Generational Dynamics World View

[John J. Xenakis]

** 10-Mar-2021 World View: The Deflationary Tsunami

Tom Mazanec" Wrote:> Too Busy Frontrunning Inflation, Nobody Sees the Deflationary
> Tsunami

> https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar21/def...i3-21.html

Bubble psychology really is very strange to me. How could supposedly
intelligent people be so dumb and blind?

Starting in 2004, I watched the housing bubble with astonishment. It
was obvious to me that there was a housing bubble. It was obvious to
Alan Greenspan that there was a housing bubble, and I quoted him at
length, although the so-called financial "experts" pretended not to
understand him by claiming he used obscure language. I sold my condo
at the height of the housing bubble, and part of the reason I'm alive
today is the money that provided. In 2007, I was begging a couple of
friends not to buy homes because they were in a housing bubble, but
they did anyway and lost a lot of money. It was only in 2009 when I
heard an analyst on tv talk about the housing bubble -- in 2006.

As I've written before, I've been tracking inflation predictions since
2003, and so-called "experts" have been wrong about predicting
inflation constantly. But they're so stupid, they keep making the
same mistake over and over. Isn't that the definition of insanity?
Every quarter they predict massive inflation the next quarter.
They've been wrong about this for about 70 consecutive quarters since
I've been keeping track, and they keep making the same stupid mistake.
And they're doing it again today.

So the above deflation article by Charles Hugh Smith is the first that
I've seen that really gives a detailed explanation of why we're headed
for a deflationary crisis.

Here is my summary of the reasoning why we're headed for a
"deflationary tsunami," based on the reasoning in the article:

• During the "roaring 1920s," the stock market kept going up,
  and the public mood was that the stock market would continue going up
  indefinitely, with the worst being an occasional dip. So ordinary
  people and investors kept buying stocks, knowing that their value
  would continue to increase.
  
  
• But it's more than that. If investors "know" that stock values
  will increase forever, then they can borrow money to buy more stocks,
  knowing that they'll be able to repay the debts by selling the stocks.
  And by the time they sell the stocks, the stocks will be worth more,
  since the stock prices are always going up, so they can repay the
  debts, and have money left over.
  
  
• So you have a bubbly cycle. Investors sell stocks to each other,
  pushing up the price of the stocks as they go back and forth between
  buyers and sellers. Investors borrow money from each other to
  purchase stocks, or use stocks as margin collateral, and go more and
  more deeply into debt with one another, as money goes back and forth
  between borrowers and lenders.

That's what happened during the roaring 1920s, until October 28, 1929.
Then something happened, and there was a panic. What changed? Why
did a panic occur on that date, rather a few months earlier or later?
I've speculated that it was because that date was seven weeks after
third quarter earnings were announced, and those seven weeks were
enough for investors to understand that stocks were not going to
continue going up. But nobody knows for sure.

Whatever the reason, the mood of the public changed, almost overnight.
It was no longer a sure thing that stocks would go up forever. This
meant that any investor who had borrowed a great deal of money,
"knowing" that he could pay off the debt by selling higher priced
stock, suddenly did not know that, but he still had debts to pay off.

It's not surprising that public mood can change overnight. For
example, we know today that something that nobody heard of a month ago
suddenly "goes viral" and becomes extremely popular with the public.

So what happened in October 1929, when the public mood suddenly
changed from "the stock market will go up forever" to "it won't."
Here's a summary:

• On October 28-29, the market fell 25%. We know from reports
  at the time that this was caused by people forced to sell assets to
  meet margin calls. These would presumably be the people who had gone
  most deeply in debt, thinking that stocks would go up forever, and now
  were forced to sell their most liquid assets to meed debt
  payments.
  
  
• On October 30-31, the market rose 18%. These were people "buying
  the dip," still believing that stocks would go up forever.
  
  
• There were further ups and downs, but overall, the market fell 90%
  by July 1932.

What happened after that was described by John Kenneth Galbraith in
his book The Great Crash - 1929:

Quote: "In the autumn of 1929 the New York Stock Exchange,
under roughly its present constitution, was 112 years old. During
this lifetime it had seen some difficult days. On September 18,
1873, the firm of Jay Cooke and Company failed, and, as a more or
less direct result, so did fifty-seven other stock exchange firms
in the next few weeks. On October 23, 1907, call money rates
reached 125 percent in the panic of that year. On September 16,
1920 -- the autumn months are the off season in Wall Street -- a
bomb exploded in front of Morgan's next door, killing thirty
people and injuring a hundred more.

A common feature of all these earlier troubles [[previous panics]]
was that having happened they were over. The worst was reasonably
recognizable as such. The singular feature of the great crash of
1929 was that the worst continued to worsen. What looked one day
like the end proved on the next day to have been only the
beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to
maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few as possible
escaped the common misfortune.

The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin
call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met
that there would still be another. In the end all the money he
had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart
money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came,
naturally went back in to pick up bargains. ... The bargains then
suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited out all of
October and all of November, who saw the volume of trading return
to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce
market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value
drop to a third or fourth of the purchase price in the next
twenty-four months. ... The ruthlessness of [the stock market was]
remarkable. ...

Monday, October 28, was the first day on which this process of
climax and anticlimax ad infinitum began to reveal itself.
It was another terrible day. Volume was huge, although below the
previous Thursday -- nine and a quarter million shares as compared
withnearly thirteen. But the losses were far more severe.
... Indeed the decline on this one day was greater than that of
all the preceding week of panic. Once again a late ticker left
everyone in ignorance of what was happening, save that it was bad.

On this day there was no recovery."

I've referred to this in the past as The Principle of Maximum Ruin --
the maximum number of people were ruined to the maximum extent
possible. Stock prices fell steadily until mid-1932, having fallen a
total of 90%, and only then began to grow again, not reaching their
1929 highs again until 1952.

It's worthwhile reading Galbraith's account carefully, because it
shows how the public mood was changing rapidly:

• Before October, the rule was: go further into debt to buy more
  stocks.
  
  
• After October, it was: Sell more stocks to pay off debts.
  
  
• Before October: People wanted to buy stocks, which pushed stock
  prices up.
  
  
• After October: People were forced to sell stocks, which pushed
  stock prices down.

So that's why the stock market crashes, but why does that cause a
"deflation tsunami"? Because people in debt have to sell off their
assets to pay off the debts, and that pushes down the prices of the
assets, causing deflation. The most liquid assets go first, such as
stocks and money market instruments. After that, less liquid assets
have to be sold -- things like jewelry, art, gems, real estate, cars
and trucks, and today that would include bitcoin.

So debt repayments require forced asset sales and result in deflation.
Between 1930 and 1933, prices fell 10% per year.

Today, we're still in the "pre October 1929" world. Personal,
business and government debt has been surging constantly for decades.
American public debt is around $27 trillion, and this week the
Democrats passed a Christmas tree stimulus bill that will add almost
$2 trillion more. And the Democrats are promising more.

These debt levels are insane, but they're even more insane because
they're backed by an insane theory, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT),
that says that the government can borrow as much as it wants and
never has to pay it back.

Today the public mood is not only that stock prices will go up
forever, but also that debts will never have to be paid back.
Astronomical, dysfunctional prices for Tesla stock or Bitcoin are
perversely considered proof that stock prices will always go up, and
that asset values will always go up.

This is exactly what people believed prior to October 1929. Then the
public mood changed. Nobody could have predicted it, just as nobody
can predict that a new hashtag "goes viral" today. It happens out of
thin air, and nobody can explain it. And at some point the public
mood is going to change to believe that stocks won't go up forever, or
that public debts will have to be repaid. That's when the
"deflationary tsunami" will occur.

As the article by Charles Hugh Smith says:

Quote: "Speculative bubbles pop. All phantom wealth vanishes
back into the air it emerged from. Insolvent borrowers counting on
ever lower rates of interest and ever higher valuations
default. Lenders who leveraged up to loan gobs of "free money" to
uncreditworthy borrowers will be destroyed by the monumental
write-offs of uncollectible debts based on phantom valuations.

Those looking up from their "free fish!" frolicking will see the
tsunami too late to save themselves. None of the frolickers will
be able to outrun the tsunami or avoid being crushed as it sweeps
all the debris of a speculative mania into the flooded ruins
beyond the shoreline."

This article by Charles Hugh Smith is the first of its kind that I've
seen. It's not entirely inconceivable that this article is the first
sign that the public mood is beginning to change. Once a panic
begins, it will be too late for anyone to save himself.