El-Erian: Fed Using Cyclical Medicine To Treat Structural Problem

PIMCO’s Mohamed El-Erian says central banks are continuing down a path that has an incredibly bifurcated set of outcomes. “Rather than step back and ask why (the measures have not succeeded), they just go deeper and deeper,” El-Erian tells CNBC of the loose money policies central banks around the globe are using. “The question is, will they finally succeed in transitioning from assisted growth to real growth, or will it end in tears? I think that’s a major uncertainty and the market doesn’t quite understand just how binary this outcome is.” El-Erian says that the U.S. unemployment problems are structural, not cyclical, but that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to address the problem with cyclical measures because “he feels he has no choice. … He feels he has to buy time for other agencies that can address the structural issues. … The question is, how much time is he going to buy, and how much collateral damage is he going to create in the process?”

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