Since the global financial crisis started in earnest in 2008, there has been a debate raging in economic circles. Is the economy experiencing inflation or deflation?
The first consideration in solving this riddle is to agree on terms. Rising or falling prices at your local grocery store is 'price inflation' but not inflation as defined in terms of an expanding money supply.* In other words, retail prices moving up and down are the secondary effects of an expanding or contracting money supply; the primary component in understanding the 'flations.'
Getting back to what happened in 2008, when the markets hit the skids, the government reacted by increasing the money supply; just as they did after the 1987 crash, the Long Term Capital Management crisis, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and the sub-prime crash. But unlike any of those instances, the money supply kept shrinking and prices kept deflating (notwithstanding the price of a few items).
At first it looked like the liquidity stimulus was going to revive the economy and there was an anemic bounce in 2009, but that death rattle has now expired and the primary trend of falling real estate prices, falling wages, and deteriorating bank balance sheets has reasserted itself and threatens to take the economy down again dramatically (read: depression). The question of a 'double dip' is misleading. The economy started down a depressionary slide in 2008 and hasn't looked back.
Will we ever see inflation?
If we're talking about the next 5 to 10 years, the deflationists don't think so. They point to the rise in the bond market and the relatively strong performance of the US dollar. While the inflationists -- licking their wounds after being wrong for years -- believe they will be right eventually.
My view is that both camps are basically wrong.
Understand Price Discovery, or lack of it.
Price Discovery -- the result of buyers and sellers simultaneously transacting in the market with the result being Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand' -- means goods and services move around in the economy at mutually advantageous prices for all. It also means that everyone holding similar items have a benchmark or 'price signal' that tells them what these items are worth.
It is my thesis that the inflation, deflation debate is flawed because we no longer have reliable price signals. The overwhelming domination of program trading on various exchanges has fundamentally changed the way prices are created and represented in the economy. All 'efficient market' theories are dead.
In place of reliable price signals (based on the supply and demand of buying and selling) we have price signals that are generated by computer algorithms; i.e., computers executing program trading, high frequency trading and algorithmic trading -- that account for up to 70% of the trading activity on the NYSE (or 100%, if you consider any shares traded -- not involved in program trading -- can't buck the pricing monopoly of the computers).
Program traders have a virtually infinite line of credit, pay virtually zero commissions, and are backed by banks on Wall St. with strong political connections who are ready to bail out any losing bets these computers make.
Plus, the computers are able to do something normal buyers and sellers can't do. They can pick a price they want a security to trade at and then fill in all the necessary trading volume needed to get the price of the security to that point. In other words, you can program computers to rig markets.
In this new rigged market capitalist model, the corrupt bank picks the price it wants a security to trade at and the computers buy and sell with each other until that price is reached; thus providing an audit trail of trades that looks on the surface like actual price discovery.
And each price manufactured by computers generates a reaction price in every other security and commodity as the rigged market price signal ripples throughout the interconnected securities market around the world.
What's being masked is that the actual supply of money in the system is falling.
The major measures of money supply have all turned down. Credit has evaporated. The velocity of the multiplier effect of fractional reserve lending has disappeared. The volume of fake trades is inflating while the actual supply of money and credit is deflating.
In place of an exchange where buyers and sellers transact with each other to their mutual advantage, we now have 'Simflation,' a hologram of fake price signals masking the worst deflationary depression since the 1930's.
The only market that inches higher in real terms at the moment -- as the financial hologram and the U.S. dollar -- the fundamental economic particle of this economic hologram disintegrates -- is gold.
This explains the seeming paradox of gold rising during real deflation.
Fake price signals and rigged market capitalism have set the dials of economic monitoring into a Bermuda Triangle of confusion and loss.
Only gold points the way out of this mess.
* Austrian School of Money Supply Definition
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Simon Johnson: Is The SEC Still Working For Wall Street?
The Securities and Exchange Commission is trying to escape a difficult legacy of being effectively captured by the very Wall Street firms it was supposed to regulate.
Sen. Ted Kaufman: Unusual Market Activity: the SEC and High Frequency Trading
It's too soon to know the myriad factors that played into last week's meltdown, though it appears to be quite likely that we witnessed a real-time example of high-tech trading run wild -- or, in some cases, unplugged.
Irene Aldridge: What is High-Frequency Trading, Afterall?
At the heart of high-frequency trading is a simple idea that properly programmed computers are better traders than humans.
Algorithmic trading - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Traders Profit With Computers Set at High Speed - NYTimes.com
One missing angle, which Izabella Kaminska has been exploring on the FT Alphaville blog, has been the incestuous relationship between the multiple billions of dollars now invested in Exchange Traded Funds ('ETFs') and the HFT algo traders.
When dollar interest rates are at the zero bound, then investors flood into ANYTHING but dollars. ETFs have become the mechanism of choice, and the money in ETFs is what is holding the markets up in a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with HFT.
By way of example, the oil market is currently held by producers at the 'upper bound' where demand destruction sets in , and they are thereby 'macro' manipulating the market price - with interest free loans from ETFs. This is normal producer behaviour of course. eg the Tin crisis; cocoa and coffee cartels; diamonds - and above all the copper manipulation by Hamanaka and Sumitomo, which went on for five years before the whistle was blown, and then for another five years after that.
Re market manipulation, I outlined here,
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5606
how BP and Goldman Sachs have essentially 'owned' the oil market mechanism - in an unholy alliance joined at the head - for ten to fifteen years, and this crucial market is now terminally dysfunctional.
But it is NOT the speculators to blame. The ETF investors whose money is being used to hold up this and many other markets are the precise opposite of speculators. Their principal aim is to avoid losses, not to make profits.
"Actually, I think we already are in a depression. We just don't know it yet because of monetary manipulation, market manipulation, and propoganda confusing the issue. There's just no way for problems this big to just disappear, without somebody paying for it. Unless the good fairy makes the truly responsible parties pay for it, it's going to be all citizens who pay (except the few elite).”
Price inflation is everywhere, as the value of the dollar fluctuates. The velocity of money is stalled because so many are hoarding their cash, as well as the banksters, who got their operating capital from the taxpayers in 2008 after approaching near collapse, and corporations who are reaping big piles of profits from squeezing workers, forcing workers to pay more for their health contributions, therefore available consumer spending shrinks.
The nation is being drained of its operating fluids like a dying patient.
Our two party system is totally bought by big money, through lobbyists. Until corporations lose their power of a person, and can no longer contribute to politicians or even indirectly support them, nothing will change.
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
I agree that deflation is happening right now, but in the long term the inflation argument always proves correct..
But that could also have to do with my living in Los Angeles. We are having some crazy price increasing going on here. And it isn't just housing (due to the shadow market, tax credit, etc.), it's also college tuition, groceries, and of course fees and taxes. I can't think of much that isn't going up. Cheap crap made in China is still low-priced though. Hooray?
And second, that the "economic recovery" we've all been hearing about is being masked by the holographic economy based on speculation and something called "confidence." Nice way of putting it.
The real economy of Main Street deals with tangibles in the here and now. Food, shelter, car payments, medical bills etc. We actually exchange goods and services on Main Street, and we understand that things have value because of what they do and how well they are made. That is the real economy. Sure, gold is nice, but you can't eat it. However, some people are accepting it as a legitimate form of payment already. http://www.connectmidmichigan.com/news/story.aspx?id=481793
I think we are already creating the new economy, and not a moment too soon.
But what about gold? If gold continues to cost more and more, that is an indicator of INflation. If gold costs less, that would be a marker of DEflation.
Or maybe gold is just a specialized commodity and I am pinning too much on its moves.
All I can say is that gold has not moved very much in the last year. It had a big jump a while back and them just sat there.
A new way to look at this mess. It looks like he is right. There are a lot of computers trading now, a lot of big entities trading very fast.
--But the markers that are tangible do point to deflation: real estate, jobs, unemployed plumbers and electricians, cities cutting back.
Banks are only advertising a fraction of foreclosed homes. They are trying to keep the demand up and unload a favorable prices. This means they expect prices to continue to drop. That is the definition of deflation. Your dollar will buy more next year.