Dear Diary,

Our hat is off. Our knees are bent. Our mouth hangs open.

We are amazed. Grateful. And appalled.

What will the Japanese do next, we wonder?

We are amazed because we have seen the international test results. On IQ tests, the Japanese score 10 points higher than the world average. And yet there they are… doing the stupidest things we can imagine.

We are grateful, because Japan has been leading the world in economic absurdity – bubbles in stocks and real estate… bailouts… ZIRP… and QE.

And there is no economic policy so ridiculous that US policymakers won’t give it a whirl. Whither thou goest, O, Nippon, we’re right behind you.

Abe, You’ve Got to Be Kidding

Finally, we are appalled…

What kind of a moron would believe government employees should decide what industries are successful?

How would they know, for example, better than people in the forestry business that timber would pay off?

And why does anyone think that encouraging young women to go out into the woods and do hard, dangerous work will be good for the economy?

It may be fun to watch… and it may be fun for girls who want fresh air and boys who want female company… but as a serious economic policy? Abe, you’ve got to be kidding.

But this is always the problem with world improvers: They are deadly serious. Bloomberg is on the story:

Japanese Women Armed With Chainsaws Head to the Hills Under Abe’s Plan
Junko Otsuka quit her job in Tokyo and headed for the woods, swapping a computer for a bush cutter and her air-conditioned office for the side of a mountain. She was part of a new wave of women taking forestry jobs, the result of economic, social and environmental policies sprouting in Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s Japan.

Otsuka, a 30-year-old graduate from University of Tokyo, said she’s fine with the 20% pay cut to be the first female logger at Tokyo Chainsaws, a lumber company. The Sugi and Hinoki trees she harvests – cedars and cypresses in Japan – are used to build local homes under the government’s program to encourage the use of domestic wood.

“When I studied forestry at university, I learned that trees on Japanese mountains, ripe for harvest decades after planting, were left untouched as nobody wanted to do the job,” Otsuka said in an interview during a break from her work on a 95 degree-Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) day on the side of Mount Mitake, about 40 miles from the center of Tokyo. “I am in the place where I should be.”

Less than 70% of Japanese women between 25 years and 54 years old have jobs, the lowest rate among the world’s richest countries, according to estimates by Japan’s Cabinet Office. The nation’s workforce may swell by more than seven million people and gross domestic product could jump by as much as 13% if participation by women equaled that of men, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in a report May 6.

 

The Final Collapse

More women sweating in the fields and forests. More of those neglected trees cut down. More paper and sawmills, their smokestacks hot with the fiery commerce.

Is that great, or what?

What, you can’t see why that’s such a good thing?

Well, clearly you do not have a Ph.D. in economics! And you are not running a major world economy.

With his “three arrows” program, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzō Abe, vowed to get the numbers up. More inflation. More GDP. More this… more that.

Would the Japanese be better off?

Hey, don’t bother us serious economists with impertinent questions. You know perfectly well we can only work with quantity, not quality. We’re digital boys now. If you can’t measure it – in numbers – we can’t do anything about it.

So let’s not talk about it, okay?

But of all the numbers Japan has added, one stands out. In 1980, Japan’s public debt was only half its annual GDP. Now, it’s two and a half times its annual GDP.

In other words, it would take two and a half years of total output to pay back the debt the government has run up – almost all of it over the last 30 years.

And remember, the government took on this debt to boost GDP. As you can see, the approach failed. For every extra dollar of output, government debt grew by $4.

And if you add in private debt, the total comes to 500% of GDP.

Clearly, it is time for a rethink. More debt has not solved Japan’s debt problem.

But along cometh the aforementioned Shinzō Abe with a plan…

His program?

More! More debt! More spending! More ZIRP! More QE! More women in the woods. More of everything that has brought Japan to the brink of desperation.

The yield on Japan’s 10-year note is a vanishing 0.51%. With so much debt, even a slight nod towards “normalization” of interest rates would be devastating.

At these ultra-low financing costs, Japanese GDP barely grows. If government bond yields were to rise to, say, 3% Japan’s economy would collapse into depression.

And normalization IS coming. It always does. Japan’s retirees are no longer saving. Japan’s exporters are no longer bringing in the big bucks from overseas. And investors (lenders) are bound to realize, sooner or later, that Japan can never pay its debts.

This will mean less money to lend… higher financing costs… and, ultimately, the final collapse of the Japanese delusion.

Regards,

Bill

Market Insight:

10 Reasons to Maintain a Well-Hedged Portfolio

From the desk of Chris Hunter, Editor-in-Chief, Bonner & Partners


It’s our view at Bonner & Partners that the big surge in the prices of financial assets over the last five years since the global financial crisis has been largely a result of investors focusing on the doctor, not the patient.

What do we mean by that?

That investors have been placing their bets based on what global central banks and activist governments (the doctor in this analogy) have been doing in response to the crisis and not based on the health of the patient (the economy).

And from our perch, at least, the patient is far from healthy. Consider the following list of “symptoms” (thanks to David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff for putting it together):

 

1. US retail sales were flat in July – the worst showing since January.
2. Jobless claims have bounced back above 300k and now stand at their highest level since late June.
3. Bellwether Macy’s just reported disappointing earnings and released cautious commentary on the US consumer.
4. Q2 real GDP will be revised lower to 3.75% from 4%, and Q3 GDP looks set to come in below 3%.
5. Germany and Italy (the No. 1 and No. 3 European economies) are now contracting… the euro zone just saw flat GDP growth in the second quarter… and economies accounting for 16% of global GDP saw growth rates go negative in the second quarter.
6. In Germany (also the fourth largest economy in the world), 10-year government notes are yielding less than 1% (a red flag for growth), and its two-year bonds are yielding less than zero (a red flag for deflation).
7. In China (the world’s second largest economy), all economic indicators fell short of expectations in July.
8. In the US, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note is falling – another sign that bond investors don’t buy the recovery meme.
9. Oil prices are down 7% from their nearby peak, and both the CRB commodities index and copper prices are down 4% from their recent peaks.
10. Small caps in the US are down for the year and the Dow Transports have been flat since early June.

What should you do about this situation?

First, do not rush for the exits. Panic selling is never a good idea.

If you bought well (and by that we mean if you bought at a discount to your estimate of intrinsic value)… and the investment case for your investments hasn’t changed… then doing nothing is nearly always better than doing something.

Second, if you use stop losses, this may be a good time to check back with how you’ve set them.

Here’s how Bonner & Partners senior analyst Braden Copeland put it to paid-up subscribers of his newsletter, Building Wealth:

If you own stocks right now, you’re probably wondering if it’s time to take profits. The answer is that it’s not. Bull markets can always run higher. If you’re in one, you never want to sell early.

Just double-check your positions. Make sure you have trailing stops in place for each one. If one gets triggered, sell.

And don’t make the mistake most investors are making of confusing the doctor with the patient. That governments and central banks are still in “triage” mode should serve as a warning that markets and economies are still far from healthy.