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Great Depression to our Depression: Debt Deflation Doom Loop Lessons

May 24, 2020

Great Depression to our Depression: Debt Deflation Doom Loop Lessons

We are now in the crosshairs of a mega debt deflationary bankruptcy phase.

Some of our sharpest forefathers left us illustrations to better understand how this cycle operates. It helps that many both actually lived through and studied the last one fresh off it happening. No not this fiat currency bifurcated ivory tower era thinking either ( not you bailout Bernanke).

☠️DEBT DEFLATION BANKRUPTCY LESSONS ☠️

Described as the last honest Federal Reserve governor, John Exter (1910 – 2006) believed by the early 1960s that the Federal Reserve was locking itself into currency expansionism it could not stop without disastrous outcomes and blowback.

He reportedly would say that the Fed was becoming a prisoner of its own currency stock and debt-based growth (effectively painting itself into a corner). Then a trend that risked a credit expansion reaching total US debt levels far in excess of the country’s GDP (quaint times). 

His was an envisionment of a major debt crisis ahead of his life, and he believed the crisis would then turn the economy down, to levels not seen since the Great Depression. 

Exter warned the Fed would one day find itself unable to prevent a wide-scale deflationary depression.

Perhaps the man could never envision our current viral scapegoat or how this global economic shutdown would quicken into existence some of his worst economic predictions.

But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, our financial system was effectively already devolving into a debt-based, debt-driven economy. To illuminate its growing unstable structure, Exter devised an upside-down debt pyramid as this original illustration shows.

Within it, the former central banker presented the US debt pyramid and drew attention to the fact that all foreign economies also had debt pyramids too. The structures are always perched in an unstable manner which Exter believed was also true for the financial system generally.

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

Housing Liquidity Crisis Coming: Debt Deflation Follows

March 9, 2018

A liquidity crisis in housing is on the way. Non-banks are at the center of the storm.

The Brookings Institute says a Liquidity Crises in the Mortgage Market is on the way.

This is in guest post format. What follows are key snips from a 68-page Brookings PDF.

This article isn’t very long. My comments follow.

Abstract

Nonbanks originated about half of all mortgages in 2016, and 75% of mortgages insured by the FHA or VA. Both shares are much higher than those observed at any point in the 2000s. We describe in this paper how nonbank mortgage companies are vulnerable to liquidity pressures in both their loan origination and servicing activities, and we document that this sector in aggregate appears to have minimal resources to bring to bear in a stress scenario. We show how these exact same liquidity issues unfolded during the financial crisis, leading to the failure of many nonbank companies, requests for government assistance, and harm to consumers. The extremely high share of nonbank lenders in FHA and VA lending suggests that nonbank failures could be quite costly to the government, but this issue has received very little attention in the housing-reform debate.

Nonbank Stress

There is now considerable stress on Ginnie Mae operations from their nonbank counterparties:

“. . .Today almost two thirds of Ginnie Mae guaranteed securities are issued by independent mortgage banks. And independent mortgage bankers are using some of the most sophisticated financial engineering that this industry has ever seen. We are also seeing greater dependence on credit lines, securitization involving multiple players, and more frequent trading of servicing rights and all of these things have created a new and challenging environment for Ginnie Mae. . . . In other words, the risk is a lot higher and business models of our issuers are a lot more complex.

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

Where Deflation Comes From

February 15, 2016

Where Deflation Comes From

Financial bubbles blown on the back of massive amounts of debt, of necessity lead to debt deflation (it’s just entropy, really). Fighting this is futile, and grossly costly to boot. The only sensible thing to do is to guide the process as best you can and try to minimize the damage, especially at the bottom rungs of society, because that’s where the deflation first takes hold, and where it spreads out from.

Attempting to boost inflation, or boost demand, before letting the debt deflation run its course through restructuring and defaults (perhaps even a -partial- jubilee) leads only to -further- distortion, and -further- impoverishes society’s poorer (at some point to a large extent the former middle classes). Whose lower spending, as nary a soul seems to comprehend, is the origin of the deflation to begin with.

All the attempts by central bankers to boost inflation that we’ve seen so far squarely ignore this, and operate on the false assumption that if only prices for financial assets and real estate can be raised even higher -artificially-, deflation can be warded off.

Thing is, deflation starts not at the top, it starts at the bottom. It’s not the banks or the bankers or the well-off who are maxed out and stop spending, but the people in the street.

They are responsible for most of the spending in an economy, and therefore for the velocity with which money moves in a society. And if the velocity of money falls below a critical point, no increase in the other side of the inflation/deflation equation -the money/credit supply- can make up for the difference. There is a point where all of the King’s horses and all of the King’s central bankers can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

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

Square Holes and Currency Pegs

January 24, 2016

Square Holes and Currency Pegs

When David Bowie died, everybody, in what they wrote and said, seemed to feel they owned him, and owned his death, even if they hadn’t thought about him, or listened to him, for years. In the same vein, though the Automatic Earth has been talking about deflation (for 8 years, it’s our anniversary today) and the looming China Ponzi disaster for a long time, now that these things actually play out, everybody talks as if they own the story, and present it as new (because, for one thing, well, after all for them it is new…).

And that’s alright, it’s how people live, and function, they always have, and no-one’s going to change that. It’s just that for me, I’ve been wondering a little about what to write lately, because I’ve already written the deflation and China stories, many times, before most others tuned into them. But still, it’s strange to now, as markets start plunging, read things like ‘Deflation is Here’, as if deflation is something new on the block.

Deflation has been playing out for years. Central bank largesse has largely kept it at bay in the public eye, but that now seems over. Debt deflation is inevitable when -debt- bubbles burst, and when these bubbles are large enough, there’s nothing that can stop the process, not even miracle growth. But you’re not going to understand this if and when you look only at falling prices as the main sign of deflation; they’re merely a small part of the process, and a lagging one at that.

A much better indicator of deflation is the velocity of money, the speed at which ‘consumers’ spend money. And velocity has been going down for years. That’s where and how you notice deflation, when combined with the money and credit supply.

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

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