The United States is Helping China Buy Gold

gold

In June 2015, China declared having bought 604.34 tonnes of gold. It’s last declaration before this had come in April 2009, when it had declared to having bought 454 tonnes of gold.

It couldn’t have bought such a huge amount of gold all at once given the limited supply of the yellow metal. Between April 2009 and June 2015, China regularly bought gold. It only declared it all at once in June 2015. The country had followed a similar strategy before April 2009, as well. It had last declared having bought 99.5 tonnes of gold in December 2002.

Hence, even though China has been buying gold all along, it has chosen to do so quietly, instead of going public with it. The reason for this was fairly straightforward. Gold is a thinly traded commodity, and hence, it makes sense for China to keep accumulating gold at a slow and regular pace, without making its intentions public and driving up the price.

Having said that since June 2015, there has been a change in strategy. Between July 2015 and February 2016 (the latest data that is available) the country has been making monthly declarations of the purchases it has been making.

These purchases vary from a minimum of 9.95 tonnes in February 2016 to a maximum of 20.84 tonnes in November 2016. Officially, China now has 1,788.4 tonnes of gold. It is the sixth largest gold owner in the world.

 

Tonnes% of reserves**
1United States8,133.575.3%
2Germany3,381.069.0%
3IMF2,814.0 
4Italy2,451.868.3%
5France2,435.663.2%
6China1,788.42.2%
7Russia1,447.015.1%
8Switzerland1,040.06.8%
9Japan765.22.4%
10Netherlands612.559.4%
11India557.76.2%

Source: www.gold.org

While in absolute terms 1,788.4 tonnes of gold sounds quite a lot, when it comes to gold as a percentage of reserves, the country still needs to catch up with other countries. As can be seen from the above table, China’s gold hoard as a percentage of its reserves is the lowest among the top eleven hoarders of gold.

While officially China may have 1,788.4 tonnes of gold, experts who are in the know of such things, suggest, that China has more gold than it is currently showing.

As James Rickards writes in The New Case for Gold: “The most interesting case is China…We know from various reliable sources including mining production and import statistics that their actual gold stock is close to 4000 tonnes. I’ve spoken to refineries and secure logistics firms—people who actually handle physical gold—in addition to official sources, and included their information in my estimates. On the whole, there is enough credible information available to support this estimate at a minimum. It is also entirely possible that China has considerably more than 4000 tonnes.”

So what this means is that the Chinese government’s real gold hoard is at least 2.2 times its official one.

In fact, Rickards in his book The Death of Money explains how China has gone about accumulating gold over the years. The country buys gold through secret agents based out of London. These agents are known to be very disciplined, and they buy gold whenever the gold price falls significantly. The gold these agents buy is paid for by the State Administration for Foreign Exchange (SAFE), one of China’s sovereign wealth funds.

The gold bought by SAFE is later transferred to the People’s Bank of China, the Chinese central bank. China also buys gold from mines directly. During April to June 2013, when the price of gold had reached a low of $1,200 per ounce, the country bought 600 tonnes of gold directly from Australia’s Perth Mint.

Also, China is now the largest producer of gold in the world. The disadvantage with China’s gold production is that it does not really have any big gold mines and a lot of gold that it produces comes as a by-product in the mining of other base metals. The Chinese government buys gold from the mines within China but does not report these buys. These reasons also explain why China’s gold hoard is actually significantly bigger than what it is telling the world.

In fact, China’s gold hoard maybe more than 4000 tonnes because Rickards seems to have made this estimate in July 2015, when China’s official gold hoard was at 1,658 tonnes. Since then, the number has officially risen to 1,788.4 tonnes.

The question is why is China buying gold? As Rickards explains in The New Case for Gold: “China’s acquisition of more than three thousand tonnes of gold in the past seven years represents almost 10 percent of all the official gold in the world…China is trying to acquire enough gold so that when the international monetary collapse comes and the world has to recut the deal, China will have a prime seat at the table. Countries like Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, with small gold-to-GDP ratios will be seated away from the table.”

Currently, the global financial system revolves around the dollar. Given that so much of it has been printed (or rather created digitally) in the last few years, there is the threat of the current financial system collapsing due to high inflation.

When the time for the new financial system comes around, China wants to be in the driver’s seat along with the United States, Germany and Russia, countries which have a significant amount of gold.

It needs to be mentioned here that China owns a significant amount of US treasury securities. These are bonds issued by the US government to finance its fiscal deficit or the difference between what it earns and what it spends. As of end February 2016, China owned $1.25 trillion of the total $6 trillion worth of treasury securities owned by foreign investors.

As I mentioned earlier, the United States has printed a huge amount of dollars over the last few years. This has led to a situation where the chances of a high inflation scenario remain. If something like this were to happen, then the value of the Chinese investment in US treasury securities will fall.

Hence, there is a quid pro quo which is currently at work. As Rickards writes: “The compromise between the Fed’s desire for inflation and China’s desire to protect its reserves is for China to buy cheap gold. That way, if inflation is low, China’s gold won’t go up much, but the value of its paper Treasury reserves is preserved. If the United States gets the inflation it wants, China’s Treasuries will be worth less, yet its gold will be worth much more. Having Treasuries and gold is a hedged position that protects China’s wealth.”

As Ricakrds further points out: “What remains is a strange condominium of interests where the [American] Treasury and China are in agreement that China needs more gold and the price cannot be too high or else China could not easily afford all it needs…The United States is letting China manipulate the market so China can buy gold more cheaply. The Fed occasionally manipulates the market as well so that any price rise isn’t disorderly.”

The question is when will this manipulation end?

The column was published on the Vivek Kaul Diary on April 22, 2016

Of Japanese deflation, global money printing and quest for economic growth

3D chrome Dollar symbolThe human obsession with economic growth has perhaps been best captured by E.B. White in an essay called A Report in January published in January, 1958. The essay is a part of a book titled Essays by E.B. White.

In this essay White writes: “The theory is that if you shoot forty thousand deer one year you aren’t getting ahead unless you shoot fifty thousand the next, but I suspect there comes a point where you have shot just exactly the right number of deer. Our whole economy hangs precariously on the assumption that the higher you go the better off you are, and that unless more stuff is produced in 1958 than was produced in 1957, more deer killed, more automatic dishwasher installed…more heads aching so they can get the fast fast fast relief from a pill, more automobiles sold, you are headed for trouble, living in danger and maybe in squalor.”

This obsession with economic growth has been at play in the aftermath of the financial crisis which broke out in September 2008, when the investment bank Lehman Brothers went bust. The central banks and governments all around the Western world unleashed an era of easy money, by printing money and maintaining low interest rates.

This was done in the hope of people borrowing and spending more. So, with interest rates remaining low, people were likely to buy more homes, more cars, more consumer goods and so on. And in the process there would be more economic growth.

Most central bankers did not want the Western world to turn into another Japan. Right through the eighties, the Japanese stock market and the real estate market had huge bubbles. These bubbles burst towards the end of the eighties. And it is widely believed by economists that the Japanese economy never recovered from this. It entered into an era of deflation (the opposite of inflation, when prices fall).

When the economy is in a deflationary scenario, people tend to postpone their purchases in the hope of getting a better deal. Once this starts to happen, the business earnings start to fall. This leads to businesses cutting costs by firing people among other things. All this impacts economic growth. Businesses cut prices further, in the hope of persuading more people to buy things. And so a deflationary cycle sustains itself.

This is something that Western central bankers wanted to avoid. And this led to the unleashing of an era of easy money, which continues. In fact, as Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, recently said in a speech: “The canonical example here is Japan, where many are persuaded that the key mistake it made was to slip into deflation, which has persisted and held back growth.”

There is a great fear that what has been happening in Japan will happen in large parts of the Western world as well, if central banks don’t act and flood their financial systems with money.

In fact, Andrew Hallande, the Chief Economist of the Bank of England recently suggested the elimination of paper money. This would allow central banks to impose negative interest rates (which some central banks have already tried in Europe). When there is a negative interest rate on deposits, the bank will charge people for depositing their money in a bank account. This will lead to people spending their money instead of keeping it in a bank account, where its value will fall because of a negative interest rate. The spending that follows because of negative interest rates will lead to economic growth.

This is only possible if there is ‘only’ digital money and no paper money. If banks apply negative interest rates as of now, people can simply withdraw that money in the form of paper money and keep it under their mattresses or wherever they want to. Hence, Hallande’s suggestion of only digital money to revive economic growth.

Such suggestions come from the fear of deflation. But the question is are things in Japan as bad as they are made out to be? James Rickards in his book The Death of Money, talks about a speech where he heard a former deputy finance minister of Japan, Eisuke Sakakibara, speak.
He [i.e. Sakakibara] made the often-overlooked point that because of Japan’s declining population, real GDP per capita will grow faster than real aggregate GDP.”

What this basically means is that because of declining population in Japan, even if the overall Japanese economy does not grow or grows at a very slow pace, there will still be more economic growth per person in Japan.

As Rickards writes: “Far from a disaster story, a Japan that has deflation, depopulation, and declining nominal GDP can nevertheless produce robust real per capita GDP growth for its citizens. Combined with the accumulated wealth of the Japanese people the condition can result in well-to-do society even in the face of nominal growth that would cause most central bankers to flood the economy with money.”

In fact, Rajan made a similar point in his recent speech. As he said: “A closer look at the Japanese experience suggests that it is by no means clear that its growth has been slower than warranted let alone that deflation caused slow growth. It is true that after its devastating crisis in the early 1990s, Japan may have prolonged the slowdown by not taking early action to clean up its banking system or restructure over-indebted corporations. But once it took decisive action in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japanese growth per capita or per worker looks comparable with other industrial countries.”

This becomes clear from the accompanying table:

In fact, one of the fears of deflation, as explained earlier, is that it leads to unemployment. Nevertheless that doesn’t seem to be the case in Japan. As Rajan said: “Japanese unemployment has averaged 4.5% between 2000-2014, compared to 6.4% in the US and 9.4% in the Euro area during the same period. In part, the Japanese have obtained wage flexibility by moving away from the old lifetime unemployment contracts for new hires to short term contracts. While not without social costs, such flexibility allows an economy to cope with sustained deflation

So, it’s time that central bankers take a re-look at the entire Japanese experience and revise their views on the idea of deflation.

Meanwhile, Japan seems to be getting ready for more money printing. As they say, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The column originally appeared on October 9, 2015 on The Daily Reckoning 

If we go by what Keynes said, the world is currently going through a depression

keynes_395

In a few weeks, it will be the seventh anniversary of the start of the current financial crisis. The fourth largest investment bank on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. A day later, AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, was nationalized by the United States government.

A week earlier two governments sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had also been nationalized by the United States government. In the months to come many financial institutions across the United States and Europe were saved and resurrected by governments all across the developed world. Some of them were nationalized as well.

Economic growth crashed in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Central banks and governments reacted to this by unleashing a huge easy money programme, where a humongous amount of money was printed(or rather created digitally) in order to drive down interest rates, in the hope that people would borrow and spend, companies would borrow and spend, and economic growth would return again.

And how are we placed seven years later? It would be safe to say that despite all that governments and central banks have done in the last seven years, the world hasn’t returned to its pre-crisis level of economic growth.

In fact, if we go by what the greatest economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, wrote in his tour de force, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, a large part of the developed world is currently going through a “depression”.

Keynes, defined a depression as “a chronic condition of sub-normal activity for a considerable period without any marked tendency towards recovery or towards complete collapse.”

This is something that the economists tend to ignore. As James Rickards writes in The Big Drop—How to Grow Your Wealth During the Coming Collapse: “Mainstream economists and TV talking heads never refer to a depression. Economists don’t like the word depression because it does not have an exact mathematical definition. For economists, anything that cannot be quantified does not exist.”

Hence, if we go as per what Keynes said, depression is a scenario where economic growth is below the long-term trend growth. And that is precisely how large parts of the global world have evolved in the aftermath of the financial crisis. As Rickards writes: “The long-term growth trend for U.S. GDP is about 3%.

Higher growth is possible for short periods of time. It could be caused by new technology that improves worker productivity. Or, it could be due to new entrants into the workforce…Growth in the United States from 2007 through 2013 averaged 1% per year. Growth in the first half of 2014 was worse, averaging just 0.95%.”

The current year hasn’t been any better either. The economic growth between January and March 2015 stood at 0.6%. Between April and June 2015, it was a little better at 2.3%.  As Rickards puts it: “That is the meaning of depression. It is not negative growth, but it is below-trend growth. The past seven-years of 1% growth when the historical growth is 3% is a depression as Keynes defined it.”

The United States economy accounts for nearly one-fourth of the global economy and if it grows slowly that has an impact on many other economies as well.
China, another big economy, has also been growing below its long term growth rate. Between 2003 and 2007, the Chinese economy grew by greater than 10% in each of the years. It slowed down in 2008 and 2009 as the financial crisis hit, and grew by only 9.6% and 9.2% respectively. In 2010, the economic growth crossed 10% again with the economy growing by 10.6%. This was after the Chinese government forced the banks to unleash a huge lending programme.

Nevertheless, growth fell below 10% again and since then the Chinese economy has been growing at below 10%. In fact, in the recent past, the economy has grown at only 7%, which is very low compared to its rapid rate of growths in the past.

Interestingly, people who observe China closely, are sceptical of even this 7% rate of economic growth. As Ruchir Sharma, Head of Global Macro and Emerging Markets at Morgan Stanley wrote in a recent column for the Wall Street Journal: “Chinese policy makers seem unwilling to accept that downturns are perfectly normal even for economic superpowers…But Beijing has little tolerance for business cycles and is now reviving efforts to stimulate sectors that it had otherwise wanted to see fade in importance, from property to infrastructure to exports….While China reported that its GDP grew exactly in line with its growth target of 7% in the first and second quarters this year, all other independent data, from electricity production to car sales, indicate the economy is growing closer to 5%.”

The moral of the story being that China is growing much slower than it was in the past. What this means is that countries like Brazil and Australia, which are close trading partners of China, will also feel the heat. Over and above this, much of Europe continues to remain in a mess. As Rickards puts it: “Keynes did not refer to declining GDP; he talked about “sub-normal” activity. In other words, it is entirely possible to have growth in a depression. The problem is that the growth is below trend. It is weak growth that does not do the job of providing enough jobs or staying ahead of national debt.”

In fact, much of the economic growth that has been achieved through large parts of the developed world has been on the basis of more lending carried out at very low interest rates. Data from the latest annual report of the Bank of International Settlements based out of Basel in Switzerland, suggests, that the total global debt has touched around 260% of the global gross domestic product (GDP). In 2008, it was around 230% of the global GDP.

As the BIS annual report for the financial year ending March 31, 2015 points out: “very low interest rates that have prevailed for so long may not be “equilibrium” ones, which would be conducive to sustainable and balanced global expansion. Rather than just reflecting the current weakness, low rates may in part have contributed to it by fuelling costly financial booms and busts. The result is too much debt, too little growth and excessively low interest rates.”

The tragedy is that there seems to have been no change in the thought process of those who are in decision making positions.

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Aug 20, 2015

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Don’t count gold out: it may be the last man standing

goldVivek Kaul
At the very outset let me confess that this has been a difficult piece to write. When everyone around you is shouting the same thing from their rooftops, it is very difficult to say something which happens to be exactly the opposite.
Gold over the last one week has turned into a four letter word. Last Thursday (i.e. April 11, 2013) the closing price of the yellow metal was $1564.2 per ounce (one troy ounce equals 31.1 grams). A week later as I write this gold is selling at around $1375 per ounce. The price has fallen by around 12.1% over the period of just one week.
And this fall has suddenly turned investment experts (at least the ones who appear on television and write and get quoted in newspapers) all bearish on gold. They have been giving different reasons to stay away from it. But if they were so confident that the price of gold would fall, as it has, why didn’t they warn the investors before fall? Everything is obvious after it has happened.
But as the Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow “The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance”. Those offering the explanations now, clearly did not predict the massive and sudden fall in price of gold. What is interesting is that before the price of gold started to fall the Bloomberg consensus forecast for gold by the end of 2013 was at $1752 per ounce. Hence, the broader market did not see this coming.
So why is the price of gold falling? One conspiracy theory doing the rounds has the investment bank Goldman Sachs at the heart of it. As John Cassidy 
of the New Yorker magazine puts it “Last December, Goldman’s economic team turned bearishon gold, saying the multi-year upward trend in gold prices “will likely turn in 2013.” And last Wednesday,(i.e. April 10, 2013) the bank’s commodities team advised its clients to start shorting gold.” Short selling refers to a scenario where investors borrow gold and sell it with the hope that as the price falls they can buy it back at a lower price and thus make a profit.
Goldman Sachs was not the only big bank turning negative on gold. On April 2, the French bank, Societe Generale, the also issued a report titled 
The end of the gold era, and turned bearish on the yellow metal.
This many believe is a conspiracy on part of the big banks to drive down the price of gold. As Paul Craigs, a former assistant US Treasury Secretary 
told Kings World News “This is an orchestration. It’s been going on now from the beginning of April…Brokerage houses told their individual clients the word was out that hedge funds and institutional investors were going to be dumping gold and that they should get out in advance. Then, a couple of days ago, Goldman Sachs announced there would be further departures from gold. So what they are trying to do is scare the individual investor out of bullion. Clearly there is something desperate going on.”
Nevertheless, conspiracy theories are easy to talk about but difficult to prove. There are several other reasons being offered on why the price of gold will continue to fall. A major reason being offered is the improvement in the American economic scenario and that leading to the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank, printing lesser money in the days to come.
The Federal Reserve currently prints $85 billion every month in the hope of reviving the American economy. Societe Generale in its report 
The end of the gold era believes that this will continue till September and come down to $65 billion after that, until being fully terminated by the end of the year.
The Federal Reserve on its part has guided that money printing will come down if it sees a ‘significant improvement in the outlook for employment’. The latest U3 rate of unemployment in the United States for the month of February 2013 stood at 7.6%. U6, a broader measure of unemployment, was at 13.8%. Both numbers have declined from their peaks. U6 touched a high of 17.2% in October 2009, when U3, which is the official unemployment rate, was at 10%. In December 2012 U6 stood at 14.4% and U3 was down to 7.8%.
So yes things have improved but they are still far away from being fine. U3 in the pre-financial crisis days used to be at around 5%. Also long term unemployment (where people are out of work for 27 weeks or more) has changed little and is at at 4.6 million or 39.6% of the unemployed people(U3).
(There are various ways in which the bureau of labour standards in the United States measures unemployment. This ranges from U1 to U6. The official rate of unemployment is the U3, which is the proportion of the civilian labour force that is unemployed but actively seeking employment. U6 is the most broad definition of unemployment and includes workers who want to work full time but are working part time because there are no full time jobs available. It also includes “discouraged workers”, or people who have stopped looking for work because the economic conditions the way they are, make them believe that no work is available for them.)
Another measure of the US economy turning around is the increase in real estate prices. As per the S&P Case-Shiller 20 City Home Price Index, real estate prices have gone up by 8.1% between January 1, 2012 and January 1, 2013. This after falling by 3.9% between 2011 and 2012.
One of the reasons the Federal Reserves prints money is to ensure that there is enough money going around in the financial system and interest rates continue to remain low. This ensures that people borrow and spend more. Hence, the low interest rates have helped in reviving the real estate sector in the United States.
But lets think for a moment on what will happen if the Federal Reserves stops printing money? Interest rates are likely to go up. People will take on fewer home loans to buy homes and that in turn will mean the real estate sector will go back to the dumps that it was in. So will the Federal Reserve take the risk of going slow or stopping money printing? Also, economic growth for the three months ending December 2012, was at -0.1%. So much for the American economy improving.
In this scenario it is unlikely the Federal Reserve will go stop money printing anytime soon, even though its Chairman Ben Bernanke, its Chairman, may keep dropping hints about doing the same.
As Stephen Leeb writes on www.Forbes.com “The Federal Reserve also wants to beat up on gold, via its drumbeat, suggesting that liquidity may be drying up and monetary easing might end soon. Never mind that recent economic data, on the whole, appears much weaker than expected, or that any halt to U.S. monetary easing could only follow higher inflation and commodity prices.
And as long as United States keeps printing money gold will remain a good investment bet, its current huge fall notwithstanding.
The last bull market in gold ended soon after the legendary Paul Volcker took over as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in August 1979. As
 economist Bill Bonner wrote in a recent column “Paul Volcker replaced G. William Miller as chairman in August 1979. A loose money policy became a tight money policy. Volcker jacked up interest rates…But what’s the Fed doing now? Has it reversed course? Has Ben “Bubbles” Bernanke been replaced with a tough-as-nails inflation fighter? Has the Federal Open Market Committee(FOMC) vowed to stop printing money? Has the loosest monetary policy in US history given way to a tight policy?”
And the answer on all the above counts is a big no.
Moving on, another reason given for the gold price falling is that Cyprus is selling gold worth $500 million in order to raise cash to pay its debt. As Peter Schiff 
president of Euro Pacific Capitalwrote in a recent column “Concerns quickly spread that other heavily indebted Mediterranean countries with large gold reserves like Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain would follow suit. The tidal wave of selling would be expected to be the coup de grace for gold’s glory years.”
The stronger countries of the euro zone (the countries which use euro as their currency) led by Germany have been rescuing the heavily indebted weaker ones for a while now through multi billion dollar rescue packages. In case of Cyprus the rescue came with terms and conditions which included seizing a part of its banking deposits and selling its gold.
This experts feel is likely to be repeated in the days to come with other countries as well. What they forget is that if the euro zone makes a habit of seizing deposits and selling gold, countries are likely to opt out of the euro and move onto their own currencies. As James Montier writes in a recent research paper titled 
Hyperinflations, Hysteria, and False Memories “If one were to worry about hyperinflation anywhere, I believe it would have to be with respect to the break-up of the eurozone.” Another reason to keep holding onto gold. If there is even a slight whiff of a euro breakup gold is going to fly.
Another logic being bandied around (especially by some of the Indian analysts) is that with the price of gold falling the investment demand for gold is likely to go down. Fair point. But a falling gold price can also push up the jewellery demand for gold. In 2011, gold jewellery consumed around 1972.1 tonnes of gold. This was down to 1908.1 tonnes in 2012, as prices rose.
A slowdown of Chinese growth has been offered as another reason for gold prices falling. As Cassidy of New Yorker writes “Many of today’s 
news storiesabout the gold price emphasized disappointing economic figures from China, which showed economic growth slowing down slightly in the first three months of 2013. China is a big consumer of virtually all natural resources, and gold was but one of many commodities that fell sharply after the report from Beijing.”
But this theory doesn’t really hold either. “The purported slowdown in the Chinese economy was very slight. First quarter growth came in at 7.7 per cent, compared to 7.9 per cent in the last three months of 2012. Allowing for the vagaries of the statistics, the difference is inconsequential,” writes Cassidy.
Also the gold bears who have suddenly all come out of the closet are not talking about what is happening in Japan. Japan has decided to double its money supply by printing yen to create some inflation. The hope is hat all this new money will create some inflation as it chases the same amount of goods and services, leading to a rise in prices. When people see prices rising, or expect prices to rise, they are more likely to buy goods and services, than keep their money in the bank. This is the logic. And when this happens businesses will do well and so will the overall economy.
A side effect of this money printing which is expected to be thrice as large as that in the United States, is the Japanese yen losing value against other major currencies because a surfeit of yen is expected to flood the financial system.
A weak yen also makes Japanese exports more competitive. (
For a detailed argument click here). But it puts countries like Taiwan, South Korea, China and even Germany in a spot of bother. As Societe Generale analysts write in a report titled How to make profits from the Sushi-style QE in Japan “In effect Korea, Taiwan and China are losing competitiveness while Japan regains it.”
Printing money is not rocket science, if Japan can print money, so can the other countries in order to weaken their currency and thus keep their exports competitive. Hence there are chances of a full fledged global currency war erupting. And this is another reason to own gold.
The final argument against gold has been that central banks have been printing money for more than four years now. But all that money has not led to high inflation, as the gold bulls had been predicting that it would. So central banks have managed to slay the inflation phantom. “After more than four years of quantitative easing in the United States, the inflation rate, as measured by the consumer price index, is running at just two per cent…In Britain, where the Bank of England has followed policies similar to the Fed’s, the inflation rate is 2.8 per cent—a bit higher, but hardly alarming,” writes Cassidy.
But just because money printing hasn’t led to inflation till now doesn’t mean we can rule out that possibility totally. There is huge historical evidence to the contrary. Let me quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb here, something that I have done in the recent past. As Taleb writes in 
Anti Fragile “Central banks can print money; they print print and print with no effect (and claim the “safety” of such a measure), then, “unexpectedly,” the printing causes a jump in inflation.” James Rickards author Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crises says the same thing “They can’t just keep printing…All major central banks are easing…Eventually so much money will be printed that this will lead to inflation.”
And in a situation like this, gold will be the last man standing.
To conclude, this is how I feel about gold. I maybe right. I maybe wrong. That only time will tell. Hence its important to remember here what John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist who talked sense on most occasions, once said: “
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
Given this it is important that one does not bet one’s life on gold going up. An allocation of not more than 10% in case of a conservative investor is the best bet to make. And if you are already there, stay there.

The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on April 18, 2013.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

High inflation is inevitable, we just don’t know when

 
InflationVivek Kaul 
There are good times. There are bad times. And there are bad times which don’t seem like bad times, at least to some people. Central bank governors all over the world live in bad times which don’t seem like bad times to them.
In the last few years, central banks of United States, Great Britain, Euro Zone, China, Switzerland and now Japan, have printed tremendous amount of money. “So far, five central banks, – the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank have effectively created more than $6-trillion of new currency over the past four years, and have flooded the world money markets with excess liquidity. The size of their balance sheets has now reached a combined $9.5-trillion, compared with $3.5-trillion six years ago,” writes investment newsletter writer Gary Dorsch.
This has been done with the hope that pushing all this new money into the financial system will ensure that interest rates continue to remain low. Low interest rates would make the citizens of their respective countries borrow and spend more more. And at the same time banks and financial institutions would also be happy to lend more, given that there is so much more money going around. This will help businesses and the overall economy.
There was also the hope that all this new money would create some inflation as it chases the same amount of goods and services, leading to a rise in prices. When people see prices rising, or expect prices to rise, they are more likely to buy goods and services, than keep their money in the bank. That was the logic. And when that happened businesses would do well and so would the overall economy. But that hasn’t happened.
So central banks have gone ahead and printed even more in the ‘hope’ that people borrow and spend and some inflation is created. The fact that all this new money floating around hasn’t led to a high inflation has been used as a justification for printing even more money in the hope of creating some inflation. That’s the most harebrained logic that one can ever come across.
The fact that doing something (i.e. money printing) that should have resulted in something else (i.e. some inflation), but is not resulting in that something else (i.e. inflation), is being used to justify doing more of that something (i.e. money printing).
Also central banks, their governors and their respective governments have suggested time and again that all the money printing will lead to only some inflation, which they will be able to manage and not very high inflation that will go beyond their control.
It has also been suggested in recent times that very high inflation scenarios don’t just occur because of excessive money printing but there are other reasons to it as well. One theory which has gained popularity in recent times is that high inflation happens when there are supply shocks.
Lets take the case of German hyperinflation of 1923 where inflation reached a peak of 1000 million % a year and which remains the most discussed case of the twentieth century.
James Montier writing in a research paper titled 
Hyperinflations, Hysteria, and False Memories points out “Germany’s productive capacity had been significantly damaged by World War I, both in terms of the losses inflicted and the resources redirected to military use. Allied troops occupied the Ruhr Valley – the seat of much of Germany’s manufacturing base. These events clearly constituted a large supply shock.”
So basically what Montier suggests is that Germany was not producing enough goods to meet the needs of its citizens. It was also not in a position to import given that it did not have the money (or gold as it was in those days) to pay for the imports. And as there were not enough goods going around that led to high inflation.
Fair point. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the excessive money printing wasn’t responsible for high prices that prevailed. The price of basic necessities went through the roof. A kilo of butter cost 250 billion marks and a kilo of bacon 180 billion marks.
The German government had been printing an excessive amount of money to finance its expenditure. It did not earn enough revenue to meet its expenditure. In 1922 a trillion marks were printed as the deficit shot through the roof. In the first six months of 1923, nearly 17 trillion marks were printed. With such an astonishing amount of money being printed, money started to lose its value dramatically. By August 1923, one dollar was worth 620,000 marks(the German currency) and by early November was worth 620 billion marks.
As the currency lost value, the government had to keep printing more of it, to meet its expenditure. So the more money the government printed, the more it lost value, and in turn, the government had to print even more money.
The industry which thrived during this period was the money printing industry. Thirty paper mills and 133 printing plants were working, but still could not turn out enough money required to keep up given the huge denominations they had reached.
So yes, a supply shock was responsible for an increase in prices, but so was money printing. And Germany was not the only country that went through this. There were other countries that went through a similar scenario which had supply shocks and printed an excessive amount of money also.
As Forrest Capie writes in a research paper titled 
Conditions in which very rapid inflation has appeared “Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Poland all had substantial and growing deficits built up prior to or coincidental with the inflation.” Austria, Hungary and Poland had peak inflation rates of 4 million %, 14,000% and 23,000%. So a supply shock would have definitely added to inflation but that does not mean that all the new money being printed and put into the financial system had no role in creating inflation.
Lets take the case of China in the late 1930s and 1940s. Japan invaded China in 1937 and occupied around one third of the country which included much of its eastern part. This meant that China no longer had access to taxes from the part under occupation of Japan. Also once this conflict ended, a civil war started in China. Hence, there was a prolonged supply shock. And this Montier argues led to very high inflation. Again this argument just covers one side of the picture.
Inflation in China at its peak crossed 50% per month. As Capie writes “There were clearly a long and accelerating inflation through these years with prices rising first by 27 per cent then 68 per cent, then more than doubling and so on until in 1947 monthly rates in excess of 50 per cent were reached.”
But was it only because of a supply shock? In 1936-37, the Chinese government revenue was equal to its expenditure. The situation changed in the years to come as war expenditure went through the roof. “When the Japanese attacked, the leader of the Nationalist Government pledged total war without regard to cost, and in the next few years no attempt was made to match increased expenditure with increased revenues,” writes Capie. By 1948, the government was spending more than twice of what it was earning. The difference being made up through printing money.
As soon as the war with Japan ended, a civil war broke out in China. And each of the factions engaged in civil war produced its own money. “Between 1937 and 1949, three governments – the Nationalists, the Japanese, and the Communists – occupied China. Each one issued its own currency (indeed, multiple currencies were issued by each authority). These bodies effectively engaged in monetary warfare, with each producing “propaganda stating that the currency of their enemies was falling rapidly in value,” writes Moniter.
In fact, money supply expanded by 700% between 1946 and 1947. And this also added to an increase in prices other than the supply shock. As Capie writes “Over the whole period of war, the money supply grew by 15,000 per cent, wholesale prices rose by over 100,000 per cent…The vastly increased note issue of the Central Bank of China lay behind the huge expansion in the money supply.”
So an increase in money supply remains an important reason behind high inflationary scenarios, there is no denying that.
Another reason often offered to argue that there will be no high inflation in countries that are currently printing money is that high inflation is an economic curse that only developing countries face. The example that is often given is that of Zimbabwe.
Between August 2007 and June 2008, the money supply in Zimbabwe went up 20 million times. With the money supply increasing by such a huge amount, inflation went through the roof. In early 2008, consumer price inflation was said to be at 2 million percent. By the end of the year it had sped to around 230 million percent.
It is argued that United States, United Kingdom, the Euzo Zone and Japan are no Zimbabwe. Of course that is true. But people who argue along these lines are victims of what we can call the black swan syndrome. Till the first Europeans landed in Australia it was thought that all swans are white. Only when they landed in Australia did they realise that swans could be black too.
Just because high inflation has happened in Zimbabwe, a developing country, in the recent past, it cannot be argued that high inflation cannot plague developed countries as well. In fact, the high inflation that prevailed in Israel in the 1970s and the 1980s is an excellent example of how high inflation can occur even in a reasonably developed country.
As Albert Edwards of Societe Generale writes in a research report titled 
Nikkei 63,000,000? A cheap way to buy Japanese inflation risk “Think about that for a moment. Japan is an advanced economy, a developed democracy and certainly no Zimbabwe. But Israel was all of those things too. It simply found itself politically committed to a level of expenditure – military and social – which it couldn’t fund. Instead of taking the politically unpalatable course of cutting that expenditure, it resorted to the tried and-tested tactic of buying time with printed money. Between 1972 and 1987 Israel’s CPI rose by a factor of nearly 10,000. Inflation averaged around 84% and peaked at an annualised 500% in early 1985.”
Like Israel, countries in the developed world where countries have found themselves politically committed to a level of expenditure that they cannot meet through their earnings and have been printing money in order to meet it. Just because this hasn’t led to high inflation till now is no basis for arguing that it won’t lead to inflation in the future as well.
Given the inevitability of high inflation, gold as a form of investment still remains very relevant despite the recent fall in prices. Having said that one shouldn’t be betting one’s life on it, given that it is difficult to predict when this will happen. As James Rickards the author of 
Currency Wars and a Partner in Tangent Capital Partners, a merchant bank based in New York, recently told The Real Asset Report “I recommend an allocation to gold from investable assets of 10% for the conservative investor and 20% for the more aggressive investor.”

 The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on April12, 2013

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)