Morgan Stanley: “Creative Destruction, Once The Backbone Of Capitalism, Is No Longer Considered”

The following brief comment by Morgan Stanley’s chief FX strategist Hans Redeker is one of the best summaries of the sad state the centrally-planned world finds itself in after 7 years of constant central bank manipulation to push risk assets higher no matter the cost.

Global imbalances have stayed strong but these imbalances are no longer expressed by current account differences and worries concerning foreign funding needs. Instead, current account differentials have developed into output gap differentials. Concretely, Asia’s current account surpluses have converged into supply, which within a world of demand deficiency has created overcapacity and falling investment returns.

Theoretically, there are three possible outcomes to deal with overcapacity. Austrian School-like destruction, increasing exports and finally providing debt-funded domestic demand. Creative destruction, once the backbone of a functioning capitalist system, is no longer seriously considered as the social costs of this approach appear unacceptably high. What remains are adjustments via exports and increasing local demand against ever-rising balance sheets.

Translation: since politicians are spineless cowards (and would much rather have the Fed do their work for them) and will never agree to kill zombie companies (or capital markets) and be exposed to the ire of their newly unemployed constituents, the only options are currency devaluation (exports) and even recorder debt, which makes the original problem even worse.

Oh, and next time Deutsche Bank laments that “capitalism is in a crisis“, please first read the bolded sentence above.