Hyperinflation

Draghi’s Friday talk of a “no limit” ECB balance sheet must have Weidmann and responsible members of the ECB at their wits end. It’s the nature of monetary inflations that there’s always a need for more. Throughout history, it’s been ‘just one more round of ‘printing’’ or ‘just one more year and then we’ll rein things in’. But things spiral out of control – and there’s a lot of currency with a lot more zeros. It can end in hyperinflation, at least when monetary inflation is afflicting the real economy. Today’s strange variety is inflating securities market Bubbles. It will end with Bubbles bursting and confidence collapsing. Integral to the bursting Bubble thesis is that policymakers are losing control. Granted, such analysis has about zero credibility when markets are in melt-up mode. But perhaps the markets’ response to Draghi is a forewarning.

The very first major economic collapse in recorded history occurred in 218-202 BC when the Roman Empire experienced money troubles after the Second Punic War. As a result, bronze and silver currencies were devalued. As HowMuch.net depicts in the video below economic collapses date back thousands of years. While many countries today still feel the effects of the most recent Global Financial Crisis, it is important to note that economic troubles are not unique to the present-day, but rather date back to some of the oldest civilizations.

While hyperinflating Argentina has begun discussing a rise in the denominations of its banknotes, and South Africa has admitted defeat in the currency wars, it appears Kazakhstan's collapsing currency and crashing reserves has prompted action. Since allowing the Tenge to "free float" in August it has imploded (from 188 to 308 per USD) and so today The Kazakh Central Bank unveiled the new 20,000 Tenge banknote - double the highest denomination previously.

Apparently taking a page out of the Spanish government's playbook, Argentines in the Santa Cruz region were surprised yesterday afternoon when at least five bright yellow armored trucks accompanied by heavily armed police paraded through the city. Just weeks after Kirchner's Peroniost government lost the election, and coming after five office fires (destroying banking and economic files from the current regime), local press reports the trucks loaded up with $130 million of banknotes at the airport and driven to banks in the region where outgoing President Kirchner's sister-in-law is governor. Amid comments by the central bank that there are no reserves left, and ongoing discussions of larger banknote denominations and (implied 50% devaluations), one could only speculate where the officially "business-as-usual" transfer of $100s of millions of banknotes will end up.

"There are more people in the world who need a currency they can trust, than there are people in the world who can trust their currency."

Price for Thanksgiving dinner pre-Fed: $0.50

Price for Thanksgiving dinner 102 years after establishement of the Fed: $50

"The global dollar standard, that is now the longest-lived of these artificial monetary systems, has developed a bunch of stress cracks and is in the process of imploding right now. There is going to be before the end of this decade, most likely, another emergency meeting of a bunch of finance ministers and economists to try and hash out another world monetary system. It is just history repeating, and it is a natural consequence of a man-made, artificial manipulation of the free market."

"New banknotes were being delivered daily in boxcar loads. In October 1923, banknote circulation amounted to 2,496,822,909,038,000,000 and everyone called for more. It is this last fact that is most telling, that every group believed that the solution was simply more money. They failed to grasp that what was needed was to simply cease all manipulation of the system and let the free market return. Their failure assured that the only possible outcome was the collapse of the system."

The low interest rates and relatively low inflation rates we’ve had recently aren’t going to last. They will soon be replaced by wildly fluctuating markets and rapidly depreciating currencies. We could have a catastrophic deflation, where trillions of currency units are wiped out; or a hyperinflation, as governments create trillions more of them; or both phenomena in sequence. But, as bad as they are, those are just financial phenomena; what will be much, much more serious are things looming on the political, economic, social, and military fronts of the Greater Depression. The bottom line is that you want to get out of the dollar before everyone else does.

"It is already too late. Having delayed way beyond the point when it might typically have raised rates in previous cycles, it has allowed an Orc-like monster to incubate, hatch and emerge into the sunlight, snarling and ready to do battle."

There’s no reason to sweat a drop in the gold price or cheer a rise.

In what's being described as a "palpably tense" tense auction, a "Chinese Beverly Hillbilly" dubbed "The Eccentric Mr. Liu" paid the second highest price at auction in history for a Modigliani. 

The cries for going totally crazy are growing louder... the lunatics are running the asylum. One shouldn’t underestimate what they are capable of. The only consolation is that the day will come when the monetary cranks will be discredited again (for the umpteenth time). Thereafter it will presumably take a few decades before these ideas will rear their head again (like an especially sturdy weed, the idea that inflationism can promote prosperity seems nigh ineradicable in the long term – it always rises from the ashes again). The bad news is that many of us will probably still be around when the bill for these idiocies will be presented.

“Consider for example a tax cut for households and businesses that is explicitly coupled with incremental Bank of Japan purchases of government debt – so that the tax cut is in effect financed by money creation”

- Ben Bernanke, Some Thoughts on Monetary Policy in Japan, 2003

Until recently, the consensus assumed a strengthening of the global economy in 2016. It won’t happen. If the global economic growth manages to reach 3.1% next year, as forecast by the IMF, it will be a miracle. We are close to the end of the current economic cycle. The outbreak of a new global crisis in the coming years is inevitable.  The Fed and other central banks are in a dead-end having fallen in the same trap as the Bank of Japan. If they increase rates too much, they will precipitate another financial crisis. It is impossible to stop the accommodative monetary policy.