Richard Russell has made his subscribers fortunes. One of the best values anywhere in the financial world at only a $300 subscription to get his DAILY report for a year. HERE to subscribe. Amongst his achievements Richard was in cash before the 2008/2009 Crash and he has been Bullish Gold since below $300
Ed Note: Richard Russell is bullish Silver and holds one of the largest single positions he has held since the 1950’s in the precious metals.
Section 10. Constitution of the United States: “No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.”
I’ve been pondering over the following strange situation. The Dow is actually lower today than it was ten years ago. What does this really mean? To me, it means that the market over the last ten years has been discounting “no growth” ahead. When you take an unbiased look at the picture, compared with gold almost everything today is cheaper than it was a few years ago. Since gold is the universal immutable standard around which everything else (including the dollar) fluctuates, this means that the price of literally everything has been going DOWN against the standard which is gold.
This is deflationary. Of course you can say that a loaf of bread costs more now than it did a year ago, and this is inflationary. True, it’s inflationary in terms of dollars, but the dollar is lower in terms of gold. So in terms of gold, everything is deflating.
This deflationary trend is continuing, and what’s more it’s continuing against a veritable ocean of central-bank created currencies. Subscribers know that I believe this bear market will end, as most others have, with stocks selling at extreme great values — dividends high, price/earnings low. And you ask, “How can this possibly occur?”
This is the question I’ve asked myself. And the answer I come with is that stocks will be hit by brutal world deflation. That’s what the miserable performance of the Dow is telling me. That’s what the poor performance of everything else against gold is telling me. I’m not talking about the performance over recent months, but their performance over the years.
Yes, I know that the conventional wisdom is that we’re heading for all-out inflation. This forecast is based on the thesis that the only way to handle America’s deadly multi-trillion debts is to inflate them out of existence. But suppose the Fed is unable to engineer inflation? Look how hard they’ve been trying over the last year to restart inflation. And what’s happened to housing, the chief object of the Fed’s inflation target? Housing prices have gone nowhere, well maybe they’re less weak then they were six months ago. But inflation in home prices? It’s just not happening.
And now political pressure is on the Fed to cut back on stimulus, money-creation and at the same time raise interest rates. This, if it happens, will definitely be deflationary, and it will hit housing and the economy.
Ever since World War II the Fed has been on the inflation path. Leverage, rising debt, speculation, and higher prices have been the “law” of the land. Now, I believe we have hit the inflection point; we are just entering the huge deflationary spiral that will unwind six decades of leverage and inflation.
In the big picture what I see is that China and Asia will become (they already are) phenomenal producers. The developed nations will not be able to compete with them. The result will be a crushing decline in the price of manufactured goods, which, in turn, will impact on all goods including foodstuffs and services and medical services. In a vain effort to compete with China, India and Asia, currencies will be devalued across the board.
Currencies will sink in the face of competitive devaluations (think Venezuela), and whatever can go bankrupt will go bankrupt. Debt will become a dirty word again, as it was during the 1930s (if you can’t pay for it with cash, live without it).
The one item that will withstand this crushing force of deflation will be gold. Whereas most items have been sinking against gold. If the deflation that I foresee arrives, items will be plunging in price against the standard — gold. This will be the great deflation that nobody foresees and nobody understands and nobody has protected themselves against.
The reason nobody foresees deflation is that for years the world has ignored or failed to understand the real meaning of gold. The world has been thinking in terms of dollars for generations. Let’s take an example. You bought a loaf of bread five years ago for a hundredth of an ounce of gold. Today you can buy three loafs of bread for the same hundredth of an ounce of gold. Bread has deflated in terms of gold since now you get far more bread for the very same amount of gold.
When you’re willing to agree that gold, not the dollar, is the universal immutable standard, you can see that the forces of deflation are taking over.
The 85 yr. old writes a market comment daily since the internet age began. In recent years, he began strongly advocated buying gold coins in the late 1990’s below $300. His position before the recent crash was cash and gold. There is little in markets he has not seen. Mr. Russell gained wide recognition via a series of over 30 Dow Theory and technical articles that he wrote for Barron’s during the late-’50s through the ’90s. Russell was the first (in 1960) to recommend gold stocks. He called the top of the 1949-’66 bull market. And almost to the day he called the bottom of the great 1972-’74 bear market, and the beginning of the great bull market which started in December 1974.