China’s Tiger by the Tail

Apparently China’s policymakers remain staunch devotees of Keynesian economics and promoters and practitioners of boom bust cycles.

The Bloomberg reports,

Policy makers have cut the amount banks must keep in reserves twice since November to free up cash for lending, in a bid to insulate the world’s second-largest economy from the effects of a global slowdown. Interest rates haven’t been reduced since 2008.

New local-currency lending was 1.01 trillion yuan ($160.1 billion) in March, the People’s Bank of China said on its website after the market closed. That compared with the median 797.5 billion yuan estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of 28 economists and 710.7 billion yuan the previous month. M2 money supply climbed 13.4 last month, accelerating from a 13 percent growth in February, the central bank said.

Instead of allowing the markets clear on the outstanding imbalances brought about by previous policies, China’s policymakers have decided to keep riding the tiger's tail.

According Mises Institutes Vice President Joseph Salerno,

It has now become clear that the Chinese government has made its choice to avoid a “hard landing” by attempting to ride the unloosed inflationary tiger for as long as it can. But its strategy of massviely expanding fictitious bank credit unbacked by real savings will cause added distortions and exacerbate unsustainable imbalances in China’s real economy. As the Austrian theory of the business cycle teaches, this will only postpone the needed recession-adjustment process and will precipitate a “crash landing” that may well shatter China’s burgeoning market economy. This would be a tragedy of the first order for the entire global economy.

As pointed out many times here, the recourse towards inflationism by China’s political authorities has been seen as necessity for the survival of the incumbent command-and-control structure of China’s political institutions. A financial and economic bust will only magnify the growing forces of malcontents which Chinese authorities have fervently been trying to contain.

And given the enormous scale of malinvestments, like her Western contemporaries, China’s authorities will likely push for more inflationism until economic realities prevail or until real savings get depleted.

Reports the Wall Street Journal,

China’s real-estate sector is enormous—accounting directly for 12% of gross domestic product, according to estimates by the International Monetary Fund—and changing fast. To capture developments in the sector, data are collected from more than 80,000 real-estate developers and reported up through the county, city, and province statistical system….

A key concern for investors is China’s overhang of unsold property. A trip around virtually any Chinese city reveals hosts of half-finished tower blocks waiting to be completed and sold. Analysts fear that excess supply could put a dent in prices, and reduce the real-estate investment that is a key contributor to China’s domestic demand.

Official data show 2.98 billion square meters of residential property under construction at the end of February. Wall Street Journal calculations show that is more than two square meters for every person in China and enough to satisfy demand for almost the next three years without a single extra apartment being built.

So unproductive grand projects already highlighted by ghost cities and malls as seen in the video below (hat tip Bob Wenzel) will mount, as scarce resources will continue to get funnelled into projects that consumes capital.

Bottom line: A Tiger by the Tail by the great Friedrich von Hayek represents an allegory of the allures of inflationism

An excerpt from the synopsis of Hayek’s work by Professor Salerno,

In brief, Hayek argues that all depressions involve a pattern of resource allocation, including and especially labor, that does not correspond to the pattern of demand, particularly among higher-order industries (roughly, capital goods) and lower-order industries (roughly, consumer goods). This mismatch of labor and demand occurs during the prior inflationary boom and is the result of entrepreneurial errors induced by a distortion of the interest rate caused by monetary and bank credit expansion. More importantly, any attempt to cure the depression via deficit spending and cheap money, while it may work temporarily, intensifies the misallocation of resources relative to the demands for them and only postpones and prolongs the inevitable adjustment.

The policies of permanent quasi booms or ‘extend and pretend’ policies will eventually get exposed for the fiction they sell—through a colossal bust or “a tragedy of the first order for the entire global economy”.

For now, profit from political folly.

Nonetheless it would be best keep vigilant over developments in China.

The Myth of ‘Safe Assets’

The IMF is concerned about the potential shortage of supply of “safe assets”

Writes the Wall Street Journal Blog

Worries about nations’ fiscal health could cut the world’s supply of “safe” government debt by 16% in the next four years, the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.

The diminishing supply comes even as demand rises for safe assets such as high-quality corporate bonds and sovereign debt, which many banks and investors need amid market uncertainty and regulatory changes.

The shrinking pool of safe assets could create more worries about financial stability, the IMF said.

“Safe asset scarcity will increase the price of safety and compel investors to move down the safety scale as they scramble to obtain scarce assets,” the fund said in its Global Financial Stability Report. “It could also lead to more short-term spikes in volatility, and shortages of liquid, stable collateral that acts as the ‘lubricant’ or substitute of trust in financial transactions.”

The notion of ‘safe assets’, which rest on the assumption of ‘intrinsic value’, is really an illusion. It has been a myth repeatedly peddled, inculcated and propagandized for the public to accept the falsehood of the necessity of the welfare-warfare state. The power to tax does not guarantee economic and financial feasibility and consequently ‘security’.

Safety does not emerge out of government decree, as the recent crisis or as history shown whether applied to government bonds or to money.

Instead, valuations are subjectively determined by acting man or by individuals.

The great Professor Ludwig von Mises explained

Value is the importance that acting man attaches to ultimate ends. Only to ultimate ends is primary and original value assigned. Means are valued derivatively according to their serviceableness in contributing to the attainment of ultimate ends. Their valuation is derived from the valuation of the respective ends. They are important for man only as far as they make it possible for him to attain some ends.

Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment.

Neither is value in words and doctrines. It is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act. The oratory of moralists and the pompousness of party programs are significant as such. But they influence the course of human events only as far as they really determine the actions of men.

Put differently, to paraphrase a popular axiom, safe assets are in the eyes of the beholder.

Take for instance gold.

Gold was essentially an ignored asset at the start of the new millennium, however following 11 consecutive years of price increases, the public’s perception has substantially changed. Now gold has been incorporated as part of the safe asset list of the IMF.

Through history, gold’s perceived safety arises from the money attributes it possesses compared with, or relative to, fiat currencies.

As I previously wrote,

paper currencies are basically IOUs issued and stamped by governments as “legal tender” and backed by nothing but FAITH in the issuer. Because paper money is an IOU, it bears counterparty risks.

Where money as a medium of exchange requires these characteristics: durability, divisibility, scarcity, portability, uniformity and acceptability, unlimited issuance of paper money essentially diminishes the moneyness quality of paper currencies. As we cited earlier given the massive and full scale deployment of the printing press globally, such the raises the risk of a potential of disintegration of the present financial architecture.

However gold may not permanently be a refuge asset either. A serendipitous discovery of a process that enables gold to be produced abundantly would lead to a loss of the current attributes and thereby the subsequent loss of gold’s moneyness. And in the world of rapid advances in technology this is something we cannot discount.

To quote Dr. Frank Shostak

If the increase in the supply of gold were to persist, people would likely abandon gold as the medium of exchange and adopt another commodity.

Bottom line: Safety is matter of subjective individual valuations and definitely not decreed by politicians and or the bureaucracy.

Chart from Dr. Ed Yardeni

To the contrary, what government declares as “safe” are likely to be the riskiest assets. A good example is the ongoing crisis in the Eurozone where toxicity has surfaced out of supposed “safe” debt instruments.

It has been the nature of the state to abuse on their powers, by plundering their citizenry through arbitrary laws, or policies of financial repression (includes inflationism), that ultimately undermines the quality of government issued papers.

In short, self-destructive actions cannot be reckoned as ‘risk free’ which serves as a paradoxical, or must I add absurd, proposition.

Quote of the Day: The Incompatibility of Innovation and Governments

It seems that as a general rule, then, the weaker the government, the better it is for innovation. With some notable exceptions, autocratic rulers have tended to be hostile or indifferent to technological change. The instinctive need for stability and the suspicion of nonconformism and shocks usually dominated the possible gains that could be attained from technological progress.

That’s from Joel Mokyr’s 1990 book, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (page 180) as excerpted by Professor Don Boudreaux

The fundamental objective of any government is the preservation of their political power through the sustainment of their political base.

And any activities that has the tendency to undermine this position will always be viewed as a threat. Thus government’s role, as pointed above, has mostly been about imposing conformity through control, and instituting dependency through political measures—such as safety nets or the welfare state—to shield against “shocks” (resistance to change) and or guard against social failure (fear of loss) through redistributive “stability” policies.

All these have been built upon the platform of centralized political institutions.

Meanwhile innovation stands at the opposite end. Innovation embraces the virtues of failure or losses through repeated trial and errors or experimentation or through the encouragement of bottom up based risk activities, which mainly operates on change-oriented and or highly competitive environments. Since innovation is about dynamism and diversity, they are usually products of decentralized institutions.

So governments approve of innovation only if it benefits them. Governments become “hostile” to innovation, if change threatens their power (this has been evident by repeated attempts to control the internet which has been counteracted by digital activists), and are “indifferent to technological change ” when innovation is seen as having neutral effects on them.

The bottom line is that innovation and the current welfare based governments represent as diametrically opposing forces, and therefore, incompatible with each other.

Vietnam Banks Pay Gold Owners for Storage

Here is an enlightening piece from Tim Staermose of the Sovereign Man.

Here’s something you don’t see every day: Banks in Vietnam will actually pay YOU to store your gold in one of their safe deposit boxes. I was pretty surprised to find this out for myself; neither Simon nor I have seen it anywhere else in the world except here.

This is actually how banking used to be. The original bankers were goldsmiths– big burly guys who worked with gold on a daily basis. They had the security systems already established, and, for a fee, they were willing to let you park your gold in their safes.

Eventually, goldsmiths got into the moneylending business; instead of charging a security fee, they would pay depositors a rate of interest for the right to loan out the gold at a higher rate of interest.

Goldsmiths’ reputations lived and died based on the quality of their loan portfolios, and their consistency of paying back depositor savings.

Today that’s all but a footnote in history. Except in Vietnam.

Read the rest here.

Interesting to note that despite technical political restrictions to do so by Vietnam’s authorities, whom sees gold as a constriction to their activities, paying fees to gold depositors seem to have become an ingrained practice by Vietnamese bankers. The simple reason for this is that gold ownership has been the main preference of the average Vietnamese over fiat money or the dong.

Yet perhaps, today’s exception will become the tomorrow’s norm. Stated differently, perhaps Vietnam’s banking ‘archaic’ banking system could become the banking system's paradigm of the future.

Add to this Malaysia’s desire for a gold standard, India’s cultural attachment to gold and the growing appetite for gold by the Chinese as evidenced by surging imports (see chart above from US Global Funds), I’d say that these evolving trends in Asia could serve as clues to the direction of the prospective reforms of the global monetary system.

Chart of the Day: The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything

The progress of computational power is the essence of the the information age which will serve as the backbone for the most of technological innovation (whether in big data, smart manufacturing and wireless revolution).

From technologyreview.com

The performance of computers has shown remarkable and steady growth, doubling every year and a half since the 1970s. What most folks don't know, however, is that the electrical efficiency of computing (the number of computations that can be completed per kilowatt-hour of electricity used) has also doubled every year and a half since the dawn of the computer age.

Laptops and mobile phones owe their existence to this trend, which has led to rapid reductions in the power consumed by battery-powered computing devices. The most important future effect is that the power needed to perform a task requiring a fixed number of computations will continue to fall by half every 1.5 years (or a factor of 100 every decade). As a result, even smaller and less power-intensive computing devices will proliferate, paving the way for new mobile computing and communications applications that vastly increase our ability to collect and use data in real time…

How long can this trend continue? In 1985, the physicist Richard Feynman calculated that the energy efficiency of computers could improve over then-current levels by a factor of at least a hundred billion (10¹¹), and our data indicate that the efficiency of computing devices progressed by only about a factor of 40,000 from 1985 to 2009. In other words, we've hardly begun to tap the full potential…

The real life impact of the Moore’s law applied to electrical efficiency of computing, from the same article…

The long-term increase in the energy efficiency of computing (and the technologies it makes possible) will revolutionize how we collect and analyze data and how we use data to make better decisions. It will help the "Internet of things" become a reality—a development with profound implications for how businesses, and society generally, will develop in the decades ahead. It will enable us to control industrial processes with more precision, to assess the results of our actions quickly and effectively, and to rapidly reinvent our institutions and business models to reflect new realities. It will also help us move toward a more experimental approach to interacting with the world: we will be able to test our assumptions with real data in real time, and modify those assumptions as reality dictates.

The Booming Global Islamic Finance

From the Economist (bold emphasis added)

THE global market for Islamic finance at the end of last year was worth around $1.3 trillion, according to the UK Islamic Finance Secretariat, part of the CityUK lobby group. The total value of sharia-compliant assets has grown by 150% since 2006. Globally, banks hold over 90% of Islamic assets, and together with funds are big investors in sukuk, a type of bond. According to the latest quarterly report from Zawya, a business information firm, global sukuk issuance in the first quarter of this year was $43.3 billion, almost half the total for the whole of 2011. The withdrawal of European banks lending to the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) region is thought to have contributed to this rise. Total issuance could reach $126 billion this year, continuing the growth trend (aside from a brief decline in 2008 associated with the global economic slowdown). Malaysia, which dominates the global sukuk issuance market, is over 60% Muslim, and Islamic banking assets make up around a quarter of the country’s total. Globally, perhaps 12% of Muslims use Islamic financial products, but with other countries (predominately Muslim or with large Muslim populations) expressing interest in increasing services, the market seems likely to continue to grow.

My observations

The unfettered market always evolves according to the people’s demand. In today’s deepening of the information age, market trends have increasingly been based on niches or custom designed products and services. And this applies to the fast growing modern Islamic financing.

The terse article also shows how the world does not operate on a vacuum. The European crisis may have even bolstered the demand for sukuk issuance, as Muslim investors seek alternative options or safe havens.

Yet, Islamic finance has not been limited to the Muslims, as seen by the over 90% holding of Islamic assets by global banks, along with other countries “expressing interest in increasing services”. The point is that integration represents as natural consequences of free trade. In other words, the booming Islamic finance has been representative of the deepening of financial globalization.

Lastly, it is should also be pointed out that Malaysia being the largest sukuk issuer in 2011 has been a key proponent of the reintroduction of the Islamic gold standard, or the Islamic gold dinar since 2002.

While there seems hardly any traces of connection between sukuk issuance and the gold dinar yet, perhaps further inflationism by the developed nations may prompt for wider usage of the gold dinar in Muslim states as Malaysia, and also perhaps sukuk issuance could be backed by gold or denominated in the gold dinar. A combination of the two would likely incite greater demand for sukuk bonds and the dinar.

China’s War against the Informal Economy or the Shadow Banks

From the Bloomberg, (bold emphasis added)

When a Chinese court sentenced 28- year-old Wu Ying, known as “Rich Sister,” to death for taking $55.7 million from investors without paying them back, it sparked an unexpected firestorm that has drawn in China’s top leadership.

Her crime involved a common, illegal practice in China: raising money from the public with promises to pay back high interest rates. Known as shadow banking, these underground lending and investing networks are estimated to total $1.3 trillion, according to Ren Xianfang, an economist with IHS Global Insight Ltd. (IHS) in Beijing. That’s the size of the 2011 U.S. government deficit.

Operating outside the banking system or government regulation, the informal networks provide an important source of economic growth, capital for private companies and return for investors seeking to beat inflation. Premier Wen Jiabao, in an unusual move, weighed in on the case at a March 14 news conference. His comments highlighted a public debate over the importance of shadow banking to the Chinese economy, government efforts to bring it under control -- and whether capital punishment is an effective means to do so.

“Chinese companies, especially small ones, need access to funds,” Wen said when asked about Wu’s case. “Banks have yet to be able to meet those companies’ needs, and there is a massive amount of idle private capital. We need to bring private finance out into the open.”

This is just an example of the abominable repercussions from arbitrary laws or how arbitrary laws are used as instruments for oppression.

Here, the private sector, clearly acting in response to government’s policies as evidenced by “seeking to beat inflation”, have been driven to become “criminals”. Yet China’s “criminal” shadow banks, which is no more than regulatory arbitrage practiced by grassroots entrepreneurs, has grown to an “estimated to total $ 1.3 trillion” or about 1/5 of the economy.

The conviction of the “Rich Sister” looks like another futile exercise at political symbolism to project the illusions of “virtuous” government or “government in action”. Nevertheless exposes on how arbitrary laws are used as instruments for oppression.

Of course, shysters and manipulators will always exist in every society and deserve punishment for the violation of the property rights of their victims.

However, Ponzi schemes, which these scoundrels frequently employ, are magnified in an environment where money have been debauched as I earlier pointed out here.

That’s because the anti-savings policies by governments through central banks, encourages or incentivizes such behavior by narrowing the public’s time orientations or increasing the public’s time preferences.

So instead of savings, inflationism leads the public to chase for yields, speculate, gamble, increase debt loads and to consume at the expense of production. This policy induced shifts in people’s incentives make the public vulnerable to skullduggery and knavery.

And that’s why the biggest Ponzi schemers and ultimate insider traders are no more than central bankers and political authorities who use financial repression to plunder wealth from people.

In reality, the China’s informal economy has been emblematic of dynamic market forces at work, viz, filing the gap of the “need access to funds”, since state sanctioned or regulated private banks, as well as, state owned banks “have yet to be able to meet those companies’ needs”.

So Premier Wen’s statement and the actions of China’s government represents the proverbial “left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing” or a patent self-contradiction.

The truth is that the Chinese government has virtually been exercising the same decorum as their Western counterparts—the promotion of the interests of politically privileged rent seekers or crony bankers who finances the activities of political authorities.

China’s war against informal economy serves as another indicator of the growing political fissures from a command and control political structure against the forces of decentralization or the “marginal revolutions”, as evidenced by the expanding political clout of entrepreneurs in and out of the ambit of China’s government.

China’s war against the informal economy or the shadow banks is bound for failure.

Information Age Politics: The Rise of the Pirate Party

As I have been saying, the information age will usher in radical and dramatic changes in the way we do things. And corollary to these, we should see the snowballing forces of decentralization percolate into the field of politics as digital activists congregate to defend against government’s repeated attempts to control the internet through coercive means (mostly via censorship) by bringing the confrontation into the political arena.

Internet activism has turned what used to be a defensive evasion strategy into offense—via voters.

I am gradually being validated by developing events abroad as digital activists appears to have emerged as a potent third party political force, first in Sweden and now in Germany.

From the Wall Street Journal, (bold emphasis added)

The Pirate Party, a loosely organized group of digital activists, is dropping anchor in state legislatures here, shaking up Germany's staid political establishment.

The Pirates believe in file-sharing, online privacy and digital democracy, but their platform lacks policies on major issues of the day, such as the euro-zone debt crisis. That isn't holding them back.

Around 10% of German voters support them, according to opinion polls. They are expected to win seats in two important state legislatures in early May, including in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. A strong result in those regional elections could set the course for the Pirates' real breakthrough: seats in the German federal parliament in next year's national elections.

"The tremors will be felt all the way to Berlin" if the Pirates enter the North Rhine-Westphalia legislature, says Joachim Paul, the party's lead candidate in the region.

The rise of the upstart movement is complicating life for Germany's established parties, which could struggle to form their usual ruling majority coalitions at state and national level if the Pirates' popularity proves durable.

The Pirates represent "a new style" in German politics, Mr. Niedermayer says. Their professed aim is to bring the digital revolution to politics, making government more transparent and accessible. They have caught the imagination of the Facebook generation, as well as of less tech-savvy voters disenchanted with bland politicians in Germany's mainstream parties.

"What we all have in common is the desire to be active in grass-roots democracy," says Kai Hemsteeg, a 30-year-old police detective. He used to be a local official for Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, but says he likes the Pirates' greater openness to participation.

The Pirates were founded in late 2006 in an underground Berlin nightspot called C-Base, a hangout of the local digerati. They are part of an international movement that began in Sweden, whose main aim is the free sharing of information online, including through looser copyright laws. Of the roughly 50 Pirate parties around the world, none has had the electoral impact of the German wing.

As the information age deepens, compounded by the crisis of the welfare states (which should implode sometime soon), global political trends will increasingly shift in favor of digital or internet activism and of the entrepreneurs (China’s media suppressed political upheaval have indicated signs of the latter’s development). In the US, the rise of Ron Paul as a serious political contender against establishment politics seem as further evidence of such a formative trend shift. This should accelerate overtime.

Chart of the Day: Capital Accumulation is Key to Economic Prosperity

Professor Steve Landsburg posted on his blog a graph from a textbook of his colleague exhibiting the tight correlations between the increase in capital and economic prosperity.

Professor Landsburg writes,

But the overall picture is clear: More capital per worker means more output per worker, and more output per worker means more income per worker. This relationship — in fact, the nearly linear relationship that you see on the graph — is just what standard economic theory predicts. It’s nice to see that prediction so powerfully confirmed.

Capital here refers to physical capital — the machinery, factory space and office equipment that allows workers to be more productive. A garment worker with a sewing machine produces more blouses per hour than a garment worker with a needle and thread; therefore the garment worker with a sewing machine earns higher wages. (A good rule of thumb is that workers are paid about 2/3 the value of what they produce.) If you want rich garment workers, you need a lot of high-quality sewing machines. If you want rich farm workers, you need a lot of high-quality tractors…

As a caveat, it isn’t just the capital that is important, instead it is the political economic environment which allows the citizenry to accumulate capital that matters most.

Professor Landsburg explains further, (bold emphasis mine)

Do not, however, jump to the conclusion that if, say, Nigerians had access to Japanese levels of capital, then Nigerian wages would rise to Japanese levels. Part of the reason Nigerians have so little capital is that capital is used less efficiently in Nigeria, so people choose to accumulate less of it. To move up this ladder, you need to do more than just accumulate capital — you’ve got to be the sort of country where capital is worth accumulating. What that entails will be a topic for a future post.

As the great Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1955, (bold emphasis mine)

It is the insufficient supply of capital that prevents the rest of the world from adjusting its industries to the most efficient ways of production. Technological "know how" and the "passion for productivity" are useless if the capital required for the acquisition of new equipment and the inauguration of new methods is lacking.

What made modern capitalism possible and enabled the nations, first of Western Europe and later of central Europe and North America, to eclipse the rest of mankind in productivity was the fact that they created the political, legal, and institutional conditions that made capital accumulation safe. What prevents India, for example, from replacing its host of inefficient cobblers with shoe factories is only the lack of capital. As the Indian government virtually expropriates foreign capitalists and obstructs capital formation by natives, there is no way to remedy this situation. The result is that millions are barefoot in India while the average American buys several pairs of shoes every year.

America's present economic supremacy is due to the plentiful supply of capital. The allegedly "progressive" policies that slow down saving and capital accumulation, or even bring about dissaving and capital decumulation, came later to the United States than to most European countries. While Europe was being impoverished by excessive armaments, colonial adventures, anticapitalistic policies, and finally by wars and revolutions, the United States was committed to a free enterprise policy. At that time Europeans used to stigmatize American economic policies as socially backward. But it was precisely this alleged social backwardness that accounted for an amount of capital accumulation that surpassed by far the amount of capital available in other countries. When later the New Deal began to imitate the anticapitalistic policies of Europe, America had already acquired an advantage that it still retains today.

Wealth does not consist, as Marx said, in a collection of commodities, but in a collection of capital goods. Such a collection is the result of previous saving. The anti-saving doctrines of what is, paradoxically enough, called New Economics, first developed by Messrs. Foster and Catchings and then reshaped by Lord Keynes, are untenable.

If one wants to improve economic conditions, to raise the productivity of labor, wage rates and the peoples' standard of living, one must accumulate more capital goods in order to invest more and more. There is no other way to increase the amount of capital available than to expand saving by doing away with all ideological and institutional factors that hinder saving or even directly make for dissaving and capital decumulation. This is what the "underdeveloped nations" need to learn.

Bottom line, economic prosperity can only be attained through a market economy (economic freedom or laissez faire capitalism). Interventionism or politicization of the allocation of scarce resources can only result to the opposite—capital consumption.

Quote of the Day: The Road to Serfdom

Rome had its socialist interlude under Diocletian. Faced with increasing poverty and restlessness among the masses, and with the imminent danger of barbarian invasion, he issued in A.D. 301 an edictum de pretiis, which denounced monopolists for keeping goods from the market to raise prices, and set maximum prices and wages for all important articles and services. Extensive public works were undertaken to put the unemployed to work, and food was distributed gratis, or at reduced prices, to the poor. The government – which already owned most mines, quarries, and salt deposits – brought nearly all major industries and guilds under detailed control. ‘In every large town,’ we are told, ‘the state became a powerful employer, standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation.’ When businessmen predicted ruin, Diocletian explained that the barbarians were at the gate, and that individual liberty had to be shelved until collective liberty could be made secure. The socialism of Diocletian was a war economy, made possible by fear of foreign attack. Other factors equal, internal liberty varies inversely with external danger.

The task of controlling men in economic detail proved too much for Diocletian's expanding, expensive, and corrupt bureaucracy. To support this officialdom – the army, the courts, public works, and the dole – taxation rose to such heights that people lost the incentive to work or earn, and an erosive contest began between lawyers finding devices to evade taxes and lawyers formulating laws to prevent evasion. Thousands of Romans, to escape the tax gatherer, fled over the frontiers to seek refuge among the barbarians. Seeking to check this elusive mobility and to facilitate regulation and taxation, the government issued decrees binding the peasant to his field and the worker to his shop until all their debts and taxes had been paid. In this and other ways medieval serfdom began.

(bold emphasis added)

That's from Will and Ariel Durant from the The Lessons of History, quoted in an article by fund manager David Kotok of the Cumberland Advisors.

Same lessons apply today.

The Impending Collapse of the Immoral Welfare State

The welfare state has been sold to the public as a moral political system. In reality, it is a gigantic fraud, not only built upon unsustainable economics or the Santa Claus principle but on immoral grounds of thievery.

Professor Gary North explains, (bold emphasis added)

The welfare state is defended ethically as a system of safety nets. These safety nets are defended as ethically necessary for a good society, meaning ethically good. Intellectuals see business profits as legitimate mainly because profits provide a tax base for funding the welfare state.

These safety nets require constant and ever-increasing funding. They are going to lose this funding. Why? Because of national government bankruptcies.

There is no question that the deficits will produce a series of fiscal crises. These crises will initially be covered up by central bank inflation, but the end result of that policy will either be hyperinflation, which is a form of concealed default, or stable money, which will be followed by open default. There will be a default. The political fall-out of this default will change the nature of Western politics.

The welfare state is going to self-destruct. It is highly unlikely that we will see the complete destruction of the welfare state in any nation, but it will contract on a scale not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. That is because we have not seen a welfare state as comprehensive as Rome's until modern times.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

I know of no studies of the effects of the fall of Rome on the masses of welfare recipients. It took centuries for the system to decline. We know that the central state in 400 A.D. could no longer support the welfare clients that it supported with bread and circuses in the days of Nero. Manorialism steadily replaced the central government in the Western Empire. But for centuries, welfare clients lived and died as clients.

Then the welfare state died. It did not revive until the twentieth century.

THE GREAT DEFAULT

What will make the coming Great Default different from Rome's will be the speed of its arrival and the magnitude of the contraction.

Birth rates have fallen everywhere outside the United States. The number of aged retirees in every Western nation, including Japan, is increasing relentlessly. The number of children born is falling. The end is clear. So is the politics of kick the can.

Unlike Rome, the West's intellectuals have defended the spread of the welfare state by means of a system of ethics. It rests on a variation of the Mosaic commandment against theft: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." So widespread has this revised commandment been that the electorates in every Western nation will not tolerate its rejection. Yet the economics of the deficits points to the operational failure of the welfare system.

The defenders of the welfare state will then have to explain this widespread collapse of the programs. How did such an ethically superior system fail? How did it lead millions of welfare clients to trust a self-destructive state? How did it mislead so many addicts to government handouts? How did it lead them into a ditch, devoid of skills to compete in the post-default world?

Answer: because the welfare state was ethically corrupt before it was fiscally corrupt. It is based on theft by majority vote.

We have seen what happens to the false messiahs of the messianic state. Western Marxists had a solid though small market for their fat books until the Soviet Union went bankrupt in the late 1980s and shut down in December 1991. Overnight, Marxism lost its academic defenders. They became as invisible as Baghdad Bob did on the day American troops marched in.

The Marxist system had been seen by Western intellectuals as intellectually viable, one of several legitimate perspectives. Then, overnight, it was regarded as a total failure, and – even worse for intellectuals – a fool's quest, a bad joke. Marxism was rejected in theory because of its visible loss of power. The ethics of Western Marxism – in contrast to Marx's rejection of ethics – had always been an illusion. Marxism had always been what Marx had said it was: a matter of power. Defenders who steadfastly had defended Marxism in theory if not in actual practice were no longer willing to do in public. They did not want to be identified with historical losers – losers of power.

If Marxism had been ethically based, it would not have faded overnight just because its power base collapsed. The true believers would have stayed the course. But Marxism was never about ethics. It was always about power.

So is the welfare state.

The defenders of the welfare state have come in the name of a higher ethics. When the system goes belly-up fiscally, these defenders will face the same sort of existential crisis that the Marxists faced in 1992.

They ought to be able to see that the welfare state is a fraud, a delusion, and an ethical monstrosity: charity with guns. They ought to be able to see that theft is theft, with or without majority votes. But they don't.

Read the rest here

The coming global debt default binge will most likely highlight the collapse of welfare state. And this would most possibly suck into the vortex the paper money system. That's because the central bank fractional reserve monetary system has enabled and facilitated the existence of the welfare state. The proverbial chickens will come home to roost.

China’s Road to Capitalism Lacks the Knowledge Revolution

A narrative of China’s path to progress according to Nobel laureate Professor Ronald Coase and Professor Ning Wang at the Wall Street Journal,

China's road to capitalism was forged by two movements. One was orchestrated by Beijing; its self-proclaimed goal being to turn China into a "modern, powerful socialist country." The other, more important, one was the gross product of what we like to call "marginal revolutions." It involved a concatenation of grass-roots movements and local initiatives.

While the state-led reform focused on enhancing the incentives of state-owned enterprises, the marginal revolutions brought private entrepreneurship and market forces back to China. Private farming, for example, was secretly engaged in by starving peasants when it was still banned by Beijing. Rural industrialization was spearheaded by township and village enterprises that operated outside state control. Private sectors emerged in cities when self-employment was allowed to cope with rising unemployment. Foreign direct investment and labor markets were first confined to Special Economic Zones.

Well, China’s road to capitalism has been half baked as it requires a very important factor that has been amiss: allowing ideas to have sex as Matt Ridley would call it.

Professors Coase and Wang adds,

In the years to come, China will continue to forge its own path, but it needs to address its lack of a marketplace for ideas if it hopes to continue to prosper. An unrestricted flow of ideas is a precondition for the growth of knowledge, the most critical factor in any innovative and sustainable economy. "Made in China" is now found everywhere in the world. But few Western consumers remember any Chinese brand names. The British Industrial Revolution two centuries ago introduced many new products and created new industries. China's industrial revolution is far less innovative.

The active exchange of thoughts and information also offers an indispensable foundation for social harmony. It is not a panacea; nothing can free us once and for all from ignorance and falsehood. But the free flow of ideas engenders repeated criticism and continuous improvement. It also cultivates respect and tolerance, which are effective antidotes to the bigotry and false doctrines that can threaten the foundation of any society.

When China started reforming itself more than three decades ago, Deng rightly stressed the "emancipation of the mind" as a prerequisite. But that has yet to happen. It's time for China to embrace not just the market, but the marketplace of ideas. This will help not just China reach its full potential, but the world as well.

China’s fundamental problems emanates from the still top-down command and control political system which has been running a head on collision course with the snowballing forces of ‘marginal revolutions’ or grassroots economic movement via entrepreneurs.

A knowledge revolution would be incompatible with the incumbent centralized structure of governance, which has underpinned the continued restrictive policies on “free flow of ideas”.

A communist society depends on the conformity of behavior, ideas and actions with those of the political authorities, mainly enforced through coercion and indoctrination, whereas a knowledge revolution will democratize and produce diversity of ideas, opinions and actions channeled through a market economy.

And a society founded on a knowledge revolution would, thus, undermine the privileges of those currently in power.

Yet having to unleash the forces of capitalism would mean substantial changes to China’s political system.

Yet the jury is out on how China’s politicians will deal with such monumental adjustment process, which I expect to be turbulent, along with the response of the average Chinese. And such transition will be accompanied by a national financial and economic crisis as ramification to the recent marco (top-down) economic policies, the impact of which would also diffuse into politics.

Current events have already been manifesting signs of such tempestuous adjustment process.

Interesting times indeed.

Poker Bluffing Central Bankers Means Gold Bullmarket Should Continue

Everytime gold prices goes into hibernation, devotees of the state yell “where is inflation?!”

The “No Inflation” Propaganda

As I have been repeatedly saying, the impact of monetary inflation has always been relative. Inflation affects different economic sectors at different degrees and at different times. Politically favored sectors are the primary beneficiaries followed by the sectors that commercially interact with them, thus the gradient multiplier effect to the economy as earlier explained.

In the stock market, this phenomenon is manifested through what I call as the rotational process.

Yet today’s seeming benign conditions of consumer price inflation (CPI), which account for as symptoms of monetary inflation, does not imply of the absence of CPI inflation nor has CPI inflation solely been manifested on gold prices alone.

Nonetheless anti-gold arguments based on reductio ad absurdum and the fallacy of reading history into the future represents no less than pretexts for further inflationism and government interventions: no inflation today, thus inflate more!

These people should be reminded that economic laws are always in operation and applies equally to everyone. And that the inflation disease operates through different stages which means that CPI inflation could explode at any given time.

In reality, gold has been up for the 11^th straight year despite the ephemeral bout of deflationary episode during the crisis of 2008.

Chart from Goldmoney.com

And gold’s 11 year phenomenal record rise came amidst the US Federal Reserve’s Bubble blowing policies.

The point is, prices of gold will continue to respond to policies and that there hardly are any market trends that moves in a straight line—unless the marketplace endures an episode of extreme pressure from embedded imbalances.

As I previously wrote,

If they do, then markets must be experiencing an episode of extreme stress, symptomatic of the ventilation of acute systemic imbalances on the marketplace. They appear in the form of a blowoff phase (climax) of a bubble cycle or of hyperinflation in motion.

These extreme episodes are the black swan moments.

And the seemingly harmless CPI inflation landscape has been prompting for what seems as the crisis-political response feedback loop mechanism: where policymakers intervene in response to the market reactions and vice versa.

Political agents and their followers will naturally ‘selectively focus’ on data that supports or fits on their views, for the simple reason any admission of the CPI inflation threat will force them to reverse on their policies that would discomfit the markets and work against their interests (more below).

Until we see CPI inflation surge and or a major political backlash on central bank actions, we should expect this cycle of political interventionism/inflationism to continue.

And such actions will come under the half-truth discourse of a “no” or “little” inflation risk environment.

Gold Outperforms Obama Crony Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway

And it is also important to point out that gold has beaten the portfolio of the Obama crony and statist, Warren Buffett in spite of his repeated ranting against gold.

Whether priced in the equivalent of gold grams...

Chart from Pricedingold.com

Or based on relative performance…

Chart from the Daily Reckoning

“Unproductive” gold has clearly outperformed Mr. Buffett’s flagship Berkshire Hathaway over the past few years.

While past performance may not guarantee future outcomes, the second point is that fundamental drivers underpinning gold’s bullrun remains firmly in place.

Inflationism (expansion of monetary base in the US—see lower window—as well as in other developed economies) and the policy of negative real rates worldwide should continue to drive gold higher in spite of the current consolidation phase (chart from US Global Investors)

So, aside from highly distorted markets through various forms of market interventionism, I think this phase can be construed as a normal profit taking consolidation phase following the recent record run.

And reading price signals over the short term in an environment of heavy interventions can mislead, as acts of market interferences may have short to medium term volatile effects on the market’s price channels.

And given these highly politically influenced conditions, gold should continue to defy any statist expectations and beat the returns of Berkshire Hathaway.

Poker Bluff, Redux

It can also be observed that many of the current attributions to weak gold prices have centered on the supposed reluctance by policymakers to continue with “further stimulus”.

Such blarneys over withholding stimulus have been the dominant narrative and may have partly influenced the recent violent downside swing of September of 2011 and in March 2012 (two arrows indicated). I don’t recall of what news was ascribed to the December decline, I was on vacation.

Yet it has been a predilection, if not a habit, of the mainstream to associate current events to the market’s price actions (available bias).

We have seen this happen before through the gibberish of so called “exit strategy” in 2010. Then, I called this nonsensical propaganda as poker bluffing central bankers.

In reality in 2011, the US Federal Reserve monetized about 61% of US treasury issuance or a “whopping 8.6% of gross domestic product (GDP) on average per annum” according to Lawrence Goodman of Center for Financial Stability.

The US Federal Reserve financed most of the expenditures of the US government to compensate for the insufficiency of funding sources from private sector savings and the decline of foreign demand for US government papers. As US government expenditures continue to swell, the buyer and financier of last resort will be the US Federal Reserve.

The third point is that any constrains towards further “stimulus” would extrapolate to an outright default by the US government. Such event would ripple across the political spectrum that would adversely impact the favored banking industry and to welfare-warfare state. And US politicians and bureaucrats won’t likely resort to this option as this would put in jeopardy the survival of current political institutions or the cartelized central banking-welfare warfare state-banking system.

So policymakers will find ways and means to conduct more inflationism through overt or through stealth and possibly will come in different names.

Alternatively, this means another round of poker bluffing chatters.

Gold’s Correlation with Various Asset Classes

Lastly gold’s correlations with asset markets have been vacillating.

For most of the past years, the inflation tide has been manifested with gold’s leading the way relative to the equities as represented by the US S&P 500.

But this relationship appears on the rocks. During parts of 2011 (red ellipses), prices of gold and US equity markets parted ways. This came coincident to the end of QE 2.0 and the policy dithering by the US Federal Reserve. Then, gold prices rose as US stocks fell. This divergence was finally resolved when central bankers abroad reintroduced their versions of QE.

However, such divergence—but on an opposite path where gold has been in consolidation gold while the US S&P continues to ascend—seems to have remerged anew today.

My guess is that gold will close this anomalous divergence by heading higher.

My impression is that the gold appears to partly mirror the actions of the euro.

While the gold-Euro correlations has been loose over the past 3 years, where the upward streak of gold’s trend came amidst the sharp gyrations of the euro, recently gold seems to be moving in sympathy along with the euro’s decline.

Correlation should not be read as causation though. It would be mistake to think of gold as plainly anti-US dollar trade.

In reality, gold is the nemesis of fiat or political money, whether the US dollar, European euro, China’s yuan, Japanese yen, British pound or the Philippine Peso.

The bottom line is inflationism will continue to breath life into gold’s bullmarket, current volatility notwithstanding.

Betting against gold, says Professor Gary North, is the same as betting on governments. He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history.

The ‘New’ Old Idea: Central Banking Ponzi Financing Schemes

From the Wall Street Journal,

Even as the European banking crisis shows signs of easing, lenders across the Continent are engaging in a variety of maneuvers to avoid, or at least delay, coming to terms with potential problems lurking on their books.

Some banks are concocting unorthodox structures designed to improve all-important capital ratios, without raising new capital or moving unwanted assets off their balance sheets. Others are engaging in complex transactions with struggling customers to help temporarily avoid loan defaults—but possibly exposing the lenders to future problems.

Banks now have greater flexibility to pursue such tactics because of the roughly €1 trillion ($1.33 trillion) of cheap three-year loans that the European Central Bank recently handed out to at least 800 lenders. The program, known as the Long-Term Refinancing Operation, or LTRO, is widely credited with averting a possible catastrophe as banks struggled to pay off their maturing debts.

But by granting the new lease on life, the ECB program also has enabled the industry to delay its cleanup process, according to some bankers, investors and other experts.

The impact of the current inflationist policies in the Eurozone has been to:

-shield bankers from adapting reforms,

-promote the moral hazard of accounting or book keeping prestidigitation,

-become heavily dependent government’s sustained rescue efforts and

-rely on continued asset inflation by the ECB in order to keep the banking sector’s balance sheets afloat. The late neo-Keynesian Hyman Minsky would have labelled this Ponzi financing.

Here is a very relevant quote from fund manager David R. Kotok (bold emphasis mine)

“The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Holmes, Sr. lived in the century before World War I. He preceded central banks like the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank. He didn’t know there would be an International Monetary Fund. In his time, he was a thinker, author, physician, poet. His son was the famous Supreme Court Justice.

Fast forward. The new idea is to take the government-institutional official sector coalition and empower it when there is a financial crisis. This approach is at work in the Eurozone, the UK, the US, and a growing number of other venues. The new idea is to crush the private sector and to keep the official sector in the game for a prolonged period.

This “idea shift” is a distinguishing feature of the recent crisis period that started in 2007-2008. The old idea was that the official sector would intervene, rebalance the system, and then exit. The old idea was to get the private sector back in the game quickly. The old idea was to recover the official money and then let the market resume its functions of pricing and clearing and providing capital.

The old idea is dead.

So Ponzi schemes from central banking have been the “new” idea. Well, it’s really nothing new. Simply ask the incumbent governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Gideon Gono.

Today’s inflationism by developed nations has signified as a modified digital version of an ‘age old’ practice by political authorities.

Quote of the Day: Troubles of Mild inflation

The Wall Street Journal’s Notable & Quotable section presented the great Henry Hazlitt’s excerpt on the “troubles of even a mild inflation”.

Here is the complete quote from Hazlitt’s must read classic Economics in One Lesson (p.150-51) [bold emphasis mine]

So inflation turns out to be merely one more example of our central lesson. It may indeed bring benefits for a short time to favored groups, but only at the expense of others. And in the long run it brings disastrous consequences to the whole community. Even a relatively mild inflation distorts the structure of production. It leads to the overexpansion of some industries at the expense of others. This involves a misapplication and waste of capital. When the inflation collapses, or is brought to a halt, the misdirected capital investment—whether in the form of machines, factories, or office buildings—cannot yield an adequate return and loses the greater part of its value.

Nor is it possible to bring inflation to a smooth and gentle stop, and so avert a subsequent depression. It is not even possible to halt an inflation, once embarked upon, at some preconceived point, or when prices have achieved a previously-agreed-upon level; for both political and economic forces will have got out of hand. You cannot make an argument for a 25 percent advance in prices by inflation without someone’s contending that the argument is twice as good for an advance of 50 percent, and someone else’s adding that it is four times as good for an advance of 100 percent. The political pressure groups that have benefited from the inflation will insist upon its continuance.

It is impossible, moreover, to control the value of money under inflation. For, as we have seen, the causation is never a merely mechanical one. You cannot, for example, say in advance that a 100 percent increase in the quantity of money will mean a 50 percent fall in the value of the monetary unit. The value of money, as we have seen, depends upon the subjective valuations of the people who hold it. And those valuations do not depend solely on the quantity of it that each person holds. They depend also on the quality of the money.

This only goes to show why policies of inflationism has hardly been about economics, but mostly about advancing the interests of some politically favored groups. Such that once embarked upon, like narcotic addiction, inflationism becomes hard to stop as this would reverse the gains made from the early infusions.

Importantly, the consequent economic and financial system built around such policies becomes entirely dependent, not only on the sustenance, but on accelerated inflationism.

Mr. Hazlitt’s warning seems in full motion as central banks persistently ramps on their balance sheets.

chart from Cumber.com

And like narcotics addition, the long term outcome would not be pleasant.

Entrepreneurship: The Gap Between Theories and Practice

Kate Maxewell of the Kauffman Foundation writing at the Growthology blog observes of the chasm between entrepreneurial literatures and entrepreneurs in action (bold emphasis mine)

In my reading of the entrepreneurship literature I have been struck by the large gap between entrepreneurs and people who study entrepreneurship. The group of people who self select into entrepreneurship is almost entirely disjoint from the group of people who self select to study it. Such a gap exists in other fields to greater and lesser degrees. Sociologists, for instance, study phenomenon in which they are clearly participants whereas political scientists are rarely career politicians but are often actors in political systems.

But in the case of entrepreneurship the gap is cause for concern. My sense is that all too often those studying entrepreneurship don’t understand, even through exposure, the messy process of creating a business, nor, due to selection effects, are they naturally inclined to think like an entrepreneur might. At Kauffman, we have had multiple scholars say to us that they’ve found that talking to entrepreneurs is useful in their research.

This should be obvious, but it’s not. The result is research that can lack grounding, perspective and credibility. As a researcher I understand the natural impulse to keep things neatly ordered so as to create elegant papers and clear conclusions. But the fact of entrepreneurship is that it is anything but pretty or neat. More importantly, the research product resulting from such a disconnect can present a distorted view of the entrepreneurial process that may actually hinder our understanding of it. Such ill-informed research can then go on to form the basis of a policy directed at entrepreneurs – without ever having involved or understood them.

Like investing in markets, theories and practice are often detached. Yet many cling to the barnacle of academic mirages that perceives entrepreneurship as rigorous methodological science.

And as I earlier pointed out entrepreneurial traits are not acquired from books or from the academia and don’t require ‘new attitudes’. Instead they emanate from observation, knowledge, the willingness to learn from failure, and most importantly, the desire to undertake activities that profits from risk ventures through servicing or producing for the consumers.

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

In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur in seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy. The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.

In short, as part of human action entrepreneurship represents more a work of art—which attempts to satisfy the preferences and value scales of consumers—than of science.

Video: "Ideas Having Sex" A Conversation with Matt Ridley and John Tierney

(hat tip Greg Ransom)