YOU CAN PRINT MONEY BUT YOU CAN’T PRINT WEALTH: The Great Wealth Illusion.

It’s no secret that for the past decade and a half the Federal Reserve has made it its mission to create a “wealth effect” in the economy by boosting asset prices. Back in 2010, Ben Bernanke explained, “…higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.” And so he began a process of printing money with the explicit purpose of inflating asset prices, a policy that has been continued by each of his successors.

Over this time, quantitative easing, as the policy is called, has been inordinately successful in boosting asset prices while not so effective in boosting the economy. The most straightforward evidence of this is the fact that household net worth relative to the economy has soared to record highs during the QE era. If it had worked the way Bernanke intended then, after a brief surge in the ratio, it would have flattened out as growth in the economy caught up to growth in asset prices. Clearly, that didn’t happen.

It does appear, however, as if the central bank did at least accomplish the first half of Bernanke’s mission (boosting wealth) even if it didn’t quite accomplish the second half (kickstarting a virtuous circle of economic growth). But when you look at household net worth relative to the growth in the money supply, it’s clear that the rise in the former was nothing more than an illusion. Net worth has actually declined relative to M2 since 2008 and is now back to levels not seen in the 20 years prior to that time. The truth is that there has been no “real” wealth created at all when measured this way.

At the time I referred to this as Cargo Cult thinking: Print the money and the goods will come. It’s amazing how many of our best-credentialed people believed it would work — and still do.