Three Bad Assumptions

Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

By PATRICK MADDEN

Robert Brenner:

The basic source of today’s crisis is the declining vitality of the advanced economies since 1973, and, especially, since 2000. Economic performance in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan has steadily deteriorated, business cycle by business cycle, in terms of every standard macroeconomic indicator -- GDP, investment, real wages, and so forth. Most telling, the business cycle that just ended, from 2001 through 2007, was -- by far -- the weakest of the postwar period, and this despite the greatest government-sponsored economic stimulus in U.S. peacetime history.

Madden sums it up:

The coming year will witness three interrelated pressures put on the dollar. The first will be the current account gap, the second the enormous expansion of the money supply that will result from the bailout plan, and the third are the gargantuan budget deficits projected by the Obama administration- already estimated at $1.75 trillion for 2009.

The Geithner plan assumes that the toxic assets that the banks hold can be detoxified to re-start lending; it assumes that there is no problem with the fundamentals of the global economy; and it assumes that China and the rest of the world will have the patience and the political will to allow the US to print money at astonishing rates in order to keep the system afloat. Maybe this is not impossible, but it is extremely unlikely.