Great discussion last few pages. Been AFK for a time but managed to stream MA's doco at least.
John
Anyway I will leave it to it as I prefer to focus on real economists like Jim Rickards, Harry Dent and co.
To each their own, but Rickards' views aren't too different from Armstrong's. Rickards has repeatedly stated that the USD will be the last man standing and that junk bonds and emerging market dollar denominated debt are primed to blow, with currency wars and their deflationary effects seeing to that. He has said no rate rise for over a year, while Armstrong said the FED
may be forced to rise (in his opinion not the models) as its a choice between saving emerging markets or American pension funds. The FED chose the EM's. Rickards also says that there is no overt effort to overthrow the dollar, more a tacit understanding to let China into 'the club's' SDR basket. And I think Dent turned from Bear to Bull recently, no?
edit: (brackets)
TPTB_needs_war
We've got the situation now were everyone is moving to the short-end of the curve (short-term sovereign bonds), because it is very uncertain if the world's central banks can do another coordinated bailout with the debt default situation much worse now in Europe, Japan, China, Brazil, Australia, etc than it was in 2008.
So we've got a lopsided situation now where the USA does not have the political nor economic incentive to participate in a global bailout.
Thanks for a number of excellent posts. Concise and well written. I have a couple of questions:
1. (first sentence above) So a move into the short end signals that no one trusts governments enough to return their money over a longer period. Is there a way to measure increased volumes or is it just by seeing the yield drop further?
2. (second) Does this mirror 1931 (that Armstrong always notes), where Euro countries defaulted which ended up shaking up the US markets / economy due to flows?
Armstrong's entire point about whether the US stock market would double before 2015.75 or after, was all about whether US stocks (and the dollar) would continue to behave as a Public asset, or would they phase shift and become a Private asset (and rise while interest rates are rising, i.e. rising when the general economic outlook is tightening and worsening thus not being bought for income potential but rather like gold bought for being a hedge against government). It became clear by the end of 2014 that the latter was the case.
Again, thanks.
1. Not sure I grasp this. I get it for the USD, ie, that while things have worsened in EM's it has strengthened, but is it the same for stocks?
2. Does the behavior of 'bad news is really good news' (eg dropping inflation / PMI numbers sees a stock boost as the market anticipates QE) exemplify this because government will do all they can to maintain / save the system?
SmoothCurves
Is there any independent evidence that this slide was really shown in 1998?
in The Forecaster, I'm pretty sure it is in the background while footage of Armstrong addressing the 98 conference is playing.
TPTB_need_war could you elucidate on MA's backtest on 6,000 year old data? What data does he have that is 6,000 years old? Is it specifically economic data or something else?
From the doco and youtube clips Armstrong had a team at a London Library (?) for a year going through the all the material relating to Ancient Greece, Sumeria etc. He also acquired the coinage from these empires as the actual coins were a communication method to the people regarding battles, kings etc. In the doco he tells the story of the Bank of Lebanon calling him and asking him to compute a model based on an old book they had found regarding the Lebanese pound. Armstrong did and the modelling suggested a crisis in 8 days, and 8 days later the Lebanese civil war broke out.