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QUESTION:

Mr Armstrong, interesting article today, the story of the store of value (at least long term) has always confused me. One can look at saving accounts also as an asset as it yields the interest payment and one relinquishes the access to the money. No difference to bonds.

But your article causes some questions: as you stated before the FED buying bonds does not increase real money supply, so what caused the decline of purchasing power of money in the asset class of equities? Is it that the manipulating of interest rates distorted the actual confidence and time preference in the economy which can be measured by the velocity?

You posted earlier that the velocity has declined. People do not want to invest but save which is not an option for big money as it doesn’t yield any or very little return. Hence enterprises buy back shares and smart money has no other option.

Interest rate hike by the FED, eventually increasing retail participation, a cooling world economy, sovereign debt crisis and the flight to the Dollar. The outcome of your computer, a rise in US stock markets including a possible phase transition, seems comprehensible.

The only thing what leaves me with amazement is what do they really intend? I don’t believe that the families who run the banking system, operating for centuries in money business, do not understand that. I can only assume that for being protected by government the banking cartel buys the governments time and keep financing the deficits.

Best regards,

ANSWER: The problem in so many areas is that we can focus on one issue, but the answer is a complexity of variables.

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

Real Wealth and Phantom Wealth – Secular Boom and Bust

August 28, 2015

Real Wealth and Phantom Wealth – Secular Boom and Bust

The Things that Produce Real Wealth vs. Phantom Wealth

Our friend Michael Pollaro, the keeper of long-term data on the true money supply and author at Forbes as well as occasionally a guest author on this site, recently sent us the following chart of a relationship he keeps a close eye on. It depicts the annual change rate in new orders for non-defense capital goods and compares this series to the Wilshire total market index.

piggy Photo via thedailysheeple.com

Annual change rate in new orders for non-defense capital goods and the Wilshire total market index – click to enlarge.

As you can see, there are slight leads and lags discernible near turning points, but there is no regularity to those that would allow us to make any definitive pronouncements on which trend is likely to lead the other. It is however clear that the two series are often directionally aligned (or to put it more simple: economic expansions and contractions often coincide with rising and falling stock prices).

What is interesting about the current situation is that the stock market is usually supposed to be forward-looking (it isn’t, at least not anymore, but this is still widely assumed – see our previous missive on this topic), but evidently, people are buying fewer of the things that are actually needed for future real wealth generation. Further below you will see that things are a bit more complicated than they look at first glance though – what is at work here is that in some industries, businessmen have just realized that they have malinvested their capital. Anyway, a noticeable gap has opened up between these two series, and it will likely be closed one way or the other. Note by the way the eerie similarity in the recent behavior of new orders and the stock market to what happened near the end of the 1990s stock market mania.

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

The Logic of Interventionism, or How to Wake up in a Prison

June 18, 2015

The Logic of Interventionism, or How to Wake up in a Prison

Archaic Financial Freedom

The mainstream press is still full of articles about the alleged evils of cash, which we regard as a typical “trial balloon” launched by the powers-that-be. The way this works is that they get a repressive measure they indent to implement out there, not only to propagandize in its favor, but also to gauge the reaction of the serfs. Is there an outcry? Does anyone care? If not, they quietly go forward with putting the measure into practice. If there is a great deal of pushback, they will simply wait for a better opportunity. A useful emergency always comes along after all. The Charlie Hebdo attack in France is a pertinent recent example: Under the false pretext that this is needed to “fight terrorism”, all cash transaction exceeding €1,000 have been banned in France.

1773

German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has recently published an article about the “hoarding of cash” by citizens of Switzerland and the euro zone. With interest rates either at zero or negative, the cash currency component of the money supply has increased significantly, as more and more citizens prefer to hoard money under the proverbial mattress. The new European “bail-in” regime, so vividly demonstrated in Cyprus, is a major motive as well. Most recently, Greek citizens have resorted to withdrawing their deposits, with mainly small savers withdrawing cash (large depositors are more likely to simply transfer money to other parts of the euro area that seem safer).

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

Weekend Edition: Literally, Your ATM Won’t Work…

June 7, 2015

Weekend Edition: Literally, Your ATM Won’t Work…

Editor’s Note: Today, we’re running an urgent warning from Bill. It’s about theviolent monetary shock he sees coming.

This may sound strange… But the catastrophic scenario Bill outlines below is potentially a much bigger threat than even the out-of-control national debt.

Please remember this warning when you go to the ATM to get cash… and there is none.

While we were thinking about what was really going on with today’s strange new money system, a startling thought occurred to us.

Our financial system could take a surprising and catastrophic twist that almost nobody imagines, let alone anticipates.

Do you remember when a lethal tsunami hit the beaches of Southeast Asia, killing thousands of people and causing billions of dollars of damage?

Well, just before the 80-foot wall of water slammed into the coast an odd thing happened: The water disappeared.

The tide went out farther than anyone had ever seen before. Local fishermen headed for high ground immediately. They knew what it meant. But the tourists went out onto the beach looking for shells!

The same thing could happen to the money supply…

There’s Not Enough Physical Money

Here’s how… and why:

It’s almost seems impossible. Hard to imagine. Difficult to understand. But if you look at M2 money supply – which measures coins and notes in circulation as well as bank deposits and money market accounts – America’s money stock amounted to $11.7 trillion as of last month.

But there was just $1.3 trillion of physical currency in circulation – about only half of which is in the US. (Nobody knows for sure.)

What we use as money today is mostly credit. It exists as zeros and ones in electronic bank accounts. We never see it. Touch it. Feel it. Count it out. Or lose it behind seat cushions.

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

Gold Verses Fractional Reserves Part 2

June 4, 2015

Gold Verses Fractional Reserves Part 2

The Harmful Consequences

We have now to examine the harm that the system does whether or not the pressure to reduce the reserve requirements is continuously successful.

Let us begin with a situation in, say, Ruritania, which has a fractional-reserve gold standard and a central bank, but in which business activity has not been fully satisfactory. The central bank then either lowers the discount rate or creates more member-bank reserves by buying government securities or it does both. As a result, business is encouraged to increase its borrowing and to launch on new enterprises, and the banks are now able to extend the new credit demanded.

As a consequence of the increased supply of money and credit, prices in Ruritania rise, and so do employment and money incomes. As a further result, Ruritanians buy more goods from abroad. As another result, Ruritania becomes a better place to sell to and a poorer place to buy from. It therefore develops an adverse balance of trade or payments. If neighboring countries are also on a gold basis, and inflating less than Ruritania, the exchange rate for the rurita declines, and Ruritania is obliged to export more gold. This reduces its reserves and forces it to contract its currency and credit. More immediately, it obliges Ruritania to increase its interest rates to attract funds instead of losing them. But this rise in interest rates makes many projects unprofitable that previously looked profitable, shrinks the volume of credit, lowers demand and prices, and brings on a recession or a financial crisis.

If neighboring countries are also inflating, or expanding the volume of their money and credit at as fast a rate, a crisis in Ruritania may be postponed; but the crisis and the necessary readjustment are all the more violent when they finally occur.

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

It Is Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off All Of Our Debt

May 22, 2015

It Is Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off All Of Our Debt

Did you know that if you took every single penny away from everyone in the United States that it still would not be enough to pay off the national debt? Today, the debt of the federal government exceeds $145,000 per household, and it is getting worse with each passing year. Many believe that if we paid it off a little bit at a time that we could eventually pay it all off, but as you will see below that isn’t going to work either. It has been projected that “mandatory” federal spending on programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare plus interest on the national debt will exceed total federal revenue by the year 2025. That is before a single dollar is spent on the U.S. military, homeland security, paying federal workers or building any roads and bridges. So no, we aren’t going to be “paying down” our debt any time in the foreseeable future. And of course it isn’t just our 18 trillion dollar national debt that we need to be concerned about. Overall, Americans are a total of 58 trillion dollars in debt. 35 years ago, that number was sitting at just 4.3 trillion dollars. There is no way in the world that all of that debt can ever be repaid. The only thing that we can hope for now is for this debt bubble to last for as long as possible before it finally explodes.

It shocks many people to learn that our debt is far larger than the total amount of money in existence. So let’s take a few moments and go through some of the numbers.

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

Modern-Day Monetary Cranks and the Fed’s “Inflation” Target

April 18, 2015

Modern-Day Monetary Cranks and the Fed’s “Inflation” Target

One Bad Idea After Another

Ben Bernanke is frequently in the news these days. The latest occasion concerns his opinion on the Fed’s “inflation” target, i.e., the target for the speed at which money should be debased relative to consumer goods in order to finally attain centrally planned economic nirvana.

Price inflation is currently deemed to be “too low” by our bien pensants, in spite of the fact that the broad US money supply TMS-2 has more than doubled since 2008 (as of March, it is very close to $11 trillion, up from $5.3 trn. in early 2008). If recent CPI data are to be believed (which requires a bit of a leap of faith), consumers may actually get slightly more goods and services for their money henceforth. What an unimaginable horror!

CPI dips ever so slightly into negative territory year-on-year – the nightmare of central planners around the world – click to enlarge.

Bloomberg reports that Ben Bernanke has an idea how to combat this terrifying development. Obviously, with the CPI’s rate of change dipping a few basis points into negative territory, the end of the world is practically at hand, so something needs to be done pronto.

Bernanke delivered his remarks at a conference sponsored by another economic central planning institution, the IMF. The people running this surplus to requirement bureaucratic vampire den are dreaming of the day when the IMF will become the global central bank, in line with Keynes’ “Bancor” idea. This would allow fiat money inflation on a nigh unprecedented scale, as currencies would no longer compete and be comparable. However, we digress.

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

Spelling Out The Big Reset

April 10, 2015

Spelling Out The Big Reset

As economies age, debt builds up. Advanced economies – those with the highest borrowing ratings by the reputable agencies they developed – have it clogging up inside all their arteries. The Big Reset will finally become inevitable, as has been acknowledged by the IMF head Largarde, mentioning the year 2020. But what must an Armageddon debt reset necessarily involve? Few have spelled it out, not even in the famous book with the same title “The Big Reset” by Willem Middelkoop.

Revision on money creation mechanics: unwrapping the meaning of ‘Reserves’

At the center of it all, wrapped by layers of secrecy and protected on the outside by purposefully confusing jargons is this concept of Reserves. Let’s understand it to mean ‘net worth’, ‘collateral’, or whatever a banking entity’s ‘really worth’, because what banking entities do, is to use this asset as backing to create instruments and derivatives, like loans, or even money, and expand the money supply. In long tradition, the ultimate reserve asset is of course gold. When the bank’s (or central bank’s) worthiness comes into doubt (like to many gold-deposit receipts flying around), people come for the ‘reserves’. If the reserves satisfy the claims, then it’s good.

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

How money creation threatens hyperinflation

March 30, 2015

How money creation threatens hyperinflation

In order to understand the relationship between money creation and the price level, we first need to get some definitions straight.

To Austrians the terms inflation and deflation refer to money and not prices. There is no doubt that money has experienced unprecedented inflation. In February of 2010 base money was $2.1 trillion. Four years later it was $3.8 trillion. In the same time frame, M1 has increased from $1.7 trillion to $2.9 trillion. M2 has gone from $8.5 trillion to $11.7 trillion. Excess reserves have doubled from $1.2 trillion to $2.4 trillion. (Please keep in mind that prior to 2008 excess reserves seldom were more than a few BILLION dollars, which is effectively zero and represented mostly the aggregate of excess reserve cash in thousands of community bank vaults.)

To Austrians changes to the price level, what the public incorrectly calls inflation and deflation, are the result of changes to the aggregate demand for consumers’ goods and the aggregate supply of consumers’ goods. Think of a simple ratio with the numerator representing demand and the denominator representing supply. Notice that an increase in supply will cause the price level to fall. Aren’t we all happy with this? I am. Or a decrease in demand will cause the price level to fall. There can be many causes of a decrease in demand–a fall in the money supply due to bank failures, a change in subjective time preference to save more, or a rational desire to hold more cash during times of uncertainty. None of these are bad for the economy per se. Whatever the cause, the antidote to a fall in demand is falling prices. The relationship between supply and demand must be re-established.

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

Steve Keen: The Deliberate Blindness Of Our Central Planners

March 30, 2015

Steve Keen: The Deliberate Blindness Of Our Central Planners

Choosing to ignore the largest risks

The models we use for decision making determine the outcomes we experience. So, if our models are faulty or flawed, we make bad decisions and suffer bad outcomes.

Professor, author and deflationist Steve Keen joins us this week to discuss the broken models our central planners are using to chart the future of the world economy.

How broken are they? Well for starters, the models major central banks like the Federal Reserve use don’t take into account outstanding debt, or absolute levels of money supply. It’s why they were completely blindsided by the 2008 crash, and will be similarly gob-smacked when the next financial crisis manifests.

And within this week’s podcast is a hidden treat. Steve’s character exposition on Greek Financial Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Steve has known Varoufakis personally for over 25 years, and is able to offer a window into his constitution, how his mind thinks, and what he’s currently going through in his battle with the Troika for Greece’s future.

…click on the above link to listen to the podcast…

The ECB’s Lunatic Full Monty Treatment

March 7, 2015

The ECB’s Lunatic Full Monty Treatment

Not Quite Right in the Head?

The belief that the market economy requires “steering” by altruistic central bankers, who make decisions influencing the entire economy based on their personal epiphanies, has rarely been more pronounced than today. Most probably it has actually never been stronger. It is both highly amusing and disconcerting that so many economists who would probably almost to a man agree that it would be a very bad idea if the government were to e.g. take over the computer industry and begin designing PCs and smart phones by committee, think that government bureaucrats should determine the height of interest rates and the size of the money supply.

We know of course that central banks are the major income source for many of today’s macro-economists, so it is in their own interest not to make any impolitic noises about these central planning institutions and their activities. Besides, most Western economists have not exactly covered themselves with glory back when the old Soviet Union still existed. Even in the late 1980s, Über-Keynesian Alan Blinder for instance still remarked that the question was not whether we should follow its example and adopt socialism, but rather how much of it we should adopt.

The recent ECB announcement detailing its new “QE” program once again confirms though that there is nothing even remotely “scientific” about what these planners are doing. Common sense doesn’t seem to play any discernible role either. Below are the 10-year government bond yields of Italy and Spain. These are actually among the higher bond yields in Europe right now.

Italy’s 10 year government bond yield is now below 1.3% – click to enlarge.

Spain’s 10-year yield is also below 1.3% – click to enlarge.

Leaving for the moment aside how sensible it is for the bond yields of virtually insolvent governments mired in “debt trap” dynamics to trade at less than 1.3%, one must wonder: what can possibly be gained by pushing them even lower? Does this make any sense whatsoever?

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

When This Ends, Everybody Gets Hurt

January 22, 2015

When This Ends, Everybody Gets Hurt

And the end is uncomfortably close

Central banks around the globe have taken us all into unchartered territory, where the possible paths boil down to a binary outcome: either it all works out or it doesn’t.

Unfortunately, the ‘it all works out’ outcome has a very low probability of actually happening; so the binary outcome isn’t equally weighted like a coin toss. By ‘working out’, here’s what the central banks all striving (praying?) for:

Inflation of 2% to 3% per year
Economic growth of at least 6% per year (nominal) and a real (inflation adjusted) rate of 3% per year.

The reason that the central banks want all of this growth and inflation isn’t because it’s good for you, me, or anybody we know. Instead, the bankers need it because that’s what our exponential money system requires.

Slaves To The System

It bears repeating, inflation is not rising prices — those are symptoms of inflation — but instead is the expansion of the existing stock of money and credit. If we observe the symptom of ‘rising prices’, then that means the underlying mechanism of expansion of credit (mainly) and money (less important because the money supply is a only fraction of the volume of credit) is functioning.

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