The Room : Goverment Debt

The Room – 05/22/2009

David Galland — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:57:00 GMT

A dose of sanity returned to the markets this week, starting with cracks beginning to show in the U.S. dollar. Consequently gold, the not-so-barbaric relic, seems to be attracting an awful lot of attention. Instead of falling, as so many pundits have been predicting it should, it has begun to string together a number of impressive up days. Another run at $1,000 in the weeks just ahead is not out of the question.

Also this week, the U.S. stock market hit a pothole on the road to Happy Days Again, helped along, apparently, by massive selling by corporate insiders...

"...in the last couple weeks, company chief executives and chief financial officers have gone from big buyers to heavy sellers. According to InsiderScore.com, two weeks ago there was a slight bias towards selling, while last week turned in the biggest disparity of sellers to buyers — more than 1.2 sellers for every buyer — since September." (WSJ)
In addition, the chart for long-dated U.S. Treasury bonds this week – shown here – resembles a steep cliff. It appears that the U.S. Treasury Department's irrational exuberance for every bailout program that lands on its desk is finally beginning to raise doubts about the government's ability to repay its many obligations. Ahead of us on the curve, the sovereign debt of the UK is thought to be a tea cozy away from being downgraded from the AAA status normally assigned to a respectable country's sovereign debt.

While no one likes to be the bearer of bad news, this week's market action is a welcome confirmation that just maybe we haven't lost our minds here at Casey Research. I can't begin to recount the number of times I woke up in the morning wondering if we were missing something really, really big regarding the current crisis. After all, both the dollar and the stock market have held up remarkably well in the face of what appears to be irrefutable evidence that the U.S. currency and economy are now racing down the fast track to a devastating collision with the reality that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Despite many opinions to the contrary, the government cannot "fix" an economy as massively broken as ours. At least the fixing involves throwing out some magic combination of regulations, jawboning, newly created money, and backroom deals with fiscally irresponsible and financially bankrupt cronies.

We are, I would opine, at the crossroads of a new paradigm in American history. We have to be, because the path we have recently traveled to get here has been wiped out by an avalanche of bad policy and institutionalized self-dealing on a biblical scale. We are not going back to the bubble years anytime soon, any more than the Japanese have or will in our lifetimes.

That is not to say that America is doomed or that we should begin eyeing the ground for roots and berries. Rather, the citizenry of this nation – and the world, for that matter – are going to have to adapt their personal outlook to the way things are, and not the way network television has portrayed them these many years. Not everyone is going to have a new car every couple of years.

Of course, it's going to take awhile for this notion to sink in. Humankind, and Americans in particular, are forever looking forward to a bigger and brighter future. To the extent that said view of the future includes ever larger high-definition TVs, the latest gadgets, and an ATV parked in the backyard right next to the trampoline and above-ground pool, expectations will have to change. Probably in conjunction with the simultaneous receipt of one's first unemployment check and one's first unpayable credit card bill.

Illuminating these post-apocalyptic thoughts, just below is the text of an e-mail I received yesterday from Dominick, a valued subscriber and correspondent of some duration.

I heard an interview on National Public Radio this week with a bunch of graduates from the college class of 2009. They universally lamented the fact that there were no jobs of any description available. Experts and various callers chimed in with their suggestions for the unlucky class. One graduate with a degree in nursing complained that contrary to expectations, there were no nursing jobs on Long Island where she lived. Apparently a lot of the hospitals in the area have closed or are closing. One caller helpfully suggested that she might want to move to another part of the country where nurses were still in demand. Her reply was along the lines of "No way," and that it wasn't fair. In other words, she was entitled to her job exactly where she wanted it.

These attitudes, too, will be changing in the weeks and months ahead.

There was a day, albeit a day long ago, where Americans were far more adventurous and willing to take on risk than they are today. They were also, if the need arose, willing to roll up the sleeves and put in a hard day's work. None of that spirit was in evidence among the callers to this particular program, whose default mode seemed to be to take a job with government and/or move back in with their parents.

So, how are the coddled generations going to cope with the world as it is, as opposed to the world they want it to be?

We are going to probe deeply into that, and a number of related topics, in the upcoming edition of The Casey Report, which will include an interview with Neil Howe, the author of Generations and The Fourth Turning (among many other works on generation research). Meanwhile, I have some general thoughts...

A continued resurgence of socialism. Socialism is really just a softer-looking form of communism. Few people will go so far to suggest that they are active communists these days. But if you properly phrase the question, I suspect that a majority of young Americans, and maybe a wide majority, are socialist in attitude. Many would even overtly identify themselves as a believer in that form of collective, a clear sign of societal amnesia, given all the lessons that history has provided about that system's shortfalls. Consequently, the world will set about relearning the lesson that you cannot build a productive society by punishing the productive elements of society. Joe Biden's public retort when a woman asked him what she should tell her friends who were unhappy about having their taxes raised, was, "It's time to be patriotic, that's what you say to them."

Watch this clip of then-candidate Biden defending this point of view, and see if you can spot the direct correlation between his words and the concept Marx expressed in his "from each according to his abilities, to each according to their needs."

Also note the obvious passion he brings to the topic. This is not simply campaign jargonizing but a deeply held conviction.

I may be hoping for too much, but I wish that Americans of any income range would be able to look past their personal bias to spot the clear fallacy of this approach. Strictly speaking from a fairness perspective, it wasn't the business owner, successful or otherwise, who led us into this dead end – it was the government and the many special-interest groups firmly latched to the teats of that government. To get a bit metaphoric, it wasn't the fellow owning a chain of dry cleaners who drained the well of American wealth and then replaced the water of enterprise with quick-hardening cement. Again, that would be the U.S. government.

And yet, according to Biden et al., the patriotic thing to do is to take your hard-earned money and give it to the government to give to the needy, whose ranks are currently swollen with the bumbling executives of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and similar Wall Street institutions.

But those comments are based on the notion of fairness. Let's forget fairness for a moment. Forget that letting the Bush tax cuts expire already amounts to the largest tax increase in history, and let's get entirely practical.

Who does the public think is ultimately going to do the heavy lifting needed to bring the economy back into some sort of equilibrium?

As I don't need to tell you, it will not be the government. Thus, every new tax and regulation or insane government dictate simply add more bricks to the wall that entrepreneurs must climb in an attempt to build a sustainable economic recovery.

Which brings me to a second prediction -- the creation of a new wave of quasi-state companies. If you like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, then you'll like the new wave of Franken-businesses that will morph out of enterprises that the government decides are too important to fail. Need to prop up a unionized car company? No problem. Just have the USG take a lot of taxes from unpatriotic taxpayers and hand them over to the "new and improved" car companies – companies that are building the next generation of cars, whether people like them or not. For a picture of what's coming, look no further than Amtrak, which has shown an unblemished track record of almost 40 years of losing money. The losses are now exceeding $1 billion a year.

To quote Amtrak's February 2009 independent auditors report...

The Company has a history of substantial operating losses and is dependent upon substantial Federal government subsidies to sustain its operations. There are currently no Federal government subsidies appropriated for any period subsequent to the fiscal year ending September 30, 2009 ("fiscal year 2009") as discussed in Note 2 to the financial statements. Without such subsidies, Amtrak will not be able to continue to operate in its current form and significant operating changes, restructuring or bankruptcy may occur. Such changes or restructuring would likely result in asset impairments.
So, what does the government propose? To build a series of high-speed bullet trains to crisscross the country.

I could go on, but I'm a little short on time this morning, given that Doug Casey and all of our senior editors and staff are gathering at the office here today for a rare in-person management meeting.

Before I rush on, however, I would like to underscore the point I am trying to make, because I think it's an important point. At this stage of the crisis, the government is doing almost everything exactly wrong, the exact opposite of what they should be doing. And the public, correctly scared as they are of the dark and threatening skies overhead, are scurrying under the government's hastily constructed tent.

We shall come out of this just fine -- though we won't come out of this anytime soon, unless there is a 180° shift in government policy, the sort of shift that traditionally only occurs as a result of a popular uprising of strong emotions, expressed eventually at the ballot box. Since the majority of the emotions now swirling around are very much oriented towards more, not less government, we are nowhere near the end of this thing.

As investors, therefore, that is how you have to rig your portfolio -- and that is how we are rigging the portfolio recommendations made in our various letters.

For a final word on the subject of where we are in the economy, I would like to turn the platform over to Howard Davidowitz, the outspoken chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a company that provides strategic consulting to the retail industry.

What Davidowitz is currently telling his clients, and what he'll tell you in the video clip you can view here, is best summed up in his comment, "If the consumer isn't petrified, he or she is a damn fool."

Crime Scene

As a matter of personal taste, not policy, no one in our household watches network television anymore -- with the exception of Survivor, which never fails to entertain by celebrating humankind's remarkable capacity for self-delusion. Even so, when watching that program, one is forced to sit through trailers for an apparently very popular genre these days -- grisly "true life" police dramas, including any number of geographical derivations of something called Crime Scene Investigation, conveniently abbreviated to CSI. The trailers alone are sufficiently gruesome, but I warn the kids to avert their eyes, which they do willingly.

This week anyone paying attention would have seen a real-life crime scene every bit as gruesome. A U.S. House of Representatives committee passed new greenhouse gas legislation, legislation that includes a cap-and-trade system.

If it were socially acceptable to swear in print in polite company, I would do so right now. Instead, I will express my continued belief -- though maybe it is just a forlorn hope -- that there is no way cap-and-trade legislation can make it into law at this point in time (hopefully at no point in time, but especially at this point in time).

Even so, it boggles the mind that, with everything else going on, the government would spend any time at all on this issue just now. So why are they? A couple of reasons...

First, thanks to a misplaced road sign, over the past couple of decades, millions of young people mistakenly wandered onto the path of "environmental remediation" and related academic pursuits, versus something far more useful and productive. This despite the fact that the world has never been cleaner and is clearly on the trend to get cleaner still.

How did this massive misallocation of time and resources come about? I have read a defensible argument that the entire green movement, which initially cropped up in Germany in the 1970s, was funded by the Soviet Union as a clever attack on the underbelly of capitalism. Given academia's natural attraction to socialism – the attraction to a worldview that seeks to bring down businesses based on the inevitable waste that they must produce in their production processes – it is understandable. But this is a topic for another day.

However, there is something more to the rushed passage of this latest round of government meddling in the affairs of business here in the U.S. It is, if you believe the polls – or just your common sense – that the average American is ignorant of exactly what "cap and trade" actually means. And I quote...

In other words, if the Democratic leadership is going to make good on its promises to its many environmentally oriented supporters, it's going to have to do so pretty darn quickly. At some point the public at large will catch on to the crime that is about to be committed through the cap-and-trade legislation. Under the best of circumstances, it will be a huge waste of time and resources. Under even moderately bad circumstances, it will result in further hardship and taxes dumped onto the back of American enterprise.

There is something else pushing Congress from behind on this issue: a massive lobbying effort by "rent seekers," who are now well positioned to earn big profits from this legislation. Below is a link to a very informative article from the Wall Street Journal. While the author, Bjorn Lomborg, is a fairly rabid socialist himself, I give him credit for at least being honest in his critical analysis of his colleagues in the environmental movement. You can, and should, read his competently constructed critique of the goings-on at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen that is opening this weekend.

As you will read, what is happening behind the scenes is not just shameful but, in my view, a criminal fraud.

Read Lomborg's article, The Climate-Industrial Complex here.

Just So You Know

This week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, concerned about talk that the U.S. government could lose its AAA bond rating, clarified his goal for government deficits in the years just ahead.

Just so you know, the government expects the deficit to be about 13% of GDP in fiscal year 2009. As we see it, that understates reality by a wide margin. The actual number is likely to be closer to 18%, or $2.5 trillion.

For fiscal 2010, Geithner forecasts the deficit will drop to 8.5%, or about $1.17 trillion. If the government's projections are as far off next year as they are this year, the actual 2010 deficit would ring in at about $1.6 trillion, or about 11.5% of GDP.

For fiscal 2011, the deficit according to Geithner will fall to 6% of GDP, or $840 million. But again, applying the same margin of error for the forecast as we expect to see this year would put that number at about 1.15 trillion. That's still almost three times the prior record of $436 billion, set by George Bush in 2008.

Of course I can't help but comment that the government is out of touch with the reality it is creating with its out-of-control spending, and that the vast majority of the money is going down a rat hole. But it is also important to try and look past the blunt numbers to some of the consequences of this fiscal insanity.

For instance, taking as our starting point the current U.S. debt of $11.3 trillion and adding in the projected additional deficits just discussed, the country will end fiscal year 2011 with a total debt of $16.5 trillion, or about 46% higher than it is today.

That would mean total federal debt would be about 120% of total GDP. That's almost exactly the previous record set in the concluding years of World War II.

One of many tangible consequences of this accumulated debt will be a staggering burden of interest payments. At just 4%, the government would be forced to pay on the order of $660 billion per year in interest payments.

But what happens when interest rates rise to 10%, let alone the 20% Doug Casey feels they are headed for? While it's hard to get one's mind around the latter number just now, the former is certainly within the realm of possibility, given the current trend.

So, how does the government cover $1.65 trillion in annual interest payments?

The answer is, it doesn't.

All of which is to say that we are racing toward a situation where the government will have absolutely no other choice besides massive inflation or an outright default. The stirrings this week suggest that Mr. Market is starting to come to the same conclusion. That means he will also come to the conclusion that interest rates must go up -- either to offset the pending inflation or to compensate for the growing risk of a default.

I'm sure economists have some fancy term for this situation, but vicious cycle will suffice for now.

By the time the politicians stop dithering around with the deck chairs, the ship of state will have sunk, with the survivors clinging to the wreckage. It is our intention – in fact more than that, it is our firm goal -- to make sure our subscribers have a comfortable seat in the lifeboats.

I am not kidding or being disingenuous when I tell you that there has never been a better time to be a subscriber to our various publications. The problem, of course, is that we have quite a few of them, and each is geared to helping you to manage various subsets of market opportunities. For gold and other natural resources, the go-to publications are BIG GOLD, the International Speculator and Casey Investment Alert. For energy, it's Casey Energy Opportunities and Casey Energy Confidential. Overall portfolio strategies, which include plays on rising interest rates, are covered by The Casey Report. And for strategically designed options and futures trades, look no further than the Casey Trend Trader.

Any one of these publications can be instrumental in helping you make it through the shipwreck just ahead, but all of them combined will get you through it in especially fine style. To that end, we are now working on a new membership organization called Casey's Club. It allows you to subscribe to all of our publications and alert services with one low initiation fee... and receive all of them, as well as any services we'll launch in the future, for as long as they are published.

The final details are being worked out now. We'll have more on this first-ever Casey lifetime offer soon.

Tar Baby

I will confess to a strong dislike for fundamentalist religions that advocate as part of their daily ritual the murder of innocents or the suppression of women. Thus, I have zero sympathy for the Taliban or similar groups now being chased around Pakistan, Afghanistan, or other corners of the Middle East.

Anyone who chooses to live by the sword is welcome, as far as I'm concerned, to die by the sword.

Unfortunately, the U.S. seems to be the only country that wants to wield the sword with which they will be smote. Is it because we are somehow more righteous than other nations? Is it that it's our destiny to police the world and to make it over in our own image? Or is it something else, perhaps an overriding and possibly even delusional sense of specialness made ever more acute by the world's largest military budget?

Who knows, maybe it's that Israel – a nation whose neighborhood keeps its back against the wall constantly – has for many decades proven effective at lobbying American congressmen for their undying support. That is not an anti-Semitic remark but a verifiable fact. I don't blame the Israelis for manipulating U.S. policy -- if I were in their position, I would do exactly the same. Instead, I blame the systematic weaknesses within the United States government that allow it to be so readily manipulated.

Regardless, as a result of the normal quirks and accidents of history, we have arrived at a place where U.S. boots are once again firmly planted on the ground in an unwinnable war halfway across the globe. Just as we replaced the French in Vietnam, we have now replaced the Ottoman Turks in Iraq and the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Consequently, even with the more "enlightened" Obama in office, the military budget for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is again being ratcheted up. The Senate will pass a funding bill of over $91 billion this week to cover the costs of fighting those wars.

Tellingly, by the end of this year, it is expected that there will be more than twice as many U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan as there were at the end of 2008. The cost of the Afghan adventure will in 2009 exceed that of the battle in Iraq.

As with the antagonist in Uncle Remus' famous parable, we are now well engaged in attacking the tar baby. I suspect the results will be much the same.

Confidence Inspiring 101

I'll admit that I am something of an Anglophile, enjoying as I always have some of the British traditions such as complete British breakfast, afternoon tea, British humor, and a pint of Boddingtons over a game of snooker.

But I do have to wonder whether someone has been slipping something into the warm beer of the British public lately, with a double dose for members of the government over the past decade or so.

There are too many signs of mass insanity to ignore this point, starting with the willing adoption of some of the world's most egregious and intrusive surveillance policies, followed by a rush towards monetary self-mutilation.

For the latest example, the UK Treasury refused to provide the results of the stress tests it had put its banks through. Rationalizing this refusal, the UK Treasury commented that publishing the information could increase instability and result in the government having to undertake even further measures to shore up that country's financial system.

How's that for confidence inspiring?

It shows just how foolish the British have become in dealing with such matters. All they had to do was follow the lead of the U.S. Treasury Department and simply come up with a poorly crafted but well-delivered set of outrageous lies about banks' solvency!

I mean, really old chaps, you can do better.

Random Thoughts

I'm running out of time, well before I run out of topics. So I'm going to go a little wild here, with some quick observations...

On Gold... Everyone seems to like gold these days, including top-performing hedge fund manager John Paulson. The majority of his holdings are now invested in all things gold. Here are his current top portfolio holdings:

Top 15 Holdings (by % of portfolio)

SPDR Gold Trust (GLD): 30.37% of portfolio
Wyeth (WYE): 13.96% of portfolio
Rohm & Haas (ROH): 13.44% of portfolio
Boston Scientific (BSX): 8.4% of portfolio
Gold Miners ETF (GDX): 6.81% of portfolio
Kinross Gold (KGC): 5.87% of portfolio
Philip Morris International (PM): 3.42% of portfolio
Petro-Canada (PCZ): 2.96% of portfolio
Schering Plough (SGP): 2.26% of portfolio
Mirant (MIR): 2.22% of portfolio
Gold Fields (GFI): 2.21% of portfolio
JPMorgan Chase (JPM): 1.65% of portfolio
AngloGold Ashanti (AU): 1.15% of portfolio
St Jude Medical (STJ): 0.91% of portfolio
Embarq (EQ): 0.81% of portfolio

The Russians Also Like Gold. "MOSCOW, May 21 (Reuters) - Russia's precious metals and gems repository plans to quadruple gold purchases this year to about 3 percent of national output to help miners survive the economic slowdown, a source within the organisation said on Thursday. The repository, known as Gokhran, plans to buy 5 tonnes (160,754 ounces) of gold from about 15 enterprises this year, up from 1.2 tonnes in 2008, the source told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

"...Gokhran was founded in 1920 with the aim of centralising and storing Russia's supplies of precious metals and gems. Today, the body is subordinate to the Finance Ministry and its total reserves are a state secret."

The Chinese Don't Like Dollars. This week the Chinese and the Brazilians began working in earnest on a new regime that would allow each country to use each other's currency in intrastate trade, bypassing the U.S. dollar. Actions speak louder than words, and the Chinese have been saying a lot with their actions of late.

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp – Next Up for Bankruptcy, I Mean, Bailout. According to our own Bud Conrad, PBGC, the government entity that guarantees the pensions of some 44 million Americans, is in deep trouble. You can read this story of epic self-dealing by America's favorite investment banks and its government stooges by following this link...

Tech Talk

A software that I find particularly useful, is SnagIt (learn more here). It allows you to very easily capture any image on a computer screen and then paste it into another document. For those of you who like to blog, SnagIt is an essential tool.

The following came in from subscriber Steve H. While I haven't personally had a chance to try out the software yet, I plan on it...

jott.com

Do you have a technology you like to share with others? Or any comments at all about this edition of The Room? If so, send them my way at David@CaseyResearch.com.

Miscellany

Oil Spills? Bring ‘em On... Check this out.

A bit of British Humor. A moment ago, I mentioned my fondness for British humor. Follow this link to a car review from a British newspaper, hands down the funniest car review I have ever read.

Joe Cocker. A subscriber this week reminded me of Joe Cocker, an artist whose name is largely faded from memory, but who was certainly unique in his time. You can view a funny "translation" of Joe's wild performance at Woodstock by pasting this url into your browser window: http://www.elwp.com/Joe%20Cocker.html. Viewing that video made me wonder, "Whatever happened to Joe Cocker?" Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I found that he is still alive and well and maybe even coming to a town near you soon. Check out his rather fancy website here, http://www.cocker.com/.

And that, dear readers, is that for this week. Even though I started well before the crack of dawn, I am now running late and ready to sign off. A quick glance at the screens tells me that the Dow is up 26 points and gold is holding steady at $957 per ounce.

Until next week... thanks for reading and for being a subscriber to a Casey Research publication.

As dire as the outlook may be, quoting Joe Cocker, together we'll get through all of this, "With a little help from our friends."

David Galland
Managing Director
Casey Research, LLC.

The Room – 03/20/2009

David Galland — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:36:00 GMT

Dear Reader,

I worry I shall disappoint you today. After all, how can mere words, pecked out awkwardly on a shaky airplane table, adequately communicate all that has occurred this week?

As regular readers may guess, the plane I am on is taking me to Las Vegas for our sold-out Crisis & Opportunity Summit. While the event was deliberately scheduled to give the Obama administration an opportunity to reveal its cards after having been handed Bush's busted hand, the timing has turned out to be especially propitious, coming as it is at the end of a week that seems to be of some historic significance.

Of course, we wish you were joining us here in Las Vegas -- if you aren't -- but as your correspondent, I will certainly include notes from the event in next week's missive. But that is then, and this is now.

And now, everything is going to hell.

Bernanke's Gamble

Last week I posed the rhetorical question, "Wen is Enough?" in which I mused about the possibility of the Chinese cashing in their dollar chips and turning inward with their investing. Analysts of every stripe pooh-pooh that idea, intoning that the Chinese are now stuck with their dollar reserves, and that, further, the U.S. Treasury market is the only one with sufficient liquidity and safety to meet the needs of cash-rich foreigners.

This week we saw two developments related to this story.

The first was the Treasury International Capital (TIC) report. It is data released by the U.S. Treasury on international purchases and sales of U.S. assets. When foreigners are purring contently, the TIC report confirms that foreign investors are buying up U.S. assets, particularly long-dated Treasuries, as those represent a long-term bet on the U.S. economy and, by extension, the dollar.

Conversely, when foreigners are unsure about the outlook for the U.S., the TIC reflects this by confirming a sell-off of U.S. assets, coupled with a shift in what Treasury buying there is from the more optimistic long-term end of the time scale, to the skittish "ready-to-bolt" short-term end.

Which brings us to the just released January TIC, which was, to use the word selected by one reliable observer, a "disaster."

Our own Bud Conrad, writing with one wing (the other being smashed up in his rather spectacular bicycle accident last week), provides the big picture.

Here are some of the highlights:

1) January saw $148 billion net capital outflows from U.S. securities.

2) These big capital outflows are hard to square with the dollar's January rally.

3) Both private and official investors sold long-term U.S. assets. Aside from December, foreign investors haven't been buying long-term U.S. assets since the crisis began.

4) U.S. investors bought a bunch of foreign bonds. U.S. investors have been selling off foreign bonds and equities throughout the fall, so this marks an interest change. Is it evidence of nervousness about the dollar's future?

5) Banks stopped piling into U.S. assets.

6) Private investors reduced their Treasury bill holdings by $44 billion, and banks reduced their net dollar deposits by $119 billion.

Conclusion: The substantial selling of U.S. securities shows growing concerns about U.S. economic prospects. It is not a good sign for the dollar.

David again.

One of the interesting aspects of the January TIC was the wholesale exit from U.S. agency paper, shown in the chart here.

Given that these agency securities (paper issued by Fannie, Freddie, and others) are for all intents and purposes guaranteed by the U.S. government, the sell-off of these assets is a clear signal that Wen Jiabao and other foreign creditors are now doing more than just talking about their concern over the creditworthiness of the world's largest debtor... they are taking action. Specifically, eschewing agency debt instruments and putting what money they still invest in Treasuries into the short-term stuff that can be dumped in a proverbial heartbeat.

Which brings us to our second story.

As we have previously discussed here and in other Casey Research publications, the dismal January TIC numbers confirm that the foreign buyers so essential to financing the U.S. government's elevated spending needs are falling well short of fulfilling those needs. Couple this with what has to be a sharp fall-off in tax revenues, and the government begins to find itself not just between a rock and a hard place, but between the jaws of a Maxpower Industrial Grade Locking Vise Grip.

And so, this week, the Fed announced it was going to whip up a large batch of fresh cash for the purpose of buying the agency securities and even long-term Treasury bills that no one wants.

Here's a quote from Bloomberg on the baseline story...

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve said it will buy $300 billion in Treasury securities and increase its purchases of mortgage and agency debt in an effort to bolster housing and hasten the end of the recession.

"To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage- backed securities," the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement in Washington today. "Moreover, to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months."

Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is becoming more aggressive after unemployment climbed to 8.1 percent and economists forecast the economy will shrink through the middle of the year. Fed officials also kept the benchmark interest rate at between zero and 0.25 percent. The central bank also said it will consider expanding the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to include "other financial assets," the statement said.

Altogether, this latest explosion in money creation comes to $1.2 trillion -- somewhat more than the Chinese now hold in U.S. dollar-denominated reserves, reserves that have been built up by years of heavy trade and regular (self-serving) investment in support of the U.S. government's endless spending.

And, with the flip of a proverbial switch, the Fed has diluted the dollars that make up those reserves with another cool $1.2 trillion infusion of funny money.

So much for President Obama's strong assurances last week to Wen Jiabao that the U.S. government can be counted on to be a careful shepherd of the dollar.

The dollar failed to concur with Obama's assurances by staging a sharp sell-off and, in the process, sending our favorite yellow metal up handsomely.

And the government isn't done yet.

Earlier this week, we also heard that the Treasury was considering using the Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility (TALF) program to lend up to $1 trillion to their buddies – I mean highly respected financial firms – to buy up a variety of discounted, albeit troubled assets, sweetening the deal up by making the loans "non-recourse." Simply translated, that means "can't lose."

Back in the good old days, these sorts of deals traditionally involved paper bags stuffed with unmarked bills... but that was much more inconvenient. Again, turning to Bloomberg...

As it's currently set up, the TALF may lend as much as $1 trillion to investors from hedge funds to pension funds and insurance companies to buy recently created securities backed by loans for car purchases, college education and real estate. Applications for its first loans are due tomorrow.

Broadening the TALF to include older, illiquid and lower- rated securities could allow the participants in the public-private investment funds to potentially repackage assets and sell them on to a wider group.

So, what does this all mean? Simply that the government is literally willing to do "whatever it takes" in its attempt to return the country to its bubble days, a notion that any sane observer would instantly recognize as a delusional fantasy. But hard reality and vote-getting often don't get along, and so instead we get a government on the determined path of least resistance... unleashing an ever-escalating airlift of dollars.

Sharp Words

And now I feel the need to express thoughts that might strike some as a little "sharp."

This morning, as I was driving to grab a pre-flight coffee, I heard an ad for a local car dealer promoting that – thanks to one of the federal government's many new programs – by purchasing a new car in 2009, you are able to deduct the state and local taxes you would otherwise pay come tax time. This, according to the announcer, would save you $1,500 on a $25,000 purchase. And this, they say, was just one of a number of new federal programs they could help you use to save money on your new car purchase.

For reasons that only a neurologist (or maybe a psychiatrist) could fathom, despite having heard a litany of bailout and stimulus news over the last year, this proved to be the final straw, and instead of just shaking my head in dull resignation, I felt anger.

Sitting with a friend over my coffee a few minutes later, I tried to put the source of my agitation into words. The conversation picks up after I explained to him the message of the commercial.

He: "Dude, I hear ya, and I hate all this stuff, but it's necessary."

I: "Why is it necessary? Who is going to pay the $1,500 that the government doesn't have in the first place? This and all the stimulus programs are just putting the country further and further into debt. And who's going to pay for that debt? Not us, but our children and their children. Sure, we're going to get stuck for more taxes now, but there is no way the Obama administration can cover all this new spending with taxes, and the foreigners aren't going to keep lending to us. So, it comes down to borrowing more and more, beggaring future generations."

"Hey, it wasn't Obama who got us into this mess, man."

"No, it wasn't, and I'm not saying it was. It was Bush and the entire Congress, with some of them, like Barney Frank, more responsible than others. But it's Obama's ball now, and he's calling the shots. And as much as I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, I can't believe what he's doing."

"Well, he's got to do something, man, otherwise the economy would crash and everyone would suffer even more pain."

"Exactly!" I said, maybe even sputtering a bit, "But it is our generation that should take the hit. It is us who should feel the pain of the collapse. We did it to ourselves by standing idly by while the government and its many friends in the banking sector got us into this mess. And don't forget the orgy of spending and personal debt that the population engaged in, encouraged every step of the way by the government's easy-money policies. This all happened on our watch, but instead of taking our medicine, we the people are now encouraging the government in its many efforts to reinflate the bubble, fully aware all we are really doing is trying to shift the mess onto the backs of our children, and their children, and probably their children's children. What a bunch of cowards we are."

(That, of course, is not a perfect recounting of our conversation... I'm pretty sure I interjected one and maybe two "rat bastards" into my diatribe.)

You can call all of this quantitative easing if you wish; I call it institutionalized cowardice walking hand in glove with mob psychology.

Or you can call it "change."

If, however, I were the Chinese, I would call it "enough" and accelerate my plans to swap my dollars for just about any tangible asset at this point. There's no reason for them to stick around to share the pain we have all but guaranteed our children.

Protectionism

While there is a fair amount of debate about the causes of the Great Depression of the 1930s, there is one lesson from that dire circumstance that pretty much everyone agrees on: that the global trade war set off by the U.S. with the Smoot-Hawley Act and its many tariffs only made things significantly worse and helped prolong the depression. Further, everyone agrees that the world, faced with an economic crisis such as that now unfolding, would never make that mistake again.

But then the U.S. government went ahead anyway and slapped our trading partners in the face by including the Buy American provision in the recently passed stimulus package.

Those trading partners are starting to slap back.

First, Mexico announced this week that they would, henceforth, be foisting tariffs on a wide array of U.S.-made products... this in retaliation to the entirely disingenuous refusal by the U.S. government to live up to the terms in the NAFTA agreement whereby Mexican trucks would be allowed to drive on U.S. highways.

"Unsafe!" say the unions and their government backers, supported, oddly, by outraged talk show hosts of a more conservative leaning, whose normal free-market instincts are apparently trumped by xenophobia.

For the record, Mexico is the United States' third largest trading partner, behind Canada and China. Even so, we all know in our heart of hearts that the Mexicans are really just looking for an excuse to smuggle drugs and illegal aliens across the border, so the hell with them! If they want a trade war, bring it on!

Then there are the Chinese, who this week decided to institute a new "Buy Chinese" clause, at least as far as Coca-Cola buying a controlling interest in a successful Chinese juice company is concerned.

Regardless of how this stuff gets started, once it does, it can very quickly snowball, with national sensitivities getting hurt and exporters on both sides of the disputes being the ones taking it in the neck.

Too bad no one in government is actually involved in an export or import business, or any business at all, for that matter. Because then they might understand that these actions have real consequences, today, just as they did in the 1930s.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not so naïve to think that our trading partners don't try to gain the system in order to help their export companies succeed in U.S. markets. But I am not so blindly nationalistic that I think we don't try to do exactly the same thing.

Even so, for better or worse, thanks to its past success, the U.S. serves as a role model for the rest of the world and, in that regard, is held up to a higher standard. That we are willing to overtly move toward protectionism, whether by reneging on elements of NAFTA or through the Buy American provision, risks setting off a chain reaction of protectionism. Just as did Smoot-Hawley.

But we'd never make that mistake again, right?

Evil Capitalist Polluters!

Despite the quickly mounting deficits caused by stimulus money flying here and there like a St. Patrick's Day snow flurry, the new administration remains fully committed to tackling the all-important topic of global warming.

In fact, if current plans come to fruition, crisis or not, Team Obama may require the evil capitalists that run the few remaining manufacturing concerns to spend up to $2 trillion on "cap and trade" credits.

An excerpt from the Washington Times on the topic...

President Obama's climate plan could cost industry close to $2 trillion, nearly three times the White House's initial estimate of the so-called "cap-and-trade" legislation, according to Senate staffers who were briefed by the White House. A top economic aide to Mr. Obama told a group of Senate staffers last month that the president's climate-change plan would surely raise more than the $646 billion over eight years the White House had estimated publicly, according to multiple a number of staffers who attended the briefing Feb. 26.

"We all looked at each other like, ‘Wow, that's a big number,'" said a top Republican staffer who attended the meeting along with between 50 and 60 other Democratic and Republican congressional aides. The plan seeks to reduce pollution by setting a limit on carbon emissions and allowing businesses and groups to buy allowances, although exact details have not been released.

At the meeting, Jason Furman, a top Obama staffer, estimated that the president's cap-and-trade program could cost up to three times as much as the administration's early estimate of $646 billion over eight years. A study of an earlier cap-and-trade bill co-sponsored by Mr. Obama when he was a senator estimated the cost could top $366 billion a year by 2015. A White House official did not confirm the large estimate, saying only that Obama aides previously had noted that the $646 billion estimate was "conservative."

"Any revenues in excess of the estimate would be rebated to vulnerable consumers, communities and businesses," the official said. The Obama administration has proposed using the majority of the money generated from a cap-and-trade plan to pay for its middle-class tax cuts, while using about $120 billion to invest in renewable-energy projects.

Mr. Obama and congressional Democratic leaders have made passing a climate-change bill a top priority. But Republican leaders and moderate to conservative Democrats have cautioned against levying increased fees on businesses while the economy is still faltering. House Republican leaders blasted the costs in the new estimate. "The last thing we need is a massive tax increase in a recession, but reportedly that's what the White House is offering: up to $1.9 trillion in tax hikes on every single American who drives a car, turns on a light switch or buys a product made in the United States," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner. "And since this energy tax won't affect manufacturers in Mexico, India and China, it will do nothing but drive American jobs overseas."

Now, of course, the Washington Times heavily skews Republican and so can be counted on to point dramatically at every Obama misstep, but the fact that anyone is even thinking about foisting another bureaucracy -- and a massive new tax regime -- on struggling businesses is, in my view, just plain insane. And for the record, while businesses do go out of business, they don't pay taxes... that burden falls only to consumers, who ultimately get passed the tab.

Even so, at the rate things are going, by the time the full force of the new taxes are felt in a couple of years, the $650 billion, or $2 trillion -- whichever the number turns out to be -- may amount only to roughly enough in inflation-adjusted dollars to buy a Big Mac, hopefully with fries and a shake.

The Coming Credit Crisis

Oh, you thought we've already had our credit crisis? Sorry, so far we've only seen the first act. As for what's next, this came to me this week from a trusted correspondent who works in the consumer credit arena. It's from the Herald News...

There is a common perception in America that most of us live beyond our means with credit cards financing the party. However, the newly released Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances for 2007 tells a different story. According to their results, it's easy to see that the middle class has been steadily increasing its consumer debt in order to keep up with inflation.

An easy translation of that is the average Joe is using his Visa card to pay the light bill and keep his family fed. He's not partying, but trying to find a way to live from day to day. That news has real repercussions for what the next rollout of bad news and blow to our already battered confidence in the economy is most likely going to be.

The Fed's survey, which is taken from a carefully selected cross-section of 4,500 consumers, shows that since the last reading in 2004, median family incomes dropped slightly for middle income Americans, particularly those headed by a single parent. Average incomes for the wealthiest 10 percent rose substantially, by 8.5 percent.

The mean amount of credit card debt being carried by individuals rose 25 percent, from $3,000 to $7,300, a much faster rate of increase than in previous years. That doesn't sound significant enough until all the pieces start to come together.

The survey noted that the majority of the credit card debt has shifted from stand-alone companies, such as Capital One, to 87.1 percent being held by commercial banks. Those are the very same banks the feds have been working with to ferret out poisonous mortgage debt. Commercial banks that are doing well also made the same decision to not lend short-term consumer debt in large quantities to high-risk people. That means that the debt that is most likely to go unpaid is sitting with the same banks that are already in trouble.

Also, most consumers in the middle income category reported they were saving less than 1 percent, which makes sense if it's already taking a credit card to pay for the basics of life.

So the picture that's forming is an average voter who has a family to support but fewer real dollars in order to accomplish the feat and vital credit sources that have quickly disappeared except for the bill, with no monetary reserve to get through a tight year.

Add on top of that the climbing unemployment rate of this very same group.

It becomes easy to see the very real likelihood that a lot of the retail debt now held by weakened commercial banks will go unpaid. Consumers will choose paying for pretty much anything else before catching up the credit card debt when there isn't enough to cover all of the essentials. A damaged credit report will stop being seen as enough incentive if there's a risk of foreclosure on the house or the phone being disconnected.

Banks will start to make hard decisions about covering the debt owed to the retailers who accepted in good faith the bank-generated credit card. It all starts to roll downhill again.

What's astounding, given that the survey is generated by the feds, is how little Bernanke and his crowd are talking about the coming tidal wave. It can't be that we're still practicing the idea that if we look away long enough it won't all fall apart, yet again.

Fannie Mae, AIG, WaMu and Lehman were apparently not a big enough lesson. One of the more galling aspects is that right now there is not only no significant consumer loan modification being offered in this category but instead, banks are trying to generate bottom line income by charging fees of 25 percent based on a consumer's balance. There was a time when that was called usury in the United States. It starts to beg the question of what real differences exist anymore between the dreaded payday loan and some of the bank-issued credit cards.

It's also possible to conceive that consumers are now paying down debt that consists more of fees owed than actual retail debt. That's where we are at the moment.

If nothing is done, voters can rightfully say that, once again, big business and another pending bailout of some titan of industry on the taxpayer dollar mattered more. After all, the Federal Reserve was the one who gathered the necessary information and then stuck it in a drawer.

David again. In previous financial crises, credit card defaults were the first sign of trouble... this time around, it has largely been mortgages. That's because so many people were so far over their head with their upside-down mortgages and the sheer burden of homeownership that they knew trying to stay in the house, in many cases bought as speculations, was a non-starter. And so, instead they let the mortgages go in record numbers, while hanging on to their lifeline – the credit cards.

That the credit crisis is now intensifying into credit cards is, and should be, deeply concerning. As bad as credit card defaults have gotten, they are getting worse. In fact, this week the news came out that, in February, credit card defaults rose to a 20-year high. Amex and Citigroup (of which you, if you are a U.S. citizen, are now a proud owner) are particularly hard hit, with net charge-off rates rising to 8.7% and 9.6%, respectively.

Now, it is not my role in this world to be a bearer of bad news but rather to make sure that you are fully in the picture. And that picture at this moment is fairly bleak. Okay, it's downright dark. So don't make the mistake of thinking that the worst is behind us... it's not.

That said, the stimulus will almost certainly have some effect once it starts to hit into the economy. But the effect will be short lived and should be treated like a lit firecracker. Kind of exciting with the fuse fizzing away, but hold on too long and the result will be very painful.

"AIG Scum Out of Town!"

That was the epitaph scrawled into the dust-encrusted rear window of an SUV stopped in front of me here in the town that serves as world headquarters of Casey Research. A town that also happens to be the location of a prominent resort built with AIG money.

This sort of outrage over the AIG bonuses was underscored by the CNN reportage I was forced to watch on the large flat-screen TV stuck on the wall in front of the exercise equipment down at the local gym. (I don't have cable at home, and never intend on getting it.)

According to CNN, the citizenry and its elected officials are up in arms because AIG lived up to contractual agreements to pay the executives who continued to work at the firm rather than deserting the sinking ship to look for more permanent employment elsewhere (and, yes, a number of those who got bonuses were helpful in the actual company-sinking).

As I am on a plane, I can't yet say whether or not the government has followed up on its threat to pass legislation, retroactive no less, levying a 90% tax on the bonus recipients, but it won't surprise me if it does.

I'll come back to that momentarily, but am going to juxtapose that story with a second story that caught my attention while attempting to whip my body into shape. The story started with CNN's cameras showing a large ballroom filled beyond capacity with bureaucrats and contractors who were lined up literally down the hallway to get and complete the paperwork needed to get their share of the stimulus funds now being made available. The only catch, according to one interviewee, was that the projects for which they sought free money had to be "shovel ready" -- meaning the recipients had to begin spending the money they received this year. Thus, the ballroom seemed to have the same sort of frenetic energy one might attribute to a mosh pit, with the recipient hopefuls jostling elbow to elbow while clamoring for their share of the quick cash.

Doing my best to test your levels of concentration, I now return to the AIG story. Given that the government provided AIG with over 150 billion dollars in bailout funds, it is a safe assumption that the powers-that-be felt such a massive bailout was necessary. In fact, according to officialdom, it was critical because, should the company fail, it would lead to a real global catastrophe.

Is it too much of a stretch, therefore, to think that the government might actually want the company to succeed in working its way out of the trillions in CDS and other problem derivatives linked to the company? Or that, to accomplish that goal, the company might need to attract or retain executives with a certain skill set?

Now, it is not my intention to be a cheerleader for the morons that brought AIG to its knees in the first place, and I was very much against the bailout in the first place. Rather, I am simply trying to follow some sort of basic logic related to these bonuses.

And it doesn't seem illogical to spend $165 million in bonuses if that raises the odds of recouping a return on the $150 billion already dropped into the company and, more importantly, the hundreds of billions of more potential losses lurking in the AIG closet. (Remember, thanks to the misguided bailout, the government has put you, the taxpayer, in the position of owning 80% of AIG... and virtually all of any further losses they incur.)

So, as distasteful as the whole mess is, I can find some small rationale for the AIG bonuses.

But how, as a taxpayer, am I to rationalize the ballroom full of bureaucrats and their friendly contractor friends, each clamoring for a million here or a million there to fill in some pot holes, build a new bridge, or a knock together a new community center? Why are these things necessary, now of all times, with the country already struggling like Atlas with a groin pull under a world of debt?

The answer, simply, is because the administration believes that this grand experiment will somehow produce an economic miracle, magically reinflating a bubble that easy money and massive spending created in the first place. And Congress, in all its wisdom, and only after great study and deliberation, signed off on the stimulus, just as they did with the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.

Sure the AIG bailout was an outrage, and the bonus money is just an extension of that initial outrage... but so is the stimulus spend-a-thon.

As is the notion that Congress would even consider using tax policy – pay up or go to jail, to be specific – as a punitive measure. By the time this plane lands, I hope against hope that the bill has failed... because if it hasn't, then the government will have discovered a new tool for its large and growing arsenal of coercive powers. While we can't know whom they will turn it against next, you can be assured that, in time, they will.

The sponsor of the bill to use taxes as punishment was Congressman Steve Israel (D-Huntington), who grandly stated upon announcing the legislation...

"American families shouldn't be forced to reward these professional financial failures with extravagant bonuses that could buy fancy cars and yachts," Israel said in a statement. "AIG may not like it, but since they had to come to the federal government for help, the federal government now has a say in how they spend taxpayer money."

I wonder what Rep. Israel would say if someone proposed a bill to tax 90% of the salary of the "professional financial failures" who have led our country into a depression, and who are now throwing taxpayer money around in the trillions, beggaring the populace for generations to come?

[Okay, I am now in Las Vegas and, sure enough, they passed the legislation. Whether you think that AIG or other bailout bonus recipients are greedy and deserve punishment or not, the horrible precedent of punitive taxation aimed at a select group of citizens has now been established.

And there is something else that I heard this morning that is as concerning. It was an overt death threat by New York's Attorney General Cuomo, who has managed to extort the names of all of the employees of Merrill Lynch who, under the terms of their employment contracts, received bonuses over the last year. The company has asked Cuomo not to make those names public over fear for the safety of their employees in this overheated atmosphere. To which Cuomo has replied that he will hold off for a bit, but only to see which employees return the bonuses so he can strike their names off the list. In other words, return your bonuses or else suffer the potentially dire consequences.

We are deep in uncharted water, and it is only going to get deeper from here.]

It Just Doesn't End

Another thing that I just have to comment on this week is that the IMF is seriously considering joining the money-printing game, pumping out Special Drawing Rights that countries around the world can use as money.

As my plane is beginning to descend, and writing about this stuff is beginning to weigh on my good temper, I will leave it to the Telegraph to fill out the story...

The International Monetary Fund is poised to embark on what analysts have described as "global quantitative easing" by printing billions of dollars worth of a global "super-currency" in an unprecedented new effort to address the economic crisis.

Alistair Darling and senior figures in the US Treasury have been encouraging the Fund to issue hundreds of billions of dollars worth of so-called Special Drawing Rights in the coming months as part of its campaign to prevent the recession from turning into a global depression.

Should the move, which is up for discussion by the summit of G20 finance ministers this weekend, be adopted, it will represent a global equivalent of the Bank of England's plan to pump extra cash into the UK economy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

If the U.S. dollar manages to come through this crisis and retain its status as the world's reserve currency, I will be very surprised. Maybe, just maybe, whatever is next will be backed by something more tangible than political promises. But that's just a pipe dream.

Miscellany

Inflation? What Inflation? Regular readers may remember that last month the inflation numbers came in significantly higher than expected. "A fluke," we were assured. But this week, the CPI from February was released, showing that once again the CPI was up 0.4%, an increase over the 0.3% the prior month. And the highest inflation reading since last July.

Another anomaly, we are told, caused because gasoline unexpectedly spiked over 8% for the month... but increases were seen in a broad range of other items, including clothes, of all things. Could it be that the China discount, another topic we have mentioned in the past, is starting to fade away right along with our foreign trade? When you consider, as does Jeff Clark in the current edition of BIG GOLD, how strong gold has been over the last year, in the face of a strong dollar and a general absence of inflation – can you imagine how strong it will get when the reverse is true?

How high could gold go? A lot higher than you might think. To read the current edition of BIG GOLD and find out, risk-free, click this link. The current edition also includes the latest and most comprehensive article I have ever seen on whether the GLD ETF is actually safe... essential reading.
Videos? I know this is oldish news, but I think I have finally figured out why President Obama gave Gordon Brown a 12-pack of DVDs as his symbolic gift of friendship when Brown came calling at the White House in one of the first state visits of the Obama administration.

It struck me that the gift was analogous to the time I forgot to get my wife a birthday present and had to hightail it down to a local spa to buy a day pass complete with relaxing herbal wrappings and a massage. In this case, I'm pretty sure that as Gordon Brown was walking up the front steps, someone slapped a forehead and said something to the effect of, "Oh, crap... we forgot the present. Quick, didn't Bush leave behind some DVDs?"

I just wish I could have been there to see the expression on Brown's face, or heard what he had to say when he got back to his room.
Got Gold? If Not, in Zimbabwe You Starve. This is not a funny story. Rather, it is a video showing how the only thing now standing between many in Zimbabwe and starvation is their ability to pan for gold. There are parts that are hard to watch, but the message – that even in the most dire of situations, gold is still used as money – is a worthwhile one. You can watch the video here.
Tea Party. There are increasing signs, overseas and in the U.S., that we are entering a new phase of social unrest. In Cincinnati, a group of citizens outraged over the stimulus staged a tea party. Expect more.
Casey Phyles Updates and Info.

The next SoCal Phyle meeting will take place Saturday, March 28, 2009 from 1:30pm - 5:00pm (or so) at the Baja Cantina, 311 Washington Blvd., Marina Del Rey, CA 90292 http://www.bajacantinavenice.com.

The next Calgary Phyle meeting will be held Tuesday, April 7, at 7:00pmatCadence Coffee, 6407 Bowness Road NW, Calgary, Alberta http://www.cadencecoffee.com/main.html (All inquiries regarding the Calgary Phyle can be directed to calgaryphyle@yahoo.ca )

People looking to start a group: Daniel in the Lapeer, Yale, Port Huron, MI region. Homer in Winter Park, FL.

And that, dear readers, is it for this week. I am sorry for having gone on so long. Believe it or not, I actually cut out about five pages of notes on other topics I wanted to discuss this week. But for now, I must sign off and turn my attention to the Summit, which starts later today.

As I sign off, I see that the U.S. stock market is down modestly (the DJIA is off 33 points) and gold is hanging tough around $960. I wonder what the government will do next if the stock market takes another big dive from here? I suspect we won't have long to wait to find out.

Until next week, thanks for putting up with my ramblings... and for subscribing to a Casey Research publication.

David Galland
Managing Director
Casey Research, LLC.

The Room – 03/06/2009

David Galland — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:22:00 GMT

March 6, 2009

Dear Readers,

Of late, it seems as though I have gotten sideways with the technology deities.

First, as reported recently, was my accidental deletion of an hour-and-a-half recorded interview with trading gurus Dave Hightower and Terry Roggensack.

Then, yesterday, while waiting to put in a phone appearance on the U.S. Global Funds Webinar that many of you sat in on, I carefully put my speaker phone on mute (you can tell it's on because the button lights up) and set about trying to wolf down a chicken salad sandwich before it became my turn to talk.

This led to being reminded of several of life's little lessons. Including...

Eating quickly is never a good idea, because it can lead to aspirating, as opposed to swallowing, one's food.
Once aspirated, a fairly decent-sized piece of food – say, for example, chicken salad – can actually make its way up through one's sinus passages. In fact, with enough coughing, hacking, turning red, grabbing of the throat, choking and blowing, the aspirated morsel can actually traverse the nasal passages and exit through the nose.
And, finally, I was made to recall the fallibility of technology when I learned, after the fact, that a lit-up mute button is no firm guarantee that the phone is actually muted.

It was only when someone stuck their head into my office to let me know that my close run with lunch was being broadcast live that I became aware of the latter point. To which I whispered incredulously, "But that's impossible... I have it on mute, see!" In reply, I received a shrug and a statement that was as accurate as it was succinct, "Must be broken."

For those of you on the call, and especially my fellow presenters, whose carefully prepared presentation, I was later told, was disrupted on multiple occasions, my sincere apologies.

And to the technology gods, I supplicate in your general direction.

Before moving on to more substantive topics, a quick "thank you" to everyone who submitted entries for my growing category of dramatic music. While there were many excellent additions to the library – and I will share more in weeks to come – the hands-down winner this week was sent from Phil of our New Zealand contingent.

You may have seen this particular piece of music/video... because apparently over 1.5 million viewers have. But I hadn't and so really enjoyed the setup and the unlikely singer's powerful delivery. Real goose bump stuff, guaranteed to bring a smile to your day. Enjoy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEo5bjnJViA

I might add that the humble phone salesman went on to become an acclaimed opera singer – according to PR Newswire, "his debut album ‘One Chance' stormed to the top of the charts in 13 countries and notched up an astounding 27 platinum and four gold awards." His second album "Passione" is due to being released in April. Proof that even in these days, which are often filled to the brim with hopeless-seeming news, dreams can and do come true.

And now, on to the decidedly less entertaining aspects of our modern world.

Desperate Measures

As I write, the U.S. stock market is not yet open, on Friday, March 6. Yesterday was yet another bad-hair day for stock investors, with the DJIA off 281 points and the S&P 500 off 30 points to 682.

At this point, it is hard to see what Team Obama will do, or even can do, in the attempt to stop the bleeding-out of equities markets.

I mean, consider!

They have announced increases in capital gains taxes, and that didn't work!
In tandem, they announced that the dwindling number of people who still have money to invest should rather give more of that money to the government in the form of higher taxes. And that didn't work.
Members of the Obama administration have gone out of their way in recent weeks to let the financial markets know that, in their expert opinions, the crisis is only going to worsen. In fact, just this week, Goldman Sachs's Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Mr. Geithner, speaking at yet another Senate hot-air festival, reminded potential investors that "this is still a deepening recession and a deepening credit crunch." Those sentiments were echoed by the president himself, who helpfully pointed out that, should the government fail to act with appropriate vigor, things could move from "crisis into a catastrophe."

And yet, the stock market stubbornly refuses to mount anything resembling a solid rally. Go figure.

Hold the phone!

The nice thing about an online discount trading account is how quickly you can place a trade: in this case, buying an inverse S&P ETF, which I just did. We'll check in later to see how the trade works out.]

So, what's Team Obama to do? Besides taxing and trash talking the economy, that is? Well, that and promising to beggar our great-grandchildren by opening the spigots on a tidal wave of monetary Kool-Aid, served up by a new army of fresh-faced Obamacrats?

This is no idle question: while the voting masses will give the prez his 100 days and probably more, a systematic failure in the economy over the next few years is unlikely to be rewarded at the polls. Should such a failure continue to gain steam, Obama risks being labeled even by his own as a false messiah, at which point, out come the stones.

The fact is, despite its many powers and foot soldiers, there's only so much that government can do at this point... and none of it without the steep potential for unintended consequences and naked risk. In no particular order, here's a quick summary of the possible measures left to the increasingly desperate government:

Suspend Mark-to-Market Rules. On March 12, a House Financial Services subcommittee will be gathering for free lattes, donuts, and a chat about suspending mark-to-market accounting standards. Simply defined, financial institutions are now required to establish, for accounting purposes, the fair value of their assets, using as a basis the "price that would be received to sell an asset or paid to transfer a liability in an orderly transaction between market participants at the measurement date."

The problem, of course, is that there currently isn't a market for much of the toxic paper now clogging the pipes of banks and other financial institutions. By exposing the folly of past decisions made by these institutions, mark-to-market rules have required these giants of finance to regularly fess up to the huge losses they have incurred.

Hypothetically, by suspending or modifying the rules, the operators of the many beggared institutions could straighten themselves up, adjust the old school tie, run a comb through their thinning but well-coifed hair, and announce that the toxic stuff was actually worth something. The "something" would, of course, be based on this model or that which imputes an elevated valuation at some distant point in the future.

With their persistent capital problems relieved, the bankers would then entice investors back to their equity by speaking in their most stentorian tones while pointing to a fresh set of metrics designed with special appeal to "value" investors.

Or, at least, that's how things are supposed to work out.

The people I have spoken with on this topic have expressed opposing views on whether mark-to-market as it now stands will be nudged over the side of the sinking ship. One well-placed money manager told me that he thinks it's unlikely it will be dumped, but that, if it is, the stock market could stage a 60% rally from here.

Another told me that there was no way that the government will tamper with it, because they would worry (correctly, in my view) that changing the rules in any material sense could be the final straw in destroying the thimbleful of credibility still retained by the financial institutions.

Personally, I think the potential of a change to these rules is very real – with the rationale for doing so announced in double-speak that positively drips of good intentions and sound practices. As to the reaction of the market, who can say? If the changes coincide with a general fatigue among the bears, and are possibly supported by some encouraging buying from friendly parties, they could spark a rally, and maybe a big one.

On the other hand, it could also put the match straight to the powder and result in an explosive collapse.

I wish I could be a bit firmer in my opinion of how this could shake out, but conjecture is all that is possible at this point. I'll keep trolling around for informed opinions, but the key thing now is to watch the upcoming hearings closely, and to watch for the trial balloons that the government likes to send up before making its decision. Knowing what's coming is half the battle, even if only as a signal to run for even deeper cover.
Bad Bank. Speaking of trial balloons, the government has floated veritable blimps with the phrase "Bad Banks" emblazoned across their girths.

A picture of the latest Bad Bank plan, snipped out of the Wall Street Journal, is shown here.

Adding some context to the graphic, the idea is for the government, along with the private sector, to pony up as much as $1 trillion to buy distressed assets.

As the graphic helpfully points out, "Investment managers who agree to put up a certain amount of capital would run the funds."

That caption may be translated as "Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan and other Wall Street insiders will be able to borrow money from the government on extremely favorable terms, with no recourse for failing to repay, as long as they agree to invest it back into the Bad Bank fund. As a reward for providing cover for this operation, the banks would earn billions in fees earned off the bulk of the money deposited in the fund, which will come directly from the Treasury. Big party follows."

Turning to the next caption over, we see that "Investors, such as pension funds, would be able to participate in the funds."

I think I have this part straight. What they are saying is that now that the Friends Of Obama (previously known as Friends of Bush) are well positioned, the investment managers are going to search the world over for the last of the really stupid pension and money managers, a moniker aptly applied to anyone willing to invest in a toxic soup of bad-asset-backed securities. They may find a few who can both drool and write a check at the same time, but not many.

In reality, what will likely happen is that (a) the government will print up another trillion to buy the bad assets, then (b) pay their buddies billions to "take a meeting" at a posh eatery a few times a week. Meanwhile, the financial institutions who sold the toxic stuff off to the Bad Bank fund will be able to sally forth to greener pastures, leaving the taxpayers with the bill for the bailout... and the bankers' many lunches.

Do I think we'll see a Bad Bank? Almost certainly. Will it solve the problems besetting the economy? No. Rather, it will just continue the process of transferring the liabilities from where they belong onto the back of the already overburdened taxpayer.

But it could result in a stock rally, if only for a limited time, and only for the stocks of the companies doing the dumping of the toxic stuff.

As for the overburdened taxpayers: as Doug Casey writes in his Casey Report lead article this month, "Street Fighting Man," taxes are a strong possible trigger for social unrest. It may already be starting, with the first proverbial (for now) shots fired this week in Hoboken, New Jersey, when a mob tarred and feathered the mayor in effigy for refusing to deal with oppressive levels of taxation. More on that story here.
Fed Buys Long-Term Treasuries. The Fed has, periodically, floated the idea of stepping into the market to buy long-dated Treasuries, should the need arise.

We think the need will arise, because of (a) the sheer scale of the government financings that will be required this year, and (b) the fact that foreigners are running out of cash due to domestic spending need and falling exports to the U.S., and maybe even running out of patience with the now official U.S. policy of monetary prolificacy. As foreigners have been about the only buyers of long-dated U.S. Treasuries in recent years, the shortfall caused by their reduced participation can only be made up by taxes – but tax revenues are plummeting right along with the engines of commerce that throw those off as byproduct – or by printing fresh dollars.

Which means, simply, printing is the only answer that will pop to officialdom's mind (the others require inconvenient free-market solutions).

So, what happens when the Fed is forced to begin buying up the longer-term paper?

For a time, interest rates might go down – simply because the primary buyer, the Fed, won't demand higher yields on its money. But rates won't stay down, because nothing will say inflation louder than the Fed becoming the lender of last resort to the Treasury, the self-described spender of last resort. At that point, the price of gold begins to soar, with interest following along in fairly short order.

As I am moving fast, I'm glossing over a new round of stimulus spending, and another after that – but those are pretty much taken as givens for now. And I'm sure I'm overlooking other desperate measures the government might take – for example, exchange controls or the creation of a dual currency system (one for the locals and one for the foreigners) -- but those will be more of a reactive nature following the broader collapse and the return of price inflation.

Of course, the government has the option of calling the whole thing off and turning their attention to supporting the free market... scraping the convoluted and counterproductive tax system in favor of a flat tax... reducing regulations... cutting government spending... but that's just silly talk.

In any event, if you have any thoughts on the topic, drop them my way at david@caseyresearch.com. In the meantime, the above seems a good list of trial balloons to keep a watch out for in the darkening skies.

Kindle Two

As readers of any duration are aware, my recent run-ins with technology aside, I have a fixation of sorts about Amazon's Kindle reading device. As I have described in far too much detail in prior missives, I think the K-I-N-D-L-E spells D-O-O-M for anything other than children's and coffee table book publishers, and I'm not so sure about the former.

Given that the other members of my immediate family agree on the many merits of the Kindle, most nights a scuffle of the friendly sort for the use of it occurs. That, and because I didn't need any other encouragement, really, caused me to rush out and buy the new Kindle as soon as it became available.

While I didn't think it possible, Amazon has outdone itself, smoothing out every first-generation bump and producing a truly elegant new reader.

I'm not going to go into any detail here, because there are now numerous articles on version two, but I will give it my wholehearted endorsement. It is more streamlined, functional, and just all around better than V.1, and that was already best of class, in my firmly held opinion.

Coincidently, this morning subscriber, correspondent, and fellow Kindle aficionado Ryan D. wrote in to suggest that we make our publications more Kindle-friendly (there is a function that allows you to email yourself documents to read on the Kindle, and apparently our letters currently don't "translate" very well). Jumping on the idea, I sent Ryan's email on to our production team, and they have already answered that this seems a task we can manage. And so, if I have anything to do with it (and I do), we will.

Not sure how long it will take, but we'll keep you posted.

Letters from You

I received a couple of letters this week that I thought worth sharing. In the first, D. White takes Jerry C. to task for the ditty on taxation he provided for last week's edition of this missive.

As I read D. White's comments, I chuckled -- but in a chagrined sort of way -- because I had entirely failed to register the point of contention to which she refers, and I near simultaneously remembered that the week before, I had shared the song "It's a Man's World" by James Brown and Pavarotti. Am I a subconscious sexist? I hope not... because I'm certainly not a conscious one.

In any event, here's the letter...

"Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids."

Well, let's see – there were no cars – so there goes the motor vehicle taxes, license taxes, gas taxes, etc. Of course, at that time, most people couldn't even afford a horse, streets were polluted by equine waste, a trip of 20 miles was a major production, and many people rarely or never left the town they were born in. I guess you think that we were all better off that way. The country may have been the most prosperous in the world (the Brits of that time probably disagreed), but life expectancy was lower, infant and maternal mortality higher, and the standard of living much, much lower. Read "The Jungle" for more details on how swell things were.

Mom had no choice but to stay home and raise the kids. And if anything happened to Dad, they were all likely to wind up in the poorhouse or county farm (they still existed), because she had no opportunity for decent employment. I think most women are grateful for their expanded horizons, Jerry – but perhaps you are the barefoot-and-pregnant kind of guy. If that's the case, let's hope that medical science (funded by the government) quickly gives you a chance to try being Mr. Mom. I'll be happy to personally chain you to the stove – which 100 years ago was much more dangerous than today and the cause of many house fires and women's deaths when their long skirts went up in flames.

Then, to liven up my day, I received this...

All I can say is, thank god Obama is willing to try to do something to unstick the system. Sarcastic philosophical rantings aren't doing it for me... nor do they help our country.

Richard

Here's the response I hastily dashed off in Richard's direction...

So, let me ask you a straight-up question. What is the economic theory – the past examples, if you will – of a government spending and taxing its way out of trouble? How exactly does that work?

The nation is bankrupt and, as would be the case with an individual, it has to come to grips with that fact. Grabbing another handful of credit cards and heading back to the mall solves nothing. It just makes things worse.

I can, and will, comment in whatever tone I see fit when I see a continuation of the same stupid and dangerous policies that got us here in the first place. Hell, I'd even happily go for the extra 40% tax increase that I will have to pay if Obama's budget passes, if it was part of a plan that actually had a chance of working.

But I am indignant at the idea that government should do "something" just "because," with zero basis in even rudimentary economics.

I hope that his rigorous actions give you a lot of personal comfort – that temporary comfort will be paid for by your great-grandchildren.

I include that last correspondence not to show that I can get my hairs up when pushed to it, but rather to stress that the skeptical comments I make now and again really aren't about Obama, per se... but rather, about his administration's clear willingness to stay the course -- the same course but even accelerated – as his predecessors.

Unlike, apparently, the often-contradictory Mr. Limbaugh (who, for instance, called for drug dealers to be shot at the same time he was a secret drug addict), I have no desire to see Mr. Obama fail... provided, of course, that we first define "success."

If in "succeeding," the Obama administration turns the nation into a socialist paradise, trapping my capital with exchange controls, and then slowly (or not so slowly) confiscating it for the "greater good," then I guess I'd prefer him to fail.

On the other hand, if his financial shell game somehow managed to get the country through to greener pastures and better days, then clearly that is an outcome I'd have to salute.

The problem is that, using history as our guide and seeing a litany of new initiatives that hardly help, and in many cases, actively hamper the enterprising individual, the only realistic conclusion I can come to is that the government remains stubbornly on the road to ruin.

The sign post for Bush's road read "To Baghdad." Obama's reads "To a Perfect World."

Both lead off a cliff.

On That Topic...

Thanks to subscriber Matt F. for sending this along...

The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

Dr. Adrian Rogers

Miscellany

Get Well Soon, Bud. In addition to his never-ending quest for truth in economics, our own Bud Conrad likes to engage in somewhat dangerous sports... like windsurfing off the coast of Northern California and, apparently, riding ten-speed bicycles too fast on city streets. Fortunately, it was his left arm he broke in three places, and not his right. Get well soon, Bud.
Phyle News.
- Alex C., who runs the first-ever Casey phyle at his coffee shop in Calgary, is looking to hold a get-together at some point in March.
- John is looking to start a phyle in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
As usual, if you are interested in participating in these or other gatherings of Casey subscribers around the country – and the world – drop us a note at phyles@caseyresearch.com.

And that, dear readers, is that for this week.

As I sign off, I see that the stock market has reversed rather sharply from its early enthusiasm and is now down 35 points. More to the point, the short position I put on as I began to write you today is about $800 to the good.

To be clear, I am definitely not a day trader. But given the news that greeted the opening bell this morning, that U.S. unemployment is at 8.1%, the highest in 25 years, the early rally made no sense. Ergo, the quick application of a short position.

Importantly, I was comfortable allocating a modest portion of the speculative corner of my portfolio to shorting the broader market, figuring that even if I do badly today, the stream of bad news is certain to continue into next week, and likely next month, and even next year. So, provided I can afford to weather a setback, which can happen at any time, then I am pretty confident I'll be able to close out the position within the week for a nice gain. And if the bottom falls out again this afternoon, then I'll make this a day trade after all and bank the short-term gain. At which point, I might take the family out to a nice dinner, enjoyed without any undue haste.

Adding a little frosting to the cake, I see that gold once again refuses to be pushed down and has bobbed back up to $939. While it is certainly not inconceivable – and maybe inevitable – we'll see it back in the 800s again before the final lift-off, there is no question we are showing firm support in here. And, as hard as we look, we can't see anything in the way of a serious obstruction to it holding up and going higher. Ditto, silver is starting to get pretty interesting, but that is a topic for another day.

Until next week, thank you for reading and for subscribing to a Casey Research publication.

David Galland
Managing Director
Casey Research, LLC.

The Room – 02/27/2009

David Galland — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:07:00 GMT

February 27, 2009

Dear Readers,

This morning, as I was looking over dispatches from correspondents around the world – from Ed in Alberta… Sadia in the UK… Baldy in Indonesia… the “General” in Portugal… and Nitin in Katmandu – I began to appreciate what it must have been like to be on the news desk during World War II.

I am trying not to be overly pessimistic, but there’s no denying the mass of bad news coming to us from all fronts: the forces of collectivism are using the cover of the crisis they largely created, aided and abetted by capitalism’s quislings, to roll over the individual.

Even so, contained within the dire reportage is also some very good news for you personally, and I’ll touch on that as well in today’s missive.

The Bad News

As fully anticipated, with its first budget plan, the Obama administration has fired a salvo into the side of the productive classes. (For those of you who are not U.S. citizens, feel free to use Team Obama as a proxy for what is likely to occur where you reside.)

Yes, we expected the $1.75 trillion budget deficit, which will, by the time all is said and done, come in a lot closer to the $2.5 trillion number anticipated some months ago by our own Bud Conrad.

Yes, we expected the government to begin raising taxes, which they are proposing to do with vigor – starting with an increase of $1.4 trillion on the people who earn in excess of $250,000 a year. “Right on!” shouts the mob, on the way out the door to burn Porsches.

For no other purpose than to keep the record straight, it’s worth noting that thanks to the government’s steady dose of inflation, $250,000 today will only buy you 77% of what it would have in 1998… and 56% of what it would have in 1988.

A decade from now, given the inflation rate we expect, the dollar’s purchasing power will erode by another 50%, and probably a lot more than that. In fact, at the current rate of money creation, by the time the dust settles, $250,000 might be the annual wage commanded by burger flippers.

But, hey, look at the bright side, at that point everyone will be rich!

The further details of Obama’s budget plan are a hodgepodge of this and that, some of which we even agree with (like cutting business subsidies). On the whole, however, the overarching mandate appears to be to thrust the hand of government, like some motion picture kung fu villain, deep into the heart of American enterprise.

And government’s expansion is far from over. Even as I write, the news continues to pour in…

Citigroup to get another $25 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury.
Treasury officials work on bailout plan for auto parts manufacturers.
President Obama exploring automatic workplace pensions and an expansion of unemployment insurance.
AIG, now a government lap puppy, takes another big loss, and is again looking to its master for another handout.
Speaking of lap puppies, Fannie Mae, has lost another $25 billion and is looking for $15 billion more from the Treasury. The value of this zombie institution’s net assets is now a negative $105 billion, and eroding. Great investment of your tax dollars, eh?
Then there’s the new administration’s cap-and-trade green tax… a stunning new initiative that will bring many U.S. businesses to their knees. (You can read more about it here.)

There is more, so much more, including a $638 billion reserve fund for healthcare reform in the president’s budget that loudly broadcasts that, “Yes, we’re going there.” There being nationalized health care.

But you already read too much and don’t need me to rehash things as they are.

I will, however, comment on the way things will be, because in that, at least, we can find some good news.

The Good News

My fellow citizens of planet Earth, it is now abundantly clear that the trend toward socialism in all its many disguises is about to, once again, shift into high gear.

We’ve been here before, encouraged by the words of Karl Marx, a distinctly unsuccessful individual (to read his life story is to read of almost unending misery, poverty, and discontent) but a decidedly successful phrase-coiner, knocking the world off its axis with his “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

While no one with any real sense of history, not to mention economics, can take any overt joy at the prospect of the dark clouds of collectivism looming high in the sky above us, there is, if you pay close attention, a very big opportunity in all of this.

Namely, we are now presented with a relatively rare chance to see with some clarity into the future.

Imagine if eight years from now you could step into a time machine and zip right back to this very moment. How much money do you think you could make?

Well, just because the chattering masses have the blinders on as they march forward to their collective penury doesn’t mean we need to join them. And, if we are even a little bit careful, we won’t.

So, what is it about the future we can now see? Some broad strokes…

Currency depreciation.
More taxes.
Rising interest rates.
A price capitulation in real estate, with a collapse in commercial.
Exchange controls (now that Team Obama is raising your taxes, you don’t really think they’re going to let you pick up your wealth and leave, do you? The window for global diversification will soon be closing.)
The return of mega-labor unions.
Trade wars, shooting wars, and other forms of heightened geopolitical tension.

(This is a topic we are discussing at greater length, backed up with specific recommendations, in the March edition of The Casey Report, which will be released on or around March 3. Among its many highlights, Doug Casey is just putting the finishing touches on his article titled “Street Fighting Man” about the prospects for social unrest.)

Provided you keep your personal wealth profile low (there was a reason Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, drove a beat-up pick-up truck), your financial powder dry, and, maybe most important of all, retain your sense of humor, the opportunities in the unfolding crisis will be abundant

We’ll do what we can to help you spot those opportunities in our various services. If you are unsure which of our services is right for you, don’t hesitate to try them all… we offer very generous trial subscriptions, most of which come with a full money-back guarantee if you don’t find the service a good match. We have no interest in trying to rope you into a service that isn’t exactly right for you, so don’t feel bad at all if you try a service and later cancel for a full refund. We’re just happy to have the opportunity to share our research with you.

You can learn about all our services, of course, at CaseyResearch.com.

Ed. Note

Casey Trend Trader

not

Casey Trend Trader

learn more about our Trend Trader trial offer here

Whatever you do, don’t be complacent about what’s coming.

We are long past the point where doing nothing is an option. Review your personal finances, cut out unnecessary expenses, talk to your accountant about tax planning, and, if you’re a U.S. citizen, consider moving at least some of your wealth out of the country while you still can (but please, don’t try to hide it… that’s a fool’s errand). If you own gold, only you and your spouse, if you have one, should be aware of it.

Ask yourself, “If I just dropped in from eight years in the future, what measures would I take?”

Now, take them.

A Musical Interlude

This week, I have been listening – repeatedly, according to certain innocent bystanders -- to the following tracks.

For the rock & rollers among you, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking from the Rolling Stones kicks off with one of my personal favorite guitar riffs. Listen to it here.

And for pretty much anyone, an odd but really well-done duet by James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing “It’s a Man’s World,” which was sent along by subscriber David B. in response to last week’s call for dramatic music. Now, I don’t know if this song is as sexist as its title makes it seem (I haven’t listened closely to the words), but watching James Brown doing his natural best to match vocal talents with Pavarotti is, alone, worth the price of admission. Which, in this case, is just a click on the link here.

Have some dramatic music you want to share? Shoot it my way at David@caseyresearch.com.

A Golden Opportunity

While it’s still a long shot, one possible outcome of the deluge of paper money about to hit the global economy may be that governments will be forced by simple math back to a gold standard: when you dump trillions of freshly created paper into the market, inflation must soar.

And because governments produce nothing, the servicing of all their many debts and new spending programs gives rise to the real risk that the inflation could devolve into a Zimbabwe-like downward spiral. At that point, the intelligentsia, uncomfortable at the sight of glowering pensioners growing tired of living on dog food, may be forced back to a sound money system.

For the most part the citizenry has no memory of a gold standard, and even less understanding of same. We expect that to change. And, in fact, an early straw in the wind showed up this week in the form of a YouTube video sent along by subscriber Peter F.

You really must watch this, given that it is an excerpt from a major cable news personality, Glenn Beck, who manages to wax intelligently on matters involving the gold standard. There may be hope after all.

Watch it by clicking here.

Meanwhile, rather than wait for government to act on gold convertibility for their currencies, individuals the world over are doing their own conversions by trading their paper currencies for the hard stuff in record amounts.

Rand Refinery Ltd.

Johan Botha

Many of you have written to us expressing concern about the potential for direct action by the U.S. government against gold, – now that it’s returning to its dominant role as a sound money – including an outright ban or confiscation. We don’t see any signs of that yet, but we’re vigilant.

Damn Foreigners

The rising power of the mob in virtually all of the world’s democracies invariably leads to geopolitical tensions.

That’s because the ruling elites know they need to pander to the blunt-force voting blocs if they are to retain their elevated status. And there are few issues more unifying to the mob than the sight of filthy foreigners taking advantage at the expense of the locals. Whether it’s the damn illegal wetbacks who dare to cut our lawns or wash our restaurant dishes on the cheap, or the crafty Chinamen willing to work for pennies a day to feed their families – thereby taking food out of the very mouths of good union folks here in the U.S.A. – fanning the flames of nationalism is as easy as drawing breath for any politician worthy of the label.

And so we’ll be seeing a lot more of that, too, as politicians on both sides of the spectrum revert to script in redirecting the blame for what is now unfolding, and what is yet to come, to anywhere other than where it belongs.

This is a dangerous game.

For starters, the U.S. is now deeply, deeply in debt to the rest of the world. While the Chinese have, so far, been tolerant, their recent demands for some form of guarantee before they buy any more U.S. agency debt is a clear signal that their patience with the U.S. government’s prolificacy is not without limits.

Some of you might protest that the Chinese and other foreign trading partners, looking for a commercial advantage by keeping our currency high, encouraged the U.S. government to spend, spend, spend by engaging in a policy well described as lend, lend, lend. And you are right. But since when does anyone have to take a loan, just because it’s offered?

At any point during the decades-long run-up in federal government spending, the reigning morons in the Washington swamp could have “just said no.”

Instead, they said “yes,” embarking on foreign adventures… spending trillions on building and then largely ruining the world’s biggest military apparatus… offering financial backing to liar loans… launching the mutant health care scheme that goes by the name of Medicare… and… and… agreeing to whatever other thick, fat-laden slice of pork the politicians thought the lazy-minded voteriat would find agreeable.

We don’t need to look overseas for people to blame. The culprits are still knocking around the halls of power, just wearing new ties (with cute little donkeys on them instead of elephants), their blubbery lips retrained to spout off about the need for new subsidies to promote this or that green energy project “for our children” (conveniently forgetting that their cousin Bob happens to be a big shareholder in said project).

Sorry about that. Got a little carried away, listening once again to Can’t Hear Me Knocking at high volume.

I need to move on, because I have to get back to editing The Casey Report, and because I just got invited to make an appearance this afternoon on Fox Business.

But before I go, I want to bring this down to a more human level by sharing the contents of an email I received this morning from Baldy in Indonesia.

I guess we’ll find out just how splendid isolation really is…

Look for the Union Label

By Donald Grove, Casey Research Washington Correspondent

After last week’s edition of this exercise in fulminating, subscriber Buster H., sent along the following note:

I am surprised you have not mentioned the major stealth labor union executive order signed (without any media coverage) by Obama on Feb. 6. Read the text here.

After reading the referenced document, I shot off a note to Donald Grove, our tireless Washington correspondent, asking him to turn over a few stones to get to the bottom of the story. Here’s his report…

Unions played a big role in putting Obama in the White House. His campaign website assured his labor backers that he would “fight for passage of the [so-called] Employee Free Choice Act” (which would eliminate secret ballots and leave workers who don’t want a union vulnerable to harassment), “ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation to ensure it rises every year,” and “increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs.” Once safely ensconced as the nation’s chief executive, it was time for Obama to remember those who put him there.

On January 30, with inauguration festivities still a fresh memory, Obama signed three union-friendly executive orders reversing a series of Bush administration executive orders dictating how federal contractors are to deal with union workers.

Obama said, “We cannot have a strong middle class without strong labor unions. We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests. I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, it's part of the solution.”

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who attended the signing ceremony, said “The executive orders are the first step in a long road to restore balance between workers and corporations. As the weeks and months continue, we thank God that we have a president, vice president, and Congress who are determined to fix our economy so that it works for everyone.”

On February 6, the president tossed labor another bone. While this fourth labor-friendly executive order does not require executive-branch agencies to use project labor agreements on construction projects, “it is the policy of the Federal Government to encourage executive agencies to consider requiring the use of project labor agreements in connection with large-scale construction projects in order to promote economy and efficiency in Federal procurement.” Unions love these agreements, which were prohibited by the Bush administration.

Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a different take, however. He said, “President Obama’s executive order will drive up the cost of government at a time when we should be doing everything possible to save taxpayer dollars. federal contracts should go to the businesses that can offer taxpayers the best value – not just the unions who supported the Democrats’ campaigns last year. Quietly signing executive orders to pay back campaign backers undermines Obama’s promise to change Washington. It is a disappointment for Americans hoping for more transparency and less politics-as-usual in Washington.”

According to two of America’s largest construction industry trade groups, the president’s orders would limit the number of workers hired on new federal jobs to build roads, bridges, and buildings – the very projects touted as creating millions of new jobs as part of the stimulus package. Jerry Gorski, national chairman of the Associated Builders and Contractors, said that 84% of the country's construction workers are not in labor unions. “If the purpose of these projects is to get Americans back to work, why would we pick an approach that would allow only a small percentage of the construction workforce to participate?” Brian Turmail, speaking for the Associated General Contractors, said Obama’s executive order “takes the contractor out of the process of negotiating with their employees and puts the government in that role.”

Here are the orders for those who wish to scrutinize.

2009-01-30 Notification of Employee Rights under Federal Labor Laws
2009-01-30 Nondisplacement of Qualified Workers under Service Contracts
2009-01-30 Economy in Government Contracting
2009-02-06 Project Labor Agreements

A couple have not yet appeared on the White House Briefing Room at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office.

I’m sure many of you will recall this inspirational jingle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNTpOnZqeUo

Thank God it’s Friday!

Regards, Don

State Sovereignty – Saying “No” to the Feds

By Shannara Johnson

David again. There have been a number of articles recently about the possible break-up of the Eurozone. Before those of us in the U.S. get too smug, we might want to wonder if something akin to that could happen here. “Never!” I can hear some of you exclaiming, and you are probably right. But we are very much heading into unchartered waters, with a serious power grab on the federal level that leaves the states with much of the costs associated with complying with the spate of new regulations.

Shannara Johnson, a senior researcher and editor here at Casey Research who touches almost everything you read from us – quite amazingly so – found the time to dig in on something of a revolt now brewing in capitals around these 50 states. Her report follows…

Drowned out by the fiscal calamities of recent months, there is a new “movement” in the United States; one that has, incredibly, received little attention from the mainstream media. Not so united anymore, an increasing number of states have been introducing resolutions to declare sovereignty.

Now, to clarify this, a declaration of sovereignty is not the same as secession. Rather, it is the assertion of states’ rights – rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution and have been, in the view of many state governments, eroded or usurped by the bigwigs in Washington, DC.

In the words of Arizona state Rep. Judy Burges, “We are telling the federal government that we are a sovereign state and want to be treated as such. We are not a branch of the federal government.”

The states are pointing to the 9th and 10th Amendments, which affirm, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” and “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Even though it’s not secession, it is definitely a warning shot. The resolutions demand that the Obama administration “cease and desist” from unrestrained government expansion; they also imply that federal laws and regulations that violate the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.

So far, ten states have recently drafted or are about to draft bills to declare sovereignty: Oklahoma, Arizona, Missouri, Michigan, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Washington, and Texas. And according to analysts, up to 20 more states may follow suit this year, including Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nevada, Maine, and Pennsylvania.

The complaints mainly revolve around federal legislation imposed on the states without their consent; pet peeves include gun control laws, martial law provisions, freedom of religion and speech, and out-of-control federal spending.

“Live Free or Die” state New Hampshire’s resolution is one of the harshest:

NH Representative Dan Itse told FOX News’ Glenn Beck, “It’s a line in the sand to tell the federal government that they are no longer allowed to transgress the Constitution, and if they do, then they’re nullifying the Constitution.”

So far, so good. Here at Casey Research, ever the small-government advocates, we might be inclined to applaud the gutsiness of the states’ lawmakers. However, as Beck pointed out in his interview with Itse, some things just don’t add up.

For example, despite tough words and fingering the revolvers strapped to their hips, many governments of the very same states that are declaring sovereignty do not seem to mind holding their hands out for their share of the stimulus money the Obama administration is dangling in front of them. They just don’t like to be told by the feds how to spend it.

The Washington Times reported that Republican governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina “aggressively opposed the stimulus plan. However, in a Thursday morning interview on CBS’ ‘The Early Show,’ Mr. Sanford said his state would accept money from the stimulus bill. Opposing the plan ‘doesn’t preclude taking the money,’ said Mr. Sanford.”

Pragmatism or hypocrisy? Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute chooses the latter, noting that about a third of average total state spending comes from the federal government. Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, agrees: “To a large degree, states are scapegoating their budget problems on Washington. It’s tough to be sympathetic for states and local governments when they go $467 billion in federal grants last year.”

Tax Revolt – Part I

Friend and mining stock guru Rick Rule sent the following along this week…

Actual “Letter to the Editor” from the February 5th edition of the Wichita Falls, Texas Times Record News...

Dear IRS,

I am sorry to inform you that I will not be able to pay taxes owed April 15, but all is not lost.

I have paid these taxes: accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog license tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gasoline tax, hunting license tax, fishing license tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, luxury tax, Medicare tax, city, school and county property tax, real estate tax, Social Security tax, road usage tax, toll road tax, state and city sales tax, recreational vehicle tax, state franchise tax, state unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax, telephone federal state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local tax, utility tax, vehicle license registration tax, capital gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Colorado property tax, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and New Mexico sales tax, and many more that I can't recall, but I have run out of space and money anyway.

When you do not receive my check April 15, just know that it is an honest mistake. Please treat me the same way you treated Congressmen Charles Rangel, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and ex-Congressman Tom Daschle and, of course, your boss Timothy Geithner. No penalties and no interest.

Ed Barnett
Wichita Falls

P.S. I will make at least a partial payment as soon as I get my stimulus check.

Tax Revolt – Part II

Thanks to subscriber and periodic correspondent Jerry C. for sending this along…

Tax the table at which he's fed.

Tax his tractor, tax his mule,

Teach him taxes are the rule.

Tax his work, tax his pay,

He works for peanuts anyway.

Tax his cow, tax his goat,

Tax his pants, tax his coat.

Tax his ties, tax his shirt,

Tax his work, tax his dirt.

Tax his tobacco, tax his drink,

Tax him if he tries to think.

Tax his cigars, tax his beers,

If he cries, tax his tears.

Tax his car, tax his gas,

Find other ways to tax his ass.

Tax all he has, then let him know,

You won't be done till he has no dough.

When he screams, then tax him some more.

Tax him till he's good and sore.

Then tax his coffin, tax his grave, tax the sod in which he's laid.

Put these words upon his tomb,

“Taxes drove me to my doom...”

When he's gone, do not relax,

It’s time to apply the inheritance tax.

Accounts Receivable Tax, Building Permit Tax, CDL License Tax, Cigarette Tax, Corporate Income Tax, Dog License Tax, Excise Tax, Federal Income Tax, Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA), Fishing License Tax, Food License Tax, Fuel Permit Tax, Gasoline Tax, Gross Receipts Tax, Hunting License Tax, Inheritance Tax, Inventory Tax, IRS Interest Charges/IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax), Liquor Tax, Luxury Taxes, Marriage License Tax, Medicare Tax, Personal Property Tax, Property Tax, Real Estate Tax, Service Charge Tax, Social Security Tax, Road Usage Tax, Sales Tax, Recreational Vehicle Tax, School Tax, State Income Tax, State Unemployment Tax (SUTA) Telephone Federal Excise Tax, Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax, Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes, Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax, Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax, Telephone State and Local Tax, Telephone Usage Charge Tax, Utility Taxes, Vehicle License Registration Tax, Vehicle Sales Tax, Watercraft Registration Tax, Well Permit Tax, Workers Compensation Tax.

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What happened? Can you spell P-O-L-I-T-I-C-I-A-N-S?

David again. If you are not yet tired of this week’s bashing of government, read the following opinion piece titled “America’s biggest problem is big government” by Dr. Gary Wolfram of Hillsdale College. It’s worth a read. Click here.

Miscellany

Toronto Phyle. On March 3rd at 7:30 p.m., the Toronto Phyle will be hosting three members of the Casey Research team, all of whom are in town for the annual Prospectors and Developers conference. If you are going to be in the area and want to connect with other Casey subscribers as well as Jeff Clark, editor of BIG GOLD, Doug Hornig of the Daily Resource, and Louis James, our senior researcher and editor of the CIA and International Speculator, drop us a note at phyles@caseyresearch.com and we’ll get you the details.
In Other Phyle News… Oren in Israel… John in Boise, ID… Michael in the Quartzsite/Parker, AZ, Blythe, CA area… plus other individuals in Edmonton, Alberta… Kingston, NY, and Wichita, KS, are willing to host subscriber get-togethers. Drop us a note at the email address just above, and we’ll get you connected.

And that, dear readers is that for this week. As I look at the screens, I see that the stock market, after having opened up sharply lower, is now down just a little… while gold is trading at $940, well off from its latest run-up near the $1,000 mark. That’s okay. This is not a sprint we are in but the early days of a grueling trek to what’s next. Gold will be a critical part of our financial travel kit and, at times along the way, a pretty good trading sardine, too. For instance, if it gets knocked back into the mid-$800s.

Stay the course.

Before signing off, I would like to give a special thanks to all of our many correspondents. Over the years, we have built a large and robust international network that now serves as an early-warning system for our team. You collectively make our task of scanning the world for what is important far easier… and individually, you make my job all that more agreeable.

For those of you who will be making it to Vegas, let’s grab a beer together. And for those who won’t, a toast in your general direction.

On the topic of Vegas, or more specifically, our upcoming Crisis & Opportunity Summit, we never did quite get around to sending out a big promotion, but the conference is all but sold out at this point. We can take a few more registrations, but just a few. By this time next week, it will be a complete sell-out. So, if you’re still interested, and you should be, the time to act is now. More info here.

Until next week, thank you for reading and for being a subscriber to one or more Casey services.

Sincerely,

David Galland
Managing Director
Casey Research, LLC.

The World as We See It

David Galland — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:51:10 GMT

4 reasons why this may be the worst crisis since the 1930s – and 4 projections for what’s going to happen

by Bud Conrad

The Casey Report Webinar– Casey Research

I identify the foundational forces now driving our economy to establish a basis for the investment recommendations you’ll read in this advisory in the months to come.

The role of the U.S. as the world's dominant economic superpower is now challenged by an out-of-control growth in debt and a deterioration in its reputation as a financial haven. The dollar is losing its special status as the global "reserve currency," is leading, in turn, to higher inflation, higher interest rates, weakening financial assets (stocks and bonds) and runaway prices for commodities.

Let the data and let them speak for themselves, with some interpretation along the way:

1. U.S. Government Deficits: From Bad to Worse

Government deficits are the root source of the creation of money... and its eventual debasement. Simply, when the federal government spends more than it raises in taxes, it eventually has to create more money (in complicity with the Fed) in order to pay the bills.

Of course, it can borrow the money, but that often includes borrowing newly created money from the Fed. The deficits remain and they accumulate and in time. They must be resolved, either by payment or default, either overtly or covertly through the mechanism of inflation.

While some level of government deficits may be acceptable over modest periods of time, the U.S. deficit is now well past the point of being acceptable. The deficit will soon grow to monster proportions as the baby boomer retirement obligations exceed the ability to tax the declining number of workers contributing to the Social Security and Medicare funds.

Projections of the likely deficit compared to GDP growth make it clear that the government is faced with hard choices. The easy path of just letting the dollar fall is the most likely.

2. The Expanding U.S. Trade Deficit

It is consumers who primarily receive the money provided by U.S. government deficits. In this globally interconnected world, they then spend a portion of that money on foreign goods. An unintended consequence of the ballooning government deficits, therefore, is a large and growing trade deficit.

The foreign recipients of those dollars – whether Chinese manufacturers or Middle Eastern oil sheiks – have, in recent years, turned around and reinvested those dollars in U.S. Treasuries. They have done so because of the perceived safety of those instruments, and because of the sheer volume of the dollars they have to invest. In addition, it has been in their commercial interest to help finance the U.S. deficit.

With the trade deficit now running at $750 billion per year, and much of that money coming back into U.S. Treasuries, the U.S. government has grown dependent on foreigners to sustain the continuing deficits.

That level of debt would normally cause extreme weakness in a currency – just as it would in the value of debt owed by a deeply indebted individual. However, the sheer magnitude of the foreign holdings provides something of a bastion against a total collapse in the dollar.

Even so, some foreign holders are easing toward the exits... through the purchase of an operating company or resource deposit here, or a landmark New York building there. They might make a billion-dollar equity investment in a brand name company, or exchange some dollars for a basket of currencies or a ton or two of gold. It's a delicate balancing act, because if they get too aggressive, they risk triggering a mad dash for the exits, a nightmare scenario where the value of their trillions of dollars in holdings would be devastated almost overnight.

3. Rising Oil Prices Affect... Everything

The growing global demand for oil, coming as it is against a backdrop of limits being hit in production growth, is a major contributor to today's big price rises.

The clear and present danger is that we are now using several times more oil than we are discovering. The world currently produces about 310 billion barrels of oil per decade. That amounts to about three times the current discovery rate of 100 billion barrels per decade.

According to the Peak Oil calculations, we have already used about half of the energy stored over the last 100 million years. Against that, we have a steady increase in demand emanating from population growth and economic development, especially in Asia. This, coupled with the dearth of major new discoveries, assures that energy markets will remain at high prices, for the foreseeable future. The current big drop from almost $150 to $110 has happened from a slowing economy and from some conservation at the extreme high gas pump prices, but the long term view is that the lack of reasonable alternative to petroleum argues for continued higher prices returning to the previous peak in the year ahead.

As energy is a component in the manufacture of all goods and services, this is of no small consequence. Energy has been the basis of the abundance of our current existence and has allowed human population to grow from 1.5 billion to 6 billion over the last century.

4. War Affects the Deficits and Hurts the Dollar

The war in the Middle East adds unwanted pressure on oil and ratchets up government spending. Less obvious is the damage to U.S. prestige that is important in the ability of the U.S. to attract much-needed foreign investment.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the war will cost 3 to 4 trillion dollars, an amount of sufficient size that it will affect the U.S. financial system.

Regardless of the short term political ups and downs or even a new administration, the pressures from war for big deficits and for dollar depreciation are inescapable.

Where Is the Economy Going in the Next Six Months?

Projections

1. The housing decline is not yet done, because we will need another year to unwind foreclosures in the pipeline. The housing bubble still has another 10% to 20% to go to fully deflate.

2. Consumers in the U.S. are not able to expand credit and are increasingly concerned about the outlook for the economy, so they will slow spending both at home and on imports, which means we are in a recession or about to confirm one.

3. The financial/banking system is weaker than understood. The global system and literally trillions of dollars in derivatives has left the world's banks teetering on the edge. Don't jump back into financials.

4. A slowing economy – recession – coupled with inflation, creates a condition referred to as stagflation, as the simulative bailouts compete with the debt implosion of overleveraged financial institutions and real estate, to leave us with stagnation and still high costs.

The result of this is that the inflation rate, interest rate, food, energy and precious metals are heading higher as the dollar is debased.

Higher rates are not good for housing and stocks.

Finally, it is important to recognize that the world remains in the throes of a deep and serious crisis. While many analysts will express the view that the worst is over or that, after a modest downturn, things will bounce back just like they always have, our view is that what we will actually witness going forward is a fairly steady erosion of paper currency purchasing power and sluggish economic growth. The crisis will accelerate, moving faster, even, than in previous major shifts such as that witnessed in the 1970s.

While history may find we are too pessimistic at this point in time, in our view it is far better to prepare for a worsening crisis and hope that it does not materialize, than to expect business as usual.

Bud Conrad is Chief Economist with Casey Research, specialists in natural resource and precious metals investing. And now, you can have the opportunity to sit in on a round-table discussion of the economy, the market, and the best ways to profit from this crisis – free and online. The Crisis and Opportunity Summit is the first-of-its-kind event by Casey Research.. giving investors exceptional information and analysis for over a quarter century. Simply click here now to sign up for this free event.