I grant that low long-term interest rates could continue for months, or even well into next year. But just as easily, long-term rate increases can emerge with unexpected suddenness. Between early October 1979 and late February 1980, for example, the yield on the 10-year note rose almost four percentage points.

He generally warned us that

The United States, and most of the rest of the developed world, is in need of a tectonic shift in fiscal policy. Incremental change will not be adequate.

Do you believe the curent regime has any political courage, let alone sufficient to change course?

• Extrmely low probability
• Extremely high impact
• Unimaginable a priori

Given this BSE, we have had a massive “pivot” from the health care fiasco in the making to focus on USA economy and jobs. The reason for this change is simply the one new Republican vote that can stop disastrous congressional economic policies.

OK, so how can this BSE save us? Bear with us for a bit.

We recently came upon this quote and find it quite descriptive:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy…”

by Alexander Fraser Tytler, Scottish lawyer and writer, 1770.

Now, consider this fact:

~50% of USA workers pay $0 taxes, while the rest of the workers (the “rich”) pay all the taxes.

We think it fair to conclude:

Half the population has incentive to free-ride on the others and will cheerfully vote for increasing burdens on those “rich”.

Our country is in peril from financial catastrophes and very poor political decisions. Most pertinently, the Scott Brown BSE may enable the inevitable lunge by Democrats for more taxation and thus massive class warfare to be avoided.

We set forth a somewhat formal answer in our post on the three main economic scenarios, deflation, neutral and inflation. We want to present a more intuitive answer below.

First, we need to set the stage.

As we have discussed, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) is an idea fiercely defended by a variety of senior finance professors, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. Our post here gives a good summary of what the EMH is, why it is wrong and how it leads to mistakes.

The issue revolves around the implication of EMH that active management is a waste of time and money, since no amount of work can produce more insight than everyone else in market has or can get, and so an investor can get only the market ROI overall over the long run. Thus, according to the EMH, one should just invest in index funds.

OK, let’s stipulate EMH is useless. Now what? How should we invest? Before answering this question, let’s also stipulate, for obvious reasons, we cannot avoid this question.

One answer could be, just give our money to an advisor and let him invest for us. But of course, that raises the question as to how one chooses an advisor who if not sufficiently skilled, is sufficiently lucky. So we need to define an investment strategy.

In spite of all the confusion and uncertainties, one can still make some rational investments, while staying emotionally calm. Let’s define assumptions for a strategy:

The goal is to maximize our ROI, subject to a level of risk we can tolerate. Clearly, the ROI and the risk level are both subjective. We are willing to take more risk to get larger ROI. But the relationship between those two large factors is not known in advance.

We believe the current economic condition is mainly deflationary (prices are dropping and being a creditor is good).

We want to hold securities in such a way that when we discern inflation signs, we can switch easily from the current deflationary position to an inflation stance.

In our case, we want to preserve capital, but have growth reasonably better than that of money market rates (which are now ~0%/YR). This is the risk avoidance component of the strategy. Additionally, we want exposure to some upside to growth. The allocation between our risk avoidance securities and the upside-capture securities is where emotion enters the framework.

Our specific recommendation: account for deflation buy owning a variety of bonds and bond funds. Position the portfolio for upside by owning equities in companies in sectors which we believe are especially promising in the current political-economic environment. This idea, of course, is a standard approach, but modified by a strong emphasis on a small amount of very high risk/high payoff equities. The portion devoted to capturing future innovations or even disasters through equities can of course be enhanced by using various combinations of long dated puts and calls.

Using this broad approach, we can manage risk simply through the allocation between fixed income and equities, and focus on higher risk equities to be exposed to upsides from innovation.

This is not what is called well-diversified….rather, it’s a bet on specific beliefs. Remember, if you diversify enough, you effectively index everything.

Finally, some examples: First, the online, medical records sector, which will be quite actively converting old medical records to electronic format, as well as creating new records electronically, and the semiconductor industry, which continues to grow and also acts as a leading indicator of economic revival.

Want to hear a real laugher? Despite the current disharmony in politics, there’s one policy on which all of Washington agrees. Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate, president and Congress all agree that after last fall’s financial crisis, the federal government has to regulate the financial industry more closely to protect our economy from risk of systemic financial collapse.

Here’s the joke. As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It’s the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians — the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street.

The piece was written by Tony Blankley and you can read it here.

Our financial situation is breathtakingly unsustainable. You really need to pay attention to preserve and grow your capital.

]]> http://www.rocketcap.com/the-largest-systemic-risk-to-usa-economy-our-federal-debt/feed/ 0 http://www.rocketcap.com/only-inflation-will-save-usa-since-politicians-wont/ http://www.rocketcap.com/only-inflation-will-save-usa-since-politicians-wont/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:18:39 +0000 admin http://www.rocketcap.com/?p=1614 We have written about the stupendous obligation Medicare owes future retirees. The amount ($90T) truly dominates all US policy, even if the current crop of politicians indulges in denial. A brief analysis reveals the situation is even worse and inflation is inevitable.

{ See our last post on Medicare dwarfing all other economic problems }

Let’s take a look at the over-arching debt and obligations owed by the US. We can get get a meaningful overview from the few numbers below.

US Assets and Obligations

The source for these numbers is the US Treasury and National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). They were conveniently pulled together here. The last line in the table is taken from our post above, and the source is Kent Smetters, Wharton School insurance and risk management professor.

Let’s get some perspective. According to the US Treasury, the average interest rate paid by Treasury is 3.36%/YR. Thus, the interest paid on the debt is about $400B/YR, which is a fraction of the annual revenues to the Treasury. On the other hand, if we applied the entire revenue stream to the US government to interest, we could pay down only $2.2T/.036=$65.5T . Thus, the enormity of the amounts of debt and obligation are loosely bounded.

Even more striking: if the US literally sold itself for the amount estimated by Prof. Smetters, the revenue still would be dwarfed by the outstanding obligations. The US cannot even hope for a hostile takeover to save itself!

So what will the end game from this situation be? Here are the possibilities, as summarized by Sprott, and the very likely outcomes:

• Default on Medicare promises. (Unlikely given the current debate in Washington to expand medical coverage.)
• Default on Social Security promises. (Unlikely given the increasing average age of the voting public.)
• Put forward a credible plan to balance the budget. (Unlikely given the most recent budget projections.)
• Default on outstanding debt. (Unthinkable)

The only remaining solution is to inflate the obligations and debt. QED.

Domestic discretionary spending amounted to $485 billion last year. With a deficit last year of $459 billion, we would have had to abolish virtually every single domestic program to have achieved budget balance. That means every penny spent on housing, education, agriculture, highway construction and maintenance, border patrols, air traffic control, the FBI, and every other thing one can think of outside of national defense, Social Security and Medicare.

This means that it is impossible to get control of spending without cutting entitlement programs. Many Republicans agree, but they never make any serious effort to do so. On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.

This reality is actually old and well-known. But it’s wise to review this stark fact from time to time if you care about your long term financial future and appreciate the enormous impact in our economy by the federal government.

“There is the strong possibility that policy makers in the US and UK will not time the transition from the current quantitative easing to a more tightened monetary policy. That is not because they are no competent. It is because the task is very tricky and there is no play book outlining the steps. This is not Tom Landry (former Dallas Cowboy coach) pacing the field with a play for every situation already planned and practiced well in advance.

The odds favor they will either be too late or too early. Getting it “just right.” The Goldilocks play, would be more than fortunate. In fact, there may be no right play to call. They may be forced to choose between a slower economy and/or inflation/deflation. And as this week’s Outside the Box authors note, there is also the possibility of yet another asset bubble, making the choices even more risky.”

See full text here

Of course, we have written about this looming disaster, and proposed some specific ways investors can prepare for it. See, for example:

http://www.rocketcap.com/portfolios-for-deflation-inflation-and-good-luck/

Watch Milton Friedman Video

See Original Research Paper

Here are important conlusions, In Our Humble Opinion:

1–”Thus Barro and Perotti are saying that each $1 increase in government spending reduces private spending by about $1, with no net benefit to GDP. All that is left is a higher level of government debt creating slower economic growth.”

2–”The most extensive research on tax multipliers is found in a paper written at the University of California Berkeley entitled The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a new Measure of Fiscal Shocks, by Christina D. and David H. Romer (March 2007). (Christina Romer now chairs the president’s Council of Economic Advisors). This study found that the tax multiplier is 3, meaning that each dollar rise in taxes will reduce private spending by $3.”

3–”The combination of an extremely overleveraged economy, ineffectual monetary policy and misdirected fiscal policy initiatives suggests that the U.S. economy faces a long difficult struggle. While depleted inventories and the buildup of pent-up demand may produce intermittent spurts of growth, these brief episodes are not likely to be sustained. In several years, real GDP may be no higher than its current levels. However, since the population will continue to grow, per capita GDP will decline; thus, the standard of living will diminish as unemployment rises. These conditions will produce a deflationary environment similar to the Japanese condition.

4–”In the normal recessions since 1950, the low in inflation was, on average, 29 months after a complete economic recovery was underway, and bond yields moved in a similar fashion. If this recession were normal, then the low in inflation would be in late 2011, at which time investors would begin to consider shortening the maturity of their Treasury portfolios. However, because of our highly-indebted circumstances and the movement of private sector resources to the public sector, the trough in inflation will be moved out, meaning that the low in Treasury bond yields is a distant event. The path there will be bumpy, as it was in the U.S. from 1929 to 1941 and in Japan from 1989 to 2008. Presently the 10-year yield in Japan stands at 1.3%. Ultimately, our yield level may be similar to that of the Japanese.”

We find (2) above especially surreal, since Dr. Romer fully understands what president Obama is doing and that his actions deny reality as revealed by her own empirical research!