Global Economy

First thing today we reported that India just suffered what may have been the biggest blackout in history, after half of the country's population of 1.2 billion, or just under 700 million was without power, as the electric grid of more than a dozen states suffered an epic collapse. Below we shares some pictures courtesy of Times of India giving some sense of what it means for two Americas worth of people to live without electricity indefinitely. Of note: the calm, peace and order despite the epic traffic jams and crowds. One wonders what would happen in the US if the entire country was without electrcity for even just one hour. Finally, one wonders what the impact to the Indian, Asian, and Global economy will be as a result of the complete halt that at least half of India - one of the world's core marginal economies - has ground to do.

Want to buy stocks on anything than a greater fool theory, or hope and prayer that someone with "other people's money" will bail you out of a losing position when the market goes bidless? That may change after reading the latest monthly letter from Pimco's Bill Gross whose crusade against risk hits a crescendo. Yes, he is talking his book (and talking down his equity asset allocation), but his reasons are all too valid: "The cult of equity is dying. Like a once bright green aspen turning to subtle shades of yellow then red in the Colorado fall, investors’ impressions of “stocks for the long run” or any run have mellowed as well. I “tweeted” last month that the souring attitude might be a generational thing: “Boomers can’t take risk. Gen X and Y believe in Facebook but not its stock. Gen Z has no money.”.... So what is a cult chasing figure supposed to do? Well, the cult of equities may be over. But the cult of reflating inflation is just beginning: "The primary magic potion that policymakers have always applied in such a predicament is to inflate their way out of the corner. The easiest way to produce 7–8% yields for bonds over the next 30 years is to inflate them as quickly as possible to 7–8%! Woe to the holder of long-term bonds in the process!... Unfair though it may be, an investor should continue to expect an attempted inflationary solution in almost all developed economies over the next few years and even decades. Financial repression, QEs of all sorts and sizes, and even negative nominal interest rates now experienced in Switzerland and five other Euroland countries may dominate the timescape. The cult of equity may be dying, but the cult of inflation may only have just begun."

As markets continue to yo-yo and commentators deliver mixed forecasts, investors are faced with some tough decisions and have a number of important questions that need answering. On a daily basis we are asked what’s happening with oil prices alongside questions on China’s slowdown, why global trade will collapse if Romney wins, why investors should get out of stocks, why the Eurozone is doomed, and why we need to get rid of fractional reserve lending. Answering these and more, Mike Shedlock's in-depth interview concludes: "The gold standard did one thing for sure. It limited trade imbalances. Once Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, the U.S. trade deficit soared (along with the exportation of manufacturing jobs). To fix the problems of the U.S. losing jobs to China, to South Korea, to India, and other places, we need to put a gold standard back in place, not enact tariffs."

GDP Growth More Strongly Correlated with Rule of Law than Anything Else ...

As usual, the stock market was vexatiously out of step with reality last week, soaring on word that the ECB plans to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro and the political union that it binds. For U.S. investors, especially those who believe in hope and change (and, presumably, the Easter Bunny), there was also the invaluable news that the U.S. economy is once again verging on recession – a development which is widely believed to portend yet more Fed easing.

A few weeks ago America had to go through the supreme political theater that was the SCOTUS' unprecedented and uber-political decision on Obamacare, which in attempting to overcome allegations of partisanship, only succeeded in reinforcing these even deeper. Now, with everyone expecting Bernanke to launch QE every time there is a 1% downtick in the Russell, our honorable Chairsatan is in the same position: he needs to do something but can not afford to appear political with the presidential election just over 3 months away. In other words, from the soap opera about the Supreme Court of the US, we now move to the one about the Supreme Federal Reserve of the US. And the trouble for those whose investment strategy is hope and prayer is that the Fed is becoming aware of this reflexive phenomenon, and just for that reason may delay QE until September, by which point the US, and global economy, will be in freefall.

"While there are many reasons to be bearish on stocks, there is only one good reason to be bullish. The only bullish hope is that the Bernanke Put again will save the stock market" is the salient reality that TrimTabs' CEO Charles Biderman exclaims in his latest clip. Shifting to 100% bearish this weekend for his institutional clients, he believes that even if the Fed QuEases again, the equity pop is well-discounted and will have at most a 10% impact before he sees at least a 20% drop from April highs followed by potentially worse as the realization of the fiscal cliff begins. The glass-half-full-of-truth Biderman notes four specific reasons for his bearish call: from wage and salary growth slowing to barely positive YoY, to the Fed's inability to create any multiplier effect to boost the economy; and from the slowing global economy where "low tides will uncover all the hidden garbage created by booms" to the basic supply/demand of stock and money based on his 'Demand' index dropping to six-month lows. His bearish view is not even predicated on Europe's conflagration accelerating which would simply add more fuel to the growing fire.

The first is a long-term chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). The recent price history has traced out a pattern that looks remarkably similar to the one that presaged the crash of 2008, with one difference: massive quantitative easing and Eurozone bailouts pushed the B leg into an overextension. If this pattern is valid, the C leg down could be a real doozy.

Lumber giant Universal Forest Products’ CEO Matt Missad said in the company’s latest earnings conference call, “We are watching our inventories closely and trying not to get too far ahead because we are concerned about disappointing employment figures and lack of  construction growth in the U.S.” Rather than observe the trends in the Mortgage Bankers Association’s headline Mortgage Applications Index, which includes refinancing, a far better gauge of economic conditions is the Mortgage Purchases Index trends. This weekly representation of demand for mortgages related to home buying is little changed from levels registered at the bottom of the housing market collapse. The level of residential housing construction is an important indicator, and has made little improvement since the apparent market bottom in 2009. The sunken pace of residential construction spending in May was $268 billion – essentially the same levels seen in 1997. This  profoundly low level of activity is not limited to the residential sector; spending on commercial structures is currently the same as in 1996. Since there is diminished activity, the need for workers in the construction industry has also stagnated. During June construction employment totaled 5.5 million workers – a near 30 percent decline from the peak in April 2006 and the same number as in mid 1996.

We’ve recently published a report showing investors how to prepare for this. It’s called How to Play the Collapse of the European Banking System and it explains exactly how the coming Crisis will unfold as well as which investment (both direct and backdoor) you can make to profit from it.

Because Everyone from the Ultra-Rich to Illegal Immigrants Pay Nothing

Too Big Leads To Destruction of the Rule of Law

There is no mystery to the “headwinds” that continue to plague and mystify monetary policymakers.  The global economy is not pulled into re-recession by some unseen magical force, conspiring against the good-natured efforts of central bankers.  Instead, the very thing central banks aspire to is the exact poison that alludes their attention.  Conventional economics will continue to believe and empirically “prove” that the theory of the neutrality of money is valid, giving them, in their minds, unrestricted ability to intervene and manipulate over any short-term period (though it is getting harder to argue that these emergency measures are “short-term” nearly five years into their continued existence).  The occurrence of panic in 2008 and the unresolved and unremoved barriers to recovery in the years since, however, fully attest to nonneutrality, an ongoing form of empirical proof that their models will never be able to refute.  And we are all condemned by it.

To evaluate the impact of private sector deleveraging on economic growth/GDP in the context of a rapidly releveraging sovereign, we present the following analysis from Citi which observes various European countries and analyzes the "credit intensity" of GDP growth, or in other words which country has preserved, or even grown its GDP even as its private sector has seen substantial deleveraging. The results are interesting and may present a framework for evaluation the winners and losers in Europe in the era of "great sovereign leveraging", permitting a reverse engineering of the success stories, and applying their lessons to the losers.

It has been a tempestuous week where good is bad, worse is better, but European news is to be sold. Here is your one stop summary of all the notable bullish and bearish events in the past seven days.