Daniel Amerman

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Jack Jones
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Daniel Amerman

Post by Jack Jones » Fri Aug 18, 2017 9:14 am

http://danielamerman.com/

Anyone dive into this guy's stuff? I listened to a podcast where he was a guest, and he seemed pretty knowledgable:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/dan ... 36426&mt=2

His site seems a bit sensationalistic, but I think he knows his stuff. On the podcast he was talking about using inflation to your advantage in real estate investing.
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Re: Daniel Amerman

Post by farjean2 » Fri Aug 18, 2017 2:38 pm

Jack Jones wrote:http://danielamerman.com/

Anyone dive into this guy's stuff? I listened to a podcast where he was a guest, and he seemed pretty knowledgable:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/dan ... 36426&mt=2

His site seems a bit sensationalistic, but I think he knows his stuff. On the podcast he was talking about using inflation to your advantage in real estate investing.
We all have to make a buck somehow.
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Re: Daniel Amerman

Post by Jack Jones » Fri Aug 23, 2019 8:04 pm

Good article on the recent yield inversion:

http://danielamerman.com/va/ccc/E1SevenWords.html
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Kriegsspiel
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Re: Daniel Amerman

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sat Aug 24, 2019 6:03 pm

Looks like this is a transcript of the podcast you mentioned.
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Jack Jones
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Re: Daniel Amerman

Post by Jack Jones » Sun Sep 29, 2019 4:23 pm

Gold!
This ability for a relatively small portfolio component to "punch above its weight" and potentially reach out and shield a much larger portfolio from inflationary losses is both rare and extremely valuable.
http://danielamerman.com/course/a/pgSIXTEENok.html
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Re: Daniel Amerman

Post by Jack Jones » Fri Sep 03, 2021 12:42 pm

The United States government has effectively addicted the nation and the economy to a steady feed of fantastic sums of money that the government doesn't actually have available to spend. The funding for the monthly child tax credit payments, the enhanced unemployment checks and much of the massive "infrastructure" bill are all dependent on running by far the largest deficits in U.S. history, with the Federal Reserve coming up which much of the money, each and every month.

Throughout all of our lifetimes, this was never the case until a new form of money creation, reserves-based money creation by the Federal Reserve, was introduced in the depths of the 2008 crisis. And now, what no serious voter or investor would have believed before 2008 has become the norm, the new default. They believe in magic - the ability of the Federal Reserve to provide endless funding for the spending of the U.S. government, and for the Fed to keep the markets stabilized and insulated from risk, with the highest valuations for stocks, bonds and real estate in history.

What makes these beliefs "magical" is that average voter and investor has no idea where the new money is coming from, or what limits might exist. People who used to understand that free markets have risk, or that the government has limits on what it can spend, have now spent more than a decade learning to suspend those beliefs. The apparent thinking is that the magic, whatever its source, has worked so far, so obviously the experts at the government can keep doing this forever... can't they?
http://danielamerman.com/va/ccc/I3Gyrations.html
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Re: Daniel Amerman

Post by D1984 » Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:23 pm

Jack Jones wrote:
Fri Sep 03, 2021 12:42 pm
The United States government has effectively addicted the nation and the economy to a steady feed of fantastic sums of money that the government doesn't actually have available to spend. The funding for the monthly child tax credit payments, the enhanced unemployment checks and much of the massive "infrastructure" bill are all dependent on running by far the largest deficits in U.S. history, with the Federal Reserve coming up which much of the money, each and every month.

Throughout all of our lifetimes, this was never the case until a new form of money creation, reserves-based money creation by the Federal Reserve, was introduced in the depths of the 2008 crisis. And now, what no serious voter or investor would have believed before 2008 has become the norm, the new default. They believe in magic - the ability of the Federal Reserve to provide endless funding for the spending of the U.S. government, and for the Fed to keep the markets stabilized and insulated from risk, with the highest valuations for stocks, bonds and real estate in history.

What makes these beliefs "magical" is that average voter and investor has no idea where the new money is coming from, or what limits might exist. People who used to understand that free markets have risk, or that the government has limits on what it can spend, have now spent more than a decade learning to suspend those beliefs. The apparent thinking is that the magic, whatever its source, has worked so far, so obviously the experts at the government can keep doing this forever... can't they?
http://danielamerman.com/va/ccc/I3Gyrations.html
I don't know how much stock I'd put in anything Mr. Amerman says.

One, he was predicting 1970s-style inflation back in 2009 and 2010 and....yeah, that didn't happen. To be fair to him, the investment he suggested to fight it (buying a home or rental property with as little down as possible and with as long of a term of a fixed rate mortgage as one could get) turned out pretty well despite the lack of double digit inflation but it was still a classic case of "right answer; totally wrong way of getting to it".

Two, he has cited Shadowstats numerous times. Enough said.

Three, from the context of this article he seems to think/imply that the Fed has to borrow money in order to print/lend/spend it. Ummm...no. That's not how central banks work. The Fed does have various borrowing and lending facilities but (being an entity with the ability to print money electronically at will) it doesn't need to directly borrow money to do it $120 billion a month of asset purchases. This isn't even MMT; it's just basic "how central banks work circa the early 21st century". The then-Fed Chairman Bernanke himself made this clear in various statements before Congressional committees (when he talked of the Fed's ability to make up a member bank's account or lend to them just by printing money and crediting the account electronically); he did something similar when he was merely a member of the Fed's Board of Governors in 2002 when he made his "helicopter money " speech ( "What has this got to do with monetary policy? Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press--or, today, its electronic equivalent--that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.") about how--as a technical matter--central banks and the US Treasury could simply print money if need be.

Does that mean that money printing couldn't lead to inflation? No. But it does mean that implying that the Fed has to borrow money in order to spend/lend/QE with it as a purely technical matter is simply wrong.

Four, he seems (from the illustration on the webpage) to be predicting that interest rates will rise from 1% to 7% in order to "normalize". If US GDP growth and population growth (and thus demand for spending and for investment) are also lower than in the past, why would rates rise to 7% like they were in early 2000? Methinks Mr. Amerman came of age from, say, 1979 to 1992 or so and thus feels that risk-free real rates "should" always be positive by three or four points (or more). Historically, the period from the late 1970s to early 1990s has been an aberration. Real risk-free yields from, circa 1942 to 1978 ranged from a point or two above inflation to sharply negative; real risk-free yields were higher from, say, 1900 to 1932 on average were higher but there were again times during this period when they were stunningly negative interspersed with periods of low inflation or even outright deflation when real yields were high. Actually, it's arguable if before 1933...likely before 1916, probably before 1913, (and certainly before mid-1908) there was a true risk-free yield at all in the US given the combined effect of the gold standard and the fact that there were no short-term T-Bills or the like before this time so every investment had at least some default risk....but that's a topic for another time.

He may make a valid point or two somewhere in the article but to me it looks mostly like fear porn designed to sell more of his webinars/seminars and books.
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