View Full Version : Nope, That’s Not Money
http://www.itulip.com/images/garbage.jpgNope, That’s Not Money
by John Rubino
DollarCollapse.com (http://www.dollarcollapse.com/iNP/view.asp?ID=57)
Prudent Bear’s Doug Noland has for years been pointing out that one of the drivers of the credit bubble has been the ever-broadening definition of money. As the global economy expanded without a hic-up, more and more instruments came to be used as a store of value or medium of exchange or even a standard against which to value other things—in other words, as money. Thus mortgage-backed bonds and even more exotic things came to be seen as nearly risk-free and infinitely liquid. In Noland’s terms, credit gained “moneyness,” which sent the effective global money supply through the roof. This in turn allowed the U.S. and its trading partners to keep adding jobs and appearing to grow, despite debt levels that were rising into the stratosphere. For a while there, borrowing actually made the world richer, because both the cash received and the debt created functioned as money.
With a few months of hindsight, it’s now clear that debt-as-money was not one of humanity’s better ideas. When the U.S. housing market—the source of all that mortgage-backed pseudo money—began to tank, hedge funds found out that an asset-backed bond wasn’t exactly the same thing as a stack of hundred dollar bills. The global economy then started taking inventory of what it was using as money. And it began crossing things off the list. Subprime ABS? Nope, that’s not money. BBB corporate bonds? Nope. High-grade corporates? Alas, no. Credit default swaps? Are you kidding me?
No longer able to function as money, these instruments are being “repriced” (a slick little euphemism for “dumped for whatever anyone will pay”), which is causing a cascade failure of the many business models that depended on infinite liquidity. The effective global money supply is contracting at a double-digit rate, reversing out much of the past decade’s growth.
Now here’s where it gets really interesting. The reaction of the world’s central banks to the freezing-up of the leveraged speculating community has, predictably, been to create massive amounts of new fiat currency and hand it to the banking system. They’re not dropping twenties out of helicopters yet, but functionally it’s the same thing. By swapping dollars, euros and yen for the no-longer-money bonds that are plunging in price, creating some paper profits where there once were catastrophic losses, the Bankers hope to revive the animal spirits of the leveraged speculators. Specifically, they hope to stop the financial community from going further down the moneyness checklist and lopping off any more instruments.
But you don’t forget a brush with death that easily. The process of debt reclassification has a momentum that a few hundred billion new dollars won’t stop. And once corporate bonds and agency bonds and emerging market bonds have been crossed off the list, the system will start eyeing the dollar. Is it really a store of value after falling by half against oil and gold in the past five years? Didn’t the Fed just create a tidal wave of new dollars and promise to create infinitely more if needed? Isn’t the U.S. economy hobbled by the implosion in housing and mortgage finance and hedge funds and (soon) derivatives? Don’t Americans owe more per capita than any people in human history? And a realization will begin to dawn: Maybe the paper currency of an over-indebted country isn’t money either…
See also:
A Financial Market Crash is a Process, Not an Event (http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1797)
The Desperate Optimism of the Invested (http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1650)
Most Hedge Funds Suck, and that's Bad News for the Industry and Investors (http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=733)
Upside Down to Right Side Up (http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1200)
iTulip Select (http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1032): The Investment Thesis for the Next Cycle™
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quigleydoor
08-19-07, 02:58 PM
Prudent Bear’s Doug Noland has for years been pointing out that one of the drivers of the credit bubble has been the ever-broadening definition of money. As the global economy expanded without a hic-up, more and more instruments came to be used as a store of value or medium of exchange or even a standard against which to value other things—in other words, as money. Thus mortgage-backed bonds and even more exotic things came to be seen as nearly risk-free and infinitely liquid. In Noland’s terms, credit gained “moneyness,” which sent the effective global money supply through the roof. This in turn allowed the U.S. and its trading partners to keep adding jobs and appearing to grow, despite debt levels that were rising into the stratosphere. For a while there, borrowing actually made the world richer, because both the cash received and the debt created functioned as money.
With a few months of hindsight, it’s now clear that debt-as-money was not one of humanity’s better ideas. When the U.S. housing market—the source of all that mortgage-backed pseudo money—began to tank, hedge funds found out that an asset-backed bond wasn’t exactly the same thing as a stack of hundred dollar bills. The global economy then started taking inventory of what it was using as money. And it began crossing things off the list. Subprime ABS? Nope, that’s not money. BBB corporate bonds? Nope. High-grade corporates? Alas, no. Credit default swaps? Are you kidding me?
No longer able to function as money, these instruments are being “repriced” (a slick little euphemism for “dumped for whatever anyone will pay”), which is causing a cascade failure of the many business models that depended on infinite liquidity. The effective global money supply is contracting at a double-digit rate, reversing out much of the past decade’s growth.
That sounds like a crystal clear account of the monetary evolution up to now.
Now here’s where it gets really interesting. The reaction of the world’s central banks to the freezing-up of the leveraged speculating community has, predictably, been to create massive amounts of new fiat currency and hand it to the banking system. They’re not dropping twenties out of helicopters yet, but functionally it’s the same thing.
Hey gang, quit repeating this pablum and prove it to me. In my opinion, the Federal Reserve has so far (speaking in the short term, i.e. August 2007) been very prudent to walk the fine line between (1) preventing systemic collapse and (2) discouraging additional moral hazard through bailouts of the guys caught holding the trash.
http://www.itulip.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=59&d=1187300901Did anyone read the <a href="http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1802">Financial Times excerpt</a> I posted on Thursday? Look at the chart to the left (it accompanied the same FT article). There is a lot of good in the corporate side of the economy—a lot of strong companies with clean balance sheets, which are still able to borrow at good interest rates.
Look, the shitstorm is only hurting those who are highly-levered and/or of low credit quality. Somebody show me otherwise.
By swapping dollars, euros and yen for the no-longer-money bonds that are plunging in price, creating some paper profits where there once were catastrophic losses, the Bankers hope to revive the animal spirits of the leveraged speculators. Specifically, they hope to stop the financial community from going further down the moneyness checklist and lopping off any more instruments.
I disagree. They are trying to shake out the financial junk meisters, and make the wrong speculators pay for taking bad risks, and all the while they are trying to keep the whole system going. Somebody show me otherwise.
But you don’t forget a brush with death that easily. The process of debt reclassification has a momentum that a few hundred billion new dollars won’t stop. And once corporate bonds and agency bonds and emerging market bonds have been crossed off the list, the system will start eyeing the dollar. Is it really a store of value after falling by half against oil and gold in the past five years? Didn’t the Fed just create a tidal wave of new dollars and promise to create infinitely more if needed? Isn’t the U.S. economy hobbled by the implosion in housing and mortgage finance and hedge funds and (soon) derivatives? Don’t Americans owe more per capita than any people in human history? And a realization will begin to dawn: Maybe the paper currency of an over-indebted country isn’t money either…
Rubino's opinion has not yet stood up to the test of history. He and Noland have been going on like this for years. Somebody show me that now is different.
That sounds like a crystal clear account of the monetary evolution up to now.
Hey gang, quit repeating this pablum and prove it to me. In my opinion, the Federal Reserve has so far (speaking in the short term, i.e. August 2007) been very prudent to walk the fine line between (1) preventing systemic collapse and (2) discouraging additional moral hazard through bailouts of the guys caught holding the trash.I agree. Remains to be seen how far they have to go.
Did anyone read the Financial Times excerpt (http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1802) I posted on Thursday? Look at the chart to the left (it accompanied the same FT article). There is a lot of good in the corporate side of the economy—a lot of strong companies with clean balance sheets, which are still able to borrow at good interest rates.Try this chart. US corps are making more than ever, but also owe more than ever. The FT chart is deceptive.
Friends who are CEOs of public companies tell me that they have lost all pricing power in the market, and productivity gains have been acheived only by increasing demand for output per employee, that technology based productivity gains peaked in 2001 or so. Profit growth has been largely derived from non-repeatable, one-off actions for the past few years.
http://www.itulip.com/images/nipa.gif
Look, the shitstorm is only hurting those who are highly-levered and/or of low credit quality. Somebody show me otherwise.Not so. You cannot get a jumbo home loan. James Cramer's complaint that "you can't get a loan even if you're rich like me" is true. Almost any kind of loan that relied on securitization for liquidity is not available today.
I disagree. They are trying to shake out the financial junk meisters, and make the wrong speculators pay for taking bad risks, and all the while they are trying to keep the whole system going. Somebody show me otherwise.Where is your evidence of this? Why allow financial junk meisters to get into so much trouble in the first place, then allow them to fail? I am missing the logic.
Rubino's opinion has not yet stood up to the test of history. He and Noland have been going on like this for years. Somebody show me that now is different.Fair enough. iTulip's Recession 2001 analysis (http://www.itulip.com/recession2001.htm) was correct in terms of timing and government response, but not severity. Perhaps Rubino and Noland are trying also to learn from their errors.
the fact that noland has been going on for years has nothing to do with the value of his writings. he was writing about the accumulation of risk. i actually stopped reading him a while ago, because i felt like i'd gotten the message, but i recall his using the analogy of people selling flood insurance during a drought. flood insurance was a good business as the drought became prolonged - all revenue, no payouts. people bought land and built in the flood plain because there'd been no floods for a while, and flood insurance became cheap. what noland said was that this represented accumulating risk. it was from noland that i learned about hyman minsky and the various stages of financial evolution as continued stability led to riskier and riskier financial structures. using his analogy, noland never said: "it's going to rain next week." what he said is that enormous financial and real structures were being built on the assumption that it would never rain again. and someday it was going to rain.
Lukester
08-19-07, 08:59 PM
QuigleyDoor -
Even were the Fed policy today a model of austerity and caution, it is only the most recent layer of policy grafted over the prior 30+ years of loose credit by that same Fed - an institution which has already irrevocably executed close to 40 years of highly lax monetary policy since Reagan's first term.
Even today's most austere Fed policy is therefore glued to the rails of 30 years of prior lax policy - with an ocean of credit growth over thirty years within which today's mild attempts at austerity exert a puny corrective action.
They have no Volcker in their arsenal, and even if they did, the most alert Fed board members today, with any kind of realistic eye on the huge present day credit market risk would lock that Volcker up in the basement and prevent him from taking the smallest corrective action, as his monetary stabilization policies if re-attempted today would trigger a catastrophic deflation.
quigleydoor
08-20-07, 07:00 AM
Thank you, EJ, for taking the time to respond constructively to my skeptical musings.
Try this chart. US corps are making more than ever, but also owe more than ever. The FT chart is deceptive.
http://www.itulip.com/images/nipa.gif
Please help me understand this chart. I think the story it's trying to tell is that companies are paying out more in financing than they are earning. Can you produce a semilog chart of this? The pattern of the 60s could be just as interesting as what we see in the 2000s, but it is too small to see. Would it be fair to adjust the time series with a GDP deflator? This one chart isn't saying a whole lot to me.
Friends who are CEOs of public companies tell me that they have lost all pricing power in the market, and productivity gains have been acheived only by increasing demand for output per employee, that technology based productivity gains peaked in 2001 or so. Profit growth has been largely derived from non-repeatable, one-off actions for the past few years.
I have heard these voices before, and I can't deny their message. These companies have public shares, and like nearly all public equity today, they are probably priced so richly that any future less than eternal solid growth will disappoint. Well, the equity investors will be sadly disappointed once the market digests voices like those of your friends.
But we were talking about how the confusion about "moneyness" in the credit markets is going to corrode the dollar-based monetary system. How do the voices of CEOs of mispriced public companies contribute to this theme?
Not so. You cannot get a jumbo home loan. James Cramer's complaint that "you can't get a loan even if you're rich like me" is true. Almost any kind of loan that relied on securitization for liquidity is not available today.
Three points:
<ol><li>The situation this month is a severe outage in a system that should have 100% reliability. But I expect that credit for high quality borrowers will flow again, in the near future. This is just my expectation that Helicopter Ben can find the right chimneys to drop his parcels into, versus your expectation that he can't.
<li>Generally speaking, this month's events are going to provoke the securitization sausage factory to clean up the meat grinder and the refrigeration system. Again my expectation is that the system can be fixed (but let the junk meisters die of listeria), versus your expectation that the whole factory should be condemned.
<li>Specific to the problem of nonconforming loans, I believe that the whole system of conformance for sale to the Fannie and Freddi was a big design mistake. It was designed to solve problems of the 1930s and 1970s, but it created other big problems inadvertently. But it is now part of the system, and smart people will find ways to build better architecture around it, and eventually replace it—because our way of life is at stake, and there is a lot of money to be made by fixing this big old machine. (Can you tell I work in enterprise software?)
</ol>
Where is your evidence of this? Why allow financial junk meisters to get into so much trouble in the first place, then allow them to fail? I am missing the logic.
I can only speculate; I have no evidence. I would be interested to be shown wrong here: My belief is that Greenspan allowed them to get into trouble, and Bernanke was not directly responsible. Bernanke is smart and pragmatic. He took over and recognized that he should not intervene until the system destabilized. He has had a year (or perhaps his entire adult life) to study the various intervention strategies at his disposal. His famous helicopter quote just says to me that he is interested in unconventional policies, not that he is an idiot.
http://www.itulip.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=59&d=1187300901Did anyone read the <a href="http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1802">Financial Times excerpt</a> I posted on Thursday? Look at the chart to the left (it accompanied the same FT article). There is a lot of good in the corporate side of the economy—a lot of strong companies with clean balance sheets, which are still able to borrow at good interest rates.
Look, the shitstorm is only hurting those who are highly-levered and/or of low credit quality. Somebody show me otherwise.
Much of the issue in my opinion is that you're talking about now and EJ and others are talking about the future, and the likely scenario.
As an analogy, there were also plenty of good companies with clean balance sheets in 2000 and most of them were hit hard in 2001-2 - not as hard as Nasdaq of course, but they still took a whack.
Perhaps right this instant the effects are only hitting the highly-levered, etc.... but all changes start at the edges. Many historical patterns are flashing huge warning signs and this still applies:
"The four most dangerous words in investing are, 'It's different this time.'"
-- Sir John Templeton
This chart also applies - it has never missed in correctly predicting a recession.
http://www.nowandfutures.com/images/predict_recession.png
Thank you, EJ, for taking the time to respond constructively to my skeptical musings.
Thoughtful and rigorously researched argument makes iTulip strong. You'll never see a blah, blah, blah piece here punctuated with a Go Gold! or Go Stocks! slogan.
Please help me understand this chart. I think the story it's trying to tell is that companies are paying out more in financing than they are earning. Can you produce a semilog chart of this? The pattern of the 60s could be just as interesting as what we see in the 2000s, but it is too small to see. Would it be fair to adjust the time series with a GDP deflator? This one chart isn't saying a whole lot to me.It's not enough to compare debt to assets, and the income statement is more important than the balance sheet. The question is what is the average US company's cash flow situation, and how vulnerable are they to a decline in demand, such as we will experience in the next recession.
I have heard these voices before, and I can't deny their message. These companies have public shares, and like nearly all public equity today, they are probably priced so richly that any future less than eternal solid growth will disappoint. Well, the equity investors will be sadly disappointed once the market digests voices like those of your friends.
But we were talking about how the confusion about "moneyness" in the credit markets is going to corrode the dollar-based monetary system. How do the voices of CEOs of mispriced public companies contribute to this theme?Most feel that the dollar-based money system is impervious. Asia, Europe and oil producers have to support the dollar. It's the kind of arrogance that is a fair leading indicator of the impending demise of a company or country, but the lead time can be very long. Similarly, most believe that the "re-pricing of risk" is healthy and soon it will be business as usual.
Three points:
The situation this month is a severe outage in a system that should have 100% reliability. But I expect that credit for high quality borrowers will flow again, in the near future. This is just my expectation that Helicopter Ben can find the right chimneys to drop his parcels into, versus your expectation that he can't.You must be confusing me with someone else. Just do a google search on "no deflation." I've taken a strong position on this. The article that resolves to, by the way, says that when the shit hits the fan the Fed will buy asset-backed securities. That seemed far fetched to most readers at the time. Now it appears that the Fed is ready to drop money down the chimney of any campaign contributor.
Generally speaking, this month's events are going to provoke the securitization sausage factory to clean up the meat grinder and the refrigeration system. Again my expectation is that the system can be fixed (but let the junk meisters die of listeria), versus your expectation that the whole factory should be condemned.Risk Pollution is a better model of what is happening than sausage factory. The socialization of risk was deliberate. Wait until the CLO based LBO financing problems start to show up.
Specific to the problem of nonconforming loans, I believe that the whole system of conformance for sale to the Fannie and Freddi was a big design mistake. It was designed to solve problems of the 1930s and 1970s, but it created other big problems inadvertently. But it is now part of the system, and smart people will find ways to build better architecture around it, and eventually replace it—because our way of life is at stake, and there is a lot of money to be made by fixing this big old machine. (Can you tell I work in enterprise software?)You are being naive. Putting well meaning but incompetent people in charge guarantees the result that we have today. See Jocks and Geeks Theory of Financial System Dysfunction (http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?t=383&highlight=jocks+geeks).
I can only speculate; I have no evidence. I would be interested to be shown wrong here: My belief is that Greenspan allowed them to get into trouble, and Bernanke was not directly responsible. Bernanke is smart and pragmatic. He took over and recognized that he should not intervene until the system destabilized. He has had a year (or perhaps his entire adult life) to study the various intervention strategies at his disposal. His famous helicopter quote just says to me that he is interested in unconventional policies, not that he is an idiot.Bernanke is a lightweight. The fact that he even took the job even after Greenspan repeatedly said that the system was going to blow up after he left shows what kind of a lightweight he is. For further evidence, watch him at a hearing. It's like watching a goat rodeo. I guarantee he'll follow unconventional policies and we detailed them here in that deflation piece last year. That should drag the asset debt deflation process out for a decade or two. Just ask the Japanese. Our asset debt deflation will be inflationary.
Good stuff! Keep it coming. Nice work on the formatting, by the way.
I can only speculate; I have no evidence. I would be interested to be shown wrong here: My belief is that Greenspan allowed them to get into trouble, and Bernanke was not directly responsible. Bernanke is smart and pragmatic. He took over and recognized that he should not intervene until the system destabilized. He has had a year (or perhaps his entire adult life) to study the various intervention strategies at his disposal. His famous helicopter quote just says to me that he is interested in unconventional policies, not that he is an idiot.[/quote]
Bernanke's been in the slot about 18 months now. When he took over the obvious idiocy in mortgage lending was well developed. Fed action = continued "measured" quarter point increases and say nothing. The most egregious of the PE related structured finance nonsense took place on his watch. Fed action = hold rates and say nothing. The Fed is a political animal and the political pressure is now becoming intense. It's still difficult to predict with high confidence how a Bernanke Fed, still early in its tenure, will respond. But the admittedly small sample size to date suggests we should not be surprised by a response very similar to the Greenspan Fed.
quigleydoor
08-30-07, 02:29 PM
So I went to iTulip 10 days ago with some evidence that U.S. corporations' balance sheets were in pretty good shape overall. EJ responded with the following.
It's not enough to compare debt to assets, and the income statement is more important than the balance sheet. The question is what is the average US company's cash flow situation, and how vulnerable are they to a decline in demand, such as we will experience in the next recession.
http://www.itulip.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=64&stc=1&d=1188504751In addition to EJ's reasoned response, it turns out that the balance sheets of non-financial public companies might be worse off than they are reporting. The corporate balance sheets are in contradiction to the national accounts.
FT.com's <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1/963a5cc4-560c-11dc-ab9c-0000779fd2ac.html">Lex column</a> published this chart yesterday (based on a report by Smithers & Co). Notice that the national accounts data shows quite a lot of corporate debt which is not included in the S&P 500 non-financial companies' balance sheets. The gap is like dark matter—probably belonging to domestic subsidiaries of foreign companies, as well as privately held companies. In fact, private equity deals account for 85% of the rise in the national accounts' corporate debt since 2001.
The point is, the balance sheets of public companies are not a good representation of all corporate debt in the national economy. And in aggregate, all non-financial companies (public, private, subsidiary, LBO, etc.) have grown more leveraged, just like consumers have. Needless to say, it is becoming harder for me to remain skeptical of Ka-Poom, even as a devil's advocate.
Andrew Smithers, whose company produced this chart, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4fae578e-5647-11dc-ab9c-0000779fd2ac.html">wrote</a> today in FT.com on his preferred way to measure of aggregate leverage, the debt to output ratio:
. . . [We] need a stable criterion for comparing today’s leverage with that of earlier years and this can be done by comparing debt with output. Profits are only 30 per cent of output (the sum of broadly defined profits and labour income), so the latter is not nearly so sensitive to changes in definitions as the former, particularly if the data are drawn from national accounts. Corporate output rises in a relatively stable way year by year and, because profit margins are strongly mean-reverting, the ratio of debt to output provides an excellent measure of the capacity of companies to service that debt, independent of their current profit levels. Compared with output, US corporate leverage is high and rising. Although mildly below its previous peak in 2002, it is well above its long-term and even higher than its post-1990 average levels.
It is likely that the growth of debt off-balance-sheet makes the underlying situation even worse. When, for example, airlines sell their aeroplanes to leasing companies and then hire them back, the debt moves from the non-financial to the financial sector. I do not know how much of the growth of financial debt comes from such activities, but financial debt has grown without interruption from 3 per cent of GDP in 1952 to 110 per cent today in the US.
It is therefore unwise to assume that corporate balance sheets are in good shape. The realisation that they are not will probably become widespread as asset prices fall.
LargoWinch
05-26-09, 10:59 AM
This chart also applies - it has never missed in correctly predicting a recession.
http://www.nowandfutures.com/images/predict_recession.png
Bart, I understand that the idea is that when "CPI adjusted monetary base, annual change rate" (in solid black) turns negative, a recession is to be expected.
Futhermore, when this metric turns back positive, the recession appears to end.
My question is the following: where is the black line now? It appears positive on your graph and hence implies the end of the "recession" sometimes in 2010? Since your post was made in 2007, I am assuming that this is/was a forecast?
On your website, this chart appears unchanged since the above-noted post.
Quigley,
I think EJ and the others have mostly laid out why the FT's financial hacks aren't quite representing the situation accurately.
For me the paradigm is quite simple. If 2006 represents 10 chairs of credit, 5 were shadow banking via securitization, 2 were irrational exuberance based on linearly extrapolated growth trends, and perhaps 3 were based on organic growth and 'normal' lending.
Today the shadow banking chairs are down to 1. Irrational exuberance is also gone - maybe 1/2 chair. Government has taken up 2.5 chairs.
But a majority of the economies of the US, UK, PIIGS, most of Eastern Europe, and a few other places are now trying to find seats after the music stopped.
10 people needing jobs, 7 chairs.
And on the subject of money - a video which is curiously relevant given the 'belief' component. The inflection point is reached once our governments are done what's being done here...
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qhmcJ7Zg5ko&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qhmcJ7Zg5ko&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
Bart, I understand that the idea is that when "CPI adjusted monetary base, annual change rate" (in solid black) turns negative, a recession is to be expected.
Futhermore, when this metric turns back positive, the recession appears to end.
My question is the following: where is the black line now? It appears positive on your graph and hence implies the end of the "recession" sometimes in 2010? Since your post was made in 2007, I am assuming that this is/was a forecast?
On your website, this chart appears unchanged since the above-noted post.
As you might imagine, the gigantic growth in monetary base recently has hugely affected that chart. It appears like there has been no change since its range limited, being that the only important data is when it gets close to 0% or goes below it.
Here's the full range going back as far as I have monetary base & TBill & TBond data, so you can see the full picture:
http://www.nowandfutures.com/images/predict_recession2.png
As far as its predictive nature and my forecast, its pointing at late 2009 through early 2010 as an end to the current recession based on the average length of recessions after the CPI adjusted base bottoms being 10 months, with a range of 5-14 months. It bottomed in September 2008.
The absolute best possible case for the *real* recession to end (after the lies involved in CPI and the deflator are taken into account) is early 2011... and I'm not holding my breath.
LargoWinch
05-27-09, 09:29 AM
Thanks bart as always.
I must say that this ties up nicely with iTulip's POOM analysis and expectations for Q4/09 - Q1/10...
I must say that this ties up nicely with iTulip's POOM analysis and expectations for Q4/09 - Q1/10...
The best part about it to me is that iTulip and I are coming at the whole area from quite different approaches and backgrounds and analysis methods, and we're frequently pretty close on macro views - nothing like being backed up to help my own confidence levels.
LargoWinch
05-27-09, 10:52 AM
The best part about it to me is that iTulip and I are coming at the whole area from quite different approaches and backgrounds and analysis methods, and we're frequently pretty close on macro views - nothing like being backed up to help my own confidence levels.
...and I must admit, that is what scaring me a little: that both you and EJ are coming to the same conclusions.
Somedays, I wish you were both wrong, but do not count on me to bet against it. :o
...and I must admit, that is what scaring me a little: that both you and EJ are coming to the same conclusions.
Somedays, I wish you were both wrong, but do not count on me to bet against it. :o
Almost every day I wish and hope that we're both wrong.
What we and others see ahead is reason for significant prudence at the very least, and I submit that anyone who isn't somewhat fearful or rattled sometimes just plain isn't looking at reality.
I also sometimes find myself walking on a razor blade between the two sides of scaring others too much (or inadvertently and unintentionally causing panic), and understating the very real probabilities ahead. All I can really do is take my best shot at putting various facts and reasoning out there, try to keep any personal bias out of charts or posts, and keep my fingers crossed that folk have covered their backsides.
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