From Jesse:
There is little doubt in my mind that the Fed has been leading a coordinated effort, along with Treasury, to play the long end of the yield curve through coordinated buying of bonds and notes at artificial prices. My study of the custodial accounts and securities lending, the Treasury TIIP program and the TIC reports brought me there beyond all doubt. But why even doubt it when Bernanke laid it right out in its playbook? They believe they have a right, and perhaps even an obligation, to rig the markets 'for the greater good.'
One can question whether they are also capping the price of gold. To that I would say first that GATA has provided sufficient evidence of this, but second, what good would it be to play the yield curve game to cap interest rates and let gold trade freely? It would be like telling only a partial story, and leaving a great gaping marker in gold that shows the falsity of one's actions.
My concern now is to see if this is going to spread to corporate debt markets more directly, and even to the equity markets. Bernanke has implied that this is possible if we reach a certain point. I want to know if we have reached that point. I can dismiss the recent ramp in equities to a 'policy error' as I have shown in some detail in past notes. But the question for me is if we had reached the point where the Fed and Treasury would look at what had happened, and decide to carry on as a policy of more aggressive intervention, and fixing of the problem, by short circuiting even more of our capital allocation and pricing mechanisms?
The jury is still out on that. But each step we take down this path takes us further from free markets, and closer to a centrally planned economy such as that which we spent decades fighting against as an enemy of freedom, and into the malinvestment and unintended consequences that are always attendant on the abuse of power by a few arrogant men who abandon their principles.
So do I prefer that we have a market crash and a depression? Well, have we reached that point where the economy is not longer viable if it is real? Or do we merely keep putting off the inconvenient choices, keep shoving the discomfort into the future, which is perhaps a viable alternative to an elderly man with no children, who has his reputation to consider, but not to the bulk of the people, who realize that we have inherited a country and that it is only ours in stewardship, and we will leave nothing but a legacy for our children by which we will be judged.
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