Investment Is Now A Gamble On Politics

``Central bank will not allow large banks to fail. This means that it will not allow the fractional reserve process to implode through bank failures and the contraction of the money supply.”- Gary North, 'Dr. Deflation' Changes His Mind After 27+ Years

What amounted to one month of rainfall gushed over the Philippine metropolis in just 6 hours! In the wake of typhoon Onyok, a vast part of Metro Manila have been turned into a virtual swamp, enough for the Philippine government to declare the affected areas in a state of calamity. According to news reports, the devastating floods from the typhoon Saturday, had been the worst in nearly 40 years.

From our perspective, this serves essentially as an example of a high impact, hard to predict rare event which classifies as a Black Swan, in terms of weather.

While one may argue that the approaching typhoon was predictable, the intensity of the rainfall, according to the local weather bureau, wasn’t.

In as much as Black Swans happens in nature, it also occurs in the marketplace. And this has been a contingent that we have been striving to prepare for, so as to achieve the entrepreneurial goal of optimizing profits via risk identification and damage control.

Of course Black Swans don’t just apply from the negative point of view but can also be seen from a positive light. Technological innovations are just vivid illustrations of these.

Nevertheless the important point is to identify where the larger distribution of risks lies as possible source of market based Black Swans.

Deflation’s Ipse-Dixitism

The recent weaknesses in many parts of the global financial marketplace have been used by the bear camp, mostly populated by the deflationistas, to extol on their “bear market rally” theme.

Figure 1: Stockcharts.com: Falling Markets

For varied indicators as the falling Baltic Dry Index (BDI), Friday’s slump in oil (WTIC) and gold (GOLD), rallying US treasuries and the struggling enfeebled market leader in China’s Shanghai index seems to have all converged.

The bear camp argues that the rally has ended on the corroding effects of stimulus, recessionary forces regaining an upperhand, prices acting “way too far, too fast”, possible escalation of trade war and the demobilized consumers from exercising their extenuated spending powers.

While we don’t belong to the camp which advocates more inflation since we think inflation is immoral and generally baneful to the society, as a market participant we understand inflation to be a political process- where policymakers make political decisions of picking winners or salvaging select interest groups or industries or companies at the cost of the taxpayers.

As Henry Hazlitt wrote, `` For inflation does not come without cause. It is the result of policy. It is the result of something that is always within the control of government—the supply of money and bank credit. An inflation is initiated or continued in the belief that it will benefit debtors at the expense of creditors, or exporters at the expense of importers, or workers at the expense of employers, or farmers at the expense of city dwellers, or the old at the expense of the young, or this generation at the expense of the next. But what is certain is that everybody cannot get rich at the expense of everybody else. There is no magic in paper money.” (bold emphasis mine)

In other words, for as long as the governments attempt to vehemently prevent the required market adjustments from previously misdirected allocation of resources, mostly by promoting credit expansion and spending, and by government directly purchasing assets with “money from thin air”, they are undertaking inflationary programs.

Yet this avowed policy direction by global authorities to inflate and the penchant by several participants to adamantly insist of a deflationary outcome seem quite self contradictory.

Why the deflation risk is a bogeyman?

For one, we have noted that central banks have the capacity to match or even exceed the issuance of money to offset every outstanding liability a political economy has been blighted with, for as long as the banking system remains afloat.

Two, macro analysis looks at problems on oversimplified basis or from one dimensional aspect of product, labor and capital. Moreover, money is often seen as a constant, where marginal supply of additional money into the economy doesn’t impact prices.

In addition, macro analyses have been predisposed to models that apply only to selective and not on general conditions.

In the case where money is construed as a constant, this fitting remark from Professor Gary North, ``Whenever an economic theory of how the world works makes an exception for monetary theory, the proposed monetary theory is incorrect, or the general theory is incorrect, or both are incorrect.” (emphasis added)

Three, inflation is fallaciously anchored as mainly a consumer dynamic.

Fourth, deflationists disregard pricing levels from a relative perspective. For instance, deflationists tend to ignore the impact from technology’s early adopter buyers. More importantly, they gloss over the fundamental law of pricing based demand and supply allocations, where low prices extrapolate to higher demand.

Fifth, deflationists discount the transmission mechanism from monetary policies given today’s US dollar currency standard platform. Remember, 23 countries (wikipedia.org) are pegged to the US dollar which means these countries are fundamentally importing Bernanke’s policies.

And since debt levels and capital structure vary from country to country, the impact of recessionary forces or debt deflation or consumer spending retrenchment from bubble afflicted economies will be different from those countries importing US policies. In addition, a further variance would be the effect from applying the same home based stimulus programs.

As CLSA’s high profile analyst Christopher Wood in a Bloomberg article, ``It’s wholly wrong to view Asia as a correlated train wreck with the U.S. consumer.”

Therefore, deflation in an absolute sense signifies as ipse dixitism or unsupported dogmatic assertion.

Unworthy Paradigms: Great Depression And Japan’s Lost Decade

Sixth, deflation proponents generally make comparisons with that of the Great Depression and the Japan experience even if both circumstances have been totally different from today.

The Great Depression was a byproduct of an amalgam of:

-Massive monetary contraction (30%),

-Regime uncertainty or investors’ reluctance to participate in a perceived hostile atmosphere resulting from a string of adverse policies imposed, which appears to have threatened property rights and prevented the necessary price adjustments, such as wages.

To quote Benjamin Anderson from Robert Higgs’ Regime Uncertainty “The impact of these multitudinous measures—industrial, agricultural, financial, monetary, and other—upon a bewildered industrial and financial community was extraordinarily heavy”, and

-high taxes and protectionism amidst a recession which metamorphosed into a depression [see earlier post Lessons From The Great Depression: Taxes, Protectionism and Inflation].

Japan's stagnation, on the other hand, which has been popularly but erroneously known as suffering from deflation (technically defined as contracting money supply), had likewise been a consequence of a mélange of regulatory mess, particularly high tax regime, policies that propped up the legacy of obsolescent zombie industrial companies [see Asia: Policy Induced Decoupling, Currency Values Aren’t Everything], reluctance to liberalize due to cultural idiosyncrasies (bad management of companies due to interlocking relationships among companies and the ``disdainful of the idea of shareholder value and of traditional profit metrics” notes James Surowiecki) and the conflict of interest issues from Japan’s bureaucracy which embraced state capitalism.

The recently victorious Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) declared it would reduce the latter’s influence, but the question is always HOW?

Moreover, Japan’s lost decade has been largely insulated from the world as most of its liabilities had been denominated in local currency. The culturally high savings quirk by the Japanese financed most of the failed boondoggles during the nearly 2 decade long of stagnation. However, demographic issues (which has been depleting savings) and current conditions (weaning off from the US consumers and reorienting trade towards China and Asia) imply that the old model is about to make a major transformation.

MAD “Mutually Assured Destruction” Policies

Seventh, deflationists often switch gears from using the monetary aspects to excess capacities or current account balances or non-monetary (usually trade) dimensions in rationalizing deflation on a global scale or data mine facts to fit their arguments.

For instance, the Global Savings Glut theory has been prevalently used as an attempt to shield the US from policy flaws which pins the blame on “currency manipulation” by Asian savers.

Hardly anyone from the mainstream incorporates the role of the US dollar, as the world’s de facto currency reserve, in the discourse of the origins of today’s imbalances.

Professor Robert Triffin rightly predicted more than 40 years ago of the accruing imbalances that a reserve currency would endure. That’s because of the incremental tensions which would amass from conflicts of national monetary policies vis-à-vis global monetary policies (provider of international liquidity). This is known as the Triffin dilemma, where the reserve currency can remain overvalued from which it would continue to accumulate deficits or undergo proportional devaluation in order to stabilize or shrink deficits [see previous discussion in The Nonsense About Current Account Imbalances And Super-Sovereign Reserve Currency].

So while the mainstream goes into a perpetual blaming spree alongside with their sanctimonious omniscient prescriptions, they don’t seem to realize that this has been the operating nature of reserve currencies, especially from a “paper money” standard.

Moreover, the recent trade dispute between US President Obama and China over increased tariffs over tires have breathed “protectionism” as an excuse for deflation.

Figure 2: BCA Research China: Tempest In A Teacup, For Now

While the risk of an escalation of a trade war appears plausible, I am predisposed to the view that these politically motivated actions has been designed to wangle some short term deal with vested interest groups, particularly the labor union-the United Steelworkers or protectionist policymakers.

However we share the optimism with BCA Research when they wrote, ``However, there are good reasons to believe that the recent tensions are likely to be contained. For one, the amount of trade in question is a tiny fraction of total trade flows between the two countries. Chinese sales of tires and steel pipes to the U.S. amount to about US$4 billion a year (compared to $US230 billion of total Chinese exports to the U.S.). Meanwhile, Beijing’s action in taking the trade dispute to the WTO shows China’s willingness to resolve disputes within the legal framework of international trade rather than via direct bilateral confrontation. Overall, the Obama administration’s seemingly toughened stance towards China-related trade issues is mainly a maneuver designed to garner domestic political support rather than an outright intention to wage a trade war. The biggest risk that could significantly heighten trade tensions and economic confrontation is if the U.S. government and lawmakers once again challenge China’s exchange rate policy and tax rebates for its exporters. Bottom line: Chinese authorities will likely continue to focus on the big picture of promoting domestic growth, so long as there is no systematic challenge to the country’s trade and foreign exchange policies to complicate its growth-boosting strategy.” (bold underscore mine)

Put differently, the Tire tariff was perhaps meant as diversionary tactic or as a concession in order to diffuse far larger protectionist tensions held by some quarters in the august halls of the US congress. In short, if we are right, the controversial enactment of the Tire tariff appears to be more symbolic than of a real risk.

In addition, it would also be plain naive to extrapolate for the US to arbitrarily lure China into a trade war when US officials are aware that the Chinese holds the largest share, about $800 billion (as of July), of US treasuries or nearly a quarter share of the foreign owned pie see figure 3.

Figure 3: Wikipedia.org: Foreign Holders of US Treasuries

As the legendary trader Julian Robertson of Tiger Management says in a recent CNBC interview, ``“We’re totally dependent now on the Chinese and Japanese” [as posted in Julian Robertson: We are going to have to Pay the Piper].

In short, President Obama significantly depends on China, Japan and Asia’s largesse to sponsor his administration’s “borrow and spend” program.

This also means that it would be utter lunacy, if not suicidal, for Pres. Obama to engage in mutually assured destructive (MAD) policies, which should hurt more of the US than China. Further this would accelerate the inflationary process in the US (…unless this serves as an opportunity for the US to seize the moment from a hostile China response to be used as a Casus Belli to declare a default! But the US owes Japan and the rest of the world too.).

Since there will be lesser access to savings globally, the court of last resort will be Chairman’s Bernanke’s printing press.

Here, Mr. Robertson estimates 15-20% annual inflation rates for the US once China and Japan desists from financing the US.

Scared Of One’s Own Shadows

Last and most importantly, deflationists belittle the role of central banking in the economy and the economic ideology underpinning the global political leadership.

In short, deflationists rule out the ramifications from the political aspects of government intervention in the economy.

It is also kindda odd to see some deflationist scared to wits about the prospects of deflation when they have been influenced by the same ideology that espouse on government intervention that paves way for the inflation-deflation boom bust cycles. It’s analogous to being afraid of one’s own shadow.

Deflation basically comes in two forms. One is a consequence of inflationary policies. The other is an outcome of productivity, which means economic output greater than the supply of money. This had been much of the case during the gold standard based, Industrial Revolution.

Nobel prize winner Friedrich A. Hayek in a speech about Choice In Currency, A Way To Stop Inflation eloquently describes the shift from stability into today’s woes,

``The chief root of our present monetary troubles is, of course, the sanction of scientific authority which Lord Keynes and his disciples have given to the age-old superstition that by increasing the aggregate of money expenditure we can lastingly ensure prosperity and full employment. It is a superstition against which economists before Keynes had struggled with some success for at least two centuries. It had governed most of earlier history. This history, indeed, has been largely a history of inflation; significantly, it was only during the rise of the prosperous modern industrial systems and during the rule of the gold standard, that over a period of about two hundred years (in Britain from about 1714 to 1914, and in the United States from about 1749 to 1939) prices were at the end about where they had been at the beginning. During this unique period of monetary stability the gold standard had imposed upon monetary authorities a discipline which prevented them from abusing their powers, as they have done at nearly all other times. Experience in other parts of the world does not seem to have been very different: I have been told that a Chinese law attempted to prohibit paper money for all times (of course, ineffectively), long before the Europeans ever invented it!”

So it is another deeply held erroneous belief that deflation is the greater evil, when 200 years of the gold standard brought about great prosperity. This is in contrast to today’s deepening intermittent boom bust cycles, which only enriches only certain segments of the society and hurts the rest of society when a bust transpires.

Deflation from an inflation bubble simply cleanses the system.

Yet the same camp of deflationists argues for more inflation.

From UK’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown (quoted by Bloomberg), ``The stimulus that we have still got to give the world economy is greater than the stimulus we have already had. What we want to do is safeguard a recovery from a recession we feared would develop into a depression.”

Moreover, the US Federal Reserve recently decided to extend and complete its $1.25 trillion buying program into the mortgage market. According to Bloomberg, ``The central bank has purchased $694 billion of mortgage- backed securities since January and plans to spend $556 billion more by April 2010 to keep interest rates down. The debt-buying is the biggest program in the Fed’s arsenal.”

Isn’t these powerful signal enough, a manifestation of both economic ideology and policy direction? It’s more than just words or propaganda, it reflects action in progress.

And as we argued in Governments Will Opt For The Inflation Route and last week’s A Deeply Embedded Inflation Psyche, for us, it has been a policy tool for the US Federal Reserve to juice up the stock market for the same reasons- economic ideology (to paint the impression of economic recovery by reanimating the irrational “animal spirits”) and policy direction.

As we previously pointed out, the US government today stands as THE mortgage market, why is this so? Aside from trying to “stabilize” the mortgage market, the US banking system holds tonnes of assorted mortgages on their balance sheets.

In short, the US government has been preventing the outright collapse of some important segments of its banking system by providing implicit guarantees on the banking system’s assets.

Moreover, the US government has also acquired ownership representation among the biggest financial institutions. This acts as another form of implicit guarantee.

Aside, the ownership accounts for interventions or interferences aimed at conveying its political objectives into the company’s business operations.

Further by undertaking quantitative easing, the US Federal Reserve reliquefies the marketplace by acting as market maker of the last resort to the illiquid markets.

If the US Federal Reserve hasn’t been the key influence of the stock market, why would issues, which accounted for most of the recent government rescues, have accrued most of the jump in the trading volume at the NYSE? (See figure 4)

Figure 4: William Hester: Without Phoenix Stocks, Volume Continues to Contract

According to William Hester of Hussman Funds (bold highlights mine), ``But almost the entire rise in volume during the last month and half has come from a handful of stocks. Examples include Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Citigroup, AIG, and Bank of America. These are just five. There are a couple of other stocks that are interchangeable with these companies and would produce similar results – but the characteristic they all share is that they are financial stocks that only recently were on the brink of collapse. And since the Government's rescue of these and other financial firms, the group has risen up from the ashes. For ease of reference, we'll call these Phoenix stocks.

``The rise in trading volumes in some of these stocks has been considerable. The shares of AIG now often trade with 15 times the volume they traded a year ago. Citigroup has traded at 12 times the amount from a year ago. This helps explain why the trades in these companies' shares are taking up a larger fraction of total share volume.”

Has US government zombie institutions been using their excess reserves or proceeds from the Fed’s QE reliquification program to trade their own shares or trade shares among themselves?

Figure 5: Andy Kessler: Monetary Base versus Dow Jones

Is it just merely a coincidence that monetary base has been growing while stock market has been rising (see figure 5)?

Some would argue, but the other money aggregates have turned south. However, what if banks haven’t been lending but instead speculating on assets?

Besides, there has been no clear agreement as to which of the monetary aggregates should serve as the true representative or as accurate indicator of money conditions in the US or globally. This makes the chart above “correlated but not causal”, as much as those arguing the opposite.

Further, the boom in the bond markets has also revealed that credit has been expanding but has been short circuiting the banking system.

By going direct through the capital markets, credit intermediation hasn’t triggered the banking system’s fractional reserve platform, hence hasn’t been reflected in traditional monetary aggregates.

All told, deflation seems more like a bogeyman widely used to justify more politicization of the marketplace.

Investment Is Now A Gamble On Politics

There are two more very significant developments the deflationists have sorely missed.

The recent weakness in the markets in gold, commodity and China hasn’t triggered a meaningful jump in the US dollar index to confirm the debt destruction and the impotence of central banking, similar to the meltdown of last year.

Moreover, it hasn’t reflected a general tightening of credit conditions out of default fears…yet.

Figure 6: Danske Weekly Credit

As you can see from the Danske Charts above, major credit indicators have all turned lower or has materially improved, all of which hasn't been emitting any trace of “deflation” tremors.

Moreover, there have been reports that the Fed has been exploring ways to tap the funds from the money market to implement its exit strategy. According to the Yahoo Finance ``The Fed would borrow from the funds via reverse repurchase agreements involving some of the huge portfolio of mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries that it acquired as it fought the financial crisis, the newspaper reported, without citing any sources. This would drain liquidity from the financial system, helping to avoid a burst of inflation as the economy recovered”. (emphasis added)

Yet analyst like Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden sees this as one of the many subterfuges employed by the FED to “reflate” the system.

This from Mr. Durden (bold highlights mine), ``And the Fed finds a way to screw everyone over yet again. Contrary to expectations that the Fed will use reverse repos to remove excess liquidity (which, by definition, such an action would) it appears that Bernanke's wily scam is to push even more money out of money market funds and into capital markets. Even though banks currently have about $800 billion in excess reserves which the Fed is paying interest on, and which would be a damn good source of liquidity extraction as the Fed considers to shrink its ever expanding balance sheet, the Chairman is rumored to be considering money market funds as a liquidity source…All in all, the Chairman is determined, come hell or high water, to part consumers with their savings: whether it be through zero deposit interest rates, through money market guarantee removals, through talk of inflation or, ultimately, through actions like these. After all, America has gotten to the point where the Fed is beating the drum on the need to keep blowing the capital market bubble bigger and bigger: anything less, and just as Madoff investors discovered, the entire pyramid collapsed overnight, and where people thought there was $50 billion, there was really $0.”

In addition, even while the Fed has declared that it would undertake the completion of its $1.25 trillion QE program by buying $556 billion more on mortgages, there seems to be a problem, it is only left with an estimated $10 billion for US treasuries which is expected to be expire by October.

This implies that should foreign central banks continue to recycle their surpluses on short term Treasury bills, the yield curve should soon steepen as the long end rises (on condition that the Fed holds course by not additionally monetizing US treasuries).

And rising treasury yields places further constraints or pressures to the financing of US government programs.

This from Professor Michael S. Rozeff (all bold underscore mine), ``The government will have problems funding its programs. It will be under pressure to raise taxes and cut back on its programs. Since it will be reluctant to do either, the problems will fall upon the dollar and on the government debt. This will place the government in an untenable position because the higher interest costs of the debt will add to the deficit. A negative feedback cycle will occur in which deficits cause higher interest costs which cause more deficits which cause higher interest costs, and so on. No amount of taxation can solve the government’s fiscal problem that lies ahead. Greater taxes will only make them worse by slowing the economy. That option is foreclosed.”

Ultimately, this brings us to the potential outcome of deflation-inflation debate.

Again Professor Rozeff, ``The two problems – the dollar and debt – are joined. If the FED tries to save the dollar, it affects government debt adversely. The FED can relieve pressure on the dollar by deflating its bloated balance sheet. To do that it needs to sell off the mortgage-backed securities that it has accumulated and not buy the rest that it is now in the process of buying. If it ever does sell off these securities, it will pressure the government debt market. This is very unlikely. Instead I expect it to pay interest on reserves, which will not solve its problems and will only add to the government deficit and start an exponential process of increase in interest paid. If the government tries to save the debt market by having the FED support it as it is now doing, that affects the dollar adversely. The central bank and the government are between a rock and a hard place. One or the other or both of the dollar and the debt are slated to have problems. Enactment of Obama’s health care and energy measures, even in diluted form, will confirm the existing course. Their rejection will be more favorable for the dollar and for government debt. As the political winds shift, so will the fortunes of the dollar and the government debt markets. Investment is now a gamble on politics.”

In short, the US government, not the US consumers, has become the ultimate driver of marketplace. And investing returns would mean reading accurately from political tea leaves.

And once emergent weaknesses in the marketplace becomes increasingly pronounced, governments will be expected, given their Keynesian interventionist ideology, to massively re-inflate the system to the point where the political option would translate to the extreme choice of ‘Mises moment’ endgame: relative deflation possibly via a default or a currency crisis.