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Dec 30, 2010

Ultimate Cost of 0% Money



By Jim Willie CB, GoldenJackass.com


From 
GoldSeek.com Wednesday, 29 December 2010 | Digg This Article

Since the early 1990 decade, the nation's maestros have promulgated the notion that cheap money is a beneficial factor for the sustenance of wealth, for economic development, for the standard of living, for the robust industries, in general for the American society. Nothing could be further from the truth, but even today the reckless US economists from the Keynesian Camp and their controllers from Wall Street have convinced the multitudes that cheap money is a good thing. Cheap money comes with a deadly ultimate cost. The inept professor occupying the US Federal Reserve Chairman post has gone on record claiming the US banking sector has a secret weapon in the Printing Pre$$ that it can use with zero cost, in its electronic form. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Clinton & Rubin team began the distortion of the Consumer Price Index, ostensibly to reduce Social Security and USGovt pension benefits in cost of living raises. They wanted to cause a massive USTreasury Bond bull market, and succeeded in doing so. They wished also to bring down the USTreasury Bond yields. The infamous Fed Valuation Model dictated that as rates rose, stocks fell. So the scheme to manipulate the bond market began with the venerable craftsmen of rigged markets, ruined engines, and mega-fraud schemes. They taught from their high priest pulpits that cheap money was good for the financial markets. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Many analysts have sought the underlying root cause for the systemic failure of the USEconomy, the US Banks, and the USFed itself. One can start in pursuit of answers by looking at the cause being a sequence of costly wars and the ensuing monetary inflation, followed by lost industry to globalization and price inflation. The Vietnam War had a powerful consequence of inducing Nixon to exit the Gold Standard, a linkage few if any economists or even gold analysts make. But the true singlemost cause of wreckage is the artificial low forced cost of money, the near zero cost of usury.The subtitle to that billboard is that CAPITAL IS TRASH. Imagine in a nation that developed, promoted, and exploited the fullest riches of capitalism, embarked upon a path to destroy capital without even the recognition by its best brain trusts. Their mental chambers have been totally corrupted by the justification that inflation is a positive force that must be managed. Nothing could be further from the truth. The consequences of artificially cheap money, the wrecked pricing of usury, ultimately is capital destruction and economic failure.
POX ON HUMANITY
My friend and colleague Rob Kirby calls the artificially low cost of money, the cost of usury, to be the pox on humanity. It is actually a pox on the entire economy, in which humanity resides. The Jackass calls it acidic paper mixed in the cauldron to dissolve capital. The points of this article expose the most glaring blind spots of USEconomic and USBanking, a mindboggling failure that has delivered the United States of America to the doorstep of the Third World. The sins committed are almost precisely what Banana Republics have done, and faced ruin. The annual $1.5 trillion USGovt deficits are proof positive of the failure. Those deficits are grossly under-stated when hidden costs of war are factored, and when hidden costs of nationalized acid pits like Fannie Mae and AIG are factored. Leave alone the costs of endless war and its seamy motives. Consider the many sides to free money, the forcibly low cost of usury.
The 0% usury cost has destroyed capital, with the recent destruction seen as in an accelerated phase. The 0% money encouraged asset speculation, not business investment. The steady stream of nonsensical labels to the USEconomy are comical. The Macro Economy ten years ago fizzled. The Asset Economy six years ago fizzled. The bylines of a Jobless Recovery offer insult to one's intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth, since no such contraption exists. The 0% money even encouraged drainage of real assets, like gold. The Clinton-Rubin gang altered the gold lease rate toward 0% in an experiment. Almost the entire gold inventory was drained from the USTreasury and its secure storage facility at Fort Knox. It was essentially stolen from the front door using official trucks. In defiance, the USFed and USDept Treasury continue to refuse an independent audit. With artificially low rates come complete destruction of capital formation, as economic laws have all been commandeered. The outcome features a shortage of everything valuable and a climax of central planning to manage the destruction. Witness the stream of nationalized failures, whether financial firms or critical industrial firms. Now General Motors (Govt Motors) produces an electric car twice the price of Toyota, rotten fruit. Witness the Home Buyer Tax Credit which has ended. The USFed as central bank has a bloated ruined balance sheet. The last remaining question for the august USFed is whether they will declare bankruptcy and liquidate, since their net value is between minus $700 billion and $1.2 trillion, OR whether they will attempt to purchase the remaining few $trillion of home loans from Fannie Mae and take property title to 30% to 35% of American homes. That would serve as a Fascist Manifesto of collectivism in a sense.
The tragedy is that the USEconomy has chronically suffered from an absence of capital investment. Some analysts point to a prohibitive US corporate tax structure. With a recent Japanese decision going into effect, the USGovt takes the top spot with a 39.5% corporate tax rate. The European nations range between 24.0% and 30.2% by comparison. Rather, the Jackass submits, the more pressing and acute problem is the 0% usury rate. It is common between the US and European Union, which faces a fracture. The United States shipped most of its factories to China, in an abandonment of capital structures and their legitimate wealth engines. The US economists applauded the move, calling it a Low Cost Solution. It was in fact a ruinous movement, one that replaced wealth engines with debt burdens. The climax is coming, with a higher cost structure across the USEconomy, and shortages where prices are kept down artificially. US businesses see little prospect in capital investment, at least not within the United States. They sit on cash, and see little usage for it. So they speculate with it, a contradiction that capitalism exists in the US at all. In the next chapter, future price inflation will be called economic growth, the next travesty!!
Look for an increase in empty sections of supermarket shelves for food, and gasoline stations shut down. It will be an end symptom. Look for a collapse of Municipal Bonds, as the states and cities are in a late stage of implosion. The impact of the semi-permanent housing bear market has local impact. Even banks have far less money in ATMs, a signal of the supply chain being interrupted. That is as much a sign of a supply chain problem as a solvency problem for the big banks. The ultimate problems are the cost of money, control of governments, the coordination of central bank policy, and the control system that enables the entire fiat system to perpetuate and continue.The desperate response has been to throw 0% money into the system, primarily the big US banks, $trillions of worthless money, and expecting to produce a remedy. It is folly on the stage in global view. Rob Kirby summed it up, as he said "It is like taking 100 gallons of water into the desert and pouring it into the sand to promote growth. Nothing happens, nothing grows, and people die of thirst." It is the climax folly of the Keynesian attempts, something in fact that Keynes himself never advocated.
EXTREME BRUTE FORCE TO MAINTAIN
For the 0% cost of usury to be enforced, all connected financial structures must be attuned, distorted, and brought in line with the artificially priced markets. The enforced long-term rates are managed by means of Interest Rate Swap contracts. Their volume went in overdrive. The Interest Rate Swaps have inherent embedded USTBonds built inside them. The IRSwaps produce therefore huge USTBond demand, enough artificial demand to enable the finance of unlimited USGovt deficits. The maestros are not stupid, just corrupt. In fact, 84% of all credit derivatives have no end user, an exercise of pure bond market control. The portion of the credit derivatives with bonafide end users is negligible. Another $150 trillion in total credit derivatives from bank holding companies does not show up in the graph, which is from commercial banks. Recall Goldman Sachs changed their status to holding company, partly to conceal their credit derivative holdings, but also to qualify for USGovt slush funds in the TARP Fund program.
The group of big banks have total derivatives greater than the global GDP, which should offer a warning signal to economists, but instead they refer to it as providing stability in an unstable world. The USFed claims that the bond market determines long-term rates, but it does NOT. The Interest Rate Swap contract serves as a powerful mechanism to control long-term rates, using leverage from the more easily enforced short-term side of the USTreasury Bill market where the USFed exerts daily control with Fed Funds. Note the skyrocketing interest rate derivative tally, which is 84% of all credit derivative contracts. Note the miniscule volume of credit derivatives with actual end users, in the lower flatline. This is the smoking gun of ruined financial markets, in particular the bond market whose job it is to set the cost of usury!! Thanks to Rob Kirby for a fine graph.
 
In a recent interview, a fool on a financial network recommended JPMorgan as a stock investment, claiming the firm would benefit from rising interest rates. The level of ignorant recklessness is without bounds. As the 10-year USTreasury and the 30-year USTreasury yields have risen markedly in the last six weeks, the stress to JPMorgan has been so acute that some astute financial analysts like Jim Rickards have suggested that JPMorgan is burning money at an unprecedented clip, and at great risk. The enforcement of 0% money by IRSwaps has become extremely costly, as the leverage has backfired in JPMorgan's face. It is a reflection of the burned capital.
Take a walk down history. Clinton made a deal with the Wall Street devils. In the Clinton Admin, from January 1993 to January 1995, Robert Rubin set the stage, did the spade work, and made the necessary preparations. During that time, he served in the White House as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy. In that capacity, he directed the National Economic Council, a creation by Clinton after his coronation in the presidency. With his squire Lawrence Summers, they developed the Gibson Paradox at the USDept Treasury. That provided the high priest ideological dogma required to alter the cost of usury. Many recall Rubin as the Goldman Sachs superstar of currency trading desks. He was also head of their gold trading desk in London through the 1980 decade. He became Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Admin in January 1995, succeeding caretaker Lloyd Bentsen. From this important privileged post, he prepared to raid the national gold inventory for private Wall Street benefit. The volume of credit derivative growth accelerated in the Clinton-Rubin years, only to skyrocket since. The chart is proof. That unbridled growth occurred at the same time as the Tech-Telecom Boom & Bust, the Housing-Mortgage Boom & Bust, and the climax of ruin when the US banking sector died in September 2008. It will no more be revived than a dead man in a morgue will be revived from massive blood transfusions. The US banking sector has no pulse. Blood from large scale transfusions continues to collect in the form of Excess Bank Reserves held at the USFed, obscene bank executive bonuses, each a major eyesore never seen before in US history.
ALL MARKETS BADLY DISRTORTED
Speculation became the norm, not capital investment. The ugly response has been heavy asset speculation, not investment in capital intensive industry. A clear consequence of 0% usury cost is the massive distortion of all financial markets.The trend has been for US industry to leave the nation, and seek lower labor costs, less federal regulatory obstacles, to lands where capital is valued and industrial output is held in the highest regard. The steady stream of wrecked markets will be written about in US journals for a generation. Witness the mortgage bond market and its ruin. Its pathogenesis includes a particular Wall Street specialty with leveraged Collateralized Debt Obligations useful to hasten to vanishing act of capital. This was financial engineering at its finest. A typical CDO bond that lost 15% rendered the bond holder with a total wipeout, a complete loss. The housing market led the decline in mortgage bonds, as collateral was eliminated, as revenue stream was eliminated, as bank portfolios suddenly saw a climb in the REO bank owned properties taken in foreclosure. The homes clutter the bank balance sheets more with each passing month in a heap of fetid rot. The control mechanisms to maintain desired price ranges for bonds, stocks, energy, and currencies were available. However, the property market failed on the maestros since Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac were forced to show financials on their balance sheet. The Chinese were actually a key player in the housing & mortgage blowup, as they abandoned the GSE Bonds. In doing so, they forced the issue and urgently pressured the USGovt to indeed prove they backed the Fannie Mae Mortgage Bonds, the so-called USAgency Bonds.
The big US banks continue to speculate, and not lend much to businesses. The 0% usury cost is like a flesh eating disease. It causes gross negligence on asset management. It causes financial counselors to suggest speculative investment portfolios. All things become a grand carry trade game. The big US banks prefer to play the USTreasury carry trade, than to engage in business lending. Capital controls keep the money in the bank casinos. Even the stock market has been exposed as a fraudulent private game. The shock in May to the stock market exposed the role of Flash Trading. The culprits were not prosecuted for either market rigging or insider trading. They continue to ply their trade. The flash trading mechanisms control the stock market similarly, like Interest Rate Swaps do with bonds. In the aftermath, it was revealed that ten stocks can dominate half the daily trading volume. It was revealed that the average time held for stocks is minutes, not months, in a grand Round Robin of Wall Street firms buying and selling stocks to themselves, thus propping stock prices. It was revealed that over 80% of stock trading volume was from the empty chamber of Flash Trading. Another ruined market, verified by almost 30 consecutive weeks of outflows from US stock funds. The American public has wised up.
VEHICLES TO ACCELERATE THE DESTRUCTION
In the United States, the destruction of capital is so widespread, so universal, so perverse, that the maestros encouraged the development of vehicles extremely useful to accelerate the destruction. An addictive American mentality helped the process, fresh off the Me Generation. Recall in 2001 when USFed Chairman Greenspan showed open frustration with the bond market. Greenspan openly urged the long-term interest rates to come down, so that housing prices would rise and support the consumer society. He attempted (and succeeded for five years) to prevent the natural course of a major stock market plunge to be followed by a major housing market decline, as history would have dictated. He knew it would have been the end of the US financial structures, with big US banks going bust. That is whey he resigned in late 2005. He did not wish to preside over his handiwork disaster. He did not want to reap the harvest of the seeds of destruction he sewed. Greenspan essentially assured the USTreasury Bond market that the vigilantes would be killed off, and enlisted the aid of JPMorgan with Interest Rate Swap contracts. Notice the acceleration in the above graph after 2003.
The housing market boom ensued. It was unique. This time around, second mortgages were easy. Home equity lines of credit were easy. Origination fees (points as closing costs) were held down. Some people refinanced every 12 to 18 months. People without income had home loans approved. A street bum in St Petersburg Florida owned four properties bought with nothing down before he died. Income and asset verification became an annoying irrelevance. The end result was that the entire US housing market morphed into a gigantic ATM machine. Cheap money overbuilt the homes (MacMansions) and brought the 2nd and 3rd homes into play. From the year 2000 to 2007, the amount of mortgage equity removed from assets was astonishing. People ate capital in a veritable frenzy. The graph shown here is of equity withdrawal as a percentage of disposal income. From 2% to 8%, the trend was revealed as a quadruple. The trend was cheered by USFed Chairman Greenspan. With the home price declines came a new American phenomenon, negative home equity. The current figure is 23% of Americans owe more in their home loans than their homes are worth on the market. They are prisoners of capitalism gone awry. The ruin of the US homeowners is the symbol of the US systemic failure. So are food stamps and tent cities.
 
The trend turned to tragedy. Instead of investment in capital equipment, factories, and providing the fertile ground for robust job growth with legitimate income, the nation did the opposite. Investment instead was made in the $trillions on devices to drain capital, namely homes, shopping malls, and big box retail stores. The nation turned into a consumption engine whereby 70% of the US Gross Domestic Product was devoted to consumption. In a sense, the nation ate their homes and shopped until they croaked. Following the binge, came the current trend with mortgage defaults, home foreclosures, and bankruptcies. Lest one forget, the tent cities of homeless. To think that a collection of homes could supplant a collection of factories to drive economic progress and sustain a standard of living is the greatest folly in the history of the USEconomy. It is the last chapter of failed Keynesian policy. Remember well, it was blessed by Greenspan as good and wholesome and legitimate. He also blessed as sophisticated, legitimate, and robust the entire offload of debt risk with credit derivatives. THE GREENSPAN LEGACY IS OF RUIN, but in particular ruin from 0% usury cost as its root disease.
The perversity is so deep that home builders have often morphed into arbitrage outfits, who purchase wrecked development project homes and sell them to Fannie Mae. Even PIMCO has become a major buyer of wrecked housing portfolios with hopes to unload them onto Fannie Mae. Even big US banks have made the rules for home loan modification so twisted, that huge 25% profits can be snagged by merely forcing foreclosure, then sending the wreckage through the FDIC. The rules have been changed to favor the banks. Other arbitrage funds have sprung up to deal with mortgage backed bonds, as the vibrant funds have turned into processors of ruined capital.Regard these all as recyclers, no different than scrap metal, scrap paper, and scrap plastic processors that we are familiar with. The nation has not only created vehicles to drain and deplete capital, it has created recyling process plants to handle the wrecked capital. For the unrecoverable toxic waste paper, go to Fannie Mae. So the investment trend enabled accelerated depletion of capital, the shortage of factories, and the removal of legitimate wealth engines. It is like making bread without wheat.
FREE LICENSE FOR FRAUD
Few if any analysts make the connection that 0% usury costs and heavy speculation instead of capital investment go hand in hand with the fraud strewn about from the Fascist Business Model. Put aside the war machine, its missing $2.2 trillion in defense appropriations, its missing $50 billion from the Iraq Reconstruction Fund, its annual sacred defense budgets that surpass the entire world combined. Focus instead on the bank fraud, centered upon mortgage bond fraud, Municipal Bond fraud, Treasury Bond fraud, and the diverse counterfeit of same. See the packaging of quickly ruined mortgage bonds as unqualified buyers rendered the bonds worthless in double quick time. Then the ruined mortgage bonds as housing market declines rendered the bonds worthless (or badly impaired) despite the buyers having good credit. See the auction bond fraud for Muni Bonds across the land. See the naked shorting of USTreasury Bonds in order to supply operational funds that kept financial firms humming, made evident by Failures to Deliver. Not one prosecution has taken place against a Wall Street bank. The civil cases all result in a settlement that later proved to be bland. The license to fraud has become a mere cost of doing business for the large corporations, led by the big US banks.
The 0% usury cost is the business card to the national fascism umbilical cord to the USGovt from the banking sector. It enabled the development of the Syndicate, and its flourish. The economists have been reduced to carrying clipboards to track the fraud as they utter mindless drivel about the justification of Too Big To Fail. The slogans should be TOO BIG TO SAVE and SO BIG, SO CORRUPT. The extraordinary efforts and attempts to save the big US banks will be the precise policy that leads to systemic failure and the USTreasury Bond default, all in time. The corrupted financial markets are the province of the Syndicate in charge, which rules over the SEC, the CFTC, the FDIC, and the debt rating agencies. They also control the USCongress, painfully evident in the outcome of the Financial Regulatory Bill that enhanced their power. They rule from their exalted perch at the USDept Treasury, where Goldman Sachs has presided since 1995. They and the USFed have strangled the nation with a 0% usury noose.
LIGHT A FIRE UNDER GOLD & SILVER
The US economists and the US bank brain trust provide many lousy analysts. They are good propaganda artisans, a craft developed in the 1930 decade in a land not so far away. Their repeated lies are echoed by the obedient US press and financial networks. The current drivel they spew is that Gold is in a bubble. Nothing could be further from the truth, since the USTreasury Bond market is the global gigantic bubble. Gold cannot be in a bubble since gold is money. Money is never in a bubble, since, well, it is money. Gold might someday be subject to downdraft pressures, if and when the paper asset world is so incredibly depressed that the value of bonds goes below the cost of producing the embossed raised print colorful bond certificates. A precedent can be drawn from in the housing market, where in some areas the price of houses has gone 15% below construction costs. When USTBonds are valued less than their printing costs, let me know then and only then about a gold bubble. The US economists and the US bank brain trust are lousy analysts because they miss, overlook, and ignore the four primary driving forces behind the gold & silver bull markets:
1) When the price of money is well below the inflation rate, gold rises and silver soars
2) When government deficits go far beyond the ability of bond markets to finance, gold rises
3) The global monetary system has been exposed as faulty, supported by debt, so gold rises
4) No restructure or remedy is permitted, only gigantic bank welfare, so gold rises.
These are four principal foundations to the valuation of Gold within the fiat money system. The truth is that Gold is constant, and the USDollar and other paper instruments like assorted types of bonds vary in value relative to gold. The mindset of the US public and European also is so twisted that they believe Gold varies in price. It is fixed. The USDollar and various US$-based bonds are losing value so fast that Gold appears to be rising in a breakout in all major currencies (US$, Euro, Pound, Yen). The USDollar and USTreasurys are in a powerful bubble, at risk of puncture. That puncture is the USTreasury default, with the associated declaration that the USDollar is no longer valid legal tender to purchase imported products in the world market. Think of the USEconomy bidding up a currency in order to purchase crude oil. With each successive month, the USDollar would go lower in order to supply the crucial supply of oil to the USEconomy.The USDollar will someday not be legitimate to satisfy commercial trade contracts. That day will see the United States slide into the Third World. It is moving quickly in transition through the Second World with its tagline of Jobless Recovery.
The real price of money is somewhere around minus 7%. Calculate the price inflation as 8% by the Shadow Govt Statistics folks, up from a steady level a smidgeon lower for several months. The true CPI is rising. Subtract 8% from the cost of money at 1%, given generously, tied to the prevailing short-term USTBill yield. So the real price of money is big negative, like in the minus 7% range. Translated, it means generally that paper based financial assets (include housing) are losing 7% per year in value. Long ago, when mortgages dominated in the home valuation process, the home lost its status as a hard asset and became a financial asset adjunct perversion, a proxy. Translated, that means to borrow money and invest in hard assets, one should expect a positive 7% annual return, conservatively speaking. It pays to invest in Gold during such conditions. It always have been profitable to invest in Gold during such conditions. The US economists and the US bank brain trust consistently ignore this important point.
The spiraling USGovt deficits have become a regular fixture, with gaping shortfalls of $1.4 trillion each year. Remember in mid-2008 the nation was told that the $1.4 trillion deficit would be reduced to below $1 trillion easily in 2009. It was not, and repeated the $1.4 trillion. Remember in mid-2009 the nation was told that the previous two $1.4 trillion deficits would be reduced to below $1 trillion easily in 2010. It was not, and repeated the $1.4 trillion. Finally, the USGovt deficits in current projections are estimated to be well above $1 trillion, as reality has struck. The $1T deficits are a permanent fixture. Thus the Quantitative Easing #2 is in place, since the USTreasury does not want the shame from failed auctions to reflect badly on the USDollar or the other galaxy of US$-based paper assets. They masquerade as containing value, when they are largely trash items. They can no longer compete against Gold. If truth be known, Wall Street executives are trashing their corporations and buying gold in private accounts as counter-parties. They will someday dump their corporate losses on the USGovt and ride into the sunset zillionaires. Then comes the USTreasury default.
 
The global monetary system is crumbling, as all major currencies are mired in deep trouble, stuck in quicksand, pulled down with perennial deficits and extremely sluggish economies. The secret is out, the jig is up, that the major currencies are nothing more than denominated debt coupons. These arguments of a broken monetary system, the search for legitimate safe haven, the colossal aid packages for the banks that broke the system, the corruption within the big US banks (see mortgage bonds and home foreclosures), these factors have been thoroughly discussed in Jackass articles to date. But the topic of 0% usury cost is something that needs to be discussed more widely and fully. The 0% usury cost encourages a war of investment in tangibles led by gold & energy, of investment into tangibles and out of the bank-run financial centers. The fast rising price of gold & energy (silver too) are a vivid screaming report card of failure. Money in the form of gold represents money taken out of the corrupted banking system. Its value rises, or more accurately, the value of all else besides gold falls. Witness the climax of failure.
The fact that the big US banks are in no way even attempting to remedy, reform, and restructure the system is the additional jet assist to Gold & Silver. Any true restructure would begin with their liquidation as corporations, with fire sales of their nearly worthless assets rotting on their balance sheets. They would be forced to cede power and control of the USGovt and its Holy Grail, the USDollar Printing Pre$$. That event will come tragically only during a USTreasury default and assumption by the Receivership Tribunal, already formed. As more phony money is devoted to false fixes, more bank welfare, and wasted goony projects like Clunker Cars, Home Buyer Tax Credits, General Motors buyouts, Fannie Mae nationalization, FDIC home foreclosure processors, TARP Funds, and the many charades that make the USFed a virtual banking system, the Gold & Silver prices will seek their rightful value. Gold will move well past $2000 per ounce, and Silver will move well past $50 per ounce, before June 2012 as my forecast. Then they will double again when the USTreasury default goes face to face with a new global monetary system. The Boyz are soiling their pants with the runup in USTreasury Bond yields, a well-kept secret. So they are trying to paint the tape on the Gold price, trying to keep it down. It will not work. They cannot paint the Silver price tape at all, since it has great industrial demand. It is making new highs, trampling JPMorgan in the process, in a Silver Shetland Pony stampede. The Golden Stallion stampede comes soon enough.
 
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Gold Mania. And Then What?

From 24hgoldDecember 30th, 2010:
by Nathan Lewis - New World Economics

Eventually, people get it. The value of their currency is collapsing. It takes more and more ... dollars, marks, yen, whatever ... to buy an ounce of gold. The only apparent way to preserve financial value is to own gold, or some foreign currency that is stable in value. When the entire world is inflating, as was the case in the late 1970s, and there are no foreign currencies that are reliable, then gold is the only option. The "demand" for paper currency collapses, causing its value to collapse, and the "price of gold" soars.

To the typical speculator, this looks very much like a "bubble" or late mania stage of a bull market. It has many of the same characteristics, including the sudden widespread realization that owning a certain asset is a "sure thing." However, fundamentally it is much different.
December 30, 2005: Is Gold an Investment?

I say that, in early 1980 for example, there was no "bubble" in gold as classically conceived. Yes, there was a panic out of paper dollars, but gold itself was essentially unchanged in value. By "essentially" I mean that we could hypothesize that gold's value varied by a little bit, maybe 10% or even 20% either way, but there isn't really any conclusive evidence to back this up, and it doesn't really change the situation even if it were true, so it is easier to just assume that gold is unchanging in value.
October 31, 2010: Gold Has Never Been (and Never Will Be) In A Bubble

The essence of a "bubble" is some asset being driven far above its intrinsic value. Tulips. Real estate. Early-stage stocks. Eventually the mania passes, and the asset's market price falls to its intrinsic value, or probably far below. The mania signals the end of the "bubble," because the asset is finally driven so high in value that it can't go any higher without fresh buyers, and all the buyers have already bought.

This does not apply to gold. In the last 500 years, I can't find one example of gold doing anything else than serving as a stable measure of value. It never trades above its intrinsic value, or below its intrinsic value.
January 13, 2008: Valuing Gold

There is an interesting point here regarding 1980. Why did the gold bull market (i.e. dollar devalution trend) of the 1970s end with this apparent mania behavior, exactly like a classic asset bubble?

I say this was because, alongside the widespread public realization that the dollar was collapsing in value (the panic/mania), was the realization among policymakersthat the dollar's collapse had to be stopped -- immediately -- or there would be dire consequences. In slightly different terms, a new political consensus formed. In this new consensus, the government/central bank was encouraged to take any measures necesssary to stop the inflationary trend. This was a major change from the previous consensus of "accomodation," in which the Fed would accept the inflationary trend because to stop it would mean a recession and unemployment (or so they imagined). The previous consensus was that "stopping the inflation is worse than letting it continue." The new consensus was that "letting the inflation continue is worse than stopping it." Volcker appeared on the scene, and had the political support to do what he did, which was to be a super-hawk to stop the inflation -- something that waspolitically impossible until they had finally reached that panic/mania point.

I should say here that stopping an inflation doesn't have to be a bad thing at all. The original Reagan strategy was to have a combination of tax cuts and a gold standard, which of course would have stopped the inflation. The gold standard would have probably led to lower interest rates, and the tax cuts would have led to a healthier economy. It was a win-win plan. The idea that inflation could only be stopped with high interest rates and "pain" was a bit of a fantasy of the time, but they believed it so much that they made it true. Volcker's plan, the Monetarist Experiment, resulted in very high interest rates. Reagan's tax cuts were mostly postponed until 1983, and watered down. The dollar not only stopped its decline, but rose explosively (deflation). The combination of deflation/high interest rates/no tax cuts produced the 1982 recession.
July 2, 2008: The Volcker Myth 
December 10, 2006: The Magic Formula

We saw previously that hyperinflation is very common. Just about every country in the world suffered some sort of hyperinflationary event during the 20th century, except for the Anglo countries of Britain, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I include not only the Weimar/Zimbabwe type hyperinflation, but also cases of chronic very high inflation (Turkey), or situations where the currency suddenly goes worthless (France in 1940). You could also include all sorts of currency collapses like Indonesia in 1998.

Happens all the time.

Imagine if you were in an incipient hyperinflation. Eventually there would be the mania/panic moment when even Joe Public understands that the real value of cash, bonds, and even stocks and real estate are collapsing, and the only way to survive is to get some gold. This would actually occur rather early in the hyperinflation, maybe when the annual CPI is around 12-15% or so.

Obviously, for a hyperinflation to occur, we must get to this mania/panic momentand then keep going. What would happen is that there would be a mania/panic, the currency's value would drop dramatically, but, unlike 1980, there would be no adequate policy response. Volcker's appearance was, in fact, rather flukey. The existing Fed Chairman, William Miller, was not a monetary specialist. He was the former CEO of Textron. His time at the Fed was characterized by "accomodation," which was basically maintaining the status quo (inflationary policy), and not causing a recession. Miller wanted to be Treasury Secretary. So, Carter made him Treasury Secretary, opening up a vacancy at the Fed before the end of his term. A search was done, and Volcker was chosen as the replacement. Volcker was not, at the beginning, the hawkish anti-inflationist we remember today. He turned into one during the mania/panic phasse. So you see, we got a little lucky there. At the mania/panic moment, we had someone who could step up to the plate and deliver the appropriate (more or less) policy change.

But what if that moment passed? What if Miller remained at the Fed? What if there were other circumstances, such as the Fed was busy printing money to fund the government's deficit, as it is today? (This was not an issue in the late 1970s.)

In that case, the classic "bubble" narrative would not apply. We would get the mania/panic, but instead of indicating the end of the "gold bull market"/episode of currency decline, things would probably accelerate still further. The public could see -- there would finally be perfect consensus -- that we were in a full-blown currency event, and they could also see, very clearly, that nobody is doing anything to fix the problem. At that point the mania/panic would reach phenomenal proportions.

At roughly that point, the government would no longer be able to issue debt, except perhaps for short-term bills at very high interest rates, like 20%-60%. We got close to that point in 1980. Why buy the debt of a government that is hyperinflating? Also, tax revenues would probably be falling in real terms, because tax evasion tends to soar during these times (the government loses all legitimacy), and also when taxes are paid at the end of the year, they are paid in a depreciated currency. Every effort is made to defer tax payments. When the government is no longer able to issue debt easily, and tax revenues are sagging, then the temptation to print money to finance the government is intense.

This is, I would say, the gateway to true hyperinflation.
October 10, 2010: Learning from Germany

Typically governments will do anything to maintain the "status quo" as they imagine it. From day to day, the political consensus will be that it is better to print the money, and keep the government operating for one more day, than it is to stop the hyperinflation (this would mean huge spending cuts, because the government would no longer be able to run a deficit). At least, that is my interpretation of the German experience. Eventually, things reach the point of absurdity. It becomes clear to all that hyperinflation cannot continue. People stop accepting these paper banknotes under any circumstances, no matter how many zeros are printed on them. Government employees can no longer buy food with their printed money, so the game comes to a halt. At that point, things enter the next stage. Ideally -- as was the case in Germany in 1923, or Japan and China in 1949 -- the government returns to a gold-linked currency. However, another common option is that the government abandons the market economy altogether, and begins to impose what amounts to a Soviet-style centrally-planned economy. If the farmers refuse to accept 100 trillion bills in for their food, then the military will stimply take the food from the farmers. Another option is "price controls," which are a thinly-disguised form of confiscation. If you declare that farmers must sell wheat at $1 million per ton, and then you print up some $100 million banknotes on the laser printer to pay for it, the end result is exactly the same. Farmers then refuse to grow food, because the last crop was stolen from them. At that point, the govenrnment creates a forced labor camp ("commune") to grow the food. Refusal to participate gets you sent to the concentration camp. This is, unfortunately, a common outcome at the end-stage of hyperinflation, whether that of the Roman empire or Zimbabwe not too long ago.

It can go on like this for decades, even centuries.

Ultimately, the government will collapse, because it no longer has an economic/resource base to draw from, and it is, shall we say, extremely unpopular by that point. In this case, the situation is resolved by the introduction of a new government, either some sort of home-grown entity, like a breakaway province that declares independence, a civil war with a new government taking control by force, or perhaps an outside power. Cooler, or at least different, heads prevail, and a new system is established.

Nathan Lewis


Nathan Lewis

Nathan Lewis was formerly the chief international economist of a firm that provided investment research for institutions. He now works for an asset management company based in New York. Lewis has written for the Financial Times, Asian Wall Street Journal, Japan Times, Pravda, and other publications. He has appeared on financial television in the United States, Japan, and the Middle East.
Also by Nathan LewisSee his website
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Related:

The Tragedy of the Euro

From Gold News:

Unseen economic effects from the single Euro currency...

FROM WHERE did Europe’s recession come? asks David Howden, assistant professor of Economics at St. Louis University in Madrid, Spain for the Cobden Centre.
To listen to some commentators one would think that it came from nowhere. Indeed, the idea that a contagion is engulfing Europe – that one insolvent member state could cause innocent bystanders to fall – is so pervasive that its mere mention seems redundant. It is unfortunate that such a belief is prevalent as it ignores not only common usage of the English language, but also some very simple and relevant economic facts.

Like many economic phenomena, the important aspect is not what is seen and readily apparent. As Frédéric Bastiat was able to so cogently stress over 160 years ago, the crucial role for the economist is to discern the unseen economic effects.


While it is all too easy to focus on European member states’ burgeoning public debts, widening credit default spreads, dwindling tax bases and climbing ranks of dissatisfied unemployed citizens, the hidden causes are what are needed to be assessed to correctly foresee a prosperous future. While it is increasingly becoming accepted that European governments spent more money than they had, and that the ECB held interest rates too low for far too long, the specific reasons why these events manifested remain largely shrouded in mystery.
Philipp Bagus has just written the first coherent book explaining the origins, functions and consequences of the European Central Bank. An understanding of how this institution functions is essential to anyone – from the general population to the pundit to the politician – to grasp how a seemingly beneficial institution could reap such detriment.


In particular, I would like to focus on two of the most important consequences of the formation of the common currency area.
First, let us turn our attention to the now well-recognized fact that the ECB held interest rates too low for too long. Accession to the Eurozone meant that a member state would become subordinate to a common interest rate policy set in Frankfurt. While one base nominal interest rate pervaded throughout Europe, divergent inflation rates quickly created distinct real rates. In the high inflation periphery countries – the PIIGS of today – real interest rates dropped to levels lower than most of their citizens had ever witnessed. The result was an expansion in interest-rate sensitive projects. Investment in housing, for example, flourished.


The Spanish economy illustrates the worst of these excesses. In 2006 Spaniards constructed over 700,000 new homes – more than Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined could tally. That 2006 was also the midst of a housing boom in the United Kingdom should more than allude to the severity of this problem. Today more than 1 million Spanish housing units stand empty – more than the whole of the United States.


This common interest rate policy was heralded throughout the 2000s as allowing the periphery countries access to cheap credit markets. This would allow, in turn, for quick and easy development of infrastructure to enable their rise to power. If a housing bubble qualifies as a positive buildup of infrastructure, mission accomplished.


Next let us turn our attention to the common exchange rate imposed throughout the Eurozone as a consequence of the shared currency. During the convergence to the common currency throughout the 1990s the member states of the future Eurozone saw their respective currencies more or less equalize in value. In retrospect the situation was like two sides of the same coin. In Northern Europe, especially Germany (but also Netherlands, Austria and to a lesser extent, Belgium) the once powerful Deutschmark declined in value to meet the future euro’s shared value. In contrast, along the Eurozone’s periphery a sharp increase in currency values coincided with the eventual appearance of the euro. As the common currency replaced the individual member states’ currencies a single foreign exchange rate was imposed throughout the whole of the monetary union.


The consequences are all too painfully obvious today. Italians, Spaniards and Greeks – countries and people accustomed to less valuable currency units – were able to buy foreign goods at much lower prices than was possible just a short period earlier. A spending boom developed which saw the demand for imports grow at a fevered pitch.


At the same time the uncompetitiveness of producers in these countries against foreigners was becoming apparent. Indeed, as Bagus explains on page 43 of his book, unit labor costs of the PIIGS countries soared anywhere from 10 to 35 percent over the decade from 1999 to 2009. The consequence was a drastic decrease in exports coupled with an increasing demand for cheap imports. Severe trade imbalances developed, as savings from these periphery countries flooded overseas markets in exchange for cheap goods.
Not surprisingly, the situation was the opposite in the economically stronger Northern European countries. German unit labor costs declined about 10 percent from 1999 to 2009, largely because of its newly devalued currency shared with its Southern European neighbors. The large trade surplus that Germany enjoys today and which is largely viewed as a positive glimmer of light from the otherwise dismal continent is caused by the same phenomenon that plagues the peripheral countries: a shared currency with a shared foreign exchange rate, the value of which is the average of the implicit currencies of its component countries. Unfortunately, very few individual data points comprise an average. A consequence in the Eurozone is that no one country has a currency valued at a sustainable level.


Europe’s unsustainable state of affairs did not come into existence from nothing. Nor is the current threat of “contagion” founded on any application of the real phenomenon. The same malady affects all Eurozone economies the same as every other one. More striking is that this disease has continued unnoticed for over a decade… until now.


The effects of the common currency are now apparent. While knowledge of how a car’s engine is of secondary importance when it is in good repair, as soon as it breaks down such knowledge is essential to make it roadworthy again. The Eurozone is an analogous case. Understanding how the euro functions, and how regional politics play a role in forming the common monetary policy is essential to understanding where the current recession came from and how we will get out of it.
Philipp Bagus’ new book “The Tragedy of the Euro” is essential reading to everyone who wants to gain a better understanding of both these points.

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Cobden Centre30 Dec '10
Built on anti-Corn Law radical Richard Cobden's vision that "Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less," the Cobden Centre promotes sound scholarship on honest money and free trade. Chaired by Toby Baxendale, founder of the Hayek Visiting Teaching Fellowship Program at the London School of Economics, the Cobden Centre brings together economists, businesspeople and finance professionals to better help these ideas influence policy.

Europol Arrests More Than 100 In Carbon Trading Fraud

BY P. GOSSELIN, NOTRICKSZONE | 28 DECEMBER 2010 
- Estimated 5 billion euros in damage for European taxpayers
- Massive fraud involving criminal networks / Middle East
Here’s more proof that trading of CO2 emission certificates is fraught with fraud and attracts seedy criminal organizations – all costing the consumers and taxpayers billions.
The Austrian online Kleine Zeitung here reports that Europol have raided an elaborate CO2 emissions scam in Italy and have arrested more than 100 persons. The Kleine Zeitung writes: “The damage runs in the billions of euros”.
According to Europol, the Italian tax authorities, directed by the Milan Prosecutor’s Office, have raided 150 companies in Italy. The fraud involves evasion of value added tax with CO2 emission certificates. More than 100 have been arrested and are suspected of being involved in organised crime.
The Kleiner Zeitung reports that the Italian Electric Utilities trading markets had earlier suspended entire trading with emissions certificates “because a high number of suspicious transactions”. The loss in tax revenue just from VAT (MTIC (Missing Trader IntraCommunity Fraud) alone is estimated to be 500 million euros, the online Kleine Zeitung writes.
The fraud is widespread
According to reports, it’s been known since June of last year that criminal organizations have been using CO2-emissions trading for defrauding governments of value added tax.
This is not the first time that police raids of this scale have taken place. It’s the latest in a series of raids that have been carried out all over Europe this year, all involving the trading of CO2 emission certificates. It seems the authorities just can’t keep up with the swindlers out there.
Norway, Switzerland and the EU countries Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, the Netherlands, Slovak Republic and Portugal are all among the countries trying to identify the network of criminals behind this massive fraud – a fraud with links to criminal networks operating outside the EU and in other continents, like the Middle East.
2500 investigators – trying to identify! That’s a lot of fraud. The fraud has spread from science to finance. Expect a meltdown – sooner than later.

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