The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a healthcare bill that essentially reforms Obamacare.  It cannot be said that it repeals and replaces Obamacare because there are still certain aspects of Obamacare that remain.

You can call it Trumpcare, or Ryancare or Obamacare lite, or whatever you want.  The fact is that it is not a full repeal of Obamacare as Trump and the Republicans have been promising for so long.  From a libertarian standpoint, it may or may not be a step in the right direction.

The bill is hard to understand.  In the words of Pelosi, I guess we will have to pass the bill to find out what is in it.  It does not have many of the market-oriented reforms that have been proposed by libertarians and even Rand Paul.  For this reason, I don’t even think the bill is a step in the right direction.  My guess is that it will have little impact in the price of health insurance premiums.

From a libertarian standpoint, we should generally seek repeal.  Take the income tax for example.  Some people support the so-called Fair Tax that would replace income taxes with a massive national sales tax.  It is said to be revenue neutral, which is the main reason libertarians should oppose it.  It replaces one bad thing with another bad thing.  We should seek to repeal the income tax.  If that is not achievable, then we should seek to at least lessen its burden.

The same goes with Obamacare.  I would rather see a partial repeal with nothing to replace it than replacing it with more government bureaucracy.  We seek a full repeal of Obamacare and then move on to repealing other federal regulations on healthcare.

Ironically, the one thing that Donald Trump stressed in his presidential campaign on healthcare was that we should allow health insurance to be sold across state lines.  This was his main thing, yet it is nowhere to be found.

When the latest bill passed the House, there were 20 Republicans who defected.  They defected for different reasons.  Some said that it would leave too many people vulnerable with inadequate health coverage.  In other words, there was opposition from the left-leaning Republicans.

There was also a little opposition from the libertarian-leaning Republicans.  While most of the Freedom Caucus had a change of heart and supported this bill, there were a few notable dissents who opposed the bill on more libertarian grounds.  Thomas Massie and Walter Jones – probably two of the best people in the House from a libertarian standpoint – opposed the latest bill.

Notably missing from the opposition was Justin Amash.  Amash has had some fighting words for Trump in the past, but he capitulated on this vote.  He was supposed to be the next Ron Paul of the House.  If anyone can live up to that mantle, I think it is either Thomas Massie or Walter Jones.  I don’t think it is Amash.

While there are more libertarian-leaning people in the House now than we have generally seen in the past, it is hard to compare anyone to the long and principled career of Ron Paul.  He really was one-of-a-kind in terms of politicians in Washington DC.

This latest healthcare bill may not pass the Senate.  Even if it does, I doubt it will do much good for the Republicans.  They may claim victory, and the Democrats will wail and complain about how many people will suffer, but the bottom line is that it doesn’t do enough to actually bring down health insurance premiums.

One of the main reasons Trump was elected was because he was seen as an advocate for the middle class.  People are struggling because they are forking over so much money for health insurance that is mostly useless.  If this continues, it is hard to see how Trump will get re-elected, unless the Democrats put up another corrupt or incompetent candidate again.

Even worse, if this bill prevents insurance companies from discriminating against pre-existing conditions as it is said to do, yet it doesn’t compel people to buy insurance, then it may just lead to even higher premiums and eventually bankrupt insurance companies.  This could be a faster ticket to fully nationalized healthcare than what exists with Obamacare.

The FOMC released its latest statement on monetary policy.  As expected, the Fed will not raise its target federal funds rate.

The elephant in the room is that growth in the U.S., at least as measured by GDP, has been abysmal.  The 2017 Q1 GDP growth came in at just 0.7%.

On this, the FOMC statement stated: “The Committee views the slowing in growth during the first quarter as likely to be transitory and continues to expect that, with gradual adjustments in the stance of monetary policy, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace, labor market conditions will strengthen somewhat further, and inflation will stabilize around 2 percent over the medium term.  Near-term risks to the economic outlook appear roughly balanced.”

Of course, you never read a statement that says, “we expect recessionary conditions within the next 12 months”, or something to that effect.

The biggest reason (one of many, admittedly) that got Donald Trump elected president will likely be the biggest reason that he doesn’t get re-elected in 2020.  The economy has been weak, and it is not showing any signs of improving.

Middle class America is hurting with bills and debt.  While unemployment rates have improved from 8 years ago, wages have been mostly stagnant.  Any increase in real wages has been more than eaten up by the skyrocketing health insurance premiums.

The Fed is content right now because the economy is puttering along and the Fed isn’t getting blamed too much.  Sure, libertarians blame the Fed, but that is nothing new, except for the size of the group.

The average American isn’t thinking about the damage done by the Federal Reserve when they are looking at their bank statement and wondering how they are going to pay their next credit card bill.  They may indirectly blame some politicians, but they don’t fully understand why.

The federal government is sucking up about $4 trillion out of the economy each year.  In addition, we are regulated to such a large degree that it literally costs us thousands of dollars (probably tens of thousands of dollars) each year in terms of our purchasing power.  The Federal Reserve enables the massive government spending and the continued deficits.  Without the Fed or a monopoly over the money, the federal government would be far more limited in its ability to spend.

Since consumer price inflation is relatively low, the Fed can sit back and say that it is doing its job.  It is meeting its mandate of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation.

This is very comparable to the disaster that was seen in 1929.  At that time, price inflation was also relatively low.  It was assumed that since consumer prices were tame that there was not bubble activity. It was assumed that the boom was not an artificial boom that could go bust.

If Trump had gotten into office and repealed Obamacare and drastically cut federal spending, along with some of the more burdensome regulations, then he might have some hope.  It probably would have led to some short-term pain, but at least he would have had some hope that the economy would be starting to prosper in 2020.

Instead, we have the continued red tape and the continued spending.  We also have Janet Yellen and company keeping its “accommodative” policy.  Actually, the Fed has not been expanding its balance sheet since October 2014, but keeping its target rate low helps to buy some time and put off the recession a little longer.

Trump would have been better off if Yellen and company had hiked its target rate and brought on the recession quicker.  If the inevitable is delayed and we get a recession in a year or two from now, I don’t think Trump is going to recover from it.  He has already been stupidly bragging about the economy and booming stock market.  If he is going to take credit for that now, he will surely have to take the blame when things go south.

The FOMC’s next meeting is June 13th and 14th.  This meeting is associated with a press conference by Yellen, making it more likely that the Fed could take some action.  My guess is that the Fed will not hike its target rate in June.

If Janet Yellen wants to keep her job, then she will probably do for Trump what seems like a favor in not hiking rates, or at least not quickly.  If I were Yellen, I wouldn’t want to stick around though.  What Bernanke went through in 2008, the Fed chair in the next term (starting in early 2018) may be facing something similar.

Donald Trump has completed 100 days in office.  For some reason, the first 100 days has been a common measure in recent times for grading the president.  It is just a nice round number.  We could just as easily look at 3 months, or 6 months, or 101 days.  The presidency of Trump continues.

The way things have gone with Trump, maybe 100 days really is a good marker though.  If I had to grade Trump after 20 days in office, I would have given him pretty decent marks, even though there are many issues where I diverge with his views.

Trump’s first couple of weeks in office consisted of him passing executive orders, repealing executive orders, fighting with the media, and fighting with the government spy agencies.

In terms of executive orders, they are obviously not looked upon positively by libertarians.  But when an executive order is issued to repeal a previous executive order, or even to repeal some unconstitutional edict by a bureaucracy (which is almost all of them), then it has merit because it never should have been a law in the first place.

Something happened around March/ early April to Trump’s whole presidency.  Perhaps nothing actually changed other than what became apparent to anyone paying attention in the general public.

The first big problem with Trump is his alignment with Paul Ryan on Ryan’s healthcare bill.  It failed to replace Obamacare in full, and it was mostly a disaster from the perspective of an advocate for free markets.  Luckily, enough Republicans in the House opposed the legislation, and it failed.

Then Trump made things worse by threatening and going into battle against the Freedom Caucus.  Instead of figuring out what would make them (and their constituents) happy, he instead essentially said that we could knock these Republicans out in primaries in the next election.  These are the few people in Congress who actually defend free markets to a certain extent and Trump is going into battle with them.

Then came the disaster of Syria.  When it was alleged that Assad’s government killed innocent people with chemical weapons, Trump wasted no time in talking about the “beautiful babies” and started lobbing missiles in Syria.  For the record, Trump also talks about beautiful pieces of chocolate cake, and not just babies, so it is hard to know how much the word “beautiful” means to him.

There was absolutely no proof that it was Assad that released chemical weapons.  If anybody did, it was likely Assad’s enemies.  Trump threw all reasoning out the window.  He also repudiated almost everything he had said in the past, especially when Assad was accused of the same thing several years ago.

And who knows now with North Korea.  By the time you read this, Trump may have started an all-out war in North Korea.  The dictator of North Korea is launching bottle rockets while Trump and the rest of the war establishment is talking about the country as a great threat to the United States.  If it is anything more than bottle rockets, then it is South Korea that should be worried.  Of course, since the Washington establishment is safely thousands of miles away, they aren’t too concerned about what happens on the Korean peninsula, as long as the war lobby is made happy.

I don’t know what happened to Trump, but he has turned into a complete disaster.  He is especially bad right now on foreign policy, which was the one small glimmer of hope for libertarians with his presidency.  The war hawks have taken control, and Trump has ceded his power to them.

Was Trump warned that if he didn’t start going along with things that he would end up with a similar fate to JFK?  Or was it something similar but a little more subtle?

Of course, Trump is going against almost everything he said in the campaign now.  He can still have his fights with the establishment media, but it doesn’t mean much now.  He is not likely to repeal Obamacare.  He is not likely to intervene less in foreign countries.  He is not going to take on the Federal Reserve.  He is probably mostly done fighting with the spy agencies.

Even in the areas where I strongly disagreed with Trump in his campaign, he will still fail.  He is not likely to get a wall along the Mexican border, let alone actually getting Mexico to pay for it.  Hopefully he will not get new tariffs, or they at least won’t be as big as he first hinted.

I didn’t vote for Trump, but I supported some of what he said.  I like his fighting with the media, and I liked his political incorrectness.  But I knew he was very short on principles.

Trump has betrayed his base, whether they know it or not.  He is not draining the swamp.  He has joined the swamp.

For libertarians, there is a major lesson to be learned here.  We shouldn’t hope for political change by electing the “right people” into office.  Political change is only likely to come through decentralization, increasing technology, and changes in public opinion.  Marijuana will be mostly legal within a decade, but it didn’t happen because any politician in Washington DC decided to make it so.

Of course, all Americans should take away this lesson about the futility of presidential elections, but I think libertarians are the only ones who will learn anything if anything is learned at all.

In order for anyone to have in impact in Washington DC, that person has to be honest, principled, and knowledgeable.  It is a very rare person indeed.  Ron Paul is the closest we have seen, but he didn’t have the personality to be elected, and there weren’t enough Americans who fully bought into his message.  (By the way, I love Ron Paul’s personality, but to be elected president I think you have to be more vicious.)

There are some people who go into politics who intend to make changes for the better.  But most of these people are corrupted if and when they get to Washington DC.  They can’t resist the pressure.  They are absorbed by the swamp.

It is made worse in the fact that most of these people do not have a firm grasp of the issues and firm principles going into it.  If you believe in the non-aggression principle or something similar to it, then it makes it easier to stand your ground.    You have no use for “revenue neutral tax cuts” because taxation is theft to you.

For the politician who just made it to DC who believes that taxation is a little too high and that we need to cut taxes for better economic growth, it will just be a matter of time before that person is selling the few principles he had down the river.  He will listen to the media. He will listen to the lobbyists.  He will soon be “compromising”.  In other words, he will be selling out.

We should not count on any one person to bring us liberty, especially through political office.  It will inevitably be a disappointment.  We will gain liberty by changing the hearts and minds of the general populace.  We will gain liberty as technology replaces the so-called necessary government functions in society.

One of the best books on economics of all time is Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.  Many libertarians will say that they got their start with Hazlitt, or at least their start in learning economics.

I recently released a book titled Free Market Economics Made Easy.  I am not trying to compete with Hazlitt.  If anything, I think my book can be a good supplement.

With that said, there is something that Hazlitt gets wrong in his book.  Chapter XXIV (24) is titled “The Assault on Saving”.  With Keynesian economics still dominating today, his chapter is as timely as ever.  Unfortunately, despite the chapter title, he makes a big error when writing about savings.

Hazlitt compares two individuals – one who saves a good portion of his income (Benjamin) versus one who consumes all of his income.  In talking about the saver, Hazlitt states: “But let us see what Benjamin actually does with this other $25,000.  He does not let it pile up in his pocketbook, his bureau drawers, or in his safe.  He either deposits it in a bank or he invests it.  If he puts it either into a commercial or a savings bank, the bank either lends it to going businesses on short term for working capital, or uses it to buy securities.  In other words, Benjamin invests his money either directly or indirectly.”

We could probably get on the subject of fractional reserve banking based on the above citation.  But it gets worse than this.

Hazlitt continues, “Mere hoarding of hand-to-hand money, if it takes place irrationally, causelessly, and on a large scale, is in most economic situations harmful.  But this sort of hoarding is extremely rare.”

Hazlitt is flat out wrong on this.  I address this with a chapter specifically on hoarding money in my book.  I argue that hoarding money is not at all harmful to the economy.  If it is harmful to anyone at all, it is the hoarder.

Let’s use an example.  If you knit a sweater and then sell that sweater for $25, then you have produced a product that is worth $25 to someone.  For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the cost of the yarn used to knit the sweater.

Now let’s say that you take the $25 that you earned through your labor and you bury it in your backyard.  Better yet, let’s say you take the $25 in cash and throw it in your fireplace to be burned.  Is this bad for the economy?

It is bad for you because you now have $25 less.  You expended your labor to make a sweater and you were entitled to your $25 to consume on something else.  That $25 represented your redemption for the value you produced with the sweater.

The fact that you burned your 25 dollars does not directly impact the person who purchased the sweater.  The buyer deemed himself better off with a sweater than the $25, so it shouldn’t make any difference to him what you do with the money.

But you produced a 25 dollar value for society and didn’t get anything in return.  You essentially gave a sweater to society.  You could have consumed something in return, but you burned your money instead.

You could have given the sweater away, which would have benefited one person.  Instead, you essentially benefited the entire economy by $25 at your own expense.  Obviously, in a large economy, this is a drop in the ocean.  But it has the impact of bringing down consumer prices for everybody else, even if by an immeasurable tiny fraction of a penny.

So while Hazlitt is correct that capital investment is important to grow an economy, it doesn’t mean that hoarding money is harmful.  Hoarding money means that people are not redeeming things despite having contributed to the economy.  They are giving their labor or their things to others, and they are not getting an equal amount back.

I was surprised to stumble across this mistake by Hazlitt.  I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend his book to anyone though.  In his day, he was a shining light in a world of statist thought.

If you want to read my take on free market economics, you can get the e-book for free if you are reading this before Sunday, April 30, 2017 at 11:59 PM.  Since it is currently free, you can hoard your money and help the economy with consumer price deflation.

My book can benefit those with little knowledge of economics, but I also believe it will help clear up some thinking even for those who are more hardcore libertarians and consider themselves to be well educated in the issues, especially economics.

If you missed the book promotional or you want to order the paperback, I still encourage you to pick up a copy.  However, I won’t claim you are helping the economy by spending your money.

There is a joke about two economists walking along a crowded street.  The one economist says to the other, “Hey, look, there’s 20 bucks on the sidewalk.”  The second economist keeps walking and doesn’t even look down.  He responds, “You know that’s impossible because if there were 20 bucks on the ground, somebody would have picked it up already.”

While libertarians like to say that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL), sometimes there really are free lunches.  When the government promotes something, it is done at the expense of others through the use of force.

But there are win-win situations where everyone can benefit.  That is what the free market is all about.  In this case, I present to you a win-win situation, and it is like a free lunch for you.

I recently released my book titled Free Market Economics Made Easy.  From now until Sunday, April 30, 2017, you can get the electronic version for free.

You get a free e-book, and I get “sales”.  Even though I don’t make any royalties off of the free book “sales”, they still help the ranking on Amazon.  So you are doing me a favor if you accept this free e-book.  It’s win-win.  It’s not like the government where a few people win and most everybody else loses.

If you are reading this after April 30, 2017, you can still buy the e-book for just $3.49.  And if you are someone who needs to hold a book in your hands, then you can order the paperback for $7.99.

Take your free lunch.  I didn’t have to force anybody to cough up money so that you can have your free e-book.

I recently released my new book titled Free Market Economics Made Easy.

The book has 35 relatively short chapters, and each chapter stands on its own.  I purposely do not discuss political parties, and I even mostly avoid political figures.  The book shows why peaceful and voluntary cooperation leads to human flourishing and why government interference distorts this process.

This book was written so that somebody with a minimal knowledge of economics could still understand it.  A mature high school student or homeschooler could benefit.  With that said, I think many libertarians and libertarian-leaning people will benefit greatly from this book.  My hope is that it will clarify your own thinking and also help you to articulate the message of liberty and free markets to others.

From Wednesday, April 26, 2017 until Sunday, April 30, 2017, you can download the Kindle edition for free.  My hope is that readers of my blog will take advantage of this opportunity.  If you read the book and enjoy it, please leave a review on Amazon.

If you are reading this post after the promotional period has expired, you can still download the Kindle edition for just $3.49.  And if you are someone who needs to hold a book in your hands, you can purchase a paperback edition for $7.99.

We hear complaints from the political left about inequality and wage gaps.  One frequent complaint is that CEOs and other top executives of major companies are making excessive amounts of money.  You may hear something such as, “A CEO shouldn’t be making 1,000 times the salary of a minimum wage worker.”

A standard response from some Republicans and libertarians is that they are earning that amount because that is what their value has been deemed to be by the open market.

This response is mostly true for founders of companies who earn tens of millions of dollars or more.  I think even many on the political left will agree to a certain extent that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs deserved to be well compensated for providing value to consumers.

The problem is that there are obviously some fools who run some of the top companies in the United States.  It is difficult to see how they can be making millions of dollars per year making stupid decision.

Take the recent incident involving United Airlines when a passenger was bloodied up after refusing to leave the airplane because the airline wanted four of its employees on the flight instead.  When nobody was willing to accept the $800 incentive to take another flight the next day, the airline bumped people off (probably illegally because it wasn’t a case of overbooking) instead of raising its offer.

The CEOs response was one of justification and word games.  He used the term “re-accommodate”  to describe forcing the passenger off the plane.  He thought this propaganda would somehow help ease the situation.  The guy is a total idiot who is being paid millions of dollars.  He is completely out of touch with reality.

He could have consulted me before he put out his stupid statements, and I could have told him not to send them out.

He should have simply stated, “We apologize for the situation that recently took place.  We are doing a full investigation of the situation, and we will revise our policies as necessary to make sure such an incident does not happen again in the future.”

But the idiot multi-millionaire CEO (likely put in place by idiot multi-millionaire board members of the company) doesn’t see it.

Therefore, there is obviously something wrong with the standard response that these executives are just being paid their market value.  You could have paid many people a small fraction of what the United CEO is paid to not put out an idiot statement like he did.

The problem here is that we simply do not have a fully functioning free market.  There are free market elements where providing value to customers can make you rich.  Again, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates brought value to hundreds of millions of people.  (This is ignoring that Bill Gates likely used government copyright and other laws to his advantage.)  But there are many elements of government interference that distort things, including executive pay.

In the case of United, the airline industry is heavily regulated.  Foreign companies are not allowed to offer domestic flights within the United State.  If Singapore Airlines and Emirates were flying within the U.S., there probably would no longer be a United Airlines.

We see the idiot bankers who helped contribute to the financial crisis that blew up in 2008.  But maybe they aren’t that idiotic for the simple fact that they secured bailouts after it happened.

And that brings me to one very important point.  Because government – particularly the U.S. government – so heavily regulates business, CEOs and other executives are often selected more for their political abilities than their abilities to provide value to consumers (and hence shareholders).

Also, for these publicly traded companies, there are also major distortions due to the tax code.  In a true free market, companies would seek to pay out dividends to shareholders instead of trying to get big capital gains.  The CEOs are often rewarded with shares of stocks that get inflated by central bank inflation and stock buyback programs.

These are just a few points.  There are thousands of laws and regulations and taxes that distort the market economy and inflate the pay of CEOs.  And not only do these things inflate their pay, but they also put people in these positions that shouldn’t be there.  It is people who are good at politics who get these positions, unless they were a founder.  In some ways, it makes sense for companies to put political figures in these positions, as political favors will be more profitable than trying extra hard to satisfy consumers.  And if anything, getting political figures is important for defensive purposes just to make sure the government doesn’t pass laws against the company or industry.

In conclusion, the political left actually has a point that many CEOs and top executives are overpaid.  The problem is that their solutions are often the exact opposite of what is needed.  The answer isn’t for more government regulation. The answer is to free up the marketplace to make these executives and their companies more accountable to consumers.

In a true free market, the only way for a company to survive in the long run is to provide great value for consumers.  If a CEO can concentrate on this and provide it, then it will benefit the shareholders in the long run.  Until this situation of a real free market arises, we really don’t know what these CEO positions should be worth.

As I write this, another tax filing season just finished up.  I recently spoke with someone who does some work on the side helping people prepare their tax filings.  Most of her clients are not simply filing a 1040EZ form or even a simple 1040 form.  They tend to be investors, or small business owners, or have rental real estate, or some combination.  In other words, her clients aren’t generally people making a low income.

I asked her specifically about the mortgage interest deduction.  She said that a sizable majority of her clients do not qualify for the deduction.

While we hear about the great benefits of being able to deduct the mortgage interest on your primary residence, it is highly overrated for most people.  The fact is that the standard deduction for 2016 was $6,300 for singles and $12,600 for married couples filing jointly.  For a married couple, you will need a lot of mortgage interest and other deductions to qualify.

She said that a few people have mistakenly believed that you can deduct your mortgage payments.  But when you make a mortgage payment, a portion is going to interest and a portion is going to pay down the principal.  In many cases, people also have taxes and insurance included as part of their mortgage payment.  They may also pay private mortgage insurance (PMI).  You can only deduct the interest portion.

For somebody who just bought a house, the interest portion will make up a large portion of the mortgage at the beginning of the loan.  As time goes on with each payment, the amount going to interest decreases each month, while the amount going towards principal increases.  She said that many of her clients had owned their house for several years and therefore did not pay nearly as much in interest as when they first bought.

This is a generalization, but people who own a house with a significant mortgage tend to be married.  To qualify for the mortgage interest deduction as a married couple, the interest alone, combined with other deductions, will have to exceed $12,600 to get any benefit.

The people who will mainly benefit from this deduction are those who live in areas with high housing prices and those who donate a lot of money.

If you have a married couple earning $100,000 per year and they donate $10,000 per year to their church, then they might easily get a tax benefit from their mortgage interest.

If you live in San Francisco or New York City (or any high-priced city in the U.S.), then you may benefit from the mortgage interest deduction if you have a large mortgage.  Of course, I would much rather live in a normal place and pay $200,000 for a house and not get the deduction than to live in a place where you pay $800,000 for the same-sized house and get the deduction.

Here is one other important thing to consider.  Let’s say that a married couple does have enough mortgage interest and charitable contributions in order to itemize.  They have $13,000 combined, which exceeds the $12,600 standard deduction.  If this couple is in the 25% tax bracket, then they will save a whopping $100.  The difference between itemizing and taking the standard deduction is $400 ($13,000 – $12,600).  But that is not a tax credit.  It is just a deduction.  At 25% of $400, congratulations on that great mortgage deduction that saved you $100 for the year.  I hope your $2,000 per month mortgage payment was worth it.

Of course, some people benefit far more than this.  But the reality is that it just does not benefit that many people.  And for those who do benefit, the actual dollar amount is usually far lower than they would estimate.

According to the Tax Foundation website, 30.1 percent of households chose to itemize their deductions in 2013.  But this doesn’t tell us how much they benefitted by itemizing.  Again, think about the $100 benefit from the example above.

You should never pay more for a house with the rationale that you can deduct the mortgage interest.  That is a terrible reason (justification) to buy an expensive house.  You should buy a house as a consumer good.  If you are buying a house for investment purposes to rent it out, then this situation doesn’t apply to you anyway, as rental real estate is handled separately and does not impact whether or not your itemize your deductions.

Buy a house because you think it is a good decision.  But I would suggest not factoring the mortgage interest deduction in this decision.

In the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve started its policy of wild monetary inflation.  It became known as quantitative easing (QE).  We have gone through QE1, QE2, and QE3.  The last round (QE3) ended in October 2014.

The Fed somehow managed to approximately quintuple its balance sheet between 2008 and 2014 while keeping consumer price inflation relatively low.  Much of the newly created money went into bank excess reserves, which helped prevent price inflation.  If all of this new money had been multiplied through fractional reserve lending, we would have likely seen extraordinary consumer price inflation.

Long before QE3 ended, we heard from Bernanke and others that the Fed would one day sell off its assets to return to normal.  In other words, the Fed would return its balance sheet somewhere in the neighborhood of its early 2008 balance sheet, or at least significantly reduce it from where it is now.

It has taken the Fed several years now just to hike its federal funds rate target by 0.75%.  There seems to be no likelihood of a major selloff of the Fed’s balance sheet soon, but there has been a little bit more talk about it lately.

Here is the problem.  It is not possible for the Fed to return to its early 2008 balance sheet, or if it does, it will be meaningless.

Of course, it is basically impossible politically speaking because the asset boom we have seen, particularly in stocks, is likely largely based on the Fed’s easy money.  If the Fed engages in significant monetary deflation, the boom collapses.

But it might also literally be impossible for the Fed to reduce its balance sheet by over $3.5 trillion.  In 2008, the Fed began buying other assets aside from U.S. Treasuries.  It began buying mortgage-backed securities (MBS).  It was one portion of the many bank bailouts, as the Fed bought these MBS for their original value instead of the actual market value.

Many of these mortgages were in default with the crash in housing prices.  If you have a bunch of mortgages where the people aren’t paying and the collateral (the houses) are worth half as much, then the mortgages are worth a lot less than their original value.

Since 2008, the Fed has accumulated nearly $1.8 trillion in MBS, which far exceeds its total balance sheet prior to 2008.  The problem is that we don’t know what these MBS are actually worth.  If the Fed were to sell them on the open market, it would likely spike interest rates and severely damage the mortgage market.  And there is no way that the Fed could get $1.8 trillion back on these MBS.  We really have no idea what they are actually worth.

What if the Fed could only sell them all for $1 trillion?  That means that $800 billion would be vanishing into thin air.  Well, that is not exactly it.  The $800 billion was already created and essentially given to the banks as part of a bailout.  That newly created money is very hard to withdraw unless they somehow force the banks to buy back the mortgages at their original value.  But this would just cause bank failures again.

So the only way the Fed can reduce its balance sheet back to early 2008 levels is by writing down this amount.  It would be meaningless.  At this point, it is just numbers on a graph or in a spreadsheet.  The Fed could say that its $1.8 trillion in MBS is actually only worth $1 trillion and subtract $800 billion from its balance sheet, but it doesn’t change the situation.  That money was already created out of thin air and given to the banks for their bad debts.

The Fed can sell off its U.S. government debt (Treasuries) or let them mature without rolling them over, but that would only go so far.  Plus, this would eventually hurt the federal government’s ability to borrow at low interest rates.

In other words, there will be no significant reduction in the Fed’s balance sheet that means anything.  Maybe we will see a couple of hundred billion dollars.  But any sign of a recession or stock market crash and you can be sure that all bets are off.  If anything, the Fed would starting inflating again.

We may still see a recession even if the Fed does not do anything.  Since it hasn’t been inflating, its policy has been monetary stability for the last couple of years.  But that doesn’t change its previous policy of massive monetary inflation and all of the malinvestment that went with it.   At some point, it will be exposed.

I think we are more likely to see QE4 before we see any significant reduction in the Fed’s balance sheet.

The latest Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) numbers are out for March.  The CPI dropped 0.3% from the previous month.  The year-over-year CPI stands at 2.4%.

The more stable median CPI continues to be stable.  The year-over-year median CPI is up 2.5%.  This is the same figure over the last 6 months.

Overall, there is not much to get excited about in either direction.  It looked as if consumer prices were picking up, but March is a slight reversal.

Gold has been rising the last few weeks, but that likely has little to do with price inflation.  It is more of a reflection of Trump’s now reckless foreign policy.

The inflation numbers are not showing any significant trend in either direction.  This means that the Fed will not change its policies unless something else changes.  The Fed will continue to do mostly nothing except roll over maturing debt and occasionally raise its federal funds target rate by one quarter of one percent.  This will be more free money for the banks, as the Fed’s primary tool is paying interest to the banks on their reserves.

While the sentiment on stocks is mostly bullish, there are certainly warning signs out there.  We know stocks are going to fall hard at some point.  It is just a matter of when and how far.

It will be interesting to see what Trump does with the Fed.  If he gets a bill to audit the Fed on his desk, I think he will veto it at this point.  He has done a 180 degree turn on almost everything else, so why not the Fed?  There is already talk that maybe he will just keep Janet Yellen as Fed chair.

If everything is still calm, economically speaking, in late 2017, then I think Trump may just keep her so as not to rattle anything.  If things get ugly before then, then Trump can put blame on Yellen and replace her with the next establishment hack.

The economy overall right now is just kind of sitting there.  There is not much growth.  There is little in the way of really good news or really bad news.  Everything is just puttering along.  Meanwhile, the federal government keeps accumulating more debt and spending huge amounts of money.  Our living standards are far worse off than they should be because of government spending and regulation.

We’ll keep an eye on price inflation to see if there are any significant shifts.  For now, there doesn’t seem to be much happening, but we know things can change quickly.  If I had to bet right now, I think we will see an economic slowdown/ recession before we see a significant increase in consumer price inflation.