Finance Reaper

Lucky Lord Jim O`Neill..Baron of Gately

Yes, I am back…sadly, not by popular demand…So, lucky Lord Jim gets a knighthood for being totally wrong…what do I get for being totally right?

I know I have been away for a long time but I am busy trying to help my constituents in what is the most deprived ward of my London Borough. I do get the time to tweet and quite frankly, if I do say myself, there is some interesting twitshit going down. I will start again at some point when my workload calms down. TO FOLLOW GO #financereaper…

Anyone who has read my blog for a while will know that I have had a downer on Lucky Lord Jim`s BRICs for about two years. I identified the fault with his reasoning and started warning of the BRICs impending doom. Today, Goldman Sachs have affectively closed their once famous BRIC fund. It has lost 88% of its value since 2010. In the last two years, I have warned that all the main winners in the BRIC argument would eventually fall from grace. BHP Billiton, one of my regular posts (bear ideas) of the past, has hit a seven year low. Steel companies are in the depths of despair. Coal was a big subject matter and I even wrote about the history of a little town in the USA called Jim Thorpe. Well, the Coal industry continues to slump and now Chinese mining company Longmay mining is laying off 100,000 employees. In fact, as many as are employed in the entire US coal industry…of course, US employees with their modern machinery investment and methods are 20 times more productive…oh, and they don’t live on a bowl of rice a week…Iron Ore will not rally as many expect. Oil will not rally as many expect. In fact, we could see new lows. Machinery manufacturers have also come into my spot light and I have continually warned of the fragility of their earnings…just look at companies like Joy Global, mentioned here many times…I have been totally right and I will continue to be so. QE is the primary reason. Central Banks have not used this tool wisely. Instead of extracting hard and fast commitments from politicians to cut spending and put in place debt reduction plans, they have worked hand in hand to raise still further the levels of debt to GDP ratios. Since the crash, global government indebtedness has risen 30%…

QE has led to over capacity. Yes, hundreds of millions of Chinese have come from the paddy fields to industrial towns and cities but it was all too quick. The cheap money has allowed huge capital spending of productive industries but at a cost to employment in developed nations. As one million extremely poorly paid manufacturing workers in China start work, jobs of very high equivalent salary workers are lost. The net result is a loss of demand. Whilst the infrastructure explosion, which took over ten years, was in full swing, all well and good…that is now past its peak, the Chinese economy has to focus more on exports than ever before. If it was to keep those hundreds of millions poor people working…they needed to export or die…that is exactly what they are doing. The 2015 trade surplus is up 75% to date. The real worry for the west is that in reality profitability is of little consideration compared to keeping people working . Therefore, the response of other developed and even developing nation’s is fairly limited.

Smoot-Hawley…lets not hope that the only way out it is trade barriers, however, currently there are 30 trade sanctions being drawn up against Chinese Steel dumping. Their are many other areas where dumping is evident. This will not end well.

 

 

 

 

is of little interest.

Tags: BRICs, China, Consumers, Iron Ore, Japan, Jim Thorpe, mining machinery, QE, Shipping, steel