Tariffs

 A country imposes a tariff to increase the cost of imports of similar goods which are being produced at home due to higher local costs such as higher wages, higher rentals, and higher quality such as tighter QC. Tariff gives the local industry a chance to survive or grow.

The country on whose exports tariffs have been imposed may want to retaliate by imposing tariffs on imports from the first tariff-imposing country. It is not likely that it will be on the same products but probably products which are competing locally or even not.

The end result is that prices of goods and services will rise in both countries on all things with tariffs imposed. There are other consequences. Tariffs are usually imposed with times are tough for local industries. This means higher prices with probably slowly growing demand. These tariffs suck up purchasing power from the local economy into government coffers and this comes in handy as governments are suffering huge deficits around the world. The net impact is smaller quantities consumed and hence production cut. 

Economic recession is inevitable, even if tariffs were originally imposed to restructure global economic balance. 

Economic restructuring usually means some industries will die and new ones come up.

The current global economic problem is something that is waiting to happen and we were not so sure how that was going to happen. This round of tariff imposition among trading countries is surprising but anything could have happened to trigger a global adjustment. For sure, this also means that the US is unlikely to print more money and so we should see a sharp drop in global liquidity and a massive contraction around the world, hitting real estates and banks.

What is happening is something we have been expecting - a massive adjustment in the global economy. A slowdown and recession will take place in the next few years, and it will be sad to see the economic adjustment and deterioration descending into military warfare.

The Value of Living

There is nothing like to feel alive, being able to enjoy life and be happy. This money cannot buy.

Money can of course prevent poverty but poverty is not starvation and not suffering in the strictly absolute sense.

All of us live in relative poverty when compared to all the rich people, in terms of money. Rich people live in relative poverty when compared to ordinary people who can love and trust and be honest in equal measure without fear of the person closest to you stabbing you even when you are guarded.

Of course, all assets are relative in value, relative to money and relative to each other.

Now, the values of all types of assets are going to be measured by which way the economy is going to adjust. 

The biggest fear is that interest rates will rise to curb inflation. It is a bit too late to curb inflation. The world economy is already highly inflated. Prices are already very high, so say too high. Prices must adjust ie to fall in order for the economy to adjust back to equilibrium. Why adjust back? Because the global economy has stopped growing, China has stopped growing. So prices must adjust downwards in the coming future.

Interest rates are not going up because all policy makers and politicians are interested. Their wealth will evaporated as whenever there is an economic depression. We do not need a cut in the money supply for proper adjustment to take place. We just need the growth of the money supply namely the growth of debt creation to slow down. Then deceleration forces will bring about the needed economic correction. Those with their hands full of assets will be devastated.

The cryptocurrency investor has a major reckoning to make. Even cryptocurrency unit is now worth more than an ordinary person's lifetime income. More many of these units are out there waiting to cash out? If all the cryptocurrency units where to be sold, there don't think there is enough volume of the money supply to support that value under the supply curve of cryptocurrency. Even if that happens, the cryptocurrency investor will now hold all the money supply in the world and surely the interest rate on money will rise. They would want interest rates to be high then they can gain from holding cash. There is a convoluted thinking in cryptocurrency. We will let the cryptocurrency investors figure that one out. Similarly, the case with gold investors. The only real gold investors are those accumulating gold to support a new international reserve money. They will not ever sell their gold holdings, as would be the case for cryptocurrency investors who want to be wealthy in that digital unit.

The food for thought here is the nature of value of assets as we await how policymakers decide to solve their debt repayment problem. Unless, they all print money till all hell breaks loose, which it seems to be. Then, we should be gladness just to be alive. Enjoyment of life is an added bonus. How cool the night is tonight. Nice!

The Nature of Risk

Nobody invest with a view to risk. Everybody invest in the belief that they will make money for sure. If they are not sure, they would not have invested.

But there are risks in investments. And people do lose money in investments.

So what happens?

People believe that prices rise and fall for all assets over time. Even those who are absolutely convinced that property values will keep rising in city centres because the population keeps rising and there is limited space in city centres.

But city centres do shift. There are many inner city decays and inner city slums and poverty.

People keep building new assets, designs keep improving as well as the way of life.

Nothing is static. Things in life keeps changing.

It is not true that if you just sit on your assets and do nothing, the prices of your assets will keep rising.

There is this fantasy that one can just accumulate more and more assets and become richer and richer.

All that happens in the end is that there will be companies that grow and grow with assets, and there are people running the companies and they are not owners of the companies. There are these non-human legal entities that just keep accumulating, apparently under the same name, but inside the companies, the corporate ownerships have changed many times, and the founders and their descendants have long sold off their grandfathers' assets and blown off their wealth.

It is true that as the world gets older and more and more people are building more and more assets, more and more assets will come into existence and they will all crowd around certain areas for critical mass. These assets will be owned by people and companies of all shapes and sizes. Or they could all be left in ruins, like all ancient cities and civilisations.

The real question is where do we as individuals come into the picture?

Do we want to become like individuals who spend all their lives accumulating gold and carrying sacks of gold on their backs?

Or are we masters of ourselves and living this world and, at the same, making sure that we have just sufficient means to be able to enjoy this short life that we have. No more, no less. If not, only slightly more but no less.

In which case, we should be spending our younger days working hard and saving, so that we have the means to enjoy our lives when we are not physically or mentally capable of exerting ourselves in the struggles of living.

The risk of accumulating assets is that we have forgotten the primary purpose of accumulating them and have forgotten to live and enjoy our lives.

Some would ask with vastly accumulated assets, we can have all the riches to live our lives the way we want. It is very hard to be rich and humble. It is also very hard to be rich and know the value of living. When very rich, we also know our cleverness and become arrogant and try to reshape the world around us to our own whims and fancies.

It is very easy to fall into the trap and think that what we believe is reality.

The truth is that we are all nothing and we will all die and there is nothing about us to be arrogant about.

We should be spending our remaining days enjoying the quietness and solitude of time spent with ourselves and loved ones, saying all the things we want to be able to say to each other face to face one simple word at a time.

All the assets are like the roof over our heads and rooms to keep us safe and warm. We can use money to buy things and comfort, but we can only discover for ourselves the true happiness of quiet contentment, that we alone are quite sufficient for us alone.

Asset values rise and fall with the madness of people as they react in fear to the uncertainty of the future which is always uncertain and hence always at risk.

The Value Of Gold

The value of gold can hold only when everybody wants to buy gold and keep and does not want to sell.

The only people in the world who keep gold forever are those from ancient civilisations which must have known, from history, that gold is something that has lasting value.

The only institutions in the world which keep gold forever are the central banks when gold is the only money and money is gold. This was true in the past when first it was the silver standard (Spain and the Incas) and then evolved into the gold standard. During the silver standard, silver was dug out in Peru and after trading was buried in the soil in China by corrupt officials. The gold standard was used by the British and abandoned by the Americans. 

The reason was that the standard restricts trade as there was a shortage of the money supply. When money becomes fiat, there is no shortage of the money supply and the only problem becomes an oversupply. The answer to the problem of the money supply is a rule on the restriction of the money supply which no government today seems to be willing to adhere to. The alternative answer is a return to the gold standard whereby the supply of money is constrained by the output in digging gold out of the ground.

Bitcoin ostensibly comes in to replace gold as a standard for the money supply where the supply of bitcoin is dependent on some computer algorithm and the amount of precious electricity required to run the program. But this is no different from a money standard based on the number of kangaroos in the world, or any other exotic or esoteric output. Furthermore, who gives the authority to bitcoin for bitcoin to be the world standard for money - nobody. But this does not detract people from buying paintings of dead people as the supply would certainly be restricted to the existing available.

Same as for bitcoin, there is nothing to prevent gold being accumulated and used in some cases for the payment of bilateral transactions, if both parties so do agree, just as in any other barter trading arrangement.

The point to make is that the price of gold is very high now because first there are people want to buy and keep gold and are buying and keeping gold. Second, there is an enormous of fiat money that has been printed and because of the oversupply of the money supply, people are selling the fiat money for real and tangible assets like gold, silver, minerals, oil, etc. Not sure how real and tangible bitcoin is.

A more interesting question is: Will the price of gold ever reverse? If the people who are keeping gold do not need money and are keeping the gold forever, then no.

Under what conditions will the price of gold reverse? When the opportunity cost of holding money is too high. I.e., when the interest rate is high, say, 5% or 8% p.a., on fiat money. When the return of investment is high, such as in stocks and shares. This may be in certain stocks, as the global economy is adjusting the current technology which seems to be threatening every human job. This last point is interesting.

If computers and machines are doing all the work producing output, who will be consuming that output. If humans are out of a job and have no money, then humans cannot consume that output. The machine produced output will go bankrupt and have to stop.

What do humans do then? Humans go back to the farm and live a simple life eating durian.

There seems to be a way out for policymakers today. Forget about the super-rich investors in technology which are producing output that no humans can afford. Focus on the agriculture sector whereby owner-farmers can grow enough simple food to feed their families. There is plenty for farm-based industries to grow, using the use of super-machines.

Accumulate gold by all means. Most likely this is your savings, your surplus capital. You have more money than you will ever need. Trading in gold and other assets is just a game you play to while away your time alone.

For those who want to live, it may be more useful to engage in more physical and down-to-earth activities which have direct benefit to your physical and mental health, making you tired and hungry, so that rest and eating are joys in your life. The value of gold is just a theoretical consideration done at leisure in quiet solitude.

The Illusionary Nature of Value

When markets collapse, we hear of the loss of billions in value. 

Just like during good times when markets rise, people feel good because they feel they are extremely rich.

The funny thing is this - that the value of any class of assets is measured by the last market traded price of probably one unit of that asset class.

It is by simple extrapolation of that last market price to the entire asset class that has not been sold that value is measured - what they call market capitalisation.

Market capitalisation is a theoretical concept that has no representation in real life. You cannot eat market capitalisation. You can only eat the last assets that you have sold for cash that you can use the cash to consume. The assets that you hold of which you imagine to be worth so very much because of the price that is currently going on in the market is a fool's paradise. 

Of course, it is better to have assets in your hands than no assets at all - because at least at the end of the day, when need be, you have something to sell for cash.

My point is to discourage people from imagining how wild rich they are when in fact they are holding onto to something durable or tangible which carries some value in the future (before of their durability), of which we have no clue what it will be when we need to sell the asset.

It is for this reason that people with extra money need to work hard and pay attention to markets so that they can ensure that the assets that they are holding hold the value that they desire.

There is no guarantee to the value of their assets - because the value is dependent on market conditions.

This is the great disaster story about saving for retirement by entire populations. But that is another story.

Financial Market & The Economy

The financial market collapse has nothing to do with the economy.

The financial market collapses because there are no more greater fools coming after them.

Everybody is looking for a way out of the financial market without losing money.

They are all stuck with financial assets with prices so high that they are ridiculous. Everybody knows that but who is to blink first.

So there is no one to blink first. Everybody is looking for a common excuse to dump the market.

That excuse is the economy.

Everybody knows that the economy has been gone for several years now, ever since covid, ever since the Russia invasion of Ukraine, ever since the CCP cracks down on its own private sector and scare foreign investors.

Everybody knows that the economic problem will be covered up by a major war where sentiments are brewing now and threaten to blow up anytime soon.

The global economy is in trouble because all economies have reached the limits of their government debt financing and the limits of zero interest money supply expansion.

The impact of relentless money printing in the last decades, apart from stimulating the China economy, has been to create a real estate bubble as evidenced by ordinary working people being unable to afford basic housing in the home land. Real estate in capital cities around the world has been fed by corrupt money inevitable from excessive money printing.

The adjustment in the real economy that needs to be seen is in the real estate sector. This has been long in coming because banks are trying very hard to stall the adjustment. Banks are inundated with actual and potential bad loans in real estate for which they are probably inadequately covered by their provisions. The collapse of the real estate in major cities and the collapse of major banks are the next major things to look out for.

This reaction in the financial market is probably major -we do not know how much the adjustment will be this time. Stocks and all kinds of financial assets include cryptocurrencies have been way over inflated. The extent of the adjustment will depend on the amount of spare cash that investors still have to buy up the fallen financial assets. If there is little money floating around, then financial asset prices will be depressed. This may spend problems for banks if they have been funding financial assets all the while.

The real estate adjustment depends on the state of the economy. The real estate sector needs rental to support their mortgage repayments. If business prospects are bad, then rentals will be low and insufficient. Real estate prices will have to fall. Probably by a sharp margin as well.

Bankers have a lot to worry about.

Finally, the saviour of the human race will be the IT sector, the electronics, the digital and everything that has to do with electrical and electronics. The feeding frenzy before has been a new frontier of technology which has brought about a new way of living. Everybody now interfaces with an electronic device.

But technology is now so well developed and embedded in consumer goods such that there is no necessity by the average person to constantly change the rice cooker, the TV, the laptop, the handphone. We are quite happen with what we already have now, thank you. So ends consumer demand for electronic goods.

The last frontier seems to the electric vehicle. Well, for now, no.

I think the human race has developed technology so rapidly in the last three to four decades that it has exhausted the possibility for further enticement of the human greed and curiosity. We are quite happy with what we already have. Our children are quite happy with what we have given them. There is no need to make more babies.

The one last adjustment that is needed is to align the cost of real estate with the purchasing power of the average person. With the end of indiscriminate money printing, there is no more corrupt floating about. The price of real estate in prime locations will have to adjust downwards. How much depends the quality of new jobs being created and the salaries they pay.

The economy is taking a path of its own to adjust. It has very little to do with the current financial market adjustment. The chicken have come home to roost.

Global Markets: Correction, Reversal or Normalisation?

When the Bank of Japan raised its costs of funds from zero to 0.25%, stocks tumbled and the currency strengthened. What is happening?

This is not just about Japan with its thirty years of zero interest rates but also the differential in interest rates among currencies.

The US Fed raised the interest rate on its Fed funds from zero by a quarter of a percentage point in March 2022, to 4.50% by the end of 2022 to 5.50% today. This major increases were to stamp inflation which unfortunately did not quite work because higher prices came from supply side disruption to the supply chain during covid and subsequently the oil price increases as a result of the Russian attack on Ukraine.

The US rate increases have created problems for many countries which fear the impact of significantly higher local interest rates on their domestic borrowers who are mostly heavily invested in real estate as well as the stock market. As a result, most of these currencies suffered depreciation as savers opted for higher rates in the US dollar. This happens to the yen and the ringgit as well.

In Japan, its main problem had been deflation as a result of the asset bubble which burst in 1991 and real estate had deflated and had been unable to recover since. Borrowers were caught with multi-generational loans and these basically prevented any youngsters from borrowing anew to fund new activities while in the meantime diligent housewives continued to save. Japan pursued a zero interest rate since 1990 to try to persuade housewives to spend and reflate the economy. Perversely, the government was trying all means to create inflation in the economy but to no avail for a long time, until recently.

Tourism is now its tool for reviving the Japan economy which after covid has gained tremendous interest such as there is now an aversion to too much tourism. In the meantime, online trading of ordinary Japanese goods has also increased. While all these economic activities are good for creating jobs and profits in Japan, the currency continues to weaken despite the inflow of tourist money. They discovered that Japanese online trading has been too dependent on foreign logistical and payment systems which they have to pay significant fees on. Of course, underlying the Japanese financial story is the borrowing of zero interest yen from Japanese banks and investing those funds abroad, not only to earn higher interest rates or better profits from expanding markets (see the many new Japanese stores open in major cities in Southeast Asia), but also to benefit from the weakening yen.

In an apparent act of desperation to prevent the yen from a depreciating trend, the BOJ raised its interest rate from 0.1% to 0.25% on 31st July, 2024. This is an act against all global interest rate policies which is to lower interest rates as economies around the world as beginning to falter on account of political interference in private investor decisions which therefore entails a significant realignment of global investor strategies among global companies. (The horse the world has bet on has become unreliable.)

It is to be noted that, as of today, what the slight but contrarian interest rate increase by Japan has caused the yen to rise as (some) funds have been sold and repatriated back to yen. The currencies of some other countries have also strengthened, including the ringgit, in an apparent mimic to the yen.

Many commentators are arguing that this is because of the loss of zero interest rate on the yen, but it is only a 0.15 percentage point increase which is small. 

The significance of the (slight) increase in the Japanese interest rate is signal to where the global markets are. That the global markets have been too high for too long and there is now going to be a major adjustment. When this major adjustment happens, don't be the last one holding the baby. So the correct market behaviour is to sell first, and buy back later when prices have fallen enough. This is we see in the global markets today.

Which of course means that the market recovery can be equally quick but probably not to previous highs.

The markets have already known that the global economy is in trouble and they are playing US interest rates coming down. This game is still being played.

The reason for small currencies such as the ringgit to appreciate lately is because forex traders have also been playing on the depreciating trend of the currencies. They could be shorting the currencies and now they have to pull back and cover their positions. In doing so, the currencies strengthened more than necessary. Eventually, everything will fall back to fundamentals.

The economies in the world are in bad shape. Loans are drying up, regardless of whether cheap or expensive. This reduces liquidity. The money supply can be reduced by the decline in the velocity of circulation as less transactions are being made. Cash sits stale in the bank. If you have gold, there is no return and if the price of gold has dropped, then you have lost money. Of course, if you had bought gold earlier, just like every other assets, you are rich asset-wise. To spend you need cash.

The global markets are currently undergoing a quick correction, but they will before long continue as before. Interest-rate disparity among currencies are still there. Economies will continue to crumble. The prospects of war shines a light for economic recovery but what a lousy way to live and prosper (for some).