The Reserve Bank’s war on capital

 

So the Reserve Bank just lowered interest rates to a record low – making the price of debt cheaper than ever before, opening a new front on the war on savers ( a war that all but demands those living off their income look for riskier and risker places from which to yield it) – and giving the lie to all those bullshit stories spouted about this being a “rockstar” economy.

The Reserve Bank’s move is predicated wholly and solely on the notion that if the price of debt is lowered, then more will be borrowed, more will be spent, and the economy will therefore produce stable inflationary growth.  This is the basic notion every time the Reserve Bank lowers interest rates. This is what they and all the learned commentators commenting on the rate drop hope will happen.

They ignore entirely the deflationary instability produced by the very malinvestment all that newly-created counterfeit capital creates.

They ignore in toto the asset bubbles created by this new debt at the very same time as the prices of commodities produced by all those gobs of previous debt are collapsing.

They ignore completely that over the last several years (since the central bankers last crashed the world’s economies) every 18 dollars of their newly-created debt created just one dollar of GDP. Eighteen dollars to produce just one! You wouldn’t take those odds out at the track – unless perhaps you were a central banker or one of their ‘learned’ commentators.

It is, quite frankly, a fucking stupid and flatly destructive notion – that new debt creates stable inflationary growth – but the poor lambs really do have no other. (If they did, then talk of Negative Interest Rates to “jump-start” something would not even be on the table.) But since every one of those bankers and the commentators that brown-nose them still worships at the altar of John Maynard Keynes and his cultish notion that all growth comes from new debt, that fucking stupid notion and the war on saving and destruction of real capital it engenders will continue to blow up new bubbles, consume our seed corn and just generally eat out our substance.

This war on saving and on the real capital it represents – on the pool of real savings that actually does fund all production – has an endpoint. As George Reisman explains, it is the picture of America’s decaying rust belt.

The Keynesians' preoccupation with the utterly fictitious problem of saving as a cause of poverty bears major responsibility for the very real problem of growing poverty as the result of a lack of saving. Based on their hostile economic analysis of saving, the Keynesians have brought about the enactment of correspondingly hostile government economic policies towards saving. The result has been economic stagnation and decline, whose nature and significance are captured in the words: the rust belt. Over a span of approximately two generations [now three], the intellectual rot of Keynesianism has helped to bring about the physical rot of the industrial heartland of the United States.

That intellectual rot is all pervasive.

We heard it this morning oozing out of the Reserve Bank, and from the industry flunkies who religiously follow their utterances.

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