Deutsche Bank
strategists Jim Reid and Craig Nicol wrote a report this week that
echos what I and other Austrian School economists been saying for many
years: actions taken by governments and central banks to extend
business cycles and prevent recessions lead to even more severe
recessions in the end.MarketWatch reports –
ドイツ銀行のストラテジスト Jim Reid とCraig Nicolが今週報告書を書いた、その内容は私や他のオーストリア学派経済学者が長年警鐘を告げていたものと同様だ:政府や中央銀行がビジネスサイクルを引き延ばし景気後退を回避しようとするが、これが結局もっと深刻な景気後退を引き起こす。
MarketWatchの報告ーー
The 10-year old economic
expansion will set a record next month by becoming the longest ever.
Great news, right? Maybe not, say strategists at Deutsche Bank.
Prolonged
expansions have become the norm since the early 1970s, when the tight
link between the dollar and gold was broken. The last four expansions
are among the six longest in U.S. history .
Why so? Freed from the
constraints of gold-backed currency, governments and central banks have
grown far more aggressive in combating downturns. They’ve boosted
spending, slashed interest rates or taken other unorthodox steps to
stimulate the economy.
“This
policy flexibility and longer business cycle era has led to higher
structural budget deficits, higher private sector and government debt,
lower and lower interest rates, negative real yields, inflated financial
asset valuations, much lower defaults (ultra cheap funding), less
creative destruction, and a financial system that is prone to crises,’ they wrote in a lengthy report.
“In
fact we’ve created an environment where recessions are a global
systemic risk. As such, the authorities have become even more encouraged
to prevent them, which could lead to skewed preferences in
policymaking,” they said.“So we think cycles continue
to be extended at a cost of increasing debt, more money printing, and
increasing financial market instability.”
As I have explained
in the past, when central banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve cut
interest rates to low levels, they manage to create economic booms by
encouraging borrowing and higher asset prices. These economic booms are
often based on dangerous economic bubbles that burst and lead to
recessions when interest rates are normalized again. As the chart below
shows, financial crises and recessions (see the gray vertical bars)
occur after rate hike cycles, including the dot-com and U.S. housing
market crashes.
The false economic booms that occur when central banks interfere with
the business cycle trick investors and entrepreneurs into thinking that
they are organic and sustainable booms. When the booms inevitably turn
to busts, the bad investments that result are known as malinvestments – 中央銀行が景気サイクルに介入することで生み出される偽の景気ブームは投資家や起業家に誤解を引き起こす、この経済ブームは自然なもので持続的なものだと。ブームというものには必ず終焉がある、このとき、筋悪投資がはじめてmalinvestmentsとして認識されるーー
Malinvestment is a
mistaken investment in wrong lines of production, which inevitably lead
to wasted capital and economic losses, subsequently requiring the
reallocation of resources to more productive uses. “Wrong” in
this sense means incorrect or mistaken from the point of view of the
real long-term needs and demands of the economy, if those needs and
demands were expressed with the correct price signals in the free
market.
Malinvestmentとは wrong lines of production 方針を間違えた生産への誤解による投資だ、これは必ず資本の浪費となり経済的損失を伴う、その後もっと生産的な目的へと資本の再配分が必要となる。ここで言うところの「Wrong」とは長期的視点での実需を見誤ったという意味だ、自由市場ならばこのような需要には正しい(投資、債務)費用が示される。
Random, isolated entrepreneurial miscalculations and
mistaken investments occur in any market (resulting in standard
bankruptcies and business failures) but systematic, simultaneous
and widespread investment mistakes can only occur through
systematically distorted price signals, and these result in depressions
or recessions. Austrians believe systemic malinvestments occur
because of unnecessary and counterproductive intervention in the free
market, distorting price signals and misleading investors and
entrepreneurs.
For Austrians, prices are an essential information
channel through which market participants communicate their demands and
cause resources to be allocated to satisfy those demands appropriately.
If the government or banks distort, confuse or mislead
investors and market participants by not permitting the price mechanism
to work appropriately, unsustainable malinvestment will be the
inevitable result.
Because the current economic cycle has lasted for an unusually long
time due to the actions of central banks, an unprecedented amount of
malinvestment has built up globally that needs to be cleansed in the
coming recession. It’s similar to a night of drinking: the more you
drink and the later you stay out, the worse your hangover is going to
be. Globally speaking, the last decade has been the bender to
end all benders and the coming hangover is going to proportionally
severe.
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