John Mauldin's Outside the Box

Harry Dent gave a speech I listened to a while back, and I got him to transcribe it for this week's Outside the Box. One thing about Harry is, you are never left wondering what he thinks about a topic. He sees inevitable demography-caused deflation in our future and makes some very intriguing arguments that deserve pondering.

Even in August, while nearly all of Europe is on vacation, we find that economies don't get to take vacation. Europe will come back from its holiday and find that nothing has improved and some things have gotten worse. Specifically, Germany looks to be rolling over into recession. In this week's Outside the Box, Charles Gave of GaveKal looks at Deutschland and notes that while it might be able to handle a mild recession, problems will be that much worse in the rest of Europe, which needs a robust German consumer. This letter will print long due to a number of charts.

It is a lazy summer day here in Texas, and the market and investment news front is rather quiet as well. But that will change before too long. We should enjoy the relative calm while we can, because Europe will soon be back in full crisis mode, coming off the summer. In today's Outside the Box we'll look at three brief pieces that may give us a preview of the near future, as well as an incisive retrospective on the recent past.

The closer we get to the presidential election, the more we are bombarded with facts, opinions, predictions, and the like from both ends of the political spectrum.

One thing I like about this analysis from my friend and geopolitical expert George Friedman is that he starts off with an obvious yet understated fact: you can't believe what presidential candidates say. Not because they are pathological liars, but because they must make promises that, once elected, they cannot keep, given the reality of the office.

The relationship between high total public debt and interest rates is controversial (to some); and in today’s Outside the Box Van Hoisington and Dr. Lacy Hunt of Hoisington Investment Management tackle the subject head-on, in their “Quarterly Review and Outlook” for Q2 2012. They bring important new evidence to the debate, citing three academic studies (including an April 2012 paper coauthored by Rogoff and Reinhart) and an historical retrospective that focuses on the debt-disequilibrium panic years of 1873 and 1929 in the US and 1989 in Japan. In their view, the onus of responsibility for the “Panic of 2008” falls on the sometimes-slumping shoulders of the Federal Reserve, for making money and credit too easily available, and then “[failing] to use regulatory powers to check the unsound lending and the concomitant buildup of non-productive debt.”

In today's Outside the Box, the ever-philosophical Grant Williams introduces us to the ancient and profound art and science of alchemy – "the original 12-step program," as he calls it, the avid pursuit of übernerds from Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton to (believe it or not) John Maynard Keynes, who referred to certain early works of econometrics as statistical alchemy (and some still are!). And we should not forget Carl Jung, who wrote the seminal workPsychology and Alchemy (for those who do not sleep or are looking for something to put you to sleep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_and_Alchemy).

Even while here in Tuscany I go on reading my email, albeit at a pace that is somewhat less maniacal than usual. I can't help myself; I find it fascinating to "surf" my emails and other sources. I get several hundred emails a day and about 40-50 that get more than a cursory notice. (I always try to read emails sent to me personally!) Today, for your Outside the Box, I am going to do something rather different. Rather than posting one or two essays, I am going to cut and paste snippets that I have found interesting in the past 24 hours.

One of the reasons I really like to read the research from GaveKal is that they are very public when their analysts disagree, and you get to listen to the back and forth. Some of the best analysis I see is when Charles and Louis Gave (father and son) and Anatole Kaletsky do email battle with each other while they are on three different continents. This time it is Anatole and one of their analysts, Francois Chauchat (whom I have not had the pleasure of meeting), differing on whether Germany should (or even can!) leave the eurozone.