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.

Where The Fugawi?

The flightless Fugawi bird lives in the tall grass of the African savannahs. Unfortunately, this bird is not as tall as the grass that surrounds it, hence its mournful call. The mavens of Wall Street seem to share the bird’s frustration as they focus on fractional changes in economic data, in the hope that they will foreshadow a return to the peaceful, sunlit uplands of free and flowing money.

Alas, it is not to be. We are fated to do battle with the multi-headed Scylla of inflation and, if we win, it is only to be sucked into Charybdis’ whirlpool of depression. Massive increases in government debt have, inevitably, increased private sector savings and pulled consumption forward in time. If these increases continue, Scylla will dine well as hyperinflation ruins the dollar. If they do not, consumption will, of necessity, fall as the credit impulse reverses. Charybdis’ whirlpool is a fine metaphor for the negative feedback cycle that will result from bankruptcies and defaults. If I do say so myself.

Jeff Gundlach Interview

Jeffrey Gundlach is the billionaire founder and CEO of DoubleLine, a Los Angeles based investment boutique mainly specializing in bonds, ranks among America’s highest-profile investors. His bold calls and correct prediction of the 2007 housing crash have earned him a solid reputation. A recent interview is most interesting in that he clearly, if intuitively, understands the instability inherent in the Fed’s attempts to control the economy by hindsight.

The next shock is that we’re having to put in a big overreaction to the inflation problem which we created from our initial reaction of excess stimulus. My guess is that we will end up creating momentum that’s more deflationary than a lot of people believe is even possible.

Of course he is very probably correct. A deflationary economic collapse is very likely to follow the inflationary phase. So long as the Fed is willing to make massive interventions in the economy without understanding the dynamics of control, we are utterly screwed. There comes to mind a well-known class of control systems known as bang-bang control.

Dummies?

When seeming professionals propose ideas that are internally contradictory I really start to question professionalism in the financial services industry.

The idea proposed was that since inflation was caused by limited supply, which the Fed cannot control, the Fed would simply raise its inflation target and resume easy money to resume growth, driving stocks to infinity and beyond.

Excuse me, but doesn’t limited supply itself limit growth?

Since when has the Fed ever been able to control supply? The money printers go b-r-r-r but there are no gas wells or potash mines at the Fed building. The Fed’s manipulations are intended to control demand.

And by the way, how is the economy to grow when businesses wanting to expand cannot hire the employees that they need?

The bubble is still with us.

Pivot – To What?

It seems as if every financial writer has no more important subject to opine upon than the exact date of the Fed “pivot,” when the Fed will be “forced to” resume supporting wild speculation.

Such opinions may be successful clickbait, but any such pivot is economically meaningless. Just look at the last employment report. The number of jobs increased significantly, but the number of employed persons hardly moved. People are taking on more jobs in order to, as President Bush put it, “put food on their family.” This can only go so far, for obvious reasons, and it means there are insurmountable limits on the economy’s ability to grow. Production equals labor hours times productivity. Productivity is slow and hard to improve, so not any help. Labor hours are pretty close to the wall, as shown by the average workweek which has flatlined at 34.6 (FRED). This all means that the economy cannot grow in response to stimulus. Easy money and/or a return to QE will simply result in more inflation, which will do as much or more damage to the economy and corporate profitability than higher interest rates. I cannot believe that the Fed is unaware of this reality. There is no free lunch. Pain is coming, regardless of what the Fed may or may not do. Look back at the Great Depression when the Fed thrashed around, trying everything because nothing “worked.”

Things Can’t Get Any Worse

The title summarizes the line being put out by Wall Street and amplified by the financial press. The logic is that it is then time to buy stocks. And it is working, stock indexes are rallying strongly as retail inflows into mutual funds and individual stocks have resumed. In turn, hedge funds and CTAs must follow, to say nothing of the resumption of buybacks as earnings season comes to an end.

Of course, things can and will get worse. The impact of input costs and other supply constraints such as war, drought and ill-advised climate change politics have hardly been felt yet in retail prices, even though they have risen substantially. Energy prices continue to be driven higher by the same bad science and emotional political campaigning. Then of course there is the labor shortage, caused by more bad government decisions partly around the pandemic, but mostly about socialist “progressive” politics.

The excess demand for labor demonstrated by the chart above means that the economy will have to slow considerably before pressure on labor costs is eased. But while rising labor costs impact inflation, they don’t mean that personal income is keeping up with inflation as food and energy prices accelerate away.

All of the above mean that the current recession will have a long way to go before inflation is reduced. Once the genie is out of the bottle, she doesn’t go back in willingly, as Paul Volcker’s efforts to contain her in the 1980s show.

Supposedly the Fed will “pivot” back to easy money (well, even easier, money is still easy with deeply negative real rates) as soon as this third quarter. Well, maybe it will – the Fed’s politically driven monetization of government debt is what has brought us here, after all. But that will bring about true hyperinflation and I doubt that Powell wants to go down in history as the Fed chairman who put politics before sound economics to complete his ruination of the world economy. I say the world economy because central bankers move in unison to avoid individual criticism.

Labor chart thanks to zero hedge, Personal Income chart thanks to Donald Swain, CFI CPA.

Kumquat?

From ECRI’s Lakshman Achuthan:

WH saying no recession & Sec Yellen saying it’s a “transition” reminds us of Carter admin economist Alfred Kahn who, when forbidden to mention “recession,” used the word “banana” instead. Banana growers protested, so he switched to “kumquat.” What’s the fruit for recession today?

Recession

In my view, it is highly likely that the US economy has already entered a recession. I’m using ECRI’s definition of recession:

A recession is a self-reinforcing downturn in economic activity, when a drop in spending leads to cutbacks in production and thus jobs, triggering a loss of income that spreads across the country and from industry to industry, hurting sales and in turn feeding back into a further drop in production – in effect a vicious cycle.

The big question is what happens to inflation. And that largely depends on the Fed. The government will continue on its path of reckless spending, that is a given. Anything that might buy votes from the naive and foolish. The question is whether or not the Fed will return to its habit of monetizing the spending or not. Since the Fed does not understand the reasons for its inability to control inflation or employment, it could do anything. One can only wait and see,

Thanks A Lot

But we do have much, much more government surveillance and intrusion into our lives. And of course much more debt and government spending. Soon we won’t need a private sector at all.

The Return Of Goldilocks

Everywhere I look in the financial press, I see predictions of a Fed “pivot”, by which is meant the abandonment of inflation-fighting and the return to the lowering of interest rates and printing of money.

This pivot is to occur sometime in the fall, apparently. The economy will be in recession, which will cause the Fed to panic and return to bubble-blowing. Inflation will have magically disappeared, because recession. The result will be the return of the bull market, “To infinity and beyond”, I guess. Biden will be carried on Powell’s shoulders to the mid-terms, supermarket shelves will be overflowing with foods, gas will be back to the $2s, unemployment will have taught the working classes the folly of asking for higher wages….

Too good to be true, I fear. But we’ll see.