by David Stockman
David Stockman’s Contra Corner
[…] The inexorable effect of contemporary central banking is serial financial booms and busts. With that comes increasing levels of systemic financial instability and a growing dissipation of real economic resources in misallocations and malinvestment.
At length, the world becomes poorer.
Why? Because gains in real output and wealth depend upon efficient pricing of capital and savings, but the modus operandi of today’s central banking is to deliberately distort and relentlessly falsify financial prices.
As we have seen, the essence of ZIRP and NIRP is to drive interest rates below their natural market clearing levels so as to induce more borrowing and spending by business and consumers.