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A Survival Guide For 2019
A Survival Guide For 2019
How to safely navigate the ‘Year Of Instability’
As the first month of the year concludes, it’s becoming clear that 2019 will be a very different kind of year.
The near-decade of ‘recovery’ following the Great Financial Crisis enjoyed a stability and tranquility that suddenly evaporated at the end of 2018.
Here in 2019, instability reigns.
The world’s central banks are absolutely panicking. After last year’s bursting of the Everything Bubble, their coordinated plans for Quantitative Tightening have been summarily thrown out the window. Suddenly, no chairman can prove himself too dovish.
Jerome Powell, the supposed hardliner among them, completely capitulated in the wake of the recent -15% tantrum in stocks, which, as Sven Henrich colorfully quipped, proved what we suspected all along:
The global tsunami of liquidity (i.e. thin-air money printing) released by the central banking cartel has been the defining trend of the past decade. It has driven, directly or indirectly, more world events than any other factor.
And one of its more notorious legacies is the massive disparity and wealth and income resulting from its favoring of the top 0.1% over everyone else. The mega-rich have seen their assets skyrocket in value, while the masses have been mercilessly squeezed between similarly rising costs of living and stagnant wages.
How have the tone-deaf politicians responded? With tax breaks for their Establishment masters and new taxes imposed on the public. As a result, populist ire is catching fire in an accelerating number of countries, which the authorities are anxious to suppress by all means to prevent it from conflagrating further — most visibly demonstrated right now by the French government’s increasingly jack-booted attempts to quash the Yellow Vest protests:
Meanwhile, two other principal drivers of the past decade’s ‘prosperity’ are also suddenly in jeopardy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What Could Pop The Everything Bubble?
I’ve long held that if a problem can be solved by creating $1 trillion out of thin air and buying a raft of assets with that $1 trillion, then central banks will solve the problem by creating the $1 trillion out of thin air—nothing could be easier.
This is the lesson of the past eight years: if a problem can be solved by creating new money and buying assets, then central banks will solve that problem.
Problem: stock market is declining. Solution: create new money and buy, buy, buy stock index funds. Problem solved! Market stops falling and quickly rebounds as “central banks have our backs.”
Problem: interest rates are inhibiting lending and growth. Solution: create a few trillion units of currency and buy enough sovereign bonds to drop interest rates to near-zero.
Problem: nobody’s left who can afford to buy the new nosebleed-priced flats that underpin China’s miracle-grow economy. Solution: create new currency, lend it to local government agencies who then buy the empty flats.
Problem: stagnant employment and deflation. Solution: create a trillion in new currency, buy a trillion in new government bonds that then fund infrastructure projects, i.e. bridges to nowhere.
And so on. Any problem that can be solved by creating a few trillion out of thin air and buying assets will be solved. The mechanism to solve these problems—creating currency out of nothing—is like a perpetual motion machine: there are no intrinsic limits on the amount of new money that can created at near-zero interest, as the interest payments can be funded by new money.
Even better, the central bank (the Federal Reserve) buys Treasury bonds with the new currency that generate income, which is then returned to the Treasury: a perpetual-motion money machine!
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
You’re Likely A Lot Less Prepared For Crisis Than You Realize
rangizzz/Shutterstock
You’re Likely A Lot Less Prepared For Crisis Than You Realize
It seems as if Mother Nature is waking up. Either she’s trying to send humans an important warning, or perhaps she’s just out to kill us all.
Massive storms across the globe, earthquakes, and collapsing ecosystems all combine to remind us that we are indeed intimately connected to our planet’s natural systems. And that our well-being rests on staying on Mother Nature’s good side.
Well, Mother Nature has seemed pretty pissed at us of late. Her recent punishments should be taken as a disciplinary wake-up call: It’s time.
It’s time to prepare, everyone. Way past time.
And it’s time to recognize that there are multiplying failure points across the many systems we depend on for our way of life — both natural and man-made. For example:
- The wealth gap between the rich and the poor is now grossly obscene and yet still growing wider.
- Our industrially-farmed soils are being depleted of their nutrients.
- Species are going extinct every single day.
- Global oil consumption ticks higher every year.
- Stock price overvaluation is about the highest it’s ever been.
- Bonds have never been more expensive (i.e. yields have never been lower) in all of recorded history.
- Debt levels have never been higher (both globally and, in most cases, locally).
- The planet’s population continues to explode (7.5 billion today, 10 billion by 2050) while key resources deplete at accelerating rates.
Only the foolish, or the seriously self-deluded, would think that these observations and trends will be consequence-free.
Which means we have to begin doing things very differently. We have to change who we are, the actions we take, the investments we prioritize, and even our most fundamental values and priorities.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Hell To Pay
SkillUp/Shutterstock
Hell To Pay
Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever going to run out of new things to say about the economy. Nothing interesting has happened in a long time.
Our liquidity-drunk “markets” remain over-priced due to the chronic intervention of the global central banking cartel, which has demonstrated over and over again that it won’t tolerate even the slightest drop in asset prices.
Those familiar with my writing know I put the word “markets” in quotes because we no longer have a financial system where legitimate price discovery is a regular — or even recognizable — feature.
It’s destined to fail. What more can be said about such a flawed system?
Well, a lot as it turns out.
And failure to pay attention at this stage of economic and ecological history will prove to be exceptionally painful.
The Beginning of the End
It’s been a long 7 years for those of us who believe fundamentals matter. For quite some time they have not.
So we reality-based fundamentalists have largely been reduced to pointing at the parade of policy failures and ham-fisted market manipulations and saying, essentially, That’s just dumb.
But ‘dumb’ mistakes have become ‘stupid’, and ‘stupid’ became ‘idiotic’, and now ‘idiotic’ mistakes are piling up, accumulating into a mountain of stored potential energy that will someday topple destructively across the global markets. We’ve all known, deep down, that money printing is not the same as capital formation, and that prosperity never truly results from redistributing wealth from one group to another. And yet, far too many have been willing to play along and place their trust in the central banks.
Well, we’ve finally reached the beginning of the end.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ed Butowsky: Calculating The True Cost of Living
Ed Butowsky: Calculating The True Cost of Living
Over the past decade, we’ve been told that inflation has been tame — actually below the target the Federal Reserve would like to see. But if that’s true, then why does the average household find it harder and harder to get by?
The ugly reality is that the true annual cost of living is far outpacing the government’s reported inflation rate. By nearly 10x in many parts of the country.
This week, we welcome Ed Butowsky, developer of the Chapwood Index, to the program. His index is a ‘real world’ measure of how prices are increasing much faster than the wages of the 99% can afford:
In my business, I wanted to make sure that I was building portfolios that weren’t just efficient but got people the rate of return that they needed. I thought: My goodness, what I need to do is give people a list of everything they spend money on and have them track quarter by quarter exactly their increases, so I can do a better job as a financial advisor in determining what return I need to target.
I got a hold of a list of 50 major metropolitan areas and found people in every city and I gave them a job: I asked everybody to send me what items they spend their after-tax dollars on. I got about 4,000 different items. Then I took the 500 that most frequently appeared on the list and we’ve been tracking specifically these same items in every city since that period of time. I weight this list based on what percentage of a normal income people spend on each item.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
If We’re Going To Borrow Against The Future, Let’s Borrow To Invest
If We’re Going To Borrow Against The Future, Let’s Borrow To Invest
We are at an important juncture as a global society: either we immediately prioritize a new trajectory focused on creating a positive, functional future or — by continuing the consumptive, extractive, exploitative status quo — we will default into a nasty nightmare.
What will determine which future path we take is our collective narrative. It’s the story we tell ourselves — who we are, what we value.
The Power Of Narrative
Under the old narrative, the one currently operating and taking us towards disaster, powerful people and interests simply perpetuate a regime of More of the same.
And I do mean ‘More.’ The old narrative rests upon an ideology of endless growth. It wants and requires moreof everything. More cars sold, more houses built, more jobs created, and more goods and services of every description sold next year than last.
Everything flows from that want for more. The defenders of the old ideology are therefore defenders of our astonishingly-wide wealth gap, rapid energy depletion, emptying aquifers, disappearing pollinators, ruined soils, and dying oceans.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A subtext of the old narrative is that humans are destroyers: we wreck natural systems. Put humans somewhere and first the large animals go extinct. Then the waters become polluted. Next, the soils are stripped.
Less well known, possibly because it shines a bitter light on our common practices, is that humans can be incredible forces of positive change, using their big brains to build natural abundance at rates far faster than nature by itself is able.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
We Live In An Era Of Dangerous Imbalances
We Live In An Era Of Dangerous Imbalances
The intervention by the world’s central banks has resulted in today’s bizarro financial markets, where “bad news is good” because it may lead to more (sorry, moar) thin-air stimulus to goose asset prices even higher.
The result is a world addicted to debt and the phony stimulus now essential to sustaining it. In the process, a tremendous wealth gap has been created, one still expanding at an exponential rate.
History is very clear what happens with dangerous imbalances like this. They correct painfully. Through class warfare. Through currency crises. Through wealth destruction.
Is that really the path we want? Because we’re for sure headed for it.
…click on the above link to see the video…
