Stocks rallied and the price of gold got a bounce after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell released a dovish trial balloon on Wednesday.
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Powell seemed to indicate interest rates are “just below the broad range of estimates of the level that would be neutral for the economy.” Investors and pundits widely interpreted this to mean the central bank may well be near the end of its tightening cycle.
In this special episode of It’s Your Dime, Mike Maharrey switches roles and becomes the interviewee.
Mike recently appeared on Inside the News with Paul Jensen and Suzanne Sherman on K-TALK AM1640 in Utah to talk about the popping of the auto bubble and more generally how the Federal Reserve has set us up for the next big crash.
Bankers, investors and executives are increasingly worried about corporate debt, according to a Reuters report.
Specifically, the concerns center around “leveraged lending.” These are loans made to firms already deeply in debt. Think subprime loans for corporations. As the Reuters report put it, “the concern is that the loans would be difficult to either collect or resell in a downturn, putting both the borrower and lender at risk.”
Last week, we reported that it looks like the air is coming out of housing bubble 2.0. Now it appears the auto bubble may have also popped.
Yesterday, GM announced plant closures and layoffs due to sluggish sales. The big automaker said it plans to shutter five North American factories and slash around 14,000 jobs.
Peter Schiff put it pretty bluntly in a podcast last week. We don’t have a booming economy. We have bubbles. And it looks like the air is starting to come out of some of those bubbles. We see signs of trouble, particularly in interest rate-sensitive sectors such as real estate. As just one example, home sales in California have hit the lowest level in a decade. And it’s not just California. We’re seeing declines in many of the “most splendid housing bubbles” in America. Even more troubling is that we’re seeing these tremors and interest rates aren’t historically high.
Yet.
But they are rising quickly. According to an article in Wolf Street, they may soon hit 6% and that could be the real tipping point.
Generally, when the mainstream talks about gold, you get a negative spin. So, whenever I see anybody in the mainstream talking positively about the yellow metal, I sit up and take notice. Well, MarketWatch had some positive things to say about gold recently, calling it “the best house in bad neighborhood” for 2019.
Last week, we got data on the producer price index. It came in at o.6%, a much hotter number than expected. It was the biggest jump in the PPI in six years. Year-over-year, producer prices are up 2.8%.
Analysts expected the monthly increase to come in at half that – 0.3%. While the Fed typically looks at consumer prices to gauge inflation, producer prices are also significant. After all, the cost of production is ultimately passed on to the consumer.
As soon as that PPI number came out, the price of gold dropped about $10. As Peter Schiff pointed out in a recent podcast, this is because the markets still don’t get it. They are playing checkers instead of chess.
Americans took on another $10.9 billion in debt in September, according to data released by the Federal Reserve. That pushed total consumer debt to a seasonally adjusted $3.95 trillion. American indebtedness is growing at a 3.3% rate.
But there are signs that American credit card borrowing is slowing down and that’s not good news in an economy built on consumer spending and debt.
As the stock market was tanking last month, Peter Schiff said a recession is obviously coming. Now things have calmed down a little bit and everybody seems convinced October was just a bad month — a needed correction. But as Peter has been saying, there are some fundamentals everybody is ignoring that look really bad. The housing market, in particular, is showing signs of trouble. In fact, we don’t have a booming economy; we have a bubble.
In an article published on Seeking Alpha, Mad Genious Economics provides an in-depth breakdown of an economy rolling over, focusing specifically on housing and auto markets, the trade war and banking.
October jobs numbers came out on Friday and everybody was all giddy about healthy growth. But in his most recent podcast, Peter Schiff said jobs are just another bubble about to burst.
