Skip to main content

The current credit cycle dynamic

I read this article Article over at the Economist about the current global credit bubble situation.

I think that there is an excess of money flooding into the bond market from the savers and currency peg maintaining central banks in Asia. It is being sent back to them by debt financed consumption in the developed world which they are putting back into bonds. As long as the trade volume keeps increasing at greater than the rate of interest this will keep going as the Asians keep giving the rest of the world the liquidity to issue new debt and make the interest payments on the bonds.

This will continue until trade volume becomes flat or falling.

A good analogy is that of a person who buys everything he owns from walmart on his walmart credit card. All the profits from walmart gets lent back to the customer so he can pay his interest payments on the credit cards. If walmart stops lending then walmart can't sell anymore. If the customer stops buying than walmart can't fund his interest payments anymore. Of course there is no free lunch in economics. Eventually the interest payments become so high that they exceed walmarts profits. The thing about walmart though is it pays its laborers 50 cents an hour and there are constantly billions flooding in from the countryside to work at walmart. As long as labor is the core cost everything works for now.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's Bernanke going to do during the housing crash?

A Recent NY Times article on the Japanese Housing Bubble got me thinking. Especially this quote: Japanese economists say the United States is not likely to suffer a decline that is as severe or long-lasting as Japan's, because they see a more skilled hand at the tiller of the American economy: the Federal Reserve. Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan, failed to curb the stock and real estate bubbles until mid-1989, when it was too late and prices were sky-high, they said. Translation: It's different this time! Is it really? Let's listen to some words from Mr Bernanke : But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to...

Why there are fewer people in engineering in the U.S : Money

There have been all kinds of articles recently about how the United States is losing its scientific edge because fewer people are going into the sciences and engineering. There is a great deal of handwringing and people talking about the anti-intellectualism of our country, its poor schools, etc and all sorts of wild guesses as to why this is happening. Well India has plenty of anti-intellectualism, poor schools, etc but they are turning out a lot of engineers. The real reason is that being an engineer in the United States does not mean you're going to get rich relative to your real estate speculating condo flipping peers. Let's look at some facts: The International Herald Tribune says that the average wage for an experienced programmer in India is $11,423 a year. The average wage for an experienced programmer in the U.S is $83,000 a year. However the average per capita income in India is $3,100 and in the U.S it is $40,100 . Per capita income is a good indicator of t...

Why there will be no hyperinflation

I have been reading the inflation/deflation debate for some time now on various parts of the web. The inflationists insist that we will collapse like Wiemar. The deflationists insist that we will collapse like Japan. The memory of the 1970s inflation is strong in many an old gold curmudgeon, so the inflationists seem to be more prevalent. I will in this essay attempt to argue that hyperinflation will not happen if global commodity markets remain priced in dollars. The reason for this is that if inflation increases, the rest of the world will bid commodities up drastically, especially oil, and severely throttle U.S economic growth, leading to a more restrictive monetary policy. Hyperinflation always happens due to a foreign exchange crisis. The population, sensing a high level of inflation, rushes to change their earnings in for real goods or foreign currency. In the case of Wiemar, or Argentina, the rest of the world is largely unaffected. They see their currencies drastically...