Money Supply

Consensus suggests India is a basket case while China is recovering. We think both views are incorrect and therein lies opportunities for contrarian investors.

The Fed Doves are not thinking of that outcome. If they did, they would be not so confident on their ability to control the outcome. That, or they're bluffing.

Imagine the following: you read in a newspaper that a group of investors has sold US dollars to the tune of $820 million over the past two months for other currencies. This incidentally represents approximately 0.082% of the broad dollar money supply TMS-2 (which amounts to roughly $9.3 trillion at present). It means they would have been selling roughly $20 million per trading day. You then learn that $4 trillion of US dollars are traded in global currency markets every single trading day. Would you believe that their selling has influenced the exchange value of the dollar beyond a rounding error? And yet, we are supposed to believe that the selling of an equivalent amount of gold from the gold holdings of exchange traded funds over the past two months (they have sold 140 tons, or 0.082% of the total global gold supply) has greatly influenced the gold price.

In official testimony before Congress in December 1912, just three months before his death, J.P. Morgan stated quite plainly: "[Credit] is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else." Of course, this testimony came only 253 days before H.R. 7837, better known as the Federal Reserve Act, was introduced on the floor of Congress. The Federal Reserve Act went on to become law and pave the way for the perpetual fraud of fiat currency which underpins our modern financial system. And if unbacked paper currency isn't bad enough, we award dictatorial control of the money supply to a tiny handful of people, and then simply trust them to be good guys. Owning gold is the same as voting against this system, turning your paper currency into something that they cannot inflate or conjure out of thin air. Yet there's one problem.

Central bankers have been counting on "the wealth effect" to lift their economies out of the post-2009 global meltdown slump. The wealth effect concept is simple: flooding the economy with credit and zero-interest money boosts the value of assets such as housing, stocks and bonds. Those owning the assets feel wealthier, and thus more inclined to borrow and spend more money. This new spending creates more demand which then leads employers to hire more employees. Unfortunately for the bottom 90% who don't own enough stocks to feel any wealth effect, the central bankers got it wrong: wages don't rise as a result of the wealth effect, they rise from an increased production of goods and services. Despite unprecedented money-printing, zero interest rates and vast credit expansion, real wages have declined.

In the upcoming week the key focus on the data side will be on US payrolls, which are expected to be broadly unchanged and the services PMIs globally, including the non-manufacturing ISM in the US. Broadly speaking, global services PMIs are expected to remain relatively close to last month's readings. And the same is true for US payrolls and the unemployment rate. On the policy side there is long lost with policy meetings but we and consensus expect no change in any of these: RBA, BoJ, Malaysia, Indonesia, ECB, Poland, BoE, BoC, Brazil, Mexico.  Notable macro issues will be the ongoing bailout of Cyprus, the reiteration of the OMT's conditionality in the aftermath of Grillo's and Berlusconi's surge from behind in Italy. China's sudden hawkishness, the BOE announcement and transition to a Goldman vassal state, and finally the now traditional daily jawboning out of the BOJ.

By 1789, a lot of French people were starving. Their economy had long since deteriorated into a weak, pitiful shell. Decades of unsustainable spending had left the French treasury depleted. The currency was being rapidly debased. Food was scarce, and expensive. Perhaps most famously, though, the French monarchy was dangerously out of touch with reality, historically enshrined with the quip, “Let them eat cake.” Along the way, the government tried an experiment: issuing a form of paper money. It didn’t matter to the French politicians that every previous experiment with paper money in history had been an absolute disaster. The Bourbon monarchy paid the price for it, eventually losing their heads in a 1793 execution. History shows there are always consequences to entrusting a paper money supply to a tiny handful of men. The French experiment is but one example. Our modern fiat experiment will be another.

In many Western industrialized nations, debt has overwhelmed or is about to overwhelm the economy's debt-servicing capacity. In the run-up to a debt crisis, bad debt tends to move to the next higher level and may ultimately accumulate in the central bank's balance sheet, provided the economy has its own currency. Many observers assume that, once bad debt is purchased by the central bank, the debt crisis is solved for good; that central banks have unlimited wealth at their disposal, or can print unlimited wealth into existence.

However, central banks can only create liquidity, not wealth. If printing money were equivalent to creating wealth, then mankind would not have to get up early on Monday morning. Only a solvent central bank can halt hyperinflation. The longer governments run large deficits, the longer central banks continue to monetize them, and the longer their balance sheets grow, the higher the potential for enormous losses and thus hyperinflation.

Necessary preconditions for hyperinflation are a quasi-bankrupt government whose debt is monetized by a central bank with insufficient assets. One way or another, owning physical gold is the safest and most effective way of insuring against hyperinflation.

Monday's selloff gives us opportunities pick up stocks for less and to write additional puts at better prices. 

• Italy Political Vacuum to Extend for Weeks as Bargaining Begins (BBG)
• Italian impasse rekindles eurozone jitters (FT)
• On Spending Cuts, the Focus Shifts to How, Not If (WSJ)
• Obama spending cuts strategy focused on waiting game (Reuters)
• BOE’s Tucker Says He’s Open to Expanding Asset-Purchase Program (BBG)
• Fed Faces Explaining Billion-Dollar Losses in Stress of QE3 Exit (BBG)
• Carney warns over lack of trust in banks (FT) - here's a solution: moar bank bailouts!
• Bundesbank tells France to stick to budget (FT)
• China to tighten shadow banking rules (FT)
• Saudis Step Up Help for Rebels in Syria With Croatian Arms (NYT)
• After election win, Anastasiades faces Cyprus bailout quagmire (Reuters)
• Just for the headline: Singapore’s Darwinian Budget Sparks Employer Ire (BBG)

Waste and Fraud Are the Real Causes of the Deficit

Here are ten things that out to be on your radar screens this week and a view on their importance.

Some interesting numbers from the Spooks.

Whether it is the price of a car, a new house, the price of gasoline, a movie ticket, or a good stock there is going to be more money created each year chasing these assets in the system. 

Central banks are the devil. Hinde Capital explains that they are like drug dealers except they administer regular doses of supposedly legally prescribed barbiturates to their addicts. The 'easy money' or 'credit' they create is an opiate and like all addictions there is a payback for the addicts, one exacted only in loss of health, misery and death. The economic system is an addict, but that system is comprised of banks, corporations, non-profit organisations, small businesses all of which are communities. And what comprises communities, us, human beings - individuals. We are the addicts. It is Hinde's contention that central banks feel they need to maintain the balance of credit in the system as it currently stands by adjusting the money supply and monetary velocity (MV) but by doing so they merely circumvent the necessary adjustment in the economic system that comes about by market failure. If they don't allow this failure then any attempt to influence MV will only lead to higher prices (P) at the expense of output (T) in the famous monetary equation MV=PT. Sadly the desire of the State to control money and administer it like a drug has left our economies unproductive and incapable of standing on their own two feet. Full must read Hinde Insight below...