“So you want to be real artists? It’s okay, I can sell that angle. But you two have to go all the way. One of you has to lose an ear.” – Bob’s Burgers
If you’re a guy and you order White Claw® it comes with a sippy cup and Crayons™.
Names given to concepts in science are influenced by the time and place the names were given – for instance, instead of having properly dry and scientific names like the properties of an electron, the subatomic particle “quark” has flavors, which include terms like “strange” and “charmed.” Those silly physicists from the 1960’s! Everyone knows that flavor is just another word for emotion, which explains why I’ve been feeling ketchup all day. I guess that works. Hopefully we won’t let the hipsters in California even read about particle physics – soon enough they’ll want their bread to be gluon-free.
Isaac Newton died a virgin. In honor of that, whenever I see a physicist I beat them up, take their money, and buy myself something nice.
A particularly flourishing time in science was the Victorian Era. I think it was because people were rich and bored and had servants to do most everything. It was about that time that real study in geology started. I think that was because in England, sex had to be scheduled for every alternate Thursday, so it gave Victorian men a LOT of extra energy to work off by staring at rocks. Me? I think sex is like bicycling. It’s all skimpy outfits, sweating, legs pumping, the uncomfortable silver helmet, my neighbors watching and sadly shaking their heads, and the police telling me to stop doing it on the sidewalk.
One concept I learned about in geology was the “angle of repose.” With a name like that, it was certainly coined by some weak-jawed Victorian Era guy named something like “Earl of Pancake-Mountbatten de Saxe-Coburg” while looking at a pile of sand and thinking longingly about his “bicycling trip” scheduled for next Thursday, barring any inclement headaches. But the concept of angle of repose was simple enough that even my drowsy freshman self quickly understood the concept while fighting to remain awake in Geology 101. If you take something that’s granular, say sand, grain, gravel, or the ground bones of your enemies and put the grains in a pile, it will take form what you’re used to seeing – a pile.
Being within six feet of your wife in Victorian England was considered a public display of affection.
What our particular sex-starved Englishman noted was that the angle was, for a given material, always the same. Dry sand has an angle of repose of about 34°. Other materials have larger angles. Flour has an angle as high as 45°, even larger in Germany. Why? The favorite game played in Germany requires a stiff flour. The call the game “gluten tag.”
But dry sand never has a natural angle of 5°, and it never has an angle of 45°. Can you get dry sand to go down to 5°? Sure. Shake it and it will flatten out. But just pour it out and that natural angle will be there.
I remember reading as a kid that “nature has no straight lines,” which I dutifully nodded and agreed with until I took a look at the world around me – nature is filled with straight lines, and the slopes of the mountains around me were obvious rebuttals to that nonsense. The angle of repose determines just how steep those slopes are.
But the really interesting part of the angle of repose (at least to me) is that it has real-world implications when it comes to things like, oh, avalanches. You can imagine making a sand avalanche – drop sand slowly onto the top of the pile, grain by grain. Each single grain will make the pile taller. You can, by gently putting the sand down, exceed the angle of repose for a time. The slope can become a little steeper than the magic angle.
What happens then? One single grain of sand will hit the slope, and the internal friction of the pile won’t be able to hold the temporarily too-steep slope up anymore. The result is inevitable:
An avalanche. The slope collapses.
Avalanche humor – it’s snow joke.
Snow has an angle of repose, and slowly falling snow can, given wind and climate conditions, exceed the angle of repose. For a while. It was a constant joke on television when I was a kid that the absolute smallest noise in Idaho would make an avalanche happen in on a sitcom in Switzerland. It’s not far off – an avalanche in snow or sand can happen because the energy stored in the slope above the angle of repose can be enormous. The trigger to unleash that energy can be as small as a congressman’s conscience.
But only so much slope can be coaxed out of a pile of dry sand. To really make the slope steep, you have to add in water. I’m sure you’ve all seen sandcastles – the walls of the damp sand can even be vertical. Through hard work and fighting to get the moisture content just right, amazing structures can be made.
Never accept a construction job in Egypt – they have a problem with pyramid schemes.
Our entire economy – strike that, our entire civilization is like that sand made into a pretty cool sand castle. In our natural state, the Earth can carry about 4 million to 10 million people, or about as many who stopped liking Star Wars® last year. That’s the maximum population the world can do with hunter-gatherers. But, no, we decided we wanted beer, so we invented agriculture and built an entire civilization so we could have access to beer year-round (Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer).
This one advance, agriculture, allowed civilization to start growing and soon enough the world could support 250 million people around 0 A.D. Civilization and the discoveries that made it possible was a little bit of water added to the sand. The slope could now be steeper – our sandcastle could now have walls. Each individual discovery and great occurrence for society including the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of PEZ®, My Birth, and now the Information Age has made our sand castle ever more glorious.
I think it was Stephen Wright who said, “It’s a small world. But I wouldn’t want to paint it.”
But we can look at our financial system as well. Our innovations have allowed markets to form. Certainly that allows the wealth in an expanding society to be allocated to best create growth. The financial “innovation” has allowed the markets to reach the height where they are today – things like Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse, The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs, and Economic Bubbles, Knife Juggling Toddlers, and Sewer Clowns are the water holding up the sand castle as we build it ever higher – certainly steeper than markets alone would have allowed.
I’ll admit, I called the Market Top back in April (I think in a comment over at Lord Bison’s (LINK) place). Oops. The Dow is up 500 points since then. So, yeah, I was wrong. And I might be wrong about the upcoming difficulty I see with our sandcastle, and we might have set up our economy for everlasting prosperity, a growth that will last forever until we have a stunning galactic empire complete with thousands of bikini princesses, pantyhose, and White Claws® for everyone who wanted one.
But until then, I’ll keep looking up and seeing if I see sand starting to flake off the walls.
Originally, this was going to be a post solely about the economy – it’s Wednesday, so I try to hit economic stuff on Wednesday. Instead, I got a bit philosophical and went further. It’s an exercise in thinking about where we sit, and the deep future we face, which is a theme that runs through the blog. I’ll have another one of these on Monday, so don’t forget to set your VCR to record. Or you could hit the subscribe button up above to have these delivered every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:28AM Eastern (US) time.
Huh. I’d never heard the bit about Newton being a virgin. Shows what you can accomplish when you steer clear of women.
It’s a great time for economics posts. The cracks in the dam are starting to spew high-pressure water. This week something snapped and nobody knows what is going on – the overnight repo rate banks charge each other to settle the world’s transactions spiked to 10% this week. This Is Very Very Bad. It means some big bank out there is Totally Out Of Cash To Pay The Bills and willing to pay A Hell Of A Lot to get some cash to stay afloat while hiding who they are.
It could be the US Treasury.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nobody-knows-whats-going-repo-market-freezes-overnight-rate-hits-all-time-high-10
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/something-just-snapped-chaos-hits-repo-market-dollar-funding-storm-makes-thunderous
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/64-trillion-question-what-happens-next-repo
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/blain-something-happening-and-we-dont-know-what-it
Today seems to be worse. This is how the Financial Crisis of 2008 kicked off.
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/fed-begins-repo-operation-funding-rates-ominously-elevated-across-board
Congress can raise the debt ceiling as many times as they want and as high as they want. The US Treasury still has to CONTINUALLY find SOMEBODY that will actually accept their electronic “paper” Treasury products and give them Cold Hard Cash in return. The repo rate is the “bank fee” for “using” this “Visa Card”. When the repo rate spikes from 2.5% to 10% overnight, somebody ain’t handing over promised cash to somebody else.
And dominoes start to fall as CYA kicks in….also known as an avalanche.
See this chart:
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/FF%20vs%20reserves.jpg?itok=I0ghD97T
It will take $400B to get from 1300 (the red Sept 17 dot) back to 1700 (and the zero Federal Funds Rate – IOER spread that existed at the beginning of 2019).
FFR is the “interest rate” the Fed charges the US Treasury to borrow / receive cash. IOER is the “interest rate” the Fed PAYS its member banks as an incentive for them to keep ready-to-go liquid cash available for Treasury hot transfers. Banks will only keep cash on hot standby if they are paid more by the Fed (via IOER) to hold cash in reserve than they could get by loaning it out overnight on the international market at whatever the public market rates are. This system in general and IOER specifically was all part of the new scam created in 2008 to keep the economy from collapsing.
The Fed continually tinkers with the FFR/IOER ratio with the ultimate intention of using the difference between the two to pay back all the money they (the Fed) borrowed via QE to prevent a crash over the past ten years. The Fed was literally printing money and giving away to the banks for free during QE / 2009-2017 with an IOER rate higher than the FFR. This party can’t last forever, and the Fed picked 2018 to end the party. The Fed’s primary goal during 2018 was to get the FFR higher (creates interest-rate policy “wiggle room” in preparation for the next recession, makes the dollar “stronger”, makes American exports more expensive, and irritates Trump) . A main secondary Fed goal in 2018 was to get the IOER to go lower than the FFR (more coming in from Treasury than is going out to member banks) and so create a Fed “cut / profit” that could be used to pay off the accumulated Fed QE balance sheet since 2009. So throughout 2018, every time the Fed charged the Treasury a little bit more with a FFR increase, the Fed ALSO gave the banks a little bit less of a corresponding IOER increase as an incentive to hold cash for hot transfer to the Treasury.
The FFR-IOER spread decreased and hit zero in late 2018, as shown on the chart. At this point the Fed was operating “at cost” as a “middleman”, and was no longer printing free money to the banks via IOER. A slow turnaround in the economy was underway. But notice – with a zero FFR-IOER spread, banks were losing incentive to hold hot cash on standby and the amount of hot cash they were holding (“reserves”) dropped from $2.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion during 2018.
By March 2019 the Fed had started the FFR creeping ever higher above the IOER to create the Fed “cut / profit” intended for use in paying back the Fed QE debts on their balance sheet – the green dots above zero on the chart. But as the IOER dropped proportionally, the banks lost even more incentive to hold hot cash on standby and reserves dwindled even more to $1.4 trillion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/fed-makes-third-tweak-to-interest-on-excess-reserves-rate
This week, somewhere, some as-yet-unnamed bank (thru choice or necessity? – a key question) said We Ain’t Got No Mo’ Cash To Contribute To This Con If We Ain’t Gettin’ Paid. As the chart shows, overnight over $100 billion vanished from the hot cash reserves funding the US Government….over 7%!!! Please, Please Rejoin The Con! the Fed said, and the IOER spiked overnight from 2.5% to 10%.
(Or maybe the correct narrative is that the US Government said We Ain’t Got No Cash To Pay The FFR and the Fed slammed the IOER up to 10% overnight to bribe a bank to kick in emergency government cash….who knows?)
Bottom line, somehow the Powers That Be gotta come up with $400 Billion in Cold Hard Cash (not new debt, not new taxes, but Cash Right Now) just to get the entire US economy and US Government back to where they were nine months ago. And they gotta do it fast.
This was a great conversational seed. And scary. A fried said to me – “When the tide goes out, you see who wasn’t wearing a swimsuit.”
Woo-hoo! Injecting $52 billion worth of raw gasoline into the US economic engine on Tuesday morning and $75 billion more this morning was not enough to toast everybody’s marshmallows or cook their hotdogs!!! The Fed is gonna splash ANOTHER $75 billion onto the bonfire for a quick 15 minutes tomorrow morning from 8:15-8:30 AM! Be there or be square!!!
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ny-fed-announces-third-consecutive-repo-operation-thursday-815am
This emergency stinks to high heaven and we still don’t know who cut the cheese.
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/bfm5FDE_1.jpg?itok=Wrww-3O6
But we will. I’m betting it was Toys ‘r Us. Or Borders.
The population charts are the most critical piece of information for the next 25 years. We are subsidizing a massive explosion in the population of societies that can’t even handle the people they had decades ago. A few million African migrants in Europe is causing massive strain already but when that number becomes 50 million? 100 million? The collapse is going to be spectacular. The Camp of The Saints coming to life.
I hear Iceland is nice.
https://econimica.blogspot.com/2019/09/is-elon-musk-right-about-global.html
So if the smartest people in the world have a shrinking population and the least intelligent people in the world have an exploding population, that will work out OK. Right?
Iceland. New Zealand.
Trends always continue until they can’t. This fits well, actually, with the CW2.
Yeah, I’ve seen Sailer’s graph. Been thinking about putting that into a future post, but it has to fit.
Economics is a source of constant confusion for me. I have no way of evaluating global economic currents, to say nothing of the undercurrents (though I’d be willing to seriously study a chart with Salma Hayek in skimpy undercurrents). I don’t understand 60% of the vocabulary used in economic talk.
To paraphrase D. Rumsfeld, “there’s a lot of unknown unknowns” in my understanding of economics.
Recognizing this, I try to keep things as simple as possible: avoid credit; pay any credit off as soon as possible; live without when I can; make more money than I spend. One thing I haven’t done which I suspect is among the best ways to survive an economic downturn, is “become a farmer”.
That aside, I like how you start with something I understand (sandpiles) and applied it to things I have trouble understanding. Very sneaky.
IMHO one reason that we have so much trouble understanding the big economic issues is that if we DID understand them, we would change our behaviour to profit from our understanding. When everybody tries to do that, the system itself changes to become less comprehensible (exploitable). There are two ways to have a trading advantage: make yourself smarter, or make the other guy dumber (by disseminating mis-information). “Make the other guy smarter” is not a winning strategy. Keep that in mind when you read the news.
It’s too late for a full source check, but I think it was Niven that said “Whenever we figure out the equations that govern the Universe, it immediately transforms to get more complicated.” Or something to that effect.
Yup, once everyone knows, no profit is left.
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) said something like that. IIRC, “some scientists claim that if we ever discover the rules of the universe, it will change…. other scientists believe that this has already happened, perhaps several times.”
You aren’t supposed to understand it, that is kind of the point. Just like mental health professionals know the least about actual mental health in our society, so too do professional economists know next to nothing about actual economic activity. Case in point, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a degree in economics and is an economic illiterate. Most of economics is a step down from voodoo. Economists like to go on CNBC and talk in their arcane jargon about the economy when almost none of them have ever run a business.
As for farming, that is deeply connected to global markets so don’t think for a second that it is a simpler, disengaged life.
Yup – and they use jargon to make it complicated on purpose. Wasn’t it Greenspan that said, “If you think you understood what I just said, perhaps I wasn’t unclear enough.” (or words to that effect)
I am sneaky! Or was it the ketamine?
Woo-hoo! Tracy Alloway talking about FFR-IOER!!! She is very easy on the eyes….
https://nv.vi-serve.com/vis-media/101/262/WMUWQm0BiTGFCbvH7eOF_720p.mp4
LOL on their chart at 1:35. Not even BLOOMBERG is accurately portraying how serious this all is. The chart shows the reserves falling from 2.81M to 1.45M. Um, we ain’t talking “M for Millions” here. That should be “T for Trillions”.
CNBC’s take on all of this:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/18/fed-loses-control-of-its-own-interest-rate-on-day-of-big-decision-this-just-doesnt-look-good.html
“…funding markets could be volatile for the next couple of weeks.
“I can’t pinpoint what happened. And I’m not sure anyone can. I’m not sure the Fed knows because he said he’s going to learn over the next six weeks. I’m taking away from that that the funding markets are going to be more volatile over the next six weeks.” Matus said. “They don’t have a solution because in part, they’re still learning. The market is very different than it was before the crisis….”
With the Fed runs this 8:15AM-8:30AM repo scam for three (or more) days in a row, they’re just making the waters muddier in terms of finding out who is really responsible for this mess. Somebody important is really low on cash for a reason that needs to be uncovered. The repo operation is like the guys in the old Monte Python movie calling “Bring out yer dead….”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU0d8kpybVg
The Fed repo ops is basically the Fed giving away free cash for fifteen minutes in exchange for bank-held Government (and Mortgage) debt that is looking increasingly shaky that the banks would prefer not to hold but were forced to do so under QE. EVERY bank out there is going to “bring out their dead” and dump it in the 8:15-8:30AM Fed “body wagon” in exchange for a wad of clean, new cash…not just the banks that really NEED the cash….
LOL. EVERY bank is bringing out their dead for free cash, just as predicted. Surprise, surprise.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fed-begins-repo-operation-funding-rates-ease
Next couple of weeks? This stuff normally sloshes around for years.
Such charts often have a note indicating “in millions of dollars”, so the “millions” on the axis are million-millions; i.e., trillions. But who really feels the difference between billions, trillions, gazillions, etc.? Math is hard (but, rewarding for those who master it).
Bikini. We want bikini.
Woo-hoo! – Repo Friday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/ny-fed-to-conduct-fourth-repo-operation-friday-15096870
As of 8:30AM today, the Fed will have injected over A QUARTER TRILLION DOLLARS into the US financial system in JUST 72 HOURS.
Folks, this ain’t normal.
Wow.
Americans are such crippled retards today that they slam icepicks into their eyes and then beg their beloved government overlords for a decree that outlaws icepicks.
Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
Can’t Americans boycott products that they don’t like?