Credit Bubble Stocks 2014 Posts On Inflation

February 7, 2014

Money printing makes no difference. The BOJ has printed oodles of yen since their demographic collapse started - 4x increase in monetary base since 1990.

As Cornelius Vanderbilt would say, "that amounts to nothing." The Nikkei fell 65% anyway during the same time period (75% peak to trough), and - best part - their 10 year bond yield has fallen to 60 bps. Their 30 year yields 1.6%.

Further, the Japanese price index has not changed in 20 years. On a long term view, Japanese CPI increases seem to have stopped right around the time that serious yen printing started.

The "increased monetary base causes increased CPI" thesis has sprung a leak, and the inflationists are out of buckets. Clearly there is a different, lurking variable. In fact, an increase in monetary base and a fall in the inflation rate both look like dependent variables of population!

March 16, 2014

The evidence is now showing in the U.S. and Japan that the price index is not a dependent variable of the quantity of money. However, both experiences are consistent with the price index and the quantity of money both being dependent variables of demographics.

Falling working age population seems to cause desperate but fruitless schemes by central banks.

August 9, 2014

Remember first and second level thinking. First level thinking is that loose monetary policy leads to inflation so buy metals and stocks and short bonds. The second level thought is that loose monetary policy leads to some goods increasing in price, mostly the hoard-able primary inputs like energy and base metals. Much of the causation is psychological. The input price increase squeezes producers who can't raise their prices as much to compensate for rising input costs. Maybe they even go out of business or layoff workers. Overall, society is poorer thanks to the misallocation of resources. Also, fear of loose monetary policy causes investors to sell bonds and interest rates rise. Both the rising input costs and rising interest rates choke off the economy; the inflationary policy is self-limiting because of the damage it does.

October 9, 2014

Commodities do seem to be the quickest to pick up on changes as we move through this cycle:

Inflation/mania -> tightening -> deflation/crash -> printing

This is a positive feedback loop. One would expect the oscillations to become wilder as people attempt to "get in front of" the next step, and that does seem to be what has happened over the past 15 years or so.

October 29, 2014

What this tells you is that their concern about deflation is situational, conditional. Deflation that threatens the big banks that own the Fed is bad. Deflation that squeezes the proles out of their assets and makes them renters is good.

The big banks have been recapitalized and the proles are making a bit too much money flipping paper [1,2]. Maybe the Fed thinks it's time to pull the rug out from under them?

Removing the inflationary supports in conjunction with a nonsensical propaganda statement is consistent with pulling the rug out. Is it consistent with anything else?