Dear Diary,

We’ll have a full report on our trip to the high plains of the punalater.

In short, we never got there… and practically died trying.

Today, let’s check on the world of money. That’s the world that really matters, isn’t it?

The Dow is still within 300 points of its all-time high.

Gold is sticking to the $1,200-an-ounce level like a burr on a wool sweater. It’s been there for about two years and shows no sign of getting restless.

Too Many Geezers

So far, we’ve proposed two reasons why the 21st century has been such a dud…

First… the developed nations are cursed with too many geezers.We have nothing against old people (especially as we hope to be one ourselves all too soon). But old people do not build a new economy; young people do. And today, there are not enough young people to power the kind of economic growth we’ve gotten used to.

Second… rules, regulations, subsidies, laws and orders now protect established financial interests against upstart competitors.

Businesses get older along with the population, as government creeps over more and more of the economy.

The feds use monopoly force to prevent competition and reward today’s voters and capital owners. The baby born in 2015 finds himself subject to debts, obligations and restrictions that were meant to benefit his grandparents.

Today, we give you another reason for the flop that is the 21st century. As you will see, they are all related…

Caveat Creditor

We begin with this report from Fox Business:

Mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae (FNMA) just debuted its new “HomePath Ready Buyer Program,” which lets first-time homebuyers get up to a 3% rebate of a home’s purchase price if they buy a Fannie Mae property, so long as they complete an online homebuyer education course which costs $75.

The new HomePath Ready Buyer Program, as described by Fannie Mae, could create $4,500 in savings on a $150,000 home for first-time buyers (defined as borrowers who have not owned a home in the prior three years).

In addition to the 3% rebate, Fannie Mae will refund the cost of the homebuyer education course. […]

This new program comes after Melvin Watt, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced last December that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (FMCC) would soon start buying mortgage securities backed by 30-year loans with just 3% down payments, which banks largely halted delivering two years ago, instead demanding 20% down.

That’s right: We’re back to 3% down payments, rebated. And we’re back to the feds (Fannie Mae is a government entity) encouraging people to load themselves down with mortgage debt.

“Stimulus,” is what they call it. “A debt trap” is what it really is.

Housing is essentially a form of consumption – of lifestyle enhancement – instead of capital enhancement. And consumption debt has become so weighty that it drags the entire world economy down.

Even the International Monetary Fund says so. Here’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in British newspaper The Telegraph:

The International Monetary Fund has sounded the alarm on the exorbitant levels of debt across the world, this time literally.

The IMF’s World Economic Outlook describes a prostrate planet caught in a low-growth trap as the population ages across the Northern Hemisphere, and productivity splutters. Nor is this malaise confined to the West. The fertility rate has collapsed across the Far East. China’s workforce is shrinking by three million a year.

The report warned of a “persistent reduction” in the global growth rate since the Great Recession of 2008-2009, with no sign yet of a return to normal. “Lower potential growth will make it more difficult to reduce high public and private debt ratios,” it said.

Christine Lagarde, the Fund’s managing director, calls it the “New Mediocre.” […]

The world has been drawn deeper into a Faustian Pact.

Total public and private debt levels have reached a record 275% of GDP in rich countries, and 175% in emerging markets. Both are up 30 points since the Lehman crisis.

Nobody knows for sure whether this is benign, or how it will end. The haunting fear for the lords of global finance at IMF headquarters this year is that it may never be repaid. Caveat Creditor.

The Root Cause of the Global Slump

Mediocre?

Not at all: Mediocrity would be a big improvement. What we’ve got here is awfulness.

Debt doesn’t only slow GDP growth. It pushes it into reverse. That is what we’ve seen so far in the 21st century. The typical American has less money to spend today than he had in 1999. The century has set him back.

Here is Lacy Hunt and Van Hoisington of Hoisington Investment Management:

Over the more than two thousand years of economic history, a clear record emerges regarding the relationship between the level of indebtedness of a nation and its resultant pace of economic activity.

The once flourishing and powerful Mesopotamian, Roman and Bourbon dynasties, as well as the British Empire, ultimately lost their great economic vigor due to the inability to prosper under crushing debt levels.

In his famous paper “Of Public Finance” (1752) David Hume, the man some consider to have been the intellectual leader of the Enlightenment, wrote about the debt problems of Mesopotamia and Rome. The contemporary scholar Niall Ferguson of Harvard University also described the over-indebted conditions in all four countries mentioned above.

Since 1940, real per capita GDP in the US grew by 2.5% a year. That’s mediocre. But since the 21st century began, real per capita growth has averaged only 1% a year. That’s downright awful.

Hunt and Hoisington explain why:

The reason for the remarkably slow expansion over the past decade and a half has to do with the accumulation of too much debt.

Numerous studies indicate that when total indebtedness in the economy reaches certain critical levels there is a deleterious impact on real per capita growth.

Those important over-indebtedness levels (roughly 275% of GDP) were crossed in the late 1990s, which is the root cause for the underperformance of the economy in this latest expansion.

Non-farm business productivity is rising at the slowest rate in 50 years. And the velocity of money – the speed at which each unit of currency changes hands and a key component of inflation – has fallen to the lowest level in half a century.Why?

Because of the declining marginal utility of debt. When there is little debt, you can add cash and credit to a system and get a boost.

The money circulates. The economy revs up. But the more you add, the greater the burden of debt becomes… and the less of a boost you get from it.

Finally, you’ve ballooned the Fed’s balance sheet to $4.5 trillion and you’re getting a measly 1% per capita GDP growth in return.

And then… as in the first quarter of this year… the growth falls to near zero.

All the “stimulus” since 2000 was a scam.

It stimulated nothing but more debt – which slows the rate of real growth.

Regards,

Bill