http://cn.nytimes.com/article/opinion/2013/04/04/c04stockman/
上周四，道琼斯(Dow Jones)和标准普尔500指数(Standard & Poor’s 500)都冲破纪录，股市自2007年上一次高峰以来遭受的损失被一扫而光。但我们不该为此雀跃，反而应该十分担心。
过去13年中，股市曾两次崩溃并引发衰退：美国家庭在2000年互联网泡沫破灭之时损失了5万亿美元，又在2007年房地产崩溃时损失了超过7万亿美元。我预计，近来的华尔街泡沫也会在未来几年之内破灭，这次的华尔街泡沫是靠美联储(Federal Reserve)恶意发行大量空头货币吹起来的，基础并不是真正的经济增长。
自标准普尔500指数于2000年3月首次达到目前水平以来，美联储疯狂的印钞机已将他们的资产负债表扩张了六倍（从5千亿美元增至3.2万亿美元）。然而，在此期间，经济产出年均增幅只有1.7%（这是内战以来最慢的增速）；真实商业投资的年增长率只有0.8%；正式就业岗位数量的年增长率也只有微不足道的0.1% 。家庭真实收入中位数增长下降了8%，中产阶级全职工作岗位数量下降了6%。收入“最低”的90%人口的真实净值下降了四分之一。领取食品补助券和残疾救助的人数翻了一番还多，达到5900万，约占美国人口的五分之一。
由此看来，实体经济仍在不断下滑，而华盛顿还在不断给后代堆积债务，没有能力控制战争预算或者福利支出，也没有能力提高偿付国家债务所需的税收。自然而然，美联储乞灵于未曾用过的激进措施，开始大肆印钞。然而，大量增加的流动性不但没有刺激银行贷款或者企业支出，反而一直被困在华尔街的深渊之中，正在发酵成又一轮无法持续的泡沫。
这轮泡沫一旦破裂，美国银行将不会再得到像2008年那样的新一轮救援方案。相反，美国将会堕入一个零和紧缩与恶性政治冲突交织的时代，就连目前这种经济增长的微小残痕也会消失殆尽。
这种失调前景源自政府的胡作非为。过去80年来，除了几次短暂的中断以外，美国一直在奉行越来越疯狂的财政和货币干预政策，试图以此对抗自由市场的周期性问题，及其减少工作机会和经济产出的可能趋势。这样做的代价十分惨重。
联邦政府及其央行伙伴美联储尝试了一个又一个目标——理顺商业周期、将通货膨胀率和失业率同时降到最低、铺开巨大的社会保障网、提高住房拥有率、提供医疗补贴、扶持传统产业（农业、汽车行业）并促进新行业（“清洁”能源、生物技术）的发展，最重要的是，为华尔街提供救援。如今它们已经被过重的负荷、过大的压力和强势利益团体的外围紧逼压得喘不过气来。在关于刺激“需求”的空洞仪式咒语中，奉行现代凯恩斯主义的美国已经破产、瘫痪、陷入烂泥，哪怕它孕育了一种让最有钱的1%人口定期坐享投机暴利的异型裙带资本主义。
两党都是罪魁祸首，但你永远不会从那些被大家视为当今政治议程的连篇废话中猜到这一点 。政府的胡作非为始于1933年，当时，富兰克林·D·罗斯福( Franklin D. Roosevelt)选择了不兑现货币（不以黄金储备为基础的货币）、经济民族主义和工农业领域的资本主义联合企业。
在二战（ 二战对结束大萧条的贡献远远强于新政）的紧急关头，美国政府变得极为臃肿膨胀，但很了不起的是，在德怀特·D·艾森豪威尔(Dwight D. Eisenhower)执掌白宫和小威廉·麦克切斯尼·马丁(William McChesney Martin Jr)掌管美联储的20世纪中期，美国迎来了健全货币和财政清廉的黄金时代，这样的膨胀由此得到了短暂的遏制。
接下来，林登·B·约翰逊总统(Lyndon B. Johnson)带来了“大炮加黄油”的过激政策，到了1971年，在一个背信弃义的周末，这一倾向在马里兰州戴维营得到了进一步加强。当时，理查德·M·尼克松(Richard M. Nixon)最终决定黄金和美元之间不能进行兑换，实质上等于赖掉了本国的债务 。这一举动——可以说是比水门事件更严重的罪过——意味着国家金融纪律的覆灭和长达40年的狂欢的开始。在这40年间，我们生活奢侈，将经常账目赤字累积到了8万亿美元之多。实际上，美国经历了一次内部杠杆收购，把总债务（公共和私人）和经济产出之间的比率从约为1.6的历史水平增加到了约3.6。由此而来的是30万亿美元的超额债务（超过了总债务56万亿美元的一半），至今还威胁着美国的经济。
这样的债务爆炸是流动资金把戏的产物，这种把戏是米尔顿·弗里德曼(Milton Friedman)在尼克松当政期间发明的。弗里德曼是所谓的自由市场经济英雄，实际上却为货币供应的无止境扩张播下了种子。今年庆祝百年华诞的美联储在上世纪70年代推动了货物和商品的极度通胀，全靠保罗·A·沃尔克(Paul A. Volcker)的钢铁意志，这样的局势才得到了控制。沃尔克是1979到1987年间的美联储主席。
在他的继任者、蒙羞的英雄艾伦·格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)的管理下，美联储把弗里德曼的那些孱弱的货币扩张规则抛在一边，在过长的时间里，美联储把利息率维持在过低的水平，并向华尔街注入了大量新发行货币。最终以“格林斯潘对策”(Greenspan put)命名的央行理念由于美联储1998年对对冲基金长期资本管理公司(Long-Term Capital Managemen)的援助这一不可原谅之举，而得到了强化。“格林斯潘对策”指的是美联储的不成文承诺，即如果市场资产价格下跌，它将会介入，就像他们在1987年的股灾发生后做得那样。
格林斯潘的宽松货币政策之所以没有引发通货膨胀，仅仅是因为国内的商品和劳动力价格被来自亚洲工厂的大量进口产品所压制。通过离岸外包美国的可交易货物业务，美联储遏制住了消费者价格指数(Consumer Price Index)，可是由此引发的流动性过剩也导致金融资产领域的价格飙升。格林斯潘的纵容态度催生了美国历史上最繁荣的股市，自1987年发生股灾到2000年互联网泡沫破裂，美国的股指上涨了五倍。
美国人很快停止储蓄，花掉了他们所赚到的每分钱和能借到的每笔款。受到1997年的金融危机重创的亚洲国家也非常配合。这些国家，尤其是中国和日本，积累了大量的美元储备，它们的中央银行变成了一系列的货币“捕蟑盒”，主权债务在那里只进不出。我们一直在靠借贷度日，而且是在花亚洲人借出的钱。
这种变化强化了里根派的陈腐观念，即“赤字不要紧”，它还强化了一个现实，即美国 “公开持有”的12万亿美元国债里，有近5万亿国债实际上是藏在各国中央银行的保险库里的。在罗纳德·里根(Ronald Reagan)任内实施的多个引人侧目的举措中，远离谨慎财政是后果最严重的一项，这也是身为里根政府预算主管的我在1985年辞职的一个原因。此举为共和党人彻底抛弃卡尔文·柯立芝(Calvin Coolidge)的平衡预算政策打造了一个样板，也让乔治·W·布什走上了不归路，他用两场师出无名的昂贵战争、联邦医疗保险(Medicare)的大肆扩张，以及针对富人的一系列减税措施，把美国送入了破产境地。华盛顿的说客们变成了国家税收政策的实际操控者。共和党的确奉行的是凯恩斯主义，只不过这是针对富人的凯恩斯主义。
对于房地产市场的爆炸性增长，我们有诸多翔实记录。虚假的信用评级、证劵化欺诈、以及抵押贷款放贷人、原始债权人和经纪人有意为之的不当操作都帮助引发了这种增长。更鲜为人知的是，截止到2008年的八年中，华尔街十大银行的资产负债表出现大规模扩张。尽管银行的微薄股本几乎没有增长，可是他们对不稳定的“热钱”的依赖度却在飙升，这是因为，来自大萧条(Depression)时期的优秀监管利器《格拉斯-斯蒂格尔法案》(Glass-Steagall Act)被彻底废除了。
2008年9月，雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)破产，华尔街把枪抵在华盛顿的脑袋上，后者几周之内就开始给哀鸿遍野的金融业输血，实施了一番惊慌失措的混乱救援和印钞行动。这是美国金融史上最可耻的一章。
与2006年起担任美联储主席的本·S·伯南克(Ben S. Bernanke)发出的严重警告相反，当时的威胁远不到“新版大萧条”或“金融核冬天”的地步。“大恐慌”(Great Fear)纯属华尔街一手造成的，它在众议院未能投票通过《问题资产救助计划》(TARP)之后，导致股市狂跌，众议院后来做出让步，最终通过了该救援计划。假如布什总统和他的高盛(Goldman Sachs)顾问（即财政部长）小亨利·M·保尔森(Henry M. Paulson Jr.)立场坚定，这场危机会自行平息，并让投机者承担他们罪有应得的损失。实体银行体系根本从未陷入严重危机，自动取款机不会关停，金融业也不会从内部垮掉。
然而，刚好相反，白宫、国会、美联储、布什和接下来的奥巴马总统铤而走险，采取了一系列不计后果的举措，这不仅毫无必要，还会带来恶劣后果。比方说，汽车行业的救援无非是在工作岗位上拆东墙补西墙——尤其是往人口老龄化、但有重要选举意义的“铁锈地带”补——但并没有保住岗位。奥巴马经济刺激计划的“绿色能源”部分基本是把近10亿美元拱手送给裙带资本家，比如风险投资人约翰·多尔(John Doerr)和自诩为太空梦想家的埃隆·马斯科(Elon Musk)之流，目的是给富人打造新玩具。
奥巴马8000亿美元的经济刺激计划中，仅有不到5%流向了真正需要食品券和劳动所得税抵免等形式的扶贫计划的人群。其绝大部分却成为了撒向州级和地方政府的大笔金钱、政治分赃式的基础设施项目、营业税漏洞和不分青红皂白的中产阶级税收减免。民主党凯恩斯主义者与他们的共和党同仁一样才智枯竭（尽管不及后者那么伪善），他们把借来的钱送到消费者手中，希望他们买个除草机、平板电视，或者至少去红龙虾(Red Lobster)下个馆子什么的，除此之外根本无计可施。
但即使是奥巴马无可救药的轻率政策也无法与美联储的肆无忌惮相提并论，后者把利率降为零，然后以每小时6亿美元的惊人速度印刷新币。多亏了美联储，短期投机者一直在“购买”大量国债和住房贷款抵押证券，用的几乎全是以实际为零的利率借得的短期隔夜资金。伯南克叔叔让他们收入不菲。
美联储如今誓称，只要通货膨胀率不超过2.5%，他们就能把失业率降到6.5%以下，但该机构哪怕只是暗示要缩减资产负债表，也会引起沽盘的狂潮，因为债券价格即使是微微下降也会彻底消灭套利者的利润。尽管伯南克保证最终会逐渐平稳退出，美联储已经置身自己打造的货币政策囚牢之中。
在美联储进行盲目调整之时，国会则心急如焚。自诩的财政鹰派人士、众议院预算委员会(House Budget Committee)主席保罗·D·瑞安(Paul D. Ryan)不敢透露真相：10年期赤字实际上在15万亿美元到20万亿美元之间，大大超过了国会预算办公室估计的7万亿美元。根据国会的最新预计，未来10年将会涌现1640万新工作岗位，而在过去10年只出现了250万个新岗位，这个数字只是华盛顿较为极端的妄想的一个例证。
就连所谓的“大胆”措施——把社会安全福利金的生活费调整和另一种通货膨胀指数联系在一起——也只能在10年的时间里节省2000亿美元，还不足填补赤字的1%。瑞恩的最新预算无耻地放过了社会安全福利和联邦医疗保险，虽然用于这两个社会福利项目的将近19万亿美元的费用中有相当一部分被富有的年老阶层享用。同时，他提议在未来10年对价值7万亿美元的安全网——联邦医疗补助(Medicaid)、食品券和劳动所得税抵免——进行30%的苛刻削减，这是共和党针对美国99%人口的又一个战场。
在没有任何变动的情况下，在接下来大约10年里，目前接近17万亿美元的联邦债务总额，将冲高至30万亿美元，并从今天的国内生产总值的105%，飙升到150%。因为美国的政治系统的僵局排除了任何“大妥协”的可能性，这个国家的财政崩溃将逐步发生，就像希腊/塞浦路斯的悲剧一样，其表现形式就是一系列可以预见到的关于举债上限的危机、后续解决方案和临时的预算补救措施。
美国的前景相当黯淡。中国曾在过去15年里大举投资基础设施建设，但由此造就的有史以来最大的建筑热潮正在放缓。巴西、印度、俄罗斯、土耳其、南非和所有其他增长中的中等收入国家都无法弥补这个需求上的缺口。美国的货币和财政刺激机制已经到达了极限。日本正在陷入老年破产期，欧洲也在沉入福利国家的衰老期。在北京，去年上台的新掌权者们明白，在经历了20年的疯狂放贷、投机和建设之后，即便是他们也终将面对好日子终结的那一天。
未来的国家凋敝惨景与伯南克在2004年宣布的“大缓和”(Great Moderation)可谓有天壤之别，当时他预测经济繁荣将会永远持续下去，因为美联储已经掌控了商业周期；直到2007年3月，他还在证言中说次贷危机的影响“看上去可以得到控制”。可现在的经济并非是“缓和”而是“大畸形”，其制造者正是一个怂恿华尔街大肆赌博的央行，它走入了邪路，把储户钉死在“零利率”的十字架上，并引发了全球大宗商品泡沫。这个泡沫通过提高食品和能源价格来侵蚀民众的生活标准，而对于这种形式的通货膨胀，美联储在计算通货膨胀率时不负责任地将之摒弃一边。
这些政策已经使得美国病入膏肓。而解决的方案太过激进以至于不可能发生。我们必须让国家和市场经济彻底脱钩，还将需要放弃裙带资本主义及其近亲——所有形式的凯恩斯主义经济学。这个国家必须摒弃其极端自满的心态、经济刺激及社会保险，并将其关注点转移到对一个高效、廉价、审查资格的安全网进行管理和融资。
所有这一切都需要政治系统大幅缩减其覆盖范围，并要废除总统连任制，因为政府机构和竞选连任者的团队已经变得密不可分。分离这两者将需要对宪法做出大幅修改：添加修正案，赋予总统和国会议员单一的六年任期，不能连任；为候选人提供100%的公共资金支持；严格限制竞选活动持续的时间（比如，最多八周）；并且终生禁止任何曾效力立法和行政部门的人士从事游说活动。此外，还需要完全推翻对“联合公民案”的判决，并要求国会通过平衡的预算方案，否则就面对自动开支削减。
我们还需要清除掉具有腐蚀性影响的金融化机制， 从20世纪70年代以来，这种金融化已将美国经济变成了一个巨型赌场。这也就意味着，要让华尔街的大型银行为自己的行为负责，让他们像自由企业一样去竞争，并承担风险，而不再为它们提供廉价的美联储贷款或存款保险。银行可以接受存款，并发放商业贷款，但应该被禁止进行交易、担保及各种形式的理财业务。
最后，我们还需要让美联储的核心决策者走下赛场，恢复这个央行原本的职责：在危机期间提供流动性，但绝不能购买政府债务，或试图对经济进行微观管理。将美联储从金融市场上剔除出去的唯一方法就是，让资本主义制度重新转向自由市场和真正的财富创造 。
当然，这些将永远不会发生，因为美联储压低利率的做法已经人为地撑起了数万亿美元的资产，从上海的摩天大楼到《财富》(Fortune)1000强的股票，再到最近的楼市“复苏”。在财政、道德，及学术理论层面，美国都已破产。美联储已经点燃了一场将颠覆自身的全球货币战争。日本已经报名参加，巴西和中国都十分愤怒，而以德国为主导的欧元区正摇摇欲坠。一旦最近这次泡沫破灭，将没有任何力量能阻止这场崩溃。如果这听起来像是个逃离市场并储备现金的建议，它的确如此。
戴维·A·斯托克曼(David A. Stockman)是密歇根州前共和党国会议员，曾在1981年至1985年期间担任罗纳德·里根(Ronald Reagan)总统的预算办公室主任，最近著有新书《大变形：美国资本主义的腐败》(The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America)。
State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America
By DAVID A. STOCKMAN April 04, 2013
The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.
Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.
Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.
So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.
When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.
THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.
As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.
The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. The state-wreck originated in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry.
Under the exigencies of World War II (which did far more to end the Depression than the New Deal did), the state got hugely bloated, but remarkably, the bloat was put into brief remission during a midcentury golden era of sound money and fiscal rectitude with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House and William McChesney Martin Jr. at the Fed.
Then came Lyndon B. Johnson’s “guns and butter” excesses, which were intensified over one perfidious weekend at Camp David, Md., in 1971, when Richard M. Nixon essentially defaulted on the nation’s debt obligations by finally ending the convertibility of gold to the dollar. That one act — arguably a sin graver than Watergate — meant the end of national financial discipline and the start of a four-decade spree during which we have lived high on the hog, running a cumulative $8 trillion current-account deficit. In effect, America underwent an internal leveraged buyout, raising our ratio of total debt (public and private) to economic output to about 3.6 from its historic level of about 1.6. Hence the $30 trillion in excess debt (more than half the total debt, $56 trillion) that hangs over the American economy today.
This explosion of borrowing was the stepchild of the floating-money contraption deposited in the Nixon White House by Milton Friedman, the supposed hero of free-market economics who in fact sowed the seed for a never-ending expansion of the money supply. The Fed, which celebrates its centenary this year, fueled a roaring inflation in goods and commodities during the 1970s that was brought under control only by the iron resolve of Paul A. Volcker, its chairman from 1979 to 1987.
Under his successor, the lapsed hero Alan Greenspan, the Fed dropped Friedman’s penurious rules for monetary expansion, keeping interest rates too low for too long and flooding Wall Street with freshly minted cash. What became known as the “Greenspan put” — the implicit assumption that the Fed would step in if asset prices dropped, as they did after the 1987 stock-market crash — was reinforced by the Fed’s unforgivable 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.
That Mr. Greenspan’s loose monetary policies didn’t set off inflation was only because domestic prices for goods and labor were crushed by the huge flow of imports from the factories of Asia. By offshoring America’s tradable-goods sector, the Fed kept the Consumer Price Index contained, but also permitted the excess liquidity to foster a roaring inflation in financial assets. Mr. Greenspan’s pandering incited the greatest equity boom in history, with the stock market rising fivefold between the 1987 crash and the 2000 dot-com bust.
Soon Americans stopped saving and consumed everything they earned and all they could borrow. The Asians, burned by their own 1997 financial crisis, were happy to oblige us. They — China and Japan above all — accumulated huge dollar reserves, transforming their central banks into a string of monetary roach motels where sovereign debt goes in but never comes out. We’ve been living on borrowed time — and spending Asians’ borrowed dimes.
This dynamic reinforced the Reaganite shibboleth that “deficits don’t matter” and the fact that nearly $5 trillion of the nation’s $12 trillion in “publicly held” debt is actually sequestered in the vaults of central banks. The destruction of fiscal rectitude under Ronald Reagan — one reason I resigned as his budget chief in 1985 — was the greatest of his many dramatic acts. It created a template for the Republicans’ utter abandonment of the balanced-budget policies of Calvin Coolidge and allowed George W. Bush to dive into the deep end, bankrupting the nation through two misbegotten and unfinanced wars, a giant expansion of Medicare and a tax-cutting spree for the wealthy that turned K Street lobbyists into the de facto office of national tax policy. In effect, the G.O.P. embraced Keynesianism — for the wealthy.
The explosion of the housing market, abetted by phony credit ratings, securitization shenanigans and willful malpractice by mortgage lenders, originators and brokers, has been well documented. Less known is the balance-sheet explosion among the top 10 Wall Street banks during the eight years ending in 2008. Though their tiny sliver of equity capital hardly grew, their dependence on unstable “hot money” soared as the regulatory harness the Glass-Steagall Act had wisely imposed during the Depression was totally dismantled.
Within weeks of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, Washington, with Wall Street’s gun to its head, propped up the remnants of this financial mess in a panic-stricken melee of bailouts and money-printing that is the single most shameful chapter in American financial history.
There was never a remote threat of a Great Depression 2.0 or of a financial nuclear winter, contrary to the dire warnings of Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman since 2006. The Great Fear — manifested by the stock market plunge when the House voted down the TARP bailout before caving and passing it — was purely another Wall Street concoction. Had President Bush and his Goldman Sachs adviser (a k a Treasury Secretary) Henry M. Paulson Jr. stood firm, the crisis would have burned out on its own and meted out to speculators the losses they so richly deserved. The Main Street banking system was never in serious jeopardy, ATMs were not going dark and the money market industry was not imploding.
Instead, the White House, Congress and the Fed, under Mr. Bush and then President Obama, made a series of desperate, reckless maneuvers that were not only unnecessary but ruinous. The auto bailouts, for example, simply shifted jobs around — particularly to the aging, electorally vital Rust Belt — rather than saving them. The “green energy” component of Mr. Obama’s stimulus was mainly a nearly $1 billion giveaway to crony capitalists, like the venture capitalist John Doerr and the self-proclaimed outer-space visionary Elon Musk, to make new toys for the affluent.
Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts. The Democratic Keynesians, as intellectually bankrupt as their Republican counterparts (though less hypocritical), had no solution beyond handing out borrowed money to consumers, hoping they would buy a lawn mower, a flat-screen TV or, at least, dinner at Red Lobster.
But even Mr. Obama’s hopelessly glib policies could not match the audacity of the Fed, which dropped interest rates to zero and then digitally printed new money at the astounding rate of $600 million per hour. Fast-money speculators have been “purchasing” giant piles of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities, almost entirely by using short-term overnight money borrowed at essentially zero cost, thanks to the Fed. Uncle Ben has lined their pockets.
If and when the Fed — which now promises to get unemployment below 6.5 percent as long as inflation doesn’t exceed 2.5 percent — even hints at shrinking its balance sheet, it will elicit a tidal wave of sell orders, because even a modest drop in bond prices would destroy the arbitrageurs’ profits. Notwithstanding Mr. Bernanke’s assurances about eventually, gradually making a smooth exit, the Fed is domiciled in a monetary prison of its own making.
While the Fed fiddles, Congress burns. Self-titled fiscal hawks like Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, are terrified of telling the truth: that the 10-year deficit is actually $15 trillion to $20 trillion, far larger than the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of $7 trillion. Its latest forecast, which imagines 16.4 million new jobs in the next decade, compared with only 2.5 million in the last 10 years, is only one of the more extreme examples of Washington’s delusions.
Even a supposedly “bold” measure — linking the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security payments to a different kind of inflation index — would save just $200 billion over a decade, amounting to hardly 1 percent of the problem. Mr. Ryan’s latest budget shamelessly gives Social Security and Medicare a 10-year pass, notwithstanding that a fair portion of their nearly $19 trillion cost over that decade would go to the affluent elderly. At the same time, his proposal for draconian 30 percent cuts over a decade on the $7 trillion safety net — Medicaid, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit — is another front in the G.O.P.’s war against the 99 percent.
Without any changes, over the next decade or so, the gross federal debt, now nearly $17 trillion, will hurtle toward $30 trillion and soar to 150 percent of gross domestic product from around 105 percent today. Since our constitutional stasis rules out any prospect of a “grand bargain,” the nation’s fiscal collapse will play out incrementally, like a Greek/Cypriot tragedy, in carefully choreographed crises over debt ceilings, continuing resolutions and temporary budgetary patches.
The future is bleak. The greatest construction boom in recorded history — China’s money dump on infrastructure over the last 15 years — is slowing. Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and all the other growing middle-income nations cannot make up for the shortfall in demand. The American machinery of monetary and fiscal stimulus has reached its limits. Japan is sinking into old-age bankruptcy and Europe into welfare-state senescence. The new rulers enthroned in Beijing last year know that after two decades of wild lending, speculation and building, even they will face a day of reckoning, too.
THE state-wreck ahead is a far cry from the “Great Moderation” proclaimed in 2004 by Mr. Bernanke, who predicted that prosperity would be everlasting because the Fed had tamed the business cycle and, as late as March 2007, testified that the impact of the subprime meltdown “seems likely to be contained.” Instead of moderation, what’s at hand is a Great Deformation, arising from a rogue central bank that has abetted the Wall Street casino, crucified savers on a cross of zero interest rates and fueled a global commodity bubble that erodes Main Street living standards through rising food and energy prices — a form of inflation that the Fed fecklessly disregards in calculating inflation.
These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.
All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.
It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.
It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.
That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.
David A. Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan, President Ronald Reagan’s budget director from 1981 to 1985 and the author, most recently, of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.”
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