New Thinking

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
-- Albert Einstein

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."
-- Saul Bellow

"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence"
-- Napoleon Bonaparte

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth"
-- Vladimir Lenin

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Peter Schiff talk in San Francisco

I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Peter Schiff, whose book Crash Proof I reviewed in an earlier post, on November 30 in San Francisco, where he was a keynote speaker at the Hard Assets Investment Conference. His talk was attended by a standing room only crowd (we managed to get a seat after standing for half an hour) of at least 1,000 maybe 2,000. Understandably, his long-standing bearish take on the U.S. economy has gained a lot of credibility in light of recent events, and people like myself are eager to learn more about what he thinks is coming down the pike. 

The first section of his talk was a review of his long-held belief that the U.S. economy is catastrophically unsound due to government intervention in the economy over the last two decades. A talk (which you can watch on youtube) he gave two years ago to the national association of mortgage brokers lays out his case in roughly the same way he laid it out at this recent talk. His argument has many pillars, but the main idea is that the government, in a series of efforts to hide, defer, or delay negative economic developments (like a recession where lots of people loose their jobs), have only succeeded in pushing the pain out into the future, where the pain will be much, much worse that if we had suffered a small amount of pain at the time. For example, when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, we should have had a recession then. Instead, we had a very isolated set of job losses in the tech sector, and the overall economy quickly rebounded, led by what? Yes, you guessed it, the real estate bubble. 

Why did we have a real estate bubble after the dot-com bubble burst? Due to the massive intervention of the government via the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to make it easy to borrow, and by the President and the Congress with their Freddie and Fannie boondoggle to juice up the housing market as a quick fix to boost the economy and prevent a recession. Well that worked, sort of, by pushing out the recession that we should have had in 2001 and 2002, all the way out to now in 2008. But in those 6 or 7 years, a whole lot of dry rot has been festering in the foundations of our economic system. Instead of cleaning it out back then and building on a solid foundation, we've built up a huge bubble economy that is collapsing before our eyes. Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and others, these are names that I grew up with that meant things to me like "stability", "security", "sound money", "Wall Street financial wizards".  It's inconceivable to me that companies like that got so far out of whack that they could collapse into dust literally overnight. 

Mr. Schiff is a student of the "Austrian School" of economics, a tradition of economic scholarship founded I believe by Ludwig von Mieses (learn more at http://mises.org), which by studying history of past economic failures, has developed a persuasive case that economies should be allowed to go through boom and bust periods without government intervention. The basic idea is that industries and businesses should be allowed to fail or succeed on their own. If they are failing, it's because they are, perhaps, no longer producing products people want, or inefficient, or any number of reasons. But preventing them from failing is only preventing the natural ebb and flow of the economy in which new companies and industries may arise to take their place. 

The U.S. auto industry bailout is a case in point. Ford, GM, and Chrysler are clearly bloated, inefficient companies that produce products that few people want to buy. Why not let them fail and allow new auto companies to take their place? What good will come of keeping them alive for one or two more years on government life-support?

But back to Mr. Schiff's talk. His take on what is going on now is that it is more of the same bad medicine that made us sick in the first place is being given to us again. More cheap credit by lowering interest rates, government programs to prop up the economy, more borrowing from foreign lenders to push off the bills to the future. We are, he says, like a person who is paying off their credit card debt by making the minimum monthly payments using cash advances from a new credit card, and paying for their living expenses by racking up even more credit card debt. This all ends in bankruptcy when the credit card companies eventually notice that you will never be able to pay back all the debt you have racked up, and stop giving you new credit cards. Similarly on a much larger scale, the foreign lenders (like China) who are buying U.S. Treasury bonds by the trillions will eventually wise up and notice that we are building up such massive amounts of debt that we will never, ever be able to pay it all back. When they pull the plug, by ceasing to put all their currency reserves in U.S. dollars, the jig will be up. The entire U.S. economy will be like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual, Fannie, Freddie, GM and Ford combined, times a billion. 

Think about it. Where is all this money coming from, $700 billion bank bailout, $30 billion auto industry bailout, the Obama New Deal to build roads, schools and universal broadband Internet? We don't have any money. We aren't saving money. The national savings rate is near zero.  We aren't producing enough products that we can sell to the rest of the world to finance all the products we need to buy from the rest of the world. We have massive trade deficits. We have a $8.5 trillion dollar budget deficit built up over the last 20 years. We have programs like Social Security, Medicare, government pension plans and other programs that have been promised to people that will cost over $40 trillion in the coming years.  The whole thing is a house built on sand. 

So where do we go from here? Mr. Schiff is saying that the U.S. economy will essentially collapse in the coming years, and will finally undergo the changes that should have been made years ago. We will start producing products people want to buy. Our manufacturing industry that has been outsourced abroad will revive here in America. We will start spending less that we earn instead of borrowing so that we can spend more than we earn, both as individuals and as a nation. But that process will take about 10 years. In the meantime, he predicts a few things. The collapse in the value of the U.S. dollar, the collapse of the U.S. housing market, massive unemployment and ultimately hyperinflation as fewer and fewer products are imported from abroad (since we can no longer afford them) and lots of worthless U.S. dollars chase fewer and fewer available products. 

What does he recommend that you do? He covers this in his latest book, The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets. Downsize your lifestyle, save as much cash as you can. Keep reserves to live on for six months. And anything you have to invest, invest in a mix of gold, and stocks in companies outside the United States that produce essentials, like energy, food, or construction. Those companies should pay a high rate of dividends and be in countries with sound, growing economies. Look at your career. Jobs related to banking, real estate, overseas travel, and luxury services are going to be scarce. Jobs will be in the basics: manufacturing, food production, agriculture, energy, computer technology, construction, clothing production. People will fix what they have instead of buying new products, so auto repair, appliance repair, and clothing repair will be big. There is time now to learn new skills.

Could he be wrong? Of course he could, and I sincerely hope his more dire predictions don't happen. But I'm not counting on it. And the things he recommends that we do to prepare are sound ideas in a good or bad economy. Spend less, save, invest wisely, and build up skills in a job that has good prospects for the long term. It's common sense, that if practiced by each of us as individuals, will collectively add up to a sound national economy. After all, the goverment is us, we elect them, and their failure is our failure. When we stand up as individuals and manage our personal affairs with wisdom and common sense, we will elect a goverment that manages the nations economy in the same way.



Tuesday, December 2, 2008

What's wrong with this picture?

(Click image to enlarge)

The economy is tanking, the government is printing money to bail out bloated inefficient companies, so the stock market goes up? Foolish, magical thinking.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Book report: Crash Proof by Peter Schiff

Just finished reading a book with a cheery title Crash Proof. How the Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse by Peter Schiff. Mr. Schiff is one of the people I give the most credit to for opening my eyes to the disastrous state of the US economy when I saw a video of him predicting the mortgage meltdown that we are suffering from today as early as 2006. The video titled Peter Schiff Was Right has been circulating on YouTube and has 650,000 views as of this writing. That video motivated me to read his book, Crash Proof, so that I could understand the details of why he predicted the mortgage meltdown, and what he predicts will happen from here.

The book was extremely en lighting on many more topics beyond just the crisis of the day
 in mortgages and banks. The failures of Freddie and Fannie, Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, Citibank and others are merely symptoms of far deeper structural problems with our economy and our collective personal behavior as a society. For example:

1. We stopped saving and started borrowing so that we could spend more than we earn. 

Just take a look at this chart from the book:



2. As a nation, we have gone from being a lender to a borrower, and a borrower on a massive scale. 

We have stopped producing products that other countries want to buy, and instead are borrowing trillions of dollars from other countries in order to buy their products. This chart shows the percent of US Treasury bonds held by foreign countries, indicating how far in debt we are getting in order to finance our spending.
Because Americans are not saving and producing but are borrowing and consuming, we have become precariously dependent on foreign suppliers and lenders. As a result, we a facing and imminent monetary crisis that will dramatically lower the standard of living of Americans who fail to protect themselves.




3. We are printing money like there's no tomorrow.

How is it that the government can simply print money, as much as it wants with no limit? The answer lies in the history of money in the United States, in which the dollar began as a paper representation of an amount of gold metal, and gradually morphed into what is called fiat currency. From Wikipedia:
The terms fiat currency and fiat money relate to types of currency or money  whose usefulness results not from any intrinsic value or guarantee that it can be converted into gold or another currency, but instead from a government's order (fiat) that it must be accepted as a means of payment.
In other words, fiat money is worth something only because the government has decreed that is is worth something. The US dollar is a fiat currency, and therefore is not worth anything in and of itself. It's just paper with ink, so there's not really any practical limit to how much of it can be printed.

There is a very interesting section of the book that explains the origin and history of the US dollar. Money is provided for in the US Constitution where is says: "Congress shall have the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof," meaning that it was empowered to take gold and sliver, which the country then recognized as money, and issue them in the form of coins. Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution forbids stats from accepting anything other then gold or silver coin legal tender for payment of debts.

The dollar was first defined in the Mint Act of 1792 as 371.25 grains of fine silver. The first US currency was issued in 1863 as a gold certificate that read "The certifies that there have been deposited in the Treasury of the United States ten dollars in gold payable to the bearer on demand."

The first step in detaching money from tangible assets (thus paving the way for today's situation in which the Federal Reserve Bank arbitrarily prints money backed by nothing) was the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. That act established the Federal Reserve System, which is politically independent of Congress and the President, to supervise the banking system and manage the supply of money. One of their first actions was to introduce a currency called Federal Reserve notes, which were redeemable "in gold or lawful money" at any Federal Reserve bank, meaning gold or silver, as before, but now also Treasury notes. This was the beginning of removing any connecting between money and gold.

The 1934 Gold Reserve Act removed the word gold from Federal Reserve notes, and changed the wording to "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private, and is redeemable for lawful money at the United States Treasury, or at any Federal Reserve Bank." A subtle change, but now any reference to a connection between paper money and gold was removed.

From the book:
On November 2, 1963, the redemption clause was eliminated completely, rendering all US currency intrinsically worthless.  On that date, our monetary system was transformed from the gold-and silver-based system specified in our Constitution to one of government fiat.
...The bottom line is that rather than representing legitimate IOUs redeemable in specified weights of gold or silver, US Federal Reserve notes because IOU nothings, mere pieces of paper that bearers did not constitute any liability on the part of the issuer. 
What that meant was that any value the dollar had would depend purely on its purchasing power, which in turn would depend on the financial strength of the US economy and how the supply of dollars was regulated.
So the value of the dollars in our bank account depend on two things:
  • the financial strength of the US economy
  • how the supply of dollars is regulated
The financial strength of the US economy? Not good right now.

How are the supply of dollars being regulated? Well, because the Federal Reserve can print money without being limited to the amount of gold in its vaults, there's not limit. And haven't recent events proven that the government can simply print money at will?
  • $700 billion dollar bailout for banks
  • $85 billion bailout for AIG
  • Another $300 billion bailout for Citibank
  • Auto makers want another $30 billion
Where is all this money coming from? The amount of tax money the government isn't going up. Even if we raise tax rates, it will still go down because people who don't have a job don't pay taxes.

The money is coming from the government printing presses. The total am out of money circulating in the US has increased 20-fold since 1980, from around $500 billion to over $10 trillion, as shown in this chart:


There are many other massive structural problems with out economy as described in the book, including inflation, the size of our national debt, and the amount of money we have promised to people that has no source of funding, such as Social Security, medicare, veterans benefits. Our national debt is $8.5 trillion dollars, and our unfunded promises is over $50 trillion. How much money is that really? Hard to say because numbers that large are abstract. But to me, it seems clear that these are amounts of money we cannon possibly repay.

Inflation is a much bigger problem than official government figures are letting on. Mr. Shiff explains that official government figures on inflation are bogus for several reasons. One, if a product like a car goes up by 10% one year, the government can decide that the car is 20% better due to new features etc, and then say that the car has actually decrease in price, not increased. Second, food and fuel costs, and housing costs, are not included in official inflation statistics. Mr Schiff asserts in the book that inflation is already a much bigger problem than is commonly assumed, and is going to get much worse due to the way we are borrowing and printing money.

So given all of the above, I have to conclude that our economy has been run into the ground, and is a total basket case, destined for a big fall. The events we have seen to date are probably only the beginning of the unraveling. How this economic disaster will play out, and what we can each due personally to prepare for it, is the final section of Mr. Schiff's book and which I'll summarize in the next blog post.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

New Thinking: Gerald Celente, founder & director, The Trends Research Institute

Here's a partial list of the events that Gerald Celente of The Trends Research Institute correctly predicted before they happened:

The Panic of '08
A Dot-Com correction by the second quarter of 2000
October 1997 Pacific Rim currency crisis
August 1998 Russian economic collapse
October 1987 world stock market crash
Demise of the Soviet Union
A full list of his prediction and the year in which he made them can be found here.

So let's admit that this guy seems to have a knack for looking at trends and accurately surmising where those trends are heading.

Here's video of Mr. Celente from 2007 accurately predicting the events we are currently experiencing in late 2008 (banking collapse, mortgage industry collapse, stock market collapse):


So I think he's proven that we ought to listen to him when he predicts what is coming down the pike in 2009 and beyond. Unfortunately, it's ugly. He's predicting a 90% decline in the value of the dollar, mass homelessness, and worse by 2012. In short, worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.



If you think what he is saying about an imminent economic depression and the mass scale suffering that will entail is plausible and possible, don't despair but do prepare.  To prepare, go right now and obtain the book "Crash Proof" by Peter Schiff. As I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, Mr. Schiff has correctly predicted the collapse of the mortgage lending industry which has already happened, and also predicting several other frightening events that have not yet happend, including hyper-inflation, the collapse of the dollar, collapse of the credit card industry and other events that will lead to an economic depression when they happen. Although sobering, he does offer a set of specific actions to take to protect your finances. In a nutshell, get any money you have out of the US stock market, and out of US dollars. Invest in gold, and stock of solid, dividend paying companies that produce essential goods and services like power, water, and food, in countries in Asia and Europe that are still growing.

Check out the book on Amazon, but get it for free at your local library and save yourself $20 that you can invest for the future.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

New Thinking: James Quinn, The Wharton School

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/the-shallowest-generation/

James Quinn is a senior director of strategic planning at The Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania.

The brutal necessary lesson that should have been learned is that if you loan money to people who can’t pay you back, your bank will go bankrupt. The “poor” people who made a bad decision in buying homes and cars they couldn’t afford have lost those homes and cars. The banks made a bad business decision in making those loans. The taxpayer was not involved in these business transactions. This is where Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and George Bush, formerly free market capitalists, decided to commit our grandchildren’s money to bailing out the horribly run financial institutions. Our government has chosen to allow these banks off the hook for their bad business decisions at the expense of taxpayers. Rewarding bad decisions and bad behavior will lead to more bad decisions and more bad behavior.

During the current Bush administration, Americans’ savings rate actually went below zero, while household debt as a percentage of GDP soared above 130%, a doubling in 25 years. These figures prove that the apparent prosperity of the last 25 years was an illusion. Beginning in 1982, Baby Boomers chose to take the easy road. Saving, investing and living within your means were cast aside as “Old School”. Boomers were handed a better future through the blood, sweat and tears of the “Greatest Generation”. Through their hubris, they’ve squandered that better future, the future of their children and imperiled our entire capitalist system.




Friday, November 14, 2008

Same old thinking: The Geniuses running the Federal Reserve Bank

From May 2008: "Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans on Monday reiterated his belief that the US economy will begin to turn around in the second half of this year."

It's now November 2008 (the second half of the year). The economy isn't turning around.

Same Old Thinking; The Leadership of the Democratic Party

Hearings on increasing regulatory oversight of Freddie and Fannie Mae were held in 2004. This video shows clearly that members of congress from the Democratic party, including Barney Frank, vigorously defending Freddie and Fannie against charges of mismagement and financial unsoundess. Republican members of congress are shown vigorously challenging the fiscal soundness of Freddie and Fannie and calling for increased regulatory oversight. Flash forward to 2008, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is shown in the video placing all blame for the failure of Freddie and Fannie on the Republican party's so-called "anything goes" no-regulation policies. Let me see if I have it straight: republicans pushed for regulation in 2004 and you blocked them. Now in 2008, you are selling the idea that this crisis was caused by lack of regulation and right wing ideology. I'm not buying it, but I guess slightly more that 50% of the American people did.

Now that their party has majorities in congress and the presidency, Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Frank are in charge, and the very people that denied there was a problem in 2004 and fought against fixing it back then are now the ones in charge of cleaning it up in 2008.