GDP is Waste

By Charles Hugh Smith


Any system that has no way to measure, much less prioritize, opportunity costs and maximization of utility is not just flawed--it is terribly misguided and structurally destructive.
We're told the gross domestic product (GDP) measures growth, but what it really measures is waste: capital, labor and resources squandered in quixotic pursuit of waste masquerading as "growth." 


50 million autos and trucks stuck in traffic, burning millions of gallons of fuel while going nowhere? Growth! All that wasted fuel adds to GDP. Everyone who works from home detracts from "growth" since they didn't waste fuel sitting in traffic jams.

Repaving a little-used road: growth! Never mind the money could have been invested in repairing a heavily traveled road, or adding safe bikeways, etc.--in the current neo-Keynesian system, building bridges to nowhere is "growth."

GDP has no mechanism to measure mal-investment or the opportunity costs of squandering capital, labor and resources on investments with marginal or even negative returns
.
Buying a new refrigerator that could have been fixed by replacing a $10 sensor: growth! GDP has no mechanism for calculating the utility still remaining in roads, vehicles, buildings, etc. that are replaced--throwing away all the fixed-investment's remaining utility to buy a new replacement is strongly encouraged because it adds to "growth."

Building and maintaining extraordinarily costly weapons systems that are already obsolete: growth! The gargantuan future costs of interest paid by taxpayers on the debt borrowed to pay for the obsolete weapons is not calculated by GDP. The staggering costs of indebting future taxpayers is ignored by GDP--the only thing that counts in GDP is "growth."

Tearing out a functioning kitchen to install granite countertops and new appliances: growth! GDP has no mechanism to measure the decline of quality in new appliances, or the marginal utility of granite countertops over the existing surfaces.

Writing complex derivatives designed to defraud the buyers: growth! The immense profits booked by investment banks and the bloated salaries of the financiers who wrote and sold the guaranteed-to-default derivatives add greatly to GDP.

Creating another huge bureaucracy to oversee the financiers: growth! Squandering taxpayers' money on more layers of bureaucracy adds to "growth" and GDP--never mind that the labor is all wasted, since a 12-page law could have achieved the same results at near-zero cost.
GDP has no mechanism to measure the value of alternatives that use less capital, labor and resources to get the same results.

Tossing out an item of clothing that was worn once or twice in favor of the latest fashion: growth! GDP has no mechanism to measure what else could have been done with the oil burned to ship the new item of clothing across the Pacific and truck it to the retailer; if a consumer spends money on the new clothing, GDP registers that as "growth" (the only economic metric we measure and value) without calculating what else could have been done with the non-renewable resources squandered on frippery.

GDP is another outmoded part of the Keynesian Cargo Cult that worships "growth" and spending (a.k.a. aggregate demand) as the only goal. The Keynesian Cargo Cultists believe that paying people to dig holes and refill them is an excellent strategy for "growth:" ordering bureaucrats to bury wads of cash in abandoned mines and then turning the unemployed hordes loose to find the cash is Keynes' own example of worthy ways to generate "growth."

This narrow way of understanding the world completely ignores the non-renewable nature of fossil fuels and the critical concept of maximizing the utility of capital, labor and resources.
Any system that has no way to measure, much less prioritize opportunity costs (i.e. what else could have been done the capital, labor and resources) and maximization of utility is not just flawed--it is terribly misguided and structurally destructive.

A History Of Money & Banking In the United States- Part 1

Watch the Canadian Dollar

I would not jump out on a limb here and make any grand prognostication or hard call here, as everything may change come this afternoon. That said, we are seeing some interesting trading dynamics in the Canadian Dollar, represented here by the Currency Shares Trust- FXC. Lets look at the chart-

What is interesting here is that despite the Euro, the yen, and the pound all breaking down below recent or long-term support levels, the Canadian Dollar has held the line. Of course the trend may be more of a story concerning interest rates in Canada, but it may also indicate a lack of conviction by Canadian Dollar traders as it pertains to the possibility of an interest rate increase by the Fed. More so, significant upside volume has come in at the support levels, which may also be another indicator that traders in the Canadian/US cross rate see little to muted changes in the interest rate differentials between the two nations. The Canadian Dollar trade should probably be on your screen of indicators to watch.

The Fed Has A Big Surprise Waiting For You

from The Automatic Earth

The topic of potential interest rate hikes by central banks is no longer ever far from any serious mind interested in finance. Still, the consensus remains that it will take a while longer, it will take place in a very gradual fashion, and it will all be telegraphed through forward guidance to anyone who feels they have a need or a right to know. Sounds like complacency, doesn’t it?

Now, it seems obvious that the Bank of Japan and the ECB are not about to hike rates tomorrow morning. In Europe, dozens of national politicians wouldn’t accept it, and in Japan, it would mean an early end to many things including Shinzo Abe.

But the Bank of England and the Fed are another story. Though if the Yes side wins in Scotland next week, the narrative may change a lot of Mark Carney and the City. That leaves the Fed. And it’s important to realize and remember that, certainly after Greenspan entered the scene, speaking in tongues, the Fed has become a piece of theater. The Fed is about perception. About trying to make people believe something, and make them act a certain way that they choose for them.

That’s why after the Oracle left they pushed first a bearded gnome and then a grandma forward as the public face. The kind of people nobody would perceive as a threat. Putting a guy who looks like second hand car salesman in charge of the Fed wouldn’t work.

Not when a big financial crisis looms, and then continues on for a decade and counting. That makes keeping up appearances the no. 1 priority. That’s when you want a grandma, or you’d lose your credibility real fast. You need grandma for your theater, for the next play you’re going to stage.

That market volatility today is at record lows is part of a big play, or a big scene in a play if you will. And the goal is not to make markets look good, as many people think. Making markets look good, making the economy look good, is just an intermediate step designed to lure everyone in.

You make people believe you got their back. All the big investors. Because they make tons of money, while they thought maybe the crisis could have really hurt them. Even the public at large feels you got their back. Because they don’t understand what the sleight of hand is.

The big investors understand, but you got them believing you will play that hand forever, or let them know well ahead of time when you intend to fold. The big investors think you will skim the public, but not them. They think you’re all on the same side. And the public thinks you’re healing the economy, and saving their jobs and homes and pensions.

When rate hikes are discussed, like I did two weeks ago in This Is Why The Fed Will Raise Interest Rates, most people have similar initial reactions. ‘They can’t do that, it would kill the economy, or at least the recovery’.
But the truth is, there is no recovery. It’s just a scene in a play. And the economy is completely shot, it only appears to be left standing because the Fed poured oodles of money into it. Or rather, into a part of the economy that it can control, that it can get the money out of again easily: Wall Street banks. And Wall Street equals the Fed.

Charles Hugh Smith, in What If the Easy Money Is Now on the Bear Side?, notices that there are hardly any bears left in the market, and that shorts are disappearing as a source of revenue for bulls. Interesting, but he doesn’t yet connect all the dots. CHS thinks big money managers can make ‘the play’, that they can fool the rest of the market and unleash a tsunami that will bury the bulls.

I don’t think so. I think what goes on is that the Wall Street banks, many times bigger than the biggest money managers, see their revenues plunge. As they knew they would, because free money and ultra low rates are not some infinite source of income, since other market participants adapt their tactics to those things as well.
Which is what Charles Hugh Smith points to, but doesn’t fully exploit. And it’s not as Wolf Richter presumes either:

After years of using its scorched-earth monetary policies to engineer the greatest wealth transfer of all times, the Fed seems to be fretting about getting blamed for yet another implosion of the very asset bubbles these policies have purposefully created.

The Fed doesn’t fret. The Fed has known for years that the US economy is dead on arrival. They’ve spent trillions of dollars backed, in the end, by American taxpayers, knowing full well that it would have no effect other than to fool people into believing something else than what reality says loud and clear.

Philip Van Doorn, who I quoted two weeks ago, got quite a bit closer in Big US Banks Prepare To Make Even More Money

For most banks, the extended period of low interest rates has become quite a drag on earnings. Net interest margins – the spread between the average yield on loans and investments and the average cost for deposits and borrowings – are still being squeezed, since banks realized the bulk of the benefit of very low interest rates years ago …

That is the essence, and that is why grandma will announce higher rates, against a backdrop of 4% GDP growth numbers and a plethora of other ‘great’ economic data and military chest thumping abroad.
The US economy is dead. The Fed has known this for a long time, but pumped it up to where it is now to draw in all the greater fools, the so-called big investors who have made money like honey from QE and ZIRP. They are the greater fools. The American real economy ceased being a consideration long ago.

We’re in for big surprises, and they won’t be pretty, they’ll be pretty nasty. There are far too many people who think of themselves as smart who don’t see the difference between a theater play and a reality show. And I don’t mean CHS or Wolf, they’re much more clever than your average investment advisor.

The Fed will raise rates because that will make the biggest banks the most money. There’s nothing else that matters. The Fed can’t revive the US economy, that’s just a foolish notion. But it can suck a lot of wealth out of it.

Cycles Suggest......... With David Gurwitz of Charles Nenner Research

 A rather interesting interview with David Gurwitz of Charles Nenner Research. Cannot say I have heard of the research firm before this but my guess is that I will doing some reading soon.

Creative Benefits of Boredom

A rather compelling article from the Harvard Business Review

In a past life, I used to be required to participate in quarterly sales meetings. These meetings followed a typical format: fly everyone in the company to an amazing destination, then lock them inside a hotel ballroom for 10 hours a day and force them to listen to speeches from sales leadership, as well as marketing, research, and legal departments (usually with a motivational speaker to close it all out). Try as they might, these meetings were boring. The real shame was that they were intended to rally troops and get the sales organization excited about new initiatives, as well as inspire them to think up new and better ways to increase sales in the field. The only saving grace: the late-night dinners. After 10 hours of being talked at, my colleagues and I would escape the hotel, find a local restaurant and talk to each other. Despite our best efforts, these dinner conversations were always about work – and good thing too. These chats were filled with new ideas for dealing with problem clients or increasing sales of new products. Late-night dinners became the source of the new and exciting our meetings were supposed to elicit.

Boredom at work (and meetings) is something nearly all of us feel at times, but admitting that boredom to coworkers or managers is likely something few of us have ever done. It turns out, however, that a certain level of boredom might actually enhance the creative quality of our work. That’s the implications of two recently published papers focused on the link between feeling bored and getting creative.

In the first paper, researchers Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, both at the University of Central Lancashire, explained the creativity-boosting power of boredom in two rounds of studies. In both rounds, participants were either assigned the boring task of copying numbers from a phone book or assigned to a control group, which skipped the phone book assignment. All participants were then asked to generate as many uses as they could for a pair of plastic cups. This is a common test of divergent thinking—a vital element for creative output that concerns ones ability to generate lots of ideas. Mann and Cadman found that the participants who had intentionally led to boredom through the phone book task had generated significantly more uses for the pair of plastic cups.

The remainder of the article can be found here

Guessing this implies that if you want more creative and thought provoking investing ideas, undertake some boring objectives before your search.

Are Rate Hikes Now Off the Table

Judging by today's intraday action, either the market is pushing out their expectations for a rate hike further out or discounting the idea of Yellen raising interests at all.

The Dollar trade

The Gold/Precious metal trade

Gld

GDX

The oil trade

Medium term treasury rate- 5yr CBOE

and finally equities, the SPY