The author, Peter Hartcher, an Australian commentator and the author of a soon-to-be-published book with the delicious title of Bubble Man: Alan Greenspan and the Missing Seven Trillion Dollars , continues:

The clue to what is driving Mr Bernanke may be found in a speech he gave in March 2003: "Credibility is not a permanent characteristic of a central bank; it must be continuously earned." In effect, an untested Fed chairman is seeking to establish through a formal arrangement the credibility that his two towering predecessors won through action. But in the meantime, as he builds this monetary fortress to protect his chairmanship from any doubt about his credentials, there are other defensive works left undone.

The experience of Japan in the 1980s, and the US in the 1990s until today, is that easy money no longer flows into traditional inflation, but into asset price inflation. While consumer price inflation stayed low, America blew up its economy with vast speculative asset price bubbles.

(...)

The US central bank, under Mr Greenspan and, shortly, Mr Bernanke, avoids focusing on [how to deal appropriately with bubbles]. The enemy has reformed, but the Fed's threat perception has not. In the meantime, the US has gone from one bubble - in stock prices - to another, in house prices. Right now, the housing bubble is starting to deflate. This is because the Fed is raising short-term rates, bringing them back to a neutral position. It just so happens that this tightening to head off any inflationary threat coincides with the need to deflate a potentially dangerous bubble in house prices.

(...) Under current Fed doctrine, the Fed would do what it did during dotcom mania - wait for the burst and the recession that follows. Is there a better way? This is the big new agenda item for central banks, but Mr Bernanke is preoccupied with the old agenda.

If you've been reading me here, you know that I am convinced that there is a massive asset bubble, and I am always pleased to see confirmation that others (in this case, most Western Central Banks except the Fed) agree. I usually go one step further and say that the bubble was caused by the Fed itself, which lowered interest rates too much.

The mysterious question is why these low interest rates, and the correspondingly frothy economies they have boosted, have not triggered inflation. That brings me to China, and one of the most comprehensive explanations provided for this, in the Economist last July.

Ironically, the article starts by expaining that the trade deficit with China, the most talked about item between the two countries, is probably the one thing that China is not responsible for. As I have argued, the Economist makes the point that it is the USA's lack of savings and over consumption that generate the deficit, which is not only with China:

But the article then goes to make a fundamental point:

China and the world economy - From T-shirts to T-bonds
(behind sub. wall - I'll email the article to anyone who requests it)

China's impact on the world economy can best be understood as what economists call a "positive supply-side shock". Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard University, reckons that the entry into the world economy of China, India and the former Soviet Union has, in effect, doubled the global labour force (China accounts for more than half of this increase). This has increased the world's potential growth rate, helped to hold down inflation and triggered changes in the relative prices of labour, capital, goods and assets.

The new entrants to the global economy brought with them little capital of economic value. So, with twice as many workers and little change in the size of the global capital stock, the ratio of global capital to labour has fallen by almost half in a matter of years: probably the biggest such shift in history. And, since this ratio determines the relative returns to labour and capital, it goes a long way to explain recent trends in wages and profits.

The entry of China's vast army of cheap workers into the international system of production and trade has reduced the bargaining power of workers in developed economies. Although the absolute number of jobs outsourced from developed countries to China remains small, the threat that firms could produce offshore helps to keep a lid on wages. In most developed countries, wages as a proportion of total national income are currently close to their lowest level for decades.

The flip side is that profits are grabbing a bigger slice of the cake (see chart 4). Last year, America's after-tax profits rose to their highest as a proportion of GDP for 75 years; the shares of profit in the euro area and Japan are also close to their highest for at least 25 years. This is exactly what economic theory would predict. China's emergence into the world economy has made labour relatively abundant and capital relatively scarce, and so the relative return to capital has risen. It is ironic that western capitalists can thank the world's biggest communist country for their good fortune.

Now that's a pretty straightforward insight: as Chinese labor becomes available to the global economy, it puts a downwards pressure on the remuneration of labor everywhere - and this is indeed what we all see and feel. And China's compatition brings prices of goods down, and keeps wages down, thus preventing inflation.

A study by Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein reckons that China has knocked almost a full percentage-point off America's inflation rate in recent years.

(...)

As it is, China's reduction of inflationary pressures has allowed central banks to hold interest rates lower than they otherwise would be.

And this is where it gets interesting: with less inflation, Central Banks have kept interest rates low, thus fuelling the financial world with vast amounts of ultra cheap money. But, in a period of actually declining prices, Central Banks should not be targetting for low inflation, but tolerate some deflation (prices going down) to reflect improved productivity and allow the gains to pass on to consumers (andw thus workers who otherwise have stagnant wages).

in such circumstances, overall price stability might be the wrong policy goal. Instead, they argued, average prices should be allowed to fall to pass the productivity gains on to workers and consumers as higher real incomes. But just like today, monetary policy prevented prices from falling. And an overly loose policy then inflated the late-1920s stockmarket bubble.

(...)  The entry of China's army of cheap labour into the global economy has increased the worldwide return on capital. That, in turn, should imply an increase in the equilibrium level of real interest rates. But, instead, central banks are holding real rates at historically low levels. The result is a misallocation of capital, most obviously displayed at present in the shape of excessive mortgage borrowing and housing investment. If this analysis is correct, central banks, not China, are to blame for the excesses, but China's emergence is the root cause of the problem.

This is compounded by China's decision to peg the yuan to the dollar, which it enforced by purchasing massive quantities of US Treasuries, thus also keeping long term interest rates at record low levels. The Economist notes that this Chinese policy has effectively eroded America's monetary sovereignty, as shown by the recent increases in the Fed's (short term) rates, which have not had their usual impact on long term rates.

America's sovereignty over its monetary policy has therefore been eroded, with a given rise in short-term rates producing much less monetary tightening than in the past. To that extent, global monetary policy is increasingly being set in Beijing as well as in Washington.

By helping to hold down interest rates in rich economies, China may have indirectly created a global liquidity bubble. Total global liquidity last year rose at its fastest pace in three decades after adjusting for inflation. This excess liquidity has not pushed up conventional inflation (thanks to cheap Chinese clothes and computers), but instead it has inflated a series of asset-price bubbles around the world. Thus, pushing this argument to its limit, it could be said that the global housing boom is indirectly "made in China". Not only has China played a role in holding down short-term interest rates, but the People's Bank of China has also supported America's mortgage market by buying vast amounts of mortgage-backed securities.

And the Economist thus concludes:

The fate of American house prices could thus be determined by unelected bureaucrats in Beijing rather than the unelected central bankers of the West.

This article has argued that global inflation, interest rates, bond yields, house prices, wages, profits and commodity prices are now being increasingly driven by decisions in China. This could be the most profound economic change in the world for at least half a century.

The important insight is that the link between interest rates and inflation has been broken, because of China's emergence on the world economy and its deflationary impact on consumer prices and wages. Thus cheap money has fed into asset prices - and created the massive housing bubble.

As a reminder, these few graphs:

Investment in the residential sector in the USA has almost doubled in the past 10 years, and increased by 50% since 2001. That's the sector where most of the current growth of the US economy is coming, and it's clearly finance generated, notably via home equity loans:

This has been compounded by Bush's reckless budgetary policies, which, as the graph below shows, are defined by an unprecedented scissor movement of increasing spending and reduced tax receipts:

So, at a time when deflation should have been tolerated and interest rates raised, hundreds of billions were given away to rich Americans in tax cuts and more to financial markets as cheap money, thus preventing consumer prices to go down at a time when wages were kept in check. The only thing that has given to many the illusion that all was dandy are the higher house prices and the debt fuelled consumption they make possible.

The result is artificial growth of the housing sector, massive debt for consumers, and no room for manoeuver on the budgetary side to fight the tighter monetary policies now imposed - finally - by higher oil prices (also caused by China). And no control over long term interest rates, willfully or not manipulated by big US Treasury holders/purchasers like China or the oil exporters.

Bush and Greenspan have given the keys of the house to China, and Bernanke is busily repainting the door. Nice job.