Confirmed: It Is Simply Impossible For Any Central Banks To Exit Their Loose Money Policies Without Triggering Market Crash

As the market panic demonstrates, central banks are stuck on a treadmill of money printing

Oh what a tangled web central bankers weave when they practice to deceive… Last night’s panic in Tokyo, where the Nikkei dropped a stomach churning 7 per cent, demonstrates just how difficult it’s going to be for the world’s central banks to exit their loose money policies.

It’s not even as if Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, said he was planning to exit; in fact, initially he said the reverse in testimony to Congress. It was only in the Q & A, and in minutes to the last meeting of the Fed’s Open Markets Committee, that a clear bias emerged to slow the pace of asset purchases “in the next few meetings”, so long as the economic data was strong enough.

What the subsequent violent gyrations in markets indicate is that any hint of applying the brakes risks generating a fresh financial crisis, which in turn would render the economic recovery still born. Both financial markets and the real economy have become addicted to “quantitative easing”, such that they can’t do without it.

Selloffs Raise Questions About ‘Abenomics’

Tokyo stocks posted a gain Friday after highly volatile trading following the prior session’s dramatic selloff. The WSJ’s Michael Arnold and Jake Lee discuss whether the Japanese prime minister’s ‘Abenomics’ is working.

BNP Warns On Japanese Repression: Echoes Of The 1940s Fed

In the 1940s, the Fed adopted pegging operations to protect the financial system against rising interest rates and to ensure the smooth financing of the war effort. In effect, the Fed became part of the Treasury’s debt management team; as the budget deficit hit 25% of GDP in WW2, it capped 1Y notes at 87.5bps and 30Y bonds at 2.5%. From the massive bond holdings of its domestic banks to its exploding public debt, Japan today faces a situation very similar to the US in the 1940s. With the market becoming dysfunctional as the BoJ’s massive buying operations drain the pool of available bonds, the BoJ’s overriding presence in the market each day has increasingly made the JGB market seem like a government-made market.

But a much bigger problem is Japan’s exploding public debt. With the debt already the largest of the developed nations, it could snowball out of control if an upturn in interest rates causes interest payments to escalate. So, even if 2% inflation is achieved, the BoJ’s zero-rate policy and massive JGB purchases will have to continue until the debt is made more manageable.

When the long-term rate climbs above 2%, the BoJ will probably adopt outright measures to underpin JGB prices to prevent turmoil in the financial system and a fiscal crisis - and just as Kyle Bass noted yesterday, they are going to need a bigger boat as direct financial repression in Japan is unavoidable.

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