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Central banks do not manage risk, they disguise it. You know you live in a bubble when a small bounce in sovereign bond yields generates an immediate panic reaction from central banks trying to prevent those yields from rising further. It is particularly more evident when the alleged soar in yields comes after years of artificially depressing them with negative rates and asset purchases.

It is scary to read that the European Central Bank will implement more asset purchases to control a small love in yields that still left sovereign issuers bonds with negative nominal and real interest rates. It is even scarier to see that market participants hail the decision of disguising risk with even more liquidity. No one seemed to complain about the fact that sovereign issuers with alarming solvency problems were issuing bonds with negative yields. No one seemed to be concerned about the fact that the European Central Bank bought more than 100% of net issuances from Eurozone states. What shows what a bubble we live in is that market participants find logical to see a central bank taking aggressive action to prevent bond yields from rising… to 0.3% in Spain or 0.6% in Italy.

This is the evidence of a massive bubble.

If the European Central Bank was not there to repurchase all Eurozone sovereign issuances, what yield would investors demand for Spain, Italy or Portugal? Three, four, five times the current level on the 10-year? Probably. That is why developed central banks are trapped in their own policy. They cannot hint at normalizing even when the economy is recovering strongly, and inflation is rising.

Market participants may be happy thinking these actions will drive equities and risky assets higher, but they also make economic cycles weaker, shorter, and more abrupt.

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

A tale of two deflations

August 5, 2019

A tale of two deflations

Japanification is a term that has re-emerged recently. It refers to the prolonged economic stagnation of Japan, which commenced after a financial crash in the early 1990s. The stagnation of Japan has been marked by very low inflation (recurring periods of deflation), stagnating productivity growth and a massive increase in government debt.

However, at the same time as the financial crisis that started the long stagnation in Japan, there was a similar crisis in a small northern country, Finland. Finland had followed such a similar economic trajectory as Japan that it was dubbed the “Japan of the North”. However, while Japan fell into a prolonged economic malaise, the Finnish economy returned to growth just four years after the onset of the crisis (see Figure 1).

What caused the difference between these two outcomes?

Figure 1. Volume of nominal, local currency GDP per capita in Finland and Japan between 1969 and 2018 (1969=100). Note: due to the recurrent deflation periods in Japan, comparisons using the constant (real) GDP per capita are not feasible. Source: GnS Economics, World Bank

The boom of Finland and Japan

Both Japan and Finland were relatively poor countries in the 1950s. Both were on the losing side of the Second World War (Japan had primarily fought against the U.S. and Finland against the Soviet Union) which made them temporary outcasts in the new global political order. After they regained a place in global politics, both established an ambitious industrialization program.

In both countries monetary and fiscal policies, under a regime of currency regulation, were used to channel resources towards industrialization. Capital flows were tightly-managed, and interest rates were set below market-clearing levels. This forced national savings toward investment and allowed for only essential consumption.

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The Gathering Storm

July 6, 2018

The Gathering Storm

The gathering storm cannot be dissipated with propaganda and bribes.

July 4th is an appropriate day to borrow Winston Churchill’s the gathering storm to describe the existential crisis that will envelope America within the next decade. There is no single cause of the gathering storm; in complex systems, dynamics feed back into one another, and the sum of destabilizing disorder is greater than a simple sum of its parts.

Causal factors can be roughly broken into two categories: systemic and social/economic. The central illusion of those who focus solely on social, political and economic issues as the sources of destabilization is that tweaking the parameters of the status quo is all that’s needed to right the ship: if only Trump were impeached, if only GDP hits 4% annual growth rate, if only the Federal Reserve started controlling the price of bat guano, etc., etc., etc.

The unwelcome reality is the systemic issues cannot be reversed with policy tweaks or shuffling those at the top of a crumbling centralized order. The systemic problems arise from the structures of centralization and monopoly capital, theinstitutionalization of perverse incentives and the depletion of natural capital: soil, water, fossil fuels, etc.

We can create “money” out of thin air but we can’t print fresh water, productive soil or affordable energy out of thin air.

Regardless of their ideological labels, centralized socio-economic systems follow an S-Curve of rapid expansion during a “boost phase,” a period of stable expansion (maturity) and then a period of stagnation and decline as the system’s participants do more of what’s failed, as they cannot accept that what worked so well in the past no longer works.

A successful model traps those within it; escape becomes impossible. That’s the lesson of the S-Curve:

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

Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds

October 25, 2017

Stagnation Nation: Middle Class Wealth Is Locked Up in Housing and Retirement Funds

The majority of middle class wealth is locked up in unproductive assets or assets that only become available upon retirement or death.

One of my points in Why Governments Will Not Ban Bitcoin was to highlight how few families had the financial wherewithal to invest in bitcoin or an alternative hedge such as precious metals.

The limitation on middle class wealth isn’t just the total net worth of each family; it’s also how their wealth is allocated: the vast majority of most middle class family wealth is locked up in the family home or retirement funds.

This chart provides key insights into the differences between middle class and upper-class wealth. The majority of the wealth held by the bottom 90% of households is in the family home, i.e. the principal residence. Other major assets held include life insurance policies, pension accounts and deposits (savings).

What characterizes the family home, insurance policies and pension/retirement accounts? The wealth is largely locked up in these asset classes.

Yes, the family can borrow against these assets, but then interest accrues and the wealth is siphoned off by the loans. Early withdrawals from retirement funds trigger punishing penalties.

In effect, this wealth is in a lockbox and unavailable for deployment in other assets.

IRAs and 401K retirement accounts can be invested, but company plans come with limitations on where and how the funds can be invested, and the gains (if any) can’t be accessed until retirement.

Compare these lockboxes and limitations with the top 1%, which owns the bulk of business equity assets. Business equity means ownership of businesses; ownership of shares in corporations (stocks) is classified as ownership of financial securities.

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

Fed Quack Treatments are Causing the Stagnation

September 30, 2017

Fed Quack Treatments are Causing the Stagnation

Bleeding the Patient to Health

There’s something alluring about cure-alls and quick fixes. Who doesn’t want a magic panacea to make every illness or discomfort disappear? Such a yearning once compelled the best and the brightest minds to believe the impossible for over two thousand years.

Instantaneous relief! No matter what your affliction is, snake oil cures them all. [PT]

For example, from antiquity until the late-19th century, bloodletting was used to treat nearly every disease. Reputable medical references recommended bloodletting as a cure for acne, asthma, cancer, epilepsy, gout, indigestion, insanity, leprosy, pneumonia, scurvy, tuberculosis, and everything in between. Bloodletting was even used to treat hemorrhaging.

The practice was simple enough. A surgeon, often a barber, would open a vein and drain blood from the patient. Somehow, this was supposed to cure them of disease.

The fundamental idea was that a sick person could be bled to health. Induced fainting, via bloodletting, was even considered beneficial. However, the results were often fatal.

On December 13, 1799, George Washington returned from a cold-winters horseback ride across his estate with a raspy throat. So, he requested bloodletting to make his sore throat better. Over a ten-hour period, roughly 126 ounces of blood was drained from his system.

The next day Washington’s treatment culminated in perfect success. Because of the bloodletting, Washington never suffered from a sore throat again. He had received a permanent cure. Namely, he croaked.

Wouldn’t a tablespoon or two of honey and lemon have been a better solution to the sore throat problem? Sure, it would have been less effective. But it would have been a great deal less terminal as well.

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

Stagnation Is Not Just the New Normal–It’s Official Policy

September 29, 2017

Stagnation Is Not Just the New Normal–It’s Official Policy

Japan is a global leader is how to gracefully manage stagnation.

Although our leadership is too polite to say it out loud, they’ve embraced stagnation as the new quasi-official policy. The reason is tragi-comically obvious: any real reform would threaten the income streams gushing into untouchably powerful self-serving elites and fiefdoms.

In our pay-to-play centralized form of governance, any reform that threatens the skims, privileges and perquisites of existing elites and fiefdoms is immediately squashed, co-opted or watered down.

So the power structure of the status quo has embraced stagnation as a comfortable (except to those on the margins) and controllable descent that avoids the unpleasantness and uncertainty of crisis. We all know that humans quickly habituate to gradual changes in circumstances, and that if the changes are gradual enough, we have difficulty even noticing the erosion.

So wages/salaries stagnate, inflation eats away at the purchasing power of our net income, junk fees, tolls and taxes notch higher by increments too modest to trigger protest, fundamental civil liberties are chipped away one small piece at a time, healthcare costs rise every year like clockwork, and the gap between the bottom 95% and the top 5% widens, as does the gap between the top .1% and the bottom 99.9%, productivity stagnates, the growth rate of new businesses stagnates, but it’s all so gradual that we no longer notice except to sigh in resignation.

Japan is a global leader is how to gracefully manage stagnation. Here’s how Japan is managing to maintain a comfortable secular stagnation:

Japan’s central bank creates a ton of new currency every year, which it uses to buy Japan’s government debt/bonds. This keeps interest rates near-zero, so the cost of government borrowing is kept minimal.

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

If We Don’t Change the Way Money Is Created, Rising Inequality and Social Disorder Are Inevitable

June 27, 2017

If We Don’t Change the Way Money Is Created, Rising Inequality and Social Disorder Are Inevitable

Centrally issued money optimizes inequality, monopoly, cronyism, stagnation and systemic instability.

Everyone who wants to reduce wealth and income inequality with more regulations and taxes is missing the key dynamic: central banks’ monopoly on creating and issuing money widens wealth inequality, as those with access to newly issued money can always outbid the rest of us to buy the engines of wealth creation.

History informs us that rising wealth and income inequality generate social disorder.

Access to low-cost credit issued by central banks creates financial and political power. Those with access to low-cost credit have a monopoly as valuable as the one to create money.

I explain why in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.

Compare the limited power of an individual with cash and the enormous power of unlimited cheap credit.

Let’s say an individual has saved $100,000 in cash. He keeps the money in the bank, which pays him less than 1% interest. Rather than earn this low rate, he decides to loan the cash to an individual who wants to buy a rental home at 4% interest.

There’s a tradeoff to earn this higher rate of interest: the saver has to accept the risk that the borrower might default on the loan, and that the home will not be worth the $100,000 the borrower owes.

The bank, on the other hand, can perform magic with the $100,000 they obtain from the central bank. The bank can issue 19 times this amount in new loans—in effect, creating $1,900,000 in new money out of thin air.

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“The Resentment Will Explode” – In Dramatic Twist, McKinsey Slams Globalization

July 14, 2016

“The Resentment Will Explode” – In Dramatic Twist, McKinsey Slams Globalization

Moments ago, in a speech in Washington, IMF head Christine Lagarde said that “The greatest challenge we face today is the risk of the world turning its back on global cooperation—the cooperation which has served us all well. We know that globalization – and increased integration – over the past generation has yielded many economic benefits for many people.”

The IMF is not alone: for years, consultancy giant McKinsey towed the party line as well saying in 2010 that “the core drivers of globalization are alive and well” and adding as recently as 2014 that “to be unconnected is to fall behind.”

That appears have changing, and cracks are starting to form behind the cohesive push for globalization, at least among those who benefit the most from globalization.

In a stunning study released today, one which effectively refutes all its prior conclusions on the matter, McKinsey slams the establishment’s status quo thinking and admits that the economic gains of changes in the global economy have not been widely shared lately, especially in the developed world. In the report titled “Poorer Than Their Parents? Flat or Falling Incomes in Advanced Economies” it finds that prospects for income growth have deteriorated significantly since the financial crisis, and that the benefits from globalization are now over:

This overwhelmingly positive income trend has ended. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, Poorer than their parents? Flat or falling incomes in advanced economies, finds that between 2005 and 2014, real incomes in those same advanced economies were flat or fell for 65 to 70 percent of households, or more than 540 million people (exhibit). And while government transfers and lower tax rates mitigated some of the impact, up to a quarter of all households still saw disposable income stall or fall in that decade.

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

Japan: A Future of Stagnation

June 18, 2016

Japan: A Future of Stagnation

Take a declining population with declining rates of productivity growth and load it up with debt, and you get a triple-whammy recipe for permanent stagnation.

One of our longtime friends in Japan just sold the family business. The writing was on the wall, and had been for the past decade: fewer customers, with less money, and no end of competition for the shrinking pool of customers and spending.

Our friend is planning to move to another more vibrant economy in Asia. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life struggling to keep the business afloat. She wanted to have a family and a business with a future. It was the right decision, not only for her but for her family: get out while there’s still some value in the business to sell.

I have written a number of entries on Japan’s economic downward-spiral and its largely hidden social depression over the past decade, most recently: Global Bellwether: Japan’s Social Depression (September 25, 2014)

Lessons from Japan: Decades of Decay, Unavoidable Collapse (April 26, 2016)

The Keynesian Fantasy is that encouraging people to borrow money to replace what they no longer earn is a policy designed to fail, and fail it has. Borrowing money incurs interest payments, which even at low rates of interest eventually crimps disposable earnings.

Banks must loan this money at a profit, so interest rates paid by borrowers can’t fall to zero. If they do, banks can’t earn enough to pay their operating costs, and they will close their doors.

If banks reach for higher income, that requires loaning money to poor credit risks and placing risky bets in financial markets. Once you load them up with enough debt, even businesses and wage earners who were initially good credit risks become poor credit risks.

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

Don’t listen to the ruling elite: the world economy is in real trouble

May 29, 2016

Don’t listen to the ruling elite: the world economy is in real trouble

Andy Xie says those attending the G20, Davos and other wasteful meetings are wrong to try to pin the blame for the turmoil on people’s psychology; all signs point to a prolonged period of global stagnation and instability

The G20 working group meeting in Shanghai didn’t come up with any constructive proposals for reviving the global economy and, instead, complained that the recent market turmoil didn’t reflect the “underlying fundamentals of the global economy”. The oil price has declined by 70 per cent since June 2014, while the Brazilian real has halved, and the Russian rouble is down by 60 per cent. The global economy is on the cusp of another recession, and these important people blamed it all on some sort of psychological problem of the people.

Over the past two decades, the global economy has been blessed with the entry and participation of 800 million hard-working Chinese, plus the information revolution. The pie should have increased enough in size to make most people happier. Yet, the opposite has happened. The world has gone from one crisis to another. People are complaining everywhere. This is due to mismanagement by the very people who attend the G20 meetings, the Davos boondoggle, and so many other global meetings that waste taxpayers’ money and put inept leaders in the limelight.

One major complaint that people have is that the system is rigged – that is, the rising income concentration is not due to free market competition, but a rigged system that favours the politically powerful. This is largely true. The new billionaires over the past two decades have come mostly from finance and property. Few made it the way Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did, creating something that makes people more productive.

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

Next Economy: The Coming ‘Age of Stagnation’

April 25, 2016

Next Economy: The Coming ‘Age of Stagnation’

Author Satyajit Das kicks off Tyee series on global capitalism’s crisis.

Satyajit Das: Having worked in financial markets for three decades, Das sees a global economy ‘in peril.’

[Editor’s note: What kind of future will we inhabit? Many thinkers say we’re moving toward automated job scarcity, digital sharing gig economies, yawning wealth imbalances, post-carbon energy, explosive innovation, new values about consumption and contentment, capitalism 2.0… anything but business as usual. Over the next few months, this Tyee occasional series will talk to experts with differing visions of a transforming global economy.]

Satyajit Das believes the global go-go growth economy is quickly ending and a tough transition lies ahead. What to expect? The title of his new book succinctly predicts: The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth is Unattainable and the Global Economy is in Peril.

An Australian born in Calcutta, Das draws on a range of experience — banker, corporate treasurer, industry consultant, academic, author — in making his prognostication. His views on what actually causes an economy to grow stand in contrast to how governments model and forecast economic trends.

Das argues factors that enabled decades of gradually increasing prosperity throughout the post-Second World War era will be overwhelmed by a range of financial, economic, demographic, resource, and environmental challenges in the next few decades.

The Tyee asked Das to break down those critical forces.

The Tyee: What is your future vision of the global economy over the next 20 years? What are the next few decades going to look like?

Satyajit Das: I think the last 50 to 60 years were quite odd in terms of the longer run economic history of the world. Now, we face a series of challenges. Some are financial and some are non-financial. But, they are all linked.

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

Could an Economic Collapse be in Our Near Future?

April 4, 2016

Could an Economic Collapse be in Our Near Future?

Climate scientists and others have in the past few years issued a steady stream of analyses showing that without immediate remedial actions, a disastrous future is headed our way. But is it a four-decade-old study that will prove prescient?

That study, issued in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, forecast that industrial output would decline early in the 21st century, followed quickly by a rise in death rates due to reduced provision of services and food that would lead to a dramatic decline in world population. To be specific, per capita industrial output was forecast to decline “precipitously” starting in about 2015.

Well, here we are. Despite years of stagnation following the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, things have not gotten that bad. At least not yet. Although the original authors of The Limits to Growth, led by Donella Meadows, caution against tying their predictions too tightly to a specific year, the actual trends of the past four decades are not far off from the what was predicted by the study’s models. A recent paper examining the original 1972 study goes so far as to say that the study’s predictions are well on course to being borne out.

That research paper, prepared by a University of Melbourne scientist, Graham Turner, is unambiguously titled “Is Global Collapse Imminent?” As you might guess from the title, Dr. Turner is not terribly optimistic.

He is merely the latest researcher to sound alarm bells. Just last month, a revised paper by 19 climate scientists led by James Hansen demonstrates that continued greenhouse-gas emissions will lead to a sea-level rise of several meters in as few as 50 years, increasingly powerful storms and rapid cooling in Europe.

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

The Class War Has Already Started

November 14, 2015

The Class War Has Already Started

Here’s what’s obvious, but unacceptable: we need a new system.

Pundits and apologists are quick to chastise anyone who even speaks of class war, as if the words alone might spark what the pundits and apologists fear.

The pundits and apologists dread the words because they know the Class War has already started. The mainstream media’s hope is that denial will somehow suppress the broader recognition that the fault lines in American society are cracking wide open.

Last week’s entries explained why increasing wealth/income inequality is the only possible output of the current social- political -economic order. All the proposed “fixes”–more regulations, more taxes, more bureaucracies, etc.– will fail because they are merely extensions of a failed system that optimizes inequality, monopoly, cronyism, stagnation, low social mobility and systemic instability.

Here is my delineation of America’s nine socio-economic classes:

The Changing World of Work I: America’s Nine Classes: Eight of the nine classes are hidebound by backward-looking conventions, neofeudal arrangements and a spectrum of perverse incentives and false choices.

A few commentators see the fault lines and understand the Class War is already rumbling. Correspondent Mark G. submitted these two articles as examples of the widening divides between various classes in the U.S.:

Are We Heading for an Economic Civil War?

How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America

In the first piece, Joel Kotkin describes the political capture of the Status Quo Imperial Democrats by the Left Coast media and tech culture of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, both of which have thrived in our hyper-financialized economy of 95% losers and 5% winners, and the Right Coast financiers, lobbyists, government bureaucrats and Wall Streeters who have benefited so handsomely from the hyper-financialization of the U.S. economy, politics, media and zeitgeist.

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

The Fed’s 2% Inflation Fairytale—–Who Made It Up And What Does It Mean?

November 5, 2015

The Fed’s 2% Inflation Fairytale—–Who Made It Up And What Does It Mean?

Once upon a time, not too long ago, central bank wizards began telling a fairytale that economies need inflation. But not just any inflation. In their Goldilocks make-believe world, the not too hot, not too cold, just right dose of two percent is needed to keep an economy healthy.

While there is absolutely no quantifiable data or economic model that proves or supports this oft-cited fairytale, the business media keep repeating it, selling the fiction that a two-percent inflation rate will somehow create jobs and spur economic growth.

“Worry Over Low Inflation Kept Fed at Bay,” screeched the Wall Street Journal, 9 October headline, following the release of Federal Reserve minutes in which they decided not to raise interest rates.

Who made this up? How is inflation – paying more for goods and services – the perfect financial tonic for working people to swallow?

In the United States, for example, with wages trending between decline and stagnation, more inflation means paying more to get less. With median household income below 1999 levels, how can higher inflation stimulate more spending? How can higher inflation be beneficial when, according to new Social Security data, 63 percent of Americans make less than $40,000 per year?

As dismal as those numbers are, in countries around the world where unemployment is much higher and real income and wages have fallen more dramatically, central bank charlatans persist with their “we need inflation” refrain.

A headline in the Financial Times read: “Eurozone’s small rise in prices misses ECB inflation target.” And the article reported: “Prices ticked up across the eurozone this month, although they remain well short of the European Central Bank’s 2 percent inflation target needed to bolster the region’s economic recovery(FT, 31 October 2015).”

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

Lost in Extrapolation

October 29, 2015

Lost in Extrapolation

Phillips Curve Fail

In the late 1970s the impossible happened. Inflation and unemployment simultaneously went vertical. The leading economists of the day were flummoxed.

summers Larry Summers favors us with his “eternal stagnation” shrug. The man is a sheer inexhaustible fount of truly atrocious ideas. As we have previously pointed out, when he’s around, the economy can only be deemed safe under certain circumstances.
Photo credit: Reuters

The Phillips curve said there’s an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. When unemployment goes down, inflation goes up. Conversely, when unemployment goes up, inflation goes down.

These are the data economist William Phillips originally studied – wage rates vs. unemployment in the UK in the years 1913 to 1948. Phillips’ study will forever stand as a monument as to why economic theory cannot possibly be derived from empirical data. In the wake of the 1970s experience, at least seven Nobel prizes in economics were awarded for work that debunked the Phillips curve-based assumptions of the Keynesians in some shape or form. Recently its long dead cousin NAIRU has risen from the grave again, like a zombie – click to enlarge.

How could it be that both were going up at once? Weren’t they mutually exclusive? Indeed, it took years of heavy handed government intervention to pull off such a feat.

When unemployment began creeping up in the 1970’s the U.S. Treasury, with backing from the Federal Reserve, did what Keynes had told them to do. They spent money to stimulate the economy and spur jobs creation.

According to the Phillips curve, with rising unemployment the planners could have their cake and eat it too. They could run large deficits without inflation.

Unfortunately, something unexpected happened. Instead of jobs they got inflation. Then, when they tried it again, they still didn’t get jobs. Astonishingly, they got more inflation.

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

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