The Age Of “Whatever It Takes” Economic Policies

And what it means for all of us

Central banks are in deep — like “$250 trillion dollars and 50x leveraged” deep. What do central banks do when basically the LAST THING ANYONE EVER EXPECTS happens? What do central banks do when a global pandemic threatens to disrupt the house of cards they’ve spent 20 years so carefully constructing?

They do whatever it takes, that’s what.

What does that mean? It means unprecedented money printing. It means stimulus measures. It means that central banks are adopting “Whatever It Takes” economic policies

What does that mean for us all? Read on.

A Perfect Storm

It’s pretty wild to imagine that in between the first two parts of my economic series and this article, a global pandemic hit (Part 1: Our Financial System 101 & Part 2: Understanding Modern Monetary Theory). OK, I might have taken my sweet time writing these, but still….

It’s fascinating looking back at the earlier pieces, because, in many ways, I was speculating on how unprepared our financial and economic system was for a disaster. What that disaster might be was impossible to predict. Then it struck. That’s the thing about disasters. They’re by definition unexpected.

This unexpected disaster seemed to hit us at the most inopportune moment. It was a perfect storm you might say.

This storm hit as global central banks poured obscene amounts of money into perpetuating a 10-year bull run. On February 6th, 2010, the S&P 500 was $886 per share. 10 years later it was $3345 with barely a blip in between.

This storm hit as global debt hit record levels — $250 trillion — which represents approximately 50x the $5 trillion of circulating global money. On a side, even if we accept the far more lenient definition of “broad money” which includes money held in checking accounts, savings accounts, and money-market accounts (basically all the places people just “hold” their cash), the total amount of global money is $80 trillion and our system…