[Skip to the end]

(the blockquotes represent powerpoint slides)

September 10th, 2007:
Speech given at the Foundations and Endowments Investment Summit

pdf version

How Modern Money Operates and the Consequent Investment Implications

by Cliff Viner, III Associates

I’m taking a great risk here today. I’m taking a great risk in presenting statements that may be exactly contrary to what you’ve been led to believe by the media, well known economists, and even by former Fed Governors and chairmen. I know this is a risk because my partner Warren Mosler, as well as myself and our firm, have been actively advancing these ideas for the past 15 years. We have been widely disregarded, with the exception of Cambridge in the UK, and the University of Missouri at Kansas City, being amongst the few notable successes where 40 PhD’s are now training in our program. I personally have been rebuffed at the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School, where I graduated undergrad in 1970 and the graduate division in 1972.

But I’m going to take this risk because it’s important to our economic futures, to recognize how things actually work, and because it has policy and investment implications for all of our business decisions. I’m taking the risk because I do not want all of you, who have taken your valuable time out to hear this talk, to have the experience of spending all this time, and not learn anything new of value.

Let’s start with some incredibly simple, but incredibly powerful concepts. All the major currencies in the world are no longer backed by anything. They are not commodity-based or commodity-backed currencies anymore. The only thing the Fed will give you for a 10 dollar bill is two fives. This is called fiat money and this is what we have.

So why do today’s currencies have any value? Simple question. We’re all veteran money managers and we should have the answer. You’ve probably heard answers like it’s the medium of exchange, or a storehouse of value, or the most widely given answer, faith in the currency, which was the only answer given to me when I asked the entire Economics faculty at a major University. So do you believe that the entire multi-trillion dollar world dollar economy is built on faith, as well as the yen and Turkish lire denominated economies?

The answer to why this fiat currency has value is actually on the money. It says “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private”. The key word is public. The dollar is the only medium for extinguishing tax liabilities to the sovereign government. Money is tax driven, and that’s why it’s valuable.

That’s why we care about dollars, the Japanese care about yen, and why the Turks care about Turkish lire. When the Mexican peso blew up and all faith was gone, why did it only go from 3:1 (dollar) to about 10:1, instead of 100:1 or a million:1, or just vanish completely? When the ruble lost all faith, it only went from 6:1 to about 28:1, it didn’t go worthless or vanish. As long as there are enforceable taxes due, payable in a particular currency, it will have value.

This concept was perfectly understood centuries ago, but forgotten during the commodity money phase. The great Commonwealth of Virginia, established four centuries ago, knew this. They wanted to establish a currency to facilitate commerce. The government could issue currency, or spend in a new currency, but people would laugh and think why should I accept this piece of paper? The first thing Virginia did was establish a tax, let’s just say a 100 card tax per person per year. Now people would ask what they had to do to earn the currency, to be able to pay the tax, and not go to prison. The need for the cards makes the people willing sellers of goods, services, and their labor to get the cards, and avoid penalty for non payment. In this manner, the state can use its otherwise worthless paper to provision itself. The government established the amount of value of the currency, by what it demanded in exchange for these cards. The government is the monopoly issuer. Fiat currencies are tax driven.

Now that we’ve established our state, our tax, and our fiat currency made of these pieces of paper to pay taxes, let’s go further. Let’s say we’re going to be fiscally responsible in our new sovereign state. We’re going to run a budget surplus. We’re going to tax 100 cards, and we’re only going to spend 90.

What is going to happen? There are not enough cards to pay the tax. People will be offering their possessions and their labor for sale to try and get the cards to pay the tax, but sufficient cards are not in circulation to meet their needs. The result is called deflation; people scramble to sell anything to get cards that in the aggregate do not exist.

Okay, so you as Governor of Virginia notice this crisis going on, and you realize your mistake and say, I’ll tax 100 cards and I’ll spend 100 cards. I’ll run a balanced budget. Great. But let’s say I wanted to put one card in my savings account, or keep one around for spending money. I can’t. There are no cards left. The government has spent 100 cards and taxed 100 cards. There is nothing left for what I very carefully call net financial savings.

So let’s talk about savings, or maybe put another way, making money. How can we save money? We see the problem in old Virginia, no cards to save, but it’s the same exact notion for the U.S. dollar savings today. Let’s say that I represent all domestic dollar holders (individuals, pensions, ins cos, banks) and I have a total of one net dollar, meaning net of borrowing. Let’s say you represent all foreign net dollar holders (Toyota, central banks, any foreigners who have net dollars), and you have a total of one net dollar. So there is a total of two net dollars in the world. How are we as a group, going to save money? I guarantee you, that no matter what we do, at the end of the year we’ll all have two net dollars total. You may have $1.50, while I have $0.50, but we’re stuck, the total is two dollars. It’s the same problem as in old Virginia. So, how do we get net financial savings? The answer is, the only way to add to dollar net financial savings, is for the sovereign government to spend money, and not ask for it back in taxes. In other words, deficit spend.

Deficit spending is the source of worldwide net new U.S. dollar financial savings. The national income accounting identity is: the Government deficit EQUALS the non government accumulation of net financial assets.

Notice the word equals. Not approximately, but equals. So when you hear that the deficit is draining our savings, or they show you the National Debt Clock, it’s really the World Dollar Savings Clock. We’ll do more on deficits in a little bit.

Let’s get back to our new sovereign state. We notice that people want to save some cards each year. So as the wise Governor, we decide to tax 100 cards each year, but we will now spend 105 cards. Let’s say that people seem to want to save about 5 cards per year. So here is what’s interesting. We will be deficit spending 5 cards per year, but people want to save these cards, not spend them. Therefore, there is some noninflationary level of the deficit related to the desire to accumulate net financial assets. You can run a deficit without causing inflation if it matches savings desires.

Let’s talk about those 5 cards. At the end of every day, someone is going to have those cards. I could have lent them to you, and you could lend them to a corporation, or even to a bank. But at the end of the day, someone has the cards. How are they going to earn interest overnight? They can’t, not unless the sovereign says, if you give me those 5 cards, I’ll give you a different card, a promise card to pay back those 5 cards with interest. Looks like a Treasury bill to me.

But let’s think about it. Did the sovereign borrow the money to spend? Did the sovereign go begging to the markets for money to be able to spend? No, it’s actually the other way around. The sovereign spends first, and the market begs the sovereign for a security so it can earn interest.

In Fed speak, securities are offered to drain excess reserves, which are called offsetting operating factors. Sound familiar? This is the way all these fiat currency systems operate. The U.S. government does issue securities, but only to support an interest rate, not to borrow and spend. That’s why the “credit” is good. If that’s too much to believe, think of Turkey. Turkey’s annual lire deficit had been running over a quadrillion lire, inflation was 100% per year, triple digit interest rates, and there was huge currency depreciation. Not much faith there. How come they never defaulted? Either they are the greatest borrowers ever known to man, or it’s simply a reserve drain of extra cards.

Let’s continue with old Virginia and the cards. We just saw how the government can create Treasury bills, which are very much like money, and are really just time deposits at the Fed. So we have Treasury bills. But where do bank deposits come from? Again, the answer is from the very first week of any Money and Banking course, and yet very few people recognize the answer. The answer is that all deposits come from loans as a matter of system accounting. Loans create deposits. Most people believe you need funds, deposits, or savings to lend. Absolutely not true. The loan immediately creates its own deposit. That’s how the accounting of the banking system works. You start a bank with $10 in capital and are allowed to leverage to make about $150 of loans. The bank balance sheet includes $150 of loan assets and $150 of deposit liabilities. Loans create all bank deposits.

So now let’s bring in the Federal Reserve. I have very limited time here, so I’m just going to say that we hear about the Fed injecting reserves, pumping in money, printing money, pumping in liquidity to the banking system, and funds not getting distributed to the right people. This is utter misrepresentation and has no application to the non government sector. The Fed’s only tool is a price tool, the fed funds rate. It has no quantity tools.

The Fed has no direct control, over the quantity of bank deposits being created, or the quantity of any other form of credit. All this reserve management from the Fed, adding or subtracting reserves, is just the management of clearing checks at the bank’s segregated Fed accounts. The Fed acts when system or Treasury operating factors may make some of the pluses and not offset the minuses, or the unusual situation like recently, when banks might be afraid to trade their reserves with another bank in the fed funds market.

The Fed does not supply money the banks use for lending, does not directly affect the quantity of bank lending or what is casually known as money supply, and can’t reflate and pump money to banks or anyone else.

Note that when Barclay’s borrowed from the Bank of England 10 days ago, it was because of a clearing house settlement problem at the Central bank.

Please see me later so I can explain what the Fed did on 8/17. They lowered the discount rate only to control the funds rate better and to raise the funds rate from low levels where it was trading. I’ll show you the 8/16 email which shows exactly this recommendation which we communicated to the Fed.

When Japan pumped 30 trillion of excess reserves into the system, this did absolutely nothing, except insure that the overnight funds rate stayed at zero. All the BOJ did, was not offer any JGBs for sale or normal repo operations. People wanted JGBs. The MOF bill auctions were hundreds of times oversubscribed at a yield of 1bp! Go check it out. People wanted to earn something rather than nothing. People wanted their reserves drained. When the reserves were drained and quantitative easing ended, all the BOJ did was offer JGBs to the banks. The economists talked about how the transmission mechanism of this excess liquidity was not making it a real economy. It can’t. Bank lending to the private sector is never reserve constrained. Bank reserves are inside money at accounts at the Fed, and have nothing to do with lending to the non government sector. Remember, lending creates its own deposits. You don’t need reserves or funds.

Let’s talk about money a little more. Everyone talks about money, money supply, and M1, M2, M3. What are these measures? They are basically deposits in the banking system. So we watch the aggregates grow, creating more money. But is it the stuff of the quantity theory of money? If money is doubled, prices are doubled. Remember, all deposits come from loans. All the money supply is not net money, or the net financial assets I talked about at the beginning, its gross money. You get borrowed money in your account, no net money. People are long or short.

So where else do we see this exact relation of longs and shorts? All this gross money is really like the open interest on the Merc. There’s a long (the guy with the money) and a short (the guy who borrowed the money and spent it). When we analyze wheat prices, yes, we do look at open interest. But we look much more closely at current net stocks of wheat, and whether there will be a good new crop. So let’s think about that. We’d like to know about the current stock of net money. But, we said earlier this stock of net money comes from past deficit spending and becomes Treasury securities, and we’d like to know about the new crop. The new crop of net money comes from new deficits. A budget surplus is not only no new crops at all; it’s burning up some of the stocks in the silos. Take a look at the past dollar fx squeezes during budget surpluses.

If you have huge open interest, or huge open interest growth, in this case, huge growth of bank deposits, that circumstance is probably much more sustainable when the net money is growing to support it. The private sector may be able to sustain large borrowing and spending for extended periods. Without the net money growing beneath it, by definition the system leverage gets higher and the potential debt service burdens get progressively more difficult. This has profound implications for how to look at money, credit expansion, and business cycle phases, overextension and contraction.

So now let’s look at this notion of net money and business activity. The entire World Net Dollar Balance is just the opposite of the U.S. Government Dollar Balance. That’s what we just said about deficits providing net dollar savings. This is accounting, not theory. This is not in dispute.

But, if we’re just talking about the U.S. Domestic sector’s net dollar balance, that equals the opposite of the U.S. Government balance plus or minus the foreign account balance.

So a U.S. Government deficit and a U.S. trade surplus would both add to U.S. Domestic savings. Again, this is not in dispute. It’s an accounting identity, not theory. But so many major economists forget about this basic equation and what it means. What does it mean?

Let’s look at the chart. The first conclusion is to notice that if the U.S. foreign account balance is a bigger negative than the savings we get from U.S. government deficit spending, then the U.S. must reduce its net financials assets (generally borrowing) to finance our current consumption. This again, is an accounting identity.

This next chart shows the course of what’s happened. Look at the recent increases in the financial obligations burden to keep our consumption and aggregate demand growing. The U.S. budget deficit is too small to provide enough net financial savings to U.S. domestics to offset our foreign trade balance. This can persist for awhile, but it is ultimately not a sustainable process.

Let’s talk more about savings. The generally accepted notion is that we have to boost savings to be able to boost investment. Good for the economy. Let’s create more savings plans. Remember, saving is not spending your income. If my wife, inexplicably, decides not to spend our income, and not to buy any more cars, is GM or is Toyota going to invest in a new plant? No way. The paradox of savings has been known for centuries, but forgotten. As a matter of fact, the act of saving will reduce effective demand, not stimulate investment, leave inventory unsold (you produced but didn’t buy all the output) and will most likely reduce employment and income.

So what does happen? Savings does equal investment, but it doesn’t happen that you need savings to make the investment.

It is the act of investment that creates both real and financial savings. Savings are the accounting record of an investment having been made. By definition, investment is spending money to produce a capital good that is not able to be currently bought or consumed. There is nothing to buy, so you must save. The workers have the money they were paid, and their only choice is to save and invest, directly or indirectly, in the capital good. You can individually try to save, but as a whole we can not determine to save. The level of investments will determine the level of saving.

Let’s talk about U.S. saving. You at this conference are the driving force in the powerful structure of incentives to save in the U.S. A large portion of personal income is encouraged to go, and does go, to IRAs, Keoghs, life insurance reserves, pension fund income, endowment income, and other money that compounds continuously and is not spent. Even much of what foreigners get, such as foreign Central Bank dollar accumulation is not spent. We call all this savings demand leakage. This U.S. structure of tax advantaged savings has probably caused the U.S. private sector to desire to be a net saver.

There are two important things about this situation. We do not need these savings for investment. So there’s no need to promote all these plans and incentives. Sorry guys. As we previously pointed out, this desire to not spend will reduce aggregate demand and result in unsold output, causing declining economic activity and declining prices. So what has happened? All these savings plans have allowed the government to deficit spend, to offset all this structurally reduced aggregate demand, without causing inflation. Once we recognize that savings does not cause investment, it follows that the solution to unemployment or low capacity utilization, is not to encourage more savings.

Let’s continue to talk about foreign balance. If we’re running a trade deficit, foreigners are sending us goods and we are sending them dollars. We’re buying their stuff instead of domestic stuff. For that amount of demand, our employment and output is being reduced. So we get underemployment in the U.S. unless we manage to keep domestic demand sufficiently high as we have been doing. When we do that, the notion of comparative advantage is at work and we have a net gain. We’ve been benefiting from this process and should not be fighting imports.

Now remember our identity of the domestic balance is the government plus foreign balances. If we have a 5% foreign trade deficit, but the government is giving us savings with a 5% budget deficit, we’re still only at zero net financial savings. The implication is that now the government can spend a 5% deficit to fully employ our resources without inflation. The government could deficit spend even more to satisfy the desire for positive net financial savings.

Let’s explore this trade deficit for a little bit. There’ so much talk of how vulnerable we are because foreigners won’t keep financing our foreign trade deficit. There is no such thing as foreigners financing the trade deficit.

I go to Citibank and I borrow money. My account is credited with 50K in deposits and Citi has an asset of 50K in loans. I take my deposit, buy a car. The foreign seller of the car has the money, first as a deposit at a U.S. bank. Everyone is happy, no imbalances and there is no borrowing of foreign capital. Citibank financed the borrowing for my purchase. The foreigner has dollar savings. Domestic credit creation funds this entire foreign savings, all $700 billion. There is no imported capital to fund the trade gap.

Let’s examine this trade deficit further. The U.S. government is begging China to revalue their currency upwards. Are we nuts? Why do we want to pay more for Chinese goods? Why do we want to give the Chinese a pay raise? We don’t allow our own workers minimum wage raises, and yet we want to give those raises to the Chinese.

They’re selling their goods below fair value which is dumping, and what we know to be an unfair trade. Let’s examine that. Dumping is a political problem, not an economic problem. Let’s put aside the issues of whether they’re incurring pollution costs or other social costs, counterfeiting, patent infringement and the like. Let’s say the Chinese are dumping, selling us goods at 35% of fair value. Here in the U.S. we complain. But what is selling us goods at 35% of fair value? It’s selling us 35 goods at fair value and 65 goods for nothing. There is no way, in the aggregate, that we can be worse off when they take their resources, capital, labor, technology and education and sell us goods for nothing. We are better off. The problem, as I said, is a political problem. Because they sell us goods for nothing, there are workers in the U.S. without incomes. But as we showed before, the U.S. government can now deficit spend so we can get the Chinese goods for nothing, and employ or reemploy these workers in the same, or different areas of the economy, to reestablish employment and aggregate demand without causing inflation.

Just two more comments on the foreign trade balance. We are so worried. We’re worried that they own all these paper assets and might sell them. But let’s think of who is at risk. We have the goods and they have these pieces of paper. They have no idea what those pieces of paper are going to be worth in the future. If they dump dollar assets, the value of their remaining holdings is going to fall dramatically. Who’s at risk? We have the cars, clothes and golf clubs. They have the indeterminate value of the paper.

The conventional wisdom is we want the Chinese and the Japanese to start spending on consumer goods, solve the unsustainable world trade imbalances. I don’t. Who wants to be competing for goods with 1.4 billion Chinese? What will happen to the price of all the items we’re consuming once there is competition for those goods? Nope, I want them to work 16 hours a day, sell us everything we need for nothing, have them never buy anything from anyone, and we play golf all day. The conceptual summation of all this is that exports are a cost and imports a benefit. Think about it.

So let’s conclude with some thoughts about the U.S. economic outlook. My partner Warren Mosler, who focuses on economic analysis and has an exceptional command of these dynamics, has helped offer some of these thoughts about the situation.

The U.S. budget deficit continues to contract. As our little identity equation showed before, the result is that net financial assets are not being added fast enough to support the gross dollars and credit structure, to help both support aggregate demand, and to satisfy the desire for savings engendered by all the incentive savings plans represented by this audience. It calls for budget balancing only making all of this worse.

As such, the financial obligations ratio rises to where the U.S. consumer can no longer continue borrowing at previous growth rates. Allocations to passive commodities by pension and endowment institutions actually exacerbated aggregate demand in the past two years. You are all supposed to buy stocks or bonds, but wound up buying all sorts of commodities. Now this phenomenon is cresting, and should also slow aggregate demand. Exports should be a help as they are picking up, but will probably not accelerate sufficiently to maintain fast GDP growth.

On the inflation front, we still see inflation as a problem despite U.S. economic weakness. It is our view that the Saudis basically set the price of oil and let quantity vary. They are the swing producer. They are comfortable with oil in this price range, so we do not expect price declines. Cost push of these prices is still occurring throughout the U.S. and world economy. Agricultural commodities are now linked to energy sector prices through the biofuels industry and are causing a second wave of food inflation. The Fed is very concerned about inflation, and that’s overall inflation, not just core inflation. If we have 0.2 month to month CPI increases for the balance of the year, YOY headline inflation will be well above 4%. The Fed is adamant about the importance of expectations, and those types of CPI numbers will worry the Fed about losing the 25 years of inflation progress they’ve made. With the labor market still tight, low levels of unemployment and high levels of capacity and resource utilization, the Fed is actually hoping for growth to slow substantially to contain this inflation. It may take much more slowing than that or a significant fall in energy and gasoline prices, for the Fed to ease.

With regard to the all important credit structure, I believe there is a very significant shift underway. In the recent past, lending (gross money) has been made easily available for all sorts of lending, business plans, assets and other leveraged ventures. These gross dollars have fueled both current cyclical economic activity and the rise in dollar asset prices around the world. I believe this is changing through both a repricing of the cost of assuming lending risk, and in a change of the simple willingness to lend or the availability of credit. Remember, loans create all deposits. No loans, no deposit growth. The Fed may be willing to oversee this significant contraction. Why? All of us, and the Fed, watched all these non-regulated lending or investment entities with much higher risk parameters go out and snub their noses at regulated entities and seemingly pass them by in good times. The Fed is not likely to want to provide a safety net and reward them for this type of frowned upon behavior. The Fed will probably be happy to see assets come back to the banking system, under their rules, regulations, and purview. In addition, the Fed will be happy for the greater stability it will bring to the capital structure of the markets and economy because the funding on bank’s balance sheets is anchored by FDIC insured deposits that don’t flee. The U.S. learned this lesson in 1934 with the establishment of deposit insurance to prevent runs on bank funding. The current voluntary termination of lending agreements (loans roll off), or withdrawal of CP deposits, and even withdrawals from hedge funds, highlight the system fragility of highly leveraged enterprises that are subject to liquidity redemptions. The sectors of the market and economy that relied upon these lending and securitization structures for funding will likely suffer, and the lending or credit participants in these sectors will likely be replaced by banks and GSEs.

Fiat currency sovereign issuers are not at risk. However, corporations, municipalities, leveraged loan and investment structures (LBO, private equity), and foreign countries issuing in denominations other than their fiat currency are at risk.

I’ll even present the notion that European government debt is at risk because a strict reading of Maastricht has created municipalities, not sovereigns, without the ECB to provide support. Did you notice that Saachsen Bank had to be bailed out by the German Savings Bank Society?

However, I have one note of caution or caveat to this notion of contraction and rationality. The financial engineering genie is out of the bottle. Financial engineering really began to accelerate when I entered the bond side of the business in the late 1970s with the advent of GNMA futures, Treasury bond and bill futures, currency and stock futures, and then the monumental creation of the interest rate swap, that became the foundation for modern derivatives such as caps, floors, swaptions, total return swaps, all variety of structured notes and even the recent explosion of credit derivatives. These instruments provide the ability to create huge notional exposures, with notional exposures in this credit arena that are hundreds of times the risk in the real economy. IBM used to have 1BB of bonds outstanding. That was the credit risk. Now the credit risk exposure taken by participants can be hundreds or thousands of times the size of the bond issue itself. While the risk may be more diversified or less concentrated, the huge notional size causes great market dislocations. But what I’m saying, is that in cycle after cycle, because it’s so difficult to make real spreads make real returns or real alpha, investors will again seek out the new product, the new leverage, the new derivative (like CDOs, CLOs, CDS) that allow the investor to greatly leverage to seemingly earn superior returns, only to see the eventual risks come to roost and the underlying risks exposed. It will happen again, the form will be different, but it will happen again.

I want to thank everyone for their great courtesy in attending today, and I hope this time together has accomplished something towards my goal, that you won’t be looking at the world economic scene in quite the same way again, and that maybe with a new understanding you’ll be an instrument for positive change in how we should conduct our economic lives.

Thank you very much.

[top]

[Skip to the end]

Seems Paulson is still blocking foreign CBs from accumulating USD financial assets. This is a negative for the USD and a negative for US real terms of trade.

It does support US exports and reduces the need to add to domestic demand, even as US consumption remains low.

Yuan Rises Most in 3 Weeks After Paulson Calls for Appreciation

by Kim Kyoungwha and Belinda Cao

(Bloomberg) The yuan climbed by the most in three weeks after U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urged China to let its currency appreciate to curb inflation and deter Congress from introducing trade penalties. Bonds gained.

[top]

[Skip to the end]

My current assessment is that the crude sell-off has caused the USD’s strength.

Lower crude prices make the USD ‘harder to get’ as oil producers get fewer USD for the same volume of crude (and product) exports to the US.

Likewise, this also brings down the US trade gap which is about half directly related to oil prices, so nonresidents have fewer USD to meet their USD financial asset savings desires.

Crude has been brought down by technical selling, which also brought with it technical buying of USD as trend following trading positions were unwound.

The crude market has gone into contango as would be expected with a futures sell off and tight inventories.

Tighter US credit conditions made the USD ‘harder to get’ while increased deficit spending makes the USD ‘easier to get’ resulting in GDP muddling through at modest rates of growth.

The Russian invasion probably helped the USD today.

Eurozone credit quality erosion with the onset of intensified economic weakness may be triggering an exit from the euro. The lowest risk euro financial assets are the national governments which carry similar risk to US States, and are vulnerable in a slowdown that forces increasing national budget deficits that are already in what looks like ‘ponzi’ for credit sensitive agents.

Eurozone bank deposit insurance is not credible and therefore the payment system itself vulnerable to an economic slowdown.

With the Russian army on the move, public and private portfolios may not want to hold the debt of the eurozone national governments that they accumulated when diversifying reserves from the USD.

I expect the Saudis to resume hiking crude prices once the selling wave has passed. I don’t think there has been an increase in net supply sufficient to dislodge them from acting as swing producer. And I also expect them to continue to spend their elevated revenues on real goods and services to keep the west muddling through at positive but sub-trend growth.

And the Russian invasion will linger on and help support the USD as a safe haven in the near-term

[top][end]

Comments about this post from email:

MIKE:

Again, its very likely you have permanently damaged demand at prices that are still over 100-

It’s possible the growth of crude consumption has slowed, but I still think it’s doubtful if consumption had declined enough to dislodge Saudi price control. July numbers still not out yet.

in addition asset alligators around the world are actually or synthetically short the dollar after 8 years of dollar selling…

Agreed. The question is the balance of the technicals, and if the CBs no longer buying USD has been absorbed by others.

For now, yes, short covering has mopped up the extra USD sloshing around from our trade gap, but it’s still maybe $50 billion per month that has to get placed. Not impossible for non-government entities to take it but it’s a tall order.

The Russian invasion helps a lot as well. That could be a much more important force than markets realize. Looks like a move to further control world energy supplies. A middle-eastern nation could be on the bear’s menu. I doubt the US could do anything about a Russian takeover of another neighbor. Certainly not go to war with Russia. and they know it.

[top]

>
>   European demand for $ funding has increased and surpassed the US demand
>

Pat, this is most problematic as it indicates the eurozone is strung out on $US debt.

At least the US banking system doesn’t have a problem with euro debt.

This compounds the systemic risk over there.

Warren

[Skip to the end]

It was deregulated back in the 1970s, which brought out vast supplies causing utilities to substitute gas for oil and eventually break OPEC.

I don’t see that kind of supply response lurking today.

The Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978

In November of 1978, at the peak of the natural gas supply shortages, Congress enacted legislation known as the Natural Gas Policy Act (NGPA), as part of broader legislation known as the National Energy Act (NEA). Realizing that those price controls that had been put in place to protect consumers from potential monopoly pricing had now come full circle to hurt consumers in the form of natural gas shortages, the federal government sought through the NGPA to revise the federal regulation of the sale of natural gas. Essentially, this act had three main goals:

• Creating a single national natural gas market
• Equalizing supply with demand
• Allowing market forces to establish the wellhead price of natural gas

[top]

[Skip to the end]

Interesting how reports of higher inflation have often meant stronger currencies in the short run due to higher anticipated rates from the CB.

Inflation, however, by definition means the currency buys less of most everything; therefore, inflation and a weakening currency are one and the same.

But it can take a long time for markets to discount this.

Emerging-Market Currency Rally Dies as Inflation Hits

by Lukanyo Mnyanda and Lester Pimentel

(Bloomberg) The five-year rally in emerging- market currencies is coming to an end as central banks from South Korea to Turkey struggle to contain inflation, say DWS Investments and Morgan Stanley.

The 26 developing-country currencies tracked by Bloomberg returned an average 0.86 percent in the past three months, down from 1.63 percent in the first quarter, 8.2 percent for all of 2007, and 30 percent annually since 2003. For the first time in seven years, investors are less bullish on emerging-market stocks than on U.S. equities, a Merrill Lynch & Co. survey showed last week.

Confidence in the Indian rupee is weakening after inflation accelerated at the fastest pace in 13 years, stoked by soaring food and energy prices. South Korea’s won will drop this year by the most since 2000, while Turkey’s lira will reverse its biggest gain since at least 1972, the median estimates of strategists surveyed by Bloomberg show.

[top]

[Skip to the end]

When in roam, pay fees of 40¢ per minute.

[top]

[Skip to the end]

This is what happens when non residents are scrambling to reduce their hoards of USD financial assets.

Exports rising like this along with the still falling dollar indicates the current $60 billion monthly trade gap is still too high - non-residents simply don’t want to accumulate USD financial assets at that rate.

This adjustment process continually aligns the ‘real’ (price adjusted) trade gap to levels that equal foreign $US ’savings desires’.

For the US this currently means a weak USD and a combo of rising exports and rising traded goods prices.

GDP muddles through as government spending and exports support demand, with continuing weak domestic demand and declining real terms of trade crushing the US standard of living.

• US Exports
• US Exports YoY

US Exports

[top][end]

US Exports YoY

[top]

[Skip to the end]

Bloomberg News Video Clip

Maybe, but…

It will be tough for the USD index to move up without the CBs and monetary authorities buying it, and that means crossing Paulson and accepting being labeled a ‘currency manipulator’ and ‘outlaw.’

And the higher crude prices mean USD spent on imports increase and unless spending on US domestic assets, goods, and services goes up by that much those unspent USD need to be/are ’saved’ by non-residents and the USD goes to a level that reflects their current desire to accumulate them.

A rising USD is evidence that the foreign sector wants the extra USDs and are fighting over them. A falling dollar is evidence of the reverse.

Also, if they don’t like the other currencies any more than they like the USD, the currencies can remain relatively stable as the excess USDs are all spent on US exports and US domestic assets. The evidence of this is rising/accelerating US exports and export prices and support for US assets which can include real estate and equities. Note the falling USD has made US equities that much cheaper for non-USD based investors.

This is all part of the same adjustment process, which includes ‘inflation’ as all the pieces described above support higher prices for goods and services both in the US and elsewhere.

And the ‘inflation channel’ also is part of the adjustment of the trade gap. I use the extreme example (hopefully it’s only an extreme example) of prices adjusting upward until coffee is $60 billion a cup, in which case the trade gap of $60 billion per month is only one cup of coffee. In other words, higher prices work to bring down the ‘real’ trade gap.

So they are all working together -trade, fx, prices- within current institutional arrangements (including CBs not wanting to be labeled outlaws and currency manipulators vs the desire to support their exporters, etc) as they always and continuously do to adjust desired to actual ’savings’ of financial assets, and sustain all the indifference levels.

A turning point if the level of the USD is sufficiently low to drive the US exports and asset sales to non residents needed to keep their residual accumulation of USD to their desired levels.

And with crude prices still rising, it seems likely to me that more USD are being credited to ‘their’ accounts than they currently wish to cling to at current exchange rates, so more downward pressure on the USD would not surprise me. Along with the associated increase in US exports and higher prices in general.

[top]

[Skip to the end]

An economist who matters

by Kyle Wingfield

(Wall Street Journal) Robert Mundell isn’t in the habit of making fruitless policy recommendations, though some take a long time ripening. Nearly four decades passed between his early work on optimal currency areas and the birth of the euro in 1999 – the same year he received the Nobel Prize for economics.

The Euro had nothing to do with the optimal currency area considerations.

Back in America, there’s an election going on. There’s also been a spate of financial problems, not the least of which is a weak dollar. But Mr. Mundell says “the big issue economically . . . is what’s going to happen to taxes.”

Democratic nominee Barack Obama regularly professes disdain for the Bush tax cuts, suggesting that those growth-spurring measures may be scrapped. “If that happens,” Mr. Mundell predicts, “the U.S. will go into a big recession, a nosedive.”

Even if the lost aggregate demand is more than replaced at the same time?

One of the original “supply-side” economists, he has long preached the link between tax rates and economic growth. “It’s a lethal thing to suddenly raise taxes,” he explains. “This would be devastating to the world economy, to the United States,

Even Laffer, the originator of his curve, does not agree with that.

and it would be, I think, political suicide” in a general election.

That may be true, but so far polls don’t show it.

Should taxes instead be cut again, I ask him, to stimulate the sluggish economy? Mr. Mundell replies that he favors a ceiling of 30% on marginal rates (the current top rate is 35%). He recounts how the past century experienced a titanic struggle over whether tax rates are too high or too low: from a 3% income tax in 1913; up to 60% during World War I; down to 25% before Congress and President Herbert Hoover raised taxes back to 60% in 1932 and “sealed the fate of our economy for a long, long time”; all the way up to 92.5% during World War II

When real output more than doubled, even as 7 million of our best workers went into the military.

before falling in three steps, reaching 28% under President Ronald Reagan; and back to nearly 40% under Bill Clinton before George W. Bush lowered them to their current level.

Deficit spending is much more of a driver of aggregate demand than marginal income tax rates.

In light of this fiscal roller coaster, Mr. Mundell says, “the most important thing that could be done with respect to tax rates now is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Eliminating that uncertainty would be more important than pushing for a further cut – in the income tax rates, anyway.”

One tax that he would cut, to 25%, is the corporate tax rate. “It could be even lower,” he says, “but I think it would be a big step to lower it to 25% . . . I made that proposal back in the 1970s.”

Very small potatoes from a macro point of view.

A long-haired Mr. Mundell spent that decade not only arguing for the euro, but laying the intellectual groundwork for the Reagan tax-cut revolution. Mr. Mundell says those tax cuts remain “as important to the United States as the creation of the euro was to Europe – a fundamental change.”

The deficit spending of the Regan years was the driver of the expansion- tax cuts and spending increases.

Combined with Paul Volcker’s tight-money policy at the Fed, which Mr. Mundell also championed, supply-side economics killed off stagflation.

And not the drop in crude prices due to a 15 million barrel per day supply response when natural gas prices were uncapped and utilities switched from oil to gas (and coal, etc.)???

Seems Mundell is pure propaganda.

Or at least it killed it off at the time. With prices again rising as growth slows, some economists are worried that stagflation could be making a comeback. Not Mr. Mundell – not yet.

He draws a comparison with the situation in 1979-1980. Start with the dollar price of oil, which he calls “one of the two most important prices in the world” (the other being the dollar-euro exchange rate, which we’ll get to in a moment).

“If you look at the price level since 1980,” he begins, “oil prices would naturally double by the year 2000. So from $34 a barrel in 1980 to $68 a barrel. And then . . . because the inflation rate’s about 3.5%, it would double again by 2020. So the natural price . . . would be something like $136 in 2020.

So ‘naturally’ doesn’t include inflation???

More to the point, the inflation rate was about 3.5% for 20 years or so with oil prices under $20, so now with oil spiking to $140, inflation should fall to the Fed’s target of maybe 2% due to a modest output gap?

“Now, we [already] got to $130-something, but . . . I really think the price is going to settle down, probably below $100, if not below $90. What I’m saying is we’re not so far off track.”

Guess he forgot the first week of micro that shows how monopolists set price?

As an economist, he should know Saudis are necessarily setting price.

American motorists still shocked by $4-a-gallon gasoline might think we’re rather more off track than Mr. Mundell suggests. Bolstering his case, he immediately moves on to another commodity often invoked to demonstrate inflation: gold.

“The price of gold in 1980 was $850 an ounce. And the price of gold today is about the same. It’s astonishing,” he says. “It’s true, gold did go up” to more than $1,000 an ounce earlier this year, “but the public doesn’t believe that there is inflation. If there was big inflation coming, then you’d see the price of gold going up to $1,500 an ounce very quickly, and that hasn’t happened.”

If they could take Nobel Prizes away, that statement would put him at risk.

In any case, don’t expect to hear Barack Obama or John McCain talk about the weak dollar’s contributions to any problem. “As [journalist] Robert Novak once put it, it’s like cleaning ladies who come in and say ‘I don’t do ironing.’

Good thing he isn’t running with a statement like that.

[Politicians] say, ‘I don’t do exchange rates,’” Mr. Mundell chuckles. “They think they can only lose by talking about exchange rates, because they don’t know enough about it, and it’s hard to predict anyway, for anyone.”

If Mr. Mundell had his way, there wouldn’t be anything for politicians to say about exchange rates. They would be fixed – as they were under the Bretton Woods arrangement after World War II until 1971, when President Nixon took the U.S. off the postwar gold standard and effectively launched the era of floating exchange rates.

“It’s a very poor and a dangerous system,” Mr. Mundell says of the floating regime, “because it creates exaggerated swings in the exchange rate.”

Vs. exaggerated swings in unemployment. Fixed foreign exchange regimes regularly ‘blow up’ with double digit or higher unemployment, negative growth, and actual blood in the streets. They have been abandoned for very good and practical reasons.

Case in point is the dollar-euro rate. From a low of about 82 cents in 2000, Europe’s common currency has risen fairly steadily and has been valued at more than $1.50 since late February, even breaking the $1.60 barrier once.

Without any negative growth, moderate inflation, and, in the Eurozone, declining unemployment.

“What people have to realize is there’s been a fundamental change in the way markets work in the past 20 years,” Mr. Mundell says. “Now, exchange rates are driven not so much by trade but by capital accounts and capital movements, and the huge amount of liquidity that’s sloshing around the world.”

Guaranteed he can’t discuss ‘liquidity sloshing around the world’ beyond that rhetoric.

Central banks world-wide, he notes, are trying to reach an equilibrium between dollars and euros in their $6.5 trillion worth of foreign reserves. Roughly two-thirds of these reserves are kept in dollars now, so they have about $1 trillion left to move into euros.

“If you did a hundred billion dollars” annually, Mr. Mundell points out, “you’d need 10 years to build that up, and that amount of capital movement has a tremendous effect in keeping the euro overvalued. It’s not good for Europe

It does help their real terms of trade, but maybe he doesn’t think that’s ‘good.’

and . . . ultimately it would cause more inflation in the United States.”

It already is, but here he’s denying it.

But this continuing shift doesn’t mean that the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currency is in danger, at least not in the short run. Countries like Iran may be pushing for the pricing of oil in another currency, “but it wouldn’t happen unless Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states moved in that direction, and I don’t see any way in which they would do this,” Mr. Mundell says.

He also doesn’t ’see’ that it doesn’t matter what currency anything is ‘priced in’ as it’s just a numeraire. What matters is the currency they ’save in’ as he mentions when he estimates how they want to hold their reserves and how that matters.

“It would be very damaging to the relations between the United States and the Gulf countries. There’s an implicit defense alliance between those, and that’s what overrides as a top priority.”

Nor is there a macroeconomic argument for demoting the dollar. “Remember, the growth prospects for the United States are probably stronger than that of Europe, because you’ve got continued and substantial population growth in the United States, and zero population growth in Europe,” Mr. Mundell says. “Quite apart from the fact that the U.S. economy is innovating more rapidly, and the population is younger and not getting old as rapidly, so they pick up new technology faster. So I look upon the United States still as the main sparkplug of economic growth in the world.”

He misses his own argument. It’s about what currency non-residents want to ’save in’ that determines reserve levels and the dollar being a reserve currency.

As for the euro’s overvalued status, he forecasts deflation in Europe,

Negative CPI???

along with a slowdown and an end to its housing boom.

Already happening to some degree.

The answer, he suggests, is for the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank to cooperate in putting a floor and a ceiling on both the euro and the dollar. “You have to grope” to the appropriate range, he maintains, but a good starting point would be to keep the euro between 90 cents and $1.30.

That would mean the ECB buying $ and giving the appearance that the $ is ‘backing’ the Euro as the ECB collects dollar reserves. This is probably unthinkable politically for the Eurozone as they want the Euro to be the world’s reserve currency, not the $.

Even better, in his mind – and now we’re really talking long term – would be to have a global currency. This could take the form of a new money or a dominant existing one to which all others are fixed – probably the dollar. “As Paul Volcker says,” Mr. Mundell relates, “the global economy needs a global currency.”

With no global fiscal authority to regulate aggregate demand? That’s a prescription for economic disaster.

To get there, he proposes holding a new, Bretton Woods-type meeting in 2010 at the Shanghai World’s Fair. Mr. Mundell, who has been spending “a lot of time” in China advising the government, says reviving an international system of fixed exchange rates would be a tremendous help to Beijing as it tries to fend off demands from U.S. and European politicians that it appreciate or float its currency.

Here, he recalls Washington’s similar “bashing” of the Japanese yen in the 1980s, and its ultimately disastrous effects: “Japan got stuck with an overvalued currency for a decade, and suffered from a perpetual deflation in its housing market from 1990 until just a couple of years ago. And China doesn’t want to have the same problem.”

Japan ran/allowed a budget surplus from 1987 to 1992 that wiped out demand and the economy didn’t begin to recover until subsequent deficits got over 7% of GDP.

China isn’t making that mistake.

Another part of his solution is for Asian countries to form their own currency bloc. If they did so, he says, “it’d be comparable in size to the European and the American bloc. And then it would not be so much the question of . . . the U.S. and Europe bashing China” or other rising economies.

He totally misses the roll of aggregate demand.

These three currency blocs, he predicts, would be large enough to weather wide swings in their exchange rates. But the swings would still do economic damage, so “the best thing you could do is to stabilize them, and that’s where the global currency comes in.”

Could it happen? Mr. Mundell allows that three decades may pass, but predicts that like the euro and the Reagan revolution before it, the global currency’s time, too, will come. Any skeptics might want to review the last few decades before betting against him.

I agree the world might do something counter productive like that. Unless there’s something worse they could do that pops up.

[top]

[Skip to the end]

It’s about that time of the cycle when emerging market governments borrow low interest USD rather than pay the higher interest rates of their local currency.

Makes no sense at the macro level by often the treasuries of these nations are incented to do this.

This external, USD debt tends to drive the USD down and add to US exports, as it adds to international financial instability.

[top]

[Skip to the end]

Dollar Index vs US Exports

Right - seems to me the dollar will fall until it’s at a level where the trade gap goes to about zero. So even though exports are way up and the trade gap down, there could be a lot more to go.

A nation can only run a trade deficit to the extent non-residents (governments and private sector agents) desire to net accumulate its financial assets (or buy its domestic assets such as real estate).

Seems to me Paulson, Bush, and Bernanke have successfully kept the world’s CBs, monetary authorities, and portfolio managers from actively accumulating USD financial assets.

Doesn’t seem like jawboning is going to alter foreign ’savings desires’ apart from short term trading responses.

[top]

Ed says:

Warren,

Isn’t it also true that the US export boom is less a result of the weaker dollar, so much as it is the cause? Foreigners using the trade surplus dollars they were previously content to save, are now spending them, and the shopping list is sizable. In this sense, all the dollars we have been exporting for years are coming home to roost, and that explains a good chunk of the inflation we are seeing.

Ed

I agree the cause is foreigners switching as a sector from wanting to accumulate USD to not wanting to accumulate them, and therefore spending them.

However, I see the market forces working as follows:

The first desire is ‘not to save’ which drives the USD down either until the $ is somehow low enough where they want to save it again, which doesn’t make sense to me, or until the USD is low enough for them to spend them here, which makes a bit more sense to me.

And the other force is the decreased desire to export to us which is evidenced by higher import prices.

Last, this is all inflationary, and inflation is the other channel for getting rid of a trade gap.

For an extreme example, if there is sufficient inflation for the minimum wage to go to $60 billion per hour, the real trade gap is suddenly down to only an hour of labor, though still nominally at 60 billion.

The combination of rising net exports, falling imports, and inflation are all working together right now to digest the sudden shift from CBs and monetary authorities away from buying USD financial assets.

Fiscal adjustment checks start going out in a couple of weeks.

Rest of govt. spending going up as well.

GDP should muddle through and inflation continue to accelerate.

It may dawn on the Fed that the weak dollar is hurting the financial sector as the consumer is being squeezed by food/energy prices and therefore having trouble making loan payments. That’s the price of sticky wages, at least this time around.

Foreign CBs have no option regarding world currency stability but to try to put pressure on the Fed to stop cutting.

(an email)

>
>   On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 11:41 PM, Craig wrote:
>
>   Ok. So then it seems to me that it’d be a big change
>   for foreigners to panic on USD assets. Not saying it
>   couldn’t happen, but it’d need a big catalyst. In the
>   mean time, I suppose foreigners will peck away,
>   the dollar will do what it does and purchasing power
>   parity will provide some elastic limits on downside.
>
>   True?
>
>   Craig
>
>

Ironically, the ‘fundamentals’ of the $ are pretty good - purchasing power parity is good, the govt deficit is relatively small, and the relatively difficulty of getting $US credit helps as well.

But the technicals remain extremely negative (we’ve cut off the traditional buyers) CBs, monetary authorities, and chunks of our own pension funds.

So it’s not so much as concern about ‘foreigners’ in general, but specifically CBs and monetary authorities no longer accumulating perhaps $50 billion a month, and no one else stepping in to replace them, so instead the $ goes to a level where the trade gap goes away.

And that level of the $ can be anywhere, as while the correction process is ‘using’ the level of the $ to get the trade gap to 0, the trade gap is not that strong/precise a function of the level of the dollar.

It’s an example of a ‘cold turkey’ adjustment (the sudden cut off of all the $ accumulators at once) with no prior thought to the subsequent adjustment process, apart from the limited understanding that it would somehow drive exports, and the mistaken notion that exports are a ‘good thing.’

I do think the rest of the G7 thinks the ‘answer’ for the G7 is to convince the Fed to stop cutting rates.

As I mentioned a while back, the Fed has become an international ‘outlaw’ seemingly prodding the world to follow it in an international race to the bottom regarding inflation. It started the game ‘who inflates the most wins’ with their ‘beggar they neighbor’/mercantilist weak/$ policy to ’steal’ (or maybe in the way the Fed sees it ‘reclaim’) world agg demand and support US gdp with US exports at the expense of foreign gdp.

Now it seems this policy is backfiring. The weak $ has seemingly raised food/energy prices for the US consumer, weakening the financial sector as less income is available for debt service as well as other consumption, and while exports have helped it’s only been enough to muddle through. And US inflation is sprinting ahead as well.

So the Fed rate cuts have not been seen to have helped the financial sector, the consumer, nor the US economy in general.

The Fed is being seen as destabilizing the world’s economy, weakening the US financial sector, depressing US consumer demand, depressing foreign domestic demand, and driving US to dangerous levels.

Once again it seems it’s being demonstrated that weakening your currency and inflating your way out of debt is not a road to prosperity.

And world markets are pricing in further US rate cuts.

Good morning!

Warren

My take on the USD:

It was at a level based on foreigners wanting to accumulate $70 billion per month which also = the US trade gap (accounting identity).

Most of that desire to accumulate came from foreign CBs trying to support their exporters, oil producers accumulating USD financial assets, and foreign portfolios allocating some percentage of assets to USD assets.

Paulson cut off the CBs calling the currency manipulators and outlaws.

Bush cut off the oil producers by being perceived to be conducting a holy war.

Bernanke scared off the portfolio managers with what looks to them like an ‘inflate your way out of debt’ policy.

And US pension funds are diversifying out of USD into passive commodities and foreign securities.  Looks to me like the desire to accumulate USD overseas is falling towards zero rapidly.

This means they sell us less and buy more of our goods, services, and our real assets.

Volumes’ of non oil imports are falling and of oil imports are flat.

The dollar has gotten low enough for the trade gap to fall from over $70 billion to under $60 billion per month (February was an aberration IMHO).

The dollar will ‘adjust’ until it corresponds with a trade gap that = desired foreign accumulation of USD financial assets.

I see no reason to think the trade gap should not go to zero.

The USD probably has not traded down enough to reflect the zero desire to accumulate USD abroad.

The ECB has serious ideological issues regarding buying of USD.  Not the least of which they don’t want to give the impression that the USD is ‘backing’ the euro, which would be the appearance if they collected USD reserves.

The ECB has an inflation problem, and they believe the strong euro has kept it from being much worse.

The policy ’shift’ might be the process of ending of US rate cuts at the next meeting by cutting less than expected.

This might first mean only a 25 basis point cut when the market prices in 50 basis points, followed by no cut when markets price in 25 basis points, for example.

This would firm the USD and soften the commodities near term, as after the last 75 basis point cut when markets were pricing 100 basis points.

But this does not change the foreign desires to accumulate USD as direct intervention by the ECB would, for example.

So the adjustment process that gets us to a zero trade gap will continue.

And it will continue to drive up headline CPI with core not far behind.

And US GDP will muddle through in the 0% to +2% range with weak private sector consumption being supported by exports, US government consumption, and moderate investment.

The MOF would have bought USD long ago if Paulson hadn’t gone around branding any CB a ‘currency manipulator’ and an international outlaw.

The USD is in freefall and is now the major source of inflation.

And maybe the Fed as seen the connection?

MOF Frets Over Yen, But No Hint Of Intervention

by Takeshi Takeuchi

(Dow Jones) Japanese currency authorities expressed alarm about the dollar’s fall close to the Y100-mark for the first time since 1995 but didn’t offer any clues about whether or when they might take any countermeasures.

Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga and his vice minister on currency affairs, Naoyuki Shinohara, separately voiced caution after the dollar fell to Y100.19 in the mid-day Tokyo session.

Nukaga said it is “a shared perception among the G7 (Group of Seven industrialized countries) that excessive exchange rate moves are undesirable,” while Shinohara also noted “excessive foreign exchange moves are undesirable.”

The two point men for Japan’s currency policy also said they will “continue closely watching foreign exchange markets,” a code phrase that shows their displeasure about current dollar/yen moves.

Neither of them, however, commented on whether they are considering taking countermeasures against the dollar’s rapid fall against the yen.

But Shinohara repeated the word “excessive” a few times in exchanges with reporters, suggesting the ministry’s level of caution has been at least raised in response to the imminent possibility of the dollar’s break below the Y100-mark.

In the past, finance ministry officials usually stepped up their currency rhetoric in stages before intervening. Their remarks on yen strength often changed from “rapid” to “a bit sharp” to “brutal,” while they also threatened “appropriate action” as an advance warning before intervening.

(A response to a comment about Fed policy changes)

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 9:46 AM, Mike wrote:

the dollar may be the buy of a lifetime here….

Right, especially if the Fed cuts less than expected next week, or not at all.

Vicious reversal of commodities, USD, short term rates, but bad day or two for stocks.

This expanded lending facility may also function to increase the supply of short Treasuries for money funds and narrow the Treasury/LIBOR spread and shut up the rocket scientists who say low rates on short term Treasuries are the market screaming for rate cuts.

The Fed continues to show a deficiency in understanding monetary operations with the latest moves. While steps in the right direction, a better understanding of monetary operations would have meant funding ANY member bank asset at the FF rate and establishing an unlimited term lending facility for Treasury securities.

Meanwhile they seem to be trying to minimize further rate cuts and instead trying to target areas of illiquidity as per Friday and today’s announcements. They may have reached their inflation tolerance with crude at $109, the dollar continuously falling, and inflation expectations elevating.

Somewhat more troubling is the eurozone seemingly wanting dollar lines from the Fed. Not sure why, but borrowing external currency isn’t ordinarily a good sign.

Here’s how the inflation can persist indefinitely:

1. In addition to the India/China type story for resource demand, this time around nominal demand for commodities is also coming from our own pension funds who are shifting more of their financial assets to passive commodity strategies.
   
   Pension funds contributions have traditionally been invested primarily in financial assets, making them ‘unspent income’ and therefore ‘demand leakages.’ Other demand leakages include IRAs (individual retirement accounts), corporate reserve funds, and other income that goes ‘unspent’ on goods and services.
   
   Supporting these demand leakages are all kinds of institutional structure, but primarily tax incentives designed to increase ’savings’.
   
   These come about due to the ‘innocent fraud’ that savings is necessary for investment, a throwback to the gold standard days of loanable funds and the like.
   
   A total of perhaps $20 trillion of this ‘unspent income’ has accumulated in the various US retirement funds and reserves of all sorts.
   
   This has ‘made room’ for the government deficit spending we’ve done to not be particularly inflationary. In general terms, the goods and services that would have gone unsold each year due to our unspent income have instead been purchased by government deficit spending.
   
   But now that is changing, as a portion of that $20 trillion is being directed towards passive commodity strategies. While the nature of these allocations varies, a substantial portion is adding back the aggregate demand that would have otherwise stayed on the sidel