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Credit has a wicked way

of magnifying a person’s defects. Even the most cautious man, with unlimited credit, can make mistakes that in retrospect seem absurd. But an average man, with unlimited credit, is preeminently disposed to going full imbecile.

Let us not forget about this important skill… [PT]

Several weeks ago we came across a woeful tale of Mike Meru. Somehow, this special fellow, while of apparent sound mine and worthy intent, racked up over $1 million dollars in student loan debt – all to become an orthodontist.

Surely, with several good text books, and a disciplined self-study program, Meru could have learned everything there was to possibly know about adjusting malpositioned teeth for roughly $200 bucks. Instead, with the full backing of Uncle Sam’s loan program, he went full imbecile.

Yet Meru isn’t alone. According to the Department of Education, there are 101 people in the U.S. who are a million dollars or more in federal student loan debt. What’s more, there are 2.5 million people who owe at least $100,000. What could they have possibly learned that could be so doggone valuable?

Did they discover how to turn nickels into dimes? Did they solve the geometry of a four-sided triangle? Did they learn the secrets of the universe? Did they get an insider’s peek at something more than what happens under the sun?

Delusions of Grandeur

Only at rare moments are people capable of understanding the full implications of the catastrophes of their making. These rare moments, often just before dawn, are the precise instants when they gain full clarity to the hopeless fact that they have gone full imbecile. That every decision they have ever made has led them to this exact place – where they find themselves to be completely and utterly screwed.

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

Nomi Prins: Central Bank-Inspired “Major Credit Squeeze” Will Trigger Next Crisis

June 9, 2018

Nomi Prins: Central Bank-Inspired “Major Credit Squeeze” Will Trigger Next Crisis

For all the talk about tapering (in both the US and Europe), the Federal Reserve has actually done remarkably little to reduce its balance sheet. And in an interview with Macrovoices Erik Townsend, former Wall Street executive Nomi Prins expands upon some of the same themes she covered in her latest book, “Collu$ion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World”.

As Prins reminds us early on, the Fed and other central banks have expanded their balance sheets by more than $20 trillion, and despite all the chatter about withdrawing stimulus and letting its balance sheet roll off, the Fed’s balance sheet has only shrunk from $4.5 trillion to $4.3 trillion.

Central bankers, Prins argues, like to pat themselves on the back for avoiding what many feared would be runaway inflation resulting from low interest rates and quantitative easing. But of course, they did create inflation, just not the kind that could be reflected by CPI:

But the reason the markets went up and didn’t see through that is not because they believed this wasn’t an act of desperation (I think), but because there was just free money being handed out. It’s sort of like if you’re a drug addict, and you know at some point you’ll be clearheaded if you just get off the drugs and get your act together and move forwards, that’s one way to do it.

Or if someone is supplying you with lots of drugs then it just works and everything else, well then you’ll take them. And this is what happened. The Fed was that sort of supplier of last resort and a lender of last resort of capital for the market.

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

Beware of the Coming Economic Debt Bomb

May 11, 2018

“There is a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of every American. Sadly, it is about to drop.”

Sorry for the drama, but I need to get your attention.

We know that the Fed has kept interest rates low for many years until recently. Why did it do so? Here are some of the reasons we have been told:

The Fed wanted to stimulate the economy.
The Fed wanted to make it easier for Americans to borrow.
The Fed wanted to create a “wealth effect” to encourage spending.

Which of these statements do you think explains the primary reason for the Fed’s decision to keep interest rates low? Don’t bother. It is none of the above.

The primary reason the Fed kept interest rates low was to avert an economic catastrophe. Today, that catastrophe can no longer be avoided. The trigger for the economic explosion is the rising interest payments on the federal debt.

Let’s go through the numbers.

During the eight years of the Obama administration, our total national debt rose from $12.3 trillion to $20 trillion while interest rates sank to a new all-time low. (The national debt figure includes money owed by the government to itself. The debt held by the public is what interests us since the government must pay out the interest to those bond holders.)

In 2009, the year President Obama took office, the national debt held by the public was $7.27 trillion. At the end of fiscal 2016, that had soared to approximately $14 trillion. Given that our marketable debt doubled from 2009 to 2016, it’s remarkable that the annual cost of the interest on the debt rose far less, from $185 billion to $223 billion.

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

US Money Supply Growth Jumps in March , Bank Credit Growth Stalls

May 10, 2018

US Money Supply Growth Jumps in March , Bank Credit Growth Stalls

A Movie We Have Seen Before – Repatriation Effect?

There was a sizable increase in the year-on-year growth rate of the true US money supply TMS-2 between February and March. Note that you would not notice this when looking at the official broad monetary aggregate M2, because the component of TMS-2 responsible for the jump is not included in M2. Let us begin by looking at a chart of the TMS-2 growth rate and its 12-month moving average.

The y/y growth rate of TMS-2 increased from 2.68% in February to 4.85% in March. The 12-month moving average nevertheless continued to decline and stands now at 4.1%.

The sole component of TMS-2 showing sizable growth in March was the US Treasury’s general account with the Fed. This is included in the money supply because, well, it is money. The Treasury department will spend it, therefore this is not money that can be considered to reside “outside” of the economy (such as bank reserves).

We were wondering what was behind the spurt in the amount held in the general account. While there was a decline in the growth rate of US demand deposits, the slowdown in momentum did not really offset the surge in funds held by the Treasury.

This reminded us of a subject discussed by the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (TBAC) in the second half of 2016 in the wake of the change in money market fund regulations. This led to a repatriation of money MM funds previously lent out in the euro-dollar market to European issuers of commercial paper (mainly European banks).

Readers may recall that there was a mysterious surge in the growth rate of the domestic US money supply (again, only visible in TMS 1 & 2) into November 2016, despite a lack of QE and no discernible positive momentum in the rate of change of inflationary bank lending growth.

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

How High Is The Risk of a Currency Crisis?

April 24, 2018

How High Is The Risk of a Currency Crisis?

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, quipped Mark Twain in response to a newspaper report that said he was on his deathbed. The same could be said about many fiat currencies. Whether we are looking at the US dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen or the British Pound: In the wake of the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, quite a few commentators painted a rather bleak future for them: high inflation, even hyperinflation, some even forecast their collapse. That did not happen. Instead, fiat money seems to be still in great demand. In the United States of America, for instance, peoples’ fiat money balances relative to incomes are at a record high.

How come? Central banks’ market manipulations have succeeded in fending off credit defaults on a grand scale: Policymakers have cut interest rates dramatically and injected new cash into the banking system. In retrospect, it is clear why these operations have prevented the debt pyramid from crashing down: 2008/2009 was a “credit crisis.” Investors were afraid that states, banks, consumers, and companies might no longer be able to afford their debt service — meanwhile, investors did not fear that inflation could erode the purchasing power of their currencies as evidenced by dropping inflation expectations in the crisis period.

Central banks can no doubt cope with a credit default scenario: As the monopoly producer of money, central banks can provide financially ailing borrowers with any amount deemed necessary to keep them afloat. In fact, the mere assurance on the part of central banks to bail out the financial system if needed suffices to calm down financial markets and encourages banks to refinance maturing debt and even extend new credit. Cheap and easy central bank funding prompted lenders and borrowers to jump right back into the credit market. The debt binge could go on.

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

Stop and Assess

April 23, 2018

Stop and Assess

America has become Alzheimer Nation. Nothing is remembered for more than a few minutes. The news media, which used to function as a sort of collective brain, is a memory hole that events are shoved down and extinguished in. An attack in Syria, you ask? What was that about? Facebook stole your…what? Four lives snuffed out in a… a what? Something about waffles? Trump said… what? Let’s pause today and make an assessment of where things stand in this country as Winter finally coils into Spring.

As you might expect, a nation overrun with lawyers has litigated itself into a cul-de-sac of charges, arrests, suits, countersuits, and allegations that will rack up billable hours until the Rockies tumble. The best outcome may be that half the lawyers in this land will put the other half in jail, and then, finally, there will be space for the rest of us to re-connect with reality.

What does that reality consist of? Troublingly, an economy that can’t go on as we would like it to: a machine that spews out ever more stuff for ever more people. We really have reached limits for an industrial economy based on cheap, potent energy supplies. The energy, oil especially, isn’t cheap anymore. The fantasy that we can easily replace it with wind turbines, solar panels, and as-yet-unseen science projects is going to leave a lot of people not just disappointed but bereft, floundering, and probably dead, unless we make some pretty severe readjustments in daily life.

We’ve been papering this problem over by borrowing so much money from the future to cover costs today that eventually it will lose its meaning as money — that is, faith that it is worth anything. That’s what happens when money is just a representation of debt that can’t be paid back.

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

RBC Warns Cracks “Starting To Show” In Canadian Credit

April 12, 2018

RBC Warns Cracks “Starting To Show” In Canadian Credit

One often wonders if the government will ever realize that, due to its policies, its “solutions” often wind up turning into bigger problems than the ones they set out to address initially? Not only that, but this has been the case for decades, and it will continue to be the case until we “engineer” ourselves into a crisis that is too big to fix or too overwhelming to print our way out of.

Every day we discuss various aspects of a system that ends up far worse off due to a government apparatus that is convinced it knows best and that intervention and interfering are the solution to the problem. In essence, much of the financial crisis of 2008 was a result of the government interfering in the housing market in years prior, combined with the Fed not being able to forecast the crisis, despite widely ostracized skeptics such as Peter Schiff stating repeatedly that the housing market was heading into the abyss.

Today, we face a new set of challenges as a result of the way governments and central banks dealt (or rather, didn’t) with the 2008 financial crisis. In the United States there are bubbles forming in student loans and subprime auto lending, while mortgage debt and consumer credit both look to soon be out of control yet again.

Meanwhile, the problem is spreading geographically and today we are presented with yet another “solution turned into problem”, and as Bloomberg reports, RBC now sees “cracks” in consumer credit becoming a problem yet again, this time in Canada. The combination of low interest rates and the cheap and easy access to capital has yet again gone from being a solution to a problem, as Canadian lenders are seeing delinquency rates “roll” out in time and duration.

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

Surviving The Next Great Depression

April 8, 2018

Surviving The Next Great Depression

Numerous economists and investors are warning of another great financial crisis to come but few people want to listen to them. No crisis is ever exactly like the last one and the next great depression will be different from the last one. In the last depression those who had money were in a good financial position to ride it out but the next depression will see those with fiat money drowning in it as it becomes worthless.

Very few Americans have any significant savings today. Most live on credit and those with savings have it stored in financial instruments that will be wiped out as the bankers collapse the system to hide the theft they have been involved in for decades. Those who think they will retire with their IRA, pensions or social security will suddenly find them all gone never to return leaving them with no means to care for themselves.

The west line has moved to Asia. This means that North America is no longer the shipping center of the world. The consequences of this for Americans will be disastrous. This means our economy in the future will be smaller and slower and will result in a standard of living far below what it currently is.

Those that own very few assets free and clear will become the new homeless as they become jobless and default on all of their credit obligations. All of the social safety nets that exist now to keep people fat and happy will fail leaving mobs of people to roam the streets to seek out what they need to survive. One only has to look at Venezuela today to see where this will all lead.

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

The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

March 31, 2018

The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

Looks like we’re in for a much rockier ride than many expect

This marks our our 10th year of doing this. And by “this”, we mean using data, logic and reason to support the very basic conclusion that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

Surprisingly, this simple, rational idea — despite its huge and fast-growing pile of corroborating evidence — still encounters tremendous pushback from society. Why? Because it runs afoul of most people’s deep-seated belief systems.

Our decade of experience delivering this message has hammered home what behavioral scientists have been telling us for years — that, with rare exceptions, we humans are not rational. We’re rationalizers. We try to force our perception of reality to fit our beliefs; rather than the other way around.

Which is why the vast amount of grief, angst and encroaching dread that most people feel in western cultures today is likely due to the fact that, deep down, whether we’re willing to admit it to ourselves or not, everybody already knows the truth: Our way of life is unsustainable.

In our hearts, we fear that someday, possibly soon, our comfy way of life will be ripped away; like a warm blanket snatched off of our sleeping bodies on a cold night.

The simple reality is that society’s hopes for a “modern consumer-class lifestyle for all” are incompatible with the accelerating imbalance between the (still growing) human population and the (increasingly depleting) planet’s natural resources. Basic math and physics tell us that the Earth’s ecosystems can’t handle the load for much longer.

The only remaining question concerns how fast the adjustment happens. Will the future be defined by a “slow burn”, one that steadily degrades our living standards over generations? Or will we experience a sudden series of sharp shocks that plunge the world into chaos and conflict?

It’s hard to say. As Yogi Berra famously quipped, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” So, it’s left to us to remain open-minded and flexible as we draw up our plans for how we’ll personally persevere through the coming years of change.

But even while the specifics about the future elude us today, “predicting” the macro trends most likely to influence the coming decades is very doable:

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

The environmental consequences of monetary dysfunction

March 29, 2018

The environmental consequences of monetary dysfunction

Dysfunction of the money-system underpins the problems of the world’s multiple converging crises. Discuss.

Might that assertion be taking an ideological position, encouraged by the echo chambers of like-minded twitterati? This piece is an attempt to tease out the nature of the underlying connection, and in doing so describe some of the attack surfaces that are available to those bent on change.

From an environmental perspective the most damaging money-system dysfunction is the misallocation of credit. Commercial banks have been given the responsibility of deciding who should receive loans – for capital investment, mortgages and asset purchases for example – and the privilege of charging interest on those loans. They are largely unconstrained in this process – while there are theoretical constraints, in practice their main concern is making sure they get their full whack of interest due over the term of the loan. They therefore generally prefer lending secured against an asset that they can repossess if necessary than against the uncertain (and difficult to assess – at least for today’s disconnected and centralised account managers) future productive capability of entrepreneurial projects. This is borne out by figures for productive investment which tend to show lending for productive use at about 15%.

The first consequence of this preference is that the banks find themselves in an unholy alliance with asset owners, with a joint interest in ever rising asset prices and a reluctance to moderate activity in asset markets lest their loans lose collateral value. They all know in their hearts that this will eventually mean painful busts. But they also know that when the time comes they will be bailed out by the government, that many of their more savvy and comfortably-connected friends will have disposed of their assets ahead of the peak, and that the greater part of the associated pain will be experienced by less well connected ‘outsiders’. There is no real sanction on the banks or their senior management from buying into this toxic cycle. So we should not be surprised when it repeats. They operate in any case with a sort of herd mentality, and taking a heterodox stance would fail the wine-bar peer-reviews. There is no way that this cycle can avoid the progressive concentration of wealth. (In passing we might note that this in turn puts a misplaced emphasis on philanthropy and volunteerism as means to address society’s ills.)

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

The $233 Trillion Dollar Dark Cloud of Global Debt

March 11, 2018

The $233 Trillion Dollar Dark Cloud of Global Debt

Global debt has reached record heights without any signs of relief. While central bankers try to explain away the phenomenon of these out-of-control numbers, it’s not much of a mystery. Immediate consumption with the promise of repayment sometime in the future has consequences. Global debt is staggering to the point most of it will never be repaid. Certainly not in our generation. Perhaps by our grandchildren, but as global debt keeps mounting, the picture is doubtful.

The per capita global debt is $30,000. Who, exactly, will be making repayments?

Economists insist that the 2007 financial crisis could not have been predicted. Yet, all the signs of out-of-control credit where there. Today, economists are repeating the same mantra, despite the spiraling world debt. The question is not if the next bubble will strike. It’s a matter of when.

The math is fairly simple. The more a country increases its debt to simply stay afloat, the more like the increasing debt will cause a tightening of credit. The next step in the equation is a burst bubble and economic crisis. This is what happened in 1929, happened again in 2007, and it’s happening now. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

Out-of-control credit will undoubtedly slow down the US’s current economic growth. It probably won’t cause an outright crisis. Other countries may not be as fortunate.

Countries such as China, Belgium, South Korea, Australia, and Canada are experiencing an unprecedented credit bubble, with few systems in place to control it. The resulted inflation or simply write-offs of debts could result in a global financial disaster we have not seen before. The current economic upswing is unlikely to continue.

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

The Real Engine of the Business Cycle

March 5, 2018

The Real Engine of the Business Cycle

A valuable lesson from the Great Recession is that credit-supply expansions play a key role in subsequent recessions. When lenders make credit more available or more affordable, households respond by taking on debt, which drives up aggregate demand – that is, until the music stops.

CHICAGO – Every major financial crisis leaves a unique footprint. Just as banking crises throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries revealed the importance of financial-sector liquidity and lenders of last resort, the Great Depression underscored the necessity of counter-cyclical fiscal and monetary policies. And, more recently, the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession revealed the key drivers of credit-driven business cycles.

Specifically, the Great Recession showed us that we can predict a slowdown in economic activity by looking at rising household debt. In the United States and across many other countries, changes in household debt-to-GDP ratios between 2002 and 2007 correlate strongly with increases in unemployment from 2007 to 2010. For example, before the crash, household debt had increased enormously in Arizona and Nevada, as well as in Ireland and Spain; and, after the crash, all four locales experienced particularly severe recessions.

In fact, rising household debt was predictive of economic slumps long before the Great Recession. In his 1994 presidential address to the European Economic Association, Mervyn King, then the chief economist at the Bank of England, showed that countries with the largest increases in household debt-to-income ratios from 1984 to 1988 suffered the largest shortfalls in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth from 1989 to 1992.

Likewise, in our own work with Emil Verner of Princeton University, we have shown that US states with larger household-debt increases from 1982 to 1989 experienced larger increases in unemployment and more severe declines in real GDP growth from 1989 to 1992.

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

Daniel Nevins: Economics for Independent Thinkers

March 1, 2018

Daniel Nevins: Economics for Independent Thinkers

It’s time we stop trusting the ‘experts’

Economists are supposed to monitor and analyze the economy, warn us if risks are getting out of hand, and advise us on how to make things runs more effectively — right?

Well, even though that’s what most people expect from economists, it’s not at all how they see their role, warns CFA and and behavioral economist Daniel Nevins.

Economists, he cautions, are modelers. They pursue academic lines of thought in order to make their models more perfect. They live in a universe of equations and presumptions about equilibrium states and other chimerical mathematical perfections that don’t exist in real life.

In short, they are the wrong people to advise us, Nevins claims, as they have no clue how the imperfect world we live in actually works.

In his book Economics For Independent Thinkers, he argues that we need a new, more accurate and useful way of studying the economy:

However far you go back, you can find economists who had a more realistic approach to how humans actually behave, than the way that mainstreamers assume they behave in the models that the Fed uses to pick winners and losers.

You mentioned credit cycles, business environment, and behavioral economics. What I’ve done is to say, “Okay. We know that the modeling approach, the systems of equations approach doesn’t work. But instead of starting completely from scratch, what can we find in the economics literature that is maybe more realistic?”

And the interesting thing is that if you look at the work that was done, the state of the profession before the 1930s, before Keynesianism took hold, you can find a lot of work that was quite sensible.

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

What’s Behind Global Inflation: China Creates A Record 2.9 Trillion Yuan In New Loans In One Month

February 13, 2018

What’s Behind Global Inflation: China Creates A Record 2.9 Trillion Yuan In New Loans In One Month

According to one monetary theory, in a world in which China is the dominant creator of debt – which it has been since the financial crisis – it is also China that is the marginal creator of the global inflationary impulse. In which case, the latest Chinese new loan data helps explain the recent inflationary burst which judging my the recent market volatility has freaked out US traders, because according to the PBOC, in January China created a record CNY2900 billion in new loans ($458.3 billion), a striking rebound from the CNY2030 billion a year ago, and almost 1 trillion yuan above the CNY2000 expected.

According to Reuters, the credit boom has been fueled “by strong economic growth, a robust property market and a crackdown on riskier shadow lending, which has forced banks to shift some loans back onto their balance sheets.” But mostly it has been forced by an implicit demand on Beijing to keep the global reflationary impulse strong at a time when the Fed is shrinking its balance sheet – a highly deflationary, if only for circulating monetary aggregates, exercise.

A more detailed breakdown of the loan data showed sharp pickups in demand for credit from both households and companies, a harbinger of strong consumption and investment, if both funded on credit. Corporate loans surged to 1.78 trillion yuan from 243.2 billion yuan in December, while household loans rose to 901.6 billion yuan in January from 329.4 billion yuan in December.

Outstanding yuan loans grew 13.2% in January from a year earlier, also faster than an expected 12.5% rise and compared with an increase of 12.7% in December.

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

What Just Changed?

February 12, 2018

What Just Changed?

The illusion that risk can be limited delivered three asset bubbles in less than 20 years.

Has anything actually changed in the past two weeks? The conventional bullish answer is no, nothing’s changed; the global economy is growing virtually everywhere, inflation is near-zero, credit is abundant, commodities will remain cheap for the foreseeable future, assets are not in bubbles, and the global financial system is in a state of sustainable wonderfulness.

As for that spot of bother, the recent 10% decline in stocks: ho-hum, nothing to see here, just a typical “healthy correction” in a never-ending bull market, the result of flawed volatility instruments and too many punters picking up dimes in front of the steamroller.

Now that’s winding up, we can get back to “creating wealth” by buying assets–$2 million homes in Seattle that were $500,000 homes a few years ago, stocks, bonds, private islands, offshore wealth funds, bat guano, you name it. Just borrow whatever you need to borrow to buy more.

(But don’t buy bitcoin. No no no, a thousand times no. It is going to zero, Goldman Sachs guaranteed it.)

Ahem. And then there’s reality: something has changed, something important.What changed? The endlessly compelling notion that risk has magically vanished as the result of financial sorcery is now in doubt. If risk hasn’t been made to disappear, and even worse, can’t be corralled into a shortable instrument like VIX, then–gasp–every asset and instrument might actually be exposed to some risk.

As I’ve noted many times here, risk cannot be made to disappear; it can only be transferred onto others or off-loaded into the financial system itself. Risk can be cloaked or masked, and indeed, that is the beating heart of financial alchemy: we can eliminate risk by hedging via exotic instruments.

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

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