Deficit Spending

• Be prepared!

The Jefferson Airplane sang about truth and lies nearly 50 years ago.

“When the truth is found to be lies

And all the joy within you dies…”

Restating their insight to make it relevant to our global delusions about real money – gold and silver – and the much less real money we call dollars, euros, pounds, yen and so forth:

When the truths we want to believe are clearly lies,

Then CONFIDENCE in our currency dies…

Needless to say, Greece is only the poster child. The McKinsey numbers above suggest that “peak debt” is becoming a universal condition, and that today’s Keynesian central bankers and policy apparatchiks are only pushing on a giant and dangerous global string. So now we get to ground zero of the global Ponzi. That is the monumental pile of construction and debt that is otherwise known on Wall Street as the miracle of “red capitalism”. In truth, however, China is not an economic miracle at all; its just a case of the above abandoned Athens stadium writ large.

The Abe administration nominated a major proponent of reflationary monetary policy to the central bank’s board, buttressing Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s efforts to save the nation from the dread of deflation. As Bloomberg reports, economist Yutaka Harada, who will replace Ryuzo Miyao, has said Japan can beat deflation by printing money in a 2013 book "Reflationary Policy Revives Japan’s Economy." So far that is not working so try harder... “The nomination is a good news for Kuroda... he will keep a majority on the board and win what he wants." Why such good news? As deputy director at the finance ministry’s Policy Research Institute, Harada exclaimed, "we just need to print money."

Until now, central banks have restricted monetary policy to domestic economic management; this is now evolving into the more dangerous stage of internationalisation through competitive devaluations. The gold price is an early warning of future monetary and currency troubles, and it is now becoming apparent how they may transpire. The ECB move to give easy money to profligate Eurozone politicians is likely to have important ramifications well beyond Europe, and together with parallel actions by the Bank of Japan, can now be expected to increase demand for physical gold in the advanced economies once more.

The grand central banking experiment being conducted around the globe right now will not end well. With little more than a lever to ham-fistedly move interest rates, the central planners are trying to keep the world's debt-addiction well-fed while simultaneously kick-starting economic growth and managing the price levels of everything from stocks to housing to fine art. The complexity of the system, the questionable credentials of the decision-makers, and the universe's proclivity towards unintended consequences all combine to give great confidence that things will not play out in the way the Fed and its brethren are counting on.

Here's why bankers are the ones driving Lamborghinis and not farmers as Jim Rogers has been saying

There is no reason to assume that this time will be different. These boom-bust sequences will continue until the economy is structurally undermined to such an extent that monetary intervention cannot even create the illusory prosperity of a capital-consuming boom anymore. The bankers applauding Draghi’s actions today will come to rue them tomorrow.

An astute reader recently posed an insightful question: we all know who benefits from asset bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate--owners of assets, banks, the government (all those luscious capital gains and rising property taxes), pension funds, brokers and so on. But who benefits from the inevitable collapse of these asset bubbles? If asset bubbles end badly for virtually every participant, then why does the system go to extremes to inflate them? This is an excellent question, as it goes right to the heart of our dysfunctional Status Quo.

The world of investing as we’ve come to know it is over. Financial markets have been distorted to such an extent by the activities, the interventions, of central banks – and governments -, that they can no longer function, period. The difference between the past 6 years and today is that central banks can and will no longer prop up the illusionary world of finance. And that will cause an earthquake, a tsunami and a meteorite hit all in one. If oil can go down the way it has, and copper too, and iron ore, then so can stocks, and your pensions, and everything else.

A promise is a promise is a promise... especially if it's from a Central Bank. That was true and undeniable for decades of BTFD 'equity market put'-provision by the world's central planners... until Wednesday. But now, on the heels of the Swiss National Bank's 'victory' against the vicious cycle of currency wars and monetary debauchment, The Asian Nikkei Review reports stirrings in the Bank of Japan as one official warns, "we have caused tremendous trouble for the financial industry," and many others growing anxious about continuing its massive purchases of government bonds (confronted with the program's negative side effects) and pressure from the financial industry is strengthening by the day "to scale back monetary easing soon."

Success, we’re constantly told, breeds success. And success breeds stability. The way to avoid failure is to copy successful people and strategies. The way to continue succeeding is to do more of what has been successful. This line of thinking is so intuitively compelling that we wonder what other basis for success can there be other than 'success'? As counter-intuitive as it may sound, success rather reliably leads to failure and destabilization. Instead, it’s the close study of failure and the role of luck that leads to success. In the macro-economic arena, we think it highly likely that the monetary and fiscal policies of the past six years that are conventionally viewed as successful will lead to spectacular political and financial failures in 2015 and 2016. How can success breed failure? It turns out there are a number of dynamics at work.

We are observing the emergence of a new phase in The Golden Age of the Central Banker – the cult phase – to use the sociological lingo. Joseph Heller’s brilliant book provides the starting point, not only by calling attention to the prevalence and power of Catch-22’s in the investment world today, but also in the creation of a self-regulated, faith-based system of social behavior. A Catch-22 world is not a happy world, but it is a very stable world, at least on its own terms. Change is very unlikely to come from within, and internal market risk indicators are all quite benign. But external market risk indicators are all screaming red, as the global environment has rarely been this worrisome for political shocks, trade/forex shocks, and supply shocks with the scope and power to challenge the Central Banking gods.

It is truly amazing to see the contortions into which some analysts twist themselves, trying to make the historical facts fit their economic models.