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What Happens When The Pandemic Ends?

April 14, 2020

What Happens When The Pandemic Ends?

Let’s assume that by the end of this year a combination of social distancing and some new and effective treatments convert covid-19 from existential threat to chronic nuisance and the economy starts to assume an air of normalcy. Which is to say that people go back to traveling and eating out and buying Chinese-made things they don’t need with money they don’t have.

Are we really home free? Or will some other, even bigger black swan come in for a landing?

To put this question into context, it helps to look at how the world got here. In extremely brief form: We engineered a tech stock bubble in the 1990s that burst in 2000, requiring drastically lower interest rates and truly insane speculation in housing to rescue the big banks. When that bubble burst in 2008, interest rates had to fall even further and even more debt – ranging from government to student to subprime auto (and, yes, mortgage) — had to be taken on to save Wall Street. Hence the term “everything bubble.”

Then came the pandemic, which burst the everything bubble and has convinced the world’s governments that truly astounding amounts of new debt are required to bail out all the parts of the private sector that have more-or-less ceased to exist.

Here, for instance, is the Fed’s balance sheet, which is a proxy for the amount of new currency the central bank has created out of thin air and dumped into the economy. The blue line is GDP growth and the red line is Fed currency creation. Note that more and more currency has to be created to maintain the same anemic growth trend:

Fed balance sheet pandemic

And here’s the federal government’s debt. Note the same situation as with the Fed: ever-greater borrowing is necessary to maintain a diminishing rate of growth.

US government debt pandemic

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The Fed’s “Insurance” Rate Cuts Didn’t Work. Now For The Emergency Cuts

October 3, 2019

The Fed’s “Insurance” Rate Cuts Didn’t Work. Now For The Emergency Cuts

Pity the guys now running the Fed. They’ve inherited an economy that requires ever-bigger infusions of new credit and ever-lower interest rates to avoid financial cardiac arrest. But with interest rates already perilously close to zero the usual leeway is no longer there.

Making the best of a bad hand, Fed chair Jerome Powell has been cutting the Fed Funds rate but managing expectations for future cuts by calling the current ones “recalibration” and “insurance.” In other words, “don’t expect a quick excursion into steeply-negative territory. In fact this latest cut might be all there is.”

But the economy, like any addict, is profoundly uncomfortable with not knowing where the next fix is coming from and is behaving accordingly. From just the past couple of days’ headlines:

US manufacturing survey contracts to worst level in a decade US gross national debt jumps by $1.2 trillion, to $22.7 trillion Growth hits the wall Student loan debt soars, totaling $1.6 trillion in 2019 There is good reason to fear the repo Midwest’s faltering economies will spread pain nationwide Treasury yields sink after U.S. manufacturing weakness raises recession fears 

VC veterans host emergency meeting of unicorns as IPO ‘bubble’ implodes 

Now equities are picking up the anxious vibe. See Global stocks plunge for a second day to start Q4.

What happens next? Almost certainly, a “coordinated” round of aggressive easing by the US Fed, the ECB and BoJ. With some unconventional coercion thrown in by the People’s Bank of China. 

As for the timing, it’s just a question of “the number.” That is, how far does the S&P 500 have to fall before the stampede begins. Since this question will be answered by a bunch of largely clueless men dripping fear sweat and trying to figure out why their models have stopped working (and more poignantly why their life’s work has turned out to be a fraud), the number is unknowable in advance. 

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

The Yield Curve Flattens And Bank Stocks Plunge. Here’s The Connection – And The Prediction

December 20, 2018

The Yield Curve Flattens And Bank Stocks Plunge. Here’s The Connection – And The Prediction

Despite all the ominous press being devoted to the soon-to-be-inverted yield curve, it’s not always clear why such a thing matters. In other words, how, exactly does a line on a graph slipping below zero translate into a recession and equities bear market, with all the turmoil that those things imply?

The answer (which is both simple and really easy to illustrate with charts) is that banks – the main driver of our hyper-financialized society – still make at least some of their money by borrowing short and lending long. They take money that’s deposited into savings accounts and short-term CDs (or borrowed in the money markets) and lend it to businesses and home buyers for years or decades. In normal times long-term rates are higher than short-term to compensate lenders for tying their money up for longer periods. The banks earn that spread, which can be substantial if borrowers make their payments.

When the yield curve flattens and then inverts — that is, when short rates exceed long rates — banks lose the ability to make money this way. They lend less, which restricts building and buying and spooks the broader markets.

So, here’s the flattening, apparently soon-to-invert yield curve:

yield curve bank stocks

And here’s how bank stocks are behaving in response. The following chart is for the BKX bank stock ETF that includes all the major US banks. Note how it was stable for the first nine months of the year and then fell off a cliff as it became clear that the yield curve really was going to invert.

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

Silver Looks Way Better Than Gold Right Now

March 4, 2018

Silver Looks Way Better Than Gold Right Now

Normally the action in the gold and silver futures markets tends to be pretty similar, since the same general forces affect both precious metals. When inflation or some other source of anxiety is ascendant, both metals rise, and vice versa.

But lately – perhaps in a sign of how confused the world is becoming – gold and silver traders have diverged. Taking gold first, the speculators – who tend to be wrong at major inflection points – remain extremely bullish. Commercial traders, meanwhile – who tend to be right when speculators are wrong – are extremely bearish, with short positions more than double their longs. Historically that’s been a setup for a big drop in gold’s price.

Viewed as a chart with the gray bars representing speculators and red bars the commercials, and where divergence is bearish and convergence bullish, the result is pretty ugly.

But now check out silver. Where gold futures speculators’ long positions are three times their short bets, silver spculators are actually more short than long. In other words, the people who are usually wrong are bearish. The commercials, meanwhile, are almost in balance, which is usually bullish for silver’s subsequent action.

Shown graphically, speculators and commercials are meeting the middle at zero, something that’s both very rare and very positive.

What does this mean? One possible explanation is that silver has gotten too cheap relative to gold and needs to be revalued. That could happen in several ways, with both metals rising but silver rising more, or both falling but silver falling less. Or with gold dropping while silver rises, as improbable as that seems.

As the chart below illustrates, gold has recently been rising relative to silver (or silver has been falling relative to gold) with the gold/silver ratio now close to 80, meaning that it takes 80 ounces of silver to buy one ounce of gold.

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

Soaring Global Debt Sets Stage For “Unprecedented Private Deleveraging”

April 7, 2017

Soaring Global Debt Sets Stage For “Unprecedented Private Deleveraging”

The UK’s Telegraph just published an analysis of global debt that pretty much sums up the coming crisis. Here’s an excerpt with a couple of the more hair-raising charts:

Global debt explodes at ‘eye-watering’ pace to hit £170 trillion

Global debt has climbed at an “eye-watering” pace over the past decade, soaring to a fresh high of £170 trillion last year, according to the Institute of International Finance (IIF).The IIF said total debt levels, including household, government and corporate debt, climbed by more than $70 trillion over the last 10 years to a record high of $215 trillion (£173 trillion) in 2016 – or the equivalent of 325pc of global gross domestic product (GDP).

It said emerging markets posed “a growing source of concern” to financial stability and the global economy as debt burdens in these countries climb at a rapid pace.

Growing vulnerabilities
The IIF data showed the increase was partly driven by a “spectacular rise” in emerging markets, where total debt stood at $55 trillion at the end of 2016, or 215pc of total emerging market GDP.

Debt has risen from $16 trillion in 2006 and $7.4 trillion in 1996.

The body, which represents the world’s top financial institutions, said a wave of maturing debt this year presented a “growing refinancing risk”.

It estimates that more than $1.1 trillion of emerging market bonds and loans will mature this year, with dollar-denominated debt accounting for a fifth of all redemptions.

The Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee (FPC) said on Tuesday that credit in China continued to grow at a “rapid” pace.

Corporate credit in the world’s second largest economy has climbed to 166pc of nominal GDP.

The IMF at the end of last year warned of broader risks to the global economy.

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

What Form Will The Great Confiscation Take — And How Can We Prepare?

February 11, 2017

What Form Will The Great Confiscation Take — And How Can We Prepare?

For what seems like decades, people have been warning that the next time some over-leveraged corner of the financial system implodes, bank and brokerage accounts will be either confiscated by desperate governments or lost during the resulting chaos.

Here, from 2012, is a representative warning from gold mining eminence grise Jim Sinclair:

My Dear Extended Family,

In bankruptcy of your bank, broker or fund, you can find your assets in the majority of cases are backing the liabilities of the entity in front of yourselves. This is why you must act to protect yourself.

No one in this financial world is going to do it for you, and few will have the courage to recommend you escape Street Name. You can wake up one day and find out that your investments are gone.

The insurance programs will function as long as the incidents of bankruptcy are isolated events.

In a systemic collapse the insurance funds are not capitalized to meet the potential obligations. The guarantor you are relying on will have to be bailed out.

For securities there are only three ways to hold them:

1. Street name.
2. Direct registration.
3. Certificate form.

Anyone advising you to stay with the Street Name option is a babbling idiot not interested at all in your welfare.

In street name the inferred ownership is the broker or bank, not you. In Direct Registrationand Certificate form, the distinct ownership is you.

In 99.9% of the cases of retirement accounts the answer is you are in Street Name.

How are your securities held? Do you even know? I dare you to ask!

Do you know what your broker’s capital ratio is? Find out as that number is the order of magnitude at which your broker is gambling on with primarily your money. I dare you to ask.

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

 

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