Home » Posts tagged 'mainstream financial media'

Tag Archives: mainstream financial media

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Gold Is Set to Crash? No Way!

Gold Is Set to Crash? No Way!

The mainstream is a fickle place.

On the one hand, we had Bank of America raising its 18-month price projection for gold to $3,000. On the other hand, some people argue the price of gold could crash later in the year.

Gold is up over 13% on the year, but the yellow metal has seen some price pressure over the last couple of days as various government agencies have started to move toward reopening the economy.

An article published by CCN offers three reasons gold could “crash to earth” in the coming months – none of them particularly compelling.

  1. A coronavirus vaccine.
  2. A quick economic recovery
  3. Deflation and a soaring dollar

The first two reasons both embrace the mainstream narrative that the economy was great before the pandemic and that it will quickly go back to “normal” as soon as governments open things back up again. But there is no normal to go back to. The economy wasn’t normal before the pandemic.

Coronavirus was merely the pin that popped the economic bubble. Everybody is still fixated on the pin, but getting rid of it doesn’t stop the air from coming out of the bubble. A coronavirus vaccine would ease the pandemic, but it wouldn’t do anything to address the malinvestments and debt that were already rampant in the economy before coronavirus reared its ugly head.

In fact, gold was already on an upward trajectory before COVID-19. In 2019, the yellow metal charted its best year since 2010. The price increased by 18.4% in dollar terms. This was in large part due to the Fed’s pivot to loose monetary policy last year. Keep in mind, the central bank was already cutting interest rates, running repo operations and relaunching quantitative easing prior to the pandemic. The response to coronavirus simply put the Fed’s extraordinary monetary policy into hyper-drive.

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

Worst Recession in 150 Years

Worst Recession in 150 Years

Worst Recession in 150 Years

The stock market had another big day today, spurred by the Fed’s massive recent liquidity injections.

But you really shouldn’t be terribly surprised by the rally. Even the worst bear markets see substantial bouncebacks. And you can expect the market to give back all of its recent gains in the months ahead as the economic fallout of the lockdowns becomes apparent.

This bear market has a long way to run. And we could actually be looking at the worst recession in 150 years if one economist is correct. Let’s unpack this…

My regular readers know I have a low opinion of most academic economists, the ones you find at the Fed, the IMF and in mainstream financial media.

The problem is not that they’re uneducated; they have the Ph.D.s and high IQs to prove otherwise. I’ve met many of them and I can tell you they’re not idiots.

The problem is that they’re miseducated. They learn a lot of theories and models that do not correspond to the reality of how economies and capital markets actually work.

Worse yet, they keep coming up with new ones that muddy the waters even further. For example, concepts such as the Phillips curve (an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment) are empirically false.

Other ideas such as “comparative advantage” have appeal in the faculty lounge but don’t work in the real world for many reasons, including the fact that nations create comparative advantage out of thin air with government subsidies and mercantilist demands.

Not the Early 19th Century Anymore

It’s not the early 19th century anymore, when the theory first developed. For example, at that time, a nation that specialized in wool products like sweaters (England) might not make the best leather products like shoes (Italy).

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

GLOBAL FINANCIAL BREAKDOWN CONTINUES: Economic Growth Chokes On Massive Debt Increases

GLOBAL FINANCIAL BREAKDOWN CONTINUES: Economic Growth Chokes On Massive Debt Increases

The U.S. and global economies are choking on a massive amount of debt.  While Wall Street and the Mainstream financial media continue to rationalize the skyrocketing debt as merely the cost of doing business, the disintegrating fundamentals point to an economic catastrophe in the making.

Of course, a full-blown economic meltdown may not occur this year or even next, but as time goes by, the situation continues to deteriorate in an exponential fashion.  So, the cheerleaders for higher stock, bond, and real estate prices will continue to get their way until the economy is thrown into reverse as decades of increasing debt, leverage and margin finally destroy the engine for good.

Yes, I say for good.  What seems to be missing from the analysis is this little thing called energy.  The typical economist today looks at the global markets much the same way as a child who is waiting for the tooth fairy to exchange a tooth for a $20 bill.  When I was a kid, it was $1 per tooth, but like with everything today, inflation is everywhere.

Mainstream economists just look at market forces, percentages, and values on a piece of paper or computer.  When economic activity begins to fall, they try to find the cause and remedy it with a solution.  Most of the time, the solutions are found by printing more money, increasing debt, changing interest rates or tax percentages.  And… that’s about it.

There is no mention of what to do with energy in the economist’s playbook.  For the typical economist, energy is always going to be there and if there are any future problems with supply, then, of course, the price will solve that issue.  Due to the fundamental flaw of excluding energy in College economic courses; the entire profession is a complete farce.

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

Second Crash Warning From The IMF – This Time It’s About Vol

Second Crash Warning From The IMF – This Time It’s About Vol

Another week, another warning regarding financial crash scenarios from those keen minds at the IMF.

In “Here Is The IMF’s Global Financial Crash Scenario” last week, we highlighted the institution’s surprisingly candid discussion hidden away in its latest Financial Stability Report “Rising Medium-Term Vulnerabilities Could Derail the Global Recovery”…or as we paraphrased the IMF’s “politically correct way of saying the financial system is on the verge of crashing”.

As we noted previously, in the section also called “Global Financial Dislocation Scenario” because “crash” sounds just a little too pedestrian, the IMF uses a DSGE model to project the current global financial situation, and ominously admits that “concerns about a continuing buildup in debt loads and overstretched asset valuations could have global economic repercussions” and – in modeling out the next crash, pardon “dislocation” – the IMF conducts a “scenario analysis” to illustrate how a repricing of risks could “lead to a rise in credit spreads and a fall in capital market and housing prices, derailing the economic recovery and undermining financial stability.”

This week the IMF has gone a step further, courting the mainstream financial media to publicise its warning about the dangers of historically low volatility and related short volatility strategies.

As The FT reports, The International Monetary Fund has warned that the increasing use of exotic financial products tied to equity volatility by investors such as pension funds is creating unknown risks that could result in a severe shock to financial markets. In an interview with the Financial Times Tobias Adrian, director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the IMF, said an increasing appetite for yield was driving investors to look for ways to boost income through complex instruments.

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

 

Japan still leads the way towards our endgame

Japan still leads the way towards our endgame

japan_SISuccessful investors live by a golden rule: what the mainstream financial media talks about is not important. They focus on what they don’t hear instead. So forget about Yellen for a second. Let go of Draghi, oil, the South African rand and Syria. That’s all in the now. But investing is about the future.

We are convinced there is one proverbial elephant in the room in particular that will shape our future. And that elephant is Japan. The ‘widowmaker’ trade has been claiming financial lives for multiple decades now. That is, short JGBs, or Japanese Government Bonds, was so obvious a trade that it never worked. The 10-year yield currently trades at 0.3%, which is close to the all-time low. We’re still waiting for the shoe to drop.

Will it ever drop? We believe it will. ‘Drop’ might not be the appropriate word. The accumulation of imbalances might trigger a cascade of events that will shake the world at its core. Let’s investigate some data.

Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio has hit a unprecedented 230%. You probably knew that. But it doesn’t keep you awake at night. We are genetically wired to focus on acute danger. If a tiger approaches us, we focus. But if stands still and doesn’t move for years, we turn around in search for other dangers. Wise investors remind themselves constantly of the tiger though. They never let their guard down.

What about the pace at which debt-to-GDP is ramping up? The budget deficit tells us all we need to know.

For six years in a row already, Japan scored around minus 8%. And given the flattish GDP, these annual percentages head straight to the public debt pile. Japan’s long term potential real GDP-growth rate is simply close to zero, given the demographics. The latest quarterly print was a minus 0.3%. This makes the debt grow even faster.

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress