By James Corbett

Today James talks to Nomi Prins, author of books like All The Presidents Bankers, about her recent article “The Central Bank Power Shift from West to East, Game of Thrones Style.” We talk about the changing economic and monetary landscape and how the locus of central bank power is shifting to the East, with players like the People’s Bank of China gaining in prominence and former US/EU lapdogs like the IMF becoming brokers for these new power players in the new world financial order.

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By Charles Hugh Smith

The idea that authorities can massage their pumping to keep asset bubbles inflated at a permanently high plateau is currently being tested.

The trouble with inflating asset bubbles is that you have to keep inflating them or they pop. Unfortunately for the bubble-blowing central banks, asset bubbles are a double-bind: you cannot inflate assets forever. At some unpredictable point, the risk and moral hazard that are part and parcel of all asset bubbles trigger an avalanche of selling that pops the bubble.

This is another facet of The Fed’s Double-Bind: if you stop pumping asset bubbles, they pop as participants realize the music has stopped, and if you keep pumping them, they expand to super-nova criticality and implode.

There are several dynamics at play in this double-bind.

1. The process of inflating a bubble (for example, the current bubbles in stocks and real estate) requires pushing investors and speculators alike into risky asset classes. This puts the market at increasing risk as everyone is pushed to one side of the boat.

2. Those on the other side of the boat (i.e. shorts) are slowly but surely eradicated as the pumping keeps inflating the bubble. When the bubble finally bursts, there are no shorts left to cover, i.e. buy stocks at lower prices to reap their profits.

3. As the bubble continues to expand, the money available to enter the market and keep prices rising declines. The very success of the pumping process strips the markets of new sources of new money, leading to a point where normal selling exceeds new-money buying and the bubble collapses.

4. Money pumping by central banks and governments follows a curve of diminishing return. One analogy is insulin insensitivity: as the systemic distortions build, markets become increasingly insensitive to money pumping. Authorities respond to this intrinsic process of increasing insensitivity by pumping even more money into the system.

But as with insulin insensitivity, at some point the system loses all sensitivity to money pumping: no matter how much money central authorities inject, the markets refuse to go higher. At this point, the stick-slip nature of bubbles manifests and modest selling triggers a collapse as participants all rush for the exits. Buyers have vanished and there is no longer a bid at any price.

5. Having pumped the assets higher with ever-greater injections of speculative risk and pumping, central banks and states have exhausted their ability to re-inflate assets as they collapse.

This growing insensitivity to money pumping is visible in the stock market’s response to each new QE program: each market advance is of shorter duration, and each rise is less robust than the last one.

This degradation of response to pumping has forced the Fed to pursue a policy of infinite QE, with no time or pumping limits.

The idea that authorities can massage their pumping to keep asset bubbles inflated at a permanently high plateau is currently being tested. The Fed is implicitly suggesting that it can adjust the expectations/policy dials with such control that it can keep the bubble inflating essentially for years to come.

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Systems cannot be controlled once risk and moral hazard have been raised to levels where instability is an intrinsic feature of the system. Those who actually believe the Fed can keep asset bubbles inflated at a permanently high plateau will discover their error in dramatic fashion, as the bigger the bubble, the more violent the implosion.

This is the super-nova nature of asset bubbles: if you try to deflate the bubble slowly, it implodes, but if you keep inflating the bubble it eventually implodes from its internal extremes.

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By Charles Hugh Smith

As central bank policies are increasingly fingered by the mainstream as the source of soaring wealth-income inequality, policies supporting credit/asset bubbles will either be limited or cut off, and at that point all the credit/asset bubbles will pop.

I’ve long held that if a problem can be solved by creating $1 trillion out of thin air and buying a raft of assets with that $1 trillion, then central banks will solve the problem by creating the $1 trillion out of thin air—nothing could be easier.

This is the lesson of the past eight years: if a problem can be solved by creating new money and buying assets, then central banks will solve that problem.

Problem: stock market is declining. Solution: create new money and buy, buy, buy stock index funds. Problem solved! Market stops falling and quickly rebounds as “central banks have our backs.”

Problem: interest rates are inhibiting lending and growth. Solution: create a few trillion units of currency and buy enough sovereign bonds to drop interest rates to near-zero.

Problem: nobody’s left who can afford to buy the new nosebleed-priced flats that underpin China’s miracle-grow economy. Solution: create new currency, lend it to local government agencies who then buy the empty flats.

Problem: stagnant employment and deflation. Solution: create a trillion in new currency, buy a trillion in new government bonds that then fund infrastructure projects, i.e. bridges to nowhere.

And so on. Any problem that can be solved by creating a few trillion out of thin air and buying assets will be solved.  The mechanism to solve these problems–creating currency out of nothing–is like a perpetual motion machine: there are no intrinsic limits on the amount of new money that can created at near-zero interest, as the interest payments can be funded by new money.

Even better, the central bank (the Federal Reserve) buys Treasury bonds with the new currency that generate income, which is then returned to the Treasury: a perpetual-motion money machine!

The policy of creating trillions in new currency and buying trillions in assets has inflated an everything bubble, a bubble in all the asset classes being supported or purchased by central banks and their proxies.

Many observers wonder what, if anything, could pop the everything bubble.

This leads to an interesting question: what problems can’t be solved by creating another trillion and buying assets?

What Problems Can’t Be Solved by Creating Another Trillion and Buying Assets?

The past eight years have created the comforting illusion that essentially all problems in the modern era of globalized, centralized, debt-based, state-cartel capitalism in all its flavors (Chinese, Japanese, European, American, etc.) can be solved by creating as many trillions as are needed (whatever it takes) and buying assets or issuing guaranteed lines of credit with the new currency.

But there are some structural problems that can’t be solved by this mechanism. Some are primarily economic, some are primarily political-social, but all of them affect the entire system, not just the financial realm.

Inflation

We’re told that inflation–the loss of purchasing power of a currency–is near death and this greatly saddens the globe’s central bankers, who desperately need inflation to push wages higher and reduce the burden on debtors.

So let’s say, just as a thought experiment, that central banks get their much-desired inflation, but it runs hotter than their 2% annual target.  Once inflation is embedded in expectations and the supply chain, printing another trillion and using it to buy stocks, bonds, empty flats, etc. won’t make inflation go away.  Rather, the inflation in asset valuations generated by endless central bank buying if assets ends up feeding real-world inflation as all this new currency doesn’t actually produce more goods and services; it simply expands the supply of currency sloshing around the world looking for speculative yield.

The chorus of voices advocating for Universal Basic Income (UBI) is growing, and central banks will increasingly be pressured to issue new currency to fund UBI and its equivalents—what’s known as helicopter money, as the central bank issues currency that then funds deficit spending, i.e. the government dropping cash into the real economy.

Helicopter money comes in a variety of forms: debt forgiveness, negative tax rates (i.e. tax rebates to those who owe no income taxes), and cash stipends such as UBI. In every case, this helicopter money doesn’t expand the supply of goods and services; all it does is expand the funds available for consumption.

While China may be able to export deflation in goods that are tradable, that is, commoditized goods that can be made anywhere and shipped to markets elsewhere, nontradable goods and services such as local government services, housing, groceries, fast food, most healthcare services, haircuts, education, etc.–the bulk of the real economy–soar in price as the supply of money expands faster than the supply of these goods and services.

This is why inflation is already running extremely hot in nontradable sectors(which are often dominated, funded or controlled by the public sector/government), while deflation is still visible in tradable goods such as TVs, software, etc. I covered real-world inflation rates in The Burrito Index: Consumer Prices Have Soared 160% Since 2001 (August 1, 2016))

Much of the real-world inflation in sectors such as healthcare is invisible to protected classes because it’s being absorbed by employers and the government, a topic I covered in Inflation Isn’t Evenly Distributed: The Protected Are Fine, the Unprotected Are Impoverished Debt-Serfs (May 25, 2017)

Real-world inflation is also distorted by hedonics and substitution, tricks that lower the official rate of inflation but don’t change the reality that the average prices paid for vehicles have risen substantially, despite the official claim that vehicle prices have been flatlined for years, a topic I addressed in About Those “Hedonic Adjustments” to Inflation: Ignoring the Systemic Decline in Quality, Utility, Durability and Service (October 11, 2017)

Be Careful What You Wish For: Inflation Is Much Higher Than Advertised (October 5, 2017)

As political pressure on central banks mounts to fund QE for the people, QE for Main Street, etc., that is, helicopter money in one form or another, the introduction of new currency into the real economy has the potential to make real-world inflation undeniable.

Once inflation is undeniably in the 5% to 7% range, who will be willing to buy a negative-interest rate bond, or a bond paying 1%?

By Thorsten Polleit

Reading through Security Analysis, the roadmap for investing first published in 1934 by Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd, I learned something quite interesting: The basis of stock valuation had changed quite drastically in the period between 1927 and 1929. The stock buying public “departed more and more from the factual approach and technique of security analysis and concerned itself increasingly with the elements of potentiality and prophecy”, write Graham and Dodd.1

What they mean is that in the pre-WWI world, stocks were typically valued on the basis of a three-part concept: (i) a decent track record of firms’ dividend returns, (ii) a stable and satisfactory earnings record, and (iii) a strong balance sheet, with sufficient backing by tangible assets. The “New-Era” theory of stock valuation reads, summarized in one sentence, as follows: “The value of a common stock depends entirely upon what it will earn in the future.”

Current dividends should only have a slight impact upon a stock’s valuation, and as firms’ asset values did not have an apparent relationship with their earning power, asset values were said to be devoid of importance when it comes to calculating a stock’s “fair price.” A firm’s earnings record was only relevant to the extent that it might indicate what changes in a firm’s future earnings were likely to be expected. In other words, the New-Era theory of stock valuation was quite a break compared to the valuation technique employed in the past.

A Sea Change in Pricing Stocks

According to Graham and Dodd, there were two significant causes why such a change in the approach to stock valuation occurred. First, accounting data of a firm’s past proved to be increasingly unreliable as a guide for making wise investment decisions. The reason for this was rapid changes in demand structures and product and process technologies. Second, the expectation of future rewards became increasingly attractive to many investors, in fact, “irresistibly alluring.”

The New-Era theory of stock valuation, which people followed in the hot phase of the 1927-1929 stock market rally, turned out to suffer from two weaknesses, according to Graham and Dodd. First, it encouraged people to speculate heavily: stock prices were driven by expected future profits, detached from “the facts of the established past.” Second, established standards of valuation were thrown overboard. Any prevalent valuation level could easily be interpreted to be the new standard of valuation.

“Fantastic reasoning” fueled the stock market bubble because people did not have to concern themselves with the question of the “fair price” of a stock any longer. With the New-Era theory of valuation, people would buy “good” stocks, regardless of their price, in the hope of having found a get-rich-scheme, given that there was the possibility of the new level of standard valuation in the future being higher than the level of standard valuation seen in the past. We all know how tragic this doctrine turned out to be.

Then, the New-Era theory of valuation developed into a somewhat more elaborate doctrine. In his book The Theory of Investment Value, published in 1937, John Burr Williams, presented the “dividend discount model.” It says that the value of a firm’s stock – and thus its “fair” price – is equal to the present value of all its future dividends. Williams’ dividend discount model has become the standard valuation formula for stocks. However, it stands in the tradition of the New-Era theory of valuation doctrine.

The dividend discount model caters to speculative frenzies. For instance, it might justify a high price of a firm’s stock even if the firm has not delivered any dividend so far — just by referring to a firm’s earnings power that is hopefully going to unfold in the future. At the same time, however, the dividend discount model clearly rests on a sound economic idea. It epitomizes a category of human action, namely time preference: One US dollar today is — and logically so — valued more than a buck to be received in one year’s time.