by James Rickards
Daily Reckoning
A lot of the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic was based on the belief that it would be over quickly. We saw big, multi-trillion dollar spending bills from March into May. The Fed took their balance sheet from about $3.8 trillion to around $7 trillion. (By the way, I can easily envision some scenarios where it goes to $10 trillion).
But all that was done as a sort of bridge loan to get us from April to July. The expectation in April was that when we got to July, the pandemic would be under control, we could reopen the economy, it would be a V-shaped recovery, and it would all be good before the election. That hasn’t turned out to be the case.
Here we are in mid-August. The virus has surged in several states, which have increased their restrictions in many cases. But the relief packages have largely ended.