Jim Rickards: The Fed is Triple Tightening Into Crisis

I’m in Dublin, Ireland, today, where I was honored and humbled to receive a writing award from Trinity College.

It’s my job to continue pointing out the risks to the financial system that we still face and to try to help people prepare for the next crisis. Of course, central banks are a big part of the problem.

If you have defective and obsolete models, you will produce incorrect analysis and bad policy every time. There’s no better example of this than the Federal Reserve.

The Fed uses equilibrium models to understand an economy that is not an equilibrium system; it’s a complex dynamic system.

The Fed uses the Phillips curve to understand the relationship between unemployment and inflation when 50 years of data say there is no fixed relationship.

The Fed uses “value at risk” modeling based on normally distributed events when the evidence is clear that the degree distribution of risk events is a power curve, not a normal or bell curve.

As a result of these defective models, the Fed printed $3.5 trillion of new money beginning in 2008 to “stimulate” the economy, only to produce the weakest recovery in history.

That’s over now. The Fed’s cycle of monetary tightening has been ongoing in various forms for over five years. First came Bernanke’s taper warning in May 2013. Next came the actual taper in December 2013 that ran until November 2014.

Then came the removal of forward guidance in March 2015, the liftoff in rates in December 2015, seven more rate hikes to date and the start of quantitative tightening in October 2017.

Another rate hike is already in the queue for December, which would be the ninth rate hike since liftoff.

During much of this tightening, the dollar was actually lower because markets believed the Fed would not raise in the first place or was overdoing it and would have to reverse course. Now that the Fed has shown it’s serious and will continue its tightening path (at least until they cause a recession), markets have no choice but to believe them.

And since last October, the Fed has also been reducing its balance sheet with quantitative tightening (QT).

When the Fed started QT last year, they urged market participants to ignore it. They said the QT plan was on autopilot, the Fed was not going to use it as an instrument of policy and the money burning would “run on background” just like a computer program that’s open but not in use at the moment.

It’s fine for the Fed to say that, but markets have another view. Analysts estimate that QT is the equivalent of two–four rate hikes per year over and above the explicit rate hikes. Markets have already suffered two significant sell-offs this year, the most recent being October’s.

While there were other contributing factors like the trade war and political uncertainty leading up to last week’s election, this monetary tightening cannot be dismissed.

Tighter monetary conditions in the U.S. have led to a stronger dollar, capital outflows from emerging markets (EMs) and disinflation.

The dollar is up about 4.5% this year against major competing currencies such as the euro, pound and yen.

A stronger dollar is itself a form of monetary tightening. A stronger dollar cheapens imports for U.S. buyers because they need fewer dollars to purchase goods. That’s a deflationary vector that will make the Fed’s goal of achieving a persistent 2% inflation rate even harder to reach.

The U.S. is now getting a triple shot of tightening in the form of higher rates, reduced money supply and a stronger dollar. At this rate, we may be in a recession sometime next year unless the Fed reverses course. We’ll see if the Fed wakes up to the danger before it’s too late.

I’m not holding my breath. The Fed is always the last to know.

- Source, James Rickards via the Daily Reckoning

James Rickards: Trump and the Economy

We continue our discussion of Trump and the economy with New York Times bestselling author Jim Rickards, who makes the case that Trump is on the right track with trade. 

But first, Taylor and Tyler break down the week’s news: the legacy of George HW Bush, the Democrats’ contentious leadership fight, and what to make of the latest turn of events in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, Michael Flynn’s sentencing memo.

- Source, Roughly Explained

James Rickards Predicts the Next Financial Crisis...

Jim Rickards, a renowned author and the chief global strategist at Meraglim, is now predicting another global financial crisis. 

He explains why, and in so doing, reviews the unusual origins of his predictive analytics tool. 

He also explores complexity theory and Bayesian statistics.

- Watch the Full Interview Here

Harry Dent VS James Rickards: Inflation / Deflation Debate Live

At the latest Casey Research conference, Recovery Reality Check, James Rickards, senior managing director of Tanget Capital Partners and author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis, debates Harry Dent, founder and president of HS Dent Foundation, on the subject of which is more likely in the near-term economic future, inflation or deflation.

- Source, Casey Research

James Rickards: A Special Economic Discussion

James Rickards & Egon Von Greyerz Discuss $10000 Gold

In this 18 minutes video, recorded in a Swiss vault, Jim and Egon cover many vital factors that investors must be aware of to protect themselves against the major risks in the financial system...

- Source, Gold Switzerland

Russia Rising, The New Axis of Gold

Russia’s financial war against the U.S. is heating up – dumping U.S. Treasuries and buying gold to break U.S. Dollar hegemony. What’s their next move?

- Source, Jim Rickards

A Weaker Dollar is Coming, The Currency Wars Renew

What is the outlook for U.S. dollar exchange rates?

The single most important factor in the analysis is that two currencies cannot devalue against each other at the same time. It’s a mathematical impossibility. If one currency is going down against another, then the other must be going up. There’s no other way.

From January 2010 (when Obama launched the currency war) to August 2011 (when the dollar hit an all-time low), the currency wars benefited the U.S. at the expense of Europe, emerging markets and China. This was considered necessary by the participants at the G-20 leaders summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009.

The U.S. was and is the world’s largest economy. If the U.S. could not escape the impact of the 2008 financial panic, no one else would, either. In effect, the world would suffer stronger currencies while the U.S. devalued to jump-start the global recovery.

After August 2011, the dollar was allowed to revalue upward while the rest of the world, especially Europe and China, was allowed to devalue so they could claim some benefit from a weaker currency. This worked in the short run, but the problem was that the U.S. never returned to sustained growth at the prior trend of 3.25% growth per year.

The U.S. endured a long depression from 2007 until today with annual growth of about 2.3%. Europe and China got a boost, but the U.S. never pulled away from the pack.

Since then, it has been a matter of taking turns. The euro is allowed to depreciate to help growth and the banking system as the dollar gets stronger based on a slightly stronger U.S. economy. But no major economy has solved the problem of achieving self-sustaining trend growth.

China has been free-riding the entire time. There have been periods of a soft peg of the yuan to the dollar, but there are intermittent periods of a weaker yuan. China executed shock devaluations in August 2015 and December 2015.

Both times, U.S. stocks fell 11% in a matter of weeks. China has just executed a 10% slow-motion devaluation over the past six months. U.S. stocks have started to sink again.

Now Trump and Mnuchin are saying, “Enough!” The Europeans will have to take their turn with a stronger currency and China will be penalized for their currency manipulation. A weaker dollar is coming.

Whether this will be achieved with cooperation by the Fed or direct intervention by the Treasury remains to be seen, but a weaker dollar is the only way out of the U.S. growth conundrum and debt debacle.

The chart below shows that the euro has settled into a trading range since April after coming down from the $1.25 range in February.

Chart 1:

The euro will break out of that trading range toward the upside ($1.20–1.30) over the next few months. This will be the result of a possible Fed pause in rate hikes as the U.S. economy weakens, continued determination by the ECB to tighten policy and possible intervention by the U.S. Treasury.

Meanwhile, a weaker dollar will give the U.S. another growth spurt after the 2018 tax cuts to help propel Trump’s reelection prospects for 2020.

- Source, Jim Rickards

James Rickards: Be Prepared for a Cheaper Dollar

When will the strong dollar weaken? Ultimately, the answer is whenever the Treasury wants.

When the Treasury is not overly concerned with the dollar, market forces can prevail to raise or lower the exchange rate compared with euros, Swiss francs, yen or any other currency.

Sometimes, other central banks intervene to raise or lower their currencies relative to the dollar and the U.S. does not seem to care. China is notorious for this. Japan and Switzerland are other practiced currency manipulators.

The last fully coordinated currency market intervention was conducted by the G-7 in March 2011 at the time of the Fukushima, Japan, earthquake and tsunami that caused the collapse of a nuclear power plant and ultimately a crash of the Tokyo stock exchange.

The Japanese economy was weakened by the natural disaster. A weaker yen would have helped the economy with cheaper exports and more inflation. But insurance companies had to sell dollar-denominated assets and buy yen in order to pay yen-denominated claims for the disaster losses. The result was a stronger yen.

The G-7 intervention, organized by then French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, successfully sold yen and bought euros, dollars and sterling to weaken the yen despite insurance companies buying it. Lagarde’s success in this intervention was instrumental in her elevation to head of the IMF shortly thereafter.

In short, except in extraordinary circumstances, the U.S. Treasury does not directly intervene in currency markets to target U.S. dollar exchange rates. If such targeting is needed, the Treasury will work with the Fed to raise interest rates or take a pause in rate hikes to affect the dollar’s value.

All of this may be about to change.

Both President Trump and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin have publicly expressed dismay at the dollar’s persistent strength in the second half of 2018. A strong dollar has adverse effects relative to Trump’s economic plans.

It makes imports less expensive, which has a deflationary impact on the U.S. domestic economy. This is at a time when both the Fed and the White House would like to see more inflation.

A strong dollar also hurts U.S. exports from major companies such as Boeing and GE. That hurts U.S. competitiveness and U.S. jobs. Finally, a strong dollar hurts corporate profits of U.S. global companies because their overseas profits are translated back into fewer U.S. dollars. This is a head wind to U.S. stock market performance.

While the White House and Fed may be united in their desire to see a weaker dollar and more inflation, the Fed is doing nothing to achieve that. The Fed has been on a path of raising interest rates for almost three years, beginning with the “liftoff” rate hike in December 2015.

Since October 2017, the Fed has also been tightening money supply by not reinvesting in Treasury securities when existing securities in their portfolio mature. This “quantitative tightening,” or QT, is the opposite of quantitative easing, QE.

The combination of rate hikes and QT has caused a significant increase in U.S. interest rates in all maturities and, in turn, a stronger dollar as capital flows to the U.S. in search of higher yields. The result is a persistent strong dollar.

This means that if the White House and Treasury want a weaker dollar, they may have to achieve it on their own with no help from the Fed. The Treasury is well-equipped to do this kind of intervention by using their Exchange Stabilization Fund, or ESF.

The ESF was created under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which provided legal ratification for FDR’s confiscation of private gold from U.S. citizens in 1933. FDR paid $20.67 in paper money for the gold in 1933, knowing he intended to raise the price of gold.

His plan was to capture the “gold profits” for the government instead of allowing citizens to realize the profits. Those profits were the original source of funding for the ESF.

Importantly, the ESF exists completely outside of congressional control or oversight. It is tantamount to a Treasury slush fund that the Treasury can use as it sees fit to intervene in foreign exchange markets. No legislation or congressional appropriation is required.

Former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin used the ESF to bail out Mexico in 1994 after Congress had refused to provide bailout money through other channels.

Today, the ESF has net assets of about $40 billion. The gross assets include about $50 billion in SDRs, but the Treasury can issue SDR certificates to the Fed in exchange for dollars if needed to conduct currency market operations. You can find the ESF financial statements here.

- Source, James Rickards via the Daily Reckoning

With Every Passing Day, a Chinese Financial Collapse Draws Closer

A dollar shortage seems implausible in a world where the Fed printed $4.4 trillion. But while the Fed was printing, the world borrowed over $70 trillion (on top of prior loans), so the dollar shortage is real. The math is inescapable.

So the Chinese debt bomb that has been a long time in the making is finally getting ready to explode. The economy is slowing, debt is exploding and the trade war with Trump has hurt China’s exports needed to earn dollars to pay the debts.

The defaults are beginning to pile up. Several large corporations and regional governments have defaulted recently.

China’s leaders have panicked at the slowdown and have started the credit flow again with lower interest rates, higher bank leverage and more debt-financed, government-directed infrastructure spending.

Of course, this solution is strictly temporary. All it does is postpone the day of reckoning and make the debt crisis worse when it does arrive.

With every passing day, a Chinese financial collapse draws closer. The rest of the world will not escape the consequences.

When the crisis strikes in full force, possibly in 2019, the rest of the world will not be spared.

- Source, James Rickards

Jim Rickards: The Debt Bomb is Ready to Explode

The great Chinese growth slowdown has been proceeding in stages for the past two years. The reason is simple. Much of China’s “growth” (about 25% of the total) has consisted of wasted infrastructure investment in ghost cities and white elephant transportation infrastructure.

That investment was financed with debt that now cannot be repaid. This was fine for creating short-term jobs and providing business to cement, glass and steel vendors, but it was not a sustainable model since the infrastructure either was not used at all or did not generate sufficient revenue.

China’s future success depends on high-value-added technology and increased consumption. But shifting to intellectual property and the consumer means slowing down on infrastructure, which will slow the economy.

In turn, that means exposing the bad debt for what it is, which risks a financial and liquidity crisis. China started to do this last year but quickly turned tail when the economy slowed. Now the economy has slowed so much that markets are collapsing.

But doesn’t China have over $1 trillion of reserves to prop up its financial system?

On paper, that’s true. But in reality, China is “short” U.S. dollars. The Chinese may have $1.4 trillion of U.S. Treasury securities in its reserve position, but they need those assets possibly to bail out their banking system or defend the yuan.

Meanwhile, the Chinese banking sector, which in many ways is an extension of the state, owes $318 billion in U.S. dollar-denominated deposits of commercial paper.

From a bank’s perspective, borrowing in dollars is going short dollars because you need dollar assets to back up those liabilities if the original lenders want their money back. For the most part, the banks don’t have those assets because they converted the dollar to yuan to prop up local real estate Ponzis and local corporations.

There’s not much left over to bail out the corporate, individual and real estate sectors.

This is all part of a global “dollar shortage” attributable to Fed tightening, both in the forms of higher rates but also a reduction in base money...

- Source, Jim Rickards via the Daily Reckoning

Robert Kiyosaki and Jim Rickards Predict the Next Financial Calamity

Find out what central bankers and politicians plan to do after the next financial crash. Jim Rickards, author of “The Road to Ruin,” joins Robert and Kim and offers a clear-eyed view of how the next collapse will unfold and what you can do to preserve your wealth. 

Rickards has worked inside Wall St. and consulted at the highest levels of government. His insights are illuminating and rooted in social science and economic history.

- Source, Rich Dad Poor Dad