US anti-state ideology destabilising world economy
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This policy is unlikely to work even in the U.S. Quantitative easing is a method advocated by Keynes in the 1930s. It played a major role in reducing interest rates in the U.S. and the UK and did indeed aid their recovery from the Great Depression.
But Keynes was operating in the 1930s – a period of nationally closed economies. Money generated by quantitative easing for the most part remained within the national economies. Today's world is totally different. The U.S. essentially has no capital controls, and the money it prints will slosh out into the international economy.
Even within the U.S. the result so far has not been in line with Federal Reserve expectations. US interest rates have risen, not fallen – US Treasury 10 year bond yields, having reached a low of 2.4 percent on October 8, have since increased to 2.9 percent. Under conditions of very low inflation in the U.S. this is a significant increase in real interest rates.
China focussed on the main problem driving the Great Recession, decline in investment, and dealt with it directly through state action. The U.S., because it rejects such measures on ideological grounds, is instead hosing out an undirected flood of money hoping some will wash into the right place. This will add to inflationary pressures in countries that came through the financial crisis more successfully than the U.S.
To use an analogy, China saw the decline in investment as threatening recession used a snipers rifle to kill the enemy with one shot. The US administration's economic ideology means it cannot use such a pin-point weapon. Instead it is acting like a movie gangster, blasting away with an inaccurate Thompson sub-machine gun, hoping that some of the torrent of bullets will hit the target – an approach dangerous to everyone around them and quite probably to themselves.
The population of the US has already paid a very high price in terms of falling living standards and unemployment for their government's mistaken ideology. Other countries are now putting up defences to make sure they don't suffer from its side effects.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/node_7080931.htm
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