Bill Fleckenstein recommends gold above all as a hedge against money printing from the Fed and the ECB. In one or two years you'll be thankful, he tells King World News: Tomorrow the Fed is probably going to bring QE3 and meanwhile Europe is in a state of disarray. All of that will sort itself out bullishly for gold even if were to decline for the next couple of days. The Japanese, the British, the Swiss, the Americans are all printing money. In Europe, this particular phase of their crisis has all been about the fact that Trichet didn’t want Greece to default, but didn’t want to print money. Now the ECB is actually printing money in a back door fashion because they have these repo’s. They are also buying debt and they are not sterilizing it, so they kind of are (printing money). But we have evolved as a society over the last twenty or thirty years since the world went off the gold dollar exchange standard, whereby every iteration we rely on the printing press more and more. Now we are just on a pure printing press standard. This will end, this is the end game for that. It could take a year or two. Maybe if the euro has to implode and they all have to take printing presses back and use them for the people to revolt because in the end the printing press is no panacea, otherwise Zimbabwe wouldn’t have collapse.
Bill Fleckenstein recommends gold above all as a hedge against money printing from the Fed and the ECB.
In one or two years you'll be thankful, he tells King World News:
Tomorrow the Fed is probably going to bring QE3 and meanwhile Europe is in a state of disarray. All of that will sort itself out bullishly for gold even if were to decline for the next couple of days. The Japanese, the British, the Swiss, the Americans are all printing money. In Europe, this particular phase of their crisis has all been about the fact that Trichet didn’t want Greece to default, but didn’t want to print money.
Now the ECB is actually printing money in a back door fashion because they have these repo’s. They are also buying debt and they are not sterilizing it, so they kind of are (printing money). But we have evolved as a society over the last twenty or thirty years since the world went off the gold dollar exchange standard, whereby every iteration we rely on the printing press more and more. Now we are just on a pure printing press standard. This will end, this is the end game for that. It could take a year or two. Maybe if the euro has to implode and they all have to take printing presses back and use them for the people to revolt because in the end the printing press is no panacea, otherwise Zimbabwe wouldn’t have collapse.
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-fleckenstein-money-printing-era-2011-11
Rothschilds own all the gold, allowing them to manipulate that money supply, too. There is too much silver in the world for them to have controlled all of it yet, though.
Jackson LaRose: Rothschilds own all the gold
Rothschilds own all the gold
I didn't know Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers and Ron Paul are all Rothschilds. You learn something new everyday.
OK, OK, enough to substantially manipulate the gold supply.
I've wondered whether Peter is at all related to Jacob Schiff.
Schiff is a common name.
Maybe Jim Rogers is related to Kenny Rogers.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
If he is, then...
Jackson LaRose:[...] There is too much silver in the world for them to have controlled all of it yet, though.
Noooooooooooo. A couple of billionaires could easily buy up all of the silver out there.
Mmm, golden country western chicken...
I thought that the rothschilds were just an anti-semitic myth. I thought they lost the most of their wealth in the 20th century.
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." - Verbal, The Usual Suspects
Verbal Kint... the ultimate badass.
Clayton -
If you're worried about inflation then buy inflation-protected bonds. Although your fears of inflation are unfounded as the Fed has already make explicit it's plan for removing all that liquidity from the system once inflation begins to pick up. This is reflected in the TIPS spread.
How are TIPS better protection than gold?
Because the real price of gold is not guaranteed to stay the same, in may very well fall! . TIPS are guaranteed to protect you from inflation, and - when liquidity trap conditions don't hold - they pay you interest.
Marginal Interest wrote: "If you're worried about inflation then buy inflation-protected bonds. Although your fears of inflation are unfounded as the Fed has already make explicit it's plan for removing all that liquidity from the system once inflation begins to pick up. This is reflected in the TIPS spread."
Good advice if you believe the CPI is an accurate measure of inflation, trust government backed securities, and don't mind paying taxes on the income 'created' by the periodic inflation adjustments.
We are the soldiers for righteousnessAnd we are not sent here by the politicians you drink with - L. Dube, rip
Acutally the CPI overstates inflation a little bit. So on average you'll probably be doing slightly better than inflation with a CPI adjustment. Yeah it's pretty stupid that the adjustments are taxable. No argument there. But what else are you gonna do? Gold isn't a hedge against inflation, it's a hedge against tail risk. Nothing hedges against inflation except indexed-bonds.
Yeah just a tad.
http://www.shadowstats.com/
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
Haha. Yeah let's use a measure of inflation from some guy who openly admits to compeletely ignoring the substitution effects of price rises, doesn't understand that we need measures of underlying inflation to correctly assess the impact of monetary policy, and decided to add in to his calculation an unspecified "adjustment for the geometric weighting that is not otherwise accounted for in BLS historic bookeeping". What could go wrong?!
Over the last ten years, gold has netted roughly 20%/year compared to TIPS return of 4%/year. Over the next ten years, who knows?
I think the gold express will keep a chugging till it reaches the crack up boom station of the dollar.
"Over the last ten years, gold has netted roughly 20%/year compared to TIPS return of 4%/year. Over the next ten years, who knows?"
Obviously the real price of god has skyrocketed recently. There's been shitloads of tail risk! Look at the historical real price though: http://goldprice.org/inflation-adjusted-gold-price.html. Does that look like a good hedge against inflation to you? Obviously not. The real price is not only not upward trending (which would give us long term positive yield), it's not even flat (which would guarantee us protection from inflation at least)! If you'd bought gold to protect yourself from inflation during the '79 oil shock, you'd have made a giant loss once the dust settled. Same goes for the 82 recession. Gold does not protect you from inflation! http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/gold_inflation.asp
I don't think you know what geometric weighting is, that the cpi was supposed to be a measure of the cost of maintaining a standard of living, or have even read the boskin commission. he clearly realizes that we need measures of underlying inflation to assess our monetary policy or else he wouldnt have made the site. anyways why are you even here if you trust the states quantwizards over an uninterested third party? really, did you get these counterpoints off the bls website?
Marginal Interest, how are you defining inflation?
David Sherin: Marginal Interest, I actually don't think you're entirely wrong, but I've never understood the justification for the substitution effect. For example, let's say the price of x goes up and people shift to y. However the current market basket that makes up the CPI would still have the same weighting for x and y as before the price increase. To account for the substitution from x to y, it is said that the basket needs to weight y more heavily and x less heavily which nominally makes sense because y is now bought more than x and because of this, y's price is relatively more important to the consumer. But the shift to y occurred precisely because the price of x went up. Their preferred ratio of x to y has changed indicating that consumers are worse off than before the price increase (you can show this with indiference curves or without them, nut the conclusion is the same). To me this substitution is no different than a decrease in quality which means including a substitution effect would tend to understate inflation; the market basket that accounts for substitution is less preferred to the market basket that doesn't. Unmeasured increases in quality tend to overstate inflation, likewise the decreases in quality tend to understate it.
That's precisely right. CPI is now a measure of the cost of maintaining a declining standard of living, not a constant one. And geometric weighting is basically 'soft substitution'. So if gas prices go up, the CPI figures that people will buy less gas, and so gasoline's weight in the market basket decreases, thus hiding the price increase. The BLS is a complete sham. They don't rewrite the records like the USSR, but they do everything they can to twist them into absurdity. Keep in mind that when inflation is understated, GDP is overstated. Our stated GDP is about 1.8% right? Factor in the true inflation and it'll look a lot lower, maybe negative.
I think the mainstream view also has a point when stating the CPI overstates inflation due to the introduction of new goods, or the improvement of existing goods (increase in quality). However, I think this simply adds to the impossibility of measuring the standard of living with any degree of accuracy. No matter what sort of changes you introduce, the CPI just isn't going to give you any sort of meaningful comparison between 2011, 1980, or 1900. Not to mention quality changes themselves are highly subjective.
The GDP deflator is a little easier since it's just measuring the price differences of things produced domestically (and not inherently trying to seek some sort of measurement of the very subjective term "standard of living") though even it faces many of the same problems that the CPI faces. Any aggregated term whether it's CPI, GDP, or unemployment is necessarily arbitrary (what should and shouldn't be included has to be decided by someone). Plus the more general it is, the less useful it is to any specific person. What is the likelihood that you buy exactly what the CPI contains in the exact proportion it weighs them?
"I don't think you know what geometric weighting is, that the cpi was supposed to be a measure of the cost of maintaining a standard of living, or have even read the boskin commission. he clearly realizes that we need measures of underlying inflation to assess our monetary policy or else he wouldnt have made the site. anyways why are you even here if you trust the states quantwizards over an uninterested third party? really, did you get these counterpoints off the bls website?"
Jargon,
If he realised the necessity of measures of underlying inflation, why did he proceed to criticise core inflation as quote "eliminating bothersome price rises"? Anybody with the slightest knowledge of monetary policy knows that highly volatile fluctations in the relative price of food and oil are not indicative of inflation.
I absolutely do not trust "quantwizards" or the state to accurately quantify the inflation rate. However, the BLS has been completely transparent in the way it calculates the inflation rate, http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/pdf/homch17.pdf (pdf), of which the data has been confirmed within a reasonable degree of significance by independent measures, http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/' (which only use online retailers, by the way), which I'd accept as being accurate long before I'd consider the measures of a man who both admits to ignoring important effects and includes a mysterious adjustment to price weightings which "the BLS have not considered".
PS: Note that I'm attacking your argument, not my perception of your level of knowledge.
"Marginal Interest, how are you defining inflation?"
Daniel Muffinburg,
I'm defining inflation as a sustained increase in the general price level.
"Marginal Interest,
Because the CPI was originally created in the 50's to be a reliable guide for consumers. Instead of altering that figure, they should create a seperate one that is used for underlying inflation. The way they have it set up now, there is no guide for inflation for consumers, or "real inflation", because that figure was transformed into the policymakers' tool. Now consumers are looking at CPI as if it's relevant to their lives, when it really isn't and there's no longer a figure that is relevant for them.
There are many many measures of inflation. CPI, PPI, PCE, each excluding volatile items, trimmed mean, weighted median, GDP deflator. All are used to estimate underlying inflation. It is dangerous to consider price indices just for "inflation for consumers", what you seem to call "real inflation", because such estimates are too easily prone to displaying relative price changes which monetary policy should not be reacting to since they don't accurately represent inflation. However, in some instances (such as TIPS or social security), cost of living adjusment estimates are necessary. I think the CPI-U is a reasonable index (though clearly not perfect) for this purpose, coming reasonably close to a good estimate for consumer inflation.
Some figure should exist which displays the actual effects of inflation, instead of one which squashes price increases, writing them off as 'volatility'. The idea that CPI-U comes close to a solid estimate of actual inflation is laughable. The boskin commission makes it so that price increases in food and gas are made all but invisible and tries to introduce gadgetry into the market basket to show everyone "how cheap the cost of living really is :)"
The reason they even had the boskin commission was because they were paying too much Social Security money to old people.
Again, with substitution bias and geometric weighting, the CPI is a measurement of the cost of maintaining a declining standard of living, rather than a constant one.
EDIT: If you want to look at underlying inflation then why not use monetary figures rather than price ones? And when you insist on price figures as measurement of inflation, you also get to write the rules on which prices? Oh that's right, anyone who knows anything about monetary policy knows that food is far too volatile to include in inflation figures. The pleb's shall have to do without information.
Laughable, why? Measures of core inflation aren't used for cost of living adjustments, headline CPI is. The substitution bias in the CPI is a bias which overestimates inflation. The CPI is tracked reasonably closely by the BPP index, an alternative measure of inflation which is limited in that it only uses online retail goods. What reasonable criticisms do you have of CPI? And what do you propose to be a credible alternative? Certainly not the measure by shadowstats, for reasons already discussed.
Monetary aggregates were tried in the 80s and failed. The link between the money supply and inflation is not stable enough to be useful. Even Milton Friedman, who had a long love for the M2 money stock (with its long-run stability of velocity), had to admin that monetary aggregates were a bad system because the demand for money is just too volatile.
Funny how everything but doctored market basket's with geometric weighting is too volatile. Could it be because their special figures are the ones that show the least inflation? If you're measuring real current inflation, use an unbiased market basket with no wizardry applied. If you're measuring long-term trends then use the money supply.
Funny how anything that doesn't fit with your bias of what inflation should be is "doctored" and "wizardry".
Marginal Interest,
Thanks for the reply. I know it's a general rise in prices and my example is consistent with that. It doesn't really matter whether x's prices rises due to a shuft in supply or demand (caveat: I'm assuming demand is increasing not because of a change in preferences to x, but because the money supply is increasing).
From the supply side, let's say the supply of x is now lower leading to a higher price. This will cause people to substitute to y not due to a chnage in preferences for y over x, but simply due to the change in prices. The shift into y will cause the price of y to increase. Consumers are clearly worse off because of this price increase in x; their preferred buying ratio of x to y in changed. The price level should rise to reflect the fact that the cost of living is indeed higher.
From the demand side, let's say the money supply increases and it goes to buyers of x. These x-buyers push up the demand for x due to their having more income. Buyers of both x and y will now shift to y again changing their preferred ratio of x to y. They are worse off and the cost of living should reflect this.
We're assuming that inflation means a general rise in the price level so I don't see how there isn't inflation in my example. Sure there are relative price changes, but there's no reason to think they would be proportional, but even if they were the general price level is still rising and as I've pointed out, the basket of goods people now buy is (slightly) inferior than the one they bought previously.
Perhaps I'm not understanding what you're saying, but I don't think you've proven your case on the substitution effect.
"From the demand side, let's say the money supply increases and it goes to buyers of x. These x-buyers push up the demand for x due to their having more income."
David,
This is my point precisely. An increase in the money supply creates an income effect, not a substitution effect. This is saying that the increase in the money supply will increase the prices of x and y in proportion, preserving their relative price. Now if there are shocks to the relative price (say due to changing conditions on the supply side), then there will be a change in the relative price of goods. People will substitute, and the basket of goods needs to change accordingly to reflect that. An increase in the general level of prices caused by an increase in the money supply is what we want to measure (inflation). Substitution effects caused by non-monetary factors need to be ignored else they will bias the measure of inflation upward.
If you notice, I said "buyers of x" implying that that specific group does not buy y. Perhaps I should have stated that explicitly, but the point is that there is a time element here. The buyers of y may not receive new income for quite some time, and even if they do, the relative incomes of the buyers of only good x may be higher than the buyers of both goods x and y. While it's possible for everyone's income to increase the same amount, it's highly unlikely and again, there is a time element so there will at least be a relative price distortion (substitution effect) in the short term if not also in the long term.
I think this is getting too caught up on the specifics of why the prices increases and that really wasn't my point. But let's look at the price change from the supply side too. It's true that there need be no changes in the money supply or in money demand for this example and thus we're looking at non-monetary factors. I disagree however that this does not constitute inflation, based on the definition given, i.e. an increase in the general level of prices. If the price of x goes up because its supply went down (less producers, increased costs, whatever the case may be), and demand (thus price) for y therefore goes up due to substitution, then the CPI must necessarily be higher since both prices are included in the CPI.
But more importantly, and this has been my main point, the basket of goods being bought by consumers after the price change is inferior to the basket before the price change. This is a decrease in quality from the consumer's perspective. For the same reason that unmeasured quality increases in the CPI overstate inflation, including a substitution effect would understate it.
I appreciate the responses though, and I hope I've come across as respectful.