Why the Government Debt Crisis Will Blow up Before We Even Get to Default
The Fed’s fight has become much more complex this month. Inflation is fighting back harder all of a sudden, while the US debt ceiling is putting bond markets and banks at considerable extra risk by driving bond yields up even faster than the Fed was doing. This extra thrust is happening just as the Fed was trying to end its rate increases and even as additional banks are poised to collapse from the already-high bond rates. The situation appears to be cascading into a nuclear market meltdown.
When I published The Daily Doom two days ago, the headlines in that edition seemed to call the latest inflation report two ways, some highlighting that inflation is down a little, some saying it is up. The truth depends on what individual components you look at, which finely parsed indices of inflation, and whether you are looking at month-to-month or year-on-year. So, I’ll sum the real inflation situation and banking situation up simply in this intro and then analyze the overall crisis in more detail in the following sections because you have to understand how serious inflation is first in order to understand the critical situation the Fed (and all of us thanks to the Fed) is facing. (Patrons who get access to The Daily Doom, may want to drop straight to the next section because they already saw most of this intro as the opening editorial on the 10th unless they want a refresher.)
The bottom line is that inflation is a tiny bit less significant overall than it was a month ago, but the rate at which inflation has been dropping has also almost stalled. That is a not what the Fed (or any of us) wants to see. What you see in many of the measures of inflation that were given in this Wednesday’s report is a tiny blip downward in CPI for the month of April that is nowhere near as significant as the drops we have been seeing in prior month’s.
Nevertheless, I think the Fed is likely to pause in its rate hikes, at the next meeting for the simple reason that we are now in exactly the month at which I have believed the Fed would pause since the start of the year. That is because, months back, the Fed telegraphed the likelihood of three more 25 basis-point hikes and then a pause, and those hikes are finally now all in with the Fed’s last meeting on May 3rd. Meanwhile, the Fed is assuredly far more concerned about the banking crisis it has created than it is about to let on because the Fed’s fears, when expressed, become self-fulfilling prophecies.
While the majority of mainstream financial writers did not believe the Fed would even stay the course with its telegraphed plan, I was certain the Fed would because inflation would not move close
Article from LewRockwell
