Ben Bernanke

Stuck on stupid I: More education bubble stuff

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I saw a young man, whose mother is from Boston, at the US Consulate General in Toronto; the consulate refused to acknowledge his US citizenship and issue him a passport yesterday.  He blamed the Tea Party movement’s influence on Congress.  He is by all counts a East coast liberal, 18-year old brain full of mush, wanting to emigrate to the US, get involved in the Democrat Party and the support the unions.  But is it his fault?  When the smartest people in the world are also stuck on stupid.

Look at Dr. Benjamin Bernanke, PhD.  He says the current inflation is low but caused really by a spike in commodity prices (from Reuters):

A recent increase in U.S. inflation is driven primarily by rising commodity prices globally, and is unlikely to persist, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Monday. …

Along the same lines, Bernanke argued that supply and demand factors are driving energy and commodity costs higher, but that these should eventually stabilize, allowing the United States to avoid any inflation troubles.

“I think the increase in inflation will be transitory,” Bernanke said in response to questions after a speech. “Our expectation at this point is that in the medium term inflation, if anything, will be a bit low. We will monitor inflation and inflation expectations very closely.”

Let me see if I understand Bernanke’s logic.  He believes that he can triple the money base in two years, but that commodity inflation is transitory.  Huh???  Get real.  If you want commodities to decrease you have to shrink the money supply.

Formerly with the Obama administration’s brain trust but now back in academia, Dr. Christine Romer, PhD, fears that there will be no QE III, for QE II worked so handsomely to get things going again.  Be careful with this video interview of Dr. Romer with my favorite Yahoo personality, Aaron Task: it can cause brain freeze, incredulity and a desire to throw things at your computer monitor.  Dr. Romer believes the best way to solve unemployment is through debauching the currency.  Of course, for the last two years, that’s exactly what the Fed has done, and the employment rate is pretty pathetic.  So what do you do when a policy doesn’t work?  Well it is obvious that you didn’t do enough of it.  So QE II is faltering because Bernanke hasn’t yet promised QE III.  Amazing.

Hyperinflation is now here: throwing gasoline on the fire

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Kapitalcon cited my post discussing the $223 billion dollar US Federal deficit in February, and then went further to predict QE III:

Important to note is the Federal Reserve’s recent announcement that it may have to begin its third round of QE in response to sky-rocketing oil prices.  Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart stated at the National Association of Business Economics in Arlington that “If [the rising price of oil] plays through to the broad economy in a way that portends a recession, I would take a position we would respond with more accommodation.”  As oil increases, so too does the cost of most, if not all, goods and services. This includes anything that requires petroleum in the production process, not to mention increased transportation costs for moving the product to market.  Such is the rationale for QE3.

Do I fear my commodity stocks going down like they did in 2008-9?  Not with people like Mr. Lockhart running the Federal Reserve Bank.  The problem of the commodities is too much liquidity chasing too few goods.  If the Federal Reserve Bank’s solution is to just throw more fuel on the fire, then I’ve nothing to fear.  QE, which I affectionately call the Bernanke Put, will be the ultimate cause of hyperinflation.  It is as though they are trying to fulfill this prophetic video that the National Inflation Association created a few months ago:

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.

Monopoly money vs. virtual money

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I argued in a previous post that when banks create money electronically we shouldn’t call it “printing money”; the metaphor doesn’t adequately describe a situation in which most money is not printed but created electronically on the balance sheets of the major financial institutions then passed on to the public through electronic transfers, credit cards, debit cards, and the like.  Most money is not printed–it is a virtual reality that people accept in exchange for very real goods and services.  In my view, this situation is analogous to a game of monopoly.  During the game, the money is received in the form of salaries, rents, gifts, and bonuses, and in turn it can be used to pay rent, mortgages, penalties, and taxes.   In the end, when the game is over, all the money goes back into the box and regresses to its intrinsic value of zero.  But Monopoly is just a game, you say? But so is our virtual economy.  It’s a game we are playing with non-real money which has no intrinsic value, not even the paper its printed on, because the central banks don’t bother to print much of it anymore.

Monopoly games last about 1-3 hours.  It is not certain how long virtual economy game will last, but it won’t be much longer with Ben Bernanke keeping interest rates at virtually nothing and creating virtual money ex nihilo–eventually the public will stop accepting it in exchange for real goods and services.  That will be the end of the game, and at real money with intrinsic value, like gold and silver, will become the norm.  And we shouldn’t make the mistake of saying that gold has no intrinsic value because it can’t be eaten.  That is a fallacious argument created by fascists trying to confuse the issue.  Gold and silver have intrinsic value by definition.

Thank you Ben: in celebration of $90 oil

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Today oil is above $90.  Last night I paid $1.119 (CDN) per litre for gasoline to fill my wife’s RAV4.  Unlike most people, I actually have a smile on my face when filling up.

I really owe a debt of gratitude to Ben Bernanke; you see he told 60 Minutes that he won’t stop with QE2–600 billion.  Quantitative easing is a fluid concept.  It is really as much as you need to make everything happy again.  And this is really like pouring money into my portfolio:  my positions are short the US dollar.  I’ve sold put options in US dollars against Barrick Gold (ABX), Gold Corp (GG), New Gold (NGD), Penn West (PWE), Pengrowth (PGH): gold and oil.  I hold long positions in most of these companies too.  Thanks Ben.  You have provided me with the Bernanke put so that I can invest in these companies virtually risk-free; if the economy sucks, you have decided to poor gas (QE) on the fire, and they are assured to explode in price.  Dear Ben, have I told you recently that you’re my best friend?  Now I know you think you can control inflation.  As long as you believe you can, you will continue to put money in my portfolio.  So please, by all means, just keep it up.

Nota Bene to my esteemed readers:  I may be just a little ironic in my tone above–I’m yanking Bernanke’s chain–not that that important man has either the time or the inclination to read my humble blog.  What I actually believe is this (does this scenario seem unreasonable today?):

hat tip: Monty Pelerin, “How inflation occurs”