When one of the world’s largest fixed income investment funds goes long US Treasuries this only means one thing – they are betting on sustained deflation. After spiking in the early spring the Treasury yields are slowly grinding down again. The 30-year Treasury is now yielding a little above 4% which is a long term low.
Deflation is the contraction (reduction) of money and credit. It occurs when the economic system is carrying too much debt to be supported by the level of income generated by economic activity. It occurs because too much debt has been incurred to create unproductive assets that don’t generate income. Deflation is a corrective process, it’s simply the market (you and I) not being able to service debt, so we must forfeit.
China is reportedly loading up on US treasuries in the face of weakening dollar. This means they are quite happy to collect low interest payments on their massive holdings of US Treasuries for years to come and are not concerned about dollars weakening at the same time. This sound deflationary to me.
The just released privately owned Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds report for September 17th, 2009 shows that the second quarter of 2009 brought the greatest credit collapse of all time (http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/current/z1r-3.pdf).
This analytical research piece from FDIC from February 10, 2005 makes quite interesting and amusing read now in September of 2009. The main premise of this article is that booms are not always followed by a bust. We now know it is nonsense. What goes up must come down, especially if it is not based on fundamentals. The laws of physics have already proven the quasi educated Federal clowns to be wrong, but that is not stopping them from trying to blow another bubble, or rather reflate the one that just burst in pretty much every asset class.
By that measure if we were to take the Q1 2009 reported US GDP of $14,097.2 billion and divide Q1 2009 total US debt level of $60 Trillion by that GDP number we would get an astonishing record Debt to GDP ratio of 425%.
Quite a sensible article from an MSM source, Telegraph of UK, that aptly discusses the real state of things on the Central Banks’ front of deflationary fighting and suggests several solutions out of this global economic crisis. I, however, do not agree with the proposed solution ouf of indebtedness problem that we the people should pay down the debts as the author puts it “very slowly, by sweat and toil”. This contradicts the very natural economic self-interest of the majority of hundreds of millions of people that were either duped into borrowing by financial wizards or had to do it as they saw no other way of being able to afford things as the wages stagnated for decades. No, I propose to default on all the debts, walk away and let the owners of this world financial system have it. I in essense call for a debt revolt, stick it to them and let them be crushed under their own debts.
One important aspect of this mechanism that is seldom mentioned is that the modern debt inflation implies that debt is never payed back and that every year it increases by at least the amount of interest. That means that millions of borrowers simply borrow more to pay off previous principal + interest as dutiful debt slaves they are. That is why debt levels are roughly doubling every decade or so. But what happens when debt growth stops? It is not just that nobody is taking on more debt, the actual principal is being destroyed either via defaults or pay downs. That is, if level of debt is staying constant that means that the principal is actually shrinking by the rate of interest, roughly speaking. This is very deflationary in and of itself. And this is what the privately owned Federal Reserve statistics are showing with regards to most privately held debt in USA. More precisely the consumer and other private debt outstanding is actually shrinking since the beginning of 2009 according the reports that are regularly published by this privately owned Federal Reserve and can be verified on its own website.
