And counter to our prediction of an imminent, counter-trend U.S. dollar rally, the dollar is most definitely not surging. Take a look at the chart below. We’ve been writing about the decline of the dollar for nigh on ten years. So we looked at a ten-year chart to tally up the damage. It is considerable.

Dollar Index Threatens New Lows

What’s at stake with the interpretation of this chart? If the dollar rallies on short covering from the dollar carry trade (a BIG if), then other “risk” assets like gold, stocks, and emerging markets would probably sell off.

The chart shows that the index’s 50-week moving average is set to cross below its 200-week moving average. That is mixed news. The first time it happened on this chart was back in early 2003. That was the early days of a long decline in the index. The second time, though the move failed to confirm the “flight to safety” rally of 2008 had staying power in 2009.

Once the fear that gripped markets in 2008 went away, the investment world sold the dollar and started borrowing en masse to buy other, higher-yielding currencies and assets (like the Aussie dollar and resource stocks). That’s where we are now.

But based on the chart, is the next move down in the dollar index a new low, which the crossing of the long-term MA by the short-term MA would suggest? Or is it a false move? Will the dollar quickly and violently rally for some reason (geopolitical perhaps) that currently remains unknown to the human beings of this world?

“It’s an interesting chart,” said our technical analyst Murray Dawes. “But it is not useful for timing your moves out of or into trades related to the dollar’s movement.”

“So you’re saying our chart doesn’t have any useful information from a trader’s perspective?”

“Not really.”

The one piece of important information communicated by our chart is that the dollar’s trend is down. But there IS a catch.

The catch is that when this many people are this uniformly bearish, everyone is probably wrong. Consider this a warning then, that a dollar rally is just the sort of thing that will lead to a correction in the gold price and the stock market. We won’t speculate on the sort of things that could lead to a dollar rally. But surely they’re out there and sooner or later they’ll come.

The other possibility is that the dollar is in its death throes and that this is the big one, in currency terms. That is such a momentous and disastrous event that people consider it both kooky and unlikely, not to mention undesirable to a predictable and comfortable world. But it IS possible.

And do you get the feeling that this kind of manic melt up rally is the sort of irrational frenzy that comes just before everything goes haywire? Haywire is not a precise financial term. So what do we mean?

We meant that the world enjoyed a 20-year economic relationship based on a fundamentally unbalanced global economy. Manufacturing capacity migrated to Asia where wages were lower. For awhile, this was mostly good news in Western countries. Goods got cheaper but jobs didn’t vanish.

Now the situation is not so pleasant. The world is awash in manufacturing over-capacity, especially in China. Wage deflation (in the Western world) looks like a long-term trend, leading to a lower standard of living. This wage deflation is occurring at exactly the same time that Western governments are encountering demographic crises of ageing populations.

We all knew the ageing of the Boomers would put pressure on public finances right around now. But no one reckoned on a global financial crisis further saddling the public balance sheet with debt. And no one reckoned that Western wages and incomes would be falling at just the time people needed them most. And no one reckoned that savers would lose the most from low interest rates on fixed income — even though those low rates are keeping the American housing sector on life support.

It’s a bit of global impasse. America’s needed structural adjustment has come. Households and businesses are reducing debt, trying to live within their means. But the net adjustment to the American balance sheet is not happening because public sector debt is growing so fast.

Meanwhile, the other obvious adjustment is that the Chinese currency ought to be allowed to strengthen. For political and social reasons though, China will not allow this. It means China is actually adding to its industrial over capacity. It is conjuring up the world’s largest ever bubble in fixed asset investment, including commercial real estate.

It is easy to see why China is reluctant to allow a stronger Yuan. Exports account for 39% of Chinese GDP. The Chinese economy, and probably the Communist Party itself, cannot survive on unleashed Chinese domestic demand. They need American markets. But American consumers — in addition to reducing debt — are now realising that the focus on finance over manufacturing from American policy makers has worked out for Washington and Wall Street, but not terribly well for the average American worker.

Where do we go from here? How about the blame game. U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner once blamed the Chinese for being currency manipulators. He back-tracked later. And yesterday, Liu Mingkang, the chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, had a go at America.

“The continuous depreciation in the dollar, and the US government’s indication that, in order to resume growth and maintain public confidence, it basically won’t raise interest rates for the coming 12 to 18 months, has led to massive dollar arbitrage speculation.” He is blaming the U.S. for fuelling a destabilising global bubble.

Of course that bubble is felt most acutely because China pegs its currency to the dollar. China is right to blame the U.S. for manipulating its currency to try and improve its competitive position. And China is right to worry about the value of its dollar-denominated assets in a world of exploding U.S. debt supply.

But China has put itself in this position. And here we are at the end of 2009 with a world still fundamentally un-adjusted to a new, workable currency arrangement. The world remains burdened by trillions in assets purchased with debt. Those assets linger on bank balance sheets, on government life support but fundamentally lifeless at fictitious book value prices.

And meanwhile, the China-US currency arrangement has fuelled a global bubble. The question is how it will end. In the U.S., the housing market looms as the Achilles heel of the economy. It could strike households, banks, and the government again in the next 12 months are more mortgages reset at higher rates (with lower home values).

If the event that pops this bubble comes from America, look for the supply of credit to the emerging world to dry up again. If the bubble pricking comes from China, what then? Well, China does everything big. So a Chinese bust would be world-class.

Regards,
Dan Denning

November 18, 2009

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning Australia as “Dollar Rally the Sort of Thing that Will Lead to Correction in Gold Price.” To view the original article, please click here.

Will a Dollar Rally Lead to a Gold Correction? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

But we’re not…yet.

Classic economic theory says that money supply can be used to stimulate the economy and our central bankers seem to agree. That’s why they’ve pumped more than $1 trillion dollars into the economy, engineered countless bailout bonanzas for zombie institutions, put Detroit on life support, and delivered a bunch of financial Band-Aids to the trauma ward — all in a desperate bid to make Americans feel better about the global financial crisis.

To their way of thinking, the trillions of dollars have been a success. That’s why any meeting of the Group of Eight (G8) nations looks more like a mutual affection society with central bankers anxious to claim credit and backslap each other in congratulations for having avoided the “Great Depression II.”

But by taking the Federal balance sheet to more than $2 trillion from $928 billion 2008, they’ve created a situation that should have resulted in an epic inflationary spike to accompany the 137% increase in liabilities.

Yet that hasn’t quite happened.

Core inflation — which denotes consumer prices without food and energy costs — has actually decreased from 2.5% in 2008 to 1.5% presently. And that has many investors who have heard the siren call of the doom, gloom and boom crowd wondering if they’re worried about nothing.

So what gives?

Well, there are four reasons we haven’t yet seen hyperinflation:

Banks are hoarding cash. Despite having received trillions of dollars in taxpayer funded bailouts and lived through a litany of shotgun weddings designed to reinvigorate the shattered lending markets, most banks are actually hoarding cash. So instead of lending money to consumers and businesses like they’re supposed to, banks have used taxpayer dollars to boost their reserves by nearly 20-fold according to the Federal Reserve. The money the bailout was supposed to make available to the system is actually not passing “Go,” but rather getting stopped by the very institutions that are supposed to be lending it out. Three-year average annualized loan growth rates were 9.6% before the crisis; now they are shrinking by 1.8%, according to Money Magazine.

The United States exports inflation to China, which remains only too happy to continue to absorb it. What this means is that low priced products from China help keep prices down here. And this is critical to something that many in the “China-is-manipulating-their-currency” crowd fail to grasp. If China were to un-peg the yuan and let it rise by the 60% or more it’s supposedly undervalued by, we’d see jump in prices here in everything from jeans to tennis shoes, toys, medical equipment, medicines, and anything else we import in bulk from China. Chances are, the shift would not be dollar-for-dollar or even dollar-for-yuan, but there’s no doubt it would be significant. Many economists I’ve talked to privately think 25%-35% is probable. So the next time you hear a “Buy American” extremist, you might want to share this little inconvenient truth.

Consumers are still cutting back. Therefore, the spending that normally helps pull demand through the system is simply not there. I don’t how things are in your neighborhood, but where I live, people are still cutting back. Indeed, data from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Federal Reserve Board shows that consumer spending growth averaged 1.4% a year prior to the crisis and is now shrinking at a rate of 0.7%. What this means is that people have figured out that it’s more important to save money than it is to spend it. And, given that consumer spending makes up 70% or more of the U.S. economy, this is a monumental change in behavior that all but banishes the last vestiges of the “greed is good” philosophy espoused by Michael Douglas as Wall Street pirate Gordon Gekko in 1987.

Businesses continue to cut back rather than hire new workers. Therefore, wages and wage inflation figures are lower than they would be if the economy was truly healthy and the stimulus was working. This is especially tough to stomach because it means people are still being marginalized, laid off and “part-timed” instead of being hired. And that means that most of the earnings growth we’ve seen this season has come from expense reductions rather than top line sales growth — and those are two very different things. But while this is tough, it’s also helped keep inflation lower than it would otherwise be. Prior to the financial meltdown, job growth averaged about 1% a year over the last three years whereas now it’s falling by 4.2%.

The upshot?

Any one of these factors could change at any time. And that means investors who are relying on the Fed’s version that everything is okay and that the government is managing inflation may be in for a rude awakening.

The only thing the Fed is doing is managing to manipulate is the data, and even then, not very well.

Regards,
Keith Fitz-Gerald

November 16, 2009

P.S.: For the last several years I’ve made my insights about the Asian markets and the true nature of the global capital markets available to investors via my daily columns in Money Morning and its monthly affiliate, The Money Map Report. Now I’m making those insights available through my new book, “Fiscal Hangover: How to Profit from the New Global Economy,” which can be purchased here.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Money Morning as “Four Reason Hyperinflation Hasn’t Hit the U.S. Economy Yet.” To view the original article, please click here.

Four Reasons Hyperinflation Hasn’t Hit the U.S. Economy Yet was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Our views are different, but not extraterrestrial. Once upon a time, not so long ago, they were even respectable. The gist of our message two weeks ago was that debt is dangerous. It feels good at first. But give a society too much debt – either in its private sector or the public sphere – and someone’s going to get killed. That’s why the present situation is such a delight to serious economists; it offers more data points. We get to see how much straw the feds can add before the poor camel’s back breaks.

What’s the best way to get through a debt crisis? Straight through was our advice last week. For at least a thousand years, the business cycle went round and round without help from central bankers or economists. It is only since these geniuses have been on the case that really serious problems have arisen. The Panic of 1920 – in which the US government did nothing but cut taxes and spending – was quickly forgotten. The Panic of 1929, on the other hand, was followed by massive rigging and jiving by the authorities. It took 20 years and a world war to overcome; today it is still remembered today as the Great Depression.

Martin Wolf, speaking, gravely, for the world’s intelligentsia in The Financial Times last week, proclaimed that: “the only thing worse than rescuing the system would have been not rescuing it.” But he is wrong; of all the many blessings economists may bestow upon a grateful people, improving the economy is not one of them. An economy is a natural thing. It can be improved by the striving of entrepreneurs, the prudence of bankers, and the sweating of field hands. But when it comes to the macro-economic policy, forbearance is the quality that pays. Any initiative on the feds’ part inevitably makes things worse.

The Bubble Era, like the Great Depression, was largely -but not completely – the result of government initiative. Artificially low interest rates – intended to counter the modest downturn of 2001 – sent the wrong message. Consumers – notably those in Britain and America – bought things they couldn’t afford. Producers – notably those in Asia – made things for which there was no real market. Debt piled up. Mountains of it.

As consumers bought more and producers made more the economy grew. But much of the economic “growth” of the 2001-2007 period was fraudulent. It was based on debt spending, not on genuine increases in purchasing power. Debt pretends to be real money. It looks like the real thing, but it is not. It stimulates the economy like counterfeit money. It causes production and consumption, but of the wrong sort. Former Reagan era Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman estimates the level of “counterfeit GDP” at $4 trillion in the US alone.

The fraud was discovered, though misunderstood, when sub-prime debt began to implode. The economy had been kissed hard; millions of houses had been built, bought and sold. Now, owners couldn’t pay for them. All of sudden, the counterfeit money began to shrivel up. Lenders, investors, and householders all began to de-leverage; paying down the debts as fast as they could, defaulting on those they couldn’t.

Rather than come to the obvious conclusion, that they should never have meddled with the economy in the first place, the feds began rescue operations on a breathtaking scale. The British government increased spending to 140% of revenues. America now runs a stimulus program nearly equivalent, in economic impact, to WWII. Not since 1945 have the two pages of its ledgers – debits and credits – told such different stories, with almost $2 of spending for ever $1 in tax receipts. Britain will add almost 50% to its government debt in the next three years. David Stockman expects the publicly held US national debt to almost double in the next five years.

Even at those levels, many economists think the government should do more. Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman is one. Richard Koo is another. They’ve warned that the US (and by extension much of the rest of the world) could suffer a Lost Decade, like Japan, if the government slacks off before consumers have finished de-leveraging. At least they understand what is going on. Too bad they missed the point of it. The problem is too much debt, not too little spending. Leveraging up the public sector doesn’t help. Even government debts must be paid – if not by the borrower, then by the lender. The feds are smooching more ardently than any debt lover in history; next, we get to see who dies…or at least who defaults.

Regards,
Bill Bonner

November 4, 2009

Editor’s Note: The above article originally appeared in The Daily Reckoning as “The Kiss of Debt.”

Debt Is Dangerous, Especially of the Government Kind was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

The forward P/E multiple on the broad stock market is not nearly as high as it was during the Internet bubble, but it’s at extreme highs if one accurately diagnoses the unsustainable stimuli currently driving global economic activity.

Just like low-quality earnings paint a misleading picture of a company’s value, this low-quality economic activity destroys wealth and promotes a dependence on sustained fiscal largesse.

Such a diagnosis would filter out how fiscal and monetary policies are distorting the efficient allocation of capital. Investors should interpret government spending as noise and interpret private sector behavior as the signal. In today’s state-sponsored economy, you cannot totally separate one from the other, but it’s still important to acknowledge the distorting influence that stimulus programs have on capital spending and hiring decisions.

What happens when the stimulus wears off? Why, we have even more excess capacity in sectors where stimulus was directed. Exhibit A: cash for clunkers. Exhibit B: the tax credit for homebuyers that will exacerbate the structural glut in housing supply. In the financial media, I’ve seen investor after investor defend these programs as valuable and necessary, which demonstrates their ignorance of sound economics.

We’re propping up zombie institutions, throwing good money after bad, and rewarding incompetence — all at the expense of prudent people’s savings and the capital that will be needed to fund the industries of the future. Top investors don’t tolerate low- or negative-return-on-capital decisions by the executives running their companies, so it’s puzzling to me why so many of these investors advocate the same type of economic malpractice on the part of government policymakers.

The latest sideshow for public consumption — a “paymaster” regulating pay at large banks — is another example of the government’s misdiagnosis of the problem.

Rather than regulate pay in the hopes that it discourages risky banking behavior, we should be phasing out the government guarantees of the banking system’s liabilities. That, I assure you, would discourage foolish risk-taking among bankers. Case in point: Goldman Sachs behaved in a much more responsible, sustainable manner when it was a privately owned partnership without government guarantees, rather than the high frequency trading, TLGP-hogging, heavily lobbying institution that it is today.

Like an addictive drug, today’s fiscal and monetary policies have made everyone feel better, but have further weakened the structural health and sustainability of the economy. If you doubt this, just look at the horror in most investors’ eyes when they are confronted with the prospect of a Fed Funds rate above, say, 2% — up from today’s range of zero percent. The addiction to E-Z credit and government support everywhere you look is one of the clearest reasons that this economic recovery is an elaborate illusion.

Yet we still see examples of extreme inefficiencies in the valuation of certain stocks. It feels eerily similar to the tech bubble, with investors behaving as if today is the last chance they’ll ever get to buy Amazon.com stock at less than 80 times earnings.

Whether it’s the sky-high multiple on Amazon’s maturing business, which seems to be discounting that every Chinese citizen will own a Kindle within 5 years, or the expectation that banks employing creative accounting have seen the worst of their credit losses, many investors are putting real money behind their belief in a super-bullish economic environment.

The reasons to be cautious and bearish are overwhelming. A market correction back to more normalized valuations may happen at any point.

Lastly, I attended the Value Investing Congress in New York last week, along with Addison Wiggin and Chris Mayer.

The most important takeaway for me was the audience’s apparent skepticism towards the two most bearish presenters: David Einhorn and Eric Sprott. Both hedge fund managers are bullish on gold and critical of Washington, D.C.’s wealth-diluting fiscal and monetary policies. The tone of the Q&A sessions after these presentations tells me that most investors are still very, very skeptical of investing in gold. That’s good news for gold bulls.

It’s also good news for stock market bears that so many believe in the Keynesian theories they read in their college economics textbooks. GDP growth driven by government spending is misleading, and damaging to capital formation. Much of today’s top line growth is coming at the expense of future profits — when mal-investments will be written off.

Regards,
Dan Amoss

October 28, 2009

Economic Misdiagnosis Due to Government Stimulus was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

A short series of secret memos, published and dissected at ZeroHedge, provide the “smoking gun” of gold-market manipulation. Apparently.

And given this little slew of dusty archive-digging – throwing up three documents from 1968 to 1975, each one declassified within thirty years – then “If over 40 years ago the Fed and the members of the gold ‘Pool’ were openly intervening in the gold market, one can only imagine what the situation is now…”

Go on, just imagine. Because imagination is what you’ll need if you’re going to nail type-written notes from before the Moon Landings as primary, original-source evidence that the United States’ official gold reserves – variously sold, lent, swapped or simply given away since the early 1990s – have been mobilized to suppress prices, pushing gold down from $250 an ounce a decade ago to, ummm, more than $1000 today.

These memos fret about shrinking gold reserves and the world’s gold-driven money supply…Britain’s failed deflation policy of the late ’60s…whether South Africa will sell its new mine supply on the open market…German border taxes…and the “gold-like” qualities of the proposed Special Drawing Right (SDR). Such prehistory matters, yes. But it’s a world away from demonstrating what newcomers to gold today may mistake for good cause to steer clear.

The little history these scattered notes sketch does echo today, however faintly. Are central banks buying gold at market prices – then France, now Beijing through via its domestic gold output? How to replace the abiding monetary standard – then gold, now the Dollar? And like the Fed memos reviewed on blogs elsewhere this year, the notes republished by ZeroHedge certainly prove one thing, at least:

Just how awkward gold became long before the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. Bluntly put, it was a pain in the arse – and not only for Washington.

“Gold was causing such a rumpus that most authorities wished it would go away and stop bothering them,” as the late Peter Bernstein wrote in his 2000 history, The Power of Gold. But with so much of the world’s gold stacked up in their vaults, slipping away was impossible, and the world’s monetary system instead “lurched from crisis to crisis” says Francis J.Gavin, University of Texas at Austin’s professor of international affairs, in his 2004 monograph, Gold, Dollars and Power.

“There was not one year between 1958 and 1971,” Gavin finds, “when the Dollar and gold problem was not the most pressing issue of American foreign economic policy.” Or as President Kennedy put it in August 1962, “My God, this is the time…

“If everybody wants gold, we’re all going to be ruined.”

Luckily for JFK and the Dollar, not everyone wanted gold. Like Washington, the British government would have quite happily seen its former “badge of honor” turned to dust and swept away, too. Their private citizens were barred from owning gold, with strict controls applied across most of the rest of the developed (and communist) world. Yet with so many new US Dollars flooding the world…and with the Dollar-exchange clause of the 1944 Bretton Woods treaty still in force…less pliant friends increasingly asked for, and got, gold over dollars.

One nation actively sought to bring on the crisis. “There can be no other criterion, no other standard, than gold,” announced French president Charles de Gaulle at a press conference on February 4, 1965 – “gold that never changes, that can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins…that has no nationality and that is eternally and universally accepted as the ultimate fiduciary value par excellence.”

De Gaulle spoke in French, naturellement, in the gilded Salle des Fêtes of the Elysées Palace. But the White House’s least Francophone staffers could get the message loud and clear when, six days later, de Gaulle’s finance minister – future French president Giscard d’Estaing – announced in a lecture at the University of Paris that, from now on, France would swap every new Dollar it accumulated for gold bullion from the Federal Reserve.

The major powers, he said, should “make a solemn and unequivocal declaration” to likewise settle all their international payments in gold. Which was an easy thing for France to declare, given its large balance-of-trade surplus.

To drive the point home, France then made headlines around the world by announcing it would not only swap all new Dollars for gold…but immediately ship that new gold straight to France, too.

What could the United States do? As we’ve noted time and again, the final collapse of the Gold-Exchange Standard – put out of its misery in Aug. 1971, when Richard Nixon canceled America’s gold-for-dollars obligation – came because the US government wanted to keep hold of its gold. The legerdemain of then “demonetizing” it through occasional sales and amendments to the IMF treaty only hid this plain fact; it didn’t deny it.

The international promise signed after the Second World War made defending that hoard impossible given America’s domestic Dollar-inflation. Producing more dollars than the rest-of-the-world needed to finance its trade, the United States also invited a drop in the Dollar. That in turn invited withdrawals of gold from its vaults, effectively sparking a “run on the United States” as one advisor called it in the mid-60s’ phase of the crisis.

“The kind of transcending value attributed to the Dollar,” Charles de Gaulle had said at that 1965 press conference “has lost its initial foundation, which was possession by America of the greater part of the world’s gold.” Never mind that de Gaulle himself knocked out that support. What mattered was the abiding idea – gold equals power. Thus US dominance was clearly ebbing away.

“The French this year have been cashing in dollars for gold at a $54 million-a-month rate,” reported Time magazine in mid-1966. “Last week the Bank of France reported that as of Aug. 1, France had hoarded $5.13 billion in gold. Gold now constitutes 86% of all French reserves, compared with 73% at the end of 1964.

“Moreover, the [French] government is squirreling away the precious metal at such a rate as to account for the entire net US gold drain so far this year.” Hence de Gaulle’s jibe at the Dollar’s fall became self-compounding. By demanding gold over dollars, he proved the value of metal, not paper. But only on the old tattered Gold Standard logic. Losing its dominance as the gold-hoarder par excellence, the United States still retained the supreme currency. The “exorbitant privilege” of which de Gaulle’s advisor, Jacques Rueff, had complained, would now take America’s economic power as its foundation. Depriving the US of its bullion backing, the promise to redeem Dollars for gold was replaced with the promise to redeem Dollars with interest.

Fast forward to the fall of 2009, and the United States remains the world No.1 holder of physical gold (the potential for secret sales, swaps, loans and outright gifts to Wall Street notwithstanding), but while France and the rest of Europe turned seller, Russia and emerging Asia began re-stocking this decade. Moreover, “The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the Dollar’s place as the world’s predominant reserve currency,” as World Bank president Robert Zoellick told an audience at Johns Hopkins University in Washington this week.

“Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the Dollar…The future for the United States will depend on whether and how it will address large deficits, recover without inflation that could undermine its credit and currency, and overhaul its financial system.”

Zoellick naturally mentioned the Chinese Yuan, noting that “Over 10 to 20 years [it] will evolve into a force in financial markets.” He just happened to speak on the very same day, as Reuters observes, that Beijing issued its first Yuan-denominated bond open to foreign investors. Yet all the World Bank chief did, however, was confirm today’s abiding idea – that monetary power builds on an economy’s strength.

Maybe a new or even old idea will emerge in the next two decades or so. “The manner in which [this crisis] is resolved may well determine the shape of the world’s monetary arrangements, and therefore our economic and political interests over the next generation,” as then-Fed chief Arthur Burns memo’ed President Ford in June 1975, but the problem of excess Dollars was never quite fixed.

Still, we guess it’s more than coincidence Beijing is now buying gold – as well as frantically powering its non-stop economy – as the world’s monetary standard slides into crisis mode.

Regards,
Adrian Ash
BullionVault

October 2, 2009

Gold, the Dollar and Smoking Guns was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Despite what a few elderly Mr. Naturals may say about abolishing “capitalism,” we’re not going to have an advanced economy without a coherent banking system, and by advanced economy I mean one in which the lights stay on. By coherent I mean a system that is able to deploy accumulated wealth for productive purposes, in the service of continuing civilization. (And, yes, I know that the followers of Daniel Quinn are not so sure that civilization is worth the trouble, but unless you support the killing-off of about six billion humans right away, things on Earth are not favorably disposed just now for a return to hunting-and-gathering.)

I would hasten to cut through the fog of despair to reassert — for the thousandth time — that a true American perestroika is possible, if the public could overcome the plague of cognitive dissonance sweeping the land and form a consensus for action that comports with reality’s agenda. But that is looking less and less likely. Instead, what we see is a rush into delusion, seasoned with grievance and gall. Spectacles like last weekend’s march on Washington don’t happen for no reason, of course. From where I sit, the uproar can be attributed to comprehensively bad American leadership, a crisis in authority and legitimacy that has left a functional vacuum in every executive office throughout the land — from the White House to the state houses, to the lairs of the CEOs, to the towers of the deans and department chairs, to the glitzy sets of the nightly news deliverers, to the makeshift quarters of the NGO chiefs. In former times, clueless and impotent leaders stuck their heads in the sand. Nowadays, with pandemic narcissism abroad in the land, the heads are more usually inserted into the aperture that leads into the large bowel….

But I indulge in diverting objurgation when I should perhaps explain this American perestroika more clearly. The Russian word roughly translates to “restructuring.” They flubbed it in 1989 because their system was too ossified and too far gone — though history and circumstance eventually did it for them. A similar outcome is possible here, too, in which things just have to completely fall apart before emergent reorganization occurs. But you can be sure that if we allow this to happen, an awful lot of things will get smashed along the way, including lives, careers, families, property, and cherished institutions.

This monster we call the economy is not just an endless series of charts and graphs — it’s how we live, and that has to change, whether we like it or not. Now, it is obviously a huge problem that a majority of Americans don’t like the idea. If they were true patriots, instead of overfed cowards and sado-masochists, they’d be inspired by the prospect. But something terrible has happened to our national character since the triumphal glow of World War Two wore off. I just hope that the Palinites and the myrmidons of Glen Beck don’t destroy what’s left of this country in a WWF-style “revolution.” In the best societies, such are marginalized by a kinder and sturdier consensus about justice. In America today, the center is not holding because there is no center.

American perestroika really boils down to this: we have to rescale the activities of daily life to a level consistent with the mandates of the future, especially the ones having to do with available energy and capital. We have to dismantle things that have no future and rebuild things that will allow daily life to function. We have to say goodbye to big box shopping and rebuild Main Street. More people will be needed to work in farming and fewer in tourism, public relations, gambling, and party planning. We have to make some basic useful products in this country again. We have to systematically decommission suburbia and reactivate our small towns and small cities. We have to prepare for the contraction of our large cities. We have to let the sun set on Happy Motoring and rebuild our trains, transit systems, harbors, and inland waterways. We have to reorganize schooling at a much more modest level. We have to close down most of the overseas military bases we’re operating and conclude our wars in Asia. Mostly, we have to recover a national sense of common purpose and common decency. There is obviously a lot of work to do in the list above, which could translate into paychecks and careers — but not if we direct all our resources into propping up the failing structures of yesterday.

The most dangerous illusion, of course, is a belief that we can return to a hyped up turbo debt “consumer” economy — and perhaps the most disappointing thing about Barack Obama, is his incessant cheerleading for a “recovery” to what is already lost and unrecoverable. The man who ran for office on “change” doesn’t really have the stomach for it. But, of course, events are in the driver’s seat now, not personalities, even charming ones. I’d venture to say that if Mr. Obama thinks he’s seen a crisis, and gotten through it, then he ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We are for sure not returning to the kind of credit orgy that made the last twenty years such a nauseating spectacle — of which, by the way, the misfeasances and wretched excesses of Wall Street were just one manifestation.

Some theorists out there say that economy follows mood, not vice-versa, and that the anger and sourness on display around the USA, in events like the weekend Washington march, is a clear sign that tectonic shifts in the structures of everyday life are sure to follow. There are too many truly good and intelligent people in this country, to leave our fate to the Palins and the Glen Becks [and Obamas—ed.] But the good people had better man up and start telling the truth with some conviction that the truth matters.

Regards,
James Howard Kunstler

September 17, 2009

Reality Receding Across America was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Did that phrase have any effect–other than to help elect a presidential challenger–on our doing financial business as usual?  Nope.  Sure, we were on a bull run with a roaring (we thought) economy.  Everyone who wanted a house could get one, even if they couldn’t afford it.  Never mind if that six-figure mortgage, secured frequently by a four-figure (or less) income meant that you were upside down from the get go.  Option ARMs let you have your cake and eat it, too.  One of the more creative approaches was the Stated Income Stated Assets Loan, also known as a SISA (Liar’s) loan. Yep, it was and is exactly what it sounds like.  The income listed on the mortgage loan application was accepted as exactly what you said it was without any verification whatsoever.  This particular loan is now about as rare as the passenger pigeon due to the mortgage collapse.

Property values were always going to increase from here to eternity, so all you had to do was wait a while, refinance after your salary had increased (as it always had) and your home’s market value had multiplied.  Then you would have a standard 30-year mortgage, low interest rate, high income, money in the bank, stock investments and a 401K.  Life was good and you could concentrate on your golf game every weekend.

What everyone forgot, or ignored due to the good life blinders they were wearing, was a rather trite phrase that happens to be truth in a nutshell: What goes up must come down.

Fifteen years later came the mortgage meltdown and a global financial collapse.  A year after that, we managed to infect Washington, D.C. with an administration that seems determined to reduce the U.S. to the status of a third world country, complete with nationalization of its remaining industries, tax increases that would break the back of Atlas and an infantile belief that we’re on the road to recovery.

Y’all know that that Government Motors…ahem, General Motors…has been bailed out to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, with virtually no chance that any of it will ever be recovered.  Healthcare is the latest target in the crosshairs.  Opposed by darn near every person with a brain and the ability to read even a few pages of the proposed legislation, there is still a very real chance that it will be rammed down our throats by our erstwhile elected officials who are not only supposed to act in our best interests but actually listen to our comments during town hall meetings, by reading our emails, snail mail and paying attention to phone calls.

Do we need healthcare reform in some respects?  Of course we do.  No system, public or private, is perfect.  But the word is ‘reform’ or ‘improvement’, not ‘nationalization.’

Tax increases ain’t hit us yet, at least not in any widespread manner.  But they’re coming.  In fact, they’re already here in the form of increased fees that are being instituted by everyone from utility companies to towns and cities.  And just wait till the cap & tax…sorry, I meant cap & trade… bill is passed, signed and forwarded to your checking account.  What was a relatively healthy account, or at least surviving, will shortly wind up on life support.

So how is cap & trade going to be a tax increase on every person?  Simple.  That legislation, if enacted, will focus energy production on the so-called ‘green energy.’  Any method that produces carbon will be heavily taxed.  The result will be dramatic increases in the cost of electricity and since we all use electricity in some way, shape or form…including ways that most of us don’t even think about…every person in this country will be paying an increased tax as the result of rising prices on virtually everything.

Conservation, energy efficiency and reduction of your carbon footprint will become watchwords, possibly even additions to your local ordinances.

As for trying to jawbone this country onto the road to economic recovery, President Obama wandered several miles into fantasyland with his recent speech before Congress.  While his focus was the embattled healthcare legislation, he did manage to address the economic conditions with a two paragraph opening statement in which he said:

“When I spoke here last winter, this nation was facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  We were losing an average of 700,000 jobs per month. Credit was frozen. And our financial system was on the verge of collapse.

“But thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January, I can stand here with confidence and say that we have pulled this economy back from the brink.”

Does this correlate with a 9.7% – 16% (depending on whose statistics you use) unemployment, ongoing foreclosures with many more to come, businesses closing, many States dealing with multi-billion dollar budget deficits, some perilously close to default, deflation in a few areas, etc, ad infinitum?

Of course, when this country only loses 216,000 jobs in August compared to 700,000 last January, I suppose you could argue that we’re moving in the right direction.  And let’s not forget that our financial problems were over when we discovered that printing presses actually functioned 24/7, enabling us to print fiat money…or Monopoly money if you prefer…whenever we needed it.  As long as we don’t run out of ink.  Happy days are here again!

Maybe it’s not the economy, stupid.

What do you think?

Regards,
Richard Marmo

September 11, 2009

Once Again, Stupid, It’s The Economy was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

It was a truly bullish way to wrap up the week. China reported a 7.9% rise second in quarter GDP, driven mostly by a 15% surge in June consumption and a huge boom in bank lending and government stimulus. Aussie stocks felt the warm glow and rallied just below 4,000 on the ASX/200 Friday. Aussie stocks were up nearly 7% for the week.

But the even better news from the bullish camp is that perma-bear Nouriel Roubini has defected! Yes, Roubini told a conference that the “free fall” in financial losses is over and the U.S. may exit its recession by the end of the year. This was enough sweet talk to send the Dow up nearly one percent.

And then there was an upgrade to second half U.S. GDP forecasts from the U.S. Federal Reserve. In April, the Fed said second half U.S. GDP would shrink by 1.3% to 2.0%. The revised forecast released yesterday now says U.S. GDP will only shrink by 1.0% to 1.5%. A stunning upgrade!

The Fed’s revised projections also show that the U.S. economy will grow faster than it first thought in 2010, once the much-anticipated recovery takes hold. In April the Fed thought the U.S. would grow by 2.0% to 3%. But in the revised forecast now says the growth rate should soar from 2.1% to 3.3%. A stunning upgrade!

The only negative note in the Fed’s forecast is that it reckons U.S. unemployment will keep growing to over 10%. That, presumably, is a drag on the economy. But if credit conditions improve, maybe all the people who’ve lost jobs because the U.S. economy is not producing and not competitive can, you know, get a credit card and live off of that.

But putting on our serious face, and while we are giving valuable publishing space to the optimists, we should point out that some people think the worst case scenario for the U.S. Housing market is already priced in to financial stocks. This leaves said stocks all clear to lead the market higher, along with tech, resources, bonds, and cash!

For example, Jim Cramer reckons that if you assume a 50% total write-off rate on the 14 million mortgages written between 2005 and 2007 in the U.S., you are only talking US$1.4 trillion in losses (7 million homes X $200,000 per home. ) Cramer says the banks have already written off that amount and that the banks stocks are priced for a worst-case scenario that may not materialize.

And if it doesn’t, it would lead to a faster recovery in bank balance sheets, which in turn would lead to a recovery in bank lending, which would not lead to inflation because the Fed has a plan to remove liquidity from the system and everything thing will be fine!

And you thought Neverland was a ranch in California.

Whether Cramer is right depends on which vintage of mortgages have accounted for the losses in the financial sector so far and which are still going bad. The chart below from the Cleveland branch of the Federal Reserve suggests to us that there are more losses to come than have been accounted for. Why do we say that? First the chart…

What does the chart tell us? Well, it shows that in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led the surge into subprime lending. This is the vintage of loans that went bad in the last year as interest rates moved up and house prices moved down, putting many new buyers and speculators underwater. This is where the first $1.4 trillion in losses came from.

But the real issue is the quality and quantity of mortgages that were packaged up and securitized from 2005 to 2007. As the GSE’s reduced their originations, banks stepped in—often having acquired non-traditional lenders for just this purpose—to keep feeding the boom. The banks wrote the loans and sold them to each other, purchasing default insurance on the securitized loans from AIG.

These loans are not subprime but supposedly higher credit quality Option ARM and Alt-A loans. And these are the loans the banks, we’d suggest, are carrying at elevated values. We’d also suggest the banks are not adequately capitalized to realize losses on these loans should the housing market get swamped again by another wave of defaults and foreclosures. This is where the second $1.4 trillion in losses will come from.

But of course it’s wacky to suggest all that. We might as well say that aliens crashed at Roswell and that the moon landing was faked (it probably was). There’s just no way it could get any worse than it did in 2007. Could it?

Regards,
Dan Denning

July 21, 2009

Mortgage Defaults May Trump the Fed was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

The problem with households not saving is that over the long run, it ruins the economy.

Lack of savings means there are not enough long-term private bank reserves. Broadly, it translates into lack of investment in new business capital. Over time, that runs down the capital base of the economy. And improving business capital is, of course, the key to increasing productivity within an economy.

If productivity doesn’t increase, wages and living standards will stagnate – at best. Eventually, living standards decline. Don’t believe me? Have you been to Detroit lately?

Decades-Long Trends

Last year’s lack of savings was not a short-term phenomenon. The savings deficit was part of a long-term cultural phenomenon. The low savings rate in 2008 was one more data point in a string of many bad years for savings.

The personal savings rate in the U.S. makes for an interesting chart (see below, for 1930 to the present). The first thing that pops out is that savings were very high (near 25%) during World War II, when there were few consumer goods available to purchase.

All that wartime saving had much to do with kick-starting the U.S. economic explosion after the war ended. While the war was raging, many economists expected a postwar crash. That’s what had happened all the way back to the days of Napoleon.

In fact, the prospect of postwar mass unemployment, involving millions of demobilized soldiers, was one of the key drivers behind creating the G.I. Bill of Rights. It was better to send former soldiers off to college for a few years than to have them sitting around with no jobs, muttering into their beer mugs.

Instead of a postwar crash, however, the large pool of U.S. aggregate savings aligned with pent-up demand to spark a historic economic revival. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, the World War II generation settled down to raise its baby boom offspring. While savings rates cooled down, they still averaged a very respectable 8.5%. And this was in an era of very low inflation.

The national savings rate actually increased toward 10% during the 1970s and early 1980s. But from the mid-1980s onward, the national savings rate declined steadily. The rate was in the low single digits – and falling – by the early 2000s, and went negative in 2006 and 2007. For the U.S., these recent numbers were the lowest savings rate since the Great Depression.

What Was Going On?

Let’s review some large-scale trends that occurred during the past four decades. Starting in the 1970s, many women entered the U.S. labor force. More accurately, women exited the unpaid world of homemaking and entered the paid labor force.

The demographic shift of women into the labor force started as a trickle, but turned into a flood. Indeed, over the past 30 years, many traditionally male-dominated occupations and professions opened wide for women to pursue careers. Enrollments in U.S. law and medical schools, for example, are now well over 50% women. Just this year, over 50% of undergraduates majoring in earth sciences in the U.S. are women.

More women in the work force led to a fast-growing number of two-income households. But as pointed out by Elizabeth Warren, a professor and bankruptcy specialist at Harvard Law School, those extra paychecks often went to consumption, rather than savings.

For example, working couples took the second paycheck and bought a second car, if not a second house or condo. Working couples took more high-end vacations, as you can observe by driving past the cruise ship terminals at most major U.S. port cities. And the average size of new homes has increased during the past 25 years, even as average family size declined from over three to about 2.1 children per couple.

In short, Americans saved less over the past 35 years. But U.S. consumer spending took off and grew faster than the broad economy. Consumption accounted for 62% of gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1960s. But consumption grew to 70% of GDP between 2000-2007.

Looking at the numbers another way, “investment” in the economy plummeted from 38% of GDP to 30% – a drop of over 21% from the 1960s baseline. So it makes sense that much of the increase in consumption in recent years was of imported goods. Thus did high consumption and low savings help to decapitalize the nation, as trillions of dollars wound up in foreign accounts.

And Then What Happened?

With high consumption and low savings, when the current recession hit, it hit hard. In fact, the effects of the recession were aggravated by the national pattern of high consumption and low savings over the past decades.

Let’s begin with the fact that many households spent every dollar that came in. Then they borrowed against the so-called “equity” in their house (often as not, the equity was mostly a product of inflation) to finance further consumption. But there’s a funny thing about borrowing money. Usually, the lender wants it paid back.

As Harvard’s professor Warren has pointed out, many two-income households painted themselves into a “two-income trap.” That is, when both wage-earners devote their entire paycheck to consumption, with nothing going into savings, the loss of one job can be a financial catastrophe. A household at the margin almost instantly goes underwater.

Also, it’s becoming clear that in the past year, many job losses in the U.S. economy are permanent. Instead of temporary layoffs, many jobs are being eliminated as part of a structural retrenchment of the U.S. economy. Think about the job losses in the auto and auto parts industries, in banking and finance, or in real estate. Many of these jobs are just plain history. These industries will never recover to the glory days of old.

Along these lines, a recent survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal reveals that 52% of companies polled expect to employ fewer people over the next five years. That can hardly be reassuring to the rapidly expanding ranks of the unemployed in large states like California, Michigan, Illinois and others. Big states with large numbers of jobless people make for big, long-term, intractable social and political issues.

The “Recovery-Less Recovery”

So the job cuts, and long-term unemployment, are here to stay. Much of this has to do with the previous lack of savings and long-term investment. After two decades of falling savings, and related underinvestment in new business capital, there is not enough momentum within the job-creation engine of the U.S. economy. The machine is stalled.

It’s not like you can accelerate the process of job creation, either. Sure, government can spend a lot of money (borrowed money, as it turns out) in a hurry on so-called “stimulus” programs. But what will that accomplish? People still can’t find long-term employment – let alone careers and employment security – in industries that don’t exist or never took root. Nobody gets hired in a firm or factory that never got built. So now we’re experiencing what many economists are calling a “jobless recovery.”

Jobless recovery? That might be whistling past the graveyard. Indeed, the lack of job creation going forward could also lead to a “recovery-less recovery.” Or to paraphrase former President Richard Nixon, speaking of the idea of Keynesian economics, we’re all living in the Rust Belt now.

Some Households Are Saving Again

There is some good news from the savings front, however. As 2009 unfolds, it appears that debt-burdened American households are desperately beginning to save. In April 2009, the national savings rate jumped to 5.7%, the highest level in 14 years.

Still, savings has to come out of something else. Households “saved,” but the other side of the coin is that “consumers” ratcheted down their spending – and did so even faster than aggregate incomes fell. That means empty shopping malls and auto lots. It’s a vicious cycle.

“Americans have learned a cruel, cold, hard lesson,” according to Bernard Baumohl, an economist for the Economic Outlook Group of Princeton, N.J. “People are scared. And that’s led them to replenish their savings because they now realize that their retirement nest eggs will no longer increase on automatic pilot.”

There’s no disputing the extraordinary shock to household wealth in the U.S. From mid-2007-March 2009, according to the Federal Reserve, household net worth plunged $14 trillion, or 21.5%. Just during the second half of 2008, household net worth plummeted nearly $8 trillion – with an eye-popping $4.9 trillion dip in the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index shed 57% of value between October 2007-March 2009. While the S&P 500 has increased 36% since its March low, it is still 41% below its 2007 peak.

According to Mr. Baumohl, the economist, “There has been a fundamental shift in the behavior of American households.” That is, savings are now a priority of financial planning. Mr. Baumohl believes that we’ll continue to see the savings rate increase to between 7-9%, where it will likely hold steady for at least several years. Many of the 75 million baby boomers are now revising their retirement plans, figuring out how to work longer, save more and spend less. (Meanwhile, the federal government is working to figure out how to pay lower Social Security and Medicare benefits to those baby boomers.)

All in all, we should expect to see U.S. consumer spending grow more slowly than GDP over the next decade. As a percent of GDP, investment will increase as some fortunate households replenish savings. But any recovery will be slower than most observers expect – particularly the politicians, who cannot abide large numbers of unemployed people near Election Day.

Rooting for the Savers

The good news is that over the long-term, more savings will translate into more business investment. That should create new jobs and raise productivity, which are the basic building blocks for a rising standard of living.

Of course, there are problems with any significant shift in the direction of capital flow in the U.S. economy. But despite any issues, the unemployed of the U.S. need to root for the savers. And the politicians, of course, need to respect the process of saving. Because without those savings, the economy will continue to wind down.

And what if the political rhetoric descends into class warfare? What if the savers of the nation become objects of ridicule, subject to punitive levels of taxation and regulation? In that case, we get back to the idea that capital is portable.

If savings cannot find a safe harbor in the U.S., then the capital flows will keep moving offshore. And if that happens, all bets are off for the U.S. economy. We can just sit back and listen as the band plays “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

Until we meet again,
Byron King

July 2, 2009

Too Much Spending, Not Enough Savings: Destruction of an Economy was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

At the moment, there is tremendous hoopla and jubilation over the start-up of so many “shovel-ready” highway projects around America — as if what we need most are additional circumferential freeways to enhance the Happy Motoring lifestyle. How insane are we? Is this the only thing we know how to do?

I remain confident that the months ahead will introduce the American public and our leaders to a range of horrors that will begin to penetrate our addled collective imagination. We’re far from done with the crisis of banking and money and the related fiasco in mortgages — which translates into the very real situation of many people becoming homeless. It remains to be seen what may happen on the food production scene, but the current severe shortage of capital and the intense droughts shaping up around the world will resolve into a much clearer picture by mid-summer. The price of oil has resumed marching up and has now re-entered a range ($50-plus) that spun the airline industry into bankruptcy last time around. Enough carnage has already occurred on the jobs scene that the next act among many chronically jobless may tilt toward desperation, anger, and violence. The sporting goods shops around the nation are already rationing ammunition.

It’s not just the stock markets that have decoupled from reality as we enjoy the fragrant vapors of spring — it’s the entire conscious consensus of everybody holding the levers of power and opinion. To put it as simply as possible, we’re still sleepwalking into the future.

Bad Collateral

The wishes of the “green shoots and mustard seed” crowd really hinge on whether the various organs of the suburban economy can be jump-started back to life — the production home-builders, the granite countertop outfitters, the mall and strip-mall gang, the national chain discount retailers, all the people who make Happy Motoring possible from the factory to the showroom, and, of course, the banks who shovel money into these enterprises.

All these organs of our now-former economy are gravely impaired, and a realistic appraisal of them would have to conclude that they’ve entered the zone of congestive failure. The choice we face really comes down to this: do we put our dwindling resources and “hopes” into resuscitating those dying systems, or do we move forward to the next chapter of American life, cut our losses, and make new arrangements more consistent with the realities on offer from the universe? To take it a step further, can we remain one nation, a common culture, without such a conscious re-purposing of our collective spirit?

The bizarre spectacle being played out right now by President Obama and his team only adds layers of mystery and mystification to this big question. It is so dispiriting to see Mr. Obama’s White House mount a campaign to sustain the unsustainable in the economic realm. Everything they’ve done for four months involving money management and enterprise policy — from backstopping hopeless banks, to gaming the bankruptcies of the big car companies, to the bungled efforts to prop up artificially-high house prices — amounts to a gigantic exercise in futility. Worse, it gives off odors of dishonesty or stupidity, since the ominous tendings of our system are so starkly self-evident.

Not least of the problems entailed in all this are the scary political consequences. It’s one thing for a business such as a bank to fail; its another thing for the public to lose confidence in banking, or their own currency, or the credibility of all the people who work in banking, or the authority of those charged to regulate these activities, or the courts and their officers who are supposed to adjudicate misconduct in them. When faith in all these things starts to go, all bets are off for even larger social constructs like democracy, justice, and the destiny of a federal republic.

The Obama White House has very quickly painted itself into a corner on these things. The so-called bank “stress test” couldn’t have backfired more completely. Rather than bolster confidence in our money system and the people who run it, it only made the system appear more obviously corrupt. It made the Treasury Department (and the White House by extension) look idiotic for concocting it. Worse, the game of allowing the banks to audit themselves, and cook their books under newly jiggered accounting rules, only made them look less sound and trustworthy, and their executives more venal and mendacious. The stress test scam also virtually guaranteed that the banks will not get another dime out of congress — even while it is common knowledge that they will desperately need quadrillions more dimes in the months ahead.

Who knows what the point of this ludicrous exercise was? Observers in all corners of the media saw through it, and the public has only been made more cynical, and is now so furious over related stunts like AIG using taxpayer money to pay back swaps bets to Goldman Sachs that there is a whiff of revolution in the American air for the first time, really, since 1861. A lot of reasonable people see a good chance that our society will sink into disorder if these trends continue, and these fears could beat a path into radical politics, even the frightful prospect of coup d’etat — not something that I advocate, by the way.

The president is playing with fire on all this. The old economy is not going to recover, and so far he has not used his rhetorical talents to articulate what the next economy is likely to be about. It is reasonable to wonder whether he even really has a clear sense of it — and, based on the fatuous utterances of his economic mandarins like Larry Summers and Austan Goolsby, this team is really behind the curve.

There are plenty of things you can state about the economy past and future with some confidence right now:

• Cheap energy is over and our wishes for alt.energy are currently inconsistent with reality, meaning we have to live differently.

• We have to downscale and re-localize our major economic activities: food production, commerce and manufacturing, banking, schooling, etc.

• We can’t hope to have a stable money system unless we allow a workout of unpayable debt to proceed.

• Even if we can do this, universal easy credit is a thing of the past. From now on, we have to save for the things we want and run our businesses and households on accounts receivable.

• Major demographic shifts are inevitable as it becomes necessary to let go of suburbia and reactivate our derelict towns and smaller cities (and allow our giant metroplexes to contract).

• We have to face the truth that our major social contracts cannot be met, namely the continuation of social security as we know it and probably all pension arrangements. We’ll probably have to change household arrangements to make up for these losses.

• Health care will have to go through a revolution more comprehensive than just changing how we pay for it. Like everything else, it will have to downscale, re-localize, and become more rigorous.

We’re not going to rescue the banks. The collateral for their loans is no good and it will only lose more value. All those tract houses on the cul-de-sacs of America and scattered on the out-parcels of our tragically subdivided farming landscape will only lose value, one way or another, in the years ahead. Right now they’re simply losing inflated cash value — and that has been bad enough to sink the banks. In the months and years ahead, they’ll lose their sheer usefulness as the distances once mitigated by cheap gasoline loom larger again, and the jobs vanish and incomes with them, and the supermarket shelves cease to groan with eighty-seven different varieties of flavored coffee creamers, and one-by-one the national chain stores shutter, and the theme parks, and the NASCAR ovals, and the malls, and the colossal superfluous cretin-cargo of consumer nonsense that we’ve been daydreaming in gets blown away in a hurricane of change that we were not ready to believe in.

Regards,
James Howard Kunstler

May 19, 2009

Shoveling Money into the Deceased Economy was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder