Going into deeply negative interest rates can be seen as a failure (a form of expropriation and slow default), when the stampede into the USD, and US assets appreciation is making negative ROI looking pretty fucking stupid in comparison. Capital tends to not be that stupid and follows capital instead to last-man-off-the-boat (aka greater fool theory of investing) appreciation wealth effect.
To which I would add the balancing observation that the U.S. 10 year is currently yeilding -1.5% after CPI indexing and marginal taxes. Anybody buying treasuries today is (1) speculating on policy actions, (2) forced by a mandate, (3) gaming something linked, or (4) happy to lose less money than they would lose elsewhere. Frankly I find it hard to put myself in their mental space.
Those who need maximum liquidity are moving to the short end of the curve so the NIRP is one of the costs of liquidity. Liquidity is collapsing in the EU (and everywhere so capital will concentrate home in the reserve currency which is always the most liquid), and this is one of several factors that will drive capital to the USD to jumpstart the process of capital chasing capital for gains, liquidity, and safe haven.
Those who are free to maximize yield vs. risk tradeoff and have the balls to do so, have long since left sovereign bonds and moved to AAA corporate or emerging markets. So those who think interest rates haven't been rising, haven't factored in the composition of fixed income portfolios.
The public has largely been on the sidelines since 2009 and is attempting to put some money under their mattress or holding cash (velocity of money is collapsing). The money that does come into the markets is chasing bubbles. The general public in the West is ripe for chasing another "sure thing" bubble in US stocks as US stocks surprisingly go against the direction expected by all the pundits.Germans are already doing insanity with Merkel at the helm inviting millions of Muslim migrants in a form of delusional socialism that is analogous to the Weimar Republic's mass delusion. They even shut off all their nuclear generation plants and will be at the mercy of Putin for electricity. This is repeat of Hitler's problem of not having enough FOREX to pay for oil, so he had no choice but to go take by force.
Yeah, it's amazing the crazy stuff people do to hew to some broken self-concept, which they can't even consistently embody. Politics does that. I still have great respect for the practical intelligence of the German entrepreneurial class and petty bourgoisie. Enslaving southern Europe from Slovenia to Portgual without firing a shot was one shrewd piece of work.
Nothing is free or without a footprint. Choose a poison or ramifications. "You can't do just one thing".SPX will likely double or triple in a massive bubble, which may take some of the steam out of gold for the interim (2017-18ish) because a booming USD and US assets, will be seen as a less risky bubble to pile into, than gold. So it is possible we haven't yet seen the high for SPX/AUG, but eventually the USD stampede will peak and then the wheels will entirely fall off the current financial system, so then expect gold to rally into 2024 at least and the SPX/AUG will have peaked 2017/18ish.
Here's where we are in unequivocal disagreement. I say xauusd bottomed in January, and consider the fundamentals too dismal to allow equities to make new real highs (not nominal), and the political situation too fubared to allow even a kamikaze move like BoJ buying half the real estate in Japan to offer reflationary substance. Blips yeah. CPI yeah. Pockets of growth, sure. System down down down.
When Trump wins, we will be kicking unsuitable migrants out of the USA (or at least rhetoric causing confidence to think that) and in Europe they will be rolling out the red carpet for trouble and strife. The USA is preparing to roll up its sleeves and get back to work (or at least rhetoric causing confidence to think that). Europe is a much more fucked political morass from hell. The fundamentals will still be onerous in the USA, but it is still the most liquid safe haven on earth. Have you not being reading Armstrong? I cite some important links for your review as follows (prepare to be educated by the master):
If you open a corporation in Nevada, you do not have to declare who the actual owner is. That company can then engage in Panama and such names will never show up in the leak.
The United States of America is emerging as a top tax haven after beating Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Panama. You can have secrecy in the USA and states such as Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming are now competing with each other to provide foreigners with the secrecy they need. However, many are now just migrating to the States. Some 3,000 millionaires from Greece; 10,000 millionaires from France; 6,000 millionaires from Italy; 2,000 millionaires from Spain, and about 2,000 millionaires from Russia have all migrated to the USA. The trend is picking up momentum as tensions between Muslims and Christians rise throughout Europe. After the revelation of the Panama Papers, in which Americans were named the least, the trend is now picking up speed.
There have been a some unusual capital flow developments involving Egypt that illustrate a shortage of dollars caused by the decline in oil prices.
This decline in oil has resulted in a decline in subsidies for Egypt from other Arab nations. What has been taking place is interesting. Shares of Commercial International Bank Egypt on the Cairo market have been bought using Egyptian pounds. These shares were dumped in London and sold for dollars, creating a loss of 20% to 30%. There is a shortage of dollars building, and there are developing net capital movement through proxy instruments.
You know the same thing is happening in Latin America. Tons of dollars have been flowing there recently and dollar borrowing rates have skyrocketed as all US benchmark rates reached record lows.
Economies are booming and it doesnt take a genius to see most of it has been funded with cheap dollars flowing from the United States as well as Europe.
Most Latin American countries indeed live on effective two-tier systems as the dollar is readily accepted for payments of most transactions. In particular, mortgages as well as land purchases are usually financed by dollar loans, its cheaper, and the lenders usually refuse to have long term exposure to local currencies.
Governments are also usually in the habit of borrowing in dollars. And borrowed they have! Argentina is the key here because they defaulted for political reasons a few years back, and up until now they were being financed by Venezuelan oil money, also for political reasons (Chavez was in the habit of handing out gifts in exchange for political favors).
So the short dollar position is indeed a WORLDWIDE issue. It will be very interesting to see what happens if something sparks a run to the USD, like the situation in Europe turning from bad to worse. Dollar borrowers the world over will indeed have a religious experience of Biblical proportions!
It is amazing how people keep touting the demise of the dollar yet cannot comprehend that it remains the only game in town. We may yet see a tremendous capital flight to the dollar for a host of reasons from war and political risk to the landscape of interest rate trends. An Asia capital fight to the dollar may really set in motion the most dramatic swings in the world economy starting very soon.
When we look at the foreign-exchange reserves of developing Asian nations, we find that they are now growing 12% annually. This trend has been bullish for the dollar for central banks are deeply worried about Europe and this limits the scope of what they can hold to primarily dollars. Those who keep preaching the crash on the dollar are perpetually myopic and cannot see the financial landscape on a global scale.
Numerous countries and foreign companies borrow in dollars for rates have been cheap. This trend has masked the decline in China for Chinese companies were borrowing dollars at 1% in Hong Kong and depositing in Beijing collecting 5%. However, because world trade is measured simply by capital movement, this carry-trade masked the fact that real trade was declining matching the performance of the Shanghai Index.
The rates are collapsing in Europe as capital flows to the center fearing war. This trend should begin to shift again and the dollar will rise AFTER 2015.75 with the ECM as it has always done.
We can see the 13 year high following the 1995 low in 2008 that was precisely on target. This should turn back to new highs starting in 2016. You can see the pattern is by no means a Phase Transition or a spike high. The dollar rally into 2008 came way too close to the 1985 high that sparked the birth of the G5 at the Plaza Accord. This is warning that the ultimate spike high that will break the US economy appears off into 2021. This is where we expect to see a capital contraction into the USA from outside the country.
Those who seriously think that the dollar will be impacted by oil or China will unseat the dollar as the reserve currency are simply living in a world of delusion. Such statements made by people display they have no clue about the depth of international capital flows remaining clueless to the FIRST Golden Rule of international capital flows that dictate why the dollar is even the reserve currency. This is the golden rule of a reserve currency always attributes to the most powerful and largest economy throughout history
The SECOND Gold Rule is that of finance over trade in the modern age that has been really accelerated globalization of the world economy since the fall of Bretton Woods. People fail to even comprehend why Bretton Woods collapsed. It had little to do with trade it was a current account deficit of the USA caused by the global expansion of the military. Even John F. Kennedy understood this and stated bluntly that the US could end its current account deficit any time it desired. I personally believe Kennedy was assassinated because he wanted to curtail the military to support the dollar. That was the real economic issue that he understood.
This globalization of the world economy is best illustrated by trading in foreign exchange markets. Daily foreign exchange trading has reached over $4 trillion, including spot and forward markets and other foreign exchange derivatives that feature prominently in carry trades (cross currency swaps based upon interest rates). While still in the teens in the late 1970s, the ratio of yearly foreign exchange market turnover over merchandise exports had reached about 50:1 in the 1980s, and has doubled again since that time. The current ratio of around 100:1 implies that only about 1% of foreign exchange trading is actually related to merchandise trade. The bulk of money flowing around the world is INVESTMENT. So just how can China or Russia displace the dollar if trade is a tiny fraction of the world economy?
This is the real state of affairs and it is why in 2032 we could be facing a profound change in our political-social-economy. If we have leveraged the entire system far beyond our rational understanding of our management capabilities, then the correction will be equally leveraged on the downside. This is the danger we face for I cannot rule out a Dark Age as long as we over leverage the entire global economy.
I was asked: Can the dollar and gold rise together? Yes! However, that variable comes into play when all other avenues become closed. What happens is much like the bubble in Japan. The yen was rising and that attracted some foreign capital, causing the Nikkei to soar and that attracted even more capital. A shares market can also rise with declining currency value but that relationship is associated with DOMESTIC buying as a hedge against inflation. Therefore, gold and the dollar can rise together ONLY when it is international capital flows. That did not materialize 1980-1985 because the gold rally began because of the declining dollar. This time, we may have more capital fleeing the rest of the world so that moves into US dollars, US shares, and gold. However, that scenario precludes gold rising to wild and crazy numbers anyhow and it certainly rules out the hyperinflation nonsense. The exponential rise in gold will come only after the dollar peaks and capital then once in US dollars starts to shift from PUBLIC (bonds) to PRIVATE (assets).
Troika will destroy the liquidity of the Euro:All it takes is just one law to ruin the economy. Agriculture will certainly be detrimental to farmers, but Brussels wants to outlaw short selling and control the financial markets that are going against them. Their fundamental authoritarian belief is to force the markets to comply with their demands no matter how unreasonable they might be. The European Parliament was pushing to fast-track powers to ban short selling of government debt by early 2011 against the interests of Britain as it would end a free market system. Clearly, the thinking process in Brussels is anti-democratic in every step of the way. This notion of outlawing short selling to stop the markets declining against them is preposterous. It would only fester and destroy London as a financial hub in the world economy. The demise of the London Stock Exchange cannot be ruled out come 2025. That will be 224 years from its founding in 1801. At the very least, we will see a major upheaval and things will change dramatically for them.
However, we are finding simply a capital flight out of the Euro and into the dollar is contributing the free-fall in the Euro.
...the ECB is now attempting to destroy many companies ... by wiping out their short-term liquidity. If companies have no cash on hand because they spent it as the ECB desires, they would run the risk of bankruptcy unable to pay employees in an economic downturn we are likely to see 2016-2020. This policy is having a major impact upon the Euro far more than anticipated just based upon our own clients.
Yet the problem concerns major companies in Germany listed in the DAX companies. Penalizing liquidity will be even more devastating for the small and medium-sized companies under the ECBs policy. This is driving the Euro into a free-fall and sending capital flows into the dollar just to maintain liquidity completely brain-dead ECB policy.
This trend becomes vastly problematic for the corporations leaving no effective alternative end liquidity or move to the dollar.
Saudi Arabia has banned financial products that amount to a short position against the riyal. The measure indicates the high degree of attack that the peg is starting to come. The government has announced a wave of layoffs in the public sector. This is an absolute first. The Middle East was considered beyond economics because of oil. Everything is changing.
We will see the same situation with respect to the euro. If Britain does not leave the EU, it will stand in silence and its financial standing in the world will collapse. Brussels will adopt the same type of policies and just make it illegal to disagree with them.
Cameron loses fight with EU over allowing short-selling. The European politicians think they can prevent a collapse by outlawing short-selling. What these morons fail to grasp is that once a market turns down and confidence vanishes, the ONLY support is short-covering. Without that, you get the 90% declines as was the case during the Great Depression in the USA. They were hunting down shorts aggressively and nobody would play the short-side resulting in a steady erosion of the market value.
The capital flows MUST push the dollar higher and that will then set the monetary reform and dethrone the dollar. Until that happens, things do not shift. Eventually, China and India will rise because the West will destroy their economies with this constant attack of rising taxes to keep their failed system in motion. That is unsustainable.
You MUST move to extremes to create the change. Change will never come without motivation. The crude oil fell from 1997 to nearly $10 going into that ECM turning point 1998. Our forecast for $100 was met. Yes, oil exceeded that intraday. It could not close any year above $100 stopping at the $98-$99 level. That was the FALSE MOVE the drop to $10 into 1998 had everyone believing oil was going back to a few dollars. On the upside, all we have heard is how the dollar will crash for it is losing the fight against oil. Opinion ALWAYS mirrors the current trend.
The BUBBLE for 2015,75 should be the bond market not stocks. The capital flows should move into the typical flight to quality mode and drive rates even lower. This will set the stage for BIG BANG. To accomplish that, we should see the stock markets tread water, but not necessarily drive off the cliff.
We can see the 30 year bonds from a yearly perspective we recreated back to the late 1700s not only elected THREE YEARLY BULLISH REVERSALS for the close of 2014, but the oscillator also turned up. This is reflecting the sectorial capital flow shift. Of course, the dollar haters are out in force claiming our capital flow models are wrong because the stock markets are dropping. This is typical myopic perspective that will prevent them from ever really profiting from what lies ahead. They refuse to comprehend (1) you have capital flows among nations that drives the currencies for example, and (2) you then have sector driven capital flows.
It is the sector flows that we see as bubbles. To create a bubble in anything, we need capital CONCENTRATION. This is where confidence comes into play. People display their herd-instinct by running into a sector because that is what everyone else is doing. People are convinced by price movement.
Fallout From the Swiss is a Dress Rehearsal for the Dollar
The move in the Swiss was extraordinary because of the massive short-Swiss through loans and their own buying of Euros. The audacity of the IMF to even state they will look into this as if they have any such authority or credibility is just stunning. They want the inside info so they can line their own pockets along with friends.
The British brokerage house Alpari (UK) Limited has entered insolvency due to the Swiss move. There is no way a Broker can limit the risk of an account when something moves 30%. There is more fallout to come. Just keep in mind this will happen when the dollar rises for there is even a larger short-dollar position around the globe. What we have seen in the Swiss will be the dress rehearsal for the dollar.
There remains a vast dollar short-positions as numerous emerging-market governments have issued debt denominated in dollars to save money on interest rates.
Note that even if the Fed isn't raising rates, the market is already doing so, as I explained we much look at the statistical change in composition of private portfolios from Treasuries to a mix of corporate AAA and emerging market debt ($9 trillion in dollar loans abroad to emerging markets as of 2015, an increase from $5.7 trillion in 2014):The collapse in the Swiss/Euro Peg has exposed the amount of mortgages and loans in Swiss being found in Britain to Greece. This is a drop in the bucket. For the amount of debt issued in dollars has grown by 50% since 2007 and has now reached some $9 trillion. This the total amount owed in dollars by non-bank borrowers outside the USA. If the Fed raises interest rates as anticipated this year for the first time since 2006, higher borrowing costs for companies and governments, along with a stronger greenback, will create the greatest economic collapse in modern times.
The dollar debt is just one example of how the Feds tightening would ripple through the world economy. From the housing markets in Canada and Hong Kong to capital flows into and out of China and Turkey right down throughout South America and lets not forget the Middle East and Australia.
I have explained the QE1-3 would not be inflationary and all those who simply try to equate inflation to money supply have been dead wrong. The dollar is now THE world currency. Not merely is world trade taking place in dollars, we have world debt as well. The increase in money supply has been easily absorbed globally and that has rendered the old theory constructed on a simplistic idea that inflation is solely driven by an increase in money supply are in adequate in todays global economy.
Liquidity conditions globally will start to tighten as this idea of negative interest rates unwinding the entire leverage of the economy as well. Emerging markets will not be the only area that will be affected. We have a domestic US economy now being fueled by collapsing energy prices and mortgage rates falling through the floor to historic lows.
The broad trade-weighted dollar has strengthened 12.3% since June, and we expect the dollar outright will advance further as the Fed is forced to tighten while the European Central Bank continues to monetize with negative interest rates buying in failed sovereign debt. Of course, Japan extends its record stimulus as well leaving the USA the only game in town. The pegs of China will have to go as the dollar rises China will have to let go of the balloon or be dragged even higher into the sky without a footing. The pegs in the Middle East and Denmark will also have to go as more and more cappital concentrates into the USA.
The real importance here is the setting of the stage for the one-world reserve currency. To reach that point, what we need is a strong dollar rally that will hurt the world economy significantly forcing political change. This is ripe for Obama has done far more to destroy the integrity of the United States than anyone could have possibly imagined. In just 3.14 years, he wiped out decades of peace and reignited the cold war.
So the resistance toward the dollar is there waiting in the wings. However, this will not prevent the rally near-term in the dollar. It is illustrating that eventually we will abandon the dollar as the reserve currency and the botched job creating the Euro has also contributed to setting this trend in motion. Displacing the dollar takes decades to accomplish for it is one domino at a time. Such profound changes to the world monetary system are not accomplished overnight. It took 26 years to wipe out Bretton Woods. From 1971, it was 26 years to the start of the Euro and the Asian Currency Crisis. We should see the dollar displacement by the peak of the next 8,6 year wave.
As we stated at the conferences, nothing appears ready to break before May. Nevertheless, the crazy period ahead appears to be the 2017-2020 time frame. The euro held the Yearly Bearish at the 103 area and elected the 116 number. Normally we would see a rally first to retest that area before turning down.
Technically, this view from the reversal model is also supported. When we broke that uptrend line, there was no retest. The euro just collapsed. We should mount some sort of a retest. As far as breaking the 80 cent level, as we have stated before, that is not short-term, but long-term. This type of move will send the U.S. dollar higher after 2017.
Every time the dollar moves to record highs, we get major monetary reform. Roosevelt devalued the dollar in 1934, and in 1985 when the dollar was pushed to all-time record highs they formed G5, which is now G20. When it broke in 1971, we ended up with the Floating Exchange Rate System. Extreme moves in the dollar spark political economic reform. Governments see this coming and are preparing to move electronic.
This is the type of move we need to see to create the change in the monetary system once again. It will probably take the form of the U.S. dollar no longer being the reserve currency. We will probably be looking at some electronic currency based on a basket.
So nothing has changed yet. We have a long, hard, road ahead into 2020.
So what we need to complete here is the dollar rally. There is about $9 trillion in dollar short positions from emerging markets. Clients around the world have been calling us in for consultations, as usual, since the number one creator of havoc is currency. More than 75% of corporate losses have to do with currency.
We have not yet felt the pain needed to create the major global shifts for the future. The TIME is not right. It appears to be the second benchmark. If you look at these markets from a connected basis, it becomes easier to see the trend. Our forecast for a dollar rally is critical to the outcome as a whole and we are seeing the subtle pressure building, as with Chinas devaluation. A dollar rally will create global chaos and that is the key to political change. If you are familiar with charts, our Dollar Index back to 1900 shows that the dollar is still alive and well with a new spike high being within the realm of possibility.
Furthermore, so many people (mainly Americans) are so bearish on the dollar because of debt that they cannot see the simple fact that even $17 trillion in debt is nothing in comparison to $158 trillion in worldwide debt. They also fail to grasp that the US debt is the ONLY place for money right now to park among nations. Europe has no single debt and as such we see predominantly the bunds of Germany going negative as capital shifts to Germany inside the EU.
Additionally, the vast majority of people do not understand how capital moves and therein lies their problem. Just look at what happened in Europe. Back in 2010 when Greece first came on the radar as in trouble, capital began to flee and traders looked around to see who would be next. They suddenly discovered Portugal, Spain, and Italy. There are now sniffing around at France. In 1931, when all of Europe moved into default with a few exceptions, China and Asia as well as South America for the fourth time overall, capital fled to the USA sending the dollar to record highs. This set in motion the whole protectionism game as politicians did not understand what was developing.
Herbert Hoover wrote in his memoirs foreign government reserve deposits were constantly driven by fear hither an yon over the world. We were to see currencies demoralized and governments embarrassed as fear drove the gold from one country to another.
[capital] behaved like a loose cannon on the deck of the world in a tempest-tossed era.
Understanding how capital moves is absolutely imperative to surviving the future. If you cannot grasp this aspect, you will lose everything by 2020 and that is no joke. The US Federal Reserve has pulled the trigger on the nonsense of QE and has cautioned that rates will rise. The Fed will have no choice as the stock market rallies they will be criticized for QE creating inflation. Of course this will not be true since the dollar is being absorbed globally. You cannot simply add QE to domestic economic conditions and expect inflation. The dollar is the RESERVE currency and it is a global money supply not purely domestic.
We will see not just Russia in economic chaos as commodities must decline into the end of 2015 including energy as the dollar rises, but all emerging markets must now brace for their ordeal by fire. Domestic analysts focus purely on domestic issues never looking around the globe to comprehend the real trend at hand. Emerging markets have collectively borrowed $5.7 trillion actually in US dollars. This presents a repeat of Greece.
The Greek financial crisis was caused NOT by simply unrestricted spending, but the conversion of their debt to euros and then the euro rose in value more than doubling the real money they had to repay. This became like stip-mining taking the wealth of Greece and exporting it to the bond holders. It was such a great deal for the buyers of government debt like money from heaven, and the worst of all worlds for the Greek people.
Now we will see this VERY SAME trend hit the emerging markets like a hammer. The emerging markets have issued debt in dollars which is a currency they cannot print and do not control. This hard-currency debt has tripled in the last decade and is split between $3.1 trillion in bank loans and $2.6 trillion in bonds. This will ripple through the banks causing massive new losses just as the Cyprus banks held Greek debt. This time, it will be the debt of all emerging markets. We are looking at a drastic scale of the biggest cross-border lending sprees of the past two centuries.
A large portion of this emerging market debt was taken out at real interest rates of 1% on the implicit assumption that the Fed would continue to flood the world with liquidity for years to come. This has made the emerging markets vast borrowers dollars so in a trading position they are short dollars. This is the greatest short-position on a currency on the boards and when the dollar RISES, they will face the margin call from Hell itself. This will set off another banking crisis for bankers always buy the high and sell the low. They have NEVER learned even once from any economic crisis.
The Fed dashed all lingering hopes for continued dollar leniency on Wednesday this past week. The pledge to keep QE-stimulus for a considerable time has vanished into the sunset. The developing countries may be just as vulnerable to a dollar shock. The Russian Rouble crash is just the beginning. Furthermore, the commodity bulls have found every possible excuse to convince themselves that China would continue to drive a commodity supercycle. That has proven to be dead wrong for a unbiased glance at their share markets there clearly demonstrate a decline has been in motion since 2007.
These false assumptions have blown up hedge funds and traders around the globe as results for 2014 have proven to be the worst year perhaps ever. Russias Vladimir Putin may be brilliant, but his timing is way off for his country suggesting that the hard times ahead will be even harder.
The collapse in energy also threatens to create massive economic readjustments throughout the Middle East. Additionally, this economic chaos is spreading beyond Russia reaching also Nigeria, Venezuela and other petro-states. Indonesia had to intervene on Wednesday to defend the rupiah. Brazils real has fallen to a 10-year low against the dollar, as has the index of emerging market currencies. Sao Paolos Bovespa index is down 23% in dollars in three weeks.
The coming meltdown in Emerging Market debt can be seen in Pimcos Emerging Market Corporate Bond Fund, which suffered a loss of $237m in November, and the pain is unlikely to stop as clients discover that 24% of its portfolio is in Russia. We are facing a very serious crisis for BIG BANG.
Clearly, gold is not in such a Waterfall Event no matter how bearish everyone gets. We have moved beyond the 3 year window from 2011 and the Yearly Bearish Reversal at $681 has held. To make that final low in gold, the vast majority have to write off gold entirely and regard it as the WSJ just did nothing more than a pet rock. So as the bearishness builds, this is good for establishing character separating the traders from the fools who just believe propaganda and trade fundamentally. But the hate mails still come in and this warns the tree must still be shaken. When they stop, then the market will be ready to rebound but only on short-covering not new longs. So expect no sudden news of a huge buyer to save the day. That will NEVER happen. The low is made by massive shorts just as highs are made by fools rushing in an believe the propaganda of the promoters at the top.
So far, we are still dealing with a reaction only phase. That could have produced a low as soon as 2013 with a rally into 2015.75, but that would have required also a Phase Transition in the equities, which did not materialize. It would have also required a premature peak in government (low in interest rates), which Larry Summers assured us would not happen by justifying negative interest rates. A 3 year reaction would have been a low in 2014. We just proved that pattern wrong as well making new lows here in 2015. This is a bear market so we have to do some damage. The PRICE objective of breaking $1,000 was not met within that 3 year window so we must look to the Benchmarks as laid out in the International Precious Metals Report.
Gold has not bottomed as of yet for it must line up with everything else. The sell signal at the end of July was yet another confirmation that new lows still lie ahead. The Phase Transition in the Dow was postponed for the post-2015.75 era because this target is manifesting as the peak in government not the private sector assets. Therefore, we should see the low in short-term rates with this target with the last rush into Flight to Quality. This postponement in the Dow likewise secured the decline in gold would be protracted rather than the typical 2 year correction with the low in 2013 or even a 3 year reaction low in 2014.
Those targets for the low in gold are in the International Precious Metals Report that warns of the final decline. We are NOT looking for the low in gold to be on October 1 either. If that materialized, it would be extremely profound. However, the more likely event will be the rush to cash completing the final Flight to Quality.
The euro has an EXTREMELY RARE virtual TRIPLE WEEKLY BEARISH REVERSAL at 10815. This is not looking very good for Europe. Our model is setting up for the massive dollar rally that the dollar haters just cannot comprehend. They swear the dollar will collapse and the U.S. will lose its reserve currency status out of thin air. They are SO DEAD WRONG; it is a shame for we are about to enter a period where there will not be a single asset class standing without its ardent supporters suffering huge losses.
The HIGHER the dollar rallies, the more likely it is to create an economic storm and losses. If the dollar declines, then all those who issued dollar debt will win. How do we create an economic downturn with a declining dollar? Corporate profits will rise, not fall, and the $9 trillion in dollar-denominated debt will reap huge profits instead of losses.
Then there are the crazies who cannot see the forest for the trees; they send in e-mails that say I am wrong and the dollar will collapse because Russia is abandoning the dollar. They are so lost in thinking that Russia is somehow a major holder of dollars. What is the alternative? There is nothing. A rise in the dollar will inflict the greatest losses worldwide and then the cry for an independent reserve currency will emerge. A declining dollar will NOT dethrone it.
It is really all about the elites holding the power. Asia has youth so they don't need to cull the unfunded liabilities,
...you say from a Phillipine perspective. Japan, Korea, even China(!) not so much. Better say South and Southeast Asia. Then the exceptions become inconsequential.
Saying AI can't surpass human creativity, though - that's utter bunk. Stick breaking in Banach spaces is not rocket science any more. We have the math. We just haven't had the time and money to implement it yet.
Try to actually rebut
my mathematical and physics reasoning. Then we can have a discussion.
Okay.
A.I. mastering the known sciences, has nothing to do with my point about where future creativity is derived from serendipity of chance meeting imperfection. If computation could replace the necessary finitenessnumerability of the speed-of-light and the necessary zigzag imperfection fitness annealing of nature, then omniscience is possible, the speed-of-light is infiniteinnumerable, and the past and future (light cones of relativity) collapse into an infinitesimal point of nothingness. And nothing exists any more. Kurzweil is a certified idiot!
This bit? Serendipity is just a stochastic algorithm. In no wise is it the hard part of constructed intelligence. Simulated annealling has been a staple of non-convex optimization since Metropolis-Hastings. I know of no reason to think that any emergent phenomena of the physical substratum is not amenable to simulation to a degree of accuracy sufficient to generate every perceivable organizational behaviour required for any clearly definable pragmatically useful behaviour or outcome. Quite the contrary: In every case studied, the consistent pattern has been for the accuracy of simulation models to increase to within some infinitesimal delta of the principled bounds of information, where any further precision becomes an accuracy illusion, and the differences no longer make a difference.
I should give you a hint to try to steer you to discover your error, otherwise you might dismiss me under some wrong impression that I am cankerous and hand waving.
There is no such thing as "accuracy" in creativity. The entire point is there can't be a top-down observer (to measure any such metric) because this would require the speed-of-light to be not finitenumerable. Creativity originates from imperfection, or stated in another way, from the entropy of the diverse perspectives. Diverse "fitness" (i.e. creativity and not one correct fit) is occurring due to the fact that nature is not measuring any thing globally. The only way to approximate nature is to recreate how diverse evolution functions. There isn't any superior omniscience. What ever A.I. is, it can never be more perfect or superior to every other thing in nature, because that would be the antithesis of a finitenumerable speed-of-light which requires local diverse perspectives. Without a finitenumerable speed-of-light, nothing can exist because past and future would collapse into the same infinitesimal point of nothingness.
I had explained all this already. You are simply not grasping that existence is a game of chance. A.I. would simply become another species in the game. A.I. can't be any more creative than I can be more creative than a monkey. A monkey does creativity in it's ecosystem that I can't do. Man could attempt to kill all the monkeys because we make superior weapons, but remember "we can't do just one thing". There are always ramifications. Kill all the monkeys and some other ecosystem changes (aka trophic cascade), which dominos and eventually impacts humans in some probably "undesirable" way since we not automatically adapted to any change (yet some will always prosper with any change, as that is the way creativity functions, since we are diverse opportunists operating in diverse local perspectives). Ditto A.I., because by correct definition of intelligence (which is always randomly accretive and not deterministic order) it can't be omniscient.
All the failure of your approach at analysing this issue begins and ends with your lack of focus of the necessity of the finitenessnumerability of the speed-of-light. Which also implies you don't grasp the Second Law of Thermodynamics at a fundamental level.
You go off on terms such as intelligence and determinism, without relating to them fact that they are ill-defined concepts. Start from well-defined fundamentals as I have done and you won't end up in ill-defined soup.
There is no such thing as a "non-physical reality". Physical is an ill-defined distinction. Verlinde's link between information and gravity should hint you of that. The red-herring is constructing ill-defined strawmen concepts.
I have stated in the past that for A.I. to be creative, then it would have to make mistakes and be alive. So my entire point has been to dispel this fear of A.I. becoming some omniscient superior force that subsumes the relevance of every other species in the universe. I have not stated that it is impossible to create new species. Heck humans have been engineering new species of plants and animals with cross breeding. My point is don't expect A.I. to be any more "perfect" than the finite ability to collect and process information globally which is inherently limited by the speed-of-light. Man might need to disperse light-years away into the universe in order to keep A.I. from being absolutely dominant at some point. But I don't even think that will be necessary, because for A.I. to be truly creative, then each instance of A.I. needs to have free will. Because otherwise it would mean the universe was deterministic, which thus would imply the speed-of-light is not finitenumerable (that future is already predetermined). By definition, free will requires that there can't be any omniscient control and that there must be divergence and "mistakes".
It seems you fail to understand that existence requires divergence. Convergence is not distinct from a static system. Convergence would require that the entropy of the universe is not trending to maximum, thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Really AlphaGo was an underappreciated watershed. The gamespace of Go is large enough to be a fully qualified proxy for (countable) infinity. The simple architectural trick of policy network separation, in combination with a lengthy catalog of less pivotal techniques, made the difference between a heuristic algorithm for guided search, such as is applicable in chess, and a meaningfully creative learner. If you need to add another dimension to a learner's representation space, you just add a parameter. It's really no big deal. It's certainly not the stopping point of creative intelligence.
The key factor you are missing in your analogy is free will.The hardest button to button in closing the loop on AI is the temporal sequence chaos which allows unbounded forward chaining inference to "jump outside of the system" in the classical Hofstadterian description, not just in toy cases, but quite generally. It's not in the static representation space. It's in the dynamical system. But I have seen enough successes (and failures) in process discovery to be quite committed to the task of proving concretely that the fitness landscape is rich enough, and the requirements of practical intelligence weak enough, so that effectively unbounded arbitrarily good approximate covers of the space of intelligence behaviour ensembles are possible. (I do not claim they are finite covers.)
Again you are focused on fitness and not on the fact that dynamic systems require divergence and free will, and thus there isn't one best fitness. No one can say which fit is good or bad. This is the essence of creativity.It's like this: Who really cares about transcendental numbers except as theoretical objects? Yes, overwhelmingly all of the reals are transcendental. But algebraic numbers, or a truncation of an infinite algebraic series, will suffice for any computation resulting in an observable. I admit that the search landscape for dynamical systems embodying creative intelligence is not a perfect cover. The inverse may be dense in that space. But I also hold that the positive set is dense in that space as well. We know how to add orthogonal dimensions to a representation space at will, I am sure you can agree. All I ask is that you acknowledge that generalizing that to adding independent dimensions to a process space is not significantly harder, AND that the resulting behaviour manifold can be dense in the infinite-dimensional manifold containing the most precise possible description of every intelligent (creative) behaviour. The last is not practically proven, but neither is it prohibited by first principles.
Structure and process are duals. Where you can create in structure, you can create in process, and vice versa. In summary, the one weird trick a Minnesota dad is using to make creative AGI is to apply that creative process to self-representation, to the self-representation of the process which embodies self. The result is a space-filling bifurcation cascade in a Banach space of truth-functionals, which suffices to dominate every control strategy. (I am using the words loosely because I'm not trying to do a proof here, just describe in tight summary a constructive strategy using coherent and illustrative language with sufficient clarity to make the fulfillment - with lots of sweat and capital - plausible in every regard.) I can go on about the pragmatic strategy elsewhere. This is only to emphasize that it is not a project predicated on a contradiction.
There is a lot of math one could imbue an A.I. species with (much of it I am not even expert enough to digest), but ultimately you have to give it randomness and imperfection (i.e. free will) else it will just be a closed universe, static, and convergent.
Randomness means it interacts with its local environment and there is not total order. The partial orders is what makes the universe divergent (and irreversible) and allows for our existence to not collapse into a globally deterministic future (i.e. a total order) and instead a trend to maximum entropy. If the speed-of-light was not finitenumerable, some omniscience could indeed calculate a total order and reverse time. If time can be reversed, then nothing is exists, because everything is already statically determined from all past to all future and thus there is no free will.
It is quite elegant how the finitenessnumerability of the speed-of-light is essential and that we can't have existence without divergence and free will. It all fits together elegantly. As Einstein quipped, theories should be beautiful and elegant.