real #unemployment 42.9%: the warren buffett economy #scprimary

As documented in Parts 1-3 (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), the Fed has generated a $50 trillion financial bubble since Alan Greenspan took the helm in August 1987. After 27 years, honest price discovery has been destroyed, thereby reducing the nerve centers of capitalism—-the money and capital markets—-to little more than gambling casinos.

Accordingly, speculative rent-seeking in the financial arena has replaced enterprenurial innovation and supply side investment and productivity as the modus operandi of the US economy. This has resulted in a severe diminution of main street growth and a massive redistribution of windfall wealth to the tiny share of households which own most of the financial assets. Warren Buffett’s $73 billion net worth is the poster boy for this untoward state of affairs.


The massive and systematic falsification of asset prices which lies at the heart of this deformation of capitalism is a direct and unavoidable consequence of monetary central planning. That is, the pursuit of Keynesian business cycle management and stimulus through central bank interest rate pegging and massive monetization of existing public debt and other securities—-especially since the latter has no purpose other than to artificially goose the price of bonds and lower their yields; and also via other indirect  methods of financial asset levitation such as the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen doctrine of wealth effects and the implicit central bank “put” which underpins the economics of buy-the-dip speculators.

As previously indicated, the Keynesian bathtub model of a closed, volumetrically driven economy is a throwback to specious theories about the inherent business cycle instabilities of market capitalism that originated during the Great Depression. These theories were wrong then, but utterly irrelevant in today’s globally open and technologically dynamic post-industrial economy.

As reviewed in Part 3, the very idea that 12 people sitting on the FOMC can adroitly manipulate an economic ether called “aggregate demand” by means of falsifying market interest rates is a bad joke when in it comes to that part of “potential GDP” comprised of goods production capacity. In today’s world of open trade and massive excess industrial capacity, the Fed can do exactly nothing to cause the domestic steel industry’s capacity utilization rate to be 90% or 65%.

It all depends upon the marginal cost of labor, capital and materials in the vastly oversized global steel market. Indeed, the only thing that the denizens of the monetary politburo can do about capacity utilization in any domestic industry is to re-read Keynes’s 1930 essay in favor of homespun goods and weep!


Eighty years on from Keynes’ incomprehensible ode to statist economics and thorough-going protectionism, the idea of state management of the business cycle in one country is even more preposterous. Potential labor supply is a function of the global labor cost curve and now comes in atomized form as hours, gigs, and temp agency contractual bits, not census bureau headcounts.

In fact, the Census Bureau survey takers and the BLS numbers crunchers have not the foggiest idea as to what the real world’s potential labor force computes to, and how much of it is deployed on any given day, month or quarter. Accordingly, printing money and pegging interest rates in pursuit of “full employment”, which is the essence of the Yellen version of monetary central planning, is completely nonsensical.

Likewise, the Fed’s current “soft” target of 5.2% on the U-3 unemployment rate is downright ridiculous. When in the year 2015 you have 93 million adults not in the labor force—-of which only half are retired and receiving social security benefits(OASI)—-and a U-3 computational method that counts as “employed” anyone who works only a few hour per week—-then what you have in the resulting fraction is noise, pure and simple. The U-3 unemployment rate as a proxy for full employment does not even make it as primitive grade school economics.




But here’s the thing. There are dozens of reasons for 180 billion unemployed labor hours, but whether the Fed is monetizing $80 billion of public debt per month or not, and whether the money market interest rate is 10 bps or 35 bps doesn’t even make the top 25 reasons for unutilized adult labor. What actually drives our current 43% unemployment rate is global economic forces of cheap labor and new productive capacity throughout the EM and dozens of domestic policy and cultural factors that influence the decision to work or not.

To be sure, for a brief historical interval—-from roughly the New Economics of the Kennedy Administration to the 2007 eve of the housing crash and financial crisis—- the Fed did levitate the GDP and meaningfully impact the labor utilization rate. That was owing to the one-time trick of levering up the household and business sector through the inducements of cheap debt.

The Warren Buffett Economy——Why Its Days Are Numbered (Part 4)


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