April 15, 2016

We are suffering from a well-disguised creative financial statism of monstrous proportions.

Sir, Dan McCrum writes: “it seems so inherently weird for about a third of debt issued by governments in the developed world to be bought and sold at negative yields” “Negative rates reverse assumptions about financial decisions” April 15.

Not weird at all: a) take away all central banks purchases of public debt with QEs, which helped to keep the saving glut intact or even increase it; b) get rid of regulations that assign the lowest risk weights and thereby the lowest capital requirements for banks to the borrowings of the sovereign monarch; c) stop what McRum mentions about “pension funds and insurers [having to] buy safe government debt irrespective of the price; and d) stop central banks from paying negative returns… and you would not see public debt bought and sold at negative rates.

What we are really suffering from is a well-disguised and utterly creative and non-transparent financial statism of montrous proportions.

The cost of all that is partly borne by savers and future pensioneers, but primarily by our children and grandchildren since the real economy will not grow as it could, consequence of all the credit opportunities denied “the risky” SMEs and entrepreneurs

@PerKurowski ©