John Mauldin’s latest weekend missive, “Where’s the Growth?” is an important read this week.
Just as the Catholic Church convicted Galileo as a heretic for pointing out that the earth rotates the sun and not the other way round as the church insisted, the economics and finance status quo directing global policy today is similarly wrong, entrenched and intolerant in its insistence that more and more monetary ‘stimulus’ is the solution to an already toxically-indebted global economy.
In the same way that unlimited steroid-use eventually degrades the health and viability of athletes, so relentless and wrongheaded monetary stimulants are degrading our economy. After 24 years of ‘stimulus’ experiments in Japan, followed by now 15 years of reckless easing and debt-schemes in the rest of the world, the results are quantifiable and undeniably devastating for real households.
And yet, those who dare to say so are systemically excommunicated from policy directing institutions and mainstream media all around the world. It is long past time for fresh thinking that works with the facts rather than tortured academic theories that have long been proven wrong and incredibly damaging. Getting new decision makers into the self-deluding monetary circles now running global policy is a critical next step in the recovery back from financial disaster. The critical steps are as always: admit, repent, reform, recover. So long as those who led into the crisis remain at the helm, there will be no admit and no repent, and thus no meaningful reform and recovery.