By MN Gordon
Flowing Toward the Great Depression
All remaining doubts concerning the place the U.S. economy and its tangled web of international credits and debts is headed were clarified this week. On Monday, Mark Yusko, CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, told CNBC that:
“…we’re flowing toward the path of 1928-29 when Hoover was president. Now Trump is president. Both were presidents with no experience who come in with a Congress that is all Republican, lots of big promises, lots of things that don’t happen and the fall is when people realize, ‘Wait, it hasn’t played out the way we thought.’ [By the fall], we’ll have a lot more evidence of declining growth. Growth has been slipping.”
A famous bad juju moment – the crash of 1929. Two of the annotations require a bit of elaboration. The so-called “Babson break” was a large down day on September 5 1929, two days after the market had peaked. Roger Babson was an entrepreneur (he inter alia invented the parking meter), an economic theorist and a famous skeptic who had already voiced doubts about the stock market bubble of the 1920s on numerous occasions before that day. This was the first time the market didn’t shrug his warnings off, and although it recovered most of the loss on the next trading day, it was the beginning of the end. “Fisher” refers to economist Irving Fisher, who famously announced “stocks have reached a permanent plateau” two weeks before the top. Fisher was a very wealthy man at the time, but lost the bulk of his fortune in the ensuing bear market. Although he couldn’t forecast his way out of a paper bag, his work has become the foundation of much of what is considered “orthodox” economic theory these days. His contemporaries Hayek and Mises, who like Babson warned of the coming crash, are shunned by the prevailing central planning paradigm. Hayek did so in the spring of 1929, when he said that there was no chance of a recovery in Europe unless interest rates decreased, which would require the collapse of the boom in the US; he added that this was very likely going to happen later that year. Mises was offered a well-remunerated post at Creditanstalt in the summer of 1929 and declined the offer. When asked why, he replied that he thought a great crash was coming soon and he didn’t want his name to be associated with it. Of course, Mises himself would probably point out that “prediction” is not a task of economic science. We just wanted to note in passing that these great economic theorists were also quite adept at sussing out what nearly everybody else missed at the time. Causal-realist economic theory does provide some advantages. [PT] – click to enlarge.
If you recall, autumn of 1929 is when the U.S. stock market commenced a multi-year swan dive and the economy commenced a decade long Great Depression. This is the path Yusko believes we’re on. To be clear, this …read more
Source:: Acting Man
The post Adventures in Quantitative Tightening appeared first on Junior Mining Analyst.