The Illustrated History of the U.S. Credit Collapse

The Global Macro Monitor blog was started b an independent trader and economist and, in a prior life, was a global macro hedge fund PM/trader, headed emerging market bond trading desks on Wall Street, and an economist/global strategist, beginning his career at the World Bank in the mid 1980’s. His unique and unconventional views are reflected on his website at marcromon.wordpress.com.

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We constructed these charts with data from today’s release of the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds. They are both stunning and frightening as they illustrate the cardiac arrest that took place in the credit markets. The collapse in credit issuance/borrowing began in 2008 and would have been net negative without the Federal government. In 2009, for example, the Federal government was 141 percent of total net credit borrowings.

If, as the President says, ‘the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy”, the country would have died in 2009 had not the policymakers taken the extraordinary measures they did. These charts illustrate how close we were to the abyss and should give a clearer perspective on what Bernanke & Co. were/are up against. They are heroes, in our book, for stabilizing the situation and pulling us back from the abyss. The jury is still out, however, on long-term structural adjustment and preventing a global sovereign debt crisis.

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This entry was posted in Black Swan Watch, Budget Deficit, Charts, Fiscal Policy, Sovereign Debt, Sovereign Risk and

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