Money Is Still Free

Real interest rates are still negative, they are way below the rate of inflation.  The last Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation reading in August was about 8.3%. The current Fed funds rate is about 2.5%.  The current two- year Treasury bond rate is about 4.1%.  The ten-year rate is about 3.75%.  None of the interest rates is nearly as high as the inflation rate.  Many people think the inflation rate is dropping, but even if it has dropped to around 6%, it is still about 2% higher than interest rates.  So, money is still on sale.    

Interest rates have been about zero, and mortgages have been about 3%, but house prices were not going up fast until the pandemic, when they skyrocketed.  If house prices, or other asset prices, increased at a normal rate, the asset price would only go up by about the same amount as the interest rate, about 3%. Of course, the stock market was booming through much of this time, except for the beginning of the Covid pandemic.  In any case, the interest rate, almost zero for big borrowers or a few percent for normal people, was well below the rate of asset appreciation.  That continues today, despite the Fed’s rate increases. 

Now, instead of zero interest, we have 3% or 4% interest, but asset appreciation at 8% or 9% is well above that rate.  Real interest rates are still below zero, although nominal interest rates have gone up.  The economy is out of whack.  Real interest rates should be above zero. 

The Fed should keep increasing interest rates until they are higher than the rate of inflation.  They say they intend to, but Wall Street now thinks the Fed should stop periodically to check the inflation rate, so that interest rates do not get ahead of inflation.  If inflation rates do not slow down, this means that the Fed will continue to maintain a negative real interest rate, which is an enormous gift to investors. 

After the “great recession” of 2008, the Fed embarked on a plan of keeping rates low by buying up trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds, thus keeping interest rates low.  In essence it destroyed the bond market, because the Fed was always buying bonds.  In a normal economy, if there are not customers buying bonds, the interest rate goes up to encourage people to buy bonds.  If a company needs to raise money, they have to offer bonds with a rate that will make people buy them.  But if the Fed will buy anything and everything, there is no reason to offer higher interest.  This has been called quantitative easing, or QE. 

As part of the Fed’s new fight against inflation, it has introduced quantitative tightening, in which it will wind down or sell off its enormous bond holdings.  This will operate in tandem with its raising interest rates the old-fashioned way.  Since QE is relatively new, being used in earnest only after the 2008 recession, QT if even newer.  Janet Yellen tried it in 2017, when it appeared to contribute to a significant stock market fall and was discontinued.  So, we do not have a lot of data on what it likely to happen when the Fed tries it this year. 

The Fed held about $9 trillion of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities on June 1.  It planned to reduce its holdings by $47.5 billion per month for three months, and then to increase reductions to $95 billion per month.  It remains to be seen how interest rate increases and QT work together. 

The one recent example we have was in the UK, where the new government’s economic plan of reducing some taxes led to a run on bonds (“gilts” in Britain), which forced the Bank of England (the British Fed) to step in and buy bonds as it and the Fed had done under QE, in essence a reversal of QT.  QE has been used to increase liquidity, to grease the bond market, in times of economic difficulty.  Could QT create the reverse condition and create market difficulties by removing liquidity?  We may find out by trial and error.  QT might end up being a greater threat to market stability than interest rate increases. 

 

Big National Debt

 

America’s gross national debt exceeded $31 trillion for the first time on October 4.  This happened as interest rates on the debt will be going up and as the US may be sliding into recession.  The debt has grown due to huge government spending during the Covid pandemic and to Trump tax cuts.  Until recently the Administration and Congress were spending like there was no tomorrow, and the Fed was cooperating with them by keeping interest rates historically low.  Low interest rates led to assertions that deficits and debts did not matter.  At higher interest rates, they may matter. 

If the Fed gets interest rates back down to 2%, paying interest on the debt may not be too bac, but if inflation remains at 4% or higher, debt payments will be an increasing burden on paying for other government programs, such as defense or Social Security.  Some programs will have to be cut in order to pay additional interest on the debt.  Otherwise the debt grows bigger. 

An article in the Economist said that unless Congress and the Administration work with the Fed by limiting spending, monetary policy (the Fed) eventually loses traction.  Higher interest rates become inflationary, not disinflationary, because they simply lead governments to borrow more to pay rising debt-service costs, i.e., the Fed has  no way to fight inflation alone. 

In the last few years the US has gone on a massive spending spree.  We may now have to pay for it.  We can pay by instituting some sort of austerity, or we can just get on the inflation bandwagon and ride it into the future. 

 

Polls Are Pretty Useless

 

TV news lives on polls, but I don’t think they are accurate.  They show to some extent what some people are thinking, but they don’t necessarily predict the outcome of elections unless there is a substantial spread between the responses.  I would not even trust a 10% differential. 

I think there are many people, like myself, who do not reaspond to poll questions, so the people polled are not representative, and many do not respond honestly.  Those who do respond may strongly favor a candidte and thus tend to respond in wsys they think will help their candidate, e.g. by saying what issues they think are important. 

One big problem is that most pollsters are elite Democrats from left-leaning media or academia.  Conservatives sense this and when these leftist pollsters call, Republicans are not going to cooperate with them, because they see them as the enemy. The pollsters have contempt for the conservatives they interview and the interviewees know that.   Thus, polls tend to confirm whatever the political elite thinks is a likely result.  Pollsters are unable to talk to those who don’t share their opinions. 

Politico has an article by Steven Shepard about the difficulties with polls.  It says:

Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren’t sure they’ve fixed it in time for the November election.

Since Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.

Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races. It’s left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress— and vindicates the GOP’s assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.

“There’s no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling profession, worry me as a pollster,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the battleground state of Wisconsin. “The troubling part is how much of that is unique to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the ballot.”

After 2016, pollsters said the problem was their samples included too few voters without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though they were still too Democratic on balance.

Then came 2020 — which was worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on a definitive explanation of what precisely went wrong. As a result, an easy fix has proven elusive. But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020, the surveys missed a chunk of Trump’s voters who refused to participate in polls.

And the New York Times noted that some of Democrats’ strongest numbers are coming in the states that have seen the greatest polling misses over the past few elections.

Partisan campaign pollsters in both parties suggested Trump voters are again difficult to capture in the run-up to this election.

“There is a good chance that a lot of the publicly released surveys are overstating Democratic strength,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster at the firm Public Opinion Strategies.

But some Democrats are daring not just to believe in the polls — but hoping that the party may actually overperform in November, pointing to two special congressional election wins last month in Alaska and New York, where polls showed Republicans ahead going into Election Day.

“You just saw the polls underestimate the victories in both Alaska and in Upstate New York,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview at a POLITICO Pro Premium Roundtable event earlier this month. “So, if anything, the polls may be showing a conservative bias right now.”

 

Founding Fathers Feared Pure Democracy

 

The Founding Fathers were not enthusiastic about pure democracy.  In his excellent book, The Quartet, historian Joseph Ellis describes James Madison’s views on a democracy that represented the direct choices of “the people.” 

 

“Madison’s experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that “the people” was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of factions or interest groups committed to provincial perspectives and vulnerable to demagogues with partisan agendas. The question, then, was how to reconcile the creedal conviction about popular sovereignty with the highly combustible, inherently swoonish character of democracy. Perhaps the most succinct way to put the question was this: How could a republic bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty be structured in such a way to manage the inevitable excesses of democracy and best serve the long-term public interest?  

 

“Madison’s one-word answer was “filtration.” He probably got the idea from David Hume’s Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth (1754), an uncharacteristically utopian essay in which Hume imagined how to construct the ideal republican government from scratch. Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who would elect the next tier of representatives, and so on up the political ladder in a process of refinement that left the leaders at the top connected only distantly with the original electorate and therefore free to make decisions that might be unpopular. A republic under this filtration scheme was a political framework with a democratic base and a hierarchical superstructure that allowed what Madison described as “the purest and noblest characters” to function as public servants rather than popular politicians.”

 

 

Originally there was no direct election of Senators, and Presidents were (and are) elected by the electoral college.  In 1913 the 17^th Amendment changed the process to allow for direct election of Senators.  Prior to the 17^th Amendment, Senators were elected by state legislatures.  Madison’s idea was that there would be different levels of voting.  “The people” would vote for the lowest level of legislators, hopefully electing the highest quality men (no women) that they knew.  That level would elect the next level, again hopefully electing the best people they knew, and so on.  Political parties and the primary system have perverted the system the founders envisaged.  The electoral college still exists, but in today’s world, few people know the candidates running to be members of the electoral college.  In general, they are party hacks, not outstanding members of the community as the founders intended. 

The Constitution gave to the states the right to determine who could vote in elections.  Most states originally limited the right to vote to property-owning or tax-paying white males.  Over the years, more and more classes of people have been granted the right to vote, so that elections are now pretty much the voice of “the people, ” which Madison feared would lead to the election of demagogues and other poor leaders.