Garbage In Garbage Out Economics

Posted on November 3, 2015 by MN Gordon

“On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine the wrong figures, will the right answers come out? …I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.

Crunching Data to Fix Prices

The fundamental problem facing today’s economy is the flagrant contempt by governments the world over for the free exchange of goods and services and private stewardship of property.  Perhaps it is power and control governments are after.  Maybe they believe they are improving the economy and making the world a better place for all.

No one really knows for sure.  But what is lucidly clear is the muddled disorder modern day economic policies have wrought upon us.  You can hardly enter into a transaction without a cluster of intervention mucking with the price of payment.

Taxes, tariffs, wage laws, and subsidies.  These all impact prices.  But the main culprit affecting prices and trade are central bank interventions into money and credit markets.  Relentless actions to control the economy by manipulating money and credit stand the price of everything else on end. Continue reading →

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The Exhilarating Romp to DOW 30,000

Posted on October 30, 2015 by MN Gordon

The stock market appears to have resumed its upward trajectory.  The S&P 500’s back above its 200 day moving average.  In fact, the S&P 500’s less than 50 points from its all-time high of about 2,131.

Soon the brief panic in August and September will be nothing more than a mere blip on the price chart.  A convenient toehold where stocks dug in, coiled up, and then sprang to a new record level from.  Buy the dip aficionados will point to it for validation and self-satisfaction.

By all accounts, stocks are nearly as expensive as they’ve ever been.  No matter how you slice and dice it – be it the Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings (CAPE) ratio or the Buffett indicator – overall stock prices are a complete and total rip off.  This simple fact is being largely ignored at the moment.

On top of that, treasury yields – which move inverse to price – are skidding along the bottom of a 30-plus year credit cycle.  When yields finally turn, they could rise for the next 20 years.  Conversely, when yields finally rise in earnest, asset prices will deflate as borrowing costs increase. Continue reading →

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Constructive Simplicity for China’s Communist Party Plenum

Posted on October 27, 2015 by MN Gordon

The People’s Bank of China cut benchmark interest rates by 0.25 percent on Friday.  This was the sixth time they’ve lowered interest rates within a year.  Bank reserve requirements were also reduced by 0.5 percent.

Economic growth has gradually declined in China over the last several years.  The official rate of GDP is at 6.9 percent, though that number should be taken with a grain of salt.  Nonetheless, a 6.9 percent GDP isn’t quite up to Beijing’s edict.  Something must be done.

Stimulating demand with cheap credit is the expedient policy for central bankers.  This move may even propel government statistics in the direction they want.  But, given that China’s economy has already been stimulated to death, what is it that the People’s Bank of China is trying to achieve?

Beijing’s policies of mass credit creation have enticed the Middle Kingdom’s corporations to borrow gobs of money.  Naturally, how this borrowed money was spent hasn’t always penciled out a return.  In short, borrowed money has been invested in losing enterprises. Continue reading →

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Lost in Extrapolation

Posted on October 23, 2015 by MN Gordon

In the late 1970s the impossible happened.  Inflation and unemployment simultaneously went vertical.  The leading economists of the day were flummoxed.

The Phillips curve said there’s an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment.  When unemployment goes down, inflation goes up.  Conversely, when unemployment goes up, inflation goes down.

How could it be that both were going up at once?  Weren’t they mutually exclusive?  Indeed, it took years of heavy handed government intervention to pull off such a feat.

When unemployment began creeping up in the 1970’s the U.S. Treasury, with backing from the Federal Reserve, did what Keynes had told them to do.  They spent money to stimulate the economy and spur jobs creation.  According to the Phillips curve, with rising unemployment the planners could have their cake and eat it too.  They could run large deficits without inflation.

Unfortunately, something unexpected happened. Continue reading →

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