Welcome to Bogleheads on Investing, episode number 22. Today, my special guest is Dr. Ed Yardeni, a longtime economist who has been analyzing the Fed and the Federal Reserve Board chairmen for 40 years. Today, we'll be discussing Dr. Yardeni's new book, "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit." Hi, everyone. My name is Rick Ferry, and I'm the host of Bogleheads on Investing.

This episode, as with all episodes, is sponsored by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a 501(c)(3) corporation. Today, my special guest is Dr. Ed Yardeni. Dr. Yardeni received his undergraduate degree in economics and government from Cornell University in 1972 and then went on to receive his Ph.D.

in economics from Yale University in 1976. He then joined the Federal Reserve and later moved to Wall Street and became a famous Wall Street economist and now has his own consulting firm. Dr. Yardeni learned early on to watch the Federal Reserve. By controlling interest rates and other key variables, the Fed has enormous impact on financial markets and the economy.

Today, we're going to be talking about just that. I'm happy to have with us Dr. Ed Yardeni. Welcome, Doctor. Thank you very much. Just call me Ed. Thank you. I'm very pleased to have you on the show, Ed. I've been following you basically my entire career for more than 30 years and really fascinated by the work that you do and your background.

I really appreciate that. Every day I go and I read your morning notes on your website, Yardeni.com. That's great. Thank you. A lot of great commentary there. Before we get into your book, "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit," I wanted to have our listeners learn a little bit about you.

Well, I started out my college years as an engineer, actually, for the first semester. After a course in differential calculus made me realize that I just wasn't going to be an engineer, I transferred over to the government department in the Arts and Science School. Subsequently, I wound up double majoring at Cornell in government and economics.

That was my undergraduate years. Then I went to Yale and more or less did the same. I took an MA, Masters of Arts in International Relations for two years. I managed to take enough courses in economics that I could, after my MA, move over and in the next two years complete a PhD in economics.

My education was very much focused on politics, international relations, and economics. Then I wound up getting a job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That was sort of the beginning of my educational background and the beginning of my career. I understand that you worked for Paul Volcker when you were at the Fed.

He was the president, and I was just a lowly economist in the research department. Every now and then, we'd have a meeting where Volcker would be there, and research economists like myself would make presentations. I wouldn't want to characterize it as I worked directly for him, but he was the president, and I was one of his many employed economists.

After you left the Fed, you went to work for Wall Street? Yeah. I got a call from a headhunter about a year at the Fed. I had no intention of leaving. I did enjoy my day there. On the other hand, I had long admired Henry Kaufman, who had been the chief economist of Salomon Brothers for many years.

In many ways, he pioneered the concept of a Wall Street firm having an economist and a strategist. When I got the call from the headhunter, he offered me the opportunity to interview at EF Hutton. Remember that firm? When EF Hutton talks, people listen. That was their motto. It was a very classy firm.

It was catered to wealthy individuals as well as institutional accounts. I went for the interview and it worked out great. The chief economist at the time, Ed Searing, hired me to do the work on the financial side of the economy, and there was another fellow who focused on the real side, on the GDP side of the economy.

From there, you started to create quite a name for yourself. You were on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser, and you became quite famous right away. One of the things that I did early on is I put a lot of financial reporters on my distribution list. I produced a monthly at first, then a weekly, and subsequently I went for a daily.

I'm fairly opinionated, but I always try to back up my opinions with the facts and the data, and answer my own phone. Reporters have found it very easy to get a hold of me and to get an analysis of whatever they're interested in. I guess that kind of open communication with the financial media helped.

I think that's part of it. The other part is I do write a lot and comment on issues that everybody is concerned about. My job is to help institutional and, back then, retail accounts try to make money in the financial markets and at least avoid losing money. Those are issues that are relevant to a lot of people, and certainly in the financial press.

Back in 2007, you decided to go out on your own and start your own company. Right. I had been on Wall Street and a few firms, and then I went off to a money management firm out in Akron, Ohio, for a couple of years. Then I decided that I really wanted to do what I'd been doing all along, which was economic and investment strategy research.

I had the opportunity to start my own firm, leveraging up the account base that I had had on Wall Street. Many of them signed up when I reached out to them and told them that I'd hung out a shingle and that I was in business on my own. You're a very good writer, by the way.

It's easy to read what you write. I can understand it. There are so many times at the PhD level you start reading this stuff, and they simply want to impress each other. Right. Here, the way you write is to me, like you're talking with me, which is very good.

You've written a lot of books. One of the books you wrote recently was "Predicting the Markets of Professional Autobiography" back in 2018, which is an in-depth book. As you were writing that book, you decided that book probably could have been three or four books. It could have been a series of books, which in a way did become a series.

You wrote another book called "Stock Buybacks, the True Story," which I read your research on stock buybacks. It really changed my opinion about it, by the way. It was very fascinating to read. Then the yield curve, what is it really predicting in 2019? Most recently in the book that I want to talk about today is "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit." I really enjoyed this book and wanted to have you on the show to talk about the Fed because you stated right at the beginning of the book that you need to watch the Fed.

You need to know who the Fed chairmen are and what their biases are and what their beliefs are and how important that is to your role, which is trying to anticipate what's going to happen in the markets next. This is such a thorough investigation, history, if you will. I just found it fascinating as I read through it.

I really wanted to go through this book with you because I think the audience would really love to hear exactly what is this thing called the Federal Reserve and how does it work? Let's just start at the beginning. Well, the Fed was created in late 1913. It was created mostly because there was a concern that we just kept having these financial crises.

The previous crisis occurred in 1907, and J.P. Morgan, the famous banker, stepped in and managed to calm things down in the financial markets. He was, in a sense, the Fed at the time. He was the power in the financial markets. But there was a sense that we were getting too many of these financial disruptions and creating too much havoc in the economy, and that the money supply just wasn't elastic enough.

It wasn't responding to the cyclical needs of the economy for farming, for example, commerce, international trade. And so some politicians and Wall Street types got together and started to map out a central bank for the United States. And by the late 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which created the Fed.

Back then, the key mandate was to provide a currency that accommodated the needs of the economy, but in the context of what happened in 1907, but to avoid financial instability. In our conversation, we'll see how that mandate has changed into something completely different and how that may have kind of led to some of the issues that confront us today.

The Act kind of left things in the hands of 12 regional banks. These regional Fed banks are essentially owned through stock ownership by other banks, by private sector banks. So it's a quasi-private and governmental organization, but it clearly is very much a regulatory agent in our economy, responsible for regulating the banks.

But it also has become very important in managing the monetary system, the financial system. Now, most of the power originally rested with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under Benjamin Strong, who was the president of that bank. He was a financial conservative. He believed in the gold standard, and he did a pretty good job.

Unfortunately, he passed away in the late '20s just before the Great Recession hit, and the Feds just did a horrible job during the Great Depression. And as a result, in 1933, the Federal Reserve Act was amended to create the Federal Open Market Committee, which includes the governors of the Federal Reserve Board and the regional presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks around the country.

And the power shifted away from New York to Washington, D.C., and that kind of created a new version of the Fed, much more powerful than it had been before, much more centralized and located in Washington rather than New York. So it really became part of the Washington government and became a little less beholden to the financial system, which was epicentered in New York City.

And so after that change, we did start to see that the FOMC became much more important in our economy, but that really didn't occur until after World War II. With World War II, what happened, of course, is we wanted to win the war, as we all do in those kind of situations, and the Fed basically provided very low interest rates to the Treasury to borrow money to finance the war.

And then in the early '50s, the Treasury and the Fed came up with an agreement where the Fed basically got its power that it has today to manage monetary policy independently of the Treasury and other government pressures. So since the early '50s, the Fed's been running monetary policy more or less independently.

I mean, there's been a lot of criticism that sometimes that's not quite the case, but for all practical purposes, the Fed determines interest rates, determines the amount of reserves that banks have in the monetary system. So that's kind of a really brief overview of where the Fed originated, what its original mandate was, and how it evolved until today.

I should just mention that in the late '70s, its mandate changed to a dual mandate, which is to focus on keeping unemployment as low as possible and to keep price inflation extremely low as well. So we went from an originally promise of financial stability to managing the business cycle, and I think that created a lot of problems that have come to haunt us to this very day.

What I found interesting when you gave the history of the first Federal Reserve presidents prior to Arthur Burns was a lot of them were business tycoons. They weren't banking people. And then Richard Nixon appointed Arthur Burns. He was the first academic. When that occurred, was there a big shift in the way in which the Fed operated?

I think there was. Right before Arthur Burns, William McChesney Martin had been the Fed chair from April 1951 to January 1970, so he was in there for quite a long period of time. And he was a financial conservative, and he warned a few times, and I highlight it in my book a few times, that he warned that the Fed really shouldn't try to manage the business cycle, that there was something kind of natural about business cycles.

During booms, you wanted to take away the punch bowl in the famous speech he gave. But I think with Arthur Burns, with economists increasingly coming into the Fed, replacing bankers and lawyers, business people, that macroeconomics became more important in the way the Fed was run. And Arthur Burns was a macroeconomist.

I don't know that he particularly was the originator of the idea of managing the business cycle, but I think the criticism that many have had about Burns is that he wasn't independent enough of Richard Nixon and that he let inflation rise a bit too much. Burns was in there from February 1970 to January 1978, so he was there when we had the first oil shock.

And he did raise interest rates, but not enough to really bring inflation down, and it just remained on an upward course that was only exacerbated by a fellow who was there for a very short period of time. And his background was business, not economics. That was G. William Miller.

And G. William Miller was there from 1978, March '78, to August 1979. And he also was a little bit too lax about dealing with inflation. And sure enough, we got hit by another energy crisis in 1979. The problem with the inflation of the 1970s is that it went straight from oil prices into wages because the labor markets were fairly rigid and there were these large unions that had cost-of-living adjustments in their contracts, so that an increase in the price of oil really became a general inflation problem.

And that's when Paul Volcker came on the scene in August of 1979. He was there until 1987. Volcker was not an economist. He was a financial conservative, and he really felt that he couldn't let this inflation problem continue. And at the time, people were pretty convinced that inflation was kind of stuck in the system, that you couldn't really get it out.

And what Volcker demonstrated is that you could if you were willing to tolerate a really bad recession, which he was, until it became so bad that he had to relent. But by then, he'd achieved his goal of bringing inflation down. Early in 1971, when Arthur Burns was named as Fed Chairman, one of the first things that happened was the Bretton Woods Agreement, or the Bretton Woods System of International Currency Management, was dissolved by Nixon.

He basically, what we say, closed the gold window. And that led to price controls and led to food, oil, labor shocks, and so forth under Burns. And this is what caused this high inflation during the 1970s. And I want you to compare and contrast the concern that people have right now.

And I'm going to jump ahead a little bit here. But we see, you know, the Fed is just printing money, and people say it will become extremely inflationary. But in history, when looking back at the 1970s and comparing that to today and what's going on, I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit in our conversation here, but it is different.

I mean, it's not automatic inflation. Right, right. Well, that's the thing is the sort of knee-jerk approaches to understanding what the Fed is doing and what the consequences of its actions are. Many of these things are just kind of based on a perception that history repeats itself. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.

I think in the '70s, I think the '70s was really a unique period, a highly inflationary period. And it was pretty traumatic. I mean, people are still looking back there and saying it could happen again. And my spin is that I don't think that's the case. We don't have union power that used to be in the private sector.

There's still lots of unions in the public sector. But we had cost-of-living adjustments back then so that an oil price shock went straight into wages and was passed through into higher prices. During the subsequent decades, we saw several forces coming into play that have kept inflation down, brought inflation down.

One of them was globalization, which may very well be at risk here, may be challenged by the way the world is evolving away from globalization. But globalization, with the end of the Cold War in the late '80s, with China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, I argued that globalization was fundamentally deflationary because the reality was that manufacturers could manufacture anywhere in the world where labor was particularly cheap.

The result was relatively attractively priced goods and some services that Americans could benefit from. But many Americans did, in fact, lose their jobs to countries with low wages, particularly China. But that's not the only deflationary force we've had occurring in recent decades. Technological disruption is a very deflationary force.

We just have ongoing technological innovations that are all designed to produce better goods and services at lower and lower prices with technologies that are extraordinarily productive. In some ways, we may very well be at the beginning of another technology revolution. You don't have to imagine it. We know about 3D manufacturing.

We know about artificial intelligence, robotics, automation. They're all there, and they're getting very rapidly implemented into our lives, and they're inherently deflationary. Another important force of deflation, which has evolved since the '70s into a very powerful force of deflation, I think, is geriatric profiles of more and more populations around the world.

The reality is, in many places, fertility rates have plunged, so we're not having as many babies and people are living longer, so we're seeing populations, on average, getting older. Older populations, I think, for a lot of reasons, are less prone to inflation. That includes young people today who tend to be minimalists.

A lot of them are not getting married early in life, or if they're getting married at all, and they're not having children. So that's deflationary, and that's ongoing. There's no sign that that's going to change. Then debt. We're used to thinking of debt as being inflationary, as being stimulative, and I think that's one of the problems we have with the central bankers.

They still believe that if you lower interest rates, you'll stimulate people to borrow more, and that'll stimulate the economy. I think they've been doing that for so long that they don't realize that a lot of us have already got more debt than we can handle, and that a lot of the easy money has actually allowed what I call "zombie companies" to exist, meaning companies that should be out of business are staying in business because they can get financing so cheaply.

So the '70s was the '70s, and the 2020s, history repeats itself to a certain extent, but there are so many structural changes in our economy. In other words, the Fed isn't the whole story. The Fed's part of the story, a very important part of the story, but just knowing what the Fed's going to do isn't sufficient to really understand how our economy works and how that all influences the financial markets.

So the four Ds, right? Yeah, the four Ds are the four forces of deflation. Globalization starts with a G, so let's call it détente, same concept, and then technology starts with a T, so let's call it technological disruption, and then it's easier, it's demography and debt. All right, perfect.

So let's go back to how Volcker fought inflation by creating a different model that basically tracked money supply and basically automatically reset interest rates based on where the money supply was. Correct. That was really something quite radical. A few months after coming to run the Fed, he realized that he was having a problem with the Federal Open Market Committee in getting an agreement on raising interest rates to break the back of inflation, so he was worried that the Fed would lose its credibility in bringing down inflation.

So he, on a Saturday night, came up with a press conference and basically said that he had met in an emergency session with the FOMC and that they had agreed that they would adapt a new approach to managing monetary policy, which was to really just focus on the growth of the money supply and let interest rates fall or rise wherever they would.

It was basically a way to let the markets determine where interest rates had to go in a highly inflationary environment, and the markets immediately realized that the Fed was letting interest rates go to where they should go, which is a lot higher as a result of inflation. And that meant that the FOMC was no longer targeting interest rates but was letting interest rates rise high enough to break the back of inflation.

And, of course, the way that happened, the higher interest rates created a credit crunch, which historically has really been the way that we've gone into recessions. We've had these credit crunches very often caused by the Fed raising interest rates when they perceived that inflation was becoming a problem. And at some point, interest rates got high enough that credit conditions tightened up, and when that happened, we'd have a recession.

So in many ways, a lot of these legacies are still with us today, right? We talked about people believe that inflation is coming back because the money supply is increasing. Right. And then, well, if inflation comes back, then interest rates have to rise, and therefore you should sit on your 0% yielding money market fund and wait for interest rates to go up.

But I remember back in 2018, as the Fed was increasing interest rates, people believed that they were going to continue to go higher back to a normal rate. Right. They didn't last very long. No, you're right. We're all only humans and very much influenced by history, particularly the history that we've lived through, which is kind of one of the reasons I wrote the book.

There are a lot of things that have happened over the past few decades that people really don't know, and I think it's very important to have sort of a continuous historical perspective on how we got to where we are today. So Alan Greenspan comes in after Paul Volcker, and he is the great inflator of asset prices.

Yes, right. That's what I called him in my book, correct. And a believer in financial engineering, derivatives, you know, hands-off approach. Yes. Could have created what occurred in 2006, 2007, 2008 with financial derivatives. Yeah, I think Paul Volcker was probably the greatest chair of the Fed that we had.

He was very conservative. He was still true to the original mandate of the Fed, which was financial stability. And in his mind, keeping inflation down was a much more important mandate, implicit mandate, than having full employment. Alan Greenspan was a macroeconomist. I mean, Arthur Burns was a Ph.D. economist, but in terms of sort of the run of economists here, the most relevant one for us is Alan Greenspan, then Ben Bernanke, then Janet Yellen, all basically kind of following the same underlying macroeconomic assumptions and using the same models.

Alan Greenspan was very different from Paul Volcker. Volcker was a conservative and believed that the financial system had to be regulated and that you had to be very careful not to let the banks run wild. Again, that was the original mandate of the Fed, don't let 1907 happen all over again.

But Alan Greenspan, as you said, he was a laissez-faire, he was a deregulator. He believed that Wall Street had to compete with London and Frankfurt and other international markets, and if we didn't let Wall Street do what they do best without a lot of regulation, that we would lose competitiveness relative to other financial centers.

So he was all for letting Wall Street do its thing, and particularly in the area of credit derivatives. There was a debate that didn't last very long where there were a few officials who really wanted to regulate credit derivatives, the folks who were regulating the commodity markets. But Greenspan, along with a few others, totally resisted that and supported laws that allowed Wall Street to create these credit derivatives without any regulation whatsoever.

His basic assumption was, you know, these are smart people, they know what they're doing, and we should let them do it. But that really set the stage for, I think, much of the problems we're confronting today. There was sort of a warning shot, right, with the collapse of long-term capital management?

Yes. Well, when Greenspan came in, a few months after he came in, he came in August 1987. By October 1987, we had a crash in the stock market. And at the time, I think there was recognition that some of it had to do with what were then basically derivatives.

Some of Wall Street's geniuses created this concept of portfolio insurance, which promised that if we ever got into a crash, that the insurance policies created by these derivatives would protect you from the downside. Instead, they just really made things much worse. And Alan Greenspan jumped in and provided, at the time, easier credit conditions and helped to relieve the pressures on the financial markets.

And that experience was viewed as being the beginning of the Greenspan put, which is the Fed, under Greenspan, suddenly cared about the equity markets, had the backs of equity investors, whereas, as we saw with Paul Volcker, he couldn't care less about what the equity market was doing. He just cared about bringing inflation down, and if that caused a recession in the bear market and the stocks, he was willing to accept that, whereas Alan Greenspan comes in, and at the first hint that the market's got a problem, he jumps in and supports the market.

And that's really been the modus operandi, not just of Alan Greenspan, but the subsequent Fed chairs, like Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and certainly now Jerome Powell. So now that we're up to Jerome Powell, what is going on right now? You wrote a great commentary about no assets left behind.

You come up with all these great acronyms, by the way. But, boy, it just seems like I guess the only thing left is for the Fed to just outright go and buy stock. Well, that's the thing, is we started out with Alan Greenspan being very laissez-faire as long as the stock market was going up, but then when it took a dive in 1987 and then in 2000, he was clearly willing to provide stimulus to try to support the stock market.

But under Greenspan, it was really all focused on interest rates, and for the benefit of hindsight, it seems like he kept interest rates way too long in 2000 through 2006. He left in January 2006, so really at the end of 2005, interest rates were kept low for too long.

When he started raising them, he raised them in a very predictable fashion, 25 basis points per meeting for a couple of years, and just wasn't tough enough the way Volcker was with regards to keeping things in check. And the result, I think, was creating the housing bubble, the credit derivatives calamity that befell us, and that's what Ben Bernanke inherited.

I don't think Bernanke realized what Greenspan had left him. Bernanke came in on February 1, 2006, and by 2007, Bernanke realized he was having a problem with the subprime mortgage market, didn't quite appreciate how big the problem was, but by 2008, it became very apparent that things were falling apart.

And then I think Bernanke's big mistake was allowing Lehman to fail. I mean, they could have restructured Lehman, they could have fired the folks who ran the place into the ground, but by letting it go under, he took a financial crisis, which was bad, and turned it into basically a disaster.

And then he turned right around and tried to save the day, came up with bringing interest rates down to zero, came up with quantitative easing in late 2008, and then three programs of quantitative easing under Bernanke where they're buying bonds. Now, Janet Yellen came in on February 2014, and she was committed to keeping all this stimulus in the system, but she started to recognize that the economy was in an expansion for a few years, and it was time to start gradually raising interest rates.

But even she laid in her first term, and she only served one term. She left on February 2008, but in 2017, in one conversation, in one conference, she was actually talking about maybe the Fed should have the power to buy equities and corporate bonds, but she said maybe that's not a good idea, but we should think about it.

But Jerome Powell was the fellow where everything that had been -- the stage had really been set for everything that he's had to deal with by his predecessors, Greenspan, Bernanke, and Yellen. With Powell, we went from QE1, QE2, QE3, you know, these quantitative easing programs of buying bonds, to gradually raising interest rates early on in his term.

So he came in February 2018, and so he continued what Yellen was doing. But by late 2018, he was backing off already because the stock market took a dive, and here was another example, this time of the Powell put, where he backed off, started to lower interest rates in 2019.

And then the virus hit us, and suddenly on March 15th, it was a Sunday, he had his own Saturday night special conference, press conference, after meeting with the FOMC, where, you know, the parallels got interesting because Volcker had his press conference to announce that he was going to raise interest rates, allow interest rates to rise to whatever levels it needed to be to break inflation.

Powell on March 15th on a Sunday said that he was going to provide QE4, $700 billion of purchases of bonds in order to do whatever was necessary to cushion the economy from the effect of the virus crisis. He also lowered the Fed funds rate to zero. And the next day, which was March 16th, it was a Monday, the stock market dropped 12%, clearly suggesting that the Fed was no longer impressed.

You know, central bankers are very much into shock and awe, and some of these QE programs were shocking and awesome. This QE4 on March 15th, the message from the market the next day was, "Aw, shucks. Is that really the best you can do? Is that all you got?" And so there was clearly a message from the markets that maybe the Fed had run out of ammo and couldn't do anymore.

And that's when Powell really shocked and awed everybody because basically a week later, on March 23rd, it was a Monday, he announced what I call QE4ever, which is no limit whatsoever on the amount of bonds that they would buy, no time frame for how long this program would last other than we'll do it until the economy shows signs of recovering from the virus crisis.

And then along the way, a few days later, it became clear that the Fed was also going to be buying corporate bonds, which according to the Federal Reserve Act, they're not allowed to do, so they finagled it. They went around asking permission from Congress, and they probably could have gotten it from Congress, by creating these special purpose vehicles that were funded by the Treasury so that the Fed wouldn't assume any risk if there were losses.

It would be all up to the Treasury, which by the way means us, the taxpayers. But the Fed would be able to buy corporate bonds that way. So as you mentioned before, what's left? I guess we could think about the possibility that at some point the Fed might go and buy corporate equities.

That's what the Bank of Japan's been doing. But I don't really think that's necessary. I think just by being the lender of last resort in the corporate bond market, and we're talking about even junk bonds, triple B bonds, which are the lowest investment grade bonds, accounted for 50% of the investment grade bonds before the crisis.

After the crisis, many of those bonds turned into junk, and the Fed announced that many of those securities would in fact be part of their program for supporting the market. The fallen angels. Yeah, right. And it was funny because not only were they going to buy existing fallen angels, bonds that went from investment grade to non-investment grade, but they were also going to buy new issues from the companies that became fallen angels, which I found really interesting.

Right. Well, it's disturbing. You know, the Fed started out with a mission of financial stability, and look where we are now. We certainly don't have financial stability. We have way too much debt. We have way too many junk bonds, leveraged loans, weak covenants, and the Fed's known about all these things.

As a matter of fact, we had a financial crisis in 2008, and it wasn't until 10 years later that the Fed started writing financial stability reports to assess that very subject. In their reports, they acknowledged that things weren't all that good in the corporate bond market and the corporate leverage market.

They said the households are in better shape than they were in 2008, and the banks were in better shape, and they said that they are aware of the problems in the corporate debt markets and are addressing them without ever saying exactly what they were doing. Then the virus crisis hits, and now we know what they're doing.

They're supporting the corporate bond market by basically buying these securities outright and allocating capital to corporations now by doing so. Do we really want an economy where the central bank is allocating capital as opposed to the markets? Let me ask you something that I've been thinking about, and that is if you have this safety net or the Powell put where equity investors know it's going to be fed to the rescue if you get volatility in the equity market, why wouldn't the valuations of equities just continue to go up over time to $25,000, $35,000, $45,000, and we get to look an awful lot like Japan looked in the late 1980s?

Is that a feasible scenario? It's a possible scenario. I hope we don't get there. That's the problem you have when the Fed provides ultra-easy monetary policy, a lot of that easy money goes to push up valuations and financial assets rather than going into the real economy. I think the Fed has crossed a lot of lines, which made it impossible to kind of go back.

It's kind of one thing led to another and bringing us to this point. If I could rewrite history, I'd kind of clone Volcker and make sure that whoever replaced Volcker was replaced by Volcker 2, then Volcker 3, and Volcker 4, and that I would have insisted that the mandate of the Fed first and foremost should be financial stability and not managing the business cycle.

Once it got into the business of managing the business cycle, I think that was the beginning of lots of the problems we have now. The reality is in a capitalist system, occasionally there will be downturns and companies that are aware of the downside risks and don't feel that there's a Fed put that'll save them from disaster, they're going to deal with that by having enough liquidity, by not doing excessive things that create speculative booms that lead to busts.

Now we're in the twilight zone of monetary policy. I mean, it's surreal. It's almost science fiction to imagine that the Fed's balance sheet is going to just expand without limit and that the Fed this year will probably wind up financing the entire federal deficit, which is projected to be something like $3.7 trillion.

So the Fed's already at $7 trillion on its balance sheet, up from $3 trillion from a few months ago. And I think it's probably headed to $10 trillion. And the consequences of that, nobody knows for sure. I think the scenario you laid out, where all that stimulus creates another financial asset bubble with forward PEs for the stock market already in the low 20s going a lot higher, that would be very unsettling because I think that would indicate that the markets are not really functioning.

They're not operating the way they should be. And that's because the central bank has become the market. I mean, they've become the bond market. And indirectly, by keeping bond yields near zero, they're forcing a lot of investors to rebalance out of bonds and into stocks, so they don't have to buy stocks.

Just by buying bonds and keeping bond yields close to zero, in effect, they're supporting the stock market. Even in your research, you recently have had to expand your forward earnings from 12 months to 18 months to come up with PEs that are reasonable. That makes sense. What do the other countries, central banks, think about what we're doing?

Or is everybody in this together? They're all in it together. The major central banks, the European Central Bank, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the BOJ, they're all doing it together. They're all run by macroeconomists, and macroeconomists are do-gooders. They think they have the power to solve a lot of our problems with our policies, and I don't think that's correct.

For example, back in 2010, when Ben Bernanke implemented QE2, I was arguing that, you know, the Fed funds rates down to zero. Maybe they should just say that's all we can do, folks. We can't do any more. Instead, they said, well, we're not going to push interest rates into negative territory, but we could in effect do that by buying $600 billion worth of Treasuries.

So they just keep coming up with more examples of how they believe they can surmount all difficulties with their ability to, in effect, print money. And what that just seems to do is get us from one problem to the next. I don't know if this all ends badly, but I don't know what we're going to do with a Fed that's got a balance sheet that's a lot bigger than it is today and owns corporate bonds and has really made it very difficult for markets to operate in a competitive manner where market prices reflect the true value of stocks and bonds as determined by investors who can make money and can lose money.

Having this huge Fed put now is something we've been working ourselves up to ever since Greenspan started it. But where it all goes, no one knows for sure. With regards to inflation, the nightmare scenario would be that we get something like Weimar hyperinflation and interest rates going up. After we've accumulated all this debt, the impact on the deficit would be that it would be huge and most of it would be just interest payments.

I don't think we're going to go that route. I think we're more likely to go down the road that Japan's been going down for quite some time, and that is a lot of fiscal stimulus financed by the central bank, and yet it's not inflationary because of underlying aging demography, underlying technological innovations, but it could very well create another bubble in the stock market, and then what?

And as you said, well, I mean, you can't rule out the possibility that at some point they'll give us the ultimate put, which is to buy stocks directly. I hope that never happens, but I certainly can't rule it out. It's interesting that you have all of these defined benefit plans that have to get a certain rate of return to meet their actuarial.

Right. And you can't get it from bonds. You can't get it from bonds, so you're forced to get into stocks. You know, March 25th in the morning, I'm proud to say that we wrote a piece saying that we thought the bear market was over, that it made it slow on March 23rd, and I think that insight came largely from having written my book on the Fed.

It said that the Fed matters, and having the Fed shock and awe me, and I'm not easily shocked and awed, but I was floored by what they had done on March 23rd. I called it QE forever, as I said. I concluded that the Fed had made the low, so the Fed matters a lot.

I have to tell you something. By the way here, in early March, I was depressed like everybody else was by the virus, by what this implied for the economy. I mean, early March was a nightmare. We had illiquidity in the credit markets. It really looked just horrible, and I just had posted my book on Amazon, and I was wondering to myself, "Oh, my God, I just spent all this time writing this book, and who could possibly be interested in the Fed?

I wish I had written a book on virology." But March 23rd, it was like, "Oh, the book's relevant again." I have to admit, even I thought, "What can the Fed possibly do to make a virus go away?" And the answer is nothing, but on the other hand, a credit crunch created by the pandemic of fear related to the virus, the Fed could do something, which is what they did, which was no acid left behind, QE forever.

I also call it launching B-52 bombers to carpet bomb the economy with cash. Remember, people used to talk about the Fed's bazookas, and then they thought maybe they were out of ammo, and there was some speculation that they'd go to helicopter money, and they didn't even bother with helicopters.

They just went straight to B-52s. I have to ask this question about negative interest rates before we finish up today. Tell me, it's happening in other countries, Japan, Germany. Why not the U.S.? Well, you know, as I've been thinking about the Fed over the years, I've been writing about the Fed in this book, and starting to increasingly piece together, show the relevance of history, of what the Fed's been doing and how the Fed's ideas have changed, and all leading to where we are today, I can certainly see how history has been extremely relevant to the mess we're in now.

And in recent weeks or months this year, I've been increasingly saying that we've never been in anything like this. And it's surreal, and you have to think differently and not get too closed off in your thinking. So things that you just can't imagine would ever happen, you have to think, well, maybe they could.

So, yeah, could negative interest rates happen here in the United States? They could. They've got slightly negative interest rates in Europe and in Japan, so it certainly could happen here. I hope it doesn't. I think that the concept of investing your money and getting less back, well, you know, some of us are used to that when it comes to inflation, and that's why people fear inflation as investors, is that, you know, even if you get a nominal yield, it may not be enough to cover inflation, so you wind up in real terms making less.

But there was an uncertainty about that, and that presumably in a relatively free market, investors could get the kind of yield that they think was appropriate to get a real return. If you start out investing with a negative nominal yield where you know you're going to lose money, well, it only works if you actually have deflation.

They actually are willing to buy securities with a negative rate if you think deflation is coming. But other than that, you know, it's a guaranteed losing proposition. And I'm not sure that in a free market environment that that would be the case, and it certainly leads to a tremendous misallocation of capital, I would think.

I don't know how retirees who are getting Social Security are going to take getting less, the actual dollar amount being less. Well, it's a very distorted environment we live in. You know, pensions have promised their pensioners that they're going to get them something like 6%, 7%, 8% returns, and you can't get that in the bond market anymore, and that forces them into the stock market and forces them to take junk bonds and dicier kind of credits.

And it just distorts the economy beyond recognition, and that's where the Fed's brought us. Things look very odd right now, like you said, the twilight zone, and maybe that's why on every dollar bill there's this saying, "In God we trust." Well, look, at the end of the day, you have to have faith that things are going to get better.

I mean, that's really been the case. I've been doing this for over 40 years, and I think that the future is actually going to be fine. The Fed is not the whole story. The point of my book was to make people understand how important the Fed really is, but at the same time, I think it's important not to lose sight that the Fed doesn't run the whole economy, that there are a lot of us that are going to work or working from home on a regular basis trying to make things better for ourselves, our families, and our communities.

And I think that kind of push by us running the economy will offset some of the excesses that have been actually created by the policymakers. And so problems are meant to be solved is kind of one of my mottos that I've tried to teach my children. And there are a lot of problems here.

Right now the most immediate one we have is the virus crisis, but there's a lot of technology being focused on solving this problem, and who knows, maybe we'll come up with something that you take one shot and it kind of protects you not just from this virus, but from a whole bunch of other viruses.

So things always look dark just before they get better, and I'm optimistic that things will get better, and hopefully so much better that the Fed could just kind of be less important and not continue with these excessive policies and just become less a factor in our lives. The name of the book is "Fed Watching for Fun and Profit" by Dr.

Ed Yardeni. Well, thank you so much for joining us on "Bogleheads on Investing." Great to have you. Thank you very much. This concludes "Bogleheads on Investing," episode number 22. I'm your host, Rick Ferry. Join us each month to hear a new special guest. In the meantime, visit bogleheads.org and the Bogleheads Wiki.

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