Fed Laundering Treasury Purchases to Disguise What’s Happening-Paul Craig Roberts - USA Watchdog - Greg Hunter - May 14, 2014 - In his latest article, former Assistant Treasury Secretary Dr. Paul Craig Roberts says, “The Fed is the great deceiver.” Why is he making this shocking accusation? The reason is tiny Belgium’s whopping purchase of $141 billion in Treasury bonds earlier this year. Dr. Roberts explains, “We know that Belgium didn’t have any money to buy $141 billion worth of bonds over a three month period. That sum comes to 29% of the Belgium GDP. So, they don’t have a surplus in their budget that is 29% of their GDP, and they don’t have trade or current account surplus in that amount. In fact, everything is in the red. Their budget deficit is in the red, and their trade and current accounts are in the red. So, Belgium didn’t have the money, and yet, they managed to pick up $141.2 billion in U.S. Treasuries over a three month period. So, where did they get the money?” Dr. Roberts, who holds a PhD in economics, goes on to say, “We know their central bank couldn’t have printed euros to buy the bonds with because the Belgium central bank can’t print euros. Belgium is part of the euro system and has lost the ability to create its own money. So, the only source for that kind of money would have been the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve thought it needed to hide the fact it was buying $141 billion in bonds over a three month period when it was officially reducing or tapering the quantitative easing down to $65 billion. It didn’t want to have to admit it was really purchasing $112 billion a month, almost double the announced purchases.”
If Economic Cycle Theorists Are Correct, 2015 To 2020 Will Be Pure Hell For The United States - Michael Snyder - May 12th, 2014 - Does the economy move in predictable waves, cycles or patterns? There are many economists that believe that it does, and if their projections are correct, the rest of this decade is going to be pure hell for the United States. Many mainstream economists want nothing to do with economic cycle theorists, but it should be noted that economic cycle theories have enabled some analysts to correctly predict the timing of recessions, stock market peaks and stock market crashes over the past couple of decades. Of course none of the theories discussed below is perfect, but it is very interesting to note that all of them seem to indicate that the U.S. economy is about to enter a major downturn. So will the period of 2015 to 2020 turn out to be pure hell for the United States? We will just have to wait and see. One of the most prominent economic cycle theories is known as "the Kondratieff wave". It was developed by a Russian economist named Nikolai Kondratiev, and as Wikipedia has noted, his economic theories got him into so much trouble with the Russian government that he was eventually executed because of them...
The Demographic Cliff: How to Survive and Prosper During the Great Deflation of 2014-2019 (2014) - Amazon List - Bestselling author and financial guru Harry Dent shows why we’re facing a “great deflation” after five years of desperate stimulus — and what to do about it now.
Throughout his long career as an economic forecaster, Harry Dent has relied on a not-so-secret weapon: demographics. Studying the predictable things people do as they age is the ultimate tool for understanding trends. For instance, Dent can tell a client exactly when people will spend the most on potato chips. And he can explain why our economy has risen and fallen with the peak spending of generations, and why we now face a growing demographic cliff with the accelerating retirement of the Baby Boomers around the world. Dent predicted the impact of the Boomers hitting their highest growth in spending in the 1990s, when most economists saw the United States declining. And he anticipated the decline of Japan in the 1990s, when economists were proclaiming it would overtake the U.S. economy. But now, Dent argues, the fundamental demographics have turned against the United States and will hit more countries ahead. Inflation rises when a larger than usual block of younger people enter the workforce, and it wanes when large numbers of older people retire, downsize their homes, and cut their spending. The mass retirement of the Boomers won’t just hold back inflation; it and massive debt deleveraging will actually cause deflation—weakening the economy the most from 2014 into 2019. Dent explores the implications of his controversial predictions. He offers advice on retirement planning, health care, real estate, education, investing, and business strategies. For instance . . .
- BUSINESSES should get lean and mean now. Identify segments that you can clearly dominate and sell off or shut down others. If you don’t, the economy will do it for you, more painfully and less profitably.
- INVESTORS should sell stocks by mid-January 2014 and look to buy them back in 2015 or later at a Dow as low as 5,800.
- FAMILIES should wait to buy real estate in areas where home prices have gone back to where the bubble started in early 2000.
- GOVERNMENTS need to stop the endless stimulus that creates more bubbles and kills the middle class, and should assist in restructuring the unprecedented debt bubble of 1983–2008.
HARRY DENT: America Is Headed Off The 'Demographic Cliff' And Another Crisis Is Near - Business Insider - Steven Perlberg - December 12, 2013
Here are some of his main points:
- Young people cause inflation because they "cost everything and produce nothing." But young people eventually "begin to pay off when they enter the workforce and become productive new workers (supply) and higher-spending consumers (demand)."
- Unfortunately, the U.S. reached its demographic "peak spending" from 2003-2007 and is headed for the "demographic cliff." Germany, England, Switzerland are all headed there too. Then China will be the first emerging market to fall off the cliff, albeit in a few decades. The world is getting older.
- The U.S. stock market will crash. "Our best long-term and intermediate cycles suggest another slowdown and stock crash accelerating between very early 2014 and early 2015, and possibly lasting well into 2015 or even 2016. The worst economic trends due to demographics will hit between 2014 and 2019. The U.S. economy is likely to suffer a minor or major crash by early 2015 and another between late 2017 and late 2019 or early 2020 at the latest."
- "The everyday consumer never came out of the last recession." The rich are the ones feeling great and spending money, as asset prices (not wages) are aided by monetary stimulus.
- The U.S. and Europe are headed in the same direction as Japan, a country still in a "coma economy precisely because it never let its debt bubble deleverage," Dent argues. "The only way we will not follow in Japan's footsteps is if the Federal Reserve stops printing new money."
- "The reality is stark, when dyers start to outweigh buyers, the market changes." It all comes down to an aging population, Dent writes. "Fewer spenders, borrowers, and investors will be around to participate in the next boom."
- The U.S. has a crazy amount of debt and "economists and politicians have acted like we can just wave a magic wand of endless monetary injections and bailouts and get over what they see as a short-term crisis." But the problem, Dent says, is long-term and structural — demographics.
- Businesses can "dominate the years to come" by focusing on cash and cash flow, being "lean and mean," deferring major capital expenditures, selling nonstrategic real estate, and firing weak employees now.
- The big four challenges in the years ahead will be 1) private and public debt 2) health care and retirement entitlements 3) authoritarian governance around the globe and 4) environmental pollution that threatens the global economy.
High Frequency Trading And Artificial Bubbles - Harry Dent - May 15, 2014
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