Posted on 06/06/2006 12:25:55 PM PDT by ex-Texan
..The golden age of liquidity is drying up...Our guess is that we will see the results of this fundamental shift towards tighter money over the next decade or two...
We don’t know what this portends, but yesterday Ben Bernanke slouched over to Congress. He must have worn lifts. For somehow he managed to remind the world of old Paul Volcker. We remember when the giant Paul walked the earth over at the Fed. It was a different world back then, with consumer prices rising at double-digit rates, and interest rates over 15%. But Volcker stood up and did what a Fed chief is supposed to do; he stopped inflation.
Even recently, speaking to an audience that included an intrepid reporter for the Daily Reckoning, Volcker said he was surprised the country had gotten away with such a long period of credit expansion, without setting off a new round of consumer price inflation. He wondered out loud how it came about and when it might end. But he, like the rest of us, had no sure answer.
And now cometh his successor, Ben. Speaking in public yesterday, the former head of Princeton’s economics department sounded if not like an inflation fighter, like an inflation taunter. Inflation, he said, was "unwelcome." Not exactly inflation-fighting words, but it was enough to lead investors to fear another .25% rate increase was coming. Stocks sold off, taking the Dow down by nearly 200 points.
Meanwhile, the European Central Bank seems to have found a touch of Volckerismo, too. "ECB rate hike done deal," says AFP.
"Golden age of liquidity is drying up," adds the International Herald Tribune. "Cash, credit, related financial instruments; liquidity surged in the past decade, fuelled by relaxed monetary policies of central banks, globalization, new technologies and such exotic financial instruments as derivatives. They in turn drove down interest rates and bond yields and encouraged investors to pump more money into riskier assets, propelling stock markets."
But now...
"The era of under-priced capital in constant supply is ending," adds David Roche, a financial strategist in London.
Our guess is that we will see the results of this fundamental shift towards tighter money over the next decade or two. We also guess that trying to fight this trend by selecting stocks carefully will be like flossing your teeth before the battle of the Little Big Horn. If we are right, asset prices are going down no matter how much financial hygiene you practice. And it will mean, among other things, fewer Fed chiefs on the cover of TIME magazine and fewer Treasury secretaries from Goldman Sachs. Speculation will cease to pay. In fact, maybe our next Treasury secretary will come from the legal profession, where he will have made his reputation in Chapters 7 and 11.
It was cheap money as well that fuelled America’s property bubble. Now, that bubble seems to be losing gas.
From Las Vegas comes news that takes our breath away. There were 2,992 houses for resale in the city in 2004. The following year there were 10,493. This year there are 17,121 – far more than 5 times as many as there were 2 years ago. Including new houses, there are some 20,000 dwellings for sale in Las Vegas right now. And they are still putting them up, with hundreds of new projects still being built out and more than 500 sales offices open for business.
Meanwhile, over to the right, on the Florida coast, comes news from our own family sources that real estate is getting hard to sell.
We recall a realtor quoted in the NY TIMES only a year ago:
"South Florida," he said, "is working off of a totally new economic model than any of us have ever experienced in the past." Explaining how limited supply and unlimited demand would create a situation in which prices rose forever.
Many people thought so. But now it looks as though this economic model was not so different after all.
"Yes, we missed the top," reported our source yesterday. "Now, we’re definitely on the downhill slope. We reduced the price twice already. We’re getting plenty of lookers but no takers. Basically, we’ll sell for whatever we can get at this point, even less than we paid two years ago."
And thus we see, dear reader, something interesting. Inflation may be ‘unwelcome’ in the dewy eyes of the economics professor who now rules the Fed, but the lack of it is terrifying to the wide open peepers of Speculation Nation.
"In a nutshell," explained Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist at Banc of America Capital Management, "the era of easy and abundant global liquidity is coming to an end – a change in the global monetary backdrop that usually inflicts pain on those asset classes highly dependent on easy money."
But all of America is now highly dependent on easy money. The US government relies upon it to pay for its bread and circuses. Wall Street needs it to keep stock and bond prices elevated. The lumpen need it too – their house prices will fall without it. And when housing falls, the whole kit and kaboodle comes down with it. The US economy will be in recession within 6 months.
We suspect that is it Hank Paulson’s job to let the Fed chief know.
Well said and the truth.....those that have access to certain info that the average Joe will never have access to, well, anyone with the brain of a 10 year old should know that greed, preservation of power and wealth is the ultimate driving force to play The Big Game. Why? Because the vast majority of the very wealthy and the very powerful have nothing else to challenge them mentally other than to 'stick' it to their competitor(s).
Howdy,
Looks like pard-on has a hard-## for ya!
Maybe this can help.
Tax Gouging: The Real Problem
by Thomas DiLorenzo
[Posted on Thursday, June 08, 2006]
The single most important tax reform of the 1980s was the indexation of the federal income tax to inflation and the reduction of the number of federal income tax brackets from fifteen to three. Prior to that, ordinary middle class workers were pushed up into higher and higher tax brackets by simply receiving cost-of-living pay increases. The result was that a couple of years of cost-of-living increases actually reduced your standard of living by diminishing your overall take-home pay after taxes while enriching the state.
Under this corrupt scheme the Federal Reserve would print excessive amounts of money, which created inflation. The inflation led to cost-of-living increases that in turn led to "bracket creep" and higher tax payments. The federal government's budget became bloated while the taxpayers suffered. Politicians never had to take the heat for voting for a tax increase; inflation did it for them. It was truly a form of taxation without representation (not that taxation with representation is any better).
The federal government is no longer capable of plundering middle-class taxpayers in this particular way, thanks to indexation. But state and local governments do through the vehicle of property taxation.
The Fed's expansionary monetary policy over the past decade has caused artificially low interest rates, which have fueled the real estate boom (or bubble, as some would say). Along with extraordinary increases in property values has come equally extraordinary property tax increases all across America.
According to online reports of tax revenues in my own state of Maryland, local governments in the Baltimore area alone collect about 35 percent more in property tax revenues than they did in 2000. Are Baltimore's schools 35 percent better? Are the police 35 percent more efficient? Are citizens getting a third more services from City Hall? Of course not; they're simply paying that much more for the same crappy "services."
State and local politicians are reveling in "budget surpluses," which should be more appropriately named undeserved windfall "profits." These revenue increases are the result of an extreme form of price gouging by the state which is, after all, a monopoly in all that it does.
On top of higher property taxes, many homeowners who have sold their homes have also been snared by capital gains taxes, not to mention the confiscatory "property transfer tax" in some states, which gives the government its percentage "take" of every real estate transaction, not unlike how the Tony Soprano gang of HBO fame goes about its business of making "collections" from local merchants.
After gouging taxpayers for years in this way, this election year has suddenly turned many local politicians into "tax cutters" — sort of. Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich of Maryland has magnanimously proposed to cut the state's property tax rate so much that it would save the average Maryland homeowner as much as $40 a year, almost enough to attend a Baltimore Orioles baseball game — alone. This comes three years after he raised the state property tax rate by 57 percent.
The first Republican governor in Maryland in thirty-five years "celebrated" his victory by imposing the largest property tax increase in the state's history. Ignorant Maryland voters still believe that voting Republican is a vote against Big Government!
The property tax bonanza that is being enjoyed by state and local governmental bureaucracies creates yet another evil. Whenever state and local governments experience windfall "profits" such as this they use the money to appease more and more special interest groups by starting up myriad new programs. Then when the real estate market cools, or the economy in general slows down, the programs all remain in place while revenues shrink, creating a "deficit crisis."
This in turn leads to calls for even more tax increases, which impose further harm on the local economy. There is never any mention of making government more efficient because government cannot be made more efficient any more than a cat can be taught to bark like a dog. Thus, property tax increases today inevitably lead to even more increases in the future, while impoverishing taxpayers more and more and damaging local economies.
During the early 1990s, after the last big real estate boom (of the 1980s), states that had experienced more modest revenue growth were in the best financial condition because they were limited in their ability to go on wild spending binges. State and local politicians are monopolistic price gougers. Every one of them should be thrown out of office this fall, just for the fun of it.
All that money that was being siphoned off into real estate will now join the competition for the rest of the goods and services in the economy. The long housing boom is part of why inflation has not driven up prices generally to nearly the extent that the continuing "devaluaton would indicate. Oil has mopped up some and the central banks of the world have soaked up much of the rest as they try to keep the value of their dollar reserves at a consistent value.
I use keywords sometimes to reach something that interests me. I would experience the abusive oness only if I am contemptuous of the material sought. What is the harm in them? The only people who notice them are the ones who go looking for them and what they find is other people's opinions on the content that they would not see if they were not seeking them.
We cannot reclaim vocabulary so long as the Left owns Academia and MSM. The Left will always own Academia in a free society and usually the MSM. It is the nature of the employment. Academics do not have a sense of earning money by working for it. They are "awarded" their livings because of their inherent value as intelligent properly educated persons who should be guiding the society as managers and Solons and resent that the society does not reward them more. MSM types share the same mindset but most of them are not quite so insulated and feel to a small extent that they are paid for their work.
Bill Bonner.....Publisher of inumerable BS financial letters that over the years have, well, helped few? Think his latest 'accomplishment'/ 'catch' is that guy Tobin Smith, on FOX, who has a new "club" you can join and get fabulous financial advice...HURRY! JOIN!
I was wondering about that. If you have to actually look for the malicious keywords, what is the big deal. I was wondering why nobody was getting back to me on this question.
How does a contemptible keyword affect someone who is not specifically looking for keywords?
I understand that, but will not relent in calling real liberals what they are, and leftists what they are, which is intellectual bankruptcy.
Good question, I don't get this keyword stuff either. But we may be missing something.
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