By Charles Hugh Smith, OFTWOMINDS
China’s “nuclear option”–selling its vast stash of U.S. Treasuries to wreak havoc on the U.S. economy and interest rates–has been downgraded by the flood of U.S. investors who have exited stocks in favor of Treasury bonds.

Go to my main site at www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
for the full posts and archives.

More articles from Charles Hugh Smith….

The Daily Reckoning

Since I am known as something of a gold bug, a lot of people write to me about gold, but since I am a paranoid lunatic, I don’t read their letters, mostly because I now call myself Marvelous Macho Grande (MMG), figuring that an established alias could potentially come in handy when the prices of gold, silver and oil shoot higher and higher as inflation in consumer prices starts going parabolic as a result of the despicable Federal Reserve creating so, so, so much money, especially so that the despicable federal government can borrow and spend that selfsame so, so, so much money.

So, you can see how a dramatic, romantic new name like Marvelous Macho Grande (MMG) would perfectly suit a guy like me, which is a guy with a theoretical massive coming increase in wealth from investing according to The Mogambo Perfect Portfolio (TMPP), which uses the Austrian school of economics (see Mises.org) and the last few thousands of years of history as Absolutely Compelling Reasons (ACR) to invest in gold, silver and oil when the government is acting so insanely bizarre, as does ours now, blithely deficit-spending a monstrous 11% of GDP, now with a national debt nearing a heart-stopping 100% of GDP, and allowing the Federal Reserve to continue to create So Freaking Much (SFM) money that, like creating too much money always does, it creates booms and bubbles that predictably, inevitably, unstoppably, disastrously go bust, leaving you, sadly, worse off than before.

So, you can see how I am not in the mood to answer emails from people who, deep down in their hearts, are pleading, “Oh, please help me, Masterful Mogambo Guru, or Marvelous Macho Grande (MMG), or whatever in the hell your name is this week: Sadly, I have not been following your terrific advice to buy gold, silver and oil as the One True Way (OTW) to end up with a lot of money without working for it, and now I need one of your famous Secret Investment Plans (SIP) to make up for lost time, else I am reduced to being the widow of a rich Nigerian banker who needs to sneak $100 million out of Nigeria and into your country. In that case, I will give you $50 million after you give me your bank account number and $5,000 in cash to pay various fees, expenses and bribes.”

Alas, I don’t have $5,000 to invest in this terrific opportunity to make a quick $50 million, as likewise there are no Secret Investment Plans (SIP), although I have spent a lifetime looking for one.

Fortunately, constantly buying gold, silver and oil is always the smart thing to do when your stupid, desperate, half-witted, corrupt, clutching-at-straws government is acting like all the other stupid, desperate, half-witted, corrupt, clutching-at-straws governments that created too much money and destroyed themselves over the last 4,500 years.

And if you don’t believe me, then maybe you will listen to the famous Richard Russell of the Dow Theory Letters, who writes, “Investors sometimes get caught up in the day to day and week to week movements in gold and silver. Don’t waste your time or energy on that, just accumulate. Standing in front of us is the greatest transfer of wealth in history. When the dust settles, those holding the gold will make the rules.”

And “just accumulate” sounds so easy because it is so easy, which is why I say, as I always say until you are tired of hearing me say it, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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• Gold is the Only Place to Turn in Times of Inflation
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• Borrowing Money is no Longer in Fashion
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More articles from The Daily Reckoning….

The Daily Reckoning

Well, August washed up. It was the worst month for US stocks in almost a decade. And yesterday didn’t help. The Dow couldn’t manage a rally. It rose just 4 points.

The British newspaper, The Telegraph, has the story:

Those fears took centre stage again during the final day of trading.

In New York, markets enjoyed some brief respite from the blizzard of weak data as reports on the US housing market and consumer confidence proved better than feared. The Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence climbed to 53.5 last month from 51 in July, while the latest reading from the respected S&P/Case-Shiller index showed that home prices were up 4.2pc in June compared with a year ago.

The day’s rally proved short-lived, however, after the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s latest meeting returned investors to the summer’s familiar themes. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has spent the past few weeks facing increasing pressure from markets to publicly declare he will do more to fight the prospect of a second recession if the recovery stumbles further. According to the minutes, some members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee saw “increased downside risks to the outlook for both growth and inflation”.

That admission left the Dow up just 4.99 points at 10,014.72 for the day, while the S&P ended the day up 0.41 at 1,049.33.

As predicted on this page, both Martin Wolf and Paul Krugman are taking the low road. Not that we wouldn’t take it too, were we in their position. They urged the Obama team to undertake massive programs of “stimulus.” Now that the stimulus hasn’t worked, they say it wasn’t massive enough.

And thank God the administration at least took some of our advice, they add. Otherwise, things would be a lot worse!

In today’s Financial Times, Wolf refers to a recent paper by Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi. The two use a “standard macro-economic model” to determine that without the feds’ intervention the decline in GDP would have been three times worse and unemployment would have risen to over 16%. And, can you believe it, we would have had a federal deficit of $2.6 trillion.

Oh man, oh man…we’re so grateful to Wolf, Krugman, Summers, Obama, Bernanke and all the other savants who protected us from such a dreadful fate.

But wait a minute, this “standard macro-economic model” sounds great and all…but we can’t help but wonder. It can predict precise outcomes based on federal policy inputs, right? That is, if the feds were to do such and such…it tells us what will happen, right? And Wolf says it’s “standard,” so we imagine that you can get it at any Wal-Mart or filling station. So, the Obama team must have had it two years ago, right? We can’t help wonder if this was the same model they used when they forecast that unemployment wouldn’t go over 8% – if Congress agreed to the stimulus bill the administration proposed. Must have been a different one… Because Congress did pass the stimulus bill and unemployment rose over 9% anyway.

And it’s still over 9% – almost 2 years after the stimulus effort got underway.

So, maybe this “standard macro-economic model” is full of… But let’s imagine that it isn’t. Let’s allow our imaginations to take flight…to soar…to loose themselves from the gravity of worldly cares or practical reality. Let’s imagine that these economists have a clue!

Imagine that the feds had done nothing – which was more or less standard policy for the nation from its founding in 1776 up until the middle of Herbert Hoover’s term in 1930…and for all the years that preceded them…all the way back to the founding of Rome. Now, let’s imagine that Blinder and Zandi are right. Without fed intervention, GDP would have sunk 12% – three times more than the actual loss…and half the loss of the Great Depression. Well, that would have been a disaster, right?

Well. Maybe not. It might have been a blessing. The point of a correction is to correct. The Blinder/Zandi study tells us that the economy had mistakes equal to 12% of GDP. Okay…well, maybe the correction overshoots. Who knows? But think of the crazy years of the Bubble Epoque…when lenders were giving unemployed people a mortgage for 110% of the inflated value of a house. Think about the Private Equity deals based on growth assumptions that were hallucinatory. Think about the hundreds of trillions’ worth of derivatives based on complex formulae that were phony and silly? Think of all the decisions made on the assumption that consumer credit would continue to expand as it had from 1949 to 2007. Was one of every 8 of them too optimistic? Too ambitious? Too unrealistic? We’d be surprised if there weren’t more errors…far more than 12% of GDP.

Now ask yourself…what good was done by failing to correct those mistakes? By failing to wash out the excess debt? Failing to allow insolvent banks to go broke? Failing to permit worn-out, uncompetitive businesses to die in peace?

We don’t know how many mistakes there were. We don’t know how far GDP SHOULD go down. And we don’t know what would have happened if willing buyers and sellers had been allowed to sort themselves out in the age- old ways – by panic, default, bankruptcy, restructuring, and reconstruction.

We don’t know. We’ll never know. But there is no reason to think we’d be any worse off if we’d found out a year ago. A 12% drop in GDP might have been just what we needed. We could be on the road to prosperity now, rather than looking at another 5 to 15 years of stagnation, decline, and desperation.

And more thoughts…

But we have good news. Yes, dear reader, genuine, no-doubt-about-it good news.

Two bits of good news, actually.

First, the café across the street from our office serves a proper café au lait. A real one.

In Paris these days, if you ask for a “café au lait” they mark you as a foreigner. Parisians ask for a “café crème.” Trouble is, the café crème doesn’t have much milk in it. It tends to be a bit watery and bitter.

A proper café au lait, on the other hand, is served with a little pitcher of hot milk. Not many cafes in Paris still serve it that way – unless you ask them specifically. Fortunately, the one across the street still does it the right way.

Second, and perhaps more important, we discovered yesterday that tea- totallers die sooner than heavy drinkers. This comes as a great relief to your editor. He sat down last night with a bottle of Lussac St. Emilion to celebrate.

Here’s the story from John Cloud (originally appearing in Time Magazine):

Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers?

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don’t drink actually tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – abstaining from alcohol does actually tend to increase one’s risk of dying even when you exclude former drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers’ mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.

Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. Moderate alcohol use (especially when the beverage of choice is red wine) is thought to improve heart health, circulation and sociability, which can be important because people who are isolated don’t have as many family members and friends who can notice and help treat health problems.

But why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life? It’s true that those who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors – job and child-care worries that might not only keep them from the bottle but also cause stress-related illnesses over long periods. (They also don’t get the stress-reducing benefits of a drink or two after work.)

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables – socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on – the researchers (a six- member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

The sample of those who were studied included individuals between ages 55 and 65 who had had any kind of outpatient care in the previous three years. The 1,824 participants were followed for 20 years. One drawback of the sample: a disproportionate number, 63%, were men. Just over 69% of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60% of the heavy drinkers died and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.

These are remarkable statistics. Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer (particularly cancers in the mouth and esophagus), heavy drinkers are less likely to die than people who have never drunk. One important reason is that alcohol lubricates so many social interactions, and social interactions are vital for maintaining mental and physical health. As I pointed out last year, nondrinkers show greater signs of depression than those who allow themselves to join the party.

The authors of the new paper are careful to note that even if drinking is associated with longer life, it can be dangerous: it can impair your memory severely and it can lead to nonlethal falls and other mishaps (like, say, cheating on your spouse in a drunken haze) that can screw up your life. There’s also the dependency issue: if you become addicted to alcohol, you may spend a long time trying to get off the bottle.

That said, the new study provides the strongest evidence yet that moderate drinking is not only fun but good for you. So make mine a double.

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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Zero Hedge

Seeing Past The Hologram, by Mike Krieger of KAM LP

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

- All quotes by Mark Twain

We Need Real Confidence to Return, Not Confidence in a Ponzi Scheme

Last week I pointed out that what I got from Banana Ben’s speech in Jackson Hole was that he realized any major public statement of interference in markets was too risky at this point following his announcement at the last meeting to keep the balance sheet steady by reinvesting MBS proceeds into treasury securities.  The operative word in this sentence being “public.”  Anyone that believes this means the Fed and government will just take a back seat and do nothing behind the scenes is deluding themselves.  Washington D.C. and the Fed still fail to comprehend how to increase standards of living in the real world, rather they remain completely addicted to the short-term buzz of printed money heroin as it flows through the house of cards they have created.  They also think that the only thing that really matters in an economy is “confidence.”  As Madoff can attest to, that is indeed the case when you are running a ponzi scheme and since the U.S. government is basically that I can understand where they are coming from.

 I agree that confidence is a huge part of any healthy economy; however, I do not define confidence in the way these arrogant bureaucrats do.  They think confidence comes from rising asset prices, including stocks and homes.  They think this is enough to spark growth in the real economy.  This is nonsense.  The confidence that is needed more than anything else today is two-fold.  First, confidence that there is the rule of law and there will be the rule of law in the future.  The second is that the money issued by the government will maintain its purchasing power over time.  As I have made clear on various occasions, I do not have confidence in either of these things based on how the government has responded to the crisis.  I do not like buying physical gold.  I do not like feeling the need to write these emails every week to warn people.  I wish I could employ capital into businesses and the real economy.  I hope that one day I will be able to do so, but at the moment I do not trust my government and I certainly don’t trust the fascist Federal Reserve.  So I will hoard what I have as the government prints and let the storm pass me by.  I am not the only one.  People are collectively starting to understand this.  So what happens when the big, smart money takes itself out of the investment and capital allocation game because they don’t trust anything?  What happens when the government’s response to this is to print money to keep up the spending habits of people with no jobs or people with government jobs that produce no goods for the economy?  You get the worst case scenario and that is exactly what is staring us straight in the face.

Is a Trade War with China Coming?

The quicker the dollar is devalued the better.  This is not to say that I think dollar devaluation is a good thing.  It is to say we are past the point of avoiding it.  We could have taken the pain in 2008, but instead it was extend and pretend all over again.  Now the debt and promises are too big.  The behind the scenes manipulations are too entrenched.  There is no avoiding a devaluation relative to things people need (food and energy) and capital goods that are imported.  The best thing would be to get it over with and then change policies and restore the rule of law.  The problem with this is that the main currencies the dollar needs its major adjustment against are those in emerging Asia and China.  What has prevented the realignment from happening in a quick and healthy way is China’s refusal to allow the yuan to appreciate.  This creates a situation where Central Banks throughout emerging Asia take steps to prevent their “free-floating” currencies from adjusting either.  If China does not change its policy I fear that what we are looking at a trade war with China after the November elections.  I think Congress and the Administration will start to introduce aggressive policies to discourage Chinese goods and encourage goods made at home.  Think it can’t happen?  We are a lot closer than you think.  This all goes back to my “think local” theme.  While I am inherently a fan of free trade we do not have free trade in any sense whatsoever.  We have policies that are geared to advantage the multi-national corporations at the expense of the U.S. citizen.  The U.S. consumer has merely been spending borrowed money.  This gave an illusion that the U.S. was benefiting from the global multinational corporate rigged market whose model mainly thrives on companies moving abroad to exploit the labor arbitrage caused by a combination of what was a labor surplus (no longer it seems) and a rigged currency.  As more people realize this, more pressure will be placed on politicians and ultimately this will overpower the corporate lobbyists and a trade war of sorts will begin.  Then the chaos could really ensue as we engage in a trade war with our biggest creditor!

Seeing Past the Hologram

The past couple of weeks have been extraordinarily interesting and some of the moves appear to be extremely important.  Although a lot of people like to point to the treasury market and then extrapolate out as to what this means to equities and the ability of the government to increase spending, I think this is the most USELESS market in the world to watch.  If anything is a hologram and a PR tool it is the U.S. treasury market.  How can people with a straight face come out and extrapolate anything from a market where the Federal Reserve is buying the debt of its own government!  The Fed is merely the fiat drug dealer to a government addicted to spending and false promises.  The equity market is the second most useless market in my opinion.  There is no doubt in my mind that a huge part of the government’s “strategy” to build confidence is to keep this thing from doing what it should be doing.  Thus, I am not surprised at all that since I last wrote the S&P500 was +1.6%, -1.5%, flat, and then +3.0%.  So what you have seen is high volatility with no real direction.  How can anyone have confidence this that thing is for real?

So what markets do I watch?  I get the most from the FX markets and the commodity markets.  While these markets are no doubt manipulated heavily as well, I think this is where the players that really understand the macro are playing.  The first currency I check in the morning is the dollar/yen.  The reason for this is that the yen is back to the highs of 1995 and if it does not stop appreciating around this level I think the Bank of Japan is going to absolutely panic.  While the yen has not broken higher yet as market participants are afraid of such intervention, unless the BOJ does something extreme soon the market may test their resolve and push this thing further.  I guess the main point I am trying to make is that with the Chinese yuan NOT strengthening and the yen threatening to break out we could be in for some major fireworks.  Meanwhile Japanese 10 year government bond yields have really started to spike lately (chart GJG10 Index on Bloomberg).  Something big is happening in the land of the rising sun.  In the back of my head I think that any panic move from the BOJ could be the spark that breaks government bond bubbles globally and ushers in a period of massive global commodity driven inflation as every country tries to devalue their way to prosperity.  Essentially, a fiat money version of the 1930’s beggar thy neighbor policies.  When this begins the rush into gold and silver that we have seen thus far will look like a trickle.  I don’t think people will be able to find supply anywhere near the quoted price on comex (or as some like to call it “crimex”).

This brings me to silver which potentially experienced a game changer last week.  I can’t remember the last time silver bounced back almost immediately after every attempted raid.  I am starting to wonder how much physical silver is available.  What we do know is that Central Banks do not store silver to manipulate markets.  Even if it doesn’t break out right now, there is no asset in the world that has more upside than silver.  Don’t buy SLV either.  Buy physical silver not something with JPM as a custodian. 

I also continue to watch food prices very closely.  Wheat, which has come off of its high now seems to have found a base at a price that is 50% higher than the end of June.  Corn prices are threatening to break above resistance at levels 30% where they were at the end of June.  Rice looks like it could have a long way to go on the upside as it is only 20% off of its June low.  If I were a foreign government I would be using this opportunity to buy every single grain of rice I could in order to feed my people when things get dicey in the months ahead.  After strong performance in recent months lean hogs and live cattle also look set to make another push to the upside.  How people in the investment world still focus on the government inflation statistics is beyond me.  It was the rampant commodity inflation, trucker strikes and food riots that played a key role in ending the game in 2008.  This is because it forced the emerging markets to raise rates and cool growth as the Western world imploded under a pile of debt.  It seems the whole play is starting again and people remain focused on deflation.  Deflation in some things yes I agree (discretionary things like homes, technology, stock prices, etc), but not in the things you NEED to buy!!!

Onto oil which is also exhibiting some strange moves.  The Asian benchmark Tapis has not experienced the recent volatility and weakness that WTI has and is currently trading at $80/b.  The Asian price is the one I really pay attention to since that is where the demand growth resides.  The spread between the two now is back above $6/b, which is toward the high end of the range for the past two years.  This tells me that one price is wrong and the spread should narrow.  Given what I think about currency debasement and lack of appropriate investment in the space I think WTI should rally.  We shall see…

A Primer on the Federal Reserve

For those that read my commentary on the Federal Reserve as an immoral an fascist institution and think to themselves “what is this guy talking about,” I have attached a video from G Edward Griffith (the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island).  It’s a great description of how the Fed was formed and who it answers to when push comes to shove.  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6507136891691870450#

Also in case you weren’t aware of the power grab that the “Financial Reform” legislation allowed the Fed, read this Bloomberg article. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2010-09-02/bernanke-meets-buffett-in-new-role-conceived-to-protect-markets.html

All the best,
Mike

More articles from Zero Hedge….

Zero Hedge

You will pardon us for posting two excerpts from David Rosenberg today, but this one is a must read, and explains more clearly than anything written on the matter why America is currently, and without doubt, in a depression, due primarily to ongoing secular changes in consumer and investor behaviour, something not experienced during mere recessions. As such any intraday or short-term bounces in the stock market that merely confirm that there was a liquidity injection by one player or another, or a successful short squeeze engineered by the wily folks at the custodian firms or due to simple headfakes, are completely irrelevant (especially with record implied correlations), as the long-term trend has only one way to go in the long-run. Down. Of course, those who believe they can time the moment when the last lingering support pillar collapses and everything tumbles down, are more than welcome to keep trying their top-ticking. We are confident that when the mass exodus begins, the HFT liquidity “support” of the market will be alive and well, and provide everyone with a perfectly acceptable exit price level…

WHAT IS A DEPRESSION ANYWAY?

A depression, put simply, is a very long period of economic malaise. A series of rolling recessions and modest recoveries over a multi-year period of general economic stagnation as the excesses from the prior asset and credit bubble are completely wrung out of the system. In baseball parlance, we are in the third inning of this current debt deleveraging ball game.                                     

You know you’re in a depression when interest rates go to zero and there is no revival in credit-sensitive spending. 

The economy is in a depression when the banks are sitting on $1.3 trillion of cash and yet there is no lending going on to the private sector. It’s otherwise known as a liquidity trap.    

Depressions usually are caused by a bursting of an asset bubble and a contraction in credit, whereas plain-vanilla recessions are typically caused by inflation and excessive manufacturing inventories. You tell me which fits the bill today.

When almost half of the ranks of the unemployed have been looking for a job fruitlessly for at least six months, you know you are in something much deeper than a garden-variety recession. True, we can’t see the soup lines; the soup lines are in the mail — 99 weeks of unemployment cheques for over 10 million jobless Americans. Don’t be lulled into the view that we are into anything remotely close to a normal economic cycle.

Basically, in a depression, secular changes take place. Attitudes towards debt, discretionary spending and homeownership are altered for many years, or at least until the scars from the traumatic experience with defaults and delinquencies fade away. That is why, as per last week’s data releases, we saw existing home sales slide to 15-year lows and new home sales to record lows despite the fact that mortgage rates have tumbled to their lowest levels in modern history. There is no economic model that would tell you that declining  mortgage rates should lead to lower home sales.

In a depression, radical changes occur in terms of social norms and spending behaviour. In recessions, people don’t cancel their life insurance policies – as one example. But in a depression, tragically, that is what happens – almost 35 million Americans now have no such coverage, up from 24 million five years ago. This reflects the focus by households to pay down their debts at all costs and how companies have bolstered profits – by eliminating benefits.

More fundamentally, in a recession, the economy is revived by government stimulus. In depressions, the economy is sustained by government stimulus. There is a very big difference between those two states.    

After all, we are now in a situation where every 1-in-6 Americans is now receiving some form of government assistance — more than 50 million Americans, from food stamps, to Medicaid, to extended jobless benefits, are on one or more taxpayer-supported programs. That transcends the definition of a recession.

In a recession, everything would be back to a new high 33 months after the initial decline. This time around, everything from organic personal income to employment to real GDP to home prices to corporate earnings to outstanding bank credit are still all below, to varying degrees, the levels prevailing in December 2007.

Let’s be clear: After all the monetary, fiscal and bailout stimulus, the economy should be roaring ahead, as would be the case if the economy were coming out of a normal garden-variety recession. The fact that there has been no sustained response to all these efforts by the government to turn things around is a testament to the view that this is not actually a traditional recession at all, but something closely resembling a depression. That, my friends, is exactly what the bond market is signaling, with Treasury yields rapidly approaching Japanese levels.  

For all the chatter about whether the recession that started in December 2007 ended sometime last year, here is what you should know about the historical record. The 1930s depression was not marked by declining quarterly GDP data every single quarter. In fact, the technical recessionary aspect to the initial period following the asset and credit shock goes from the third quarter of 1929 to the first quarter of 1933.

What is important to know is this; in that initial four-year economic downturn, from 1929 to 1933, there were no fewer than six — six! – quarterly bounces in GDP data. The average gain in these up-quarters was 8% at an annual rate! But because they proved not to be sustainable, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) refused to declare that the recession officially ended, even though the stock market rallied 50% in the opening months of 1930 on the belief that the downturn was about to end. False premise. And guess what? We may well be reliving history here. If you’re keeping score, we have recorded four quarterly advances in real GDP, and the average is only 3%.

I can understand how emotional the debate can get over whether or not we have actually just stumbled along some post-recession recovery path or whether or not this is actually a depression in the sense of a downward trend in economic activity merely punctuated with noise that is influenced by recurring rounds of government intervention. The reality is that the Fed cut the funds rate to zero, as was the case in Japan, to little avail. Then the Fed tripled the size of its balance sheet – again with little sustained impetus to a broken financial system. Government deficits of nearly 10% relative to GDP, or double what FDR ever ran during the 1930s, have obviously fallen flat in terms of providing and lasting impact to the economy.  

This is going to sound like a broken record but it took a decade of parabolic credit growth to get the U.S. economy into this deleveraging mess and there is clearly no painless “quick fix” towards bringing household debt into historical realignment with the level of assets and income to support the prevailing level of liabilities. We are talking about $6 trillion of excess debt that has to be extinguished either by paying it down or by walking away from it (or having it socialized). Look, we can  understand the need to be optimistic, but it is essential that we recognize the type of market and economic backdrop we are in.

The markets are telling us something valuable when (after a period of unprecedented government bailouts, incursions and stimulus programs) we had a 2-year note auction that saw the yield dragged to new record low of 0.46%. Instead of lamenting over how attractively priced equities must be in this environment, market strategists and commentators would bring a lot more to the table if they tried to decipher what the macro message is from this price action in the Treasury market. Conducting stock market valuation analysis based on unrealistic consensus earnings assumptions does nobody any good, especially when these estimates are in the process of being  cut.

If the Treasury market is correct in its implicit assumption of a renewed contraction in the economy, then we could well be talking about corporate earnings being closer to $60 or $65 in the coming year as opposed to the current consensus view of almost $90. In other words, we may wake up to find out a year from now that whoever was buying the market today under an illusion of a forward multiple of 12x was actually buying the market with a 17x multiple.

How’s that for a reality check?

More articles from Zero Hedge….

By Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker

Again, I must say……

The same principal has left the nations public and private pension funds badly underfunded.

We are actually more underfunded than we were at the end of 2008 because of the drop in interest rates since then, said John Ehrhardt, who tracks fund performance for benefits consultant Milliman.

That "same principal" is The Fed’s ZIRP policy.

By picking winners – in this case the banks who made imprudent loans and should have been forced out of business, along with "protecting" the imprudent buyers of bonds in institutions that made those imprudent loans, the prudent are getting hammered.

There is no solution to this other than to stop doing that.  And this means withdrawing liquidity and forcing the borrowing of money to have a reasonable cost, so that those who lend money through the purchase of bonds can earn a reasonable inflation-adjusted return.

The initial "impact" of low interest rates appears seductively good.  It’s not – it’s always bad.  It forces people to take imprudent risks (how do you think we got a housing bubble in the first place?) and destroys the prudent investor, lender of capital and saver.

As these people are eviscerated their ability to contribute positively to the economy is likewise destroyed, and in particular, capital formation is critically damaged.

This is the real story on how Japan lost two decades. 

We will follow them unless we stop this insanity, and soon.

(PS: Are the unions still sheep on this issue, more than two years after I started sounding this alarm?)

More articles from the Market Ticker….

If one wants to be taken seriously in the world of policy analysis, one should at least use an internally consistent framework. This consideration, apparently, has not troubled Mr. Reidl.

To quote from The fatal flaw of Keynesian stimulus, in the Washington Times:

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a report claiming that the $814 billion “stimulus” has added 3.4 million net jobs.

…

Such implausible analysis does not come from actually observing the post-stimulus economy. Rather, it comes from Keynesian economic models that have been programmed to conclude that government spending injects new dollars into the economy, thereby increasing demand and spurring economic growth. In other words, these models are programmed to conclude that stimulus spending always creates jobs and growth, no matter how the economy actually performs.

Well, not quite. As I described in this post, there are a variety of ways in which multipliers are obtained. Oftentimes, the impacts are estimated either directly or indirectly, by estimating the marginal propensity to consume. The article continues:

But there is one problem with the government stimulus theory: No one asks where Congress got the money it spends.

Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another.

It is intuitive that government spending financed by taxes merely redistributes existing dollars. Yet spending financed by borrowing also redistributes existing dollars today. The fact that borrowed dollars (unlike taxes) will be repaid some years later does not change that.

Here, I think Mr. Riedl is invoking Ricardian Equivalence, despite the fact that there is no empirical evidence, to my knowledge, that validates pure Ricardian Equivalence (actually, Ricardian equivalence wouldn’t necessary hold for government spending on goods and services, anyway). Now, at this juncture, I thought that he might be invoking a real business cycle model, or an older, nonstochastic version of the RBC, namely a flex price Classical model. But then the next paragraph reads:

Some believe stimulus spending is the mechanism by which the Federal Reserve injects new dollars into the economy. Yet the Fed could run the printing press and then inject those dollars into the economy by buying existing bonds (with mostly inflationary results). It doesn’t need an expensive stimulus bill to conduct monetary policy.

Accepting that the Fed can stimulate via monetary policy then implies either (1) sticky prices so an expansionary monetary policy can affect the real interest rate, or (2) a financial accelerator model such that collateral constraints or some other financial rigidity holds. In the latter case, it seems prima facie that Ricardian Equivalance cannot hold.

Next, I was thrown for a loop, because Mr. Riedl seems to conflate real saving and the monetary multiplier. He argues that government deficits can only be financed by foreign saving, private saving and “idle saving”. This he describes thus:

Idle savings. The only government spending that truly increases current purchasing is the amount that would have otherwise sat idle in safes and mattresses. Those are the only dollars not already circulating through the economy as consumption, or through the financial markets as investment spending.

Idle savings are rare. People and businesses generally invest or bank their savings, where the financial markets transfer them to other spenders. Banks that receive savings either lend them out to a spender, or (when afraid to loan) invest them conservatively to earn some interest. They are not hoarding customer deposits in massive vaults (beyond the required cash reserves).

This is an odd conflation of saving, measured as a flow, and financial assets. But lets take the equation at face value, there is an incredibly counterfactual observation that there no reserves are behing held in excess of required cash reserves. According to the St. Louis Fed, excess reserves are now approximately $1 trillion dollars. Well, no need for facts to get in the way of a good polemic.

Mr. Riedl’s main point is:

All government stimulus spending requires first borrowing dollars that would have otherwise been applied elsewhere in the economy. The only exception is money borrowed from “idle savings,” which for reasons described above likely constitute a minuscule portion of the $814 billion stimulus.

As I’ve mentioned here and elsewhere, this is true in a full employment model. (I’m working off of textbook models; move to coordination models, or allow monopolistic power, and you have lots of other inefficiencies arising).

Mr. Riedl concludes:

Economic growth requires raising worker productivity to create more goods and services. Government stimulus spending represents a naive “magic wand” attempt to create purchasing power and wealth out of thin air.

No wonder the unemployment rate remains high.

Well, if we’re in a Classical world, then there is no involuntary unemployment. If we’re in a New Classical world, then whatever involuntary unemployment exists is not systematic. If there is involuntary unemployment, then there are resources that are not being utilized, and putting them to use naturally raises productivity (remember labor productivity is defined as output per man hour).

It pains me to say that Mr. Riedl is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, in economics and political science.

Postscript: Here is Deutsch Bank’s assessment of the impact of the ARRA on the growth rate of GDP.

Figure 1: Dobridge, Hooper, Slok, Sufian, “The growing risk of fiscal drag in the US,” Global Economic Perspectives, New York: Deutsche Bank, July 28, 2010.

Level impacts are depicted in this post. Here is CBO’s latest assessment.

Read more….

Robert Waldmann

Kevin Drum stresses the very sound point that even if part of current unemployment is structural, we should stimulate to get rid of the part which is cyclical. I don’t have a serious disagreement and choose to debate his guess as to the level of structural unemployment for the sake of debating.

“The “normal” unemployment level is about five points less than it is today. I wouldn’t be surprised if perhaps three of those points are cyclical and two are structural.”

He agrees with Annie Lowrey who presents the following analysis

The unemployment is cyclical and structural. Most sectors have suffered from the turndown, but job losses are concentrated in some industries: In residential construction, they are down 38 percent since 2006. (Between Aug. 2007 and Dec. 2009, unemployment in construction quintupled from about 5 percent to about 25 percent.) In health care and education, however, jobs are up.

This analysis is accidental theory. Between the first sentence and the second, there is a theoretical argument that the cycle has the same effect on log employment in each sector. This argument makes no sense. More after the jump.

I know it is not wise to argue with an “I wouldn’t be surprised” but their approach to measuring cyclical unemployment is completely incorrect. Lowrey identifies the cyclical component by assuming that around the cycle percent changes are equal. Therefore a much much larger percent change in construction than in health is not cyclical.

In fact, the amplitude of the cycle in log employment is not the same in each sector. Some sectors are very cyclical (always go down a lot in recessions) others are almost acyclical. A correct estimate of how much unemployment can be eliminated with fiscal and monetary policy requires an estimate of the effect of fiscal and monetary policy on log-employment by sector. The assumption that this is necessarily equal is an accidental theory — a very strong and plainly false assumption which is made by people who think they can just look at the data without theory.

This is the topic of one of my very rare contributions to the actual economics literature

The practical relevance of the decomposition is due to the fact that it is argued, that, if unemployment is due to miss-match, then a general stimulus will lead to labor shortages in some sectors. This would lead to inflation. As Drum notes this is not a problem at the moment. However, let’s imagine a stimulus powerful enough to drive unemployment down to 7%. Does anyone really think this would create (much more of) a shortage of workers in health care ?

Why would demand for health care increase much (as a percent of current demand for health care). 85% of people are insured. Much of the effect of the recession is people moving from private insurance to Medicaid. There isn’t a big cycle in the number of uninsured and there is little reason for demand for care by the insured to shift with aggregate demand. Even the uninsured demand health care in ERs, then go bankrupt. Recall the HCR debate.

Now how about residential construction. Does anyone really think that no construction workers can shift from residential to commercial construction ? Is there any reason to think that an increase in employment which were to drive the unemployment rate down to 6% would cause labor shortages anywhere ?

Read more….

The Daily Reckoning

Bad day for stocks, yesterday. A bad day. Not a terrible day. Not a crash day. Just a bad day.

The Dow fell 140 points. This was baaaad…because it shows that the stock market does not really buy Bernanke’s storyline.

You’ll recall that when we left off last week, Ben Bernanke assured the world that while the recovery was not exactly what he had hoped for, he nevertheless had the situation in hand. He said he had the tools necessary to fix the problem and would do whatever was required.

The initial reaction was positive. The Dow rose more than 160 points on Friday. Some analysts thought the market’s downward trend had been broken. But it needed follow-through on Monday. Instead, the market fell.

The fact is, there is no recovery…and no recovery is possible…and investors are beginning to realize it.

Then what is going on? A “Great Recession,” say some analysts. A “depression,” say others.

There is a good article in The Financial Times that helps understand what is really going on. It’s by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart; you’ve heard of them before, dear reader. They are the ones who researched dozens of episodes of financial crisis and sovereign default throughout history.

Today, they write in the FT about what happens after a financial crisis. Well, what do you think? Do you think you get a “recovery”? Do things go back to normal? Is the recession over quickly and painlessly?

Not at all. Instead, there is rarely anything you would recognize as a “recovery.” Things do not go back to normal because they weren’t normal before the crisis. Crises are caused by abnormal conditions – usually too much credit, too much debt, too much spending and too much speculating. Then, when the bubble blows up, it typically takes a long time for the economy to get back on its feet.

Over the following ten years, unemployment usually stays higher than it was before the crisis.

Growth rates are usually lower.

And ten years after a blow-up in real estate house prices are still usually BELOW where they were when the crisis hit.

But what if the feds really get on the ball and try to turn things around? Then, watch out!

We read an article on dying yesterday. Here’s a question for you, dear reader. Would you rather live in a recessionary economy or die in a booming one? We’ll take the recession. Probably most people would. Heck, make it a depression.

There are a lot of illnesses for which there are no cures. Still, people will spend a fortune…and endure unspeakable treatments…in the hopes that they will be the one in a thousand who survives.

So too are people ready to believe that Dr. Bernanke can cure what ails the US economy. We don’t think so. Because we don’t think the economy is “sick.” We think it is healthy…and finally correcting the mistakes of the Bubble Epoque.

Leading economists and the feds have believed, for example, that there was some problem of “liquidity” that was temporarily blocking the flow of cash and credit. They believed the problem could be solved by making more money available. That was why the Fed bought an extra $1.4 trillion of the banking sector’s suspicious “assets.” They wanted to make sure the banks had money to lend.

Well, now the banks have plenty of cash. Businesses too have record holdings of cash. Even households are rebuilding their cash accounts.

But who’s borrowing? Who’s spending? Who’s buying new houses, for example? (New house sales are currently taking place at the slowest rate ever measured.)

CNN: “Credit if finally available, but no one wants it.”

And more thoughts…

Why don’t people borrow?

Because it’s not a liquidity problem. It’s a debt problem. A solvency problem. And it won’t go away by making more cash and credit available. Instead, all those bad decisions, bad loans, and bad investments have to be cleaned up. And that takes time. And while the economy is de- leveraging, people are becoming more cautious…more risk-averse…more modest in their expectations.

What do Rogoff and Reinhart say about governments’ efforts to fix these problems? What does history show?

They say the feds often make the situation worse.

Not only do governments typically pour bad money after good, they also disrupt the process of correction. Insolvent banks are kept alive. Big businesses that ought to go broke and be sold off are instead propped up…the lights are kept on by government subsidies, preventing new competitors from occupying the space. Consumers and investors keep waiting for the promised “recovery”…for the cure…for the fix. Instead of quickly adjusting to the new circumstances, they delay…they hesitate…they postpone unpleasant changes.

They might quickly sell a house at a loss, for example. They could then go on with their lives. But when they hear the feds tell them they have a new program in the works…or a new stimulus bill in Congress…or new action by the Fed…what are they supposed to think?

“Maybe I should wait and see if this new effort does the trick…” they say to themselves. “I’ll feel like a real fool if I sell now and then the feds get a new bull market going.” “Maybe I should wait before accepting a job at a lower salary; it says in the paper that the economy should recover by summer…”

The economic setbacks of the 19th century were sharp, but fairly short, affairs. The contribution of modern economics has been to stretch them out and make them worse.

*** How about China? Won’t growth in China and the other BRICs lead the whole world out of its funk?

We wouldn’t count on it.

First, the Chinese economy has been growing at near double-digit rates for the last ten years. It didn’t stop the crisis and so far it hasn’t helped the developed nations – at least the US – get out of it.

More important, China is probably getting itself into a big mess too. All we know is what we read in the paper on the subject. But what we read is that the spectacular growth China has enjoyed so far was made possible by freeing the private sector. But now the Chinese government is muscling the entrepreneurs out of the way.

“Now…it is state-run Chinese companies that are on the march,” says The New York Times.

Railroads, mining, airlines, manufacturing, hotels, yogurt… The Chinese government either owns it, controls it, or invests in it.

And if you think private investors make mistakes, you should see what the government does!

A Daily Reckoning dictum: people make mistakes all the time; but if you want to make a real mess of things, you need taxpayer support.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

Similar Posts:

• We Expect No Recovery from the Economy
• Feds See Every Emergency as an Opportunity
• Investors Are Betting On Recovery
• Is Inflation Necessary for Recovery and Growth in the United States?
• The Return of the Cattle Market

More articles from The Daily Reckoning….

Zero Hedge

As part of the Fed’s latest QE iteration, it has already been made clear that despite initial disclosures that the Fed would stay in the 2-10 Year bound of Treasurys, Ben Bernanke is now also gobbling up the very long end of the curve. For all those who are, therefore, still confused why bonds continue to surge to record levels, don’t be: when there is a guaranteed bidder just below you in the face of the Fed, and who you can turn around and sell to at will, there is no pricing risk. The problem, from a bigger stand point, is what happens when the Fed is actively buying up 30 Year bonds with impunity and the much desired (by the Fed) inflation still does not appear? Well, the Fed then, in Michael Pento’s opinion, will begin to purchase stocks and real estate. And as all those who enjoy comparing the US to Japan can attest, outright purchases of securities by the Japanese government is a long-honored tradition in the ongoing fight with deflation in Japan. However, and as the recent BOJ (lack of) intervention demonstrated, Japan never could do anything with the required resolve, and bidding up one stock here and there would never achieve anything. Which is why in this interview with Eric King, Michael Pento makes the case that as opposed to the occasional market intervention via the President’s Working Group, Bernanke will soon make stock purchases an outright policy of the Federal Reserve as its last ditch attempt to engender inflation before the hundreds of billions of Commercial Real Estate and other bank debt start maturing in 2011/2012. Bernanke is running out of time and he knows it. And once the Fed becomes the bidder of last resort in stocks, all bets are off, as the Central Bank will become the defacto only market in virtually every risky category. And the only safe vehicle, once the market then begins to price in Fed driven asset-price hyperinflation, will be gold.

Pento also provides some perspectives on the Fed’s balance sheet, which he anticipates will expand in a “great fashion”, but a much bigger concern to the recent Euro Pacific Capital addition, is the possible surge in M2: “That base money can expand, M2 which is currently running around 8.5 trillion all the way up to nearly 25 to 30 trillion dollars of money supply and that’s enough obviously to send prices through the roof.” All Bernanke needs to do is light the “alternative asset purchasing” match and all those who wonder what left field hyperinflation could come out of, will get their answer.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Pento interview without a requisite smack-down, in this case of Dennis Gartman, whose call to sell gold denominated in euros at the very bottom of the recent gold correction needs no further commentary: EUR-denom gold has jumped well over 10% since Gartman said to get out. Pento adds the following: “There is so much misinformation out there, Dennis Gartman was out there saying gold has lost its inflation hedging properties: this is just ludicrous and insane. I can tell you that gold will never lose its inflation lure, and that’s precisely why I’ve stepped up my purchases of gold., I see what the monetary base is doing, I can clearly see Bernanke’s next step to vastly increase the size of the balance sheet and the monetary base. So for me, it’s 100% an inflation hedge.”

Pento also goes into explaining why housing is facing a “deflationary depression,” and a further collapse in pricing, why inflation benefits only those closest to the money, i.e., the banks and the military complex, why it destroys the middle class (we are sure Buffett ca. 2003 could say something about that too… the current, far more senile and captured Uncle Warren, not so much), the impact on discretionary purchases, on unemployment, real incomes, and all other items which tend to “follow the money.”

Lastly, Pento concludes with an analysis of what would have happened had the government allowed the deflationary depression to occur two years ago, without the tens of trillions in bank bailouts. We protracted, and elongated the depression. But instead of having the benefit of falling prices, you have rising prices.” And if Pento is right, the price rise has only just begun.

Full King World News interview here.

More articles from Zero Hedge….