Tag Archives: 29 trillion

Bernanke’s 29 Trillion Dollar Fog of Deceit

By L. Randall Wray

As I reported over at Great Leap Forward,a new study by two UMKC PhD students, Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson,provides the most comprehensive examination yet of the Fed’s bail-out of WallStreet. They found that the true total cumulative amount lent and spent onasset purchases was $29 trillion. That is $29,000,000,000,000. Lots of zeros.The number is quite a bit bigger than previous estimates. You can read the first of what will be a series of reports on their study here: I want to be clear that this is a cumulative total—and for reasons I willdiscuss in this post it is the best measure if we want to understand themonumental Fed effort to restore Wall Street to its pre-crisis 2007 glory.
 
It is certain that no government anywhere, ever, hascommitted so much to benefit so few. Wall Street owes the Fed a big fat wetkiss. That’s a kiss Chairman Bernanke apparently does not want.
Last week he extended the Fed’s veil of secrecy over itsbail-out of Wall Street by trying to counter a recent Bloomberg analysis of theextent of the Fed’s largess with a fog of deceit. Apparently the Chairmanforgot the lesson we learned from Watergate: the cover-up is always worse thanthe original indiscretion.

Stresses Seen at the Outer Surface of the Ballooning Commodities Complex

Matthew Boesler interviews L. Randall Wray regarding his views of the present commodities bubble:
We’ve discussed this topic before on Benzinga Radio, with respected market analysts like Dan Dicker (again) and Fadel Gheit–financialization of commodities markets. At issue: massive institutional inflows into paper commodities, which end up factoring into prices much more than, say, real supply and demand for the physical assets. The result? A bubble.
That term–bubble–gets thrown around pretty loosely these days, and it’s often a contentious issue, especially in the commodities context. We’ve spoken to several others on Benzinga Radio, including successful investors like Jim Rogers and Marc Faber, who are outspoken advocates of the long commodities trade in the coming years. The question now, with evidence of a coming global slowdown increasingly in focus, is whether commodities will continue to outperform. The last few trading sessions, going back a week or so, certainly seem to have raised concerns.
Dr. Randy Wray, a respected economist at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, was commissioned by congressional offices in 2008 to look into the commodities markets as prices marched to record highs during early summer before crashing in July. He spoke with us on Benzinga Radio, raising several interesting points about the evolving dynamics of the commodities markets and the statistical significance of the change in prices we’ve seen over the last several years.