Iranians Go for Gold

It’s not just the Greeks, but latest reports say that Iranians too have been stampeding into gold.

From the Reuters, (bold emphasis mine)

Amid global economic uncertainty, the price of gold on world markets rose steadily in the first half of 2011 and Iranian coins appreciated in line with that. Rather than cashing in their coins for a profit, Iranians continued to buy them in ever larger numbers.

"Usually, as the price of an item increases, demand will decrease. But in the case of gold, it seems that higher prices are creating more demand," said a gold retailer in Tehran who asked not to be identified.

The Iranian gold rush was mainly driven by fears about the domestic economy, particularly the risk of soaring inflation and a wobbly currency, he said.

In addition to concerns about a global double-dip recession, the economy has been hit by sanctions as the United States leads global pressure on Tehran over a nuclear program many states say is aimed at building atomic weapons, a charge Iran denies.

Here’s a glimpse of the Iranian rial-US dollar performance

Below is a chart of Iran’s inflation rate

US-Rial, and Iran inflation rate from Wikipedia.org

The Iranina rial-euro over the past 5 years (yahoo finance)

More from the same Reuters article, (bold emphasis added)

Saving rials is also less attractive than a few months ago after the government reduced the level of interest banks could pay on savings. Returns were slashed in April from a range of 26-28 percent to 14-17 percent, below what many Iranians believe to be the actual inflation rate.

Worries about the declining buying power of the rial and doubts over the currency's stability are the main drivers behind the flight to gold.

While the International Monetary Fund has praised Iran for reducing inflation to 12.4 percent for 2010-11 from 25.4 percent two years earlier, the rate has been creeping back up over the last year to 14.2 percent in May. Prices have risen much faster for key items such as fuel, water and food as heavy government subsidies are phased out.

At the end of last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad started winding down some $100 billion of subsidies and giving direct cash payments to families to reduce the impact of price rises. The switch, praised by the IMF, was done despite the predictions that surges in the prices of fuel, food and water could stoke wider inflation.

As well as hoarding gold, many Iranians sought to change their rials into hard currency, increasing demand for dollars so much that the Central Bank devalued the rial by almost 11 percent last month.

That sudden decision did nothing to assuage Iranians' fears about the safety of their savings.

Many economists believe the rial, which is loosely pegged to major world currencies under a "managed floating exchange rate," has not been allowed to devalue in line with inflation and is overvalued by between 30 and 50 percent.

As international trade in rials is very limited, the change in its value has no real impact on global markets.

It sank to 12,500 to the dollar last month, compared to 10,500 earlier in the year.

Same problems haunt paper money system, whether the US dollar, Belarus ruble, Greek drachma or Vietnam Dong or Iranian rial.

Fundamentally, the pathology stems from an overspending welfare state, which has been financed by government’s inflationism and artificially low interest rates, where the crescendoing ramifications of such accrued imbalances have been vented on a devaluing domestic currency and on rising prices of domestic consumer goods and services.

Uncertainty over the preservation of hard earned savings has prompted many of their citizens to swap government legal tender paper currencies for man’s historical default store of value—gold or precious metals. (flight to real value)

These signs of intensifying cumulative efforts worldwide to hoard gold seems to portend the return of gold as money.

But then again, gold as part of a reformed monetary architecture would mean a vastly reduced welfare state, a privilege which incumbent politicians everywhere would unlikely yield...until market forces prevail on them.

Interesting times indeed.

Huge Rare Earth Metals Discovery in the Pacific Seabed

For the many who believe in various “Peak” theories—seen as the shrinking of “finite” supplies of specific natural resources/commodities (e.g. oil, copper etc…)—their fundamental error has been to ignore the laws of economics and human ingenuity.

This also applies to entities who operate under such premises and think that they can monopolize or control supply of natural resources by restricting trade. This applies particularly to rare earth metals.

The BBC.co.uk reports,

Japanese researchers say they have discovered vast deposits of rare earth minerals, used in many hi-tech appliances, in the seabed.

The geologists estimate that there are about a 100bn tons of the rare elements in the mud of the Pacific Ocean floor.

At present, China produces 97% of the world's rare earth metals.

Analysts say the Pacific discovery could challenge China's dominance, if recovering the minerals from the seabed proves commercially viable.

The British journal Nature Geoscience reported that a team of scientists led by Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo, found the minerals in sea mud at 78 locations.

"The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometre (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo.

The minerals were found at depths of 3,500 to 6,000 metres (11,500-20,000 ft) below the ocean surface.

My comments

One, China’s apparent monopoly on rare earth metals will be challenged by such findings.

Two, the laws of economics work: High prices translates to profitable opportunities for the market to discover alternative sources of supply

Three, innovative technology trends help underpin such supply sourcing. Yes, the above development points to seabed mining as the next major frontier in resource exploration.

Fourth, prices founded on current (‘peak’ and monopolists) premises will likely be affected.

So far, the REMX (Market Vectors Rare Earth ETF) have been on a downswing, along with a major US rare earth producer Molycorp [MCP] even before the news was released (maybe the market has anticipated this).

Yet aside from the above the dynamics of supply-demand balances, there is also monetary factor to always consider. So while prices of rare earth may be pressured by supply side discoveries, continuation of policies of inflationism may partly offset such declines.

Like any endeavor, there will always be naysayers or detractors (or perhaps defenders of the current monopolists)

From the same article,

The prospect of deep sea mining for precious metals - and the damage that could do to marine ecosystems - is worrying environmentalists.

Are these environmentalists really working to “save” the environment? Or are they there to promote vested interest groups or simply advancing the cause of etatism?

US Equity Markets: Signs of the Rising Tide Phenomenon

I’ve long been saying that pricing of equities are being influenced more by the inflationism (boom bust cycles) rather than the deep-seated conventional notion of discounted cash flows or other traditional metrics.

Even in the US we seem to be observing the “rising tide phenomenon” affecting the price actions of their equity markets, similar to the Philippines.

The recent rally in the US has been broad based and manifested across all sectors.

As Bespoke Invest notes, (chart theirs)

At the moment, 68% of stocks in the S&P 500 are trading above their 50-day moving averages. It's a strong breadth number, but it's still below the levels seen at prior short-term market highs over the past year.

Also Bespoke sees that the US rally has been supported by strong market internals

Bespoke observes, (bold emphasis mine, chart above theirs)

Last week's strength of group breadth was also notable given the fact that all 24 groups finished the day in positive territory on four different days. Looking back at data over the last ten years, we found that there has never been a period where all 24 groups were up on the day in four out of five trading days. In fact, prior to last week, there was never a period where all 24 groups were up on the day in even three out of five trading days.

This reminds me of Edwin Lefevre’s investment classic “The Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” where he quotes the legendary trader Jesse Livermore, (emphasis mine)

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street. When you read contemporary accounts of booms or panics the one thing that strikes you most forcibly is how little either stock speculation or stock speculators today differ from yesterday. The game does not change and neither does human nature.

Graphs of the Day on Keynesian Stimulus: All that Jazz but still Nothing to Show For

From Cato’s David Boaz (chart above and the following except)

this was the recovery that was aided by the largest Keynesian-style big government “stimulus” since World War II. Since 2008, total federal “stimulus” has been $4.6 trillion, as shown in the chart. As a share of GDP, recent deficit spending has been far greater than during all other recessions since the war.

Biggest Keynesian Stimulus + Slowest Recovery = Time to Rethink Keynesian Theory.

Following the Keynesian doctrine, the US government threw the proverbial “everything but the kitchen sink” on demand side management.

Not only has the econometric model elixir failed to accomplish the purported goals, but importantly, such measures has exposed the US fiscal balance to even more undue risks. (chart from Heritage Foundation).

Yet for them, it's never enough. And given that policymaking trends have been mostly influenced by this ideology, one can be assured that what is unsustainable won't last; accrued imbalances fostered by such measures will be unraveled in the fullness of time.

BIS: The Difference of Great Depression and the 2008 Crisis is Central Bank Inflationism

What’s the fundamental difference between the crisis of the Great Depression in 1931 and that of the US Mortgage crisis of 2008?

The Bank of International Settlement (BIS) gives an answer: central banking inflationism

Here’s the concluding remarks of William A Allen and Richhild Moessner from their recently published paper:

We have suggested a number of ways in which the financial crisis of 2008 was propagated internationally. We argue that the collateral squeeze in the United States, which became intense after the failure of Lehman Brothers created doubts about the stability of other financial companies in the United States, was an important propagator. The provision of large-scale swap lines by the Federal Reserve relieved many of the financial stresses in other countries that had followed Lehman Brothers’ failure. The unwinding of carry trades, particularly yen carry trades, is also likely to have transmitted market volatility to the countries that had been the destination of the carry trades when they were first put in place. It seems likely that, at the time of writing, there is still a large quantity of yen carry trades to be unwound.

In both crises, deposit outflows were not the only important sources of liquidity pressure on banks: in 1931, the central European acceptances of the London merchant banks were a serious problem, as, in 2008, were the liquidity commitments that commercial banks had provided to shadow banks. And in both crises, the behaviour of creditors towards debtors and the valuation of assets by creditors, were all very important. Flight to liquidity and safety was an important common feature of the crises of 1931 and 2008. In both episodes, the management of central banks’ international reserves appears to have had pro-cyclical effects.

However, there was a crucial difference, in that the supply of assets that were regarded as liquid and safe in 1931 was inelastic and became narrower with the passage of time, whereas in 2008, it could be, and was, expanded quickly in such as way as to contain the effects of the crisis. The understanding that the role of governments and central banks in a crisis is to enable such assets to be supplied was perhaps the most important lesson of 1931, and the experience of 2008 showed that it had been learned.

The difference has been Central Bank's asset-purchasing program or termed as credit easing policies a.k.a Quantitative Easing.

The BIS gets it.

The deflation camp based on premises of “aggregate demand” does not.

Perhaps a little more elaboration from the great Murray N. Rothbard who presciently wrote (What has Government Done To Our Money), [emphasis added]

But the central Bank, by pumping reserves into all the banks, can make sure that they can all expand together, and at a uniform rate. If all banks are expanding, then there is no redemption problem of one bank upon another, and each bank finds bank expansion of one bank upon another, and each bank finds that its clientele is really the whole country. In short, the limits on bank expansion are immeasurably widened, from the clientele of each bank to that of the whole banking system. Of course, this means that no bank can expand further than the Central Bank desires. Thus, the government has finally achieved the power to control and direct the inflation of the banking system.

In addition to removing the checks on inflation, the act of establishing a Central Bank has a direct inflationary impact. Before the Central Bank began, banks kept their reserves in gold; now gold flows into the Central Bank in exchange for deposits with the Bank, which are now reserves for the commercial banks. But the Bank itself keeps only a fractional reserve of gold to its own liabilities! Therefore, the act of establishing a Central Bank greatly multiplies the inflationary potential of the country.

The essence is, an inflationary or deflationary outcome depends largely on central bank directives.

Inflation expands the power of central banks, deflation does not. Guess which route central bankers are likely to chose? (Of course, this assumes that the market can still bear with the effects of central bank policies)

Effective Disaster Recovery Programs are Based on Personal-Community Relationships

The success of disaster recovery programs has mostly been associated with personal relationships. (Sorry but it’s hardly about governments)

That’s the findings of NPR’s Shankar Vedantam. (hat tip: Prof Peter Boettke) [bold emphasis mine]

Aldrich's findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during — and recover after — a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful — in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example — government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.

When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren't those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people — the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals.

Hayek’s local knowledge plays a key role. Again from the same NPR article (bold emphasis)

It's this passion for a local community and granular knowledge about who needs what that makes large-scale government interventions ineffective by comparison. It's even true when it comes to long-term recovery...

Governments and big nongovernmental organizations — which are keenly aware of the big picture — are often blind to neighborhood dynamics...

The problem isn't that experts are dumb. It's that communities are not the sum of their roads, schools and malls. They are the sum of their relationships.

Why does personal-community based relationship matter more than governments?

As I previously explained, (emphasis original)

Remember it is in the vested interest of the private sector to be charitable.

This is not only due to self esteem or social purposes but for sustaining the economic environment.

Think of it, if retail store ABC's customer base have been blighted by the recent mass flooding, where a massive dislocation- population loss through death or permanent relocation to other places- would translate to an economic loss for the store, then, it would be in the interest of owners of store ABC to "charitably" or voluntarily provide assistance of various kind to the neighborhood in order to prevent such dislocation from worsening, or as a consequence from indifference, risks economic losses.

Hence, such acts of charity is of mutual benefit.

Moreover, charity is the province of the marketplace. That's because markets produce and provides the goods and services required by society to operate on. Whereas government essentially don't produce goods or services but generates revenues by picking on somebody else's pocket.

With government, personal relationships are merely reduced to political interests.

With the marketplace, people see the benefit of social cooperation arising from social exchanges, which is fundamental to community building.

As the great Ludwig von Mises wrote, (bold emphasis added)

Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man's most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.

The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.

This is a truism which politicians and their media bootlickers always misrepresents.

Corn Prices, Ethanol Subsidies and the Farmland Bubble

Here is an interesting chart illustrating the correlationship between corn prices and corn used in ethanol (also in feed).

The Bloomberg writes,

The portion of this year’s U.S. corn crop going to ethanol may surpass the amount used in feed for the first time. Federal subsidies for ethanol production, due to expire at the end of 2011, have spurred corn demand and pushed up prices, to the dismay of livestock farmers

The chart reveals that rising corn prices have accompanied the expansive growth of corn bushels used as ethanol. In short, usage of corn as food have been diverted to energy.

The question is if this correlation constitutes causation or merely a coincidence.

According to a study, the answer has partly been yes; subsidies to the ethanol industry has been generating additional demand for corn, which consequently has been influencing corn prices.

From the AFP,

US ethanol subsidies pushed up corn prices as much as 17 percent in 2011, according to a study released Wednesday at a time when Washington's policies on biofuels are coming under heightened scrutiny.

The study by Bruce Babcock of Iowa State University and released by the Geneva-based International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, suggests that high gasoline prices this year may have intensified demand for ethanol, creating a tighter market for maize than in previous years.

To see how relevant this relationship has been. Corn prices recently tumbled. Apparently, the collapse has been coincidental or timed with the elimination of subsidies for the ethanol industry.

According to the Reuters last June 16^th,

The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to eliminate billions of dollars in support for the U.S. ethanol industry, sending a strong message that the era of big taxpayer support for biofuels is ending.

The 73-27 vote may ultimately be symbolic since the White House has vowed not to repeal ethanol subsidies fully and the bill the repeal language is attached to is not expected to make it into law. But it underscores the growing desperation to find savings in a budget crisis that is forcing both sides of the aisle to consider sacrificing once-sacred government programs.

In my view, this shows that the answer has also partly been a yes. Subsidies have had significant distortive effects on the balance of corn economics which has been reflected on prices.

Although the White House is expected to veto the Senate bill, the corn market probably interprets that these subsidies may not last (subject to the winner of the Presidential elections of 2012).

The recent spate of interventions in the commodity markets may have also influenced the downdraft.

Aside, other factors could also be in play: the Fed’s monetary policies, global monetary policies, global supply and demand balance, (lesser) degree of globalization of agriculture trade among many other variables involved.

The side effect of levitated corn prices from ethanol subsidies has been contributing to a boom in US farmland

According to Douglas French at the Mises.org,

today's Big Ag boom is sponsored by ethanol subsidies from the state. Just as when the federal government told farmers during WWI to grow wheat to win the war, Congress voted to double production of corn-based ethanol "to win Al Gore's war" — and so a third of the US corn crop could be dedicated to making fuel, up from 7 percent in 2001.

David Peligal at Grant's Interest Rate Observer says that if the ethanol subsidy were removed, the price of corn would collapse. Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, has put forth just such a bipartisan proposal to end the 45-cent federal tax credit for every gallon of ethanol-blended gasoline.

Farmland prices doubled nationally in the 2000s, to more than $2,300 per acre, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and prices today in soil-rich areas of Iowa and Illinois are more than three times that level. Values for nonirrigated cropland soared by 10 percent or more in 2010 alone in states across the Midwest, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Net cash yields cluster around 3.5 percent for corn land in Iowa and wheat land in Kansas. At the height of the 1970s boom the net cash yield was 4.55 percent.

As corn prices have shot upward, so has Iowa farmland, which is selling for $8,500 to $10,000 an acre.

Recently an 80-acre parcel was auctioned in Mitchell County, Iowa, going for $10,000 an acre, or $800,000. But with only 72.2 acres actually tillable, it works out to $11,080 an acre — a country record.

Grant's Interest Rate Observer provides some color to the auction. It turns out the farmers bidding for the ground dropped out at $9,000 an acre and then two investors took it the rest of the way. A gentlemen who attended the auction said it was the slowest he'd ever seen. The last $1,000 was bid up in $25 increments.

In Kansas, with wheat going for $3.25 a bushel, the land is going for $1,500 an acre, double what it was five years ago.

Bottom line: Myriad government interventions have been producing pockets of bubbles in the US and the global economy.

Graphic: World’s Military Conscription

According to the Economist,

THIS month Germany suspended military conscription and its civilian counterpart, community service. After 50 years and the service of 8.4m young men, Germany is set to shrink the Bundeswehr from 220,000 to a maximum of 185,000 troops. But conscription still remains part of the constitution and available in the case of an emergency. Similarly in America, while "the draft" ended in 1973, laws require men to register with the Selective Service System within 30 days of their 18th birthday. This provides a deep pool of manpower in the event of a national emergency. Where compulsory military service is enforced in Europe it ranges from 260 days (in Switzerland), to 26 months (in Cyprus). As the map below shows, conscription is most popular in Asia and Africa.

Here’s the Libertarian take on military conscription. The following quotes with bold emphasis mine:

From Professor Bryan Caplan

Slavery is involuntary servitude; conscription is involuntary military servitude; therefore not only is conscription slavery; it's a particularly heinous form of slavery that often ends in maiming and death.

From Congressman Ron Paul

Ronald Reagan said it best: "The most fundamental objection to draft registration is moral." He understood that conscription assumes our nation's young people belong to the state. Yet America was founded on the opposite principle, that the state exists to serve the individual. The notion of involuntary servitude, in whatever form, is simply incompatible with a free society.

In short, military conscription is a conventional form of slavery. Perhaps Germany’s move could set the trend for more individual liberation and freedom worldwide.

Some Independence Day Passages

From 30^th US President Calvin Coolidge (who incidentally was born on the 4^th of July) (Heritage Foundation) (Emphasis added)

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

Anthony Gregory on why popular knowledge of history about Independence Day has been a sham. (Emphasis added)

In the first five U.S. presidencies, we see the American empire, albeit in embryonic form, begin its centuries-long crusade of aggressive expansion and centralization of power in the capital. George Washington cracked down on the libertarian Whiskey Rebellion, created a national bank, and put Alexander Hamilton, a centralizing statist, in charge of the Treasury. John Adams blatantly violated the First Amendment as much as any president since with his notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson deployed the Marines on an ultimately failed mission in the Barbary war, attempted to suspend habeas corpus and create a department of education, imposed a brutal embargo on English goods that decimated the economy and destroyed privacy rights, and conducted the Louisiana Purchase in bold defiance of the Constitution. James Madison invaded Canada in his war with England, a war in which martial law was enforced in New Orleans and a judge was jailed merely for issuing a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a newspaper editor whose only crime was criticizing the war. Under James Monroe, the U.S. invaded Spanish Florida and adopted a doctrine whereby the U.S. would essentially claim prerogative over the whole of the Western Hemisphere, a colonial pretension whose bloody legacy continues to this day. This could all be blamed on the Constitution rather than the American Revolution itself, but it was the war that brought the "Founding Fathers" to power and allowed them to consolidate authority and take over the nation.

July Fourth celebrations did not become tacky or hypocritical only recently. The day was always a dubious cause of commemoration. The word "holiday" – holy day – clearly has a religious connotation. It is a day set aside for sacred observation. Those who regard Independence Day revisionism as profane should ask themselves which religion is sacrosanct to them. The Fourth of July is ultimately a celebration of the American nation-state’s birthday. It is a ritual in the U.S. civic religion. This is why it has been a militarist tradition since 1777, when the occasion was marked in Philadelphia with 13-gun salutes and imagery of the battle flag everywhere. The greeting card holidays might seem unworthy of mention alongside Christmas, Hanukkah and Easter. But Independence Day, even more than the politically correct and secular days celebrated every year, resembles an actual incidence of blasphemy.

There is a heroic side to the American Revolution, and surely no U.S. war since has been nearly as just in its cause. But the political shenanigans that led to war, the war itself, and its aftermath all deserve more criticism. Sadly enough, those who support the federal government’s domestic ambitions and foreign occupations while waving the flag on Independence Day are only as hypocritical as the colonists who tarred and feathered their antiwar countrymen in the name of liberty, the soldiers who invaded Canada in the name of anti-imperialism, the rebels who destroyed privately owned tea in the name of property rights, the Founders who waged a war against tyranny only to create a regime as formidable as King George’s, or the Father of our Country who started an unnecessary and tragic world war and then led a revolution in refusal to pay the bills for it.

Professor Gary North on why he doesn’t celebrate Independence Day... (Emphasis added)

The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.

In an article on taxation in that era, Rabushka gets to the point.

“historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses.”

So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.

The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge...

That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Company, so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers' cost on non-British tea. This had cost Hancock a pretty penny. The Tea Party had stopped the unloading of the tea by throwing privately owned tea off a privately owned ship – a ship in competition with Hancock's ships. The Boston Tea Party was in fact a well-organized protest against lower prices stemming from lower taxes.

So, once again, I shall not celebrate the fourth of July.

Finally, along with the US, this week China also commemorates the 90^th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

However, Cato’s David Boaz sees the light on how China’s path towards economic freedom may possibly influence her political institutions.

From Prof Boaz (Emphasis added)

China of course followed a different vision. Take the speech of Mao Zedong on July 1, 1949, as his Communist armies neared victory. The speech was titled, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.” Instead of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it spoke of “the extinction of classes, state power and parties,” of “a socialist and communist society,” of the nationalization of private enterprise and the socialization of agriculture, of a “great and splendid socialist state” in Russia, and especially of “a powerful state apparatus” in the hands of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”

Tragically, unbelievably, this vision appealed not only to many Chinese but even to Americans and Europeans, some of them prominent. But from the beginning it went terribly wrong, as really should have been predicted. Communism created desperate poverty in China. The “Great Leap Forward” led to mass starvation. The Cultural Revolution unleashed “an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness” in which “tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed.” Estimates of the number of unnatural deaths during Mao’s tenure range from 15 million to 80 million. This is so monstrous that we can’t really comprehend it. What inspired many American and European leftists was that Mao really seemed to believe in the communist vision. And the attempt to actually implement communism leads to disaster and death.

When Mao died in 1976, China changed rapidly. His old comrade Deng Xiaoping, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, had learned something from the 30 years of calamity. He began to implement policies he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which looked a lot like freer markets — decollectivization and the “responsibility system” in agriculture, privatization of enterprises, international trade, liberalization of residency requirements.

The changes in China over the past generation are the greatest story in the world—more than a billion people brought from totalitarianism to a largely capitalist economic system that is eroding the continuing authoritarianism of the political system. On its 90th birthday, the CCP still rules China with an iron fist. There is no open political opposition, and no independent judges or media...

The CCP remains in control. But it struggles to protect its people from acquiring information, routinely battling with Google, Star TV, and other media. Howard French notes that “the country now has 165,000 registered lawyers, a five-fold increase since 1990, and average people have hired them to press for enforcement of rights inscribed in the Chinese Constitution.” People get used to making their own decisions in many areas of life and wonder why they are restricted in other ways. I am hopeful that the 100th anniversary of the CCP in 2021 will be of interest mainly to historians of China’s past and that the Chinese people will by then enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under a government that derives its powers from the consent of the governed.

I may be late, as I am writing from sickbed but nonetheless...

“Happy Freedom Day!”

I Just Can’t Get Enough: Philippine Phisix Emits Intensely Bullish Signals

And when it rains

You`re shining down for me

I just can`t get enough

I just can`t get enough

Just like a rainbow

You know you set me free

I just can`t get enough

I just can`t get enough

-I Just Can’t Get Enough, Depeche Mode

Last week I pointed out that signs of market divergences in the global markets and a seeming convergence of many local indicators pointed to a possible sustained momentum for a rally.

I wrote[1]

All these factors, particularly chart formation, rallying peso, improving market breadth, bullish local investors, appears to have converged to signify possibly as a significant tailwind in favor of the bulls.

With lady luck seemingly smiling at me, events have proven this short term observation to be stunningly accurate.

The Phisix (black candle) makes an all important watershed with a rousing breakout (light blue circle) from the massive 8-month reverse and shoulder formation (orange arcs).

In Bullmarkets, Everyone is a Genius

Before I proceed, I’d like to make additional comments on what I think will be forthcoming mindset that will dominate the equity markets as the bullmarket flourishes.

Bullmarkets create the impression of infallibility, smugness, invincibility and expansive risk appetite. That’s because erroneous or defective reasoning, beliefs and or strategies will be validated by prices actions regardless of the soundness of the imputed causal relationship. In short, luck determines most of successes.

Yet most will get immersed with self-attribution bias[2], particularly self-serving bias[3], where people attribute successful outcomes to their own skill, but blame unsuccessful outcomes on bad luck.

In convention, many will argue that ‘fundamentals’ will reflect on price actions. Others will argue that chart trends will serve as the critical factors in establishing fundamentals.

Both these groups essentially argue from the perspective of historical determinism, where past performances have been assumed to determine future outcomes.

Black Swan author Nassim Nicolas Taleb exposes the shortcomings of such presumptions; Mr. Taleb writes[4], (emphasis added)

When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. Our mind will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones. Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backwards.

Their fundamental mistake is to overestimate causality and oversimplify market’s actions as easily explainable from superficial perspectives.

Further, these groups will also fall captive to the reflexivity theory where expectations and outcomes would play a critical self-reinforcing feedback mechanism

The aspect where I agree with Mr. George Soros[5] is this theory, (bold emphasis mine)

The structure of events that have no thinking participants is simple: one fact follows another ending in an unending casual chain. The presence of thinking participants complicates the structure of events enormously: the participants thinking affects the course of action and the course of action affects the participants thinking. To make matters worst, participants influence and affect each other. If the participants’ thinking bore some determinate relationship to the facts there would be no problem: the scientific observer could ignore the participants’ thinking and focus on the facts. But the relationship cannot be accurately determined for the simple reason that the participants’ thinking does not relate to facts; it relates to events in which they participate, and these events become facts only after the participants’ thinking has made its impact on them. Thus the causal chain does not lead directly from fact to fact, but from fact to perception and from perception to fact with all kinds of additional connections between participants that are not reflected fully in the facts.

In short, hardly anyone understands that such reflexive feedback loop process, which functions as the psychological backbone or stepping stones for boom bust cycles, are shaped by actions of policymakers whose political goal has been to sustain perpetual quasi booms.

As the great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises writes[6], (bold highlights added)

Nothing harmed the cause of liberalism more than the almost regular return of feverish booms and of the dramatic breakdown of bull markets followed by lingering slumps. Public opinion has become convinced that such happenings are inevitable in the unhampered market economy. People did not conceive that what they lamented was the necessary outcome of policies directed toward a lowering of the rate of interest by means of credit expansion. They stubbornly kept to these policies and tried in vain to fight their undesired consequences by more and more government interference

The effect of inflationism is to distort economic or business calculations. This will further cause massive misallocation of capital or an inducement to excessive speculations which subsequently gets manifested on the marketplace, including the stock markets via a boom bust cycle.

Bottom line: Bull market geniuses will fall short of the recognition and comprehension of the true drivers of the marketplace. They would continue to latch on cognitive biases backed by technical gobbledygook (‘macro-micro fundamentals’, political-economic ideology, mechanical charting) to argue for their cases. When the bubble pops all these arguments evaporates.

‘I Told You So’ Moment on Divergences

This leads us back to the significant chart breakout by the Phisix above.

An important reminder is that while charts are representative of past actions of the market, patterns alone do not suggest of the reliability of statistical precision of repetitive occurrences for reasons cited above, such as analytics tenuously derived from historical determinism.

That’s why charts must work in consonance with other indicators. Importantly, charts must be grounded on theory as basis for such prognosis. In short, charts should only play the role of guidepost in measuring theory. It would serve as a grave mistake to interpret charts as the foundation for theory.

Friday’s upside pop (green circle) beyond the reverse head and shoulders resistance levels may have signaled the second wind or the next significant upside leg which may bring the Phisix to the 4,900-5000 level (this implies returns of 12-15%) to the yearend.

Of course, returns will vary according to the actions of specific issues but the returns of the Phisix would essentially reflect on the average of the returns from the 30 elite issues included in the local basket bellwether.

Unfortunately, the Philippine Stock Exchange does not have an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) listed locally that may reflect on the actions of the Phisix. Nevertheless for residence abroad, the first Philippine Exchange Traded Fund, the iShares MSCI Philippines Investable Market Index Fund (EPHE) has been listed since September of last year[7] One can take advantage of the possible Phisix rally through the EPHE.

The breakout of the Phisix appears to be validated by the actions of the Philippine Peso (red candle) where the USD-Peso chart echoed on an equally sharp downside move (green circle) for the US dollar. The Peso closed at 43.175 on Friday for a .6% gain over the week.

One would note that while the Phisix exudes a bullish backdrop, the Peso’s chart has exhibits what chartists call as a “whipsaw” or a chart pattern failure or in stockcharts.com’s definition “when a buy or sell signal is reversed in a short time”[8]

Early this month, the US dollar broke to the upside against the Peso, but this breakout was essentially expunged by this week’s rally in the Peso (light blue circle).

This should be a good example how charts can’t be used as a standalone metric.

The tight Peso-Phisix correlation suggest that for the time being, the Phisix appears to lead the price actions of the Peso, as I previously noted[9]

currency traders must take heed of the activities in the PSE as part of their studies from which to derive their predictions

Again this has been premised mostly on the favorable relative demand for Peso assets, aside from the lesser inflationary path by the Peso based on the supply side.

This Phisix-Peso correlation appears as being bolstered by a spike in Foreign buying which turned positive this week (red circle).

Net foreign buying accounted for 44.46% of this week’s peso volume traded at the Philippine Stock Exchange.

Divergent external policies are likely to continue to drive foreign funds into local shores.

Market Internals Swings To Positive Zone

As an idiom goes, ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’.

All sectors posted gains this week with Industrials and Financials taking the leadership from the mining sector (see graphic above).

Even from the midterm basis, All sectors have been on an uptrend (Financials, Industrials and Holdings-left column; Property, Services and Mining and Oil-right column) despite the recent corrections.

What Friday’s sprightly activities did was to magnify on these gains.

Said differently, while Friday’s rally may have hallmarked a significant and symbolical turnaround, in reality, most of the sectors have already been on an upside creep way before Friday, most notably coming from the troughs in mid June.

Further, this interim rally seems to reinforce the medium term trend dynamics.

“I just can’t get enough” is a song by new wave band called Depeche Mode during the early 1980s. To borrow from Depeche Mode, I just can’t seem to get enough to further show how markets have been validating our expectations.

The advance-decline ratio (left window) has oscillated to favor of the bulls, while issues traded daily has turned to the upside backed by a seeming double bottom (red) and an interim ascendant trend.

A rising Phisix will induce more trades that will be reflected on volume expansion. That’s how reflexivity theory incentivizes people: As prices go higher more people will start chasing prices and higher prices will be read as improvements on economic and corporate output which will further lead to rationalizing of price chasing dynamics, hence, the feedback loop.

Also, an ascendant Phisix will tilt the balance of ‘frequency’ of the advance-decline differentials mostly to the positive or advancing side. So the advance decline chart would show denser on the positive column where advancing issues dominate.

From Divergence to Convergence

The current divergent phenomenon should not be misread as decoupling. We may see another series of re-convergence in global stock markets.

The US S&P 500 (SPX), Europe’s Dow Jones EURO STOXX 50 (STOX5E), Asia’s Dow Jones Asia/Pacific Index (P1DOW) and the Emerging Markets’ (MSEMF) MSCI Emerging Markets Free Index (EOD) have all bounced strongly from last week (green arrows).

With global equity markets on a heady upside explosion following the ratification of the Greece austerity vote which paves way for the Greece Bailout 2.0 (estimated at 85 billion Euros[10]), we should expect the previously divergent international signals to transition towards re-convergence.

Global markets are being flushed with liquidity once more. This time the flow will not only be coming from the Greece bailout 2.0, but likewise from the proposed bailout by Japan of the embattled nuclear industry, which would signify as an indirect bailout of her Banking industry which has massive loan exposure on the former[11].

The wave of bailouts appears as being intensified by increasing expectations for the reinstitution of asset purchases or Quantitative Easing by the Bank of England[12] (BoE)[13]. Guess who would be next?

Again the serial bailouts, divergent monetary policies by developed and emerging markets, negative real interest rates (here and abroad) and artificially low interest rates represent as key contributors to the prospective extension of the bullish momentum.

Of course, momentum won’t go straight forward, there will be interim or intermediate corrections. Yet these corrections should be seen as windows of opportunities to position.

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[1] See Phisix: Divergences Point to a Bullish Momentum, June 26, 2011

[2] self-attribution-bias.behaviouralfinance.net, Self Attribution bias

[3] Wikipedia.org Self-serving bias

[4] Taleb Nassim Nicolas Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets Random House 2005, p.56

[5] Soros George The Alchemy of Finance, John Wiley and Sons, p. 318

[6] Mises, Ludwig von, Free Banking and Contract Law, Chapter 17 Human Action, Mises.org

[7] Rowland Ron iShares Gives U.S. Investors Their First Philippines ETF, October 1, 2010, Seeking Alpha

[8] Stockcharts.com Glossary - W

[9] See ASEAN’s Equity Divergence, Foreign Fund Flows and Politically Driven Markets, June 5, 2011

[10] Bloomberg.com Euro Area Backs Greek Aid, Looks to New Bailout, July 03, 2011

[11] See Japan Mulls More Bailouts for the Nuclear Industry (and Mega Banks) June 28, 2011

[12] Express.co.uk SOFT PATCH CLOUDS OUTLOOK, July 3, 2011

[13] Bloomberg.com BIS Says Central Banks Need to Start Increasing Rates to Contain Inflation, June 27, 2011