Bill Gross – February 2013 Investment Outlook: Credit Supernova!
Money and Finance

Bill Gross – February 2013 Investment Outlook: Credit Supernova!


Economist Hyman Minsky did. With credit now expanding, the sophisticated economic model provided by Minsky was working its way towards what he called Ponzi finance. First, he claimed the system would borrow in low amounts and be relatively self-sustaining – what he termed “Hedge” finance. Then the system would gain courage, lever more into a “Speculative” finance mode which required more credit to pay back previous borrowings at maturity. Finally, the end phase of “Ponzi” finance would appear when additional credit would be required just to cover increasingly burdensome interest payments, with accelerating inflation the end result.

Minsky’s concept, developed nearly a half century ago shortly after the explosive decoupling of the dollar from gold in 1971, was primarily a cyclically contained model which acknowledged recession and then rejuvenation once the system’s leverage had been reduced. That was then. He perhaps could not have imagined the hyperbolic, as opposed to linear, secular rise in U.S. credit creation that has occurred since as shown in Chart 1. (Patterns for other developed economies are similar.) While there has been cyclical delevering, it has always been mild – even during the Volcker era of 1979-81. When Minsky formulated his theory in the early 70s, credit outstanding in the U.S. totaled $3 trillion.† Today, at $56 trillion and counting, it is a monster that requires perpetually increasing amounts of fuel, a supernova star that expands and expands, yet, in the process begins to consume itself. Each additional dollar of credit seems to create less and less heat. In the 1980s, it took four dollars of new credit to generate $1 of real GDP. Over the last decade, it has taken $10, and since 2006, $20 to produce the same result. Minsky’s Ponzi finance at the 2013 stage goes more and more to creditors and market speculators and less and less to the real economy. This “Credit New Normal” is entropic much like the physical universe and the “heat” or real growth that new credit now generates becomes less and less each year: 2% real growth now instead of an historical 3.5% over the past 50 years; likely even less as the future unfolds.





- Bill Gross – February 2013 Investment Outlook: Most ‘medieval’
Link to: Most ‘Medieval’So for those of you who don’t live in Washington State or Colorado or others who are a little miffed at this example, let’s just put it this way. P/Es of 3 or P/Es of 15 or P/Es of 0 are intimately connected to the amount...

- How Do You Say “minsky” In Mandarin? - By Christopher Pavese
Wikipedia defines a Minsky Moment as, “a sudden major collapse of asset values which is part of the credit cycle or business cycle. Such moments occur because long periods of prosperity and increasing value of investments lead to increasing speculation...

- Gmo White Paper: Feeding The Dragon: Why China's Credit System Looks Vulnerable - By Edward Chancellor And Mike Monnelly
The conventional view is that China’s economy has recently experienced a "soft landing" and is now poised for take-off. In this white paper, GMO’s Edward Chancellor and Mike Monnelly tell a rather different story, namely that the Chinese credit system...

- Felix Zulauf's Market Prognosis - June 2012
Found via Zero Hedge. There is too much debt in the industrialized world and the financial system is virtually bust.  Real disposable income is stagnating or declining.  Employment participation keeps heading south.  This produces a chain...

- Prem Watsa's 2008 Shareholder Letter - Fairfax Financial
Last year, I quoted Hyman Minsky who said that history shows that “stability causes instability”. He said that prolonged periods of prosperity lead to leveraged financial structures that cause instability – and did we see that in spades in 2008!!With...



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