Jay Taylor: Turning Hard Times Into Good Times

3/27/2012: Who is Demolishing America’s Middle Class?

What Inflation Could Look Like in 2014

By Jeff Clark, Senior Precious Metals Analyst

Most economists, especially those from the mainstream, will tell you that inflation is widely expected to remain benign for the foreseeable future. And for those who think it could climb higher, it's usually because they think it should be higher. History has a message for them: be careful what you wish for.

There are plenty of examples in history showing that once inflation takes hold, it can quickly spiral out of control. That's the danger we face now. Here's what I mean…

A recent article about sudden inflation by Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow of economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and a best-selling author, provides some examples from the past century of US inflation that was at first subdued but then abruptly rocketed to alarming levels. I put them into a chart so you could see how quickly inflation rose within just two years from "benign" levels. I then made some projections for us today based on these historical examples.

(Click on image to enlarge)

According to Shlaes, US inflation was 1% in 1915 (based on an earlier version of the CPI-U). Over just two years, it hit 17%. As she states, it happened because the Treasury "spent like crazy on the war, creating money to pay for it…"

Given the fact that our spending and money-printing is now out of control, I projected what our inflation rate would be if we matched the inflation rates of these time periods. The first striped bar to the right represents what the CPI would register if we matched the 1915-1917 rise. Inflation would hit 19% by 2014. (Yes, the CPI has been tinkered with many times, but this is at least what "unofficial" or "authentic" inflation would register.) (more)

10 Reasons Why The Reign Of The Dollar As The World Reserve Currency Is About To Come To An End

The Economic Collapse
March 26th, 2012

The U.S. dollar has probably been the closest thing to a true global currency that the world has ever seen. For decades, the use of the U.S. dollar has been absolutely dominant in international trade. This has had tremendous benefits for the U.S. financial system and for U.S. consumers, and it has given the U.S. government tremendous power and influence around the globe. Today, more than 60 percent of all foreign currency reserves in the world are in U.S. dollars. But there are big changes on the horizon. The mainstream media in the United States has been strangely silent about this, but some of the biggest economies on earth have been making agreements with each other to move away from using the U.S. dollar in international trade. There are also some oil producing nations which have begun selling oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, which is a major threat to the petrodollar systemwhich has been in place for nearly four decades. And big international institutions such as the UN and the IMF have even been issuing official reports about the need to move away form the U.S. dollar and toward a new global reserve currency. So the reign of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency is definitely being threatened, and the coming shift in international trade is going to have massive implications for the U.S. economy.

A lot of this is being fueled by China. China has the second largest economy on the face of the earth, and the size of the Chinese economy is projected to pass the size of the U.S. economy by 2016. In fact, one economist is even projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

So China is sitting there and wondering why the U.S. dollar should continue to be so preeminent if the Chinese economy is about to become the number one economy on the planet.

Over the past few years, China and other emerging powers such as Russia have been been quietly making agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar in international trade. The supremacy of the U.S. dollar is not nearly as solid as most Americans believe that it is.

As the U.S. economy continues to fade, it is going to be really hard to argue that the U.S. dollar should continue to function as the primary reserve currency of the world. Things are rapidly changing, and most Americans have no idea where these trends are taking us.

The following are 10 reasons why the reign of the dollar as the world reserve currency is about to come to an end….

READ MORE

Martin Armstrong: Gold 17.2 Day Decline

Gold
17.2 Day Decline



click here to read in pdf

Silver Update : Rare Earths

Bill Gross: Investment Outlook (April 2012)

The Great Escape:
Deliv­er­ing in a Delev­er­ing World

by William H. Gross, PIMCO

April 2012

• When inter­est rates can­not be dra­mat­i­cally low­ered fur­ther or risk spreads sig­nif­i­cantly com­pressed, the momen­tum begins to shift, not nec­es­sar­ily sud­denly, but grad­u­ally – yields mov­ing mildly higher and spreads sta­bi­liz­ing or mov­ing slightly wider.
• In such a mildly reflat­ing world, unless you want to earn an inflation-adjusted return of minus 2%-3% as offered by Trea­sury bills, then you must take risk in some form.
• We favor high qual­ity, shorter dura­tion and inflation-protected bonds; div­i­dend pay­ing stocks with a pref­er­ence for devel­op­ing over devel­oped mar­kets; and inflation-sensitive, supply-constrained com­mod­ity products.

About six months ago, I only half in jest told Mohamed that my tomb­stone would read, “Bill Gross, RIP, He didn’t own ‘Trea­suries’.” Now, of course, the days are get­ting longer and as they say in golf, it is bet­ter to be above – as opposed to below – the grass. And it is bet­ter as well, to be deliv­er­ing alpha as opposed to delev­er­ing in the bond mar­ket or global econ­omy. The best way to visu­al­ize suc­cess­ful deliv­er­ing is to rec­og­nize that investors are locked up in a finan­cially repres­sive envi­ron­ment that reduces future returns for all finan­cial assets. Break­ing out of that “jail” is what I call the Great Escape, and what I hope to explain in the next few pages.

The term delev­er­ing implies a period of prior lever­age, and lever­age there has been. Whether you date it from the begin­ning of frac­tional reserve and cen­tral bank­ing in the early 20th cen­tury, the debase­ment of gold in the 1930s, or the ini­ti­a­tion of Bret­ton Woods and the coör­di­nated dol­lar and gold stan­dard that fol­lowed for nearly three decades after WWII, the trend towards finan­cial lever­age has been ever upward. The aban­don­ment of gold and embrace­ment of dol­lar based credit by Nixon in the early 1970s was cer­tainly a lever­ag­ing land­mark as was the dereg­u­la­tion of Glass-Steagall by a Demo­c­ra­tic Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion in the late 1990s, and else­where glob­ally. And almost always, the pri­vate sec­tor was more than will­ing to play the game, invent­ing new forms of credit, loosely known as deriv­a­tives, which avoided the con­cept of con­ser­v­a­tive reserve bank­ing alto­gether. Although there were acci­dents along the way such as the S&L cri­sis, Con­ti­nen­tal Bank, LTCM, Mex­ico, Asia in the late 1990s, the Dot-coms, and ulti­mately global sub­prime own­er­ship, finan­cial insti­tu­tions and mar­ket par­tic­i­pants learned that pol­i­cy­mak­ers would sup­port the sys­tem, and most indi­vid­ual par­tic­i­pants, by extend­ing credit, low­er­ing inter­est rates, expand­ing deficits, and dereg­u­lat­ing in order to keep economies tick­ing. Impor­tantly, this com­bined fis­cal and mon­e­tary lever­age pro­duced out­sized returns that exceeded the abil­ity of real economies to cre­ate wealth. Stocks for the Long Run was the almost uni­ver­sally accepted mantra, but it was really a period – for most of the last half cen­tury – of “Finan­cial Assets for the Long Run” – and your house was included by the way in that cat­e­gory of finan­cial assets even though it was just a pile of sticks and stones. If it always went up in price and you could bor­row against it, it was a finan­cial asset. Secu­ri­ti­za­tion ruled supreme, if not subprime.

As nom­i­nal and real inter­est rates came down, down, down and credit spreads were com­pressed through pol­icy sup­port and secu­ri­ti­za­tion, then asset prices mag­i­cally ascended. PE ratios rose, bond prices for 30-year Trea­suries dou­bled, real estate thrived, and any­thing that could be lev­ered did well because the global econ­omy and its finan­cial mar­kets were being lev­ered and lev­ered consistently.

And then sud­denly in 2008, it stopped and reversed. Lever­age appeared to reach its lim­its with sub­primes, and then with banks and invest­ment banks, and then with coun­tries them­selves. The game as we all have known it appears to be over, or at least sub­stan­tially changed – mov­ing for the moment from pri­vate to pub­lic bal­ance sheets, but even there fac­ing investor and polit­i­cal lim­its. Actu­ally global finan­cial mar­kets are only selec­tively delev­er­ing. What delev­er­ing there is, is most vis­i­ble with house­hold bal­ance sheets in the U.S. and Euroland periph­eral sov­er­eigns like Greece. The delev­er­ing is also rel­a­tively hid­den in the recap­i­tal­iza­tion of banks and their looka­likes. Increas­ing cap­i­tal, in addi­tion to hair­cut­ting and defaults are a form of delever­ag­ing that is long term healthy, if short term growth restric­tive. On the whole, how­ever, because of mas­sive QEs and LTROS in the tril­lions of dol­lars, our credit based, lever­age depen­dent finan­cial sys­tem is actu­ally lever­age expand­ing, although only mildly and sys­tem­i­cally less threat­en­ing than before, at least from the stand­point of a growth rate. The total amount of debt how­ever is daunt­ing and con­tin­ued credit expan­sion will pro­duce accel­er­at­ing global infla­tion and slower growth in PIMCO’s most likely outcome.

How do we deliver in this New Nor­mal world that levers much more slowly in total, and can delever sharply in selec­tive sec­tors and coun­tries? Look at it this way rather sim­plis­ti­cally. Dur­ing the Great Lever­ag­ing of the past 30 years, it was finan­cial assets with their expected future cash flows that did the best. The longer the stream of future cash flows and the riskier/more lev­ered those flows, then the bet­ter they did. That is because, as I’ve just his­tor­i­cally out­lined, future cash flows are dis­counted by an inter­est rate and a risk spread, and as yields came down and spreads com­pressed, the greater return came from the longest and most lev­ered assets. This was a world not of yield, but of total return, where price and yield formed the returns that exceeded the abil­ity of global economies to con­sis­tently repli­cate them. Finan­cial assets rel­a­tive to real assets out­per­form in such a world as wealth is brought for­ward and stolen from future years if real growth can­not repli­cate his­tor­i­cal total returns.

To put it even more sim­ply, finan­cial assets with long inter­est rate and spread dura­tions were win­ners: long matu­rity bonds, stocks, real estate with rental streams and cap rates that could be com­pressed. Com­modi­ties were on the rel­a­tive los­ing end although infla­tion took them up as well. That’s not to say that an oil com­pany with reserves in the ground didn’t do well, but the oil for imme­di­ate deliv­ery that couldn’t ben­e­fit from an expan­sion of P/Es and a com­pres­sion of risk spreads – well, not so well. And so com­modi­ties lagged finan­cial asset returns. Our num­bers show 1, 5 and 20-year his­to­ries of finan­cial assets out­per­form­ing com­modi­ties by 15% for the most recent 12 months and 2% annu­ally for the past 20 years.

This out­per­for­mance by finan­cial as opposed to real assets is a result of the long jour­ney and ulti­mate des­ti­na­tion of credit expan­sion that I’ve just out­lined, result­ing in neg­a­tive real inter­est rates and nar­row credit and equity risk pre­mi­ums; a state of finan­cial repres­sion as it has come to be known, that promises to be with us for years to come. It reminds me of an old movie star­ing Steve McQueen called The Great Escape where Amer­i­can pris­on­ers of war were con­fined to a POW camp inside Ger­many in 1943. The liv­ing con­di­tions were OK, much like today’s finan­cial mar­kets, but cer­tainly not what they were used to on the other side of the lines so to speak. Yet it was their duty as British and Amer­i­can offi­cers to try to escape and get back to the old nor­mal. They inge­niously dug escape tun­nels and even­tu­ally escaped. It was a real life story in addi­tion to its Hol­ly­wood fla­vor. Sim­i­larly though it is your duty to try to escape today’s repres­sion. Your liv­ing con­di­tions are OK for now – the food and in this case the returns are good – but they aren’t enough to get you what you need to cover lia­bil­i­ties. You need to think of an escape route that gets you back home yet at the same time doesn’t get you killed in the process. You need a Great Escape to deliver in this finan­cial repres­sive world.

What hap­pens when we flip the sce­nario or per­haps reach the point at which inter­est rates can­not be dra­mat­i­cally low­ered fur­ther or risk spreads sig­nif­i­cantly com­pressed? The momen­tum we would sug­gest begins to shift: not nec­es­sar­ily sud­denly or swiftly as fat­ter tail bimodal dis­tri­b­u­tions might warn, but grad­u­ally – yields mov­ing mildly higher, spreads sta­bi­liz­ing or mov­ing slightly wider. In such a mildly reflat­ing world where infla­tion itself remains above 2% and in most cases moves higher, deliv­er­ing double-digit or even 7–8% total returns from bonds, stocks and real estate becomes prob­lem­atic and cer­tainly much more dif­fi­cult. Real growth as opposed to finan­cial wiz­ardry becomes pre­dom­i­nant, yet that growth is stressed by exces­sive fis­cal deficits and high debt/GDP lev­els. Com­modi­ties and real assets become ascen­dant, cer­tainly in rel­a­tive terms, as we by neces­sity delever or lever less. As well, finan­cial assets can­not be ele­vated by zero based inter­est rate or other tried but now tired pol­icy maneu­vers that bring future wealth for­ward. Cur­rent prices in other words have squeezed all of the risk and inter­est rate pre­mi­ums from future cash flows, and now finan­cial mar­kets are left with real growth, which itself expe­ri­ences a slower new nor­mal because of less finan­cial leverage.

That is not to say that infla­tion can­not con­tinue to ele­vate finan­cial assets which can adjust to infla­tion over time – stocks being the prime exam­ple. They can, and there will be rel­a­tive win­ners in this con­text, but the abil­ity of an investor to earn returns well in excess of infla­tion or well in excess of nom­i­nal GDP is lim­ited. Total return as a super­charged bond strat­egy is fad­ing. Stocks with a 6.6% real Jeremy Siegel con­stant are fad­ing. Lev­ered hedge strate­gies based on spread and yield com­pres­sion are fad­ing. As we delever, it will be hard to deliver what you have been used to.

Still there is a place for all stan­dard asset classes even though betas will be lower. Should you desert bonds sim­ply because they may return 4% as opposed to 10%? I hope not. PIMCO’s poten­tial alpha gen­er­a­tion and the sta­bil­ity of bonds remain crit­i­cal com­po­nents of an invest­ment portfolio.

In sum­mary, what has the poten­tial to deliver the most return with the least amount of risk and high­est infor­ma­tion ratios? Log­i­cally, (1) Real as opposed to finan­cial assets – com­modi­ties, land, build­ings, machines, and knowl­edge inher­ent in an edu­cated labor force. (2) Finan­cial assets with shorter spread and inter­est rate dura­tions because they are more defen­sive. (3) Finan­cial assets for enti­ties with rel­a­tively strong bal­ance sheets that are exposed to higher real growth, for which devel­op­ing vs. devel­oped nations should dom­i­nate. (4) Finan­cial or real assets that ben­e­fit from favor­able pol­icy thrusts from both mon­e­tary and fis­cal author­i­ties. (5) Finan­cial or real assets which are not bur­dened by exces­sive debt and sub­ject to future haircuts.

In plain speak –

For bond mar­kets: favor higher qual­ity, shorter dura­tion and infla­tion pro­tected assets.

For stocks: favor devel­op­ing vs. devel­oped. Favor shorter dura­tions here too, which means con­sis­tent div­i­dend pay­ing as opposed to growth stocks.

For com­modi­ties: favor infla­tion sen­si­tive, sup­ply con­strained products.

And for all asset cat­e­gories, be wary of lev­ered hedge strate­gies that promise double-digit returns that are dif­fi­cult in a delev­er­ing world.

With regard to all of these broad asset cat­e­gories, an investor in finan­cial mar­kets should not go too far on this defen­sive, as opposed to offen­sively ori­ented sce­nario. Unless you want to earn an infla­tion adjusted return of minus 2–3% as offered by Trea­sury bills, then you must take risk in some form. You must try to max­i­mize risk adjusted carry – what we call “safe spread.”

“Safe carry” is an essen­tial ele­ment of cap­i­tal­ism – that is investors earn­ing some­thing more than a Trea­sury bill. If and when we can­not, then the sys­tem implodes – espe­cially one with exces­sive lever­age. Paul Vol­cker suc­cess­fully redi­rected the U.S. econ­omy from 1979–1981 dur­ing which investors earned less return than a Trea­sury bill, but that could only go on for sev­eral years and occurred in a much less lev­ered finan­cial sys­tem. Vol­cker had it eas­ier than Bernanke/King/Draghi have it today. Is a sys­temic implo­sion still pos­si­ble in 2012 as opposed to 2008? It is, but we will likely face much more mon­e­tary and credit infla­tion before the bal­loon pops. Until then, you should bud­get for “safe carry” to help pay your bills. The bunker port­fo­lio lies fur­ther ahead.

Two addi­tional con­sid­er­a­tions. In a highly lev­ered world, grad­ual rever­sals are not nec­es­sar­ily the high prob­a­ble out­come that a nor­mal bell-shaped curve would sug­gest. Pol­icy mis­takes – too much money cre­ation, too much fis­cal belt-tightening, geopo­lit­i­cal con­flicts and war, geopo­lit­i­cal dis­agree­ments and dis­in­te­gra­tion of mon­e­tary and fis­cal unions – all of these and more lead to poten­tial bimodal dis­tri­b­u­tions – fat left and right tail out­comes that can inflate or deflate asset mar­kets and real eco­nomic growth. If you are a ratio­nal investor you should con­sider hedg­ing our most prob­a­ble inflationary/low growth out­come – what we call a “C-“ sce­nario – by buy­ing hedges for fat­ter tailed pos­si­bil­i­ties. It will cost you some­thing – and hedg­ing in a low return world is harder to buy than when the cot­ton is high and the liv­ing is easy. But you should do it in amounts that hedge against prin­ci­pal down­sides and allow for prin­ci­pal upsides in bimodal out­comes, the lat­ter per­haps being epit­o­mized by equity mar­kets 10–15% returns in the first 80 days of 2012.

And sec­ondly, be mind­ful of invest­ment man­age­ment expenses. Whoops, I’m not sup­posed to say that, but I will. Be sure you’re get­ting value for your expense dol­lars. We of course – per­haps like many other firms would say, “We’re Num­ber One.” Not always, not for me in the sum­mer of 2011, but over the past 1, 5, 10, 25 years? Yes, we are cer­tainly a #1 seed – with aspi­ra­tions as always to be your #1 Champion.

William H. Gross
Man­ag­ing Director

Chart of the Day - VF Corp (VFC)

The "Chart of the Day" is VF Corp (VFC), which showed up on Monday's Barchart "All Time High" list. VF Corp on Monday rallied to a new all-time high of $151.82 and closed up 2.96%. TrendSpotter has been Long since Feb 8 at $139.63. VF Corp management on March 8 said that the company should exceed its 10% revenue growth target in 2012 and that the company expects its e-commerce business to triple in size from 2010 by 2015. VF Corp, with a market cap of $16 billion, sells branded jeanswear, intimate apparel, children's playwear, occupational apparel, knitwear and other apparel. Brands include Lee, Wrangler, Riders, Rustler, Vanity Fair, Vassarette, Bestform, Lily of France, Lee Sport, Healthtex, JanSport, Eastpak, Red Kap and The North Face.