Aspectos monetarios y financieros

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

http://www.europac.com/commentaries/shot_not_heard_around_world

China’s recent move to devalue the yuan has sent shock waves through the global financial markets and has convinced most observers that a new front in the global currency wars has begun. The move has caused many observes to envision a new round of competitive devaluations around the globe in which the race to the bottom will intensify. In this scenario they envision that the U.S. dollar will solidify its standing as the only strong currency. This misses the point entirely.
 
In the past, most of the action in the "currency wars" had been focused on the efforts that many nations undertook to prevent their currencies from rising against the U.S. dollar, which itself was being weakened by a perpetually easy Federal Reserve and persistently negative U.S. trade and budget deficits. But with the dollar now strengthening significantly, the Chinese government has become concerned that the yuan, which has remained largely tethered to the dollar, had become too strong against other currencies, particularly its primary trading partners in Asia and the Pacific. To remain competitive locally, it decided to ease the tether to the dollar and instead let its currency float more freely. The purpose and implications of this significant pivot has largely escaped the U.S. media. In reality, the move raises the likelihood that the yuan will rise significantly when the dollar resumes its long-term bear market, not that it will remain weak forever.
 
It is surprising how quickly market observers ascribed the recent losing streak on Wall Street to jitters over the 2% yuan devaluation. The development provided a convenient excuse for those who continue to deny that any economic weakness in the U.S. is chronic and self-generated. But why should America be so concerned with a small drop in the yuan? After all, we have supposedly done quite nicely for ourselves economically even while currencies like the yen and the euro, and all the other major currencies around the world, have fallen more than 20% against the dollar since May of last year.
 
In truth, the U.S. markets had been selling off for days before any change in policy from Beijing became remotely clear. With U.S. economic data deteriorating, corporate earnings falling, and 95% of economists forecasting a rate hike in the next few months, a sharp sell-off of already wildly valued stocks could be considered a logical development that needs no overseas explanations. But given that this is a reality that no one prefers to acknowledge, the yuan devaluation comes at a convenient time. 
 
The last round of the currency wars began around 2010, when pronounced dollar weakness resulting from the Fed’s Quantitative easing experiment and the Federal government’s annual trillion dollar plus deficits had caused the dollar to fall sharply against most other major currencies except the yuan, which did not rise because the Chinese were enforcing a peg against the dollar. To affect the linkage, China had to accumulate trillions of U.S. dollar reserves, with the added benefit to America of keeping a lid on long-term interest rates and consumer prices, that would not have been there absent China’s help. As a result, many currencies gained value against the dollar and yuan simultaneously. Faced with such scary prospects, many countries devalued to keep things in equilibrium; hence the race toward the bottom.
 
In contrast, I believe this time around Beijing was forced to act because the continuously surging dollar had been bringing the yuan along for an unwanted ride upward. This resulting movement against other currencies was not driven by fundamentals and put China at a disadvantage against its local trading partners.
 
By letting their currency float more freely, their principle concern was not their exchange rate with the dollar, which had remained largely fixed, but their exchange rates with currencies like the Japanese yen, the Australian dollar, the euro, the Canadian dollar, and other emerging market currencies in Latin America and South East Asia. This shows where the Chinese are placing their priorities.
 
While making its devaluation announcement, Beijing said that it wanted its currency “to reflect fundamentals” and to no longer simply mirror the movement of the dollar. It acknowledged the fact that its peg to the dollar was problematic and that it wanted a better, more natural mechanism. This is the key to understanding the announcement: The Chinese are preparing for a time in which the financial world does not spin in orbit around the dollar. Such a reality must make us think about the future.
 
Perhaps the Chinese feel as I do that the current dollar rise has all the earmarks of a classic bubble. After all, a major part of the dollar rally over the past year has been the hollow beliefs that the U.S. economy has fully recovered and that the Fed, in 2015 and 2016, will be able to raise interest rates and shrink its balance sheet substantially even while the world’s other major central banks continue to deliver stimulus. If they see the fallacies that I do inherent in these naïve assumptions, they may be sparing a thought or two as to their best course of action if the dollar bear market resumes, as it surely must.
 
What will happen if current trends continue and the U.S. economy slips back toward recession? Any sober reading of the current economic data, which shows anemic investment, minimal productivity growth, barely positive GDP growth, wage stagnation, and falling labor participation, should allow for the strong possibility that recession is looming in the U.S. If it occurs, or to prevent it from occurring in an election year, the Fed will be forced to immediately shelve its tightening plans (if it even has any) and instead deliver another round of QE. When that occurs the confidence that inspired the dollar’s rise will prove to have been misplaced, and the rally nothing more than another Fed-induced bubble.
 
By decoupling from the dollar now, China is sending a message that it may be prepared to let it fall later. This means that when the dollar starts to fall in earnest, China may not be there to catch it. This will also mean that the biggest foreign buyer of Treasury bonds will likely be sitting on its hands when deteriorating U.S. finances force the Treasury to begin issuing trillions of new bonds annually. So when the U.S. needs China’s help the most, it will be unwilling to provide it.
 
In the absence of a Chinese backstop that the U.S. has for too long taken for granted, when the dollar resumes its decline, the fall will be much more pronounced. This will also generate significant upward pressure on both U.S. consumer prices and interest rates that was absent five years ago, when Chinese buying provided a huge cushion to the U.S. economy. In fact, data indicates that China is already paring the amount of Treasuries held in reserve. That means a full blown dollar crisis may not have been averted, but merely postponed, with the dire warnings of U.S. hyperinflation potentially coming true after all.
 
The move may also rekindle to the Chinese appreciation for gold as a safe haven asset as the yellow metal has surged in yuan terms over the past few weeks. Increased buying in China indicates that this may indeed be the case. Given the importance of gold to the typical Chinese investor, the yuan/gold exchange rate may become more important globally than the gold/dollar rate.

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article51803.html

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article51754.html

How eager are gold bugs to believe their ill fortune over the last four years is the result of sinister forces rather than a lack of prudence on their own part?  The answer is easily seen in the writings of gold commentators over the last few months. References to organized manipulation and an official conspiracy to suppress the gold price abound among many analysts and their followers.

The collective passion behind this belief has reached a fever pitch and has created something akin to mass hysteria within the gold investing community.  To even question this ingrained belief is to elicit the scorn of the conspiracy crowd.  So ingrained is their belief that gold’s losses in the last four years are the result of manipulation that they refuse to pay heed to the underlying fundamental and technical reasons for the metal’s 4-year bear market.


This should come as no surprise, however.  As Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “Men in general live as much by appearances as by realities: indeed, they are often moved more by things as they appear than by things as they really are.”  This explains the eagerness of many gold investors to believe that the metal’s value has diminished due to the acts of organized manipulators instead of owing to the natural market forces of supply and demand.

Indeed, the main reason why so many gold bugs incessantly chant the mantra that “gold is manipulated” is because most of them stubbornly refused to sell at the 2011 top.  That the bull market for gold ended in September that year was made abundantly clear by the actions of the CME Group, which raised margin requirements for precious metals several times that year.  This, in no uncertain terms, established that the regulatory and liquidity framework were no longer friendly for metals, thus speculators no longer had an incentive to load up on it.

Upon realizing that the 10-year upward trend in gold prices had broken in 2011, long-term investors still had plenty of time to sell at least some of their gold holdings in order to book healthy profits.  The worst ravages of the 4-year bear market in gold which began in September 2011 occurred in 2013.  That gave investors more than a year in which to distribute their holdings so as to minimize the impact of the decline that followed.  Yet true to form, the years since 2011 have proven to be a “slope of hope” for the many investors who refused to sell.

In its original conception, the term “manipulation” was simply a term used to describe high pressure salesmanship in the marketing of securities.  The process by which investment assets are either accumulated or distributed fell under the rubric of manipulation, since without wide public participation a bull market cannot occur.  The professionals who undertake to either purchase or sell assets must, at times, play against the public, hence the impact of professional “manipulation” in the broadest sense.  This is not the same thing, though, as the willful engineering of a sustained market decline for the express purpose of keeping an asset’s price permanently depressed (as many gold bugs allege).

In 1933, John Durand and A.T. Miller wrote the following on the subject of manipulation: “In the broadest sense of the word, manipulation, in the form of purposeful effort to control prices, is seldom absent from the market.  Practically every [market] has at least one professional guardian who watches to see that it does not fluctuate too erratically, and protects it against violent onslaughts.”  The authors concluded that manipulation “need have no terrors for the intelligent speculator who will take the trouble to learn its ways: he should in fact profit by its leadership.”

As far back as the early 1900s, traders who knew how to “read the tape” could easily spot the operations of would-be manipulators.  Consider the words of Richard Wyckoff in his 1910 book, “Studies in Tape Reading.”  He wrote:  “The element of manipulation need not discourage any one.  Manipulators are giant traders, wearing seven-leagued boots.  The trained ear can detect the steady ‘clump, clump’ as they progress, and the footprints are recognized in the [tape].”

If Wyckoff’s words be true, why then do so many complain of manipulation when they should be able to counteract its negative influence with prudent market analysis?  Perhaps because of a lack of technical trading skill, the influence of manipulators is grossly exaggerated.

Gold’s 4-year slide can be explained in terms that even novice investors instinctively understand: whenever an asset is the subject of a speculative bubble and its price is driven to unsustainably high levels, the bubble must inevitably burst.  Or as they say in commodity parlance, “High prices cure high prices.”  That is, when a commodity’s price is driven to extremes, the demand for the commodity diminishes.  A decline then sets in which returns prices to more reasonable levels.  When the bear market pushes prices to unreasonably low levels, investors who recognize the undervaluation step in and begin accumulating it until eventually a new bull market commences and the cycle repeats.  This is the fundamental law which governs all tradable assets; gold is no exception.

The question I posed in my original commentary on gold manipulation remains unanswered: why invest in gold at all if one truly believes the market for it is manipulated?  If one truly believes that gold is controlled by manipulators who want to depress its price, then owning it must surely rank as the ultimate fool’s errand.  Or could it be that there’s another reason for gold bugs’ stubborn refusal to sell?

The drawing below by the political cartoonist Darkow is worth a thousand words.  This was during the investing public’s hue and cry over High Frequency Trading (HFT) on Wall Street and the supposedly “rigged” nature of the stock market in consequence of it.  Of course the real reason for the outcry over HFTs is because the public needed a scapegoat to blame their lack of participation in the stock market rally of 2009-2012.  But like every other specter, HFTs gradually disappeared from the public’s consciousness and was replaced by another fear, namely manipulation.

As an 18-year veteran of the gold market, I fully understand the mindset of most gold bugs.  They believe that gold prices should proceed higher in a non-stop linear fashion until it reaches what they consider to be “fair value,” that is, somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 an ounce (if not higher).  A gold price anywhere south of $10,000 is considered by this crowd to be an outrage and the obvious work of evil conspirators.  Any decline in gold prices is most emphatically the result of dark and sinister forces bent on establishing a New World Order.
                                 
This leads us to our next question, viz. what is the driving force behind the conspiratorial mindset?  What exactly motivates the conspiracy theorist into believing that his world is shaped by powerful manipulative forces?  The answer is that there is a certain measure of emotional comfort in the belief that big market declines are completely outside one’s control.  Hence there is no need for actively evaluating one’s investment decisions.  That the 4-year bear market in precious metals can be explained by a far-reaching conspiracy to depress gold prices provides a cathartic effect to many investors.  It soothes the sting of the losses these investors have suffered since 2011 as they’ve watched the value of their gold holdings continuously plummet.

The belief in a conspiracy to suppress gold prices originates from the accrued losses that many buy-and-hold investors suffer whenever gold enters an extended bear market.  In just the last couple of years we’ve seen the gold market conspiracy theory belief grow into a rather profitable cottage industry for some.  Indeed, certain commentators have made a lucrative living from books, newsletter and websites devoted to explaining gold manipulation.  There’s even an organization dedicated to uncovering and stopping the participants alleged to be involved in it.

The words of Robert Edwards & John Magee are worth quoting: “The market is big, too big for any person, corporation or combine to control as a speculative unit.  Its operation is extremely free, and extremely democratic in the sense that it represents the integration of the hopes and fears of many kinds of buyers and sellers.  Not all are short-term traders.  There are investors, industrialists, employees of corporations, those who buy to keep, those who buy to sell years later – all grades and types of buyers and sellers.”

Yet, as previously mentioned, there’s also no denying that some degree of manipulation exists in the everyday operations of gold and other asset markets.  With the stakes as high as they are, this is to be expected.  An experienced investor recognizes this truth and can generally avoid the ill effects of manipulation.  Certainly any investor worth his salt would not be so foolish as to risk his hard-earned capital on an extended period where markets are showing signs of undergoing distribution (i.e. organized selling) or other periods of extreme volatility.  If an experienced investor suspects that any of his investments are the subject of organized manipulation he certainly would have enough sense to unload them rather than suffer the vagaries of such a campaign.  “Holding and hoping” is the last refuge of the naïve and inexperienced.

None of this is to say that gold is a poor long-term investment.  It’s worth pointing out that gold has outperformed many other commodities and asset categories in the last decade.  Even today, after a 4-year bear market, its price per ounce is still well above its previous bear market low of 2001.  Moreover, as one of my readers has pointed out, “Gold price has kept pace with inflation and then some since 1970s.”  Claims of manipulation notwithstanding, gold has done an admirable job of maintaining value over the last 40 years.  When viewed from the perspective of the long-term chart (below), its performance since 2001 is even more impressive.  In fact, it’s hard to understand the gold bugs’ cries of “manipulation!” when looking at the following graph.



This is cold comfort for the conspiracy-obsessed gold bugs, though.  They won’t be satisfied until gold rockets to $10,000/oz. and the gold standard is reinstated.  Until that day arrives they will continue to vilify the invisible hordes of manipulators and conspirators who seek to bring about an Orwellian slavery by eliminating gold ownership and replacing it with “monopoly money.”

There is consolation, however, in the knowledge that this, too, shall pass.  In due time the prevailing fears over organized gold market manipulation will be replaced by yet another fear.  This is how public opinion proceeds -- from fear to fear and from outrage to outrage.  Eventually all discussion of manipulation will be forgotten as this phantasm disappears into the fog of the collective consciousness.

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Eventful days in the middle of summer. Just as the Greek Pandora’s box appears to be closing for the holidays (but we know what happens once it’s open), and Europe’s ultra-slim remnants of democracy erode into the sunset, China moves in with a one-off but then super-cubed renminbi devaluation. And 100,000 divergent opinions get published, by experts, pundits and just about everyone else under the illusion they still know what is going on.

We’ve been watching from the sidelines for a few days, letting the first storm subside. But here’s what we think is happening. It helps to understand, and repeat, a few things:


• There have been no functioning financial markets in the richer parts of the world for 7 years (at the very least). Various stimulus measures, in particular QE, have made sure of that.

A market cannot be said to function if and when central banks buy up stocks and bonds with impunity. One main reason is that this makes price discovery impossible, and without price discovery there is, per definition, no market. There may be something that looks like it, but that’s not the same. If you want to go full-frontal philosophical, you may even ponder whether a country like the US still has a functioning economy, for that matter.

• There are therefore no investors anymore either (they would need functioning markets). There are people who insist on calling themselves investors, but that’s not the same either. Definitions matter, lest we confuse them.

Today’s so-called ‘investors’ put to shame both the definition and the profession; I’ve called them grifters before, and we could go with gamblers, but that’s not really it: they’re sucking central bank’s udders. WHatever we would settle on, investors they’re not.

• The stimulus measures, QE, were never designed to induce economic recovery. They were meant to transfer private losses to public purses. In that, they have been wildly successful.

• China is the end of the line. It was the only economy left that until recently could boast actual growth on a scale that mattered to the global economy. Growth stopped when China, too, introduced stimulus measures. To the tune of some $25 trillion or more, no less.

The perhaps most pivotal importance of China is that it was the world’s latest financial hope. The yuan devaluation shatters that hope once and for all. The global economy looks a lot more bleak for it, even if many people already didn’t believe official growth numbers anymore.

Because we’ve reached the end of the line, the game changes. Of course there will be additional attempts at stimulus, but China’s central bank has de facto conceded that its measures have failed. The yuan devaluations, three days in a row now, mean the central People’s Bank of China has, openly though reluctantly, acknowledged its QE has failed, and quite dramatically at that. They just hope you won’t notice, and try to bring it on with a positive spin.

Central banks are not “beginning” to lose control, they lost control a long time ago. The age of central bank omnipotence has “left and gone away” like Joltin’ Joe. Omnipotence has been replaced by impotence.

This admission will reverberate across the globe. China is simply that big. It may take a while longer for other central bankers to admit to their own failures (though ‘failures’, in view of the wealth transfer, is a relative term here), but it won’t really matter much. One is enough.

What will happen from here on in will be decided by how, where and in what amounts deleveraging will take place. This will of necessity be a chaotic process.

Debt deleveraging leads to, or can even be seen as equal to, debt deflation. This is a process that has already started in various places and parts of economies (real estate), but was kept at bay by QE programs. It will now accelerate to wash over our societies like a biblical plague.

The Automatic Earth started warning about this upcoming deflation wave many years ago. I am wondering if I should rerun some of the articles we posted over the past 8 years or so. I might just do that soon.

It is fine for people to say that since it hasn’t happened yet, we were wrong about this, but for us it was never, and is not now, about timing. If you think like an investor -or at least you think you do- timing may seem to be the most important thing in the world. But that’s just another narrow point of view.

When deflation takes its inevitable place center stage, it will wipe away so much wealth, be it real or virtual or plain zombie, that the timing issue will be irrelevant even retroactively. Whether the total sum of global QE measures is $22 trillion or $42 trillion, its deflation-driven demise will wipe out individuals, companies and nations alike at such a pace, people will wonder why they ever bothered with trying to get the timing right.

This may be hard to understand in today’s world where so many eyes are still focused on central banks and asset- and equity markets, on commodities and precious metals, on housing markets. In that regard, again, it is important to note that there have been no functioning markets for many years. Those eyes are focused on something that merely poses as a market.

For us this was clear years ago. It was never about the timing, it was always about the inevitability. Back in the day there were still lots of voices clamoring for – near-term or imminent – hyperinflation. Not so much now. We always left open the hyperinflation option, but far into the future, only after deflation was done wreaking its havoc. A havoc that will be so devastating you’ll feel silly for ever even thinking about hyperinflation.

Deflation will obliterate our economies as we know them. Imagine an economy for instance where next to no-one sells cars, or houses, or college educations, simply because next to no-one can afford any of it.

Where everything that today is bought on credit will no longer be bought, because the credit will be gone. Where homes are not worth more than the cardboard they’re made of, and still don’t sell.

Where ships won’t sail because letters of credit won’t be issued, where stores won’t open in the morning because they can’t afford their inventory even if it arrives in a nearby port.

As for today’s reality, the Chinese leadership has been eclipsed by its own ignorance about economic systems, the limits of their control over them, and the overall hubris they live in on a daily basis. These people were educated in the 1960s and 70s China of Mao and Deng Xiaoping. In the same air of omnipotence that today betrays all central bankers. Why try to understand the world if you’re the one who shapes it?!

It was obvious this moment would arrive in Beijing as soon as the one millionth empty apartment was counted. There are some 60 million ’empties’ now, a number equal to half the total US housing contingent.

Beijing then heavily promoted the stock market for its citizens, as a way to hide the real estate slump. All the while, it kept the dollar peg going. And now all this is gone. And all that’s left is devaluation. As Bill Pesek put it: “China Adds a Chainsaw to Its Juggling Act”.

Ostensibly to improve the country’s trade position, for lack of a better word. Whether that will work is a huge question. For one thing, the potential increase in capital flight may turn out to be a bigger problem than the devaluation is a solution.

Moreover, one of the main reasons to devalue one’s currency is the idea that then people will start buying your stuff again. But in today’s deflationary predicament, one of the main failures of mainstream economics pops up its ugly head: the refusal to see that many people have little or nothing left to spend.

This as opposed to economists’ theories that people must be sitting on huge savings whenever they don’t spend “what they should”. Ignoring the importance of personal debt levels plays a major part in this. Any which way you define it, the result is a drag on the velocity of money in either a particular economy, or, as we are increasingly witnessing, a major spending slowdown in the entire global economy.

Seen in that light, what good could a 1.9% devaluation (or even a, what is it, super-cubed 5% one, now?!) possibly do when China producer prices fell for the 40th straight month, exports were down 8.3% in July, and cars sell at 30% discounts? Those numbers indicate a fast and furious reduction in spending.

Which in turn lowers the velocity of money in an economy. If money doesn’t move, an economy can’t keep going. If money velocity slows down considerably, so does the entire economy, its GDP, job creation, everything.

This of course is the moment to, once again, point out that we at the Automatic Earth define deflation differently from most. Inflation/deflation is not rising/falling prices, but money and credit supply relative to available good and services, and that, multiplied by the velocity of money.

When this whole debate took off, even before Lehman, there were only a few people I can remember who emphasized the role of deflation the way we did: Steve Keen, Mike Mish Shedlock and Bob Prechter.

And Mish doesn’t even seem think the velocity of money is a big factor, if only because it is hard to quantify. We do though. Steve is a good friend, he’s the very future of economics, and a much smarter man than I am, but still, last time I looked, stumbling over the inflation equals rising prices issue (note to self: bring that up next time we meet). Prechter gets it, but believes in abiotic oil, as Nicole just pointed out from across the other room.

So yeah, we’re sticking out our necks on this one, but after 8+ years of thinking about it, we’re more sure than ever that we must insist. Rising prices are not the same as inflation, and falling prices are but a lagging effect of deflation.

Spending stops when people are maxed out and dead broke. And then prices drop, because no-one can afford anything anymore.

We’ve had a great deal of inflation in the past decade or two, like in US housing. We still have some, for instance in global stock markets and Canada and Australia housing. But these things are nothing but small pockets, where spending persists for a while longer.

Problem is, those pockets pale in comparison to diving -consumer- spending in the US, China, Europe, Japan. Spending that wouldn’t even exist anymore if not for QE, ZIRP and cheap credit.

The yuan devaluation tells us the era of cheap credit is now over. The first major central bank in the world has conceded defeat and acknowledged the limits to its alleged omnipotence.

It always only took one. And then nothing would stand in the way of the biblical plague. It was never a question. Only the timing was. And the timing was always irrelevant.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer

Website: http://theautomaticearth.com (provides unique analysis of economics, finance, politics and social dynamics in the context of Complexity Theory)

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

BIS & DD (2005!)

[JENOFONTE10]

BIS & DD (2005!)

Parece un buen repaso teórico a la Deflación (56 pgs., en inglés). Solo he visto hasta el índice. Me lo guardo para lectura tranquila con mi torpe inglés. ¡Muchas gracias LH84!.

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Novanta anni...

[spainfull]

While making its devaluation announcement, Beijing said that it wanted its currency “to reflect fundamentals” and to no longer simply mirror the movement of the dollar. It acknowledged the fact that its peg to the dollar was problematic and that it wanted a better, more natural mechanism. This is the key to understanding the announcement: The Chinese are preparing for a time in which the financial world does not spin in orbit around the dollar. Such a reality must make us think about the future.

esto es importantísimo. El día que de verdad hay cambio flotante, los USA lo van a pasar muy mal. Esto lo explica en profundidad FOFOA. Europa se  está preparando desde los 70 para ese día, los chinos parece que también, los árabes saben que el oro es fundamental (porque es lo que están haciendo los chinos además de asegurarse recursos energéticos, pero estos últimos ya los tienen) y lo acumulan (pero están tan unidos a USA que no sé cuál será su jugada porque además la tienen que hacer en el último momento).

Lo que no sé es qué están haciendo los americanos para el día que esto suceda. Tontos no son y saben la jugada del resto. Imagino que cambiar el rumbo actual es prácticamente imposible y llevan una huida hacia delante pensando que son demasiado grandes e importantes para caer estrepitosamente y que sabrán reaccionar a tiempo. Así que la estrategia es torpedear al resto de todas las formas posibles e irles creando guerras fronterizas que los tengan ocupados. Además, si el oro es tan importante como algunos conceden, supongo que es tan sencillo como enviar unas fuerzas especiales y robar donde se acumule de forma más o menos silenciosa (con cualquier pretexto)...

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

¡Hola Spainfull! Me alegra verte de vuelta

Lo que no sé es qué están haciendo los americanos para el día que esto suceda. Tontos no son y saben la jugada del resto. Imagino que cambiar el rumbo actual es prácticamente imposible y llevan una huida hacia delante pensando que son demasiado grandes e importantes para caer estrepitosamente y que sabrán reaccionar a tiempo. Así que la estrategia es torpedear al resto de todas las formas posibles e irles creando guerras fronterizas que los tengan ocupados. Además, si el oro es tan importante como algunos conceden, supongo que es tan sencillo como enviar unas fuerzas especiales y robar donde se acumule de forma más o menos silenciosa (con cualquier pretexto)...

Y así es:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-18/ukraine-admits-its-gold-gone

PD: cuántas molestias por unos pedruscos inútiles, ¿verdad? Claro que no todas las clases de pedruscos tienen un histórico de milenios dentro del sistema monetario y siguen en 2015 en primera línea del balance de todos los BCs del mundo...

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

[sudden and sharp]

EM Equity ha subido mucho... 

[rain dog]

While making its devaluation announcement, Beijing said that it wanted its currency “to reflect fundamentals” and to no longer simply mirror the movement of the dollar. It acknowledged the fact that its peg to the dollar was problematic and that it wanted a better, more natural mechanism. This is the key to understanding the announcement: The Chinese are preparing for a time in which the financial world does not spin in orbit around the dollar. Such a reality must make us think about the future.

esto es importantísimo. El día que de verdad hay cambio flotante, los USA lo van a pasar muy mal. Esto lo explica en profundidad FOFOA. Europa se  está preparando desde los 70 para ese día, los chinos parece que también, los árabes saben que el oro es fundamental (porque es lo que están haciendo los chinos además de asegurarse recursos energéticos, pero estos últimos ya los tienen) y lo acumulan (pero están tan unidos a USA que no sé cuál será su jugada porque además la tienen que hacer en el último momento).

Lo que no sé es qué están haciendo los americanos para el día que esto suceda. Tontos no son y saben la jugada del resto. Imagino que cambiar el rumbo actual es prácticamente imposible y llevan una huida hacia delante pensando que son demasiado grandes e importantes para caer estrepitosamente y que sabrán reaccionar a tiempo. Así que la estrategia es torpedear al resto de todas las formas posibles e irles creando guerras fronterizas que los tengan ocupados. Además, si el oro es tan importante como algunos conceden, supongo que es tan sencillo como enviar unas fuerzas especiales y robar donde se acumule de forma más o menos silenciosa (con cualquier pretexto)...

Recordemos que USA dijo un día que el dolar ya no era convertible en oro, y se quedaron tan anchos. En aquél momento, a todos los que decían que USA se iba a cagar cuando alguien empezase a exigir la convertibilidad en oro, los dejaron con el culo torcido.

Por el momento, y parece que por mucho tiempo, USA fija las reglas. Un jugador que fija las reglas nunca puede perder. Y si pierde algo, los demás van a perder MUCHO, MUCHO MAS.

[pedrito]

While making its devaluation announcement, Beijing said that it wanted its currency “to reflect fundamentals” and to no longer simply mirror the movement of the dollar. It acknowledged the fact that its peg to the dollar was problematic and that it wanted a better, more natural mechanism. This is the key to understanding the announcement: The Chinese are preparing for a time in which the financial world does not spin in orbit around the dollar. Such a reality must make us think about the future.

esto es importantísimo. El día que de verdad hay cambio flotante, los USA lo van a pasar muy mal. Esto lo explica en profundidad FOFOA. Europa se  está preparando desde los 70 para ese día, los chinos parece que también, los árabes saben que el oro es fundamental (porque es lo que están haciendo los chinos además de asegurarse recursos energéticos, pero estos últimos ya los tienen) y lo acumulan (pero están tan unidos a USA que no sé cuál será su jugada porque además la tienen que hacer en el último momento).

Lo que no sé es qué están haciendo los americanos para el día que esto suceda. Tontos no son y saben la jugada del resto. Imagino que cambiar el rumbo actual es prácticamente imposible y llevan una huida hacia delante pensando que son demasiado grandes e importantes para caer estrepitosamente y que sabrán reaccionar a tiempo. Así que la estrategia es torpedear al resto de todas las formas posibles e irles creando guerras fronterizas que los tengan ocupados. Además, si el oro es tan importante como algunos conceden, supongo que es tan sencillo como enviar unas fuerzas especiales y robar donde se acumule de forma más o menos silenciosa (con cualquier pretexto)...

Recordemos que USA dijo un día que el dolar ya no era convertible en oro, y se quedaron tan anchos. En aquél momento, a todos los que decían que USA se iba a cagar cuando alguien empezase a exigir la convertibilidad en oro, los dejaron con el culo torcido.

Por el momento, y parece que por mucho tiempo, USA fija las reglas. Un jugador que fija las reglas nunca puede perder. Y si pierde algo, los demás van a perder MUCHO, MUCHO MAS.

El plan ¿oculto? de los americanos es el Amero, según los rusos de Russian Today, claro  . Pero si los americanos ya se liaron la manta a la cabeza y desligaron el dolar del oro, por mis cojones 33, a finales del siglo XX, lo que provocó una turbulencia financiera de la cual muchos de nosotros somos hijos (entre ellos el euro),  pues lo mismo lo vuelven a hacer a principios del Siglo XXI. Desde luego, tiene su lógica y mucha razón de ser; pero como con todo lo futurible (¿existe esta palabra?), pues solo el tiempo lo dirá.

http://actualidad.rt.com/economia/160387-amero-eeuu-dolar-moneda-divisa

http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Ame_rica_del_Norte_-_El_momento_de_un_nuevo_enfoque.pdf

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

The US and world economies are frauds that are coming unraveled. The Greek bailout is the most recent example of “kick the can down the road” solutions. The US housing bubble was an attempt to cover up/recover from the dot-com bust. Now the US is in a financial bubble engineered to recover from the housing bubble debacle. Soon this bubble will burst. Only the date is unknown.

Two predictions can be made with reasonable confidence:

· The stock market is likely to be halved and that might be optimistic. Only the date is unknown.
· The economy will eventually resemble the Great Depression. Only the date is unknown.

Nothing is ever certain. An experienced CFO told me at the beginning of my career that “even the impossible has a 20% probability.” In deference to him and years of empirical evidence, I put the the above two events as virtually certain, i.e., an 80% probability.


The REAL problem for the financial system is the bond bubble. In 2008 when the crisis hit it was $80 trillion. It has since grown to over $100 trillion.

The derivatives market that uses this bond bubble as collateral is over $555 trillion in size.

Many of the large multinational corporations, sovereign governments, and even municipalities have used derivatives to fake earnings and hide debt. NO ONE knows to what degree this has been the case, but given that 20% of corporate CFOs have admitted to faking earnings in the past, it’s likely a significant amount.

Corporations today are more leveraged than they were in 2007. As Stanley Druckenmiller noted recently, in 2007 corporate bonds were $3.5 trillion… today they are $7 trillion: an amount equal to nearly 50% of US GDP.
The Central Banks are now all leveraged at levels greater than or equal to where Lehman Brothers was when it imploded. The Fed is leveraged at 78 to 1. The ECB is leveraged at over 26 to 1. Lehman Brothers was leveraged at 30 to 1.

The Central Banks have no idea how to exit their strategies. Fed minutes released from 2009 show Janet Yellen was worried about how to exit when the Fed’s balance sheet was $1.3 trillion (back in 2009). Today it’s over $4.5 trillion.

The cumulative effects of decades of interventions to mask economic weakness are harmful to the economy. Statistical manipulation and outright lies in government reporting of economic conditions suggest that times are becoming ever more desperate for the political class. There is not enough bailing wire in the world to hold this train wreck in check. Nor is there any way to solve the massive problems created over decades.

Mac Slavo believes we are already in a world-wide depression stating:

With stock markets in China having self destructed, Greece and Europe in another crisis, and corporate earnings for some of the world’s biggest corporations showing lackluster performance, it should be clear that the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

But for the last several years America has appeared to remain fairly insulated from overt crisis. We were told that a recovery had taken hold, jobs were returning and consumer confidence had reached new highs, propaganda which drove millions of investors back into stock markets and real estate. No one in the mainstream world, it seems, believes there’s anything to be concerned about.
 
Except there is.

Nassim Taleb described the problem:

"Uncertainty should not bother you. We may not be able to forecast when a bridge will break, but we can identify which ones are faulty and poorly built. We can assess vulnerability. And today the financial bridges across the world are very vulnerable. Politicians prescribe ever larger doses of pain killer in the form of financial bailouts, which consists in curing debt with debt, like curing an addiction with an addiction, that is to say it is not a cure. This cycle will end, like it always does, spectacularly."

Each intervention has been bigger than the previous one. And they are needed more frequently. Bad times are here and have been despite what government says. Worse times lie ahead. Only the date is unknown.

Government is helpless at this point. Their cover-ups have made matters worse. When the unknown date arrives, America will likely look like some third-world country. Its political system may not survive.

Welcome to Venezuela with nuclear weapons.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-18/only-date-unknown

[lectorhinfluyente1984]

Pues yo no veo tan claro que la hegemonía estadounidense - lo que yo llamo "la tesis Stratfor" - sea incuestionable, ni una ley escrita en piedra.

Ganaron la II Guerra Mundial y la Guerra Fría. En el contexto de la Guerra Fría fueron capaces de imponer la continuación del dólar tras el impago del 71 Nixon Shock.

Pero la Historia puede repetirse, puede continuar... o dejar de hacerlo. Grandes eventos históricos resultaron imprevisibles en su conjunto, no digamos ya en su timing y detalle de su desarrollo, por los "expertos" e incluso insiders. Tal fue el caso con el rápido y deslumbrante colapso soviético, por ejemplo. Hace poco, las Primaveras Árabes y todo lo que ha venido después ha sido bastante caótico.

Fofoa ha descrito un escenario de desmembramiento del sistema dólar. Primero el apoyo estructural europeo al dólar, inevitable tras la II Guerra Mundial, les pilló por sorpresa en el Nixon Shock pero para eso se creó el euro, para ser capaces de retirar el apoyo estructural al dólar, cosa que ya se hizo por cierto. Luego China, a cambio de entrar en la OMC ha proporcionado un apoyo estructural que, de nuevo, les pilló por sorpresa en 2008 como a los europeos les pilló por sorpresa en los 70; pero ya han comenzado a dar pasos definitivos que señalan el abandono de su apoyo estructural al dólar también.

Con todo ello, no quiero decir que no sea de esa manera, y que el King Dollar no siga viviendo muchos y muchos años, indiscutido. Solo digo que ante la caótica e imprevisible Historia, es razonable en mi opinión contemplar los escenarios posibles, y no sólo el "más probable", aunque cuando esa alta probabilidad esté avalada por "expertos", o por el sentido común, que suele ser una inducción o una proyección del pasado. Ya que los expertos, y a la espera de que Krugman Hari Seldon invente la psicohistoria, fallan más que una escopeta de feria.

Salud,