“If we mean to prosper long term, I am sure we need to act to make debt less attractive to everybody: it really is a snare and a delusion.”
-Jeremy Grantham
I sold my Gold again yesterday, taking the Hedgeye Asset Allocation to Commodities back to 0%. I took my long US Dollar position up to 12%. I have a 70% asset allocation to Cash and couldn’t care less about missing the last few days of another Month-End Markup.
Long-term investors: if you’re betting against the Fiat Fool system of conflicted, compromised, and constrained monetary and fiscal policy, ultimately you are betting on King Dollar’s return. That’s the only way out. We need to let losers lose. We need to deflate.
Deflation is only bad if you are one of the people whose business is to earn a fee on perma-inflating asset prices. For we commoners who have our own capital at risk and are running our own companies for cash flow, deflation is good. We like to buy low, sell high, and earn a spread.
My sense is that the people who didn’t sell high (either in October 2007 or April 2011 – the SP500 is down -25% and -14% from those Policy To Inflate tops, respectively) are the ones whining the most right now, just like they were then.
“Then” was Q3 of 2008. That’s when Old Wall Street’s finest were begging for the “bazooka.” Remember that? “We need some shock-and-awe rate cuts” from the Fed … we “need” Paulson to deliver us the biggest one-sided bailout in the history of the world…
Today, with certain French and Belgian banks not looking any different to us than Lehman did then (marking their Pig Paper at par; Dick Fuld called this “level-3 asset pricing”), what are the Keynesians begging for? Another Bazooka.
This is no ordinary Keynesian Bazooka. This one needs to be 2-3x the size of the biggest man-made financially engineered Delusion, ever.
Back to Grantham…
The aforementioned quote came from Mr. Grantham’s August 2011 Quarterly Letter titled “Danger: Children At Play”, where he opened his always thought-leading missive with the following fear:
“My worst fear about the potential loss of confidence in our leaders, institutions, and capitalism itself are being realized. We have been digging this hole for a long time. We really must be serious in our attempts to resuscitate the fortunes of the average worker.”
Effectively, what he’s calling for is the end of the plundering of American wages and savings accounts; the end of policies to inflate the debt of bad debtors; and the end of abusing our currency for the sake of a conflicted few.
Back to this morning’s Global Macro Grind…
Strong Dollar = Strong America. Period. It did under Reagan inasmuch as it did under Clinton. Both of these Presidents not only saw much lower levels of commodity inflation imposed on their citizenry, they saw the highest levels of employment in modern American history.
- Q: Who needs Commodity inflation? A: The people who are long of commodities.
- Q: What happens when you strengthen the US Dollar? A: You Deflate The Inflation.
With the US Dollar being one of the best Global Macro investments you could have made in the last 3 months, let’s look at what the correlation math says about everything that trades globally in US Dollars (these are inverse correlations – USD up = everything down):
- WTI Crude Oil = -0.87
- Heating Oil = -0.94
- Silver = -0.81
- Copper = -0.88
- Coffee = -0.87
- Oats = -0.87
Now if you take a Washington/Old Wall Street car service to work and don’t need to pay for gas, or if you’re not planning on heating your home this winter… or drinking coffee, or eating oatmeal… or anything like that at all… You should be supporting policies to inflate via US Dollar debauchery.
Otherwise, don’t call yourself a patriot trying to solve this country’s long-term problems via a currency devaluation. Patriots attack the tyranny of self-dealing government policy; they don’t perpetuate it.
Destroying our currency through failed policies didn’t work for us in the 1970s and it’s not working now. It didn’t work for Charles de Gaulle in France in the 1960s, and it won’t work for Sarkozy’s Eurocrats this time around either.
Intraday rallies on rate cuts and bazookas are the Snares and Delusions that I have personally had enough of. This is not leadership. Neither is it going to put America back on the long-term path to prosperity.
My immediate-term support and resistance ranges for Gold, Oil, and the SP500 are now $1, $78.21-84.49, and 1118-1182, respectively.
Best of luck out there today,
KM
Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer
