Home » Posts tagged 'Matthew Piepenburg' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: Matthew Piepenburg
Translating Yellen-Speak into Golden-Speak
Translating Yellen-Speak into Golden-Speak
Given the increasingly politicized interplay (cancer) of central bank policy and so-called free market price discovery, it’s becoming increasingly more important to track the actions of central bankers rather than just traditional market signals alone.
Like it or not, the Fed is the market.
Toward this end, we’ve had some substantive fun deciphering the past, current and future implications of “forward guidance” from our openly mis-guided crop of central bankers, most notably Greenspan, Bernanke and Powell.
But let’s not forget Janet Yellen.
As we see below, translating Yellen-speak into blunt speak tells us a heck of a lot about the future.
The Open and Obvious Debt Crisis
Back in 2018, Janet Yellen (former Fed Chairwoman and current Treasury Secretary, eh hmmm) along with Jason Furman (current Biden economic advisor) observed in a Washington Post Op-Ed that, “a U.S. debt crisis is coming, but don’t blame entitlements.”
As I like to say, “that’s rich.”
As in all things economic, the motives and thinking coming out of DC are largely political, which means they are self-serving, partisan and predominantly disastrous.
As for translating Yellen’s political-speak into honest English, the motives for this 2018 warning were two-fold: 1) Yellen and Furman were making a partisan attack on Trump’s then $1T budget proposal, and 2) Yellen actually believed what she said and that the US was indeed careening toward “a debt crisis.”
In fact, we were already in a debt crisis in 2018, a crisis which has simply risen to much higher orders of magnitude in the three short years since Yellen’s “warning” was made.
Stated otherwise, Yellen will get her debt crisis. It’s ticking right in front of her.
Tracking the Debt Trail
Ironically, the most obvious metrics of the current and ever-expanding debt crisis began just months after Yellen’s infamous Op-Ed.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Keep It Simple: Gold vs. a Mad World
Keep It Simple: Gold vs. a Mad World
Psychologists, poets and philosophers have written for centuries that many who have eyes refuse to see, and many who can think, refuse to think clearly–all for the simple reason that some truths, like the sun, are just too hard to look straight into.
Or as others have said more bluntly: “Truth is like poetry—everyone [fricking] hates it.”
When it comes to bloated markets, debt orgies and helicopter money, the rising fun of such “stimulus” is embraced, yet the template for its equally market-tanking, social-destroying and currency-debasing consequences are simply ignored.
The same is true when it comes to the “great inflation debate,” which is simply no longer a debate but a neon-screaming reality playing out in real time and growing more pernicious before eyes otherwise blinded by calming Fed-speak and bogus inflation scales.
Each passing day, the evidence of the inflationary cancer beneath the smiling surface of our still rising markets and “recovering/opening” economy increases, and thus, like it or not, the inflation topic just won’t and can’t be over-stated enough.
In short: Here I go again with the inflation thing…
From the Grocer to Buffet: Inflation is Obvious
Extreme US “stimulus,” vaccine rollouts, Europe’s eventual reopening, and rising commodity costs are accelerating the inflationary tailwinds which everyone from grocery store clerks and home builders to Warren Buffet can no longer deny or ignore.
As facts rather than theories confirm, commodity prices have surged from steel to copper, or corn to lumber while precious metals steadily rise against COMEX price fixers, CPI lies and other unsustainable boots to the neck of a coiled gold market positioned for big moves into late 2021 and beyond.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Things That Make Me Go Hmmm: Inflation, Crypto, Command Economies and Gold.
Things That Make Me Go Hmmm: Inflation, Crypto, Command Economies and Gold.
Over the years I’ve written almost ad nauseum about the crazy I see (and saw) around me as a fund manager, family office principal and individual investor.
The list includes: 1) an entire book on the grotesque central bank distortions of free market price discovery, 2) the open (and now accepted) dishonesty on everything from front-running Musk tweets and bogus inflation reporting to COMEX price fixing, 3) the insanity of 100-Year Austrian bonds or just plain negative-yielding bonds going mainstream, 4) the open death of classic capitalism and the rise of economic feudalism, 5) asset bubble hysteria seen in everything from BTC to Tesla; 5) rising social unrest, 6) the serious implications of Yield Curve Controland the gross mispricing of debt that has midwifed the greatest credit binge/bubble in recorded history, and 7) the ignored power of logical delusion that so characterizes the madness of crowds in the current investment era.
In short, there a great deal of things which, as our advisory colleague, Grant Williams, would say: Makes me go hmmm.
Speaking of exceptional team advisors at Matterhorn Asset Management, Ronni Stoeferle recently had a compelling discussion with the equally brilliant, and hitherto deflationary thinker, Russell Napier.
Among the many compelling take-aways from that discussion is the fact that Mr. Napier is now turning inflationary.
As we’ll see below, this broader and structural inflationary pivot, now undeniably on the horizon, has massive (and positive) implications not only for precious metal ownership, but also the very structure of the financial world going forward (negative).
In short, the inflation topic is not just an academic topic nor fodder for podcasters and economic tenure-seekers—it’s a critical signal of the repressive financial world staring us straight in the eyes today and heading toward ever-more financial repressions tomorrow.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Matthew Piepenburg, inflation, financial repression, gold switzerland, central banks, money printing, credit expansion
The Fed’s Most Convenient Lie: A CPI Charade
The Fed’s Most Convenient Lie: A CPI Charade
Despite a penchant for double-speak that would make a politician blush, the Fed tells us that its primary focus is unemployment not inflation.
Let me remind readers, however, that an openly nervous Mr. Powell came out in the summer of 2020 with a specific, as well as headline-making, agenda to “allow” higher inflation above the 2% rate.
This “new inflation direction” ignored the larger irony that the Fed had been unsuccessfully “targeting” 2% inflation for years before changing verbs from “targeting” to “allowing.”
Such magical word choices reveal a critical skunk in the Fed’s semantic wood pile.
If, for example, the Fed was honestly “targeting” inflation to no success for years, how could Powell suddenly have the public ability to then “allow” more of what he failed to achieve before, as if inflation was as simple to dial up and down as a thermostat in one’s home?
Dishonest Inflation Reporting
The blunt answer is that the Fed, in sync with the fiction writers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), reports consumer inflation as honestly as Al Capone reported taxable income.
In short: The Fed has been lying about (i.e. downplaying) inflation for years.
As we’ve shown in many prior reports, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) scale used by the BLS to measure U.S. consumer price inflation is an open charade, allowing the BLS, and hence the Fed, to basically “report” inflation however they see fit—at least for now.
If, for example, the weighting methodologies hitherto used by the Fed to measure CPI inflation in the 1980’s were used today, then US, CPI-measured inflation would be closer to 10% not the reported 2%.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
