Asset Prices vs GDP

Asset Prices vs GDP - Zerohedge

But trouble begins when the system gets seriously out of whack. People begin to question why their money has any value at all if the central banks can just print up as much as they want. Any time they want. And hand it out for free in unlimited quantities to the banks. Who have their own mechanism (i.e., fractional reserve banking) for creating even more money out of thin air.

Pretty slick, right? Convince everyone that something you literally make in unlimited quantities out of thin air has value. So much so that, if you lack it, you end up living under a bridge, starving.

Let's express this visually.

“GDP” is a measure of the amount of goods and services available and financial asset prices represent the claims (it's not a very accurate measure of real wealth, but it's the best one we’ve got, so we’ll use it). Look at how divergent asset prices get from GDP as bubbles develop:

Source: You're Just Not Prepared For What's Coming

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How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio - Bridgewater

Source: How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio

Letter: Why the geopolitics of international currency choice matters - FT

This coincidence must alert readers that a tempest is brewing on subjects noted: lurking inflation, increasing debt, suppressed interest rates and the shifting of hegemonic power. There are only two important questions in investing that also apply to subjects impacting the future stability of the world — tell me why and tell me when. Plender gives us the “why”, the ever-increasing “intolerable burden” of government debt and suppressed rates leveraging the global financial system. He gives us the tipping point. What we await is “the when”, as in when do we know we have “tipped”. Paul Hackett Madison, NJ, US Letter: Why the geopolitics of international currency choice matters

Reading the runes on a Warsh Fed - Martin Wolf - Financial Times

Intellectually, at least, today’s Warsh appears the same as the one of 2010. In his IMF lecture delivered in April 2025, he stressed not only the Fed’s “institutional drift”, but also its recent “failure to satisfy an essential part of its statutory remit, price stability. It has also contributed to an explosion of federal spending. And the Fed’s outsized role and underperformance have weakened the important and worthy case for monetary policy independence.” He made other criticisms, the most pointed being that “the Fed has been the most important buyer of US Treasury debt — and other liabilities backed by the US government — since 2008”. He asserts: “Fiscal dominance — where the nation’s debts constrain monetary policymakers — was long thought by economists to be a possible end-state. My view is that monetary dominance — where the central bank becomes the ultimate arbiter of fiscal policy — is the clearer and more present danger.” For Warsh, then, easy money is the road to ruin. ...

Luca Bindi, LL.M.

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