Most Popular
1. It’s a New Macro, the Gold Market Knows It, But Dead Men Walking Do Not (yet)- Gary_Tanashian
2.Stock Market Presidential Election Cycle Seasonal Trend Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
3. Bitcoin S&P Pattern - Nadeem_Walayat
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
4.U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - Raymond_Matison
5. How to Profit from the Global Warming ClImate Change Mega Death Trend - Part1 - Nadeem_Walayat
7.Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - Nadeem_Walayat
9.It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - Stephen_McBride
10.Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - Richard_Mills
Last 7 days
Stocks, Bitcoin and Crypto Markets Breaking Bad on Donald Trump Pump - 21st Nov 24
Gold Price To Re-Test $2,700 - 21st Nov 24
Stock Market Sentiment Speaks: This Is My Strong Warning To You - 21st Nov 24
Financial Crisis 2025 - This is Going to Shock People! - 21st Nov 24
Dubai Deluge - AI Tech Stocks Earnings Correction Opportunities - 18th Nov 24
Why President Trump Has NO Real Power - Deep State Military Industrial Complex - 8th Nov 24
Social Grant Increases and Serge Belamant Amid South Africa's New Political Landscape - 8th Nov 24
Is Forex Worth It? - 8th Nov 24
Nvidia Numero Uno in Count Down to President Donald Pump Election Victory - 5th Nov 24
Trump or Harris - Who Wins US Presidential Election 2024 Forecast Prediction - 5th Nov 24
Stock Market Brief in Count Down to US Election Result 2024 - 3rd Nov 24
Gold Stocks’ Winter Rally 2024 - 3rd Nov 24
Why Countdown to U.S. Recession is Underway - 3rd Nov 24
Stock Market Trend Forecast to Jan 2025 - 2nd Nov 24
President Donald PUMP Forecast to Win US Presidential Election 2024 - 1st Nov 24
At These Levels, Buying Silver Is Like Getting It At $5 In 2003 - 28th Oct 24
Nvidia Numero Uno Selling Shovels in the AI Gold Rush - 28th Oct 24
The Future of Online Casinos - 28th Oct 24
Panic in the Air As Stock Market Correction Delivers Deep Opps in AI Tech Stocks - 27th Oct 24
Stocks, Bitcoin, Crypto's Counting Down to President Donald Pump! - 27th Oct 24
UK Budget 2024 - What to do Before 30th Oct - Pensions and ISA's - 27th Oct 24
7 Days of Crypto Opportunities Starts NOW - 27th Oct 24
The Power Law in Venture Capital: How Visionary Investors Like Yuri Milner Have Shaped the Future - 27th Oct 24
This Points To Significantly Higher Silver Prices - 27th Oct 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Reflation and Stagnation Are Next for the Economy

Economics / Recession 2008 - 2010 May 16, 2009 - 07:56 AM GMT

By: Justice_Litle

Economics

Best Financial Markets Analysis ArticleMr. Market has begun to show clear signs of split personality disorder in recent weeks. Now that investors have exhaled in relief that a deflationary apocalypse has been avoided, the new reality of reflation and stagnation is sinking in…

“Mr. Market” is starting to show clear signs of split personality disorder.


On the one hand, certain areas of the market - the ones much favored in the big run-up - have started to wilt and fade as the much-lauded “green shoots” turn brown. On the other hand, other areas of the market - which didn’t participate so much in the rally at first - have started showing signs of life.

Take the grain markets for example. Foodstuffs like corn, wheat, soybeans and sugar have been red-hot in recent days.

DBA, which is NOT built around “total return swaps” like other inverse/leveraged funds, is essentially a basket of futures contracts - primarily wheat, corn and soybeans, with sugar thrown in for good measure.

Commodity after commodity has roared back to life, thanks to a combination of renewed inflation expectations, a cratering U.S. dollar, and newly bullish fundamentals. Let’s take a closer look at some of DBA’s components to see what I mean.

Prices as High as an Elephant’s Eye

Corn prices surged to a six-month high,” Bloomberg reported earlier this week, “after the U.S. government said domestic demand will exceed production for the third time in four years, slashing reserves by 28 percent.”

Corn inventories are expected to fall even as the various demand sources for corn - food, livestock and fuel - rise an estimated 3.5% next year.

Soybean prices, meanwhile, recently hit seven-month highs on the CBOT (Chicago Board of Trade) after U.S. stockpile forecasts dropped. Beans were also boosted by word that the Brazilian National Agriculture Confederation, a major farm lobbying group in Brazil, would press for limited soybean acreage in the coming planting season to help keep prices firm.

And finally Sugar, not to be outdone, recently hit 34-month highs - their highest level in nearly three years - on “poor crops and robust demand,” according to the Financial Times. A failure of India’s local sugar crop was seen as a big price booster. “Swings in Indian sugar output, which move the country back and forth from exporter to importer, are a critical factor in global prices,” the FT reports.

Wheat is the one area with potential for disappointment, relating to large India stockpiles that could be released onto the market later this summer - hence Macro Trader’s willingness to take some gains off the table and watch closely as further developments unfold.

Reflation and Stagnation

Agriculture is thus one area where the market is doing well. Other foodstuffs not mentioned, like cotton and coffee, have also seen big gains in recent weeks. On top of that, various agriculture-related equities have been performing well and look to have strong potential upside in the coming months.

Along with base metals, ag has been showing signs that the “reflation trade” is on. There is a new and aggressively bullish stance emerging on hard assets and inflation-themed plays, including everything from base metals, to gold and silver, to crude oil and natural gas... and well-run companies related to all the above.

China, too, has had a hand in pumping up the reflation trade with its aggressive stockpiling of base metals. (A few weeks back we wondered aloud in these pages if good Dr. Copper, the “metal with a PhD in economics,” was being goosed by China buying. That hunch was more or less correct, as Beijing doubles down on industrial inflation hedges with a vengeance.)

But all is not rosy and cheery for the recovery-minded bulls, as other, weaker areas of the market can attest. At the same time that inflation-linked themes are hopping, other econ-related data points are dropping.

“U.S. railroad freight traffic is running about a fifth lower than a year ago,” The Wall Street Journal reports, adding that the news “is one of several less-obvious indicators that all isn't well, despite the financial-market rally since early March.”

The underlying reality, as the dismal freight numbers point out, is that a change from “bad” to “less bad” on the economic data front doesn’t mean things are necessarily getting better. It only means we aren’t free-falling quite as fast as we were.

Think of the skydiver hurtling towards the Earth at an astonishing rate. A few thousand feet above the ground he pulls the ripcord and - hooray! - his rate of descent has been arrested, to the point where he is pleasantly drifting rather than free-falling now. But in which direction is he still headed? And where exactly is he going to land? (Let’s hope it’s not an alligator swamp...)

The budding hope that U.S. consumers would come bouncing back with wallet intact also took a hard knock this week. April retail sales were down for the second month in a row, coming in below expectations and breaking the bulls’ happy winning string of positive upside surprises.

Brian Bethune, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Mass., believes the “green shoots” talk was premature. “There are some preliminary signs (of improvement) in certain areas of the financial markets,” Bethune tells Reuters, “but in terms of the real economy, we are still a long ways off.”

To which we try (and fail) to resist the temptation to say: “Well, duh.”

A Classic Combo

The environment we are headed into - and the view Mr. Market seems to (perhaps) be acknowledging now - is a classic combo of wearisome economic stagnation and creeping paper-fueled inflation. One acts as a fearsome headwind, blowing in the face of consumer-oriented names reliant on economic recovery to justify their newly bid-up valuations. The other acts as a powerful tailwind, further bidding up the price of inflation hedges and hard assets.

The main worry that has wracked markets these past few months, a relentless deflationary downward spiral leading to Great Depression 2.0, has now more or less been put to bed (at least in the mind of investors at large). Upon coming to the realization that we’re not all going to die, a massive post-apocalypse bear market rally ensued as investors audibly exhaled and the “green shoots” meme excited suggestible minds far and wide.

But now the follow-on reality is slowly sinking in that, while we may not be dead ducks, we’re still far (quite far) from being out of the woods. And that means an unpleasant combo of debt-hobbled economic growth, budget-busting government deficits, and persistent fiat currency erosion as far as the eye can see.

Macro Trader’s special recipe for an environment such as this is two-pronged. We are scanning the landscape for bearish trading opportunities in overhyped and overinflated consumer discretionary-type names, still pumped up from the short-covering aspects of rally and vulnerable to fresh disappointment, while simultaneously ferreting out bullish opportunities to play the “reflation trade” (in everything from ag to energy to metals) on the long side.

Warm Regards,

By Justice Litle
http://www.taipanpublishinggroup.com/

Copyright © 2009, Taipan Publishing Group

Justice Litle is editorial director for Taipan Publishing Group. He is also a regular contributor to Taipan Daily, a free investing and trading e-letter, and editor of Taipan's Safe Haven Investor, which helps guide readers to new global investment frontiers and safe harbors.

Justice_Litle Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in