Japan Redux

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While we wait for the July Canadian housing data to trickle out, let's return to Japan and their housing price experience after nearly 20 years of ZIRP and NIRP.

I have posted charts about Japan since 2012 to illustrate the folly of global central banks and their monetary policies of instituting ZIRP & NIRP to stimulate inflation > consumption > production, the by-product of which, has been the manic search for yields as the underlying asset class values became stretched to perfection under pressure from the FOMO crowd.

Instead of using fiscal policy which requires long term planning and socially cohesive agreements directed towards production and well being, the quarterly knob twiddling monetary policy has in part, along with the rise of a digitized global financial network, unleashed "megabyte" money laundering which the UNODC  estimates at 2-5% of global GDP per year.

It has also crushed the incentive to save for a future funding of investment into productive assets.  

The Household Saving Rate in Canada has decreased to 1.1% in the first quarter of 2019.
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​Commodity Super Cycle - 10 Years into the Bear

After 20 years of monetary suppressed-yield policy in Japan and 10 years in Canada we still see long term inflation in a grinding downtrend, and peak commodities have come and gone.
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Here is a chart I published in a 2012 post "What Do You Do During a Housing Bust".

The answer is "save".
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If the CRB chart above has correctly identified a cyclical swing between bull and bear commodity production, then we should expect another "lost decade" of balance sheet repair especially in the over-speculated and now depreciating housing asset markets of Canada.

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