SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: elmatador who wrote (92362)7/10/2012 3:36:25 PM
From: Paxb2u  Respond to of 219648
 
I agree with everything u said, do have my gold and silver but not sure what to do with rest of cash. Don't want everything in 1 basket, but certainly do not want it in neg FED paper---Peace



To: elmatador who wrote (92362)7/10/2012 4:23:11 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum2 Recommendations  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 219648
 
From: russet7/10/2012 3:35:25 PM

of 3414
The last thing the world needs now is a deflationary shock from China

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard EconomicsLast updated: July 9th, 2012

blogs.telegraph.co.uk

China is on the cusp of a deflationary vortex.

This was signalled late last year by the sharpest contraction in the (real) M1 money supply since modern records began. The hard data is now confirming the warnings.

Consumer prices have been falling for the last three months, producer prices have been falling for four months. This is not a food cost story. It is systemic.

"While an economy-wide generalized deflation is yet to be seen, the deflationary spiral looks to have started in some industrial sectors, attesting to considerable stress with the economy. Persistent deflation can be poisonous," said Xianfang Ren from IHS Global Insight in Beijing.

Indeed it can be poisonous, and China already has the twin-afflictions of the deflation malaise: a fast aging nation, and a surfeit of factories and industrial plant.

Meanwhile, Japanese machine tool orders fell 14.8pc in May, the biggest drop since 2001 – when Japan’s deflation began in earnest. The post-Fukushima reconstruction boom has run its course. Asia is turning stone cold.

All engines of the global economy are sputtering at the same time.

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao called for a "proactive fiscal policy" to keep the economy afloat, warning that "downward pressure is still relatively large."

Is this the long-feared hard landing? Of course it is.

Macao’s casino revenue – that closely watched proxy for the Chinese economy – dropped 11pc in June. Commodity stockpiles are grinding ever higher, with coal depots bursting at Tianjin and other key ports.

Zarathustra has a good list here.

The authorities have begun to devalue the yuan – despite protectionist threats from Capitol Hill – the clearest evidence that last year’s carefully planned monetary tightening has slipped control.

The fact that China DELIBERATELY engineered the slowdown changes nothing.

The Fed deliberately popped the Wall Street bubble in 1928 and the Bank of Japan deliberately popped the Nikkei bubble in 1989-1990, only to find that boom-bust deflation can have its own unstoppable momentum.

The problem was the explosive growth of credit in the preceding years. China was no slouch in this area. The IMF’s Zhu Min says loans doubled to almost 200pc of GDP between 2006 and 2011, including off-books lending.
This is roughly twice the intensity of credit growth – around 50 percentage points of GDP – before the US and Japanese blow-offs.

There seems to a near universal assumption that China can pull the levers of the state banking system and set off a fresh credit boom whenever it wants.

Well, perhaps, but loan demand has withered. The big four banks lent just 190bn yuan in June, down from 253bn in May.

"Large banks are all offering money, but no one is taking it," said a Shanghai dealer quoted by Reuters. This is more or less what happened in Japan in the 1990s, what is happening in Europe now. It is what happened to half the world in the 1930s.

The World Bank says China still has plenty of scope for fiscal largesse – cutting taxes and boosting spending – so it should at least avert full depression. If only the West were so lucky.

But at the end of the day, the country is bursting with industrial over-capacity. As Caixin reported recently, eight of the ten largest shipyards did not receive any new orders in the first five months of the year.

Albert Edwards from Societe Generale said the danger now is that China suddenly lurches into a deeper downturn, unleashing a flood of excess goods onto global markets and sending a powerful deflationary impulse across the world.

The global deflation shock of the Asian crisis in 1997 to 1998 caused inflation expectations in the West to fall by 3 percentage points in short order.

The Asian bloc is a much bigger animal today, and the elastic band of China’s credit is stretched further. And this time the West is in fit state to cope. Large parts of the Atlantic system are already disturbingly close to deflation.

Woe betide the world if China does indeed land with a thud. We will then have a synchronised planetary slump for the first time since you know when.



To: elmatador who wrote (92362)7/10/2012 7:27:23 PM
From: THE ANT  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 219648
 
You are saying real estate may inflate as fast as gold.Maybe.Or if we go to the gold standard gold may go up faster.Also if you have high inflation even with negative rates on mortgages houses can go down as the cash flow to make monthly payments is to high---think US in the 1970's



To: elmatador who wrote (92362)7/10/2012 9:08:16 PM
From: Hawkmoon  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 219648
 
What TJ does not know -but me and klaser do- is that as soon as gold skyrocket, trust in money disappears, thus assets will be priced in gold, not in paper money.

That could be true.. But now we have the CB around the world buying gold, especially in China.. Yet the price doesn't seem to be responding of late against the rising USD. I believe I opined on this thread recently that I suspected the CBs were attempting to prop up the price of gold in order to create the illusion of inflation and keeping a lid on USD appreciation.

The following article seems to support my perspective:

zerohedge.com

That said, the USD will eventually top out at some point as asset prices deflate, and Gold/Silver will shine again.. I think that point will come when we see the US short-term Treasuries and CD yields approach negative territory due to European capital flight (we just saw French 3 month rates go negative and no one can pretend that France is economically healthy).

So it will be interesting to see which way Gold goes.. The deflationary trend has to finish its course to the point where investors once again see value in asset prices. But I'm not going to pretend to know what that level will be..

Cash is currently King.. Even if yields go negative, if asset prices decline faster, people are still "making money".

Hawk