Purchasing Power

Respected economist and historian and the editor of the ‘Gloom, Boom & Doom Report’ Marc Faber warned on Bloomberg TV’s Market Makers yesterday that there are now “no safe assets” including deposits and said that he is focusing “on precious metals.”

Markets have "reached some kind of a tipping point," warns Marc Faber in this brief Bloomberg TV interview. Simply put, he explains, "because of modern central banking and repeated interventions with monetary policy, in other words, with QE, all around the world by central banks - there is no safe asset anymore." The purchasing power of money is going down, and Faber "would rather focus on precious metals because they do not depend on the industrial demand as much as base metals or industrial commodities," as it's now "obvious that the Chinese economy is growing at nowhere near what the Ministry of Truth is publishing."

"China is imposing fresh controls to prevent too much money from leaving the country, in an effort to keep badly needed funds at home to battle a deepening slowdown in the world’s No. 2 economy." This is undsiputedly bad news for China, but Blythe Masters would be the first to admit, escalating Chinese capital controls would be just the thing bitcoin needs to surge, and surpass, it previous all time highs...

Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't: trash your currency and watch capital gush out of your economy and financial sector, or support your currency and watch your export sector's sales and profitability crater.

Whichever option China chooses, it loses.

While the market's attention overnight was focused on China's crumbling manufacturing and service PMI, data which was already hinted in the flash PMI reports earlier in August, the real stunner came not from China but from South Korea, which last night reported an unprecedented 14.7% collapse in exports, far worse than the -5.9% consensus estimate, and more than 4 times worse than July's 3.4%. The number is critical because not only do exports account for about half of South Korea's GDP but because it also happens to be the first major exporting country to report monthly trade data. That makes it the perfect barometer of global trade flows, or as the case may be, the canary in the global trade coalmine. It also confirms what we reported just one week ago when we said that "Global Trade Is In Freefall."

This is just the beginning. As Central Bankers grow more and more desperate in the coming months, you’ll see more and more calls for extreme measures such as banning physical cash or imposing a “carry tax” on those who remove cash from the system.

• Hilsenrath: Fed Appears to Hold Line on Rate Plan (WSJ)
• Europe, Asia stocks set for worst monthly drop in three years on China, Fed (Reuters)
• Beijing abandons large-scale share purchases (FT), if only for a few hours
• China’s Next Problem: Paying for Its Stock-Market Bailout (WSJ)
• Crises Put First Dents in Xi Jinping’s Power (WSJ)
• Man Group’s China Chief Said to Assist Police in Probe (BBG)

The economic slowdown in China was set in motion a long time ago when the yearly rate of growth of the money supply fell from 39.3 percent in January 2010 to 1.8 percent by April 2012. The effect of this massive decline in the growth momentum of money puts severe pressure on bubble activities and in turn on various key economic activity data. Any tampering with the currency rate of exchange can only make things much worse as far as the allocation of scarce resources is concerned.

According to Einstein reality must comprise the physics of energy and matter. Match the physics of enterprise with the physics of gold and you cannot but get prosperity. It can be no other way! This is not philosophy. This is Physics!”

The virtuous circle that has sustained the dollar and buoyed USD assets for decades has definitively been broken. Now, with China's Treasury liquidation serving to exacerbate the pressure from the demise of the petrodollar, it's critical to take stock of accumulated petrodollar reserves in order to understand how large the unwind could ultimately be in a worst case scenario. As it turns out, narrowly focusing on official FX reserves could understate the size of petrodollar accumulation by some $2.5 trillion.

So why did debt levels rise so dramatically after the final central bank restraint was removed? It is essentially due to the massive subsidy central bankers provided. If you tax a thing you get less of it (think all the tax on labour) but if you subsidise it you will get more of it. As time went by, debt obviously grew ever larger and eventually large enough to become an integral part of the business cycle. In other words, central banks could not stop the subsidy for fear of creating, well, a 2008 financial meltdown.

A half-century ago, America - and then the world - was rocked by a mighty stock-market crash that soon turned into the steepest and longest-lasting depression of all time. Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it - except that now, with gold abandoned and each nation able to print currency ad lib, we are likely to wind up, not with a repeat of 1929, but with something far worse...

To make people eat their seed corn, we need to add the essential element: a perverse incentive. There’s only one way to make everyone play a perverse game: force. Let’s look at monetary policy in this light.

As asset bubbles are in the way of the Fed’s policy, a decline in stock prices removes the equity market bubble and enables the Fed to print more money and start the process up again. On the other hand, the stock market decline could indicate that the players in the market have comprehended that the stock market is an artificially inflated bubble that has no real basis. Once the psychology is destroyed, flight sets in.

The reason given by our rulers for suppressing cash is to keep society safe from terrorists, tax evaders, money launderers, drug cartels, and other villains real or imagined. The actual aim of the ?ood of laws restricting or even prohibiting the use of cash is to force the public to make payments through the financial system. This enables governments to expand their ability to spy on and keep track of their citizens’ most private financial dealings, in order to milk their citizens of every last dollar of tax payments that they claim are due.