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2019: The Three Trends That Matter

February 11, 2019

2019: The Three Trends That Matter

Look no further than Brexit in Britain, the yellow vests in France and the Deplorables in the U.S. for manifestations of a broken social contract and decaying social order.

Among the many trends currently in play, Gordon Long and I discuss three that will matter as 2019 progresses: 2019 Themes (56 minutes)

1. Final stages of the debt supercycle

2. Decay of the social order/social contract

3. Social controls: Surveillance capitalism, China’s Social Credit system, social globalization

The basic idea of the debt supercycle is simple: resolving every crisis of over-leveraged speculative excess, evaporation of collateral and over-indebtedness by radically increasing debt eventually leads to an implosion of the entire credit-based financial system.

The final stages of the current debt supercycle are manifesting all sorts of interesting cross-currents: de-dollarization and the unprecedented expansion of debt in China to name just two.

De-dollarization describes the efforts of many nations to reduce their dependence on U.S. dollars for trade and reserves. Since the USD remains the largest reserve currency in both trade and reserves, this trend threatens to reorder the entire global financial system, with potentially disruptive consequences not just to the USD but to a variety of institutions and norms.

China’s total systemic debt has soared from $7 trillion in 2008 to $40 trillion in 2018. This is of course only a rough estimate, as China’s enormous Shadow Banking System is famously opaque, as are many of its institutional and corporate balance sheets.

China has embraced the narrative of “growing our way out of stagnation by quintupling debt,” but the banquet of consequences of this speculative orgy is finally being served: China’s dramatic slowdown in 2018 is just the appetizer course of the banquet of consequences.

This excerpt of a recent (and immediately censored) talk given by a Chinese economist illuminates the result of debt-fueled mal-investment and speculation on a grand scale:

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

Steen Jakobsen: The End Of The Debt Cycle

February 23, 2016

Steen Jakobsen: The End Of The Debt Cycle

As transformational as the fall of the Berlin Wall

As we’ve been watching closely, something is wrong with the big banks. Their shares have lost 25-33% of their market value since the beginning of the year. What’s going on?

The turmoil seems greatest in Europe, where bank shares have fallen the hardest, and negative interest rates have appeared with increasingly frequency across member countries.

To make sense of it all, we’ve invited Steen Jakobsen back on, Chief Investment Officer of Saxo Bank, who can provide an eyes-on-the-ground perspective on the European banking system from his location in Copenhagen:

Clearly what we’ve seen over the course of the first quarter this year is that the ability of central banks to do their magic in terms of talking to the market with the rhetoric of “low for longer” and the likes is running on empty now.

If we look back in chronological order of what happened this year, first we had, of course, the Fed with Yellen and Fischer backing down slightly from the three to four hikes they promised in December. That was followed very quickly by, of course, Draghi promising to do ‘Whatever it takes!’ yet again in March this year. Then the BOJ went negative on interest rates and a number of European central banks followed suit. So much so that actually right now if you look at the G7 governments, about 50 percent of all G7 government is now trading at a negative yield, which seems to be the new solution from central banks.

I think the market is seeing right through that because, of course, at the center of all of this at all times will be the banking system, a banking system that is getting penalized for the negative interest rate.

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

A Market Collapse Is On The Horizon

February 13, 2016

A Market Collapse Is On The Horizon

1. Growth in debt
2. Growth in the economy
3. Growth in cheap-to-extract energy supplies
4. Inflation in the cost of producing commodities
5. Growth in asset prices, such as the price of shares of stock and of farmland
6. Growth in wages of non-elite workers
7. Population growth

It looks to me as though this linkage is about to cause a very substantial disruption to the economy, as oil limits, as well as other energy limits, cause a rapid shift from the benevolent version of the economic supercycle to the portion of the economic supercycle reflecting contraction. Many people have talked about Peak Oil, the Limits to Growth, and the Debt Supercycle without realizing that the underlying problem is really the same–the fact the we are reaching the limits of a finite world.

There are actually a number of different kinds of limits to a finite world, all leading toward the rising cost of commodity production. I will discuss these in more detail later. In the past, the contraction phase of the supercycle seems to have been caused primarily by too high a population relative to resources. This time, depleting fossil fuels–particularly oil–plays a major role. Other limits contributing to the end of the current debt supercycle include rising pollution and depletion of resources other than fossil fuels.

The problem of reaching limits in a finite world manifests itself in an unexpected way: slowing wage growth for non-elite workers. Lower wages mean that these workers become less able to afford the output of the system. These problems first lead to commodity oversupply and very low commodity prices. Eventually these problems lead to falling asset prices and widespread debt defaults.

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

2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle

January 7, 2016

2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle

What is ahead for 2016? Most people don’t realize how tightly the following are linked:
  1. Growth in debt
  2. Growth in the economy
  3. Growth in cheap-to-extract energy supplies
  4. Inflation in the cost of producing commodities
  5. Growth in asset prices, such as the price of shares of stock and of farmland
  6. Growth in wages of non-elite workers
  7. Population growth

It looks to me as though this linkage is about to cause a very substantial disruption to the economy, as oil limits, as well as other energy limits, cause a rapid shift from the benevolent version of the economic supercycle to the portion of the economic supercycle reflecting contraction. Many people have talked about Peak Oil, the Limits to Growth, and the Debt Supercycle without realizing that the underlying problem is really the same–the fact the we are reaching the limits of a finite world.

There are actually a number of different kinds of limits to a finite world, all leading toward the rising cost of commodity production. I will discuss these in more detail later. In the past, the contraction phase of the supercycle seems to have been caused primarily by too high population relative to resources. This time, depleting fossil fuels–particularly oil–plays a major role. Other limits contributing to the end of the current debt supercycle include rising pollution and depletion of resources other than fossil fuels.

The problem of reaching limits in a finite world manifests itself in an unexpected way: slowing wage growth for non-elite workers. Lower wages mean that these workers become less able to afford the output of the system. These problems first lead to commodity oversupply and very low commodity prices. Eventually these problems lead to falling asset prices and widespread debt defaults.

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

 

The Next Debt-Clearing ‘Super Cycle’ Starts Now

November 11, 2015

The Next Debt-Clearing ‘Super Cycle’ Starts Now

We are in the early stages of a great debt default – the largest in U.S. history.

We know roughly the size and scope of the coming default wave because we know the history of the U.S. corporate debt market. As the sizes of corporate bond deals have grown over time, each wave of defaults has led to bigger and bigger defaults.
Here’s the pattern.
Default rates on “speculative” bonds are normally less than 5%. That means less than 5% of noninvestment-grade, U.S. corporate debt defaults in a year. But when the rate breaks above that threshold, it goes through a three- to four-year period of rising, peaking, and then normalizing defaults. This is the normal credit cycle. It’s part of a healthy capitalistic economy, where entrepreneurs have access to capital and frequently go bankrupt.
If you’ll look back through recent years, you can see this cycle clearly…
In 1990, default rates jumped from around 4% to more than 8%. The next year (1991), default rates peaked at more than 11%. Then default rates began to decline, reaching 6% in 1992. By 1993, the crisis was over and default rates normalized at 2.5%. Around $50 billion in corporate debt went into default during this cycle of distress.
Six years later, in 1999, the distress cycle began to crank up again. Default rates hit 5.5% that year and jumped again in 2000 and 2001 – hitting almost 8.7%. They began to fall in late 2002, reaching normal levels by 2003.
Interestingly, the amount of capital involved in this cycle was much, much larger: Almost $500 billion became embroiled in default. The growth in risky lending was powered by the innovation of the credit default swap (CDS) market. It allowed far riskier loans to be financed. As a result, the size of the bad corporate debts had grown by 10 times in only one credit cycle.
The most recent cycle is the one you’re most familiar with – the mortgage crisis.

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

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