There’s a school of thought to the effect that if the market price of a stock you own has fallen below the price at which you bought, you haven’t really suffered a loss unless you sell. If you don’t sell, all you have is a “paper loss”. While technically correct, this is an amateurish and dangerous way to look at things. If you view a paper loss as materially different from and of lesser consequence than a realised loss, then you are essentially deluding yourself. Incredibly, some newsletter writers encourage this form of self delusion.

There will usually be a chance that a stock in your account that is currently ‘under water’ will recover and move into profit. The probability of this happening could, in fact, by very high, but it is important to acknowledge the reality that it is now showing a loss and that a recovery is not guaranteed. The simplest way to do this is to regularly — say, at the end of every week — mark your portfolio to market. In doing so, a “paper loss” is accounted for in the same way as a realised loss and a “paper gain” is accounted for in the same way as a realised gain.

By taking the simple step of regularly marking your portfolio to market you will be facing up to reality and avoiding the counter-productive behaviour, when things are going badly, of ‘sticking your head in the sand’. Accordingly, you will be putting yourself in a position where decisions can be based to a greater extent on facts and to a lesser extent on hope — a position where you will be less likely to kid yourself.

Of course, almost all good practice in the world of investing/speculating is easier said than done.

This post is a slightly-modified excerpt from a recent TSI commentary.

The monetary data published by the ECB last week showed that the rate of euro-zone TMS (True Money Supply) growth continued to accelerate in February — to a year-over-year rate of 11.8%, from 11.4% in January and ‘only’ 6.4% last October. Here’s a chart that puts the current monetary inflation rate into perspective.

The ECB didn’t begin its new QE program until March, so the above chart doesn’t include any of the effects of this new program. In fact, the effects of the new program probably won’t start becoming apparent until the April monetary data are published in late-May.

In one way, the current situation in Europe is similar to the situation in the US during the final few months of 2012. Back then, the Fed embarked on an aggressive new money-pumping program despite the year-over-year rate of US TMS growth already being in double digits and despite the prices of US stocks and bonds being near multi-year or all-time highs. Now we have the ECB embarking on an aggressive new money-pumping program despite the year-over-year rate of euro-zone TMS growth already being in double digits and despite the prices of European stocks and bonds being near multi-year or all-time highs.

The QE program introduced by the Fed in late-2012 did not help the US economy, but it did inflate a new stock market bubble. It also encouraged stock buybacks at the expense of capital investment, incentivised the continued accumulation of debt at a time when both the private and public sectors were already over-indebted, and fostered an investment boom in the shale-oil industry that’s now in the process of collapsing.

Apart from the specific example of the oil-investment boom, it’s possible that the QE program recently introduced by the ECB will end up having similar effects.

Yesterday I published a short piece dealing with the logical fallacies and self-contradictions in one of Ben Bernanke’s early blogging efforts. David Stockman has since published a more in-depth demolition of the same Bernanke post, titled “Central Banking Refuted In One Blog — Thanks Ben!“.

Stockman starts with Bernanke’s absurd assertion that because the Fed’s actions determine the money supply and the short-term interest rate, the Fed has no choice other than to set the short-term interest rate somewhere. He points out that as originally designed/envisaged, the Fed “had no target for the Federal funds rate; no remit to engage in open market buying and selling of securities; and, indeed, no authority to own or discount government bonds and bills at all.” Instead, “[the] entire purpose of the original Fed’s rediscounting tool was to augment liquidity in the banking system at market determined rates of interest. This modus operandi was the opposite of today’s monetary central planning model. Back then, the rediscount window at each of the twelve Reserve Banks had no remit except the humble business of examining collateral.”

According to Stockman: “…in 1913 there was no conceit that a relative handful of policy makers at the White House, or serving on Congressional fiscal committees or at a central bank could improve upon the work of millions of producers, consumers, workers, savers, investors, entrepreneurs and even speculators. Society’s economic output, living standards and permanent wealth were a function of what the efforts of its people added up to after the fact — not what the state exogenously and proactively targeted and pretended to deliver.”

Stockman’s point, in a nutshell, is that the machinations of today’s Fed represent one of the most egregious examples of mission creep in world history.

For anyone interested in economics and economic history there’s a lot of useful information in the Stockman post. For example, Stockman notes that during the 40 years prior to the 1913 birth of the Fed, “the US economy had grown at a 4% compound rate — the highest four-decade long growth rate before or since — without any net change in the price level; and despite the lack of a central bank and the presence of periodic but short-lived financial panics largely caused by the civil war-era national banking act.”

In fact, Bernanke’s short post and Stockman’s lengthy rebuttal make an interesting contrast. The former is gibberish, whereas the latter displays a good understanding of economic theory and history.

Former Fed chief Ben Bernanke now has a blog. This is mostly good news, because he will certainly do less damage as a blogger than he did as a monetary central planner. However, it means that he is still promoting bad ideas.

I doubt that I’ll be a regular reader of Bernanke’s blog, because his thinking on economics is riddled with logical fallacies. Some of these fallacies were on display in his second post, which was titled “Why are interest rates so low?“. Some examples are discussed below.

In the fourth paragraph Bernanke states: “The Fed’s ability to affect real rates of return, especially longer-term real rates, is transitory and limited. Except in the short run, real interest rates are determined by a wide range of economic factors, including prospects for economic growth — not by the Fed.” However, earlier in the same paragraph he states that the real interest rate is the nominal interest rate minus the inflation rate, that the Fed sets the benchmark nominal short-term interest rate, that the Fed’s policies are the primary determinant of inflation and inflation expectations over the longer term, and that inflation trends affect interest rates. Also, the Fed clearly attempts to influence the prospects for economic growth. So, by Bernanke’s own admission the Fed exerts considerable control over the “real” interest rate. In other words, he contradicts himself.

A bit further down the page he states: “…[the Fed's] task amounts to using its influence over market interest rates to push those rates toward levels consistent with the equilibrium rate, or — more realistically — its best estimate of the equilibrium rate, which is not directly observable.” And: “[the Fed] must try to push market rates toward levels consistent with the underlying equilibrium rate.”

So, having said in the fourth paragraph that the Fed has minimal control over the real interest rate and then contradicting himself by saying that the Fed controls or influences pretty much everything that goes into determining the real interest rate, he subsequently says that the Fed’s task is to push the market interest rate towards the “equilibrium rate”, which, by the way, is unobservable. Now, the so-called “equilibrium rate” is the REAL interest rate consistent with optimum usage of resources. In other words, he’s now saying that the Fed’s task is to push the REAL market interest rate as close as possible to an unobservable/unknowable “equilibrium rate”, having started out by claiming that the Fed doesn’t determine the real interest rate. I wish he would at least keep his story straight!

As an aside, the equilibrium rate is the rate that would bring the supply of and demand for money, capital and other resources into balance, which is the real rate that would be sought by the market in the absence of the Fed. In other words, if the Fed did its job to perfection, which is not possible, then it would be constantly adjusting its monetary levers to ensure that the market interest rate was where it would be if the Fed didn’t exist.

Bernanke goes on to say that today’s US interest rates aren’t artificially low, they are naturally low. Apparently, the Fed’s ultra-low interest rate setting is a reflection of a naturally-low interest-rate environment, not the other way around. This prompts the question: Why, then, can’t the Fed just get out of the way? To put it another way, if default-free nominal interest rates would be near zero and real interest rates would be negative in the absence of the Fed’s gigantic boot, then why can’t the Fed allow interest rates to be controlled by market forces?

It seems that Bernanke cleverly anticipated this line of thinking, because in a beautiful example of circular logic he says “The Fed’s actions determine the money supply and thus short-term interest rates; it [therefore] has no choice but to set the short-term interest rate somewhere.” That is, the Fed can’t leave the short-term interest rate alone, because if the Fed exists it will inevitably act in a way that alters the short-term interest rate. Clearly, Ben Bernanke can’t even imagine a world in which there is no central bank.

Ben Bernanke ends his post by putting aside all the talk in paragraphs 5 through 9 about the Fed’s efforts to control the real market interest rate and by reiterating his comment (from paragraph 4) that the Fed doesn’t determine the real interest rate. As a final piece of evidence he notes that interest rates are low throughout the world, not just in the US, but forgets to mention that central banks throughout the world are behaving the same way as the Fed.