As pundits and politicians continue to speculate about economic recovery, hundreds of companies large and small are struggling under loads of debt, filing for bankruptcy and closing their doors.
In September, 54 more large companies filed for bankruptcy, according to S&P Global intelligence. A total of 509 companies have gone bankrupt this year as of Oct. 4, exceeding the number of filings during any comparable period since 2010. That was piled on top of the 54 companies that filed for bankruptcy protection in August.
Regal Cinemas shut down all of its US theaters this week. The company said the closure is temporary, but it reveals the deeper strain in the retail sector. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey digs deeper into the retail mess and talks about what it is telling us about the broader economy. He also discusses the ongoing stimulus debate and the national debt news that nobody is talking about.
The economy has gone through the quickest and arguably the deepest collapse in history, but the stock market has been rallying. How can this be? In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey says look no further than the Federal Reserve. Despite the economic chaos, it has managed to blow up stock market bubble X.0 He also talks about a move China recently made that ups the ante in the “war on cash.”
In a speech at the Cambridge House Vancouver Resource Investment Conference back on Jan. 19, 2020, Peter Schiff said it was “game over” for the Federal Reserve. It’s interesting to look back at his remarks in context with what’s going on over at the central bank today. If it was game over then, where are we now?
The Dow Jones is back of 25,000 and despite increasing tensions with China, people seem pretty optimistic about the economic future as states begin to open back up. SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap host Mike Maharrey says people should know better. He makes his case by digging into some of the long-term ramifications of the economic shutdown and the government/central bank response to it. He also recaps the last month in the gold and silver markets.
The economy was booming. The stock market was setting records. Then coronavirus came along and governments shut things down to minimize the pandemic. That led to massive layoffs and a nasty recession. But once states open up, things will spring back to life and the economy will go back to being great again.
That’s the mainstream narrative. But it’s not based on reality.
Sometimes you need to look back at where we come from to understand where you’re going. Peter Schiff does just that in his May 27 podcast. He analyzes the stock market surge of last year and concludes the mainstream might be a little over-optimistic on where we’re heading. The recent surge in stocks isn’t based on economic reality. The economic reality is we’re an insolvent zombie nation. We’re just on a giant Fed-induced sugar high.
During a recent 60 Minutes interview, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said there is “no limit” to what the Fed can do. Indeed, the central bank has pulled out all the stops.
But while the actions of the central bank are extreme, we’ve seen them operate out of this playbook before, if not at this level.
The Federal Reserve and the US government are rerunning the exact same policies they turned to in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but on a much grander scale. We have bigger QE, more money printing, more government spending and bigger deficits. Case in point — the money supply grew at a record rate in April with no sign of slowing down.
There seems to be mounting optimism that the US economy will rebound relatively quickly as states begin opening up and there is progress toward a coronavirus vaccine. But the optimism ignores deep problems in the US economy that existed before the pandemic – chief among them staggering levels of debt and the proliferation of zombie companies.
In the last couple of years, corporate debt has blown through the roof. So much so that the Federal Reserve issued warnings about the increasing levels of corporate indebtedness late last year.
For years, I have been warning that during the age of permanent stimulus (which began in earnest with the Federal Reserve’s reaction to the dotcom crash of 2000), each successive economic contraction would have to be met with ever larger, increasingly ineffective, doses of monetary and fiscal stimulus to keep the economy from spiraling into depression. I have also said that the enormity of the asset price gains over the last 10 years had increased the danger because reflating the bloated stock, real estate, and public and private debt markets would bring on doses of stimulus that could prove lethal for the economy. But even though I expected that the next financial crisis would be catastrophic, I thought that it would come into the world in the usual way, as a credit crisis triggered by over-leverage. But the Coronavirus ripped up those stage notes, and instead ushered in a threat that is faster and deeper than I imagined, and I imagined a lot. It’s a perfect storm, a black swan with teeth.
