Archive - Aug 2015 - Story

Over the weeks, months, and years ahead we’ll begin to understand more about the fallout from the death of the petrodollar and nowhere is it likely to be more apparent than in Saudi Arabia where widening fiscal and current account deficits have forced the Saudis to tap the bond market to mitigate the FX drawdown that's fueling speculation about the viability of the dollar peg. As Bloomberg reports, the current situation mirrors a "very scary moment" in Saudi Arabia’s history.

Last week, in the global currency war’s latest escalation, Kazakhstan instituted a free float for the tenge causing the currency to immediately plunge by some 25%. The rationale behind the move was clear enough. What might not be as clear is how recent events in developing economy FX markets stem from a seismic shift we began discussing late last year - namely, the death of the petrodollar system which has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance and was, until recently, a fixture of the post-war global economic order.

In the aftermath of China's worst manufacturing PMI since the financial crisis, which in turn sent the Shanghai Composite crashing to the "hard floor" level of 3500, below which the PBOC and Beijing officially are seen as having lost control, virtually every China expert and strategist rushed to defend China's policymakers (and its stock market) with predictions that an RRR cut as large as 100 bps is imminent, and would take place as soon as this weekend, a much-needed move to calm nerves that China is in control. it did not.

Earlier this week, two people, a Pole and a German, said they may have found the legendary, long-lost Nazi train rumored to be full of gold, gems and guns, i.e., the prize possessions of years of Third Reich plunder, that disappeared just before the end of World War Two. As BBC first reported, the train was believed to have gone missing near what is now the Polish city of Wroclaw as Soviet forces approached in 1945.

Is it any wonder that with "personal finance experts" such as these, that the personal finances of America have never been worse?

The only question, now that stocks are back to their fair excess-liquidity implied value, is what happens next?

China believes, with good reason, that she is more politically and economically robust, and has a better grasp over the actions of her own citizens, than the welfare economies of the west in the event of an economic downturn. Therefore, she is pursuing her foreign exchange policy from a position of strength. And the increments that will now be added to gold reserves month by month are a signal that China believes she can destabilise the dollar through her control of the physical gold market, because it gently reminds us of an unanswered question always ducked by the US Treasury: what evidence is there of the state of the US's gold reserves?

There is at least one hacked account that is sure to have been mysteriously deleted... You know, for personal reasons.

Adjusting for the WWII anomaly (which tells us that GDP is not a good measure of a country’s prosperity) US productivity growth peaked in 1972 – incidentally the year after Nixon took the US off gold. The productivity decline witnessed ever since is unprecedented. Despite the short lived boom of the 1990s US productivity growth only average 1.2 per cent from 1975 up to today. If we isolate the last 15 years US productivity growth is on par with what an agrarian slave economy was able to achieve 200 years ago.

"People are beginning to realize the Chinese government is not omnipotent and omniscient. In fact, like many of us, sometimes they don't have a clue."

The table below, courtesy of State Street's "Mr Risk", looks at key events occuring in 7 year cycles, finds that every recent multiple of the year 2015 going back in 7 year increments brings with it some major adverse market event, and asks: is it 2015's turn?

The $64,000,000,000,000 question: what does the Fed now do? One attempt at an explanation taking into account last week's market plunge comes from Nomura, which provides a "2015 Scenario Analysis" in which it "breaks down various monetary policy (rate hike options) and rates market implications ahead."

The current bubble is not comparable to the mania that culminated in the year 2000. At the time, one could actually watch out for very close equivalents to the shoeshine boy, given the huge participation of retail traders in the market. Nowadays we have a “bubble of professionals”, so we must look for something slightly different. And we have found it – or rather, it actually fell into our lap yesterday, or rather, suddenly appeared in our inbox.

The eventual outcome to all this is captured brilliantly in this quote by Ludwig Von Mises, the Austrian economist: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." The credit expansion happened between 1980 and 2008, there was a warning shot which was soundly ignored by ignorant central bankers, and now we have more, not less, debt with which to contend.