China is on the edge of recession — excluding Covid, for the first time since 2008 — as new data showed all-important manufacturing contracted for the fourth month in a row with particular weakness in new orders.In other words, what they’ve got is a backlog, then it’s a cliff.Manufacturing makes up a third of China’s economy — much more than the US. The collapse of China’s property — another third of China’s economy — is adding further fuel to the fire.Offices Emptier than CovidLondon’s Financial Times reports that office buildings in China are emptier than they were during the Covid lockdowns. FT notes that work-at-home hasn’t taken off in China, implying the main driver of empty offices is layoffs.In Shanghai, office vacancies are at 21%. In Shenzhen, China’s central export hub,

Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute.The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years — the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era.They found that unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke.In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019, Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.So, yes, something broke.And it’s nowhere near over: Canada’s per-person real GDP is still falling, and with a looming US recession — the US is 75% of Canada’s exports — Canada could crash again before it ever

For the first time in our nation’s history, 30 year olds are doing worse than their parents.In other words, we killed the golden goose.Last week, Professor Scott Galloway went on an epic rant on MSNBC laying out for his well-heeled hosts exactly what young people are going through right now.Rattling off the numbers, for Americans born in 1951 — that’s baby boomers — fully 80% were earning more than their parents. By Gen X that was down to 60%. For Millennials it’s barely 50%. We can only imagine what’s coming for the Zoomers.I’ve talked a lot in videos about what’s happening to the young, from being shut out of housing to being stuck cobbling together shifts to make ends meet instead of building a proper career.In short, they’re spending their evenings eating ramen with the roommates

In case you thought anybody in Washington was driving this thing, they are not. It’s official: the Department of Treasury is now issuing debt at pandemic levels. It’s worth noting the pandemic record was double the previous record, which had stood for 231 years.In raw numbers, the latest numbers for Q4 2023 show Treasury issued $7 trillion in new debt. For the entire year, it came to $23 trillion.This has bloated the Treasury market to $27 trillion — up 60% since the pandemic. In other words, one-third of Treasuries have fresh ink on them. And it’s up roughly sixfold since the 2008 crisis.Meaning if we hit another crash, it could be a lot bigger.Sending US Economy to DefaultsAt this point, federal debt is rising by $1 trillion every 90 days, and US government spending as a percent of GDP

Argentina’s Javier Milei is racking up some solid wins, with the fiscal basket case seeing its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years.
Apparently, it took Milei just nine and a half weeks to balance a budget that was projected at 5% of GDP under the previous government. In US terms, he turned a 1.2 trillion-dollar annual deficit into a 400 billion surplus. In 9 and a half weeks.
How did he do it? Easy: he cut a host of central government agency budgets by 50% while slashing crony contracts and activist handouts.
For perspective, if you cut the entirety of Washington’s budget by 50%, you’d save a fast 3 trillion dollars and start paying off the national debt.
It turns out it can be done, and the world doesn’t collapse into chaos.

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Milei

Argentina’s Javier Milei is racking up some solid wins, with the fiscal basket case seeing its first monthly budget surplus in 12 years.
Apparently, it took Milei just nine and a half weeks to balance a budget that was projected at 5% of GDP under the previous government. In US terms, he turned a 1.2 trillion-dollar annual deficit into a 400 billion surplus. In 9 and a half weeks.
How did he do it? Easy: he cut a host of central government agency budgets by 50% while slashing crony contracts and activist handouts.
For perspective, if you cut the entirety of Washington’s budget by 50%, you’d save a fast 3 trillion dollars and start paying off the national debt.
It turns out it can be done, and the world doesn’t collapse into chaos.

Sovereign debt is eating the world. Lining up a financial crash that could make 2008 look like a picnic.
How did we get here?
In short, governments and central banks deluded themselves into thinking that unlimited deficit spending financed by unlimited money printing won’t do what they’ve done for literally millennia — plunge the economy into stagflation.
They are, of course, wrong. And we’re seeing the catastrophe unfold before our eyes.
From Nixon to $33 Trillion in Debt
The story begins in the 1970s when Nixon broke the global gold standard, unleashing permanent deficits worldwide. But the latest chapter starts in 2008 when central banks bailed out the financial system by effectively printing trillions of dollars.
At the time, everybody knew that much printing would cause inflation,

Aside from stealing your life savings and launching depressions, one of the nastier features of paper money is what it does to governments.
In short, paper money transforms governments from parasites to predators. Once a government can print what it likes, it no longer needs taxes.
Meaning it no longer needs us.
We saw this in living color during the covid lockdowns. Just imagine a world without a central bank where, in the first days of the pandemic, some young bureaucrat proposed shutting down the entire economy. No worries, he’d say: the economy — and tax revenue — will shrink by half. But we can just lay off half of government workers.
He would have a very short career.
Instead, of course, they did have an in-house money printer. The Fed alone pumped out the $6 trillion it took to

China’s authoritarian gerontocracy has built a Doom Loop with Chinese characteristics, with over half the economy now crashing.
Chinese exports are now plunging at the fastest pace since the covid lockdowns: Exports fell 14.5% on the year, driven by a 21% drop in exports to Europe and a 23% drop to the US.
Meanwhile, imports to China are also falling — 12.4% on the year — as shrinking manufacturing buys fewer inputs and households buy less.
In short, foreigners aren’t buying, and the Chinese aren’t spending either.

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This is all a problem for Chinese factories because they’re obscenely overbuilt thanks to cheap central bank money and government subsidies. To give a sense, the FT reported that

Governments worldwide are trying to replace cash with CBDCs, and people worldwide are starting to wake up, but we need a lot more.
A CBDC is a government-run crypto-token that replaces the national currency with a tracking ledger—a list of who owns what—that lets government surveil, control, and mandate every dollar you spend. 
They could prevent you from buying the wrong thing, whether raw milk or gas stoves, or self-defense. They could stop you from donating to the wrong person, as we saw with the Canadian Truckers. They could even force you to buy whatever a government bureaucrat tells you to. 
On top of the Soviet-style surveillance state, a CBDC is an existential threat to the banking system, to the US dollar and would give central planners push-button control over every element of

The Central bankers of the world, apparently losing confidence that they can fix the inflation they created, are turning to Plan B: blame the people. So we fight each other.
Last week the chief economist of the Bank of England, Huw Pill, said the quiet part out loud, that “British households and businesses need to accept they are poorer and stop seeking pay increases and pushing prices higher.”
Note inflation in the UK is currently running double-digits, with grocery prices up 19% year-on-year. So not getting a raise may mean cutting a meal.
Meanwhile, a poll from a major British insurer found 57% of small businesses in Britain are at risk of closure from rising prices.
So you plebes need to drop a meal and close your family business so we can keep stealing from you.

The past few weeks, major countries have been moving away from the US dollar, raising doubts about the dollar’s long-dominant role in the world. Eight weeks ago, it was just pariah nations like Iran or Russia trying to de-dollarize. Now it’s Brazil, France, even Saudi Arabia—the lynchpin of the decades-long “petrodollar” arrangement.
If the dollar does lose its position as the global reserve currency, it will be catastrophic for the American economy. Catastrophic for the American people on whose backs 80 years of reserve status were built. And it will subject billions of foreigners, for whom the dollar has meant decades of being bullied, to history’s greatest bait and switch.
Dollar at Risk
In late March, Saudi Arabia announced it will price oil in Chinese yuan. Even CNN was worried, in a

It’s the weekend, but our fresh Financial Crisis does not sleep. And a recent study says we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
The Washington Post yesterday wrote: “If banks were suddenly forced to liquidate their bond and loan portfolios, the losses would erase up to 91 percent of their combined capital cushion.” In other words, we were already right up against the edge.
The Post cites two studies that total unrealized losses in the system are between $1.7 trillion and $2 trillion. Total capital buffer in the US banking system: $2.2 trillion. That’s about a 10 percent to 20 percent buffer. And now running into a market crisis where bank stocks have declined by about a third in the past few weeks, and are now at a P/E ratio of 7.35.

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One popular critique of bitcoin is energy cost per transaction. This doesn’t begin to capture bitcoin’s massive energy savings compared to fiat currency. Bitcoin’s cost per transaction is well known, and often critiqued; one article in Wired magazine called bitcoin “[a] big middle finger to earth’s climate.” This is because bitcoin’s security, redundancy, and architecture are more energy intensive than traditional payments relying on a single point of failure.

With its $700 billion bond-buying expansion in response to the COVID crisis, the Federal Reserve has thrust itself into the limelight. Like a sixteen-year-old with a credit card, the Fed is salivating over what money-printing powers it shall seize next. How is the prudent investor to respond?

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The Economist recently opined that interest rates don’t affect investment. This claim is based on an empirical study that contradicts what we already know: that lower prices lead to more demand. In the end, the problem lies with the researches who fail to account for the behavior of central bankers, writes Peter St. Onge.This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Robert Hale.