James Grant discusses the new bailout bill in the Washington Post, arguing that we should recognize and write off losses, rather than inflating the currency and debasing accounting standards. 
He later suggests that the Fed’s insistence that it must print hundreds of billions of new dollars, among other things, is a statement of it’s belief that "the financial truth is too awful to bear."
Bad Medicine
By James Grant
Excerpt: "Low interest rates, easy money and malleable accounting rules are what plunged Wall Street into crisis. Yet it is low interest rates, easy money and malleable accounting rules that top the list of federal fixes. The unifying theme of the new bailout bill, all 451 pages of it, is the hair of the dog that bit you.
The unblinkable fact is that Americans own too much house. We overpaid and overborrowed, and many of us are "upside down," as the car dealers say. What to do? Recognize the losses and write them off. What not to do? Inflate the currency and debase accounting standards.
But inflation and debasement are the very policies being put in place. The Federal Reserve, not waiting for Congress, embarked last month on a radical program of money-printing. Reserve Bank credit — the raw material of bank lending — is growing at the year-over-year rate of 61 percent.
Credit creation is the Fed’s signature crisis-management policy: Let a bubble inflate, then watch it burst; clean up with lots of dollar bills...
…When, in 2006, the roof began to fall in, Wall Street was in a quandary. It held outsize volumes of triple-A-rated mortgage-backed securities (MBSs). That they were not, in fact, triple-A, had become painfully obvious. Curious analysts consulted the financial statements of the top mortgage dealers, including Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, for clarification.
Readers, however, found no clarification and no foreshadowing of the troubles to come...
…Long after the crisis burst into the open, the Fed and Treasury downplayed it. It was, they insisted, "contained." Last week they asserted that, unless the House voted "yea," the wheels would come off this $14 trillion economy. President Bush himself has broadly hinted that the nation is on the cusp of disaster.
How can they be so sure? And how can they know that the unintended consequences of the radical policies they are pushing through won’t be worse than the panic that they themselves are helping to foment? When the Fed insists it has no choice but to print up hundreds of billions of new dollars and when the keepers of accounting standards bend in the face of criticism that market prices hurt, what they are really saying is the that financial truth is too awful to bear. Heaven help us all if they’re right.
Full article here.
James Grant is the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and author of the forthcoming book "Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond."
