Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

Debt Makes You Dumb, Japanese Edition

Economics / Global Debt Crisis 2014 Apr 02, 2014 - 11:58 AM GMT

By: John_Rubino

Economics

Debt works the same way for countries as for families and individuals. That is, if you borrow too much, your life begins to suck. And actions that in normal times might have seemed unwise, contradictory or downright stupid begin to look better than the (even more disturbing) alternatives.


Pretend, for example, that you are Japan. You borrow huge amounts of money year after year to keep the zombie banks and builders created by an early-1990s asset bubble from imploding and decimating the rest of the economy. Your annual deficits are huge, your accumulated debt, as a percentage of GDP, dwarfs that of any other major country. And your population is aging rapidly, so you have at best a decade to start generating massive surpluses to pay retirees what they’ve been promised.

So you elect a president who bullies the central bank into creating enough new currency to boost economic growth and inflate away a big part of your debt. It works, sort of. The yen’s exchange rate falls immediately, just as you hoped it would, thus boosting exports. And though you worry that such an aggressive “currency war” strategy involves some risk, it feels good to be doing something.

But those deficits keep rising, which, government statisticians calculate, will increase the national debt at a rate that more than offsets the inflationary effects of easy money. So you’re not actually fixing anything. You’re just causing the savings of a whole generation to evaporate as the value of their government bonds plunge along with the currency.

How do you respond to that? Well obviously, say your leading economists, you raise taxes to lower the government’s deficit. You agree, and on April 1 boost the national sales tax by an amount sufficient, other things being equal, to take a serious bite out of the deficit.

Alas, higher taxes tend to slow economic growth, which pretty much offsets the central bank stimulus. So you find yourself even worse off than before. Not only have your aggressive, innovative policies failed, but everyone now realizes that 1) you never had the slightest idea what you were doing and 2) there’s nothing left to try in any event.

Then your people start behaving as people always do when they realize that their leaders are clueless and that events will henceforth progress according to the laws of nature and physics rather than politics: they buy gold.

Japanese Prepare For “Abenomics Failure”, Scramble To Buy Physical Gold

As we reported yesterday, the world’s most clueless prime minister, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, has suddenly found himself in a “no way out” situation, with inflation for most items suddenly soaring (courtesy of exported deflation slamming Europe), without a matched increase in wages as reflected in the “surprising” tumble in household spending, which dropped 2.5% on expectations of a 0.1% increase in the month ahead of Japan’s infamous sales tax hike. How does one explain this unwillingness by the public to buy worthless trinkets and non-durable goods and services ahead of an imminent price surge? Simple – while the government may have no options now, the same cannot be said of its citizens who have lived next to China long enough to know precisely what to do when faced with runaway inflation, and enjoying the added benefit of a collapsing currency courtesy of Kuroda’s “wealth effect.”That something is to buy gold, of course, lots of it.

According to the FT, “Tanaka Kikinzoku Jewelry, a precious metals specialist, reported that sales of gold ingots across seven of its shops are up more than 500% this month. At the company’s flagship store in Ginza on Thursday, people queued for up to three hours to buy 500g bars worth about Y2.3m ($22,500). March has been the busiest month in Tanaka’s 120-year history.”

Of course, while the Japanese consumers know what is the best defense against runaway inflation and purchasing power destruction, the government also knows that just like in India, where massive gold imports to satisfy local demand so skewed the current account deficit that India spent most of 2013 imposing gold capital controls, it simply needs to make gold purchases impossible in order to redirect spending into more Keynes-approved products and services.

However, for now Japan is happy just to crush its population’s meager disposable income with soaring energy prices. Which also means the locals can allocate their personal capital in the most efficient way: one which discounts a very unpleasant future.

Investors are being drawn to the metal not just because of higher taxes, said Itsuo Toshima, an adviser to pension funds.“Slowly and steadily, people are preparing for the worst, which is the failure of Abenomics.” “To protect the value of wealth, gold comes into play as an inflation hedge, and if the economy goes back to deflationary circumstances then, again, money seeking safe havens would flow into gold.”

This post is the first in a series that will show the same process at work in every major country: Too much debt leads to increasingly-contradictory and irrational policies that, because they appear to be purposeful, lull the local populace into temporary complacency. But when the policies are revealed to be not only ineffective but self-negating and therefore really dumb, mass-disillusion sets in. Then the real fun begins, at least for precious metals dealers.

By John Rubino

dollarcollapse.com

Copyright 2014 © John Rubino - All Rights Reserved

Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.


© 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