09 February 2011

Updated Money Supply Figures: Dude, Still No Deflation


For comments see the original post from August 2010, US Money Supply Figures

My forecast remains for a severe stagflation with the continuing devaluation of the dollar relative to real goods, in a Potemkin economy masked by newspeak and distorted metrics designed to make looting appear to be recovery, crime as sensible compromise, torture as benevolence, tyranny as stewardship, and hell as heaven. 

Despite a drop in aggregate demand the monetization that the Fed is performing will do its work. However, this liquidity's diversion into the banking and health sectors to the relative exclusion of productive investment will create a third world economy with large pockets of wealth amongst generally reduced living standards.  One cannot stimulate a failed economy into vitality while the corruption that caused the collapse still remains.

The solution is to go back to the 1980's when the median wage began to stagnate and see what changed, and begin constructing the remedies from there.  I doubt this will occur as the American middle class has been almost as thoroughly indoctrinated to its own destruction as any people had been in the first half of the twentieth century, without even realizing it.   Edward Bernays would have been proud. 
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal – that there is no human relation between master and slave.” Leo Tolstoy

Note: I see in the news that the NYSE and the Deutsche Boerse are in merger talks. One ring to rule them all...

“Independently of its misdeeds, the mere power, the bare existence of such a power, is a thing irreconcilable with the nature and spirit of our institutions.” Nicolas Trist, secretary to Andrew Jackson, writing on the privately owned Second Bank of the United States (Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, p.102)

M2

M2 Year Over Year Growth

MZM

MZM Year Over Year Growth

True Money Supply (TMS) from Mises



 


08 February 2011

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts


Silver is looking explosive. I think it will take a severe stock market correction of a certain type to slow it up.

The Wall Street wiseguys are getting a little edgy that mom and pop are not taking the handoff at the top of a mini stock bubble.

I will be quite interested to see how both gold and silver act in any pullbacks in the equity bubble. But until then its up and up on the Fed float.




SP 500 and NDX March Futures Daily Charts


Another 'up day' on the lightest volume of the year. The commentary I was hearing from the stock touts on financial television was right from the scripts used in 2000 for the late stage tech stock phenomenon.

Don't ask why, just BUY!

Remember that prices are set 'on the margin.'

What if the US gave a bubble, and nobody came?




07 February 2011

SP 500 and NDX March Futures Daily Charts



Remarkably thin volumes.

This market is hardly resilient to say the least. But it is capable of selectively ignoring reality, denial-wise, until the facts become overly intrusive to its smug and complacent repetition of the unsustainable, floating higher on the swelling monetization of the Fed.

To that extent it reminds me of the economics profession, which is quite adept at eluding reality when it does not fit its models and fashions, muttering to itself within deep wells of subjectivity, calling its jabbering science.



In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
 The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race,
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Horace Smith, Ozymandias, 1818