Muir: "People Are Going To Be Wiped Out" By Short-VIX ETFs

Back in August, we highlighted a story in the New York Times about a former manager at Target who decided to try day trading with $500,000 he had saved up. Over the following years, he turned that into $13 million by following one simple strategy: Shorting volatility every time it spiked.

As MacroVoices host Erik Townsend points out, that strategy has worked for many retail investors over the past eight years. And in a brief “postgame” interview with the Macro Tourist Kevin Muir following a longer interview with Francesco Filia, a fund manager at Fasanara Capital, the former explains how many investors don’t understand the risks associated with shorting volatility, as well as the possible repercussions if exchanges and brokerages don’t take the appropriate steps to limit this.

Townsend begins the discussion by asking Muir about a chart he created of the VXX - the long-VIX ETF - which, because of the low-volatility environement, has repeatedly split leading to unbelievable wealth destruction.

Going back to 2009, the price of the ETF has gone from $120,000 a share to just $35. And while a sudden spike in volatility could see it surge, with so many investors on the other side of the trade, it"s worth considering what might happen if they couldn"t pay.

It’s frightening. And I don’t think enough people are – well, there are some – but I don’t think that enough people are really considering all these things. And I think that guys like the Interactive Broker chairman, that are taking proactive steps to make sure that there’s enough margin, we need to see more of that. We need to see more people saying, hey, wait, this is actually a very, very scary instrument that has a lot of risk in it.

 

I watched a Real Vision interview with John Hempton from Bronte Capital, and he talked about phoning up the infamous Target salesman guy, the fellow that quit his job as a Target manager to trade XIV and all the VXX products, and he turned his 1/2 a million bucks into 13 million bucks. The part that really scared me about it was that John phoned him up and he was expecting to talk to this very sophisticated guy, and his basic takeaway was that, although he had a lot of buzzwords, and he understood kind of what the products represented, he didn’t really understand his true risk.

 

And I think that there’s just a myriad of people out there that are trading these things that don’t understand that. The more people that wake up and realize this, and stop playing this game, the better off we’ll be, actually.

Brokerages have caught on to this, Muir says. Interactive Brokers, one of the largest online brokerages, is now asking retail investors to post between 300%-400% margin when they short certain VIX contracts – because brokerages recognize that one sharp drawdown in the S&P 500 could blow millions of short traders out of their positions, potentially leaving thousands of customers with massive negative balances that could threaten the brokerages’ existence.

Erik, you’re absolutely correct. And Interactive Brokers, one of the largest electronic brokers out there, realizes the risk. If you look at the way that they’re margining these products, they’re margining them completely different than what the exchanges and everyone else say is the proper amount.

 

So if you look at the VIX futures, the front month is $6,200 – the exchange minimum is $6,200 – which works out to roughly 50% of a contract. The next month is $4,000, which works out to 30% of a contract. And the far months are $2,500, which works out to 17% of a contract.

 

But if you go to Interactive Brokers and you want to sell this VIX contract short, you have to put up 300%–400% of the contract. Because they’ve looked at it and they’ve realized that if the S&P has a 10% down move, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility, that the VIX could spike up to 37 really easily. And people are going to be wiped out if that happens.

Should the VIX suddenly spike, the repercussions of such a move would be further complicated by the billions of dollars sitting in various VIX-linked ETFs. Because individuals sellers would probably disappear from the market in such a situation, the ETF market makers would find it nearly impossible to hedge their positions, potentially triggering the dissolution of the funds, or even the collapse of some of these firms.

There’s $1.2 billion of the XIV, which is the short ETF. There’s $1.3 billion of the SVXY, which is another short one. These are staggering numbers.

 

In my days, when I was on the institutional desk, we had this big – I did index arbitrage, and we used to go out and buy the baskets and sell the futures. One day the risk manager came to me and said, if you had to take this position off (because we had accumulated this big position) how long would it take you? And who would do it?

 

And I said, the reality is that there’s nobody. You know, we were the biggest player in the market and there was nobody that was going to take this off of us. The only way was to go all the way to expiry.

 

Well, the reality is that these numbers are way bigger than any market player can absorb. And, if we get a situation where – as Francesco says, all it’s going to take is a return of the VIX from its current level of 10 to its average level of 18 or 19 to wipe out these products.

 

I guess that’s the point that I want to make: If you’re actually owning these things, you should be aware that all it will take is a move of 80% and then they’re going to wind down these products. So the XIV, when it moves up, if all of a sudden VIX goes from 10 to 18 in a day, they’re going to wind down that product.

 

And what’s going to be really scary is the amount of VIX futures that is going to have to be bought, because they’re short all those VIX futures and they’re going to have to buy them back.

 

And I just don’t know who’s going to sell it to them. For the first time – for a long time, I didn’t view this VIX as that big a deal, and there were some smart guys like Jesse Felder that were going on about it – I just think that it has been taken to a level that is becoming increasingly worrisome. And it actually could create a market dislocation in itself.

 

And what is it Warren Buffett says? What the wise man does in the beginning the fool does in the end. Well, VIX, at this point, we’re hitting a point where if you’re actually continuing to bet on it you’re going to be in the fool category.

 

Because it’s not going to take much to have a big spike that wipes a lot of people out. And it’s actually very, very worrisome.

Of course, it would take a large intraday move to trigger a truly catastrophic spike in the VIX. But at least one analyst, Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett – whose work we have cited here – believes there could be a 1987-style crash in the early months of 2018. Hartnett’s reasoning? The bearish positioning seen at the beginning of 2017 has completely flipped. Investors’ long positions are larger than they’ve been in years.

And as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, with volatility and volume so subdued, hedge funds have remained overwhelmingly short vol, fearful of missing out on even one tick of the torrid rally for fear of pissing off their clients.

One things for certain: Given the market’s already dramatically overextended rally, the day of reckoning is coming. The only question is will it be a steady decline, or will it happen suddenly?

Given the incredibly stretched nature of positioning, the latter scenario, Muir and Co. believe, seems far more likely.

* * *

Muir"s discussion begins just after the hour mark:

 

Van Halen, M&Ms, And The Next Market Downturn

The planet-sized egos of rock & roll performers are legendary.

Few things symbolize this better than the outrageous requests they often make when on tour.

These requests are referred to as "riders", and appear in the contract a tour venue receives in advance of the artist"s arrival. These contract riders specify the physical conditions that the singer/band requires to be in place before arriving to perform. Stage lighting settings, sound equipment, furnishings, etc -- that kind of stuff.

And these rider requests can get pretty funky - often extremely so -- when it comes to backstage perks the performers want.

For example: A wooden pond filled with koi carp (Eminem). A driver who will not speak or make eye contact (Katy Perry). 20 white kittens and 100 doves (Mariah Carey). Seven dwarves (Iggy Pop). 50,000 bees (Slayer). A sub-machine gun (Mötley Crüe). And, yes, even a great white shark (Hank III).

The practice of making these kind of outrageous demands stems from a rider Van Halen inserted into the contract for its 1982 world tour, which insisted on a bowl of M&Ms to be provided backstage, but with all of the brown M&Ms removed.

As this image below of the actual rider shows, the band was very explicit in its seriousness about this:

Once the media got whiff of this, it had a field day roasting the band"s narcissistic chutzpah. A new high-water mark of diva capriciousness had been established, which quickly became legend. A feat of prima donna pampering that subsequent performers have been trying to top ever since.

But as crazy as it sounds, Van Halen"s "no brown M&Ms" rider had nothing to do with caprice. There was a solid rationale behind it.

In fact, it was quite brilliant.

The Importance Of Effective Indicators

Van Halen"s 1982 world tour was a massive production, involving a tremendous amount of gear and technical complexity. The contract the band sent in advance to venues was so thick due to all the details within, it was referred to as the "Chinese Yellow Pages".

Non-compliance with the requirements in the contract could have serious consequences that could ruin the show, or even jeopardize lives.

So when the band rolled up to its next venue, it needed a quick way to determine if the stage crew there had complied with all of the specifications within its contract.

And that"s why the "no brown M&Ms" rider was inserted. The band could simply hop off the bus and check the candy bowl. If they found brown M&Ms, they knew the contract hadn"t been carefully read. And then they"d immediately call for a full-line check of the entire set.

As lead singer David Lee Roth detailed in his autobiography:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

Genius.

Through its rider, the band had created a easy-to-monitor and trustworthy indicator. No brown M&Ms, and the show was likely set up to go smoothly. But if otherwise, don"t perform until the entire venue is scrutinized for other missed requirements.

The lesson to take from Van Halen"s wisdom is that having good indicators is key to achieving success.

This is also extremely true for the world of investing, where you are deploying capital based upon an expected future return. How do you determine when it"s a good time to enter into an investment? Once in it, how do you monitor the conditions supporting your rationale for holding it -- are those changing? And if so, are they getting better or worse? When should you exit the position?

For all of these questions, the better the indicators you use, the more accurate and informed your decision-making will be. And the better your returns as an investor will be.

When The Indicators Are Giving A Signal, Pay Attention

Over the years, we"ve compiled a large number of indicators that we monitor closely on an ongoing basis here at PeakProsperity.com. They most definitely inform our economic outlook and forecasting.

We"ll dedicate an upcoming report to laying out the sources and metrics we place the greatest weighting on. But several that we"re watching closely right now come from two market analysts that we highly respect.

The first set comes from Lance Roberts, chief strategist/economist for Clarity Financial. Lance is renowned for his excellent charts and ability to highlight key changes in data trends. Below are several indicators he"s recently featured, suggesting weariness in the US financial markets and growing likelihood of economic recession.

First, the S&P 500 is showing signs of topping out, having broken below the trading range of its latest 8-month bullish trend, and its MACD momentum indicator displaying two recent sell signals:

Lance warns that such signals suggest that further price gains will be "volatile and limited" unless the S&P returns into its bullish channel. If it indeed does not and drops below the key resistance level of 2390, he sees a swift price correction of 12% as a real possibility.

But he then combines this near-term technical analysis with more far-sighted data to make the point that the financial markets are not just overbought, but dangerously overvalued at this point. Similar to John Hussman (another producer of market indicators we value highly), Lance shows that, because today"s prices are the result of pulling so much of tomorrow"s valuation into today (e.g., via the suppression of interest rates and overexuberant speculation), we are living at a rare time in history where the average market return for the next 20 years may well be negative:

And he recently caught our attention by surfacing this chart of the change in annual Real Value Added to the US economy, a metric that hadn"t been on our radar beforehand. This has been a reliable indicator of recession in the US for nearly 70 years, and is now signaling that we"ve likely already entered one:

Couple Lance"s indicators with those of our other expert, Grant Williams, portfolio advisor at Vulpes Investment Management and co-founder of Real Vision TV. Grant and the team at Real Vision recently issued their latest Killer Charts series, which adds validation and additional weight to Lance"s warnings.

First off, Grant and his team see similar technical signs of "exhaustion" in the S&P 500 and predict lower prices ahead:

Note that they don"t just expect the S&P to correct slightly and then continuing powering higher. Other indicators they track, like the equities-vs-commodities ratio, strongly suggests a bubble peak for the S&P. From here they predict a secular bear trend for stocks (possibly paired with a new bull trend in commodities):

And like Lance, Grant sees signs that the US economy is poised to slow further...

.. and is likely, as Lance also concludes, tipping into recession:

When smart analysts independently find the same patterns in the data, it"s time to take notice.

The charts above are only a few of the indicators Lance and Grant monitor that are now sending strong cautionary warnings about the near-term prospects for the financial markets and the underlying economy. What other key metrics should we also be tracing closely right now?

To dig much deeper into this, Lance and Grant will be presenting their latest indicators, analysis and forecasts at the Dangerous Markets webinar on September 13th -- where they will take ample questions live from the audience. For more information on the webinar, click here.

Grant Williams: "History Is About To Repeat Itself Again... And It Might Get Ugly"

Real Vision"s Grant Williams believes that the 76 million retiring Baby Boomers will trigger a major pension crisis. 

“With that potentially bad situation we could face,” the seasoned asset manager and co-founder of Real Vision TV said in a recent extended Metal Masters interview (full interview below), “holding physical metal, somewhere safe, somewhere outside the banking system, is just a sensible precaution to take.”

His outlook has changed drastically since he started his first job trading Japanese markets in 1986: “What I walked into at that time was one of the greatest bull market bubbles the world had ever seen, in the Japanese equity market and real estate market.” During this heyday, precious metals weren’t on his radar at all—until a year later, when he witnessed his first stock market crash and started asking some inconvenient questions.

“I’ve always been a fan of history,” says Williams, who also writes the wildly popular macroeconomic newsletter, Things That Make You Go Hmmm… “So I read financial history and I just kept reading. And it was clear to me that at this point in time, I needed to buy some gold.”

Until then, the gold price didn’t mean much to him, except as an indicator of other things, so he considers the crashes he witnessed in his career wake-up calls and blessings in disguise.

The 1987 crash, he says, was more like “a bad day at the office; it came and went so fast… The bounce-back was quick, but it was a real shock to the system that that could happen.” When the dotcom bubble burst, he was well prepared. “I recognized the madness for what it was much sooner… and so that taught me that markets can reverse and just go down.”

He remembers reading a story about a boy from Chicago who studied in Weimar Germany, and his parents sent him tuition and rent money every month. At some point, “the Reichsmark was going through the roof—four billion to one, compared to one to one a few months earlier—and this kid, with his one hundred dollars that his parents sent him… ended up buying the entire street he lived on, all the houses, and became a landlord.”

Over the years, his study of monetary history and current economic events has convinced him that it would be prudent to hold some gold as crisis insurance. “I remember I wanted just to buy an ounce of gold… and I very consciously took cash to pay for this thing. I handed over $333 in paper, and [the dealer] gave me this coin.” The experience of holding physical gold in your hand, he says, answers a lot of questions. “People get stuck in this trap of ‘Why does it have value?’ These are the wrong questions to ask, because you’re driving yourself mad. It does. Pure and simple.”

Williams says gold is still undervalued: “At heart, I’m a value investor, and I think gold offers incredible value now.”

He says he’s followed the gold market ever since that pivotal day and recommends that everyone should have at least some allocation to precious metals: “I think if you don’t own some gold in your portfolio now, you either don’t understand history, or you don’t want to understand history.”

Much more from the author of "Things That Make You Go Hmmm" in the full video below.

Gold In Uncertain Times: "The West Doesn't Get It... They've Been Indoctrinated By Paper Money"

In this fascinating interview on RealVision TV, Grant Williams and Egon von Greyerz cover a very broad range of subjects from gold, wealth preservation to debt, interest rates, Brexit, the EU and much more.

The interview was recorded in London at the end of 2016 but the discussion is timeless and extremely relevant in regard to future events and risks.

The biggest risks ahead according to Egon is the global bond markets. He predicts rates going to very much higher levels like in the 1970s. That will lead to more money printing, faster currency debasement and the demise of the bond market.

Grant and Egon also discuss that in every period of panic and crisis combined with economic mismanagement, which we are seeing today, gold has always acted as insurance. The setup is now perfect for gold to act to protect wealth against the coming problems in financial markets and the world economy..."the Indians know this, the Chinese know this but the West doesn"t understand because they have been indoctrinated by paper money..."

As inflation rises institutions will be obliged to hold gold as a hedge. Since gold production is coming down substantially over the next 8 years there will be less gold available. No one will trust paper gold. This will lead to major upward pressure in the price of physical gold. Future increases in demand can only be satisfied at much higher prices.

*  *  *

Full interview below: One of the most respected names in the gold market, Egon von Greyerz illuminates the discussion on the long term trend for the precious metal, against the current climate.

Source: GoldSwitzerland.com

*  *  *

Real Vision: Raoul Pal and Grant Williams created Real Vision which is great financial video-on-demand service with over 500 in-depth interviews with the world’s sharpest independent analysts, fund managers, geopolitical strategists, economists and investors. Free from groupthink, advertising or bias, Real Vision presents its viewers with the very best economic information and financial insight available and then allows them to make up their own minds, and profit from knowledge.

Former Fed Advisor: State Pensions Time Bomb Spells Disaster For The US

Underfunded government pensions to the tune of $1.3 trillion, with a gap that just can’t be filled, is the ticking time bomb facing the US economy which faces dramatic cuts in public services - and potentially riots reminiscent of Athens six years ago - according to former Federal Reserve advisor, and President of Money Strong, Danielle DiMartino Booth.

As she picks apart the danger signs with the US on the precipice of recession, it’s the impending pensions crisis that keeps her awake at night, sharing the gloomy sentiment laid out in an extensive March 2016 Citi report titled "The coming pensions crisis."

With few people taking part in what little recovery the US has had, and given how stretched pensions are, checks are going to have to be written from Washington sooner than you think, DiMartino Booth told Real Vision TV in an interview. “The Baby Boomers are no longer an actuarial theory,” she said. “They"re a reality. The checks are being written.”

A Bulldozer Couldn’t Fill the State Pensions Gap

The $1.3 trillion pensions deficit just takes into account state and municipal obligations, and with promised returns of 8% and funds compounding at 3% for decades it will take nothing short of an economic miracle to recover.  “The average state pension in the last fiscal year returned something south of 1%. You cannot fill that gap with a bulldozer, impossible,” DiMartino Booth said. “Anyone who knows their compounding tables knows you don"t make that up. You don"t get that back unless you get some miracle.”

The last time we saw significant market weakness, the baby boomers pretty much accepted that they would be retiring at 70 instead of 65, she added. “Well, guess what? They"re turning 71. And the physiological decision to stay in the workforce won"t work for much longer. And that means that these pensions are going to come under tremendous amounts of pressure.

“And the idea that we can escape what"s to come, given demographically what we"re staring at is naive at best. And it"s reckless at worst,” DiMartino Booth said. “And when you throw private equity and all of the dry powder that they have -- that they"re sitting on -- still waiting to deploy on pensions’ behalf, at really egregious valuations, yeah, it"s hard to sleep at night.”

Pension Fund Underfunding is Ground Zero

The interview with Real Vision was held in Dallas, which DiMartino Booth said is Ground Zero for the pensions crisis, where returns for the $2.27 billion Police and Fire Pension System have suffered due to risky investments in real estate made over a decade ago. Huge withdrawals are now taking place, amid concerns over the future viability of the pension scheme, which commentators say could be flat broke in a little over ten years.

“We"re seeing this surge of people trying to retire early and take the money. Because they see it"s not going to be there. And if that dynamic and that belief spreads-- forget all the other problems,” DiMartino Booth said. “The pension fund -- underfunding is Ground Zero.”

The gravity of the situation with the lack of returns is magnified by the fact that the underperformance has been going on for between ten and 15 years. Calpers, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System is a case in point, amid reports that it returned just 0.6% last year compared with its long term target of 7.5%. With the legal language tightly written on pensions like this across the country, such that states and municipalities won’t be able to break free of their obligations, DiMartino Booth thinks the endgame will evoke memories of the Winter of Discontent in London in 1979 and more recently the riots in Athens as key public services are cut.

Angry Country, Angry World – The Wealth Effect is Dead

“This is where the smile comes off my face. We are an angry country. We"re an angry world. The wealth effect is dead. The inequality divide is unlike anything we"ve seen since the years that preceded the Great Depression,” she told Real Vision TV. “Where"s the money going to come from? And the answer is, for now, they cut services. I"ve just written about the Winter of Discontent and the rubbish piled up in central London streets in 1979, as Thatcher was coming in. I worry about the ambulance not getting there in time. I worry about firefighters being cut to the bone and policemen.”

The seriousness of the issue might not have hit home yet in Denver, where the state budget for tulips had to be cut recently to top up the pension fund, she said, but what happens when you are not talking about flowers anymore and when you are talking about a very populous state like Illinois?

“If the actuaries are going to force the checks to be written and reduce the rate of returned assumptions to anything remotely related to reality, then we won"t be laughing anymore looking in the rear view mirror at the riots in the streets of Athens a few years back,” DiMartino Booth warned.

Visit Real Vision TV to watch this exclusive full interview, free to all. Real Vision TV is a video-on-demand channel for finance, offering over 500 videos from 200 of the world’s sharpest investment minds. Think of it as what CNBC could have been if it actually focused on quality of content.

Raoul Pal Warns "Trump Will See A Recession In 2017"

Authored by Raoul Pal via The Global Macro Investor,

US Presidential Elections and Recessions

As you know, I follow the business cycle, which describes the ebb and flow of the economy from boom to bust that drives asset prices and thus our investment choices.

Linear models in a cyclical world

Most economic models don’t use the business cycle even though it clearly exists, which strongly suggests that economic linear models are wrong, yet economists sadly persist in this flawed linear analysis. This lack of acknowledgement of the business cycle is why so many economists are almost always wrong in their forecasts. Steady state analysis is proven time and time again to be junk.

Austrian economists (and a few others) do however accept the business cycle as given but they endlessly debate what causes this ebb and flow in the economy. In general, most opt for the credit cycle as the explanation without thought as to what creates the credit cycle and thus they fall into the economic model trap again.

The practical world

I live in the world of practical economics – where the investment rubber meets the economic road – so I ponder less about the detailed why and try to instead look at the when in terms of timing of the booms and busts.

Recession and Elections

I recently noted that since 1910, the US economy is either in recession or enters a recession within twelve months in every single instance at the end of a two-term presidency… effecting a 100% chance of recession for the new President.

No recession without an election

I then spent some time looking at US recessions in general, and found that every single one occurred during, or just after, an election, without exception.

Not every single election sees a recession, only every two-term incumbent change. Some two-term Presidents saw recessions at their first-term re-elections too (Wilson and Eisenhower).

The following chart shows every NBER recession since 1910 (in yellow) with the new President after a two-term election marked in white and the new Presidents after a single-term presidency in red. Wilson and Eisenhower appear as both. Only Coolidge saw more than a year (sixteen months) from his second-term election and the onset of the subsequent recession at the end of WWI...

click image to enlarge

Just to be 100% clear, the coloured vertical lines show the election date. Every President’s name written in white followed a two-term presidency. They each suffer recessions early in their presidency. And those names in red also suffered immediate recessions but after a single-term change of presidency. No recession except that of 1979 (clarified below) is not explained by its proximity to an election.

Some observers might suggest that the correlation between recession dates and election dates is spurious but I simply refuse to believe that based on the chart above. It is not a coincidence.

Why some new governments, after a change of a single-term presidency, don’t see an immediate recession remains a mystery, but those instances are few: Clinton, Carter and Johnson. Of these only Johnson and Clinton did not see a recession at all. Carter got his recession at the end of his presidency, but don’t forget Ford was not voted in so no election cycle occurred.

In the last 100 years, the recession of 1979 is the only recession not to occur around an election date (again, Carter came into office after Ford who did not undergo the election cycle).

Just mull that over...

Every single US recession bar one (with explainable circumstances) occurred around an election. Only two Presidents in history did not see a recession and they were inaugurated after single-term Presidents.

There are a few other things to note from this analysis:

Politics creates recessions

Firstly, it is the political cycle that is the key driver of recessions – governmental cycles in one way or another are an essential component. I am really not yet sure of the reason why two-term presidential cycles are so spectacularly consistent in provoking recessions but I do know that election dates are super helpful for predicting recessions and thus asset prices. The investment game is all about odds, and odds of 100% – even from a small data sample – are incredibly useful. Sure, it might not remain 100% forever but the probability is still going to be extremely high and that’s all we need to make successful forecasts and investments.

[If you are not yet familiar with the relationship between the business cycle and asset prices, I’d suggest watching the video on the subject that I produced for Real Vision Television.]

Politicians care about themselves

Secondly, it makes you question whether the governmental system in general has politicians’ best interests at heart, or that of the country. It is difficult to believe it is primarily the country’s economic wellbeing that the politicians care about when this cycle is so evident.

Trump will see a recession in 2017

Finally, bearing in mind the above, we have to acknowledge that there is an extremely high chance of a recession within the coming year with the imminent change of government in the US after a two-term presidency. History would suggest that the odds are 100%.

Should you really be betting on growth and inflation for 2017?

I very much doubt it.

I think that the current euphoria for equities and hatred for bonds is going to be exactly the wrong trade for 2017.

David Rosenberg Calls For A Multi-Trillion, "Helicopter Money" Stimulus Package

With the inherent weakness in US GDP and the rising probability of a recession (two weeks ago Bank of America modeled that the next recession would likely start roughly one year from now), Gluskin Sheff"s David Rosenberg thinks that with monetary options exhausted it will take a fiscal boost in the trillions of dollars to kickstart the economy. These issues were discussed in an extended interview with Real Vision TV, where the chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff proposed some radical policies to engineer the growth needed in nominal income. 

His ideas, some of which can be seen here in a clip of the interview, include helicopter money attached to a $2 trillion perpetual bond, massive infrastructure spending and measures to tackle the $1 trillion student debt load that has seriously hamstrung the economy.

Here are some of the interview highlights:

Doing the Same Thing Over Again and Expecting a Different Outcome

Whether the US will in fact experience the technical definition of a recession is a matter of fervent debate, with the odds something like 20%-30%, according to Rosenberg (60% according to Deutsche Bank), but with growth averaging around 1%, there is no doubt the economy is weak.

“There are some people saying a recession is here right now,” Rosenberg says, “I don"t think that we meet those conditions yet. But people say, well, look. Twelve months in a row of negative year on year industrial production, that"s never happened outside recession, check. We"ve had now going into six quarters of profit contraction, year over year. That"s only happened in the context of a recession, check. I mean, all that is true, but so much of this has been related to the oil shock that we had.”

Rosenberg’s problem with monetary policy, now in its 7th year of unorthodox experimentation, is that it has become a weak antidote to structural problems in the economy (even if it is still quite potent at boosting financial asets). Fiscal policy on the other hand, if constructed right, could be the answer due to its very powerful multiplier impact. “I can"t say that I know for sure, but it"s the old Einstein adage about the definition of insanity,” Rosenberg said. “And we"re finding that we"re really-- if we"re not hitting the wall on monetary policy, we"re certainly seeing classic economics 101 of the law of diminishing returns.”

In terms of infrastructure spending, he said that one lesson from recent history and the Great Recession is that you"ve got to have the credibility to convince people that this is going to be permanent and not temporary, in terms of the impact on the economy. “So it can"t be transitory. It"s got to be very big. With interest rates as low as they are, there"s certainly the capacity. I mean, you"ve got a lot of governments around the world issuing 50 or 100-year bonds. So this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to borrow money.”

A Couple of Trillion Dollars of Helicopter Money

While companies have been taking advantage of these conditions to borrow money, the funds have not been invested in the real economy. Share buybacks have become more popular, while personal savings rates have increased amid the economic uncertainty. This all boils down to a big case for government spending, with monetary policy joining forces with fiscal policy in the form of helicopter money.

“What you do with helicopter money is you finance it off the central bank"s balance sheet because we"re talking doing something very dramatic to reflate the economy,” Rosenberg said. “It"s not a few hundred billion dollars. It"s a couple of trillion...I know I"ll get accused of bailing out the sinners, but, my lord, we"ve already done that. I mean, nobody went to jail.”

One of the things holding the economy back is the $1 trillion student debt load, which he said has left 35% of males aged 18 to 34 living with mom and dad, not getting jobs and not becoming first time home buyers. Employment growth for the 65s and over is 7%, meanwhile, as the aging boomers have to work longer because they didn’t save enough for retirement. 

“Helicopter money is QE plus where, say, the treasury issues a perpetual-- call it, like, a century bond, a $2 trillion bond on the Fed"s balance sheet. And so when that bond matures, it"s, like, we"re all dead in the long run at that point. And then the Treasury can use that money to stimulate growth. "

The beauty of this idea, according to Rosenberg is that you don’t have to go through Congress, with such difficulty in achieving corporate or personal tax reform.  “It would lead to a permanent increase in the monetary base. Inflation expectations would go up, which means that real interest rates would go negative. And the theory is that that would provide a bigger thrust towards getting what we all want, which is sustainable and accelerating nominal income growth.“

Real Risk of Fed Mistakes or Trump Trade War

Sustainable and accelerating nominal GDP is certainly what’s required while the risk persists that we could be shocked into recession, or the Fed could make a mistake in raising interest rates too aggressively.

“That"s what happened in December of last year. They raised rates 25 basis points, but the overall financial tightening, in terms of what it meant for the dollar or in credit spreads and the stock market, it was really, like, 75 basis points of tightening. And the next thing you know, the economy slows to stall speed."

Another concern for investors is the prospect of a Trump presidency, bringing with it the potential start of a trade war. That could provide the sort of exogenous shock to cause the economy to go into recession, Rosenberg stated, noting that historically all the recessions in the post war period have been created by the Fed.

“The problem is that when you have the economy running on average 1% growth, or 1% plus, which is not a big cushion. And so, you know, it"s a complicated question to try and handicap a recession on us right now. There"s a lot of people out there that are convinced that a recession is coming.”

To watch the full interview with David Rosenberg, visit Real Vision TV.  You can access this and many more interviews with a free trial. 

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Oh, if Rosenberg"s idea gets traction - and execution -  which it will eventually, as we have said since our first days in 2009, buy lots and lots of gold.