Scooter Speaks

Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, a couple of bubbles ago:

Pied Piper

We had a bit of selling yesterday after Janet Yellen threw cold water on the idea of insuring all deposits by executive order, but of course the dip is being bought overnight because… Actually the market is being led higher by the usual handful of “tech” stocks, in turn being led by Nvidia. This seller of video cards has had a good run from crypto, where the parallel computing power of the graphics chips can be effectively utilized. But it is winter in crypto land (yes, I know Bitcoin is running but it is lonely) so Nvidia needed a new story. Press releases followed mentioning AI (plausible) and quantum computing (not so much). Anyway the stock has taken off again, now on offer for a mere 25 times sales. Yippee.

Something’s Going To Break

From past experience, we can be pretty sure that the bear market doesn’t begin until the inverted yield curve returns to a positive slope. Usually this happens because of a major disruption in the financial markets. Here are some of the opportunities for breakage.

• The average 30-year mortgage rate, as of today, is 7.13% according to Bankrate.com. Housing affordability has dropped to what Redfin deputy chief economist Taylor Marr calls the “lowest level in history.”
• Office occupancy in major city centers is ranging from 40-60% as a result of WFH practices. Pressure on bricks-and-mortar retailers from online shopping continues to build. The overall US CMBS delinquency rate jumped 18 basis points in February to 3.12%. (The all-time high on this basis was 10.34% registered in July 2012. The COVID-19 high was 10.32% in June 2020.) . Giga-investor Blackstone just defaulted on $562 million of CMBS.
• CPI/PCE inflation continues. While energy prices continue to be contained by withdrawals from the SPR, labor prices continue to increase. Fed chair Powell says that his primary measure of inflation is core PCE less housing, which implies a heavy weight on labor costs when evaluating inflation.
• The Fed continues to raise short-term interest rates to reduce business activity and therefore reduce inflation. So far with little success. Financial markets are busily fighting the Fed’s attempts to tighten financial conditions. History says this does not end well.
• There’s a war on, into which black hole the US continues to pump money and armaments. These will need to be replaced at great cost. Defense spending will be increased. The big risk is of further escalation, which could include the use of nuclear weapons.
• The primary source of inflation is deficit spending by government. Half of the government’s debt has a maturity of less than five years. The Fed’s rate increases are quickly running up the government’s interest bill, which of course will increase the deficit – that’s how the black hole works. Interest is already nearly as large a budget item as defense spending.
• China’s recovery from its draconian COVID policies is limping badly after a small initial surge. In addition, the US is actively hampering the development of technology in China and relations are a historic lows. There is a significant risk of another war, this time over Taiwan, where TSMC is the crown jewel of semiconductor manufacturing. All this means that China is unlikely to be the source of cheap manufactures goods that have helped quell inflation for the last twenty years or so.
• The US stock markets remain highly overvalued and not investable as the flood of liquidity during the COVID era has supported speculation. The options market has grown to be larger than the equity market of which it is supposedly a derivative, leading to extreme gambling activities such as 0DTE options..

Get the idea?

Kumquat

Recession is here. The official dating will come later, much later. But the economy is slowing quickly. Commodity prices are falling due to lack of demand. Property – real estate – is slowing. China is struggling with Covid – and trying to infect the rest of the world with whatever variants they have incubated over the last couple of years. Europe is struggling with the Ukraine war and self-inflicted wounds from sanctions and immigration.

But equity markets don’t care. The S&P 500 looks to be making a bottom at a level that was the May bottom. The Dow seems to be heading for all time highs. Only the NDX seems to be close to a new low as some hypervalued “tech” stocks have been clobbered.

Not What You Think

I see numerous pieces observing that the NASDAQ 100 has lost 30% over the last year or so, True enough, but if you think the pain must be over, keep this in perspective. All of those gains were put in from mid October 2020 through late December 2021, about 15 months. And they were given up by October 2022, the NDX has flat-lined since. The 2009 lows are down 90% from here. Only 86% though if you take inflation since 2009 into account.

Disintegration

The world is disintegrating. Trust has been lost, both within countries and between countries. Without trust, economic relationships cannot operate.

China

China is a poor country, despite the glitz and glamor of its big cities and its showpiece infrastructure, with a per-capita annual GDP of about USD 11,000.

Chairman Xi presented his plan for world domination at the opening of the party congress. Not going to happen, sir. Your country is an economic and social house of cards that is in the process of collapsing. The housing market, investment of choice for the masses, is a bubble bursting and desperate local governments are even buying their own land use rights from themselves or one another because retail buyers have left the building. So to speak. Your Covid-zero policy has shaken the people’s faith in the benign CCP, while wreaking destruction on millions of small businesses. Unemployment is high and rising, college graduates cannot find jobs. Biden’s withdrawal of support for your semiconductor industry has condemned it to a bleak future without the production technology that your people cannot build. Export demand from the rest of the world is shrinking fast. Sir, your country is likely heading for a deep economic depression and social turmoil. This will further weaken China’s positioning for the world hegemony which you desire.

United States

In the USA, we live in a world now that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley would readily recognize. The state has commandeered the legacy media, as well as the new social media, to not only put out the “progressive” state’s version of reality but to identify, spy on, ostracize and  punish critics and dissenters.

President Biden, your “progressive” policies are not working. Democrat-run inner cities are being abandoned to crime and homelessness. Illegal immigrants are flooding in without any prospects for employment or training. You are continuing to feed the inflation which is mostly damaging the people you claim to represent. Your support for expansion of NATO triggered the invasion of Ukraine, with severe economic and social consequences.

You and your Democratic predecessors, notably Hillary Clinton, have created a deeply divided society, with those who have drunk the purple Kool-Aid and accept the state’s lies and propaganda on one side, and those with a more traditional view of reality on the other. Neither side trusts the other, respects the other’s views, or is willing to compromise. Both sides are preparing for more direct conflict as the sporadic clashes increase in frequency and severity. This is a recipe for a failing state with extremism on both sides. Negative economic consequences are to be expected.

Europe

Neither China nor Europe are democracies – by design. The architects of the European Union claimed that, since democracy had enabled Hitler, it could not be a part of the EU’s structure. As a result, bureaucrats who suffer no consequences for their failures and care little for the fate of the citizenry run the EU. Ursula van der Leyen is no less of an autocrat than Xi. Deep rifts have emerged as democratically elected governments have resisted the orders of the bureaucrats. These rifts are between rich north and poor south as well as conservative east and “progressive” west. It is only a matter of time before a second country leaves the EU, and that will spark a rush for the exits.

The coming winter is going to be hard, as the bureaucrats’ energy policy has been disastrous. Immigration policies have resulted in shocking increases in crime, with many countries reporting zones where the police dare not go in fear for their lives. Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” has left a legacy of irresponsible debt, as in the USA. As  interest rates increase, this is going to be a huge problem

Russia and Ukraine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has no winners. Regardless of the outcome, the invasion is an economic disaster for both of them. Their economies depend heavily on the export of commodities, such as food, energy and metals. The volumes of these commodities are large, and their absence are also a problem for the countries that have come to depend on them.

Conclusion

I could go on, but it is time to recognize that the future is not bright. Economies will get worse. Much worse. Be careful out there. Don’t focus on the narrative of the “Fed pivot.” The Fed is irrelevant.

Flippy

Shortage of labor + higher wages and benefits = Flippy 2 

PASADENA, Calif., Oct 4 (Reuters) – Fast-food French fries and onion rings are going high-tech, thanks to a company in Southern California. Miso Robotics Inc in Pasadena has started rolling out its Flippy 2 robot, which automates the process of deep frying potatoes, onions and other foods. A big robotic arm like those in auto plants – directed by cameras and artificial intelligence – takes frozen French fries and other foods out of a freezer, dips them into hot oil, then deposits the ready-to-serve product into a tray. Flippy 2 can cook several meals with different recipes simultaneously, reducing the need for catering staff and, says Miso, speed up order delivery at drive-through windows. “When an order comes in through the restaurant system, it automatically spits out the instructions to Flippy,” Miso Chief Executive Mike Bell said in an interview.” … It does it faster or more accurately, more reliably and happier than most humans do it,” Bell added.

Of course this is in addition to the original Flippy, which does burgers, etc.

Can the fully automated fast-food restaurant be far off? Ordering is handled by kiosks, cooking by Flippy. What’s next?

The Price Of Moderation

From my last blog post of 2020:

William Greider, in his book, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs The Country, reports Nixon (’69-’74) as saying: “We’ll take inflation if necessary, but we can’t take unemployment.” The nation eventually had to take both. Note that Fed Chair Powell has indicated a willingness to let inflation “run hot” to encourage economic growth. That’s what they thought in the 1960s, too.

Well, inflation is running hot. Too hot for comfort. Discretionary spending is falling rapidly as the cost of essential goods and services takes more of people’s income. Fed Chair Powell is raising interest rates in baby steps, presumably in an attempt to quell inflation without slowing the economy significantly. People seem to think that raising rates to 2 1/2 percent will achieve this result, and are competing to time the “pivot” when the Fed returns to easy money. All I can say is good luck with that. History says that once inflation starts to surge – as it has – it is not easy to stop, as all kinds of feedback loops keep driving prices higher. Weakness now will only make the pain worse.

Perfect Storm Plus

The Perfect Storm began as an extratropical system, absorbed a tropical system (i.e., Hurricane Grace), and ended somewhat uneventfully as an unnamed hurricane. In the process it caused considerable damage on the US East Coast, and sank the fishing vessel Andrea Gail, with the loss of all hands.

We are now living through the early stages of the economic Perfect Storm Plus. The “Plus” is due to the near-simultaneous collapse of four great bubbles – China, Japan, North America and Europe. All are due to central bank monetization of government deficit spending, coupled with over-expansion of consumer and property credit. As Austrian economics teaches, there are only two paths out of these bubbles – stop the credit expansion and accept the resulting recession or depression, or continue to hyperinflation and the destruction of the currency.

The collapse of China began with the cascading failures of property developers, such as Evergrande, when President Xie’s “three red lines” reined in their ability to raise new debt. Then his idiotic “zero-Covid” policy drove a dagger into the beating heart of China’s economy, Shanghai. Then failures in a handful of smaller banks were mishandled by local governments which failed to honor deposit insurance guarantees, instead hiring toughs to beat up demonstrators. This has been followed by a wave of buyers refusing to continue mortgage payments on unfinished properties, especially where cash-starved developers have stopped working on them. A loss of confidence in the CCP government has resulted. It is attempting to stop the collapse with promises of more government funding, but so far success is elusive.

Japan is, so far, following the path of currency destruction. Even though Japan’s central bank now owns virtually all government debt and a very large chunk of the stock market, it continues its path of yield curve control – at zero. This has led to a downward slide in the yen as the US Fed has reacted to inflation, well a little bit anyway. Japan is short of natural resources and must import many commodities, especially energy as the Fukushima disaster has constrained the use of nuclear power. One could easily see a return of the yen to dollar valuations like the pre-1989 mid-200s, compared to 140 today and the 2012 high in the 70s. Needless to say, this would kick off serious inflation in Japan.

North America’s asset bubble, in property and financial assets of all kinds has finally been joined by rapidly inflating prices of consumable goods and services. While Alan Greenspan started the Fed’s monetization addiction around the turn of the century, rapid growth in outsourcing to China, India and numerous other countries kept consumer prices and wages under pressure. Finally the combination of supply chains ruptured by Covid and government payments that put large sums directly in the hands of consumers started to drive up prices, and also allowed large numbers of people to withdraw from the labor force. The coup de grace was Biden’s decision to follow the urging of the climate fanatics and cut off investment in future fossil fuel supply. Anecdotally, a farmer of 1,800 acres in Canada reports that his annual diesel fuel bill has doubled from $40K to $80K, and nitrogen fertilizer (made from natural gas) has gone from $270/tonne to $900/tonne. The Fed’s reaction has been a minor increase in interest rates. A recession is either already underway or set to begin anytime now.

Europe (including the UK) is a basket case. It shares many of the same problems as North America, but in addition climate fanatics and the Russian attack on the Ukraine have conspired to leave it desperately short of energy. EU inflation is running high (8.8%) but the real problem is yet to come. Germany continues to shut down its remaining nuclear plants, while Russia has just notified Germany that it is terminating natural gas deliveries. Germany lacks the terminals needed to import LNG.

A key component of the coming confluence of these storms is the climate mania. This mania is based on bad science, but socialist politicians and activists see an opportunity to disrupt the status quo.

The Digital Economy

Zuckerberg said that Meta (Facebook) will make significant losses in coming years as it invests heavily to build “the digital economy”. He implied that the excess expense would include subsidizing the virtual reality headgear needed to experience Meta’s virtual world(s).

We have something of a digital economy today. Crypto tokens, NFTs that include digital avatars and clothing for them, digital real estate and even digital yachts presumably navigating digital seas. Most of what you need in a digital world. Fortunately mundane things like food and water or fuel are not required, just a lot of imagination.

Will it make the kind of huge business needed to pay out those billions to be invested? I don’t know, I like my life real. Even it is dangerous and challenging. Zuck’s vision seems to me to be a sad imitation of reality.