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There is a general belief, and that is all it is, that state finances fare better in an inflationary environment than a deflationary one. This perception arises from the transfer of wealth from lenders to the state through a devaluation of the currency, which occurs with monetary inflation, compared with the transfer of wealth from the state to its creditors through deflation. The effect is undoubtedly true, even though it is played down by governments, but it ignores what happens to continuing government obligations and finances.

This article looks at this aspect of government finances in the longer term, first on the route to eventual currency collapse which governments create for themselves by ensuring a continuing devaluation of their currencies, and then in a sound money environment with a positive outcome, for which there is good precedent. This is the second article exposing the fallacies of supposed advantages of inflation over deflation, the first being posted here.

Inflationary policies

While central bankers have convinced themselves, in defiance of normal human behaviour, that consumption is only stimulated by the prospect of higher prices, there can be little doubt that the unmentioned sub-text is the supposed benefits to borrowers in industry and for government itself. Furthermore, the purpose of gaining control over interest rates from free markets is to reduce the general level of interest rates paid to lenders, further robbing them of the benefits of making their capital available to willing borrowers.

All this is in defiance of the principles behind contract law, but the courts do not accept that the unbacked state-issued currency of today is no different from the gold-backed money of yesteryear, nor the same as tomorrow’s further debased currency. Tax on interest is an added distortion, reducing net interest received by holders of depreciating currency even more.

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

Prepare for a Chinese Maxi-devaluation

October 13, 2017

Prepare for a Chinese Maxi-devaluation

China is a relatively open economy; therefore it is subject to the impossible trinity. China has also been attempting to do the impossible in recent years with predictable results.

Beginning in 2008 China pegged its exchange rate to the U.S. dollar. China also had an open capital account to allow the free exchange of yuan for dollars, and China preferred an independent monetary policy.

The problem is that the Impossible Trinity says you can’t have all three. This model has been validated several times since 2008 as China has stumbled through a series of currency and monetary reversals.

For example, China’s attempted the impossible beginning in 2008 with a peg to the dollar around 6.80. This ended abruptly in June 2010 when China broke the currency peg and allowed it to rise from 6.82 to 6.05 by January 2014 — a 10% appreciation.

This exchange rate revaluation was partly in response to bitter complaints by U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner about China’s “currency manipulation” through an artificially low peg to the dollar in the 2008 – 2010 period.

After 2013, China reversed course and pursued a steady devaluation of the yuan from 6.05 in January 2014 to 6.95 by December 2016. At the end of 2016, the Chinese yuan was back where it was when the U.S. was screaming “currency manipulation.”

Only now there was a new figure to point the finger at China. The new American critic was no longer the quiet Tim Geithner, but the bombastic Donald Trump.

Trump had threatened to label China a currency manipulator throughout his campaign from June 2015 to Election Day on November 8, 2016. Once Trump was elected, China engaged in a policy of currency war appeasement.

China actually propped up its currency with a soft peg. The trading range was especially tight in the first half of 2017, right around 6.85.

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

China Battles “Impossible Trinity”

September 3, 2017

China Battles “Impossible Trinity”

Just because something is inevitable does not mean it cannot be postponed.

The popular name for this is “kicking the can down the road,” which is a perfectly good description.

I prefer more technical terms such as dynamic systems in “subcritical” and “supercritical” state space, but it amounts to the same thing.

A financial crisis can be a long time in the making, but it will definitely erupt. When it does, there will be huge losses for those who ignored the warning signs.

China is in a pre-crisis situation today.

It is confronting the harsh logic of the “Impossible Trinity.”

The Impossible Trinity theory was advanced in the early 1960s by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell. It says that no country can have an open capital account, a fixed exchange rate and an independent monetary policy at the same time.

You can have one or two out of three, but not all three. If you try, you will fail — markets will make sure of that.

Those failures (which do happen) represent some of the best profit-making opportunities of all. Understanding the Impossible Trinity is how George Soros broke the Bank of England on Sept. 16, 1992 (still referred to as “Black Wednesday” in British banking circles. Soros also made over $1 billion that day).

The reason is that if more attractive total returns are available abroad, money will flee a home country at a fixed exchange rate to seek the higher return. This will cause a foreign exchange crisis and a policy response that abandons one of the three policies.

But just because the trinity is impossible in the long run does not mean it cannot be pursued in the short run. China is trying to peg the yuan to the U.S. dollar while maintaining a partially open capital account and semi-independent monetary policy. It’s a nice finesse, but isn’t sustainable.

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

Gold Reset To $10,000/oz Coming “By January 1, 2018” – Rickards

August 30, 2017

Gold Reset To $10,000/oz Coming “By January 1, 2018” – Rickards

– Trump could be planning a radical “reboot” of the U.S. dollar
– Currency reboot will see leading nations devalue their currencies against gold
– New gold price would be nearly 8 times higher at $10,000/oz
– Price based on mass exit of foreign governments and investors from the US Dollar
– US total debt now over $80 Trillion – $20T national debt and $60T consumer debt
– Monetary reboot or currency devaluation seen frequently – even modern history
– Buy gold eagles, silver eagles including monster boxes and gold bars
– Have a 10% allocation to gold, smaller allocation to silver

Editor: Mark O’Byrne

Source: Agora Financial

A new monetary standard which will see the dollar “reboot” and gold be revalued to $10,000/oz according to best-selling author and Pentagon insider Jim Rickards.

A monetary ‘reboot’ is not unprecedented

Articles about an imminent return to the gold standard are not exactly infrequent in the gold world and it can be easy to become immune to them and dismiss them without considering the facts and case being made.

Many of the articles are not just based one ever-wishful daydreams. Much of it comes from information that is true about today and is then applied to situations that we have seen in the past.

Rickards makes this point himself. A monetary reset is not unheard of. Since the Genoa Accord in 1922 there have been a further eight reboots. The most recent was in 2016 in what Rickards refers to as the Shanghai Accord which purportedly saw deals done that would allow China to ease without leading to a sharp correction in the US stock market.

Rickards isn’t the only one who is speculating that there could be some big monetary changes on the horizon. In March intelligence service Stratfor wrote:

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

Hyperinflation Defined, Explained, and Proven: Part II – Jeff Nielson

August 16, 2016

Hyperinflation Defined, Explained, and Proven: Part II – Jeff Nielson

Part I began the somewhat ambitious mission described in the title: providing readers with the true definition of the term “hyperinflation”, in both economic and mathematical terms. This was done through first defining the term “inflation” itself. It was then explained how the dynamics of inflation/hyperinflation operate, through the use of a simple allegory. Finally, readers were provided with a real-life illustration: the hyperinflation of the U.S. money supply .

Part II continues this mission by explaining why the current economic context makes a full-blown, monetary episode of hyperinflation inevitable, meaning the collapse (to zero) in the exchange rate of our fiat currencies – at least those of the Corrupt West. The starting point here is obvious: “competitive devaluation” .

Competitive devaluation is the official (and permanent) monetary policy of all the regimes of the Corrupt West. Let me restate this, so that the true insanity and criminality of this policy is explicit. All of our governments are racing to see which can drive down the value of its currency the fastest, i.e. which can “create inflation” the fastest – since lowering the exchange rate and creating inflation are two sides of the same coin.

Regular readers already know what inflation really represents: central bankers stealing our wealth through (deliberately) diluting the value of our currencies. We already have the written confession from the Dean of these inflation-thieves.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation [i.e. theft]through inflation.

– Alan Greenspan, 1966

Our governments are racing to see which can steal our wealth the fastest, through the monetary crimes of the central banks which rule above them . When will it end? When will our governments stopthis race to steal our wealth?

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

Presenting The Complete Global Currency Swirlogram

March 25, 2016

Presenting The Complete Global Currency Swirlogram

In case you missed it, DM central banks are locked in a truly epic FX deathmatch.

Sluggish growth and trade and the attendant global deflationary supply glut have left the world stuck in a nauseating, perpetual hangover from the financial crisis. Subpar inflation and disappointing growth have become the norm in developed markets and that’s lured central bankers into a mad Keynesian dash for the bottom.

The Fed got a head start on the race in 2008 and so naturally, the FOMC is set to try and normalize first. Unfortunately, dollar strength plays havoc with an EM complex that’s already coping with collapsing demand from China, a cloudy outlook for commodity currencies, and a laundry list of idiosyncratic domestic issues (see Turkey and Brazil for instance).

And so, in this increasingly confusing environment wherein one round of DM easing begets another and wherein strange dynamics persist such as the perverse trading pattern of the BRL- which rallies every time the government looks set to collapse entirely only to be reined in by central bank sales of reverse FX swaps so excessive currency strength doesn’t keep the CA from adjusting – we present the following swirlogram from Deutsche Bank whose analysts have taken the average of several models to determine where the world’s currencies stand on the spectrum from overvalued to undervalued.

Average:

Recipe for Collapse: Rising Military and Social Welfare Spending

March 23, 2016

Recipe for Collapse: Rising Military and Social Welfare Spending

Leaders faced with unrest, rising demands and dwindling coffers always debauch their currency as the politically expedient “solution.”

Whatever you think of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, he is one of the few public voices identifying runaway entitlement costs as a structural threat to the economy and nation. We can summarize Greenspan’s comments very succinctly: there is no free lunch. The more money that is siphoned off for entitlements, the less there is for investment needed to maintain productivity gains that are the foundation of future income generation: Greenspan: Worried About Inflation, Says “Entitlements Crowding Out Investment, Productivity is Dead” (via Mish)

Many people look to the rising costs of the U.S. military as the structural problem, and they have a point: there is no upper limit on military spending, and the demands (by the civilian leadership of the nation) on the services and the Pentagon’s demands for new weaponry are constantly pushing budgets higher.

But the truth is entitlement spending now dwarfs military spending:entitlements are more than $1.75 trillion, half of all Federal spending, while the Pentagon, VA, etc. costs around $700 billion annually.

We have a model for what happens when military and social welfare spending exceed the state’s resources to pay the rising costs: the state/empire collapses. The Western Roman Empire offers an excellent example of this dynamic.

As pressures along the Empire’s borders rose, Rome did not have enough tax revenues to fully fund the army. Hired mercenaries had become a significant part of the Roman army, and if they weren’t paid, then the spoils of war became their default pay.

This erosion of steady pay also eroded the troops’ loyalty to Rome; their loyalties switched to their commanders, who often decided to take his loyal army to Italy and declare himself Emperor.

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

Canada Rebels against the Destruction of the Loonie

January 19, 2016

Canada Rebels against the Destruction of the Loonie

The fear of “currency instability.”

“Without precedent” — that’s what National Bank of Canada’s chief economist Stéfane Marion called the wholesale destruction of the loonie.

The Canadian dollar is in a tailspin. Rarely has it tumbled so far so fast, and against so many currencies. The steepness of the CAD’s depreciation against the USD is without precedent, -33%, or 3.5 standard deviations, in 24 months.

In the two weeks so far this year, the loonie has dropped 5.8% against the euro, 5.3% against the greenback, and 8.6% against the yen. “Even the likes of Norway (+5.4% against the CAD) and Sweden (+3.9%) are mocking the once-mighty Canadian dollar,” Marion wrote in the note. “Australia and New Zealand? Not to worry, they are also gaining ground against the CAD.”

The Canadian dollar plunged to a fresh 13-year low last week and hasn’t recovered since, hovering at US$0.688, below $0.70 for the first time since spring 2003.

People are getting alarmed. A lot of consumer goods are imported, including 81% of fruits and vegetables. The plunging loonie makes them more expensive for Canadians: meat prices rose 5% last year, fruits 9%, vegetables 10%. The average household ended up spending C$325 more for food in 2015 than in 2014, according to the Food Price Report. And it’s likely to get worse.

When Stephen Poloz became governor of the Bank of Canada in 2013, he set out to hammer down the Canadian dollar. In 2015, he redoubled his efforts. He relied on ceaseless jawboning. He even invoked the absurdity of negative interest rates. And he cut the overnight rate twice, the infamous surprise cut in January and the telegraphed cut in July, at a time when the Fed was flip-flopping about raising rates.

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

Nations Scramble to Compete in ‘Currency War’ as China’s Yuan Falls to Five-Year Low

January 7, 2016

Nations Scramble to Compete in ‘Currency War’ as China’s Yuan Falls to Five-Year Low

Allan Ajifo / (CC BY 2.0)

China, Europe and Japan are driving down the value of their currencies in order to make their exports more attractive on the global market, leaving millions of workers in associated industries “protected or vulnerable, depending on which side they find themselves,” writes Guardian economics correspondent Phillip Inman.

Governments devalue their currencies to make their goods cheaper and thus increase the volume of their exports. It’s an attempt to shift what economists call the “balance of trade” in a country’s favor, with the intended net effect of increasing a home economy’s size and overall wealth.

Inman continues:

The phrase “currency war” speaks to a seemingly phoney battle between the world’s major trading powers over the price of exports. It has all the attributes of an illusory conflict because no one ever agrees that a genuine dispute has taken place. And as long as everyone denies they have drawn swords to slash their currency to compete with rival powers, talk of a war fizzles and dies.

There is a fringe constituency of analysts who have long argued that, much like the hundred years’ war of intermittent battles between England and France, currency wars make headlines only when there is a lurch in policy, which is the equivalent of deploying archers and unleashing the cavalry.

China’s decision to set its benchmark for the yuan at a five-year low is such a moment. It makes clear what has been true since last August, namely that the Communist leadership believes it needs a low-valued currency to help bail out its ailing export industries. The problem is that everyone wants to use the same trick.

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

The Fallacy that Weakening Your Currency Generates Prosperity

December 8, 2015

The Fallacy that Weakening Your Currency Generates Prosperity

Those demanding that the purchasing power of the currency be devalued are impoverishing everyone who holds the currency.

Of the many economic policies that are accepted as true yet are absolute nonsense, perhaps none is more achingly nonsensical than the notion that weakening a nation’s currency will magically make that nation prosperous.

Like the equally nonsensical Keynesian Cargo Cult’s misplaced obsession with “aggregate demand” driving “growth,” the idea that devaluing one’s money makes one more prosperous does not make even rudimentary sense.

If devaluing one’s currency generated prosperity, then those nations that have destroyed their currencies should be the most prosperous on Earth. The reality is those nations that devalue their currency are poor, for self-evident reasons: devaluing one’s currency lowers its purchasing power, which generates price inflation as imports soar in cost.

By lowering the yield on bonds (the favored method of devaluing one’s currency), the leadership inflates enormous credit/asset bubbles as everyone seeks to borrow nearly-free money to buy real-world assets that generate income streams. This fatally distorts the domestic economy and creates the potential for crisis in the foreign exchange (FX) market.

The obsession with devaluing one’s currency is rooted in the idea that exports are the key to growth, and the only way to boost exports in a world awash in virtually everything is to beggar thy neighbor by lowering the cost of one’s exports in other currencies by devaluing your own currency more than competitors are devaluing their currencies.

The problem with this idea is that the cost to the entire economy exceeds the modest gains in exports generated by beggar thy neighbor devaluation. In most economies, exports are a modest sector of the overall economy. In the U.S., exports are around 13.5% of the economy: $2.35 trillion in a $17.4 trillion economy.

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

China and the dollar

October 11, 2015

China and the dollar

With the benefit of hindsight, the two-day devaluation of the yuan in mid-August might have been a masterstroke of strategy.

China executed a financial move that appeared to undermine its own position but instead created trouble for the US; how much is still to be played out. So was the devaluation a well-executed move against the dollar, or are the Chinese authorities as clueless as any other government?

For a clue about how the Chinese might approach these matters, I am indebted to Simon Hunt of Simon Hunt Strategic Services for drawing my attention to a speech by General Qiao Liang, the Peoples Liberation Army’s military strategist, delivered about six months ago. The General makes it clear that China’s external relationships are pursued through financial, not military means. China pits subtle tai chi against America’s brash pugilism. It is therefore quite possible that China’s August devaluation was planned and timed to undermine America’s financial position.

This possibility is disregarded by nearly all financial commentators, who have been fixated on the bursting of China’s credit bubble. This would be a major crisis for a western economy, but it allows China to reallocate economic resources from legacy industries towards the monumental task of developing Asia’s infrastructure with the promise of its future markets.

Regarding the August devaluation as designed to enhance the competitiveness of the Chinese currency is too simplistic. The way to look at it is China actually triggered a wide-spread revaluation of the dollar. By undermining US export markets, China has effectively taken control of America’s interest rate policy from the Fed. She has shown that China, not America, now sets the pace in the global economy. General Qiao made an interesting point in his speech: China’s Alipay alone settled more purchases by value in just one day over China’s “Valentine” holiday last November, than all US online and retail outlets over the three-day Thanksgiving holiday.

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

Brazilian Nightmare Worsens On Bad Budget Data, Record Low Confidence, Horrific Government Approval Ratings

October 1, 2015

Brazilian Nightmare Worsens On Bad Budget Data, Record Low Confidence, Horrific Government Approval Ratings

Last month, in “‘No Recovery For You!’ Brazil Officially Enters Recession, Goldman Calls Numbers ‘Disquieting’”, we outlined Brazil’s July fiscal performance and came away believing that the country had little chance of hitting its primary fiscal surplus targets. Here’s what we said:

The latest on the political front is that President Dilma Rousseff has 15 days to explain to the the Federal Accounts Court why everyone seems to think that she intentionally delayed nearly $12 billion in social payments last year in an effort to make the books look better than they actually were. And while we won’t endeavor to weigh in one way or another on that issue, what we would say is that if someone in Brazil is doctoring this year’s books, they aren’t doing a very good job because things just seem to keep going from bad to worse. Case in point, on Friday, Brazil said its primary budget deficit was R10 billion in July, far wider than expected. The takeaway: “no primary surplus for you!”

Just three days later, Brazil officially threw in the towel on the primarily surplus projection for 2016 only to reverse course a few weeks later when embattled Finance Minister Joaquim Levy promised to enact some BRL26 billion in primary spending cuts for the 2016 budget on the way to achieving in a primary surplus that amounts to 0.7% of GDP.

Of course implementing austerity in the current fractious political environment is going to be well nigh impossible which means any and all upbeat assessments of the outlook for the country’s fiscal situation should be looked upon with an appropriate degree of skepticism. Add in the abysmal outlook for commodities and you have a recipe for perpetual twin deficits on the current and fiscal accounts, a situation which portends more BRL weakness to come.

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

India “Surprises” 51 Out Of 52 “Experts”, Slashes Rates More Than Expected As Easing Bonanza Continues

September 29, 2015

India “Surprises” 51 Out Of 52 “Experts”, Slashes Rates More Than Expected As Easing Bonanza Continues

Late last month, we asked how long it would be before the RBI hit back in the wake of China’s yuan deval.

The Indian government’s chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian had just told ET Now television that India may need to “respond” to China’s monetary policy stance, and also hinted at further export weakness. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines: more shots were about to the be fired in the ongoing global currency wars.

Reinforcing that contention was the following from Deutsche Bank:

India’s export sector continues to be under pressure, with merchandise exports contracting yet again in July by 10.3%yoy. The weakness in India’s exports is striking (this is the eighth consecutive month of decline), not only in terms of past trend, but also from a cross country perspective. Indeed, India’s exports performance has been the weakest in the region thus far in 2015. In the first quarter of the current fiscal year (April-June’15), Indian exports have contracted by 17%yoy, one of the sharpest declines on record. The main reason for such a weak Indian export performance can be attributed to the sharp decline in oil exports (down 51%yoy between April-June’15), which constitute 18% of total exports.

Another factor that could likely explain the weak performance of exports is the probable overvaluation of the rupee. As per RBI’s 36-country trade based real effective exchange rate, rupee remains overvalued at this juncture and this could be impacting exports to some extent, in our view.

Currency competitiveness is an important factor in influencing exports performance, but global demand is even more important, in our view, to support exports momentum. As can be seen from the chart [below], global demand remains soft at this stage which continues to be a key hurdle for exports momentum to gain traction.

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

Don’t Forget China’s “Other” Spinning Plate: Trillions In Hidden Bad Debt

September 5, 2015

Don’t Forget China’s “Other” Spinning Plate: Trillions In Hidden Bad Debt

To be sure, there’s every reason to devote nearly incessant media coverage to China’s bursting stock market bubble and currency devaluation.

The collapse of the margin fueled equity mania is truly a sight to behold and it’s made all the more entertaining (and tragic) by the fact that it represents the inevitable consequence of allowing millions of poorly educated Chinese to deploy massive amounts of leverage on the way to driving a world-beating rally that, at its height, saw day traders doing things like bidding a recently-public umbrella manufacturer up 2,700%.

The entertainment value has been heightened by what at this point has to be some kind of inside baseball competition among media outlets to capture the most hilarious picture of befuddled Chinese traders with their hands on their faces and/or heads with a board full of crashing stock prices visible in the background. Meanwhile, the world has recoiled in horror at China’s crackdown on the media and anyone accused of “maliciously” attempting to exacerbate the sell-off by engaging in what Beijing claims are all manner of “subversive” activities such as using the “wrong” words to describe the debacle and, well, selling stocks. Finally, China’s plunge protection has been widely criticized for, as we put it, “straying outside the bounds of manipulated market decorum.”

And then there’s the yuan devaluation that, as recent commentary out of the G20 makes abundantly clear, is another example of a situation where China will inexplicably be held to a higher standard than everyone else.That is, when China moves to support its export-driven economy it’s “competitive devaluation”, but when the ECB prints €1.1 trillion, it’s “stimulus.”

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

Saudi Arabia Faces Another “Very Scary Moment” As Economy, FX Regime Face Crude Reality

August 23, 2015

Saudi Arabia Faces Another “Very Scary Moment” As Economy, FX Regime Face Crude Reality

“They are working for their market share, not for the price,” Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov told Bloomberg on Saturday, during the same interview in which he predicted that sooner or later, dollar pegs in Saudi Arabia and the UAE would have to be abandoned.

The Saudis are essentially betting that their FX reserves all large enough to allow the Kingdom to ride out the self inflicted pain from persistently low crude prices on the way to bankrupting the US shale space. But the battle for market share comes at a cost, especially when ultra easy monetary policy in the US has served to kept capital markets open to heavily indebted drillers, allowing otherwise insolvent producers to remain in business longer than they otherwise would. It is, as we’ve noted before, afight between the Saudis and the Fed.

In the midst of it all, the petrodollar has died a rather swift if quiet death and as we documented on Saturday, the demise of the system that has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance has left emerging markets in no position to defend themselves in the face of China’s move to devalue the yuan. With Kazakhstan’s decision to float the tenge, we are beginning to see the post-petrodollar world (or, the “new era” as Karim Massimov calls it) take shape.

Over the weeks, months, and years ahead we’ll begin to understand more about the fallout and nowhere is it likely to be more apparent than in Saudi Arabia where widening fiscal and current account deficits have forced the Saudis to tap the bond market to mitigate the FX drawdown that’s fueling speculation about the viability of the dollar peg. Here’s Bloomberg on why the current situation mirrors a “very scary moment” in Saudi Arabia’s history.

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

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A monetary ‘reboot’ is not unprecedented

Allan Ajifo / (CC BY 2.0)

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