• 545 days Will The ECB Continue To Hike Rates?
  • 546 days Forbes: Aramco Remains Largest Company In The Middle East
  • 547 days Caltech Scientists Succesfully Beam Back Solar Power From Space
  • 947 days Could Crypto Overtake Traditional Investment?
  • 952 days Americans Still Quitting Jobs At Record Pace
  • 954 days FinTech Startups Tapping VC Money for ‘Immigrant Banking’
  • 957 days Is The Dollar Too Strong?
  • 957 days Big Tech Disappoints Investors on Earnings Calls
  • 958 days Fear And Celebration On Twitter as Musk Takes The Reins
  • 960 days China Is Quietly Trying To Distance Itself From Russia
  • 960 days Tech and Internet Giants’ Earnings In Focus After Netflix’s Stinker
  • 964 days Crypto Investors Won Big In 2021
  • 964 days The ‘Metaverse’ Economy Could be Worth $13 Trillion By 2030
  • 965 days Food Prices Are Skyrocketing As Putin’s War Persists
  • 967 days Pentagon Resignations Illustrate Our ‘Commercial’ Defense Dilemma
  • 968 days US Banks Shrug off Nearly $15 Billion In Russian Write-Offs
  • 971 days Cannabis Stocks in Holding Pattern Despite Positive Momentum
  • 972 days Is Musk A Bastion Of Free Speech Or Will His Absolutist Stance Backfire?
  • 972 days Two ETFs That Could Hedge Against Extreme Market Volatility
  • 974 days Are NFTs About To Take Over Gaming?
  1. Home
  2. Markets
  3. Other

As The World Rolls Over

Brutal news is pouring in from pretty much everywhere.

US retail sales are flat and wholesale prices are falling. Big retail chains are missing on earnings and seeing their shares plunge.

Chinese nonperforming loans are soaring while imports, car sales and steel production are way down.

Oil is flirting with multi-year lows as tankers wander the ocean with nowhere to offload their crude. Other commodities like aluminum and copper are back at 2009 levels and still falling.

A general strike has paralyzed Greece and a far-left coalition is taking power in Portugal. Middle Eastern refugees keep pouring into Europe and no one seems to know where to put them. Eurozone growth is sliding back towards zero and the once-bulletproof Scandinavian countries are now the "sick men" of the region.

Argentine inflation is 35%, Brazil's political/economic crisis is threatening to topple the government, and a giant copper mine just dumped millions of gallons of toxic sludge on some Brazilian villages.

Equities in Asia, Europe and the US are getting whacked as the sheer volume of bad news swamps the hope that European and Chinese QE programs will keep the asset price party going.

The world, in short, is rolling over. Debt monetization on the scale so far attempted has failed to stop the implosion of tens of trillions of dollars of bad paper, growth has stalled and geopolitics has begun to resemble the parking lot of a British soccer match, with scary people doing random, incomprehensibly violent things and no generally recognized authority able to impose control. Elections are now fearful rather than hopeful prospects and anti-status quo parties in France, Britain, Italy and Spain have become serious contenders.

And none of this is a surprise. It's just what you get when you put monetary printing presses in the hands of governments and/or big banks. That is, soaring debt, increasing corruption and inequality as newly-created currency flows to the already-rich, political instability as the have-nots of the world decide they've got nothing to lose, and uncomprehending paralysis among sitting leaders who have only ever known easy money.

It's time for us all to go back and read Friedrich Hayek's Road To Serfdom and to pay renewed attention to the relative handful of people who got it right, such as Ludwig von Mises...

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

...Hyman Minsky...

Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits.

... and of course Ron Paul:

You cannot print money forever and deceive the markets forever. Eventually, the markets will rule and it's only a question of when that will happen. Gold is your defense against the policies of the Fed.

 

Back to homepage

Leave a comment

Leave a comment