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Featured Video: David Rosenberg on Inflation vs. Deflation

Watch special video below of David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates, discussing the inflation vs. deflation debate. This powerful presentation was filmed at the Strategic Investment Conference 2011 in La Jolla, CA.

O Deflation, Where Is Thy Sting?

The CPI was out this week, and it showed a continued drop in inflation. There were those who immediately pointed out that this vindicated the Fed’s move to QE2. We have to get ahead of this deflation thing, don’t we? Well, maybe, depending on how you measure inflation/deflation. This...

Pushing on a String

This week the Fed altered their end-of-meeting statement by just a few words, but those words have a lot of meaning. It seems they are paving the way to a new round of quantitative easing (QE2), if in their opinion the situation warrants it. A trillion dollars of new money could soon be injected...

Some Thoughts on Deflation

The debate over whether we are in for inflation or deflation was alive and well at the Agora Symposium in Vancouver this this week. It seems that not everyone is ready to join the deflation-first, then-inflation camp I am currently resident in. So in this week's letter we look at some of the causes...

The Debt Supercycle

I have been writing about The End Game for some time now. And writing a book of the same title. Consequently, I have been thinking a lot about how the credit crisis evolved into the sovereign debt crisis, and how it all ends. Today we explore a few musings I have had of late, while we look at some...

Thoughts on the End Game

When I was at Rice University, so many decades ago, I played a lot of bridge. I was only mediocre, but enjoyed it. We had a professor, Dr. Culbertson, who was a bridge Life Master at an early age. He was single and lived in our college, playing bridge with us almost every night. He was a master of...

The Best of Times

What's a Fed to do? We get talk about tightening and taking away the easy credit, but we got the fourth largest monetization on record last week. This week we examine the elements of deflation, look at some banking statistics that are not optimistic, and then I write a reply to my great friend Bill...

Killing the Goose

Peggy Noonan, maybe the most gifted essayist of our time, wrote a few weeks ago about the vague concern that many of us have that the monster looming up ahead of us has the potential (my interpretation) for not just plucking a few feathers from the goose that lays the golden egg (the US free-market...

The Hole in FDIC

This week we continue to look at what powers the forces of deflation. As I continue to stress, getting the fundamental question answered correctly is the most important issue we face going forward. And the problem is that we cannot use the usual historical comparisons. This week we look at one more...

Elements of Deflation, Part 2

Just as water is formed by the basic elements hydrogen and oxygen, deflation has its own fundamental components. Last week we started exploring those elements, and this week we continue. I feel that the most fundamental of decisions we face in building investment portfolios is correctly deciding...

The Elements of Deflation

As every school child knows, water is formed by the two elements of hydrogen and oxygen in a very simple formula we all know as H2O. Today we start a series that starts with the question, What are the elements that comprise deflation? Far from being simple, the "equation" for deflation is as...

An Uncomfortable Choice

We have arrived at this particular economic moment in time by the choices we have made, which now leave us with choices in our future that will be neither easy, convenient, nor comfortable. Sometimes there are just no good choices, only less-bad ones. In this week's letter we look at what some of...

The Endgame

Deflation? Stimulus? Deleveraging? Recession? A soft depression? A return to a bull market? With all that is going on, how does it all end up? When we get to where we are going, where will we be? In chess, the endgame refers to the stage of the game when there are few pieces left on the board. The...

Forecast 2009: Deflation and Recession

Where are we headed in 2009? We will explore that in detail over the next few issues of Thoughts from the Frontline, but today we will start with some of the larger forces which will have a major impact on the economies of the world, and I will end with my usual attempt to forecast the various...

The Velocity Factor

"A severe global recession will lead to deflationary pressures. Falling demand will lead to lower inflation as companies cut prices to reduce excess inventory. Slack in labour markets from rising unemployment will control labor costs and wage growth. Further slack in commodity markets as prices...

Leverage Is an 8 Letter Word

Leverage is an eight-letter word, which the markets now regard as twice as bad as the two four-letter words debt and pain (or fill in your own four-letter words). This week I try to give some insight into what is happening in the credit markets, some of it below the radar screen of most...

The Slow Motion Recession Re-visited

"We appear to be entering a period of serious stagflation with sharply rising expected and actual inflation combined with large downside risks to growth and employment."

"I would argue that what we are seeing is an acceleration of expected consumer price inflation in the context of a sharp...

Earnings Deflation

Earnings season is upon us, and with each announcement the market seems to surge on new ecstasies or retreat with disillusionment. Each new announcement is cut open, like so many sheep, to see what its entrails will divine to us about the future, as if one more bit of fresh data will give us the...

Conflicting Opinions

What can we make of the huge variations in economic predictions by quite reasonable analysts? I briefly touch on the topic from my perch in Halifax where I am cool, if not calm or collected. We then go on to Part Two of Art Cashin's excellent essay on how the world of economics really works.

For...

The Most Unlikely Action

This week we look at what Greenspan really said and what he didn't say; the real reason why the bond market reacted so violently (not what the headlines would lead us to believe); what History tells us about the volatility of the bond markets and what we can expect in the future. It should make for...