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This week we heard further details about more trillions in upcoming spending and even changing monetary issuance laws (for CBDCs) worldwide.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), what critics might call a supranational leveraged buyout bank, was out this week making calls for governments worldwide to spend as much as they can.

The IMF also noted that monetary issuance laws would need to be changed in 104 nations to directly issue fiat Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC for fuller global fruition.

Sounder money advocates yet to banned off of Twitter are predicably pissed off.

Global Government Bonds

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SDBullion Market Update

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell had the following statement this week worth highlighting in our market update video.

There is nothing in any definition about how fiscal dominance, which considers our still having the dominant fiat currency of the world, utilizes yield curve control, with suppressed real interest rate yield, rigging inflation and unemployment data, while still dominating the world in most price discovery powers.

Yet on the cusp of losing economic output dominance to over 2.5 billion Chinese and Indian residents, they tend to stack physical gold and silver as they get wealthier increasingly.

Another week of up then down spot price action for silver and gold. As we head into this Monday’s thinly traded Martin Luther King holiday, note that the spot gold price sits just below its 200-day moving average.

During gold bull markets outside of the global financial crisis, that is typically an excellent time to add to bullish and betting long positions.

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

The Wonders of Free Money in Two Pictures

August 15, 2020

The Wonders of Free Money in Two Pictures

Lesson of the Day

If you give away enough free money, spending recovers.

Census Report on Advance Retail Sales

The Census report on Advance Retail Sales provides half of our “Lesson of the Day“.

Adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, July sales were $536.0 billion, an increase of 1.2 percent from the previous month, and 2.7 percent above July 2019.Total sales for the May 2020 through July 2020 period were down 0.2 percent from the same period a year ago.

The May 2020 to June 2020 percent change was revised from up 7.5 percent to up 8.4 percent. Retail trade sales were up 0.8 percent from June 2020, and 5.8 percent above last year.

Nonstore retailers were up 24.7 percent from July 2019, while food and beverage stores were up 11.1 percent from last year.

Retail spending rose for the third straight month despite a rise in coronavirus infections with reopenings stalled.

Spike in Government Spending

The chart from Pew shows stimulus and deficits exceed that in the Great Recession.

Since March, government stimulus authorizations (not all spent yet) total at least $3 trillion. Another $2 trillion is on the deck when Democrats and Republicans agree to another package.

That is the second half of the Free Money Wonder.

The federal government has run deficits nearly every year since the Great Depression and consistently since fiscal 2002. Through the first 10 months of fiscal 2020, the government took in $2.82 trillion in revenue and spent $5.63 trillion, for a year-to-date deficit of just over $2.8 trillion, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Through the first 10 months of fiscal 2019, by comparison, the deficit stood at $866.8 billion.

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

Rabobank: “We Live In A Pretty Crazy World Right Now”

July 13, 2020

Rabobank: “We Live In A Pretty Crazy World Right Now”

Crazy World

I think we can all agree that we live in a pretty crazy world right now: and that’s an appropriate title for the Daily today too, for reasons that will be explained shortly.

It’s a world where we are seeing staggering increases in public-sector deficits. We have already seen WW2 level spending in the UK, for just one example: and yet the British Chancellor is now planning to introduce 10 deregulated “free ports” across the country where UK taxes and tariffs will not apply at all. It’s obviously the inverse tactic of spending more money on left-behind places. Yet will somewhere like Luton hypothetically become the next mini-Hong Kong just because there are no regulations and no taxes to be paid there? We shall see: and those deficits will swell even further. Laffer would approve of course: and using the logic his fans always push for, by cutting taxation to zero, presumably tax revenue will now be infinity.

Equally, it’s a world where despite one in three Americans worrying about making rent, there appears reticence from the White House to push for a new major fiscal package. Is this all political timing, and huge stimulus looms in weeks? Or do the it-will-all-be-fine arguments from economic advisors like Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow reflect the official line?

It’s a world where despite all this state largesse, or absence of state largesse, bond yields continue to move lower anyway: the US 5-year touching 0.25% last week (though at the giddy heights of 0.29% at time of writing) as it does not throw in the kitchen sink; the UK 5-year gilt is at -0.07% even though they ARE throwing in that ‘no-taxes-here’ sink.

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

The World Is Drowning In Debt

July 13, 2020

The World Is Drowning In Debt

According to the IMF, global fiscal support in response to the crisis will be more than 9 trillion US dollars, approximately 12% of world GDP. This premature, clearly rushed, probably excessive, and often misguided chain of so-called stimulus plans will distort public finances in a way in which we have not seen since World War II. The enormous increase in public spending and the fall in output will lead to a global government debt figure close to 105% of GDP.

If we add government and private debt, we are talking about 200 trillion US dollars of debt, a global increase of over 35% of GDP, well above the 20% seen after the 2008 crisis, and all in a single year.

This brutal increase in indebtedness is not going to prevent economies from falling rapidly. The main problem of this global stimulus chain is that it is entirely oriented to support bloated government spending, and artificially low bond yields. That is the reason why such a massive global monetary and fiscal response is not doing much to prevent the collapse in jobs, investment, and growth. Most businesses, small ones with no debt and no assets, are being wiped out.

Most of this new debt has been created to sustain a level of public spending that was designed for a cyclical boom, not a crisis and to help large companies that were already in trouble in 2018 and 2019, the so-called ‘zombie’ companies.

According to Bank Of International Settlements, the percentage of zombie companies – those that cannot cover their debt interest payments with operating profits – has exploded in the period of giant stimuli and negative real rates, and the figure will skyrocket again.

That is why all this new debt is not going to boost the recovery, it will likely prolong the recession.

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

Bankrupting America

April 8, 2020

Bankrupting America

Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed the largest stimulus bill in U.S. history: more than $2 trillion.

For once, both Republicans and Democrats agreed. The Senate voted 96-0. The House didn’t even bother with a formal vote.

At the White House, a reporter asked the president, pointing out that the bill includes $25 million for the Kennedy Center, “Shouldn’t that money be going to masks?”

“The Kennedy Center has suffered greatly because nobody can go there,” Trump responded. “They do need some funding. And look — that was a Democrat request. That was not my request. But you got to give them something.”

“Something” they got. The bill includes $25 million for Congressional salaries, $50 million for an Institute of Museum and Library Services and lots of other wasteful things.

Only a few politicians were wary. Rep. Thomas Massie complained that he wasn’t even allowed to speak against the bill.

Rep. Alex Mooney asked: “How do you pay for it? Borrow it from China, borrow it from Russia? Are we going to print the money?”

Those are good questions.

Our national debt is already $24 trillion. Now it will jump, percentage-wise, to where Greece’s debt was shortly before unemployment there hit 27%.

Greece was bailed out by the European Union. But the United States can’t be bailed out by others.

How will we pay off our debt? That’s the topic of my new video.

There are really three options:

1. Raise taxes.

2. Print money.

3. Default.

Let’s consider each:

1. Raising taxes on rich people is popular. Even Michael Bloomberg wants “higher taxes on billionaires” like him.

But raising taxes on the rich often kills the wealth and jobs some rich people create. And it won’t solve our debt problem. Even if we took all the billionaires’ wealth — reducing their net worth to zero — it would cover only an eighth of our debt.

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

The Prophet

February 10, 2020

The Prophet

Oh how I miss George Carlin. Yes he was mainly known as a stand up comedian, but he was more than that, much more. He was a social critic, he challenged that status quo, he dared to go where society wasn’t prepared to go: Look at ourselves critically. He did it with biting humor, masterful oration and a directness digging into core truths that were not only uncomfortable at times, but needed to be heard and said.

His voice has fallen silent as he passed away a few years ago and I’m sorry to say: We don’t have anyone like George today. I didn’t agree with everything George said and I don’t need to, nor does anybody else, but his talent was to make us think and to view the world with a different perspective and yes he was a prophet.

He saw long ago where this was all heading. The political charades and manufactured dramas that are sold to the public as choice, the illusion of choice as the agendas have long been in play.

“What do they want?” he asked. “More for themselves and less for everybody else.”

He spoke of the owners of this country, the owners that control everything, the media, what to believe what to think, and the great business and lobbying interests that spend billions of dollars lobbying for ever more benefits for themselves.

And lobby they do:

And boy did they succeed. Under the mantle of populism and draining the swamp they got themselves the biggest tax cuts in corporate history, a historic killing:

Wall Street celebrated and celebrates to this day.

Wealth inequality skyrocketing for years and now trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and debt through the roof:

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

Not Modern, Not About Money, and Not Really Much of a Theory

April 28, 2019

NOT MODERN, NOT ABOUT MONEY, AND NOT REALLY MUCH OF A THEORY

“Ignoring MMT’s rising popularity would be about as smart (and effective) as a dog barking at the waves in the ocean.”
–KEVIN MUIR, author of the avant garde financial newsletter, The Macro Tourist

“I believe that all good things taken to an extreme become self-destructive and that everything must evolve or die. This is now true for capitalism.”
–RAY DALIO, founder of hedge fund behemoth, Bridgewater Associates

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION

The final lap. It’s hard to believe that as recently as February, when I first brought up the concept of a new economic model that was poised to radically alter the world we’re living in, MMT was as obscure as an extra in an old Cecil B. DeMille bible film. Yet, a mere two months later, you have to try extremely hard to ignore Modern Monetary Theory and its swelling number of disciples.

Perhaps at this point, some of you who have read the three previous installments of our month-long series on MMT wish I’d never brought it your attention. You might even think it’s such a zany idea that it will never see the light of day. If so, you could be right—but I doubt it.

Prior issues of this series have made the point that ultra-low and, even, negative interest rates have led to a boom in asset prices at the expense of the real economy. This has created the most lop-sided income distortion since 1929.

Source: Grant Williams, TTMYGH (2/10/2019)

Even after 10 years of a long and sluggish expansion—which happily has driven unemployment down to 50-year lows–there is an unmistakable whiff of outrage in the air. The non-1% or, perhaps more accurately, the non-5%, are coming to believe they’ve been stiffed by the reality revealed in the above chart.

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

The Most Important Chart in Economics?

March 26, 2019

The Most Important Chart in Economics?

Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Reserve quietly released the Financial Accounts of the United States. Like most government data, the 198-page report (known to insiders as the Z1) is almost impossible to understand.

However, to the economists and accountants who wade their way through the mess, the implications are clear.

America has been growing government, business and household debts faster than its economy for more than four decades. Despite the huge runup in asset prices during that time, the country is essentially bankrupt.

The impending disaster becomes even clearer when presented visually.

The above chart, compiled on the St-Louis Fed’s FRED site, strongly suggests that economists have been pushing a GDP expansion that has been fueled almost uniquely by debt.

The three stages of scam economics

The story of how the American government and the Federal Reserve—with the quiet backing of university academics—fueled this elaborate Ponzi scheme unfolded in three stages.

Tax and spend

The first signs emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s, when American companies, after an almost three-decade free ride, began to get competition in international markets from countries such as Japan and Germany, which had been bombed back to the stone ages during World War II.

By that time, the American public had gotten used to constantly-rising living standards. For politicians, asking voters to work harder or to curtail constant demands for “more” became increasingly more difficult.

Governments responded with what became known as “tax and spend” economic policies.

Taxing the hard-earned savings of workers and passing the cash to bureaucrats to spend instantly created “sugar highs,” due to the short-term effects of dumping extra cash into the economy.

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

Federal Borrowing Crosses the Rubicon

March 12, 2019

Federal Borrowing Crosses the Rubicon

A year ago, Republicans in control of Congress suspended the cap on federal borrowing. The limit was automatically re-imposed on March 1st. Politicians now have a few months to hammer out legislation to raise the cap as the Treasury employs “extraordinary measures” to fend off default.

The federal deficit is mushrooming once again. The 2017 tax cuts have taken a bite out of receipts at the IRS and economic growth has not met expectations.

This year’s borrowing to fill the gap between government tax revenue and expenditures may reach a trillion dollars for the first time since 2012.

If Washington politicians follow the usual script, we can expect Republicans to posture as fiscal conservatives and then relent either just before or just after a federal shutdown.

Democrats will chastise the GOP for playing politics with America’s sacred responsibility to pay its bills.

This drama has played out dozens of times over recent decades and is therefore likely to repeat once more this fall.

Perhaps it won’t, though. The Associated Press notes that there just aren’t many people in the Capitol who even pretend to care anymore when it comes to deficits.

The AP quoted former senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire on Sunday: “The president doesn’t care. The leadership of the Democratic Party doesn’t care.” He should also have included Republican leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have reliably supported metastasizing federal debt.

Meanwhile, the socialist Left has touted so-called “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT) as the mechanism to fund the economy-killing Green New Deal and any and all other government boondoggles. At its core, MMT advocates for perpetual money printing to fund government spending.

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

Tax Cuts Without Reducing Government Outlays Is Not Possible

March 11, 2019

TAX CUTS WITHOUT REDUCING GOVERNMENT OUTLAYS IS NOT POSSIBLE

According to many economic experts and commentators, an effective way to generate economic growth is through the lowering of taxes. The lowering of taxes, it is held, is going to place more money in consumer’s pockets thereby setting in motion an economic growth. This way of thinking is based on the popular view that a given dollar increase in consumer spending will lift the economy’s gross domestic product (GDP) by a multiple of the increase in consumer expenditure. An example will illustrate the magic of this multiplier.

Let us assume that on average individuals spend 90 cents and save 10 cents of each additional dollar they receive. If consumers raise their spending by $100 million this will boost retailers’ revenues by this amount. Retailers in turn will spend 90% of their new income, i.e. $90 million on various goods and services. The recipients of the $90 million will in turn spend 90% of $90 million i.e. $81 million and so on. At each stage in the spending chain, people spend 90% of the additional income they receive. This process eventually ends with the GDP rising by $1 billion i.e. (10*100million).

In short, all that is required is to give every individual more money to spend, and this in turn should set in motion increases in consumer expenditure, which in turn will trigger increases in the production of goods and services. Observe that within the framework of ‘the multiplier’ savings are actually bad news – since the more people save the smaller is the multiplier.

The magic of ‘the multiplier’ however, is just wishful thinking – a myth. Every activity in an economy has to be funded and therefore it is always in competition with other activities for scarce real savings. Hence, within all other things being equal if more is spent on consumption goods, then less is left for capital goods. An increase in retailers activity will be offset by the decline in the activity of capital goods producers.

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

Trump Administration on Track for $1 Trillion Budget Deficit This Year

November 20, 2018

Trump Administration on Track for $1 Trillion Budget Deficit This Year

The Trump administration is on track to post a 2019 fiscal year budget deficit of over $1 trillion. These are the kind of budget deficits we would expect to see during a deep recession, not an “economic boom.”

The government got off to a good start at achieving this illustrious achievement last month. According to the Treasury Department report, the deficit came in at $100.5 billion in October. That represents a 58 percent increase from the $63 billion deficit recorded in October 2017. Spending rose 18 percent year-on-year. Revenues only increased by 7 percent.The month-on-month increase was impacted by a quirk in the calendar. Total outlays were much higher this October compared to last year because Social Security payments for October 2017 went out in September due to Oct. 1 falling on the weekend. Nevertheless, we should have seen a decrease in this year’s September outlays compared to last year and that didn’t happen. The September 2018 deficit was significantly bigger (119.116) than September 2017 ($7.886 billion) even without the October Social Security payments falling in September this year. The bottom line is spending is going up year-over-year.

Spending last month continued the pace of the last fiscal year. The federal government ended 2018 with the largest budget deficit since 2012. Uncle Sam ended 2018 $779 billion in the red, adding to the ballooning national debt. The CBO forecast this year’s deficit will come in close to $1 trillion. The current Treasury Department estimate projects a total fiscal 2019 deficit over the $1 trillion mark, coming in at $1.085 trillion.

The national debt expanded by more than $1 trillion in fiscal 2018. It currently stands at over $21.7 trillion. According to data released by the Treasury Department, fiscal 2018 gave us the sixth-largest fiscal-year debt increase in the history of the United States. (If you’re wondering how the debt can grow by a larger number than the annual deficit, economist Mark Brandly explains here.)

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

The Economic Consequences Of Debt

November 12, 2018

The Economic Consequences Of Debt

Not surprisingly, my recent article on “The Important Role Of Recessions” led to more than just a bit of debate on why “this time is different.” The running theme in the debate was that debt really isn’t an issue as long as our neighbors are willing to support continued fiscal largesse.

As I have pointed out previously, the U.S. is currently running a nearly $1 Trillion dollar deficit during an economic expansion. This is completely contrary to the Keynesian economic theory.

“Keynes contended that ‘a general glut would occur when aggregate demand for goods was insufficient, leading to an economic downturn resulting in losses of potential output due to unnecessarily high unemployment, which results from the defensive (or reactive) decisions of the producers.’ In other words, when there is a lack of demand from consumers due to high unemployment, the contraction in demand would force producers to take defensive actions to reduce output.

In such a situation, Keynesian economics states that government policies could be used to increase aggregate demand, thus increasing economic activity, and reducing unemployment and deflation.

Investment by government injects income, which results in more spending in the general economy, which in turn stimulates more production and investment involving still more income and spending and so forth. The initial stimulation starts a cascade of events, whose total increase in economic activity is a multiple of the original investment.”

Of course, with the government already running a massive deficit, and expected to issue another $1.5 Trillion in debt during the next fiscal year, the efficacy of “deficit spending” in terms of its impact to economic growth has been greatly marginalized.

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

Why Bad Economics Makes Such Good Politics

November 4, 2018

Why Bad Economics Makes Such Good Politics

As the election nears, politicians will more and more frantically point out what wonderful favors they’ve done for the voters — or what favors they will do for the voters, if elected.

Of course, they never mean all the voters. They mean groups or individuals within the voting population who believe they benefit from laws, taxes, regulations, and spending programs supported by the politician in question.

Two such examples of these sorts of favors are tariffs and minimum wage laws. Both impose costs on both producers and consumers overall, while benefiting a small sliver of the population that is able to take advantage of the government mandate.

The economics of each of these, or taxation and business regulation in general, have already been addressed numerous times in these pages.

It must suffice to point out that these policies, for which politicians think they deserve accolades, potentially benefit only very specific interest groups. Nevertheless, these policies can prove to be politically popular, and may help a politician get elected.

But why should policies that help so few — and impose many costs on even those they purport to help — be politically popular?

Hazlitt and Mises on the Popularity of Bad Economics

Answering this question was one of the main reasons that Henry Hazlitt wrote his perennially popular bookEconomics in One Lesson.

In the very first chapter, Hazlitt notes that economic science is prone to so many errors because people are motivated to believe an incorrect version of economics that supports their own economic interests. Or as Hazlitt put it, economic errors “are multiplied a thousandfold … by the special pleading of selfish interests.”

Sometimes, these attempts to throw good economics in the garbage are spectacularly successful. After all, for decades, no insignificant number of Americans believed the claim that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”1

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

Disaster Awaits: National Debt Will Be 6 Times The Size Of The Economy

October 29, 2018

Disaster Awaits: National Debt Will Be 6 Times The Size Of The Economy

Even without changes to the current spending policy, the government’s spending is on an unsustainable path. By the time a child born in 2018 reaches retirement age, the United States national debt will be six times the size of the economy according to an analysis released this week.

Without making any changes to current policy (in other words, even without the glut of new entitlement spending proposed by some of Bernie Sanders’ acolytes) that’s the trajectory for the national debt over the rest of the 21st century, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), as reported by Reason. It’s an outlook that the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), in an analysis released this week, calls “frightening and almost certainly unsustainable.”

Under current law—which assumes, among other things, that last year’s tax cuts will expire in 2025 and not be extended—the national debt will double from 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year to 160 percent of GDP by 2050. It would hit 360 percent of GDP, and still be climbing, by the end of the CBO’s 75-year projection window in 2093. In the so-called “alternative fiscal scenario,” which assumes current policies (such those tax cuts) are kept in place, the debt would hit 225 percent of GDP by 2050 and more than 600 percent of GDP by 2093. -Reason

The CBO’s 75-year budget forecast (its longest of long-term projections) makes it clear that the current budgetary course must change dramatically. The United States simply cannot afford the size of government it has now, let alone the size of government demanded by socialists. The spending must be cut, there’s no other way around it.

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

Getting Serious About Debts and Deficits

October 1, 2018

Getting Serious About Debts and Deficits

Photo Source CafeCredit.com | CC BY 2.0

With the possibility that the Democrats will retake Congress and press demands for increased spending in areas like health care, education, and child care, the deficit hawks (DH) are getting prepared to awaken from their dormant state. We can expect major news outlets to be filled with stories on how the United States is on its way to becoming the next Greece or Zimbabwe. For this reason, it is worth taking a few moments to reorient ourselves on the topic.

First, we need some basic context. The DH will inevitably point to the fact that deficits are at historically high levels for an economy that is near full employment. They will also point to a rapidly rising debt-to-GDP ratio. Both complaints are correct, the question is whether there is a reason for anyone to care.

Just to remind everyone, the classic story of deficits being bad is that they crowd out investment and net exports, which makes us poorer in the future than we would otherwise be. The reason is that less investment means less productivity growth, which means that people will have lower income five or ten years in the future than if we had smaller budget deficits. Lower net exports mean that foreigners are accumulating US assets, which will give them a claim on our future income.

Debt is bad because it means a larger portion of future income will go to people who own the debt. This means that the government has to use up a larger share of the money it raises in taxes to pay interest on the debt rather than for services like health care and education. Or, to put it in a more Keynesian context, there will be more demand coming from people who own the debt, which means the government would need higher taxesnto support the same level of spending than would otherwise be the case.

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

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