Connelly on Commerce

Terry Connelly is dean emeritus of the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University and is frequently quoted on business, financial, and economic issues by Bay Area local, as well as national, news media.

 

Traders ares speculating that the fed is bound to disappoint the markets on wednesday as there is really nothing much they can do tohelp the economy grwo any more, and nothing much that they can agree on in any event. I think they are wrong, on both counts.

 

As to the second matter first — Ben Bernanke’s background is not in the corporate world, where a Board of Directors, like the Fed’s Open Market Committee at least in structure and mission, is expected to be unanimous or nothing at all. Instead, the Chairman’s background is steeped in academic strcuture. Like any dean of a strong minded faculty (including myself, although I have lived in the other world of business, too), he knows that no faculty is likely to be unanimous about anything, and it does not bother him particularly even he has two or three public dissenters to Fed policy. And he gets great marks from his colleagues for courtesy and openness. Most faculties prefer to debate more than decide, anyway, because down deep they have mutual respect for their diverse opinions, no matter have pointed their disagreements. Ben will do a deal with majority support and not hold out for the “perfection’ of unanimity. You don’t have a specially-extended  two-day meeting and then do nothing; unless you want to contribute to market carnage.

 

And what ‘s to be done? Lengthening the maturity of the Fed’s balance sheet (the so-called “twist’) was sexier  when it was really just a teenage dance move, but it would help hold down longer-term interest rates that are the base for mortgages and consumer loans. Lowering the interest rate it pays banks to keep their excess reserves on deposit with the Fed will also help at the margin to push them to lend, finally. (This step should be staged to prevent a huge washover of deposits into money market funds and risking their valuation.) Both these moves would be welcomed by the financial markets, especially in terms of reducing the current obsession with every choreographed move in the Greek default process, as the “troika” of EU. ECB and IMF negotiators string bailout approval VERY PREDICTABLY BUT ALSO INEVITABLY  to the last minute so as to hold in check the negative public  opinion in Germany about spending more money on the Greeks. (They cannot afford to be scene as anything other than the strictest of lenders, so they drag things out to create that impression while the markets forget that it was just last week that Merkel and Sarkozy said the deal would get done! Traders can be downright stupid at times.)

And, by the way, don’t let this loose talk that we’d all be better off just to let Greece default right now (rather than waiting until 2013 when the lead countries of the European Community get their banks in shape to sustain losses in a managed default) get the better of your memory. That’s what folks said about “letting Lehman fail” before the great mistake (predicted in this blog) that triggered the Great Recession. Moral: don’t listen to the drumbeat on CNBC, ever!

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Blogroll, CNBC, default, European Central Bank, Federal Reserve, Greece, Lehman, Operation twist, recession