Are you ready for some surprising news? You may want to sit down for this. As it turns out, the central banks haven’t a clue as to what they’re doing:
Growing concern at the International Monetary Fund over the long-term side-effects of interest rates close to zero came as some of the leading figures in central banking conceded they were flying blind when steering their economies.
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, the former member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, captured the mood at the IMF’s spring meeting, saying: “We don’t fully understand what is happening in advanced economies.”
But the best part of the article the following paragraph:
It is troubling for monetary policy experts that their crisis-fighting tools – rates stuck at zero, money printing operations to bring down longer-term interest rates and encourage private sector spending, and efforts to calm financial market fears – might have nasty side-effects.
Who would have thought that artificially lowering interest rates to nothing, printing billions upon billions of dollars, and sucking people into malinvestment would have any harmful side-effects? Just everybody with an elementary school understanding of basic economics. Unfortunately the politicians decided that Keynes’s mysticism sounded much better than Mises’s deductive logic, which isn’t surprising since Keynes’s mysticism basically said anything the state does to bolster the economy is good whereas Mises said the state should take an entirely hands off approach. Needless to say the state liked the idea of monopolizing the monetary system and it has been downhill ever since.