Even so, you have to wonder where all this “financial repression” – the artificial depression of interest rates – is going to lead. Since the crisis began, the world’s major central banks have engaged in a degree of intervention in financial markets quite without precedent in the modern age, if ever. In seeking salvation from the banking maelstrom, interest rates have been cut close to zero, and long-term bond yields suppressed to historic lows.
In Britain, the Bank of England has already bought up more than a third of the conventional gilts market, or rather more than a quarter of the entire national debt. Since quantitative easing began, the Bank has hoovered up gilts to the value of more than a half of those issued by the Debt Management Office, greatly easing its task in financing the deficit.
Nor is this the limit of the UK’s financial repression. Banks have been required by regulators greatly to increase their liquidity buffers, creating another big source of demand for UK gilts. It’s the same in the US and Europe.
These sovereign debt holdings have created new threats. Given the inflated size of the buffers, it would require only a quite small rise in interest rates – one or two percentage points – to create additional solvency problems for the banks, as we saw with the Franco-Belgian bank Dexia, which had to seek a bail-out after its eurozone sovereign debt turned toxic. Yet it is the rapid expansion of central bank balance sheets which is beginning to cause greater concern.
There are a number of justifications for this expansion. One is that by printing money, the central bank counters the contraction in credit being caused by private and banking sector deleveraging. By so doing, the monetary authority keeps the deflationary bogey at bay.
But it also allows governments to issue debt at lower interest rates, reducing servicing costs and eroding the real value of the debt. Economists have described it as a form of stealth taxation, or debasement.
It’s not an ideal way of proceeding, and it’s deeply unfair on savers, who through negative real interest rates are obliged in effect to subsidise both the Government and other debtors. It is, however, generally considered less painful than the alternative of even greater fiscal austerity.
For the moment, it’s hard to argue that such actions are inflationary. Today’s relatively elevated levels of UK inflation are not directly caused by money-printing, but by devaluation and the spike in energy prices. The problem is not too much money, but not enough. Yet intuitively, one knows that some way down the line, such practices will have inflationary consequences which, once out of the box, will be extremely hard for central banks to put back in again.
Only last week, the US Federal Reserve committed itself to keeping interest rates close to zero for another three years. By the time we get there, the US will have had seven years of essentially “free” money. Nobody knows what the long-term consequences of such financial repression might be. As I say, it’s never been tried before. But we do know from the way unduly loose monetary policy helped stoke the credit bubble in the first place that the potential for things to go very badly wrong is high. Central banks frequently seem to do more harm than good.
