The Bloomberg Commodity Index plunges to 13-year low, led by a drop in gold. http://bloom.bg/1I4NjGH
#2 Oil Is Crashing
Home » Posts tagged 'deflation' (Page 10)
Tag Archives: deflation
Making Sense Of The Sudden Market Plunge
Making Sense Of The Sudden Market Plunge
Are you prepared for further turmoil?
The global deflationary wave we have been tracking since last fall is picking up steam. This is the natural and unavoidable aftereffect of a global liquidity bubble brought to you courtesy of the world’s main central banks. What goes up must come down — and that’s especially true for the world’s many poorly-constructed financial bubbles, built out of nothing more than gauzy narratives and inflated with hopium.
What this means is that the traditional summer lull in financial markets has turned August into an unusually active and interesting month. August, it appears, is the new October.
Markets are quite possibly in crash mode right now, although events are unfolding so quickly – currency spikes, equity sell offs, emerging market routs and dislocations, and commodity declines – that it’s hard to tell for sure. However, that’s usually the case right before and during big market declines.
Before you read any further, you probably should be made aware that, at Peak Prosperity, our market outlook has been one of extreme caution for several years. We never bought into so-called “recovery” because much of it was purely statistical in nature, and had to rely on heavily distorted and tortured ‘statistics’ to be believed. Okay, lies is probably a more accurate term in many cases.
Further, most of the gains in financial assets engineered by the central banks were false and destined to burstbecause they were based on bubble psychology, not actual returns.
Which bubbles you ask? There are almost too many to track. But here are the main ones:
- Corporate bond bubble
- Corporate earnings bubble
- Junk bond bubble
- Sovereign debt bubble
- Equity bubbles in various markets (US, China) and sectors (Tech, Biotech, Energy)
- Real estate bubbles, especially in the commodity exporting countries
- Central bank credibility bubble (perhaps the largest and most dangerous of them all)
What’s the one thing that binds all of these bubbles together? Central bank money printing.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Indonesia Impaled: Currency Crashes To 1998 Asian Crisis Low As Exports Crater
Indonesia Impaled: Currency Crashes To 1998 Asian Crisis Low As Exports Crater
On Monday we laid out the rather dire road ahead for the world’s emerging economies in the face of China’s entry into the global currency wars. The path ahead is riddled with exported deflation and decreased trade competitiveness for a whole host of emerging economies [and] all of this is set against a backdrop of declining global growth and trade, a trend which many had assumed was merely cyclical, but which in fact may prove to be structural and endemic.”
Well don’t look now, but trade just collapsed for Indonesia as exports and imports plunged 19.2% and 28.4% (more than double to consensus estimate), respectively in July.
Imports of raw materials dove 24%. Manufacturing and palm oil exports fell 7.1% and 2.4%, respectively, nearly tripling June’s declines. Oil and gas exports fell nearly 8%.
Meanwhile, Bank of Indonesia kept its policy rate on hold at 7.5% and indeed the bank looks to be stuck in a dilemma similar to what we described earlier this month when we noted that “EM central bankers are grappling with slumping exports and FX-pass through inflation or, more simply, bankers are caught between a ‘can’t cut to boost the economy’ rock and a ‘can’t hike to tame inflation’ hard place. The rupiah, like the Malaysian ringgit, is trading near multi-decade lows and hit its weakest level since August 1998 earlier in the session. Depressed commodity prices and slumping demand from China aren’t helping.
And neither is Beijing’s devaluation of the yuan which means that suddenly, Indonesia has lost export competitiveness to China while anything China imports from Indonesia will now cost more.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 2
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 2
The Psychological Driver of Deflation and the Collapse of the Trust Horizon
The collective mood shifts rapidly from optimism and greed to pessimism and fear as the bubble bursts, and as it does so, the financial system moves from expansion to contraction. Financial contraction involves the breaking of promises right left and centre, with credit instruments drastically revalued downwards in the process. As the promises that back them cease to be credible, value disappears extremely rapidly. This is deflation and the elimination of excess claims to underlying real wealth.
Instruments once regarded as money equivalents will lose that status through the loss of confidence in them, causing the supply of what retains sufficient confidence to still be regarded as money to collapse. The more instruments lose the confidence that confers value upon them, the smaller the effective money supply will be, and the more confidence will become a rare ‘commodity’. Being grounded in psychology is the primary reason that deflation cannot be overcome through policy adaptations which are inherently too little and too late. Nothing moves as quickly as a collective loss of confidence in human promises, and nothing destroys value as comprehensively.
The same abrupt change in collective mood will also drive contraction in the real economy, but more slowly, since the time constant for change in the real world is much slower than in the virtual world of finance. This process will also result in broken promises as structural dependencies fracture when there is no longer enough to go around. There will be wage and benefit cuts, layoffs, strikes, strike-breaking, breaches of contract, business failures and more on a huge scale, and these will fuel further fear, anger and the destruction of trust.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 1
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 1
Intro
A great deal of intelligence is invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow, 1976
More and more people (although not nearly enough) are coming to recognise that humanity cannot continue on its current trajectory, as the limits we face become ever more obvious, and their implications starker. There is a growing realisation that the future must be different, and much thought is therefore being applied to devising supposed solutions for that future. These are generally attempts to reconcile our need to make changes with our desire to continue something very much resembling our current industrial-world lifestyle, with a view to making a seamless transition between the now and a comfortably familiar future. The presumption is that it is possible, but this rests on foundational assumptions which vary between the improbable and the outright impossible. It is a presumption grounded in a comprehensive failure to understand the nature and extent of our predicament.
We are facing limits in many ways simultaneously – not surprising since exponential growth curves for so many parameters have gone critical in recent decades, and of course even more so in recent years. Some of these limits lie in human systems, while others are ecological or geophysical. They will all interact with each other, over different timeframes, in extremely complex ways as our state of overshoot resolves itself (to our dissatisfaction, to put it mildly) over many decades, if not centuries. Some of these limits are completely non-negotiable, while others can be at least partially mutable, and it is vital that we know the difference if we are to be able to mitigate our situation at all. Otherwise we are attempting to bargain with the future without understanding our negotiating position.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Approaching a Global Deflationary Crisis?
Approaching a Global Deflationary Crisis?
Anyone with any sense for global economic trends ought to be worried. The signs are everywhere of a serious deflationary crisis. It is obvious that Chinese growth is falling. The prices for energy and the raw materials that feed the growth economy keep falling. The demand for Chinese exports is down too. Stock Markets in Asia are falling, despite attempts to prop them up. Countries are being tempted to export their problems abroad – for example by competitive devaluation. In Europe its obvious that a “solution” is being cobbled together for the Euro and Greek crisis even though no one at all believes that it will work. At the same time the policy response of “quantitative easing” which has kept interest rates down very low has reached the end of the road. With interest rates at or near to zero the scope for addressing the crisis through monetary policy (low interest rates) is exhausted. Many pundits believe that low interest rates have not encouraged productive investment but speculative bubbles – the creation of capacity in fields that in the long run will not pay, or fuelled a casino style speculation, a giant bubble of bets that could soon collapse, bringing the global economy down with it.
So what is going on? How do we explain the situation? In this paper I am going to argue that there are a number of ways of understanding and addressing what is developing into a global crisis. The desire to make the crisis understandable can convert into a temptation to make it seem simpler than it is. At its most banal we have the explanations that neo liberal German politicians are prone to – like the idea that the crisis is because of a lack of confidence and trust and that this can be resolved (in Europe) purely and simply by countries following the Eurozone rules. If the confidence and trust are restored then all will be well and the market will restore prosperity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Deleveraging as a Biblical Plague
Deleveraging as a Biblical Plague
Eventful days in the middle of summer. Just as the Greek Pandora’s box appears to be closing for the holidays (but we know what happens once it’s open), and Europe’s ultra-slim remnants of democracy erode into the sunset, China moves in with a one-off but then super-cubed renminbi devaluation. And 100,000 divergent opinions get published, by experts, pundits and just about everyone else under the illusion they still know what is going on.
We’ve been watching from the sidelines for a few days, letting the first storm subside. But here’s what we think is happening. It helps to understand, and repeat, a few things:
• There have been no functioning financial markets in the richer parts of the world for 7 years (at the very least). Various stimulus measures, in particular QE, have made sure of that.
A market cannot be said to function if and when central banks buy up stocks and bonds with impunity. One main reason is that this makes price discovery impossible, and without price discovery there is, per definition, no market. There may be something that looks like it, but that’s not the same. If you want to go full-frontal philosophical, you may even ponder whether a country like the US still has a functioning economy, for that matter.
• There are therefore no investors anymore either (they would need functioning markets). There are people who insist on calling themselves investors, but that’s not the same either. Definitions matter, lest we confuse them.
Today’s so-called ‘investors’ put to shame both the definition and the profession; I’ve called them grifters before, and we could go with gamblers, but that’s not really it: they’re sucking central bank’s udders. WHatever we would settle on, investors they’re not.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Economic Growth Fails
How Economic Growth Fails
We all know generally how today’s economy works:
Our economy is a networked system. I have illustrated it as being similar to a child’s building toy. Ever-larger structures can be built by adding more businesses and consumers, and by using resources of various kinds to produce an increasing quantity of goods and services.
There is no overall direction to the system, so the system is said to be “self-organizing.”
The economy operates within a finite world, so at some point, a problem ofdiminishing returns develops. In other words, it takes more and more effort (human labor and use of resources) to produce a given quantity of oil or food, or fresh water, or other desirable products. The problem of slowing economic growth is very closely related to the question: How can the limits we are reaching be expected to play out in a finite world? Many people imagine that we will “run out” of some necessary resource, such as oil, but I see the situation differently. Let me explain a few issues that may not be obvious.
1. Our economy is like a pump that works increasingly slowly over time, as diminishing returns and other adverse influences affect its operation. Eventually, it is likely to stop.
As nearly as I can tell, the way economic growth occurs (and stops taking place) is as summarized in Figure 3.
As long as (a) energy and other resources are cheap, (2) debt is readily available, and (3) “overhead” in the form of payments for government services, business overhead, and interest payments on debt are low, the pump can continue working as normal. As various parts of the pump “gum up,” the economic growth pump slows down. It is likely to eventually stop, once it becomes too difficult to repay debt with interest with the meager level of economic growth achieved.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
TSHTF Podcast with Nicole Foss, Raúl Ilargi Meijer & RE
TSHTF Podcast with Nicole Foss, Raúl Ilargi Meijer & RE
Nicole and I did an interview with Reverse Engineer at the Doomstead Diner a few nights ago. I haven’t listened to it yet, but he seems to think it was, let’s say, entertaining yet insightful. Cheerful in the face of collapse.
Here’s what Reverse Engineer wrote about it on the DD site:
Reverse Engineer: Recently, Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth returned to blogging after taking something of a hiatus over the last year. I caught one of her recent pieces on the situation in China, and her writing partner Raul Ilargi Meijer has been covering the situation in Greece extensively. Besides those two ongoing clusterfucks in China & Greece, there’s quite a bit of ongoing collapse related to climate, the recent publication by James Hansen on Sea Level Rise, and of course the Encyclical by the Vicar of Christ on Earth, His Holiness Pope Francis, Chief Spokesperson for some 1.2B members of the Holy Roman Catholic Church…. clearly no shortage of Collapse Topics to discuss!
It’s been about 2 years since I first got together with Nicole to talk about Energy & Inflation & Deflation. So this seemed like a good time to do an update, and I nailed her down for another chat this week. She happens to be visiting with Raul in the Netherlands, so as a bonus in this conversation we got his input as well. Now, for those of you expecting to get the normal “Just the Facts, Ma’am” type of presentation from Nicole in this Podcast, you may be slightly disappointed.
There definitely are a lot of facts jammed into this hour of KollapsnikTM chat. However, because Nicole was chatting with both me and Ilargi, we kind of went off the rails a few times, and hilarity ensued. I decided to leave some of it in there for a little entertainment value.
The stuff I cut out is even funnier, but sadly not for public consumption. LOL.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Deflation, Debt and Gravity
Deflation, Debt and Gravity
Far too many people have already used lines like “We Are All Greeks Now” for the words to hold on to much if any meaning by now. But it’s still a very accurate description of what awaits us all. Just not for the same reasons most who used it, did.
No, I don’t really want to talk about Greece again. I want to talk about where you live. And about how similar the two will be not too long from now. How Greece is holding up a lesson and a big red flashing warning sign for all of us.
Greece is the mold upon which all of our futures will be based. Quite literally. Greece is a test tube baby rat.
Greece will never “recover” to our North American and Western European economic levels (if ever they were there). Instead, it’s us who will descend, “uncover” so to speak, to the levels Greece is at today. That is baked into the cake, that is inevitable, and that is therefore what we need to be ready for.
If we wake up in time to this new reality, we may, and that’s still only may, be able to prevent the worst, prevent something akin to the same punitive measures the Troika has unleashed upon Greek society, fully wrecking it in the process, its healthcare system, the safety nets for its most needy.
We may find a way to make a smoother transition from here to there if we prepare in time. But that’s the best we can do. As societies, that is; individual fates will vary.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
I Sure Am Glad There’s No Inflation
I Sure Am Glad There’s No Inflation
I sure am glad there’s no inflation, because these “stable prices” the Federal Reserve keeps jaw-jacking about are putting us in a world of hurt.
We are constantly bombarded with two messages about inflation:
1. Inflation is near-zero
2. This worries the Federal Reserve terribly, because stable prices are deflationaryand deflation is (for reasons that are never explained) like the financial Black Plague that will wipe out humanity if it isn’t vanquished by a healthy dose of inflation (i.e. getting less for your money).
Those of us outside the inner circles of power are glad there’s no inflation, because we’d rather get more for our money (deflation) rather than less for our money (inflation). You know what I mean: the package that once held 16 ounces now only holds 13 ounces. A medication that once cost $79 now costs $79,000. (This is a much slighter exaggeration than you might imagine.)
Our excellent F-18 Super Hornet fighter aircraft cost us taxpayers $54 million a piece. Now the replacement fighter, the wallowing collection of defective parts flying in close proximity known as the F-35 costs $250 million each–unless you want an engine in it. That’ll cost you extra, partner.
Despite all these widely known examples of rampant inflation, every month we’re told there’s no inflation. Just to reassure myself there’s no inflation, I looked up a few charts on the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database.
I have to say, I’m scratching my head here because the cost of things has gone up a lot since 2000.
The consumer price index is up 38% from 2000. Now if somebody were to give me a choice between getting 10 gallons of gasoline and 10 gallons minus 3.8 gallons of gasoline, I’d take the 10 gallons. So how the heck can a 38% increase be near-zero inflation?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
China And The New World Disorder
China And The New World Disorder
Nicole Foss: Our consistent theme here at the Automatic Earth since its inception has been that we are facing a very powerful deflationary depression, following on from the bursting of an epic financial bubble. What we have witnessed in our three decades of expansion and inflation is nothing short of a monetary supernova, and that period has been the just culmination of a much larger upward trend going back many decades at least. We have lived through a credit hyper-expansion for the record books, with an unprecedented generation of excess claims to underlying real wealth. In doing so we have created the largest financial departure from reality in human history.
Bubbles are not new – humanity has experienced them periodically going all the way back to antiquity – but the novel aspect of this one, apart from its scale, is its occurrence at a point when we have reached or are reaching so many limits on a global scale. The retrenchment we are about to experience as this bubble bursts is also set to be unprecedented, given that the scale of a bust is predictably proportionate to the scale of the excesses during the boom that precedes it. We have built an incredibly complex economic system, but despite its robust appearance it is over-extended, brittle and fragile after decades of fuelling its continued expansion by feeding on its own substance.
The Automatic Earth, December 2011: The lessons of the past are sadly never learned. Each time the optimism is highly contagious. In the larger episodes, it crescendos into euphoria, leading societies into a period of collective madness where risk is embraced and caution is thrown to the wind. Sky-high valuations are readily rationalized – it’s different here, it’s different this time.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Deflation Is Winning – Beware!
Deflation Is Winning – Beware!
Expect the ride to get even rougher
Deflation is back on the front burner and it’s going to destroy all of the careful central planning and related market manipulation of the past 6 years.
Clear signs from the periphery indicate that a destructive deflationary pulse has been unleashed. Tanking commodity prices are confirming that idea.
Whole groups of enterprises involved in mining and energy are about to be destroyed. And the commodity-heavy nations of Canada, Australia and Brazil are in for a very rough ride.
Whether the central banks can keep all of their carefully-propped equity and bond markets elevated throughout the next part of the cycle remains to be seen. We know they will try very hard. They certainly are increasingly willing to use any all tools at their disposal to keep the status quo going for as long as possible.
Whether it’s the People’s Bank of China stepping in to the market to buy 10% stakes in major Chinese corporations in a matter of weeks, the Bank Of Japan becoming the majority owner of key ETFs in the Japanese markets, or the Swiss National Bank purchasing $100 billion of various global equities, we see the same desperation. Equity prices are being propped, jammed and extended higher and higher without regard to risk or repurcussions.
It makes us wonder: Why haven’t humans ever thought to print their way to prosperity before?
Well, that’s the problem. They have.
And it has always ended up disastrously. History shows that the closest thing that economics has to an inviolable law is: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Sadly, all of our decision-makers are trying their hardest to ignore that truth.
First, The Fall….
So how will all of this progress from here?
We’ve always liked the Ka-Poom! theory by Erik Janzen which we explained previously like this:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Central Banks Have Shot Their Wad——-Why The Casino Is In For A Rude Awakening, Part I
Central Banks Have Shot Their Wad——-Why The Casino Is In For A Rude Awakening, Part I
There has been a lot of chatter in recent days about the plunge in commodity prices—–capped off by this week’s slide of the Bloomberg commodity index to levels not seen since 2002. That epochal development is captured in the chart below, but most of the media gumming about the rapidly accelerating “commodity crunch” misses the essential point.
To wit, the central banks of the world have shot their wad. Accordingly, the 12-year round trip depicted in the chart is not about the end of some nebulous “commodity supercycle” that arrived from out of the blue after the turn of the century. Nor, most certainly, is it evidence of the Keynesians’ purported global shortage of “aggregate demand” that can be remedied by an even more extended spree of central bank monetary stimulus.
No, the Bloomberg Commodity index is a slow motion screen shot depicting the massive intrusion of worldwide central bankers into the global economic and financial system. Their unprecedented spree of money printing took the aggregate global central bank balance sheet from $3 trillion to $22 trillion over the last 15 years.
The consequence was a deep and systematic falsification of financial prices on a planet-wide scale. This unprecedented monetary shock generated a double-pumped economic boom—–first in the form of an artificial debt-fueled consumption spree and then a sequel of massive malinvestment.
Now comes the deflationary aftermath. Soon there will follow a plunge in corporate profits and collapsing prices among the vastly inflated risk asset classes which surfed on these phony booms.
So it is worth recounting how we got here. In the first phase, central banks engineered a massive wave of household borrowing and consumption/housing spending in the DM economies which, in turn, ignited an export manufacturing boom in China and among its caravan of EM suppliers. This China/EM export boom eventually over-taxed the world’s existing capacity to supply the raw materials required by a booming industrial economy—hydrocarbons, iron ore, met coal, aluminum, copper, nickel etc.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
4 Things That Are Happening Today That Indicate That A Deflationary Financial Collapse Is Imminent
4 Things That Are Happening Today That Indicate That A Deflationary Financial Collapse Is Imminent
When financial markets crash, they do not do so in a vacuum. There are always patterns, signs and indicators that tell us that something is about to happen. In this article, I am going to share with you four patterns that are happening right now that also happened just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008. These four signs are very strong evidence that a deflationary financial collapse is right around the corner. Instead of the hyperinflationary crisis that so many have warned about, what we are about to experience is a collapse in asset prices, a massive credit crunch and a brief period of absolutely crippling deflation. The response by national governments and global central banks to this horrific financial crisis will cause tremendous inflation down the road, but that comes later. What comes first is a crisis that will initially look a lot like 2008, but will ultimately prove to be much worse. The following are 4 things that are happening right now that indicate that a deflationary financial collapse is imminent…
#1 Commodities Are Crashing
In mid-2008, just before the U.S. stock market crashed in the fall, commodities started crashing hard. Well, now it is happening again. In fact, the Bloomberg Commodity Index just hit a 13 year low, which means that it is already lower than it was at any point during the last financial crisis…
On Monday, the price of oil dipped back below $50 a barrel. This has surprised many analysts, because a lot of them thought that the price of oil would start to rebound by now.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Side-Effects Include: Household Debt
Side-Effects Include: Household Debt
Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz fancies himself a surgeon. He compares cutting interest rates to life-saving surgery for the economy. I consider it more like bloodletting, a terrible practice that is now widely accepted as pseudoscience. According to Canada’s central banker, if the interest rate cut resulted in an increase of household debt, that should be viewed as a necessary side effect.
If the Bank of Canada has one job it’s to focus on the 2 per cent inflation target and that means cutting the benchmark rate by 25 basis points when global crude oil prices tumble. Or at least, that’s what Stephen Poloz said to the central bank of central banks, the Bank for International Settlements.
“If the doctor says you need surgery to avoid death, the side effects usually don’t deter you, you just go ahead and manage them somehow,” Poloz said. “Other issues must be subordinate and I think of them as side effects.”
Likewise, if a bloodletter tells me I need to balance my “humors”, the side effects of losing so much blood won’t deter me. I’ll just go ahead and manage them somehow.
Of course, what Poloz is really saying is that the Bank needed to intervene to prevent death, or rather, a contraction of credit and available money. The side effects of more household debt, the prospect of higher prices in the future, the misallocation of resources – those are all side effects where the alternative is deflation. And we can’t have that.
“When we cut rates to stabilize the economy we don’t picture some heavily indebted household going out and adding to their debt pile, rather we picture a household with no debt at all deciding finally to buy a house and taking out a mortgage,” Poloz said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
