Repost : Bubble Bursts : First Snows Of K-winter

[fofp]

I posted the following comment back in August when the credit bubble had finally burst. My perspective comes from a quarter century of studying financial manias and bubbles. At the time it generated some interesting comment. Unfortunately I've been too busy to follow this up until now. Partly that's due to keeping up with the sheer volume of financial news generated by the credit crisis. Anyway, I plan to post an update to the article below, taking into account what's been happening since August.

Meanwhile, for those who kindly suggested I write for a magazine, I made a small start here:

http://www.iamone.co.uk/wordpress/

If anyone cares enough to post comment or questions on that site, I'll try to look in to reply to them....

The Credit Bubble Bursts : First Snows of K-Winter

Well, it's several years since I said "It ain't a housing bubble it's a credit bubble!" in these hallowed pages and finally, and by Eris it's been a long wait, that credit bubble has burst.

There was the Tulip Bubble, the Wall Street Bubble, the Canal Stocks Bubble, the Railways Bubble, and the granddaddy of all credit bubbles: the South Seas Bubble. You should all feel very privileged that you've lived through the one credit bubble that's been bigger than all of them and this planet's very first global credit bubble.

Better yet: you've reserved a ringside seat for the denouement and already it promises to be spectacular. Folks, this is a once in three generations event. This is the only time this will happen in your lifetimes. For the Longwaves and Kondratiev fans around you, the first snow of K-Winter is starting to fall thick and fast.

How's the show so far? Well, entirely as expected, if a little faster than I'd have thought it would be. Naturally the first hole appeared in mortgage credit since mortgage debt is far and away the largest part of the credit pyramid that's been so carelessly put together over the past couple of decades. Sir Printsalot, Alan Greenspan, must be regretting the day he said that derivatives don't need regulation, because part of the fun in this giant game of pass the parcel is that nobody even knows where those trillion-Dollar parcels of bad debt are. Worse, since it's known that there are more credit default swaps insuring corporate debt than there is corporate debt to insure, we can't even put an upper limit on the actual amount of poison there is still floating in the global financial system. Not unnaturally, pretty much everyone is suspected either of holding some bad paper or of having loans out to someone who is.

Meanwhile, remember that little fuss about how the backroom boys of derivatives trading hired to keep records couldn't keep up with the action and were sometimes weeks behind? Well, we'll get to see how they do when the markets get a little excited. My bet is that they'll fall behind and folks will get even more jumpy when they realise that not only don't they know where the bad stuff is, but they don't know either who's trading in it.

Now of course a normal credit bust would take 16-18 years to play out, though history's largest bubble may take a little longer. We can't though expect this sort of mayhem every day for eighteen years. There will be days, weeks, months and even years when things seem to be getting back to "normal", only to fall off a cliff again. What I'd expect sooner rather than later is for a gigantic fraud or two to be uncovered. Frauds are easy to hide when everything is booming, but not so easy when folks start nervously counting their money. The great Warren Buffet pointed out that it's only when the tide goes out that we find out who's been swimming naked. Needless to say, when these frauds are discovered, there will be a whole lot more nervousness to go around.

Now of course I've been absent from the prediction game (other than that it was a credit bubble and it would bust) because if we could predict when a bubble would pop we would be overnight billionaires. Worse, it gets quite disheartening to continue knowing that it's going to happen and yet see the monster go on and draw yet more people into its maw. I still believe that we would have had a bust and debt deflation in 2003 if it wasn't for Sir Printsalot and Chopper Ben cutting rates to 1% to prevent the coming debt-deflation. Naturally this simply took a mortgage bubble already on a moonshot and gave it a stardrive. Those guys will yet go down in history as the folks who saved a recession at the cost of a depression.

Still, since we have the above bubbles, plus the 1990's Japanese credit bubble to crib from, let's make some predictions about the general structure of what's coming.

The golden rule of credit bubbles seems to be that whichever assets, or Magic Money Tokens, people use credit to bid up during the bubble, are the main areas of price implosion during the bust. I don't think it's any sort of well-kept secret that the main MMT in this one has been housing. The usual margin on a MMT is 90%, that is people put 10% down and borrow 90%. That was certainly true for Wall Street stocks in 1929 and nothing I've read of the other bubbles indicates them as having been grossly different. Housing in his bubble has been unprecedented in garnering 100% loans and even 110% or 120% for pretty much anyone who could fog a mirror.

Even the South Seas Bubble, the previous largest, drew in only one third of the UK population. The Millenium Bubble (Hell, someone has to name it eh? Any better suggestions?) has involved 70% of the population of those countries affected (and in the advanced western countries, I see only Japan and Germany not taking part). The price of the main MMTs will generally fall between 67% and 90% in the aftermath. This fits well with what happened in Japan and it's what I expect to see happening here.

Another firm rule is that the more debt involved, the more people involved and the longer the bubble goes on, the worse the denouement will be. Remember the old saw:

If you owe the bank a million Dollars, you're in trouble, but

If you owe the bank a billion Dollars then your bank is in trouble?

Well, we've just invented a third line:

If you owe the bank a trillion Dollars, then we're ALL in trouble.

So there's no escaping that general economies are going to hit the skids. Pretty clearly the first hits will be in the financial sector. There are going to be swathes of redundancies in banking, stockbroking, estate agencies, builders and pretty much anyone else who's been an intermediary in the game. Worse, since everyone is going to need a scapegoat (nobody blames themselves for their financial stupidity and politicians are adept at finding someone else to blame) some of those folks are going to jail. If you're an estate agent, or a buy to let landlord, then keep your nose clean and your head down. I'm serious: some of you are going to the pokey simply because someone has to. All folks need is some sort of chicanery which will suffice as a charge. An unsympathetic jury is already guaranteed.

Next up, people who've been spending borrowed money for a couple of decades are going to have to relearn how to spend only earned money. That's going to guarantee a decline in retail sales. Worse, once the severity of what's happening becomes apparent folks are going to try to pay down debt and save, just to feel a little security again. This will devastate retailers even more. In western economies, the amount of retail space now is ten times what it was in 1990. That all got built for the boom and it's all about to be redeployed back to other uses. A lot of people who got jobs in retail are going to become redundant, and they're going to have trouble paying their debts. Inevitably this will lead to repossessions and more property on the markets.

Since two-thirds of US and UK economies depend on the consumer (and it's close enough for government work elsewhere too) these economies are going to go into recession. In the UK this is going to produce an immediate and interesting result. A whole bunch of people from outside the UK are here to earn money to send to their families back home to buy or build a house there. When the recession comes and they can't earn money, they're going to take the plane out to wherever they can. This is going to hit retail again. It's going to hit the tax take and it's going to hit the property rental markets. A great many properties are very suddenly going to find themselves missing tenants. This will drive rents down and it will produce a large number of landlords racing each other to sell first while there are still any buyers. This is the point that Charles Mackay called "Devil take the hindmost".

Needless to say, by this point housing prices will already be falling. This sudden flux of de-immigration will ratchet them down further.

In the US, 40% of loans in the past 2 years were subprime, 12% were Alt-A, and 8% were Jumbos. None of those markets are making significant new loans now because the bond investors won't buy them. Even if someone can find a creditor ready to take a risk, they're asking 3% per annum on top to compensate them for it. There's a great deal of difference in the affordability of a mortgage at 8% and one at 11%. I figure that based on this, more than half the US mortgage market has been almost shut down. The other half depends on two companies: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they’ve had serious problems of their own. It's time to ask what price properties will sell at if almost nobody gets credit and everyone pays in their own cash. The Japanese found this out the hard way, and we're all now headed implacably to facing the same question.

In the ratchet up of property price to income ratios as the mortgage interest rates have been falling, properties have been behaving like a bond where the price acts inversely to the yield. No doubt at some point the central banks would like to cut the mortgage rate to try to head off the carnage. However what the last fortnight showed is that it's not the central banks who decide mortgage rates, and it's not the "lenders" either. Nope, that pass was sold as long ago as 1998 and it's just taken folks this long to notice. Last week US Treasury rates fell as folks sought security. Those are the rates the central banks can affect. However mortgage rates actually rose while Treasury rates were falling. The bondholders discovered that they control the mortgage rate by setting the price at which they'll buy mortgage-backed bonds and the CDOs based on them, if they'll buy any at all, which is becoming a less academic question by the day.

If property acts like a bond, then as the bondholders raise the interest rate on mortgages, properties must fall in price in response. I estimate that for every percentage point on the rate, prices will fall around ten percent. If the risk premium is to be three percent, we're looking at a 30% fall from that alone. Due to erosion of availability of credit, I expect things to eventually go much further than that. This is the only time in history that credit has been available to everyone, and by the time we're through, I don't think anyone on the planet will be looking to repeat the experiment. Not the lenders, and certainly not the borrowers.

Another lesson from credit bubbles past is that they end in "revulsion" (Kindleberger's term I think). Those whose financial lives have been destroyed by debt will refuse ever to countenance taking it again in their lives, which is fine because there essentially won't be any offered anyway because revulsion happens to those creditors who lost their all too. Also, they'll teach their kids not to take on debt. Those kids will grow up and teach their kids the same thing but with the bust becoming history, they'll probably take it out for serious purposes. Their kids will see it as ridiculously old-fashioned to be scared of debt and sooner or later they'll find their own Magic Money Token. It could be a flower bulb (I know of six flower bulb bubbles in history) or maybe flying cars or AI chips, but there will be one, and the credit cycle will be complete. The only real likelihood is that it won't be housing. The token usually changes from cycle to cycle.

So what will the central banks do? Well, they'll try to stop a deflation. That's the reverse of inflation. Cash under the bed becomes more valuable over time. The effective value of debt rises because the money it takes to pay it back becomes more valuable. If enough deflation happens, then wages start to fall. If they don't, as in the 1930's in the US, then mass redundancies happen and that has even worse implications for turning the financial screw tighter. As folks wages fall, it gets harder for them to pay their outstanding debts and more defaults happen. That affects debt paper. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The central banks will try more of what they're doing now: printing money and showering it liberally upon the economy. Chopper Ben got his name for a 2003 paper on how to stop a deflation by throwing cash out of helicopters.

There are a couple of problems with the idea though. First, you have to shower ever more money out of the helicopters to keep things going, and keeping them going will make any eventual bust worse. Eventually the amount of cash needing rained down is going to be such that you don't have enough helicopters. Remember those pictures of wheelbarrows in post WWI Germany? That's the end of that story. Eventually people repudiate the currency, as they did in the Mississippi Bubble in France, and run to gold. Needless to say, that's even worse than a deflation. The Japanese tried this by sending everyone a cheque for the equivalent of 150 Dollars in the hope they’d spend it and kickstart the economy.. It failed because folks took their cheques from the central bank and duly put them in the bank or paid down debt with them. Paying down debt doesn't cause as much deflation as defaulting on debt, but it does cause some. Anyway, the scheme failed because people were already scared enough to hoard money rather than spend it. Amazing though it sounds in our currently profligate economy, people here are going to change in the same way.

The second problem is that the more usual way for central banks to shower people with money is to let them borrow it at ultra cheap rates. The Japanese cut heir base rates to zero for a decade (they've only just raised them to half a percent in the last month and some folks think that's too much). Japanese house prices still fell 50% to 90% and the deflation still went gaily on. You can offer people ultra cheap loans to give the economy yet another fix, but if the last thing they ever want to see again in their lives is a loan, then it just won’t help.

What might happen with all this money printing is that inflation will rise. Then the bondholders will simply raise their interest rates to compensate them for the inflation risk and property prices will take another large step down.

I expect the central bankers to try it though, so we'll get an inflation, then a deflation – a combination which will almost certainly destroy more people's wealth than if we cut out the middleman and go straight for the deflation. The great thing about deflation is that it's self-curing. Once the price of money and assets returns to a sustainable level then it stops automatically. Sure, that's likely to see property, art, vintage cars, collectibles etc drop 90% or so in value, but in fact it will be a good thing that people don't have to go into hock their whole lives just to get a roof over their heads. Sure, some people with current mortgages will be in debt for the rest of their natural, but more and more they'll find that their neighbours won't. It will be a far healthier society.

Remember the end of the 1989 housing bubble (interesting that housing bubbles are 18 years in length in the UK, we now have a housing bubble and credit bubble peaking, and busting, at the same time - exciting or what?) where prices fell 50% in real terms but only 25% in nominal terms? That was because we got 25% inflation over the 4-5 years of the bust and that sheltered nominal prices from a larger fall. In a deflation though, nominal prices fall further than real prices because the effect is reversed. Thus a 50% fall in real prices again, plus a 40% deflation (say over 18 years that's not a huge amount per year) and you get a 90% all in nominal values for houses only going down 3% per annum in a 2% deflation.

So enough of the economics. What else will change? There's the famous Hemline Indicator where hemlines go up in good times and down in bad. We can safely assume that they'll be going down and sadly we'll see the demise of the bare midriff and other forms of fleshly exposure. Modesty will make a comeback. People will be more worried about keeping their jobs and social conservatism and conformity will return. People will have less money and so will move from expensive to cheaper pursuits. They'll move away from reality TV to escapism and fantasy (the Potter mania may be an early indication). Romance, Westerns, SF and Fantasy and so on will be back in vogue. People don't like reality when it's grim and they’ll want to get away from it in their leisure time. People will mend and make do rather than junk stuff when it's broken. They'll also speak to their neighbours again. People need to know there are other people around to help when they're in trouble and so individualism will wane.

In short, times will change, but not all the changes will be bad ones. Certainly the future just got a lot more interesting and as I said, you all have a ringside seat for the most spectacular financial event in this planet's history.

[killerbee]

thanks for reposting, missed this first tjme round.

kb

[goldenbear]

That made a very interesting read. Looking forward to the update. Cheers.

[Ursus Helvetica]

Interesting post, thank you.

Do you see deflation being across all asset classes?

At what stage do you think the Chinese, UAE, Singaporian, Saudi, Norwegian, etc. sovereign wealth funds will use their cash reserves to ramp up their acquisition of strategic assets?

Deflation would be accompanied by near zero interest rates. Would the sovereign wealth funds use their cash to obtain leverage, at near zero percent, to further increase their acquisition of any high yielding strategic assets?

[zinny01]

Thanks for reposting this. It was by far the best post I have read on this web site. I enjoyed reading it again.

[Guest Bart of Darkness]

Quality post fofp.

So what will the central banks do? Well, they'll try to stop a deflation. That's the reverse of inflation. Cash under the bed becomes more valuable over time.....

....The central banks will try more of what they're doing now: printing money and showering it liberally upon the economy. Chopper Ben got his name for a 2003 paper on how to stop a deflation by throwing cash out of helicopters.

I expect the central bankers to try it though, so we'll get an inflation, then a deflation – a combination which will almost certainly destroy more people's wealth than if we cut out the middleman and go straight for the deflation.

In such a scenario, what would be the best way to protect one's savings? Would gold go up during the inflationary stage, then down during a deflationary period? (So would it be gold as the first thing to have, then switch to cash?)

and sadly we'll see the demise of the bare midriff and other forms of fleshly exposure.

The less flabby chav flesh on view the better!

[stig of the dump]

Thanks for the post, very intersting read. I'm no expert on any of the matters here, more or a lurker trying to learn, so a well structured post is always welcolm. However I think that the last para on people dressing more modestly, seemed to be a bit too far removed from subject, and i'm not sure why you seem to think it will happen anyway. And how could Potter mainia be related to the subject? They were well written kids books that adults read too. I do however agree with the mend and make do coming back, I'm 27 and have been doing this for years and am happy to be ridiculed by friends.

Thanks again for the post though.

. "So enough of the economics. What else will change? There's the famous Hemline Indicator where hemlines go up in good times and down in bad. We can safely assume that they'll be going down and sadly we'll see the demise of the bare midriff and other forms of fleshly exposure. Modesty will make a comeback. People will be more worried about keeping their jobs and social conservatism and conformity will return. People will have less money and so will move from expensive to cheaper pursuits. They'll move away from reality TV to escapism and fantasy (the Potter mania may be an early indication). Romance, Westerns, SF and Fantasy and so on will be back in vogue. People don't like reality when it's grim and they’ll want to get away from it in their leisure time. People will mend and make do rather than junk stuff when it's broken. They'll also speak to their neighbours again. People need to know there are other people around to help when they're in trouble and so individualism will wane."

[Methinkshe]

Excellent analysis - thanks for re-posting. This is pretty much in line with Dale Davison and Rees Mogg's prediction in their book Blood in the Streets, albeit their timing was out by a decade - even they didn't suspect that Greenspan would loosen credit to such dangerous levels.

You say:

"What might happen with all this money printing is that inflation will rise. Then the bondholders will simply raise their interest rates to compensate them for the inflation risk and property prices will take another large step down.

I expect the central bankers to try it though, so we'll get an inflation, then a deflation – a combination which will almost certainly destroy more people's wealth than if we cut out the middleman and go straight for the deflation."

Sadly, I agree with this analysis - first inflation THEN deflation, whereas cut to the inevitable deflation quick would be painful but better medicine in the long run. I don't suppose you care to risk a stab at how high inflation could go? Do you think we could see hyper-inflation before the inevitable deflation sets in? If so, savers are going to be horribly penalised and debtors will get a windfall.

[injustice]

Very enlightening read!

Mike Holmes is an economic contrarian who frequently commentates online under his nom de guerre, A Friend of Fernando Poo. He doesn’t have a mortgage.

[steve99]

I expect the central bankers to try it though, so we'll get an inflation, then a deflation – a combination which will almost certainly destroy more people's wealth than if we cut out the middleman and go straight for the deflation."[/color]

Sadly, I agree with this analysis - first inflation THEN deflation, whereas cut to the inevitable deflation quick would be painful but better medicine in the long run. I don't suppose you care to risk a stab at how high inflation could go? Do you think we could see hyper-inflation before the inevitable deflation sets in? If so, savers are going to be horribly penalised and debtors will get a windfall.

This is likely to happen as it suits the timing of the next election, which is the only issue that politicians and their lackys (BOE) are interested in. Do the deflation now and your out of office for another 10+ years.

[injustice]

This is likely to happen as it suits the timing of the next election, which is the only issue that politicians and their lackys (BOE) are interested in. Do the deflation now and your out of office for another 10+ years.

So in this scenario do we see more HPI in the short term. Is this why the government have bailed NR.

[Crash Buyer]

This is likely to happen as it suits the timing of the next election, which is the only issue that politicians and their lackys (BOE) are interested in. Do the deflation now and your out of office for another 10+ years.

A question to consider - how much of the inflation have we already had?

We might be closer to the deflation than many think.

The credit crisis has started, recession is imminent and the short term trend in M4 money supply is rising but decelerating.

[Laura]

My goodness. I am in awe.

In one way it's such a simple subject, but one so hard to get your mind around.

There is only one thing missing, a little note at the end saying:- "Therefore I advise you all to invest in **** & ********. & have ***** as currency".

[fofp]

Do you see deflation being across all asset classes?

At what stage do you think the Chinese, UAE, Singaporian, Saudi, Norwegian, etc. sovereign wealth funds will use their cash reserves to ramp up their acquisition of strategic assets?

Deflation would be accompanied by near zero interest rates. Would the sovereign wealth funds use their cash to obtain leverage, at near zero percent, to further increase their acquisition of any high yielding strategic assets?

I think we'll certainly see deflation amongst asset classes which were bid up during the credit bubble. It's not unreasonable to expect that to spread more widely. Conversely, at least at first, the actions of central banks in the US and UK indicate that we might see a breakout of ordinary consumer price inflation running alongside asset deflation as the credit bust deepens. That's going to make life very uncomfortable for central bankers.

The Chinese were bitten hard by investing the SWF just before the bubble burst. There are signs that right now they're trying to use their foreign reserves to shore up the black holes in their banking system, which are maybe three times larger in relation to GDP as the Japanese banking problem in 1990. I'm also struck that at the end of the last major western bubble in 1929, it wasn't the borrower (UK) which was hit hardest, but the lender, the US. If that pans out again, then the Chinese economy might suffer more than the US one. Certainly it's hard to look at the Chinese stocks and property markets and not see bubbles. If there's a crash there, it looks like a repeat of Japan in 1990.

I'm no expert on middle-eastern politics, but it looks to me like there are internal arguments about retaining the Dollar peg for some countries there, and a wider argument about setting up a currency accord on the lines of the Euro. Expect to hear moreon that.

[fofp]

Quality post fofp.

In such a scenario, what would be the best way to protect one's savings? Would gold go up during the inflationary stage, then down during a deflationary period? (So would it be gold as the first thing to have, then switch to cash?)

The less flabby chav flesh on view the better!

I'm long gold just now. I admit though that my reading indicates conflicting views on how gold behaves in a deflation, so a switch to cash wouldn't be unreasonable. What's interesting is that after two of the largest bubbles burst, the governments saw fit to interfere with gold. After the Mississippi Bubble, the French government banned ownership of gold and sent soldiers into homes to look for it. This was a last desperate attempt to force people to use the currency that had already reached a "repudiation" stage. In the US during the 1930's, the government rigged the price of gold by mandate

[injustice]

The link in post #1 has died.

[Guest Bart of Darkness]

The link in post #1 has died.

It looks like the hosting server is having problems, might be back on again in a while.

[fofp]

Thanks for the post, very intersting read. I'm no expert on any of the matters here, more or a lurker trying to learn, so a well structured post is always welcolm. However I think that the last para on people dressing more modestly, seemed to be a bit too far removed from subject, and i'm not sure why you seem to think it will happen anyway. And how could Potter mainia be related to the subject? They were well written kids books that adults read too. I do however agree with the mend and make do coming back, I'm 27 and have been doing this for years and am happy to be ridiculed by friends.

. "So enough of the economics. What else will change? There's the famous Hemline Indicator where hemlines go up in good times and down in bad. We can safely assume that they'll be going down and sadly we'll see the demise of the bare midriff and other forms of fleshly exposure. Modesty will make a comeback. People will be more worried about keeping their jobs and social conservatism and conformity will return. People will have less money and so will move from expensive to cheaper pursuits. They'll move away from reality TV to escapism and fantasy (the Potter mania may be an early indication). Romance, Westerns, SF and Fantasy and so on will be back in vogue. People don't like reality when it's grim and they’ll want to get away from it in their leisure time. People will mend and make do rather than junk stuff when it's broken. They'll also speak to their neighbours again. People need to know there are other people around to help when they're in trouble and so individualism will wane."

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but what I was trying to say was that the changes brought by debt-deflation will amount to more than simply economic ones. "The Hemline Indicator" is a piece of economic lore that says that we'll always see more flesh in booms as people enjoy themselves and fashion moves to reflect the current psychology, just as do markets. It is thought that the drop in the hemline, or more accurately, more conservative dress styles, return just prior to the bubble bursting and so the indicator might be used to predict market movements. I'm not so sure of it as a prediction tool. However, when you look at the Roaring 20's and the Flappers; the 1960's and miniskirts; then the Noughties and the whole Britney Spears look, there does seem to be something to the idea that there's more bare flesh when the bubble is underway.

In a similar way people who look for realism in their fiction, or reality TV shows, when things are booming, are likely to want a lot less reality when things aren't so pleasant. In previous busts, people have preferred their fiction to be anything but based in reality. Thus we can expect the return of interest in romance, westerns, fantasy, SF and so on. A few hard-boiled detectives will survive the bust, just as they did the last one, but the trend will become obvious. That's why I wondered if Potter-mania was an early sign of this. As you say, adults too were reading it.

The shift from reckless lending to saving; to mend and make do; and most likely to more conservative politics and behaviour (expect Dress Down Friday to go extinct) is all part of the same change.

[bazzzzzzz]

My perspective comes from a quarter century of studying financial manias and bubbles.

In what capacity?

Are you a self appointed cyber Guru, (of which we have many) or do you have qualifications or experience which might add weight to your post?

[cynic]

Mills and Boom...in a bust

[cynic]

In what capacity?

Are you a self appointed cyber Guru, (of which we have many) or do you have qualifications or experience which might add weight to your post?

Oh yeah, perish the thought that he hasn't passed any exams!

[eric pebble]

Oh yeah, perish the thought that he hasn't passed any exams!

[fofp]

In what capacity?

Are you a self appointed cyber Guru, (of which we have many) or do you have qualifications or experience which might add weight to your post?

I'm sorry to disappoint you but it's all self-study. Professionally I'm a computer geek.

Then again, let's recall all the experienced and qualified people who have been telling us "There is no bubble" for so many years.

[Tartaglia]

It is amazing to think that people actually believe you can learn this sort of stuff by doing exams.

A couple of decades reading is precisely what is required

[Guest Bart of Darkness]

Mills and Boom...in a bust

Don't forget the bodice.