Richard Russell: the only true standard of value

The Only True Standard of Value

from  Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letters

April 20, 2011 -- The dollar is doing just what the Fed wants it to do -- it's sinking, sinking and sinking more. Sadly, the great American public doesn't understand what's happening, and if they were told they couldn't care less. Of course, what the public does notice is the painful result of the dollar's bear market. The result is seen every time Joe six-pack and his wife hit the neighborhood super-market. The rising prices are a shocker.

And if the price of your favorite cold cereal has not been raised, there is less of the cereal in the box. Then when Joe has to fill up the buggy to get home, he groans as he sees the gasoline tab. "Sixty bucks to fill up this lemon. I'm going to get a motorized bike," growls Joey. "This country is going to hell in a hand-basket."

The US has been getting away with spending more than it takes in, ever since World War II. It's a process that isn't sustainable, and if a process is unsustainable it will end. The US's habit of spending more than it's paying for has finally hit a brick wall. The wall is the demise of the famous "Yankee dollar." In order for the US to live over its head, it must borrow.

Half of the US's borrowing comes from foreign sources. And that's a problem. The fiat US dollar has no fixed value. It's worth must be measured against other currencies. "The dollar is worth so much in relation to the Brit pound -- or the dollar is worth so much in terms of the euro." Our foreign creditors, many of whom are loaded with dollars, keep a sharp eye on the comparative value of the dollar, and they're now frightened and mulling over the credit-worthiness of the US. The recent warning from the S&P rating agency heightened our creditors worries about both the US and the dollar.

The disgraceful battle between Obama and the Democrats vs. Paul Ryan and the Republicans is further raising the fears of our creditors. With commodity inflation now out in the open, Fed head Bernanke has a problem. His absurd defense is to refer to "core inflation" (without the cost of food and energy). Bernanke announces to the world that there's "no inflation," and besides if there is inflation the Fed can end it any time they want.

What Bernanke and the Fed can not control is the tell-tale price of gold.

As I write the battle is on to keep June gold from closing above 1500. Yesterday June gold hit an intra-day high of 1500, but can it close there? "Ah," Bernanke must be thinking, "If I could only control the price of that damn gold."

Yesterday, as I looked at my computer, and I could see the fierce struggle that was going on as gold whipped up six dollars, then five minutes later it is up a dollar-fifty. There must be a powerful contingent (perhaps backed by the Fed) that is desperate to keep the price of gold DOWN and below 1500. But alas for the Fed, gold is traded internationally across the face of the

planet and 24 hours a day. Gold is out of the hands of the Fed and Goldman Sachs, and it trades everywhere and where it wants.

This year I've been telling my subscribers to think in terms of two concepts:

(1) Think in terms of avoiding losses (rather than thinking in terms of building fat profits).

(2) Think in terms of PURCHASING POWER. Are you gaining or losing purchasing power?

For ten years I've advised my subscribers to climb aboard the great bull market in gold. Early subscribers who have followed my advice now have huge paper profits, many have become millionaires, others have been able to retire on their gold positions. Even new-comers have benefited from their belated investments in gold.

Over the last 12 months, the dollar price of gold is up 31.32 percent. Gold is the only true standard of value. The value of everything else must be measured in terms of gold. "How many ounces of gold does it take today to buy a new Ford?" "How many ounces of gold did it require to buy a new ford in 1932?" It costs a lot more (in dollars) to buy a new Ford today. But how many ounces of gold does it cost to buy a new Ford today compared with the ounces required in 1932 to buy a new Ford? What has changed, gold or the dollar? Gold hasn't changed, what has changed is the dollar, which has lost purchasing power.

The US public is rapidly being educated about money and gold. Ads are appearing almost daily in the newspapers, telling readers how and why to buy gold. The ads are being confirmed by the rising price of gold. The public is finally "getting it". I've been in this business since 1958, and I've seen a lot of advisory services come and go -- a lot! What I notice is that there are a number of fairly new advisories that are climbing (entering) on the back of the gold bull market. These advisories are sending out mass mailings to the public -- educating them on the fact of the dying dollar and the Fed's plan to solve the debt problem by diminishing the purchasing power of the dollar. As Lincoln put it, "You can't fool all of the people all of the time." Clueless as the American populace is, they are finally learning about gold, something that their great grandparents took for granted.

In terms of gold: Assessing real estate values in terms of gold. At its peak, the housing market in March 2007, the median US home price was $262,600, which was equivalent to 340.6 ounces of gold. Today's median income price is $186,100 or 109.2 ounces of gold. So in terms of real money, gold, the US median home price has lost 47% since 2007.

Applying the same measurements to the Dow, from the end of 2001 to the end of 2008 an investment in the Dow would have lost 81% of its purchasing power in terms of gold (statistic courtesy Larry Edelson of the outstanding "Uncommon Wisdom" advisory).

The great and harsh lesson of history now stares Americans in the face -- no fiat currency in history has ever survived. This fact underscores the growing panic to get out of dollars and out of all fiat currencies.

This emphasizes the irony of those who are rushing into dollars or dollar denominated bonds and blue-chip stocks on the thesis that these are "safe havens." It's a rush out of dollars to get into other forms of dollars. What's happening now is on a greater scale than has ever occurred before in the history of mankind. It's going to hit the current generation of Americans like a whirlwind. It will be historic in its intensity and destructiveness.

The great gold rush of 1849 opened up the American West. This gold rush of the early 2000's will open up the eyes of Americans to the danger of the Federal Reserve and fiat money.

Below in log scale -- one of the greatest and most significant bull markets in US history.

Below, the Dow over the exact same period.

Richard Russell

Gerald Celente and Max Keiser ....at large!!

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Egon von Greyerz: There Will Be No Double Dip

The world economy will soon go into an accelerated and precipitous decline which will make the 2007 to early 2009 downturn seem like a walk in the park. The world financial system has temporarily been on life support by trillions of printed dollars that governments call money. But the effect of this massive money printing is ephemeral since it is not possible to save a world economy built on worthless paper by creating more of the same. Nevertheless, governments will continue to print since this is the only remedy they know. Therefore, we are soon likely to enter a phase of money printing of a magnitude that the world has never experienced...

Egon Von Greyerz: There Will Be No Double Dip

Egon von Greyerz: Alea Iacta Est (the die is cast)

ALEA IACTA EST

by Egon von Greyerz – Matterhorn Asset Management

Yes this is it! We have crossed the Rubicon and events in the world economy are now likely to unfold in a totally uncontrollable fashion. Clueless governments still don’t understand that it is their ruinous actions that have created a credit infested and bankrupt world. They will continue to prescribe the same remedy that caused the problem in the first place, namely more credit and more printed money. The consequences are clear; we will have hyperinflation, economic and human misery as well as social unrest.

When will the world finally begin to understand that we have reached the point of no return and that “the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).  Sadly, we are probably not very far from that point. It is already starting to happen in many countries.

The latest EU and IMF package of $ 1 TRILLION (Euro 750 billion) is yet another futile attempt by governments to abolish poverty by printing paper. Let’s be absolutely clear, this money does not exist and the EU governments are hoping by declaring such a large amount that they can con the Wolfpack speculators. At this point the EU has just picked a large round figure of out the air. But when their bluff is called by the Wolfpack and the next attack happens, EU governments will after initial huffing and puffing start printing unlimited amounts of paper.

So the world is now on its road to ruin and there is no action, no leader and no new amount of printed money that can save the world or prevent a hyperinflationary depression.

Never in history has the world been in a situation when virtually all industrialised countries are bankrupt. Therefore there is no precedent for what will happen in the next few years. What we can be quite certain about is that events will happen in a seemingly random pattern and that it will be impossible to forecast where the next crises will start.

But although we will not be able to predict in what order events will take place, we can expect much of what is outlined below to happen.

Wolfpack attacks

Already back in 2007 we warned about the very high risk of the CDS (credit default swap) market. This is now one of the primary instruments used by the Wolfpack (expression coined by the Swedish Finance Minister Borg). The Wolfpack, speculators with enormous fire power such as hedge funds and investment banks, use the CDS market to attack any weak financial sector, be it a country, a bank or a company. The combination of the leverage of the CDSs and the massive capital available to the Wolfpack makes it possible for them to bring down or badly maul whatever they attack. It was not the Wolfpack that caused the problem in for example Greece but they can bring down a weak victim quickly and profit immensely and immorally from it.

There are so many weak potential victims that the Wolfpack can attack and they will start with the most vulnerable ones like, Portugal, Spain and Ireland etc. But when the time is right they will also attack the US and the UK.

So in the coming year we will see country after country coming under attack from the Wolfback which will lead to acceleration in money printing and higher interest rates.

Iceland – Ireland – Greece – Who is next?

The EU support package of $ 1 trillion is supposed to be sufficient to protect the rest of Europe from another Greek tragedy. The dilemma with such a massive EU commitment is that no government expects to have to pay the money out. If they did the voters in the respective EU countries would throw out their government. Why should the German people, who are also having hard times, pay for the Greeks, Portuguese or the Spaniards, especially since these loans will never be paid back.

Greece is bankrupt but is still taking on additional EU loans of € 140 billion. In addition, their austerity measures are supposed to bring the deficit down from 12% of GDP today to 3% in a few years time. But who can be so stupid as to lend to a bankrupt nation which will sink into the Ionian and Aegean Seas in the next few years. With massive cuts in government expenditure, with major falls in output, with unemployment rising fast, with tax revenues collapsing how can Greece possibly be expected to improve the economy and pay a high interest rate on their exploding debt?  In addition, as long as they have the Euro they will be totally uncompetitive. So if they couldn’t manage their economy in the so called good times, it is absolutely guaranteed that they have no chance of surviving in bad times. So Greece will default and so will Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, the UK, the US and many more. But before that there will be the most colossal worldwide money printing exercise which would have used up most of the trees in the world but for electronic fiat money.

So, if virtually bankrupt nations don’t cut their deficits, they will definitively go under and if they try to cut, they will also go under due to collapsing output and tax revenues and colossal debts. Thus whatever actions governments take or don’t take, they are damned.

The table below shows debt as a percentage of GDP for various OECD countries. The official debts (in red) are massive and unlikely to ever be repaid in real money. Total debts (grey bars) include unfunded liabilities such as pensions and health care. Spain has the lowest total debt to GDP of 250%. Germany and the UK have around 400%, the US over 500% and Greece over 800% debt to GDP. These figures are absolutely astronomical and prove that most governments in the world will be totally incapable of repaying their debts or funding the pensions or medical care which they have committed to. It doesn’t matter however much governments cut expenditure or raise taxes, all these countries are insolvent and nothing can save them.

 ^[1]

The world must permanently readjust

Most governments still believe that deficit spending and money printing is the solution to all their problems. Because the world economy’s expansion in the last 100 years and particularly in the last 40 years has been primarily based on credit and not real growth, governments live under the false impression that money printing will work this time too. But we have reached the point when investors will no longer buy worthless government debt that will never be repaid with real money. We will first go through a period when governments issue and buy their own debt thus monetising the debt or print money.  This will be the hyperinflationary phase. Thereafter the world will realise that none of the government debt and very little of the bank debt will ever be repaid. Credit will then implode and so will also the assets financed by credit. Eventually there will be a new monetary and financial system and the world will start afresh. The adjustment period will be very long and will involve economic and human misery, leading to social unrest and major political change. It will be a horrible experience for the world during this extended period of adjustment. But it will be like a forest fire that clears out the deadwood and creates the conditions for  strong new growth. Once the new era starts it will therefore be from a very much lower level and individuals will be rewarded for hard work with  little or no social security safety net. Credit will only be granted for sound capital investment projects, not for consumption or speculation. Ethical and moral values will return and the golden calf will not be worshipped. But before that, the period of readjustment will be very long and extremely difficult for the whole world.

Hyperinflation

For several years we have predicted that hyperinflation is the most likely outcome of the economic predicament that the world is in. But it is unlikely to be a straightforward hyperinflationary period. Precious metals will be the primary beneficiaries of hyperinflation. Certain commodities, especially food and energy, will also go up in price.  But most assets that have been financed by the credit boom will go down in real terms. This includes property, stocks and bonds. In hyperinflationary money these assets could still go up in price. If someone who earned $ 50,000 per annum in real money now earns $ 5 million in newly printed money, his house will probably also go up in nominal terms. But in real terms property prices will decline massively. There will be no credit available and interest rates will be very high, probably at least 15-20% so very few people will be able to buy a house.

Hyperinflation will destroy many currencies so paper money will definitely reach its intrinsic value which is zero. Gold and silver will virtually be the only assets that will protect investors fully against the destruction of money.

 ^[2]

The next leg of the debt crisis is here

In our February newsletter “Sovereign Alchemy will Fail” we discussed the Sovereign Time Bomb and we are now experiencing the initial small explosions with Greece as the first victim. The $1 trillion EU/IMF rescue package was never intended to be more than a headline figure. EU governments were hoping that this would frighten the Wolfpack away. But so far this has failed. The Euro went up 4 cents when the package was announced but is now down to new lows again. How can anyone take a massive rescue package seriously when most of the countries making the commitments are bankrupt themselves? Spain and Italy have committed tens of billions each. And they are the ones that will be attacked by the Wolfpack next.This is the bankrupt saving the bankrupt. The IMF has no money but is dependent on its members of which the US is the biggest contributor. And they are bankrupt too. The UK, which is not in the Euro Zone and which has a worse budget deficit than Greece, contributed £15 billion. The new UK government is planning to cut a massive £ 6 billion of costs out of its next year’s budget which will bring major hardship. But as a last act, the outgoing labour government committed £15 billion which if paid out will never be repaid. The whole thing is a total farce. Governments commit trillions to rescue banks and sovereign states but cannot even make budget cuts of a few billion in their own countries. This shows that the world economy and the world financial system is being run by morons who only have their own self interest in mind and do not understand the consequences of their ruinous actions.

When the $1 trillion EU rescue package was announced, the US simultaneously offered European banks dollar Swap facilities (dollar loans) of a minimum $500 billion but probably much more. In addition the US Fed also injected at least $500 billion into the US banking system. These actions make it clear the banking system is under tremendous strain similar to 2008. But this is just the beginning. Things will get a lot worse.

Gold

In 2002 we advised investors to put up to 50% of their liquid assets into gold when the price was $300. To us it was crystal clear that the mountain of debts and derivatives would never be repaid with normal money but would be inflated away by money printing and this is what is now happening. The media are now talking about a bubble in gold and comparing to the 1980 top at $850. Let us be very clear, although gold has gone up 5 times since the 1999 bottom at $250,  it is nowhere near its peak. Adjusted for real inflation (as per shadowstats.com) the 1980 gold peak in today’s prices corresponds to around $7,200 today. So gold could easily go up 6 times from the current price of $1,220 and still be within normal parameters.

 ^[3]

There are many factors that will contribute to gold’s rise from here (in addition to money printing):

1. Gold production is going down.
2. Neither Comex (the futures exchange), nor the bullion banks would be able to deliver more than a fraction of the physical gold for which they have outstanding commitments.
3. Central banks and the IMF probably don’t hold even half of the 30,000 tons that they claim they have. Most likely, at least 15,000 tons (6 years gold production) have been sold to suppress the gold price.
4. The precarious financial system will lead to a total distrust of paper gold including most of the ETFs which have no physical gold.

The four factors above will lead to the most massive surge in the gold price. There will be nowhere near sufficient gold to satisfy demand at current prices. We had been expecting gold to start its acceleration in March 2010 and this is exactly what is happening. We expect the move to be relentless during most of this year with very few major corrections but with high volatility. Moves of $100 in one day could easily happen.

So gold is likely to make a top in the next few years between $5,000 and $10,000. But if we get hyperinflation the price could go exponentially higher like in the Weimar Republic when gold reached DM 100 trillion per ounce in 1923. Will gold experience the same type of correction when is has peaked as happened after the 1980 peak? Probably not, because gold is likely to be a part of a new monetary system that will be created when the current one has collapsed.

The table below illustrates the total destruction of paper money against gold in the last 100 years and shows how many ounces of gold that $1,000 bought at various times. In 1910, $1,000 bought 40 oz of gold at $25 per oz. Today in 2010, $1,000 buys 0.80 oz of gold at $1,230 per oz. This is a massive decline of 98% in the value of the dollar measured in real terms in the last 100 years. The next significant year is 1971 when Nixon abolished the convertibility of dollars to gold. It was this disastrous decision that opened the floodgates for the credit and money creation that we are experiencing currently. The dollar is down 97% since then. But even if we take more recent years, the purchasing power of the dollar measured in gold has declined catastrophically. Since the 1999 gold low, the dollar has declined by 80% against gold and since 2002 (when Matterhorn Asset Management recommended major gold investments) by 76%.

 ^[4]

Virtually all currencies show similar declines in value against gold in the last 100 years. This is the clearest evidence of governments and central banks defrauding their people of their hard earned money. Where will it end? It will end when the dollar and many other currencies reach their intrinsic value of ZERO. That time is not far away.

Matterhorn Asset Management AG
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CH 8001 ZURICH
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matterhornassetmanagement.com

Orlandini: We're heading into a long, cold and grim winter...

What follows is taken from Enrico Orlandini's latest weekly missive: The Next Shoe to Fall ( in Dow Theory Analysis) and although it doesn't paint quite a very pretty picture of things to come, it just hopefully might nudge some of you out there from your slumber into a sober awakening!..

Funny thing is, it also ties in rather nicelly with the latest Mises.org daily article called The Trouble with Democracy (which you can read HERE)

"... So that’s the long and the short of it. We are heading into a long, cold winter and we are all naked in the sun. As long as it’s warm we feel great and life goes on, but once the temperature drops we’re all in trouble. The problem is that no one sees, or wants to see, what’s coming and that is a real shame. Everyone says the US will enter a long period of sideways movement like Japan, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Japan had reserves! All the US has is mountains of debt and poor leadership. I am old enough to remember the Kennedy inauguration, which means that I also remember Eisenhower and I experienced Johnson and Nixon first hand. I liked Nixon and couldn’t stand Johnson, but at least he took a stand and stuck to it. In today’s world I can’t see one decent politician in the United States and let me qualify that by saying that there isn’t anyone with a good message and great communication skills the people will listen to.

Back in the 1960’s we had some really great public speakers like the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers and they all died a violent death. In particular Robert Kennedy had the communication skills and a message that played well to the American public. Is it an accident they were all shot? I don’t know but I think it served as a message to the next generation of politicians that you don’t mess with the system. On November 15, 1963 John F Kennedy gave a speech in Pittsburg saying he wanted to close down the Federal Reserve and he was dead two weeks later. I don’t know if that was just a coincidence or not, but I personally don’t think so. In any event it produced a system that punished original thought and anyone who wanted to challenge the status quo. Fast forward to the present and you see the fruits of that labor, a system bloated on debt and pork that violates its own constitution almost on a daily basis.

So many paid such a high price so Americans could enjoy the freedoms they so easily cede to the Bushes and Obama that it’s scary. Fortunately there is a mechanism called a market that is so big and so powerful that no one individual, group, or government can manipulate it for very long. The current manipulation has been going on for more than seventy years and involves the biggest transfer of wealth the world has even known. In 1913 the US was the richest nation in the world and most of that wealth belonged to the American people as a whole. Then along can a very small and select group of men, under the guise of the Federal Reserve and began to transfer that wealth to themselves and a few others. The result is the largest debtor nation in the world and an uneducated population that can’t compete. Along with the wealth went the entire production base of the US and now we are service oriented, meaning we sell each other insurance.

The greed has been so extreme that it overflowed the shores of the US and permeated the rest of the world in the form of over-the-counter derivatives. Almost US $700 trillion worth of them! Those chickens will come home to roost this fall and it will be very messy indeed. The market will have its day and no amount of bad legislation will change that, and neither will the printing press. The only salvation will be gold, silver, and maybe the Swiss Franc. A couple acres of vegetables in a backyard surrounded by an electric fence won’t hurt either. While you’re at it don’t forget your own well and power source since most public utilities are antiquated and their employees may not get paid. Civil disobedience will be a real problem and I wonder just how far it will go. The Viet Nam demonstrations aside, Americans haven’t been really worked up over anything since the days of “Hooverville” and will react negatively once they figure out that they’ve been taken to the cleaners. Like all distortions, the repercussions are likely to be extreme and I suspect will lead to a new form of government.

Whether it’s framed after the US Constitution or not remains to be seen."

The Great Depression: What We Can Learn From It Today

The Mises Circle in Colorado; sponsored by Limited Government Forum of Colorado Springs and hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Recorded Saturday, 4 April 2009.
You can watch all 5 videos HERE.

Sprott says U.S. at start of depression that will boost gold

By Stewart Bailey
Bloomberg News

NEW YORK -- Eric Sprott, the Canadian money manager who last year predicted banking stocks would collapse, said the U.S. is at the beginning of an economic depression that will help gold prices more than double.

Bullion may top $2,000 an ounce in coming years amid a series of financial catastrophes, the chairman and founder of Toronto-based Sprott Asset Management Inc. said yesterday in an interview. Banks will battle to replenish capital, Treasury auctions stand the risk of failing and the moribund economy will create a dire operating outlook for many companies, he said.

"The trend is down, and there's not one signpost that says it's changing yet," Sprott said yesterday from Toronto. "We'll stand by to wait to see those, and until it does, you have to assume it gets worse."

Sprott, who manages $4.5 billion, said in March that the world was in a "systemic financial meltdown," a call that presaged the collapse of financial institutions including Bear Stearns & Co. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Since then, the U.S. has entered the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression, credit markets have tightened and asset prices have dropped as companies and funds sell portfolios to raise cash.

The 81-company Standard & Poor's 500 Financials Index has dropped 62 percent since Sprott said on March 6 he was buying bullion and gold-producers' shares, while shorting financial-sector stocks. Gold slipped 6.3 percent during the same period.

So-called short-selling allows speculators to profit from a stock's decline by borrowing shares, selling them to raise cash and buying them later when the price drops to repay the debt.

Sprott now favors buying more gold stocks and bullion while selling the entire equity market short. Most at risk in the current climate are banks and discretionary consumer stocks and any companies that have debt to refinance, he said.

Sprott believes there is a chance that a U.S. Treasury auction will fail as countries use their resources to quell financial turmoil in their home markets, leaving less to help finance the world's largest economy. That outcome will have a "catastrophic" impact, he said.

"When do people stop buying the credit of the country? That's a tough question to answer, but it's on a lot of its own financial problem, so there's no funding for anything external."

Such concerns have driven investors to the gold market, propelling the metal higher as other commodities have slumped and helping gold-producers' stocks almost double in the past three months.

Greenlight Capital Inc., a $5.1 billion New York-based hedge fund, has started investing in gold for the first time, while Federated Investors Inc.'s $1.3 billion Federated Market Opportunity Fund, which outperformed 99 percent of rivals last year, now counts Yamana Gold Inc. and Goldcorp Inc. among its largest investments.

Gold companies such as Newmont Mining Corp. and Kinross Gold Corp. have taken the opportunity to issue stock to bolster their own balance sheets.

Barrick Gold Corp. Chairman Peter Munk said last week he has been inundated with calls from wealthy investors seeking to buy gold to protect their capital.

"The window to raise money for gold stocks has blown open," Sprott said. "The investing public has started to go to that one thing that they think it's safe to invest in."

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