Die Farbe von Greenspans Unterhosen .... - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Ken_meyer]

ich schätze die Chance auf 60 Prozent, dass wir sie
im Laufe des Jahres kennenlernen...


Quelle: Financial Times

A different downturn

The record expansion and sudden slowdown in the US economy breaks with the pattern of the past 50 years, says Gerard Baker
Published: March 1 2001 20:06GMT Updated: March 1 2001 20:16GMT

Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, seemed to disappoint financial markets this week when he indicated he was in no hurry to cut interest rates again before the scheduled meeting of the central bank`s policymaking open market committee in three weeks` time.
After a renewed slide in stock prices that has taken the Nasdaq near to its lowest level in two years, much of Wall Street had been begging the Fed to do something it has not done in more than a decade - cut interest rates at two consecutive "inter-meeting" periods. Mr Greenspan and his colleagues reduced the federal funds rate - the key money market interest rate instrument - by 50 basis points two weeks after their December meeting, and followed that up with another 50 basis points at their January gathering, to bring short-term rates to 5.5 per cent.
But while Mr Greenspan indicated, in an update of his half-yearly monetary policy report to Congress on Wednesday, that more rate cuts are likely - presumably at the March 20 FOMC meeting and beyond - he gave no sign that he was thinking of more precipitate action.
In part, this reflects a concern about symbolism. To cut rates soon after a meeting at which policymakers had decided to leave well alone can be portrayed as flexibility. To do it twice - after the very next meeting - might look like panic.
Even so, the Fed chairman seemed eager to dispel a little of the gloom that seems to have settled over the US in the last few weeks. He noted that while consumers have become much more pessimistic about the economic outlook, households had not yet cut their spending significantly. He again characterised the slowdown as largely a correction to the unsustainable build-up of inventories last year, and expressed optimism that the underlying improvement in economic performance of the last few years assured the US of a return to elevated rates of growth.
Financial markets fell following the chairman`s observations and Wall Street economists remain divided over over the prospects of a return to growth in the short term. Some believe the worst may already be over; that, with a supportive monetary policy, the conditions exist for a "V-shaped" recovery. Others argue that, without much more aggressive action by the Fed - and soon - the chances of a prolonged downturn and a nasty recession are rising.
What unites almost all analysts and investors is a firm belief that the Fed holds the key; that, as in all business cycles since the second world war, judicious exercise of monetary policy will eventually allow a recovery to take place.
But what if this near-universal faith in the power of the central bank to stimulate demand proves misplaced? What if there is something different about this turn of the century economic cycle that may limit the ability of monetary policy to produce the desired response?
It is certainly clear that the gestation of the current period of economic weakness is rather different from those that have occurred throughout the postwar era.
For most of the last 50 years, recessions have been caused by a familiar process. As the US economy has expanded, consumer price inflation has built up, prompting the Fed to raise interest rates to squeeze price pressures. The rate of inflation has varied widely over the years, from close to 20 per cent in the cycles of the 1970s to 6 per cent in the 1960s and late 1980s, but the faster growth-accelerating inflation combination was always the same.
In the current cycle, however, the "overheating" that occurred as the economy accelerated did not bring any significant increase in price inflation. Between the beginning of 1999 and the middle of last year, the consumer price index edged up by less than 1.5 percentage points; the core rate, excluding the effect of volatile food and energy costs, showed even less acceleration.
As a result, the Fed did not force interest rates much higher. From the middle of 1998 to the middle of 2000 short-term rates rose by just 1 percentage point - a very modest tightening by postwar standards.
Instead of a familiar demand-side price inflation forcing a Fed response and causing a recession, the current weakness began as a result of an over-accumulation of supply, fuelled by the rise in business investment of the 1990s. Real productivity-enhancing investments in technology prompted companies to invest in far more capacity than could be required, even at faster rates of growth. It is this process, rather than a crushing of inflationary pressures, that is unwinding in the shape of a steep fall in stock prices and a sharp retrenchment in business investment.
Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in New York, argues that this cycle is much more like those that were familiar before the second world war. For most of the first half of the 20th century, he says, "inflation was not a problem and monetary policy had a much more limited role in demand management". Indeed, in the early part of the century only 18 countries in the world had central banks. "It was only in the period after 1950 that central banks became inflation-fighters," he adds.
Supply-side-led recessions of the low-inflation era tended to be longer and deeper, Mr Roach notes, but also self-correcting. It was not a more accommodating monetary policy that produced recovery but the working out of the excesses of over-accumulation and speculation. Recessions were caused not by an aggressive monetary shock but by the unsustainability of internal imbalances in the private sector.
In this respect, the current US difficulties bear a passing resemblance to the policy challenge that faced Japan in the late 1980s. The Bank of Japan did not act to burst a speculative bubble in land and other asset prices because it was largely focused on broader price inflation, which, throughout the period of speculative excess was, in effect, non-existent. Consumer price inflation in Japan was zero between 1985 and 1988; while real growth of gross domestic product accelerated to 5 per cent a year.
As Yutaka Yamaguchi, deputy governor of the Bank of Japan, told the Fed`s Jackson Hole monetary policy symposium in 1999: "Pre-emptive policy to achieve sustained price stability would probably have been desirable but must have been very hard to initiate."
In the face of the collapse in asset prices that followed, aggressive monetary easing by the BoJ was ineffectual. The unwinding of the excess proved a much more powerful force than its efforts at demand stimulus.
This is not to suggest that the US is about to face a Japan-style slump. Nor is a return to the wild fluctuations of output that characterised much of the pre-second world war period all that likely.
Few economists now doubt that, unlike Japan in the 1980s, America has experienced real changes in the last 10 years that have raised the long-term growth rate. The excess rate of growth in the year or so up to the middle of last year was not that far above potential growth and the subsequent shake-out may be brief and relatively shallow.
But in the context of the US economic history of the last 50 years there clearly is something different about this cycle. Until now, attention focused mainly on the fact that it was longer than previous cycles, and that recent recessions have been shorter and shallower. Now, however, for the first time in more than 50 years the US is experiencing a downturn against a background of suppressed inflation. And just as the Fed`s role in producing this period of weakness was relatively limited - compared with the financial problems associated with the supply explosion of the last few years - so it may also be not much more than a bit-part player in determining how quickly it ends.

[BizKodem]

Grün,grün,grün, bitte so richig Knalldunkelgrün !!!!!

[HerrKrause]

ja Ken Meyer
wieso sollte der alte Herr denn seine Hosen runterlassen?
im Gegensatz zu vielen Leuten in diesem Geschäft, versteht
er sein Handwerk
und in deinem Artikel wird er meiner Meinung nach doch unterstützt,
übereilte Zinssenkungen würden im momentanen Umfeld nur eins hervorrufen,
kurze überdrehte Rallys, mit demselben Effekt wie beim letzten mal (Januar)

Und das der Markt das verstanden hat, sieht man doch in den letzten 2 Tagen,
oder meinst du nicht?

Ausserdem würde er sich der allgemeinen Erwartungshaltung anschliessen und das
tun was alle erwarten, Gäbe es eine Katastrophe, dann müsste er
zu irgendeinem Punkt eingreifen, weil die Wirtschaft, krankt,(wirklich krankt, nicht hustet, wie gerade zur zeit)
das wäre nicht auszudenken, dann müsste er der allgemeinen Meinungsmache hinterherlaufen und hätte verloren.

Ich persönlich denke, dass er zwar zu lange mit der ersten Zinssenkung gewartet hat, die hätte schon im
Oktober spätestens anfang Dezember kommen müssen und ich war damals auch nicht gut auf ihn zu sprechen (Depotmässig)
aber ich bin mittlerweile der Überzeugung , er hat das Heft in der Hand
und sehe der nächsten Periode gelassen entgegen.
bin jetzt fertig mit Fegen

Ausserdem gewinnt der Heinz Harald Frentzen am Sonntag in Melbourne, und das stimmt mich milde
Hausmeister K.

[HerrKrause]

und nochmal Frentzen und up