Money News (Link) - Dan Weil (June 22, 2010)
Governments and central banks aren’t moving fast enough to exit their fiscal and monetary stimulus, says Morgan Stanley Asia Chairman Steve Roach.
“Policy makers are making a mistake by keeping monetary and fiscal policy in stimulus positions for too long, injecting a lot of excess liquidity into markets and economies,” he told Bloomberg.
“It ends up setting the stage for the next crisis. This is a recipe that didn’t work out well in the period following the (2000) bursting of the equity bubble. And I see no reason why it’s going to work out differently this time either,” he said.
The Federal Reserve is keeping the federal funds rate at a record low of zero to 0.25 percent, and last year’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus is still working its way through the economy.
Exploding government debt burdens represent another major problem, Roach says. U.S. debt hit a record high of $13 trillion. “Excess sovereign debt is a problem that is endemic in the developed world,” Roach said. “At this point, we still have ample slack in the global economy and an absence of inflation pressures.”
But if monetary and fiscal policy remain too accommodative, serious inflation could ensue, he says.
Many echo Roach’s view of the debt crisis.
“Economic historians such as Kenneth Rogoff point out that at debt levels of 80-90 percent of GDP, a country’s real growth becomes stunted,” Pimco’s Bill Gross wrote on the firm’s website.
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