“Make terror your friend,” says our old friend Doug Casey. By that, Doug means that you should befriend the things likely to go up in price in a terror-worried world. Gold, for example.
But the quip has a deeper meaning, too.
There is more than one kind of strife, wrote Hesiod, around 700 B.C. There are two, he goes on to explain. One is destructive. Wars, cruelty: “her no man loves,” says Hesiod. But the other form of strife stirs man to action. “Even a rich man hastens to plough and plant and put his house in order...this strife is wholesome for men.” The trick is to make strife your friend, to let it stir the brain and body to new efforts and better insights.
We don’t have anything particular in mind. But we came across Hesiod in a new book just published by...us! The Essential Classics from Les Belles Lettres contains the critical works of the Classical period that you always meant to read, but never got around to doing so.
It is available from Amazon.com:
The Essential Classics
Meanwhile, another old friend, Jim Rogers, was in town last night. We caught up with him in a pub in Knightsbridge.
“Well, Jim, what do you think of the world economy?” we asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m making sure my little girl learns Chinese,” was his reply.
Jim is three-times famous for turning strife to his advantage. First, for having been a partner of George Soros in one of the earliest and most successful hedge funds: The Quantum fund. He is famous, too, for taking his money off the table. At 37 years old, he retired and took a trip around the world on a motorcycle, writing a book about it called “Investment Biker.” Most recently, he is famous for having been right about commodities. “The next big thing is things,” he began saying in 1999. That was when things were the last thing anyone wanted. That was at the tail end of the dot.com boom, when things were taken for granted and strife was thought to have disappeared.
But that New Era ended and soon people wanted things again. The Chinese were making more things than ever before. But, they needed things to make them with. And all over Asia, people were beginning to have enough money to buy things. Even in the West, people liked things so much they mortgaged their houses to buy them.
Prices of the things Asians make have remained mostly steady, because they are able to make them in greater volume and with lower labor costs. But the prices of the things that people use to make things have gone way up. When no one cared about oil, gas, cotton, or copper, nobody bothered to dig new mines, drill new wells, or plant new fields. Now, with demand much higher, it takes a while for production to catch up. This is the classic model for a boom in prices.
“Commodities are notoriously, unbelievably, treacherously cyclical,” we recall another old friend, Rick Rule, telling us recently. “They are much more cyclical than anything else in the marketplace...and much more cyclical than the average investor realizes. He sees a big increase in the price of copper and he assumes the time has come to buy a copper mining stock. What he doesn’t realize is that the time to buy the company was when the price of copper was low, not when it is high. The time to buy the miners is when they aren’t making money, not when they are. By the time the general public comes into the commodity market, you can be sure that the cycle is ready to turn down.”
We were on our third glass of Shiraz in the Tattersall Pub (a cozy little establishment...with plenty of trash on the floor) before we got to the critical question: Where are we in the cycle?
Oil has already risen from $10 to $72. Silver has tripled. In 2006, alone, copper practically doubled. But then came what Jim calls a “consolidation.” Others might call it a collapse. Silver fell 20%. Gold has lost $100. Copper is down nearly 20%, too.
Does this mean it is over? Is it too late to buy silver or other commodities? What about gold?
As for gold, we have our own thoughts, which we pass along, below. For the rest of the commodities, we’ll let Jim do the talking:
“Looking at the previous bull market in commodities, the shortest lasted 15 years and the longest lasted 23 years. This one just got started in 1999. We’re only about a third of the way.
“This isn’t exactly like a boom in dot.com stocks. You can create a dot.com company in about 20 minutes. But it takes a long time to get a copper mine up and running. If people think the price of copper is going to go down, they must think that the supply is going to go up. I’d like to know where all this new copper is going to come from. Where are the mines? Where is the ore? Where is the oil? Nobody can give me an answer. So, what’s going to drive down prices?
“And when you look at today’s prices adjusted for inflation, these things are still cheap. Silver is 75% below its all-time high. And after the last two weeks, it’s 20% cheaper still.
“But if you really want to make some money, you’ll invest in food. Agricultural commodities are cheaper than the minerals. Sugar is 80% below it all-time high. Corn is 60% below its all-time high - so is cotton. In the last five years, the world has consumed more food than it has produced. As far as I know, that has never happened before in human history. And the amount of land used to grow these things - wheat, for instance - has been declining for 30 years. If people think these prices are now on the way down, I want to know where they think they are going to get more food.
“No, this bull market has a long way to go. And somewhere along the way we’re going to have a drought - like we did in the 1960s and 1970s - and then you’re going to see some of these prices really take off. It happened in the 1960s and ‘70s, when the price of sugar went up 47 times in an eight-year period.”
[Ed. Note: Jim isn’t the only one who thinks commodities have nowhere to go but up. Resource Trader Alert’s Kevin Kerr has been helping his subscribers make major gains in the natural resource markets - in fact, he picked 16 winners in a row. See his track record for yourself:
Eight Times Better Than The Stock Market!
Over to today’s currency news...
--------------
Chuck Butler, reporting from the EverBank world-currency-trading desk in St. Louis:
“I'm going to call the Aussie economy the ‘Goldilocks Economy.’ It's not too hot. It's not too cold. It's Just Right! Yeah, ‘Goldilocks Economy,’ that's the ticket! I must say that I like that!”
For the rest of this story, and for more market insights, see today’s issue of
The Daily Pfennig
--------------
And more views from London...
*** Back in the United States, “builders crumble under pressure,” says a headline at TheStreet.com. New orders fell 40% for Standard Pacific. Ryland, Toll, and Pulte have all recently cut earnings projections. The building stocks on the Philadelphia housing index are all coming down.
Why? Because the housing bubble is over. Mortgage activity is at a four-year low. Nationwide, foreclosures rose 75% during the first quarter, over a year ago.
Houses are still selling, but more slowly. Prices are holding up...we are told.
But for how long? If you intend to cash in on the biggest housing boom in American history, you had probably better do it soon.
*** Gold dropped down to $634 yesterday.
“I tell people that instead of trying to turn base metal into gold, they’d be better off turning gold into base metal,” says Jim Rogers. “Over the last 30 years, lead has made more money for investors than gold.”
That may be. But we have never been interested in lead coins. We don’t recall anyone using the expression: “as good as lead.” Or saying of someone that she “has a heart of lead.” Nor does the new U.S. Treasury secretary hail from a firm known as Leadman Sachs.
Lead is certainly a useful thing. You can use it to weigh down corpses before you toss them in the river. Only a fool would do that with gold. Lead was once useful for writing; in ancient Rome, scribes used a stylus made of lead for their calculations. Gold is useless for writing; it leaves no mark on the paper. You can add lead to gasoline to stop engine knock, and knockout bicyclists. Add gold to your gasoline and who knows what you would get?
But gold’s lack of usefulness is its great merit. It is never used up in idle doodles or lethal fumes. It just sits there looking pretty - through boom and bust. Not so, lead. In a boom, lead sprouts wings. It soars in price because people are so eager to use it in the hubbub of their industries. In a bust, the wings fall off...and the price drops. Who needs a lead stylus when there are no longer any profits to calculate?
Gold is so useless; it is practically indispensable. It is still there after lead has crashed to the ground, looking prettier than ever. If Jim Rogers is right, a commodity boom will lift prices on almost all commodities. Gold will go up, too, maybe as much as lead - maybe less, maybe more. But thoughts of Armageddon dog us here at The Daily Reckoning. Any day now, we expect China to blow up. Or the Dow to crash. Or the dollar to collapse. The whole world economy is a public spectacle, too, begun on a fraud (that central planning by central banks can create prosperity), and now deep into the farce stage (in which bankrupt Chinese companies expand production in order to sell products to insolvent consumers on the other side of the world). At some point, we look for trouble. And when the ship starts going down, we doubt investors will reach for life preservers of lead. Gold, on the other hand, should be remarkably buoyant.
And since we don’t know what to expect - either the inflation of a commodity boom or the deflation of Armageddon - we still wait for the dip...and buy gold.
[Ed. Note: Justice Litle has found a way for you to buy gold for as little as one-tenth what other bullion investors will pay... while making as much as 12 times what they'll make on every move upward in the gold price. Get his full special report here:
Zero-Downside Gold
The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: Whiskey and Gunpowder’s Mike Shedlock has been thinking a lot about the worst circumstances for carry trade players - and finds that these situations are more plausible than one would first think...
THE NIGHTMARE CARRY TRADE SCENARIO
by Mike “Mish” Shedlock
For those unfamiliar with the term "carry trade," I will use the definition found on Freebuck.com.
"Carry trade - The speculation strategy that borrows an asset at one interest rate, sells the asset, then invests those funds into a different asset that generates a higher interest rate yield. Profit is acquired by the difference between the cost of the borrowed asset and the yield on the purchased asset."
I view the nightmare scenario something like the following:
1. End of quantitative easing (QE) in Japan
2. End of ZIRP in Japan (Rising interest rates)
3. Rising interest rates in Europe
4. Falling interest rates in the U.S.
5. Tightening credit in the U.S.
6. A rising yen vs. the U.S. dollar
Quantitative Easing
Quantitative easing has already ended in Japan. Quantitative easing simply means excessive printing of money by the Bank of Japan in order to defeat the deflation that has been raging for about 18 years.
I believe that ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and QE (quantitative easing) prolonged Japan's deflation, but for now, that is irrelevant. The key point is that both are about to come to an end.
As you can see, money supply in Japan nearly doubled between 2001-2006. Hedge funds could borrow yen at zero percent and invest in the U.S. stock market; or gold; or silver; or, after all of these rate hikes, U.S. Treasuries and get 5%. The only real worry was the yen rising in value more than the return on other investments. With Japan unwilling to let the yen rise, players piled high on the carry trade.
From a U.S. dollar perspective, when interest rates were slashed to 1%, another possible carry trade was to borrow funds in U.S. dollars and invest in gold, silver, or equities. With the S&P dividend ratio under 2% and interest rates close to 5%, the U.S. carry trade slowly died with each rate hike.
Rising interest rates in Europe and Japan and falling rates in the U.S. (a global equalization of interest rates) will end more of these carry trades.
Contrary Investor points this out:
"Historical periods of meaningful rate of change decline in the Japanese monetary base have preceded each meaningful U.S. recession of the last three decades. Just eyeing them out, these large percentage drops occurred in '73/'74, '79/'80, 1990, and 2000. If, indeed, history has the chance of repeating itself ahead, what should we now be expecting for the macro U.S. economy as we look directly at current Japanese monetary base contraction?"
Speculation in various markets is extreme, as noted by trillions of dollars worth of derivatives floating around. The unwinding of those derivatives and any related carry trades is not likely to be a smooth event. In "Financial War Games," I talked about the European Central Bank running "stress tests" to see if it could handle a derivative meltdown. We might just be put to the test. Clearly, we are at a serious crossroads of the greatest liquidity experiment the world has ever seen, with multiple players, in multiple countries, doing mind-boggling things with tremendous leverage.
Right now, we see the "Fed in a Quandary" about what to do. In spite of that, Bernanke thinks the Fed can magically control the global economy with a looming U.S. recession on top of a housing bubble bust. It is the height of hubris.
ZIRP
QE is toast. Let's consider the end of ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). Bloomberg is reporting, "Yosano Says Japan Must Eventually Say Deflation Over":
"Japan's government will eventually need to declare an end to deflation, Economic and Fiscal Policy Minister Kaoru Yosano said.
"'At some point citizens will need to be told by academics or politicians that sustained price declines have ended,' said Yosano, who was speaking to lawmakers in Tokyo today. 'Hardly any consumers are under the impression that prices are falling.'
"Japan's core consumer prices have risen for the past six months, signaling the economy's tussle with more than seven years of deflation is ending. Rising prices and an expanding economy may prompt the Bank of Japan to raise borrowing costs for the first time in almost six years as soon as July, economists say.
"Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe reiterated separately that the central bank should keep borrowing costs near zero to support the economy. He said the bank and the government need to work together to end deflation and ensure prices don't resume falling. Abe was speaking to reporters at a regular news conference in Tokyo today."
For now, Japan seems unwilling to let interest rates rise, as evidenced by the Financial Times article "BOJ Injects $13 Billion Into Market to Cut Rates":
"The Bank of Japan on Monday injected a massive Y1,500 billion ($13.3 billion) into the money market as it desperately sought to keep overnight interest rates under control.
"The injection came as overnight rates once again tested the 0.1% ceiling, calling into question the central bank's ability to keep rates at 'effectively zero,' in line with its stated policy."
The market is attempting to force Japan to hike. Japan is resisting. With a national debt of 150% of GDP, how much longer can Japan resist? A rising yen would be bad for those borrowing in yen and investing in U.S. Treasuries. A rising dollar is bad for those borrowing U.S. dollar and buying gold, silver, or falling U.S. dollar-denominated assets. The crosscurrents on some of these trades are significant, even though the yen and the dollar cannot both fall relative to each other. What can happen, however, is falling asset prices (stocks, gold, silver, copper, equities) at a rate greater than any interest rate differential. That is likely in a monetary tightening situation as we are seeing in both Japan and the U.S.
E.U. Money Supply
Writing for the Financial Sense Market Wrap Up on May 31, Paul Nolte had this interesting commentary:
"Many fingers are pointing to money supply (or lack of M3 being reported) as a key to the 'blown-up' U.S. economy. However, the reality points to places outside the U.S. The various Ms are running at relatively low year-over-year rates -- MZM 3.9%, M2 4.5%, and M1 a measly 1.8%. This contrasts with the big inflation years during the '70s and '80s, when these aggregates were well over 10% (and sometimes north of 15%). Even the monetary base is growing at a 4% rate, less than one-third of the pace of the early '90s. So where is the liquidity coming from? One place is Europe, where the European central banks are boosting money supply by a torrid 8% annual rate. While 'Helicopter Ben' may have a tough name to overcome in the months ahead, investors need to look elsewhere when complaining about excessive monetary growth."
Bingo. Once again, "dollar bears" only point out what the U.S. is doing, forgetting about gross distortions in Japan, Europe, and the U.K. Long term, this is, of course, good for gold, but short term, the unwinding of various carry trades can wreck havoc on those that are overleveraged.
With that excessive expansion of credit in Europe, interest rates in the E.U. are poised to rise. Please be prepared to click off No. 3 on the list above if and when it happens.
Fed Cause
No. 4 is a given. The Fed at some point will pause. The unwinding of the housing bubble in the U.S. assures it. The question is when. The problem if it does not pause is that the blowup of the housing bubble will accelerate, and the problem if it does is a potential bond market revolt. Jobs here are the key. Falling jobs in conjunction with a housing bubble bust will let the Fed get away with a pause and subsequent cuts. This, of course, is where it gets complicated. Will Japan react to slowing U.S. demand by attempting to weaken the yen yet again? If internal demand in China and Japan picks up, Japan can perhaps happily keep hiking. If not, can Japan can abruptly end QE and go back to ZIRP to fight one more round of deflation? I think not.
Everyone talks about hyperinflation in the U.S. What happens to the Japanese if they stay on its current QE/ZIRP path forever? At some point, a national debt at 150% of GDP matters even if "they owe it to themselves." It might seem funny to be talking about massive inflation in Japan, but under the right circumstances, I could foresee a loss of faith in the yen. Typically, emergence from K-Winter is a slow event with slowly rising inflation, but with central bankers everywhere taking all sorts of untried experiments with liquidity, some sort of major currency problem with the yen is possible. If the BOJ changes its mind about QE (something I do not expect), then a loss of faith in the yen is certainly possible. It is a scenario that is on virtually no one's radar, yet it is not really that far-fetched (even if at this point it is unlikely). Yet everyone assumes the U.S. dollar will blow up. The contrarian in me suggests that if a huge currency problem of some sort emerges, it just may be elsewhere. Perhaps this scenario unfolds sometime down the road in a panic move by Japan to reinstate QE.
Credit Tightening
Let's move on to No. 5. Is credit tightening in the U.S. so unlikely? I think not. All it takes to kick it off is accelerating housing declines. The ultimate nightmare scenario for U.S. housing would be a situation in which long-term mortgage rates decouple from the 10-year Treasury note and stubbornly refuse to drop in the face of easing actions by the Fed. I view that as a possibility that I have not heard discussed elsewhere. Rising default risk could potentially change mortgage lending standards in situations in which large downpayments are not made. Regardless of whether that specific scenario unfolds, consumer credit is showing signs of stress and money supply growth is far greater in the E.U. and China than it is in the U.S. In fact, money supply in China is up a staggering 22%, as noted in "9th-Inning Liquidity." Falling home prices, falling jobs, and a correction of the negative savings rate in the U.S. is all that it will take for huge credit problems in the U.S. to surface. At this point, all three of those seem extremely likely.
A Rising Yen
Some have argued that with interest rates in Japan at zero, a modest rise in interest rates to 1% will not stop the yen carry trade. Borrowing at 1% in Japan get 4-5% in the U.S. -- what could be simpler? I disagree. A rise in the yen greater than the interest rates' differential would cause a loss for yen carry trade players. Assume for a second that rates fall to 4% in the U.S. and rise to 1% in Japan. At that point, the U.S. Treasury yield will still be over double the dividend yield on the S&P (a situation not that great for U.S. dollar carry trade players). And from the perspective of the yen carry trader, all it would take to wipe out profits would be a mere 3% rise in the yen. Notice that it would not take a collapse of the U.S. dollar to cause huge problems. A mere 6% move versus the yen would cause a tremendous amount of damage. I suppose one could try to hedge that currency risk, but ask yourself how well Fannie Mae has done hedging its interest rate risk. It may not be the easiest thing to do.
An additional problem for Japan is that a rising yen would hurt Japanese exports. That might not bode well for the Japanese stock markets. As long as Japan could slow the rise of the yen via ZIRP and QE policies, yen carry trade players had the green light to pour it on. That green light is now a brightly flashing yellow (possibly even red) given that every increase in Japanese interest rates will help fuel a rise in the yen.
There you have it: the nightmare carry trade scenario. All in all, it looks closer than anyone might have thought. Perhaps that is the message of a 100-point plunge in gold; copper going down lock limit several times; silver ramping to the moon; just to fall off a cliff; various emerging markets indexes plunging; and global equity markets taking a collective nose dive.
Should a nightmare unwinding of various carry trades unfold as I expect it to, "dry powder," as in cold hard cash, just may be a good thing to have.
Regards,
Mike Shedlock ~ "Mish"
for The Daily Reckoning
Editor's Note: Michael Shedlock (Mish) worked in the financial services industry for 20 years at some of the top institutions in the country including Harris Bank, the Bank of Montreal, Bank One, First National Bank of Chicago, and First Data Corp. Mish runs one of the more popular stock boards on the Motley Fool, Investment Analysis Clubs / Mishedlo and one of the more popular boards on Silicon Investor, Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis. You can see more of Mish's writing on his blog also entitled Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis.
He is also a contributor to Whiskey and Gunpowder, a free e-newsletter, from Dan Denning and Byron King (among others) that covers resources, oil, geopolitics, military history, geology and personal freedom. To get your free subscription, click below:
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