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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

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To: mishedlo who wrote (69225)9/19/2007 4:16:08 PM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (1) of 116555
 
This is the inflationary problem which occurs on the way to de-leveraging.

The Fed is openly and aggressively pursuing a policy of punishing dollar holders. But what's really amazing in all of this is everyone is cheering Fed intervention in the free markets when that is the root of the problem.

The devaluation of a currency leads to the very de-leveraging the central bank is trying to fight - because leverage is a function of incomes and interest rates. If you fight the de-leveraging with additional money and debt, inflation sends interest rates up, making debt less supportable. So the de-leveraging of too much debt relative to income happens with or without new money creation. This is the important difference between money and debt which Monetarists don't acknowledge.

As this de-leveraging happens, equities, bonds, and many hard assets, such as real estate, lose value, but not as much when measured in the local currency.

We see these events in Zimbabwe, where Zimbabwean real estate, stocks, and bonds have become nearly worthless - but not necessarily in the greatly devalued Zimbabwean Dollar. The less of a necessity an asset is, the lower its value, even in the local currency.

The end result of Monetarist nonsense - if the Dow 30 rises to 20,000 but the value of the US Dollar declines by 2/3 does it really lose value if the stockholder doesn't understand the concept? They discover this when they come to spend their "gains". Worse still with a 2/3 Dollar decline and a flat or declining market.

The result is similar to the old BBC program "Are you being served?" where store clerks must walk to work because they can't afford the bus - and other similar scenarios from post-WWII England when the Pound declined precipitously in value. Quality items were not on offer as their price would make them unsalable, so too-long sleeves on ill-made suits were promised to "ride up with wear".
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