"This is [is this?] the sound of a bubble popping."

"Mark Zuckerberg had exciting news to share yesterday. His company Meta had finished a great quarter—and would continue to increase spending on AI.

"He said that yesterday afternoon. But when the market opened this morning, Meta shares dropped more than $80. That’s $200 billion in market cap wiped out in an instant. 

Meta’s share price this week 

"Why don’t investors like AI? Only a few months ago, companies saw their shares skyrocket when they made AI investments.

"In September, Oracle’s stock shot up 36% in just one day after announcing a huge deal with OpenAI. The share price increase was enough to make the company’s founder Larry Ellison the richest man in the world.

"But then investors changed their mind. Since that big day, Oracle shares have fallen $60. Larry Ellison is no longer the richest man in the world.

"This is [is this?] the sound of a bubble popping."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Bubble Just Burst'

"Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is spending untold billions on infrastructure and top talent for its AI ambitions.

"In fact, the CEO announced during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Meta will be spending between $70 billion and $72 billion on AI this year — up from its previous estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion, as CNBC reports.

"Unsurprisingly, that cash bonfire isn’t going over well with investors. Meta’s shares slid by more than 11 percent on Thursday, indicating widespread skepticism about the company’s ability to stop bleeding billions of dollars as it races to keep up with the AI industry’s ever-escalating expenditure commitments.

"That’s particularly striking because the drop comes in spite of Meta’s revenues exceeding Wall Street’s estimates. In other words, out of control AI spending is starting to rattle investors. 'The total dollar spend is just kind of what hangs us up a little bit,' [said one]...

"The AI industry is seemingly approaching a major inflection point, with Meta competitors Alphabet, and Microsoft tripling down on AI by increasing their planned spending to even loftier heights, fuelling fears of a growing AI bubblethat could take down the entire US economy with it if ever pops."

~ Victor Tangermann from his post 'Meta Stock Plummets as Investors Horrified at How Much Zuckerberg Is Spending on Misfired AI'

Moral Hazard + Bubble = ?

"The whole point of financial stability reports is to warn about stuff that might go wrong in the future but probably won’t. Even so, the latest missive from the IMF last week was bracing.

“'Valuation models show risk asset prices well above fundamentals, raising the risk of sharp corrections,' it said. ... Investors and policymakers should be alert to the prospect of 'disorderly' corrections and the potential for self-reinforcing doom loops, where a loss of confidence in the sustainability of government debt whacks the bond market, which in turn whacks risky assets priced for nirvana, which in turn hammers the banking sector, both traditional lenders and shadow banks that are locked in an embrace of 'increasing interconnectedness.' The Bank of England struck a similar tone, noting the risk of a 'sharp market correction.'

These things are extremely precisely worded. When such august institutions talk of valuations 'well' in excess of observable reality, and of 'sharp' or 'disorderly' corrections, they are very much switching on the fasten-your-seatbelts sign.

In the private sector, heavy-hitters are also urging caution, including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, who observed that 'you have a lot of assets out there which look like they’re entering bubble territory.' ...

"And still, markets are humming along just fine. This is not complacency, as such. ... The foundation of this worldview is an unshakeable belief in the rescue squad — a sense that if markets do get seriously tricky, for any reason, the cavalry will soon arrive, in the form of large interest rate cuts or even asset-purchase schemes from central banks. Investors, both professional and retail, have become accustomed to this ever since the great financial crisis of 2008.

"Policymakers are keen to stress that the bar for emergency intervention is high, but investors are happy to call their bluff. ... The moral hazard is extreme here ..."

~ Financial Times from today's article 'Bubble-talk is breaking out everywhere'

AI's Bubble. Ready to burst yet?

While politicians here in NZ bicker about who should get credit for an Amazon data centre that either is (or isn't) opening, over in the States they're already wondering whether these data centres are part of an AI bubble that's starting to show clear signs of being about to burst. 

"Even Open AI boss Sam Altman is now talking about an AI bubble," notes Ted Gioia. "Of course, he knows better than anyone because he is seeing it up close—the disappointing release of ChatGPT-5 played a key role in setting off the current turmoil."

Consider this: 

AI buildout is contributing more to measured US economic growth than all of consumer spending.

I want you look long and hard at this chart, and consider the implications.

Another sign? Mark Zuckerberg just paid US$14 billion for a stake in Scale AI, the data-labelling startup that's never made a dollar.

Meanwhile in the real world, McDonald’s CFO told Bloomberg that the company is struggling because many customers are now too poor to afford breakfast. And this isn’t some isolated anecdote—it’s a data-driven report from the biggest restaurant chain in the world. ...

There’s a mismatch here between two visions of the emerging economy. So which one is real? Are we entering an AI-driven boom time like an out-of-control Monopoly game? Or will [Americans] be too broke to eat breakfast?

Several signs, maybe, that both are happening —many signs of businesses struggling, closing, unemployment and debt rising, customers at any price simply disappearing. And meanwhile, 

• half the gains in the stock market are due to betting on the shares of five companies, who are betting everything on their spending up AI data centres
• consumers however are spending so little that this "investment" spending on AI by just four CEOs (two of whose money is made mostly by selling ads) totals more in the last 6 months than all the spending by all those consumers
• the energy grid simply can't support this growth in AI data centres, and there’s no indication that consumers are willing to pay for the enormous infrastructure. 

That last is the biggest sign right there. 

Fewer than 1% of ChatGPT users are paid business accounts. That total is no larger than the number of paid Substack subscribers (but what a difference in company valuation!).

In fact, most of ChatGPT’s traffic disappears when students go on summer vacation.

That tells you how wide the chasm is between reality and the crazy claims of AI fanboys—but many of them (I bet) are also reluctant to pay for AI. ... The tech simply doesn’t live up to the hype. The more people deal with it, the less they like it. That’s why AI companies must give it away (or bundle it into an already successful product) in order to gain any reasonable usage.

So everywhere I go online, companies are touting free AI. That’s funny. It doesn’t fit the narrative of a transformative technology.

But even four billionaires can’t change reality," warns Gioia. 

Yes, they are spending like drunken sailors, but that just makes the bubble bigger. It can’t stop it from bursting. The crazy level of investment only makes the eventual fallout all the worse.

How much longer can it last? Maybe a few weeks or a few months or a few quarters. Billionaires often throw good money after bad. But the whole economy is fragile—or beyond fragile—right now. And that’s the bigger reality.

By any reasonable measure, the current trend is unsustainable. And there’s one thing I know about unsustainable trends—there’s a day of reckoning, and it’s not a happy one for the people who caused it. But, even sadder, they take down a lot of others with them when the bubble bursts.

Read the whole thing here. (NB: He's opened up the article from behind the paywall.)

PS: How is this AI capital malinvestment even possible? Because of absurdly low interest rates set by the state's economic planners at the US Federal Reserve — rates that are so "economically absurd" they are only made possible "because the monetary fraudsters on the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC) had their big fat thumbs on the scales in the bond pits."

And we do mean fraud: The Fed’s balance sheet rose by $1.2 trillion or 17% during the 12-month period ending on July 7, 2021, and at a time, as we will amplify below, when the Fed’s balance sheet should have actually grown by essentially zero.

That is to say, the FOMC was buying government debt and GSE paper hand-over-fist with fiat credits snatched from thin digital air, thereby starkly falsifying yields and prices in the bond pits. There is not a chance in the hot place that tax-paying, real money savers left to their own devices would accept such niggardly real yields.

David Stockman explains the Fed's fraud.

Ludwig Von Mises explains the inevitable results of malinvestment — "meaning bad investment in
lines of production that would not otherwise take place."

"So let's look at three explanations for NZ's secular stagnation that the big media outlets refuse to blame."

"The country does not appear to [just] be in a cyclical down-turn. ... The evidence ... points more to a long-lasting slow-down ... which has turned [New Zealand's economy] into one of worst performing in the world. ... [The reasons] remain unaccounted for. The 'experts' quoted in the mainstream media, who work for the Big Banks and NZX 50 firms, don't have a clue, though not the modesty to admit it. ...
    "So let's look at three explanations for NZ's secular stagnation that the big media outlets refuse to blame.
    "First, the vast number of New Zealanders who now 'work' from home. ... An article published in the National Bureau of Economic Research is being quoted world-wide which estimates falls in productivity of around 18% once a person works from home. ...This outbreak of collective laziness is more than able to explain why the country has stagnated. ...
     "Second, many of the Board members and CEOs of our largest corporations are nothing short of useless. Many are accountants & lawyers who know little about the core business. ... The higher echelons of NZ corporates have descended into an inbred club of status-seeking social climbers who aren't the real deal. ...
    "Third, our national energy has been increasingly sucked up by [endless] Treaty debates. ... spawning industries of academics, lawyers, politicians and media types who do nothing productive, other than argue with one another. ... It has emerged that property rights, the fundamental driver of economic growth, are thereby insecure in NZ, making it a terrible place to keep your money and invest. ...
    "[I]t is [therefore] entirely plausible that [all of our economic stagnation is due to] the vast numbers of Kiwis who are now pretending to work from home, hiring and promotion policies not based on merit, ... along with endless going-nowhere Treaty debates which have consumed the energy of the country ..."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'Should NZ's secular stagnation be due to working-from-home, lack-of-meritocracy & endless Treaty debates, then we can forget economic growth.'

Reserve Bank's 'stabilisation': still chaos

In honour of the Reserve Bank's admission this morning of their own blithering incompetence, I wore my favourite anti-monetarist shirt to work. Its point is that the so-called stabilisers of prices create instead more chaos from their incessant boom and bust programme — first overheating, then withdrawing the heat, then resiling and trying to re-heat again.

No to mention that they don't even know what they don't know.

From May to August, the Reserve Bank undertook what Michael Reddell calls "a huge shift" — "from a “hawkish hold” (best guess, no easing until this time next year, and possibly some tightening late this year) to not only an OCR cut now, but a really large (at peak 130 basis points) change in the projected forward track for the OCR."

Do you think they know what they are doing?

"There has been no nasty external shock in that time (global financial crisis, pandemic, collapse in commodity prices etc) ... . I can’t recall another change that large that quickly, in the absence of a major external shock, in the 27 years since the Bank started publishing these forward tracks."

So why did they cut now, when price inflation is still out there, when three months ago they insisted they wouldn't, and couldn't?

"It was simply because Orr and the Monetary Policy Committee [at the Bank] badly misread how the economy was unfolding now ... Other commentators have used the label 'U-turn.' I prefer flip-flop myself."

I'd suggest it's the simple incompetence of the monetary stabilisers, tilting at the same old windmills with the hope of a different result. The programme of the stabilisers ("we know how to put inflation back into the bottle" they crow, then prove they can produce only the destruction of boom and bust) has always and everywhere been destructive. Hayek nailed the stabilisers decades ago, placing the blame for “the exceptional severity and duration of the Great Depression” squarely on central banks’ “experiment” in “forced credit expansion” first to stabilise prices and then to combat the resulting depression.

Hayek defiantly declared: “We must not forget that ... monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilisers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.”

It's the kind of thing you need nailed up above the Reserve Bank's door. At least some of us have it on the back of a shirt.

So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't give central bankers the keys to the whole monetary system.

"To repeat one of my consistent lines, human beings are fallible, they make mistakes. Central banks – here and abroad – are made up of humans, so they make mistakes. Really serious ones, of the sort seen in the last few years, shouldn’t happen but they do. One might even offer perspectives in mitigation: the pandemic was something quite extraordinary, and many people (here and abroad) misread the macroeconomics of it for too long. But those responsible need to take responsibility for the mistakes that were made."

~ Michael Reddell from his post 'Still avoiding responsibility'

Few people truly understand the destructive present relationship between interest rates and central banks. Daniel Lacalle points out the toxicity in this guest post, and suggests a way out ...

Central Banks Are Wrong about Rate Cuts

by Daniel Lacalle

When we talk about monetary policy, people do not understand the importance of interest rates reflecting the reality of inflation and risk. Interest rates are the price of risk and manipulating them down leads to bubbles that end in financial crises, while imposing too high rates can penalize the economy. Ideally, interest rates would flow freely and there would be no central bank to fix them.

A price signal as important as interest rates reflecting the true amount of money would prevent the creation of bubbles and, above all, the disproportionate accumulation of risk. The risk of fixing rates too high does not exist when central banks impose "reference rates," as they will always make it easier for state borrowing—artificial currency creation—in the most convenient—what they call “no distortions”—and cheap way.

Many analysts say that central banks do not impose interest rates; they only reflect what the market demands. Surprisingly, if that were the case, we wouldn’t have financial traders stuck to screens [before every central bank announcement] waiting to decipher what the rate decision is going to be. Moreover, if the central bank only responds to market demand, it is a good reason to let interest rates float freely.

Citizens perceive that raising interest rates with high inflation is harmful; however, they do not seem to understand that what was really destructive was having negative real and nominal interest rates in the business cycle's earlier phase. That’s what encourages economic agents to take far more risks than we can take, and to disguise excess debt with a false sense of security. At the same time, it is surprising that citizens praise low rates but then complain that home prices and risky assets rise too fast!

Shifting the Blame

Inflation is a huge advantage for the currency issuer. It blames everyone and everybody for the rise in prices, except for the only thing that makes aggregate prices go up, consolidate that increase, and continue to rise, even at a more moderate rate: printing much more currency than the private economy demands and setting rates well below the real risk levels.

The benefit of statism is that it puts the blame for high interest rates on banks, just as it blames supermarkets for high and rising consumer prices.

Who prints currency and disguises risk? Of course, we look at the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Fed and the local Reserve Bank, who all dictate the increase in money supply through repurchases and fixed interest rates. However, central banks do not buy back state assets, print money, or impose negative real interest rates because they are evil alchemists. They do so because the state’s deficit—which is artificial monetary creation—remains unsustainable, public debt is atrophied, and state solvency is worsened by imbalanced public accounts. The central bank is not responsible for implementing fiscal policy. Thus, the state is the one that prints money out of nowhere and passes the imbalance to the citizens through inflation and taxes.

No wonder politicians are always so eager to shift the blame.

In a genuinely open unhampered economy, banks do not create money out of nowhere; they lend to real projects that are expected to be repaid with interest, and those loans have collateral. If commercial banks created money out of nowhere, none of them would go bankrupt. They only create money out of nowhere when regulation imposes risk-disconnected rates and eliminates the need for capital to sustain the government by accumulating its bonds and loans under the false construction that they are “no-risk assets.” Thus, the castle of cards built under the disguise of public-sector risk always creates inflation, financial crises, secular stagnation, and liquidity traps. The amount of money created goes to unproductive expenditure, destroys the purchasing power of the currency, impoverishes citizens, and at the same time decapitalises the most fragile companies, SMEs (small and medium enterprises). 

That’s what they call the social use of money. Seriously.

Hikes or cuts?

The ECB has announced a possible interest rate cut in June that is in danger of being premature and wrong. First, because money supply, credit demand, and supply are rebounding, and inflation remains persistent and above the 2% target. Furthermore, the underlying trend is a much higher inflation level than the ECB’s target, even after two changes in the CPI calculation. After a 20% accumulated consumer price level since 2019, calling victory on inflation after two changes in the calculation of CPI and still elevated core inflation is insane. If we see the rise in non-replaceable goods prices, we can understand why citizens are angry. Real non-replaceable goods’ CPI is probably closer to 4-5% per year.

The ECB rate hikes are signalled by many market participants as the cause of the euro zone’s stagnation, but curiously, no one mentions that the euro area was already experiencing massive stagnation due to negative interest rates earlier in the phase. Besides, if you need to have real negative rates to “grow,” you’re not growing but accumulating toxic risk. 

The ECB knows that the base effect, which played in favour of year-on-year inflation in 2023, will not be supportive in 2024. They also know that monetary aggregates were down a few months ago but are rebounding, and that the supply of credit has not collapsed. The ECB, like every other non-deluded central bank in the known world, knows that inflation is a monetary phenomenon and that there is no such thing as so-called cost-push inflation, “greedflation,” or similar statist excuses. None of those factors can cause aggregate prices to soar, consolidate, or continue to rise; it is only the destruction of the currency’s purchasing power that causes inflation.

Of course, no central bank will acknowledge that inflation is its fault, among other things, because no central bank increases the money supply at will but to finance an unsustainable public deficit. However, no central bank will challenge a financial structure that is based on the myth that public debt is risk-free. Central banks know that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, which is why they attack rising consumer prices with rate hikes and money supply reductions. They just do it mildly because governments benefit from inflation.

Eurozone cuts?

The problem of lowering interest rates now, when there is no evidence of having controlled inflation and achieved a target that already erodes the purchasing power of the currency by 2% annually, is to fall into the narrative that the eurozone is in a poor economic situation because of monetary policy when it is due to the wrong fiscal policy, the disaster of the Next Generation EU Funds, whose failure is already only comparable to the forgotten "think big" Juncker Plan, a shortsighted and destructive energy, agricultural, and industrial policy, and a taxation system that shifts innovation and technology to other countries.

The ECB is aware that interest rates are not high and that the system’s money supply has not decreased as expected. In fact, it continues to repurchase outstanding bonds and will not carry out a significant reduction in its balance sheet in real terms until the end of the year. Lowering interest rates now includes the risk of depreciating the euro against the dollar and thus increasing the euro area’s import bill in real terms, reducing the inflow of reserves into the eurozone, and further encouraging public spending and government debt that has not been contained in countries like Italy and Spain, which boast of “growing” by massively increasing debt and where inflation, moreover, is not under control. 

All this reminds us of the mistakes of the past when Greece boasted to be the EU’s growth engine, and many said that Germany was Europe’s “sick member.” The ECB cannot pretend to be the Bank of Japan for two reasons: the eurozone lacks the luxury of Japanese society’s dollar savings structure or its iron citizen discipline, and, above all, because the failure of Japan’s ultra-Keynesianism has brought the yen to a 35-year low against the dollar.

(To those who say that the euro and the ECB are Europe's main problem however, I recommend that you exercise your imagination of what Spain, Portugal, or Italy would be with their own currency and populist governments printing as if Argentina were Switzerland. You don’t have to imagine it; remember when these countries had an inflation rate of 14–15% and they destroyed savings and real wages with the falsehood of “competitive” devaluations? It wasn't that long ago.)

* * * * 

Daniel Lacalle, PhD, economist and fund manager, is the author of the bestselling books Freedom or Equality (2020), Escape from the Central Bank Trap (2017), The Energy World Is Flat​ (2015), and Life in the Financial Markets (2014). He is a professor of global economy at IE Business School in Madrid.
Ranked as one of the top twenty most influential economists in the world in 2016 and 2017 by Richtopia, he holds the CIIA financial analyst title, with a postgraduate degree in higher business studies and a master’s degree in economic investigation. He is a member of the advisory board of the Rafael del Pino Foundation and Commissioner of the Community of Madrid in London.
Lacalle is a regular collaborator with CNBC, Bloomberg TV, BBC, Hedgeye, Seeking Alpha, Business Insider, Mises Institute, and the Epoch Times as well as an occasional consultant for the World Economic Forum, Focus Economics, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other major news publications around the world.

His article first appeared at the Mises Wire.

 

This guest post by Soham Patil is for everyone who still thinks that falling prices are a bad thing, and that rising prices are, somehow, good...

CNN Is Wrong. "Deflation" Is a Good Thing.

by Soham Patil

A recent video by CNN states that lower prices are bad for the economy, and that consumers must get used to the newer, higher prices. The video goes so far as to say, “We’re never going to pay 2019 prices again.” The video claims that deflation is responsible for a long list of problems including layoffs, high unemployment, and falling incomes. Americans should simply get used to paying more and more each year, they say, and be happy about it. Except, so-called "deflation" -- falling prices, caused by rising productivity rather than by monetary collapse — is actually good for consumers despite the contentions of inflation-supporting economists.

The conclusion that inflation is a good thing is reached by the mishandling of economic terms. While Austrian economics accepts that "inflation" when used accurately is the expansion of the money supply, mainstream economics contends that inflation is simply an increase in the general price level in an economy however it is caused. This skewed definition allows one to erroneously conclude that inflation causes prosperity by raising profits and incomes through higher consumer prices. The problem with this is that “price inflation” (rising prices) is also often caused by real inflation: i..e, the increase of the money supply. An increase in the money supply comes from the creation of additional units of money. The wealth of savers is diluted by the expansion of the money supply, which leads to the hardships many Americans face.

Further, while the video contends that the pandemic may have caused rising prices, it cannot explain the continual growth of prices even after the effects of the pandemic have subsided. The pandemic is not responsible for the continual trend of increasing prices; the growth of the money supply is.

Figure 1: The M2 in the United States, 1959–2024

Source: FRED. Data from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

While the money supply of US dollars has increased steadily over the past few decades, a significant jump can be seen after 2019 when the Federal Reserve’s expansionary monetary policies caused a great rise in the money supply. This growth, uncompensated by additional production due to the pandemic, caused the price inflation that many now blame solely on the pandemic. The truth is that if the pandemic were the cause of prices rising a significant amount, the absence of the pandemic should account for a proportionally drastic deflationary period afterward. This never occurred, and thus the money supply paints a more honest picture of inflation than any index of a collection of prices ever could.

Rising prices are obviously troublesome for both consumers and producers (everyone faces rising costs). By contrast, deflation (falling prices) is often a good thing. "Deflation" in simple terms simply means that the same unit of money is worth more today than it was yesterday. Consumers thus can buy more today than they could yesterday. Instead of actively being impoverished during conditions of rising prices, during times of gently falling prices consumers would instead be made richer. There are two contrasting ways that we might see falling prices: when productivity increases faster than the money supply (a very good thing), or when the money supply collapses after a failed inflationary boom (almost always a bad thing). Unfortunately, both good and bad are tarred with the same semantic brush.

The reason many economists are quick to champion inflationary booms as somehow creating prosperity is because central banks have previously used expansionary monetary policies to temporarily boost the economy by increasing aggregate demand. Several of these policies, often specifically lowering interest rates, cause a boom-bust cycle. When the money supply is expanded and cheap credit is abundant, firms are able to take on ambitious projects that they may not have been able to previously. Malinvestment results from the unsustainable credit expansion created by extremely low interest rates. There is greater demand for the factors of production, and an increase is seen in conventional metrics of economic growth such as gross domestic product.

During the process of malinvestment, an increase in employment occurs due to the firms having access to cheap and easy credit, allowing for greater business spending. However, when firms lose access to cheap and easy credit due to the central banks having to prioritise cutting inflation, jobs are lost. These job losses are not the fault of the deflation but rather of the malinvestment during the false economic booms. Without malinvestment and inflation, resources would have been invested in more-profitable endeavours, making better use of these resources.

Artificially cheap credit causes a misallocation of resources by skewing price information. Eventually, a bust must follow the boom. In this period, deflation often occurs due to market actors coming to more-realistic valuations of the factors of production. After these realistic valuations come about, consumers are able to pay less for their goods and services . . . at least until the central bank causes the next boom-bust cycle.

In conclusion, it would be wrong to pinpoint deflation as a potential issue for the economy. To do so would be to conflate the cause and effect of how money supply affects an economy. Contrary to CNN’s video, the Federal Reserve throughout its history has not helped the cause of consumers, evidenced by the exponential growth of prices since its foundation.

* * * * 

Soham Patil is a high school senior at Symbiosis International School. He is passionate about Austrian Economics and Philosophy.

 

His post first appeared at the Mises Wire.

You would think that when serious problems exist in the world, the world would be desperate to understand the causes. Yet causality, as a field of inquiry, is in decline. The great tragedy, as Finn Andreen explains in this guest post, is that discovering the real and underlying causes for social and economic problems is too often deemed unnecessary (and far too often wilfully ignored), and the public’s support instead is too often for easy, simple, and wrong-headed statist solutions ...

Libertarianism and the Importance of Understanding Causality

by Finn Andreen

Even though support for the free market has become stronger in the last decades, and a self-proclaimed libertarian just elected to President in Argentina, libertarianism itself can still only be considered a fringe movement. Most people still believe that many social problems are due to “market failure” and therefore require state intervention to be “solved.” Despite the obvious flaws of modern socialism—with its unlikely combination of a redistributive welfare state and globalist crony capitalism—and despite libertarianism’s robust philosophical and empirical foundations, the liberalism of Ludwig von Mises is still far from enjoying the majority support that it so amply deserves.

There are many reasons for this. Of course, media bias and public education prevent the dissemination of the ideas of freedom in society and limit the understanding of the free market. However, an often overlooked, yet equally important, reason is a general disregard for causality. When the real and underlying causes for social and economic problems are unknown or misunderstood, the public’s support for wrong-headed statist solutions to these problems is not surprising.

The Importance of Causes

The importance of causes to human inquiry has been grasped since early antiquity, crystalising with Aristotle and his still seminal theory of causality. Following in this tradition, Herbert Spencer considered the discovery of causal laws the essence of science; those who disregard the importance of the identification of causes, he argued -- whatever the subject matter -- are liable to draw erroneous conclusions.

In the Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche chastised modern society for still making errors of causality, namely, “the error of false causality,” “the error of imaginary causes,” and “the error of the confusion of cause and effect.” Unfortunately, these errors are made all too frequently in economic and political life.

In the realm of international relations, for instance, a disregard for contemporary history has led to an ignorance of the real causes of serious political events. Today’s conflicts could arguably have been avoided if their many and deep causes had been soberly and objectively considered by decision-makers. When George Santayana said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and when George Orwell wrote in his masterpiece 1984 that mastering the past is the key to mastering the present, both had in mind the crucial importance of knowing the actual causes of political events.

Nietzsche considered the error of the confusion of cause and effect to be the most dangerous one; he called it the “intrinsic perversion of reason.” This was not an exaggeration, considering the impact of this all-too-common reversal of causality. For example, this error happens when the state is absolved of the nefarious consequences of its previous actions, thereby empowering the state to legitimise policies that “solve” problems for which the state was itself originally responsible.

Examples: Recessions, Inflation, and Unemployment

As an example, it is possible to mention the boom-and-bust cycles of the typical state capitalist economy. The original cause for this cycle is the state, through its monopolistic monetary policy. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “The business cycle is generated by government: specifically, by bank credit expansion promoted and fueled by governmental expansion of bank reserves.”

Yet, during hard times—because this original cause of recessions is not generally recognised—the state itself is looked to by society to “save” the economy through measures such as bailouts or interest rate reductions (which mostly benefit big banks and strategic industries). This in turn sets the stage for the next artificial boom, and the cycle continues.

The problem of high inflation and high unemployment may be seen in the same way. Price inflation is caused by the state when its central bank increases the money supply to pay for its chronic budget deficits, with the added benefit of reducing the relative size of its enormous debt. Yet, when prices increase in the economy because of such actions, then the central bank itself is expected to come to the rescue—for instance, by artificially imposing price controls or hiking interest rates, thus slowing economic activity—to the further detriment of society.

High unemployment is also a phenomenon caused by the state, of course, when it imposes rigid labour laws and high taxation on companies, while redistributing “generous” unemployment benefits. Yet, when unemployment becomes “too” high because of these actions, then the state itself is expected to solve the problem—for instance, by providing tax incentives to companies for hiring low-skilled workers or by hiring more civil servants.

The Fallacy of “Market Failure”

It seems counterintuitive to believe that an agent responsible for social problems should also be the one to solve those problems. The only reason this flawed logic continues to be accepted is because of errors of causality. The real causes for economic problems are not well understood by the general public and are often confused with its consequences. In economics, this disregard for causal connections has probably wrecked as much damage upon societies as the international conflicts mentioned earlier by giving free rein to those who see few limits to the state’s regulation of economic and social life.

The same reasoning is applicable to an aspect that is usually blamed on the free market: so-called “externalities,” or the “external” costs that third parties sometimes bear. The extreme case of this is the concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” which is often used to justify the many globalist “green” initiatives to “fight” climate change. Quite apart from whether there are apocalyptic grounds to support such extreme social top-down policies, the libertarian view is that the real cause of many “externalities” is generally that private property rights have not been adequately defined.

Since causality is disregarded, social and economic problems such as those mentioned earlier are generally attributed to so-called “market failure,” thereby reducing the credibility of libertarianism among the general public. Indeed, libertarianism is usually rejected by the majority as a political and economic system because social problems are attributed erroneously to an incapability of the free market to provide solutions. There is rarely any perception that the real causes of these problems are statist interventions in the free market in the first place.

Libertarians have always recognized the importance of causality, as per the title of Mises’s magnum opus Human Action. Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, explicitly mentioned that, as an important means of gaining insight into economic processes, he had “devoted special attention to the investigation of the causal connections.” Importantly, this was not only the position of the Austrian School at the time: “the search for these causal laws of reality was very much an international enterprise among economists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and up to World War I.” However, for several sad and tragic reasons, this focus on causal connections in economic research was then lost.

As this article has tried to show, it is essential for causality in both economics and politics to be better understood -- by politicians, economists, and the general public. 

This is key to rein in the authoritarian inroads from governments that are taking place in all areas of life. 

And by demonstrating that the market only fails when it is constantly disrupted by state intervention, a better understanding of causal connections would also lead to an increase in the appreciation and popularity of libertarianism.

In fact, it would improve the standard of thinking all round.

* * * * * 

There are always headwinds that resist the forces of progress, and tailwinds that push progress forward. Furthermore, outlines Peter Boettke in this Guest Post, the economic history of humanity is made up of the story of this battle between headwinds and tailwinds. Just imagine it as a three-horse race between two great economists and a nag ...

Imagine a Horse Race Between Smith, Schumpeter, and Stupidity

by Peter Boettke

We economists have been the object of ridicule for centuries. [Deservedly so, for the most part. - Ed.] We supposedly know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The stress on scarcity and choice within constraints is seen as raining on the hope and aspirations for a better world.

In my book The Four Pillars of Economic Understanding, I try to counter these criticisms by pointing out that,  by capturing the beauty of the complex coordination of commercial society, the message of basic economics not only provides truth and light to uninitiated would-be students of society. It also conveys the hope that entrepreneurship offers for the discovery of new and fascinating products, and the implementation of new rules of social interaction which enable productive specialisation and peaceful social cooperation.

It does so with a sense of deep compassion for the least advantaged, who most benefit from the unleashing of economic forces to alleviate extreme poverty, and raises the material standards of living of people. Economic freedom brings with it progress and peace.

Unfortunately, economics is often taught as an abstract discipline with abstract examples to illustrate. Don’t get me wrong, abstraction is a necessary intellectual tool. Our theories must be logically sound, and as such must be empirically relevant. That requires discipline of thought and expression. Economics is not poetry, and neither is moral philosophy and political economy. We must practice these distinct but related disciplines with the utmost of intellectual care.

Why must we do that, you ask? Wouldn’t it be so much more inspiring to spin fanciful tales of better worlds to inspire the youth?

I want to say NO. James Buchanan, my teacher, argued that what we needed was to articulate a vision in political economy of a “workable utopia.” Hayek earlier had argued that we need a vision of a “liberal utopia,” and that we had to excite the imaginations of the best and the brightest to explore the workings of a free society — a true radical liberalism. But in both Hayek and Buchanan, the idea was to have these “utopias” firmly grounded in the teachings of basic economic reasoning.

As Hayek argued in his 1945 essay “Individualism: True and False,” the idea was to find a social system that relied not on individuals becoming better versions of themselves for its operation, but which made use of individuals as they are — sometimes smart, more often stupid; sometimes good, but capable of being bad. In fact, the idea was to have a system not where the best and the brightest could rule over others, but where bad men if they were to find themselves in charge could do least harm. In this way, freedom could be granted to all, and not restricted to only a few.

This is why Adam Smith’s critical idea of the invisible hand is so vital to our understanding of commercial life: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker and the brewer that we can expect our dinner, he explained, but from appealing to their self-interest. We cannot rely on friendship and fellow feelings to secure for us the material progress required to lift us from the Malthusian trap of subsistence. We escape that Malthusian trap through expansions of the trade and technological innovations spurred by the gains realized from turning scientific knowledge into commercially useful knowledge as the great economic historian Joel Mokyr has so convincingly argued throughout his career. To put it another way, borrowing from Mokyr, there are always headwinds that resist the forces of progress, and tailwinds that push progress forward, and the economic history of humanity is made up of the story of this battle between headwinds and tailwinds.

That metaphor is a useful one to keep in mind when thinking about our current situation, and where the primary winds are coming from — public sector, private sector, independent sector, or some combination. What are the headwinds that seem to block the timely and honest communication of knowledge about public health issues to us, for example; what are the headwinds that delay testing and medical innovations; what are the headwinds that keep the allocation of scarce yet critical medical resources from being allocated to their most urgent use?

On the other hand, where are the tailwinds coming from that will cut against those headwinds and push us forward to make progress against the reality of the current situation? When the history of our recent times comes to be written, obviously a serious accounting of the headwinds and tailwinds will need to take place.

After 2008, in my effort to try to communicate basic economic reasoning to make sense of the reality we were collectively experiencing, I started to utilise my own metaphors and analogies. One was to look at Michael Phelps, the great Olympic swimmer, and to ask my readers to imagine what would happen to his ability to swim across a pool if we first just tied his hands together.

Well it turns out that Phelps gets across the pool in a slower time using the breaststroke than he does freestyle, but still at amazing speed. How about if we tied his feet together as well? Well, again, Phelps is one of the best butterfly swimmers that the world has ever seen, so that dolphin kick would not be impeded by tying his feet together. But again, much slower than his freestyle. How about if we added a 250-pound weight to his waist?

At that point, he would sink to the bottom of the pool. The point I am trying to make however is that you would never say that under those circumstances Phelps’s failure to get across the pool represents swimmer failure. The failure is clearly due to the obstructions placed on his ability to swim. That, I argue, is the error we make when, in the context of highly regulated market economies, we continue as economic educators in discussing “market failure.”

Adam Smith long ago recognised that individuals can find workarounds and ingenious ways to realise gains from trade and gains from innovation even in the presence of what he identified as hundreds of impertinent obstructions which human folly may put in the way.

This led me to articulate another example in hopes of communicating an important economic lesson. To capture the idea of gains from trade and gains from innovation in the face of those impertinent obstructions, I asked readers to envision a horse race between three horses — one named Smith (for gains from trade), a second one named Schumpeter (for gains from innovation), and a third one named Stupidity (for those government-imposed obstructions).

My basic ideas was, following Smith, that as long as the Smith and the Schumpeter horses were running ahead of the Stupid horse, tomorrow will be better than today. The counter-factual is this: what if the Smith and Schumpeter horses were able to run freely, without that Stupid horse biting at their heels and bumping into them rather than staying in their lane.

...

Thankfully, those Smith and Schumpeterian horses are younger, fitter, faster and more nimble. Once unleashed, it is my sincere hope that they will burst out and catch up quickly to that dumb old hag of a horse Stupidity. They will leave Stupidity in its wake, and tomorrow will be better than today.

So, let’s get those tailwinds blowing harder than the headwinds, stop tying down our entrepreneurs, and let those Smith and Schumpeter horses run freely. 

Our greatest reason for hope is to be found not in bumbling bureaucrats [or self-important politicians] who attempt to lead from ossified institutions of authority, but in the erring entrepreneurs who have their judgements constantly contested by others and only the most nimble and creative are able to negotiate the turbulent times to provide the solutions to our woes.

Peter J. Boettke is a Senior Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research. He is a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, as well as the Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Boettke is a former Fulbright Fellow at the University of Economics in Prague, a National Fellow at Stanford University, and Hayek Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics.

His post, of which this is an excerpt, first appeared at the blog of the American Institute for Economic Research.

What's ESG? What's ZIRP? -- and why should you care?

ZIRP (zero-interest rate policies) characterises the cheap credit that has flooded out of central banks in the last decade or more. 

ESG (environmental, social, and governance) is the dripping wet "stakeholder" theory that demands that so-called "ethical investors" should direct companies to undertake more politically-correct projects. It is the stakeholder theory route to collectivism.

Fortunately, as Peter Earle explains in this guest post, shareholders and consumers are starting to flex their muscles, and the credit contraction is making a lot of what was formerly cheap very expensive.

ESG as an Artifact of ZIRP

Guest post by Peter C. Earle

Founding myths tend to be mired in obscurity, and like many other investment trends, the roots of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) philosophies are unclear.

The founding of the World Economic Forum is one origin. Stakeholder theory is another of ESG’s clear antecedents, especially as formalised in R. Edward Freeman’s 1984 book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. The 2004 World Bank report “Who Cares Wins: Connecting Financial Markets to a Changing World” is another contender, providing as it did guidelines for firms to integrate ESG practices into their daily operations. And the publication of the reporting framework United Nations Principles for Responsible Investing in April 2006 (the most recent version of which can be found here) was another.

Its origins however are less important than the destruction it has caused.

Wherever it began, ESG clearly hit its stride within the last five to ten years. Those were heady times for bankers and financiers, first characterised by zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) and then, during the pandemic, by massively expansionary monetary and fiscal programs. Yet in the last two years or so, the prevailing economic circumstances have changed considerably. Inflation at four-decade highs is battering firms by raising the cost of doing business. It is also negatively impacting corporate revenues, as consumers retrench by cutting back on expenditures.

Nowhere are these effects more evident than in shareholder land, where the fourth-quarter 2022 S&P 500 earnings season is just about over. “Earnings quality” is an evaluation of the soundness of current corporate earnings and, consequently, how well they are likely to predict future earnings. For the past year, and certainly for the last quarter, the quality of earnings has been abysmal. One particular element – “accruals,” or cashless earnings – are their highest reported level ever, according to UBS. In that same report, we find the somewhat shocking revelation that nearly one in three Russell 3000 index constituents is unprofitable.

For those and other reasons, a theme in many of the fourth-quarter corporate earnings reports has been cost-cutting: Disney, Newscorp, eBay, Boeing, Alphabet, Dell, General Motors, and a handful of investment banks are all eliminating jobs and slashing unnecessary expenses. And although firms regularly write off the value of certain assets and goodwill, that process accelerates during recessions. 

Firms are additionally contending with the highest interest rates they’ve faced since 2007, and in some cases back to 2001. A substantial amount of corporate debt assumed at lower interest rates is now more costly to service, as a generation of managers grapple with a world of interest rates (and its effects) that they've never seen before.

Dividend payments for example, typically considered sacrosanct during all but the most severe financial straits, are being targeted for savings. February 24th in Fortune:

Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer processors, this week slashed its dividend payment to the lowest level in 16 years in an effort to preserve cash and help turn around its business. Hanesbrands Inc., a century-old apparel maker, earlier this month eliminated the quarterly dividend it started paying nearly a decade ago. VF Corp., which owns Vans, The North Face, and other brands, also cut its dividend in recent weeks as it works to reduce its debt burden … Retailers in particular face declining profits, as persistent inflation also erodes consumers’ willingness to spend. So far this year, as many as 17 companies in the Dow Jones US Total Stock Index cut their dividends, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

All of this suggests two things.

First, if large firms are doing everything they can to reduce unnecessary overhead, then feel-good initiatives and other corporate baubles are likely to face the chopping block – even if quietly. ESG observance is one of those very costly trinkets, bringing as it does compliance costs, legal costs, measurement costs, and opportunity costs. The reporting requirements alone associated with upholding ESG standards are high, and rising. In 2022, two studies attempted to estimate those costs:

Corporate Issuers are currently spending an average of more than $675,000 per year on climate-related disclosures, and institutional investors are spending nearly $1.4 million on average to collect, analyze and report climate data, according to a new survey released by the SustainAbility Institute by ERM … The survey gathered data from 39 corporate issuers from across multiple U.S. sectors, with a market cap range of under $1 billion to over $200 billion, and 35 institutional investors representing a total of $7.2 trillion of AUM … The SEC has released its own estimates for complying with its proposed rules, predicting first year costs at $640,000, and annual ongoing costs for issuers at $530,000. The study explored the specific elements covered by the SEC requirements, and found that issuers on average spend $533,000 on these, in line with the SEC estimates. Elements not included in the SEC requirements included costs related to proxy responses to climate-related shareholder proposals, and costs for activities including developing and reporting on low-carbon transition plans, and for stakeholder engagement and government relations.

Difficulty measuring costs means difficulty budgeting for them. Another recent report commented:

Although it is inherently difficult to assess the costs [of ESG], it is fair to anticipate significant costs for ambitious ESG goals. In an article in The Economist, a specific cost estimate was made in relation to offset a company’s entire carbon footprint. This was estimated to cost about 0.4 percent of annual revenues. This could already be a huge component for many companies, but it is only one aspect of merely one ESG factor.

Yet that comment concludes with the kind of assurance that flows effortlessly from consultants well-positioned to, frankly, make a lot of money off of ESG compliance: “However, there is no real choice. The climate certainly cannot wait.” Given the recent backlash against ESG, whether driven by ideology or accounting, it’s clear that there is a real choice, and that choice is being invoked with increasing frequency throughout the commercial world.

Second, the recent explosion of ESG adoption may have been in the spirit, if not embodying a strictly theoretical manifestation, of malinvestment as predicted by Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). 

Without engaging in a lengthy discussion of ABCT, artificially-low interest rates (interest rates set by policymakers instead of markets) undercut the natural rate of interest, misleading entrepreneurs and business managers. Many years of negligible interest rates, indeed negative real rates, have given rise to bubble-like firms, projects, and I would argue, by extension, business concepts. The latter, which include but are not limited to ESG, seem feasible and arguably essential when the money spigots are open. When interest rates normalise and sobriety re-obtains, cost structures reassert themselves. It’s back to the business of business. 

Interest rates are now beginning to normalise. And, perhaps, business practices with them.

Gone are the salad days of easy money, and with it the schmaltzy wishlists of niceties which a decade of monetary expansion permitted activists to blithely force upon corporate executives. In the face of rising interest rates, an uncertain path for inflation, budget-constrained consumers, and rapidly deteriorating corporate earnings, shareholders are likely to take a closer look at how and where their money is being spent than they have in some time. 

Although it is unlikely to disappear completely, the ESG fad is probably past the crest of its popularity. It’s time again for firms to focus, singularly and completely, on the inestimable task of making money.

* * * * 

Peter C. Earle is an economist who joined the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in 2018. Prior to that he spent over 20 years as a trader and analyst at a number of securities firms and hedge funds in the New York metropolitan area. His research focuses on financial markets, monetary policy, and problems in economic measurement. He has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, NPR, and in numerous other media outlets and publications. Pete holds an MA in Applied Economics from American University, an MBA (Finance), and a BS in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

His post first appeared at the AIER blog.

'The Most Important Factor in The Economy Is Flashing A Huge Warning Sign'

Source: TheChartStore.Com, and the post: 

'The Most Important Factor in The Economy Is Flashing A Huge Warning Sign'

"The wavelike movement effecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion.”

~ Ludwig von Mises, from his chapter titled 'The Monetary or Circulation Credit Theory of the Trade Cycle,' quoted in the post 'The Most Important Factor in The Economy Is Flashing A Huge Warning Sign'

Source: Board of Governors St Louis Fed, and the post: 

'The Most Important Factor in The Economy Is Flashing A Huge Warning Sign'

"The economic damage is done during the boom...."

"An under-appreciated idea of the Austrian School of economics: 

    "The economic damage is done during the boom. The bust does not destroy wealth, it's just the accounting catching up to the reality."

~ Keith Weiner, an economist of the New Austrian School

Shamubeel Eaqub is an idiot

HERE'S MY ADVICE: DON'T take your recession advice from so-called economist Shamubeel Eaqub, who says this morning in preparation for his "thinking" that "household consumption, at two-thirds of the economy, is a big component.... People think [for example] household consumption is only down 1%, no big deal," he says, "but when it’s two-thirds of the economy, it’s important.”

Yes, household consumption is important. But household consumption is not two-thirds of the economy -- and only an idiot or a poorly-trained economist would say so. Household spending is, at best, only around 30% of the economy. Fully two-thirds of all economic spending is not by households, as idiots like Eaqub seem to think, but business-to-business spending -- which is more than double what households spend on themselves, and is what is really keeping all the wheels spinning. And if household consumption spending is down by 1%, by his example, then if that were to mean they were saving that 1% for a rainy day, then that saved money is actually being spent by the part of the economy that really is two-thirds of the economy.

Yes, it's conventional wisdom that consumption spending drives the economy.

Yes, you will hear it from newsmen and alleged economists.

Yes, you can read it almost everywhere.

Such a pity then that it's dead wrong. Insanely and destructively wrong.

YOU SEE, THE FACT IS that consumers don't drive more than two-thirds of the economy at all. This is just horse shit on a stick.Yes, that's what it looks like if all you read are GDP statistics. But the GDP statistics don't measure all the spending that happens in an economy. Specifically, they don't measure that vast bulk of business-to-business spending -- i..e., the productive spending that constitutes the majority of spending and income payments in the economy. In other words, for the stuff that really makes the economy go round.

If you do want to measure that, and you should if you want to keep an eye on how businesses are going, then it's not GDP you need to look at (too much of which is only an incentive for governments to try juicing up this figure ) then you need to look at a measure called Gross Output which, sadly, neither our Treasury nor our Stats Department bothers to do. 

U.S. business-to-business spending compared to consumer spending, 2005-22.

Source: 'Supply Chain Business Still Growing: Recession Fears May Not Pass GO'

Nonetheless, as economist George Reisman explains it, this productive expenditure constitutes "all the expenditures made by business firms in buying capital goods of all descriptions and in paying wages,"

Capital goods include machinery, materials, components, supplies, lighting, heating, and advertising. In contrast to productive expenditure, consumption expenditure is expenditure not for the purpose of making subsequent sales, but for any other purpose. In the terminology of contemporary economics, consumption expenditure is described as final expenditure. Productive expenditure could be termed intermediate expenditure. Implicitly or explicitly, productive expenditure is always made for the purpose of earning sales revenues greater than itself, i.e., is made for the purpose of earning a profit.

And this figure is huge! It is, he explains, 

an amount equal to the sum of all costs of goods sold in the economic system plus all of the expensed productive expenditures in the economic system. It is these costs which must be added to GDP to bring it up to a measure of the actual aggregate amount of spending for goods and services in the economic system... And because productive expenditure is the main form of spending, most spending in the economic system depends on saving. Even consumption expenditure depends on saving, inasmuch as saving is the basis of the payment of the wages out of which most consumption takes place.

Which means that it's not consumer spending that drives the economy at all: it's savings.

Just contemplate that for a moment. 

SO HOW CAN SUCH an enormous figure be hidden in the arithmetic? Well, I blame Keynes. Essentially that GDP figure is his; when the GDP (or National Income figure) is totted up it counts profits, but it ignores completely the costs required to make those profits, i.e., it completely ignores productive expenditure, which by any rational measure is the spending that drives everything. In Reisman's words, that means that "Keynesian macroeconomics is literally playing with half a deck.

It purports to be a study of the economic system as a whole, yet in ignoring productive expenditure it totally ignores most of the actual spending that takes place in the production of goods and services. It is an economics almost exclusively of consumer spending, not an economics of total spending in the production of goods and services.

And since its the production of goods and services that do make the economy go round, and pay most of our wages and salaries, it's probably not a bad idea to keep an eye on how they're paid for. 

How are they paid for, you ask? As it happens, they're paid for by those very savings economists like Eaqub don't favour.

TOO OFTEN, YOU'LL HEAR SOME of these alleged economists, like Eaqub, or politicians, especially Ministers of Finance, whining about something they call 'the paradox of thrift' -- they'll say that in times of recession people need to spend, spend, spend and if they don't -- if they save instead (the horror!) -- then everything will collapse in a heap. But this is just dumb. Saving doesn't mean "not spending." It simply means deciding to spend later, rather than spending it all now. And in the meantime, if that saved money goes into a bank instead of a hole in the ground, the money that people save goes into investment, which means it goes to producers (or would do if it weren't diluted by printing money to produce stimulus packages).

It's those stimulus responses, and the idiots' urge to keep spending, that at this stage of the business cycle are the most destructive.

And to ignore idiots like Eaqub who keep their eyes averted.

And being an economics almost exclusively of consumer spending it sees "stimuli" only in consumer terms.

But once you realise where most of the deck of cards resides -- i.e., in productive spending -- you really do see what you're doing with consumer stimulus packages: you're taking real resources away from the behemoth that really does drive the economy, which is productive expenditure, and you're pissing it up against a wall.

That might be popular, but in the long run it's just flat-out dumb.

RELATED:

• Standing Keynesian GDP on Its Head: Saving Not Consumption as the Main Source of Spending - George Reisman's Blog 

• Bastiat: 'What is Seen and Not Seen.'  
  "There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen."
• Bastiat: 'What is Money'  
  "I cry out against money, just because everybody confounds it, as you did just now, with riches, and that this confusion is the cause of errors and calamities without number.
• Rand: 'Egalitarianism & Inflation'  
  "If I told you that the precondition of inflation is psycho-epistemological—that inflation is hidden under the perceptual illusions created by broken conceptual links—you would not understand me. That is what I propose to explain and to prove."  And she does!