Hyperinflation

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.

And now for this evening's stunner, via Dow Jones. "There won't be hyperinflation in China this year, the state-run China Securities Journal reported Tuesday, citing Yao Jingyuan, the chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics. The abundant stocks of grains and main agricultural products in China are key factors in stabilizing consumer prices, the newspaper quoted Yao as saying. China's consumer price index rose 4.9% in January from a year earlier, picking up from December's 4.6%." So putting aside what official denial means about the validity of a story, not to mention this utterly bizzare and completely out of left field statement, China's best and only reason why it won't have hyperinflation is that it has "abundant stocks of grains and agricultural products."... We can, at best, hope that this has to be some early version of an April Fool's joke, or else things are truly far worse than anyone expected. Also, just where does China put the threshold cut off on "hyper" - 10%? 20%? 50%? Is it at least safe to say that China may well experience mega, turbo, or nitrous inflation (and we generously put all three terms to the left of "hyper" on the X-axis)?

Keynes' key insight was the role central banks and governments could assume to ameliorate specific kinds of financial depressions via borrowing and fiscal stimulus. But politicians found that keeping the spigot open all the time increased their power and longevity in office, and so what was to be used sparingly and infrequently became the default policy. We are now witnessing the exhaustion of permanent Keynesian stimulus. We shall soon see its repudiation as a systemic "solution." Which brings us to everyone's favorite campfire debate, inflation vs. deflation. What this really boils down to is whether the financial world will expire from fire (hyper-inflation) or ice (deflationary death spiral). My own position is that hyper-inflation is first and foremost a political phenomenon--it is necessarily the result of specific political policies and choices.

We now live in a world where governments print worthless pieces of paper to buy other worthless pieces of paper that combined with worthless derivatives, finance assets whose values are totally dependent on all these worthless debt instruments. Thus most of these assets are also worth-less. So the world financial system is a house of cards where each instrument’s false value is artificially supported by another instrument’s false value. The fuse of the world financial market time bomb has been lit. There is no longer a question of IF it will happen but only WHEN and HOW. The world lives in blissful ignorance of this. Stockmarkets remain strong and investors worldwide have piled into government bonds in a perceived flight to safety. -

The rise in oil and grain prices over the last several months will be reaching Main Street by this winter. Gonzalo Lira argues that those price rises, coupled with the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing 2—scheduled for announcement in the coming two weeks—as well as the escalating Currency War with China will inevitably lead to runaway inflation: And he is prediciting it will start this March of 2011. —Gonzalo Lira

It appears that the one topic pundits have the most problems grasping is the spread between the segregation of traditional and shadow monetary aggregates, overall economic deleveraging and aggregate monetary velocity, and how all that impacts GDP. A summary which confirms just how prevalent the confusion is, is this terrific post by the Kalafia Beach Pundit, terrific not because it is even remotely correct (the post is so blatantly wrong - one wonders if Western Asset Management even expects its current and former asset managers to count beyond 2... M2 that is), but because it demonstrates how self-professed "pundits", whether of the beach variety or not, don't have the faintest grasp of more than merely trivial monetary topics.

A Fed paper released in September, which we luckily missed as otherwise it would have led to the collective death through uncontrollable foaming in the mouth of the entire Zero Hedge staff, was "Oil Shocks and the Zero Bound on Nominal Interest Rates", in which author Martin Bodenstein (an econ Ph.D.) argues that oil price shocks (i.e., surges in the price of oil such as the one we are about to experience courtesy of a fresh trillion in liquidity about to be unleashed by the Fed) are... wait for it... beneficial to GDP and stimulative to the interest-rate sensitive parts of the economy. To wit: "In fact, if the increase in oil prices is gradual, the persistent rise in inflation can cause a GDP expansion.". Yes you read that right. The Fed is stealthily floating the idea that a surge in oil prices will be for the greater good. In essence, the Fed is telegraphing that while it acknowledges that oil is about to jump to over $100, it won't be as bad as those with a functioning brain dare to claim. And, as we show below, it will actually be a very good thing! While we would probably get a massive lethal subdural hemorrhage if told to argue a view so blatantly and stupefyingly demented, insane and, simply said, wrong, as that espoused by Bodenstein, we are glad that Sean Corrigan of Diapason has gone the extra mile to not only expose the Fed charlatans for their voodoo gimmickry in this narrow topic, and brings up an even more critical idea, which is that the Fed "actually welcomes the current surge in the prices of many of the staples of everyday life; that it actually exults in the drain being exerted on family budgets; that it revels in the squeeze on profit margins being suffered by already-struggling small businesses, because it imagines this will serve to lower the reckoning of the ethereal construct of a generalized, future real interest rate and that this alone will serve to shower riches upon all who are presently suffering, in comparison for the present woes." That nobody has reached this conclusion before is explainable - it is something only the brain of an illogical, demented, perverted genocidal madman's brain can come up with. Which is why we are now convinced the Fed is hoping for not only mild inflation, but an outright surge in prices.

Veteran PM expert, Sprott's John Embry, whose observations on the lack of a bubble in precious metals we posted recently, and which came just before the CFTC's own disclosure that there may be extensive manipulation in the silver market, as well as a lawsuit filed against JPM and HSBC for silver price manipulation, shares his latest thoughts with Eric King in a traditionally contrarian insightful interview. In a nutshell, Embry is confident the current Fed policy will lead to hyperinflation, and that he would not be surprised if silver hit $50 within the next few months.

In today's interview with King World News, Art Cashin confirms that through its endless meddling, intervention and manipulation over the past two years, the Fed has essentially broken the market: "You used to have markets that were not particularly correlated. The asset classes now seem to be so heavily dominated and in inverse relationship to the dollar, and in direct relationship to the euro... It's frustrating having honed my skills over 50 years to be able to interpret news, and look at a piece of economic data, and try and outwit the rest of the world by figuring out how it would work, and now all you have to do is look and see how the dollar is reacting and know how everything else works. And that huge correlation is not good for people because if everything is correlated in a basket like that, it is very difficult for people to hedge and protect themselves, and therefore when assets move they tend to move altogether." In other words, step aside Value Investor Congress - meet Lack of Value Dollar Correlation Congress. But readers have known that for over three months. Just as they know that lately the biggest concern on Cashin's mind is hyperinflation "the difficulty is while you can get what appears to be nominal benefit out of [hyperinflation], when you try to convert to a hard asset, or even use it to try to buy a needed good, and the perfect example is Zimbabwe. If you were from out of space, and just could get the records of the Zimbabwe stock market you would say, "wow, they are having a pretty good time down there." But they are going up because the assets they hold are going higher and higher in a debased currency." And Cashin on his hyperinflationaty musings from earlier in the week: "My hope is that we don't get anything like that - hyperinflation would be destructive to civilization... But you are right, not only Zero Hedge, I think that was the most emailed comment that day all over the country." He may well be right. And he is certainly right about the Shazam moment: "Money only gets velocity when you lend it or spend it. The difficulty with studying things like the Weimar republic, is that the money supply growing drastically the initial reaction was small. There was very little doing, and it went slowly, until it went suddenly, and when it went suddenly, it went parabolic."

We present today's thoughts by Art Cashin on the coming hyperinflation (and no, it does not mean very high inflation - it means a complete and total collapse in the monetary system - which is what Ben Bernanke is attempting to achieve), without commentary.

"The number one performing stock market in the last ten years has been Zimbabwe - in nominal terms" - that is the most memorable soundbite of Kyle Bass' presentation to David Faber at the Bearfoot Summit, because unfortunately, in real terms investors have lost all their money. In this series of key presentations in which Bass recaps not only all his previous positions on hyperinflation, but pretty much everything previously noted on the topic on Zero Hedge, Bass focuses on what is the most "convex" product to imminent hyperinflation. Spoiler alert: it is not stocks. In fact, Bass says to shun stocks by and large, as in real terms (note not nominal), stocks will underperform a hyperinflationary system. This confirms what we have been observing for the past months ever since the latest FOMC regime, when gold has benefited far more from "money deluge" expectations that risk assets. In other words, those who are betting on a rising tide emanating from the inkjets' liquidity spigot, will do far better to buy gold than stocks.

There have been a lot of articles about the coming hyperinflation in America. Many of the commentators with whom I agree most of the time say hyperinflation is inevitable here. The problem is that it is an easy thing to say but more difficult to prove. If one does a careful analysis of the hows and whys of hyperinflation, it is highly unlikely to happen here.

In which we learn that that outspoken iconoclast has now taken on a $2 billion short position in Japanese credit, although presumably not cash-based as Ecclectica is well under that in AUM. For those who wish to recreate this position synthetically, we refer you to Dylan Grice's ATM swaption in the 10Y10Y forward which is the cheapest way to follow in Hugh's footsteps, and, ahem, may we remind you of Takefuji's recent bankruptcy...). His bet is in essence a gamble against the "China will never fail" bandwagon: "I am just intrigued as to the optionality, as to the profits that could be made, should that revert. And because it's deemed to be impossible, the trade is actually asymmetric. By golly if I am right, I can make a lot of money." Another topic is the already much discussed malinvestment in China, which was the centerpiece of the argument between Hendry and Faber from some time ago (link for clip). But back to what actual things Hugh is doing, he gives the following specifics: "I am shorting 10 year industrial corporate debt with 1% yield. Should this ricochet, which began in America, should the west be grappling with fears of recession, it goes to Asia, it goes to China, and I do not believe they have the vitality and consumption to pull the global economy out." And just in case there is any doubt how Hendry view the endgame, here it is:"At these immense levels of yen strength, Japan is bankrupt. And when it's bankrupt it has given up hope, and there is huge political legitimacy to then do quantitative easing, which leads to the debauchery of the system." In other words: the nuclear response of monetary debasement is certainly coming. We won't spoil what Hendry says on gold (suffice to add the following quote: "We will see a joint meltup in US Treasrys and gold") - for his insights on where the metal will go, for a shoutout to all Zero Hedge Hugh Hendry fans, and for much more, listen to the whole interview.

Together with the Fed's balance sheet, we are now convinced that the second most important developing metric for the economy is a granular analysis of the key public monetary aggregates: M1+M2. Within a month we also hope to develop our own definition of M3, to supplement such work elsewhere, in order to provide an independent opinion on what the true monetary growth is, now that increasingly more people are discussing the threat of outright hyperinflation. But before we get there, here is our first breakdown of M1 and M2 data. As a reminder, M1, or the monetary base, consists of the i) Currency in Circulation, ii) Demand Deposits, and iii) Other Checkable Deposits (technically it also includes roughly $5 billion worth of Travellers Checks each week, but this is merely a remnant of a bygone era and it rarely if ever changes). In the most recent week, total M1 was $1,700.7 billion, a modest decline from the prior week mostly due to a $12 billion drop in Other Checkable Deposits. Beyond pure M1, there are also i) Savings Deposits at Commercial Banks, ii) Savings Deposits at Thrifts, iii) Total Small Denomination Time Deposits and iv) Retail Money Funds. All these, in addition to the items listed under M1, make up M2, which closed the week ended September 8 at just over $8.7 trillion for the first time in history. For those who look at M2 as an indication of just how much liquidity is sloshing in the system, and use it as a proxy for inflation, the attached chart must be rather troubling.

In his new post, Gonzalo Lira analyzes the Oil Shock of '79, and the subsequent run up in inflation. He comes to some interesting conclusions about 1979, and how those conclusions might apply to today, if and when there is a run on Treasuries. "In both 1979 and today, dollars were poised to chase after commodities, following a triggering event. In ‘79, it was the fall of the Shah. In 2010, we are waiting for our moment to exit Treasuries. Therefore, one can look at the events of ’79–’82 as a dress rehearsal for what I think will happen today, and in the immediate future, if and when the Treasury bond bubble pops." — Gonzalo Lira