Bonds & Interest Rates
One of the greatest lies of the modern financial system (and that’s really saying something) is about inflation.
The puppet masters who control the system have managed to convince people that deflation = bad, and inflation = necessary evil.
Perhaps the even bigger lie is that of the actual inflation statistics. They tell us that there’s no inflation… or minimal inflation.
And they tell us that the ‘target’ rate is 2%. Bear in mind that 2% annual inflation means your currency will lose over 75% of its value during the course of your lifetime.
But these figures are massively understated. And you don’t have to look hard for proof.
US postage stamp rates, for example, are set to increase this weekend. They’ve been going up almost every year since 2006.
This weekend, the rate for a one-ounce first class letter will rise to 49c from 46c, a 6.5% increase. And the price to send a postcard will rise from 33c to 34c, a 3.0% increase.
If you take a longer-term view, the price of a postcard back in 1951 was just one cent. This means that the dollar has lost over 97% of its value against postcard shipping rates in the last six decades.
Let’s look at this another way.
According to the US Department of Labor, the average household income in 1950 was $4,237. This means that the average US household could afford to send 423,700 postcards back then.
Today’s median household income is $51,017 (and that’s for a majority of dual-income households). This means the average family in the Land of the Free can now afford to send about 150,050 postcards.
It’s a huge difference. The standard of living denominated in postcards has declined by nearly two-thirds since the 1950s.
Short-term, long-term, the conclusion is the same: Inflation exists.
And any suggestion to the contrary that inflation is ‘good’ or at least a ‘necessary evil’ is simply a lie. It destroys both purchasing power and standard of living.
Rational, thinking people need to be aware of this. If you hold a lot of your savings in a bank denominated in paper currencies like the dollar or euro, you will lose.
And I’d strongly urge you to consider holding at least a portion of your savings in stronger, more stable currencies, or better yet, alternative asset classes that cannot be inflated away by central bankers.
This includes productive real estate, precious metals, or even collectibles.
In September I wrote a post where gold made the same wise guy statement, because there is a valid argument that sees the onset of a ‘tapering’ regime as positive for gold.
Today it is the very asset class in the cross hairs of tapering, long term Treasury bonds that is saying ‘Taper this you mofos!’ Amidst all the hysteria about reduced bond purchases by the Fed the TLT fund is holding an important moving average and threatening to turn up.
Click HERE or on Chart for larger view
It is so cool to think about how utterly enthralled the herd is with policy makers these days (doing a 180° to 2011 or 2009). As if policy makers were not compelled to start babbling about tapering because long term yields had already bottomed and turned up. They then rose persistently right to the targets that NFTRH had all along. Voila, tapering initiated at the last FOMC.
Yields rise = taper jawbones in the media; not taper jawbones in the media = yields rising.
Today if yields do the contrary thing and decline (into an eventual counter cycle) maybe Huey, Dooey and Louie will start jawboning a tapering of the ‘taper’ talk. Only this time, I would not necessarily expect a resumption of full QE to hurt gold; not if it comes in response to a decelerating economy. That’s a big detail sitting right in the middle of the analytical equation.
Okay, so the post riffed a little and got off its original message, which would be that T bonds are threatening to put a majority off sides due to their own herd following behavior patterns. There, now I’m done.
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About & ToS
About Biiwii.com
Gary Tanashian of biiwii.com successfully owned and operated a progressive medical component manufacturing company for 21 years, keeping the company’s fundamentals in alignment with global economic realities through various economic cycles. The natural progression from this experience is an understanding of and appreciation for global macro-economics as it relates to individual markets and sectors.
Along the way, a geek-like interest in technical analysis, a long-time interest in human psychology and various unique macro market ratio indicators were added to the mix, with the result being a financial market newsletter (and dynamic interim updates), Notes From the Rabbit Hole (NFTRH) that combines these attributes to provide a service that is engaged and successful in all market environments by employing risk management first, and opportunity for speculation second.
Primary Influences:
- Former US GAO chief Robert Walker
- Robert Prechter’s Conquer the Crash
- Doug Noland’s Credit Bubble Bulletin
- Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
China Has a Problem
When the U.S. markets are healthy, overseas concerns often get overlooked. You have seen headlines about China recently, but may not have taken the time to click-through. From CNNMoney:
It starts with an epic credit binge. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the Chinese government ordered the credit lines open. Banks and other lenders responded, funding massive building and infrastructure projects. The strategy worked, and China emerged relatively unscathed from the global financial crisis. But credit growth never really slowed down. Analysts now worry that new credit is no longer generating strong economic returns. And, worse, the ballooning borrowing could sap growth if the central government is forced to stand behind defaulting local governments or agencies, through which much of the lending flowed.
[Hear More: Chinese Property Bubble May Collapse in a Year or Two]
Default Fears Are Increasing in China
Charlene Chu covered China for Fitch Ratings over the past eight years. In a recent interview, she answered the “why should we care?” question. From The Wall Street Journal:
WSJ: What do you make of the concern over the possibility that a 3 billion-yuan set of trust products sold by ICBC might default at the end of the month?
Ms. Chu: The reason why this matters is we’ve never been in an environment in China where defaults are allowed to happen, whether in the bond market or trust sector or other parts of the financial sector. It could be interpreted as a new willingness by authorities to start to allow things to default. The question after that is how far they are willing to go, because there are many questionable exposures out there. Over the last couple of years there were lots of stories about corporates about to default on domestic bonds, but it never happens in the end.
Stock Investors in the U.S. Could Be Impacted
….read more and view 3 telling charts HERE
Dedicated readers of The Wall Street Journal have recently been offered many dire warnings about a clear and present danger that is stalking the global economy. They are not referring to a possible looming stock or real estate bubble (which you can find more on in my latest newsletter). Nor are they talking about other usual suspects such as global warming, peak oil, the Arab Spring, sovereign defaults, the breakup of the euro, Miley Cyrus, a nuclear Iran, or Obamacare. Instead they are warning about the horror that could result from falling prices, otherwise known as deflation. Get the kids into the basement Mom….they just marked down Cheerios!In order to justify our current monetary and fiscal policies, in which governments refuse to reign in runaway deficits while central banks furiously expand the money supply, economists must convince us that inflation, which results in rising prices, is vital for economic growth.
Simultaneously they make the case that falling prices are bad. This is a difficult proposition to make because most people have long suspected that inflation is a sign of economic distress and that high prices qualify as a problem not a solution. But the absurdity of the position has not stopped our top economists, and their acolytes in the media, from making the case.
A January 5th article in The Wall Street Journal described the economic situation in Europe by saying “Anxieties are rising in the euro zone that deflation-the phenomenon of persistent falling prices across the economy that blighted the lives of millions in the 1930s-may be starting to take root as it did in Japan in the mid-1990s.” Really, blighted the lives of millions? When was the last time you were “blighted” by a store’s mark down? If you own a business, are you “blighted” when your suppliers drop their prices? Read more about Europe’s economy in my latest newsletter.
The Journal is advancing a classic “wet sidewalks cause rain” argument, confusing and inverting cause and effect. It suggests that falling prices caused the Great Depression and in turn the widespread consumer suffering that went along with it. But this puts the cart way in front of the horse. The Great Depression was triggered by the bursting of a speculative bubble (resulted from too much easy money in the latter half of the 1920s). The resulting economic contraction, prolonged unnecessarily by the anti-market policies of Hoover and Roosevelt, was part of a necessary re-balancing. A bad economy encourages people to reduce current consumption and save for the future. The resulting drop in demand brings down prices.
But lower prices function as a counterweight to a contracting economy by cushioning the blow of the downturn. I would argue that those who lived through the Great Depression were grateful that they were able to buy more with what little money they had. Imagine how much worse it would have been if they had to contend with rising consumer prices as well. Consumers always want to buy, but sometimes they forego or defer purchases because they can’t afford a desired good or service. Higher prices will only compound the problem. It may surprise many Nobel Prize-winning economists, but discounts often motivate consumers to buy – -try the experiment yourself the next time you walk past the sale rack.
Economists will argue that expectations for future prices are a much bigger motivation than current prices themselves. But those economists concerned with deflation expect there to be, at most, a one or two percent decrease in prices. Can consumers be expected not to buy something today because they expect it to be one percent cheaper in a year? Bear in mind that something that a consumer can buy and use today is more valuable to the purchaser than the same item that is not bought until next year. The costs of going without a desired purchase are overlooked by those warning about the danger of deflation
In another article two days later, the Journal hit readers with the same message: “Annual euro-zone inflation weakened further below the European Central Bank’s target in December, rekindling fears that too little inflation or outright consumer-price declines may threaten the currency area’s fragile economy.” In this case, the paper adds “too little inflation” to the list of woes that needs to be avoided. Apparently, if prices don’t rise briskly enough, the wheels of an economy stop turning
Neither article mentions some very important historical context. For the first 120 years of the existence of the United States (before the establishment of the Federal Reserve), general prices trended downward. According to the Department of Commerce’s Statistical Abstract of the United States, the “General Price Index” declined by 19% from 1801 to 1900. This stands in contrast to the 2,280% increase of the CPI between 1913 and 2013
While the 19th century had plenty of well-documented ups and downs, people tend to forget that the country experienced tremendous economic growth during that time. Living standards for the average American at the end of the century were leaps and bounds higher than they were at the beginning. The 19th Century turned a formerly inconsequential agricultural nation into the richest, most productive, and economically dynamic nation on Earth. Immigrants could not come here fast enough. But all this happened against a backdrop of consistently falling prices.
Thomas Edison once said that his goal was to make electricity so cheap that only the rich would burn candles. He was fortunate to have no Nobel economists on his marketing team.They certainly would have advised him to raise prices to increase sales. But Edison’s strategy of driving sales volume through lower prices is clearly visible today in industries all over the world. By lowering prices, companies not only grow their customer base, but they tend to increase profits as well. Most visibly, consumer electronics has seen chronic deflation for years without crimping demand or hurting profits. According to the Wall Street Journal, this should be impossible.
The truth is the media is merely helping the government to spread propaganda. It is highly indebted governments that need inflation, not consumers. But before government can lead a self-serving crusade to create inflation, they must first convince the public that higher prices is a goal worth pursuing. Since inflation also helps sustain asset bubbles and prop up banks, in this instance The Wall Street Journal and the Government seem to be perfectly aligned.
The article above was taken from the January edition of Euro Pacific Capital’s Global Investor
Peter Schiff is the CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, best-selling author and host of syndicated Peter Schiff Show.
Subscribe to Euro Pacific’s Weekly Digest: Receive all commentaries by Peter Schiff, John Browne, and other Euro Pacific commentators delivered to your inbox every Monday!
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“But one thing I wanted to show you and talk about because you said that lower interest rates help people. Well, if money trending helps everybody, then why does not everybody in the whole world always have zero interest rates? And everybody would be rich. You keep on printing money and you don’t need to work here, you don’t need to put on makeup. I could stay in bed the whole day and go drinking in the evenings. So, let’s just print money and be all happy. It doesn’t add up. One thing about the figures you showed: first of all, you live in New York. Do you really think that your cost-of-living increase is a 1.2% per annum? You really believe that? It doesn’t feel like more, it feels like five times more, or even ten times more.”
“Number two, by keeping interest rates at zero percent on the Fed fund rate — i want to emphasize that this is now going on in March of 2014 for five years. It is not something new. For five years this has happened. You penalize the income earners, the savers who save, your parents, why should your parents be forced to speculate in stocks and in real estate and everything under the sun?”
– in Bloomberg TV : Click here to watch the full interview >>>
Marc Faber is an international investor known for his uncanny predictions of the stock market and futures markets around the world.Dr. Doom also trades currencies and commodity futures like Gold and Oil.
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