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The Mother of All Deflations

Apr 092018

April 9, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:22 pm Finance Tagged with: Banks, building society, deflation, housing, loans, money creation, money supply, money velocity, mortgages, Steve Keen 8 Responses »

Keith Haring Retrospect 1989

Longtime and dear friend of the Automatic Earth, professor Steve Keen, wrote an article recently that everyone should read (that goes for everything Steve writes). It’s hard to select highlights, but I’ll give it a try. Steve explains where our housing markets went off the rails, what (short-sighted) interests politicians have in subverting them, and, something rarely addressed, why housing markets are unlike any other markets (the turnover of existing properties is financed with newly created money)

He then suggests some measures that might counter this subversion, with a twang of It’s a Wonderful Life nostalgia thrown in. That nostalgia, which will be seen by many as outdated and a grave mistake in these ‘modern times’, instead makes a lot of sense. We might even say it’s the only way to get back on our feet. It resides in the idea that money-circulating building societies, rather than money-creating banks should be in charge of the housing market.

Because it’s not supply and demand that rule the market today, it’s available debt (credit). And banks can, and will, always create more debt at the stroke of a keyboard. That is, until they can’t, and then house prices must and will of necessity fall off a cliff. In Steve’s words: “..mortgage credit causes house prices to rise, leading to yet more credit being taken on until, as in 2008, the process breaks down. And it has to break down, because the only way to sustain it is for debt to continue rising faster than income.

Still, it left me with a big question. But I’ll ask that at the end; here’s Steve first.

The Housing Crisis – There’s Nothing We Can Do… Or Is There?

[..] the UK data is remarkable, even in the context of a worldwide trend to higher levels of leverage. Between 1880 and 1980, private debt in the UK fluctuated as a percentage of GDP, but it never once reached 75% of GDP. But in 1982, both household and corporate debt took off. In 1982, total private debt was equivalent to 61% of GDP, split equally between households and corporations. 25 years later, as the global financial crisis unfolded, private debt was three times larger at 197% of GDP, again split 50:50 between households and corporations.

The key changes to legislation that occurred in 1982 is the UK let banks muscle into the mortgage market that was previously dominated by building societies. This was sold in terms of improving competition in the mortgage market, to the benefit of house buyers: allegedly, mortgage costs would fall. But its most profound impact was something much more insidious: it enabled the creation of credit money to fuel rising house prices, setting off a feedback loop that only ended in 2008.

Building societies don’t create money when they lend, because they lend from a bank account that stores the accumulated savings of their members. There’s no change in bank deposits, which are by far the largest component of the money supply.

However, banks do create money when they lend, because a bank records a loan as their asset when they make an identical entry in the borrower’s account, which enables the property to be bought. This dramatically inflates the price of housing, since, as the politicians themselves acknowledge – housing supply is inflexible, so prices increase far more than supply.

The supply side of the housing market has two main factors: the turnover of the existing stock of housing, and the net change in the number of houses (thanks to demolition of old properties and construction of new ones). The turnover of existing properties is far larger than the construction rate of new ones, and this alone makes housing different to your ordinary market. The demand side of the housing market has one main factor: new mortgages created by the banks.

Monetary demand for housing is therefore predominantly mortgage credit: the annual increase in mortgage debt. This also makes housing very different to ordinary markets, where most demand comes from the turnover of existing money, rather than from newly created money.

We can convert the credit-financed monetary demand for housing into a physical demand for new houses per year by dividing by the price level. This gives us a relationship between the level of mortgage credit and the level of house prices. There is therefore a relationship between the change in mortgage credit and the change in house prices. This relationship is ignored in mainstream politics and mainstream economics. But it is the major determinant of house prices: house prices rise when mortgage credit rises, and they fall when mortgage credit falls. This relationship is obvious even for the UK, where mortgage debt data isn’t systematically collected, and I am therefore forced to use data on total household debt (including credit cards, car loans etc.).

Even then, the correlation is obvious (for the technically minded, the correlation coefficient is 0.6). The US does publish data on mortgage debt, and there the correlation is an even stronger 0.78—and standard econometric tests establish that the causal process runs from mortgage debt to house prices, and not vice versa (the downturn in house prices began earlier in the USA, and was an obvious pre-cursor to the crisis there).

None of this would have happened – at least not in the UK – had mortgage lending remained the province of money-circulating building societies, rather than letting money-creating banks into the market. It’s too late to unscramble that omelette, but there are still things that politicians could do make it less toxic for the public.

The toxicity arises from the fact that the mortgage credit causes house prices to rise, leading to yet more credit being taken on until, as in 2008, the process breaks down.

And it has to break down, because the only way to sustain it is for debt to continue rising faster than income. Once that stops happening, demand evaporates, house prices collapse, and they take the economy down with them. That is no way to run an economy.

Yet far from learning this lesson, politicians continue to allow lending practices that facilitate this toxic feedback between leverage and house prices. A decade after the UK (and the USA, and Spain, and Ireland) suffered property crashes – and economic crises because of them – it takes just a millisecond of Internet searching to find lenders who will provide 100% mortgage finance based on the price of the property.

This should not be allowed. Instead, the maximum that lenders can provide should be limited to some multiple of a property’s actual or imputed rental income, so that the income-earning potential of a property is the basis of the lending allowed against it.

Two smaller points first: Steve doesn’t mention the role of ultra-low rates. Which is a huge factor leading the process. Second, he says his proposals will “..transition us from a world in which we treat housing as a speculative asset rather than what it really is, a long-lived consumption good”. I wonder if perhaps we should take this a step further.

We don’t see land as a consumption good either, or water sources. They are assets that belong to a given community. Or should. So shouldn’t buildings be too? A building society (or some local equivalent, It’s a Wonderful Life style) in a community can’t, won’t lend out money to build homes that serve the interests of the owner, but hamper those of the community. But now I sound even more commie than Steve for many, I know.

On to my main point: if you return mortgage lending to money-circulating building societies, rather than money-creating banks, who’s going to create the money? Don’t let’s forget that a huge part of our present money supply comes from those banks, and much of that from the mortgage loans they issue. Steve may well have thought about this (was he afraid to ask?), and I’d be curious to see his views.

Inflation/deflation is a function of money supply x money velocity (MxV). There are multiple ways to define this, and discuss it, but in the end this remains valid.

This is what the US money supply (stock) has done over the past 30-odd years

And here is the Case/Shiller home price index for the US over roughly that period. The correlation is painfully clear. Except maybe for that drop in 2008, but the Fed caught that one. Can’t let the money supply fall off a cliff.

And why can’t we afford to let the money supply fall off a cliff? Because money velocity already has:

How dramatic that fall has been is perhaps even clearer on a shorter time-frame.

We can say that MV = GDP, or we can make it a bit more complex with MV=PT, where P is prices and T is transactions (or national output), and people can say that this is just one of many ways to define inflation, but when you have a drop in velocity as steep as that one, and you combine it with the rise in money supply we saw, the danger should be obvious.

We have made our economies fully dependent on banks creating loans out of thin air. Which is a ridiculous model, and as Steve says: “That is no way to run an economy”, but we still have. And if and when home prices start to fall, and fewer people buy homes, the money supply will first stop rising, and then start falling, and we will have the mother of all deflations.

If you take the MV = GDP formulation, GDP will go down right with the money supply, unless velocity (V) soars. Which it can’t, because people are maxed out on those mortgages. They can’t spend. If you go with MV=PT, then if money supply falls, so will prices. Unless transactions (output) is demolished, but that will just kill off velocity even more. Why many people see inflation in our future is hard to gauge.

We could, presumably, get our central banks to pump ginormous amounts of money into our societies, but where are they going to put it? Not into our banks(!), which wouldn’t create all those loans anymore, as It’s a Wonderful Life takes over that role, taking the banks and their present role down with it.

Because it’s starting to get obvious that the present ‘system’ is set to go down big time, since as Steve put it:the only way to sustain it is for debt to continue rising faster than income, and we all know where that goes, we can advocate a version of controlled demolition, but who would lead that?

The banks are the most powerful party at the table right now, and controlled demolition of what we have today, as sensible as it may be for society at large, is not for them. Which makes this not only a financial problem, but a political one too: where does power reside. Down the line, it doesn’t even seem to matter much who gives out the loans, there will be very few takers.

Let’s just say we’re open to suggestions. But they better be good.

Deflation Is Blowing In On An Eastern Trade Wind

Jul 022016

July 2, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 4:38 pm Finance Tagged with: China, deflation, devaluation, Japan, money supply, monopoly money, spending, velocity, yen, yuan 1 Response »

Jack Delano “Lower Manhattan seen from the S.S. Coamo leaving New York.” 1941

Brexit is nowhere near the biggest challenge to western economies. And not just because it has devolved into a two-bit theater piece. Though we should not forget the value of that development: it lays bare the real Albion and the power hunger of its supposed leaders. From xenophobia and racism on the streets, to back-stabbing in dimly lit smoky backrooms, there’s not a states(wo)man in sight, and none will be forthcoming. Only sell-outs need apply.

The only person with an ounce of integrity left is Jeremy Corbyn, but his Labour party is dead, which is why he must fight off an entire horde of zombies. Unless Corbyn leaves labour and starts Podemos UK, he’s gone too. The current infighting on both the left and right means there is a unique window for something new, but Brits love what they think are their traditions, plus Corbyn has been Labour all his life, and he just won’t see it.

The main threat inside the EU isn’t Brexit either. It’s Italy. Whose banks sit on over 30% of all eurozone non-performing loans, while its GDP is about 10% of EU GDP. How they would defend it I don’t know, they’re probably counting on not having to, but Juncker and Tusk’s European Commission has apparently approved a scheme worth €150 billion that will allow these banks to issue quasi-sovereign bonds when they come under attack. An attack that is now even more guaranteed to occcur than before.

Still, none of Europe’s internal affairs have anything on what’s coming in from the east. Reading between the lines of Japan’s Tankan survey numbers there is only one possible conclusion: the ongoing and ever more costly utter failure of Abenomics continues unabated.

It’s developing in pretty much the exact way I said it would when Shinzo Abe first announced the policies in late 2012. Not that it was such a brilliant insight, all you had to know is that Abe and his central bank head Kuroda don’t understand what their mastodont problem, deflation, actually is, and that means they are powerless to solve it.

That Abe said somewhere along the way that all that was needed was his people’s confidence to make Abenomics work, says more than enough. The multiple flip-flops over a sales-tax increase say the rest. People don’t become more confident just because someone tells them to; that has the opposite effect. Deflation results from reduced spending, which in turn comes from not only decreasing confidence as well as a decrease in money people have available to spend.

That modern economics sees everything not spent as ‘savings’ adds significantly to the failure -on the part of Abe, Kuroda and just about everyone else- to understand what happened in Japan over the past 2-3 decades. To repeat once again, inflation/deflation is the velocity of money multiplied by money- and credit supply. The latter factor has in general gone through the roof, but that means zilch if the former -velocity- tanks.

That this velocity is -still- tanking, in Japan as well as in the western world, is due to, more than anything else, an unparalleled surge in debt. At some point, that will catch up with any economy and society. Even if they are growing, which our economies are not. Growth has been replaced with credit, and credit is debt. It’s safe to say that money velocity cannot possibly ‘recover’ until large swaths of debt have been cancelled, one way or another.

For Japan we saw this week that “..household spending fell for the third straight month in May and core consumer prices suffered their biggest annual drop since 2013..” (Reuters) while “..The Topix index dropped about 9% in June, plunging on June 24 with the Brexit vote, the most since the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. The yen strengthened about 8% against the dollar in June..“ (Bloomberg).

Japan has an upper-house election in a little over a week, and it seems like Abe can still feel comfortable about his position. A remarkable thing. The country needs to stop digging, it’s in a more than 400% debt-to-GDP hole, but Abe won’t listen. The rising yen is suffocating what is left of the economy, as are the negative interest rates, but all the talk is about ‘further easing’.

Still, Japan is outta here, and this has been obvious for a long time to the more observant observer. In the case of China, it is a more recent phenomenon, and it will even be disputed for a while to come. It’s also one that will have a much more devastating effect on the west. We’ve seen problems in various markets in Singapore, Macau and Hong Kong, but the real issues on the mainland are still to be sprung on us.

Mainland stock exchanges are as good a place as any to begin with. The combined tally for Shanghai and Shenzhen looks like this -data till June 23-; yes, that’s a loss of over 40% in the past year.

Beijing has been trying very hard to paper over these numbers, even quit supporting it all for a while through 2014, only to do a 180º when they didn’t like what they saw (foreign reserves drawdown), and now PBoC injections have gone bonkers: $316 billion in one month would mean $4 trillion on a yearly basis in what is really nothing but monopoly money.

Meanwhile, corporate bonds are, perhaps partly because of volatility, becoming an endangered species. Maybe the PBoC can do something there as well, the way Draghi does in Europe (must be high on the agenda), but there’s already so much bad debt we hardly dare watch.

China must and will try to keep boosting exports by devaluing the yuan. It’s just waiting for an opportunity to do it without being accused of currency manipulation. Perhaps it can create that opportunity?! Create a crisis and then use it?! Regardless, this Reuters headline yesterday sounded very tongue in cheek:

China To ‘Tolerate’ Weaker Yuan

China’s central bank would tolerate a fall in the yuan to as low as 6.8 per dollar in 2016 to support the economy, which would mean the currency matching last year’s record decline of 4.5%, policy sources said. The yuan is already trading at its lowest level in more than five years, so the central bank would ensure any decline is gradual for fear of triggering capital outflows and criticism from trading partners such as the United States, said government economists and advisers involved in regular policy discussions. Presumptive U.S. Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump already has China in his sights, saying on Wednesday he would label China a currency manipulator if elected in November.

Note: remember Japan above? The yen rose 8% against the USD just in June, as the yuan fell by just 4.5% in all of 2015 (6.8% over the past 2 years). Now you go figure what’s happening to Japan-China trade. And the yuan is still hugely overvalued. But the desire to be part of the IMF basket of currencies comes with obligations. Trump doesn’t help either.

I said in the beginning of this year that a 30% devaluation was something of a minimum, and that certainly continues to stand. So yeah, creating a crisis may be the only way out. An accident in the South China Sea perhaps. Combined with a ‘tolerance’ for a 50% weaker yuan….

All of the above leads us to the title of this essay: deflation is coming in from the east. China’s economy’s already in deflation, even though it will take some time yet to be acknowledged. A very ‘nice’ report from Crescat Capital provides a bunch of clues.

China QE Dwarfs Japan and EU

In July of 2014, we wrote about the huge imbalance with respect to China’s M2 money supply and nominal GDP relative to the US. At the time, China’s M2 money supply was 71% higher than the US but its economy was 56% smaller, which we said was an indication of the overvaluation of the Chinese currency. Since that time, the yuan has fallen by only 6.8% relative to the dollar. We haven’t seen anything yet.

Today, the circumstances have significantly worsened. Money supply has continued to grow faster than GDP. With over $30 trillion of assets in its banking system and an underappreciated non-performing loan problem, we are convinced that China is headed for a twin banking and currency crisis. Money velocity has reached historically low levels which reflects China’s extreme credit imbalance and its crimping impact on its ability to generate future real GDP growth.

Just as worrying as the immense amount of credit built up, China has been reporting major downward revisions in its balance of payments (BoP) accounts. For more than a decade, China had been reporting an impossible twin surplus in its BoP accounts. When we wrote about this issue in 2014, we emphasized the likelihood of massive illicit capital outflows that not been accounted for. At that time, according to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange of China (SAFE), China had accumulated a BoP imbalance that was close to $9.4 trillion surplus since 2000 which we believed represented capital outflows that should have been recorded in the capital account.

The same accumulated BoP number today, revised by SAFE several times since, is now a deficit of about $2.8 trillion. Essentially, with its revisions, the SAFE has acknowledged even more capital outflows over the last 16 years than we had initially identified. On the capital account side, there was a downward revision of $10.1 trillion – from a $4.2 trillion surplus to a $5.9 trillion deficit. On the current account side, the revisions show that Chinese exports have not been as strong as initially reported over the last decade and a half. China’s current account surplus has been reduced by $2.1 trillion– going from $5.1 trillion to $2.9 trillion over the last 16 years. What we initially considered to be a $9.4 trillion imbalance has been more than proven by a $12.2 trillion revision.

Those are some pretty damning numbers, if you sit on them for a bit. There was another graph that came with that report that takes us head first into deflationary territory. China’s velocity of money:

That is utterly devastating. It’s what we see in the US, EU and Japan too, but ‘we’ have thus far been able to export our deflation -to an extent- to … China. No more. China has started exporting its own deflation to the west. Beijing MUST devalue its currency anywhere in the range of 30-50% or its export sector will collapse. It is not difficult.

That it will have to achieve this despite the objections of Donald Trump and the IMF is just a minor pain; Xi Jinping has more pressing matters on his mind. Like pitchforks.

The ‘normal’ response in economics would be: in order to fight deflation, increase consumer spending (aka raise money velocity)! But as we’ve seen with Japan, that’s much easier said than done. Because there are reasons people are not spending. And the only way to overcome that is to guarantee them a good income for a solid time into the future, in an economy that induces confidence.

That is not happening in Japan, or the US or EU, and it’s now gone in China too. Beijing has another additional issue that (formerly) rich countries don’t have. This is from a recent Marketwatch article on Andy Xie:

China Is Headed For A 1929-Style Depression

[..] Xie said China’s trajectory instead resembles the one that led to the Great Depression, when the expansion of credit, loose monetary policy and a widespread belief that asset prices would never fall contributed to rampant speculation that ended with a crippling market crash. China in 2016 looks much the same, according to Xie, with half of the country’s debt propping up real-estate prices and heavy leverage in the stock market – indicating that conditions are ripe for a correction. “The government is allowing speculation by providing cheap financing .. China “is riding a tiger and is terrified of a crash. So it keeps pumping cash into the economy. It is difficult to see how China can avoid a crisis.”

And then check this out:

China’s GDP grew 6.9% in 2015, its slowest pace in a quarter-century. For 2016, Beijing has set a GDP target of 6.5% to 7%; The latest spate of global uncertainties prompted Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank to trim their forecasts to 6.4% and 6.6%, respectively. The export sector, long a driver of Chinese growth, is sputtering due to global saturation and household consumption is barely 30% of China’s GDP, Xie said. In the U.S., household consumption accounted for more than 68% of GDP in 2014, according to the World Bank.

Yeah, China is supposed to be going from an export driven- to a consumer driven economy. Problem with that seems to be that those consumers would need money to spend, and to earn that money they would need to work in export industries (since there is not nearly enough domestic demand). Bit of a Catch 22. And definitely not one you would want to find yourself in when the global economy is tanking.

The more monopoly money Beijing prints, the more pressure there will be on the yuan. And if they themselves don’t devalue the yuan, the markets will do it for them.

Kyle Bass says China’s $3 trillion corporate bond market is “freezing up” (see the third graph above), which threatens to undermine the $3.5 trillion market for the wealth management products Chinese mom and pops invest in. He expects a whopping $3 trillion in bank losses, an amount equal to the entire corporate bond market (!) “to trigger a bailout, with the central bank slashing reserve requirements, cutting the deposit rate to zero and expanding its balance sheet – all of which will weigh on the yuan.”

With the yuan down by as much as it would seem to be on course for, wages and prices in the west will plummet. This wave of deflation is set to hit western economies already in deflation and already drowning in private debt, and therefore equipped with severely weakened defenses.

Leonard Cohen once wrote a song called “Democracy Is Coming To The USA”. Maybe someone can do a version that says deflation is coming too. Not sure that’s good for democracy, though.

Have a great Holiday Weekend.

Where Deflation Comes From

Feb 152016

February 15, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:57 pm Finance Tagged with: bankers, central bankers, Darwin, deflation, Humpty Dumpty, middle class, pitchforks, poor, Steve Keen 12 Responses »

Dorothea Lange We’ll be in California yet. We’re not going back to Arkansas 1938

Financial bubbles blown on the back of massive amounts of debt, of necessity lead to debt deflation (it’s just entropy, really). Fighting this is futile, and grossly costly to boot. The only sensible thing to do is to guide the process as best you can and try to minimize the damage, especially at the bottom rungs of society, because that’s where the deflation first takes hold, and where it spreads out from.

Attempting to boost inflation, or boost demand, before letting the debt deflation run its course through restructuring and defaults (perhaps even a -partial- jubilee) leads only to -further- distortion, and -further- impoverishes society’s poorer (at some point to a large extent the former middle classes). Whose lower spending, as nary a soul seems to comprehend, is the origin of the deflation to begin with.

All the attempts by central bankers to boost inflation that we’ve seen so far squarely ignore this, and operate on the false assumption that if only prices for financial assets and real estate can be raised even higher -artificially-, deflation can be warded off.

Thing is, deflation starts not at the top, it starts at the bottom. It’s not the banks or the bankers or the well-off who are maxed out and stop spending, but the people in the street.

They are responsible for most of the spending in an economy, and therefore for the velocity with which money moves in a society. And if the velocity of money falls below a critical point, no increase in the other side of the inflation/deflation equation -the money/credit supply- can make up for the difference. There is a point where all of the King’s horses and all of the King’s central bankers can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

The people in the street are not just maxed out in the sense that they have no money, they have less than no money, since they’re deep in debt. An increasing part of whatever they do still have, and what they make in their ever lower paying jobs, goes toward debt payments. Yeah, that’s the giant sucking sound.

QE and other ‘plans’ like it don’t address this even in the slightest, and are necessarily failures before they even start.

Central bank stimulus measures are all exclusively targeted at the upper rungs, and therefore miss their aim entirely. Or perhaps we should say ‘alleged’ aim, since it takes quite a leap of faith to presume that all the world’s central bankers fail to understand their own field so thoroughly that all they can all come up with is failures.

However, given that they all studied the same faulty economics textbooks, we can’t rule out this possibility. It is certainly strongly suggested -once again- by Steve Keen in Our Dysfunctional Monetary System.

Rather than effective remedies, we’ve had inane policies like QE, which purport to solve the crisis by inflating asset prices when inflated asset prices were one of the symptoms of the bubble that caused the crisis. We’ve seen Central Banks pump up private bank reserves in the belief that this will encourage more bank lending when (a) there’s too much bank debt already and (b) banks physically can’t lend out reserves.

What may also play a role is that the upper rungs tend to be blind to anything outside of their own circles, that because they 1) have their hands on a nation’s wallets and 2) they see themselves as the most important segment of any given society, they elect to try and solve the problem inside their own circles -and truly believe this is feasible-.

This can of course not possibly work. Because they’re hugely outnumbered. They don’t have nearly enough influence on money flows in their societies. If they can’t sell the bottom, let’s take a number, 80%, of society sufficient produce or gasoline or homes or trinkets, the entire society seizes up the way an engine does that runs out of oil.

The top makes its fortune for a while getting the bottom ever deeper into debt, only to inevitably find that this kills off the entire economy. Then they do some more of the same, and find ever more of their own kind becoming part of the bottom.

The problem for the rich is simple: there’s not enough of them. Well, that and they don’t understand how societies function. Let alone economies. Scraps off the table won’t do the trick. Next stop pitchforks.

Any deflationary period would have been hard no matter what. Still, none would have had to lead to what we’re facing now.

But look out there at what’s happening in politics, at who’s popular in various places. It’s all geared towards more inequality, not less, like some tooth and claw Darwin version were the world’s economics teacher, wherever you look it’s all the well-off making ever surer they will remain well-off or better.

And even if you look for instance at Bernie Sanders in the US, he wants more for the bottom of society, but that seems more for sentimental or ideological reasons than a sign he actually understands why it would raise the odds of the States being a going concern going forward.

The actual Darwin could have taught us all a lesson or two three about the role of balances in ecosystems, and in human societies. But then he actually studied them. Economists, politicians and central bankers have not.

What Deflation Quacks Like

Dec 072015

December 7, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 2:08 pm Finance Tagged with: bonds, credit, debt, deflation, QE, saving, Wile E. 12 Responses »

Tyrone Siu|Reuters Deflation

As yet another day of headlines shows, see the links and details in today’s Debt Rattle at the Automatic Earth, deflation is visible everywhere, from a 98% drop in EM debt issuance to junk bonds reporting the first loss since 2008 to corporate bonds downgrades to plummeting cattle prices in Kansas to China’s falling demand for iron ore and a whole list of other commodities.

The list is endless. It is absolutely everywhere. And it’s there every single day. But how would we know? After all, we’re being told incessantly that deflation equals falling consumer prices. And since these don’t fall -yet-, other than at the pump (something people seem to think is some freak accident), every Tom and Dick and Harry concludes there is no deflation.

But if you wait for consumer prices to fall to recognize deflationary forces, you’ll be way behind the curve. Always. Consumer prices won’t drop until we’re -very- well into deflation, and they will do so only at the moment when nary a soul can afford them anymore even at their new low levels.

The money supply, however it’s measured, may be soaring (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes the point every other day), but that makes no difference when spending falls as much as it does. And it does. The whole shebang is maxed out. And the whole caboodle is maxed out too. All of it except for central banks and other money printers.

Everyone has so much debt that spending can only come from borrowing more. Until it can’t. We read comments that tell us the global markets are reaching the end of the ‘credit cycle’, but can the insanity that has ‘saved’ the economy over the past 7 years truly be seen as a ‘cycle’, or is it perhaps instead just pure insanity? There’s never been so much debt on the planet, so unless we’re starting a whole new kind of cycle, not much about it looks cyclical.

Also, though we hear this all the time, the collapse in spending does not happen because people are ‘saving’, but we wouldn’t know that from the ‘official’ numbers, because when people pay down their debts, that is counted as ‘saving’.

So you have debt collectors at the front door (and the back) and you’re about to be evicted or lose your car, and then when you pay them with what you would really need to feed your kids with, and sell your furniture, and sell your TV, economic models tell you you’re actually saving.

That’s the sort of accounting retardation that keeps us from ever understanding what bind we’re really in. When deflation starts and commodities prices begin plunging -and they would have to be first, there’s no better barometer-, we’re told to think that only when what we pay for goods and services goes down, do we have deflation. And when we pay off our debts with our very very last pennies, they tell us we’re saving.

Of course we could have known long ago what’s happening not only if these faulty definitions weren’t so infectiously widespread, but also if our central banks wouldn’t have engaged in stimulus related actions, ostensibly meant to save the economy but which are in reality just yet another means of wealth transfer away from you and me.

What all the stimulus has done is suspend us in a Wile E. moment fashion, in which things look sort of OK while we’re busy frantically paddling our feet, but in which we’re just as sure as Mr. E. to eventually plummet to the ground, albeit with much less predictable results than in his case (he’s always fine after 10 seconds max).

Stimulus, whether disguised as QE or anything else, keeps us from recognizing the reality of the situation, and the deflation, that we’re in. But then someone gets nervous about their investments, or their loans, their stocks, and before you know it they all do, and everything turns out to be based on leveraged debt, of which they can’t get any anymore, and they all want their money back all at the same time, and you hear a big loud Poof!

One more time, this is deflation. This is what it looks like, what it smells like and what it quacks like.

Short Squeeze, Liquidity, Margin Debt and Deflation

Oct 122015

October 12, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:27 pm Finance Tagged with: assets, deflation, liquidity, margin debt, repo, short squeeze, stocks 4 Responses »

Jack Delano Gallup, New Mexico. Train on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe 1943

Some things you CAN see coming, in life and certainly in finance. Quite a few things, actually. Once you understand we’re on a long term downward path, also both in life and in finance, and you’re not exclusively looking at short term gains, it all sort of falls into place. The only remaining issue then is that so many of you DO look at short term gains only. Thing is, there’s no way out of this thing but down, way down.

Yeah, stock markets went up quite a bit last week. Did that surprise you? If so, maybe you’re not in the right kind of game. You might be better off in Vegas. Better odds and all that. From where we’re sitting, amongst the entire crowd of its peers, this was a major flashing red alarm late last week, from Investment Research Dynamics:

September Liquidity Crisis Forced Fed Into Massive Reverse Repo Operation

Something occurred in the banking system in September that required a massive reverse repo operation in order to force the largest ever Treasury collateral injection into the repo market. Ordinarily the Fed might engage in routine reverse repos as a means of managing the Fed funds rate. However, as you can see from the graph below, there have been sudden spikes up in the amount of reverse repos that tend to correspond the some kind of crisis – the obvious one being the de facto collapse of the financial system in 2008. You can also see from this graph that the size of the “spike” occurrences in reverse repo operations has significantly increased since 2014 relative to the spike up in 2008. In fact, the latest two-week spike is by far the largest reverse repo operation on record.

Besides using repos to manage term banking reserves in order to target the Fed funds rate, reverse repos put Treasury collateral on to bank balance sheets. We know that in 2008 there was a derivatives counter-party default melt-down. This required the Fed to “inject” Treasury collateral into the banking system which could be used as margin collateral by banks or hedge funds/financial firms holding losing derivatives positions OR to “patch up” counter-party defaults (see AIG/Goldman).

What’s eerie about the pattern in the graph above is that since 2014, the “spike” occurrences have occurred more frequently and are much larger in size than the one in 2008. This would suggest that whatever is imploding behind the scenes is far worse than what occurred in 2008. What’s even more interesting is that the spike-up in reverse repos occurred at the same time – September 16 – that the stock market embarked on an 8-day cliff dive, with the S&P 500 falling 6% in that time period. You’ll note that this is around the same time that a crash in Glencore stock and bonds began. It has been suggested by analysts that a default on Glencore credit derivatives either by Glencore or by financial entities using derivatives to bet against that event would be analogous to the “Lehman moment” that triggered the 2008 collapse.

The blame on the general stock market plunge was cast on the Fed’s inability to raise interest rates. However that seems to be nothing more than a clever cover story for something much more catastrophic which began to develop out of sight in the general liquidity functions of the global banking system. Without a doubt, the graphs above are telling us that something “broke” in the banking system which necessitated the biggest injection of Treasury collateral in history into the global banking system by the Fed.

That should scare even the crocodile hunter, I venture, but he’s dead, and you’re not. So move one to the next sign that you’re in way over your head. How about Tyler Durden quoting Bank of America. Turns out, last week’s gains were down to one thing, and one only: short covering. In fact, the second biggest short squeeze in history. So much short covering that stock prices went up. And that’s why they did.

Stocks Soar To Best Week In A Year On “Mother Of All Short Squeezes”

With China shut and The Fed going full dovish panic-mode over growth fears, world markets went crazy…
• S&P up 7 of last 8 days +3.2% – best week since Oct 2014
• Russell 2000 +4.5% – best week since Oct 2014
• Nasdaq up 7 of last 8 (since Death Cross) closed above 50DMA
• Trannies up 8 of last 9 +4.9% – best week since Oct 2014
• Dow up 8 of last 9 +3.5% – best week since Feb 2015
• "Most Shorted" +4.7% – biggest squeeze in 8 months
• Biotechs -2.3%
• Financials +2.2% – best week in 3 months
• Asian Dollar Index +1.4% (worst week USD vs Asian FX since Oct 2011)
• Dollar Index -1.2% (worst week for USD vs Majors in 2 months)
• AUD +4% – best week since Dec 2011
• 2Y TSY Yields +6.5bps – biggest rise in 7 weeks
• 5Y TSY Yields +11bps – biggest rise in 4 months
• WTI Crude +8.9% – 2nd best week since Feb 2011
• OJ +4.8% – best day since March
• Silver +3.8% – best week since May

LOLume!!

The last 8 days have seen a massive short-squeeze… 2nd biggest in history

The last 2 times stocks were short-squeezed this much, did not end well…

And the following stunning chart shows the percent of S&P 500 names above their 50-day moving-average has soared from 4% to 60% in a few weeks…

h/t @ReformedBroker

Got that? The biggest injection of Treasury collateral in history combined with the 2nd biggest short squeeze in history. Still want to buy stocks? Think there’ll be an actual recovery?

And then there’s this mass selling of Treasuries by emerging markets, as per the following Economist graph.

How many trillions are we down so far? And you still want to buy ‘assets’? You sure you can spell the word please? Josh Brown at the Reformed Broker thinks maybe that’s not the smartest move around:

QE Causes Deflation, Not Inflation

In America, Japan and the Eurozone velocity has continued to decline since the financial crisis in 2008. Thus, US, Japan and Eurozone money velocity, measured as the nominal GDP to M2 ratio, has declined from 1.94x, 0.7x and 1.29x respectively in 1Q98 to 1.5x, 0.55x and 1.05x in 2Q15.

Indeed, US money velocity is now at a six-decade low. This is why those who have predicted a surge in inflation in recent years caused by the Fed printing money have so far been proven wrong. For inflation, as defined by conventional economists like Bernanke in the narrow sense of consumer prices and the like, will not pick up unless the turnover of money increases. This is the problem with the narrow form of mechanical monetarism associated with the likes of American economist Milton Friedman.

[..] QE is deflationary because it shrinks net interest margins for banks via depressing treasury bond yields. It also enriches the already wealthy via asset price inflation but they do not raise their consumption in response, because how much more shit can they possibly buy? Finally, it leads to a preference of share buybacks vs investment spending because the payback from financial engineering is so much easier and more immediate.

Now, we’re not sure that QE ’causes’ deflation, or let’s put it this way: perhaps QE doesn’t cause the deflation we see, but it certainly reinforces it. ‘Our’ deflation originates in our debt. And there’s more than plenty of that to go around.

More is still being added on a daily basis. Though we’re approaching the limits of that. Which is a good thing on the one hand, but a bad one on the other: we’re all going to feel like heroine junkies going cold turkey. Not a pleasant feeling. But still healthier in the long run.

That US money velocity is at its lowest pace in 60(!) years -do let that one sink in- is a huge component of what deflation really is: not rising or falling prices, but the interaction of falling/rising money supply vs falling/rising money velocity.

And in that sense, isn’t it interesting to note that “US money velocity is now at a six-decade low.”?! And that, accordingly, no matter how much money is injected into the economy, if it is not being spent, deflation is inevitable?!

Why is it not being spent? Because America, wherever you look, and at whatever level, the country is drowning in debt. And so is the rest of the planet. If a large enough part of your ‘gains’ goes toward paying of what you’ve already spent in the past, you’re just a hamster on a wheel. Well, hamsters rule the planet.

And, now that we’re talking about it, deflation is inevitable anyway in the aftermath of the by far biggest credit mountain in the history of not just mankind, but of the planet, if not the universe.

It may be hard to let sink in if you and/or your pension fund own large(-ish) portfolios of stocks and bonds, or if you make a living trading the stuff, but come on, how long do you think you can keep the charade going? or should that be: ‘could keep it going’?

To add insult to injury, Bloomberg tells us that margin dent is falling fast in ‘da markets’. Ergo: smarter money is paying its money down, before too much of it vanishes into the great beyond. Watch that graph and imagine it going all the way back down to 2012, and then think about where your ‘assets’ will be.

Margin Debt in Freefall Is Another Reason to Worry About S&P 500

Most people get concerned about margin debt when it’s shooting up. To Doug Ramsey, the problem now is that it’s falling too fast. The CIO of Leuthold Weeden whose pessimistic predictions came true in August’s selloff, says the tally of New York Stock Exchange brokerage loans flashed a bearish sign when it slid more than 6% in July and August. The retreat took margin debt below a seven-month moving average that suggests demand for stocks is dropping at a rate that should give investors pause. For years, bull market skeptics have warned that surging equity credit portended disaster for U.S. shares, pointing to a threefold runup between the market low in March 2009 and the middle of this year. Ramsey, who says that surge was never strong enough to form the basis of a bear case, is now worried about how fast it’s unwinding.

“Margin debt contracting is a sign of loss of investor confidence and it’s confirmation of a lot of other evidence we have that we’ve entered a cyclical bear market,” Ramsey said in a phone interview. “We got a lot of traditional warning signs leading up to the high in terms of market action, and deteriorating breadth and margin debt is important to the supply-demand analysis.” Margin debt, compiled monthly by the NYSE, represents credit extended by brokerages for clients to buy stock. It hews closely to benchmark indexes such as the S&P 500, primarily because equity is used to back the loans and as its value rises, so does the capacity to lend.

Of course, the entire global economy has been hanging together with strands of duct tape for decades now, but hey, it looks good as long as you don’t take a peek behind the facade, right? But you know, it all comes together in that money velocity graph earlier.

People have massively toned down their spending, some because they’ve grown wary of what’s going on, but most because they either have nothing left to spend or they are too deep in debt to have anything left after they pay their money down.

And there’s no cure for that. Not even a people’s QE will do it, no matter what shape it would come in. The entire world economy would need to restructure its various debt levels.

Problem with that is, A) we’ve already committed to bail out our banks at the cost of our entire societies, and B) we largely owe our debts to those same banks. So why should they let us off the hook now? They own us.

Meanwhile, even if you think that last bit is silly, how do you yourself think you can squeeze your behind out of the massive short squeeze that happened last week? By purchasing shares? Really?

Deflation, Debt and Gravity

Aug 062015

August 6, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:05 am Finance Tagged with: Banks, deflation, gravity, Greece, Growth, losses, recovery, society, wagers 23 Responses »

Arnold Genthe “Chinatown, San Francisco. The street of the gamblers at night” 1900

Far too many people have already used lines like “We Are All Greeks Now” for the words to hold on to much if any meaning by now. But it’s still a very accurate description of what awaits us all. Just not for the same reasons most who used it, did.

No, I don’t really want to talk about Greece again. I want to talk about where you live. And about how similar the two will be not too long from now. How Greece is holding up a lesson and a big red flashing warning sign for all of us.

Greece is the mold upon which all of our futures will be based. Quite literally. Greece is a test tube baby rat.

Greece will never “recover” to our North American and Western European economic levels (if ever they were there). Instead, it’s us who will descend, “uncover” so to speak, to the levels Greece is at today. That is baked into the cake, that is inevitable, and that is therefore what we need to be ready for.

If we wake up in time to this new reality, we may, and that’s still only may, be able to prevent the worst, prevent something akin to the same punitive measures the Troika has unleashed upon Greek society, fully wrecking it in the process, its healthcare system, the safety nets for its most needy.

We may find a way to make a smoother transition from here to there if we prepare in time. But that’s the best we can do. As societies, that is; individual fates will vary.

Greece will find ways to do better than it does right now, balance things out, but it won’t be through a recovery or a bailout. Athens will -because it must, lest the humanitarian crisis deepens profoundly- find ways to better -fairer- apportion what means are at its disposition, amongst its people.

We all have to do the same, wherever we are. Our advantage today is that we can do this from a relatively well-to-do starting point. Our disadvantage is that, unlike the Greeks, we do not understand the reality we’re in.

We’re ignorant, we deny, we prefer not to think about it. The Greeks used to be like that, but they no longer have that choice. And we won’t for much longer either.

The reason why Greece is where it is today, and why we will all be there tomorrow, we can by now for good reason call ‘deceptively simple’. That is to say, the global banking system that orchestrated the financial crisis refuses to take the losses on its extravagant bets, and it has the political clout to get its way, all the way. That’s all you need to know.

The losses are therefore unloaded upon the citizens of our respective nations. But the losses are far too massive for those citizens to bear. They, or rather we, will see our societies stripped of most things, most of the social fabric, that hold them together. Any service that costs money will be cut, progressively, until there’s very little left.

It happened in Greece, and it will happen all over the world. Mind you, this is nothing new; third world nations have undergone the same treatment for decades, if not forever. Disaster capitalism wasn’t born yesterday. What’s new is that it now takes place in the supposedly well-off part of the world, in this case the European Union. And it will spread.

The successive Greek bailouts that have now ruined the entire nation were “needed” to stem the losses on wagers, derivatives and other, incurred by global banks, French, Dutch, German, Wall Street, the City. The first bailout in 2010 also served the purpose of allowing the banks time to shift away from their exposure to Greek debt.

All bailouts, be they directly for banks, or indirectly through a country like Greece and then for the banks, have been set up according to the exact same MO. Greece’s economic reserves just happened to be a bit tighter, and moreover, the country was a convenient lab rat and scarecrow to prevent others from protesting the bailout system too loudly.

The whole system of bailouts, be it in Greece or in the US, was never anything else than a transfer of public money to private interests, with the express aim of making good on the lost wagers of that private sector. With impunity, no less.

And no, the losses have not disappeared. Nor have they been written down. They have instead been transferred to fester in dark vaults, hidden behind swaps and other derivatives, and on central bank balance sheets. But that won’t last either.

The Automatic Earth has warned of the imminent deleveraging and deflation for years, and now everyone is talking about deflation. No worries, guys. As you were. But do please try and understand how this works.

There’s all these losses, with no-one prepared to write down any of them (see Germany vs Greece), and the elites behind the banks unwilling to absorb any -the elites instead insist on getting richer even in a depression-. There is only one outcome left then: that you and me will have to become much poorer. They are our losses now.

The only way the rich can keep getting richer is if the rest of us keep getting poorer. Economic growth is a thing of the past. Deleveraging has started for real. Huge amounts of zombified ‘money’ are disappearing as we speak.

That leaves the world with a lot less wealth. And still the rich seek to get richer, and they are in charge. The math is simple. As Greece shows us, the rich have no qualms about throwing an entire society off the cliff.

A large part of what is now considered wealth is made up of QE and related and inflated stocks, bonds and real estate prices, all of which is zombie wealth. Which can disappear overnight. And if it can, it will.

China stocks and “real” estate and local government debt to shadow banks, emerging markets, commodity currencies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc.), if you overlook that whole panorama it’s hard to see how you could possibly think there’ll be some kind of recovery.

Where should it come from? Overall debts are much worse, much higher, now, then they were in 2008. We haven’t had a recovery, we’ve had an “uncovery”. And we’re headed for a discovery.

The entire idea, the phantom ghost, of a functioning market died, if you were willing to look, with the advent of central bank intervention. People who work in finance, obviously and for understandable reasons, have never been willing to take that look. They’re just looking to make more money even if things tumble down the mountain in a handbasket. They call it “opportunity”.

But they haven’t been actual investors in years. They’ve just helped the banking system put you into deeper doodoo. Greece shows us where that leads. And soon, wherever you live will show that to you too.

Deflation is a bitch. Nicole Foss here at the Automatic Earth has used the phrase “multiple claims to underlying real wealth”, for a long time. It’s like playing musical chairs. And you’re not winning. You never had a chance.

The only people who will wind up winning are the rich trying to get richer. The rest of us will soon live like the Greeks, and that’s if we are lucky.

There is no other possibility. “Money” is vanishing fast, and the only way it can even seem to return is if central banks do more QE, but that’s a dead in the water policy. Economic growth across the globe, and certainly in the west, is an illusion.

China was the last place that briefly seemed to have any, and they screwed up just like us, ending up with far too much debt to ever repay.

There is a point when the can gets so big and heavy, no-one can kick it down any road anymore. Not even one that plunges down a mountain. Something to do with gravity.

No No No! That Is Not Deflation!

Dec 042014

December 4, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:05 pm Finance Tagged with: deflation, Greece, hubris, misery, poverty, prices, Spain 28 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Homeless mother and child walking from Phoenix to Imperial County CA Feb 1939

So, Matthew Lynn, I’m sure you’re a fine young man and your mommy loves you to bits, but you’re obviously in the wrong line of work. Or maybe the right one, come to think of it, since if you can make enough people see the world your way, in the end you’ll be right. That’s how journalism is defined these days. Anything goes, provided you can make people believe what you write. The problem is, that process can only end up with everyone a lot dumber than they already are. The lowest common denominator wins the day, every day.

My problem with that is, why does someone work for a finance site like MarketWatch who has no clue what finance actually is, and how it works? Your ignorance leads you, I’m sure without any bad intentions, to insult millions of people who are having a very bad time. Does that mean anything to you? See, I’m guessing it doesn’t. I think you don’t know bad times, because if you did, you would never write the offensive blubber you do.

But Matthew, this once, and only once, I’m going to say what I have to say about your mindless drivel. Because I don’t care one bit about the investor crowd whose fancy you’re trying to tickle, I’m here for the people you aim to leave by the wayside (yeah, I know, you had no idea..). And you know, normally I don’t care anymore, I can’t get angry every single time some nutjob gets his stuff upside down. But this goes too far, you’ve overstretched even your lowest common standards.

In your article, you paint the perfect example of why seeing deflation only as falling prices is so completely useless, numbing and dumbing. Hey, maybe I should thank you for that.

If you refuse to look a WHY prices fall, you never learn a thing, and you will always be behind. Apart from the fact that the idea of Greece and Spain doing well can easily be refuted by 1000 other data sources, there’s the simple fact that looking at one day or week or month tells you nothing. You need to look at consumer spending over at least the past few years. That would also show more respect for the over 25% of the working population, and over 50% of youth, who are unemployed in both Greece and Spain, and who are the topic of your ‘article’.

Here’s you, Matthew:

If Deflation Is So Terrible, Why Are Spain, Greece Growing?

Prices are starting to fall across the European continent. Mass unemployment, and a grinding recession are forcing companies with too much capacity to charge less for their products. Company profits will soon be collapsing, while government debt ratios threaten to spiral out of control. The threat of deflation is so worrying, the European Central Bank is expected to throw everything in its armory to prevent it, and to get prices rising again. It may even move towards full-blown quantitative easing as early as Thursday.

You get it awfully wrong from the get-go. What you call “companies with too much capacity” are simply those who could sell their products before the recession set in, and would now have to fire people to get rid of that ‘overcapacity’, thereby lowering spending capacity, which would lead to even more ‘overcapacity’, and therefore more unemployed. I’m thinking you must have studied economics, because that’s the only place people pick up such warped notions. It’s a chicken and egg thing, Matthew, a horse and a cart, and getting them the wrong way around is not going to help.

What you describe but don’t understand is deflation. It starts with a drop in spending, caused by lower or no wages, saving or simply the demise of confidence. It doesn’t start with overcapacity. It starts with people losing their jobs.

But here’s a puzzle. The two countries with the worst deflation in Europe are Greece and Spain. And two of the countries with the best growth? Funnily enough, that also happens to be Greece and Spain. So if deflation is so terrible, how come those two are recovering fastest? The answer is that deflation is not nearly as bad as it sometimes made out to be by mainstream economists.

Matthew, I’m not a mainstream economist. I’m not an economist at all, and I see that as my saving grace. Steve Keen is a good friend, but I don’t know any other economists who make any sense to me (Steve says he know a few, so we’re covered). But I don’t think even Steve fully gets deflation either. Which of course he’ll deny.

Still, saying that Greece and Spain are doing just great despite their deflation is simply meaningless. Deflation is not about prices, it’s about spending. And people in Greece have been forced to lower their spending for years now. So much so that one single extra boat of tourists would suffice to raise its GDP. But that makes no difference for the population. Which means Greece is not doing well. Yeah, the highest GDP growth in Europe, but that only says something about the rest. Still, selling a few additional retsinas and tzatzikis may lift Greece, but not Europe. Here’s more you:

The real problem is debt. But if that is true, perhaps the eurozone would be better off trying to fix its debt crisis than campaigning to raise prices – especially as it probably won’t have much success with that anyway. There is no question that the eurozone is sliding inexorably towards deflation. Only last week, we learned that the inflation rate across the zone ratcheted down to 0.3% last month, from 0.4% a month earlier, and a significantly lower figure than the market expected. It has been going steadily down for some time. Consumer inflation has not hit the ECB’s target level of 2% since the start of 2013. It has been falling steadily since it peaked at 3% in late 2011.

I must admit, after reading that again, I have no idea where you’re going with it. The problem is debt, I get that, and I agree too, and that should be fixed, kudos, but after that, you don’t seem to have much of a train of thought, just numbers.

It would be rash to expect that to change any time soon. The oil price has collapsed, and other commodity prices are coming down as well. That will all feed into the inflation rate. Retail sales are still weak, and unemployment is still rising. People who have lost their job don’t spend money – and companies don’t hike prices when the shops are empty.

What you’re describing there is not so much deflation itself, but its consequences. And you yourself just claimed that deflation is not all that bad, didn’t you?

Most economists will tell you that is very worrying — and that the ECB needs to act immediately to stop it getting worse. People will postpone buying anything because they think it will be cheaper next month. Companies will be reluctant to invest because they see their prices and profits going down. Confidence will be sapped, and the economy will suffer. Even worse, the debts of peripheral eurozone countries will spiral out of control — because the amount they owe will remain the same, but there will be less income to service it. But there is something odd about that analysis. The two countries with the worst price data are also the two countries doing best within Europe.

What happens is that Greece and Spain have become so cheap that tourists from other countries come and spend their money on their beaches. That lifts their GDP. Nothing to do with the people in the street. Nor does it have anything to do with deflation. Deflation is defined by the speed at which people spend their money (provide the money supply remains reasonably high). If no-one spends, prices fall. The reason people don’t spend is because they’re too poor. I’m lousy at rocket science, but I do get that one.

Just take a look at the figures. In Greece, prices are falling at an annual rate of 1.7%. In Spain, they are falling by 0.4%. So presumably those are the two countries that have been hit hardest? Well, it has not quite worked out like that. The fastest growing economy in the eurozone right now is none other than Greece. True, it is not exactly China, but it is expanding at an annual rate of 1.9% right now. And how about Spain? Its economy is also growing again, at an annualized rate of 1.6%.

You see, this is where you start to be insulting. You have a nation full of people who don’t even know anymore how to pay for a doctor, and because of some empty government massaged number you want to tell those same people they’re actually doing fine? They’re still as poor as they were before Samaras published that number, and before you reported on it.

By contrast, the economies where prices are still rising are not doing as well. Over in Germany, the supposed powerhouse of Europe, the inflation rate is still just in positive territory, at an annual rate of 0.5%. But growth in the third quarter was only 0.1%, narrowly avoiding recession. The same is true in France – inflation just about stayed positive, but growth has completely stalled.

Yeah, I know, it’s shooting fish in a barrel here for me: if you don’t know what inflation or deflation is, you’re bound to get everything wrong and upside down. But even then, don’t you at least think when you write “the economies where prices are still rising are not doing as well”, that that is weird? Because it would mean that countries who are already knee deep in deflation, whether it’s your definition or mine, with lower prices and therefore higher unemployment, do better than those who have fewer jobless. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?

So there does not appear to be much of a connection between rising prices and stronger growth. Nor do falling prices appear to be hurting very much.

See, now I’m getting pissed off. Did you even read that? Falling prices, Matthew, are the result of having more than half of your young people out of work for years on end. What the f*ck do you mean, they don’t appear to be hurting that much?

So what is going on? In reality, there is nothing terrible about prices falling. It is what happens in a competitive economy. Most of us like it when the stuff we buy gets cheaper. There is no serious evidence to suggest that it deters people from buying things. If it did, no one would ever buy a television or a smartphone, because they know perfectly well that they can get a better one for less money next year. In reality, they buy plenty of both.

This is where I give up on you, Matthew, and where I call on the MarketWatch board to fir your ass. Chances are, I know, that they agree with this absurdity, but what the heck, I’m calling anyway. I mean, what the hell is this supposed to mean: “There is no serious evidence to suggest that it deters people from buying things. If it did, no one would ever buy a television or a smartphone ..”

There’s plenty evidence, go to Athens, go to their soupkitchens and hospitals, and you’ll see that deflation DOES deter people from buying smartphones. Because they need the money, if they even have any, to pay for treatments to keep their children alive that we don’t even have to think twice about. It doesn’t deter them becise deflation loewred prices, but because deflation took their jobs away.

People buy things when they need them, taking price trends into account – after all, you can’t take either the money or the phone with you when you die, so you can’t postpone the purchase forever. Neither is there much evidence that it saps the confidence of companies. Again, if it did, no one would make any kind of consumer electronics. Businesses will invest where they think they can make money, and so long as costs are falling as well it is fine for prices to come down.

No people don’t buy things when they need them when they can’t afford them, you ignorant drip. You’re completely clueless about the world out there. And I take that personal, because these are my people. They’re all my people.

The threat to growth from deflation is wildly oversold. Indeed, for most of the 19th century deflation was completely normal — and that didn’t stop the industrial revolution in its tracks. Indeed, mild deflation may actually be helping Spain and Greece. As things get cheaper, consumers feel a bit more confident – and start spending again.

Yeah, the 19th century was a great period, wasn’t it, Matthew, and completely normal to boot, whatever that may mean. Just ask Marx and Dickens how normal it was, or the millions who came to America escaping the hell that was much of Europe. All Oliver Twist needed was a bit more confidence, so he could start spending again…

The one thing that is a problem is where there are high debts, as there certainly are across the eurozone. If prices fall, then those debt ratios are just going to get worse and worse. At a certain point, they will be unsustainable. But in that case, surely the right response is to deal with the debt, not the deflation. Many eurozone countries have debts that they probably won’t ever be able to repay.

If they thought inflation was going to deal with that for them, they will be disappointed. It isn’t going to happen. By far the best thing for them to do now would be to restructure their debts. The ECB will throw everything it has at fighting deflation. But it is probably not going to work – and it might well be better if it didn’t.

See, Matthew, you actually know some things. But you don’t understand them. I know, if only because you end with this cracker:

Deflation is not nearly as bad as everyone thinks.

I don’t really know what to say in the face of so much, what do you call this, nonsense, propaganda, ignorance? I write because I don’t like what happens to the people that folks like Matthew Lynn couldn’t care less about, as long as their little economic theories seem to fit whatever little rich lives they lead.

I have nothing with that. I have something with the people. And I therefore find comments like the ones above by Matthew Lynn repulsive.

Here’s real life:

Is The Greek Economy Improving?

The Guardian’s Greece correspondent, Helena Smith, is deeply sceptical about the heralded recovery having any real impact on the ground. “The ‘success story’ peddled by the government differs wildly to what life is really like on the ground – with plummeting living standards, unprecedented unemployment and the inability of most to keep up with bills, including the barrage of new taxes that can change with lightning speed on any given day,” she says.

“Five years down the road the crisis, to great degree, has been ‘normalised’ but the disconnect is evident in the collateral damage caused by the massive devaluation Greece has been forced to undergo in return for emergency funding: suicides, homelessness, a middle class pauperised by austerity. “And all eclipsed by a level of uncertainty, shared by all who live in a country whose debt load – the biggest impediment to real economic recovery – has actually grown since the crisis began.” [..]

Catherine Moschonas, from Thessaloniki: “Wages still much lower than a few years ago but taxes are MUCH higher, especially land taxes – the state is now taxing real estate that people can’t find tenants for and can’t sell because nobody’s buying. Generally policies are driving rather than limiting tax evasion – otherwise people can’t make ends meet (quite apart from perceived lack of social justice in measures taken).

“For families, healthcare increasingly a major financial concern as hospitals or sections close and social insurance is cut – but most people can’t afford private healthcare. People with relatively decent paychecks are one sick parent away from disaster. I don’t see any sign that things are improving”

Greece’s Recovery Is Deceptive

A small economic recovery is little consolation when one considers that in the past 5 years of recession, the Greek economy has lost a fifth of its total volume. And in a country that has seen unemployment rise to 28%, a drop of half a percentage point is not particularly noticeable.

.. the conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras desperately needs successes to mobilize his core voters. But real life is not helping him much. Growth in Greece is still very fragile, restructuring of inefficient state apparatuses is still very slow, tax avoidance has not been clamped down on, privatization is stalling, and austerity measures are driving more and more people to despair – younger generations in particular are struggling with a dearth of opportunities ..

.. even in these unusual circumstances, the Greek parties are not in a position to achieve even a basic consensus on how to rescue the country. Even now, they are feverishly preparing for a new election instead of trying to establish some political stability and continuity. Leading members of Syriza have even suggested demanding leftover war reparations from Germany and use them in calculations for a new budget. This might sound like a farce from the periphery of the eurozone, but it is testament to the backwardness of political culture in Greece. Anyone who wants to help the Greek people needs to keep their politicians and governments under control first.

Greeks Struggle To Get By Despite Economic ‘Recovery’

The number of Greeks at risk of poverty has more than doubled in the last five years – from about 20% in 2008 to 44% in 2013, according to a report by the International Labor Organization.

Sorry if I get too emotional for your taste at times, but I have a hard time with sheer and especially mean hubris. Telling people things are great since their basic necessities just got cheaper, exactly BECAUSE they can no longer afford them (because that IS deflation), that must be the pits. Still, it’s how 99% of economists ‘understand’ the world. Now you know why it’s all such a mess.

OPEC Presents: QE4 and Deflation

Nov 282014

November 28, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:58 pm Finance Tagged with: BoJ, debt, deflation, deleveraging, ECB, eurozone, Fed, Italy, Japan, oil, OPEC, QE 7 Responses »

NPC Thanksgiving turkeys for the President Nov 26 1929

Thinking plummeting oil prices are good for the economy is a mistake. They instead, as I said only yesterday in The Price Of Oil Exposes The True State Of The Economy, point out how bad the global economy is doing. QE has been able to inflate stock prices way beyond anything remotely looking fundamental, but energy prices have now deflated instead of stocks. Something had to give at some point. Turns out, central banks weren’t able to inflate oil prices on top of everything else. Stocks and bonds are much easier to artificially inflate than commodities are.

The Fed and ECB and BOJ and PBoC may of course yet try to invest in oil, they’re easily crazy enough to try, but it will be too late even if they did. In that sense, one might argue that OPEC – or rather Saudi Arabia – has gifted us QE4, but the blessings of the ‘low oil price stimulus’ will of necessity be both mixed and short-lived. Because while the lower prices may free some money for consumers, not nearly all of the freed up ‘spending space’ will end up actually being spent. So in the end that’s a net loss as far as spending goes.

The ‘OPEC Q4′ may also keep some companies from going belly up for a while longer due to falling energy costs, but the flipside is many other companies will go bust because of the lower prices, first among them energy industry firms. Moreover, as we’re already seeing, those firms’ market values are certain to plummet. And, see yesterday’s essay linked above, many of eth really large investors, banks, equity funds et al are heavily invested in oil and gas and all that comes with it. And they are about to take some major hits as well. OPEC may have gifted us QE4, but it gave us another present at the same time: deflation in overdrive.

You can’t force people to spend, not if you’re a government, not if you’re a central bank. And if you try regardless, chances are you wind up scaring people into even less spending. That’s the perfect picture of Japan right there. There’s no such thing as central bank omnipotence, and this is where that shows maybe more than anywhere else. And if you can’t force people to spend, you can’t create growth either, so that myth is thrown out with the same bathwater in one fell swoop.

Some may say and think deflation is a good thing, but I say deflation kills economies and societies. Deflation is not about lower prices, it’s about lower spending. Which will down the line lead to lower prices, but then the damage has already been done, it’s just that nobody noticed, because everyone thinks inflation and deflation are about prices, and therefore looks exclusively at prices.

It’s like a parasite can live in your body for a long time before you show symptoms of being sick, but it’s very much there the whole time. A lower gas price may sound nice, but if you don’t understand why prices fall, you risk something like that monster from Alien popping up and out.

I had started writing this when I saw a few nicely fitting articles. First, at MarketWatch, they love the notion of the stimulus effects. They even think a ‘consumer-spending explosion’ is upon us. They’re not going to like what they see. That is, not when all the numbers have gone through their third revision in 6 months or so.

OPEC Has Ushered In QE4

Welcome to the new era of QE4. As if on cue, OPEC stepped in just as monetary policy (at least the Fed’s) has dried up. Central bankers have nothing on the oil cartel that did just what everyone expected, but has still managed to crush oil prices. Protest away about the 1% getting richer and how prior QE hasn’t trickled down to those who really need it, but an oil cartel is coming to the rescue of America and others in the world right now.

It’s hard to imagine a “more wide-reaching and effective stimulus measure than to lower the cost of gas at the pump for everyone globally,” says Alpari U.K.’s Joshua Mahoney. “For this reason, we are effectively entering the era of QE4, with motorists able to allocate more of their money towards luxury items, while firms are now able to lower costs of production thus impacting the bottom line and raising profits.”

The impact of that could be “bigger than anything that has come before,” says Mahoney, who expects that theory to be tested and proved, via sales on Black Friday and the holiday season overall. In short, a consumer-spending explosion as we race to the malls on a full tank of cheap gas. Tossing in his own two cents in the wake of that OPEC decision, legendary investor Jim Rogers says it’s a “fundamental positive for anybody who uses oil, who uses energy.” Just not great if you’re from Canada, Russia or Australia, he says. Or if you’re the ECB, fretting about price deflation. Or until it starts crushing shale producers.

Bloomberg, talking about Europe, has a less cheery tone.

Eurozone Inflation Slows as Draghi Tees Up QE Debate

Eurozone inflation slowed in November to match a five-year low, prodding the European Central Bank toward expanding its unprecedented stimulus program. Consumer prices rose 0.3% from a year earlier, the EU statistics office said today. Unemployment held at 11.5% in October [..] While the slowdown is partly related to a drop in oil prices, President Mario Draghi, who may unveil more pessimistic forecasts after a meeting of policy makers on Dec. 4, says he wants to raise inflation “as fast as possible.” [..]

“The only crumb of comfort for the ECB – and it is not much – is that November’s renewed drop in inflation was entirely due to an increased year-on-year drop in energy prices,” said Howard Archer at IHS. The data are “worrying news” for the central bank, he said. Data yesterday showed Spanish consumer prices dropped 0.5% this month from a year ago, matching the fastest rate of deflation since 2009. In Germany, Europe’s largest economy, inflation slowed to the weakest since February 2010. [..]

Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, a long-running opponent to buying government bonds, today highlighted the positive consequence of low oil prices. “There’s a stimulant effect coming from the energy prices – it’s like a mini stimulus package,” he said in Berlin.

Sure, there’s a stimulant effect. But that’s not the only effect. While I’m happy to see Weidmann apparently willing to fight Draghi and his pixies over ECB QE programs, I would think he understands what the other effect is. And if he does, he should be far more worried than he lets on.

But then I stumbled upon a long special report by Gavin Jones for Reuters on Italy, and he does provide intelligent info on that other effect of plunging oil prices. Deflation. As I said, it eats societies alive. I cut two-thirds of the article, but there’s still plenty left to catch the heart of the topic. For anyone who doesn’t understand what deflation really is, or how it works, I think that is an excellent crash course.

Why Italy’s Stay-Home Shoppers Terrify The Eurozone

Italy is stuck in a rut of diminishing expectations. Numbed by years of wage freezes, and skeptical the government can improve their economic fortunes, Italians are hoarding what money they have and cutting back on basic purchases, from detergent to windows. Weak demand has led companies to lower prices in the hope of luring people back into shops. This summer, consumer prices in Italy fell on a year-on-year basis for the first time in a half-century ..

Falling prices eat into company profits and lead to pay cuts and job losses, further depressing demand. The result: Italy is being sucked into a deflationary spiral similar to the one that has afflicted Japan’s economy for much of the past two decades. That is the nightmare scenario that policymakers, led by European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, are desperate to avoid.

The euro zone’s third-biggest economy is not alone. Deflation – or continuously falling consumer prices – is considered a risk for the whole currency bloc, and particularly countries on its southern rim. Prices have fallen for 20 months in Greece and five in Spain, for example. Both countries are suffering through deep cuts in salaries and state welfare. Yet Italy, a large economy with a huge public debt, is the country causing most worry. [..]

Like Japan, Italy has one of the world’s oldest and most rapidly aging populations – the kind of people who don’t spend. “It is young people who spend more and take risks,” says Sergio De Nardis, at thinktank Nomisma. In recent years, young people have been the hardest hit by layoffs, he says. Many have left the country to seek work elsewhere. People tend to spend more when they see a bright future. Italian confidence has steadily eroded over the past two decades … In Italy, as in Japan, the lack of economic growth has become chronic.

Underpinning economists’ worries is Italy’s biggest handicap: a huge national debt equal to 132% of national output and still growing. Rising prices make it easier for high-debt countries like Italy to pay the fixed interest rates on their bonds. And debt is usually measured as a proportion of national output, so when output grows, debt shrinks. Because output is measured in money, rising prices – inflation – boost output even if economic activity is stagnant, as in Italy. But if activity is stagnant and prices don’t rise, then the debt-to-output ratio will increase. [..]

Sebastiano Salzone, a diminutive 33-year-old from the poor southern region of Calabria, left with his wife five years ago to run the historic Cafe Fiume on Via Salaria, a traditionally busy shopping street near the center of Rome. Salzone was excited by the challenge. But after four years of grinding recession, his business is struggling to survive. “When I took over they warned me demand was weak and advised me not to raise prices. But now, I’m being forced to cut them,” he says. [..] Despite the lower prices, sales have dropped 40%, or 500 euros a day, in the last three years. [..]

For hard-pressed individuals, low and falling prices can seem a godsend; but low prices lead to business closures, lower wages and job cuts – a lethal spiral. Since Italy entered recession in 2008 it has lost 15% of its manufacturing capacity and more than 80,000 shops and businesses. Those that remain are slashing prices in a battle to survive.

Home fixtures maker Benedetto Iaquone says people are now only changing their windows when they fall apart. To hold onto his €500,000-a-year business, Iaquone says he is cutting prices. By doing so, he is helping fuel the chain of deflation from consumers to other companies.

In Italy’s largest supermarket chains, up to 40% of products are now sold below their recommended retail price, according to sector officials. “There is a constant erosion of our margins,” says Vege chief Santambrogio.

What Italy would look like after a decade of Japan-style deflation is grim to imagine. It is already among the world’s most sluggish economies, with youth unemployment at 43%. As a member of a currency bloc, Rome’s options are limited [..] Italy’s budget has to follow European Union rules.

Lasting deflation would force more companies out of business, reduce already stagnant wages and raise unemployment further [..] The inevitable rise in its public debt could eventually lead to a default and a forced exit from the euro.

Many in southern Europe say the EU should abandon its strict fiscal rules and invest heavily to create jobs. They also say Germany, the region’s strongest economy, should do more to push up its own wages and prices. Mediterranean countries need to price their products lower than Germany to make up for the fact that their goods – particularly engineered products such as cars – are less attractive. But with German inflation at a mere 0.5%, maintaining a decent price difference with Germany is forcing southern European countries into outright deflation.

Italy’s policymakers are trying to stop the drop. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi cut income tax in May by up to €80 a month for the country’s low earners. But so far the emergency measures have had little effect – partly because Italians don’t really believe in them. A survey by the Euromedia agency showed that, despite the €80 cut, 63% of Italians actually think taxes will rise in the medium-term. Early evidence suggests most Italians are saving the extra money in their paychecks. If so, it will be reminiscent of similar attempts to boost demand in Japan in the late 1990s. The Japanese hoarded the windfalls offered by the government rather than spending them.

That same process plays out, as we speak, in a lot more countries, both in Europe and in many other parts of the world: South America, Southeast Asia etc.

Deflation erodes societies, and it guts entire economies like so much fish. Deflation is already a given in Japan, and in most of not all of southern Europe. Where countries might have saved themselves if only they weren’t part of the eurozone.

If Italy had the lira or some other currency, it could devalue it by 20% or so and have a fighting chance. As things stand now, the only option is to keep going down and hope that another country with the same currency Italy has, i.e. Germany, finds some way to boost its own growth. And even if Germany would, at some point in the far future, what part of that would trickle down to Italy? So what’s Renzi’s answer? An €80 a month tax cut for people who paid few taxes to begin with.

Deflation is not lower prices. Deflation is people not spending, then stores lowering their prices because nobody’s buying, then companies firing their employees, and then going broke. Rinse and repeat. Less spending leads to lower prices leads to more unemployment leads to less spending power. If that is not clear, don’t worry; you’ll see so much of it you own’t be able to miss it.

And don’t think the US is immune. Most of the Black Friday and Christmas sales will be plastic, i.e. more debt, and more debt means less future spending power. Unless you have a smoothly growing economy, but that’s not going to happen when Europe, Japan and soon China will be in deflation.

And yes, oil at $50-60-70 a barrel will accelerate the process. But it won’t be the main underlying cause. Deflation was baked into the cake from the moment that large scale debt deleveraging became inevitable, and you can take any moment between the Reagan administration, which first started raising debt levels, to 2008 for that. And all the combined central bank stimulus measures will mean a whole lot more debt deleveraging on top of what there already was.

We’ll get back to this topic. A lot.

Hugh Hendry And The Deflationary Zeitgeist

Nov 202014

November 20, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:10 pm Finance Tagged with: god, hedge fund, homeless, Hugh Hendry, jobless, judgment, profits, Zero Hedge 9 Responses »

Jack Delano Colored drivers entrance, U.S. 1, NY Avenue, Washington, DC Jun 1940

It’s funny how things roll at times. When I wrote yesterday’s Making Money While The World Burns, and quoted Hugh Hendry, one of my heroes – well, close, he’s not Ali, but I love the man for his brain -, I hesitated, but thought his words were a great way to start a discussion on what people do when faced with certain conundrums. I certainly never meant to attack Hugh, though words can always be construed to mean things they were not meant to mean.

David Stockman picked up the essay (Jim Kunstler told me to use that word) and retitled it Making Money While The World Burns – The Troubling Case Of Hugh Hendry. Bless David for all the great work he does, and I would never even suggest he shouldn’t add that bit, that’s entirely his prerogative, but I myself would never call Hugh Hendry a ‘troubling case’.

I merely wanted to get a discussion going, and maybe to get people thinking about what they choose and why. Not to judge anyone, who am I to do that, but to get people to ask why they act the way they do, and what it is that makes them tick.

If I would want to judge anyone, it would be the politicians and central bankers who pretend they serve the public and then turn on a dime and screw that same public. Hugh Hendry doesn’t pretend to be anything he’s not. However, I can still ask questions about why he chooses to do what he does, and use that as a mirror, for lack of a better term, to gauge where I stand, what I think, and put that out there for my readers.

But I’m not Hugh Hendry, I’m not a hedge-fund manager, and I don’t morally judge people or tell them what to do and what not. That would be like starting a religion, separating right from wrong for other people, and I have no design on that. I’ll admit I thought about that religion thing in the past, but that was because it seemed the greatest way to get girls, not because I want to tell anyone what to think or do. As things went, I started a band, and that worked just fine, thank you very much.

Short story long, Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden today posted a video and text excerpts of Hugh explaining his mindset, and included snippets of my ‘essay’, saying “Raúl Ilargi Meijer has a different perspective on Hendry’s change of tack”. And I don’t even know that I do. I’m just less focused on the short term, and the potential financial profits involved, than Hugh is. As I said yesterday, I think about the 50% increase in homeless kids in the States and the 50%+ jobless rates in southern Europe, and wonder if that justifies the drive for monetary profits.

But that’s just me. And I find it curious enough that that moral divide is never being breached in all the stuff I read every single day. It seems so obvious to ask that question. But that’s not the same as saying I judge Hugh Hendry, or anyone else, for not bringing it up, let alone living up to any conclusions I draw from it for myself. If there’s anything we need around here, it’s independent minds and neurons, not identical replicas.

So, Hugh talks about how he was a ‘bear’ and saw the error of his ways and is now a bull. But that’s just in as far as his ‘duties’ towards his hedge-fund clients are concerned. It doesn’t say anything about his longer term expectations. Which, I venture, have not changed, but merely been relocated to more remote locations of his – pretty brilliant – mind. And the gist of my question is, I guess, how other people process that short vs longer term divergence, if they are smart enough to see what Hugh does.

What Hugh Hendry implies that he got ‘wrong’ is that a few years ago, he saw, and understood, what was happening, and acted on it. And it’s not that he misunderstood, but that his acting on it did not garner the short-term profits he claims he’s tasked with making – as a fund manager -.

Because the financial system – as Hugh knows – may be screwed three ways to Sunday, but central banks have prevented it from showing its – fatal – injuries, by dressing it in layer upon layer of gauge and band-aids made of and paid for by the real economy’s present and – especially – future wealth and labor.

In the end that means you’re making money off of other people’s misery, be it in the present or the future. And that is a stark choice. In my view. If an economy stops growing, the only profit opportunities left involve taking something away from someone. Obviously, there’s tons of people who’ll swear our economy is still growing, but they’ll find neither yours truly nor Hugh Hendry in their camp.

Here’s Tyler Durden’s piece, with Hugh Hendry video and partial transcript:

Hugh Hendry Live 1: “It Felt Like The Sun Only Rose To Humiliate Me”

In the first of three interviews with MoneyWeek’s Merryn Somerset Webb, Hugh Hendry, manager of the Eclectica Fund, talks about what it takes to be a good hedge fund manager – and how he learned to stop worrying and love central banks. Key excerpts (click link above for full transcript):

MSW: What makes a successful hedge-fund manager and whether you are, under that definition, a successful manager.

Hendry: I think I’ve always answered that question by relating back to the ability to conceive of a contentious posture. I think if I was to quote from Fight Club, I think there’s a famous saying “Would you rather…” my children would say ,“Would you rather upset God or have God just ignore you?” There’s a degree to which being a successful macro-manager is upsetting, not only God, but to the rest of the world, if you will. By being out there with the articulation of qualitatively intelligent argument, which just isn’t shared by the majority. But which can stand the test of time and come to actually define the future. That is what global macro is all about.

With regard to language the notion of ‘bullish’ and ‘bearish’, I think, does an injustice to the complexity of the arguments that are necessary to construct a global macro hedge fund. I think if I had my time again, I would have been saying that we’re actually, perhaps, guilty of the misconstruing of a bull market in equities, for what is actually the ongoing degradation in the soundness of the fiat monetary system. I think that’s what I was trying to say.

MSW: You had given in to a bull market that you had refused to accept previously.

Hendry: The last time I was really angry was late 2010-2011. Where the market, in its wisdom, had yet to configure the changing economic landscape, and it was perceiving that the economy in Europe and elsewhere was recovering. I thought that was just insane, that we weren’t capturing the kind of deflationary zeitgeist that was approaching. I have to say when I look back in the last three years it feels as if the sun only rose each day to humiliate me after that point.[..]

But the mea culpa, that I think is very necessary in that I found myself unable to forgive the Federal Reserve and the other central banks for, if you will, bailing out Wall Street from the excess of 2008. I just couldn’t get over it. I luxuriated in the polemics of Marc Faber and James Grant and Nassim Taleb, in our own country, Albert Edwards, et al. I luxuriated as they ranted and it was fine for them to rant. But I am charged with the responsibility of making money and not being some moral guardian and certainly not a moral curmudgeon. I had to get over that. So again, back to my infamous letter of last year.

That was cathartic for me to say “You know what? I get it.” I think if we’re going to try and explain the qualitative arguments behind why we are more receptive to the notion of not only left tails where markets can fall, but the right-hand tail of the expression, where markets can actually continue to rise if not to accelerate. [..] So I really feel very, very isolated from their view of the world. Arguably, we’re talking about the here and now and the future’s a long time. But in the future, I’m sure our paths can converge once more.

MSW: Why do you think that [macro funds] as whole is failing to make money? What’s going on there?

Hendry: I can reflect on my own difficulties, if you will. What I’ve found is that macro is distinguished, I believe, by superior risk control. It’s almost analogous to a disaster insurance programme. In 2008, all the good macro managers, they made you money. That’s what you pay them for. The world became profoundly unsettling and you cashed in your insurance policy. Today, I question the relevancy of that disaster insurance. In a world where the central banks seem to have your back, seem to be underwriting risks and global asset prices, do you require that intense scrutiny of risk?

MSW: So your basic point here is that if the central banks have your back, there’s no need to have the same kind of risk controls that you used to have.

Hendry: There is less need. Less need. I tell you, I was at a conference with some of the great and the good global macro managers in September in New York and I asked them all the question, “If the S&P is down 12% what do you do? Are you selling more or are you buying?” Guess what? They’re all buying. So the central banks have created a behavioural tic which is becoming self-reinforcing and I believe we saw another manifestation of that behaviour in October.

But Raúl Ilargi Meijer has a different perspective on Hendry’s change of tack…

Hendry, I think, is as bearish (or negative) about the – future of the – world as he has been for a long time, only he’s decided to see things from his fund manager point of view, and to ride the crest of the waves the central banks have tsunamied towards our shores. He’s chosen to make a buck off of them waves, even as he’s aware of the damage they’ll will do once they hit land. In the exact same way as a surfer who sees a tsunami as merely a set of great waves to ride on. And, no value judgment involved, but that’s not what I see.

He sees the world going to hell in a handbasket (and Hendry recognizes that very much, that’s not why he shifted gears from bear to bull) and his response is to grab as much money and wealth as he can (for his investors … ). [..]

Hugh Hendry sees the world in an extremely bearish way, he sees hell, the handbasket, brimstone and far worse. But he wants to profit – in name of his investors (?!) – from the very mechanism that drives the world there: the power central banks and governments have been allotted, and the way they use it to protect the interests of investors, banks, insurance companies and uber rich individuals, all at the expense of booting the 90% who make up the real world and the real economy, ever deeper into the mud.

Seeking to profit from that is a choice. Hendry makes it, and so do many others, even many inside the 90%. Who mistakenly dream they’ll be able to hold on to those profits (they’ll wake up yet, and wish they had before). The whole idea of scraping out what you can before the tsunami hits is not my thing.

I don’t think Hugh Hendry and I see the world through hugely different eyes at all. It’s just that since I don’t have uber rich clients I tell myself I need to make even richer, I have the liberty to wonder what Hendry’s choices mean for the bottom layers of society. And yes, I also think that societies cease to function if the poor get too poor. Not very Hobbesian or Darwinian, am I?

By all means, let’s keep the conversation going, and let everyone decide for him-her-self where (s)he stands. Hugh Hendry thinks in money terms, and I tend to feel that’s a waste of a brilliant mind. But that’s not a judgment. It’s merely a question. And a pretty well defined one at that: Is a brilliant mind better engaged making money for the rich or trying to alleviate the sorrows of the poor? I can’t answer that for you.

Debt, Propaganda And Now Deflation

Nov 132014

November 13, 2014 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:26 pm Finance Tagged with: China, CPI, debt, deflation, Europe, oil, plague, PPI 14 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Negro woman who has never been out of Mississippi July 1936

Looks I have to return to the deflation topic. I’m a bit hesitant about it, because the discussion always gets distorted by varying definitions and a whole bunch of semi-religious issues. The Automatic Earth has for many years said that an immense bout of deflation is inevitable because of global debt levels, and it’s all only gotten a lot worse since we first said that. Our governments and central banks have ‘fought’ deflation with more debt, and that was always the stupidest idea in human history. Or at least, most of us were stupid for believing it would work, or was even intended to.

Just so we don’t get into yet more confusion, i probably need to explain that the debt deflation we’re talking about here is not some subdivision like consumer inflation or price inflation or cookie inflation, those are just hollow and meaningless terms. Debt deflation is deflation caused by too much debt, and the deleveraging it must and will lead to. Deflation does not equal falling prices, those are merely an effect of it.

The reason this matters is that when you equate inflation and deflation with rising or falling prices, you’re not going to be able to know when you actually have deflation. Because prices can rise for all sorts of reasons. Inflation/deflation is the money/credit supply in an economy multiplied by the speed at which money is spent in that economy, the velocity of money.

It should be obvious that prices for some items can still rise, certainly initially, when deflation sets in. Producers that see less sales can try to raise prices for their remaining buyers. Basic necessities will always be needed. Governments can raise taxes. Rising/falling prices tell us only part of the story, and with a considerable time delay.

Ergo: rising/falling prices are a lagging factor, and if you look at them only, you will have missed the point where deflation has set in. What follows, obviously, is that you can’t measure deflation by looking at consumer prices (CPI) or production prices (PPI) numbers. You’d be way behind the curve. CPI and PPI tell you something, but they don’t tell what causes falling or rising prices. And that is a valuable thing to know.

I see even John Mauldin in this week’s The Last Argument of Central Banks talk about ‘good deflation’, but that doesn’t exist any more than cookie inflation, sorry, John. Prices for some items may fall due to innovation etc. while an economy booms, but if you call that deflation, you’ll miss what’s really deflation when it arrives.

Deflation is always bad. It either occurs when money/credit is so short that people can not get their hands on it no matter how hard and productive they work, and how much demand there is for their products, or it occurs when people are too poor, too much in debt or too reluctant to part with what they have.

In a deflation, people spend only what they absolutely must, provided even that they can afford to, which leads to large swaths of an economy being liquidated. Falling prices lead to falling wages lead to ever further falling prices lead to factory closings lead to more people who can’t afford to spend which leads to closings which leads to less spending which leads to faling prices etc. This continues until the debt has been deleveraged. Governments will lose tax revenue and raise taxes, but soon enough they will in quick succession disband and be replaced, rinse and repeat until even essential services can no longer be provided.

Until recently, a shrinking money/credit supply was very clearly not in the cards. Central banks have gone absolutely nuts in their stimulus plans, and this has artificially kept price levels up somewhat, though far less than they, and scores of ‘experts’ had hoped and expected. Now that game, too, is up. Japan went crazier than ever the other day out of fear that falling oil prices would sink consumer spending even more, but the US Fed has cut QE. That is an admission it has failed to do what it officially was supposed to, not the sign of triumph it’s made out to be, as in ‘the economy is doing so well, it doesn’t need our support anymore’.

Central banks have spent like maniacs, and consumer spending only keeps falling. Just ask Japan. And while you’re at it, ask them how entrenched deflation can become even in an economy that still has the benefit of growing world market to sell its products in. We won’t have any such benefit. The world has stopped growing, and there’s no massaging of numbers left strong enough to hide it. Not that it won’t be tried. As I said earlier this week, we now live in a world built on debt and propaganda.

Since QE and other ‘plans’ never reached the real economy, most nations’ money supplies have also either fallen or at best remained stagnant. We have the perfect set-up for deflation, and we therefore have deflation. It hasn’t reached the US yet, though we should be careful with that because the numbers being reported are notoriously flaky. But it has reached Europe and Asia. Which means the US is only a matter of time. And people, reluctantly, start taking notice. Steve Hochberg and Pete Kendall penned the following for Bob Prechter’s Elliott Wave:

Deflation Rearing its Ugly Head in Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Ways Around the Globe

According to the latest figures, deflation is now perched on China’s doorstep. In September, China’s consumer price index was up 1.6%, but its producer price index fell 1.8%. The CPI increase was its lowest since 2010. [..] in September, demand for electric power, a “bellwether for China economic activity,” fell 8.4% from the prior month, the second straight monthly decline.

“Deflation is the real risk in China,” stated the chief economist at a Hong Kong bank. In Europe, deflation is no longer a possible risk; it’s reality. In September, eleven of fifteen European Union members experienced lower goods prices, and the latest quarter-over-quarter Eurozone growth in real GDP is zero.

With Alice-in-Wonderland naiveté, U.S. financial media place the United States outside the risk of global deflation. Headlines talk of “Mild Inflation” and insist that the U.S. will gain “From Good Deflation.” On October 14, Bloomberg reported that consumer spending is strong enough “to steer the U.S. economy safely through the shoals of deteriorating global growth and the turbulent financial markets.” In early September, we stated that it was only a matter of time before economic weakness and deflation (which will be anything but good) jump the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and arrive in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Labor Department, real wages for full-time employees averaged $790 a week in the third quarter, about $1 less than in the third quarter of 2007. “There’s been no net gain for workers since 1999.” In recent months, spending has been uneven. Retail sales fell 0.3% in September. Most economists are baffled: “one of the great mysteries is why the U.S. has lacked inflation despite all the money being pumped into the economy.” A study by the St. Louis Fed finds that the answer is “a dramatic increase in the private sector’s willingness to hoard money instead of spend it.”

Note: the ‘hoarding meme’ is habitually used by economists, re: Bernanke and his Chinese savings glut, to point out situations which are more often than not characterized by people being too poor to spend, not sitting on anything at all. For economists, if people don’t spend, it must be because they save, never because they’re poor. I kid you not.

For years now, the Fed along with most economists have anticipated the imminent return of inflation, but it continues stubbornly subdued. This long-term chart above of the CPI shows a succession of lower highs since the early 1980s, as inflation turned into disinflation, which is on the cusp of leading to outright deflation. Some argue that the CPI is rigged to show milder levels of inflation, but the bottom graph shows the same steady move toward the zero line in the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, an alternate inflation measure favored by the U.S. Fed.

When outright deflation hits, recognition of it will play an important role. Once its presence becomes widely observed, investors and the debt markets will belatedly take defensive action. Eventually, notes Conquer the Crash, “default and fear of default exacerbate the trend as it causes creditors to reduce lending. A downward ‘spiral’ begins feeding on pessimism just as the previous boom fed on optimism.”

Moving from theory to practice, we end up with our old friend Ambrose. Though he confuses inflation and consumer prices, and thinks they’re one and the same thing, he does have useful numbers:

Spreading Deflation Across East Asia Threatens Fresh Debt Crisis

Deflation is becoming lodged in all the economic strongholds of East Asia. It is happening faster and going deeper than almost anybody expected just months ago, and is likely to find its way to Europe through currency warfare in short order. Factory gate prices are falling in China, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore. Some 82% of the items in the producer price basket are deflating in China. The figures is 90% in Thailand, and 97% in Singapore.

These include machinery, telecommunications, and electrical equipment, as well as commodities. Chetan Ahya from Morgan Stanley says deflationary forces are “getting entrenched” across much of Asia. This risks a “rapid worsening of the debt dynamic” for a string of countries that allowed their debt ratios to reach record highs during the era of Fed largesse. Debt levels for the region as a whole (ex-Japan) have jumped from 147% to 207% of GDP in six years.

These countries face a Sisyphean Task. They are trying to deleverage, but the slowdown in nominal GDP caused by falling inflation is always one step ahead of them. “Debt to GDP has risen despite these efforts,” he said. If this sounds familiar, it should be. It is exactly what is happening in Italy, France, the Netherlands, and much of the eurozone. Data from Nomura show that the composite PPI index for the whole of emerging Asia – including India – turned negative in September.

China itself is now one shock away from a deflation trap. Chinese PPI has been negative for 32 months as the economy grapples with overcapacity in everything from steel, cement, glass, chemicals, and shipbuilding, to solar panels. It dropped to minus 2.2% in October. The sheer scale of over-investment is epic.

The country funnelled $5 trillion into new plant and fixed capital last year – as much as Europe and the US combined – even after the Communist Party vowed to clear away excess capacity in its Third Plenum reforms. Old habits die hard. Consumer prices are starting to track factory prices with a long delay. Headline inflation dropped to 1.6% in October. This is so far below the 3.5% target of the People’s Bank of China that it looks increasingly like a policy mistake. Core inflation is down to 1.4%.

China has flirted with deflation before: during its banking crisis in the late 1990s, and again during the West’s dotcom recession from 2001-2002. Both episodes proved manageable. This time the level of debt is greater by orders of magnitude, with a large chunk in trusts, wealth products, and other parts of the shadow banking nexus, and a further $1.2 trillion in “carry trade” loans from Hong Kong.

Standard Chartered thinks total debt has reached 250% of GDP. This is roughly $26 trillion, the same size as the US and Japanese commercial banking systems put together, and therefore a headache for us all. Larry Brainard from Trusted Sources says China is sliding towards a European debt-compound trap. “It’s arithmetic.Deflation will kill you if you’re leveraged. It is just a question of how quickly. We don’t know how big the problem is because China is playing a game of three-card Monte and moving the debt to different buckets,” he said.

Asia is not yet in a full-blown currency war, but no country can stand idly by as neighbours dump toxic deflationary waste on their front lawn. Korea has threatened to force down the won, pari passu with the yen. The central bank of Taiwan has been intervening. These skirmishes are happening in a region of festering grievances and territorial disputes, with no Nato-style security structure – or for that matter EU-style soft governance – to damp down fires.

[Chinese] purchases of foreign bonds have dropped to zero, down from $35bn a month at the start of the year. The yuan has appreciated 22% against the yen since June, and 50% since mid-2012. It is up 12% against the euro since the early summer. China is in effect strapped to the rocketing dollar through its quasi-peg, increasingly a torture machine.

George Magnus from UBS says this cannot continue. “What is happening in the property market is the tip of the iceberg for the whole economy. China will have to resort to monetary reflation over the winter, and I think this will include a lower yuan. We are heading into a currency war,” he said.

We have the debt. And we recognize it. Still, the line politics and media feed us is that more debt can be a good thing, that we need more debt in order to attain what they like to call ‘escape velocity’ from the financial crisis caused by that same debt. Oil on fire.

We have the propaganda. We don’t always recognize it for what it is, but the, that’s the idea, isn’t it? It’s to make people think that things are not really what they really are. That we need to spend more public funds on saving banks, not saving people, or else armageddon. There’s hardly a news story left today that is not to an extent phrased by propaganda.

And now we have deflation. Which is not the falling prices, though they are a – delayed – symptom. Still, other symptoms are as valid, as nobody is spending. Mass unemployment in southern Europe is a symptom. West Texas oil at $74 dollars today is one. The Chinese economy, allegedly still growing at $7.5%, but at 250% debt-to-GDP, is another. Throw in 207% debt-to-GDP debt levels across southeast Asia.

With deflation becoming a daily topic in our propagandistic media, despite the fact that governments and central banks are vehemently allergic to it (for good reasons), rest assured that we are entering a next phase of the crisis. Just not one that they would like you to think we are. When debt starts being deleveraged for real, deflation cannot be avoided. And debt must be deleveraged, we can’t sit on it till Kingdom Come and keep adding more while we’re at it. That was never in the cards. And we’ve accumulated too much of it to ever outgrow it. We simply can’t sell or make enough iPhones to accomplish that. Or eat enough burgers, hard as we try.

Our world, our life, has been built on debt and propaganda for many years. They have kept us from noticing how poorly we are doing. But now a third element has entered the foundation of our societies, and it’s set to eat away at everything that has – barely – kept the entire edifice from crumbling apart. Deflation.

It’s time to check where your basic needs will come from when it becomes first harder and them impossible to obtain them from the sources you have been used to. And please, get out of debt. Debt during deflation is a cruel and unforgiving mistress. Think of deflation as a biblical plague.

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