Lacy Hunt Hoisington Investment Q4 Letter “Deflation”
Deflation
“No stock-market crash announced bad times. The depression rather made its presence felt with the serial crashes of dozens of commodity markets. To the affected producers and consumers, the declines were immediate and newsworthy, but they failed to seize the national attention. Certainly, they made no deep impression at the Federal Reserve.” Thus wrote author James Grant in his latest thoroughly researched and well-penned book, The Forgotten Depression (1921: The Crash That Cured Itself).
Commodity price declines were the symptom of sharply deteriorating economic conditions prior to the 1920-21 depression. To be sure, today’s economic environment is different. The world economies are not emerging from a destructive war, nor are we on the gold standard, and U.S. employment is no longer centered in agriculture and factories (over 50% in the U.S. in 1920). The fact remains, however, that global commodity prices are in noticeable retreat. Since the commodity index
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The proximate cause for the current economic maladies and continuing downshift of economic activity has been the over-accumulation of debt. In many cases debt funded the purchase of consumable and non-productive assets, which failed to create a future stream of revenue to repay the debt. This circumstance means that existing and future income has to cover, not only current outlays, but also past expenditures in the form of interest and repayment of debt. Efforts to spur spending through relaxed credit standards, i.e. lower interest rates, minimal down payments, etc., to boost current consumption, merely adds to the total indebtedness. According to Deleveraging? What Deleveraging? (Geneva Report on the World Economy, Report 16) total debt to GDP ratios are 35% higher today than at the initiation of the 2008 crisis. The increase since 2008 has been primarily in emerging economies. Since debt is the acceleration of current spending in lieu of future spending, the falling commodity
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