My Mortgage Blog

We have a truly splendid outbreak of spring fever in the markets and media, the infected running about in circles, yelling “Inflation! Money-printing! Dollar crashing!”
     
Before rounding them up, a moment for the economy: inbound data are on the weak side. 1st quarter GDP, expected everywhere (until March) to be in excess of 4% growth, maybe 5%, arrived at 1.8%. Net of distortions, probably closer to 2.5%, but not going anywhere, certainly not fast enough to absorb labor or houses. Orders for durable goods did rise 1.2% in March, manufacturing continuing as the one bright spot.
     
Case/Shiller found falling home prices in February (Again. Duh.). The surprise of most concern is the rise in people filing new claims for unemployment insurance. At the peak of optimism last winter, weekly filings fell into the 380,000 range; last week were 429,000, the recent average above 400,000 for the first time in two months.

     
Okay, get out the butterfly nets, soothing voices, straightjackets, and a quart of whatever they used to give to Pat Nixon.
     
Principles and facts sometimes quiet the disturbed: any inflation problem will cause a jump in long-term Treasury yields. Instead, the 10-year T-note this week dipped to 3.31%; excepting Tsunami Day (“3/11”) as low as any since mid-December.
     
Second, you cannot have an inflation problem without rising wages. If people don’t have the money to pay higher prices, they won’t buy much of the stuff that got more expensive. In next Friday’s job data, expect wages to be flat for a fifth-straight month.
     
Third, there is an inflation problem -- several of them, full-go wage-price spirals -- not one of them here. China, India, Brazil, Russia, even parts of Europe, all “overheating,” meaning economic growth faster than capacity, all in the serious stages of inflation that everywhere previously have required a recession to stop.
     
“But GOLD, man! Don’t you SEE it?! $1,545!! FIFTEEN HUNDRED BUCKS!! Going straight up... are you BLIND!?! SILVER $47.50... time to melt all that crap we got at the wedding... inflationinflationINFLATION!!”
     
Better to rent “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” There is nothing to do with these people but shoot ‘em up with thorazine. At $1,545, gold is at last closing on that all-time money loser, $895 on April 25, 1980. In constant dollars that was $2,167.
     
Gold does not mean anything. Just a pretty, scarce, and emotional commodity.
     
Dollar principles are harder. First: the price of gold is the price of a thing; the price of a dollar is measured in other currencies, themselves relative to each other. Therefore, any time the booby-hatch begins this dollar-falling hollering, pinch yourself. Fall from what, relative to what? Beware of charts beginning at prior highs -- in mathematic inevitability, they must show subsequent decline.
     
We have fallen versus the yen, now 81/buck. Which is very good news. The yen’s strength is a self-welded prison of deflation. We have fallen versus the commodity exporters -- Australia and Brazil -- themselves overheated by China’s insatiable appetite, and deeply vulnerable to any China slowdown. We have “fallen” versus the euro (now $1.48), but the dollar is still stronger than the euro-top in the summer of 2008, pre-Lehman ($1.59). The dollar has had no meaningful slide versus China’s yuan or Russia’s ruble, and has gained versus Swiss franc and Canadian loonie.
     
All of the nations whose currencies have risen recently, previously succeeded in devaluing versus us in the pit of the financial crisis, which cheapened their exports, and helped them to recover. Relative processes tend to self-correct, recurrently.
     
Last currency principle: the primary mover is interest-rate differential. Earn more there than here, money goes there. In Teutonic blockheadedness, the European Central Bank has begun to raise its cost of money, assuring the collapse of Club Med. Our cost of money is still zero, where it will remain until someone here decides to help housing. The day that Greece goes down, you won’t want to hold euros.
     
Some day we’ll have dollar trouble, but this day belongs to the Mad Hatter.