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If you have not yet read Part I, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Part II: Why It’s Now Easier to Predict the Outcomes of the Coming Recession

The Oil-Sensitive West

Consumption of oil in the West started to flatten out as early as 2004. And readers of my previous essays know that after the crisis started in ‘08, both Europe and the US shed even more oil demand. Let there be no doubt: Oil demand in the OECD has been highly elastic (responsive) in the face of oil prices above $80. In the data, you could even see some early signatures of reduced demand coming in 2004, when oil prices rose above $40.

One of the paradoxes that repeatedly trips up analysts, because it’s so counter-intuitive, is the fact that the wealthy Western countries are hurt more by high oil prices than the poorer, emerging market countries.

Your average Westerner is consuming quite a lot of oil, per capita. It’s embedded in shipped goods and in shipped foods, and also comes via high penetration of automobile ownership. Westerners drive lots of miles, comparatively. But people in emerging markets have only just begun to use oil. It hardly matters whether petrol is $4.00 per gallon or even $8.00 per gallon if you have just upgraded from a rural existence, and for the first time ever your family is consuming 4-6 gallons of petrol per month (enough to power a motorbike each day for a short distance). This is precisely what Bernanke is alluding to, when he allows that we have no control over emerging market oil demand.

More vexing is that emerging market economies are primarily running on coal, so they are able to produce and align their consumption with the power grid, while being more discretionary about liquid fuel use for mobility. This is really perplexing, as I said, to Western analysts but I do want to point out that its empirically true (see Stuart Stanford’s post on the subject, Wow, Just Wow, from earlier this year).

If you have not yet read Part I, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Part II: How Low Will Housing Prices Go?

It’s a truism that “all real estate is local,” and to the degree that the ultimate price of a property is only truly “discovered” when a specific buyer purchases a specific property at a specific point in time, this is certainly true. It is also true that many key inputs to real estate valuation are locally derived, such as employment, wage levels, demand for rental housing, the attractiveness of neighborhoods, and so on.

But to say that interest rates managed by the Federal Reserve or subsidies provided by the Federal government have no influence on real estate valuation is clearly untrue. Valuation is directly influenced by global, national, and state economies, and by the policies of the central bank and government.

In attempting to answer the question When will housing hit bottom? we might start with the coarse-grained systemic inputs and then move to the more fine-grained local inputs.

If you have not yet read Part I, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Part II: The Framework for Predicting Our Financial Future

Okay, assuming you have the basics covered, I now want to share with you my views on the markets and how things will unfold in the future. My assumption is that you have completed the full Crash Course (or one of the shorter versions) and are familiar with the exponential function and how it permeates our everyday life.

This framework is always subject to revision as new experiences and data points become available, but its central themes have been operative for me for several years.

Again, this body of work represents my personal observations, historical readings, and faith in the idea that cultures and laws may change but humans tend to behave in predictable ways. As always, I reserve the right to change my forecasts as new information becomes available.

Exponential Change ‘Speeds Up’

Understanding the nature of the systems in which we live is the centerpiece of our analytical framework. And at the heart of that is the concept that we live in a world dominated by exponential functions and curves. 

If you have not yet read Part I, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Part II – Understanding Where Gold and Silver Go from Here

As readers now understand, I am not currently a supporter of higher gold prices as a function of inflation risk. Instead, my view is that we must first move through the various iterations of crisis, collapse, debt default, instability, and policy panic before gold attaches itself to inflation. Yes, I agree with the Paul Brodsky thesis (and the FOFOA thesis) that the foundations of future inflation have already been laid. But it’s also my view that for a severe inflation to unfold, there has to be a collapse in currency demand itself. It would also be necessary for global industrial production to have collapsed down to much lower levels to provide sufficient scarcity of goods. Mind you, I see both of these conditions — rejection of currencies and industrial collapse — as high risk. The two maps I offer here include them.

Mapping the Price Future of Gold and Silver

The first price path I want to share with you is called The Grand QE Cycle. It begins with the resolution to the most pressing question facing markets right here, right now, today: Will the ECB federalize all Eurozone debt?

Based on my own analysis and in consultation with contacts, I concluded for myself weeks ago that the crisis in the EU was becoming increasingly binary. Indeed, it is now fully binary. Either the ECB guides to a new charter or mandate, allowing it to buy unlimited quantities of EU debt, or it follows through on its hard-money threats — and the sovereign debt, which forms the core asset of pension funds, banks, institutions across the EU, will become distressed debt, forcing a cataclysmic purge.

Because this urgent question has not been definitively answered as yet, gold is making its way in volatile fashion towards a price of…