Jotapay wrote:I read an interesting thread on TF which got me thinking. Once the current deleveraging is complete, that is when semi-hyper-inflation will most likely occur, a la Peter Schiff. Here are some questions:
1. Do you believe this to be true?
2. When will deleveraging be complete?
If true, this will be the time when you will want to have already bought commodities (food, ammo, medicine, PMs), because their price will skyrocket and cash will be worth much less.
Background info:
Treasuries Fall as U.S. May Announce $60 Billion of Debt Sales
March 4 (Bloomberg) -- Treasuries fell, extending the worst losses in five years, on speculation the U.S. will announce plans tomorrow to sell $60 billion of debt next week as it borrows record amounts to spur the economy.
It's true deleveraging will eventually complete, or hit a bottom. The problem right now is that the 'natural' economic process of deleveraging (read, debt contraction / deflation) is being thwarted by the Federal government. I should specify - they are *trying* to thwart it, unsuccessfully.
The 1.2 trillion or so the US Gov't spent in 2008 pales in comparison to the 10+ trillion lost in 2008 alone ( 3.3 trillion in home equity, 6.9 in the stock market). This doesn't even take into account multiple incidents like Madoff (50 billion), bondholders of defunct or soon to be defunct companies, etc. My guess is that the real amount lost by Dec 31 2008 was more like 12 trillion. Now in March, the numbers may be hitting close to 15 trillion in lost in equity of various sorts. Another 800 billion has little chance of reversing that kind of meltdown.
The mechanism that has been and is being used to create the bailout money is once again debt. Rather than letting the debt out there simply go bad and having the system reset itself, we are trying to fight a deflationary debt bubble collapse by creating more debt.
In short, this is only extending the amount of time it takes for this cycle to work itself out. We are likely to have some quarter or two of positive growth where people think things are ok, only for things to slide yet again.
The fiat currency argument for hyperinflation has a lot of basis in fact, but you've also got to keep in mind the time horizon. I would term most of the stable or high flying commodities (there are only a few, gold and oil right now) as bubbles themselves. People have it in their mind that gold is safe, and oil will go up. This is because they are thinking about the last major recession(s) - 1974 and 1981. This is not the last major recession, this is something different from that but not at all new either. These bubbles in oil and gold will collapse imo, and I don't think that is too far off. My thought is that oil will collapse this summer, and gold shortly afterwards.
At some point, the Fed may indeed start printing money without debt backing due to popular opinion and political pressure, use it to make mass purchases or refunds of some kind to tall taxpayers, and cause inflation to kick off. Things will have to get a lot worse before then. The general public opinion will have to reverse from 'you're spending too much money' to 'do something, things are too bad' - along with some serious arm twisting at the Fed. I think anything like that is at least a year away, and probably several years out.