The newt got up and slowly walked away

I didn't think it plausible.

Pay up, or default

Karl Denninger says it's time to settle accounts. Here's his estimate of the tab:

We have recognized $300 billion of losses but it has all been derivative loss. The $2.5-$3 trillion in credit loss from housing is still to come, plus all the credit card and other debt that cannot be paid down, likely a couple hundred billion more - at best.

= c. 20% of US GDP.

The system is now out of control

Recently I seem to be an annexe for Karl Denninger's blog, but that's the way it is. Here he figures that public and private debt in the US are so massive that with an average 8% interest rate, debt servicing is now equivalent to 22.4% of GDP. He thinks the system must soon explode and those holding cash will be safest.

The pocket calculator reveals the truth

A spendidly indignant Karl Denninger explains how the $600 "stimulus cheque" sent to American taxpayers will be more - much, much more - than paid for, by higher borrowing costs.

Where are the forthright Cassandras on this side of the Atlantic? Are they silent because nobody here believes in our country?

The "little hand-mill"

Official figures going back to 1963 show that bank lending has NEVER stopped increasing.

Lowest: 1.1% annualised, for the quarter ending 31 December 1966.
Highest: 44.9% annualised, for the quarter ending 30 June 1972.

Median: 11.9%
Mean: 13.45%

Is it my imagination, or does the graph spike regularly before stockmarket crashes and recessions?

Original BoE data here.

In the late 60s, my school magazine carried a major bank's advert, for 16-year-old school leavers to join them. I aimed at a degree instead. Perhaps I'd have chosen differently if the ad had read "39 thieves looking to recruit trainee".

Do recessions lead to inflation?

Robert Murphy thinks so, and produces a graph that to him suggests prices go up during a recession, not down:

However, this picture suggests to me that recessions follow periods of higher inflation, and maybe where that inflation continues during the recession, it could be put down to a sort of residual momentum. Why should prices fall at precisely the moment the NBER says a recession has started? Even a cut flower will maintain its bloom for a while.

On the other hand, it seems clear from the above graph that prices do generally seem to fall after a recession. Perhaps this is because of the recently reinforced lesson about thrift, so people become less keen to spend too much on stuff they don't need.

But it's also possible that the recession has cleansed certain inefficiencies in the use of capital - businesses that should have folded faster - and as that capital gets better employed elsewhere, it does its work of improving productivity.

Which it needs to, when people have become more cost-conscious. I recall reading about an American who found a way to sell dresses for a dollar in the Great Depression - he used a machine to stamp out the outline of 100 at a time, so only the machine sewing was needed, not the measuring and cutting. So it was still possible to buy a dress for your sweetheart when money was tight.

But the little hand-mill of monetary inflation continues to grind...

Tibet and China: clash of cultures

I’d long been interested in Tibet and had a romantic vision of the Land of Snows, but I’d never been there. Now I learned that the Tibetans have a different way of seeing the world. My classmates were Buddhist and had a strong faith, which inspired me to reflect on my own views about the meaning of life. I had been a materialist, as all Chinese are taught to be, but now I could see that there’s something more, that there’s a spiritual side to life.

[...]

The Chinese protesters thought that, being Chinese, I should be on their side. The participants on the Tibet side were mostly Americans, who really don’t have a good understanding of how complex the situation is. Truthfully, both sides were being quite closed-minded and refusing to consider the other’s perspective. I thought I could help try to turn a shouting match into an exchange of ideas. So I stood in the middle and urged both sides to come together in peace and mutual respect. I believe that they have a lot in common and many more similarities than differences.

But the Chinese protesters — who were much more numerous, maybe 100 or more — got increasingly emotional and vocal and wouldn’t let the other side speak. They pushed the small Tibetan group of just a dozen or so up against the Duke Chapel doors, yelling “Liars, liars, liars!” This upset me. It was so aggressive, and all Chinese know the moral injunction: Junzi dongkou, bu dongshou (The wise person uses his tongue, not his fists).

Read the rest of Grace Wang's Washington Post article here.