PART 1
During the past three years, Washington has made three catastrophic errors. These include:
- The draconian one-size-fits-all Lockdowns in response to the Covid;
- The insane $11 trillion bacchanalia of monetary and fiscal stimmies designed to counter the supply-side shutdowns caused by the Virus Patrol;
- The mindless Sanctions War on Russia, which has caused global commodity markets to erupt skyward.
The resulting economic and financial dislocations, both global and domestic, are unprecedented and could not have come in a worst context. To wit, prolonged fiscal and monetary excesses prior to February 2020 were already destined to generate an era of reckoning, even before Washington jumped the shark after the Covid panic was ignited by Donald Trump in March 2020.
For want of doubt, just consider the course of fiscal and monetary policy over 2003-2019. During that 17-year period, the public debt share of GDP soared from an already high 62% to 111%, and the Fed’s balance sheet exploded under the bailouts of 2008-2009 and QE thereafter from $725 billion to $4.2 trillion. The latter embodied a growth rate of 11.0% per annum over the period, nearly 3X the 4.0% growth rate of nominal GDP.
I
