Doug Casey: business cycles and subprime loans

"The Man In The Moone" by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Hereford (1620)

I noticed years ago that you get the crispest explanations from someone who's busy trying to get to their main point - Isaac Asimov's "Extraterrestrial Civilizations" (1979) is an excellent example. Even if you disagree with the conclusion, you have learned so much on the journey, and so quickly.

Doug Casey in DollarDaze yesterday summarises the theorised relationship between the money supply and the business cycle, plus subprime mortgages and hedge fund gearing, as part of the argument for gold mining stocks. Again, you may not agree with him that gold "is going to the moon", but in the meantime he has given us a clear and concise exposition of two important economic topics.

2012: Olduvai Theory, sunspots and energy planning

Wm. Robert Johnston's reconstruction of the last Ice Age (at 16,000 BC)

A fascinating article by Brian Bloom in The Market Oracle on 6 August. He ties together a number of threads:

• Regular periodic stockmarket cycles
• Richard Duncan's Olduvai Theory (we've passed the peak of the per capita energy use that built our civilisation)
• The possible role of sunspots in cycles of climate change (allegedly we're heading for a deep global freeze in 50 years' time)
• The sun's movement in relation to the Milky Way, tentatively linked to a 100,000-year glaciation cycle

... and relates them to economic and political issues to suggest that we need to take urgent action to reduce debt and become more energy-efficient.

In case you are tempted to dismiss frontier thinking of this kind, it's worth remembering that many highly successful investors are intrigued by long-wave patterns. For example, Marc Faber is interested in the Kondratieff cycle, among others:

...business cycles do exist. Some economists claim that they occur, according to Juglar, every eight to twelve years. But according to Kondratieff and Schumpeter, you have these long waves that occur. You have a rising wave of about 15 to 25 years, then there is a plateau and downward again for 15 to 25 years. And then you have a drop and the entire cycle starts again. You have all kinds of cycle theory. I am not so sure you can measure the timing of the peak and the bottom, but definitely cycles do exist.

(Interview with Jim Puplava on Financial Sense, February 22, 2003)

More on Marc Faber and agricultural land

Zee News reports Dr Faber's continuing support for the agricultural sector, in which he himself has invested:

Faber... owns agricultural land and plantation stocks in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

Gold and farmland: further points

The Daily Reckoning Australia has very stimulating thoughts today.

(1) Dan Denning quotes a friend (David Evans) on the divergence between physical gold and shares in gold mining companies:

If the price of gold rises a lot, gold shares have greater leverage and will tend to go up more than gold bars (the cost of mining the gold stays constant, but the price of the mined gold goes up). When the general public gets involved and everyone just wants gold, gold bars tend to appreciate faster... The obvious strategy is to own gold shares now, and when every man and his dog is clamouring for gold, sell your gold shares and buy gold bars to enjoy the last part of the ride.

So when I looked at gold dropping with the Dow, maybe I should have also taken a peek at what gold shares were doing at the same time. For example, Newmont Mining opened yesterday at $40.30 and closed up at $41.07, whereas gold for delivery in December fell by $2.70.

(2) Chris Mayer looks at agricultural land in Brazil and Argentina, in the light of a hungry and resource-limited China:

In Brazil and Argentina, you have one of the few places left in the world where you can acquire large tracts of land in temperate climates with plenty of rainfall to support large-scale agriculture. Already, the two countries produce about one-third of the world’s agricultural commodities. As China is the world’s workshop and India its back office, so has South America become its breadbasket.

Maybe this is why Hugh Hendry and his colleagues have just launched the Eclectica Agriculture Fund.

Gold: speculative investment vs store of value

White Star Line's "Olympic", launched 20th October 1910 (big picture)

Yet again, the Dow drops (about 2%), and gold limps after the pack (down about 0.3%). Until there's a major financial disaster, or it is returned to currency status, gold will not be able to make up its mind whether it's a quality investment or an emergency provision - a liner or a lifeboat.

Money supply, shares and property

Here's a 22 May article by Cliff d'Arcy in The Motley Fool, comparing house prices and the FTSE 100. From mid-1984 to December last year, the FTSE has outperformed by 7.4% compound per year versus 7.2% for houses. But as he points out, houses are "geared" by mortgages, whereas most of us don't borrow to buy shares.

From September 1984 to the end of 2006, the money supply as measured by M4 showed an annualised average increase of 11.64%. Looking at the growth of M4 as against that of two classes of asset, I wonder where the difference went? Do interest charges roughly account for this?

The money supply, the stockmarket, gold and land

Here's part of an interesting interview with a hedge fund manager in 2003, reproduced in October 2005:

An old interview with Hugh Hendry (2003)

Hendry: What's happening today happened 300 years ago in the French economy when John Law, another Scotsman, was allowed to launch the first government-sanctioned bank, which replaced coins with paper money. Commerce boomed. Politicians recognized this correlation between issuing more money and people liking you. They issued more and more money, but it was a false promise. Nothing intrinsically was being added to the economy except promises, which could never be redeemed. Selling by speculators caused the stock market to correct. The correction encouraged the authorities to print more funny money. Ultimately, the continued pumping of liquidity destroyed the economy, the stock market and France's currency.


More recently, the U.S. came off the gold standard in 1971 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average bottomed in 1974. Over the next 25 years, the Dow goes up 20-fold because every period of economic anxiety brought forward an orthodoxy of generous liquidity. Money has to go somewhere. It seeks to perpetuate itself by going into a rising asset class. This time, it is financial assets. Just like the Mississippi stock scheme in 1720 and the South Sea Bubble in London at the same time.

Hugh Hendry set up Eclectica Asset Management in 2005 and like others I've mentioned before, seems to have discovered an enthusiasm for agriculture; Eclectica's new Agriculture Fund is detailed here.