If you can, try to picture our economy like a big balloon. This balloon has been steadily inflated since the last, great depression of the 1930's. The Federal government and the Federal reserve have use all the tools at their disposal to keep things afloat for the last 70 years.
Is it really possible to have an economy that never experiences a severe correction, that keeps growing with ever growing employment?
Or is it, in the words of Gordon Harzard, "No man can throw a brick so high that it will never come down."
We think of bubbles as being specific to markets such as tech stocks and real estate. What we are dealing with is different, a credit bubble.
"Credit is the air that financial markets breathe", says Richard Parry, a columnist with the Stockman Grassfarmer. "The credit bubble is the source of the asset bubbles, the underlying cause."
We have this "credit crisis" because debtors are defaulting on their loans in record numbers. (An interesting side note here, on CNN there was a story on this huge bank in California, Indymac, that the Fed had seized, closed and will re-open on Monday. Only people with less than $100,000 will get any money, and probably not all of it. I saw this while sitting in the emergency room, which I will explain another time.) The "credit crunch" is because of not much lending going on, despite low interest rates on short term loans.
The bottom line is that there is a shortage of good, quality debtors and lenders don't seem to trust very many people anymore. Instead of loaning out money (what is "money"?), lenders tend to sit on it, trying to fix their balance sheets.
The "powers that be" tend to tell us to borrow and spend, stimulate the economy.
Consumers say, "We can't, we're too far in debt."
The Fed can make the world "liquid", but they cannot make homeowners and consumers "solvent." To top things off, consumers are suffering from the double whammy of rising food and energy costs.
Thanks to money creation by the Federal Reserve and the leveraging of all that newly created money by commercial banks and by Wall Street investment banks, we have a huge, inflated balloon resting on a base of much smaller real output.
How big is this balloon?
Charles Morris, author of Trillion Dollar Meltdown, estimates that one trillion dollars of excess credit and bad debt has to come out of the system. The current sub-prime lending crisis is just the beginning of the "great unwinding".
The list of troubled sectors subject to possible write-downs or out right defaults include, sub-prime mortgages, hedge funds, corporate debt/ leveraged buyouts, credit card debt, auto loan debt, and credit default swaps between banks. Even insurance companies that insure home mortgages and municipal bonds are in trouble.
All total, about one trillion dollars of bad debt will need to be recognized before the credit crisis will be over. So far, banks have written down about 200 billion of bad loans, so there is still along way to go.
How will this be different than the great depression of the 1930's? Normally the economy goes bad first, creating financial problems. In this instance, trouble in the financial markets is dragging down the economy- a crucial distinction.
The last time this happened was in 1929!
In 1929 numerous bank failures touched off the Great Depression. We can' say that there will be another like it, but we need to take necessary precautions.
We have a similar situation, a financial crisis, a huge excess of liquidity and bad debt and the use of debt for excessive speculation. Economists now feel that the 1929 slowdown morphed into the Great Depression because the Federal Reserve tightened credit rather than loosening it after the financial crisis of 1929.
With that in mind, you can see why the Fed is busy cutting interest rates and throwing all but the kitchen sink at today's problems. It is though that because of this "throwing everything in" that we are facing the the worst set of macroeconomic conditions since the great depression. Perhaps this time we will have hyper-inflation instead.
In 2004, Economist magazine worried that "the global financial system has become a giant printing press as Americans easy money policy has spilled beyond its borders". This glut of global liquidity has flowed to share prices and houses around the world inflating a series of asset priced bubbles.
Now we see this tidal wave flowing into natural resources and commodities, raising their prices. When the asset priced bubbles break, all those dollars will flow back home (like a tidal wave) leaving paper money worth less than toilet paper. (It already is, in my opinion.)
If you think that can't happen here, research the German Wiemar inflation of the 1920's.
Interestingly, the French Revolution of the 1790's involved a period of hyper-inflation induced by the banning of gold and silver currency and the introduction of massive amounts of paper currency. (do you see a connection here?)
The U.S. dollar has been the per-eminent currency around the world. We will soon see talk of pricing oil in other currencies. Which Iran is already talking of, they want to switch to the Euro, which is the real reason we want to go to war with Iran. If other countries begin trading in other currencies, there will be serious trouble for the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar has been on a self destructive path since it left the gold standard in 1971. Historically, the dollar loses 90% of its value every thirty years, that will continue.
A good Principle to follow is that when everyone and everything is debt ridden, don't follow that same foolish course.
Investment in gold and silver is always a good choice, in good times and bad.
(You can learn more by subscribing to the Stockman Grassfarmer. Click on the link to the right of this blog.)
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