Meanwhile, over on the other bank of the Atlantic, Citigroup has issued storm warnings and Merrill Lynch says that it is reconsidering. Citi says it has about 9,000 employees too many; it says a flurry of layoff notices is about to go out. As for Merrill Lynch, the company went on record saying it needed no additional capital. But that was before announcing another $10 billion write-down of subprime debt. Now, the bank says it is "open to" further capital raising.

The price of oil hit a new high of $116 on Friday. The dollar stuck at $1.57 per euro. Gold got whacked - down to $915.

As we mentioned last week, there is a whole lot of flation goin' on. Our guess is that it will inflate prices of commodities and gold...and that it will deflate (if only relatively) prices for stocks and houses. But you couldn't prove it based on last week's market action.

Friday, the Dow rose another 228 points. The stock market is said to 'look ahead' and see things that we mortals can't see. The index went down about 10% since last October, but lately seems to want to go up. What does it see?

We think it sees inflation. But the conventional thinking is that it sees a boom. 'The negativity has been severely over-done,' goes the gist of popular opinion. Finance has bottomed out...homebuilding has bottomed out...the dollar has bottomed out. What's more, the authorities have taken quick and resolute action to cure whatever was bothering the markets. Central banks have injected hundreds of billions into the banking system. The Fed has cut rates sharply. Congress is considering measures to help out homeowners...and here comes the Bank of England, which (according to the BBC) is preparing a $50 billion mortgage bailout plan. Well, that settles it as far as we're concerned. It should be onwards and upwards from here on out!

As we pointed out last week, the newspaper headlines may be negative, but sentiment is not. Most people think this is a good time to buy a house - meaning, they still think 'you can't go wrong in property.' And stocks at 20 times earnings are no bargains. At real bottoms, you can buy stocks at 5 to 8 times earnings.

At real bottoms, people have stopped looking for bottoms. Our old friend Marc Faber sent a convenient list of quotations from the crash of '29. A chart of the market action looks like a mountainside, with ledges...followed by more sharp downturns. But on each ledge...at each pause on the way down...there was some notable figure telling the world that it was over:

"This is the time to buy stocks," said R.W. McNeal in the New York Herald Tribune after the first leg of the crash. "This is the time to recall the words of the late J.P.Morgan...that any man who is bearish on America will go broke."

It is the "long slope of hope," says Marc.

As it turned out, anyone who was bullish on America in October of 1929 went broke. Stocks did not return to their '29 high until the 1950s - after more than 1,000 banks had gone bust...a quarter of the workforce had lost its jobs...and the Dow had given up 89% of its value.

And now, dear reader...the press may talk about depressions, bear markets and credit crises, but we ain't seen nothing yet. When we get a real bottom, they won't be talking at all - they will have lost interest. That's what happens. When we get a real bottom, people won't be interested in buying stocks; they'll come to regard stocks as a rich man's game. And they will once again view houses as a consumer item, not an asset class. As for depression...they won't need the newspapers to tell them how bad things are.

We think that day is coming. How far out it is, we don't know. As we often say, we don't have a crystal ball.

*** More and more indications suggest that there is a kind of decoupling happening. That is, the new economy of the Far East (and to a lesser extent Latin America and Africa) is separating itself from the old economy of Europe and North America.

Prudential Insurance, Britain's largest insurer, says that Asian sales are now more than half its business. The company can grow, it points out, even with falling revenues from Europe and North America.

Meanwhile, colleague Manraaj Singh tells us that China's latest growth announcement masked an even more important detail. The headline number - GDP growth over 10% - is breathtaking. But what is more interesting about it is that it is happening while exports to the developed world are actually going soft. That is, the growth is being fueled by domestic demand not foreign buying. This is not to say that emerging markets no longer need their Old World customers. Just that they don't need them as much as before.

*** Our India expert, Ajit Dayal, paid us a visit last week in London. In the first two and a half months of this year, the Indian stock market got hit hard - the BSE 200 lost 32% of its value. We checked Ajit's wrists for signs of slash marks and found none.

"I'm not the least bit worried," he told us. "The India Thesis still stands. Indian GDP should post average growth of 6% per year for the next 10 years. Our stocks will give investors a risk-adjusted return of 15% to 20% per annum. That will make it possible for an investor to multiply his investment 4 to 6 times over the 10 year period."

Ajit points out that while Indian stocks dropped sharply, they were coming down from a crazy high. A big rush of foreign money in 2007 had sent the BSE skyward. Even after correcting by 30%, Indian stocks are still ahead for the 12 months ending March 19th by 45%.

"Look around your house," Ajit suggests. "You will find few things labeled 'made in India.' India gained little from the housing boom in America. And it will suffer little from the housing bust."

What does affect Indian equities, though, is the movement of foreign capital. But foreign investors are generally light on Indian shares, while local investors - especially mutual funds - are taking bigger and bigger positions.

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Unlike China, India is Not Willing to Learn from its Mistakes
• All the World’s Stock Exchanges are Now Officially in Bear Markets
• In India With a Strategic Partner
• The Investor in Indian Bonds has Ben Bernanke on His Side
• The Planet’s First Worldwide Bailout

The modern 1930s are the logical consequence of the "New Economy" of the past decade, just as the original was a logical consequence of the "Roaring Twenties." In each case, technology and leverage combined to create a potent but ultimately poisonous brew of wildly inflated asset prices. In essence, greedy CEOs (and investment managers) said, "we brought you the new economy, please cash us out now." And a gullible American public affirmed this by bidding up prices to insane levels, expecting to share, rather than subsidize, the wealth of the selling shareholders. First the tech companies, then the financial intermediaries were then caught in traps of their own making, and escaped as sorely crippled entities, if they survived at all. But by this time, the more privileged players had "taken their money and run."

Probably without meaning to, the Los Angeles Times aptly summed things up with an article headlined "A New Great Depression? It's Different This Time." The aptness is if you interpret the headline as "The Depression is Different This Time" as opposed to "Things Are Different This Time." The details will naturally differ from those of the 1930s, but the substance will remain the same. But the paper dismisses the popping of asset bubbles in housing and stocks as merely "disturbing parallels." Working together, the Fed (and the modern J.P. Morgan) "saved" Bear Stearns, the modern Bank of the United States, thereby preventing a collapse of the banking system. International trade remains robust, at least for now. So things don't seem to bad, at least to the Times.

But are things really that different almost 80 years later? For instance, the popping of major asset bubbles almost defines a recession by itself. And one can argue that the 1930s collapse of the banking system is the consequence, or reflection of the real economy, rather than its cause. So saving one insolvent institution isn't going to prevent the unraveling of the rest of the system early in the new century. And yes, the international situation is okay, but that's just because America is the cause, rather than the recipient, of global economic problems this time around; falling stock prices abroad are saying that foreign GDP growth will soon collapse as a result of America's troubles.

In deciding whether or not we are headed toward depression, one needs to look at the substance of economic events, as opposed to the form. Some examples of the substance: 1) A post-war record level of home foreclosures headed to 1930s levels fueled by a similarly record collapse of home prices. 2) Several major "runs on banks" as investors begin to wake up to the fact that a lot of what passes for collateral is in fact worth very little. 3) A panicked Fed trying to head off a financial panic by simultaneously lowering interest rates and injecting money into the system.

And what's worse, we are only in the early stages of the crisis. Last year, 2007, was the year that the mortgage market unwound. This year, 2008, will feature the collapse of major financial institutions, starting, but not ending, with Bear Stearns. Next year, 2009, will be the year when the problems make their way to the rest of the U.S. economy, including the still-buoyant industrial sector. By 2010, the recession (or worse) will be global.

Some take comfort in the fact that we haven't yet seen soup lines, or 25% unemployment. But soup lines are merely an unnecessary (and hopefully unrepeated) appendage of the above. And anecdotal evidence suggests that many welfare agencies are now stretched to the absolute limit, meaning that new soup lines will appear if the system is tested just a bit more. And unemployment hasn't risen because companies have so far chosen to cut health care and pension contributions rather than lay off workers. One can easily get to the 1930s 25% unemployment with a 0% headline unemployment rate - by assuming that half the work force will be "temps" working half time without fringe benefits.

But perhaps one of the better definitions of the modern 1930s was given in a previous article on this site - a two decade pullback in the American standard of living to the 1980s (the original took American consumption back to the 1910s). Such a pullback seems inevitable from the deleveraging and loss of wealth that is now taking place. Moreover, such a retreat would last for an extended period of time. That's because we had the best of all possible worlds (relative to the true state of the global economy) for most of the past decade and half. The next decade and half will probably see the worst of all such worlds.

Regards,

Tom Au
The Daily Reckoning Australia

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