central banks

Central Banks Will Not Be Able to Halt This Economic Collapse

Central Banks Will Not Be Able to Halt This Economic Collapse

In 2008, the world experienced the worst economic collapse in 80+ years. This collapse triggered a stock market crash that erased $30 trillion in wealth.

Since that time, collectively Central Banks have cut interest rates over 600 times and have printed over $15 trillion in new money… money that has failed to generate sustained economic growth… money that has set the stage for another stock market crash.

Consider the measures of GDP growth in the US for instance.

The mainstream media likes to present the “official” GDP numbers as though they are gospel… but the reality is that the number you hear in the press is not even close to accurate.

One of the simplest means of hiding the real economic collapse is to use a bogus measure for inflation. If GDP growth is 10%, and inflation is 10%, then real GDP growth is 0%.

But what if GDP growth is 10%, real inflation is 10%, but you claim inflation is just 6%?

Boom! You can promote GDP growth of 4% to support your claim that printing trillions of dollars has boosted the economy.

To remove this accounting gimmick, you can use Nominal GDP and look at the rate of growth from a year ago. Doing this presents a VERY different view of the economy: one of economic collapse, not growth. I’ve circled periods in which the current level of “growth” occured in the past.

-2As you can see, the “recovery” of the last six years has largely involved a “growth” rate that was closely associated with recessions over the last 30 years. At best the US economy has been flatlining. At worst we’ve had bouts of economic collapse comparable to a recession.

Also, note that the previous periods in which we’ve experienced this rate of economic collapse have been associated with stock market crashes.

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The media can try to hide reality all it wants. But an economic collapse is here. It will trigger another stock market crash just as it did in the early ’90s, the Tech Bubble, and the Housing Bubble. And this time Central Banks won’t be able to stop it: they’ve used up all of their ammo in the last six years trying to create recovery.

Smart investors are preparing now.

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Best Regards

Graham Summers
Chief Market Strategist
Phoenix Capital Research

Posted by Phoenix Capital Research in It's a Bull Market
The War on Cash is Real

The War on Cash is Real

Stocks have rallied over the last 10 days in part by ECB President Mario Draghi’s statement that if push comes to shove, the ECB will push interest rates even further into negative territory (NIRP).

This represents just another round in the War on Cash, first implemented by the Central Banks in 2008.

It’s a little known fact that the cause for the gut-wrenching collapsing in late September-October 2008 was due to a significant portion of investors trying to move their money out of money market funds.

A money market fund takes investors’ cash and plunks it into short-term highly liquid debt and credit securities. These funds are meant to offer investors a return on their cash, while being extremely liquid (meaning investors can pull their money at any time).

This works great in theory… but when $500 billion in money was being pulled (roughly 24% of the entire market) in the span of four weeks, the truth of the financial system was quickly laid bare: that digital money is not in fact safe.

Remember, the bulk of money in the financial system is digital.

  • The total currency (actual cash in the form of bills and coins) in the US financial system is a little over $1.36 trillion.
  • When you include digital money sitting in short-term accounts and long-term accounts then you’re talking about roughly $10 trillion in “money” in the financial system.
  • In contrast, the money in the US stock market (equity shares in publicly traded companies) is over $20 trillion in size.
  • The US bond market (money that has been lent to corporations, municipal Governments, State Governments, and the Federal Government) is almost twice this at $38 trillion.
  • Total Credit Market Instruments (mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, junk bonds, commercial paper and other digitally-based “money” that is based on debt) is even larger $58.7 trillion.
  • Unregulated over the counter derivatives traded between the big banks and corporations is north of $220 trillion.

The Central Banks like it this way because they can regulate and control digital money much more easily than physical money. Moreover, as the 2008 money market fund collapse revealed, if a significant percentage of investors ever moved to shift their wealth into physical cash it could implode the financial system.

For this reason, the Central Banks are slowly pushing to implement reforms that will either tax physical cash or ban it all together.

The first round of this involved implementing NIRP (negative interest rate policy), which is a form of stealth tax as it charges depositors for sitting in cash.

However, things are getting more aggressive. France just banned any transaction over €1,000 Euros from using physical cash. Spain has already banned transactions over €2,500. Uruguay has banned transactions over $5,000.

Aside from actually banning physical cash, some public services are no longer accepting cash as payments.

Last summer, London buses stopped accepting money. To pay your fare, you now have to wave either a prepaid Transport for London Oyster card or a contactless payment bank card at a receiver. For some, not having to dig out a handful of coins is a welcome relief.

Source: Bloomberg View

Make no mistake, the War on Cash is very real. And it’s unfolding before our very eyes.

Indeed, we’ve uncovered a secret document outlining how the Feds plan to take hold of savings during the next round of the crisis to stop individuals from getting their money out.

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Phoenix Capital Research

Posted by Phoenix Capital Research in It's a Bull Market
One by One Central Banks Are Losing Control

One by One Central Banks Are Losing Control

Since 2008, the Keynesians running global Central Banks had always suggested that there was no problem too great for them to handle. They’d promised to do “whatever it takes,” to maintain the financial system and print the world back to growth.

Thus far, we’d seen some pretty aggressive moves. The most aggressive was committed by the Bank of Japan, which announced a single QE program equal to 24% of Japanese GDP in April 2013.

However, the SNB was the first Central Bank to actually reach the point at which it had to decide between printing a truly insane amount of money relative to GDP (50%+) or simply giving up.

It chose to give up.

In many ways, the SNB was cornered by the ECB into this situation. I think this is why the SNB decided to make its announcement on a Thursday as opposed to over the weekend (when Central Banks usually announce bad news to minimize the market impact). The SNB wanted to cause mayhem, likely because it was frustrated by the ECB’s upcoming QE program of which the SNB was undoubtedly aware in advance.

This situation has since progressed with an even larger, more important Central Bank buckling to market forces.

That Central Bank is China.

As we’ve noted before, China’s economy is in tatters. At best it is growing around 3.5%. At worst it isn’t growing at all. And with its currency closely linked with the US Dollar (which is in a bull market) Chinese exporters were getting destroyed.

So what did China do? It chose to devalue the Yuan.

In short, a new player is in the global currency war. And it represents the second largest economy in the world. Having said that, we want you to take note of a few lessons from this situation:

  • There are in fact problems that are too big for Central Banks to manage.
  • Central Banks are in fact individual entities. True, they try to coordinate their moves, but when push comes to shove, it will be each Central Bank for itself. This trend will be increasing going forward.
  • Central Banks have no problem lying about the significance of a situation right up until they shock the market (both the SNB and the PBOC’s moves were suddenly announced).

Of these, #1 is the most important. Since the mid-‘80s, the general consensus has been that there is no problem too great that Central Banks cannot fix it. This has been the case because most crisis that have occurred during that period were either isolated to a particular market (Asian Crisis, Latin American Crisis, Russian Ruble Crisis, etc.) or a particular asset class (Tech Bubble, Housing Bubble, etc.).

This situation has resulted in less and less volatility in the financial system, combined with increased risk taking on the part of investors. As a result, the necessary deleveraging has never been permitted to occur and the financial system has become increasing leveraged (meaning more and more debt).

You can see this in the below chart revealing total credit market instruments in the US (this only includes investment grade bonds, junk bonds, and commercial paper). The deleveraging of the 2008 crisis which nearly took down the entire financial system was a mere blip in a mountain of debt (and this doesn’t even include US sovereign debt, emerging market debt, derivatives, etc.).

Today, when you include global debt issuance, we are facing a debt super crisis, the likes of which has never existed before: $100 trillion in global bonds, with an additional $555 trillion in derivatives.

Central Banks, by printing money, began a war of competitive devaluation in 2008. This worked fine when they were coordinating their moves to prop the system up from 2009-2011. We even had some coordinated efforts by the Fed and the ECB to push the markets higher in 2012 in order to benefit President Obama’s re-election campaign.

However, 2012 marked the high water mark for Central Bank intervention without political repercussions. From that point onward, all Central Bank began to lose their political capital rapidly.

  1. In Japan, the Bank of Japan’s policies are demolishing the Middle Class. The number of Japanese living on welfare just hit a record and real earnings and household spending have been in a free fall since the middle of 2014.
  1. In Europe, the ECB’s President Mario Draghi has admitted in parliament that he was concerned about a “deflationary death spiral” and admitted that QE was the last tool left. Half of the ECB’s Board is against his direction.
  1. In the US, the Fed is now being targeted by Congress. Legislation has been introduced to audit the Fed AND force it to abide by the Taylor Rule.
  1. In China, deflation is spiraling out of control with a stock market crash, housing bubble bursting, and economic downturn that is more serve than most realize.

The significance of these developments cannot be overstated. Central Banks will be increasingly acting against one another going forward. There will more surprises and more volatility across the board. Eventually it will culminate in a Crash that will make 2008 look like a picnic.

Smart investors are preparing now, BEFORE it hits.

If you’ve yet to take action to prepare for this, we offer a FREE investment report called the Financial Crisis “Round Two” Survival Guide that outlines simple, easy to follow strategies you can use to not only protect your portfolio from it, but actually produce profits.

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Best Regards

Phoenix Capital Research

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Posted by Phoenix Capital Research in It's a Bull Market