Bill Gross

Excerpt from an interview with Barrons.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard in 1971. For the past 40-plus years, central banks have been able to print as much money as they wanted, and they have. When I started at Pimco in 1971, the amount of credit outstanding in the U.S., including mortgages, business debt, and government debt, was $1 trillion. Now it’s $58 trillion. Credit growth, at least in its earlier stages, can be very productive. For all the faults of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the securitization of mortgages lowered interest rates and enabled people to buy homes. But when credit reaches the point of satiation, it doesn’t do what it did before.

Think of the old Monty Python movie, The Meaning of Life. A grotesque, rotund guy keeps eating to demonstrate the negatives of gluttony, and finally is offered one last thing, a “wafer-thin mint.” He swallows it and explodes. It’s pretty funny. Is our financial system, with $58 trillion of credit, to the point of a wafer-thin mint? Probably not. But we’re to the point where every bite is less and less fulfilling. Even though credit isn’t being created as rapidly as in the past, it doesn’t do what it did before.

Central banks believe that the historical model of raising interest rates to dampen inflation and lowering rates to invigorate the economy is still a functional model. The experience of the past five years, and maybe the past 15 or 20 in Japan, has shown this isn’t the case.