Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016. Then the next question is: what does it mean to the financial markets? As Mr Trump plans to increase the federal debt to invest in infrastructure, the markets now expect high interest rates worldwide, but if you look at President Trump’s policies more carefully, you might assume something different could take place: rate cuts and QE.
Continue reading President Trump could cut rates and restart QE to fight against secular stagnation
It is not always easy to predict a collapse of a financial bubble, but there often is something that indicates it in advance.
In the case of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, some famed fund managers such as George Soros or John Paulson knew it could be as serious as it eventually happened to be. This article explains the economic situations during the crisis and shows the statistics that preceded to imply the timing of the collapse of the stock markets.
Continue reading How you could have predicted the financial crisis in 2008
Did Abenomics successfully save Japan from deflation? Not really. Will quantitative easing and negative interest rates by the Bank of Japan (BoJ) make it better in the future? Not very likely.
The BoJ is no longer controlling the monetary policy of the Japanese economy. The central bank has already taken all the effective options, and thus the room for expansion of easing is quite limited. There is something that decides the monetary policy instead of the central bank.
Continue reading Explaining Japan’s deflation 2016: the cause is not just the consumption tax hike
The dollar will fall, and the yen will strengthen in 2016. The Fed could not continue to raise rates, and the strong yen will be back again as the Bank of Japan’s monetary expansion is now limited.
There might be a number of investors who still bet on the yen’s fall due to Abenomics, but we recommend to reconsider. We even recommend to buy the currencies under quantitative easing, such as the yen or the euro. Here are the reasons.
This is somewhat old information but surely illustrates what Japan thinks of quantitative easing. The following is a video of the Japanese financial minister Taro Aso in 2010 explaining why Japan’s huge public debt is not a problem:
In this video, Mr Aso asserts that Japan will not go bankrupt despite the huge public debt because debt monetization will clear all of it. This was when the Liberal Democratic Party was not ruling the parliament, and thus he was perhaps more frank to talk about what he actually thinks of the debt.
Continue reading Japan’s finmin Aso supports the debt monetization by the Bank of Japan
The currency war, the market turmoil and the secular stagnation will make the gold price skyrocket to $2,000 in 2017 or 2018.
In Jan, 2016, we predicted the turnaround of the gold price, and since then gold has indeed rebounded from its three-year bear market as you see in the following chart of the gold price:
The timing of our prediction was perfect. Investors finally realized three or four rate hikes in 2016 are practically impossible, and the secular stagnation will keep the US and global economy in need of financial easing. In addition to it, there are several facts for which we can be bullish about gold.
The easy market for investors supported by the Fed’s quantitative easing is already over, and now the question is merely when, not if, the asset bubble bursts in several markets. The assets in a bubble are stocks, bonds and the dollar.
The Fed has ended its QE programme and is now in a process of raising interest rates. Will the US stock market be okay? It can never be okay as the central bank has injected trillions of money and is now going to retrieve it, but the market is manifesting groundless optimism.
The greatest premise investors believe in is the strong US economy and thus the strong dollar. However, the time is near for the uptrend of the dollar to be fading out. Why, how, and when? We will explain it in this article.
On the 3rd of December, the ECB (European Central Bank) decided to cut interest rates and extend its quantitative easing. The deposit rate was lowered from -0.20% to -0.30%, and it was declared that the central bank would maintain the QE until March of 2017, postponed from September of 2016.
As Dr Mario Dragi, the governor of the ECB, had suggested further easing in advance, some investors were expecting the expansion of the QE, which was not decided this time. Consequently, EUR/USD sharply rebounded.
On the 16th of November, the Cabinet Office of Japan published the GDP data for the 3rd quarter of 2015. The real GDP grew 1.08% (year-on-year) during the quarter, revealing that the economy slightly recovered from the negative growth after the consumption tax hike in 2014.
To compare, the growth for the previous quarter was 1.00%. We look into the details of the numbers.
As the Fed remains unclear about when it raises interest rates, the investors are starting to doubt the Fed’s will for a rate hike. The doller is getting weak, and the gold price rebounded.
In the global markets, we also need to note that one central bank’s policy affects another central bank’s policy, and at the moment, this is the most true with the Fed and the Bank of Japan.
The Fed’s aim
As we explained in the following article, the Fed is not waiting for the further improvement of the labour market, but we estimate its aim is the depreciation of the stock market itself:
