The New TVA
July 23, 2015·0 comments·adaptive investing
Governments are flooding markets with cheap capital to suppress volatility while insisting this is just good policy. Debt levels are higher than before the 2008 crisis, and growth rates needed to service that debt are mathematically impossible. Yet the conversation shifted without anyone explicitly arguing for a new system. What happens when the only path forward requires calling one thing by another's name?
- Debt isn't shrinking, it's compounding. Post-2008, the world didn't deleverage. It accumulated more debt. Japan, France, and Italy would need to double their current growth rates just to begin addressing it. Growth targets are becoming a receding horizon.
- There are only three exits from a debt crisis: growth, inflation, or austerity. Growth is mathematically impossible for most developed economies. Austerity is politically unacceptable. That leaves one option, and every central bank on earth knows it.
- The language around markets has shifted without argument. Market deflation is now called "volatility" in the West and "market malfunction" in China. Inflation is "accommodation" or "wealth effect." The words changed, so the political acceptability changed.
- Central banks are now explicitly managing markets as utilities, not mechanisms. Policymakers believe markets are too important to leave to investors, just as wartime leaders believed war was too important to leave to generals. What gets stabilized gets politicized.
- When you raise the floor on losses, you lower the ceiling on gains. Pension funds chasing 7.5% returns in a state-managed utility world won't find them. The entire capital market has shifted to a different equilibrium, and the old assumptions are broken.
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