Archive - Mar 2011 - Blog entry

Deep thinking from the Minneapolis Fed head

Are Greece and Eurozone doomed? I'm not buying the drama...

This is a chart of the US monetary base. In simple terms, it charts how much money the Fed has pumped into the system (at least that it admits). So it’s a kind of visual of the Fed hitting the PANIC button: when the monetary base explodes higher, the Fed is FREAKING out. You'll note that during the Financial Crisis the Fed didn't do much until the autumn of 2008 when it pumped nearly $1 trillion into the system. Think about that, the Fed didn’t go nuts pumping money until the stuff REALLY hit the fan.

Foreign evacuation precedes toilet paper like bottled water panic.

Ben will have a have tough time defending QE.

We’ll share a couple of new pieces of information we’ve come across since our Aussie Pride post just a few days ago. To begin, we think it’s worth noting that the peak in existing house sales in the U.S., led the peak in price by about six months. It is intuitive that, Activity Leads Price in the real estate market. With that little nugget in mind, homeowners in Australia may wish to note the following press releases from HIA’s Economics Group.

Stop whining, citizen ... eat some radioactive spinach and just wash it down with Corexit!

That chart from Tyler's article is reason enough by itself to get back to our BBB strategy (bullets, beans and bullion) and head for the fallout shelter - even without the fact that there is ACTUAL FALLOUT spreading across the globe from the STILL NOT FIXED nuclear reactor in Japan.

An evil plan to raise the prices of Thin Mints while no one is looking. If you can’t trust the Girl Scouts, who can you trust? In this deflationary environment, companies are loathe to raise prices. Food companies are especially hard hit, with many commodities like wheat, corn, sugar, soybeans, and coffee up 50%-300% in a year. Any attempt to pass these costs on to consumers is punished severely. Who will betray me next? The US government? The Department of the Treasury? The Federal Reserve?

EURGBP has exploded into the strong long zone with almost 70% of retail traders short after UK Retail Sales data yesterday. AUDUSD is back in the long zone and EURUSD is holding its ground in the long zone. USDCAD after a brief dip in the short zone is now back in the strong short zone. The German Ifo Business Climate is the main retail position moving event of the day.

Has Canada become the world's largest subprime lender?

I warned, in detail, that Research in Motion was a strong short due to waning market share and margin compression in January. RIM warns of the EXACT SAME risks as it lowers guidance earlier today. For all of those optimists in the stock, this is just the beginning - for RIM and its competitors as well. Mobile computing will soon be a commodity business like desktop computers.

I know that many deflationists believe that we cannot experience hyperinflation in the US due to our obscene debt levels. The belief here is that all the money thrown into the US financial system will be swallowed by another round of debt deflation. The problem with this belief is that it doesn’t understand how currency crises work. Inflation occurs when a currency falls in value relative to other currencies. And as noted by other astute commentators, hyperinflation occurs when a currency is abandoned all together.

The US Dollar's inflationary death spiral continues. We've now taken out the 2010 low leaving only two more lines of support before we're in completely uncharted territory. At its current rate of collapse, the US Dollar will do this within the next 3-4 months. This means the greenback will break into a new all-time lows by 2H11, which will precipitate the coming inflationary collapse.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Black Swan...