Friday, June 15, 2012

Money in Europe is TIGHT! (And Interest Rates are a Useless Guide)

I had not been previously able to find the stats to investigate this (even though they were on FRED the whole time, under my incompetent nose). I did a few data transformations (in an attempt to paint the picture I wanted to see in order to create a picture of whats going on. Here's what I came up with.

Two things. 

1. This chart seems to corroborate what Milton Friedman  Scott Sumner always says about interest rates being a piss poor  misleading guide to the stance of monetary policy. I mean, just look at that correlation. Interest-rates plunged along with the growth in the money supply; and that even going by the change in quantity of euros, not a percent of the total! 

2. Europe is clearly literally suffering from contractionary monetary policy; their M2 supply is growing at a vastly slower rate than pre-crisis, again, in terms of quantity, not just rate. 

But hey, interest rates are still low, so money must be easy, right? Right?

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