Michael Howell

“If you look at the frequency of that cycle, it pretty much is in line with the average maturity of debt in the world economy. So it's a debt refinancing cycle.”

“Money moves markets. If there's a lot of cash coming in, asset prices are likely to go up. And if money is leaving, asset prices are likely to come under pressure.”

“All money that's anywhere must be somewhere, and if it's going into the real economy it's not there to drive asset prices — Bitcoin or whatever — upwards.”

“The absolute level of liquidity is not falling yet, but the momentum has definitely slowed down. And at the margin, markets price off the margin.”

“Strong economies don't always have strong financial markets, particularly if central banks are not doing that much.”

“No longer is the capital market used to finance new capital spending. Those days have long gone. We're in a world that's dominated by debt, and in particular debt refinancing.”

“I would venture that every financial crisis we've experienced in the last 30 years has ultimately been a refinancing crisis.”

“The thing to look at is not debt to GDP, which is what all economists are telling us we need to be monitoring, but the debt to liquidity ratio.”

“The spoiler alert is that debt is never paid back. It's only ever refinanced.”

“In 4,000 years we haven't had zero interest rates. But we did have it in Covid.”

“New credit relies on old debt as collateral. It's virtuous until it's vicious.”

“The US may well be the cleanest shirt in the laundry. But hey, it's in the laundry.”

“I think it's being engineered lower. I think the Treasury and the Fed realize that they've got to get volatility down. If they get volatility down, that's liquidity enhancing.”

“You're shifting from a regime of Fed QE to a situation where the Treasury is more and more responsible for liquidity easing. It's taken on the mantle.”

“There seems to be deliberate manipulation of volatility in the market. I call that yield volatility control, not yield curve control.”

“History shows that it's the long end of the market that determines the short end of the market, and not, as textbooks tell us, the short end that drives the long end.”

“Ultimately it's better to devalue that debt en masse through printing liquidity. And that's, I think, the path of least resistance that the politicians and the central bankers will ultimately come to.”

“If a credit provider buys government debt, they monetize the government debt, so it's effectively printing money.”

“Eighty percent of US gross issuance is now under two years, which is an eye-wateringly large figure.”

“If the bank balance sheets are expanding, that is called monetization of debt. And that is exactly what's going on. That's printing money. It's just a rather more prosaic version of the printing press.”

“Stanley Druckenmiller said this is crazy, these are the numbers you would apply to a Latin American economy. The paradox is that some of the Latin American economies have actually cleaned their act up.”

“Since the year 2000 the stock of US Treasuries has increased by 9.6 times. The gold price has gone up over that same period by 9.65 times.”

“Gold is like the pole star in the sky that navigators use to get their bearings. Gold doesn't really move. It's everything else that falls against it.”

“The Shanghai Gold Exchange is really driving things. There's a premium on Shanghai gold, a persistent premium, because they're bidding for it.”

“Why is it that Bitcoin is going down? Because global liquidity is challenged. And why is the gold market going up? That's all to do with China.”

“In the long term, gold and Bitcoin are correlated very strongly, but in the short term they're negatively correlated. They trend together, but they cycle apart.”

“Bitcoin, in my view, is definitely the future. And I think that the US officially has to endorse that pretty quickly before somebody else does.”

“They're the most liquidity sensitive assets on the planet, and they're a barometer, or canary in the coal mine, for tightening liquidity conditions.”

“I'd still be a long-term buyer even at these levels, but I still think that you can pick it up cheaper.”

“For every 10% move in liquidity you get an 80% move in cryptocurrencies. In the case of gold and silver, about two times.”

“You need very little crypto in a portfolio to give you pretty comprehensive coverage against monetary inflation. Maybe at most 5% of a portfolio.”

“We're going to see Make Japan Great Again before we see MAGA.”

“This gap of more than 200 basis points between nominal GDP and the 10-year bond is unsustainable compared to history. Yields have got to rise.”

“We're in a regime change, and that regime change is coloured by the whole notion of — either you call it trade wars or, more accurately, capital wars.”

“Capital spending booms are always inflationary.”

“We've inherited a system whereby it's the aged who get income support, where it actually should be the young who get income support.”