SEMI-MONTHLY FISCAL/MONETARY UPDATE – EVERYTHING’S UNDER CONTROL…SURE! – Believe that and I’ve got a bridge to sell you 🙂

Some economists, stock market strategists, and investment advisors have referred to the current economic situation is “goldilocks”, GDP growing modestly (sub 2%) but about to firm up, inflation under control (also sub 2%), the Fed continuing to “normalize” rates with the latest 25 basis point increase and another scheduled for December. Everything is even promising enough that the Fed is talking about beginning to pare down their $4 trillion balance sheet at the end of this year. (I can’t resist interjecting here that balance sheet reduction remains to be seen and the end of ’17 is a long way off.)

However…..while the financial world is relatively quiet, for the moment, the underlying problems have not gone away. The following chart provides us a simple picture of what Central Banks have “wrought” over the last 8-9 years.

While the US Fed has taken a break from money printing, their slack has been taken up by the ECB, BOJ, BofE, and SNB. Lots of economists have reflected that the appropriate money printing in ’08 saved the world from a financial collapse, and we can’t disprove that, but you can see that  $7-8 trillion has been printed subsequent to early ’09, and the curve now is steep as ever. Wouldn’t it be nice if all we had to do to create prosperity was rely on the Central Banks to provide the cash. We could all stop working, collect, and spend the cash. Unfortunately, goods and services have to be produced at competitive prices if an economy is to flourish. You would think that Central Bankers would understand this, but surgeons “cut” and Central Bankers “print”.  You would think that $11 trillion of new money since 2006 would have stimulated the US (and worldwide) economy rather substantially. That’s an incomprehensible amount of money. (Lebron James makes $40,000,000 per year. It would take him TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY FIVE THOUSAND YEARS to earn $11 trillion.) That’s true, but bringing the discussion back to earth, the result in this case is that US GDP growth has averaged 1.3% from 2007 until 2016, still sub 2% since ’10. It happens that the US economy grew at 1.3% during the US depression of 1930-1939, so I propose that what we have experienced, and are about to experience,  is not “goldilocks”. The Central Banks around the world have been essentially “pushing on a string”.

The same problems exist today that were in place ten years ago, but the numbers are a lot larger. We continue to believe that there is no graceful way to “normalize” the situation. We don’t blame Janet Yellen. She didn’t create this mess. It was the politicians, of both parties, over the last thirty to forty years. We believe that there will be no more than one more rate hike this year (right now an apparent 38% probability for December) but interest rates will still be very low historically, and “real” interest rates will still be negligible, if not negative. As far as reducing the Fed balance sheet, Janet Yellen discussed a modest pace of reduction. If this reduction starts at all, it will be a form of “tightening” that, along with the modest rate increases,  our still fragile economy will not easily withstand. We believe that the current series of interest rate increases, as well as the initiation of the Fed balance sheet reduction, will just be precursors to the next round of stimulus.

We believe that the price of gold, marking time lately, will resume its long term rise, as the next round of stimulus comes into view. This is, after all, what Central Bankers do.