It was Robert Rubin, special economic assistant to Clinton and later Treasury secretary, who worked out what has come to be known as Rubinomics, the strategy of dollar hegemony through the promotion of unregulated globalization of financial markets based on a fiat dollar that also forced deregulation on the US financial market. (See US dollar hegemony has got to go, Asia Times Online, April 11, 2002.)
The argument that financial market regulation would reduce US competitiveness because it would force US financial institutions to relocate overseas had assumed an air of immaculate logic in the ideological context of neo-liberal globalization during the Clinton years. That neo-liberal mentality set the stage for US government abdication of regulatory responsibility over the financial sector and allowed the free market to move towards the inescapable path of eventual self-destruction, despite historical experience of the Roaring Twenties and the New Deal having shown the need for regulation to rein in the suicidal excesses of financial free markets.
The neo-liberal strategy was set in motion with the help of an ever-accommodating Federal Reserve to supply more liquidity to foil even the slightest stock market correction on what Fed chairman Alan Greenspan observed as "irrational exuberance". Since for almost two decades the finance sector had grown faster than the real economy, most of the excess liquidity injected by the Fed went to develop serial debt bubbles that simply got bigger and bigger each time through financial innovations.
These ever-bigger bubbles were generated by increasingly sophisticated and complex debt instruments that carried synthetic credit ratings structured in linked hierarchies of risk exposures and marketed worldwide as "safe" investments to supposedly nondiscretionary conservative institutional investors managing the money of clients who normally were not in any position to take such risks. Such triple-rated "safe" investment-grade instruments were theoretically protected by a solid base of a large number of dispensable financial frontline yeomen instruments. The structured finance regime nevertheless mandates that when enough of the frontline yeomen die, the lords who depend on a tolerable yeomen survival rate for protection also fall into jeopardy.
Excessive cash injected into the bubble economy
Through much of the Clinton administration, the Greenspan Fed kept short-term interest rates too low for too long for a healthy economy, notwithstanding the alleged safety provided by sophisticated hedging of risks. Towards the end of the Clinton presidency, an abnormal term structure on interest rates was created in early 2000 by the Greenspan Fed finally raising short-term Fed Funds rate targets to fight inflation while the Treasury under Larry Summers was pushing down long-term rates by buying back 30-year Treasury bonds with funds from a Federal budget surplus derived from a debt bubble, flooding the market with excessive cash.
As all market participants know, an inverted rate curve is a classic signal for recession down the road. Yet silly talk of the "end of the business cycle" was extravagantly entertained by neo-liberal government economists, along with silly talk of the "end of history" by neo-conservative superpower strategists. The so-called "Goldilocks" economy fantasy of not too hot, not too cold, but just right, was born, along with the superpower fantasy that Goldilocks will pay for costly foreign wars of moral imperialism around the world without hurting the domestic economy. Goldilocks was called upon to provide the US with both guns and butter.
George W Bush won the November 2000 presidential election along with the bursting of the Clinton debt bubble. The Greenspan Fed again came to the rescue by turning on the fiat money spigot to fund a housing bubble mistaken as a miraculous boom, applauded by a grateful Congress overtaken with unquestioning awe and blind adulation normally reserved only for living gods. (See The Presidential Election Cycle Theory and the Fed, Asia Times Online, February 24, 2004).
The policy of moral imperialism brought spectacular terrorist attacks on the US homeland, forcing the Bush administration, less than nine months in office, to turn Clinton's foreign war of moral imperialism into a global war on terrorism that some have estimated will cost up to US$2 trillion or 20% of US gross domestic product, a cost even a Goldilocks economy cannot afford. The 9/11 2001 terrorist attacks on the US homeland gave the Fed a convenient excuse to flood the market with massive liquidity. The Goldilocks economy got a new lease on life from the global war on terrorism, allowing structured finance to blossom as a regime of global financial terror. The destruction of 9/11 goes pale against the still-unfolding destruction of the 2007 credit crunch.
The argument that financial market regulation would reduce US competitiveness because it would force US financial institutions to relocate overseas had assumed an air of immaculate logic in the ideological context of neo-liberal globalization during the Clinton years. That neo-liberal mentality set the stage for US government abdication of regulatory responsibility over the financial sector and allowed the free market to move towards the inescapable path of eventual self-destruction, despite historical experience of the Roaring Twenties and the New Deal having shown the need for regulation to rein in the suicidal excesses of financial free markets.
The neo-liberal strategy was set in motion with the help of an ever-accommodating Federal Reserve to supply more liquidity to foil even the slightest stock market correction on what Fed chairman Alan Greenspan observed as "irrational exuberance". Since for almost two decades the finance sector had grown faster than the real economy, most of the excess liquidity injected by the Fed went to develop serial debt bubbles that simply got bigger and bigger each time through financial innovations.
These ever-bigger bubbles were generated by increasingly sophisticated and complex debt instruments that carried synthetic credit ratings structured in linked hierarchies of risk exposures and marketed worldwide as "safe" investments to supposedly nondiscretionary conservative institutional investors managing the money of clients who normally were not in any position to take such risks. Such triple-rated "safe" investment-grade instruments were theoretically protected by a solid base of a large number of dispensable financial frontline yeomen instruments. The structured finance regime nevertheless mandates that when enough of the frontline yeomen die, the lords who depend on a tolerable yeomen survival rate for protection also fall into jeopardy.
Excessive cash injected into the bubble economy
Through much of the Clinton administration, the Greenspan Fed kept short-term interest rates too low for too long for a healthy economy, notwithstanding the alleged safety provided by sophisticated hedging of risks. Towards the end of the Clinton presidency, an abnormal term structure on interest rates was created in early 2000 by the Greenspan Fed finally raising short-term Fed Funds rate targets to fight inflation while the Treasury under Larry Summers was pushing down long-term rates by buying back 30-year Treasury bonds with funds from a Federal budget surplus derived from a debt bubble, flooding the market with excessive cash.
As all market participants know, an inverted rate curve is a classic signal for recession down the road. Yet silly talk of the "end of the business cycle" was extravagantly entertained by neo-liberal government economists, along with silly talk of the "end of history" by neo-conservative superpower strategists. The so-called "Goldilocks" economy fantasy of not too hot, not too cold, but just right, was born, along with the superpower fantasy that Goldilocks will pay for costly foreign wars of moral imperialism around the world without hurting the domestic economy. Goldilocks was called upon to provide the US with both guns and butter.
George W Bush won the November 2000 presidential election along with the bursting of the Clinton debt bubble. The Greenspan Fed again came to the rescue by turning on the fiat money spigot to fund a housing bubble mistaken as a miraculous boom, applauded by a grateful Congress overtaken with unquestioning awe and blind adulation normally reserved only for living gods. (See The Presidential Election Cycle Theory and the Fed, Asia Times Online, February 24, 2004).
The policy of moral imperialism brought spectacular terrorist attacks on the US homeland, forcing the Bush administration, less than nine months in office, to turn Clinton's foreign war of moral imperialism into a global war on terrorism that some have estimated will cost up to US$2 trillion or 20% of US gross domestic product, a cost even a Goldilocks economy cannot afford. The 9/11 2001 terrorist attacks on the US homeland gave the Fed a convenient excuse to flood the market with massive liquidity. The Goldilocks economy got a new lease on life from the global war on terrorism, allowing structured finance to blossom as a regime of global financial terror. The destruction of 9/11 goes pale against the still-unfolding destruction of the 2007 credit crunch.
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