Debt & Deficits

...Until now a full picture of global debt was missing. The October 2016 Fiscal Monitor has, for the first time, put a number on the size of debt covering virtually the whole world and the picture is not pretty.

...Whenever a country (or countries) creates debt that is beyond the level that they can ever repay, an economic collapse is a near-certainty. Today, many jurisdictions, particularly, the US, EU, UK, Canada, etc. have created debt that is far beyond anything the world has ever seen. This assures us that the corresponding collapse will be of epic proportions.

The deterioration of the federal budget began in slow fashion over a year ago, and it's now become obvious. The deficit is still quite manageable but spending is firming while revenues are stagnating. The public sector is growing while the private sector struggles. Here are some updated charts that speak for themselves:

When numbers get into the billions or trillions, they start to lose context. The U.S. national debt is one of those numbers. It currently sits at $19.5 trillion, which is actually such a large number that it is truly difficult for the average person to comprehend so today’s data visualization plots the U.S. national debt against everything from the assets managed by the world’s largest money managers, to the annual value of gold production.

We're hurdling toward a massive financial crisis, and all we have to show for it are financial asset bubbles destined to burst, and when they do, they'll wipe out the artificial wealth they've created for many decades in just a few years, as they did from late 1929 into late 1932!

I believe it is too late to reverse the tidal wave of our financial system’s failure that has been brewing for three decades now. As such, in the next few weeks, an election event will take place that I believe could trigger major volatility ending in a market crash - a speculator implosion.

Retail sales numbers for July came in at a disappointing 0.0% and, after backing out auto sales, retail sales actually declined by 0.3%. That's in spite of much lower gas prices and (supposedly) an improving job market so my guess is that American consumers are simply running into a brick wall of too much debt. This article suggests 9 companies that could prosper from such financially stressed-out consumers.

According to the New York Federal Reserve, 14% of the U.S. population lives in households that have “negative” wealth. In other words, these are households that have more debts piled up than assets, which puts their net worth in minus territory. In today’s chart, we compare the data on negative wealth households with the data on their positive counterparts. There are some obvious and stark contrasts.

The unwinding of the "Central Bank Bubble" will be worse than either the Dot.Com Bubble or the Housing Bubble. It seems like most investors continue to show apathy even with the warnings by us and quite a few others of the "unintended consequences" of the central banks doing things that have never been done before. Those investors are in good company because it appears to us that the leaders of the major central banks of the world do not have any idea of the "unintended consequences" either.

When growth becomes exponential the likelihood is that it won’t last and that there will a substantial move in the opposite direction. This article looks at the unsustainable trends in most asset classes, population numbers, inflation and credit growth and discusses the dire consequences that are most likely to unfold in the years to come as a result.