Droht eine Inflation? – interessante Parallelen zu den 1960ern
Ambroise Evans-Pritchard (AEP) mit einem interessanten Vergleich der heutigen Lage mit der Zeit vor dem Ausbruch der Inflation in den 1960er Jahren in den USA. Klar ist, die Fed ist in einer echten Schuldenfalle gefangen und wir alle gleich mit!
- “The edifice of hyper-valued assets across the world is built on one elemental premise: that US inflation is dead, and therefore that the US Federal Reserve will continue to bathe international finance with dollar liquidity.” – bto: oder noch besser: Wenn Inflation (endlich!) kommt, wird die Fed (und die anderen Notenbanken) nichts dagegen tun, weil sie so die Schulden entwerten wollen. Siehe auch unsere Diskussion vom Mittwochnachmittag.
- “The US economy looked eerily similar in late 1965. The jobless rate had fallen to 4.2pc – exactly where it is now – without a flicker of wage pressure. It was the calm before the storm.” – bto: damals allerdings mit deutlich weniger Schulden (heute also mehr Interesse an Inflation) dafür heute aber mehr deflationärem Druck (Überkapazitäten, faule Schulden, Zombies).
- “Powerful forces were building below the surface. The US was on the cusp of the Great Inflation. Wall Street equities lost almost 60pc of their value in real terms over the next decade. Bondholders were slaughtered.” – bto: weshalb ich immer vor der These des Inflationsschutzes durch Aktien warne.
- “The collective market bet is that this time is different. It is why investors are so nonchalant about a global economy leveraged to the hilt. The world debt ratio has risen from 276pc of GDP just before the Lehman crisis to a record 327pc today. ” – bto: Und der Schuldenberg muss weiter wachsen, um nicht einzustürzen!
- “It is why the Shiller CAPE price earnings ratio for the S&P 500 is now above the 1929 high at 31.12. It is why we have so many symptoms of excess, whether Wall Street margin debt at three times the pre-Lehman peak, or a surge in the riskiest ‘leveraged loans’ with covenant-lite terms to $750bn. This will be seen in retrospect be seen as another episode of collective madness.” – bto: Ich habe, wie geschrieben, eine Zahl von 1000 Milliarden an leveraged Loans gelesen. Egal. Madness trifft es wohl.
- “Investors have bought into the reassuring hypothesis that inflation has been tamed by the ‚China effect‘ and the ‚Amazon effect‘. These twin forces of globalisation and digital technology have smashed the labour movement. In academic argot, global wage bargaining has flattened the Phillips Curve. Unemployment rates can fall safely below 4pc without igniting wages and setting off a fresh inflation spiral. That at least is the fond hope.” – bto: ergänzt um Schuldendruck, Überkapazitäten und Zombies.
- “Markets have been right so far. Inflationistas who warned for year after year that the Fed’s ultra-radical policies would lead to surging prices patently misunderstood the global liquidity trap after 2008.” – bto: weshalb ich immer von Ketchup-Inflation gesprochen habe und noch spreche. Ich denke, dass es lange genug geschüttelt wird und dann passieren kann, nicht muss.
- “Yet the balance of risk is shifting. It is certainly arguable that the greater danger now is that the Fed will wait too long, wagering that it can safely drive the jobless rate even lower in the benign circumstances of an apparently dormant Phillips Curve. This is what happened in 1965. ‚The cautionary tale from 1965 is that once you see signs of inflation, you have to respond forcefully,‘ said Prof Orphanides, a former Fed veteran (…).” – bto: Aber genau das würde die Fed auf keinen Fall tun.
- “He thinks workers have been clinging to their jobs because the trauma of 2008 was so brutal, and this has distorted labour market signals. ‚It is fear. What happened is nothing like anything people have seen before in their working lifetimes. It is a depression effect like the 1930s. But the forces of supply and demand for jobs are going to kick in sooner or later,‘ he said.” – bto: Das ist zumindest eine einleuchtende Erklärung.
- “Danny Blanchflower, a Dartmouth labour economist and former UK ratesetter, says the parallel with the 1960s is invalid. ‚Globalisation is quite different today. The forces pushing down wages are much stronger. Firms can just up and go to Hungary or Thailand. If there was any truth to the inflation story we would see it in wages, and we don’t,‘ he said.” – bto: also ein Kampf zwischen Inflation und Deflation, der noch nicht entschieden ist.
- “Harvard professor Ken Rogoff doubts that inflation is about to start galloping up when there is still so much slack in the global economy. In his view the greater danger is what happens when ‚real‘ rather than nominal interest rates rise across the globe. ‚If you have a crisis in China that the infects the whole region it could force Asia to call money home. This could shut down the global flow of savings and would be extremely disruptive. You could have a panic scenario,‘ he said.” – bto: Das China-Szenario habe ich öfter diskutiert. Doch auch hier gilt, dass es länger gut geht, als man denkt.
- “Fed officials know full well that they cannot raise rates far without detonating a bond and equity crash: they are already caught in what the BIS calls a central bankers’ ‚debt trap‘. Yet I also suspect that they will underestimate the volcanic effects of their actions on the world financial system, since they are still remarkedly wedded to a pre-global ‚closed-economy‘ model. (…) In the end, the Fed may have no choice. If the bond vigilantes start to sniff inflation they will force up long-term US bond yields and transmit the shock through global markets anyway. The Fed will find itself being led by nose.” – bto: außer die Fed geht “all-in” und kauft wie die BoJ alles zu einem festen Preis auf.
Fazit AEP: “Whether or not we are already at this historic inflexion point is anybody’s guess. We are certainly entering very treacherous waters.” – bto: Dem kann man nicht widersprechen!
