dimanche 1 novembre 2009

Two choices

De Nic Lenoir, contributeur de Zero Hedge.

That leaves only two choices for governments: let the debt cycle take its course. Bankruptcies will rise further, real estate will devalue another 30%, equities will lose 65%, and we will start with a clean sheet. That will wipe out the baby-boomers who are the main asset holders. Note by the way that the correlation between the number of 45/55 year-olds in our society and equities is historically positive. The other solution is to print as much as needed to prevent that from happening. It will be very difficult because leverage will only find people with sound balance sheets who will pour the resources into assets, driving asset inflation at the expense of sound economic recovery. Also despite what politicians may think asset inflation is a lot worse for the lower and middle class than is the debt cycle, or maybe they are just cynical. In the end, there is little chance that governments will be able to coordinate their actions like they did last fall, because fear then was a lot greater than now, when consequences of today's actions can in fact be more dramatic than they were then... In the end I think we will experience cycles of injection and draining of liquidity trying to dance between the two evils.