Hey everyone me kevin here, so there's a chance that i could be wrong. Uh, according to history, there's actually one instance in the past, where we were able to get under five percent inflation without a recession, and i think it's worth exploring what the economist just said about this one era and what it could mean for us going forward. So that's what we're going to do in this video if you find this helpful, well buckle up and consider getting yourself life insurance in as little as five minutes by the link down below all right. So the first thing that we should do is we should look at inflation year over year and the easiest way to do this is just hop over to the st louis fred grab the chart, and we can go all the way back to the 50s and we Can see what inflation has looked like uh well, historically and broadly speaking as as somebody who loves charting, we know that we have had this downtrend of inflation.

Essentially, since the 80s, i mean it's pretty clear after paul volcker killed inflation over here. We've seen this consistent downtrend and a lot of this agrees with the kathy woodyan argument, which is technological innovation and creative disruption, leads prices to go down. It leads legacy companies to go bankrupt and have to lower prices because of that leading to broader based in deflation. Rather than inflation, so the long-term trend here is clear decades long.

I i would expect we're more likely to face negative interest rates than hyperinflation, at least based on the longer term trend and the rationale for that longer term trend. Uh. What's fascinating, though, is if we look at this chart and we look at the five percent level, which is right here where my mouse is here, there's only been one time in history, we've actually been able to get it down without a recession. You see here recession.

Well, at least in the last 70 years right here, recession here, recession here, recession uh, i i guess that never really hit five percent. No, that hit four point: eight: nine percent. Okay, here you go over five percent recession uh here we go uh. This didn't even hit five percent recession.

We hit five percent here during 08 recession right and so here we are again uh and - and this is as far as the measure goes back - maybe maybe that's why we can't go any further back. This is the furthest. It goes back, looks like we're above five percent here and, of course, we had a recession as well, and so the only time that we have not hit a recession was actually right here in 1951, where we went from 9.4 inflation back down and we're going to Talk about that right after we take a listen to uh, some highlights from this article from the economist. It's really really incredible! So here they talk about today, as inflation.

Spikes there's a growing sense that the fed has lost its way they and this so far they say, has battered stock markets. We know this last eight weeks, eight to nine weeks, have been a little rough and led many firms and homeowners to wonder if the era of low rates might be over for good, and so they say that in the long run they believe that the world's aging Population, along with the kathy woodian argument, essentially, is going to keep a cap on interest rates, but what's important is what might happen between now and the long term? So that's short to medium term, and this is where they think we might go through what they call an unpleasant financial squeeze, rather than this hyperinflationary paul, volcker, disaster style era of the 1970s. So let's take a look at this: they mentioned that over history we've been somewhere well, global interest rates have been above five percent uh in the 90s and over the last decade, they've only been about two and a half percent we've seen cheap financing sort of be The cornerstone of our global economy uh, and they suggest that right now, though, in the last 18 months, we've had a little bit of a rude awakening that so far with inflation at seven percent now and the next expected cpi read to come in at 7.3 percent. They argue that it's likely we're far from transitory inflation and if anything, inflation right now seems to be feeding into wages, and this is a problem because as soon as inflation goes into wages, then you could potentially risk what's known as the wage price spiral.

This is that, as prices of things go up via inflation, people demand more pay because they need more pay just to pay food and rent and bills. And we know that rent's gone ridiculous, potentially as much as 20 up year over year, and so that demands that wages go up. But if wages go up and companies want to preserve their profit margins, they raise their prices as a way to preserve profit margins, which is literally what every single company has been saying in their earnings calls for q4 that they believe they have pricing power and because Prices have gone up for wages and costs they're going to raise prices to preserve their margins, to try to appease their investors, and that sounds good for the company. But it's terrible for inflation, because it means that the spiral is starting and it's an upward driving spiral.

Now they say here that private sector wages and salaries are up five percent. In a year i wrote next to it rent because we know rent is up about 20, so there's actually a lag uh. You know in in real terms, wages have actually gone down in the last year. Real terms is basically just taking your actual your nominal wage growth of five percent, subtracting inflation from it and then you're negative, two percent.

So you have actually had a real decline of wages in of two percent over the last year, which is insane because everything else has gotten more expensive. I mean there are some food items that have gone up 50 and it makes you wonder like. Why is our cpi seem rigged? Sometimes, but you know that's the topic for a different video. In december, the median consumer expected prices rose by six percent over 12 months, and many of these trends are being felt around the world.

Global inflation, they say, has now reached six percent and, as a result of this, we're seeing 12 emerging market rate, setters aka central banks raising rates in 2021, the bank of england did so as well. The bank of england is about a quarter percent ahead of us, and now all eyes on are on powell, who, whom the economist says, has a dominant role in the world, but argues is behind the curve. Now they do say that the goal is to get back to two percent by 2024, which might be close to the neutral rate of interest. This is when you're neither stimulating the economy uh nor uh, essentially trying to tighten on the economy or restrain the economy or, as they say here, hold it back uh, and so here they go on to say that the most likely prospect uh, therefore of a year Or more of interest rates rising? Well, okay, let me rephrase this a little bit so in the long term, 2024 plus they believe it's likely we're going to see these lower rates again.

That makes sense, but they make this argument here and that's the start of a powerful argument that they're going to conclude with you. They believe that quote the most likely prospect is therefore of a year or more of interest rates in america rising more sharply than the fed has so far indicated. Some forecasters predict. Interest rates will rise by 1.75 percentage points in 2022 more than any year since 2005., and so the economist here is making the argument that look long term we're going to have lower rates, we're going to have a more likely element of deflation.

The kathy woody an argument is going to make sense, but we're going to go through this really weird financial squeeze period and we don't exactly know what's going to happen, nobody can predict exactly what the market is going to do, and this is why we look to History and that that chart i showed you which we'll be going back to in a moment, and so again they reiterate here that the most likely prospect is a year or more of interest rates rising more sharply than the fed has indicated now. I think this is interesting because, right now, you've got people like mary daley, coming out from the federal reserve and and they're suggesting things like hey. You know what we're going to be data dependent, we'll see what the data does. Our goal is a smooth landing.

A soft landing jerome powell says we want to be very predictable and methodical with how we do this. We want to communicate clearly to the the american public into markets. We've got neil kashgari, who even was had headlines suggesting that maybe there would be a pause in store for interest rates in the spring or maybe only two rate hikes this year. Although when i broke down the actual transcript of that neil kashgari article and transcript went through the transcript neil kashgari said the only way we would pause interest rate hikes is if the data started.

Turning in our favor, otherwise, it's possible. We might have to move to a more contractionary stance, so i think the fed a little bit is playing us they're, trying to play the violin for us and say: hey everything's gon na be okay. Everything's gon na relax like we're gon na, be fine. We're gon na soft landing this, but i think the fed themselves realizes that's the hopeful case scenario.

That hope isn't always the scenario that's going to work out best uh, you know, with a rescue ship for the titanic. Took four hours to come. Hope was that it would be there within the next 30 minutes. Okay, hope doesn't always work out, but they're playing the violin for us right now.

Now i want to just clarify before we get to the end of this article. I i used to be the biggest fan of jay pow, but i'll tell you when he flipped on us. Nine days after meeting with joe biden, i lost a lot of respect and i made a video saying: i can no longer trust this guy. It was a short: it was like 59 seconds long.

You could probably see it just type into youtube meet kevin. I can no longer trust this guy, jerome powell or fed or whatever, and you probably see him - and that was within that moment, where i'm like you, literally just flipped, because of politics or like what why it was odd uh. So anyway - and i like in hindsight - like i - i don't disrespect him - i suppose - for for making this change, because i'd rather know, but the fact that it came nine days after meeting joe biden makes me think that there's a lot more politics at play here and The fed right now is kind of trying to sing the song of joe biden, trying to tell us that in this midterm election year, don't worry, everything's gon na be okay, we've got it all under control and there's supposed to be a political. You know chasm between these two anyway, so over the past 20 years, the underlying neutral rate has steadily fallen, as savings and investments got out of whack, rising global savings caused by hoarding of cash reserves in asian countries and so on so forth.

Basically, they reiterate here that look, it's very very normal, that because of technological progresses and uh, and what history tells us spending on intellectual property and innovation again, the kathy woodian argument, it's very normal for us to expect that interest rates will go back down substantially for, For the long term, and that we can expect a low level of interest rates in the long term, future - that's okay, but take a look at this this. This is very interesting. These factors lay down the map for interest rates. In other words, rates are going to go down in the long term.

In the long run, any upward shift is likely to be small and, to the extent that this reflects a pickup in investments welcomed, because we want to see more investments right. However, between now the short term, the medium term and the long term, there is likely to be a sharp and potentially painful rise in rates. The world's debts have reached 355 percent of gdp, making firms and households potentially more sensitive to even small rate rises. Potentially after we offload the cash that we have because households do have a lot more cash on their balance sheets, but once that cash is gone, that's when pain starts.

Because that's when you go back to debt and it's like oh crap, credit card rates are higher, buy now pay later rates, are higher everything's, getting jacked up right and then listen to this one folks. There are few examples of central banks: taming inflation without the economy suffering recession. The last time america's inflation fell from over five percent. Without a downturn was over 70 years ago, fighting inflation could put the world in a slump.

If so, the prospect that rates will one day fall back again would only offer some consolation, that's kind of bearish. Now what about that one exception? Can we be that one historical exception where inflation was quelled? Well, we have to know what happened in 1950 to 1952.. The korean war happened and when you have a war, you tend to have wartime inflation. That's because manufacturers shift their production to guns instead of butter.

This is the old definition of guns and butter, not the stocks in psychology; money definition that we like to use, but they shift their production to means of war like tanks and bullets and guns, and that increases the price of things like butter and food and consumer Consumer essentials right because we're focused on a war now what's interesting is what happened in 1951. Is our government and treasury department actually felt that inflation would be long lasting, so they implemented very stringent price controls and aggressively responded by essentially tightening monetary and fiscal policy to bring inflation back down? They also raised taxes, so they raised taxes, they tightened policy and they put in price control, saying we're not allowing you to charge more than x for a certain product. Well, this succeeded in bringing inflation down, but what happened unfortunately, was because of these higher taxes and all of these these price controls. We ended up just kicking the can down the road about two years from 1951 and we fell into a recession in the third quarter of 1953, all the way through the first quarter of 1954..

Now it was a brief, a recession. It wasn't an extremely painful recession like what we've seen in 2008 or or uh, probably uh, what we've seen in other recessions. It was brief and and relatively painless, but it was still a recession nonetheless, and so i find it very interesting that the only time we've actually been able to get under five percent inflation without creating a recession was when we basically raised taxes a bunch and implemented Price controls, unfortunately, neither of those are very likely to happen in america. There's not a lot of appetite to raise taxes, especially during a democratic administration, when republicans have enough control to basically prevent the biden administration from doing anything until 2024.

So i don't think taxes are going to be able to go up much, especially since the buildback better plan keeps getting whacked. I really doubt that price controls are going to be popular because price controls are the lifting of price controls are ultimately what led to the insane inflation that we saw in the late 60s and then the disasters that we saw in the 70s. So i also doubt that we're going to see price control, so price controls and taxes are likely off the table, which means we're most likely to see aggressive monetary policy tightening from the federal reserve, in addition to a lack of fiscal stimulus, leading to what is most Likely going to be according to history, a recession that pulls us down from above five percent levels of of inflation. Now that does not necessarily have to be a bad thing.

You know, i think when we hear recession, we think, oh, my gosh, that's it! You know time to be the most bearish ever not necessarily. Recessions are wonderful opportunities to remove speculation from markets to remove uh, uh zombie companies from markets that shouldn't be alive to create the innovation that we should actually foster. The fact that companies like amazon and apple have become so incredibly efficient from the pandemic, uh and and have have uh you know, worked on their supply chains to the point where, in a few years, they're gon na have the most efficient supply chains in the world. They're gon na be the most efficient companies ever that we've seen in the world.

A recession wouldn't hurt them. I mean their stock price might go down temporarily, but in the long term, they'd be great, like companies like tesla and whatever else they'll be they'll, be phenomenal. In the long term, but in the short term, what you'll actually likely do is weed the battlefield for these companies and you'll actually pave the way for companies like apple amazon and tesla, to be bigger, more efficient companies than we've ever seen before in our lifetimes. So a recession could actually be the best possible thing to get all the crap out of the way, get the speculation out of the way reset our economy, so to speak, get rid of inflation and then we're really off to the races.

The question now, though - and this is the most difficult one is: do you buckle up and hold on for the ride, because we're going to have a lot of rallies and crashes and rallies and crashes and rallies and crashes between now and when we get inflation down. Hopefully, inflation is transitory. The biggest argument which at this point we know, is not, but the biggest argument that inflation will be coming down is that don't worry supply chains will fix themselves by the end of 2022 or at least they'll get better in the second half. But the question that i have to ask you is just because supply chains get better.

Does that mean companies are going to stop raising their prices if consumers are still buying or do supply chains get better, reducing the costs that businesses have and prices continue to go up because people are continued, continuing to be willing to pay those prices leading to essentially Double benefits to the profit margins of companies, lower costs and higher incomes, and then we actually get the greatest earnings ever for companies right before, potentially going into an actual recession. When the fed says we've got to get really aggressive here, uh i don't know, i obviously don't know the answers, but i'm going to be tracking this on the daily to try to find out when we actually hit an inflation inflection point and, of course i'll be Sending alerts in the stocks and psychology money group for any kind of transactions or trades that i make based on new information that i find thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you and folks we'll see in the next one thanks goodbye.