Yesterday, the Dow ended up with its face in the mashed potatoes again. It’s ironic that while the nation is engaged in the most hopeful, positive political campaign in decades, the financial markets are hawking up phlegm and getting ready for the Big One.
Good news comes in the form of rumors that the Fed, bless its expanding little heart, is once again considering rate cuts. By next year at this time, I believe it’s quite possible that the rate will fall through zero and go out the other side. At that point, the Fed will actually be paying banks to lend money. Lenders will then pass along that increased cash flow to borrowers.
There is some precedence for this idea. Several years ago, one could go to buy a car and get either zero financing or cash back on that transaction. The model would work very much like that, according to Newt Farlurnst, an quantum economist formerly with a major New York hedge fund who is now working at Arby’s in Terra Linda, California.
“There is no structural reason why interest rates should always be expressed in positive integers,” says Farlurnst, who received his doctorate in string theory in an alternate universe that intersects with our own only at certain key academic locations. “With interest rates breaking through the event horizon at zero, they enter into a region governed by completely separate economic laws than the ones that are messing up our global financial system. This can only be an improvement.”
Rumors are that Mr. Bernanke is now considering this, along with other proposals now on the table to halt the advancing recession that is either not happening, already started, or soon to be over.
It is believed that the chairman is growing increasingly frustrated with having to reduce interest rates every week, since each decision involves hundreds of hours of meeting time, endless boring discussion and the incessant requirement to look at spreadsheets, all the while knowing that his final decision — to keep the air in the balloon by reducing rates — is actually never in doubt.
“Bernanke may just want to take an end run around the whole thing and get to negative interest rates right away,” says a source of mine who is about as trustworthy as any of the prognosticators now working the beat. “At that juncture, the gloves are off, the banks are incented to give everybody money in bucketloads, the economy takes off like a rocket. Everybody will be lining up to take on debt. It’ll be a lot better than getting a free toaster, even.”
It may be asked asked what the economy will do when those in charge of our money, having given all of it away for negative return, run out of it.
“Don’t worry,” says my source. “They can print more.”
