Last fall, New York City’s health department adopted the nation’s first and only salt warning scheme. The rules, which apply only to chain restaurants, require warnings on most menu items that contain more than 2,300 mg sodium.
At the time of their adoption, Melissa Fleischut, president of the New York State Restaurant Association, called the rules “just the latest in a long litany of superfluous hoops that restaurants here in New York must jump through.”
But this week, an appellate court issued a stay that will prevent the city from implementing the rules, for the time being at least. Baylen Linnekin argues that they should be gone for good.
Peter Ford, who was the UK’s Ambassador in Syria during 2003-2006, was asked by the BBC in their “The Big Questions” interview on February 14th, whether the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have to be a part of the solution in that country after the war is over, and Ambassador Ford said:
“I think sadly, but inevitably, he is. Realistically, Assad is not going to be overthrown. This becomes more clear with every day that passes. Western analysts have been indulging in wishful thinking for 5 years; it’s time to get real, we owe it to the Syrian people to be much more realistic and hard headed about this. The West has to stop propping up the so-called ‘moderate opposition’, which is not moderate at all.”
"The frustrated interviewer asked Mr. Ford about 'what we should have done,' and he responded that 'we should have backed off, we should have not tried to overthrow the regime.' Mr. Ford eloquently added that this policy has been 'like a dog returning to vomit.’”
The video of the interview below showed him making that statement in this context:
The interviewer was clearly anti-Assad, and Ford responded with evident anger by noting (starting at 2:55 on the video) the shocking fact that:
“In Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, like a dog returning to vomit, we go back to [and the audience already was started to clap here], we never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow.”
He was saying there that we support only non-secular regimes, sectarian regimes, in Arabia, this meaning fundamentalist Sunni governments — especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, the very same regimes that even the U.S. Secretary of State acknowledged in a 2009 cable that was wikileaked, are the chief regimes that are funding Al Qaeda, ISIS and other jihadist groups. Ford was noting that the United States and UK strive to keep in power those governments, the ones that are led by royal families that supply the bulk of funding for jihadist groups — jihadists who perpetrate terrorism in the United States and Europe. “We never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow”: Ambassdor Ford was so bold as to imply that our governments are supporting, under the table, the very same ruling families that they know to be funding (as that cable only vaguely referred to them) “Sunni terrorist groups worldwide” (which includes in Western countries, too).
The BBC’s interviewer ignored that statement; he wasn’t struck by it, such as to ask: “Why are we supporting the chief funders of Islamic jihad? Why are we overthrowing (or in Syria are trying to overthrow) a secular regime, against which we join foreign jihadist groups in order to overthrow that non-sectarian regime; why are these dogs, as you call the U.S. and UK, returning time and again to that vomit?”
This was a live interview program, and so the BBC censors weren’t able to eliminate Ambassador Ford’s responses from the interview; but, instead, the interviewer did his best to interrupt and to talk over Ford’s shocking — and shockingly truthful — assertions about the government (ours) that supposedly represent our interests (and not the interests of Western oil companies etc.). Ford will probably not be invited again to be on live television in the West to air his views about Syria.
Ford’s evident anger at what’s going on, and at the media’s resistance to letting the public know about the reality, appeared to reach near to the edge of his blurting out that ulterior motives have to be behind this addiction to “vomit” — but he was a professional diplomat, and so he was able to restrain himself there.
The U.S. Secretary of State who had specifically requested the fundamentalist-Islamic Arab ‘allies’ to stop funding terrorism was Hillary Clinton, the leading candidate now contending for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. Here she was, expressing her current view regarding Syria, in a recent debate against her Democratic Party opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders:
QUESTIONER: In respect to when you take out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Right now or do you wait? Do you tackle ISIS first? You have said, Secretary Clinton, that you come to the conclusion that we have to proceed on both fronts at once. We heard from the senator just this week that we must put aside the issue of how quickly we get rid of Assad and come together with countries, including Russia and Iran, to destroy ISIS first. Is he wrong?
CLINTON: I think we're missing the point here. We are doing both at the same time.
QUESTIONER: But that's what he's saying, we should put that aside for now and go after ISIS.
CLINTON: Well, I don't agree with that.
She's still (now after five years, and even though she knows that we’re supporting jihadist-backing Arabic royal families and their Shariah-law regimes) comes back to that “vomit”: that "we never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow.” She’s an example of this addiction, to that “vomit.”
What’s exhibited here is a double-scandal: first, that a person such as that would even be a Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Presidency (and Jeb Bush shares Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy prescriptions, though he’s virtually certain not to win the Republican Presidential nomination); and, second, that the Western press try to avoid, as much as possible, to expose the fact that this is, indeed, “vomit,” and avoid to explain to their audience the very corrupt governmental and news-media system that enables people such as Ms. Clinton to become and remain a leading Presidential candidate in the United States. Clearly, a person like that isn’t qualified to be in government at all; she’s corrupt, or else incredibly stupid. And no one thinks she’s that stupid. But lots of people accuse her of being corrupt.
The conventional wisdom holds a decline in voter turnout is a sign of apathy. But it may also be a sign of a renaissance in personal responsibility. It could be people saying, "I won't be fooled again, and I won't lend power to them."
Politics has always been a way of redistributing wealth from those who produce to those who are politically favored. As H.L. Mencken observed, every election amounts to no more than an advance auction on stolen goods, a process few would support if they saw its true nature.
Protesters in the 1960s had their flaws, but they were quite correct when they said, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." If politics is the problem, what is the solution? I have an answer that may appeal to you.
The first step in solving the problem is to stop actively encouraging it.
Many Americans have intuitively recognized that government is the problem and have stopped voting. There are at least five reasons many people do not vote:
1. Voting in a political election is unethical. The political process is one of institutionalized coercion and force. If you disapprove of those things, then you shouldn't participate in them, even indirectly.
2. Voting compromises your privacy. It gets your name in another government computer database.
3. Voting, as well as registering, entails hanging around government offices and dealing with petty bureaucrats. Most people can find something more enjoyable or productive to do with their time.
4. Voting encourages politicians. A vote against one candidate—a major, and quite understandable, reason why many people vote—is always interpreted as a vote for his opponent. And even though you may be voting for the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils is still evil. It amounts to giving the candidate a tacit mandate to impose his will on society.
5. Your vote doesn't count. Politicians like to say it counts because it is to their advantage to get everyone into a busybody mode. But, statistically, one vote in scores of millions makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach. That's entirely apart from the fact that officials manifestly do what they want, not what you want, once they are in office.
Some of these thoughts may impress you as vaguely "unpatriotic"; that is certainly not my intention. But, unfortunately, America isn't the place it once was, either. The United States has evolved from the land of the free and the home of the brave to something more closely resembling the land of entitlements and the home of whining lawsuit filers.
The founding ideas of the country, which were highly libertarian, have been thoroughly distorted. What passes for tradition today is something against which the Founding Fathers would have led a second revolution.
This sorry, scary state of affairs is one reason some people emphasize the importance of joining the process, "working within the system" and "making your voice heard," to ensure that "the bad guys" don't get in. They seem to think that increasing the number of voters will improve the quality of their choices.
This argument compels many sincere people, who otherwise wouldn't dream of coercing their neighbors, to take part in the political process. But it only feeds power to people in politics and government, validating their existence and making them more powerful in the process.
Of course, everybody involved gets something out of it, psychologically if not monetarily. Politics gives people a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves and so has special appeal for those who cannot find satisfaction within themselves.
We cluck in amazement at the enthusiasm shown at Hitler's giant rallies but figure what goes on here, today, is different. Well, it's never quite the same. But the mindless sloganeering, the cult of the personality, and a certainty of the masses that "their" candidate will kiss their personal lives and make them better are identical.
And even if the favored candidate doesn't help them, then at least he'll keep others from getting too much. Politics is the institutionalization of envy, a vice which proclaims "You've got something I want, and if I can't get one, I'll take yours. And if I can't have yours, I'll destroy it so you can't have it either." Participating in politics is an act of ethical bankruptcy.
The key to getting "rubes" (i.e., voters) to vote and "marks" (i.e., contributors) to give is to talk in generalities while sounding specific and looking sincere and thoughtful, yet decisive. Vapid, venal party hacks can be shaped, like Silly Putty, into salable candidates. People like to kid themselves that they are voting for either "the man" or "the ideas." But few "ideas" are more than slogans artfully packaged to push the right buttons. Voting for "the man" doesn't help much either since these guys are more diligently programmed, posed, and rehearsed than any actor.
This is probably more true today than it's ever been since elections are now won on television, and television is not a forum for expressing complex ideas and philosophies. It lends itself to slogans and glib people who look and talk like game show hosts. People with really "new ideas" wouldn't dream of introducing them to politics because they know ideas can't be explained in 60 seconds.
I'm not intimating, incidentally, that people disinvolve themselves from their communities, social groups, or other voluntary organizations; just the opposite since those relationships are the lifeblood of society. But the political process, or government, is not synonymous with society or even complementary to it. Government is a dead hand on society.
Many people of mature years are amazed at how many young people have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders, and are enthusiastic about the socialism he preaches.
Many of those older people have lived long enough to have seen socialism fail, time and again, in countries around the world. Venezuela, with all its rich oil resources, is currently on the verge of economic collapse, after its heady fling with socialism.
But, most of the young have missed all that, and their dumbed-down education is far more likely to present the inspiring rhetoric of socialism than to present its dismal track record.
Socialism is in fact a wonderful vision — a world of the imagination far better than any place anywhere in the real world, at any time over the thousands of years of recorded history. Even many conservatives would probably prefer to live in such a world, if they thought it was possible.
Who would not want to live in a world where college was free, along with many other things, and where government protected us from the shocks of life and guaranteed our happiness? It would be Disneyland for adults!
Free college of course has an appeal to the young, especially those who have never studied economics. But college cannot possibly be free. It would not be free even if there was no such thing as money.
Consider the costs of just one professor teaching just one course. He or she has probably spent more than 20 years being educated, from kindergarten to the Ph.D., before ending up standing in front of a class and trying to convey some of the knowledge picked up in all those years. That means being fed, clothed and housed all those years, along with other expenses.
All the people who grew the food, manufactured the clothing and built the housing used by this one professor, for at least two decades, had to be compensated for their efforts, or those efforts would not continue. And of course someone has to produce food, clothing and shelter for all the students in this one course, as well as books, computers and other requirements or amenities.
Add up all these costs — and multiply by a hundred or so — and you have a rough idea of what going to college costs. Whether these costs are paid by using money in a capitalist economy or by some other mechanism in a feudal economy, a socialist economy, or whatever, there are heavy costs to pay.
Moreover, under any economic system, those costs are either going to be paid or there are not going to be any colleges. Money is just an artificial device for getting real things done.
Those young people who understand this, whether clearly or vaguely, are not likely to be deterred from wanting socialism. Because what they really want is for somebody else to pay for their decision to go to college.
A market economy is one in which whoever makes a decision is the one who pays for that decision. It forces people to be sure that what they want to do is really worth what it is going to cost.
Even the existing subsidies of college have led many people to go to college who have very little interest in, or benefit from, going to college, except for enjoying the social scene while postponing adult responsibilities for a few years.
Whether judging by test results, by number of hours per week devoted to studying or by on-campus interviews, it is clear that today's college students learn a lot less than college students once did. If college becomes "free," even more people can attend college without bothering to become educated and without acquiring re any economically meaningful skills.
More fundamentally, making all sorts of other things "free" means more of those things being wasted as well. Even worse, it means putting more and more of the decisions that shape our lives into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who control the purse strings.
Obamacare has given us a foretaste of what that means in reality, despite how wonderful it may sound in political rhetoric.
Worst of all, government giveaways polarize society into segments, each trying to get what it wants at somebody else's expense, creating mutual bitterness that can tear a society apart. Some seem to blithely assume that "the rich" can be taxed to pay for what they want — as if "the rich" don't see what is coming and take their wealth elsewhere.
One month ago, we wrote about the curious story of several Vancouver homes which sold in 2011 to Chinese buyers for millions and dollars, and which had since been left completely abandoned, vacant and rotting. As Postmedia News first reported that the home — in the 4100-block West 8th Avenue, bought for $4.6 million in July 2011 by Huaican Ren and his wife Xuepei Sun, was subject to a City of Vancouver “untidy premises” order.
A quick reminder for those new to the story:
The Point Grey property stopped functioning as a home and became a storage of wealth six years ago, according to property documents and a neighbour’s account.
It was well-cared for in 2010 when it was sold to an investor. Since then it has been flipped through a property transfer in a Beijing law office and left unoccupied.
Current owners of the other vacant property residing on the 4100-block 8th Avenue West home are Huaican Ren and Xue Pei Sun. Since the purchase, the current “owners” have not been seen. Huaican Ren is founder of a number of China-based companies with interests in real estate development, as well as gemstones, retailing, tourism, and restaurants. His wife is a shareholder in companies.
City hall is currently trying to estimate how many Vancouver homes are vacant. And these online communities are anecdotally gathering photo evidence and coming to conclusions that offshore investment is to blame. In other words, the “Chinese.”
The property, because “house” is too generous a word, in question – located on the 4100-block West 8th Avenue in Vancouver – is shown below:
According to the Global Real Estate Institute, Huaican Ren is chairman of Kunming North Star Enterprise Company Limited and is among “the world’s leading real estate players.” According to other sources, he is the “founder of a number of China-based companies with interests in real estate development, as well as gemstones, retailing, tourism, and restaurants.”
Whatever his profession may be (or was) one thing is certain: he is long gone.
The Chinese businessman aka “launderer of hot money into Canadian real estate” and his wife also own a $3.57-million Arbutus Ridge home that also appeared to be vacant. The Province attended the Arbutus Ridge home last week seeking to speak to Huaican Ren for this story, and attempted to reach Huaican Ren through the listing brokerage for the Point Grey home. No one answered the door at the Arbutus Ridge home.
What is fascinating is the history of flips involving just this one home, and involving Chinese “investors: Huaican Ren, then listed as “businessman,” and his wife Xue Pei Sun, “homemaker,” bought the home from Wei Min Zhang in July 2011 for $4.6 million. Wei Min Zhang in turn had bought the home in July 2010 for $3.35 million.
And it is about to be flipped again: according to Sam Cooper of PostMedia news, the vacant, rotting, “ownerless” $6.2-million home is on the market again. For $7.2 million!
While we don’t know who the seller is – after all the official owner appears to have disappeared – we have no doubt it will be sold: recall this chart of Vancouver real estate prices, which incidentally is the best indicator of China’s capital outflow problem:
We are sad to say that this “abandoned, rotting” house will sell, and almost certainly above asking. At that point we can begin counting down the days until the new owner (Chinese, of course) will likewise disappear. We explained this odd dynamic a month ago:
What is happening is quite simple:
Chinese investors smuggled out millions in embezzled cash, hot money or perfectly legal funds, bypassing the $50,000/year limit in legal capital outflows.
They make “all cash” purchases, usually sight unseen, using third parties intermediaries to preserve their anonymity, or directly in perso, in cities like Vancouver, New York, London or San Francisco.
The house becomes a new “Swiss bank account”, providing the promise of an anonymous store of value and retaining the cash equivalent value of the original capital outflow.
Then the owners disappear, never to be heard from or seen again.
We also said that “as more Chinese scramble to engage and repeat if only the first three steps, the price of local housing, which is merely a store of value to price indiscriminate foreign buyers, soars while it makes home purchases for the domestic population prohibitively expensive and virtually impossible.”
For its part, the local government has no incentive to stop this recycling of real estate: after all the higher the price, and the more the “flips”, the greater the taxes collected.
We do, however, express our condolences to the local population which not only can not afford to chase these ridiculous bids ever higher, but is left out in the cold… literally.
It remains to be seen how much longer such Chinese house flipping will continue, because the natives are getting restless, and also angry.
As we reported earlier this week, when we brought readers the story of another Vancouver shack selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars above asking, everyone involved in these kinds of transactions can not believe what is going on, starting with the real estate agent, who was incredulous. “For it to go over $4 million is remarkable. I had five offers,” he said. “These were local buyers just looking to make a shift who wanted to move into this area.”
Thomas Davidoff with UBC’s Sauder School of Business told Vancity Buzz: “These prices are getting pretty freaking nuts in my opinion.”
“As a proposition for someone who’s going to live in that house and what you’re getting for four million plus – that is a ridiculous joke and that is not something that’s going to work for people who just make a living in Vancouver,” Davidoff says.
We can’t wait to learn the reaction of the people who “make a living ” in Vancouver when they learn that this “rotting, abandoned” sheck is about to sell above its $7.2 million asking price.
Venezuela’s opposition to socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro this week has called on the Organization of American States to help them oust him, Time reports.
At the same time, President Obama in continuing to (bombastically) refer to that nation’s economic and political troubles as a threat to U.S. national security, renewing a similar declaration made last year:
The Obama administration first issued the executive order against crisis-hit Venezuela in March of last year…
In renewing the order, the president mentioned the same list of abuses cited last year: persecution of political opponents, curtailment of press freedoms, use of violence and human rights violations….
In renewing the measure, Obama reiterated that the situation in Venezuela constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and that he was declaring a “national emergency” to counter that threat….
The “national emergency” declaration is a tool U.S. presidents possess that allows them to impose sanctions on a country under certain circumstances and go beyond what Congress has approved.
Agricultural production in Venezuela had already been hobbled by the socialist government’s land confiscations and price controls, which often force farmers to sell at a loss. As domestic food production dropped, Venezuela turned increasingly to imports. But with oil prices plunging, the country now has fewer petrodollars to purchase food abroad.
The problem is compounded by Byzantine currency controls that make it more difficult for private companies to access the dollars needed to import food. And many products that are produced here are smuggled to neighboring Colombia to be sold for big profits. The resulting scarcity has helped fuel the world’s highest inflation and produced long lines at supermarkets as people clamor for milk, meat, pasta and other staples.
Maduro intends to try to turn the army, still faithful to him, into a giant militarized bunch of farmers to try to turn things around on the food front.
Bloomberg Business notes, in a story based on an interview with opposition governor Henri Falcon, that Maduro is just doubling down on bad management and tyranny:
Maduro has barely acknowledged his electoral defeat [in Congress] in December, ceding little ground to the opposition. He’s sidestepped congress’ decisions through the courts and vowed to block its central initiatives, such as giving deeds to public housing residents and granting amnesty to dozens of jailed politicians and activists….
Temir Porras, who was a top aide to Maduro till 2013, said the government finds itself with few answers. “The problem of Chavismo is ideological: How do I face a situation like this without employing socially regressive policies?” he said in an interview….
In other words, socialism is a horrible failure; we are socialists, though, and just can’t back down since any move that might actually get the economy working would be seen as “socially regressive.”
….just over three years into his political afterlife, the ghost of Hugo Chávez is as inescapable as el Comandantehimself was in life. To his remaining supporters, he goes by many names: “the Giant,” “the Eternal One,” “Redeemer of the Poor,” and even “Galactic Commander.” ….
Images of the late president, or sometimes of his signature or his disembodied eyes, are ubiquitous in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. And he’s not always alone. In colorful murals he can often be found hanging out with a veritable A-list of revolutionaries, including Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Simon Bolívar, and Jesus Christ…
This quasi-religious veneration of Chávez by his comrades is not known for its subtlety. In 2014, the government pushed an “Our Chávez” reboot of the Catholic “Our Father” prayer, which included supplications to “lead us not into the temptation of capitalism and deliver us from the oligarchy,” thereby reaching new heights of pathos.
Various local religions, they report, indeed are already quasi-deifying Chavez. And why not? When his policies have lead to:
a nation of thirty million scavengers, desperately seeking rare food and medicines, and increasingly without electricity or running water. As a result, Maduro’s government is increasingly reliant on the Chávez legacy as a justification for remaining at the helm. And, like any pre-industrial regime worth its salt, it knows that when the peasants are restless, a little medieval pageantry can perhaps set them right. Despite the country’s collapsed economy, festivities are in the works to commemorate March 5, the official day of his passing.
In other political turmoil from Venezuela:
• Maduro’s government is unsurprisingly launching an investigation into possible charges against opposition leader Henrique Capriles (who is leading a referendum campaign to oust Maduro) over alleged financial irregularities from his past post as governor of the Venezuelan state of Miranda).
• Students are in the streets protesting a Supreme Court decision that, according to the BBC, “curtailed the power of the opposition-controlled National Assembly to review government appointments of Supreme Court justices.”
• Venezuela’s central bank is trying to sue, in U.S. District Court in Delaware, a website that publishes black market bolivar-dollar exchange rates, accusing it of being responsible for cyber-terrorism and destroying the bank’s reputation (as it continues to “manage” ruinous inflation) and in fact being responsible for the inflation it tries to honestly chronicle.
In his most recent Gold Videocast for SchiffGold, Albert K Lu interviewed John Rubino, founder of DollarCollapse.com. Rubino had a pretty compelling explanation for why there wasn’t a massive, sustained economic collapse a decade ago, and why he thinks it’s still lurking on the horizon.
"The reason that we’re still here, when we really should have fallen apart based on how much debt there was out there, and various other measures of instability, is that a printing press has turned out to be a great tool for fooling people.”
Rubino pointed out that this is the first time in human history that all of the world’s governments are armed with a basically unlimited fiat currency printing press. The ability to create money out of thin air has allowed governments to take on more debt than anybody imagined feasible. Rubino noted that economists 20 years ago couldn’t have imagined $7 trillion of bonds trading at negative interest rates, and global debt at 300% of global GDP, but that’s where we are today. He went on to explain how the entire world pitched in to help the Federal Reserve keep things limping along after the 2008 meltdown. For instance, post 2009, China borrowed more money than any country has ever borrowed in history.
Rubino said there’s no way to know when the economy will hit the wall, but it will likely be pretty soon. At some point central banks and governments will run out of the ability to borrow and print, and they will have to start living within their means again.
According to Rubino, It’s going to be a painful transition. So, what does this mean for gold? Lu and Rubino share their insights.
Follow along with the full transcript:
Albert: Gold storms up as U.S. stocks struggle to extend streak. Hi, I’m Albert Lu, welcome to SchiffGold. That was a headline out of MarketWatch, and as the global financial turmoil continues, interest in gold appears to be growing. Gold is up nearly 16% this year, and as we approach the Fed’s March meeting, it’s looking more and more like that highly anticipated rate hike could be off the table. Joining me now is John Rubino, who manages DollarCollapse.com, and he’s also the co-author, The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It, as well as many other fine books. John, thanks for joining me today. How are you?
John: Good, thanks for having me on, Albert. Good to talk to you.
Albert: Good to talk to you, John. I have to ask you, first of all, when you went out and got that domain, dollarcollapse.com, were you thinking a two-year lease?
John: Yeah, I actually did expect this particular gig to last just a couple of years because this was 2004 when I set up the original dollarcollapse.com website. And it really did seem like the global financial system was on the precipice. I thought I would chronicle our descent into financial chaos for a couple of years, and then move on to something else. But the story has turned out to have legs. We have kept it together more or less in ways that I never expected us to be able to. And that the reason that we’re still here, when we really should have fallen apart based on how much debt there was out there, and various other measures of instability, is that a printing press has turned out to be a great tool for fooling people. This is the first time in human history that all of the world’s governments are armed with basically an unlimited fiat currency printing press. And so, it’s allowed them to take on more debt than seemed feasible based on history. And to manipulate interest rates down to levels that I don’t think anybody really expected. We’re in a negative interest rate world now, or we’re entering it. And if you’d gone back 20 years, and asked 100 economists if today’s world was possible, they would have said, “Nah, no way. You’ll never have $7 trillion of bonds trading at negative interest rates, and you’ll never have global debt at 300% of global GDP; that’s just not possible.” And yet here we are. My sense and my take on this is that we didn’t actually fix anything. We basically just bought ourselves time in which to build up even more debt to leverage ourselves even more catastrophically, and then make the eventual reckoning that much more serious. I think what’s coming is going to be unlike anything that has happened in living memory, certainly, something comparable to the Depression, but probably much worse. And so we’ve got very interesting decade ahead of us, Albert. And I wish that the details were easily predictable, but they’re not, except to say volatility and chaos are the rule for our immediate future here.
Albert: Yeah. I think you hit on something very important there. Basically, we have I think, it’s close to half of a sovereign debt trading in negative yields. Negative yields persisting up the yield curve, all the way to five years in some cases. I think it has helped a lot, and maybe this is what was not factored into some of our calculations is how much the world, the rest of the world would assist the US central bank in this game that we’re playing. If the US had to carry the entire economy on its back, I think we would have seen that, maybe not hyperinflation, but we would have seen something very bad. By spreading it around, by having the Bank of Japan help, by having the ECB help, I think this has kind of spread the symptoms of the catastrophe that you and James wrote about.
John: Yeah. Post 2008-2009, China for instance borrowed really more money than any country has ever borrowed in history. And that was the big driver of the “recovery” of the last few years. They just bought up all the natural resources in the world and drove the prices of iron ore, and copper, and timber, and oil through the roof. And that created a global resource boom. And that basically pulled us out of the, what would have been a depression after 2008-2009. But of course, that was done via huge amounts of new debt. And so, now the world is something like $60 trillion more in debt than it was back when debt was so accessible that it almost blew up the global financial system in 2008. And yeah, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, and the US Fed, along with the People’s Bank of China, and the Chinese government have kind of gone back and forth borrowing money, and then lending it to each other. And they’ve enabled the system to hold on for much longer than it would have if it was just one country doing things like this. But that’s not a perpetual motion machine; we can’t keep going on like this forever, because we are building up more and more debt. And the big banks are bigger than ever, they’re more leveraged than ever. This time, the emerging markets have been pulled into it with something like $9 trillion of dollar denominated debt that they can’t manage. So at some point, it blows up. And then the question is, is it this year, or is it 2017, or 2020? There’s no way to know when we hit that wall. But I think it’s highly likely if not absolutely guaranteed that we do hit the wall pretty soon. We can’t go on for decades more as we’ve gone on for the past three decades. At some point, we basically run out of the ability to borrow, and print, and we have to start living within our means again. And at that point, we have to go through a transition from what is today unsustainable, to whatever we do after this that is sustainable. And it’s going to be a really painful transition. And there’s really only two ways to get there; either all the debt or most of the debt that we’ve taken on defaults, and we have a 1930s style deflationary depression, or we inflate our way out of it. That is we create enough new currency to make today’s debts manageable, but in doing so, we risk people losing faith in the fiat currencies that we’re creating with such abandon, and end up with a currency crisis, and that’s it. Those are our two choices. The next few years will determine which of those courses that we end up, and which kind of crisis we’ve chosen, but we can only chose one or the other, that’s all that’s left.
Albert: And clearly the preference of the big thinkers at the world central banks would be to inflate the debt away, hence to target positive inflation rates, those are supposed to be a good thing. It’s 2% now; I can see that very well going higher. But the consequence of that, of course, is that the market recognizes the price inflation. Now, gold has not been responding, but it seems like perhaps this correction is coming close now because gold is starting to respond the way you would expect it to respond. And part of the consequence of having this be a worldwide effort, all of the central banks participating in different currencies is sometimes the appreciation in gold is masked, meaning that the US dollar as a unit of account, the US dollar has not been participating in this currency war, but in other currencies, I believe you would have seen gold rising.
John: Yeah. Well, the US dollar has been the strongest currency in the world for the last few years. And that’s largely because…we’re not in great shape, but we look relatively good compared to the rest of the world. So a lot of capital is flowing in to the US and that creates demand for dollars, and pushes up the value of the dollar. But yeah, as you said, if you value gold in virtually any other currency it’s up now. So gold’s bear market ended some time in 2013 or 2014 depending on the country that you’re focusing on, and it’s been going up ever since. And finally, at long last, it has started to go up in dollars. So, whether that’s the beginning of a new leg in the gold market, or just a kind of a fake out before we get one more down leg before the gold market resumes, we can’t know that until retrospect, until afterwards. But when the gold bull market resumes, this is what it’ll feel like, this is what the early stage will be like. And so now the question is, will it continue through the rest of the year? I don’t know. But eventually, because gold is the form of money that humanity has used for the last 3,000 years, and it’s held its value for that entire time, it tends to be where we hide out when things get crazy. And as things get crazier, and crazier, and more and more capital is going to flow into gold, and also into silver, so other things being equal, you’ll see upward pressure on their prices even when priced in dollars over the next few years. Whether it’s a gradual kind of, a little at a time bull market, or a parabolic one when all of a sudden in the space of a couple of months we see another $1,000 added to gold’s dollar price, we can’t know, because that depends on the other stuff that’s going to happen out there. Will we have a raging war in the Middle East that distorts global trade? Will China have a hard landing credit crisis? Is the European Union or the Eurozone going to spin apart? And is the dollar going to do something crazy like spike from here or fall from here? We can’t know any of these things. But we can say with a fair degree of certainty based on history that things are going to be really volatile, and they’ll get crazier and crazier as this debt really bites. As our bad decisions of the past come home to roost, and the globe will be one of the beneficiaries of that, because that’s the way it’s worked in every previous currency crisis. You can go back to the Roman Empire, and France in the 1700’s, and Weimar, Germany; it’s always been the same. Money flows out of these mismanaged fiat currencies, and into real money like, gold and silver. There’s no reason to think it won’t happen again, and the only question is timing.
Albert: John, with just a minute left, I want to get your thoughts on two points. We got a fairly important decision coming up in March; the Fed is going to decide whether to pause or to go ahead. I think that this time, it may be different, meaning that this time, gold will win either way at least relative to the stock market, because if the Fed eases, sure stocks will get a break. But investors seem to be sensitized to inflation now, so I would expect gold to go up more. If the Fed tightens, gold may go down, but I think the stock market will just be obliterated. And so, I want to get your thoughts on that. And then finally as we close out, where do you see gold going by the end of the year?
John: Well, let me take the second question first. I am terrible at making short-term predictions, so I have absolutely no idea. Gold can be $900 or $2,000 by the end of the year. And both crises would be justifiable based on what’s going on immediately in the financial markets. But the first part of your question, I think, is very interesting, because it is possible that no matter what happens to the stock market and bond yields, and things like that, that capital is going to flow into gold going forward, because gold responds not to any particular set of economic data, but to the volatility and the stress in the markets. So if things seem really unpredictable, and really volatile, and people get scared, they will move some of their money into gold. And lots of things can scare people out there – a parabolic rise in stock prices that coincide with a bear market in bonds that might send people into precious metals. But a collapse in the stock market, same thing. What we saw in January of this year, when stocks went down hard, and a lot of that money that was taken out of the stock market flowed into precious metals; so gold went up, that could happen too. I think in the longer-term, I have no idea about this year, but in the longer term gold is a beneficiary of the instability that necessarily flows from borrowing too much money. And so, I think people who buy gold gradually, right now, not all at once at any given price, but a little at a time over a long period of time are going to be glad they did that five years from now. And who knows what the world will look like, but I think it’ll be a more stressful world than today’s, and gold will be an antidote to the stress of the world in that time.
Albert: That’s very good advice, John. We’re out of time, so I’ve got to let you go. Thank you very much for joining me on the program today. I really appreciate it.
In his latest note tited “The Calm before The Storm”, Nomura’s traditionally downcast Richard Koo is not too excited about the market’s future prospects, in fact quite the opposite and makes the point that since QE was no game changer, not only is there no clear way out, but “the price for QE has yet to be paid.”
What does that mean for risk assets:
Recently, for example, the markets took a tumble when the Fed moved to normalize monetary policy. The US central bank responded by delaying the normalization process, which stabilized the markets, but eventually fears of falling behind the curve on inflation will force it to resume the process. That will lead to renewed market turmoil in a cycle that has the potential to repeat itself endlessly.
I expect this balancing act between the monetary authorities, who want to push ahead with policy normalization, and the markets, which violently reject each such attempt, will persist for an extended period of time, interspersed with periodic lulls like the current one.
Some further insight from Nomura’s Richard Koo:
For more than half a century after macroeconomics began to develop as an independent academic discipline in the 1940s, the emergence of breakthrough products such as aircraft, automobiles, home appliances, and computers provided companies in the developed world with a host of investment opportunities. Perhaps it should not be surprising that economic theorists at that time were unable to envision a world of no borrowers.
Economists were focused instead on the problem of how to effectively allocate a limited pool of private-sector savings. Government borrowing and spending was seen as something to be avoided since it was a symbol of inefficient resource allocation.
And until Japan caught up with the west in the 1970s, economists’ attention was focused on monetary policy since there was a surplus of domestic private-sector borrowers and no one envisioned capital fleeing the developed world for the EMs. This was the world of Phases 1 and 3, in which there were enough borrowers. Given the historical backdrop, it is perhaps only natural that economists at that time moved in the direction they did.
Macroeconomics did not keep up with changes in global economy
Subsequently, the global economy underwent major changes, with manufacturing shifting to Asia and the developed economies—almost without exception—experiencing asset bubbles that eventually burst, triggering balance sheet recessions. These economies entered Phases 2 or 4 as a result.
The discipline of economics, however, did not keep pace with these changes. Economists continued to build their theories and models based on assumptions that had only been valid in the developed economies of the 1950s and 1960s.
That is the main reason why most economists, whether in academia or the private sector, were completely unable to predict what has happened since 2008. They could not imagine a world where the private sector is actually minimizing debt instead of maximizing profits. Even now, the discipline tends to suffer from the bias that monetary policy is inherently good and fiscal policy inherently bad.
Unconventional monetary policy creates problems when it is wound down
These preconceptions underlie the current policies of inflation targeting, quantitative easing, and negative interest rates. Because central banks have pushed ahead with these policies even though there is no reason why they should work at a time of no borrowers, excess reserves created by the central bank now amount to $2.3trn in the US, or 15 times the level of statutory reserves, and to ¥222trn in Japan, or fully 26 times statutory reserves.
I have used the term “QE trap” to describe the problems that must be confronted when such policies are unwound. They can trigger severe market turmoil that cannot be avoided no matter how extensive the authorities’ dialogue with market participants.
Recently, for example, the markets took a tumble when the Fed moved to normalize monetary policy. The US central bank responded by delaying the normalization process, which stabilized the markets, but eventually fears of falling behind the curve on inflation will force it to resume the process. That will lead to renewed market turmoil in a cycle that has the potential to repeat itself endlessly.
QE was no game changer, and price has yet to be paid
Professor Krugman, who came up with the idea of lowering real interest rates by combining an inflation target with quantitative easing, has finally acknowledged that these measures were no “game changer” capable of sparking an economic recovery. But he still insists they did no real harm. (http://ift.tt/1YbnzTq)
While that may be the case during a balance sheet recession, when there is no private loan demand, these policies can cause huge problems when they are wound down (witness the market’s recent gyrations). The global economy has now entered a phase characterized by this kind of instability.
Inasmuch as there is no clear way out, I expect this balancing act between the monetary authorities, who want to push ahead with policy normalization, and the markets, which violently reject each such attempt, will persist for an extended period of time, interspersed with periodic lulls like the current one.
While Christianity remains the largest religion in all 50 states, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism are on the rise across the nation.
Chart: BofA
As the chart shows, Islam is the second largest religion in 20 states (mostly in the Midwest and South), Judaism in 14 states (mostly in the Northeast), and Buddhism in 13 states (mostly in the West).
Starting this time last year we added over 40 Million Barrels to US Oil Stockpiles. The question is can storage facilities handle another 40 Million Build in Oil Stocks over the next 7 weeks?
