How central bankers broke the economy
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151.0763
Summary
Inflation is at its highest rate in decades, interest rates are rising quickly, and entire generations are priced out of homeownership. So how did we get here? Well, it has to do with the fact that one in five Canadian dollars didn t even exist pre-pandemic. The Bank of Canada rapidly grew our money supply, and it was by no means distributed equally. To shed light on exactly what happened, and how radical choices by central bankers distorted the economy and society at large, we have Christopher Leonard, a New York Times best-selling business journalist, on the podcast today. His latest book, The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy, is one of my favourite reads of the year.
Transcript
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I'm Sabrina Meadow, and I'm guest hosting this week's podcast.
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If you haven't done so already, please consider subscribing.
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Everyone's talking about monetary policy and central banking these days,
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no one was talking about it outside of pretty niche policy circles.
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Inflation is at its highest rate in decades and shows few signs of slowing.
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Interest rates are rising quickly, and entire generations are priced out of homeownership.
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Well, it has to do with the fact that one in five Canadian dollars didn't even exist pre-pandemic.
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The Bank of Canada rapidly grew our money supply, and it was by no means distributed equally.
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To shed light on exactly what happened and how radical choices by central bankers distorted the economy and society at large,
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we have Christopher Leonard, a New York Times best-selling business journalist, on the podcast today.
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His latest book is called The Lords of Easy Money, How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy,
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and it's one of my favourite reads of the year.
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Many of his shocking findings about the Fed and how it works are mirrored here by the Bank of Canada.
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It's going to be an absolutely fascinating conversation, so let's dive in.
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You know, not everyone is an economist or follows central banking very closely,
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so perhaps we could start off with you explaining the overall gist of your book
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and exactly what it is that the Fed and other central banks do.
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And it's funny you say that because, I mean, even as a business journalist,
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I didn't really follow the Federal Reserve or any central bank closely.
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It seems like central banking is this part of the economy that's really, really complex
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and really distant from our lives, and when you hear about the Fed,
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you hear about interest rates and bond purchases and all this arcane stuff.
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But the reason I wrote this book is because, as a business reporter,
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I have the chance to get out and talk to lots of people in all different places in the economy.
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And in 2016, I was interviewing somebody who's sort of like one of these financial traders
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who really understands markets, and this guy explained to me
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what the Federal Reserve had been doing since 2010
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and explained it in kind of this like mechanical and granular way,
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and it just absolutely blew my mind, and that's what led me down the path to write this book.
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So the entire goal of this book is to try to explain to everyday people who don't follow the Fed
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just how radical and unprecedented the last decade of central bank policy has been.
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the Fed printed three times as much money between 2008 and 2014
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than it had printed it in the first 95 years of its existence.
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Another way to put that is that after the great financial crisis,
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the Fed printed about 350 years worth of money in four and a half years.
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They totally changed the landscape and the dynamics of our global economy,
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and I wanted to set out to explain to people in really clear terms
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what the Fed had done and why it matters so much.
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Now, the second part of your book title makes quite the assertion.
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It's how the Federal Reserve broke the American economy.
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And, you know, as, okay, I mean, listen, I'm a business reporter
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who came up through newspapers and wire services,
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Fairness and, you know, objectivity is kind of an overused word,
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but being fair and rational and being like an honest broker
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on behalf of the reader is really important to me.
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But by the time it came time to publish this book,
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I really felt like that was the only description I could give that was accurate.
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And let me describe in three ways how I think the Fed
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and the fact that this is becoming more and more evident,
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and I would argue undeniable today, just undeniable.
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First of all, you got to think about the way the Fed creates new money.
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by making them appear in the checking accounts of ordinary people.
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and inside the bank accounts of 24 Wall Street banks,
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And it does it in a way that pumps up the stock market.
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between the very richest of the rich and everybody else.
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they laid the groundwork for financial crashes.
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They created really unstable financial asset bubbles.
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You know, we saw the dot-com crash of asset bubbles in 99.
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We saw the crash of an asset bubble in the housing market in 2008.
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we're watching these asset bubbles across the spectrum teeter.
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The third way the Fed broke the American economy
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of truly unprecedented experimentation and money printing
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when the Fed took on these experiments in the 2010s,
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it committed the central bank to easy money policies.
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It had to keep pumping all this cash into Wall Street
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it has trapped itself in this easy money world.
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So all these things are very fundamental to the economy,
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trapping the central bank in this quagmire of easy money.
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And all of these things are coming to the forefront today.
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for me to slow down and start from the beginning.
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I mean, this book really is a story about people.
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who was a senior official at the Federal Reserve back in 2010.
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And he's this low-key, pretty small-c conservative guy
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And the key thing that this guy was voting against