Hyperinflation

There is no indication that the Obama administration has even considered this eventuality. Indeed, I have not heard anyone on the left refer to Bernanke or the poison of his policies at any point in the last few months.

One way or another, change is coming. 

Let’s step away from the noise for a moment and look at the big picture. This isn’t about doom and gloom, or fear, but objective facts. Undoubtedly, the Western hierarchy dominated by the United States is in a completely unsustainable situation. Across the West, national governments have obligations they simply cannot meet—both to their citizens and their creditors. Once again, this is not the first time history has seen such conditions. In our own lifetimes, we’ve seen the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the tragi-comical hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, and the unraveling of Argentina’s millennial crisis. Plus we can study what happened when empires from the past collapsed. The conditions are nearly identical. Is our civilization so different that we are immune to the consequences?
However, one of the things that we see frequently in history is that this transition occurs gradually, then very rapidly.

UBS' Art Cashin provides the clearest 'simile' for our current economic malaise as he remembers back 90 years... On this day in 1922, the German Central Bank and the German Treasury took an inevitable step in a process which had begun with their previous effort to "jump start" a stagnant economy. Many months earlier they had decided that what was needed was easier money. Their initial efforts brought little response. So, using the governmental "more is better" theory they simply created more and more money. But economic stagnation continued and so did the money growth. They kept making money more available. No reaction. Then, suddenly prices began to explode unbelievably (but, perversely, not business activity). Think it can't happen here? read on...

The other day the Huffington Post ran an article by a Bonnie Kavoussi called “11 Lies About the Federal Reserve.” And you’ll never guess: these aren’t lies or myths spread in the financial press by Fed apologists. These are “lies” being told by you and me, opponents of the Fed. Bonnie Kavoussi calls us “Fed-haters.” So she, a Fed-lover, is at pains to correct these alleged misconceptions. She must stop us stupid ingrates from poisoning our countrymen’s minds against this benevolent array of experts innocently pursuing economic stability. Here are the 11 so-called lies (she calls them “myths” in the actual rendering), and Tom Woods and Bob Murphy's responses.

We have lately noticed that there is an ongoing debate on whether (or not) the world can again embrace the gold standard. We join the debate today, with an historical as well as technical perspective. The gold standard will be the last option: If adopted, it will be out of necessity and in desperation. We are not historians. In our limited knowledge, we note however that historically, the experiment of adopting a gold standard –or a currency board system- was usually preceded by extremely trying moments, including the loss by a government of its legal tender amidst hyperinflation. The change to a commodity standard has often been then out of necessity. In summary, the Argentine case and the Dutch Golden Age suggest that the elimination of the credit multiplier (i.e. extinction of shadow banking) is more important than the asset backing a currency.

Just over a week ago we we were the first to shed light on the reality of hyperinflation on the ground in Iran - and subtley suggested the whole thing could be watched in real-time. Soon after, a mysterious cabal of 16 currency manipulators was arrested and the Rial jumped dramatically higher (according to official sources) - as if by magic there was no problem at all. This all sounded a little too good to be true (just like unemployment rates in slightly more controlled economies). Sure enough, by the power of social media, we now know it was too good to be true.

We have mentioned the little-known Belgian economist's works a couple of times previously (here and here) with regard his exposing the serious flaws in the Bretton Woods monetary system and perfectly predicting it's inevitable demise. Triffin's 'Dilemma' was that when one nation's currency also becomes the world's reserve asset, eventually domestic and international monetary objectives diverge. Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the USA has run a trade deficit for 37 consecutive years? Have you ever considered the consequences on the value of your Dollar denominated assets if it eventually becomes an unacceptable form of payment to our trading partners? Thankfully for those of us trying to navigate the current financial morass, Robert Triffin did. Triffin's endgame is simple. A rapid diversification of reserves out of the dollar by foreign central banks. The blueprint for this alternative has been in plain sight since the late 1990's, and if you watch what central banks do – not what they say – you can benefit.

Several weeks ago, the platinum producing company that started it all (after police killed 34 of its striking workers at its Marikana South African mine) Lonmin, conceded and agreed to a 22% wage hike. In doing so it once again proved that in game theory he who defects first, defects best. Shortly thereafter the strike spread to all other South African mining industries, and has even spilled over into the trucking industry, whose ongoing strike has crippled the country and threatens to paralyze all commerce. The only reason for the continued worker boldness: Lonmin folding to worker demands, in the process empowering all other workers in the African country to demand equitable treatment. Which is why today's news that that "other" platinum miner in South Africa has decided to go the opposite route, and instead of yielding to worker demands for a raise, has gone and fired 12,000 workers taking part in a three-week strike. How this dramatic shift in the balance of power affects the already struggling country, and its mining sector remains to be seen. However, if recent events are any indication, he doubt local workers will just put down their banners and go back to work as per the old status quo. In the meantime, look for ever less platinum,and gold, to be produced by this mining powerhouse.

The fact that naturally scarce currencies like gold do not hyperinflate — even in times of extreme economic stress — suggests that the underlying mechanism here is of an extreme exogenous event causing a severe drop in productivity. Governments then run the printing presses attempting to smooth over such problems — for instance in the Weimar Republic when workers in the occupied Ruhr region went on a general strike and the Weimar government continued to print money in order to pay them. While hyperinflation can in theory arise either out of either ?Q or ?M, government has no reason to inject a hyper-inflationary volume of money into an economy that still has access to global exports, that still produces sufficient levels of energy and agriculture to support its population, and that still has a functional infrastructure.  This means that the indicators for imminent hyperinflation are not economic so much as they are geopolitical — wars, trade breakdowns, energy crises, socio-political collapse, collapse in production, collapse in agriculture. While all such catastrophes have preexisting economic causes, a bad economic situation will not deteriorate into full-collapse and hyperinflation without a severe intervening physical breakdown.

Confirming that it is always the markets who make the news, especially when the news is explained by "world renowned commodity experts" who really are only long of newsletter sales in constantly wrong terms, yesterday's slide in oil was quickly and clinically "justified" with the near certainty that Iran's regime was on the verge of collapse following the local currency devaluation. We welcome these same "experts" to justify away why it is that the HFT algos which comprise over 30% of the CME's revenue have decided to send WTI right back to unchanged in yesterday terms. Because it would appear that today the Iranian regime is suddenly more entrenched than ever, and hyperinflation is actually a sure fire way to cement a so called dictator in his throne (as we said previously).

Below are several excerpts only the brains of those practicing the world's most useless profession (and we are very generous with that assessment) could possibly come up with, in attempting to explain the shocking outcome of reality continuously refusing to comply with their exhaustive and comprehensive Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models.

Given that policymakers seldom if ever experimented with forward guidance this far in the future, there is little data to guide them. The problem, however, is that these DSGE models appear to deliver unreasonably large responses of key macroeconomic variables to central bank  announcements about future interest rates (a phenomenon we can call the "forward guidance puzzle")

But the absolute punchline you will never hear admitted or discussed anywhere else:

Carlstrom et al. show that the Smets and Wouters model would predict an explosive inflation and output if the short-term interest rate were pegged at the ZLB (Zero Lower Bound) between eight and nine quarters.This is an unsettling finding given that the current horizon of forward guidance by the FOMC is of at least eight quarters. 

In short: the Fed's DSGE models fail when applied in real life, they are unable to lead to the desired outcome and can't predict the outcome that does occur, and furthermore there is no way to test them except by enacting them in a way that consistently fails. But the kicker: the Fed's own model predicts that if the Fed does what it is currently doing, the result would be "explosive inflation."

Since the U.S. and E.U. first enacted sanctions against Iran, in 2010, the value of the Iranian rial (IRR) has plummeted, imposing untold misery on the Iranian people. When a currency collapses, you can be certain that other economic metrics are moving in a negative direction, too. Indeed, using new data from Iran’s foreign-exchange black market, we estimate that Iran’s monthly inflation rate has reached 69.6%. With a monthly inflation rate this high (over 50%), Iran is undoubtedly experiencing hyperinflation. The rial’s death spiral is wiping out the currency’s purchasing power

Yes, you read that correctly. High ranking members of the US Federal Reserve believe that because a one time purchase of an iPad is cheaper, the increase in the daily cost of food and energy is balanced out.

"It will surely take at least a decade... for the world economy to get back to decent shape" is the somewhat shockingly honest (and at the same time hopeful that ECOpocalypse does not happen before) outlook that the IMF's Olivier Blanchard offers in a recent interview with Hungary's Portfolio.ru via Reuters. His diatribe of expectations that Germany would have to accept higher inflation, the US had to fix its fiscal problem, "Japan is facing a very difficult fiscal adjustment too" is more an understatement of facts than a forecast but on the bright-side he thinks China has turned the corner on its asset boom (but faces slower growth ahead). The reality is that, as he also notes, debt reduction (via default or deleveraging) is unavoidable and while he believes that this can be done without stifling growth in this credit-fueled world in which we have lived (though no mention of the tooth fairy). Dismissing the idea of inflation-targeting, he warns "You can have an economy in which inflation is stable and low, but behind the scenes the composition of the output is wrong, and the financial system accumulates risks." It seems the IMF is waking to the new reality - perhaps as evidenced by their actual disagreement with Greece over fantasy GDP data - though we fear what another decade of this will do to global instability.