David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director 1980-1984, in this 23- minute video points out why the economy and stocks are headed for major downturns.
Other nuggets gleaned from this video:
** Joy Rides never end well;
** World equities markets have topped $100 trillion;
** Earnings collapsed 30% in 2020, yet stocks rose 25%;
** Capital is flowing to massively over-valued companies;
** Governments are totally out of control when it comes to money printing;
** Stockman explains the importance of short sellers in dampening declines but says short sellers have been destroyed;
** Federal Reserve is expanding its balance sheet at the rate of $120 billion a month;
** European Central Bank announced it intends on buying $200 billion a month;
** Balance sheet of the Fed was only $500 billion in 2000, now it’s $7.2 trillion;
** Total world debt of $270 to $280 trillion dollars;
** Gold is the only safe haven, an alternative to central bank printing press money;
** Stay away from stocks and bonds, and accumulate gold;
** Only $10 trillion to $12 trillion of gold available to be bought, yet total global assets exceed $400 trillion;
VIEW VIDEO HERE: 23-minutes
The arguments that David Stockman presents are not new. And they (almost) always seem very believable and logical. But even so, it seems that he is, at best, consistently and amazingly wrong in regard to timing! And at worst, he is just plain wrong overall. Look up some of his earlier predictions. Huge catastrophic market crashes were coming! And then… they didn’t. I started worrying, and worrying a lot, about impending financial collapses, hyperinflation, and more, way way back during the (awful) Jimmy Carter years. We just kept spending ourselves into more and more massive debt. And yet the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency! Pretty dumb world, huh? Why do those billions of people still trust the utterly-debased dollar? And why doesn’t even one country, just one, have an actual gold-based currency? I have a brilliant friend who is a well known economist. Unfortunately, he’s not into monetary theory, and he’s been pretty useless to me in explaining all this. And I don’t think Stockman is even as intelligent as my economist friend, either. Gold will go up or down. Stockman doesn’t know any better than I do. But hey, at least I don’t go around pretending to know! Frankly, he should have noticed by now that his own predictions have been poor. And until he understands, accepts, and can explain why he has been wrong so many many times before, it would sure be nice if he would have the decency to stop trying to explain economics to everyone else. He’s as lost as the rest of us.
Less than 100 years ago, gold was valued at $20 an ounce. Today it’s at the $1,700 level. Stockman did not mention timing in his article. He said gold is the ultimate safe haven. As for Stockman not mentioning anything new, you are right. But why should he come up with new things? The cause of inflation has long been known, massive money creation, be it by digital money creation or as the Weimar Republic printed massive quantities of marks.
As I type this, gold is at $1712.01 per troy oz. It was over $2000.00 per troy oz last summer. Since then, leftists have acquired power in the US and passed massive, multi-trillions of $ in new spending, exploding the deficit and building up more debt than ever before. And yet, gold is down more than $300.00 per ounce. What is David Stockman’s explanation? Does anyone (anyone at all) have a credible explanation?
Whenever governments enter into loose monetary policies, precious metals bull markets follow thereafter. However, metals prices increases can be up to 1-1/2 to 2 years following the announcement/implementation of loose monetary policies. It has now been a little less than a year since the Trump administration announced its massive fiscal stimulus program.
As for Stockman’s comment about gold being the ultimate store of value, gold has have been valued in all civilizations for 6,000 years. I think we can expect the same this time as governments start their massive money printing programs.
Bill, I think you are completely right about the long term, especially on the 1000s of years time scale, and even on a 100-year time scale. But looking back over the last 40 years or so, it seems that there is just no way to know if gold will even maintain (let alone, appreciate) in its purchasing power over, for example, any particular 10-year time period. I find it absolutely remarkable that the government’s monetary policies (spending, taxing, printing, etc.) do not seem to provide any actually-useful clues to would-be investors in regard to predicting how the gold price will ultimately behave over 10 year terms. Are there any reproducible correlations (in terms of govt. policies vs. gold prices) that you can observe and point out, that occur repeatedly/reliably, if considered over 10-year time scales? Anything that undeniably works better than flipping a coin in regard to when to buy or when to sell?
In my 48 years in precious metals, I’ve noticed that people adapt to higher rates of inflation and the expectations thereof. The thing to remember is to buy the dips in the metals. You may not always buy at the bottom, but you will have exchanged a currency that can be printed in unlimited quantities for gold and silver that have been valued in all civilizations through out history. With the Biden administration promising to print still money dollars, now appears to be an excellent time to add precious metals to your holdings.
Been long time coming as the currency gets massively debased currently for well over 100 years. Currency should buy more as the economy produces more and becomes more efficient. We are so far removed from that, that finally the effects are seen in a hollowed out economy and a banking system that is essentially the walking dead.
I agree. As an economy becomes more efficient, money should buy more. However, it does not because the rise in efficiency is exceeded by the increase in money creation. Hence, money buys less.