Yesterday, the Dow rose 41 points. Oil and the dollar held steady. But the big news today - the price of gold went back over $900. This morning, the yellow metal is trading at $910.
Is the correction in gold over? Seems so... Will gold fever soon take over?
We interrupt our look at the gold market with the following song lyrics from the Rolling Stones:
Who wants yesterday’s paper?
Who wants yesterday’s girl?
Who wants yesterday’s paper?
Nobody in the world.
What prompts this musical interlude is a thought: that US stocks are yesterday’s news. Maybe the US economy is yesterday’s news too. Maybe the US itself is yesterday’s news.
But what we reckon with today is not a dreary story of the decline and fall of the American empire. No, today...we bring you a cheerful message of hope for the future.
Our Trade of the Decade - Buy Gold, Sell Stocks -- has done pretty well...though not as well as expected. Gold has almost quadrupled. US stocks went down...then came up. Now, they’re back to about where they were 10 years ago. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, however, they’re down about 30%.
Of course, the decade is not over and we’re expecting to squeeze a lot more juice out of this trade before 2010. Still, we’re already looking ahead to the Trade of the NEXT Decade. We’ll take a peak at that below...but first, let’s look at the broad sweep of history. What was the number one success story of the 20th century? America. Oh...yes... there were more frightening stories...and stories with more suffering and more sturm and drang in them. (WWI brought down the leading families in Europe - the Hohenzollerns in Germany...the Hapsburgs in Austro-Hungary...the Romanovs in Russia, not to mention the Ottoman Empire in what is today Turkey. Then, the Soviet Union lost 25 million people in the Great Patriotic War, known in the West as WWII...the Chinese lost tens of millions in Mao’s purges and famines...) But as for stories with a happy ending, there was none bigger...and none happier...than the story of the United States of America.
And now, Will Hutton writes in The Observer that the US will stay ahead of China in the 21st century, because it has more knowledge and brainpower...more universities...and a commitment to new technologies. Maybe Mr. Hutton is right. We had the same idea ourselves, when we were about 14 years old. We recall thinking that America was unbeatable...because she had created an almost perfect meritocracy, in which the brightest people - among whom we immodestly counted ourselves (remember, we were just 14 years old) - would always rise to top positions in government and business. These people could go to public schools and state universities, learn all the latest ideas and useful knowledge, and then apply what they had learned in their careers. The system was self-perfecting all the time.
Later, we realized that the brightest people are capable of making the greatest errors and suffering the biggest delusions...and that even the best systems are inevitably gummed up by self-seeking parasites and corrupted by time. We are, as Aristotle put it, a "deathward going tribe." All our institutions age...decay...and die.
Universities are just are part of the life-cycle...from birth to decadence. Universities follow money and power, not the other way around. People get rich; then they build universities to celebrate and eliminate their wealth. People who could be doing good work on assembly lines or road crews are shunted off to ivy-covered campuses, where they undertake discussions of the role of gender in Egyptian history...or a metaphysical interpretation of the cinematic experience in, say, "Dude, where’s my car?"
Universities impoverish society; the scholars inevitably reduce the net knowledge of the population with foolish ideas and preposterous plans. After a few generations, the professors have introduced not only gender studies and film interpretation, but Social Security, ethanol, Medicaid, central banking, option pricing models, wars on terror, tax rebates, sub-prime mortgages, progressive taxation, direct election of senators - and all the other bugaboos and balderdash of modern societies.
Naturally, all these humbugs cost a lot of money. Yesterday, USA Today gave us an accounting. In the last year alone, it figured, the real deficit of the federal government increased $2.5 trillion. USAT did what we have done many times before - it looked at government finances as if it were a business. Sharp pencils in hand, it found that the federal government has net unfunded obligations of $57.3 trillion - or about half a million dollars per household. Add in state and local budget shortfalls, and you get to $61.7 trillion. This year alone, Medicare added $1.2 to federal obligations. Social Security made the situation worse by $900 billion...and veterans’ benefits tacked on another $34 billion.
The last time we looked, the average American household had net assets of only about $70,000. How is it going to pay more than $500,000 to support government’s promises? In effect, the typical family is broke, with liabilities far greater than its assets.
We only bring this up to explain how it is possible for such a great nation - with so many great universities - to fall into decline.
And now, looking ahead, Bloomberg says the "sub-par growth is the New Normal in the US."
Naturally.
When you reach a certain maturity, with so many burdens on your back, you slow down.
Here in London, Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England, has noticed the same thing. The "NICE" 10 years are behind us, he says. By ‘NICE’ years, he means the years of Non-Inflationary Continuous Expansion.
Now, inflation is a fact of life. Central banks have to fight it with higher rates - which cause slower growth.
And more thoughts...
*** Back to our good news. If the US boom was yesterday’s boom...what is today’s and what will be tomorrow’s boom? What will our Trade of the NEXT Decade be?
Well, we don’t know. But we’re beginning to think our colleague, Manraaj Singh, is right. This is the century of Emerging Markets.
"The first oil shock of the ‘70s was fundamentally a transfer of wealth from the western oil users to the oil producers," he says. "Now, we’re seeing a transfer of wealth to the oil producers...and to the food and raw material producers too."
The latest news is that the emerging markets have already recovered from their October-March losses. You’ll remember, dear reader, that they were hit especially hard by news of a credit crunch in the West - even though they, generally, had no exposure to sub-prime debt. But now they’re booming again. The MSCI Emerging Market index has gone up 4 times in the last five years. Compare that to the Dow - which is flat.
Much of that growth can be traced directly to the boom to the commodities that these countries export - but not all. Some emerging markets - notably China - export neither food, nor fuel, nor raw materials. Instead, they are the biggest importers of these things in the world. In other words, they should be the countries that suffer most when prices rise. Instead, they’re booming too.
What seems to be happening is that the Emerging Markets are doing just what you’d expect. After listening to so many lectures from so many American advisors and busybodies, they’ve finally turned on and tuned in to the new paradigm of modern development. It doesn’t seem to matter what kind of government they have, by the way. Oligarchy, communist dictatorship, old-fashioned dictatorship, popular democracy, monarchy - George W. Bush tells the world that it must have an American-style democracy in order to get rich; he needs to open his eyes. All these emerging markets have access to capital and technology...they have the desire... and they have globalized markets that allow them to sell what they make and buy what they need .
Will mistakes be made? You bet. Huge mistakes. Costly mistakes. But, at least from what we can see, there seems to be no stopping them. Which also makes sense. One of the universal laws of economics is ‘regression to the mean.’ The US - along with other developed countries - must be expected to regress to the mean. There is no inherent reason why they should be richer than other countries - at least no reason we can see. Now, with the Emerging Markets growing fast...and sub-par growth the "new normal" in the US...one rises, while the other falls. Before too long, they will meet - at the mean.
*** Finally, there’s a new gold rush - in Northern California.
The Daily Telegraph tells us that the hills of California are attracting prospectors - just as they did during the Gold Rush of 1848. Walt Eason of the Gold Prospectors Association say a guy might find $15,000 to $20,000 worth of gold in a week.
But "Klondike" Mike LaBox, who’s been panning for gold in Northern California for 50 years, says "too many people think there’s gold just lying along the rivers waiting to be picked up."
Instead, finding gold is hard work. Many new prospectors don’t even find enough gold to buy fuel, says Mike.
More on gold...tomorrow...
P.S. If you enjoyed this article then we encourage you to sign up for the free Fleet Street Daily eletter. Learn what you can expect from today's markets -- and how to prosper in the face of uncertainty. You won't find more thought provoking writing anywhere on the Internet.