Grant Williams: the Rising Danger of a Bidless Market
by Adam Taggart
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity
Grant Williams, veteran portfolio and strategy advisor, as well as proprietor of the economic blog Things That Make You Go Hmmm returns to the podcast this week to discuss his great concern about the liquidity risk underlying financial markets long-addicted to central bank rescue stimulus.
Through life, behavior is reinforced by consequences. And since 2008, everything possible has been done to avoid the consequences.
So it’s no great surprise to me to that investors are back here again so soon, because what should have happened in ’08-09 was not allowed to run its course. Given the speed with which trillions of dollars of printed money brought things back to where they were before, people did not really feel the consequences. At the time people lost jobs and that’s real — that problem is still working itself out — but in the markets, investors were basically back-stopped by governments and central banks and so they did not feel those consequences. It’s like the kid falling out of the tree and getting caught: well, he’s going to climb the tree again. If he had fallen out and broken his leg, he’d think twice about doing it again.