Eric Sprott: "Fooled by Stimulus" (August 2010)

By Eric Sprott & David Franklin, Sprott Asset Management.

Despite our firm’s history of investing primarily in equities, we’ve spent much of this past year writing about the government debt market. We’ve chosen to focus on government debt because we fear its impact on the equity markets as a whole. Government debt is an intrinsically important part of the financial landscape. It is the bellwether by which we measure risk, and we believe we have entered a new era where traditional "risk-free" assets are undergoing a tremendous shift in quality.

In studying the government debt market, we have inadvertently been led to question the economic theory that most fervently justified recent government spending programs: that of Keynesian economics. The so called "beautiful theory" of Keynesian economics is arguably the most influential economic theory of the 20^th Century, shaping the way Western democracies approached the balance between free market capitalism and government initiatives. Like many beautiful theories, however, Keynesianism has ultimately succumbed to the ugly facts. We firmly believe the Keynesian miracle is dead. The stimulus programs are simply not producing their desired results, and the future debt costs associated with funding these programs may cause far greater strife in the future than the problems the stimulus was originally designed to address.

Keynesian economics was born with the publishing of John Maynard Keynes’ "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in February 1936. Keynesian theory advocates a mixed economy, predominantly driven by the private sector, but with significant intervention by government and the public sector. Keynes argued that private sector decisions often lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes, and advocated active public sector policy responses to stabilize output according to the business cycle. Keynesian economics served as the primary economic model from its birth to 1973. Although it did lose some influence following the stagflation of the 1970s, the advent of the global financial crisis in 2007 ignited a resurgence in Keynesian thought that resulted in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, TARP, TALF, Cash for Clunkers, Quantitative Easing, etc., all of which have been proven ineffective, ill-advised and whose benefits were surprisingly short-lived.

The economic historian, Niall Ferguson, recently described a 1981 paper by economist Thomas Sargent as the "epitaph for the Keynesian era".¹ It may have been the epitaph in academic circles, but the politicians clearly never read it. Almost thirty years later, we now get to experience the fallout from the latest Keynesian stimulus binge, and the results are looking pretty dismal to say the least.