All Posts Tagged With: "correction"

In the real world, the economy is always making mistakes and always correcting them. Making mistakes and correcting them. And markets are always discovering what things are worth. They figure out what one thing is worth, conditions change and they change their minds.

It was time for a bear market/credit contraction. The correction began in January 2000. The NASDAQ collapsed. And in 2001, the economy entered a recession. But this recession was phony. Consumer spending didn’t go down; it went up. Consumers kept borrowing money. It wasn’t correcting the debt problem, in other words, it was making it worse.

Why would gold go down so much? Because people are finally realizing that deflation is the real risk, not inflation. Gold could continue to slip and slide for a long time now… It’s hard to say. It can rise in a deflation. But it depends on how volatile and uncertain the markets appear. In a stable, Japanese-style slump, gold could go down and stay down for many years.

We refer to Bernanke, Summers, Obama, Geithner, Krugman – the whole lot of them. They added three trillion dollars to US debt in the last two years. In two more years the debt will be at 100% of GDP. Add in the debts they’ve guaranteed – from Fannie Mae, for example, and state and local debt implicitly backed by the feds – and you’re already at 150% of GDP. Worse than Greece, in other words.

What’s more, the emergence of the gold exchange traded funds (ETFs) has put a huge portion of the gold market in a very small number of hands. If the ETFs sell…who will they sell to? Or more succinctly, a lot of the gold demand is coming from a few institutions. If other institutions (central banks and sovereign wealth funds) don’t pick up the slack, there will be more sellers than buyers and prices will fall.

Almost all the gains made by investors in this century have now been corrected. Dan Denning sends us over this chart:…