Central Bank Musical Chairs

If recent stock market volatility is interrupting your sleep, Jim Bianco and CNBC’s Rick Santelli are saying, get used to it. The total assets of all central banks hit $16.4 trillion plus (an all-time high) and these banks now, collectively, own 33 percent of all the world’s sovereign bonds (someone/something had to buy ‘em).

Santelli’s question to Bianco was, if the aggregate size of the world’s central banks is at an all-time high, and these banks have purchased a third of all government paper, will these banks be able to “normalize in size” (shrink) without “going through a lot more stock market anguish?” Bianco’s response was a flat, “no.”  

Reversing trillions of dollars worth of securities purchases will create market turmoil.  And now that price inflation has entered the equation, the ride is bound to be bumpy. So, who should 401k investors be worried about and keeping an eye on? Bianco and Santelli agree that person is ECB head man Mario Draghi. Santelli believes Draghi may be caught without a chair in this game of monetary musical chairs. By the way, it’s not all about the Fed anymore. “All central bank stimulus is fungible,” says Bianco, “it doesn’t matter who does it.”  

The patron saint of central bankers, John Maynard Keynes, wrote in The General Theory,

“For it is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs — a  pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passed the  Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when  the music stops. These games can be played with zest and enjoyment, though all the players know that it is the Old Maid which is circulating, or that when the music stops  some of the players will find themselves unseated.”

Surely central bankers aren’t just speculating with funds created from nowhere? However, the once “lenders of last resort” are now engaging in social policies, boosting the collective wealth effect, while keeping the under-capitalized, over-leveraged, and less than competent operators in business.