It appears that many people are so married to this wrong idea that INFLATION is created by the Fed expanding the money supply. Sorry – it does not work that way. Others are confused that interest rate increases are bearish and declines are bullish. All you need to do is look at Japan to see that did not work out very well.
The pundits are betting on a Fed rate increase of 25 basis points in September. That is most likely correct, but not for the reasons many suspect. The jobs report came out showing a solid trend of really only a couple hundred thousand jobs in an economy of some 300 million people. That is not what you would call a wild-eyed bullish trend.
Inflation is not the main factor for gold or the Fed. The Fed realizes that the economy is not in crisis and maintaining lower interest rates is highly damaging to the economy for it is creating the next crisis – defaults in pensions both government and private. The entire idea of pensions has been set around the average 8% return in interest rates. But it has been pension funds that are primarily the cause of lower interest rates – NOT THE FED.
The amount of pension funds out there created a bid for long-term bonds and they kept bidding higher and higher because it was presumed that Gentlemen Buy Bonds, as Mellon once said. The lack of skills in fund management and regulation requiring bond investment created a lethal mix. This has contributed to the lowering of interest rates and it was this underlying bid which helped in creating the mortgage crisis for 2007 as investment banks used AIG to guarantee their junk calling it AAA so they could sell this type of paper to pensions.
Add to this bull market in bonds the change in technology and you introduce the opposite trend of the 1970s with still the STAGFLATION result thanks to rising taxation. When we put out our forecast back in 1997 that oil would rise from $10 to $100 going into 2007, many people said we were crazy arguing the world could not sustain such high energy prices. We warned that unless oil rose to $100, new technology would not emerge. Oil had to rise in order to create alternatives. Now that we have warned that oil will move back to retest $35, everyone likewise said we were wrong for the world would not be sustainable at such a low level. This is a wave of Creative Destruction that is part of the whole shift into the technology age just as the railroads altered the 19th century and the combustion engine altered the 20th century. Welcome to the next economic phase transition to the technology age.
