Bubble to Bubble, Dust to Dust

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The Daily Reckoning | Friday, June 24, 2011 The negative impact of the Internet on real, sustainable growth... Searching for the "promethian light" in the space between two bubbles... Plus, Bill Bonner on turning against the zombies and a few reasons for unsustainable earnings growth... ------------------------------------------------------- Legally Collect Money Each Year... From the OTHER government-backed "retirement program"! Finally - you can get on the inside! Here's why you must do so now... Starting Sept. 30 last year, your US government sponsored "safety net" officially started to shrink. So start collecting money every year for retirement. Get full details here. The Divergent Paths of Growth and Human Progress Bill Bonner Reckoning today from Waterford, Ireland... Oil down to $91 a barrel. Stocks down again yesterday...with a loss of 65 points on the Dow. The 10-year note yield dropped to 2.90... ..and gold? The yellow metal lost $32. What to make of it? We don't know any better than anyone else. But we have a feeling that the 'stocks are cheap' crowd have yet to discover how cheap stocks can become. And the 'inflation is around the corner' crowd is going to look around the corner and not see much coming. And the 'bonds will crash when the Fed stops buying' crowd will be surprised too. QE2 ends in about a week. If bonds were going to crash you'd think bond investors would have begun to sell by now. What are they, stupid? Instead, bonds are becoming more expensive. It's gold, stocks and real estate that are becoming cheaper. So far, these are not even trends. It's too early for that. They're just guesses. But they could turn out to be good guesses. Because the one thing this market has not fully reckoned with is the Great Correction. All this 'recovery' talk has masked the real, underlying trend. That is this: we're correcting 60 years' worth of credit expansion. How far? How much? How fast? We don't know...but households are not spending like they used to. So, it doesn't make sense that businesses should be worth what they used to be worth...or that people should have the jobs they used to have...or that economic policy should work the way it used to work. That much is obvious. But we've been making the point, this week, that the Great Correction might be part of something much bigger. Real GDP growth slowed to medieval levels in Japan after 1989 and in the US 10 years later. Japan has not added a single new job in 20 years; America has not added a single new full time job in over 10. Why? Well, no one really knows. The explanation might be a simple one. After a big bull market came a big bear market. In both Japan and the US, the authorities decided to fight the downside of the financial cycle...wasting trillions of dollars and preventing the economy from healing itself. This resulted in a long period of stagnation. In the last century, the political authorities in Russian and China caused real GDP to go backward for 70 and 30 years respectively. Couldn't central financial planning achieve the same perverse effects in the US and Japan today? Maybe. Or, maybe it is something more profound. Yesterday, we looked at what an economic flop the Internet Age turned out to be. Since the introduction of the worldwide web growth rates have gone down, not up. While the web has certainly made a lot of things more efficient, and made a lot of people rich, it has not led to growth. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe we've had enough of growth. Maybe we're now more concerned with efficiency...time saving...and leisure. But that doesn't do much for the 25 million people who lack decent, full-time jobs in America. And it doesn't do much for the millions who struggle to pay their mortgages, while house prices go down every month. The Internet may be a great thing, but it is not like the discovery of fire. When ancient man discovered fire it gave him an opportunity for above-trend growth. All of a sudden, he was able to use calories that did not come from his own digestive system. He moved into colder areas. His numbers increased (we imagine.) Every major advance for mankind has been made possible by using more energy. First, he used the energy from wild plants and animals - eating them; converting them to useful calories. Then, he found that he could grow the plants that he wanted...and domesticate the animals that were most useful. This further increased the number of calories available to him. Human populations grew again. Then, in the 18th and 19th centuries, he got his biggest break ever. He discovered that he could use coal and oil - thereby drawing on energy that had been condensed and stocked up by the earth itself. This gave him a huge advantage over other animals. It allowed his numbers to soar. It increased GDP growth rates from almost negligible to over 5%. Finally, he went forth and multiplied so much that it looked like even these new advances could not keep up with him. But there are limits to everything. After two centuries it may be that the easy, accessible and cheap sources of fossil fuel - at least of oil - have been exploited. It may be too that the human population has expanded to the point where further increases will be costly and difficult. It could be that the advanced economies - those that got onto oil first - have already squeezed most of the growth juice out of it. That is, perhaps they have reached the point where further growth will be slow, incremental, and expensive...just as it was through most of human history? As we noted yesterday, all the great technological advances happened at least a half a century ago. They all involved new and better ways to use fossil fuel. Since then, the only big advance has been the Internet...and it looks like a dud from a growth point of view. If this is so...perhaps we are not doomed to a "lost decade," as the papers warn. Perhaps the whole century will be lost. We have lost one decade already. Israel Gives Money-Grubbing OPEC the Middle Finger Israel just discovered what could be the 2nd largest oil basin in the world today. This could spell the beginning of the end for OPEC - and huge gains for you. Details here. The Daily Reckoning Presents Bubble to Bubble, Dust to Dust In which Bill Bonner bets on ignorance by Bill Bonner So far, this century has been a delight. From tech bubble to tech bubble in scarcely 10 years. On our recent trip to China, all of a sudden we felt 10 years younger. For in the coffee bars of China's futuristic cities were entrepreneurs, dreamers and lunatics who still thought it was 1999. A group of young techies filled us in: "We don't worry about profitability. We can worry about that later. We want traffic. Because we know we can monetize the traffic on the stock market." Here were people who still believed they could take eyeballs to the bank. And they were right; once again, investors react to the Internet as though it were a toxic mushroom. Just look at Youku. It's a Chinese version of YouTube. It had revenues of only $60 million last year. Yet, investors drove the stock up so high the company was valued at $7 billion. Renren, billed as "China's Facebook," produced similar hallucinatory effects. With revenues - not profits - of just $76 million, its value rose to $9 billion. In the Occident too, the 'social media wave' is making financial history, if not profits. Last week, Pandora, a loss-making on-line music site, rose more than 60%, before falling back. The trouble with edgy technology is that something edgier comes along soon after. So capitalizing a tech company at more than a few times earnings is usually a mistake. But the conceits of the worldwide web go far beyond p/e ratios. Ten years ago, people had such high hopes they could barely talk about it without running out of oxygen. George Gilder, in his book Telecosm announced a new economy "based on a new sphere of cornucopian radiance - reality unmassed and unmasked, leaving only the promethian light." Gilder thought he could see the promethian light shining through the undersea cables laid by a company called Global Crossing. He urged investors to buy. The stock had traded over $60 during the tech bubble of the late '90s. By the middle of 2002, you could buy it for 6 cents. Another Internet visionary, Michael Saylor, chairman of MicroStrategy, said he was on a mission to purge "ignorance from the planet." He said his company was leading a "crusade for intelligence." In a contest between intelligence and ignorance, we know how to bet. On March 20, 2000, Saylor admitted that he had cooked his company's books. Investors lost $11 billion. Saylor, personally, lost $6.1 billion - more than anyone had ever lost in a single day's trading. Behind the huge losses were cosmic delusions. Digitized knowledge was supposed to make us all smarter and richer. Computing power doubled every 18 months; true believers thought the rate of innovation and GDP growth should speed up too. But did it? Just the opposite. For starters, the promethean light was harmful to jobs. Larry Summers explained, in The Financial Times, what the Internet did to the book trade. First, Amazon undermined bookstores. And then, e-books undermined the kind made of trees. Between writing a word and reading it there were fewer middlemen. Thousands of jobs disappeared. In other industries too productivity rose, but fewer employees were needed. In 2000, America had 113,899,000 full time jobs. Ten years later it had 112,618, 000. Real GDP growth declined too. The US government accumulated $8 trillion in deficits, but GDP only rose $4 trillion. Adjust for inflation properly and America's real GDP per capita went backwards for the entire decade - the first time ever recorded. In real terms, house prices and stock prices too, both declined. What went wrong? Why didn't computer-equipped Wall Street allocate capital to businesses that could grow wealth and create jobs? Why didn't entrepreneurs and scientists use the worldwide web to invent new technology and new sources of prosperity? Why didn't investors use the knowledge at their fingertips to avoid dead-end investment in mortgage backed derivatives and housing? Digital progress is not the same as real progress. And digital knowledge is a far cry from actually knowing anything useful. Besides, it's not knowledge that makes the world go around, anyway. It's ignorance. How many people would have bought Global Crossing if they had known what would happen? How many innovations would be aborted if people knew how they would work out? How many marriages would be cancelled; how many movie tickets would go unsold? If you could look into the future and know your whole life in every intimate detail...how many people would blow their brains out rather than sit through a re- run? People hustle and take chances only because they don't know how it will turn out. As for making people smarter, a report in last week's press tells us that the typical teenager spends 13 hours a day on some form of electronic device. Another report tells us that his IQ will go down if he watches dumb programming. Today, there are 600 million people on Facebook and 175 million on Twitter. Knowledge is there aplenty. You can go there, if you like, and find out what a congressman's crotch looks like. Facebook and Twitter have not yet gone public. But secondary market trading suggests that Facebook would fetch a price of more than $75 billion and Twitter as much as $8 billion. As for their real value to the human race, they're probably not worth a damn. Regards, Bill Bonner for The Daily Reckoning URGENT NEWS... Breakthrough: New "Magic Bullet" Technology Could Zap Deadly Cancer Cells at Will In the latest clinical trial, over 85% of cancer patients achieved complete or partial remissions of their symptoms using the "magic bullet" technology. This is a rare opportunity to get in early on a little-known Biotech Company that's making medical history... Click here for full details. Bill Bonner Ongoing Problems in the 21st Century Are people turning against the zombies? Here's a report, from The Telegraph, that describes the mixed-up, confusing scene in Greece: Families swelled the ranks of those camping permanently in the square, some carrying children on their shoulders. "It's for my children that I have found a voice," said Yiannis, a taxi driver with five children. "They face a bleak future unless they can get educated and get out of Greece but I want them to know that we didn't just give up and accept this disaster - that at least I put up a fight." Some groups were notable in their absence - there were no demonstrators marching under union banners after crowds turned against them last week labeling them "traitors". "Part of the problem is the huge number of public sector workers who enjoy special privileges while the rest of us can't find jobs," said one 27-year-old graduate. "I have been unemployed for two years and hold no illusions that I will find a job soon. I am trapped living with my parents with no independence. There has been mismanagement on so many levels and now we pay the price." *** Here's another thing that has gone wrong in the 21st century - the stock market. The last 10 years have produced real rates of return that are the worst ever. If you'd put in money a decade ago you'd have less real money now than you did then. And wait...here's another paradox. Efficiency may make businesses more profitable. But, when you're on the bust side of the boom-bust teeter- totter, it could also make them less valuable. Here, Mish Shedlock explains why: Negative Annualized Stock Market Returns for the Next 10 Years or Longer? It's Far More Likely Than You Think Market cheerleaders keep ratcheting up expected earnings, failing to note that much of the recent earnings growth is simply not sustainable. Reasons for Unsustainable Earnings Growth Much of the recent earnings growth is directly related to federal stimulus that will eventually end. Much of the earnings in the financial sector are a mirage, based on assets not marked-to-market and insufficient loan loss reserves. The Fed and the FASB have repeatedly postponed rules changes for the benefit of banks and other financial institutions. Earnings in both the financial and nonfinancial sectors have margins outside historical norms, based on very low headcounts and outsourcing. Please consider the following snip from the Sitka Pacific 2010 Annual Review. Depending on how closely you follow the financial markets, it may be surprising to learn that profits are at new highs even though stock prices, as measured by the S&P 500, are still 20% below their highs. In other words, new highs in profits haven't translated into new highs in stock prices. If we go back even further, after-tax corporate profits soared 175% from the first quarter of 2000 through the second quarter of 2010. However, during that same time, stock prices fell roughly 15%. In fact, there is nothing novel about a period of falling stock prices and rising earnings. Since the end of World War II, corporate profits have more or less trended continuously higher, with only minor interruptions during recessions. However, stock prices have gone through long periods in which they trended sideways or down, even though earnings continued to rise. From 1966 to 1980 after-tax corporate earnings rose 244%, but the price of the S&P 500 rose only 18% during that period. In contrast, earnings grew only 112% during the next 14 years from 1980 to 1994, but the S&P 500 rose 327% over that time. Although very short-term returns are influenced by corporate earnings, beyond the short-term it is not trends in earnings but valuations and trends in valuations that determine stock market returns. In short, when valuations are low and increasing, long-term stock market returns are high. When valuations are high and decreasing, long-term stock market returns are low - even negative at times of peak valuations. Regards, Bill Bonner, for The Daily Reckoning ------------------------------------------------------- Readers who are interested in exactly what Bill is doing to protect and grow his own family wealth will do well to take a look at his Bonner & Partners Family Office project. In it, Bill and his team of international analysts, contrarian thinkers and specialists work to devise creative, though low-risk investments to build long-term financial security. Feel free to take a look at a personal invitation, from Bill's son, Will, right here. ------------------------------------------------------- Here at The Daily Reckoning, we value your questions and comments. If you would like to send us a few thoughts of your own, please address them to your managing editor at joel@dailyreckoning.com Economic Growth in the Internet Age The Internet, like TV before it, is a great entertainment device. It is also very useful, improving productivity in a vast number of industries. But it has not speeded up GDP growth or improved living standards. Perpetual Investor Confidence Another Lost Decade China: Where Money Is Treated Best I am sure that Mr. Pento is right because every country on the Face Of The Planet (FOTP) is desperately creating more and more money, and the money will eventually find its way to the place where it is treated best and/or has the best prospects, which is, in this case, Bob. Oops! I meant "China." Buying Gold on the Price Inflation Guarantee Awaiting the "Zero Hour" of Available Credit Elitism in China: Understanding the Communist Party Despite rampant corruption in government — which the US itself is no stranger to — the Communist Party of China (CPC) will be celebrating its 90th anniversary a week from today, on July 1st. Although much discussed, the one-party system is little understood outside of China. Trichet Deep-Sixes Euro Rally Who's Really More Productive? Ranking the Top-20 US vs European States The Daily Reckoning: Now in its 11th year, The Daily Reckoning is the flagship e-letter of Baltimore-based financial research firm and publishing group Agora Financial, a subsidiary of Agora Inc. The Daily Reckoning provides over half a million subscribers with literary economic perspective, global market analysis, and contrarian investment ideas. Published daily in six countries and three languages, each issue delivers a feature-length article by a senior member of our team and a guest essay from one of many leading thinkers and nationally acclaimed columnists. 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