From 5¢ Cokes to $5 Cappuccinos
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By David Galland and Casey Research
When most folks think about inflation, they think about the $3 gallons of gasoline, $4 half-gallons of milk and $5 half-pints of coffee from Starbucks. "Inflation" is just a synonym for "rising prices"... or so they believe. But the rising prices of goods and services, also known as "price inflation," is merely a RESULT. The cause is "monetary inflation." And now that Ben Bernanke and most of the world's other central bankers have embarked on a massive monetary inflation campaign, we gold bulls have reason to be even more bullish.
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Monetary inflation, which occurs when the supply of money increases faster than the supply of goods and services, causes price inflation. But while almost everyone sees price inflation when it happens, few people notice the monetary inflation that is causing it. And so they tend to blame the producers of goods and services for higher prices -- rather than the money-creating government that is the true culprit.
As governments around the world borrow and spend - piling up massive debts in the process - they have to find the money somewhere to pay these debts. Most governments "find" the money they need on a printing press. This situation is not unique to the U.S…Every government owns a printing press.
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The results of over three decades of unhindered monetary creation are increasingly being felt in a rising tide of price inflation worldwide, whether it be the 7.4% increase in producer prices reported by the U.S. in the most recent quarter, or the news just out of China that consumer price inflation now tops 8% and is worsening… or, in the most extreme example, Zimbabwe, where the utter lack of restraint by an insane dictator now burdens that economy with an inflation rate of over 100,000% annually.
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To get a better sense of things, Casey Research recently conducted a survey of the world's top 30 economies, broken down on a region-by-region basis. The snapshot below offers a glimpse of the big picture…and the context for today's booming commodity markets.
Why are commodity prices rising? Supply and demand fundamentals are one of the biggest reasons. But monetary inflation certainly deserves some of the credit.
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So in order to understand today's rising commodity prices, we must examine both of these influences. The supply and demand picture is relatively straightforward: Supplies are tight; demand is booming. Therefore prices are rising. But the current commodity boom includes a fresh wrinkle that has to do with the concept of "peak" commodities. In other words, the theory that natural resources are nearing - or have already passed - an all-time peak in supply, from which the only direction is down. Marion King Hubbert's 50-year old theory of Peak Oil has received the most attention recently, but credible arguments can also be made for Peak Metal (the dearth of major new discoveries), and even Peak Food. While these arguments have merit, they were beyond the scope of our survey, other than noting them as potentially rising in significance over time.
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The second long-term influence over commodity prices is monetary inflation. The monetary systems now in universal favor around the world rely on little more than central bank shell games and upbeat press releases. The world's major currencies are convertible into nothing more than paper and ink, which is why almost no government can resist making more of them. While the central banks of a handful of countries are (just) managing to contain inflation through restrained monetary and fiscal policy, the vast majority are finding the task politically inexpedient and are losing control. The nearby chart paints a picture of the largely unfettered global growth in money since the early 1970s plotted against industrial production – a proxy for "goods" in their many varieties.
This chart begins to get under the hood of the problem, but one further view is necessary to understand what happened in the early 1970s that unleashed the tidal wave of money. The chart below presents the ratio of global money growth to industrial production, and includes a marker indicating President Nixon's canceling of the link between the U.S. dollar and gold in 1971. Once this anchor was removed, all that remained was a pure fiat monetary system, or what James Grant calls the "faith-based" system. While canceling the gold standard was a U.S. policy decision, its impact was felt around the world.
Just 27 years before Nixon severed the link between the dollar and gold, the U.S. government had guaranteed "forever" that it would readily exchange one ounce of gold for 35 US dollars.
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But as is inevitable when dealing with governments, "forever" really means "for as long as it is politically expedient." When the dollar's convertibility into gold became inconvenient, Nixon canceled it…forever.
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Once President Nixon canceled that convertibility, which took effect in 1971, the world's central bankers, left with no other immediately obvious or more viable alternative, continued using the U.S. dollar as a key component of their reserves. It also continued to be used in international trade, to price globally traded commodities, such as oil. Yet the end of gold convertibility represented a fundamental change - from that point forward the creation of U.S. dollars and, by extension, all of the world's currencies, was restrained by nothing more than political expediency…And that's not much of a restraint.Therefore, in light of the cause and effect between monetary inflation and price inflation, and given the clear findings in our Global Inflation Survey, we can only conclude that rising inflation is now baked into the proverbial cake.
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As investors, that keeps us focused on gold, the world's longest-serving form of money. Importantly, a quick scan of global currency markets finds that gold is rising against every major currency and most minor ones. This is a very useful view of the current inflation trend in that it demonstrates that the trend has expanded considerably beyond just a weakening U.S. dollar, and is now affecting fiat currencies around the world, almost without exception. Are we seeing the end of the experiment in fiat monetary systems? It's too early to say one way or another, but it's not too late to shift at least some percentage of your portfolio into gold.
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