In a recent letter John Mauldin worries that central banks are ‘out of bullets’, but this is not something that any rational person should be worried about. Instead, they should be worried about the opposite.

The conventional view is that with interest rates at all-time lows and with vast amounts of debt having already been monetised, if a recession were to occur in the not-too-distant future there would be nothing that the central banks could do to ameliorate it. However, this view is based on the false premise that central banks can smooth-out the business cycle by easing monetary policy at the appropriate time. The truth is that by distorting interest rates, central banks get in the way of economic progress and cause recessions to be more severe than would otherwise be the case.

Think of it this way: If it is really possible for a committee of bureacrats and bankers to create a better outcome for the economy by setting interest rates (the price of credit), then it logically follows that a healthier economy would result from having all prices set by committees comprised of relevant ‘experts’. There should be an egg committee to set the price of eggs, a car committee to set the price of cars, a massage committee to set the price of massages, etc. After all, if it really is possible for a committee to do a better job than a free market at determining the most complicated of prices then it is certainly possible for a committee to do a better job than a free market at setting any other price.

However, hardly anyone believes that all prices should be set by committee or some other governing body. This is undoubtedly because that type of price control proved to be an unmitigated disaster wherever/whenever it was tried throughout history. Most people therefore now realise that it would make no sense to have committees in place to control prices in general, but are strangely incapable of making the small logical step to the realisation that it makes no sense to give a committee the power to control the most important price in the economy — the price of something that influences the price of almost everything else.

Getting back to the worry that central banks are out of bullets, it would actually be good news if they were. This is because a central bank does damage to the economy every time it fires one of its so-called monetary bullets. The damage usually won’t be apparent to the practitioners of the superficial, ad-hoc economics known as Keynesianism, but it will inevitably occur due to the falsification of price signals.

Unfortunately, central banks have an unlimited supply of bullets. This has been demonstrated over recent years by zero not proving to be a lower boundary for the official interest rate and by asset monetisation proving to be not restricted to government bonds. We should therefore expect central banks to keep firing until they are reined-in by market or political forces.

The real worry, then, isn’t that central banks are out (or almost out) of bullets. The real worry is that they are not remotely close to being out of bullets.

When the Baltic Dry Index (BDI), an index of international ocean-going freight rates, plunged to a multi-decade low early this year it provoked excited commentary from the “economic armageddon is nigh!” crowd. An example can be found HERE. However, bearish commentary is unhelpful after the prices of useful things have fallen to the point where the suppliers of these things are financially in dire straits.

There’s always a risk that the stock price of an individual company will go to zero, but there’s never a risk that freight rates or the prices of useful commodities will go to zero. Therefore, the further they move into an area where they are low by historical standards, the lower the downside risk will generally be.

I’m lumping ocean-going shipping rates and commodity prices together in this post because they are linked. They usually trend in the same direction and reach important peaks/troughs at around the same time. A consequence is that it doesn’t make sense to be bullish on commodities and at the same time anticipating a large decline in shipping rates, or bearish on commodities and at the same time anticipating strength in shipping rates. For example, after commodity prices reversed upward during January-February of this year it made no sense to expect a continuing downward trend in shipping rates.

The link between shipping rates (as represented by the BDI) and commodity prices (as represented by the Goldman Sachs Spot Commodity Index – GNX) is illustrated below. The two indexes have been positively correlated for a long time. Divergences are not uncommon, but the divergences are always short-term.

So, here’s an idea: Rather than piling onto the bearish bandwagon, when the real price of an indispensable service or commodity drops to a multi-decade low it might make more sense to be bullish.

A popular line of thinking is that the US banking system is not making as much use of its “excess” reserves as it should be because of the interest rate that the Fed now pays on these reserves. This line of thinking reflects a basic misunderstanding of how the banking system works.

There are two reasons why it is wrong to believe that the 0.50% interest rate now being earned by US banks on their reserves is encouraging the banks to stockpile money at the Fed rather than take a risk by making more loans. The first reason is that there is no relationship between bank lending (and the associated creation of new bank deposits) and bank reserves. I’ve covered this concept in previous blog posts, including HERE, so today I’ll focus on the second reason.

The second reason is that the banking system has no control over its reserves. An individual bank can reduce its reserves by lending reserves to another bank, but banks as a group have no say in the total quantity of reserves. In other words, even if the US banking system desperately wanted to reduce its collective reserve quantity it would be powerless to do so.

By way of further explanation, there are only three ways that reserves can leave the US banking system. They can be removed by the Fed (the Fed has unlimited power to add or delete reserves), they can exit in the form of notes and coins in response to increasing public demand for physical cash, or they can be transferred to governmental accounts at the Fed. The third way will always be temporary because the government is always quick to spend any money it gets, so there are really just two ways that the banking system’s reserves can decline: a deliberate action by the Fed or increased demand for physical cash within the economy.

In other words, regardless of how many loans are made and how many new commercial bank deposits are created, every dollar of reserves currently in the US banking system will remain there until the Fed decides to change the system-wide level or until it leaks into the economy via the conversion of electronic deposits to physical cash.

An implication is that changing the rate of interest that the Fed pays on reserves will not affect the pace at which banks expand/contract credit within the economy. For example, if the Fed increased the interest rate on reserves from 0.50% to 1.00% the banks would generate more interest income from their reserves, but there would be no change in the incentive to make new loans because the banks will earn this additional income regardless of whether they lend more or less money into the economy (the creation of a bank loan doesn’t cause bank reserves to disappear). For another example, if instead of paying banks a positive rate on their reserves the Fed started charging banks, that is, if the Fed adopted Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP), the banking system as a whole would have no additional incentive to grow its loan book since there would be nothing it could do to avoid the cost. In fact, the cost imposed by the NIRP could indirectly REDUCE the incentive to make new loans.

As an aside, this doesn’t guarantee that NIRP won’t happen in the US, especially given the evidence that the Fed’s senior management is almost as clueless as Mario Draghi. However, the obvious failure of the policy in Europe lessens the risk of it happening in the US.

Summing up, the interest rate paid on reserves cannot be a reason for either more or less bank lending. As explained previously, the only reason that the Fed began paying interest on bank reserves in late-2008 was to enable it to maintain control of the Fed Funds Rate while it pumped huge volumes of dollars into the economy and into the reserve accounts of banks.

in Australian dollar (A$) terms.

The A$-denominated gold price (gold/A$) made a correction low in April of 2013, spent about 18 months forming a base and then resumed its long-term bull market in late-2014. It will probably soon make a new all-time high.

It is useful to follow gold’s performance in terms of the more-junior currencies, for two main reasons. First, gold tends to bottom in terms of these currencies well before it bottoms in terms of the senior currency (the US$). Second, money can sometimes be made by owning the stocks of gold-mining companies operating in countries with relatively weak currencies even when the US$ gold price is in a bearish trend.

A good example is Evolution Mining (EVN.AX), an Australia-based mid-tier gold producer that I’ve followed at TSI for the past few years. As illustrated by the following chart, EVN commenced a powerful upward trend in late-2014 after basing over the preceding 18 months (just like gold/A$). It is now well above its 2011-2012 peak.

As a gold bull market progresses, the more junior currencies and especially the commodity currencies begin to strengthen relative to the US$. This causes the mining companies with operations in the US to start doing relatively well.