Deflation, like winter, is no longer coming; it’s here. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:
As yet another day of headlines shows, see the links and details in today’s Debt Rattle at the Automatic Earth, deflation is visible everywhere, from a 98% drop in EM debt issuance to junk bonds reporting the first loss since 2008 to corporate bonds downgrades to plummeting cattle prices in Kansas to China’s falling demand for iron ore and a whole list of other commodities.
The list is endless. It is absolutely everywhere. And it’s there every single day. But how would we know? After all, we’re being told incessantly that deflation equals falling consumer prices. And since these don’t fall -yet-, other than at the pump (something people seem to think is some freak accident), every Tom and Dick and Harry concludes there is no deflation.
But if you wait for consumer prices to fall to recognize deflationary forces, you’ll be way behind the curve. Always. Consumer prices won’t drop until we’re -very- well into deflation, and they will do so only at the moment when nary a soul can afford them anymore even at their new low levels.
The money supply, however it’s measured, may be soaring (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes the point every other day), but that makes no difference when spending falls as much as it does. And it does. The whole shebang is maxed out. And the whole caboodle is maxed out too. All of it except for central banks and other money printers.
Everyone has so much debt that spending can only come from borrowing more. Until it can’t. We read comments that tell us the global markets are reaching the end of the ‘credit cycle’, but can the insanity that has ‘saved’ the economy over the past 7 years truly be seen as a ‘cycle’, or is it perhaps instead just pure insanity? There’s never been so much debt on the planet, so unless we’re starting a whole new kind of cycle, not much about it looks cyclical.
Also, though we hear this all the time, the collapse in spending does not happen because people are ‘saving’, but we wouldn’t know that from the ‘official’ numbers, because when people pay down their debts, that is counted as ‘saving’.
To continue reading: What Deflation Quacks Like
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