Free Republic

At the start of 2012 Horseman Global did something which virtually none of its peers dared or would dare to do: it took its formerly 100% equity net long exposure to deep net short, launching an 8 year period in which the fund would be bearish month after month on stocks, yet as the monthly P&L table below shows, it also manged to generate impressive annual returns over this same period (with the exceptions of 2016 and 2019) despite constant central bank intervention pushing stocks relentlessly higher, largely thanks to the Fund's significant bond long position. Yet after a dismal...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The economic paralysis caused by the coronavirus led in April to the steepest month-to-month fall in U.S. consumer prices since the 2008 financial crisis — a 0.8% drop that was driven by a plunge in gasoline prices. And excluding the normally volatile categories of food and energy, so-called core prices tumbled 0.4%, the government said in its monthly report on consumer inflation. That was the sharpest such drop on records dating to 1957. The business shutdowns, reduced travel and shrunken consumer spending that the virus has caused have likely sent the U.S. economy into a severe recession....

The Federal Reserve gives us the freedom to buy things now that we would otherwise have to wait for.In looking at the Federal Reserve, it is important to note that this is a money system, not just a group of people sitting in a conference room controlling everything having to do with the US dollar. The Fed is a system just like the government of the US is a system. What that means is that no one controls it, and that it is much bigger than any one person or group of people could ever control. They can guide it,...

"It seems to me like a lot of people think we're in a new inflationary boom," but, warns Gluskin-Sheffs David Rosenberg, "the answer is no... that's just not gonna happen. It's not like Ronald Reagan at all in that regard." Submitted by Patrick Ceresna via Macrovoices.com*This time around, not only are valuations at 15-year highs but we're entering it into the eighth year of the expansion of the bull market. You have to respect where were you are in the market cycle in the business expansion and we're much more mature now than we were in that early stage of...

Darryl R Schoon August 8, 2016 If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will… The Grateful Dead, The Wheel(lyrics) In the world of phenomena, everything has a beginning and an end; and today, the bankers’ endgame is moving closer to its inevitable resolution and demise. The question is no longer if, it is when and how. The relationship between paper money and gold is causal in central banking’s collapse. When paper money was backed by gold, it (1) gave the bankers’ paper money its value and (2) constrained the ability of governments to print limitless amounts of money,...

Falling rates of global trade growth have attracted much comment by analysts and officials, giving rise to a literature on the ‘global trade slowdown’ (Hoekman 2015, Constantinescu et al. 2016). The term ‘slowdown’ gives the impression of world trade losing momentum, but growing nonetheless. The sense of the global pie getting larger has the soothing implication that one nation’s export gains don’t come at the expense of another’s. But are we right to be so sanguine? World trade volume plateaued around January 2015 Using what is widely regarded as the best available data on global trade dynamics, namely, theWorld Trade...

The central bank experiment with negative interest rates—where governments charge you to buy their debt—is reaching a tipping point. Fierce political backlash is emerging against a policy that hurts savers and small businesses, all of which could have ramifications for U.S. markets. The bulk of negative-yielding debt is concentrated in Japan and Europe. Globally, the total is now $10.4 trillion, according to Fitch Ratings. In Japan, where politicians are preparing for the next election cycle, negative rates have become a hotbed issue. The chief policy architect of Japan’s new Democratic Party, Shiori Yamao, just came out publicly against the Bank...

The global economy is heading for a storm as faith in policymakers dwindles, according to a stark warning from one of the world’s most respected financial institutions. The uneasy calm in financial markets last year has given way to turbulence, the Bank for International Settlements, known as the central bank for the world’s central banks, said in its latest quarterly report. Financial markets are losing faith in the healing power of central banks and their latest policy weapon - negative interest rates - to boost the world's main economies, the bank said.

The stock market is having a horrible time so far in 2016, with the S&P 500 down more than 9%. Gold, on the other hand, is up nearly 10% year-to-date and hit a four-month high of just under $1200 per ounce on Monday before dipping 0.7% Tuesday to $1189.30. It's a bit of a cliche to say that people turn to gold in times of uncertainty: Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Gold did phenomenally well from 2000-2011 but really suffered after hitting nearly $2000 per ounce in 2011. From 2011 to 2015, the yellow metal pretty much fell in...

Tyler DurdenFebruary 5, 2016) Before this year the lowest level The Baltic Dry Index had reached was 556 in August of 1986 and the highest was in June 2008 at a stunning 11,612. Today saw the freight index hit a new milestone however, crashing through the 300 barrier for the first time ever - at 298, this is almost 50% below the previous record low.Commodities obviously are saying something very different from "the market"...> And as Dana Lyons notes, of course much of the input into the BDI comes from the price of raw materials. Considering the deflationary spiral in...

The Bank of Japan is stepping up its efforts to kick-start the country's struggling economy by taking interest rates into negative territory. The central bank announced Friday that it will introduce an interest rate of minus 0.1% and will go even lower if needed. In theory, negative rates encourage consumers to save less and spend more. They can also weaken a country's currency, helping exporters. ...

As we’ve been warning for quite a while (too long for my taste): the world’s grand experiment with debt has come to an end. And it’s now unraveling. Just in the two weeks since the start of 2016, the US equity markets are down almost 10%. Their worst start to the year in history. Many other markets across the world are suffering worse. If you watched stock prices today, you likely had flashbacks to the financial crisis of 2008. At one point the Dow was down over 500 points, the S&P cracked below key support at 1,900, and the price...

David StockmanTyler Durden 12/18/2015 There is going to be carnage in the casino, and the proof lies in the transcript of Janet Yellen’s press conference. She did not say one word about the real world; it was all about the hypothetical world embedded in the Fed’s tinker toy model of the US economy. Yes, tinker toys are what kids used to play with back in the 1950s and 1960s, and that’s when Janet acquired her school-girl model of the nation’s economy. But since that model is so frightfully primitive, mechanical, incomplete, stylized and obsolete, it tells almost nothing of relevance...

Dec 07, 2015 Raul_I_Meijer As yet another day of headlines shows, see the links and details in today’s Debt Rattle at the Automatic Earth, deflation is visible everywhere, from a 98% drop in EM debt issuance to junk bonds reporting the first loss since 2008 to corporate bonds downgrades to plummeting cattle prices in Kansas to China’s falling demand for iron ore and a whole list of other commodities. The list is endless. It is absolutely everywhere. And it’s there every single day. But how would we know? After all, we’re being told incessantly that deflation equals falling consumer prices....

October 27, 2015 Harry_Dent During World War II, the Fed bought its own bonds to keep interest rates low and demand high enough to finance the war effort. Back then, the Fed’s efforts did what you’d expect: they caused a modest level of inflation. So you’d expect the unprecedented stimulus of today to create substantially higher inflation. In fact, with the greatest money printing in history, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to fear hyperinflation. That’s what most gold bugs fear. It’s what most everyone seems to fear. They’re completely wrong. Inflation is low… will stay low… and there will be no...

So you’d expect the unprecedented stimulus of today to create substantially higher inflation. In fact, with the greatest money printing in history, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to fear hyperinflation. That’s what most gold bugs fear. It’s what most everyone seems to fear. They’re completely wrong. Inflation is low… will stay low… and there will be no hyperinflation to speak of. The money the Fed printed has largely gone into financial speculation. It hasn’t performed any real stimulus efforts by expanding the money supply through lending and spending.

In a world in which the Cold War is a fading memory, North Korea and Cuba endure as museums of communism, so no one will forget how criminally insane it always was. In a world haunted by the specter of persistently falling prices, some countries are creating severe inflation, so we can be grateful for its virtual disappearance. One of the governments providing this public service is that of Venezuela, where the currency has lost so much value that even robbers reject it. A recent carjacking victim told The New York Times his armed captors had no interest in his...

Tyler Durden 10/22/2015 Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog, Whenever we at the Automatic Earth explain, as we must have done at least a hundred times in our existence, that, and why, we refuse to define inflation and deflation as rising or falling prices (only), we always get a lot of comments and reactions implying that people either don’t understand why, or they think it’s silly to use a definition that nobody else seems to use. -More or less- recent events, though, show us once more why we’re right to insist on inflation being defined in...

The math is pretty simple: A lack of purchasing power for consumers has led to a lack of pricing power for companies. When it comes to the U.S. economy big-picture outlook, the ramifications are more complicated, and not particularly pleasant. Wednesday's producer price index reading, showing a monthly decline of 0.5 percent, demonstrates a larger problem: At a time when policymakers are hoping to generate the kind of inflation that would indicate strong growth, the reality is that deflation is looming as the larger threat. Declining prices often would be treated as a net positive by consumers, but income weakness...

Harry_DentSeptember 23, 2015 It’s not enough that jobs are less stable, or that the ones we’re adding are increasingly more part-time… It’s not enough that rapidly growing student loan costs are plaguing more young echo boomers and millennials… It’s not enough that the high costs of education are increasing the inequality gap and making upward mobility impossible… Or that, even after the last crash, housing is still expensive and loans are harder to get… Today, the young generation ALSO has to deal with runaway childcare costs. It’s no wonder many of them aren’t having kids! But I believe much of...