Gold News

So Now What?

A new "Trade of the Decade" to replace "Sell stocks, Buy Gold..."


ANOTHER GREAT YEAR
for gold. But it wasn't a bad year for stocks either, writes Bill Bonner in his Daily Reckoning.

The Nasdaq rose 45% in 2009. The Dow went up about 20%. As we guessed back at the beginning of last year, stocks bounced. What we didn't guess was that they would bounce so much for so long.

All over the world, stocks went up...and continued to go up. A bounce is inevitable, following a stock market drop. And it's impossible to say how big a bounce it will be...or how long it will go on.

But a kiss is still a kiss...and a bounce is still a bounce. No kiss lasts forever. Neither does a bounce. Looking ahead, we have to anticipate that it will come to an end...probably in 2010.

If you've profited from the 2009 run up in stocks...bravo! Now sell them, is The Daily Reckoning's tip. Yes, the bounce could continue. But it's not worth the risk.

And how 'bout the gold market! Buying Gold showed a net gain every year of the decade. It was the surest, safest place for you money by far.

Does that mean gold will go up in 2010...? Does that mean we will stick with our "Trade of the Decade" for another ten years? Not to brag, but our trade was a big success. Even we were surprised by how well it did.

As long-suffering Daily Reckoning readers will recall, we announced our Trade of the Decade in 2000: Sell Stocks; Buy Gold. "It turned out to be a good plan," observes colleague, Merryn Somerset Webb, in a recent Financial Times story:

"In 2000, you could buy an ounce of gold for $280 (the average price over the year). Now, it will cost you about $1,100. At the time, Bonner saw what most others did not. He saw the US not as an economy carefully and cleverly managed by then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and his passion for low interest rates, but as a massive credit bubble waiting to burst.

"He also saw the massive and growing national debt, the trade and budget deficits, and fast growth in the money supply as factors that would naturally debase the Dollar over the long term. He also saw the credit bubble as global rather than peculiar to America. So it made sense to him to hold the only non-paper currency there is – gold."

So what's next? What's the trade of the coming decade?

Well, we decided not to double-down on the identical trade. Buying Gold will remain a core position. But it doesn't figure in our new Trade of the Decade, not for the next 10 years. Why? Because we think there is fresh humbug to be unwound elsewhere. In short, we think the US economy is going the way of Japan, and that Japan is long over-due a recovery.

Japan went into a slump in 1990. It has come out...and gone back in...and come out again...and gone back in again. In terms of the amount of wealth destroyed – at least, on paper – the world's second-largest single economy was the worst disaster in human history. The value of real estate went down 87% in some cities. Stocks fell from a high of 39,000 on the Nikkei Dow down to the 7,000 range in 2009...their lowest point in 27 years.

Why such a bad performance? As we keep saying, if you really want to make a mess of things you need taxpayer support. The Japanese put more taxpayer money into the effort to prevent the correction than any nation theretofore ever had. The result? The correction was stalled, delayed, and stretched out over more than two decades.

And now US economists are looking at Japan...not with alarm, but with admiration. They are beginning to believe that the Japanese model is the way to go...because it prevented widespread unemployment and a deeper slump.

Here's our best guess...

Now that the US economy is caught in the same sort of de-leveraging process that gripped Japan, the same sort of "remedies" will inevitably be employed...leading to the same results, more or less.

We'll skip the details for today, and instead turn to our Trade of the Decade for the next 10 years. There are, of course, two sides to this trade...the long side and the short side. We had no trouble finding things to put on the short side. In a de-leveraging period almost everything goes down. We could have stuck with US stocks, for example. They'll probably continue to come down...just as they did in Japan.

But who knows? US stocks just had their worst decade since the 1930s. What are the odds that they'll have another bad decade? We don't know. But what we look for in our Trade of the Decade, for the sell side, is something that has just had its best decade ever...something that has been going up for so long people think it will go up forever...something that everyone wants.

What does that describe? Not gold. It's still ridiculed and mocked by the vast bulk of analysts and advisors. Rather, the thing that comes closest to our perfect "sell" is US Treasury debt.

Yields have been going down (meaning, the price of debt is going up) since 1983. And now, despite a supply that seems to be going off the charts, demand for Treasury bonds, notes and bills has never been stronger. What's more...if our analysis of the US economy is correct...the supply of Treasury debt is going to continue to rocket upward for many years. Deficits of $1 trillion to $2 trillion per year are going to become commonplace.

How long will it be before the market in Treasury debt crashes? How long will it be before hyperinflation...or a debt default...sends investors running for cover? We don't know...but it seems a likely bet that it will happen sometime in the next 10 years.

So, on our sell side...we'll put US Treasury debt.

How about the buy side? Ah...that is something we've struggled with. While there are many things that seem likely to go down, there aren't many that seem destined to go up. Let's see, what has been beaten down, dissed, battered, and abused for the last 20 years or more? What is it that people don't want? What is it that they expect to go down...possibly forever?

Of course...Japanese stocks!

So there is our Trade of the Decade: Sell US Treasury debt/Buy Japanese stocks.

Crazy, right? Maybe not. Treasury debt has been going up for the last 27 years. Japanese stocks have been going down for the last 20 years.

Does this mean we're giving up on gold? Not at all. We're sticking with gold. Aurus eternis, or something like that. The yellow metal is what you buy when you think the financial authorities are making a mess of things. We have little doubt about that. So we'll continue to Buy Gold and hold it...until the financial system blows up. It is definitely worth having. And holding. And using to protect your wealth.

But the trade of the decade is a way of making money...by buying/selling two opposing assets that are at extraordinary valuations. It is not a speculation on what MIGHT happen. It is merely a bet on the phenomenon known as "regression to the mean". Things that are out-of-whack tend to go back into whack...and if we're right, over the next 10 years, the most popular investment of 2000-2009 – Treasury debt – will go out of fashion. The least popular investment of the last 20 years, on the other hand – Japanese stocks – will surprise everyone by finally showing signs of life.

In any event, the trade is fairly low risk. What are the odds that US Treasury debt will go up? What are the odds that Japanese stocks will go down? Of course, we don't know...things that are out-of-whack can get farther out-of-whack. But we count on time to sort it out. And hope we live long enough to be able to say, "We told you so" once again.

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New York Times best-selling finance author Bill Bonner founded The Agora, a worldwide community for private researchers and publishers, in 1979. Financial analysts within the group exposed and predicted some of the world's biggest shifts since, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, to the collapse of the Dot Com (2000) and then mortgage finance (2008) bubbles, and the election of President Trump (2016). Sharing his personal thoughts and opinions each day from 1999 in the globally successful Daily Reckoning and then his Diary of a Rogue Economist, Bonner now makes his views and ideas available alongside analysis from a small hand-picked team of specialists through Bonner Private Research.

See full archive of Bill Bonner articles

Please Note: All articles published here are to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events – and must be verified elsewhere – should you choose to act on it. Please review our Terms & Conditions for accessing Gold News.

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