Is the Bounce Still Bouncing?

"What's that smell?"

We were on an airplane when Edward, 15, noticed an odor that seemed out of place.

"Dad...you should have at least cleaned your boots!"

The manure began accumulating when we rode up to the high pasture on Tuesday. More about that below...

In the meantime, the Dow rallied a bit yesterday - up 127 points...barely half of what it lost on Monday.

Is the bounce still bouncing? We don't know. But we don't trust it. They say the stock market 'looks ahead.' So, it is possible for it to see things we can't see. On the other hand, what was it looking at two years ago? Didn't it see the economy going over a cliff? Apparently not.

But investors tend to believe what they want to believe. And what they want to believe is that the stock market has had its vision corrected and now sees a recovery.

Our guess is that they are wrong on both scores. The stock market is just as blind now as it was in early 2007...and there is no recovery coming any time soon. As to the first point, we have no further evidence to present...but as to the second; at least we have a theory.

By our reckoning, this is not a recession...this is a depression. In a recession, the bull market formula still works. It just needs a little time to rest...catch its breath...work off inventories...and rebuild cash accounts. But in a depression, the formula stops working.

The basic formula that drove the U.S. economy for the last 60 years has been the expansion of consumer spending. At first, that spending was healthy spending. People had built up savings during the war. In the Eisenhower years, they were ready to get back to work in the consumer economy, get married, have children, and spend money. America was the world's leading lender...leading exporter...leading manufacturer...and leading everything. Gradually though, having so many advantages caught up to the United States of America. By the '70s, the Nixon administration thought it could do away with the gold backing for the currency. By the '80s, the United States slipped from being a net creditor to being a net debtor to the rest of the world. By the '90s, American consumers were spending more than they made...and by the '00s they had given up saving all together - depending on the savings of poor people in China and elsewhere in order to continue living beyond their means.

Each time this system was faced with a recessionary correction, at least in the last 25 years, the feds tried to stimulate consumer spending with easier credit. And each time, consumers took the bait and got hooked on more debt. That's why the financial industry expanded so much...it sold more and more debt in more and more grotesque and amazing ways.

This time is different. This time the feds have responded with zero interest rates...and $13 trillion worth of bailouts and boondoggles. But the old magic doesn't seem to work anymore. This time, the formula no longer works. Consumers already have too much stuff - and no way to pay for it all. They have no choice; they have to cut back. This is not a pause in the long cycle of increasing consumption, debt and speculation. It is a reversal of the cycle - with less consumption and less debt (more savings). This is a depression.

If left alone, this cycle will see falling asset prices, falling bond prices and rising savings for many years. Stocks should sell down to levels where they are attractive again - at average P/Es below 8...7...or even 6. And with dividend yields above 5%.

Of course, when that happens people will have lost interest in top stocks. The financial magazines will have pronounced the stock market "dead" and Jim Cramer will have been booted off the air.

By that time, the economy will have been restructured too. There will be less retail space. Many malls will have gone broke. Living standards in America and Britain will have gone down. And many of the people in the financial industry will be doing what they ought to have been doing all along - taking lunch counter orders.

Still a long way to go...in the meantime, check out our latest report that explains exactly how to set up your own 'Personal Bailout'...because you know you can't count on the federal government to lend you and your assets a hand. See it here.

Now, we turn to Addison for news on the global financial losses:

"Banks, brokerages, fund managers...you name the financial firm...they've now seen nearly $4.1 trillion in digits evaporate since the beginning of the credit crunch, says the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this morning."

"More than half the losses - $2.7 trillion - were sustained by U.S. firms," explains Addison in today's issue of The 5 Min. Forecast.

"So far, global financial losses in this bust are almost equal to the entire market cap crunch of the tech bust early in the century:

"In an effort to paper over the losses abroad, the IMF has already funded over $55 billion in emergency loans to European nations including Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Iceland, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia.

"Last week, Mexico became the first Latin American country to put up the white flag, asking for a $47 billion line of credit. Just yesterday, Columbia followed suit, seeking $10.4 billion. We'll go out on a limb here... they won't be the last."

Each weekday, Addison brings readers the The 5 Min Forecast, an executive series e-letter that provides a quick and dirty analysis of daily economic and financial developments - in five minutes or less.

The 5 is free to subscribers of our paid publications, such as the Hulbert #1 Performing Investment Letter, Outstanding Investments.

And back to Bill, with more thoughts:

Compuel is a huge valley...probably about 10,000 acres...above 3,000 meters in altitude. There are no trees. And a cold wind blows through the sage even in summer. This time of year, at least it is green.

The summer rains came late this year. A river runs through the center of the valley, wide and shallow...you can splash through it on horseback. For a few months of the year, it turns the center of the valley into wetlands. Later, in the winter months, it will be dry as Death Valley and as cold as a tax collector's heart. But last week it was wet and marshy...with ducks flapping up suddenly wherever you go.

You can get to Compuel in a 4x4...but it is an almost impossible drive...not to mention dangerous. There are sections of the road that are hardly as wide as the wheelbase...with a 1,000 ft drop off the edge.

"It was probably an old Inca or pre-Inca trail," explained Veronica. She was one of three archeologists who showed up at the house on Saturday. They asked if they could camp out and do some digging in the Indian ruins on the ranch.

"We won't take anything. Besides, the law requires that anything we find belongs to the state," she anticipated our questions.

"This area is very rich in archeological evidence," Veronica continued. She was from Buenos Aires, a cheerful, talkative woman with a librarian's air about her. With her was Paola...another archeologist from Buenos Aires ...and Hector...an archeologist from Salta. They were trying to figure out dates.

"We don't really know much about the Indians who were here before the Inca," Veronica went on. "All we know is that they were brave and independent. This tribe resisted the Inca...and the Spanish. The Incas tried to subjugate them...forcing them to pay tribute. But they fought them off. I guess they figured that if they could beat the Incas they could also beat the Spanish. In fact, they were the last Indians in all of Argentina to surrender. And the story is that women took their babies up into what they call the 'fortress' - a natural stone formation - and threw them onto the rocks down below rather than see them enslaved by the conquistadors.

"But we don't know much more than that. So we dig down to try to find bits of pottery...and seeds...and soil samples that will tell us what they ate and which groups of other tribes they were related to. Then, we put the pieces together and gradually develop a better picture of who they were and how they lived.

"That's why we need to go to the ruins at Compuel."

"How are you going to get there?" asked Jorge, the farm manager.

"We're going to hike. What do you think...can we get there in 4 hours or so?"

"Ha...ha... it will take you at least 7 hours... depending on how strong you are. And of course, you will need a pack mule to carry your equipment."

On horseback, you can get to Compuel from the ranch house in 4 hours. The trail is rugged...with the horses stepping from stone to stone in some areas. By the time we got there we were already tired and saddle- sore. When we arrived, the roundup had already begun. The vaqueros - our local cowboys - had already rounded up the cattle from the whole valley and driven them into a big stone corral. They were roping the calves and separating the bulls from the cows. Occasionally, a bull would charge...but the cowboys were fast, they dashed to the side and jumped up onto the stonewall. Their dogs stood on top of the stonewall watching attentively. This was a once-a-year spectacle they didn't want to miss.

 

People often accuse me of making "irresponsible" forecasts of massive price inflation. Even though they know that history is replete with examples of central banks ruining their currencies, these critics are sure that "it can't happen here." So in the present article I'd like to make the brief case for why we should all be very alarmed about the prospects for the U.S. dollar.

First, let's look at what those penny pinchers in the federal government are up to. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released its analysis of the Obama Administration's ten-year budget proposal. The projected deficit for (fiscal year) 2009 is a whopping $1.8 trillion. Now the president has said, in effect, that you need to spend money to save money, but the CBO projects deficits once again exceeding $1 trillion by 2018. In fact, over the whole CBO forecast from 2009-2019, the lowest the deficit ever goes is $658 billion.

This should be rather surprising to anyone who actually took Obama at his word when he promised to restore fiscal discipline to Washington. In fact, the CBO projects that the outstanding federal debt held by the public will increase from 40.8% of GDP in 2008 to 82.4% in 2019. In other words, the CBO predicts a doubling of the national debt in a mere decade.

One last thing to give you chills (and not the good kind): The CBO is not exactly a doom-and-gloom forecasting service. They're run by the government, for crying out loud. This is the same CBO that projected at the start of the Bush Administration ten years of an accumulated $5.6 trillion in budget surpluses.

I would caution readers not to dismiss all CBO numbers as obviously meaningless. On the contrary, I think we will see the same pattern play out under Obama as under Bush: Because the CBO in both cases is grossly overstating future tax receipts, its projections for the Obama proposal are going to turn out just as rosy as they did back in 2001. Besides anemic tax receipts, if mortgage defaults continue to increase, the CBO projections on losses from the Treasury's numerous "rescue" measures will also be far too optimistic.

In short, I think we should view the doubling of the national debt (as a share of the overall economy) over the next decade as a naïve best- case scenario.

If fiscal policy is a disaster, monetary policy is even worse. Unfortunately, the issues here get very complicated, and so it's difficult for the layman to know whom to trust. Not only do left- wingers like Paul Krugman say that we need more inflation, but even (alleged) right-wingers like Greg Mankiw are saying the exact same thing. With all due respect, those guys are crazy.

Normally, I do my best unshaved-guy-wearing-a-sandwich-board routine by showing this Fed chart of the monetary base. But every time I do that, some wise guy argues that I don't understand how our banking system works, and that because of "deleveraging" we are actually experiencing a shrinking money supply.

No, we aren't. It's true that there are forces tending to shrink the money supply, but Bernanke has more than overwhelmed them. All of the standard measures of the money stock went way up during 2008, even though prices (as measured by the CPI) fell in some months. For example, the monetary aggregate M1 consists of very liquid items such as actual currency held by the public, and checking account deposits. It does not include the monetary base (which we know has exploded through the roof). Even so, look at the annual percentage graph of M1 recently; it's grown at almost a record rate:


Now the reason prices haven't exploded is that the demand to hold U.S. dollars has also increased dramatically. (That's also what happened in the 1980s: the Reagan tax cuts and Volcker's squelching of severe price inflation made it much more attractive to hold dollars, and so the Fed got away with printing a bunch even though the CPI didn't increase wildly.)

Once people get over the shock of the financial crisis, the new money Bernanke has pumped into the system will begin pushing up prices. Others have used this analogy before me, but it's still apt: The U.S. economy right now is like Wile E. Coyote right after he runs off a cliff but hasn't yet looked down. Once the spell of a "deflationary spiral" is broken by a full quarter of significant price hikes, there will be an avalanche as people come to their senses.

Some analysts concede that the traditional Fed policies have indeed left the dollar vulnerable to serious devaluation, but they think the central bank wizards can save the day by acquiring new "tools." For example, San Francisco Fed president Janet Yellen has been arguing that the Fed should be able to issue its own debt, to give the Fed more flexibility. The idea is that when the time comes for the Fed to sop up the excess reserves it has pumped into the banking system, it would be devastating to the incipient economic recovery if the Fed has to dump a bunch of mortgage-backed securities, or Treasury bonds, back onto the market. This would ruin the banks with MBS on their balance sheets, and/or it would push up interest rates for the government. Thus, the Fed would have painted itself into a corner, and it would have to choose between massive CPI hikes or a renewed recession. To avoid that nasty tradeoff, Yellen argues that if the Fed could sell its own debt, then it could drain reserves out of the banking system without unloading its own balance sheet.

For a different idea, economists Woodward and Hall think the Fed just needs the ability to charge banks for holding reserves. The Fed already (recently) obtained the right to pay interest on reserves, and so Woodward and Hall think the Fed should also have the ability to do the opposite, i.e. to be able to pay a negative interest rate on reserves that banks hold on deposit with the Fed.

How does this avert the threat of hyperinflation? Simple, according to Woodward and Hall. If banks ever start loaning out too much of their (now massive) excess reserves, and thereby start causing large price inflation, then the Fed can simply raise the interest rate it pays on reserves. Banks would then find it more profitable to lend to the Fed, as it were, rather than lending reserves out to homebuyers and other borrowers in the private sector. Voila! Problem solved.

Obviously these tricks can't avoid the consequences of Bernanke's mad money printing spree. At best, they would merely push back the day of reckoning, while ensuring that it grows exponentially (quite literally).

A quick numerical example: Let's say the Fed wants to drain $100 billion in reserves out of the banking system, in order to cool off rising prices. But it doesn't want to sell off some of its assets on its balance sheet (like "toxic" mortgage-backed securities), so instead the Fed sells $100 billion worth of the brand new "Fed bonds," as Yellen hopes.

In the beginning, this will indeed solve the problem. When people in the private sector buy the Fed-issued bonds, they write checks on their banks and ultimately those banks see their reserves go down at the Fed. There is less money held by the public, and so prices don't rise as quickly.

But what happens when the Fed bonds mature? For example, if the Fed sold a 12-month bond paying 1% interest, then after the year has passed our private sector buyers will hand over the securities and now their checking accounts will be credited with $101 billion. At that point, the economy would be in the same position as before, only worse: there would be an extra billion in newly created reserves (because of interest on the Fed debt).

The financial gurus running our financial system and advising our political leaders aren't even thinking two steps ahead when making their cockamamie recommendations. For those readers who share my skepticism, the solution seems clear: You need to transfer your wealth out of assets denominated in fixed streams of U.S. dollars, and switch to something that responds to large price inflation. In short, sell your corporate and government bonds, and start stocking up on precious metals.