Belarus Currency Devaluation & Inflation Spreads Panic

Business week writes Belarus devaluation spreads panic:

A sharp devaluation of the Belarusian ruble has spread panic throughout the country, with people sweeping store shelves and queuing up at currency exchange offices on Wednesday in a desperate attempt to protect their savings.

President Alexander Lukashenko promised that the national currency will remain stable following the devaluation enacted a day earlier, but experts warned the Belarusian ruble will continue its nosedive if Russia doesn’t provide a quick bailout.

The ruble lost nearly half of its official value against the dollar Tuesday, when the National Bank ordered a devaluation. The new official rate is 4,930 rubles per dollar, up from the previous 3,155 but the perceived value of the local currency is much lower — on the black market it takes 6,000 rubles to buy a dollar.

To make matters worse, there is a physical shortage in the country of dollars and euros, which companies and households desperately want to own to protect themselves from a worse devaluation in the future.

The government has tightly regulated sales of hard foreign currency and its own reserves are badly depleted. Exchange offices have run out of foreign currency because they are allowed only to sell what they buy from clients.

Andrei Krylevich, 42, has spent a week in lines outside an exchange booth in downtown Minsk without a chance to buy a single dollar. The computer company he works at has sent its employees on an unpaid leave, and he urgently needs to pay back a $9,000 loan to a bank.

“In just one month, I have virtually turned bankrupt, the entire country has gone bankrupt,” Krylevich said.

Most Belarusian industries are state-owned, and the government has tried to keep its scarce currency reserves for vital imports. On Tuesday, it set tight limits on interbank currency trading, effectively stifling the market.

The flamboyant Lukashenko, in power for nearly 17 years, has kept an unusually low profile in recent weeks as his government has been pleading Moscow for a vital loan. Russia has been reluctant to provide it, pushing Belarus to sell its industrial assets.

Russia’s Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Tuesday that Belarus can get the total of $3 billion in loans from an economic alliance of several ex-Soviet nations over the next three years, including the first $800 million disbursement that could be delivered next month. Kudrin added that Belarus could earn another $7.5 billion by privatizing its industries, most of which remain in state hands.

Events like these are likely to occur more and more in Europe, in particular Eastern Europe, but also in many other emerging markets.

Note how the dollar is still well accepted as a stable flight to safety when other currencies fail. That’s why I marked that one part in bold: This is a perfect example for what happens when credit crunches hit emerging market economies.

Global deleveraging is always rather likely to exert an upward pressure on the Dollar and on gold as well as the chickens of cheap global credit come home to roost.

By the way: It’s comical, but absolutely typical, for any actions taken by government officials, that “Lukashenko promised that the national currency will remain stable”! As if the affected people had any choice in the matter to begin with!! =)

Tags: belarus, devaluation, inflation, ruble, russia

Public Credit Expansion Fuels Inflation

April 23, 2011 · Posted in General Economics · Comment

Are the current price increases we see across the board inflation? Well, price increases are never in themselves inflation, but they can be signs of inflation.

Inflation, as I have explained before, is an increase in the supply of money and credit.

Let’s see what’s been happening in the US over the past year.

Total Loans and Leases:

Total Loans and Leases still had their peak in 2008. In early 2010 there was a big spike and they have been declining since then.

Total Bank Credit at Commercial Banks:

A similar pattern can be observed with Total Bank Credit ad Commercial banks as you can see above.

Together those two numbers give you a pretty good and complete indication as to how private credit has contracted in the in US and still continues to contract from peak credit.

However, the most complete picture of credit in the US is, as always, a number in the Fed’s Flow of Funds Report “Total Credit Market Debt Owed”:

Here we can see that indeed through 2010 there has been a resurgence in credit, in spite of a contraction in private credit. The reason is that public credit, that is money owed by governments, has soared:

Yes, we have been back in inflation mode indeed, but without the private sector playing along on a long term basis, I don’t think that this one can last very long. All that this has done is fuel speculation and bubbles again in commodities, junk bonds, and stocks. A few jobs may have been created as a result of that, a few more may get created. However, these developments are completely unsustainable. Government intervention in the past crisis has ensured that this will be a long, ongoing, and painful period, and we are witnessing it right now.

We are now in a desperate repetition of what I already warned about in 2007 when I wrote “Credit Expansion Policy“:

The policy of credit expansion has been pursued by governments time and time again. It has become prevalent in the United States under President Woodrow Wilson after the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank under the Federal Reserve Act during the Christmas Holiday of December 1913. Since then, it has caused major credit booms and crunches in the form of asset booms and subsequent crashes and economic booms and subsequent recessions. In particular this has been the case in the years of 1929, 1987, and 2001, and will be visible in 2008 and the following years. It has always precipitated precisely the effects outlined above. Its workings and effects have been fully explained by this theory of the business cycles. No one has ever refuted the correctness of this theory.

Yet, to date economists and politicians appear completely riddled as to what causes booms and crashes. It is claimed to still be a matter of discussion amongst experts. It has been attempted to impute it upon humans’ greedy nature and natural exuberance. Whenever a crisis emerges the pundits, experts, central banks and politicians will try and regulate the market to stave off the impending crunch. They forget or don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand that it has been their own policy that has caused the crisis in the first place.

As long as the central banks keep pursuing this policy, there is no need to be surprised when the next credit crunch occurs. Neither is there any need to be surprised about the fact that all countermeasures taken by the government will turn out to be utter failures that will accomplish nothing but aggravate the crisis. For if the cause of the problem has been too much government intervention, then more government intervention will only add to it.

The only difference now is that private sector credit is not playing along anymore. In fact, private sector credit is doing precisely what it should be doing: contract.

When the next crash comes, I expect that we’ll be back in deflation mode again in no time at all, snapping back into the long term pattern of this contraction. Like I said before:

Thus the long term outlook for the US economy is the fate Japan took: A long lasting correction supercycle with one failing “stimulus” program after another, and with on and off periods where the economy slips out of and back into recessions from time to time.

And most importantly … when the next crash comes, I sure hope people will point their finger at the root causes, and not at whatever lying politicians and media minions will tell them to.

Tags: credit, deflation, inflation, public credit

Money, Credit, Inflation, and Deflation

December 24, 2010 · Posted in Monetary Economics · Comment

Tags: credit, deflation, inflation, money

Deflation or Inflation – Is Public Credit Setting Off Contraction in Private Credit?

March 13, 2010 · Posted in General Economics · Comment

I want to follow up on something Marc Faber said the other day in the second clip.

He said that it is true that private credit is contracting, but it is being offset by a government credit expansion.

Let’s examine this suggestion a little more closely.

I regularly publish the total contraction of total private loans and credit:

total-credit-feb-2010

This is, however, only a subset of the total credit picture. What is missing are things like corporate and government bonds, and probably some other non financial obligations.

The most comprehensive data on the total of pretty much ALL credit issued in the US is really the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds Report, in particular the subsection “Level tables”.

The current flow of funds report can always be accessed here and for March 11, the latest release shows us the following:

Based on these numbers we can see that total credit, when measured across all sectors, has indeed been declining throughout 2009, by roughly $466 billion, in spite of a massive ramp up in public debt.

This simply shows us the magnitude of the deflationary forces in action.

I would also add to this that we could easily double the total credit outstanding above if we included the federal government’s Medicare and Social Security obligations which nominally amount up to $43 trillion and will never be fully paid back. There is no official number to track for this since these obligations are not reported on any balance sheet and are not traded on any markets. Thus we can only assume that their present value is declining by at least the current rate of decline in the remaining credit volume (about 0.8% through 2009).

This would bring the total contraction in credit up to around $810 billion through 2009.

I’m also not sure to what extent other municipal and state pensions are covered in the flow of funds number, but I rather doubt they are included at all. A lot of those lavish union pension plans are going to have to cut back on their commitments soon, probably the next big events to shake the markets, along with commercial real estate defaults and property values declining.

And last but not least, it is rather unlikely that the current numbers are all marked to market. Government regulations across the board have ensured that banks and corporations can be rather creative in their reporting.

Either way, all this is a rather strong indication that Marc Faber’s assertion may not me correct.

Tags: deflation, flow of funds, inflation, total credit

Inflation or Deflation? Marc Faber vs. Mike “Mish” Shedlock

March 13, 2010 · Posted in General Economics · Comment

Once in a while you can observe a few minutes where people on mainstream news speak the truth. I treasure these moments …

Part 1: Mish & Faber discuss market outlook and see value in Japan

Part 2: Mish & Faber on Inflation or Deflation

In case you care about my humble views in next to these two brilliant titans, read my Inflation & Deflation Revisited.

Part 3: Mish and Faber agree “It’s too late to fix things”

Tags: deflation, inflation, marc faber, mike shedlock, mish

Bets on Inflation – Full Steam in the Wrong Direction

July 8, 2009 · Posted in General Economics · Comment

Bloomberg writes Jim Rogers Sells Dollars, Plans to Short Treasuries:

July 6 (Bloomberg) — The dollar and U.S. Treasuries are both likely to slide as soaring government debt in the world’s biggest economy undermines confidence in its assets, according to Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings.

“The government is printing lots of money and borrowing even more; that’s not the basis for a sound currency,” he said in a telephone interview today from Singapore. “The idea that anybody would lend money to the U.S. government for 30 years at 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 percent interest is mind-boggling to me.”

Rogers, the author of books including “Investment Biker” and “Adventure Capitalist”, said he holds fewer dollars than a year ago and plans to “short U.S. government bonds someday.” A short bet involves selling a security you don’t own with a view to buying it back after the price has fallen.

A time will come when Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff, Mark Faber, and other hyperinflationists will have to come forward and tell their investors that they were plain wrong. The only other option they have it to continue to predict for years and years to come, in millennial fashion, that someday their prophecy of hyperinflation will become reality. It is not a surprise that a lot of the current phenomena are entirely confusing and mind-boggling to them.

I would advise anyone who is still listening to them on this matter to consider Inflation & Deflation Revisited, take a look around and see what is going on with grocery stores, commercial properties, credit card defaults, friends who are losing their jobs, the immense appetite for savings, etc.

Adjust your investment strategy accordingly, and cash in while hyperinflationists continue lose money.

Tags: deflation, inflation, jim rogers

Inflation Fears Meet Reality

June 18, 2009 · Posted in General Economics · Comment

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that consumer prices fell by 1.3% over the past year:

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.3 percent in May before seasonal adjustment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Over the last 12 months the index has fallen 1.3 percent. This is the largest decline since April 1950 and is due mainly to a 27.3 percent decline in the energy index.

As can be seen this CPI-U measure applies a rise of 0.5% for “Housing”. How realistic does this appear? It is obviously a mirage. It is a result of the fact that the so called owners’ equivalent rent (OER) has replaced real home prices in the index. It contributes 24.433% to the current CPI-U and is included as a component of “Housing”.

This prevented the CPI from raising red flags during the housing boom, and it is now skewing price declines significantly

When we replace OER with the Case-Shiller home price index, which most recently indicated a year on year drop of 18.7%, prices overall actually fell by 6.3%.

As I said 11 days ago:

…this is not the stuff from which inflations are made.

I expect a reversal of market data to adjust to real conditions sooner or later. I think Treasury Notes will be a good call. The dollar should start to rise again against other currencies. I think gold is likely to do fine. It is merely back to where it was before the inflation fears began. Silver’s excessive gains, however, may have partly been fueled by these inflation expectations. I would advise caution here. It may be time to ring the register on some silver gains and buy at another low.

Treasuries have rallied since then. Stocks have fallen. The dollar has gained, albeit rather moderately. Gold saw a minor drop while silver fell by about 6%. Virtually all inflation expecation indicators that I posted in that article have begun to change direction. I expect this to be a pervasive and extended trend over the next weeks and months with gold beginning to bounce back stronger than silver. Whenever expectations are so out of whack with reality, a market correction tends to be due … time will tell.

Tags: cpi, cpi-u, deflation, inflation

Inflation Fears vs. Reality

June 7, 2009 · Posted in General Economics · 2 Comments

Markets everywhere are unanimously heralding a return to dollar inflation…

Perceptions:

Inflation expectation is up:

Click on image to enlarge.

Stock markets are up (S&P 500 below):

Click on image to enlarge.

Treasury yields are up (10 year Treasury Note yield below):

Click on image to enlarge.

Spreads between Treasury Inflation Indexed Securities and regular Treasuries have widened significantly:

Click on image to enlarge.

The dollar is dropping against major currencies:

Click on image to enlarge.

Inflation & Deflation Revisited

June 5, 2009 · Posted in Global Economics, Monetary Economics · 15 Comments

I have in the past defined inflation as an increase in the true money supply. I defined deflation as a drop or only a very minor increase in the money supply. In those strict terms I have interpreted economic data correctly. I said we were in a major inflation through the 90s and from 2001 through 2006, then I switched to the deflationary camp and later, and toward the end of 2008 again supported the inflationary view. The chart below shows the money supply growth up until the end of 2008.

I include only actual money in cash or in checking accounts in my data. I still would not change a word of what I said regarding what is and what is not to be included in the true money supply, the supply of the medium of exchange inside a country.

But I admit that I used an insufficient definition for inflation and deflation. What I was really referring to was monetary inflation. We create definitions in order to understand and/or explain cause and effect of market events.

I agree with Mish in that:

I prefer a practical definition of deflation that matches and even predicts what the credit markets and stock markets are going to do, not some definition that is useless for anything but academic debate.

Inflation is broadly understood as an event where, due to monetary intervention, a large group of people consumes and/or produces differently from how they would have consumed or produced without the intervention. The dislocations of demand versus supply generally cause prices to rise differently from how they would have risen/fallen without the intervention. I explained these phenomena in the consumption business cycle and the production business cycle. Deflation is the reversal of this development back toward market equilibrium.

I said in The Dispute About the True Money Supply:

We are trying to ascertain the true money supply for a reason. We want to explain the current and the future development of asset and consumption prices in the country, measured in dollars. The more money is available for spending the higher will the prices be. But prices emerge in exchange transactions where money is surrendered in exchange for goods and services. They change over time as a result of continuous ongoing exchange transactions. As a tendency, they change with every additional exchange transaction. The medium used in these transactions and thus affecting prices, and nothing but it, is what we need to measure (…)

…maybe if we want to know how many media of exchange are available. But it won’t necessarily help us in explaining inflation and deflation. Why? It’s simple. Inflation is created based on how much money people think they have, not how much they actually have. People act based on perception. Their error will only become apparent at a later point in time. In addition to that, prices don’t necessarily have to emerge through exchange transactions only. When two investors agree on a certain price to trade claims to money from some business, then all other holders of the same may see that same price on their broker statement at the end of the day without having done anything.

Imagine a society with a relatively free market and a certain amount of fiat money in circulation. Now imagine the central bank or one of its fractional reserve banks offers to A a new credit of $100, pushing down interest rates and pushing up the prices for debt instruments. Now imagine the person A who receives the loaned money passes it on as a loan to someone else, B. If A is certain that he’ll be paid back with interest he will consider the claim to future money as good as money. B may do the same and so on and so forth.

All participants in this chain will think their claim to $100 is actually $100 of money owned. Each of them will, at worst, consider it a wash: I owe $100 and I am owed $100. In other cases they may value the asset owned higher than the money owed, especially when government intervention creates an ongoing demand for these claims by buying them up or by offering guarantees to banks who buy them up (see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and push up their prices. Everyone will continue spending the rest of their other money as if their claim was as good as money. But what if the final debtor in the chain has squandered the money and defaults. Now others in the chain may default as well: The price of the claims drops to zero.

Suddenly reality kicks in and everybody realizes that they never owned as much money as they thought. “I have my money in mortgage backed securities.” or “I have my money in corporate bonds.” may be some of the things they used to say before their net worth evaporated. But they never had money in anything. They had given their money away in exchange for a future claim to it. There was never enough money in circulation to pay off every debt in the first place. This is when people begin appreciating true cash again, with no strings attached, earned money. Everybody will be scrambling for it on order to pay off their debts. Others see this happening before their eyes and will save more than they used to.

The US economy has been at the center of a worldwide network of such cascading credit relationships. Central banks loaned fiat money to fractional reserve banks, those would pass it on to financial institutions which would make it available as wholesale mortgages, individual mortgage banks would take those on and make loans to homebuyers. Insurance companies would insure one or the other loan in the chain and again consider the insurance policy as good as money, using it as collateral to obtain … more credit. On top of that, huge pension plans would invest money in such financial institutions and insurance companies. This is just one example of how the entire world economy has been permeated by credit that is now imploding.

Consumer behavior will obviously change drastically as a result of this. This is exactly what has been going on for the past 2 years. It is a credit deflation. The sum of money inflation/deflation and credit inflation/deflation can thus be defined as total inflation/deflation. The amount of debt at this point is so huge that the pure money inflation/deflation component almost doesn’t matter: The true money supply is currently at around $2.14 trillion. According to Michael Hodges, in January 2009 total Debt in the US excluding unfunded social security and medicare commitments is estimated at roughly $60 trillion, and at around $174 trillion when those are included.

Some may now ask “But what about the Fed with all its money pumping and printing?”. But the Fed is not just printing money and unloading it over our cities. The only way the Fed and other banks can currently add money to the economy is by offering credit. But when it offers credit then naturally someone on the other end must accept it. When the demand for credit dries up the game is over. Robert Prechter offers a great illustration with his Jaguar example:

Jaguar Inflation

I am tired of hearing people insist that the Fed can expand credit all it wants. Sometimes an analogy clarifies a subject so let’s try one.

It may sound crazy, but suppose the government were to decide that the health of the nation depends upon producing Jaguar automobiles and providing them to as many people as possible. To facilitate that goal, it begins operating Jaguar plants all over the country, subsidizing it with tax money. To everyone’s delight , it offers these luxury cars for sale at 50 percent off the old price. People flock to the showrooms and buy. Later, sales slow down, so the government cuts the price in half again. More people rush in and buy. Sales again slow, so it lowers the price to $900 each. People return to the stores and buy two or three, or half a dozen. Why not? Look how cheap they are! Buyers give Jaguars to their kids and park an extra one on the lawn. Finally, the country is awash in Jaguars. Alas, sales slow again, and the government panics. It must move more Jaguars, or, according to its theory – ironically now made fact – the economy will recede. People are working three days a week just to pay their taxes so the government can keep producing more Jaguars. If Jaguars stop moving the economy will stop. So the government begins giving Jaguars away. A few more cars move out of the showrooms, but then it ends. Nobody wants any more Jaguars. They don’t care if they’re free. They can’t find a use for them. Production of Jaguars ceases. It takes years to work through the overhanging supply of Jaguars. Tax collections collapse, the factories close, and unemployment soars. The economy is wrecked. People can’t afford to buy gasoline , so many of the Jaguars rust away to worthlessness. The number of Jaguars – at best – returns to the level it was before the program began.

The same thing can happen with credit.
It may sound crazy, but suppose the government were to decide that the health of the nation depends upon producing credit and providing it to as many people as possible. To facilitate that goal, it begins operating credit production plants all over the country, called Federal Reserve Banks. To everyone’s delight , the banks offer the credit for sale at below market rates. People flock to the banks and buy. Later, sales slow down, so the banks cut the price again. More people rush in and buy. Sales again slow, so it lowers the price to 1 percent. People return to the banks and buy even more credit. Why not? Look how cheap it is! Borrowers use credit to buy houses, boats and an extra Jaguar to park out on the lawn. Finally, the country is awash in credit. Alas, sales slow again, and the banks panic. They must move more credit, or, according to its theory – ironically now made fact – the economy will recede. People are working three days a week just to pay the interest on their debt so the banks can keep offering more credit. If credit stops moving the economy will stop. So they start giving credit away at zero percent interest. A few more loans move through the tellers’ windows, but then it ends. Nobody wants any more credit. They don’t care if they’re free. They can’t find a use for it. Production of credit ceases. It takes years to work through the overhanging supply of credit. Interest payments collapse, banks close, and unemployment soars. The economy is wrecked. People can’t afford to pay interest on their debts , so many bonds deteriorate away to worthlessness. The value of credit – at best – returns to the level it was before the program began.

I also explained this, albeit a bit less vividly, in Sick and Tired of Debt. I recommend reading Prechter’s excellent paper The Guide to Understanding Deflation in full. Nowhere else have I seen the concepts behind deflation explained so precisely and with so much foresight.

A lot of economists and investors, such as Peter Schiff and Marc Faber are ignoring the ideas that I outlined above. They are expecting a Weimar style hyperinflation. I used to think the same way. But I wasn’t looking at the details. Weimar Germany’s hyperinflation happened because the German government simply printed money, actual currency, in order to pay off debts owed to the victors from World War 1. Zimbabwe did the same thing to honor IMF loans. This is nothing near to what is going on in the US. Money is created by issuing new debt, not by paying it off. When people have had enough, it ends.

Hyperinflation is simply not going to happen under the current conditions. So long as credit remains the only means for the Federal Reserve Bank to “inject” money, deflation will continue to run its course.

What will happen after the debt is written off? Who knows. We may or may not see a hyperinflation at some point in the far distant future, depending on how monetary policy changes over time. But to put all your eggs in that basket, and to do so right now would be a mistake.

Tags: credit, debt, deflation, inflation

Net Drain on US Foreign Reserves

March 21, 2009 · Posted in Global Economics · 3 Comments

Asia Times’ Julian Delasantellis article US Fed’s move is the bigger problem would be a brilliant piece if he didn’t continuously make the assumption that what caused the US financial crisis was an outgrowth of a lack of government rules and decrees (Please see Credit Expansion Policy and The Business Cycle). That gaffe taken aside, he makes a lot of good observations. In particular:

The first article I ever wrote for Asia Times Online, (US living on borrowed time – and money” March 28, 2006), introduced readers to the US Treasury’s monthly Treasury International Capital (TIC) report, a compendium of how much investment
or short-term capital the US receives from foreign sources every month. Back then, the US was quite the popular parking spot for foreign capital, frequently drawing in over $100 billion a month.

That worm has certainly turned; the US in January, the last month data is available, was actually net drained of foreign capital, to the tune of $150 billion. On his blog at the Council of Foreign Relations, economist Brad Setser interpreted the data this way.

Today’s TIC January data was a disaster. $150 billion in (net) capital outflows (negative $148.9 billion to be precise) cannot sustain even a $40 billion trade deficit.

Obviously, the concern is that those with still the capital to lend to the US, primarily China, seeing the huge increase in US government demand for borrowed funds with its now huge and ever-burgeoning budget deficits being used to finance the economic crisis recovery programs, will fear that the US dollars they use to buy US debt will depreciate in value, devastating the value of their investments.

Previously, China has tried to give messages that slowly pulling out of its dollar positions was exactly what it wanted to do, but America’s cherished habit of ignoring anything that foreigners say to it had it lending a stone-deaf ear to the warnings.

One can only hope that China will act in accordance with its rhetoric. A Chinese withdrawal from additional purchases of US Treasury securites will make the American people wake up to reality and understand the consequences of their government’s policy of inflation. When exactly this will happen is hard to determine. The current deflation may continue to go on for a very long time, in spite of all the Fed’s desperate attempts to reflate.

More on China-US relations in the US Current Account Deficit and in US on the Hook for Chinese Investments.

Tags: china us dependency, inflation