Mass Transit Use Is Declining As Millennials Buy More Cars

More than a quarter of U.S. government spending on surface transportation goes to mass transit, and yet mass transit accounts for less than 2 percent of total trips taken nationwide. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marc Scribner attributes this eye-popping mismatch to a persistent “falsehood peddled by the transit lobby:” If you build it, they will come.

A stunning chart put together by the University of South Florida’s Steve Polzin illustrates how transit supply has failed to create its own demand.

The blue line represents transit ridership; the red line shows the expansion of the country’s mass transit infrastructure going back to 1970. Their divergence is a “report card on productivity that mom and dad would hardly be proud of,” Polzin writes. It’s also a statistical representation of a sad yet all-too-famiTransit Ridership vs. Vehicle Miles ||| Steven Polzinliar scene in American cities: empty light rail trains chugging along main streets in deserted downtowns.

As Polzin notes, data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the National Transit Data Program show that transit ridership in the U.S. has been declining recently. Yet advocates hold out hope that millennials will deliver on the mass transit renaissance they’ve been claiming is right around the corner since the 1970s.

It’s not going to happen. As Reason Foundation’s Director of Transportation Policy Bob Poole noted recently, J.D. Power’s and Bankrate.com report that car buying is surging among millennials. This data contradict a 2014 paper from the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) claiming young people were no longer attracted to automobiles and therefore the U.S. should divert even more money to transit.

For more on the failure of mass transit, click below to watch a video story I put together on Washington D.C.’s disastrous new streetcar line:

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Taking The ‘Petro’ Out Of The Dollar

Submitted by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Saudi Arabia has been in the news recently for several interconnected reasons. Underlying it all is a spendthrift country that is rapidly becoming insolvent.

While the House of Saud remains strongly resistant to change, a mixture of reality and power-play is likely to dominate domestic politics in the coming years, following the ascendency of King Salman to the Saudi throne. This has important implications for the dollar, given its historic role in the region.

Last year’s collapse in the oil price has forced financial reality upon the House of Saud. The young deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, possibly inspired by a McKinsey report, aims to diversify the state rapidly from oil dependency into a mixture of industries, healthcare and tourism. The McKinsey report looks like a wish-list, rather than reality, particularly when it comes to tourism. The religious police are unlikely to take kindly to bikinis on the Red Sea’s beeches, or to foreign women in mini-shorts wandering around Jeddah.

It is hard to imagine Saudi Arabia, culturally stuck in the middle ages, embracing the changes recommended by McKinsey, without fundamentally reforming the House of Saud, or even without a full-scale revolution. Nearly all properties and businesses are personally owned or controlled by members of the extended royal family, not the state, nor by lesser mortals. The principal exception is Aramco, estimated to be worth $2 trillion.

The state is subservient to the House of Saud. It is therefore hard to see how, as McKinsey recommends, the country can “shift from its current government-led economic model to a more market-based approach”. The country is barely government led: a puppet of the Saudis is more like it. But the state’s lack of funds is making it increasingly desperate.

It was for this reason the Kingdom recently placed a $10bn five-year syndicated loan, the first time it has entered capital markets since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. It proposes to raise a further $100bn by selling a 5% stake in Aramco. The financial plan appears to be a combination of this short-term money-raising, contributions from oil revenue, and sales of US Treasuries (thought to total as much as $750bn). The government has, according to informed sources, been secretly selling gold, mainly to Asian central banks and sovereign wealth funds. Will it see the Kingdom through this sticky patch?

Maybe. Much more likely, buying time is a substitute for ducking fundamental reform. But one can see how stories coming out of Washington, implicating Saudi interests in the 9/11 twin-towers tragedy, could easily have pulled the trigger on all those Treasuries.

Whatever else was discussed, it seems likely that this topic will have been addressed at the two special FOMC meetings “under expedited measures” at the Fed earlier this month, and then at Janet Yellen’s meeting with the President at the White House. This week’s holding pattern on interest rates would lend support to this theory.

The White House’s involvement certainly points towards a matter involving foreign affairs, rather than just interest rates. If the Saudis had decided to dump their Treasuries on the market, it would risk collapsing US bond markets and the dollar. Through financial transmission, euro-denominated sovereign bonds and Japanese government bonds, all of which are wildly overpriced, would also enter into free-fall, setting off the global financial crisis that central banks have been trying to avoid.

Perhaps this is reading too much into Saudi Arabia’s financial difficulties, but the possibility of the sale of Treasuries certainly got wide media coverage. These reports generally omitted to mention the Saudi’s underlying financial difficulties, which could equally have contributed to their desire to sell.

While the Arab countries floated themselves on oceans of petro-dollars forty years ago, they have little need for them now. So we must now turn our attention to China, which is well positioned to act as white knight to Saudi Arabia. China’s SAFE sovereign wealth fund could easily swallow the Aramco stake, and there are good strategic reasons why it should. A quick deal would help stabilise a desperate financial and political situation on the edges of China’s rapidly growing Asian interests, and keep Saudi Arabia onside as an energy supplier. China has dollars to dispose, and a mutual arrangement would herald a new era of tangible cooperation. The US can only stand and stare as China teases Saudi Arabia away from America’s sphere of influence.

In truth, trade matters much more than just talk, which is why a highly-indebted America finds herself on the back foot all the time in every financial skirmish with China. Saudi Arabia has little option but to kow-tow to China, and her commercial interests are moving her into China’s camp anyway. It seems logical that the Saudi riyal will eventually be de-pegged from the US dollar and managed in line with a basket of her oil customers’ currencies, dominated by the yuan.

Future currency policies pursued by both China and Saudi Arabia and their interaction will affect the dollar. China wants to use her own currency for trade deals, but must not flood the markets with yuan, lest she loses control over her currency. The internationalisation of the yuan must therefore be a gradual process, supply only being expanded when permanent demand for yuan requires it. Meanwhile, western analysts expect the riyal to be devalued against the dollar, unless there is a significant and lasting increase in the price of oil, which is not generally expected. But a devaluation requires a deliberate act by the state, which is not in the personal interests of the individual members of the House of Saud, so is a last resort.

It is clear that both Saudi Arabia and China have enormous quantities of surplus dollars to dispose in the next few years. As already stated, China could easily use $100bn of her stockpile to buy the 5% Aramco stake, dollars which the Saudis would simply sell in the foreign exchange markets as they are spent domestically. China could make further dollar loans to Saudi Arabia, secured against future oil sales and repayable in yuan, perhaps at a predetermined exchange rate. The Saudis would get dollars to spend, and China could balance future supply and demand for yuan.

It would therefore appear that a large part of the petro-dollar mountain is going to be unwound over time. There is now no point in the Saudis also hanging onto their US Treasury bonds, so we can expect them to be liquidated, but not as a fire-sale. On this point, it has been suggested that the US Government could simply block sales by China and Saudi Arabia, but there would be no quicker way of undermining the dollar’s international credibility. More likely, the Americans would have to accept an orderly unwinding of foreign holdings.

The US has exploited the dollar’s reserve currency status to the full since WW2, leading to massive quantities of dollars in foreign ownership. The pressure for dollars to return to America, when the Vietnam war was wound down, was behind the first dollar crisis, leading to the failure of the London gold pool in the late sixties. After the Nixon Shock in 1971, the cycle of printing money and credit for export resumed.

In the seventies, higher oil prices were paid for by printing dollars and by expanding dollar bank credit, in turn kept offshore by lending these exported dollars to Latin American dictators. That culminated in the Latin American debt crisis. From the eighties onwards, the internationalisation of business was all done on the back of yet more exported dollars, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan echoed the earlier wars of Korea and Vietnam.

Many of these factors have now either disappeared or diminished. For the last eighteen months, the dollar had a last-gasp rally, as commodity and oil prices collapsed. The contraction in global trade since mid-2014 had signalled a swing in preferences from commodities and energy towards the money they are priced in, which is dollars. The concomitant liquidation of malinvestments in the commodity-exporting countries has been contained for now by aggressive monetary policies from China, Japan and the Eurozone. The tide is now swinging the other way: preferences are swinging out of the dollar towards oversold commodities again, exposing the dollar to a second version of the gold pool crisis. This time, China, Saudi Arabia and the BRICS will be returning their dollars from whence they came.

In essence, this is the market argument in favour of gold. Over time, the price of commodities and their manufactured derivatives measured in grams of gold is relatively stable. It is the price measured in fiat currencies that is volatile, with an upward bias. The price of a barrel of oil in 1966, fifty years ago, was 2.75 grams of gold. Today it is 1.0 gram of gold, so the purchasing power of gold measured in barrels of oil has risen nearly three-fold. In dollars, the prices were $3.10 and $40 respectively, so the purchasing power of the dollar measured in barrels of oil has fallen by 92%. Expect these trends to resume.

This is also the difference between sound money and dollars, which has worked to the detriment of nearly all energy and commodity-producing countries. With a track-record like that, who needs dollars?

It is hard to see how the purchasing power of dollars will not fall over the rest of the year. The liquidation of malinvestments denominated in external dollars has passed. Instead, the liquidation of financial investments carry-traded out of euros and yen is strengthening those currencies. That too will pass, but it won’t rescue the dollar.

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Nothing Is Real: “It’s All Being Played To Keep People Believing The System Is Working”

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

The stock market may be hovering near all-time highs, but according to Greg Mannarino of Traders Choice that doesn’t mean the valuations are actually real:

We exist, beyond any shadow of any doubt, in an environment of absolute fakery where nothing is real… from the prices of assets to what’s occurring here with regard to the big Wall Street banks, the Federal Reserve, interest rates and everything in between.

 

…All of this is being played in a way to keep people believing, once again, that the system is working and will continue to work.

Full Interview with USA Watchdog:

 

 

President Obama has suggested that people like Greg Mannarino who are exposing the fraud for what it is are just peddling fiction. And just this week the President argued that he saved the world from a great depression and that the closing credits of the 2008 crash movie “The Big Short” were inaccurate when they claimed that nothing has been done to fundamentally curb the fraud and fix the system under his administration. But as Mannarino notes, the President and his central bank cohorts are making these statements because the system is so fragile that if the public senses even the smallest problem it could derail the entire thing:

Let’s just look at the stock market… there’s no possible way at this time that these multiples can be justified with regard to what’s occurring here with the price action of the overall market… meanwhile, the market continues to rise.

 

 

Nothing is real. I can’t stress this enough… and we’re going to continue to see more fakery… and manipulation and twisting of this entire system…  We now exist in an environment where the financial system as a whole has been flipped upside down just to make it function… and that’s very scary.

 

 

We’ve never seen anything like this in the history of the world… The Federal Reserve has never been in a situation like this… we are completely in uncharted territory where the world’s central banks have gone negative interest rates… it’s all an illusion to keep the stock market booming.

 

 

Every single asset now… I don’t care what asset… you want to look at currency, debt, housing, metals, the stock market… pick an asset… there’s no price discovery mechanism behind it whatsoever… it’s all fake… it’s all being distorted.

 

 

The system is built upon on one premise and that is confidence that it will work… if that confidence is rattled the whole thing will implode… our policy makers are well aware of this… there is collusion between central banks and their respective governments… and it will not stop until it implodes… and what I mean by implode is, correct to fair value.

And when that confidence is finally lost and the fraud exposed – and it will be as has always been the case throughout history – the destruction to follow will be one for the history books.

In a previous interview Mannarino warned that things could get so serious after the bursting of such a massive bubble that millions of people will die on a world-wide scale:

It’s created a population boom… a population boom has risen in tandem with the debt. It’s incredible.

 

So, when the debt bubble bursts we’re going to get a correction in population. It’s a mathematical certainty.

 

Millions upon millions of people are going to die on a world-wide scale when the debt bubble bursts. And I’m saying when not if…

 

 

When resources become more and more scarce we’re going to see countries at war with each other. People will be scrambling… in a worst case scenario… doing everything that they can to survive… to provide for their family and for themselves.

 

There’s no way out of it.

And that may be why governments around the world are preparing for nothing short of Armageddon that will see rioting in the streets, violence, civil war and regime change. In the United States, the Federal government and Pentagon have been war-gaming large scale economic collapse scenarios and those preparations began in earnest shortly after the collapse of 2008.

Nationally syndicated talk radio host Mark Levin explains:

I’m going to tell you what I think is going on.

 

I don’t think domestic insurrection. Law enforcement and national security agencies, they play out multiple scenarios. They simulate multiple scenarios.

 

I’ll tell you what I think they’re simulating.

 

The collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society and the potential for widespread violence, looting, killing in the streets, because that’s what happens when an economy collapses.

I’m not talking about a recession. I’m talking about a collapse, when people are desperate, when they can’t get food or clothing, when they have no way of going from place to place, when they can’t protect themselves.

 

There aren’t enough police officers on the face of the earth to adequately handle a situation like that.

 

I suspect, that just in case our fiscal situation collapses, our monetary situation collapses, and following it the civil society collapses – that is the rule of law – that they want to be prepared.

 

There is no other explanation for this.

The entire system is built upon a fraud. The losses have been hidden and papered over with trillion dollar cash infusions by governments and central banks around the world.

It is only a matter of time. That we can be sure of.

If you’re reading this and haven’t yet done so, it’s time to prepare for a collapse of a magnitude never before witnessed.

The elite are feverishly building bunkers for a reason, just as the government is spending billions of dollars on food stockpiles, assault weapons, and hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition.

Why? Because they know.

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UPS Braces For $3.8 Billion Charge As Treasury’s Pension Benefit Decision Looms

As we covered previously, in an effort to remain solvent the Central States Pension Fund has submitted an application to the Treasury for approval to cut member benefits.  While some plan participants could see pension incomes cut in half, the fund projects that it will become insolvent by 2025 if nothing is done.

Treasury is set to decide on the matter by May 7th, and as it turns out, the decision impacts more than just current plan participants…

During its Q1 earnings call, UPS told investors that if Treasury approves the CSPF plan to cut benefits, the company would have to take a charge of approximately $3.2 to $3.8 billion.

 

As part of a collective bargaining agreement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters when UPS withdrew from the fund in 2007,  the company agreed to provide supplemental benefits to any remaining members in the event that certain benefits were lawfully reduced.

While any income statement impact will be adjusted out by analysts, it will be a significant drain on UPS' cash flow (UPS generated $5 billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2015) as it funds the benefit gap over time.

UPS is just the latest example of what lies ahead and forces the government's hand to provide yet another bailout (and encourage yet more moral hazard over-promising).

As we concluded previously, "This is going to be a national crisis for hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of retirees and their families. It's going to open the floodgates for other cuts." said Karen Friedman, executive president of the Pension Rights Center.

 

We can't help but wonder that as more pension funds become insolvent, and more and more participants are forced to take reductions in benefits, whether helicopter money won't soon become a reality for the United States, even before it becomes one in Japan. Especially if it is spun by some opportunistic politicans as the "only hope" for America's workers to preserve some of their retirement savings.

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Trump Nomination Odds Hit Record High As Rubio Urges GOP Not To “Ignore The Will Of The People”

The probability of The Donald becoming the Republican Presidential nominee has surged up to a record high 85% this week (as the odds of a brokered convention collapse) as a more mild-mannered and "can't we all get along" Trump begins to creep out of the shadows.

Source: PreditIt.org

 

Source: PreditIt.org

As the inevitable event looms – no matter what the establishment tries – increasing numbers of #NeverTrump-ers are slowly but surely moving over to what they pictured before as the dark side. The latest, as The Hill reports, is none other than Marco Rubio who said "[Trump's] performance has improved significantly," urging GOP "let's not divide the party."

In a separate interview, Rubio said the GOP should avoid a divisive battle for the nomination.

 

“Look, let’s not divide the party,” he told Miami radio host Jimmy Cefalo, according to The Tampa Bay Times.

 

“I do think it's valid to argue to delegates: 'Look, let’s not divide the party. You have someone here who has all these votes, very close to get 1,237, let’s not ignore the will of the people or they’re going to be angry.' And delegates may decide that on that reason they decide to vote for Donald Trump. But if they don’t, it’s not illegitimate in any way,” Rubio said.

 

“I’ve always said that I will support the Republican nominee, and that’s especially true now that it’s apparent that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.”

Additionally, Rep. Jimmy Duncan (R-Tenn.) on Saturday endorsed Donald Trump for president, giving the GOP front-runner his 12th lawmaker endorsement.

And with all eyes now on Indiana, Trump either holds a near double-digit lead…

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is ahead by 9 points in Indiana ahead of the state's Tuesday primary, according to a poll released Friday.

Trump has 41 percent support among likely GOP primary voters, the American Research Group poll found, followed by Ted Cruz, at 32 percent, and John Kasich, at 21 percent.

 

or (3 hours later) is behind by double-digits…

Ted Cruz leads Donald Trump by double digits in a new poll of Indiana, which hosts the next contest in the GOP presidential primary on Tuesday.

The Texas senator leads the real estate mogul 45 percent to 29 percent among registered voters, according to a poll by the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics.

*  *  *

So depending on who or when you asked, Trump is a yuuge leader or yuuger laggard .. “This is good news for Cruz, but the volatility of the electorate means all campaigns should view these results cautiously,” pollster Andrew Downs said in a statement.

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The Real Story Behind The True Magnitude Of The New Home Sales Collapse

Submitted by Wall Street Examiner's Lee Adler via Contra Corner blog,

Comparing the growth in the number of full time jobs versus the growth in new home sales starkly illustrates both the horrible quality of the new jobs, and how badly ZIRP has served the US economy.

Growth in new home sales has always been dependent on growth in full time jobs. For 38 years until the housing bubble peaked in 2006, home sales and full time jobs always trended together, subject to normal cyclical swings. With the exception of 1981-83 when Paul Volcker pushed rates into the stratosphere, new home sales always fluctuated between 550 and 1,100 sales per million full time workers in the month of March.

New Home Sales and Full Time Jobs - Click to enlarge

That correlation broke in the housing crash of 2008-09 when sales fell to a low

But in the housing crash in 2007-09 sales fell to a low of 276 per million full time workers. Since then the number of full time jobs has recovered to greater than the peak reached in 2007. In spite of that, new home sales per million workers remain at depression levels.

With 30 year mortgage rates now at 3.6% sales are lower today than they were when mortgage rates were above 17% in 1982. Sales have never reached 400 sales per million workers in spite of the recovery in the number of jobs, in spite of ZIRP, in spite of mortgage rates often under 4%.

ZIRP has actually made the problem worse. It has caused raging housing inflation which has caused median monthly mortgage payments for new homes to rise by 20% since 2009. ZIRP has enabled corporate CEOs to game the stock market to massively increase their own pay while encouraging them to cut worker salaries and shift higher paying jobs overseas. That leaves the US economy to create only low skill, low pay jobs that do not pay enough for workers to be able to purchase new homes.

The perverse incentives of ZIRP are why the housing industry languishes at depression levels.

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Starting Monday, Interactive Brokers Will Charge You 0.25% On Yen Cash Balances

Three months after Japan unveiled NIRP, the effect has finally arrived. As IB warns its FX traders, starting Monday, Interactive Brokers “will move to a credit interest policy which allows for negative rates on long cash balances held in JPY where accounts with balances over approximately 100 thousand USD will be subject to the current Benchmark Rate minus 0.25%.” Why? Because while initially the negative interest rate policies unveiled by “many central banks were viewed as short-term measures, they now appear to be policies with open-ended duration.

These NIRP costs are now being passed on to FX traders, and very soon, to depositors.

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Gold And Negative Interest Rates

Submitted by Dan Popescu via Acting-Man.com,

The Inflation Illusion

We hear more and more talk about the possibility of imposing negative interest rates in the US. In a recent article former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke asks what tools the Fed has left to support the economy and inter alia discusses the use of negative rates.

We first have to define what we mean by negative interest rates. For nominal rates it’s simple. When the interest rate charged goes negative we have negative nominal rates. To get the real rate of interest we have to subtract inflation from the nominal rate, so to speak remove the illusion of inflation.

 

1-real FF rate

The “real” federal funds rate (effective FF rate minus CPI-U y/y rate of change)

 

Real interest rates have been negative fairly often, including for most of the period since 2009. The main problem consists of choosing the appropriate measure of inflation.

Since the calculation of price inflation is highly subjective and easy to manipulate, one possibility is to adjust nominal prices to gold to calculate real interest rates. In the chart below you can see nominal U.S. 10-year Treasury rates versus gold-adjusted rates since 1962.

 

2-treasury yields

Nominal vs. gold-adjusted treasury yields (actually, the calculation of “price inflation” or a “general level of prices” is not merely subjective – it is literally impossible) – click to enlarge.

 

Ben Bernanke says in his article:

“The fundamental economic constraint on how negative interest rates can go is that, beyond a certain point, people will just choose to hold currency, which pays zero interest. (It’s not convenient or safe for most people to hold large amounts of currency, but at a sufficiently negative interest rate, banks or other institutions could profit from holding cash, for a fee, on behalf of customers). Based on calculations of how much it would cost banks to store large quantities of currency in their vaults, the Fed staff concluded in 2010 that the interest rate paid on bank reserves in the U.S. could not practically be brought lower than about -0.35 percent.

 

bernanke_2017935b

Well-known monetary quack Ben Bernanke, who in a way is the John Law of our times. He actually seems to think he knows something (no-one has told him differently, but they should), but if one looks closely at what he is writing and saying, it soon becomes clear how utterly simplistic and superficial his theoretical thinking really is. Moreover, he and his counterparts elsewhere couldn’t even forecast their way out of a paper bag, i.e., they are completely useless in practice as well. Bernanke e.g. denied for years that there was a housing bubble in the US, a bubble that was so glaringly obvious even blind Freddie and his dog (h/t JD) could see it. It is rather astonishing that people like him not only seem to believe they should manipulate the economy, but actually expect something good to come of it! One might be tempted to call this the triumph of hope over experience, but in reality it is simply incredible and unwarranted arrogance.

 

Rising Demand for Safes, Cash and Gold

In Japan, the European Union and Switzerland, where negative nominal interest rates have already been adopted, it was observed that demand for safes and cash increased. When negative rates took effect in mid-February in Japan, queries about home safes surged, especially from customers aged 50 and over. Sales of safes are now running some 40 to 50 percent above this time last year, according to a Reuters article.

In the European Union Reuters reports the same trend. The European Central Bank’s negative interest rates are sparking demand for safe deposit boxes, where bank customers can store cash to avoid the prospect of eventually having to pay interest on their account balances, German bankers told Reuters. The same trend was observed recently in Switzerland as well, not only with private investors but also with pension fund managers (see: “The War on Cash Migrates to Switzerland” for details).

At the same time, we learn that negative rates have boosted demand for gold in Japan. According to Takahiro Ito, chief manager at Tanaka Kikinzoku Kogyo K.K.’s store in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district, “Many customers are wagering that it’s better to turn their savings to gold as a safe asset rather than deposit money at banks that offer low interest rates,” reports Bloomberg.

Sales of gold to Japanese consumers rose to 32.8 metric tonnes in 2015 from 17.9 tonnes a year earlier, Bloomberg reports in the same article. Gold bar sales climbed by 35 percent to 8,192 kilograms in the three months ended March 31 from a year earlier, according to Tanaka Kikinzoku Kogyo K.K., the country’s biggest bullion retailer.

A boom in safe-deposit-box companies was also observed in Switzerland in the canton of Ticino. The rising popularity of safe-deposit boxes has created a boom for jewelers along Lugano’s Via Nassa, home to Cartier, Bulgari, and Bucherer boutiques, as people race to convert cash into assets they can lock away.  Bloomberg reports:

“Investors are buying more gold as an alternative to holding Swiss franc cash deposits, according to Vontobel Holding AG, a Swiss bank and wealth manager… “We keep noticing that gold is coming back into favour with investors,” said Vontobel’s Chief Executive Officer Zeno Staub.”

In a negative interest environment, gold is the best way to store large amounts of cash. A gold coin of 1 troy ounce (31.1 grams) stores about $1,250 while a one-kilogram bar of gold stores about $39,620 today and is just about the size of your palm.

With the looming threat of cash bans and with the one-hundred-dollar bill the largest denomination both in the U.S. and Canada, one can easily see the advantage of holding gold in a safe or under the mattress. In the European Union there is also talk of banning large euro denominations like the 500-euro bill. The largest denomination in the UK is just 50 pounds.

 

gold bar

$40,000 in gold – the fact that gold doesn’t take up much space and that no government can actually order humanity to forget that it is the money of the free market, are among the many reasons that make it an ideal store of value.

Photo via goldbroker.com

 

Negative Rates and Cash Bans

But negative interest rates also increase the cost of doing business for banks, which find it hard to pass these costs on to borrowers. They are therefore weakening the banking system. This also encourages people to buy gold and hold it outside the banking system, despite the inconveniences.

It is for this reason some economists are associating negative interest rates with a ban on physical currency. In order to impose negative rates effectively, the government must have control of people’s cash. The State can easily control access to electronic money by limiting the amount of withdrawals from the banking system just with a small adjustment in the software.

The State can stop printing fiat money but it can’t easily ban physical currency like gold and silver. It is estimated that approximately 20% of the above-ground gold is in private hands in the form of pure bullion. A large part of the jewelry stock could also be used as cash if necessary.

 

3-above ground stocks

Estimates of who holds gold and in what form – click to enlarge.

 

Conclusion

In today’s negative interest rate environment one should definitely be more concerned about the return of one’s money, than the return on one’s money. Considering the threat of negative interest rates it is obvious why people are rediscovering the value of holding gold.

Gold tends to perform well in declining or negative real interest-rate environments. The deeper central banks move into negative rate territory, the  more gold is going to be supported, as the cost of carry disappears. High real rates are bad for gold but negative real rates are quite good for it (see also “Gold and the Federal Funds Rate” for some additional color on this).

 

Addendum: A Few Charts on Real Rates vs. the Gold Price

4-real rates and gold

Real rates and gold: US treasury bond yields less CPI vs. the gold price (inverted) – click to enlarge.

 

5-real rates and gold-b

Real rates and gold: 3 month real interest rate, 3 months gold lease rate and the gold price (inverted), 1975 – 2016 – click to enlarge.

 

6-real rates and gold-c

Real rates and gold: 3 month real interest rate, 3 months gold lease rate and the gold price (inverted), 2006 – 2016 – click to enlarge.

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Landmarking Is Turning New York City Into a Life-Sized Historical Diorama

New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Act was intended to protect about three or four “historic districts”—Brooklyn Heights, Greenwich Village, etc.—preservationist James Van Derpool told the New York City Council in 1964. That’s all “anyone had seriously considered.”

The Landmarks Act  was passed the following year thanks in part to Van Derpool’s testimony. A half-century later the city has protected 138 historic districts. Nearly a third of the structures in Manhattan have been landmarked. As I argued in a Reason TV video published last year, entire swaths of New York City may as well be encased in a life-sized historical diorama. Out-of-control landmarking is undermining the process of creative The recently landmarked Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens ||| Joe Mabel (creative commons)destruction that made New York, well, New York.

This month, the Landmarks Commission designated a giant Pepsi-Cola sign on the Queens waterfront (which was in no danger of being torn down for what it’s worth), and it voted to extend the Park Slope Historic District to include an additional 292 buildings.

What justifies these two designations? Landmarks Commission Chairwoman Meenakshi Srinivasan was left straining. She lauded the Pepsi sign for “its prominent siting” and “frequent appearances in pop culture.” The Park Slope blocks are part of an area, Srinivasan explained, that “owes its cohesiveness to its tree-lined streets, predominant residential character, and its high level of architectural integrity.”

If “prominent siting,” “tree-lined streets,” “residential character,” and “architectural integrity” are grounds for landmarking, what’s to stop the Commission from declaring every square inch of the Big Apple too precious to ever change?

Click below to watch “How New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Act Bulldozed the Future:”

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