by James A. Bacon
I’m sure many readers are tired of hearing my jeremiads about excess debt, fiscal unsustainability, and the necessity of re-engineering Virginia institutions to survive the inevitable reckoning. Well, too bad. The global economy is severely out of balance, Virginia is part of that economy, and we will suffer the consequences when the world’s 21st century experiment with fiscal and monetary perpetual motion machines collapses. State and local polities that prepare for the inevitable storm will be in a better position to ride it out.
Bacon’s Rebellion has explored the unintended consequences of the Federal Reserve Bank’s policy of monetary easing, which has been magnified by comparable policies of monetary easing and reckless credit creation in the European Union, China and Japan. While near-zero interest rates benefit the world’s largest debtor, the United States federal government, it punishes savers and the institutions that serve them. Thus, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are generating lower income from their surpluses, leading to premature depletion. Insurance companies are earning less on their capital, causing them to increase premiums. The rate of return for pension funds are earning less money, compelling corporations and governments to bolster their contributions.
Even money market fund are affected. A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Unintended Consequences of the Zero Lower Bound Policy,” has found that zero-interest rate policies create problems for savers who park their cash in seemingly safe money market funds. In an effort to deliver non-negative net returns to their investors, portfolio managers have not only reduced expenses charged to investors but chased higher yields by taking bigger risks.
That money market fund you think is a safe and stable repository for your cash? It may not be as safe and stable as you think. Not only is the yield approaching zero, but you may be shouldering risks you didn’t know existed. What’s worse:
Although our empirical results speak mostly to one part of financial markets, we want to emphasize that the effects we document are not necessarily limited to [the] money fund industry only. The reaching-for-yield phenomenon has been observed in other markets: for example, an average insurance company has shifted its assets toward riskier equity holdings, reaching the level of equity exposure of almost 20% in 2014. Similarly, pension funds expanded their holdings into more than 60% equity, away from typically held bonds. More work is needed to better understand the transmission mechanisms underlying the effects of the zero lower bound monetary policy on the stability of financial markets.
Just as generals are said to fight the last war, economic policy makers fight the last recession. Just as the masters of the universe in Washington, D.C. pursue policies to prevent a repeat of what they failed to foresee in 2007, they are blind to the extraordinary leverage built into the global economy, the linkages between sectors, and the mechanisms by which defaults in one corner of the globe will spread panic and chaos to other parts of the globe.
The best way for state and local lawmakers to insulate Virginia and its communities is (a) to curtail borrowing and (b) stop creating new long-term obligations that cannot be readily pared back. That’s not to say that we should cease borrowing altogether or refuse to launch any new programs, but it is to say that we live in times of great volatility and unpredictability and we should set higher standards for incurring any new liability.
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