September 25, 2024 | Premium Service | Below for our subscribers we provide some specific thoughts on our bank, mortgage and finance surveillance groups. With consumer confidence falling the most in three years, we begin to understand the urgency behind the 50bp rate cut by the FOMC. How will the sudden shift in Fed policy impact financials? Are we headed for a recession? The chart below shows total credit card delinquency for all US banks, above pre-COVID levels and slowly climbing.
As we note in the updated edition of “Inflated, Money, Debt and the American Dream," the Fed has not used deflation as a deliberate monetary policy tool in almost 50 years. In the 1980s, regulators made far more thrifts fail than necessary, creating economic chaos and deflation that killed growth for much of the decade of the 1990s.
Ever since that deep recession in the 1980s, the Fed has avoided punitive deflation. Indeed, the measure of the effectiveness of monetary policy has been to make asset prices rise, that is, to encourage inflation. If we include homes, stocks and everything else in the inflation smoothie, clearly the Fed’s sole mandate over the past few decades is maintaining at least 2% inflation.
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