economy

Hyperinflation is now here: Food prices rising

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The Globe and Mail says that 7% price increases in food could be on their way to Canada. What is to blame?

Bad crops around the world, oil trading for more than $100 (U.S.) a barrel and the economic recovery are driving prices higher.

Key words that do not appear in the article:  money base, quantitative easing, Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Bank, Bank of Canada, low interest rates, deficit spending.

The media’s general lack of awareness and insight into what ails the world leads me to believe that they are stuck on stupid.

My investment conclusion:

Short:  US dollar, all fiat currencies

Long:  Wine kits, beans

Is it time to buy US? II: February deficit $223 billion

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I lamented in May 2010 that the US federal budget deficit was $83 billion, or about $8.90 per person per day.  Now the Washington Times (hat tip: the American Thinker) reports that the US government has posted its largest monthly deficit in history, $223 billion in February.  Now that means that the US government borrowed nearly $26 per person per day.  Clearly, the fundamentals that have caused the US dollar to depreciate against commodities is getting much worse not better:  the US government is borrowing three times as much money as what it was only 10 months ago.  This is proof that the debt death spiral is a reality in our times.

Now here is what has been happening:  (1) the US government borrows money but doesn’t find sufficient lenders whether domestic or foreign, so the Federal Reserve bank lends to them the remaining shortfall.  This is called quantitative easing because the money is created out of nothing.  But that is not the end of QE: for Bernanke is also buying old debt as it turns over and finds no new borrowers (see “Hyperinflation when?“).  QE greatly increases the amount of greenbacks that are in the money base:  view (chart below) and be afraid and weep.  (2) Next, commodities go up in price because too many dollars are chasing too few goods–food riots start happening in poorer countries.  (3) Then, consumer prices go up.  (4) Lastly, workers will get cost of living adjustments if indeed their employer can pay them at all.  In any case, the last thing to adjust to this whole mess is people’s take home pay.  But unfortunately, the adjustments will be too little too late because the next round of QE has already taken place and the spiral of hyperinflation has reached the next stage even before they receive their next pay cheque.

The newly elected Republican Congress?  They swept into power with Tea Party momentum.  But they can’t or rather they won’t fix anything.  Their puny little efforts to reduce the deficit are a joke.

My investment approach remains steady (current portfolio is up 88% above book) :

Short:  US dollar

Long:  Canadian oil & gas; Canadian gold mining; physical gold and silver (via Sprott Physical Gold Trust, Sprott Physical Silver Trust)

Finally, in my opinion, those who are telling people it is a great time to exchange your loonies for greenbacks and to go long on US stocks are really not doing their readers a favor; they seem ignorant of the fundamentals.  Yet even Warren Buffet’s famous and flippant advice about gold is little better.  What, pray-tell, Mr. Buffet, do you suggest to the American people regarding how they might protect themselves from this robbery?  Remember these words of Alan Greenspan (hat tip: Monty Pelerin):

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.

… the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.

Is it time to buy US? I. Studying the fundamentals

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Blogging has been a great help to DIY investors.  They can formulate their own strategies in writing, see what works, and share their knowledge with others.  Bloggers often have skin in the game; it might not be very much skin, as many are not rich people, but they are real investors and not like young journalists who don’t really have much hands on experience with trading or owning anything more elaborate than index or mutual funds in their RRSP accounts.

One of the clear reasons for thinking that many financial journalists are not particularly knowledgable about investing is that they are always engaging the advice of “experts” who are wrong most of the time.  Blogger Devon Shire is hypercritical of Robert Prechter, whose predictions are often dead wrong.  Another famous talking head is Dennis Gartman, whose own fund, HAG.TO, has remained essentially static since the fund began in 2009 while the stock indexes have greatly improved.  So why is this guy on TV?  He’s doing worse than an ING Direct savings account, where at least your money gets 1.5% interest.  The original investors of his HAG’s IPO at $10.00 are still 35 cents below water.  In the meantime, the Dow Jones and the TSX are both up about 60%.  How can a fund lose money in these conditions?  Why does Dennis Gartman get on TV and why do so many financial advisers read his famous Gartman Letter?  I think it may be because the journalists and the advisors are themselves incompetent.  At least all the many sheep following Warren Buffet around can say he is the best investor of all time.  A proven track record is actually a sign of competence.  But what proves that Gartman or Prechter know what they are talking about?

Bloggers, who have skin in the game and gain experience as they go, thus contrast with financial journalists.  Consider the Financial Post’s John Shmuel has a column with the title, “Lofty loonie spells buy opportunity”; but just a few weeks ago, he’s done columns on why Canadian stocks will outperform.  So why would he change his mind?–Or does he even see the contradiction? Well, as a journalist, he’s not actually trying to present a coherent strategy but information as it comes to him.  So I find that journalists can be great sources of information but terrible sources for eking out an investment strategy.  Why does Shmuel think that the lofty loonie spells a buying opportunity for US equities?  It seems for no better reason than that loonie is at a three year high.

Well, I did a few blogs about how and why I short the US dollar by using leverage in my US margin account to buy Canadian gold mining or oil and gas companies (e.g., abx, gg, erf, pwe, pgh).  The dividends from the oil and gas companies cover the interest charges and some.  Later, I added the selling of put options on the same equities, and reduced my overall cost of carry, because the leverage is now pushed off to some time in the future and I don’t actually have to pay interest on it today.  Has this strategy worked?  Extremely well.  Now that the loonie is at a three year high, will I now go long on the greenback or US equities as Shmuel’s article advises?  I don’t think so.  Consider the following chart (source Yahoo! Finance, straight line is mine):

What we see is that the loonie hit a low of $1.61 in 2002 and has basically improved in a nine year trend against a dollar.  Once the extremes of 2008-2009 are removed, a secular trend emerges which would suggest that the greenback will continue to move down against the loonie unless the fundamentals that caused this trend are changed.  If we looked at gold or oil against the dollar, we will see the same trend.  What we are seeing in the chart is US dollar inflation.  Not that the loonie is much better, but what happens in periods of inflation is that the cost of commodities rise.  Since the Canadian dollar depends so much on commodities, then whither commodities so the loonie.  If the price of commodities is increased by the inflation of the US dollar, can we expect this trend to reverse?  I think so if any of the following events were to happen:

(1) If Bernanke gives up QE.

(2) If Stephen Harper announces a deficit budget in the order of 150 billion or more (its is currently projected at 45.4 billion).

(3) If the US Congress makes serious cuts or attempts to balance the US federal budget.

(4) If the Chinese and other foreign investors decide to abandon Canada.

Let’s discuss each of these issues:

(1) If Bernanke gives up QE. I fully expect him to announce QE 3 in the next few months.  If he doesn’t continue to implement QE then the US government will have to make serious cuts of a trillion or so dollars from its current spending.

(2) If Stephen Harper announced a deficit budget in the order of 150 billion or more.  The Canadian population is about 1/10th that of the USA.  Therefore, the Canadian deficit would have to reach 150 billion in order to match the magnitude of the US deficits of 1.5 trillion.  I don’t see this happening under Harper’s watch.  In fact the trend is that the deficit is dropping in Canada.

(3) If the US Congress makes serious cuts or attempts to balance the US federal budget. This won’t happen until a cost cutting president gets elected.  It may actually never happen.  But the new Republican House is arguing over small cuts which won’t make any difference in a 1.5 trillion or so deficit.  Cut a few hundred billion out of that, and you are still over $1 trillion.

(4) If the Chinese and other foreign investors decide to abandon Canada. Right now, China, Korea, Thailand, Japan are all pouring money into Canadian resources.  Heck, foreigners are even buying our sovereign debt.  I see this trend continuing, as Canada has what these economies need, commodities.

The economy in the US is bad.  I’ve lost money in the US in a bad real estate deal started in 2008.  You won’t see me fall into that trap again unless the secular trends change.  My feeling is that my reasons for shorting the US dollar haven’t changed because the loonie has improved to $1.03 US.  This is a sign of secular trend not a buying opportunity for US stocks.

And if you ask me why I expatriated from the US?  I’ll tell you now that it’s so that at least one of my dad’s four children will still be able to take care of him in his old age.

Update:  Why pick on the Financial Post and John Shmuel?  David Berman has a similar article at the Globe & Mail: “Bruised greenback an opportunity for Canadian investors.”  Like Shmuel, he makes it clear that the US dollar is at a low but doesn’t seem to deal with any of the secular trends that put it there and then irrationally states:

It seems likely that the worst of the freefalling is over, given that the factors that drove the dollar down – including massive deficits and stimulative monetary policies – will probably move in reverse as the economy improves.

But he provides no actual proof that the US economy is improving.  That’s just baseless optimism as far as I can see.  Personally, I doubt that the damage of the QE that Bernanke’s already done has run its course.  Some inflationistas believe that when the economy actually improves, that’s when we will see the full effect of monetary inflation, because then velocity and credit will also expand.

Hyperinflation is now here II: Food prices

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Bruce Walker writes today at the American Thinker that food prices are what is going to do in President Obama’s chances in the next election.  One of the signs of hyperinflation is spiraling out of control food prices, and Walker points out that the food commodities are up 27% over the last six months.  I don’t know about you, but a 54% annualized increase in food commodities looks a lot like hyperinflation to me.  I wrote a post in August 2010 that dealt with food prices, which I reproduce here:

August 3, 2010

What’s wrong with inflation? Do you have enough to eat?

Monty Pelerin has a excellent article on inflation this morning.  He maintains that the great temptation for government will be to try to solve the problem of debt and unfunded obligations by inflating it away, and that, since politicians are cowards, they will not make the tough decisions to avoid inflation.  He writes, however, about the consequences of inflation:  “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.”

I believe that the real danger of inflation may lie in the consequences it will  have on the food supply.  Never mind that food shortages have never been a problem in the living memory of most North Americans (unless they are over 75 or immigrated here from a war zone or something).  Today, obesity in developed countries is feared more than starvation.  So I made the following comment on Pelerin’s blog:

I am reading Adam Ferguson, When Money Dies (1975). He tells the story of Frau Eisenmenger, an Austrian who at the end of WWI had sufficient investments to live on and care for her family (31). She went into her bank in 1918 to withdraw some funds and her banker advised her to buy Swiss Francs, but it was illegal to hoard foreign currencies, and so she declined. Eventually, her savings became worthless. Her situation was greatly helped by her daughter working in the “American mission” paid in dollars, renting a room in her apartment to an American, and speculative investments in the Austrian stock market.

I fear that what will happen is similar to Europe in that period, when food was scarce and required a large percentage of income to procure. Eventually, the price of food will sky rocket and so more dollars will be created ex nihilo. Then the farmers will refuse to supply their food to people for worthless dollars and food stamps from the government, and they will have to stop producing–because their costs have to be covered too. Then, we will see shortages like never before. A farmer offered Frau Eisenmenger three month’s provision for her grand piano (33); and an acquaintance of hers sold her own piano for a sack of wheat flour.

Education bubble XII: Hiring policy, nothing to do with your merit

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I was once interviewed for a job in Georgia.  It was a no brainer.  It was a small pentecostal college that had am academic dean with a master’s degree–it paid probably 30k, and so the money wasn’t anything special.  I waited weeks afterward and only to find out that they gave the job to a guy studying at an American seminary who ABD–nobody bothered to inform me.  The academic game had surprised me.  In today’s analogy, I was Lebron–I studied at prestigious university, my PhD was all but in hand, and to top it off, I could speak three modern languages, and had proficiency in Greek, Hebrew and Coptic.  It was a no brainer.  But in the end, the other guy received the call, and I was still out of job.  How could this happen?  I did everything right and I was ready to step into a job, and they give the job to some guy still working on his PhD!  Well, in the end, I determined that merit often has little to do with who gets a job in academics.  Here are the real criteria:

(1) Ethos:  Who fits into the reigning ethos of the school?  A recent graduate from an expensive school is not likely to fit in well at a small school in Georgia that puts no priority on research or writing.  Such a person has to be used to deprivation and self-sacrifice and must be satisfied with the small wage the school has to offer.

(2) Politics:  a recent informal survey of social psychologists at an academic conference showed that their profession is dominated by those on the Left side of the political spectrum. Only an extremely minute number were self-identified conservatives.  This sort of difference can only happen when the admission policies to graduate programs and the hiring policies intentionally weed out those of conservative persuasion, since the conservatives in the American general population greatly out number liberals.

(3) Diversity (=Affirmative Action):  Michael, who reneged on his obligation to return to Africa, was one of 160 candidates for a job at a Christian University.  When I pointed out that the reason he received the job offer was that the school was implementing a policy of diversity, he was offended, but I was able to point out the page on their website that showed that they were trying very hard and had even offered a job to Botswanan the year before.  Adjuncts who had been working their butts off at one seminary I taught at were passed over as white males to hire full-time females; the next three biblical studies appointments were women.  This wasn’t about their relative merit as professors but about increasing the number of women in the faculty.

(4) Old boys’ school:  J. F. K.’s essay explaining why he wanted to go to Harvard was lamentably lame, but he happened to mention that his father was a Harvard man, and he would like very much to study there too. [BTW, old boys could now be a bunch of liberal woman for all I know–I don’t belong to the club–in fact, I’ve never seen the inside of the club either].

Ok.  So lets consider this question from the standpoint of how good the education is, given that merit is not usually the reason why people get hired.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reviews a recent book by researchers of the products of university education in America:

Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college. [Further study has indicated that 36 percent of students did not show any significant improvement over four years.] While these students may have developed subject-specific skills that were not tested for by the CLA, in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master. These findings are sobering and should be a cause for concern.

A cause for concern indeed!  You mean you can send  18-22 year-olds to school and they aren’t one wit smarter after four years of partying and learning about diversity and multiculturalism?  Wow! Who woodda thunk?

I have heard the dogma that if schools become indoctrinators instead of educators, strongholds of political correctness and diversity, that that makes them better places, richer and superior to the monolithic schools (read: professors are all white males) that prioritize academic achievement.  Yet after 30 or so years of this crap, we now have schools where large swaths of kids come out no smarter than they were before they entered.  So what does a BA mean today?  It means a huge debt without necessarily any usable or productive skills.  It means that a university education for something like a third of graduates is a waste of time and money.