How are you weathering the great government shutdown of 2018?
We’re in day seven now. It’s been tough here in Lexington. I’m pretty sure I saw some kid setting up an unauthorized lemonade stand. I’m not sure we will survive the plague that’s sure to follow without the FDA to put a lid on such things.
The SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap podcast combines a succinct summary of the week’s precious metals news coupled with thoughtful analysis. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
We often criticize the Federal Reserve for its three rounds of quantitative easing. Coupled with artificially low interest rates, Fed QE stimulus — essentially money creation –pumped up all kinds of asset bubbles. Now that the US central bank is trying to tighten, we’re beginning to see the air seep out of those bubbles.
But when it comes to QE, the Federal Reserve has nothing on the European Central Bank. The ECB just announced the end of its QE program this month. The ECB’s QE purchases totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.6 trillion euros. The bank also pushed interest rates below zero. So, what did the EU get for all this stimulus? Not a whole lot.
Student loan debt has grown to over $1.5 trillion. And that just accounts for loans held by Federal Student Aid. It doesn’t include private loans. Meanwhile, the Department of Education says 43% of those government-backed loans are considered “in distress.”
In a speech last month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos put the current level of student debt in perspective.
One-point-five trillion dollars is almost impossible to fathom. So, let me put it this way: $1.5 trillion is more than $10,000 of someone else’s student loan debt for each and every American taxpayer—145 million of them.”
Between Christmas 2017 and Christmas 2018, the US government added a staggering $1,370,760,684,441.54 to the national debt, according to Treasury Department figures.
If you split that up between all American, your share of Uncle Sam’s 2018 spending spree comes to about $4,178.10.
Merry Christmas!
You’re welcome.
There was no Santa Clause rally on Christmas Eve. Instead, US stock markets continued to tank. The Dow Jones dropped 653 points. The S&P 500 fell another 2.7% and officially entered into bear territory. It was the worst Christmas Eve’s on Wall Street in history. The Washington Post put it in stark terms.
By the end of Monday’s shortened holiday trading session, the great bull market that began in the lows of March 2009 lay lifeless, capping a three-week, 16 percent sell-off of the S&P 500.”
As Peter Schiff put it, “The Grinch stole the Santa Clause rally.”
As WolfStreet put it, the $1.3 billion leveraged loan market has come unglued.
“Leveraged loans” are made to firms already deeply in debt. Think subprime loans for corporations. As with any risky loan, they could be difficult to either collect or resell in a downturn, putting both the borrower and lender at risk.
What the Federal Reserve doesn’t understand about the market is that the market is going to continue to keep falling until they cut rates again and do another round of quantitative easing. The market is acting like a drug addict in withdrawal thanks to the drugs (easy, cheap money) the Fed gave everyone during the Obama presidency, but have had it taken away during the Trump presidency (Fed rate hikes – quantitative tightening). Now the drug addict (stock market) wants its drugs back.
Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer is my favorite Christmas special. And Yukon Cornelious is one of my favorite characters in the show. I mean what’s not to like, right? He’s a man’s man. He openly carries a gun. He travels with cornmeal and gunpowder and ham hocks and guitar strings. And he’s always on the lookout for silver and gold.
Smart guy!
The SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap podcast combines a succinct summary of the week’s precious metals news coupled with thoughtful analysis. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
