Debt draws forward prosperity -- Ambrose Evans Pritchard

 

Money printing getting way ahead of output is the cause of the current inflation

 US GDP last clocked in at $24.883 trillion in 2Q. The total public debt at the end of 2Q is $30.569 trillion.

That's now a mismatch of 123%, up from 105% in 2013, ten years ago, when the total public debt was $16.8 trillion and the GDP $16 trillion.

In other words, the debt has grown by 82% over the period while the GDP has grown by only 56%.

The debt represents spending money we do not have, and the increase in the debt represents the spending of more money we do not have. We simply create it out of thin air to facilitate the process. It doesn't matter what form it takes, whether in the form of Treasury securities or physical money.

Spending go whirr, Fed money machine go whirr, debt go whirr, and eventually inflation go whirr. Inflation is the payback for going into the debt for which we refused to pay at the time.

Debt draws forward prosperity . . .

But it should come as no surprise that the future we robbed has no prosperity in it, now that we have arrived there. 

And people wonder where the inflation came from.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard gives the microphone on Ukraine to the weak sisters and has-beens Henry Kissinger and Eric Cantor

Dr Kissinger said the war must not be allowed to drag on for much longer, and came close to calling on the West to bully Ukraine into accepting negotiations on terms that fall very far short of its current war aims. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself,” he said. ... Mr Cantor said the US was in danger of overplaying its hand. “We have got to have multilateral support. We are already being accused of weaponising the world’s reserve currency. Even allies and friends are starting to ask, if you are using it in this way, we too could one day be subject to these sanctions,” he said.

More.

A return to the status quo ante would mean pretending Russia's war crimes against Ukrainian civilians never happened. Kissinger only vainly imagines that that clock can be turned back now. Putin must go, and Russia must pay. Anything less means the West stands for nothing important.

As for Eric Cantor, the clock ticks on but only money continues to matter to him. He was never serious about repealing Obamacare and stopping illegal immigration or amnesty for illegals while he was in office. He was wisely toppled while at the height of his powers in the US House by his fellow Republicans in a primary (VA-7), for crying out loud.

It's characteristic of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard to showcase Cantor's hand-wringing. He's done a lot of that in his own writing over the years. He ends this one worried about a European oil shock later this year.

Things like that happen when the false promise of libertarian cooperation with despots for energy comes a cropper. Europe has only itself to blame.

Toronto Canada is the new crucible for molten salt reactors

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports here:

Canada is now the crucible for molten salt reactors. Terrestrial Energy in Toronto is the most advanced such project in the world with an integral molten salt reactor, and is already pre-licensed. "We can bring our reactor to the commercial market in the 2020s," said the chief executive Simon Irish.

"Once we put a shovel to the ground we can build it in three to four years. The parts can be manufactured on a mass scale.  We believe we can produce power for 40-50 US dollars per megawatt hour," he said.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is voting for Brexit because EMU is the greatest economic crime of modern times

From his remarks, here, where it's everywhere else a wonder that he was able to work up the nerve to side with the Leavers:

There has been no truth and reconciliation commission for the greatest economic crime of modern times. We do not know who exactly was responsible for anything because power was exercised through a shadowy interplay of elites in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Paris, and still is.

German leftist critic of Trump's America First policy proclaimed the death of rapacious English and American free markets in 2008

Boltneck shakes hands mit Steinmeier in 2014

It took less than one day after Trump's speech for Germany to wet its pants. First VW kills profits, and now Trump is going to cost Germany a fortune. Steinmeier here went on record almost immediately criticizing Trump's remarks as incoherent.

Here the leftist was prematurely celebrating eight years ago about the death of right-wing economics in the West:

[T]he Social Democrats (SPD) are shifting hard Left to protect their flank. "The rule of the radical market ideology that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan has ended with a loud bang," said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister and SPD candidate for chancellor next year. "We need a comprehensive new start, so we can reestablish our society on fresh foundations. People create value, not locusts," he said.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is rightly exasperated by the oligarchy's attempt to criminalize Yanis Varoufakis

Here:

'It has come to this. The first finance minister of a eurozone country to draw up contingency plans for a possible euro exit is under investigation for treason.

'Greece's chief prosecutor is examining criminal charges against a five-man "working group" in the country's finance ministry for the sin of designing a "Plan B", a parallel system of euro liquidity and bank payments that could - in extremis - lead to a return of the drachma.

'It is hard to see how a monetary union held together by judicial power, coercion and fear in this way can have a future in any of Europe's ancient nation states.

'The criminalisation of any Grexit debate shuts off the option of an orderly return to the drachma, even though there is a high probability - some say a near certainty - that the latest EMU loan package for Greece will prove unworkable and precipitate the country's exit from the single currency within a year. As a matter of practical statecraft, this is sheer madness.'

Someone gets to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: On the weekend Schauble was a devil, but now he's a misunderstood genius!

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard erupted on Twitter on the weekend when Schauble leaked the Grexit memo in Brussels:

Now Schauble is a misunderstood genius who had it right all along:

'Wolfgang Schauble is one of the very few figures who has behaved honourably in this latest chapter. ... [H]e is entirely right to argue that a velvet divorce and an orderly exit from the euro for five years would be a “better way” for Greece, as he did on Germany radio this morning. ... Mr Schauble has been pushing for Grexit since 2012, and probably earlier. He genuinely thinks it would better for all concerned. When he floated his plan, he meant it. ... Even if [Merkel] was irritated by the Schauble paper – and her skirmishes with the irascible finance minister are legendary – she appears to have latched on to it as a useful negotiating ploy. The trick worked. It terrified Mr Tsipras into submission. ... Mr Schauble’s original and honourable intentions have been entirely misunderstood. The world’s verdict is that Germany's benign and enlightened statecraft in Europe over the past 60 years has given way to Bild Zeitung reflexes, the hegemony of crude populism. One can only feel sympathy for German diplomats who must clean up the mess and explain how this tangle of conflicting agendas spun escaped control.'

Greece left in a permanent debt trap under neo-colonial rule after historic weekend showdown in Brussels

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here:

The crushed Syriza leader [Alexis Tsipras] must sell a settlement that leaves Greece in a permanent debt trap, under neo-colonial control, and so economically fragile that it is almost guaranteed to crash into a fresh crisis in the next global downturn or European recession.

On GDP Mish sounds just like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard five years ago

Here is Mish in 2015:

"Effectively we have borrowed current growth from the future. Looking ahead, growth surprises will be predominantly on the downside for years to come."

Here is Ambrose in 2010:

"Debt draws forward prosperity, which leads to powerful overhang effects that are not properly incorporated into Fed models. That is the key reason why Ben Bernanke’s Fed was caught flat-footed when the crisis hit, and kept misjudging it until the events started to spin out of control."

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says Britain's George Osborne is full of fiscal baloney

George Osborne is in today's Wall Street Journal here, bragging about Britain's fiscal discipline, among other things:

"In the U.K., faced four years ago with a record budget deficit of over 10%, we set out a clear deficit-reduction plan and steadily implemented it. The challenging spending totals I set out for the British government have been consistently achieved year after year."

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has heard it all before, and says baloney, here:

On the fiscal front, Britain has a deficit of 5pc of GDP a full five years into the economic recovery, when growth is running at 3pc and should be generating a windfall of tax revenue. This is prima facie evidence of a chronic reliance on state borrowing to perpetuate a consumption model.

The deficit is 4.4pc in France, 1.5pc in Italy and 0.2pc in Germany. The US deficit - once similar to ours - has dropped to 2.8pc of GDP on a quarterly basis. Britain sticks out like a sore thumb. ... 

For all the superficial likeness, the Anglo-Saxon growth stories in Britain and America have nothing in common. The US has cut its current account deficit from 6pc to 1.9pc of GDP. It is on track to achieve energy independence by 2018, igniting a revival of its chemical, plastics, glass and steel industries along the way. Luck has played its part but one recovery is durable, the other is literally on borrowed time.

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Methinks Ambrose overestimates US GDP in his analysis to arrive at his rosy 2.8% deficit, and is too sanguine about the future of Republican spending restraint now that Cromnibus has passed, but you get the idea . . . Politicians spinning tales.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard oddly unaware high CO2 coincides with 17yr+ pause in global warming

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here:

[Shale] has whittled down the US current account deficit, now just 2pc of GDP [approximately $340 billion?]. Cheap gas costs - a third of EU prices and a quarter of Asian prices - has brought US industry back from near death, perhaps for long enough to give America another two decades of superpower ascendancy. But making money out of shale is another matter.

Even if the fossil companies navigate the next global downturn more or less intact, they are in the untenable position of booking vast assets that can never be burned without violating global accords on climate change.

The IEA says that two-thirds of their reserves become fictional if there is a binding deal limit to CO2 levels to 450 particles per million (ppm), the maximum deemed necessary to stop the planet rising more than two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. It crossed 400 ppm threshold this spring, the highest in more than 800,000 years.

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Ambrose's problem is that he has insufficient skepticism: There is no binding deal, and we couldn't stop developing nations from spewing even if we wanted to. Ambrose has become a co-dependent in the climate scare and is trafficking in last year's news:

If CO2 was at the same level as of 800,000 years ago, why are we cooler by 5-10 degrees and sea levels lower by 75-120 feet? This would indicate there’s no CO2/temp/sea level relationship.

Indeed, as the picture has unfolded in the last year, we are well past the 17 year milestone for no temperature anomaly. All that extra CO2 is doing nothing, except maybe producing too much vegetation.

So I bought a lawn tractor to mow it all down.

24 from France's National Front elected to European parliament, 24 from England's UKIP

In each case, nationalist parties won a clear plurality of seats from their countries' respective delegations, which are only 74 and 73 strong to begin with, respectively. It is a strong vote of displeasure from the citizens of France and the UK in sending nearly a third of their parliamentarians from parties of the right to raise hell over the Euro.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks this means it's curtains for the EU, here:

The EU authorities are now in a near hopeless situation. The logic of EMU is a further erosion of nation states. The "Two Pack", "Six Pack" and "Fiscal Compact" are all coming into force, and national regulators are losing control over their banking systems. The euro will inevitably lurch from crisis to crisis without some form of fiscal union and debt pooling. Yet voters have just let forth a primordial scream against any further transfers of power.

Jim Cramer reads fellow Democrat Tim Geithner and suddenly discovers frugality: both men are only five years behind the curve

THE MARKET IS UP 11% SINCE CRAMER SAID SELL IN SEPTEMBER 2013

Jim Cramer, quoted here:

"I think America's gone frugal. Just like our parents, or grandparents, or even great-grandparents changed their patterns of behavior somewhat radically after the Great Depression, I'm thinking we've changed ours, too."

Here's a newsflash for you Jim: America went frugal already more than five years ago. Why do you think things are the way they are?

See Mish's "The Age of Frugality" here, from October 19, 2008, which noted that frugality had finally (!) made the cover of a magazine after he'd been talking about it since at least March:

"Frugality has finally made front page. BusinessWeek is commenting on The New Age of Frugality."

Cramer thinks there's a new opportunity in the "new" frugality. Remember, this is coming from the same guy who told you in October 2008 to get out of the market if you needed your money in the next five years. If you took his advice, you missed one of the most incredible bull markets in the history of investing. Unfortunately, being five years behind Jim doesn't realize we've already reaped the opportunity of the new frugality.

The future?

I'm still with Chris Whalen and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: DECADES of economic shrinkage ahead. We've already enjoyed the prosperity which the debt we racked up provided. Civilizationally speaking: It's time to pay for all that.

Sorry old boy.

Unnumber'd Maladies each Joint invade,

Lay Siege to Life and press the dire Blockade;

But unextinguish'd Av'rice still remains,

And dreaded Losses aggravate his Pains;

He turns, with anxious Heart and cripled Hands,

His Bonds of Debt, and Mortgages of Lands;

Or views his Coffers with suspicious Eyes,

Unlocks his Gold, and counts it till he dies.

-- Samuel Johnson, 1749

China Ups The Ante In The Race For Thorium Reactors

The earth is loaded with thorium, but so is the moon.

The South China Morning Post reports here:

A team of scientists in Shanghai had originally been given 25 years to try to develop the world's first nuclear plant using the radioactive element thorium as fuel rather than uranium, but they have now been told they have 10, the researchers said. ... 

Professor Li, director of the project's molten salt chemistry and engineering technology division, said the smog crisis had provided huge impetus for their research. ...

Western countries such as the United States have experimented with thorium reactors but gave up on the technology because of the engineering difficulties.

Analysts have also suggested the US lost interest in thorium as a fuel for reactors because uranium was a more suitable material to produce nuclear weapons.

Interest, however, has been revived in recent years and research projects have been established in several countries, including the United States, France and Japan.

"This is definitely a race," said Li. China "faces fierce competition from overseas and to get there first will not be an easy task", he said.

h/t Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Total Credit Market Debt Owed Has Grown Just 16% In 6 Years, The Smallest Increase On Record

Between July 2007 and July 2013, total credit market debt owed (TCMDO) has grown just 16%, by barely $8 trillion. It's the smallest increase on record for any six year period going back to when the data series begins in October 1949.

Going back six years from 2013 is instructive because the summer of 2007 was when the level of TCMDO last doubled (going back to the summer of 1999), and if you go back to the beginning of the data series you find doubling times of as few as 6 years in length to as many as almost 12. In other words, in a period of rapid credit expansion TCMDO might have conceivably doubled in our last six year period, but it hasn't. We sure could have used it. Instead it has for all intents and purposes collapsed, growing just $8 trillion from $50.032 trillion in 2007 to $58.082 trillion now.

From humble beginnings in 1949 when TCMDO stood at $400 billion, the level went on to double in the summers of 1961, 1970, 1977, 1983, 1989, 1999 and 2007. In order to double again (to a level of $102 trillion) by, say, 2019 (12 years from 2007), we're going to have to pick up the pace just a little . . .. Unless, of course, this debt-based economy has reached the limits of what it can do, which may be what the last six years is trying to tell us. 

Here's the data for TCMDO for the six year periods going back to July 1953:

7/1/13 $58.1 trillion (up  16%)

7/1/07 $50.0 trillion (up  74%)

7/1/01 $28.8 trillion (up  58%)

7/1/95 $18.3 trillion (up  45%)

7/1/89 $12.6 trillion (up 102%)

7/1/83 $06.3 trillion (up  97%)

7/1/77 $03.2 trillion (up  87%)

7/1/71 $01.7 trillion (up  57%)

7/1/65 $01.1 trillion (up  49%)

7/1/59 $00.7 trillion (up  42%)

7/1/53 $00.5 trillion.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard formulated it in 2011, "debt draws forward prosperity". In other words, we've already enjoyed the prosperity years ago which should be present today by literally pulling it back there from here, and now that we're here, well, there's nothing here, except for a measly 0.97% real average GDP report for the six years 2007-2012.

Time to pay.

Forget The "Threat" Of Deflation. Its Crushing REALITY Means Monetarism Is Doomed.

Galactic hitchhikers know this is the answer to everything.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Lars Christensen, here, think deflation is only an omnipresent threat:

The world is still in a contained depression. Sliding commodities tell us global money is if anything too tight. "There is a threat of deflation almost everywhere. A lot of central banks will have to follow the Bank of Japan, whatever they say now," said Lars Christensen from Danske Bank.

The era of money printing is young yet. Gold will have its day again.

I couldn't agree less. The threat isn't everywhere. The reality is everywhere.

Total credit market debt outstanding (TCMDO) for the five years ended on July 1, 2012 was up a paltry $5.83 trillion. Yes, I said paltry. For monetarism to continue working as it has in the past, TCMDO needs to double on average every 8.25 years. That's the historical experience of America going back to the beginning of the post-war. At the current rate since 2007, however, it's going to take until the year 2049 for TCMDO to double from July 1, 2007.

We've had periods of doubling as short as six years for TCMDO, and periods as long as 11.5 years, but at the current rate over the last five years continued into the indefinite future it's going to take 42 years to double. 42 years. Not 11.5 years. And not 6 years. 42 YEARS. America has hit a brick wall.

People who talk about an L-shaped recovery and decades of economic shrinkage ahead may not appreciate quite adequately enough just how right they are.

Russia Was Just The Excuse For The Eurogroup To Steal From Cyprus

So says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here, for the UK Telegraph:

"First they purloin the savings and bank deposits in Laiki and the Bank of Cyprus, including the working funds of the University of Cyprus, and thousands of small firms hanging on by their fingertips. Then they seize three quarters of the country’s gold reserves, making it ever harder for Cyprus to extricate itself from EMU at a later date. ...

"Cypriots are learning what it means to be a member of monetary union when things go badly wrong. The crisis costs have suddenly jumped from €17bn to €23bn, and the burden of finding an extra €6bn will fall on Cyprus alone. ...

"The workhouse treatment of Cyprus is nevertheless remarkable. The creditor powers walked away from their fresh pledges for an EMU banking union by whipping up largely bogus allegations of Russian money-laundering in Nicosia. A Council of Europe by a British prosecutor has failed to validate the claims. The EU authorities have gone to great lengths to insist that Cyprus is a 'special case', but I fail to see what is special about it. There is far more Russian money – laundered or otherwise – in the Netherlands. The banking centres of Ireland and Malta are just as large as a share of GDP. Luxembourg’s banking centre is at least four times more leveraged to the economy. ...

"The original plan in Cyprus – approved by the Eurogroup, but rejected by the Cypriot parliament – was to steal the money from any bank regardless of its health, and from small depositors regardless of the €100,000 guarantee. They have shown their character. The Eurogroup don’t give a damn about moral hazard. They are thieves."

The Gas Hydrates Revolution Will Dwarf The One In Shale Oil/Gas

And the desperate Japanese are leading the way to its successful recovery within 5 years.

So says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for the UK Telegraph, here:

'The immediate discoveries in Japan's Eastern Tankai Trough are thought to hold 40 trillion cubic feet of methane, equal to eleven years gas imports. The company described the gas as "burnable ice", saying the trick is free it from a crystaline cage of water molecules by lowering the pressure. Tokyo hopes to bring the gas to market on a commercial scale within five years.'

The stuff is all over the world, especially along coastlines of continents, deep, deep down, in quantities double the known fossil fuel varieties.

The future is bright!

Follow the link for more charts and discussion.

Central Banks In 2012 Bought 536 Tonnes Of Gold, The Most In Half A Century

So reports Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here:

"[C]entral banks around the world bought more bullion last year in terms of tonnage than at any time in almost half a century.

"They added a net 536 tonnes in 2012 as they diversified fresh reserves away from the four fiat suspects: dollar, euro, sterling, and yen."

In dollar terms with gold at $1,600 the ounce, 536 tonnes is an allocation of roughly $30.26 billion to gold by central banks in 2012, conservatively speaking.

To put central bank demand in 2012 in its context, compare this from Reuters, here:


Jewellery buying, the largest demand segment, fell 4.4 percent to 1,885 tonnes [in 2012]. Global coin minting is forecast to have dropped to a four-year low of 199 tonnes, down 19 percent from the previous year. ... On the supply side of the market, mine supply is expected to tick up 1.5 percent to 1,389 tonnes in the first half [of 2013].

In other words, falling demand in jewellery and coin minting was offset to some extent by central bank buying in 2012, supporting the price of gold, which began the year near $1,600 and ended it near $1,650.

The bankers obviously saw 2012 as a buying opportunity in the wake of weak demand.

Separately, as I noted here, central bank purchases year over year in March 2012 had ramped up to 400 tons from 156 in the prior period.

Predictions last summer, when prices were at their 2012 nadir, that central bank purchases going forward would come in at roughly 375 tons max obviously underestimated the reality significantly, way over 40%.