In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Wolf Richter discusses:
- Worried Central Banks
- The risks of financial instability are mounting
- The Cryptocurrency Conundrum
- Can the central banks afford not to contain it?
- Too Much Leverage
- When credit tightens, the system will crash
- Housing Harm
- Many regional real estate markets are poised to burst
Wolf watches the minutes of the Fed and ECB closely, and concludes they are (finally!) becoming very concerned about the market imbalances that years of central bank liquidity and intervention have resulted in. They desperately want to cool things off, but have no idea how to do so without pricking the massive asset bubbles they have created. Whether they figure out a graceful way to do it or not (and he and Chris bet "not" is much more likely), he sees a fast-approaching sudden end to the era of ever-rising asset prices:
So I think we're in an era where the central banks are starting to react, not because it's within the mandate of inflation, but because they're worried about financial stability. They're worried about recreating a financial crisis when all these bubbles are coming down all together. Now, I don’t think the Fed is really worried about a long drawn-out stock market decline that's fairly orderly, and they're actually wanting long term yields to go up — which would be a losing proposition for bond holders.
by kugscheese