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Divided Opinions

POITOU, France – Last week, young colleagues at Bonner & Partners HQ in Delray Beach, Florida, put us on the spot.

“What do we stand for as a publishing business?” they asked. “Who are we? How are we different from anyone else? What do we think that others don’t?”

We are not the only publishers to offer opinions. And not the only ones with alternative points of view. So, to answer these questions, let’s look first at the range of opinions on offer…

First, there is “the authorities must know what they are doing… besides, I have more important things to think about” camp. This is by far the largest group: hoi polloi. The masses. The lumpenproletariat.

Saved by the border collie
Cartoon by Gary Larson

There may be some grumbling and kvetching. But most people count on the feds to manage the economy, foreign policy, the future, and the government. They expect mistakes from time to time. But they also believe the system can be trusted to produce an acceptable, although perhaps not always ideal, outcome.

And if not, God help them. Because the difference between the outcome if they bothered to think about it and the outcome if they didn’t is the same. They have no ability to influence public policy… and not much room to maneuver in their private lives.

They get salaries, pensions, Social Security. They need jobs, mortgages, student loans, and medical insurance. They have little capital to invest or protect. They depend so heavily on “the system” that they can’t afford to believe there is something deeply wrong with it. They go along. They get along.

sheeple

Going along, getting along…
Cartoon by Gary Larson

At the other end of the idea spectrum, there are the edgy, malcontent, and extremely marginal opinions. A man, sitting in his double-wide watching TV can come to hold all sorts of wacky views. There is an entire infotainment industry that provides screwball opinions.

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

What’s up with the global economy, and where do we go from here?

October 27, 2015

What’s up with the global economy, and where do we go from here?

A deflationary spiral, such as is now becoming evident globally, acts as a natural poison.

It now appears that the grand yearly addition to total human wealth, the global GNP, is no longer growing. If so, this means the world is headed toward a global deflationary spiral, a contraction in the global economy similar in nature to the trade slump that spread globally during the era of the Great Depression.

There really is no other explanation but a global trade slump that can account for the steep decline in the prices of basic essential commodities like oil and copper, and also the decreased demand for shipping capacity reflected in the Baltic Dry Index.

The troubled Chinese economy, its reduced demand for commodities, the devaluation of its currency to try to capture more trade, and the Chinese support for a new trade alliance in competition with the new U.S./Japanese TPP alliance — all these are symptoms that indicate that aggregate global buying power has stalled out. That means that investment capital is unable to find new profitable investments in the global marketplace, which is very bad news for finance capitalism as a global system.

At this point let me refer readers to Gail Tverberg and her blog, Our Finite World, which focuses on the key interactions between energy and economics. In fact we now see just the sort of troubled global economy that we might anticipate from a world that peaked in production of historically cheap conventional oil almost a decade ago in 2006. Tverberg is able to explain the global economic situation so clearly, so convincingly, and so persistently that she has attracted a huge popular economic following. One of her recent posts drew over a thousand reader responses; “Low Oil Prices – Why Worry?.”

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

Everything’s Deflating And Nobody Seems To Notice

October 22, 2015

Everything’s Deflating And Nobody Seems To Notice

Whenever we at the Automatic Earth explain, as we must have done at least a hundred times in our existence, that, and why, we refuse to define inflation and deflation as rising or falling prices (only), we always get a lot of comments and reactions implying that people either don’t understand why, or they think it’s silly to use a definition that nobody else seems to use.

-More or less- recent events, though, show us once more why we’re right to insist on inflation being defined in terms of the interaction of money-plus-credit supply with money velocity (aka spending). We’re right because the price rises/falls we see today are but a delayed, lagging, consequence of what deflation truly is, they are not deflation itself. Deflation itself has long begun, but because of confusing -if not conflicting- definitions, hardly a soul recognizes it for what it is.

Moreover, the role the money supply plays in that interaction gets smaller, fast, as debt, in the guise of overindebtedness, forces various players in the global economy, from consumers to companies to governments, to cut down on spending, and heavily. We are as we speak witnessing a momentous debt deleveraging, or debt deflation, in real time, even if prices don’t yet reflect that. Consumer prices truly are but lagging indicators.

The overarching problem with all this is that if you look just at -consumer- price movements to define inflation or deflation, you will find it impossible to understand what goes on. First, if you wait until prices fall to recognize deflation, you will tend to ignore the deflationary moves that are already underway but have not yet caused prices to drop. Second, when prices finally start falling, you will have missed out on the reason why they do, because that reason has started to build way before a price fall.

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

What Keeps Neil Howe Up At Night: An Interview With The Author Of “The Fourth Turning”

October 14, 2015

What Keeps Neil Howe Up At Night: An Interview With The Author Of “The Fourth Turning”

“Underproduction, undercapacity, deflation, currency wars, demographics, falling birth rates” – those are the biggest fears which Fourth Turning author, and head of Saeculum Research Neil Howe, lays out in this interview excerpt courtesy of RealVision TV.

While Howe goes on an interesting tangent on the one topic that will surely be absent from all presidential debates, namely the fact that migration into the US is “actually in huge decline“, and that the largest immigrant group into the US is Asian (after all someone has to buy those luxury NYC condos), what is more interesting are Howe’s parallels of the current economic situation to the Great Depression: “whole areas of the world no longer having a global superpower, no longer having global institutions that enforce orders so you have these huge areas of failed states and power vacuums and regional authoritarian governments – that’s exactly what people saw in the 1930s and we’re seeing it now in Russia, China, Iran doing whatever they want.”

He continues:

“Another interesting economic parallel is the crisis of overvaluation: in the 1930s it was the gold standard, for southern Europe it’s the Euro, and for China they have a fixed rate regime that they’re attending to too little too late. It’s the nature of an authoritarian regime to always to do too little and too late. Everyone is too timid to tell the person in power “this is what you need to do.” I think China faces an absolute choice between a huge devaluation to restimulate its economy, because becoming competitive I think the carry trade is going to go and I think even domestic savings are going to flee. If they don’t do that they have very few options left at this point. They have $3.5 trillion of reserves – you’ll be amazed how quickly that goes. So that’s another parallel.

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

Short Squeeze, Liquidity, Margin Debt and Deflation

October 13, 2015

Short Squeeze, Liquidity, Margin Debt and Deflation

Some things you CAN see coming, in life and certainly in finance. Quite a few things, actually. Once you understand we’re on a long term downward path, also both in life and in finance, and you’re not exclusively looking at short term gains, it all sort of falls into place. The only remaining issue then is that so many of you DO look at short term gains only. Thing is, there’s no way out of this thing but down, way down.

Yeah, stock markets went up quite a bit last week. Did that surprise you? If so, maybe you’re not in the right kind of game. You might be better off in Vegas. Better odds and all that. From where we’re sitting, amongst the entire crowd of its peers, this was a major flashing red alarm late last week, from Investment Research Dynamics:

September Liquidity Crisis Forced Fed Into Massive Reverse Repo Operation

Something occurred in the banking system in September that required a massive reverse repo operation in order to force the largest ever Treasury collateral injection into the repo market. Ordinarily the Fed might engage in routine reverse repos as a means of managing the Fed funds rate. However, as you can see from the graph below, there have been sudden spikes up in the amount of reverse repos that tend to correspond the some kind of crisis – the obvious one being the de facto collapse of the financial system in 2008. You can also see from this graph that the size of the “spike” occurrences in reverse repo operations has significantly increased since 2014 relative to the spike up in 2008. In fact, the latest two-week spike is by far the largest reverse repo operation on record.

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

Austerity Good or Bad?

October 12, 2015

Austerity Good or Bad?

QUESTION: Martin,

The ‘Austerity’ argument seems a bit confusing.

Surely, “Austerity” means reducing the size of Government and is an understanding that we can’t keep funding zillions of civil/public servants and on the other is a reduction of the Social Security Bill – healthcare, social benefits, the cost of the un and underemployed etc – both of which seem to be excellent objectives unless you are in one of the groups affected. Isn’t it impossible to return to or have a vibrant economy unless and until these objectives are achieved?

ANSWER: The problem with austerity carried out in the fashion is they are turning off the spigot, which is ending Marxist/Socialism, but they are continuing to service the debt and to accomplish that they hunt the rich and raise taxes, then agree to exchange all info and in the process you cause capital to hoard and not invest. So you are not really ending socialism, you are moving more toward totalitarianism.

So we will get these riots for they are not just people who receive, these are the people who cannot find a job because nobody is creating them with deflation. We have to look at both sides and this is why our proposal is to eliminate taxation at the federal level to unwind this mess from both directions.

So there is more to this than just reducing social programs. Doing that raising taxes to still service debts you end you with taxation without representation for the current workforce must then pay for spending that they never received anything in return.

Bernanke’s Balderdash

October 8, 2015

Bernanke’s Balderdash

The US and world economies are drifting inexorably into the next recession owing to the deflationary collapse of commodities, capital spending and world trade. These are the inevitable “morning after” consequence of the 20-year global credit binge which has now reached its apogee.

The apparent global boom during that period was actually a central bank driven excursion into the false economics of household borrowing to inflate consumption in the DM economies; and frenzied, uneconomic investing to inflate GDP in China and the EM.

The common denominator was falsification of financial prices. By destroying honest price discovery in the financial markets, the world’s convoy of money-printing central banks led by the Fed elicited a huge excess of financialization relative to economic output.

The central manifestation of that was $185 trillion of debt growth during the past two decades——a stupendous explosion of credit which amounted to 3.7X the expansion of global GDP.

And even that ratio is an understatement. That’s because measured GDP has been artificially bloated by the monumental worldwide malinvestment and excess capacity arising from the credit bubble. That is, phony “growth” which under the laws of economics will be liquidated in due course.

But you wouldn’t have known that the global economy is about to hit the skids from Monday’s action. Bernanke kicked off the day in a Wall Street Journal op ed taking a bow for “saving the world”.

Then the stock market completed a rally from Friday’s post-NFP low, which amounted to 84 points (4.5%) on the S&P 500 during a seven-hour span of trading. That was even less time to “mission accomplished” than last October’s three-day Bullard Rip.

So here we are again circling the 2000 mark on the S&P 500—a level first crossed 440 days ago. Undoubtedly, the casino is knee-jerking upward because Goldman has already made an unsecret audible call, instructing the Fed to substantially defer lift-off well into next year.

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

From ZIRP to NIRP

October 1, 2015

From ZIRP to NIRP

The sudden end of the Fed’s ambition to raise interest rates above the zero bound, coupled with the FOMC’s minutes, which expressed concerns about emerging market economies, has got financial scribblers writing about negative interest rate policies (NIRP).

Coincidentally, Andrew Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, published a much commented-on speech giving us a window into the minds of central bankers, with zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) having failed in their objectives.

Of course, Haldane does not openly admit to ZIRP failing, but the fact that we are where we are is hardly an advertisement for successful monetary policies. The bare statistical recovery in the UK, Germany and possibly the US is slender evidence of some result, but whether or not that is solely due to interest rate policies cannot be convincingly proved. And now, exogenous factors, such as China’s deflating credit bubble and its knock-on effect on other emerging market economies, are being blamed for the deteriorating economic outlook faced by the welfare states, and the possible contribution of monetary policy to this failure is never discussed.

Anyway, the relative stability in the welfare economies appears to be coming to an end. Worryingly for central bankers, with interest rates at the zero bound, their conventional interest rate weapon is out of ammunition. They appear to now believe in only two broad options if a slump is to be avoided: more quantitative easing and NIRP. There is however a market problem with QE, not mentioned by Haldane, in that it is counterpart to a withdrawal of high quality financial collateral, which raises liquidity issues in the shadow banking system. This leaves NIRP, which central bankers hope will succeed where ZIRP failed.

– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/09/from-zirp-to-nirp/#sthash.Qb02oWjj.dpuf

Deflation Warning: The Next Wave

October 1, 2015

Deflation Warning: The Next Wave

The global economic slump is accelerating

The signs of deflation are now flashing all over the globe. In our estimation, the possibility of an associated financial crisis is now dangerously high over the next few months.

As we’ve been saying for a while, our preferred model for how things are going to unfold follows the Ka-Poom!Theory as put out by Erik Janszen of iTulip.com.

That theory states that this epic debt bubble will ultimately burst first by deflation (the “Ka!”) before then exploding (the “Poom!”) in hyperinflation due to additional massive money printing efforts by frightened global central bankers acting in unison.

First an inwards collapse, then an outwards explosion. Ka-Poom!

We’ve been tracking the deflationary impulse for a while, and declared deflation the winner back in July of this year.

A Failed Strategy

What exactly do we mean by deflation? Back in 2008 the central banks of the developed world, as well as China, had a choice:

admit that prior policies geared towards encouraging borrowing at a faster rate than income growth were a horrible idea, or
double down and push those failed policies even harder

As we all know, they chose option #2. And so here we are, just 8 years later, with nearly $60 trillion in new debt piled on top of the prior mountain — while GDP grew by only $12 trillion over the same time period:

(Source)

[Note: Global nominal GDP is projected to be $68.6 trillion in 2015, virtually unchanged from 2013]

In other words, instead of saying to ourselves: Hmmm…. it was probably a terrible idea to pile up debt at 2x the rate of income growth, what the world did instead was to double down on that terrible idea and pile on more debt at 5x the rate(!) of nominal GDP growth.

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

Today’s Turning Point on ECM

October 1, 2015

Today’s Turning Point on ECM

I have been warning that this turning point is not in markets, it is centered in government. The number of issues coming to a head are just mind-blowing from the Catalonia vote to separate from Spain to the resignation of Boehner with non-politicians leading not just in the USA, but everywhere. The elections in Greece was most likely the last vote for any political establishment since the Greeks do not expect any promise to be kept.

Yet today just may mark a very strange event that might be extremely important. Today, Russia gave the US 1 hour notice and began bombing both ISIS and rebels seeking to overthrow the Syrian government. It is extremely curious that this beginning precisely on the day of the ECM. Will this prove to be the start of international war?

Meanwhile, Christine Lagarde of the IMF came out to state today also on the turning point of the ECM that the rate of economic growth this year will probably be weaker than in 2014. I had a meeting in Europe with a former board member of the IMF and we had some very frank discussions. To put it mildly, they are indeed worried. The inflation rate for Euroland just turned NEGATIVE again.

So while cash is now KING, stocks remain vulnerable and commodities have no bid sufficient to change the trend, it appears we are headed into the wonderland of our political-economy.

Goldman Strikes Again: Did A Probe Into “Global Warming” Fraud Cost A Prime Minister’s Job

September 26, 2015

Goldman Strikes Again: Did A Probe Into “Global Warming” Fraud Cost A Prime Minister’s Job

When Tony Abbott became Australia’s prime minister in September 2013, the chain of events that would prematurely end his tenure may already have been in motion: just a few months later China would order its out of control shadow banking system to put on hold its debt issuance machinery, which as we reported a year ago, ground to a complete stop around November 2014 (which also was the explanation for the dramatic slowdown in the US economy over the winter as the collapse in China’s Total Social Financing growth sent a deflationary ripple effect around the globe), which – as we warned at the time – would have dire consequences on all of China’s “feeder” economies, namely Brazil and Australia.

But while we have been tracking the implosion of Brazil’s economy since December, long before the rest of the world noticed the calamitous collapse of what was once Latin America’s most vibrant economy, it was a very recent event in Australia – not the country’s parallel economic slowdown also due to China’s hard landing: that was painfully clear long in advance – that took many by surprise. Namely, the resignation of Tony Abbott almost exactly two years after becoming Prime Minister.

And while it is easy to blame his admission of failure on external factors, namely the Chinese slowdown, a very surprising finding has emerged over the past few days, one which reveals Abbott’s “ouster” in a totally different light.

According to Freedom of Information documents obtained by Australia’s ABC, now-former prime minister Tony Abbott’s own department discussed setting up an investigation into the Bureau of Meteorology amid media claims it was exaggerating estimates of global warming.

Yes, it appears that the prime minister himself had dared to question to prevailing status quo on “global warming.”

ABC reports that in August and September 2014, The Australian newspaper published reports questioning the Bureau of Meteorology’s (BoM) methodology for analyzing temperatures, reporting claims BoM was “wilfully ignoring evidence that contradicts its own propaganda.”

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

Canada’s Retail Prices Jump the Most in “Over a Decade”

September 24, 2015

Canada’s Retail Prices Jump the Most in “Over a Decade”

When Statistics Canada released its July retail sales report today, it dished out a few unwelcome surprises – and a bombshell.

Among the surprises, based on what economists – though perhaps not average Canadians – had expected: Growth in retail sales was a measly 0.5% in July; and growth in June was revised lower to 0.4%, from the originally reported 0.6%. Year-over-year, retail sales rose just 1.8% adjusted for inflation.

The saving grace, sales of auto and parts dealers rose 2% month over month. Without them, retail sales were flat – also worse than economists had expected.

And by province, there were some ugly differences: on a year-over-year basis, not adjusted for inflation – more on that in a moment – nominal retails sales jumped 5.7% in British Columbia and 4.6% in Ontario. But at the other extreme, nominal retails sales edged down 0.7% in Newfoundland & Labrador, and slumped 3.6% in Saskatchewan and 3.7% in Alberta.

These two provinces are the epicenter of the Canadian oil bust, where a deep recession has set in. Home sales are plunging. Layoffs are cascading through the local economies. Uncertainly reigns. And consumers are reacting the best they can.

And here’s the bombshell: over the last six months, retail prices have jumped at the fastest rate in over a decade.

Inflation has obviously been too low in Canada, the US, Europe, Japan, etc. Heaven and earth must be moved by central banks to raise inflation. The Damocles sword of deflation – when money gains in value rather than loses in value – is hanging over our entire civilization.

But OK, when you go shopping, this sort of scenario isn’t quite that visible. What you see are price increases, and some of them are very painful.

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

Is cheaper driving here to stay?

September 23, 2015

Is cheaper driving here to stay?

Gasoline may stay cheap until we burn through the current market glut in perhaps a year.

We are now seeing declining growth and a deflationary economic contraction globally. In fact, the current $40-plus a barrel oil price is by itself good proof of that. The global collapse in the price of oil shows that with global supply remaining roughly constant over time at about 95 million barrels per day. The current low oil price, together with a price slump in other industrial commodities like iron ore, is really an indication of a broad and deep contraction in the global economy, much like 2008-2009.

The Texas shale drilling industry was supposed to keep us driving normally forever, or at least until the economy could recover enough so we could afford to make a transition to electric cars, right? Everyone connected to Wall Street and its financial followers with any media influence were saying that only about a year ago. Then the global oil price gradually collapsed from over $100 a barrel in mid-2014, down to its current price of about $45.

The reason that the Texas shale drilling boom is now in a state of deep decline and won’t easily bounce back is that shale drilling is losing money. Shale oil really needs $80 a barrel or above to break even in the context of fast well decline and shrinking number of sweet spots left to drill.

Shale drillers must keep producing oil at a loss because of their largely junk bond financing.

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

Gold – Follow the Yellow Brick Road?

September 12, 2015

Gold – Follow the Yellow Brick Road?

The following is a veritable tour de force by Nicole Foss on the value of gold in a crashing economy, for different people in different circumstances.

Nicole Foss: In light of the rapidly-propagating loss of confidence, and consequent shift to deflation, with falling prices across the board as a result, it is appropriate to review our stance on gold. The yellow metal is often perceived as a panacea – a safe haven guarding against all manner of potential financial disruption. It has long been our stance at the Automatic Earth that this is far too simplistic a position to take. We live in a complex world for which there are no simple one-dimensional solutions. It is important to distinguish between the markets for paper gold and for physical gold, and to understand the risks inherent in gold ownership in order to manage them. As we wrote back in 2009:

Firstly, the goldbugs are right that physical gold is real money (unlike paper gold, which is just another Ponzi scheme). It has held its value for thousands of years and will continue to do so over the long term. However, that does not mean that gold prices cannot fall or that purchasing gold now is the right way for everyone to preserve capital….People’s circumstances are different. Those circumstances determine their freedom of action, both now and in the future.

Bubble Dynamics

It is our view that (paper) gold has been in a bubble which peaked in 2011, along with the rest of the commodity complex. It has been subjected to the same dynamic as other commodities, which have collectively lost touch with their own fundamentals as they have become increasingly over-financialized. Financialization moves the dynamics into the virtual world, while simultaneously subjecting them to perverse incentives. Substantial price movements having at best a tenuous connection with actual supply and demand are the result.

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

Deflationary Collapse Ahead?

August 26, 2015

Deflationary Collapse Ahead?

Both the stock market and oil prices have been plunging. Is this “just another cycle,” or is it something much worse? I think it is something much worse.

Back in January, I wrote a post called Oil and the Economy: Where are We Headed in 2015-16? In it, I said that persistent very low prices could be a sign that we are reaching limits of a finite world. In fact, the scenario that is playing out matches up with what I expected to happen in my January post. In that post, I said

Needless to say, stagnating wages together with rapidly rising costs of oil production leads to a mismatch between:

The amount consumers can afford for oil

The cost of oil, if oil price matches the cost of production

This mismatch between rising costs of oil production and stagnating wages is what has been happening. The unaffordability problem can be hidden by a rising amount of debt for a while (since adding cheap debt helps make unaffordable big items seem affordable), but this scheme cannot go on forever.

Eventually, even at near zero interest rates, the amount of debt becomes too high, relative to income. Governments become afraid of adding more debt. Young people find student loans so burdensome that they put off buying homes and cars. The economic “pump” that used to result from rising wages and rising debt slows, slowing the growth of the world economy. With slow economic growth comes low demand for commodities that are used to make homes, cars, factories, and other goods. This slow economic growth is what brings the persistent trend toward low commodity prices experienced in recent years.

A chart I showed in my January post was this one:

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

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