Mauldin: Europe and Sovereign Debt Economics; the Endgame Approaches -- Soon!

One of the interesting things about being in Hong Kong is that I get to see the weekend edition of the Financial Times 12 hours early. And the headlines were not all that pleasant. As I promised last week, we will cast our eyes to Europe and ponder what is in store for Europe for the year and the next five years. And what do we read on page 2? The "ECB raps revisions to draft a fiscal pact." Seems they feel there are too many loopholes, which will make the document meaningless … somewhat like the treaty they have now. And we further learn that "Greek default threat grows as talks falter." Seems there is a lack of agreement on how much of a haircut the investors ought to take, and the Greeks don't want to guarantee any future debt, just in case they need to default some more in the future. But they do want the €15 billion they need to keep the debt machine running for a few more months.
And on page 1, in big type, we are surprised (but not very) by the headline, "France and Austria face debt blow." Seems those sharp-eyed accountants over at S&P have decided to downgrade French debt from AAA. Which of course leads to another headline on page 2, suggesting "Firepower of bail-out fund cast into doubt." The currency markets were shocked – shocked I tell you – that S&P would do such a thing and promptly took back the euro rally and cast the euro down to recent cycle lows. Who knew, other than the entire free world not watching reality TV, that S&P was planning to do such a thing? And we read elsewhere that the European Commission is dismayed that S&P would do something so clearly not right, at least according to the way they keep their own books.
Even here in amazing Hong Kong, with the growth of China driving a wave of prosperity, eyes are fixed on Europe. How will they deal with the crisis? We read that US exports to Europe were down 7% last quarter, and Europe has not yet really entered into recession, which is almost guaranteed this year. And if US exports are down, then so are Asian and Latin American exports. Global growth appears to be threatened.

Solving the Mayan Code

There are so many pieces of data to go through in order to augur Europe's future – I want readers to know I have left no stone unturned! In fact, I went to some very old stones to get help with this week's letter. I began to scrutinize the Mayan Code from ancient Central America, which so many feel predicts the end of the world on December 21 of this year, bringing my fresh eyes to an old mystery.
After much deliberation, I have come to this astounding insight: The Mayan academics who created the code were not in fact astronomers or even astrologers. No, it is clear they were another breed of even more dubious forecasters, called economists. Once you approach the glyphs with that understanding, it becomes clear they are not predicting the end of the world, merely the end of Europe. One symbol clearly shows the Greek flag dipping to the ground. Another depicts the Italian flag with its wheels coming off. Oh, and you don't even want to know what they have prognosticated for the French. This is a family e-letter and I can't squeeze such language past the censors. But now that I have provided the basic insight, I leave it to you, fellow scholars, to decipher the rest of code.
And we will spend our time together here this week trying to discern what it means, in fact, for Europe to come to the place in its journey where it must make extremely difficult and often painful choices. As I wrote last week, as I started this voyage of discovery with you, the choices the various countries in the developed world are now making will put us on a path that does not allow us to turn back without severe consequences. (If you missed last week's letter, here it is.) We are left with debt that must be dealt with, with imbalances that must be balanced, and with deficits that must be brought under control. No matter what we choose, there will be pain for all of us. You cannot make debt go away without paying it back or defaulting, one way or the other, which means someone loses. And as we will see, paying it back can be very difficult, indeed, once it has grown this large.

To Solve the Crisis You Must Solve Three Problems

There are three main problems in Europe. The first is that most of the banks are massively insolvent, because they have 30 times their capital invested in the second problem, which is the sovereign debt of countries that are going to have trouble paying that debt. If the banks have to mark down the debt to what its real value is – or to what it will soon be – they will be bankrupt on a scale that makes 2008 look like a waltz in the park.
Countries simply cannot function in a manner that can be called normal without viable banking systems, which is why the authorities spend so much time worrying about them. If banks can't make loans, then businesses must cut back, which means fewer jobs, products, and services, which quickly becomes an ugly spiral. Losses in the private sector mount up. This obliges the treasury secretary to get on one knee and beg some elected official who has no understanding of how business and economics work to save the world as he knows it.
But if countries must step in and save their banks, then they have to assume some of the losses. (I am assuming that this time shareholders get completely wiped out, as do most bondholders. Taxpayers – read voters –are actually paying attention this time. They are in no mood to bail out bankers.) But most of the countries in Europe with the worst banks simply do not have the money to invest. They already have too much debt. Where do they get the capital? (More on that later.)
For most of the past two years, European leaders have tried to deal with the problems as though they were short-term liquidity problems: "If we just find the money to buy some more Greek bonds, then Greece can figure out how to solve its problems and then pay us back. Given enough time, the problem can get solved."
They have now arrived at the understanding that it this not a short-term problem. Rather, it's a solvency problem of the various governments, which of course creates a solvency problem for their banks. They are now addressing the problem of solvency and providing capital until such time as certain countries can get their budgets under control and the bond market sees fit to provide the capital they need.
But they are completely ignoring the third and largest problem, and that is massive trade imbalances. Germany exports products to the peripheral European countries, which run trade deficits. As I have shown in several letters, a country cannot reduce private-sector leverage, reduce public-sector leverage and deficits (balance its budget), and run a trade deficit all at the same time. That is simple, unavoidable math, based on 400 years of accounting understanding. Ultimately, there must be a trade surplus if leverage and debt are to be reduced.
Greece runs a trade deficit of about 10% of GDP. Until they can stop that bleeding, they cannot get their government and private budgets under control. It is not simply a matter of cutting budgets or raising taxes. Indeed, their economy will continue to shrink, making it more difficult buy foreign goods without increasing their own production of goods and services. It is a vicious spiral. And that same spiral will spin up to take in all of Europe. Again, more on that later, as we consider what their choices are.
But for now, let's start with my contention that if you do not solve all three problems you do not solve the real problem. Greece cannot "stand on its own" without a change in its cost of production relative to Northern Europe. Neither can Portugal, et al., unless Germany either changes how it exports and consumes more, or Germany is willing to fund Greek (and Portuguese and Italian and…) debt, so those countries can continue to run large deficits.
Let's resort to something I have done in the past, and that is to create a simple model to help us understand the issues involved. As always, when we make simple assumptions we are ignoring the real complexities. I know things are vastly more complicated than the following simple analogies, but the underlying truths are basically the same.

Getting Simple About Europe

Let's assume a country that has a gross domestic product (GDP) of $1,000. In the beginning it taxes its citizens about 25% of GDP and spends the money for the public's benefit. But alas, it spends about 30% of GDP, so it must borrow the overage (about $50) from its citizens or from the citizens of other countries. Because the country starts out with relatively little debt, interest rates on this loan are low, because those who buy the debt can easily see that the the country can pay them back. If the debt of the country is only 5% of GDP ($50) and the interest rate is 4%, then the amount that must be paid as interest is only about $2 per year. Not a whole lot, about 0.2% of GDP.
But this goes on year after year. Sometimes the deficits get smaller and sometimes they get larger, depending on the economy; but government expenditures grow at the same rate as the country grows, and the debt keeps growing at an average of 5% of GDP per year. Now, if the country is growing at 3% a year, after 24 years the economy will have doubled to $2,000 GDP. That means the debt has grown (roughly) to a total of $1,800, which is now a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90%. Debt has grown faster than the country's economy. Note that if the country had held its budget down to where it grew slower than GDP, thus reducing its need for debt, that ratio would be lower, even if the debt had grown. You can indeed grow your way out of a debt problem if the growth of government spending is less than the growth of the economy.
But what if the size of government grows to about 50% of GDP, rather than 25% or 30%, over the 24 years, as politicians decide to spend more money and voters decide they want more benefits? (Think France.) Then the private sector must pay about 50% of its production to the state – plus, the debt is now growing unwieldly. The private sector has less to invest in new businesses and tools, and the growth of the economy slows.
And then along comes a very nasty recession. The revenues of the government fall as the economy shrinks. If the economy shrinks by 3% and total taxes are 50%, then tax revenue falls to $970. But the government does not cut back; and indeed, because it must pay unemployment benefits and welfare (because unemployment rises in a recession), its expenses actually rise by 5%! So it now needs $1,050 to pay all its budgeted expenses. And it must now borrow $80 to pay everyone it has promised to pay, in addition to the $100 it was already borrowing every year to cover its deficit, or a total of $180 a year, which is 9% of GDP.
(Yes, I know that debt must change as a percentage over time and nothing is stagnant, but work with me here.)
Now debt-to-GDP is rising by about 5% a year. Not a large number in the grand scheme of things, and everyone knows that the recession will soon be over and the deficits will come down. Sovereign governments never default on their debts – our government leaders assure us of that. They can always raise taxes or cut spending, can't they?
And things rock along just fine, and the bond market continues to buy the debt, until one day you look up and the debt is 120% of GDP. Then the bond market gets nervous and says that instead of 4% it wants 7%. Now the interest payments are over 8% of GDP and 16% of government spending, which means the government must either cut back on services or salaries or benefits, or raise taxes, or borrow more money. But cutting spending and raising taxes have consequences. They reduce GDP growth over the following 4-5 quarters as the economy adjusts.
What if that interest rate cost rose to 10%? Then the interest cost to the government would become 20% of its expenses and be rising faster than the country could grow, even in the best of times. And if they continued to borrow at 7% and the country did not grow, those interest expenses would rise at least 7% a year – as long as interest rates didn't go up.
And what if the other countries who had been buying the government's debt looked at the basic math and realized that, another step or two down the current path of government spending, there was no way they would be able to get their money back?

How Much Risk Do You Want in a Government Bond?

Now, government bond investors are a curious breed. They invest in government bonds because they actually think there is not supposed to be any risk. They want their money to be safe. If they wanted risk, there are lots of opportunities to invest with the potential for more reward.
The moment that government bond investors begin to think they might be at risk, they leave. And history suggests they tend to leave seemingly all at once. It is the Bang! moment. Someone fires the starting gun, and they all head for the exits. They start selling their bonds to speculators at discounts, which makes the effective interest rates in the market rise, sometimes by a lot. That means that if a country wants to borrow more money, it will have to pay the effective price in the market, or maybe as much as 15-20% IF – a big IF – it can even get someone to buy the bonds, which of course makes it even more difficult to pay their debt as interest costs rise.
Now, let's add a twist. The other countries that have bought those bonds are not actually countries, but banks in other countries. And because the regulators of those banks knew it was impossible – inconceivable – that a sovereign country might default, they allowed their banks to buy 30 times as much sovereign debt as they had capital in their banks. They did not have to reserve against any losses, so these were "free" profits for the banks. You pay 2% on deposits or short term commercial paper and buy bonds paying at 4%. You make a 2% spread, which you then do 30 times. Now you are making 60% profits on your capital and deposits. It is a very nice business – as long as everyone pays the interest. And because it is such a good business, you just roll over the debt every time the bond comes due, because you want more easy profits.
Let's say that banks bought up to 10% of their total government sovereign-debt holdings in our problem country. If the country gets into trouble and says, we will only pay 50% of our debt (we will discuss why below), then that means the banks lose 5% of their total assets. But they only have about 3% capital, because they were allowed to leverage. That means they are functionally bankrupt.
Without a functioning banking system, other countries now have to step in and take the losses (and perhaps wipe out the shareholders and owners of their banks). That would be bad for the other countries, as that much spare cash is not just lying around in government coffers. They are ALL borrowing money already and have their own deficits to worry about.
So everyone gets together and they tell the bankrupt country (because that is what it really is), we will lend you more money to keep you alive, but you must agree to balance your budget. And since that is the only way the problem country can get more money, they initially say, "Sure. We can do that. Just give us some money now so we can get it figured out and get everything under control."
In the world of government, living within your means is called austerity. And it's an uphill slog. Let's say your deficit started out at 15% of GDP (somewhat like Greece's). If you agree to cut that deficit by 4% a year for four years running, if everything stays the same, you could be back in balance. But the other counties would have to agree to lend you the difference between what you budgeted to spend and what you took in as tax revenues. Just to keep things going. Otherwise you'd have to default on your debt. If the countries simply have to guarantee the loans and not actually spend the money, it is a lot easier than having to find real money to save their banks, so they agree.
But the cuts you have to make are not as easy as everyone hoped. It seems that employees don't like having their pay cut, and unions don't want pensions cut, and retirees certainly expect the government to fulfill its promises; and don't even get started on cutting healthcare, which is a God-given right.
So you raise taxes and cut spending by about 4% the first year. But a funny thing happens. That reduces the private economy by about 4%, so the base on which taxes are collected is reduced, which means less revenue is raised, which means that the deficit is much worse than projected. And then the following year you have to make another 4% in cuts, plus the last shortfall, just to make your plan and get to the agreed-upon deficit, in order to get more loan money. It becomes a very vicious circle.
And let's look at the endgame. That debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to at least 150%, while the economy is actually shrinking. If interest rates settle to a mere 7% (hardly likely), it means the people of the country are going to have to pay over 10% of their total production to foreign banks each and every year for decades, never mind paying down the principle.
Let's throw in one more twist. The country has been buying about 10% of GDP more from other countries than it sells to them. That is because the relative wages in the problem country are about 30% higher than in the "good" countries. The good countries get the money from what they sell and have a nice surplus. The problem country soon runs through its savings, trying to buy the goods and service it wants; and the private sector, as well as the government, must cut back.
What happens is that you are locking in what feels like a depression initially, and then you have a slow- or no-growth economy for many years, as so much of your work goes just to pay back that debt to the banks of other countries.
Understand, your government has freely obligated itself to pay that debt. But it means that its citizens in effect become debt slaves for a generation or two to foreign banks. Not a very popular platform for a politician to run on for re-election.
Long-time readers know I think the neo-Keynesians do not have a proper view of the world. They live in a theoretical world divorced from what really happens. But in this respect they are deadly right. Austerity on the scale needed by many countries will only reduce potential GDP. The Keynesian prescription is to therefore run deficits and borrow money until you get growth again; but when you have already exhausted your ability to borrow money, it just doesn't work.
More debt makes if far more difficult to grow your way out of the problem. If you are already drunk, you can't get sober by drinking more whiskey. If Greece cuts its deficit by 15% of GDP, the reality is that GDP over time will be reduced by about 20%, and the debt will grow, both in real terms and as a percentage of GDP. A 20% decline in GDP is by any standard a depression and makes it even harder to grow, as so much of what you do make has to go to basic expenses and not productive capital. And if you have the burden of massive debt it becomes damn near impossible.
That is why individuals can file for personal bankruptcy. We no longer force people into slavery or debtor's prison to pay their debts, at least in most places.
So our problem country goes to its lenders and says, "We think you should share our pain. We are only going to pay you back 50% of what we owe you, and you must let us pay a 4% interest rate and pay you over a longer period. We think we can do that. Oh, and give us some more money in the meantime. And if you refuse, we won't pay you anything and you will all have a banking crisis. Thanks for everything."
The difficult is that if our problem country A gets to cut its debt by 50%, what about problem countries B, C, and D? Do they get the same deal? Why would voters in one country expect any less, if you agree to such terms for the first country?
So now let's return to the real world of Europe. Greece cannot pay its debt without a major depression. So its wants to pay only 50%, but it doesn't even want to guarantee that in any meaningful way; so bondholders scream, "We get nothing in return for agreeing to take a 50% haircut?!" Which is today's headline.
Greece cannot print its own money, so unless it leaves the Eurozone, it's stuck. They can default on their debt, but that means they are shut out of the bond market for some period of time. That would force them to make the spending cuts they are now resisting, as they would simply not have enough money to pay their bills. Even with a 100% haircut they're looking at a shorter but very real depression. And because no one will sell them products they need, like energy and food and medicine, unless they can sell or trade something in return (that trade-deficit problem), they will be forced to change their lifestyles. Wages must drop or productivity rise to be competitive with northern Europe. And that differential is about 30%. I am not certain, as I have not been to Greece in a long time, but my bet is, you won't find many Greeks who think they are overpaid by 30%.
But that is what the market is going to say. And that is the third problem, which Europe is not addressing. Germany and the northern tier are simply more productive than the Southern periphery. (With the possible exception of Northern Italy, but Italy all gets lumped together, which is why many Northern Italians want to be their own country and not have to pay taxes that go to Southern Italy. I am not taking sides, just observing what we read in the papers.) Until Germany consumes more from the peripheral countries or the peripheral countries become more productive, the imbalance will not allow a positive solution.
Prior to the euro, the imbalances would be handled by currency exchange rates. The value of the drachma would go down relative to the value of the deutschmark. Things would balance over time. Now, all of the eurozone countries are effectively on a gold standard, with the euro standing in for gold this time. Britain, the US, and Japan print their own currencies. Their currencies can rise or fall over long periods of time, based on national accounts and the desires of foreigners to buy goods or invest in their countries.
Greece and the other peripheral countries face a difficult choice. Do we stay in the euro and pay as much as we can, and watch our economy drop; pay nothing and watch our economy drop (as we get shut out of the bond market); or leave the euro and go back to our own currency and watch our economy drop?
They have no choices that allow them to grow and prosper without first suffering (for perhaps a long time) some very real economic pain. As I have written in previous letters, leaving the eurozone has severe consequences; but the economic pain of leaving would go away sooner and allow for quicker adjustments, than if they stayed. However, the initial pain would be worse than the slow pain they'd suffer by staying in the euro. Their choice is, simply, which pain do they want – or maybe, which pain do they think they want? Because whatever they choose, they are not going to like it.
And just as I was finishing this section, this note came from Naked Capitalism:
"The three Troika inspectors—Poul Thomsen from the IMF, Mathias Morse from the EU, and Klaus Mazouch from the ECB—are supposed to head to Greece next week to inspect its books; the budget deficit is once again higher than the revised limit that Greece had vowed to abide by. And they're supposed to negotiate additional 'structural reforms.' But there probably won't be three inspectors, according to senior IMF sources. Missing: Poul Thomsen. The IMF has had enough.
"Already, according to more leaks, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde had warned German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the fiscal and economic situation in Greece had deteriorated. Hence, the 'voluntary' haircut on Greek bonds held by private sector investors should be increased to more than 50% to maintain the goal of bringing Greece's debt load down to 120% of GDP. And the second €130 billion bailout package, agreed upon on October 26, should be enlarged by 'tens of billions of euros.'
"The German reaction was immediate. 'There has to be a line somewhere,' said Michael Fuchs, deputy leader of Merkel's party, the CDU. 'This cannot be a bottomless barrel.' Even if Merkel were amenable to committing more taxpayer money to bail out Greece, she'd face a wall of opposition in her own party. And he wasn't brimming with optimism: 'I don't think that Greece, in its current condition, can be saved,' he said."
The article goes on with a description of the chaos in Greece. It is worse than I have described. Really. And so terribly sad.

Do You Have a Spare €1.5 Trillion?

Before I hit the send button this week, let's look at a few charts that can help us judge the current scope of the problem. These are from the very astute Bill Hester of the Hussman Funds. He wrote a very solid piece entitled "Five Global Risks to Monitor," at http://hussmanfunds.com/rsi/fiveglobalrisks2012.htm. It is very good, if sobering, reading.
This first chart shows how much bank debt is maturing in Europe over time. You have to add in how much new debt must be sold, as they will need to raise capital to balance the sovereign debt losses. Do you have a spare €1.5 trillion? Yes, some of that is rollover debt, but banks are trying to reduce their exposure to each other and may not want to roll over that debt, unless they can turn around and get capital from the European Central Bank to buy it, which is a back door to debt monetization.

The next chart shows how much debt must be rolled over by governments in the coming year. Notice how much Italy must raise in the first three months!

And one last chart from Hester. This is the rise in the cost of new debt as older, cheaper debt comes due. My simple example is not at all extreme.

Next week we will look further into Europe. As a preview, I do think this is the year they will be forced to the very hard decisions. We will examine what a fiscal union would look like and how likely it is to happen, and what the prospects are for a break-up of the eurozone, and compare several scenarios for what Europe may look like in five years.

Mauldin: "No Good Choices"

"Happy New Year. We enter 2012 with a great deal of hope, but our hopes are not for more bailouts, or money printing, or any of the myriad policies that investors seem to hope will save bad investments and sustain elevated valuations. Instead, our hope is that in 2012, the market will finally "clear," in the sense that bad debt around the world will be recognized as bad and restructured; that overleveraged financials will be taken into receivership instead of forcing austerity on every corner of the global economy in order to make them flush again; that rates of return will rise enough to compensate and encourage saving – and high enough to encourage borrowers and other users of capital to allocate the funds productively. Of course, in order to restructure bad debt, someone has to accept a loss. In order for rates of return to rise, valuations must decline. In short, our hope is for events that will unchain the global economy from an irresponsible past and open the gates toward a prosperous future. Maybe that is too hopeful, but we are not entirely convinced that bailouts and 'big bazooka' will be as easily procured in the year ahead as a confused public has allowed in recent years."

– John P. Hussman, Ph.D. ( hussmanfunds.com

 

) 2012 will the year that the consequences of the choices made by nations of the so-called developed world will begin to truly manifest themselves in the economic realm. We are in the closing chapters of the current Debt Supercycle, with different countries strewn out along the path, some at more advanced stages than others but all headed for a destination that will force major decisions if politically painful actions are not taken. The longer that process takes, the fewer options that are available and the more painful the outcomes. Some countries (think Greece, et al.) have a choice between dire economic circumstances and disastrous. The option for merely difficult choices was passed long ago, and the rules are such that there is no going back to where you started without a different but equally painful outcome.
This is the time of year I think about the future, and foolishly opt to make predictions. This year I have decided to be especially foolish and to think about the next five years, especially for the US. Why five? Because I think by then the consequences of our past and immediate future choices will have been realized, the "reset button" as it were will have been pushed, and the economies of the developed world will be ready to move on to a brighter future. The question is, from what level will that new upward journey begin? It will be very different for different countries, depending on the paths they choose.
Let me presage my thoughts. Most countries are being faced with dual choices, which differ according to their own particulars, but all deal with what to do about the need to deleverage, both in the public and private sectors. The end of the Debt Supercycle is a tectonic plate shift of massive global economic proportions, unlike anything the world has seen for 70-80 years. It will cause all sorts of economic earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. While the choices each country makes are their own, the consequences of their choices will have a much larger effect upon the world, as global interconnectedness has landed us in a world where isolating the impact of a problematic country is no longer possible. The need for global cooperation is most paramount at a time when politicians will be more and more restrained by the exigencies of their local problems and voter angst.
Jumping ahead and, by way of example, taking a peek at the Greek newspapers, one would not think that the current Greek crisis is at root a problem of their own making. The culprits are those nasty Germans. Political cartoons depict Germans as saying they have finally won WW2. Not exactly the climate in which Greek politicians are able to make calm decisions or explain the need to accept a great deal of pain. And the German editorials and columns are awash with the question of why Germans should work longer and harder to pay for Greek retirements and "lavish" benefits while Greeks don't pay their own taxes.
But choices must be made to proactively deal with the problems, or have the market force a severe solution. It is not a choice between pain or no pain, but exactly which pain do we prefer and how much? And anesthetics are not available on the pain menu. This is pain that will be felt from head to toe of the various national economic bodies, worldwide.
The US, Europe (including most of Eastern Europe), Japan (a bug which will soon find that windshield!), and even (especially) China must all deal with the problems that come with deleveraging. To fully understand the nature of the choices and their consequences, we are going to start somewhat far afield with some thoughts about choices and path dependence, then look back at history to see if we can get some clues about what deleveraging looks like (warning: it is not pretty), then examine the choices faced by specific countries and make some guesses as to outcomes, where possible.
I should note that in spite of the rather dark tone of this introduction, I remain an unabashed long-term optimist. History shows that these periods end and new periods of growth and prosperity emerge. While for the moment the situation is stressful, the trick for individuals is to make the best possible choices, given the circumstances, with a view to that moment in the future when risk will once again be something to be wooed and willingly accepted, rather than avoided as much as possible. For nations, it is preferable to make the choices that will bring about a new equilibrium, even if doing so requires some pain. The longer that difficult choices are avoided, the greater the pain will be when the choices are either taken or forced upon us.
That being said, so many choices are made by people and nations who happily blunder forward into what proves to be a disaster, swept along by the tides of emotion and rationalization, thinking that by avoiding the consequences of the real problems, things will somehow turn out OK. I am reminded of the times when I told my children to clean their rooms before they went out to play, and was cheerfully told, "I did," as they poured out the door, only to have Dad find that they'd stuffed all the detritus that was on their floors into the closets, drawers, and under the bed. The appearance is that there is order and calm, while in the shadows and cubbyholes lurks the sad reality.
To be able to make wise choices means understanding and dealing with the real problems and not just the symptoms. In the US, the old joke was that doctors routinely told their patients to "Take two aspirin and see me in the morning" (which simply shows that I am old enough to remember an era when everyone had their doctor's home phone). And that was often the best advice, as most things do eventually take care of themselves, one way or another.
But if you are lying in a ditch bleeding on the side of the road, you need more than aspirin. The European interbank credit markets are screaming that the system is at risk of a cataclysmic failure. Think Bear Stearns and Lehman. On steroids. We are rapidly coming to the point where we can no longer stuff the dirty clothes and toys under the bed. There is no more room. We are going to be forced to actually deal with the mess. That means that we will have to put "playtime" off for a little bit, but Mr. Market is going to stand over us and force us to clean the room. Better to get on with it.

The Consequences of Path Dependency

Breathes there a parent who has not lectured his teenage children on the consequences of making good and bad choices? Who has not tried to help them learn to figure out their own path in life?
We make choices every day. What do we eat? What color shirt today? Do we take a new job, or ask for a raise? Almost everything is a choice or the result of a previous choice. There are whole genres of academic literature on choices and what drives us human beings to choose and do the things we do. Behavioral psychology and in particular behavioral economics is a topic oft discussed in this letter. But today I want to briefly focus on what might be thought of as the opposite of behavioral studies, and that is path dependency. These are not the choices that we think we make or that we would like to make, but the limited choices we have because of past choices and circumstances.
The classic studies of path dependence try to explain how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant. (I would encourage those interested to Google "path dependence" and spend an afternoon [or night] reading some of the research.) But now, let me dismay the academics among my readers and resort to anecdotes and analogies to set the stage for our analysis of the end of the Debt Supercycle and to open a view on what awaits us as we journey down that path.
There are several different types of path dependency. The simplest analogy is that we go down a path, come to a fork in the road, choose one direction, and go down that path until we are presented with another fork. If we decide we don't like that path we can always go back to some previous fork and take another path. Our only loss is the time we took and the energy (or money) we spent on that path, while we did gain some knowledge of the path we left, even if we ultimately decided not to go on.
How many of us went to school to study one topic and perhaps even got a degree that we now don't use? Or started all over again in a different course of study? How often do voters elect a different group of politicians, hoping for change or a new direction, only for a majority to become disenchanted with the changes and opt for yet another change, or go back to the old political party? We fall in love with a stock or investment and then lose that love over time, and either stick it out or find a newer, more interesting investment.
We can't change the past, but we often tell ourselves that we can change things back if we want to – we can always turn around and try again, we assure ourselves.
Often there are things that are somewhat in our control. We can change. We can decide to eat healthy and exercise, or to change careers if we are unhappy. Sometimes those changes are positive and sometimes we act, even though the new path is not an easy one or one that makes everyone else happy.

There's No Going Back

The problem is that there is another type of path, one that we cannot retrace. After we choose that sort of path, the way back is blocked, and we must go on dealing with the consequences of our chosen path. We may come to forks in the road and vary our directions on the path, but we can't turn back, no matter how much we would like to. We can choose other paths into the future, but the past will always be there.
If we make a bad investment, we will lose money. I can't ask the market to give me back my money if the stock I picked goes down. If I own a business that is dependent on one customer and I lose that customer, I am out of business. If a bank lends money to someone who can't pay the money back, it is going to take a loss (unless it is a subprime mortgage and they can find some pension fund in Europe to buy it because Moody's say a whole bunch of bad loans are now suddenly AAA).
If you are eight months pregnant, you can't go back to being just four months pregnant. It is better to make the wise, if harder, choice as soon as you can.
And then there is yet another category of paths, the ones that are chosen for us, whether by family, circumstances, or fate; and once on them we don't know what we may have missed on alternative ones. Parents move to a different town and take the kids with them. A "chance" meeting becomes a new business endeavor. A torn muscle forces a promising athlete into another career. War erupts and changes the plans of young men. Accidents happen.
Let's look at an example of a seemingly small choice that had large consequences much later. In 1953 some CIA types, with the blessing of senior US and British administrators, decided it would be a good idea to replace the elected prime minister of Iran with the Shah, who would more or less do what we asked and keep Iran from turning communist, which was a big deal in Western government circles at the time. And who really cared? We were focused on the Korean War and Russia and China, nuclear threats, and all sorts of other "distractions." It was a different time and culture. We trusted our government to do what was right to keep us safe. There was barely a mention of Iran in the papers.
And eventually (1979) we got the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Islamist parties, with Iranian support, throughout the Mideast. Fearing that an Islamist revolution might develop in some of its republics, Russia panicked and invaded Afghanistan. An otherwise low-profile Democratic Congressman from Texas named Charlie "Good Time" Wilson (he did like to party) decided to make the Afghanistan rebels his personal cause, and "traded" all sorts of favors to get what became massive secret funding for the Afghanis, who not only succeeded but turned into the Taliban and helped train and arm a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. And then along came 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Could any of that have been foreseen in 1953? Is there a path-dependent link? You be the judge. What would have happened if we had not meddled? Perhaps things would have been better, or they might have been worse. We will never know. All we know is what did happen (or at least what we have been told).
We all have a lot of stories about the paths that we chose or the limits of our choices. The good choices we take credit for and the bad choices we blame on circumstances or find some way to rationalize them.
The "invisible hand" of the market is millions of people making their own individual choices. Do we choose to rent or buy a house because one choice is better for the national economy? Why do some companies or unions support trade barriers and tariffs? Because they know that given a free choice individuals will buy the products of companies from "foreign" sources, and they persuade politicians to limit the choices of consumers to protect their own incomes, either by forcing them to pay more for foreign products or to buy inferior, locally made products. "We need to protect our jobs, don't we?" Even if it means we all pay more for products.
And our choices add up. They become cumulative and create an economic tide. Policies and practices that initially seem small in the grand scheme of things can become much more significant when taken together and given a little time.

The End of the Debt Supercycle

And that brings us to the Debt Supercycle. Let me quote a few paragraphs from my book Endgame:
"When we mention The Endgame, you'll immediately want to know what is ending. What we think is ending for a significant number of countries in the "developed" world is the Debt Supercycle. The concept of the Debt Supercycle was originally developed by the Bank Credit Analyst. It was Hamilton Bolton, the BCA founder, who used the word Supercycle, and he was referring generally to a lot of things, including money velocity, bank liquidity, and interest rates. Tony Boeckh changed the concept to the simpler "Debt Supercycle" back in the early 1970s, as he believed the problem was spiraling private-sector debt. The current editor of the BCA, Martin Barnes, has greatly expanded on the concept. (And of course Irving Fisher talked about the long debt cycle in his famous 1933 article.)
"Essentially, the Debt Supercycle is the decades-long growth of debt from small and manageable levels, to a point where bond markets rebel and the debt has to be restructured or reduced. A program of austerity must be undertaken in order to bring the debt back to acceptable levels. While the focus of BCA has primarily been on the Debt Supercycle in the US, many of the countries in the developed world are at various stages in their own Debt Supercycle."
A Debt Supercycle is not some new thing. Rogoff and Reinhart write about 266 such events in the past few centuries in their epic work This Time Is Different. It seems to be part of the human condition. We increase the amount of debt in a system until there is too much debt. Each and every time, the people and leaders in a country convince themselves that "this time is different" and the debt is not a problem to worry about. And that is true until some moment in time when the markets lose confidence in the ability of governments or businesses to service the debt.
Professor John Cochrane of the University of Chicago has written a series of brilliant papers and articles on this problem, forcefully demonstrating the math that interest rates are partially a reflection of the risk that investors perceive concerning the potential for returns on their money. When they begin to lose confidence that a government (or business) will be able to raise enough revenue to pay off the debt at some point in the future, interest rates begin to rise. At first, there are all sorts of reasons given. Then there is a moment when the bond market simply walks away. Rogoff and Reinhart call it the "Bang Moment."
Once that confidence has been lost, it is not easily regained. "A program of austerity must be undertaken in order to bring the debt back to acceptable levels." Governments or businesses have to demonstrate that they can get their budgets under control in order to get renewed access to the bond market. And make no mistake, austerity is a path for slow growth and/or recessions.
We are used to countries like Argentina having their problems. But in the 1990s we saw what happened to both Canada and Sweden as they had to deal with that lack of confidence. While they had different answers, they came through their respective crises, although there were clearly economic costs, higher unemployment, losses, and very difficult decisions made. It is not just "banana republics" that have debt problems.
Only a few years ago, European regulators were allowing European banks to leverage as much as 40 to 1, gorging themselves on sovereign debt, because everyone "knew" that sovereign nations in a modern world would not – indeed could not! – default; so why worry about leverage on government debt? Until Greece and then Ireland and then Portugal and now Italy, etc. I was writing early last year that Greek bonds would lose 90% of their value. This week we read that Greece indeed wants private investors to agree to a 90% write-off. Soon it will be public bond holders like the ECB that will take haircuts.
No country starts borrowing money with the thought that they will keep on borrowing until there is an economic collapse. It all starts with good intentions. No bank lends money not expecting to have it returned. Then things change over time. Since there seemed to be no problem with the current level of debt (and spending), why can't we increase it a little more?
There are countries that can keep their budgets and debt under control (like Switzerland and others). But politicians like to promise benefits today and pay for them with debt that future generations must incur (like the US and countries all over Europe). Or they try to spend their way to prosperity and growth (like Japan).
And of course they promise that "in the very near future" they will get the deficits under control. "We will grow our way out of the problem. We will limit the growth of spending next year, when the economy is better. We can always raise taxes on the rich. Or increase consumption taxes. Or create some taxes somewhere." Whatever it takes to convince the bond market to keep on funding their spending.
And so the choices to provide this benefit and that program, each justified by some reason and desired by some group of voters, add up over time. Everything goes well until there is a recession. Then revenues go down and costs go up, because unemployment benefits rise. But because the natural business cycle leads to recovery and growth, things soon get better and the game continues.
But then the accumulated debt becomes too much to handle when the next recession comes along. And bond investors lose confidence and the Bang Moment has arrived. Cochrane shows that there is no magic number or formula, no way to know in advance when that moment will be. Unless a country chooses to deal with the pain of cutting spending and raising revenues, eventually there is a true crisis, resulting in massive dislocations and losses. Bond holders lose a large percentage (if not all) of their investments. That moment is often precipitated by a credit or banking crisis. And when the banking system freezes up, businesses lose access to capital, and the recession can turn into a depression if not dealt with aggressively. But that means pain.
Let's jump ahead to an illustration we will refer to again later. In the late '70s, inflation in the US rose to over 14%. I remember borrowing money at 18%. The stock market lost about 40% in just 18 months. Unemployment was high and rising.

It was the single largest failure of US monetary policy since 1950. While some blamed it on high oil prices, or speculators, or greedy businesses or unions, the fact was that the Fed printed money to allow the government to run large deficits. And US politicians supported the policy because it allowed them to spend money.
And then came Paul Volcker. He is now credited with almost singlehandedly forcing the inflation genie back in the bottle. He is everyone's hero. But back then there were plenty of people who did not like what he was doing, because he precipitated two major, back-to-back recessions, in 1980 and 1982 (as bad or worse than what we just went through). Unemployment climbed above 10%. The stock market got hammered even further. We look back now and say "It had to be done." That is great with hindsight, when we are long past the recessions. But it was tough in the middle of the recessions to explain just why we needed a tighter monetary policy in the face of 10% unemployment.
What if there had been no Volcker? No one to stand at the door of the Fed and say "No more!" What if the Fed had continued to print? Then inflation would have risen even more. 25%? Bank loans of 35%? Higher? Who knows?
At some point, the math, even for the US, does not work. There is a limit to what a government can borrow and a central bank can print without a total collapse of the economy. There would have been another depression at some point. There would have been no Reagan Revolution, because to cut taxes when inflation was 25% and deficits were higher would have been unthinkable. We would have stumbled from crisis to crisis, cutting spending and programs only to have revenues fall and costs rise. It becomes a debt spiral that always ends badly. Would Reagan have tried, anyway? I think so, as that was part and parcel of his philosophy. But he would have been blamed for the recessions, and not Volcker. And in the midst of a crisis, how do you get Congress (or any politician) to make the right decisions?
Volcker chose a hard path. But it was a better path than the one we'd been going down. He hit the reset button. But did it seem like a better path at the time to anyone who could not find a job? To those on a fixed income? To the business owners who lost everything? To investors who gave up faith in the stock market?

The Time for Hard Choices

Most nations in the "developed world" are coming to, or are already at, the end of their Debt Supercycle. They will soon lose their ability to borrow money at low rates, absent a demonstrated ability to control their budgets. An abilitythat almost none has shown. And when you look at the cost of the promises made to an aging population for healthcare and retirement benefits, the future costs are staggering. There is no way such promises can be kept. And one by one, with increasing frequency, countries will find their interest rates, the cost of servicing their debt, of getting people to buy their bonds, will rise to the point where, absent a central bank willing to print money in massive quantities, their budget and economy will collapse. Banks that have "invested" in huge amounts of sovereign debt will see their capital wiped out, seemingly overnight.
In Europe in the past few weeks, almost €500 billion has been deposited at the ECB for a return of 0.25%. The interbank market, when it functions, will pay 0.40%. Why would a bank take less money from the ECB? Because they can't get other banks to lend them the money. Banks no longer trust the ability of other banks to pay them back. UniCredit in Italy is raising money at a 40% discount to their already depressed stock price. They will not be the last to be forced into such choices. The credit markets are telling us there is a crisis in the making, on the scale of Bear Stearns or Lehman in 2008, except that now governments have less ability to step in and salvage the banks. Now, government debt is the problem.
Just as you can't solve the problem of being drunk with more whiskey, you can't solve a debt problem with more debt.
But that means hard choices. And the choice right now, is how long should this letter be? I think we are at a good breaking point, so next week we will look at why the choice in Europe is between recession now or depression later. We will take a look at periods of deleveraging in the US in the 19^th century, and see what happened. While there were indeed massive dislocations of the economy and huge investor losses, a few good lessons were learned and applied, until recently. We will look at what choices countries can make. Some, like the US, still have a viable path to control their bond markets and avoid a depression or major recession; but there will be pain. Think Volcker. Others simply will get to choose between what type of depression they want: short and deep or long and exhausting.
Will the Greeks become debt slaves, working for an entire generation at reduced wages to pay their debt and remain in the eurozone, or will they leave and suffer very large currency losses and the loss of access to the credit markets? Not a very good set of choices, but that's all they have, unless they can convince German taxpayers to fund their deficits and rising costs ad infinitum. Good luck on that one.
We will find that the European crisis will create serious problems for the rest of the world. Global growth is set to slow rapidly. By the end of this year, we may be happy that there was any growth.
And next week we must address Japan, China, and the US. So much for the quick, easy forecast. But those you can get anywhere. Google "economic forecast 2012." There are 2.8 million hits. I'm sure you can find several that fit whatever mood you're in.
We will take the longer path, but when we finish we will have some idea of where we're going. Stay with me.

John Mauldin on Hyperinflation

"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

- John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of Peace

"Unemployed men took one or two rucksacks and went from peasant to peasant. They even took the train to favorable locations to get foodstuffs illegally which they sold afterwards in the town at three or fourfold the prices they had paid themselves. First the peasants were happy about the great amount of paper money which rained into their houses for their eggs and butter… However, when they came to town with their full briefcases to buy goods, they discovered to their chagrin that, whereas they had only asked for a fivefold price for their produce, the prices for scythe, hammer and cauldron, which they wanted to buy, had risen by a factor of 50."

- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1944.

The beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic was some 89 years ago this week. There is a stream of opinion that the US is headed for the same type of end. How else can it be, given that we owe some $75-80 trillion dollars in the coming years, over 5 times current GDP and growing every year? Remember the good old days of about 5-6 years ago (if memory serves me correctly) when it was only $50 trillion? With a nod to Bernanke's helicopter speech, where he detailed how the Fed could prevent deflation, I ask the opposite question, "Can 'it' (hyperinflation) really happen here?" I write this on a plane flying to NYC, with a tighter deadline than normal, so let's see how far we can get. More on where I'm heading at the end of the letter.
But first, let me quickly call to your attention a speaking engagement that I'm doing November 9 in Atlanta. It is for Hedge Funds Care, and it's a wonderful event for a children's charity. If you can make it, I hope to see you there. You can learn more and register at http://www.hedgefundscare.org/event.asp?eventID=74.

Can "It" Happen Here?

I was inspired for this week's letter by a piece by Art Cashin (whom I will get to have dinner with Monday). His daily letter always begins with an anecdote from history. Yesterday it was about Weimar, told in his own inimitable style. So without any edits, class will commence, with Professor Cashin at the chalk board.
An Encore Presentation

By Art Cashin

Originally, on this day (-2) in 1922, the German Central Bank and the German Treasury took an inevitable step in a process which had begun with their previous effort to "jump start" a stagnant economy. Many months earlier they had decided that what was needed was easier money. Their initial efforts brought little response. So, using the governmental "more is better" theory they simply created more and more money.
But economic stagnation continued and so did the money growth. They kept making money more available. No reaction. Then, suddenly prices began to explode unbelievably (but, perversely, not business activity).
So, on this day government officials decided to bring figures in line with market realities. They devalued the mark. The new value would be 2 billion marks to a dollar. At the start of World War I the exchange rate had been a mere 4.2 marks to the dollar. In simple terms you needed 4.2 marks in order to get one dollar. Now it was 2 billion marks to get one dollar. And thirteen months from this date (late November 1923) you would need 4.2 trillion marks to get one dollar. In ten years the amount of money had increased a trillion fold.
Numbers like billions and trillions tend to numb the mind. They are too large to grasp in any "real" sense. Thirty years ago an older member of the NYSE (there were some then) gave me a graphic and memorable (at least for me) example. "Young man," he said, "would you like a million dollars?" "I sure would, sir!" I replied anxiously. "Then just put aside $500 every week for the next 40 years." I have never forgotten that a million dollars is enough to pay you $500 per week for 40 years (and that's without benefit of interest). To get a billion dollars you would have to set aside $500,000 dollars per week for 40 years. And a…..trillion that would require $500 million every week for 40 years. Even with these examples, the enormity is difficult to grasp.
Let's take a different tack. To understand the incomprehensible scope of the German inflation maybe it's best to start with something basic….like a loaf of bread. (To keep things simple we'll substitute dollars and cents in place of marks and pfennigs. You'll get the picture.) In the middle of 1914, just before the war, a one pound loaf of bread cost 13 cents. Two years later it was 19 cents. Two years more and it sold for 22 cents. By 1919 it was 26 cents. [Double in value, or a "mere" 12% compound inflation –JM.] Now the fun begins.
In 1920, a loaf of bread soared to $1.20, and then in 1921 it hit $1.35. By the middle of 1922 it was $3.50. At the start of 1923 it rocketed to $700 a loaf. Five months later a loaf went for $1200. By September it was $2 million. A month later it was $670 million (wide spread rioting broke out). The next month it hit $3 billion. By mid month it was $100 billion. Then it all collapsed [as if a roughly 8 billion times rise in cost wasn't already collapse! Hint of irony here. – JM]
Let's go back to "marks". In 1913, the total currency of Germany was a grand total of 6 billion marks. In November of 1923 that loaf of bread we just talked about cost 428 billion marks. A kilo of fresh butter cost 6000 billion marks (as you will note that kilo of butter cost 1000 times more than the entire money supply of the nation just 10 years earlier).

How Could This All Happen?

In 1913 Germany had a solid, prosperous, advanced culture and population. Like much of Europe it was a monarchy (under the Kaiser). Then, following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the world moved toward war. Each side was convinced the other would not dare go to war. So, in a global game of chicken they stumbled into the Great War.
[Side note: So convinced were the bond markets that war was not possible that bonds were still selling at normal prices. War was simply inconceivable. Bad call. - JM]
The German General Staff thought the war would be short and sweet and that they could finance the costs with the post war reparations that they, as victors, would exact. The war was long. The flower of their manhood was killed or injured. They lost and, thus, it was they who had to pay reparations rather than receive them.
Things did not go badly instantly. Yes, the deficit soared but much of it was borne by foreign and domestic bond buyers. As had been noted by scholars….."The foreign and domestic public willingly purchased new debt issues when it believed that the government could run future surpluses to offset contemporaneous deficits." In layman's English that means foreign bond buyers said – "Hey this is a great nation and this is probably just a speed bump in the economy." (Can you imagine such a thing happening again?)
When things began to disintegrate, no one dared to take away the punchbowl. They feared shutting off the monetary heroin would lead to riots, civil war, and, worst of all communism. So, realizing that what they were doing was destructive, they kept doing it out of fear that stopping would be even more destructive.

Currencies, Culture and Chaos

If it is difficult to grasp the enormity of the numbers in this tale of hyper-inflation, it is far more difficult to grasp how it destroyed a culture, a nation and, almost, the world.
People's savings were suddenly worthless. Pensions were meaningless. If you had a 400 mark monthly pension, you went from comfortable to penniless in a matter of months. People demanded to be paid daily so they would not have their wages devalued by a few days passing. Ultimately, they demanded their pay twice daily just to cover changes in trolley fare. People heated their homes by burning money instead of coal. (It was more plentiful and cheaper to get.)
The middle class was destroyed. It was an age of renters, not of home ownership, so thousands became homeless.
But the cultural collapse may have had other more pernicious effects.
Some sociologists note that it was still an era of arranged marriages. Families scrimped and saved for years to build a dowry so that their daughter might marry well. Suddenly, the dowry was worthless – wiped out. And with it was gone all hope of marriage. Girls who had stayed prim and proper awaiting some future Prince Charming now had no hope at all. Social morality began to collapse. The roar of the roaring twenties began to rumble.
All hope and belief in systems, governmental or otherwise, collapsed. With its culture and its economy disintegrating, Germany saw a guy named Hitler begin a ten year effort to come to power by trading on the chaos and street rioting. And then came World War II.
That soul-wrenching and disastrous experience with inflation is seared into the German psyche. It is why the populace is reluctant to endorse the bailout. It is also why all the German proposals have each country taking care of its own banks. (It gives them more control.) The French plans tend to socialize the bailout. There's more disagreement in these plans than the headlines would indicate.
To celebrate have a Jagermeister or two at the Pre Fuhrer Lounge and try to explain that for over half a century America's trauma has been depression-era unemployment while Germany's trauma has been runaway inflation. But drink fast, prices change radically after happy hour.

What Causes Hyperinflation?

We spent a whole chapter writing about inflation and hyperinflation in Endgame, which I think highlights the topic rather well ( http://www.amazon.com/endgame). Let me quote a few paragraphs.
"We know that the world is drowning in too much debt, and it is unlikely that households and governments everywhere will be able to pay down that debt. Doing so in some cases is impossible, and in other cases it will condemn people to many hard years of labor in order to be debt-free. Inflation, by comparison, appears to be the easy way out for many policy makers.
"Companies and households typically deal with excessive debt by defaulting; countries overwhelmingly usually deal with excessive debt by inflating it away. While debt is fixed, prices and wages can go up, making the total debt burden smaller. People can't increase prices and wages through inflation, but governments can create inflation and they've been pretty good at it over the years. Inflation, debt monetization and currency debasement are not new. They have been used for the past few thousand years as means to get rid of debt. In fact, they work pretty well.
"The average person thinks that inflation comes from 'money printing.' There is some truth to this, and indeed the most vivid images of hyperinflation are of printed German Reichmarks being burnt for heat in the 1920s or Hungarian Pengos being swept up in the streets in 1945.
"You don't even have to go that far back to see hyperinflation and how brilliantly it works at eliminating debt. Let's look at the example of Brazil, which is one of the world's most recent examples of hyperinflation. This happened within our lifetimes. In the late 1980s and 1990s it very successfully got rid of most of its debt.
"Today Brazil has very little debt as it has all been inflated away. Its economy is booming, people trust the central bank and the country is a success story. Much like the United States had high inflation in the 1970s and then got a diligent central banker like Paul Volcker, in Brazil a new government came in, beat inflation, produced strong real GDP growth and set the stage for one of the greatest economic success stories of the past two decades. Indeed the same could be said of other countries like Turkey that had hyperinflation, devaluation, and then found monetary and fiscal rectitude.
"In 1993 Brazilian inflation was roughly 2,000%. Only four years later, in 1997 it was 7%. Almost as if by magic, the debt disappeared. Imagine if the US increased its money supply which is currently $900 billion by a factor of 10,000 times as Brazil's did between 1991 and 1996. We would have 9 quadrillion USD on the Fed's balance sheet. That is a lot of zeros. It would also mean that our current debt of thirteen trillion would be chump change. A critic of this strategy for getting rid of our debt could point out that no one would lend to us again if we did that. Hardly. Investors, sadly, have very short memories. Markets always forgive default and inflation. Just look at Brazil, Bolivia, and Russia today. Foreigners are delighted to invest in these countries.
"The endgame is not complicated under inflation/hyperinflation. Deflation is not inevitable. Money printing and monetization of government debt works when real growth fails. It has worked in countless emerging market economies (Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Taiwan, Brazil, etc.). We could even use it in the US to get rid of all our debts. It would take a few years, and then we could get a new central banker like Volker to kill inflation. We could then be a real success story like Brazil.
"Honestly, recommending hyperinflation is tongue in cheek. But now even serious economists are recommending inflation as a solution. Given the powerful deflationary forces in the world, inflation will stay low in the near term. This gives some comfort to mainstream economists who think we can create inflation to solve the debt problem in the short run. The International Monetary Fund's top economist, Olivier Blanchard, has argued that central banks should target a higher inflation rate than they do at present in order to avoid the possibility of deflation. Economists like Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, and Olivier Blanchard argue that central banks should raise their inflation targets to as high as 4%. Paul McCulley argues that central banks should be 'responsibly irresponsible.'
"Peter Bernholz wrote the bible on inflation and hyperinflation, called Monetary Regimes and Inflation: History, Economic and Political Relationships. He writes about 29 periods of hyperinflation. What causes such a spectacular increase in prices? Bernholz has explained the process very elegantly.
"Bernholz argues that governments have a bias towards inflation. The evidence doesn't disagree with him. The only thing that limits a government's desire for inflation is an independent central bank. After looking at inflation across all countries and analyzing all hyperinflationary episodes, the lessons are the following:
1. Metallic standards like gold or silver standard show no, or a much smaller, inflationary tendency than discretionary paper money standards
2. Paper money standards with central banks independent of political authorities are less inflation-based than those with dependent central banks.
3. Currencies based on discretionary paper standards and bound by a regime of a fixed exchange rate to currencies, which either enjoy a metallic standard or, with a discretionary paper money standard, an independent central bank, show also a smaller tendency towards inflation, whether their central banks are independent or not.
"Bernholz examined twelve of the twenty-nine hyperinflationary episodes where significant data existed. Every hyperinflation looked the same. 'Hyperinflations are always caused by public budget deficits which are largely financed by money creation.' But even more interestingly, Bernholz identified the level at which hyperinflations can start. He concluded that 'the figures demonstrate clearly that deficits amounting to 40 percent or more of expenditures cannot be maintained. They lead to high inflation and hyperinflations….' Interestingly, even lower levels of government deficits can cause inflation. For example, 20% deficits were behind all but four cases of hyperinflation.
"Stay with us here, because this is an important point. Most analysts quote government deficits as a percentage of GDP. They'll say, 'The US has a government deficit of 10% of GDP.' While this measure makes some sense, it doesn't tell you how big the deficit is relative to expenditures. The deficit may be 10% the size of the US economy, but currently the US deficit is over 30% of all government spending. That is a big difference."

A Very Frank Idea

I am confronted all the time on the road by investors who want to know my basis for stating that we will not see hyperinflation in the US. I am good friends with many who believe it is the only way the US can end up, given the size of the current off-balance-sheet debacle. "End of America" Porter Stansberry, Doug Casey and David Galland (see below), Peter Schiff, Bill Bonner, and a host of gold bugs see no other way out. They look at history as written by Bernholz and see the proverbial writing on the wall. It is totally decipherable by them. I remain very unconvinced.
The US Federal Reserve system is different from most central banks, whether it is independent or not. It is composed of 12 separate regional banks, each of which has its own board, which appoints its regional president. The regions each get a certain number of rotating votes in the FOMC meetings, along with the appointed Fed governors. But they all get to participate in FOMC meetings and offer opinions. And the presidents certainly talk with each other. The last two meetings have seen the unusual circumstance of three dissenting votes.
These regional boards comprise local business leaders, some academics, and community leaders. They have to go back and work and live in their communities. They don't get to retire to an ivory tower and tenure, like many Fed governors. They see the real world, or at least their parts of it, and the boards have become very diverse over time.
Hyperinflation requires a central bank to willingly commit economic suicide. Typically, that happens at the behest of an authoritarian government. Under our current system, I can't see that happening. The hue and cry would be very loud and long and early. If you think Fisher et al. are vocal today, think about their response to really aggressive printing. I am not talking about something on the order of QE2, a BB gun as compared to a bazooka. I am talking about real printing.
It is not just a few vocal regional Fed presidents, of whom Fisher is the most eloquent. Even Bernanke has been talking about the limits of monetary policy and the need for the fiscal house to be put in order.
If Bernanke and his fellow Keynesians could whip up 4-5% inflation for a few years, would they do it? I think so, although they would publicly demur. But that is a far cry from 10% and even further from the 50% that would be needed to really ignite hyperinflation. I doubt they have the stomach for that, even in the face of a serious recession. The memories of the '70s are still part of our genetic make-up.
But could they print a whole lot more than one can imagine now, without unleashing the inflation demon? The simple answer is yes, and for that rationale we go back to the '30s and Irving Fisher, who gave us the classic equation of the link between money supply and inflation and the velocity of money (how fast money moves through an economy).
Inflation is a combination of the money supply AND the velocity of money. In short, if the velocity of money is falling, the Fed can print a great deal of money (expanding its balance sheet) without bringing about inflation. Remember the above instance, where workers wanted to get paid twice a day? That was a case of both rising money supply and rising velocity of money, a deadly combination. I have written several e-letters about the velocity of money, if you want more in-depth analysis. If this is something you do not understand, I suggest you take the time; otherwise you will not get the background of the argument. Here are a couple links to letters where I explain the velocity of money:
http://www.johnmauldin.com/frontlinethoughts/the-implications-of-velocity-mwo031210
http://www.johnmauldin.com/frontlinethoughts/the-velocity-factor-mwo120508
When do we see a seriously falling velocity of money? At the end of debt supercycles, where deleveraging is the order of the day. Which is where we are today in the US. Look at the graph below (from my friend Lacy Hunt at Hoisington Asset Management). Notice that the late '70s saw a rising money supply and rising velocity of money. And voila, we got inflation in the US. Notice that now velocity is falling and, as Lacy points out, the velocity is mean reverting over very long periods of time, so we can expect it to go lower. Also remember that the US government (at the federal level) has yet to really begin to get its fiscal house in order. (Although state and local government have combined to cut deficits $200 billion a year through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, or over 1% of GDP, which has been a serious headwind with more cuts and tax increases to come.)

What could change my mind? If the (how to say this politely?) ill-conceived (stronger words come to mind) proposal by Financial Services Committee ranking member Barney Frank (D-Mass) were to see the light of day, I would get very concerned. According to Bloomberg and The Hill, Frank plans to submit a bill that would remove the votes of the five regional Federal Reserve presidents from the 12-member Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC), which sets interest rates, and replace them with five appointees that would be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
Frank says "he is concerned that the process is undemocratic because the regional Fed presidents are not elected or appointed by elected representatives, and he believes that regional Fed presidents are overly likely to focus on guarding against inflation at the expense of more adequately tackling the country's unemployment crisis." (US News and World Report)
Basically, he wants the Fed to be subservient to the politicians. Under his proposal, the FOMC could lose what independence it has in a short time. This is part of a strain of thought that suggests that the decisions that affect all of us should be made by a few elite people who purport to understand what is going on, which coincidentally are government insiders and the academics who foster their agendas.
How did Weimar and other hyperinflation incidents occur? When power was in the hands of a few well-intentioned elites who did not understand the long-term consequences, or were acting in self-interest without transparency or any check on their decisions. The Fed is designed to be a system of checks and balances, with no one president getting to appoint all the governors (they have 14-year terms), in order to try to remove the process as much as possible from political interference. That does not mean they will make the right decisions, but in this I agree with the alarmists: history suggests that without some constraint (gold standards as an example) hyperinflations may occur.
A repeat of the '70s? That is within the realm of possibility, but it's certainly not a base-case scenario. Hyperinflation under our current system? I just don't see it.

But What About the $70 trillion in Off-Balance-Sheet Debt?

I am asked that question all the time. My answer is that it illustrates the power of "It Won't Happen." As in "if it can't happen it won't happen." That number will never be paid, either in terms of current buying power or actual numbers or actual benefits. It can't be. The money is not and will not be there.
The far more interesting question is what will happen when we reach the point of "won't happen." Will that be something we recognize before it happens and act proactively to avoid a cataclysmic event? Will we wait until the bond market jerks our chain about the fiscal crisis, which is massively stagflationary? Yes, the Fed can print to some degree, but not dealing with the crisis will ultimately force a huge restructuring of spending and taxes which, if not caught early enough, will propel us into a certain Second Great Depression. Which is why I think we will deal with it proactively in 2013, because to not do so would be folly of the worst sort. The consequences are unimaginable for the US and for the world. Think Greece, and then go downhill. All over the world.
I think more and more political leaders are beginning to understand that point. They are not happy about it. But I remain hopeful that in 2013 we can actually deal with the deficit and the debt in an orderly manner. If we do not, God help us all.

Mauldin: The Endgame Is Here, and We're In Deep Trouble

I came away from Maine, and meeting with some of the most astute economists in the world, with a series of impressions that will be the core of this week's letter. On Friday night, S&P downgraded US debt, and of course I need to comment on that. But as we talked the next two days and into the nights, I came increasingly to the opinion that this is indeed the Beginning of the Endgame. I must admit it has come about faster than I thought. But that is the nature of these things. And so, with no "but first," let's jump right in.

The Big Bang Moment

I think it relevant to start off by quoting from my book Endgame, where I quote in turn from what I think is the most important book of the last decade, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. I truly urge you to read it. The book is consciously designed so you can read the first chapter and the last five and get the thrust of the work. You can order it from Amazon.com. (The Kindle edition is only $9.99 and makes a perfect companion to my book Endgame [shameless plug].) Quoting from my book:
"We are going to look at several quotes from [This Time is Different], as well as an extensive interview [the authors] graciously granted. We have also taken the great liberty of mixing paragraphs from various chapters that we feel are important. Please note that all the emphasis is our editorial license. Let's start by looking at part of their conclusion, which we think eloquently sums up the problems we face:
"'The lesson of history, then, is that even as institutions and policy makers improve, there will always be a temptation to stretch the limits. Just as an individual can go bankrupt no matter how rich she starts out, a financial system can collapse under the pressure of greed, politics, and profits no matter how well regulated it seems to be. Technology has changed, the height of humans has changed, and fashions have changed.
'Yet the ability of governments and investors to delude themselves, giving rise to periodic bouts of euphoria that usually end in tears, seems to have remained a constant. No careful reader of Friedman and Schwartz will be surprised by this lesson about the ability of governments to mismanage financial markets, a key theme of their analysis.
'As for financial markets, we have come full circle to the concept of financial fragility in economies with massive indebtedness. All too often, periods of heavy borrowing can take place
in a bubble and last for a surprisingly long time. But highly leveraged economies, particularly those in which continual rollover of short-term debt is sustained only by confidence in relatively illiquid underlying assets, seldom survive forever, particularly if leverage continues to grow unchecked.
'This time may seem different, but all too often a deeper look shows it is not. Encouragingly, history does point to warning signs that policy makers can look at to assess risk—if only they do not become too drunk with their credit bubble–fueled success and say, as their predecessors have for centuries, "This time is different."'
[Back to my voice] "Sadly, the lesson is not a happy one. There are no good endings once you start down a deleveraging path. As I have been writing for several years, much of the entire developed world is now faced with choosing from among several bad choices, some being worse than others."
And this is key. Read it twice (at least!):
"'Perhaps more than anything else, failure to recognize the precariousness and fickleness of confidence—especially in cases in which large short-term debts need to be rolled over
continuously—is the key factor that gives rise to the this-time-is-different syndrome. Highly indebted governments, banks, or corporations can seem to be merrily rolling along for an extended period, when bang! — confidence collapses, lenders disappear, and a crisis hits.
'Economic theory tells us that it is precisely the fickle nature of confidence, including its dependence on the public's expectation of future events, which makes it so difficult to predict the timing of debt crises. High debt levels lead, in many mathematical economics models, to "multiple equilibria" in which the debt level might be sustained—or might not be. Economists do not have a terribly good idea of what kinds of events shift confidence and of how to concretely assess confidence vulnerability. What one does see, again and again, in the history of financial crises is that when an accident is waiting to happen, it eventually does. When countries become too deeply indebted, they are headed for trouble. When debt-fueled asset price explosions seem too good to be true, they probably are. But the exact timing can be very difficult to guess, and a crisis that seems imminent can sometimes take years to ignite.'"

Bang, Indeed!

When the subprime crisis started, we were told by numerous authorities (including Ben Bernanke) that the problems would be "contained." But by 2006 it was clear to anyone who studied the toxic instruments that the losses would be in the hundreds of billions. I estimated $400 billion, which just goes to show that I'm an optimist. That crisis spread to banks all over Europe and then back to the US. Authorities used every bullet in their guns, every legal means and –well let's be charitable, perhaps they pushed the rules a bit – to try and stem the tide. And then we had a "Lehman moment" and all at once the markets seemingly froze. It was "Bang!"
My sense is that the S&P downgrade is like that moment when we were told things would be contained. In and of itself, the downgrade is not that important. What did we learn that we did not already know? The US is headed for a financial crisis if they do not get the deficit under control? This is news?
But I think it forces S&P to take a very hard look at France, whose loss of AAA would bring into doubt the whole EFSF mechanism. And Spain and Italy must come under scrutiny if S&P's move in the US is not to be seen as politically motivated. The main result of the downgrade may not be here in the US but in Europe, where there are already issues. A series of downgrades (which are warranted if the US one was) would be traumatic.
My London partner Niels Jensen penned this observation:
"If France is downgraded, a number of French banks will almost certainly be downgraded, following which other European banks will face the same destiny. Such a scenario has the potential to cause calamity across Europe. The 90 European banks which recently went through the (so-called) stress test organized by the European Banking Authority need to roll a total of €5.4 trillion1 (!) of debt over the next 24 months. A massive amount even during the best of times. Probably undoable during times of stress.
"As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in consultation with Willem Buiter of Citigroup, pointed out in the Daily Telegraph over the weekend:
" '... the issue is not how long Italy and Spain can ride out the storm in bond markets. There would be a banking and insurance crisis long before sovereign defaults came into play, simply because the fall in bond prices on the secondary market is causing carnage to bank books (among other transmission mechanisms).'
"With its downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt, Standard and Poors has started a chain of events which can only make things worse in an already crisis-hit eurozone. For that reason, the decision to downgrade was not only badly timed but also ill considered; that it was probably justified is of little relevance at the moment."
My latest trip to Europe and discussions with friends in Maine, plus my reading, simply reinforces my sense that we are seeing Europe unravel, or at the very least come to a very important crossroads where they must make a fateful decision. And let's make no mistake, this is a demon of a problem of their own making. Monetary union without fiscal union will not work in a world where there are so many cultures and different traditions. But how does that work? How do you exorcise that demon?
Which leads me to a sidebar. Michael Lewis is one of the greatest writers of our time. He is just brilliant. He has a piece in the latest Vanity Fair on Germany and the crisis in Europe. It is rather long (about 15 pages in a Word doc) and makes some rather interesting (if odd) scatological references, trying to explain the German world view, so if you are of a delicate mindset, perhaps you should confine yourself to the few paragraphs I quote here. But I do suggest you set aside some time to read the entire piece. (You can read the whole thing at http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/09/europe-201109.) Here is the editor's intro to the piece:

"It's the Economy, Dummkopf!"

"With Greece and Ireland in economic shreds, while Portugal, Spain, and perhaps even Italy head south, only one nation can save Europe from financial Armageddon: a highly reluctant Germany. The ironies—like the fact that bankers from Düsseldorf were the ultimate patsies in Wall Street's con game—pile up quickly as Michael Lewis investigates German attitudes toward money, excrement, and the country's Nazi past, all of which help explain its peculiar new status."
And from the middle of the piece, these insights:
"Greeks are still refusing to pay their taxes, in other words. But it is only one of many Greek sins. 'They are also having a problem with the structural reform. Their labor market is changing—but not as fast as it needs to,' he continues. 'Due to the developments in the last 10 years, a similar job in Germany pays 55,000 euros. In Greece it is 70,000.' To get around pay restraints in the calendar year the Greek government simply paid employees a 13th and even 14th monthly salary—months that didn't exist. 'There needs to be a change of the relationship between people and the government,' he continues. 'It is not a task that can be done in three months. You need time.' He couldn't put it more bluntly: if the Greeks and the Germans are to coexist in a currency union, the Greeks need to change who they are.
"This is unlikely to happen soon enough to matter. The Greeks not only have massive debts but are still running big deficits. Trapped by an artificially strong currency, they cannot turn these deficits into surpluses, even if they do everything that outsiders ask them to do. Their exports, priced in euros, remain expensive. The German government wants the Greeks to slash the size of their government, but that will also slow economic growth and reduce tax revenues. And so one of two things must happen. Either Germans must agree to a new system in which they would be fiscally integrated with other European countries as Indiana is integrated with Mississippi: the tax dollars of ordinary Germans would go into a common coffer and be used to pay for the lifestyle of ordinary Greeks. Or the Greeks (and probably, eventually, every non-German) must introduce 'structural reform,' a euphemism for magically and radically transforming themselves into a people as efficient and productive as the Germans. The first solution is pleasant for Greeks but painful for Germans. The second solution is pleasant for Germans but painful, even suicidal, for Greeks.
"The only economically plausible scenario is that Germans, with a bit of help from a rapidly shrinking population of solvent European countries, suck it up, work harder, and pay for everyone else. But what is economically plausible appears to be politically unacceptable. The German people all know at least one fact about the euro: that before they agreed to trade in their deutsche marks their leaders promised them, explicitly, they would never be required to bail out other countries. That rule was created with the founding of the European Central Bank (E.C.B.)--and was violated a year ago. The German public is every day more upset by the violation--so upset that Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a reputation for reading the public mood, hasn't even bothered to try to go before the German people to persuade them that it might be in their interests to help the Greeks.
"That is why Europe's money problems feel not just problematic but intractable. It's why Greeks are now mailing bombs to Merkel, and thugs in Berlin are hurling stones through the window of the Greek consulate. And it's why European leaders have done nothing but delay the inevitable reckoning, by scrambling every few months to find cash to plug the ever growing economic holes in Greece and Ireland and Portugal and praying that even bigger and more alarming holes in Spain, Italy, and even France refrain from revealing themselves.
Until now the European Central Bank, in Frankfurt, has been the main source of this cash. The E.C.B. was designed to behave with the same discipline as the German Bundesbank, but it has morphed into something very different. Since the start of the financial crisis it has bought, outright, something like $80 billion of Greek and Irish and Portuguese government bonds, and lent another $450 billion or so to various European governments and European banks, accepting virtually any collateral, including Greek government bonds.
"But the E.C.B. has a rule--and the Germans think the rule very important--that they cannot accept as collateral bonds classified by the U.S. ratings agencies as in default. Given that they once had a rule against buying bonds outright in the open market, and another rule against government bailouts, it's a little odd that they have gotten so hung up on this technicality. But they have. If Greece defaults on its debt, the E.C.B. will not only lose a pile on its holdings of Greek bonds but must return the bonds to the European banks, and the European banks must fork over $450 billion in cash. The E.C.B. itself might face insolvency, which would mean turning for funds to its solvent member governments, led by Germany. (The senior official at the Bundesbank told me they already have thought about how to deal with the request. 'We have 3,400 tons of gold,' he said. 'We are the only country that has not sold its original allotment from the [late 1940s]. So we are covered to some extent.') The bigger problem with a Greek default is that it might well force other European countries and their banks into default. At the very least it would create panic and confusion in the market for both sovereign and bank debt, at a time when a lot of banks and at least two big European debt-ridden countries, Italy and Spain, cannot afford panic and confusion.
"At the bottom of this unholy mess, from the point of view of the German Finance Ministry, is the unwillingness, or inability, of the Greeks to change their behavior.
"That was what the currency union always implied: entire peoples had to change their ways of life. Conceived as a tool for integrating Germany into Europe, and preventing Germans from dominating others, it has become the opposite. For better or for worse, the Germans now own Europe. If the rest of Europe is to continue to enjoy the benefits of what is essentially a German currency, they need to become more German. And so, once again, all sorts of people who would rather not think about what it means to be 'German' are compelled to do so."

The Long and Winding Road to Crisis

As I will show below, the US (indeed much of the world) is on the edge of yet another recession. It will not take much to push us into one, just a small shock, like say a banking crisis in Europe, alluded to by Lewis and something I have been writing about for a year.
That being said, the apparent willingness of the Germans to come up with creative ideas (and to get the French to go along) to fund the various nations in crisis, in order to avoid technical defaults, is somewhat amazing. And if there was an election today and the socialists and Greens won in Germany, they would be even more open to the idea of a eurobond, to be somehow guaranteed by member countries. The current EFSF can deal with Greece, Ireland, and Portugal until maybe 2013, and the next version will be large enough to deal with Spain, unless of course the Eurozone elites decide to call it quits, which is something they have not shown the slightest hint of doing. What is more likely is that we lurch from crisis to crisis, with each crisis somehow being averted by throwing more money at it, until the debt of the AAA guarantors like France (and to a lesser extent Italy) starts to be called into question by the markets.
Remember, the demographics of Spain and Italy are horrendous, soon to be on a level with Japan. The government portion of GDP in France is already 53% (not a typo!) and is only going to get worse as aging Boomers have been promised monster benefits that simply cannot be provided without Greek-level austerities. Their future numbers are worse than those of the US.
This can go on for a long time, or it can end in a Bang! moment this year. That is the nature of the lesson from Rogoff and Reinhart. Look at Japan. They took what were functionally insolvent banks and kept them going for decades. Where there is a political will there can be a way … but there will be an Endgame. That is also the lesson we learn from history. Japan will not be able to stave off a crisis of major proportions forever. Neither will Europe, unless they all become Germans in their national accounting.

Are We Already in Recession?

My friend Barry Ritholtz posted the above question today, and wrote:
"Bloomberg reported today that " Consumer Sentiment Plunged to Three-Decade Low." That sent me scurrying to find some charts, and I ended up liking the two from UBS strategist Andy Lees, at bottom.
"The first one is an overlay the University of Michigan consumer confidence index vs the Conference Board's data. The second chart shows the long term history of the Conference Board data. At an implied level of 43.37 we would be in recession now; not only that but a deep recession.
"As the charts show, the ABC index has diverged from the Conference Board data for some time now. The correlation between consumer confidence and recession might not hold this time - although that would be the first split for 40 plus years. There is also an implication from this data series that we are already in recession. Given yesterday's data showing both imports and exports falling, we may have an implied Q2 GDP revised lower by 0.8% to 0.5% annualized growth - putting Q2 into the negative category.
"Hence, it is not unfeasible that we could be the verge of recession."


And that brings me to a chart I asked Rich Yamarone (chief econ type at Bloomberg) to update for me. Again, it is about the horrific consumer confidence number that came in today, but this time it is correlated with GDP. As you can see, there is a close correlation. With GDP growth of less than 1% for the last six months, asking if we are close to or already in a recession is not a question without merit. And either way, this does not bode well for the long-term direction of stocks and corporate earnings. Consumer confidence is really saying that a recession is in the cards. Maybe it is just weariness with the political malaise (which would be understandable), but we should pay attention.

And while I won't print the chart again, every time year-over-year GDP growth falls below 2%, we end up in a recession. It is now 1.6%. Past performance is not indicative of future recessions, but the trend is not in our favor.

So What Can We Do?

The economy is getting weaker. What can we do? The short answer is, sadly, not much. There were some in Maine who argued for more fiscal stimulus, but I think there is little political will for another major stimulus program. The last one got us up to 3% GDP growth before we fell back, and all we got was a major debt bill and a higher level of government spending. I fully get that lowering government spending will have negative short-term effects, but we are at the point in the Endgame where we must bite the bullet.
And fiscal policy is becoming a drag on the entire Eurozone, as well as Great Britain. Austerity may be warranted, but is has consequences.
What about QE3? Let's look at how that last move turned out. We ended up with more money on the Fed's balance sheet and higher commodity prices. The NFIB survey I cited last week showed there was no great demand on the part of small business for loans. 91% had what they needed. What they want are sales and customers! The trade data yesterday showed exports fell by over $2.3 billion last month. That suggests a slowing world economy. Which is borne out by numerous other indicators.
One has to applaud the Chinese for allowing their currency to rise by a significant (for them) amount this week, as almost every other government (including Switzerland) wants a weaker currency. Everyone can't devalue at the same time, just as everyone cannot export their way out of this crisis. Someone has to buy!
In short, there are no easy solutions. We have just about used up all our "rabbits in the hat" as far as fiscal and monetary policy are concerned. We now need to focus on what we can do to get out of the way of the private sector, so it can find ways to create new businesses and jobs. And that means figuring out how to get money to new businesses, because that is where net new jobs come from. But that takes time – and is a subject for another letter, as it is time to hit the send button.