Category Archives: Money

David Rosenberg: “A Whole Bunch Of People Are Really, Really Wrong” About Inflation, by Tyler Durden

Posted on May 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

The consensus is for further increases in inflation, and SLL is part of that consensus. However, SLL is always interested in views that challenge the consensus. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

With so much focus on the macro environment as stocks struggle to return to their all-time highs, MacroVoices invited seasoned Wall Street economist David Rosenberg, the chief economist and chief strategist of Rosenberg Research, on the show this week to discus the market’s topic du jour: inflation, and whether or not it will be “transitory,” like the Federal Reserve says.

What followed was a thorough critique from Rosenberg, who just a couple of months ago was warning that rising Treasury yields would soon push the market to a “breaking point,” of what he sees as flaws in the market’s pricing of lasting inflationary pressures.

Instead, Rosenberg essentially agrees with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell that the recent acceleration in inflation seen in April will be temporary.

What’s going on isn’t a fundamental “regime shift”, but rather a “pendulum” swinging back to the opposite extreme following the sudden deflationary demand shock caused by the pandemic. We had three consecutive months of negative CPI prints last year, Rosenberg pointed out. To offset all that, April saw the biggest MoM jump in consumer prices since 1981.

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Basel III and the New Role For Gold, by Tom Luongo

Posted on May 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

Why do the new Basel rules seek to eliminate the massive unallocated gold and silver markets? From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

Last week both Martin Armstrong and Alistair MacLeod wrote about the changes to the Basel III rules and how they will greatly affect the physical and paper gold markets if implemented in their current form.

MacLeod’s article from last week is an excellent primer on the definitions and inner workings of the rules, the gold market and the changes to the rules.  The short redux is that the advantage to using unallocated accounts, savings accounts which are linked to gold by holding futures contracts, will end.

We’ve discussed parts of this in the past.  The process of creating fake supply to control the price of gold is on the line with these rule changes.

These rules are coming at the end of June for the European Banking System which will adopt the new Basel III rules. In short, the incentive to have exposure to gold as a pile of credit will go away if the banks can’t use any of that as part of their reserve calculations for their ASF – Available Stable Fundings.

Moreover, any physical gold they hold will be held at a 15% discount. Bottom line: these rules will make it impossible for the LBMA member banks to hold any exposure to unallocated pools of gold derviatives –futures and swaps — on their balance sheets.

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The end of paper gold and silver markets , by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on May 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

The banking regulators may regulate gold and silver derivative, or paper, markets out of existence. That could be quite bullish for physical gold and silver. From Alastair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

This article looks at the likely consequences of the Bank for International Settlements’ introduction of the net stable funding requirement (NSFR) for bank balance sheets, insofar as they apply to their positions in gold, silver and other commodity markets.

If they are introduced as proposed, banks will face significant financing penalties for taking trading positions in derivatives. The problem is particularly important for the London gold market, as described in last week’s article on this subject. Therefore they are likely to withdraw from providing derivative liquidity and associated services.

This article delves into the consequences of the NSFR leading to the end of the London forward markets in gold and silver. Replacement demand for physical metal appears bound to rise, and an assessment is therefore made of available gold not tied up in jewellery and industrial uses. An analysis of gold leasing by central banks, leading to double ownership of physical gold, is included.

The conclusion is that unless the BIS has an ulterior motive to trigger a chaotic financial reset of some sort, it is a case of regulators not understanding the market consequences of their actions.

Introduction

Last week I explained why as they stand the new Basel 3 regulations will make it uneconomic for banks to continue to run bullion trading desks.[i] The introduction of the net stable funding requirement (NSFR) means that mainland European banks, of which ten are LBMA members including the Swiss, will have to comply with the new regulations from the end of June, and all UK banks, in effect the entire banking membership of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) will have to comply by the year-end. There are 43 LBMA members listed as banks, and on Comex there are currently 17 with long and 27 with short positions in the Swaps category, which represent bullion bank trading desks in the dominant futures contracts. So being similar, the Comex numbers must broadly replicate those operating in London. It is therefore reasonable to assume that if the LBMA’s banking membership ceases dealings in unallocated bullion, then very few will continue to deal on Comex — the LBMA crowd having ceased taking trading positions.

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Will 2020 Prove to Be the Beginning of the End of Modernity? by Daniel J. Boudreaux

Posted on May 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

For modernity to happen, a lot of historically unprecedented things had to happen. Now many of those things are being reversed. From Daniel J. Boudreaux at aier.org:

Daniel Hannan – Lord Hannan of Kingsclere – is today among Britain’s wisest and most articulate champions of classical liberalism. He’s also today very pessimistic about the future of liberalism. This pessimism is on full display in this recent video. Hannan predicts that the post-Covid-19 world “will be poorer, colder, grayer, more pitched, more authoritarian.”

I ardently wish that I found his stated reasons for pessimism to be unpersuasive, but this wish is not granted. Hannan’s pessimism, to me, seems warranted.

I urge you to watch the entire video. At under seven minutes, it’s short. But I believe that my summary here of Hannan’s point is accurate:

We humans are evolved to put our trust in hierarchy, for hierarchical methods of decision-making were quite effective at protecting the small tribe, as it roamed the countryside, from predators and privation. And our deep past was in fact fraught with dangers that, when not quickly avoided, killed us. In that long-ago era, anyone refusing to follow the leader’s commands was indeed a threat to the survival of the tribe. As a result, fellow tribe members turned on renegades. ‘Renegadeness’ was thus largely drained from the gene pool and replaced with the instinct to conform, especially whenever there was a perception of danger, which there was quite often.

Confidence in hierarchy, hair-trigger alarm, and fear of strangers (who back then usually were sources of real danger) helped our ancestors to survive. And survive they did for 300,000 years, nearly all of which time was spent hunting and gathering in small tribes. But these genetically encoded instincts that are so useful to members of the always-imperiled tribe do not support a liberal, open society of the sort that arose in the West over the past few centuries.

We humans have been around for at least 300,000 years. Nearly all – 97 percent – of this time was spent as hunters-gatherers in a perilous world. Yet only in the past two or three centuries have we stumbled upon a set of beliefs and institutions that suppressed many of our primitive instincts in a way that encouraged the emergence of modernity. By historical standards, the world that we know today is freakishly abnormal.

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Warning Light Flashing Red, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on April 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

People ignore warning lights in financial markets until they get run over. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

When the warning light is flashing red, it’s prudent to have a capital preservation strategy in place.

Not everyone has an IRA or 401K invested in the stock market, for those who do, the red warning light is flashing red: markets have reached historic extremes on numerous fronts.

Just like in 2000, proponents claim “this time it’s different.” Back then, the claim was that since the Internet would be growing for decades, dot-com stocks could go to the moon and beyond.

The claim the the Internet would continue growing was sound, but the prediction that this growth would drive stock valuations into a never-ending bubble was unsound.

Once again we hear reasonable-sounding claims being used to support predictions of a never-ending rise in stock valuations.

What hasn’t changed is humans are still running Wetware 1.0 which has default settings for extremes of emotion, particularly manic euphoria, running with the herd (a.k.a. FOMO, fear of missing out) and panic / fear.

Despite all the assurances to the contrary, all bubbles pop because they are based in human emotions. We attempt to rationalize them by invoking the real world, but the reality is speculative manias are manifestations of human emotions and the feedback of running in a herd of social animals.

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Why the future money is gold and silver, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on April 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Why we’ll be using gold, silver, and convertible currencies and not cryptocurrencies as the official means of exchange after fiat collapses. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

A reminder why they always will be sound money and why bitcoin cannot fill that role

With bitcoin’s price still rising and expected to rise even more, there has been a growing belief in cryptocurrency circles that it will replace unbacked government currencies when they eventually fail.

The assumptions behind this conclusion are naïve, exposing hardly any knowledge in what qualities are needed for sound money. This article agrees that current events are accelerating the path towards fiat destruction, and that historical precedents point to their eventual replacement with a sounder form of money. But what that money will be is decided when governments lose control over their fiat; and the public, its users, through free markets will set the monetary agenda.

Only then will the general public determine the qualities required, and in the past, it has always opted for metallic money. And because government treasury departments and their central banks coincidently possess only gold in their non-fiat reserves, its monetisation is the only option for governments to survive the collapse of their fiat currencies. That is what will eventually happen, with silver perhaps fulfilling a subsidiary monetary role to gold.

Introduction

While increasing numbers of the fiat investment community understand that the quantities of government money are being expanded without any sign of limitation, they have also concluded that bitcoin, not gold, is the pure investment play because over the next few years bitcoin will approach its final quantity.

It is almost certain that like the majority of gold and silver bulls hodlers expect to sell bitcoin for profit measured in their governments’ currencies, creating for themselves relative wealth in dollars, euros, yen — whatever their governments impose on their citizens as money. But it is an investor’s, or speculator’s approach, which is accompanied by feverish examination of charts, confirmation bias from “experts” and only a half-understood concept of what is driving the price. So sudden and wonderful has been the unbanked wealth creation in leading cryptocurrencies, that investors commonly proclaim that gold and silver are yesterday’s story and that we oldies should move with the times.

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From the Notebook: The Digital Yuan, Proof of Guns, and the Expiration of Money, by Tom Luongo

Posted on April 15, 2021 | 1 comment

Central bank digital currencies aren’t going to fix the mess central banks have made of their non-digital currencies. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

One of the things that converted me to the Austrian way of thinking about the economy was the concept of money with an expiration date.  Early articles at Lewrockwell.com and Mises.org covering hyperinflations of various forms and kinds horrified me when banknotes and government scrip reached the point of forcing people to spend money versus having it lose its ‘legal tender’ status.

Money that ‘expired’ like points on your credit card was simply a horrifying idea.

Martin Armstrong makes the point all the time that the main reason why the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency is because it is the only modern government-issued currency that hasn’t been defaulted on in over two hundred years.

In fact, it was the consolidation of the Colonial government debt held over from the Revolutionary War which ultimately doomed the government under the Articles of Confederation giving rise to the current U.S. constitution and its monopoly power to issue dollars.

That power gave the Constitution its power as an international player, telling the world the new government honored its debts. The inability of the ECB today to control the debt issuance of the euro-zone states is that currency zone’s fatal flaw and why any move towards consolidation of that power is the goal of all EU fiscal and EU monetary policy.

Absent that the EU is doomed to the same fate as the Articles of Confederation.

Fast forward to today with the world awaiting the birth of the first Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the Digital Yuan from China, and we see the concept of expiration being embedded directly into what looks like the next monetary system planned for us.

We’ve come full circle, folks.

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From American Dream to American Nightmare, by Jim Quinn

Posted on April 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

How did America go from the land of opportunity to the land of crybabies, grifters, rampant corruption, fake money, and UBI? From Jim Quinn at theburningplatform.com:

For most of the ninety years since James Truslow Adams coined the term American Dream, most Americans still believed the fairy tale of the American Dream, that no matter how humble your beginnings, everyone had a fair chance to become a success in America, based upon your individual talent, intelligence, work ethic and a society that rewarded those who exceled. Sadly, that dream is no longer achievable for most Americans. Our society has devolved into an oligarchy since The Epic of America was published in 1931, where a powerful few rule over a willfully ignorant many through propaganda, mistruth, fear, and an iron fist.

Amazon.com: The Epic of America eBook: Adams, James Truslow: Kindle Store

“But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position…

The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.” – James Truslow Adams – Epic of America – 1931

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Expect Inflation to Accelerate? Here’s 8 Reasons to Expect Decelerating Inflation, by Mike “Mish” Shedlock

Posted on April 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s been a chorus of commentators and economists predicting big increases in inflation, and SLL has been part of that crowd. However, we don’t mind posting well-reasoned contrary viewpoints. Here’s an analysis of why the crowd might be wrong, from Mike “Mish” Shedlock at thestreet.com:

Lacy Hunt at Hoisington Management has some interesting thoughts regarding the inflation debate.
Case for Decelerating Inflation

In its Quarterly Review and Outlook for the First Quarter of 2021 Lacy Hunt makes a case for decelerating inflation.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, disinflation is more likely than accelerating inflation. Since prices deflated in the second quarter of 2020, the annual inflation rate will move transitorily higher. Once these base effects are exhausted, cyclical, structural, and monetary considerations suggest that the inflation rate will moderate lower by year end and will undershoot the Fed Reserve’s target of 2%. The inflationary psychosis that has gripped the bond market will fade away in the face of such persistent disinflation.

After declining 5.2% in 2020, or the most since World War II, world-wide real per capita GDP is estimated to rise 4.7% in 2021. The United States will perform even better, rising 6.2%, after a contraction of 4.9% in 2020. The U.S. growth rate this year could be the fastest since 1984 and possibly even since 1950 (Chart 1).

Five considerations suggest that such growth is not likely to lead to sustaining inflation.

Lacy said 5. I added a 6th bullet point from his discussion, then added 2 more points of my own.

Six Reasons to Expect Disinflation

  1. Inflation is a lagging indicator, as classified by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The low in inflation occurred after all of the past four recessions, with an average lag of almost fifteen quarters from the end of the recessions. (Table 1 Inflation Troughs Below)
  2. Productivity rebounds in recoveries and vigorously so in the aftermath of deep recessions. This pattern in productivity is quite apparent after the deep recessions ending in 1949, 1958 and 1982 (Table 2 Below). Productivity rebounded by an average of 4.8% in the year immediately after the end of these three recessions and unit labor costs were unchanged. The rise in productivity held down unit labor costs.

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“You’d Have To Shut Down The Internet” To Ban Bitcoin, Says SEC’s Hester Peirce, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Will governments ban Bitcoin and other private cryptocurrencies? Tread carefully, it’s not clear what the outcome will be. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Any government efforts to ban Bitcoin would be “foolish,” said Hester Peirce (aka “Crypto Mom”), a very Bitcoin-friendly commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), during a MarketWatch virtual conference earlier this week, according to Cryptoslate reporter Liam Frost.

“I think we were past that point very early on because you’d have to shut down the Internet,” Peirce said, adding, “I don’t see how you could ban it. You could certainly make the effort. It would be very hard to stop people from [trading Bitcoin]. So I think it would be a foolish thing for the government to try to do that.”

Not only that, but the government would immediately wipe out $2 trillion in net wealth – the market cap of the crypto sector – an event that would have profoundly deleveraging consequences, and since much of that wealth is now backed by debt, for example all those debt-funded purchases of bitcoin by Microstrategy, such a move by the government would immediately destabilize the all important debt market.

The statement came on the heels of Ray Dalio, a billionaire investor and founder of Bridgewater Associates, arguing that there’s “a good probability” that governments around the world would ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Dalio told Yahoo Finance:

“Every country treasures its monopoly on controlling the supply and demand. They don’t want other monies to be operating or competing, because things can get out of control. They outlawed gold, that’s why also outlawing Bitcoin is a good probability.”

However, according to Peirce, the main issue for authorities—at least when it comes to cryptocurrencies—is to find an approach to regulation that would be productive and non-restrictive at the same time. She noted:

“We’ve seen other countries take, I would say, a more productive approach. We really need to turn that around. And I’m optimistic, with a new chairman coming in with a deep knowledge of these markets, that is something we could do together—build a good regulatory framework.”

At the same time, Peirce also pointed out that she doesn’t know when—or if—a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) will finally be approved in the U.S. Recently, we’ve seen a new wave of major investment companies, such as Fidelity Investments, SkyBridge Capital, and VanEck, filing their applications for Bitcoin ETFs with the SEC.

The regulator, however, never approved a single filing of this kind so far, which as discussed earlier, may be a good thing for not only bitcoin but the entire nascent DeFi ecosystem where hundreds of billions in very real money is now intertwined.

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