Business

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares of Sinclair & Co.,

It seems that everyone these days is exporting deflation to the US.

The drop in commodity prices and the US dollar rally versus a broad basket of currencies in recent years had a big impact of course, but the magnitude of the decline of US import prices has been very significant indeed. And this matters for many reasons.

That the Fed has been boxed in by unleashing destructive monetary policies to "fix" decades of prior policy mistakes, is something we have been warning about since our first day. And, with every passing day that the Fed and its central bank peers pile up error upon error  to offset prior mistakes, the day approaches when this latest bubble, which some have dubbed it the "central banks all-in" bubble, will burst as well: Friday's shocking announcement of NIRP by the BOJ just brought us one step closer to the monetary doomsday.

Now that the Bank of Japan has joined other central banks such as Denmark, Sweden, the ECB, and Switzerland into pushing its rates into what until just two years ago was considered the monetary twilight zone below the zero bound, and in the process sending a record $5.5 trillion in government bond yields negative...

... which quickly puts into in context all the recent warnings about physical cash being eliminated (because as a reminder negative rates and cash simply can not coexist as the latter provides a ready immunity from the former), such as the following:

Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares of Sinclair & Co., and reposted from the original as of May 19, 2015 in light of the recent decision by the Bank of Japan to launch negative interest rates.

What A Cashless Society Would Look Like

Calls by various mainstream economists to ban cash transactions seem to be getting ever louder, while central bankers have unleashed negative interest rates on economies accounting for 25% of global GDP, with $5.5 trillion in government bonds yielding less than zero. The two policies are rapidly converging.