This note was originally published at 8am on May 06, 2011. INVESTOR and RISK MANAGER SUBSCRIBERS have access to the EARLY LOOK (published by 8am every trading day) and PORTFOLIO IDEAS in real-time.

“Freedom and liberty are now words so worn with use and abuse that one must hesitate to employ them.”

-F.A. Hayek

Earlier this week I gave some air time to Hayek’s chapter titled “The Abandoned Road.” The aforementioned quote comes from the same book (“The Road To Serfdom”). As you think about what Big Government Intervention has done to the US Dollar and The Correlation Risk it perpetuates in markets this morning, don’t forget that the Jobless Stagflation you see emerging from the Fiat Fools finest isn’t employing a sustainable economic recovery.

Both of these Keynesian ideologies are crocks:

1. Fiat Debt - that central planning policy of printing short-term debt (beyond 90% debt/GDP) to solve long-term liabilities is the best path to prosperity

2. Dollar Debauchery - the notion that having an implied monetary policy to devalue the currency and inflate is going to end in “price stability”

What we have here folks is The Price Volatility.

We’ve seen a version of this movie before. Not unlike the Keynesians begging The Bernank to provide markets with “shock and awe” interest rate cuts to zero percent in 2008, this time our professional politicians on Wall Street and in Washington have begged for The Quantitative Guessing.

What has that done for the country?

Well, consider the order of events (causality) that drove The Correlation Risk to lead to the largest weekly decline in oil prices since, you guessed it, 2008:

  1. The Bernank panders to the political wind at the April FOMC meeting keeping all rate hikes off the table
  2. The US Dollar Index proceeds to test its all-time lows in the last week of April (same levels reached in Q2 of 2008)
  3. Energy stocks hit YTD highs on April 29th (month end)

Then, the US Dollar stops crashing (USD = UP +1.6% for this week-to-date)… and commodities start crashing…

Nice. What else happened?

  1. US stocks are down every day since April 29th…
  2. Silver prices have their biggest down week since 1975…
  3. The Volatility Index (VIX) is up +23.4% for the week-to-date…

Cool, right?

The Keynesian Kingdom calls this The Price Stability.

Let me tell you what a small business owner (me) thinks about price volatility - I am less confident to run out and hire people.

That’s why you see weekly US jobless claims breaking out to the upside again (474,000 this week versus 429,000 last week). That’s why you see the Bloomberg weekly consumer confidence reading drop to minus -46.1 this week versus -45.1 last. That’s what volatility does to real businesses with real people making real life risk management decisions.

What’s the answer to this colossal problem of common sense? Get out of the way.

That’s right, the potty trained Risk Managers in financial markets can handle the truth. We are accountable for getting run-over in our long Gold and Oil positions this week. We can handle it – Yes We Can.

As Hayek astutely observed in 1944: “Perhaps the greatest result of the unchaining of individual energies was the marvelous growth of science which followed the march of individual liberty from Italy to England and beyond.” (“The Road To Serfdom”, page 69)

He was talking about the 150 years of industrialization in this world pre WWI (see Chart of The Day below, which I think I have been using in every client presentation for 2 years). The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 doesn’t look so swell for the median global inflation rate on this chart. That’s when the Fiat Fools took over from the Gold Standard … and the financial engineering revolution began.

Fully loaded with yesterday’s drawdown in oil prices, don’t forget that the all-time high price for a barrel of oil (nominal) on an annualized basis was $101/barrel in 2008. Correcting to the all-time high yesterday isn’t called a crash – it’s called a reminder.

Yesterday was one more reminder that we have a choice in this country. We can take our “free” markets back – but first, we have to re-teach ourselves what Employing Liberty’s definition to our lives and markets really means.

What to do from here?

Well, after badgering myself about it at the YTD top, I’m still short the SP500 (SPY) but think it has every opportunity to bounce to another lower-long-term high. My immediate-term TRADE lines of support and resistance for the SP500 are now 1331 and 1351, respectively.

I took down our exposure to Commodities this week to 12% in the Hedgeye Asset Allocation Model by selling our long position in Corn (CORN) and then taking our long Oil and Gold positions to 6%, respectively. If Oil can’t hold its intermediate-term TREND line of support of $98.63 in the next three trading days, I’ll likely sell it all too. The market owes me nothing in this or any other position.

Gold looks much different than Silver or Oil at this point (lower VOLATILITY studies across durations in my models and less concerning PRICE/VOLUME factoring). My Immediate-term lines of support and resistance for Gold are now $1482 and $1523, respectively.

Happy Mother’s Day to my Mom, Mrs. Scott, and Laura, and best of luck out there today,

KM

Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer

Employing Liberty - Chart of the Day

Employing Liberty - Virtual Portfolio