John Williams Of “Shadowstatistics” Is A Specialist In Government Economic Reporting….He Says We’re Going To See An Intensified Downturn In The Near Future!

Posted By on April 30, 2010

Everyone should take the time to read this, which is part of a broader interview done on April 30 .  This will also effect interest rates.
 

ShadowStats’ John Williams has done his math and believes his numbers tell the truth. He explains why the U.S. is headed for or in a depression and why a “Hyper-Inflationary Great Depression” is now unavoidable. John also shares why he selects gold as a metal for asset conversion.    John Williams is not a doom and gloomer.  His statistics are reviewed by the government with a keen interest.  If He is wrong and things continue better, then everybody will prosper.  If he is right in his negative accessment, then only those willing to listen and prepare for an unknown future will prosper.  It’s a very unusual circumstance that we have now.
 
Put yourself in Mr. Bernanke’s situation the had to prevent a collapse of the banking system. He was afraid of a severe deflation as was seen in the Great Depression, when a lot of banks went out of business. The depositors lost funds and the money supply just collapsed. He wanted to prevent a collapse of the money supply and keep the depository institutions afloat. Generally, that has happened. The FDIC expanded its coverage and everything that had to be done to keep the system from imploding was done. The effects eventually will be inflationary.
 
In the process, what Mr. Bernanke did was to expand the monetary base extraordinarily, more than doubling it over a period of a year. The monetary base is money currently in circulation plus bank reserves. If you go back to before September 2008, the bank reserves were in the $50 to $60 billion range. Where the currency was maybe $800 billion, we’ve gone over $2 trillion in total reserves. Most of that is in excess reserves and not required reserves that banks have to keep to support their deposits. Normally banks would take their excess reserves and lend them out into the regular stream of commerce, and in doing so, that would create money supply. Instead they’re leaving the excess reserves on deposit with the Fed. Money supply and credit are now generally contracting. We’re going to see an intensified downturn in the near future. I specialize in looking at leading indicators that have very successful track records in terms of predicting economic or financial turns. One such indicator is the broad money supply.
 
Whenever the broad money supply adjusted for inflation has turned negative year over year, the economy has gone into recession, or if it already was in a recession, the downturn intensified. It’s happened four times before now, in modern reporting. You saw it in the terrible downturn of ’73 to ’75, the early ’80s and again in the early ’90s. In December of 2009, annual growth in real M3 turned negative. It’s now at a record low in terms of decline, down more than 6% year over year.  What that suggests is that in the immediate future you’re going to see renewed downturn in economic activity

 
 In all the prior instances that I mentioned, this event led recessions, except for ’73 to ’75. That’s when you had the oil spike and a recession that came from that. When the money supply turned down in that recession, the economy accelerated in its decline. We’re going to see something along those lines, now, with about a six-month lead time. You’re going to have negative economic growth this year. The implications for that are extraordinary, because the projections on the federal budget deficit, a number of the state deficits, and the solvency and stress tests for the banking system all were structured assuming positive economic growth in the 2% to 3% range for 2010. Instead it’s going to be negative. Many states are going to be in greater difficulty than they thought. Most likely, you’re going to have federal bailouts there. The banks are going to have more troubles. All this means more government support, more government spending, greater deficits and greater funding needs for the U.S. Treasury. We have a global market that already is increasingly reluctant to hold the dollars and U.S. Treasuries.
 
I don’t like the euro. I don’t think that’s going to hold together, and I’ve thought so for some time. If it should break up and you have a new German currency, a new mark or something like that might be a strong one option. At the moment I like the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar and the Swiss franc. For anyone living in the United States, rather than looking at the short-term volatility in the markets and trying to make money off of that, this is the time to batten down the hatches and to look to preserve your wealth and assets.

In terms of preserving the purchasing power of your assets, the best thing I can think of is physical gold. That’s worked over the millennia. I’m not per se a gold bug. It just happens to be a circumstance in which it’s the cleanest asset around for that. You don’t need to put all your assets into gold, but hold some. Hold some silver. I’d look to get some assets out of the U.S. dollar and look to get some assets out of the U.S. When I say outside of the U.S. dollar, again, I look at the Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Swiss franc in particular. I think they will tend to do particularly well, whereas the U.S. dollar is going to become effectively worthless.

As the dollar breaks down, you’ll also likely see disruptions in supply chains.   No currency system in the U.S. is going to work unless the fiscal conditions that drove it into oblivion are also addressed.

On a global basis, where the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, 80% of currency transactions involve the U.S. dollar. There’s going to have to be an overhaul of the global currency system. To gain credibility with the public, the powers that be likely will design a system that has some kind of a tie to gold, but that’s purely speculative.

Walter J. “John” Williams was born in 1949. He received an A.B. in Economics, cum laude, from Dartmouth College in 1971, and was awarded a M.B.A. from Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in 1972, where he was named an Edward Tuck Scholar. During his career as a consulting economist, John has worked with individuals as well as Fortune 500 companies. For more than 25 years he has been a private consulting economist and a specialist in government economic reporting. His analysis and commentary have been featured widely in the popular media both in the U.S. and globally. Mr. Williams provides insight and analysis on his website, www.shadowstats.com.

 

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