend will demand a much higher interest rate than Jerome Powell wants them to get. That is when interest rates will rise, and it won\u2019t matter too much what the central planners at the Fed think about it.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/articles-analysis\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/money-metals.png\" width=\"80\" height=\"79\" align=\"left\" \/> The Money Metals News Service provides market news and crisp commentary for investors following the precious metals markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Money Metals News Service Federal Reserve officials like to pretend they can use interest rates like a motorcycle throttle on the U.S. economy. They can either rev things up by dropping interest rates or slow things down by moving rates higher. The public has been led to believe the central planners can do whatever [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148077"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148080,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148077\/revisions\/148080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}