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The Rowboat (Wages) and the Yacht (Assets)

The Rowboat (Wages) and the Yacht (Assets)

As I keep saying: the status quo has divested the working and middle classes.

The reason why the status quo has failed and is fragmenting is displayed in these three charts of wages, employment and assets: wage earners (labor) are in a rowboat trying to catch the yacht of those who own assets (capital).

Here is a chart of weekly wages of those employed fulltime: up a gargantuan $4/week in the 18 years since 2000. Let’s see, $4 times 52 week a year–by golly, that’s a whole $208 a year. Brand new Ford F-150, here we come!

If we go back 38 years to 1980–an entire lifetime of work–we find real (adjusted for official inflation, which seriously understates big-ticket expenses such as rent, healthcare and college tuition/fees) wages have notched higher by $10/week–a gain of $500 annually.

If we adjusted wages by real-world income, we’d find wages have declined since 1980 and 2000.

Here’s employment by age group since the year 2000. THose who can’t afford to retire are still dragging their tired old bones to work while employment for the under-55 cohort hasn’t even returned to the levels of 2000.

Meanwhile, asset valuations have soared. Those who own capital (assets) have done very, very well, those who trade their labor for dollars–they’ve gone nowhere.

Households with two regular jobs could afford to buy a house in Seattle, Brooklyn, or the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995. By 2005, they were priced out. Can a household with median income ($59,000 annually) afford a crumbling shack in any of the white-hot housing markets? You’re joking, right?

The cold reality is wage-earners are tugging on the oars of a water-logged rowboat, trying to catch up with the sleek yacht of asset owners. The system has been rigged to reward those who own assets (capital) or who can borrow immense sums of nearly-free money (credit) to buy assets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed Scared to Death of Causing Global Financial Crash – Nomi Prins

Fed Scared to Death of Causing Global Financial Crash – Nomi Prins

Two time, best-selling author Nomi Prins says central bankers have no idea how to stop the easy money policies that they started after the financial meltdown of 2008. Prins explains, “So, when the Fed says they are going to remove assets from their $4.5 trillion book by not reinvesting the interest payment . . . the reality is they haven’t really done that.  They have reduced their book by about $10 billion off of $4.5 trillion since they mentioned they were going to start ‘tapering.”  The media discusses this as a major tightening move.  Somehow all of our economies have finally worked because of central bank activity.  Growth is real.  It’s all positive.  The markets are evidence of that because of the levels they are at; and, therefore, these central banks, starting with the Fed, are going to reverse course of these last 10 years.  The reality is if you look at the actual activity of the central banks, beyond the Fed raising rates by a little bit, there hasn’t been and there isn’t being a reversal of course because they are scared to death that too much of a reversal is going to cause a major crash throughout the financial system. Everything is connected.  All the banks are connected.  Money flows around the world in less than nanoseconds, and all of it has the propensity to collapse if that carpet the central banks have created is dragged from beneath the floor of all this activity.”Prins, who just finished traveling the globe to research her upcoming book, thinks there is one big thing that can take the entire system down. Prins, a former top Wall Street banker, contends, “There hasn’t been any real growth in the real economy.  That is an indication of the misfire of this entire plan.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gold Only Safe Asset Left – David Stockman

Gold Only Safe Asset Left – David Stockman

Record high stock and bond prices are flashing danger signs to former Reagan White House Budget Director David Stockman. Stockman contends, “I don’t think we are going to have a liquidity crisis.  I think it’s going to be a value reset.  I think there is going to be a jarring downward price adjustment both in the stock market and in the bond market.  This phantom or phony wealth that has been created since the last crisis is going to basically evaporate.”

So, what asset is safe? Stockman says gold and goes onto explain, “I think the time to buy (gold and silver) is ideal.  Gold is the ultimate and only real money.  Gold is the only safe asset when push comes to shove.  They tell you to buy the government bond, that’s a safe asset.  It’s not a safe asset at its current price.  I am not saying the federal government is going to default in the next two or three years.  I am saying the yield on a 10-year bond of 2.4% is way below of where it’s going to end up.  So, the only safe asset left is gold.  This crazy Bitcoin mania has drained off what would otherwise be a demand for gold. . . . When Bitcoin collapses, spectacularly, which it will because it’s sheer mania in the markets right now.  When it collapses, I think a lot of that demand will come back into gold, as well as people fleeing the standard stock and bond markets for the first time in 9 or 10 years.”

What about the so-called Trump tax cuts? Stockman predicts, “I think it’s going to be a fiscal calamity of Biblical proportions.  I want to be clear.  I am always for tax cuts and shrinking the size of government, but you have to earn it.  You have to cut spending and entitlements and this massive defense budget.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Noland: There Will Be No Way Out When This Market Bubble Bursts

Doug Noland: There Will Be No Way Out When This Market Bubble Bursts

Financial assets will become toxic to hold

This week Doug Noland joins the podcast to discuss what he refers to as the “granddaddy of all bubbles”.

Noland, a 30-year market analyst and specialist in credit cycles, currently works at McAlvany Wealth Management and is well known for his prior 16-year stint helping manage the Prudent Bear Fund.

He certainly shares our views that prices in nearly every financial asset class have become remarkably distorted due to central bank intervention, first with Greenspan’s actions to backstop the markets in the late-1980’s, and more recently (and more egregiously) with the combined central banking cartel’s massive and sustained liquidity injections in the years following the Great Financial Crisis.

All of which has blown the biggest inter-connected set of asset price bubbles the world has ever seen.

Noland foresees tremendous losses as inevitable, as the central banks lose control of the monstrosity they have created:

This is the granddaddy of all bubbles. We are at the end a long cycle where the bubble has reached the heart of money and credit.

There will be no way out. We’re not going to get enough private credit growth to reflate things when this bubble bursts. It’s going to have to come from central bank credit; it’s going to have to come from sovereign debt.

When this bubble bursts, it will shock people how far the central banks will have to expand their balance sheet just to accommodate the deleveraging in the system. And they won’t really be able to add new liquidity to the market; they’re just going to allow the transfer of leveraged positions from the leveraged players onto the central bank balance sheets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Could Pop The Everything Bubble?

A crisis that can’t be solved by just printing more dollars

I’ve long held that if a problem can be solved by creating $1 trillion out of thin air and buying a raft of assets with that $1 trillion, then central banks will solve the problem by creating the $1 trillion out of thin air—nothing could be easier.

This is the lesson of the past eight years: if a problem can be solved by creating new money and buying assets, then central banks will solve that problem.

Problem: stock market is declining. Solution: create new money and buy, buy, buy stock index funds. Problem solved! Market stops falling and quickly rebounds as “central banks have our backs.”

Problem: interest rates are inhibiting lending and growth. Solution: create a few trillion units of currency and buy enough sovereign bonds to drop interest rates to near-zero.

Problem: nobody’s left who can afford to buy the new nosebleed-priced flats that underpin China’s miracle-grow economy. Solution: create new currency, lend it to local government agencies who then buy the empty flats.

Problem: stagnant employment and deflation. Solution: create a trillion in new currency, buy a trillion in new government bonds that then fund infrastructure projects, i.e. bridges to nowhere.

And so on. Any problem that can be solved by creating a few trillion out of thin air and buying assets will be solved.  The mechanism to solve these problems—creating currency out of nothing—is like a perpetual motion machine: there are no intrinsic limits on the amount of new money that can created at near-zero interest, as the interest payments can be funded by new money.

Even better, the central bank (the Federal Reserve) buys Treasury bonds with the new currency that generate income, which is then returned to the Treasury: a perpetual-motion money machine!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Observations on Wealth-Income Inequality (from Federal Reserve Reports)

Observations on Wealth-Income Inequality (from Federal Reserve Reports)

There’s a profound difference between assets that produce no income and those that produce net income.

To those of us nutty enough to pore over dozens of pages of data on wealth and income in the U.S., the Federal Reserve’s quarterly Z.1 reports and annual Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) are treasure troves, as are I.R.S. tax and income reports.

Allow me to share a few observations on family wealth and income drawn from my review of these documents:

Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2013 to 2016 (42 pages)

Financial Accounts of the United States (198 pages)

Corporate profits clock in at $2.135 trillion annually, around 11% of the nation’s GDP (gross domestic product). (Page 10 of Z.1) This has changed very little over the past few years; corporate profits totaled $2.140 trillion in 2014.

Most people who follow financial matters closely probably know corporate profits have been around $2 trillion annually for awhile.

But how many know that proprietors’ income from small businesses ($1.375 trillion) and rental income of persons–i.e. not corporations–($740 billion) together equal corporate profits? ($2.115 trillion for small biz/rentals, $2.135 trillion for corporate profits.

How many financially savvy people know that proprietors’ income and private rental income rose by $189 billion since 2014, while corporate profits flatlined?

Clearly, the families that own the proprietorships and rentals pulling down $2.1 trillion in annual profits are doing a bit better than OK.

As the charts below reveal, most of this profitable business equity is owned by the top 10% of families. There are a few clues that suggest that family-owned business equity is distributed along a power-law curve, i.e. the majority of wealth and income is held by the top and the rest is distributed over the rest of the owners.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds

Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds

The majority of middle class wealth is locked up in unproductive assets or assets that only become available upon retirement or death.

One of my points in Why Governments Will Not Ban Bitcoin was to highlight how few families had the financial wherewithal to invest in bitcoinor an alternative hedge such as precious metals.

The limitation on middle class wealth isn’t just the total net worth of each family; it’s also how their wealth is allocated: the vast majority of most middle class family wealth is locked up in the family home or retirement funds.

This chart provides key insights into the differences between middle class and upper-class wealth. The majority of the wealth held by the bottom 90% of households is in the family home, i.e. the principal residence. Other major assets held include life insurance policies, pension accounts and deposits (savings).

What characterizes the family home, insurance policies and pension/retirement accounts? The wealth is largely locked up in these asset classes.

Yes, the family can borrow against these assets, but then interest accrues and the wealth is siphoned off by the loans. Early withdrawals from retirement funds trigger punishing penalties.

In effect, this wealth is in a lockbox and unavailable for deployment in other assets.

IRAs and 401K retirement accounts can be invested, but company plans come with limitations on where and how the funds can be invested, and the gains (if any) can’t be accessed until retirement.

Compare these lockboxes and limitations with the top 1%, which owns the bulk of business equity assets. Business equity means ownership of businesses; ownership of shares in corporations (stocks) is classified as ownership of financial securities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds

Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds

The majority of middle class wealth is locked up in unproductive assets or assets that only become available upon retirement or death.

One of my points in Why Governments Will Not Ban Bitcoin was to highlight how few families had the financial wherewithal to invest in bitcoin or an alternative hedge such as precious metals.

The limitation on middle class wealth isn’t just the total net worth of each family; it’s also how their wealth is allocated: the vast majority of most middle class family wealth is locked up in the family home or retirement funds.

This chart provides key insights into the differences between middle class and upper-class wealth. The majority of the wealth held by the bottom 90% of households is in the family home, i.e. the principal residence. Other major assets held include life insurance policies, pension accounts and deposits (savings).

What characterizes the family home, insurance policies and pension/retirement accounts? The wealth is largely locked up in these asset classes.

Yes, the family can borrow against these assets, but then interest accrues and the wealth is siphoned off by the loans. Early withdrawals from retirement funds trigger punishing penalties.

In effect, this wealth is in a lockbox and unavailable for deployment in other assets.

IRAs and 401K retirement accounts can be invested, but company plans come with limitations on where and how the funds can be invested, and the gains (if any) can’t be accessed until retirement.

Compare these lockboxes and limitations with the top 1%, which owns the bulk of business equity assets. Business equity means ownership of businesses; ownership of shares in corporations (stocks) is classified as ownership of financial securities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk

Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk

Reflexivity in the Shadows of Black Monday 1987

The Ouroboros, a Greek word meaning ‘tail devourer’, is the ancient symbol of a snake consuming its own body in perfect symmetry. The imagery of the Ouroboros evokes the infinite nature of creation from destruction. The sign appears across cultures and is an important icon in the esoteric tradition of Alchemy. Egyptian mystics first derived the symbol from a real phenomenon in nature. In extreme heat a snake, unable to self-regulate its body temperature, will experience an out-of- control spike in its metabolism. In a state of mania, the snake is unable to differentiate its own tail from its prey, and will attack itself, self-cannibalizing until it perishes. In nature and markets, when randomness self-organizes into too perfect symmetry, order becomes the source of chaos (1).

The Ouroboros is a metaphor for the financial alchemy driving the modern Bear Market in Fear. Volatility across asset classes is at multi-generational lows. A dangerous feedback loop now exists between ultra-low interest rates, debt expansion, asset volatility, and financial engineering that allocates risk based on that volatility. In this self-reflexive loop volatility can reinforce itself both lower and higher. In a market where stocks and bonds are both overvalued, financial alchemy is the only way to feed our global hunger for yield, until it kills the very system it is nourishing.

The Global Short Volatility trade now represents an estimated $2+ trillion in financial engineering strategies that simultaneously exert influence over, and are influenced by, stock market volatility(2). We broadly define the short volatility trade as any financial strategy that relies on the assumption of market stability to generate returns, while using volatility itself as an input for risk taking. Many popular institutional investment strategies, even if they are not explicitly shorting derivatives, generate excess returns from the same implicit risk factors as a portfolio of short optionality, and contain hidden fragility.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bubble-nomics

Bubble-nomics

Question: What is a bubble?
Answer: A bubble is trade in an asset at a price range that strongly exceeds the asset’s intrinsic value.  Or it could also be described as a situation in which asset prices appear to be based on implausible or inconsistent views about the future.

Question: How do you know when you are in a bubble?
Answer: Gauge asset prices against a standard, foundational premise to determine if the price appreciation is warranted.

Lucky for us, the Federal Reserve provides exactly what is needed to show how unjustifiable current prices are against households disposable income.  The chart below is all US household’s net worth (current value of all real estate, stocks, bonds, etc.) as a percentage of their disposable personal income (disposable income is what they have left to spend or save after paying their taxes).  To round out the picture, I’ve added in the net growth in full time workers during each period, dramatically decelerating.

Since 1970, every time asset values have risen above 520% of households disposable income (the dashed line in the chart) then the US has been in a bubble and a subsequent crash has followed.  This has simply meant asset values growing much faster than households income or households capability to sustain those price increases.  The depth of each crash has been relative to the overshoot of asset values on the upside.

Why???

I hear much discussion that the millennials are the largest age group in US history and are expected to drive growth in demand.  However, most people fail to understand what this truly means.  The millennials are just marginally larger than the boomers but what this truly means is zero growth.  The millennials are just meeting the previous high water mark the boomers set.  When the boomers came through, they nearly doubled the previous high water mark.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Endgame of Financialization: Stealth Nationalization

The Endgame of Financialization: Stealth Nationalization

This is the new model of nationalization: central banks control the valuation of private-sector assets without actually having to own them lock, stock and barrel.

As you no doubt know, central banks don’t actually print money and toss it out of helicopters; they create a digital liability and use this new currency to buy assets such as bonds and stocks. Central banks have found that they can take control of the stock and bond markets by buying up as much as these markets as is necessary to force price and yield to do the central banks’ bidding.

Central Banks Have Purchased $2 Trillion In Assets In 2017. This increases their combined asset purchases above $15 trillion. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money–especially if you add in assets purchased by sovereign wealth funds, dark pools acting on behalf of monetary authorities, etc.

Gordon Long and I discuss this stealth nationalization in our latest video program, The Results of Financialization: “Nationalization” (35 min):

In the old model of nationalization, governments expropriated/seized privately owned assets lock, stock and barrel. When a central state nationalized an enterprise, it took total ownership of the asset.

In today’s globalized financial world, such crude expropriation is avoided for two reasons:

1. The entire point of the dominant neoliberal / neofeudal /neocolonial model is to maintain private ownership as a means of transferring the wealth to the New Aristocracy, i.e. the financier class. Government ownership certainly conveys benefits to the some are more equal than others functionaries atop the state’s wealth-power pyramid, but it doesn’t transfer the assets’ income streams to private hands.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

3 Uncommon Signs that an Economic Collapse Could Happen Soon

3 uncommon signs of economic collapse

As stocks continue to climb and the U.S. economy sustains its third longest period of expansion in history, market forecasters are seeking clues for when our next crisis may strike. So far, three uncommon signals have them worried.

Here’s an explanation of the three uncommon signs causing alarm, and what they mean for your savings…

Sign #1: Resurgence of Synthetic CDOs

The riskiest plays on Wall Street are made using financial instruments known as derivatives.

Derivatives are named for how they “derive” their value from the underlying assets on which they’re based. They give investors the ability to leverage assets — that is, control large quantities of an asset without actually buying or selling it.

Depending on how the underlying asset performs, derivatives can generate either massive gains or crushing losses.

But it’s when big banks and financial institutions start gambling in derivatives that things become especially dangerous. And that’s exactly what happened in the case of our last crisis: A slew of “too big to fail” organizations took on excessive risk through derivatives (mortgage-backed securities and others), and they couldn’t shoulder their losses when the bets went bad.

Now one of the most potentially destructive derivatives is regaining popularity after being shunned by Wall Street for years because of its role in the 2008 collapse.

The derivative is called a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO), and Citigroup is spearheading its resurgence.

Granted, post-2008 regulations do make the market for these kinds of derivatives less liable to spark another collapse, and Citigroup executives claim to be pursuing this endeavor responsibly (we can trust them, right?). But Bloomberg reports the positive trend toward CDOs is still a negative sign (emphasis ours):

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bubble Fortunes


Wynn Bullock Child on a Forest Road 1958
 

A few days ago, former Reagan Budget Director and -apparently- permabear (aka perennial bear) David Stockman did an interview (see below) with Stuart Varney at Fox -a permabull?!-, who started off with ‘the stock rally goes on’ despite a London terror attack and the North Korea missile situation. His first statement to Stockman was something in the vein of “if I had listened to you at any time after the past 2-3 years, I’d have lost a fortune..” Stockman shot back with (paraphrased): “if you’d have listened to me in 2000, 2004, you’d have dodged a bullet”, and at some point later “get out of bonds, get out of stocks, it’s a dangerous casino.” Familiar territory for most of you.

I happen to think Stockman is right, and if anything, he doesn’t go far enough, strong enough. What that makes me I don’t know, what’s deeper and longer than perennial or perma? But it’s Varney’s assumption that he would have lost a fortune that triggered me this time around. Because it’s an assumption built on an assumption, and pretty soon it’s assumptions all the way down.

First, that fortune is not real, unless and until he sells the stocks and bonds he made it with. If he has, that would indicate that he doesn’t believe in the market anymore, which is not very likely for a permabull to do. So Varney probably still has his paper ‘fortune’. I’m using him as an example, of course, of all the permabulls and others who hold such paper.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The 5 Steps to World Domination

The 5 Steps to World Domination

You don’t need an army to achieve World Domination; all you need is enough cheap credit to buy up everything that generates the highest value and/or income.
World Domination–it has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Here’s how to achieve it in 5 steps:
1. Turn everything into a commodity that can be traded on the global market:land, leases on land, options to purchase land, houses, buildings, rooms in slums, labor, tools, robots, water, water rights, mineral rights, rights to air routes, ships, aircraft, political power, shares in corporations, government bonds, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, student loans that have been bundled into debt-based instruments, the income from city parking meters, electricity, software, advertising, marketing, media, social media, food, energy, insurance, gold, metals, credit, interest-rate swaps and last but not least, financial instruments that control and/or pyramid all the real-world goods and assets that have been commoditized (i.e. almost everything).
Why is this the essential first step in World Domination? Once something has been commoditized, it can be bought and sold in the global marketplace in fiat currencies–currencies that are not backed by any real-world asset and that can be created out of thin air by central and private banks.
You see the dynamic, right? Create credit-currency out of thin air, and then use this “free money” to buy up the real world. Quite a trick, isn’t it? Get a means of exchange for essentially nothing (i.e. money at near-zero interest rates) and then trade this for assets that produce goods and services everyone else needs or wants.
Now we understand steps 2 and 3:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Governments to Control Large Cash Transactions

I have been pointing out the crisis we face moving forward. The gist of this is the total fiscal mismanagement of government for which we, the people, are always blamed. This hunt for taxes has led down the path of arguments for eliminating currency. While people think Bitcoin is an answer, they do not understand government’s hunt for taxes no less the lack of a true rule of law. The government need only pass a law that anyone who fails to report what they have in Bitcoin is criminal and they get to confiscate all your assets.

Switzerland has its “wealth tax” which they argue is nothing just 0.02%. However, it requires you to report all assets worldwide. They then know precisely what you have and it is merely one vote away at anytime to raise the tax or impose criminal penalties for failure to report everything. Yet, once Switzerland has that info, under G20 they must share it with all other governments.

We have stood by and watched India cancel all high denomination notes. Try walking around with €500 notes in Europe and they look at you funny or won’t accept them. ATM machines have been reduced in Europe to taking a maximum of €200 in cash at best. This is all th hunt for taxes because government cannot function ethically no less morally.

Now the German Federal Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, is proposing to control all large cash transactions claiming this will prevent black money transactions and money laundering. Of course, they see these two issues not as typical crime like drugs, but tax avoidance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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