Today, not one of these events is happening. In fact, the opposite is happening: M3 (a measure of the amount of money and credit in the system) is contracting at its fastest pace since the 1930s. Interest rates on Treasury bills are stuck at zero. The CRB index of commodities is at half its value of just two years ago. The stock market is lower than it was 10 years ago. The PPI and CPI (measures of producer and consumer prices) have a zero rate of change. People are struggling to get anyone to part with a dollar: They can’t get loans, they can’t sell their houses, and they can’t land a job. And Walmart is cutting prices. This is the “Bizarro” version of Germany and Zimbabwe: Everything’s backwards.
Crux: Well, not everything. Gold is at all-time highs.
Prechter: And so are Toronto real estate and vintage wine. But let’s put these markets in perspective. There have been three great credit-inflation peaks over the past ten years. In 2000, many stock markets around the world stopped going up. In 2006, real estate stopped going up. In 2008, commodities stopped going up. Stocks, commodities and real estate are three massive markets worldwide.
Here in 2010, a few late bloomers are making new all-time highs. I never thought the long term inflationary topping process would take this long, but it has. At each of these peaks, investors have focused on one area or another. Every time it’s happened, the area of focus has reversed trend, plummeting in price by 50% or more.
This latest credit reflation is the weakest yet, so it hardly inspires confidence that today’s isolated bull markets will end any differently. Each time a bull market matures, investors are sure it can’t reverse. They said that about technology and internet stocks; they said it about real estate; they said it about oil. Now that a couple of markets are at all-time highs, we hear the same argument about them. This is natural, because investors always want to own markets that are way up. But investors in those previous booms are never going to get back to breakeven. Many of them were ruined.
)! So what?! Ist was? War was?
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