Warren Buffett's classic aphorism “You only see who's swimming naked when the tide goes out” is being tossed around more frequently these days, as the world gets yet another deflation scare. David Stockman just published a great piece on this topic, which should be read in its entirety. In the meantime here's a summary of the story with a few added bits.

Let's begin with the common sense premise that overly-easy money sends a false-positive signal to market participants, leading them to buy and build things that maybe shouldn't be bought or built. Then, when money goes back to a more reasonable price, the bad decisions (malinvestment in economist-speak) are revealed and financial turmoil ensues.

Today's situation has its roots in the 1980s, when the developed world got too lazy to live within its means and started borrowing way too much money. It then tried to inflate away its debts by creating a tidal wave of new currency and pushing interest rates down to unnaturally low levels. Flush with extra cash and cheap credit, consumers (especially in the US) bought huge amounts of imported junk. This in turn led China — the main producer of said junk — to go on an infrastructure/factory building spree of epic proportions, which shifted into hyper-drive after the 2008 crash. Chinese demand for industrial materials like copper, iron ore, and oil soared, pushing their prices far above historical averages.

This in turn led miners and drillers to mine and drill on an unprecedented scale, which caused the supply of industrial materials to surge. The flashiest case in point is the US shale oil boom, which sent domestic oil production back to levels not seen since Texas' blockbuster oil fields were young.

But it was all a money illusion, and every part of this process has recently hit a wall. Consumers refuse to go more deeply into debt to buy non-necessities, even when money is nearly free. Faced with lower demand and poor cash flow from the past decade's overbuilding, China has tapped the brakes on its infrastructure build-out. The US is trying to stop monetizing its debt, which has sent the dollar through the roof on foreign exchange markets, thus making life even harder for about half the world's population.