Some analysts now contend that China can no longer afford to let the gold or silver price slump. The rationale behind that contention is that with the Chinese government now telling the general populace to buy precious metals, it would be highly problematic should gold and silver subsequently take a nose dive.

In many cases, what a government wants and what ultimately occurs can be wildly different, due to unintended consequences rarely foreseen by officialdom, and because once the masses get it into their heads to break one way or another, government’s desires are largely ignored.

“You shall not smoke marijuana,” says the government. “Roll me another,” says John Q. Public.

But in the case of gold, interestingly enough, the Chinese government has the means at its disposal to actually do something about prices. Namely, at $1,000 an ounce, the total value of all the gold ever mined comes to about $5 trillion.

Of that amount, less than $1 trillion is held in official reserves, the rest under mattresses, in jewelry and family heirlooms, and in various ETFs – GLD being the biggest, by far, holding about $34 billion worth of gold.

Against these totals, China has foreign reserves in excess of $2 trillion. In other words, more than enough to push the tiny gold market around in any way it wishes. Given that much of its reserves are now denominated in fragile U.S. dollars that it would sorely love to replace with something more tangible, and that China is the world’s largest gold producer, the country’s involvement with gold is something more than just a passing fancy.

Simply, there is a new gorilla in the room in global gold markets. The extent to which the broader market hasn’t yet figured this out is the extent to which you as an early mover can ultimately profit. Especially in the more leveraged gold stocks, which continue to be strong even as the broader markets show weakness.

That all of this comes before the dollar hits the wall it must hit, or before the inflation that is now baked in the cake arises, lends a lot of credibility to the idea that when the gold bubble begins to expand, it could reach all the way to the moon.

No need to chase gold at these levels, as opposed to buying on dips. But buy.

Regards,
David Galland
Managing Director, Casey Research

September 18, 2009

Could China Push Gold to the Moon? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Howe and Strauss have written many books on how generations determine the course of history and how they will shape America’s future. Their forecasts on a wide variety of indicators have turned out to be amazingly accurate. They were among the first to predict (back in the late 1980s) the rise of Boomer-driven culture wars and the simultaneous rise of Gen-X-driven free agency and distrust of government. And they were completely alone back then in predicting, for the post-X “Millennial Generation” (a label they coined), a decline in youth crime and risk taking and an increase in youth civic engagement that would first become apparent around the year 2000. Guess what? For the last ten years, everyone has been noticing exactly these trends among teens and 20somethings.

Howe and Strauss also made extensive predictions, based on generational aging, on how America’s entire social mood would likely change, in dramatic fashion, during our current 2000-2010 decade. To quote Doug’s prescient 1997 article, which was reprinted in Outside the Box late last year…

“… an excellent case can be made the U.S. is approaching another time of secular crisis, a Fourth Turning, with an expected due date of 2005 – seven years from now – plus or minus a few years in either direction.

“The Stamp Acts catalyzed the American Revolution, the election of Lincoln catalyzed the Civil War, the Crash of ‘29 catalyzed the Depression/WW II era. What might precipitate the elements now floating in solution? The answer is practically any random event that’s sufficiently traumatic. Any of the theses of current disaster/action novels and movies will do nicely. Perhaps the accidental or intentional release of a super plague vector. The crashing of an airliner into the Capitol during a joint session. An all-out assault on the IRS computers by an armed group – or perhaps the computers just melting down due to the Year 2000 Problem. Perhaps a financial disaster that cascades into the Greater Depression. In any of these, or a hundred other scenarios, the federal government would almost certainly act precipitously and with a heavy hand, which would bring on a whole other set of consequences.

“There’s no way of telling where the Crisis will lead, or how it will end. That’s going to depend not only on exactly who’s in control, but what they do, who they’re up against, and a hundred other variables we can’t even anticipate.

“One thing that seems certain is that real crisis brings out strong leadership. Because of its age and size, it will come from the Boomer generation, and it will be in the mold of Roosevelt or Lincoln – both very dangerous precedents. The boomers in elderhood will be dogmatic, harsh, puritanical, and quite willing to burn down the barn in order to destroy whatever rats they see. Admix that attitude to a time resembling the Revolution, the Civil War, or WW II, overlain with today’s ethnic strife, urbanization, financial overextension, and powerful, compact new weaponry in the hands of foreign fanatics out to teach the Great Satan a lesson and it’s a real witch’s brew.”

As eye-opening as Doug’s predictions were, they brought us only to the onset of the current crisis. Consequently, we thought it both timely and important to check back with the source of much of the research he relied on. And so it was that I spent several hours talking with Neil Howe, co-author of the seminal work on generational cycles, The Fourth Turning, and, just recently, the subject of the DVD “The Winter of History.” Howe is not just an historian, but also a Washington DC-based economist and demographer. While our conversation covered a great many topics, the overriding focus was on how things are likely to unfold from here.

Many bullish readers won’t be thrilled to hear Howe’s latest findings about the future, but given his predictive track record, dismissing them out of hand could be a costly mistake.

The summary outlook, according to Howe, is that we are in the very early stages of a 20-year period of economic and institutional upheaval – an era denominated by a crisis during which we’ll likely witness the tearing down and reconstruction of many aspects of society as we know it.

As individuals, understanding Howe’s views and taking some reasonable precautions makes a lot of sense. As investors, those views also have the potential to make us a lot of money.

Following is my high-level recap of my long conversation with Neil Howe, along with some general thoughts on the investment implications of a 20-year bear market.

Remember the Sixties?

If you’re old enough — or possess even a rudimentary sense of history — think back to the 1950s, with roller-skating waitresses, crew cuts, and nuclear families of the sort represented by the iconic Leave it to Beaver. Fathers worked, while many mothers stayed home. Life had a certain predictable quality and, as far as anyone knew, would continue along the same lines for time immemorial.

But then something happened… the 1960s. Literally no one saw it coming. It was as if someone had flipped a switch that electrified America and, quickly, the world. Most everything changed, and a society accustomed to conformity was blown away with a fierce individualism expressed with long hair, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, topped off with civil disobedience and bloody riots in the streets.

What happened?

According to Neil Howe, in the mid-1960s, generational change pushed society around a dramatic corner as idealistic, individualistic young Baby Boomers (born 1943 to 1960) rebelled against the midlife leadership of their G.I. Generation parents (born 1901 to 1924).

These periods of transitions are part of a larger cyclical pattern made up of four distinct eras, or “Turnings,” each lasting approximately 20 years. It can be helpful to think of the four turnings as you might think of the four seasons, repeating predictably in their own natural rhythm. A full cycle of turnings takes place over a period of about 80 to 90 years — roughly the span of a long human life. A new turning begins as a new youth generation comes of age, bringing a new social ethic that compensates for the excesses of the midlife generation then in power.

While we don’t have the space here to go into the full details of Howe’s research, it’s important to the topic at hand that we quickly recap the Four Turnings.

The First Turning is referred to by Howe as a High. As this follows a period of crisis, one of the hallmarks of a First Turning is a heightened sense of community and collective optimism, driven in part by the fact that the society has just come through a difficult and challenging time. Consequently, during First Turnings, societal institutions tend to be strong while individualism is weak. The post-World War II “High” of the mid-1940s through early ‘60s is the most recent example of a First Turning.

The Second Turning, called an Awakening, typically starts out feeling like the high tide of a High, with signs of progress and prosperity everywhere. But just as everything seems to be going along swimmingly, large swaths of society begin to chaff under the social conformity of the High, beginning to gravitate to more individualistic pursuits and demanding that their personal interests come first. You may recognize the “Consciousness Revolution” of the mid-1960s through early 1980s, correctly, as the Second Turning.

Next up, the Third Turning, which Howe calls an Unraveling, is much the opposite of a High. To wit, individualism dominates, while institutions are increasingly weak and discredited. Quoting Howe on the Unraveling…

“This is a time when social authority feels inconsequential, the culture feels exhausted, and people feel bewildered by the number of options available to them. It is a time of celebrity circuses and a tremendous amount of freedom and creativity in our personal lives, but very little sense of public purpose.

“The most recent Third Turning began in the mid-‘80s with Morning in America, and continued through the ‘90s. Previous periods of Unraveling in American history were also decades of cynicism and bad manners. Think of the 1920s, the 1850s, the 1760s. And history teaches us that the Third Turnings inevitably end in Fourth Turnings.”

Finally, there is the Fourth Turning, called a Crisis. The recent Third Turning appears to be winding down, and we are currently on the cusp of a Fourth Turning. This is a time of great turmoil, when society’s basic institutions are torn down and rebuilt, and seemingly insurmountable problems are addressed. During Fourth Turnings, America engages in a struggle for its very survival and redefines its identity as a nation. Large wars are often a part of this process. The American Revolution, Civil War, Great Depression, and World War II were all features of past Fourth Turnings.

In sum, Howe’s research has shown that, with remarkable predictability, history is not a straight line extending toward a better and brighter (or increasingly awful) future, but rather a repeating cycle of the four distinct social eras. These four turnings have recurred with remarkable consistency throughout Anglo-American history, as Neil Howe outlines at length in Generations and The Fourth Turning. It is therefore no accident that America has experienced great cataclysms or “Crises” about every 80 years. Travel back eighty years from Pearl Harbor Day, and you land in the middle of the Civil War. Eighty years before that takes you to the Revolutionary War. If the rhythms of history hold, America is now poised to enter another Fourth Turning.

Bad News, Potentially Good News

You don’t need me to tell you that the United States and in fact the world are now facing a plethora of intractable problems. The world’s former powerhouse economy, the U.S., is now the world’s largest debtor nation – and by a wide margin. The nation has trillions in unpayable liabilities coming due on Social Security and Medicare, to name just two of many broken government programs weighing on the country. And our much vaunted democracy is increasingly dysfunctional – rotten to the core, truth be known – thanks largely to entrenched special interests and a voting public clamoring for their own piece of the pie, while trying to hand the bill off to somebody else.

Meanwhile, the economy – despite rigorous jawboning by the government and its many friends in the large banking institutions — is in serious trouble, with the housing market buffeted by tsunami-like waves of defaults, foreclosures, overvaluations, historic levels of personal debt, and tight credit that has left the U.S. government as the sole lender in many markets.

Bernanke and his ilk may see green shoots, but what they’re really seeing is the deep, green sea rising up once again to bury the economy. That’s the bad news.

The potentially good news, if you credit Howe’s research, is that the Crisis we’re now entering will change pretty much everything. While this change will entail a great deal of pain and a reduced standard of living for a large number of people, by the time the Crisis subsides, society will have pretty much remade itself in ways that no one can predict at this point.

Put another way, today’s intractable problems will be solved… one way or another.

What’s Next

When discussing what’s likely to follow next, Neil Howe turns to his generational profiles and points out that the rising societal power today belongs to the generation he calls the Millennials, individuals born between 1982 and 2004. They are a “Hero” generation, just like the G.I. Generation that coped so well with the turmoil of the Great Depression and World War II — the last Fourth Turning. Coddled as children, the G.I.s were ultimately called upon to help society through a dark and dangerous period and rose to the occasion. Again, quoting Howe on the Millennials…

“These are today’s young people, who are just beginning to be well known to most Americans. They fill K-12 schools, colleges, graduate schools, and have recently begun entering the workplace. We associate them with dramatic improvements in youth behaviors, which are often underreported by the media. Since Millennials have come along, we’ve seen huge declines in violent crime, teen pregnancy, and the most damaging forms of drug abuse, as well as higher rates of community service and volunteering. This is a generation that reminds us in many respects of the young G.I.s nearly a century ago, back when they were the first boy scouts and girl scouts between 1910 and 1920.”

Unlike the Baby Boomers, who are largely individualistic and anti-establishment, the Millennials are good team players. We hear a lot these days about working together for a common cause, volunteerism, and the need for stronger government institutions, largely because these are the new priorities of the Millennial Generation.

As you may recall, out of the devastation of World War II, a spate of transnational political and economic institutions were born, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the International Monetary Fund. By the time the current Fourth Turning is over, expect more of the same — but probably even bigger and more ambitious.

What Does This Mean to You?

Most importantly, if Howe is right, this crisis is far from over. In fact, when I asked him where we are today on a scale from 1 to 10 — with 10 representing as bad as the crisis will get — he replied that we are at either 2 or 3. In other words, the worst is very much yet to come. And, per above, he expects this period of turmoil to take 20 years to play out. Thus, if nothing else, you may want to continue approaching matters of personal finance cautiously.

Secondly, if you’re the type of individual that tends to get steamed up by larger and more intrusive government programs, you may want to take a few deep breaths and resolve yourself to the fact that this phenomenon is likely to get far worse before we see a return to celebration of individual rights. (And the cycle shows that we will see such a return — about 40 to 50 years from now, when the next Second Turning comes around.)

If it is any consolation, the Millennial Generation places a great deal of weight on teamwork and the notion of doing things “smart.” That doesn’t mean, of course, that the various programs that are kicked off in an attempt to fix the many problems now confronting society will in fact turn out to be technically smart. But they will almost certainly be better thought out than some of the numbskull initiatives we’ve seen over the last 20 years.

You can also take some comfort in the fact that Millennials are builders, not destroyers. By contrast, the individualistic Boomers that dominate today’s aging political class are world-class dissenters, radio talk show aficionados always ready to scrap it out for their beliefs. Millennials want to skip the philosophical debate and get straight to fixing things.

Other insights about Fourth Turning periods gained from my conversation with Neil Howe…

• Government grows powerful, and sweeping new legislation is enacted. The old 1990s rule was: just compete and stay off the state’s radar screen. The new 2010s rule will be: better have a presence in Washington so you’re not dealt out of the “new” new deal.  One political party tends to dominate. The Democrats under FDR during the last Fourth Turning offer a good example. While Neil Howe doesn’t think it will necessarily be the Democrats this time around, they are certainly in the pole position at this point.

• While public history speeds up, personal life slows down. Families will spend more time together, like in the old Frank Capra movies. Ever more households will be multi-generational, a trend now spurred by Boomers with large, empty McMansions and Millennials without jobs. There will be a blanding of the pop culture, with the entertainment of the young (put Miley Cyrus or “High School Musical” on fast forward) increasingly regarded as tamer than the entertainment of the old.

• Innovation tends to stagnate, while a few new technologies will be chosen to be adopted on a large scale. We will see the equivalent of canals or railroads or interstates being built across America. To borrow from Carlotta Perez’ four-stage description of technological revolutions, we are moving from the “innovation” to the “implementation” stage.

• New laws and regulations will do less to referee a free market and more to pursue one or another national priority. They will increasingly favor the large producer over the retail buyer, investment over consumption, planning over risk, debt over equity. Businesses will hustle to reposition themselves. Anti-trust will weaken.

• The authority and obligations of community will strengthen at all levels, from local to national and possibly beyond (if our alliances prove durable). Personal reputation and membership will matter more. A “new localism” will reshape town and urban planning. A global slide toward national or regional protectionism will loom as a real danger.

• It is too early to tell whether the crisis will ultimately be inflationary or deflationary, though we at Casey Research come down on the side of inflation for the simple reason that the government possesses the means to inflate. Due to the gold standard, that was not the case early in the Great Depression.

• In the past, Fourth Turning periods have always resulted in the nation redefining who we are in some essential way. That was certainly the case during the American Revolution, when we transitioned from a British colony into a collection of independent states — and the Civil War, when those states were hammered into a single nation. And, again, after World War II, when the U.S. went from being a relatively isolated nation to a global empire. A wild card, for instance a terrorist nuke going off in a city anywhere on the planet, could similarly take the country, and the world, into unforeseeable new directions.

• Baby Boomers will continue to be respected for their cultural achievements (it’s not a fluke of history that Boomer music and other entertainments are still wildly popular among the young), but will be increasingly ignored in the political debate. The term “senior citizen,” already in decline, will disappear entirely. And if push comes to shove, Boomer’s financial interests – including Social Security – will be subjugated “for the greater good.”

• There will be a growing push to rebuild the middle class. The wealthy and the impoverished alike will both come under pressure thanks to new pro-middle class initiatives. If you are a high-income earner, it’s a certainty your taxes are going up, and likely by a lot. If you want to make a fortune, don’t pursue the niche or the “long tail.”  Invent the next big brand that will appeal to Everyman.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

That is, at best, a sketch of my long conversation with Neil Howe and doesn’t do justice to his research. If nothing else, however, I hope I’ve succeeded in giving you at least some sense of the man and his unique research and encouraged you to think outside the box about the nature of today’s crisis.

A couple of final observations.

First, Neil Howe is not a negative person, nor a professional doomsayer. Rather, he is a social scientist and historian with decades of experience in the social sciences. As you speak to him, you get the sense that he doesn’t view the world through any particular philosophical bias, but rather is simply reporting what his research is telling him about the current players on the global stage, and which act we are currently in.

Secondly, speaking as a Baby Boomer and someone with a lifelong distrust of government and its meddling institutions, talking to Neil left me feeling oddly relaxed — letting go, if you will, of some of the frustration that has been building within me as I watch the nanny state grow more and more bloated.

That is not to say we won’t continue to speak out against government waste and prolificacy. We will. But it seems increasingly clear that we’re now caught up in a powerful trend toward bigger, not smaller, societal institutions — and that these institutions will, over the period ahead, change the world as we know it.

Of course, being active investors, at the same time we raise our voices in protest, we’ll deal with the reality of the situation by strategically positioning our portfolios to profit from the coming changes.

And so, like the Rockefellers and J.P. Morgan during the Great Depression, we’ll make the trend — to matter how negative — our friend. You may want to consider doing so yourself.

Making the trend your friend is more important than ever, if your assets are to make it through the Fourth Turning intact. The Casey Report discovers and analyzes budding economic trends and turns them into hands-on, actionable recommendations for its subscribers. Read the latest report from Casey Chief Economist Bud Conrad about our favorite investment of 2009… a play on an all but inevitable economic development. Click here to read more.

Regards,
David Galland

July 13, 2009

A 20-Year Bear Market? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Early though it may be, however, it’s not too early to come right out and say what needs to be said: when it comes to the steps being taken to address the current crisis, Obama has no clothes.

Both President Obama and Timothy Geithner, the latest recipient of the Goldman Sachs Chair for Managing the Treasury, are on record as saying that the Japanese experiment in quantitative easing didn’t work. They say much the same about FDR’s New Deal. In both instances, they correctly point out that massive doses of government stimulus had no lasting effect.

If the history lesson stopped there, we could all nod our heads in agreement and go about our business.

Alas, the lips of Mssrs. Obama and Geithner keep moving… telling us with great confidence that the reason the fiscal exertions of Japan and FDR failed was only because in each case government didn’t act quickly enough, or with enough monetary vigor.

Having thus explained the shortcomings in prior adventures in stimuli, the administration promises that “this time it will be different” and wholeheartedly commits itself to acting decisively, quickly, and with stunning amounts of cash. By doing so, we are told, they will shock the economy back to life.

But this argument simply doesn’t hold water — there is zero historical precedent for the notion that applying blunt-force government stimulus will somehow mechanically “shock” an economy back into productivity. A couple of bullet points:

• When FDR came into power in 1933, unemployment in the U.S. had reached a high of about 25%. Despite tripling federal spending on the much heralded New Deal, the best unemployment number achieved was 14%, in 1937. By 1939, however, unemployment was back up to 19%. Now, there is some nuance in those numbers, because the calculations include some number of people on the payrolls of the New Deal’s many make-work programs. Yet, given the fact that those make-work jobs would have come to a quick end if the government had stopped its New Deal spending, the poor results of the FDR stimulus hold up.

• In the Japanese crash, the government spent hundreds of billions supporting banks and businesses, buying U.S. Treasuries in an attempt to keep the yen cheap and so their manufacturing sector at work. As the economic morass dragged on, the government cut interest rates to zero, then eventually accelerated spending in a five-year experiment in “quantitative easing,” which involved funding all manner of public works projects and other targeted infusions of government spending into the economy.

Using the equity market as a proxy for the broader economy, the Nikkei fell from around 38,000 at the height of the bubble in the late 1980s, down to around 7,000. During the five-year period of quantitative easing, 2001 to 2006, the Nikkei rebounded by about 100%, moving back to the 14,000 neighborhood. Importantly, however, the minute the Japanese government stopped the spending, the stock market came tumbling back down to around 7,500, near where it hovers today. Note that at no point did it get anywhere near the bubble high of over 38,000.

In sum, the evidence strongly suggests that there is no permanent benefit to be gained from throwing a lot of money at an economy, though there is one clear negative: a steep ratcheting up in government debt. Of course, because the government doesn’t actually make anything, what we’re really talking about is a steep ratcheting up of your debt… and that of your children… and their children.

So, what’s going on? Don’t you think all the Obama’s horses and all the Obama’s men know this?

Maybe they do.

In earlier editions of this missive, I have commented that President Obama may be the best politician in U.S. history. How else to explain how a virtually unknown black man could, in just a few short years, become president. And do so despite a foreign father and two given names eerily reminiscent of two of the most vilified individuals in the current American ethos? Impossible, most would have said, if asked a few years ago. But here he is… undeniable proof of his political skills.

Not to be cynical, but what if, on surveying the landscape, Obama and his inner circle came to the following conclusions about the possible paths they could take in regard to the dismal economy:

Path One: Stand aside and let Mr. Market put on the leather gloves, pick up the truncheon, and get to work pounding the economic dislocations out of the economy. Or…

Path Two: Observe that, during the period of Japan’s quantitative easing, the economy actually did pick up, albeit on a cushion of growing government debt. Using the same approach, one might push the worst of the economic problems past the next presidential election. Given his political skills, that approach syncs up nicely with what is almost certainly Obama’s most pressing personal goal: to avoid at all costs the ignominy of being a one-term president.

Besides, Team Obama could rationalize, even though the quantitative easing will have no lasting effect other than sending government deficits through the roof (a fact that Obama has been very candid about), it will at least buy the new administration some time to come up with another plan that might actually work.

I sincerely believe that just this sort of calculation has been made, and not for practical economic reasons – but almost entirely political ones. Supporting that contention, a large part of the spending in the latest stimulus bill is slated for 2011, the year before the next presidential election is held. Coincidence?

Then there is the $2 billion earmarked for ACORN in that same stimulus bill. While I tend to dismiss the allegations about ACORN’s purported voter fraud as desperate measures on the part of the failing McCain campaign, what we do know about ACORN is that their primary mission is voter registration, and that they are very friendly to President Obama.

It’s all a big win-win… as in “yes we can” win-win the next presidential election.

The way the current mess will actually get cleaned up is through the adoption of measures that support, or at least don’t hinder, entrepreneurs running or starting businesses and expanding into new markets. What we have instead is yet another experiment in more government.

In this matter, at least, Obama has no clothes.

Regards,
David Galland
Managing Editor, The Casey Report

February 23, 2009

Stimulus, Deficit and Elections: Obama Has No Clothes was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder