Ah we begin the long journey of having a system so politically broken that the central bank must command its balance sheet to stop the rotten structure from collapsing, a la Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe.
This liquidity isn't a life boat. It's propping up corporations and people who have been dangerously over leveraged for years and who are beginning to become habituated to the notion of getting a government bailout when times get hard.
To the enlightened HN participants proclaiming that this is a necessary step to save an ailing economy facing an unprecedented crisis, consider the following:
1) this crisis was not that unprecedented and many companies had large enough balance sheets that they were able to weather it. Why are we rewarding corporate mismanagement? Have any of the corporations eligible for asset filed for bankruptcy or attempted an asset selloff to recover some liquidity?
2) the Main St. loan pool is much smaller than the Wall St one. Why do we expect smaller businesses to be better able to weather this crisis?
3) what is this cash infusion actually doing to tackle the exponential rise in unemployment? How does it help the taxpayer? It's not going to stimulate consumption in people who have lost their jobs and kickstart a recovery - the unemployed will likely be unemployed for months to come and the loan recipients will likely be so saddled with debt at the end of this that they won't experience growth again for years. There's no mandate that companies receiving emergency loans have to maintain their current workforce. The taxpayer receives no equity in the companies they have gone into debt to save.
4) given the size of these loans we may well be in another recession in 10-20 years and still have the majority of these loans outstanding. Do we then forgive these loans when the usual suspects need another round of cash infusions?
5) the Fed has set interest rates close to rock bottom for the better part of a decade (and backed down from raising them last year when Trump threatened bloody war) leading to a massive asset bubble and a business climate addicted to cheap liquidity. The message this bailout sends is that corporate over-leveraging is rewarded with a cash infusion, but god help the individual who took out a mortgage, car loan, etc. and lost their ability to keep up payments from coronavirus unemployment. Why is one type of entity granted access to public money in order to be spared from their bad decisions?
The scale of this debt is almost unfathomable and adds to an already overloaded Federal Reserve balance sheet. Other commenters have rightly pointed out how precarious this situation is in the longer term. I'm more worried about the callousness of the average person on this issue. American economics are so polluted with worship of great titans of business that nobody really seems that concerned that millions of Americans are facing perhaps permanent homelessness and long-term unemployment in the next few months.
Pumping failing businesses full of cash when millions of our citizens are struggling to buy food should not be normal. It is not a stepping stone of necessity to preserve our way of life. It is a choice to use capital to violate perhaps the most central tenet of capitalism: businesses must face the consequences when the punch bowl runs dry. This is socialism for corporations and we're all footing the bill.
Thank you for this explanation. So much of what I’ve been reading about the fed / stimulus response has felt rotten to the core, but I’ve lacked a clear explanation for exactly why.
It’s impossibly l to know how this will all play out over the next several decades, but the house of cards is teetering dangerously and when it crashes, it will be a tremendous fall.
This liquidity isn't a life boat. It's propping up corporations and people who have been dangerously over leveraged for years and who are beginning to become habituated to the notion of getting a government bailout when times get hard.
To the enlightened HN participants proclaiming that this is a necessary step to save an ailing economy facing an unprecedented crisis, consider the following:
1) this crisis was not that unprecedented and many companies had large enough balance sheets that they were able to weather it. Why are we rewarding corporate mismanagement? Have any of the corporations eligible for asset filed for bankruptcy or attempted an asset selloff to recover some liquidity?
2) the Main St. loan pool is much smaller than the Wall St one. Why do we expect smaller businesses to be better able to weather this crisis?
3) what is this cash infusion actually doing to tackle the exponential rise in unemployment? How does it help the taxpayer? It's not going to stimulate consumption in people who have lost their jobs and kickstart a recovery - the unemployed will likely be unemployed for months to come and the loan recipients will likely be so saddled with debt at the end of this that they won't experience growth again for years. There's no mandate that companies receiving emergency loans have to maintain their current workforce. The taxpayer receives no equity in the companies they have gone into debt to save.
4) given the size of these loans we may well be in another recession in 10-20 years and still have the majority of these loans outstanding. Do we then forgive these loans when the usual suspects need another round of cash infusions?
5) the Fed has set interest rates close to rock bottom for the better part of a decade (and backed down from raising them last year when Trump threatened bloody war) leading to a massive asset bubble and a business climate addicted to cheap liquidity. The message this bailout sends is that corporate over-leveraging is rewarded with a cash infusion, but god help the individual who took out a mortgage, car loan, etc. and lost their ability to keep up payments from coronavirus unemployment. Why is one type of entity granted access to public money in order to be spared from their bad decisions?
The scale of this debt is almost unfathomable and adds to an already overloaded Federal Reserve balance sheet. Other commenters have rightly pointed out how precarious this situation is in the longer term. I'm more worried about the callousness of the average person on this issue. American economics are so polluted with worship of great titans of business that nobody really seems that concerned that millions of Americans are facing perhaps permanent homelessness and long-term unemployment in the next few months.
Pumping failing businesses full of cash when millions of our citizens are struggling to buy food should not be normal. It is not a stepping stone of necessity to preserve our way of life. It is a choice to use capital to violate perhaps the most central tenet of capitalism: businesses must face the consequences when the punch bowl runs dry. This is socialism for corporations and we're all footing the bill.