How Inflation, Prudence, And Fundamentals Are Setting Up Gold To Soar

International Man: Governments around the world, including the United States, are printing trillions of currency units. This will continue to significantly devalue these paper currencies and create inflation.

Doug Casey recently said:

With all the money that’s been created by governments and central banks, the chances are excellent we’re going to have a gigantic bull market. Maybe the last one, since I expect the world is going back to using gold as money—at which point we’ll have a stable gold price.

In the meantime, I think mining stocks could go absolutely insane. The prices will have no relation to fundamentals, because everybody will want to own them.

How do you think the situation is going to play out for gold and precious metals?

Dave Forest: Inflation is a given. I see it every day in commodities, although many mainstream investors don’t recognize it. Yet.

In the 2000s, investors were over the moon when gold broke above $1,000 per ounce and copper passed $1.50 per pound. During the previous commodities bear market, those levels were unthinkable.

But now, $1,000 gold is peanuts. Hardcore bullion investors were distraught in 2016 when gold “plunged” close to $1,000. That’s seen as a depressed and unsustainable price.

Same with copper. That sector’s been in the doldrums, because the price fell below $2.50 per pound. If you’d told a copper miner in 1999 they’d have $2.50 copper, they would have popped the champagne! Today, it’s seen as scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The thing is, back in the “old” days, you could mine and process an ounce of gold for $100. Today, production costs are more like $600 per ounce. Closer to $1,000 per ounce if you add in sustaining and expansion capital.

That’s the real reason metals, including gold, have to go higher. The gold price isn’t arbitrary. The price must exceed production costs—or mines will shut down and supply will run out.

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China "Faces The Worst Of Both Worlds" As PPI Deflation Arrives While Food Inflation Soars

As if China did not have its hands full with a trade war, a plunging yuan and growing civil unrest in Hong Kong, which is fast becoming the potential epicenter for the next global crisis (and which Steve "The Big Short" Eisman thinks is the next black swan), it now also has deflation to worry about at a time when its ability to boost liquidity in the system is severely limited... or maybe it's soaring inflation China should be concerned about.

On Friday, China's National Bureau of Statistics reported that the Producer Price Index (PPI), i.e. factory prices, fell 0.3% in July from a year ago, missing the modest 0.1% decline expected by analysts. This was the first annual decline in China's PPI in three years - since August 2016 - and just like back then, was largely the result of tumbling commodity prices which in turn depressed both manufacturing and raw material goods prices. And with oil sliding, and iron ore plunging, not to mention the whole trade war thing, it does not seems like a rebound is imminent at all. 

Worse, since PPI is closely linked to corporate profitability, the decline suggests that China is badly lagging in the credit impulse arena despite having started off 2019 with a bang and some of the biggest increases in Total Social Financing on record.

So what's the big deal: China has always been able to boost inflation, all it had to do was turn on the credit spigot and inject a few trillion in new bank and shadow loans into the economy.

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Libra As A Competitor To Inflationary Central Banks

As an international private currency, Libra will be in competition with publicly issued currencies.

It could have large and fruitful repercussions on the global monetary policy, especially with reference to those countries where central banks are still heavily subject to political influence and tend to pursue inflationary monetary policies.

The introduction of the Libra project to the public has generated a lot of fuss over the consequences this cryptocurrency may have for the stability of the global financial system.

At first, we need to clear the ground from the most common mistaken facts about Libra running over the news. As detailed in this white paper, Libra will be a fully backed digital currency, it will be issued solely upon demand, and its value will be given by a basket of reserves whose composition will be diversified, privileging safe assets and stable international currencies (as thoroughly described in the technical part of the white paper dedicated to the functioning of the reserve mechanism).

Thus, despite the rumors, we know as a fact that Libra will not:

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Big Pharma Hikes Drug Price 879% And That's Just One Of 3,400 So Far This Year

Big Pharma continues to jack up the prices on the drugs they peddle. The price of one drug was hiked 879%, and that’s only ONE of the 3,400 price increases that have occurred so far this year.

Pharmaceutical companies raised the prices of more than 3,400 drugs in the first half of 2019, surpassing the number of drug hikes they imposed during the same period last year, according to an analysis first reported by NBC News. While the average price increase per drug was 10.5%, a rate around five times that of inflation, about 40 of the drugs saw triple-digit increases. That includes a generic version of the antidepressant Prozac, which saw a price increase of 879%.

ARS Technica reported that the surge in price hikes comes amid ongoing public and political pressure to drag down the sky-rocketing price of drugs and healthcare costs overall. In May of 2018, President Donald Trump boldly announced that drug companies would unveil “voluntary massive drops in prices” within weeks, however, Big Pharma didn’t announce any big drops or actually reduce their prices. Trump then went on to publicly shame Pfizer for continuing to raise drug prices. The company responded with a short-lived pause on drug price increases mid-way through last year, but it resumed increasing prices in January along with dozens of other pharmaceutical companies.

“Requests and public shaming haven’t worked,” Michael Rea, chief executive of RX Savings Solutions, told Reuters last December. His company helps health plans and employers seek lower-cost prescription medicines. It also conducted a new analysis of some drug prices.

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Here are all the ways inflation is happening today

Something strange happened in the markets last month that signals trouble ahead…

When stocks fell from their September highs, you would have expected investors to run for cover in the world’s safe-haven asset – US Treasurys.

But that’s not what happened.

While stocks were plunging, Treasurys also fell. Yields on 30-year Treasurys increased to 3.4% from 3.22% (and yields have already more than doubled from their 2016 lows).

It’s a sign that the market is worried about the US government’s ability to pay its exploding debts and that inflation is creeping back into the market. That makes me a bit nervous because we haven’t seen inflation in a decade.

We’ve seen an increase in oil prices, food prices, rent and many other things that eat into people’s savings. Unemployment is low and US wages increased 3.1% in September (the highest in nine years). And core inflation is already running above the Fed’s target of 2%.

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Global Stocks Rise Ahead Of Central Bank Barrage, Inflation Data

Global trade was front and center again, after the Trump administration proposed another round of trade talks with Beijing before slapping China with $200BN in tariffs in the absence of key concessions from Beijing, while traders were on edge ahead of a slew of central bank announcements and critical CPI data in the US.

One day after Apple's latest iPhone unveiling disappointed shareholders who sold AAPL stock and pressured tech stocks, world markets calmed and MSCI’s All World index was set for a fourth straight day of gains with S&P futures slightly higher after Asian shares jumped ending a 10 day losing streak, the longest in 16 years, on renewed hopes of fresh trade negotiations between the US and China.

Shanghai, Tokyo, Jakarta stocks all gained around 1% following Wednesday's sharp drop in the dollar, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng finished up 1.8%, while China’s yuan also edged higher in the currency markets even if the Shanghai Composite barely budged amid ongoing skepticism inside Ground Zero, China, that talk this time will be different.

Initially, Europe also moved higher, led by automakers with gains between 0.2% and 0.6% for German, French, Italian and Spanish shares offsetting a weaker FTSE in London which was hit by weaker oil and tobacco stocks. However, Europe's Stoxx 600 index erased gains of as much as 0.3% as the Turkish lira plunged after country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacked the central bank for continuously missing inflation targets and saying the CBRT "should cut this high interest rate", just hours before rate decision.

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This Political Event Will Be Unlike Anything We've Seen In 50 Years

Do you ever feel—despite the supposed economic "recovery" of recent years—that something in America is still not quite right?

If so, you are not alone.

After all, how can things be "OK" when nearly half the men ages 18-34 now live with their parents—the highest level since the Great Depression?

How can it be "normal" when in one of America's richest cities (Seattle) there are now 400 unauthorized homeless camps under bridges and along freeway medians?

How can it be a "recovery" when 78% of the U.S. population now lives paycheck to paycheck, with essentially zero savings?

How can you explain things like the dramatic rise of the militant left-wing group ‘Antifa'... the resurgence of White Supremacists... and the booming popularity of the Democratic Socialists—they've doubled membership in recent months.

Sure, some people—CEOs, tech entrepreneurs, and other members of the "1%"—are doing great. There's never been a better time for wealthy Americans. But the truth is, for most people, the situation is getting much, much worse.

Today I want to share a few facts our politicians are afraid to tell you—including the secret reason why working class Americans have gotten dramatically poorer over the past 40 years.

I've never seen this information published anywhere else. It's a secret that explains why the rich are really getting so much richer—while everyone else is falling behind.

Once you understand this secret, you'll see why, for millions of Americans, a crisis is coming.

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Venezuela Surpasses Weimar As Hyperinflation Expected To Hit 1,000,000% By Year End

Some readers may recall this headline from January 2018 "IMF Projects Venezuela Inflation Will Soar to 13,000 Percent in 2018."

This, it turns out was just a little bit off, because as we reported only two weeks ago, Venezuela's annualized inflation hit an annualized rate of 482,153%, with food prices soaring 183% in just one month.

Fast forward to today, when it's time for another "slight revision" because according to the latest IMF forecast released today, Venezuela’s hyperinflation by the end of the year will hit, drumroll, 1,000,000% as the government continues to simply print money to in hopes of filling the void of what was once the country's economy. Putting that number in perspective, the IMF believes that Venezuela inflation hit only 2,400% in 2017, according to a report published Thursday by Alejandro Werner, head of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere department.

The revised forecast means that as of right now, Venezuela's hyperinflation has officially surpassed the Weimar Republic's, where the highest recorded monthly inflation was a timid 29,500% (resulting in prices doubling ever 3.7 days).

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It's Not Stagflation... It's Inflationary Impoverishment

It is a matter of personal interest that it was my uncle, Iain Macleod, who invented the term stagflation shortly before he was appointed shadow chancellor in 1965. It is no longer used in its original context. From Hansard (the official record of parliamentary debates) 17 November that year:

We now have the worst of both worlds —not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other, but both of them together. We have a sort of "stagflation" situation and history in modern terms is indeed being made.

The inflation that Iain was referring to was of wages, which were averaging an increase of 6.2%, and rising, and stagnation in production, which had declined from an index of 134 to 131. It was this divergence that gave him the opportunity to invent this portmanteau word. It has now passed into more common use to describe an economy that fails to respond to the stimulus of monetary inflation.

Its use in this context is therefore different from the original. The idea that stagflation exists as an economic phenomenon is only really true for neo-Keynesians, who view inflation as economically stimulative, and its failure to stimulate perplexing. In this sense it is frequently applied to conditions today, where massive monetary stimulus does not appear, so far at least, to have brought about the economic growth that might have been expected from it.

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It All Begins And Ends With China: "Is The Global Reflation Cycle Ending?"

Last night, China released factory inflation numbers (i.e., PPI), which slowed for a fifth straight month in Mar. ’18… marking the slowest Y/Y growth rate since Oct. ’16 (Exhibit 1). Similarly, the Mar. ’18 consumer price index (“CPI”) retreated from the four-year high set in Feb. ’18 (Exhibit 1).

Interestingly, we note that the Mar. ‘18  +2.1% Y/Y growth in China’s PPI missed Consensus’ expectation of +2.6% Y/Y growth, while the Mar. ’18 +3.1% Y/Y growth in China’s PPI also missed Consensus’ forecast of +3.3% Y/Y growth.

WHAT’S DRIVING COMMODITY-PRICE DEFLATION IN CHINA? As we’ve argued before, and as noted in Exhibit 2 below, it appears the swift collapse in China’s credit impulse (i.e., a fancy way of saying China is issuing less debt as a % of GDP) is driving a correction in China’s commodity consumption. Why does this matter? Well,  in our view, steel price strength in 2017 was due to China’s steel exports falling 33.4Mmt, or the second largest decline ever, trailing only that seen in 2009 (Exhibit 5) – China produces roughly half of world’s steel, meaning when they export less, global prices rally. While the driver in 2009 was the global financial crisis (“GFC”), the driver in 2017 was a record credit stimulus in China (i.e., $4.9tn in new credit issued) driving domestic demand, and thus boosting domestic Chinese steel prices. So, in general, while in most years China’s steel prices lag the rest of the world, in 2017 they were much higher; this, in turn, pushed mills in China to ship more domestically vs. to other countries, and thus drove up global steel prices –given China was >50% of global steel production in 2017, this had a big impact on global steel prices. However, this dynamic is now in reverse (Exhibit 6), which we believe forebodes risk to global steel prices.

CONCLUSION. When analyzing China’s Mar. ’18 PPI internals, looking to see what drove such weakness in China’s factory inflation numbers (Exhibit 7), it becomes clear that price deflation across the raw material and basic industrial complex was among the key drivers. Consequently, given China’s PPI is an excellent leading indicator into how China’s industrial economy is fairing, and also considering China’s Mar. ’18 Caixin Manufacturing PMI missed Consensus’ estimate (i.e., 51.0 vs. Consensus’ 51.7), we believe the 2018 “China slowdown” meme is firmly intact (we remind our readers that China consumes the bulk of the worlds commodity-metal output). Consequently, while China’s Mar. ’18 excavator sales growth rate of +78.9% Y/Y got a lot of people excited this weekend (we received a number of inbound emails asking our opinion on this surprisingly strong number), China’s loader sales fell -50.3% Y/Y in Mar. ’18 (i.e., the weakest growth in any single month since 4Q15’s global growth scare) and China’s Mar. ’18 crane sales growth fell to -12.8% Y/Y, or the weakest rate of growth in 17 months.

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Economists Who Push Inflation Stunned That Rising Home Prices Put Buyers Deeper Into Debt

Once again, when the government intervenes – this time in housing – the left hand is starting a fire that the right hand is trying to put out. Rising prices for homes are once again pricing out prime borrowers and nobody can "figure out" why this is happening.

It is news like this article reported this morning by the Wall Street Journal that continues to perpetuate the hilarious notion of Keynesian economics as giving a job to one man digging a hole and another job to another man filling it, simply so that they both have jobs.

There is nothing funnier (or sadder) than "economists" struggling to understand how housing prices got so high and why people are taking on more debt in order to purchase them. However, that is the great mystery that the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday morning, making note of the fact that people are “stretching“ in order to purchase homes. What's the solution to this problem? How about just easing lending standards again? After all, what could go wrong?

Apparently blind to the obvious – that forced inflation could amazingly make things more expensive relative to income – "economists" have hilariously blamed this price/debt delta on lack of supply. Of course, no one has mentioned the credit worthiness of borrowers getting worse or the fact that homes prices are being manipulated in order to offer home ownership to people who otherwise may not be in the market.

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What's Behind Global Inflation: China Creates A Record 2.9 Trillion New Loans In One Month

According to one monetary theory, in a world in which China is the dominant creator of debt - which it has been since the financial crisis - it is also China that is the marginal creator of the global inflationary impulse. In which case, the latest Chinese new loan data helps explain the recent inflationary burst which judging my the recent market volatility has freaked out US traders, because according to the PBOC, in January China created a record CNY2900 billion in new loans ($458.3 billion), a striking rebound from the CNY2030 billion a year ago, and almost 1 trillion yuan above the CNY2000 expected.

According to Reuters, the credit boom has been fueled "by strong economic growth, a robust property market and a crackdown on riskier shadow lending, which has forced banks to shift some loans back onto their balance sheets." But mostly it has been forced by an implicit demand on Beijing to keep the global reflationary impulse strong at a time when the Fed is shrinking its balance sheet - a highly deflationary, if only for circulating monetary aggregates, exercise.

A more detailed breakdown of the loan data showed sharp pickups in demand for credit from both households and companies, a harbinger of strong consumption and investment, if both funded on credit. Corporate loans surged to 1.78 trillion yuan from 243.2 billion yuan in December, while household loans rose to 901.6 billion yuan in January from 329.4 billion yuan in December.

Meanwhile, with the fate of the US capital markets in the hands of the inflation/deflation debate, the real answer what happens next will not be found in the BLS seasonally adjusted average hourly earnings dataset or the Wednesday CPI print - these are merely measurements of the underlying credit dynamics - but half way across the world, in Beijing, which decides month after month, what is the proper level of new credit with which to lubricate not only China, but the rest of the world as well.

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"We Can't Pretend Interest Payments Aren't Rising Anymore..."

Is anyone paying attention? I don’t know, but the cost of carrying debt has been rising and it’s already showing measurable impacts despite the Fed Funds rate still being very low.

My concern of course is that the global debt construct will bring global growth to a screeching halt (see also The Debt Beneath).

As the 10 year is already piercing above the 2.6% area now I want to pay attention to the data coming in as the Fed is dot plotting more rate hikes to come:

I repeat: “There’s an underlying deterioration in the ability of the consumer to keep up with their debt service burden.”

That’s a problem given the Fed’s dot plot. Before you know it consumers will be handing over a good portion of their tax cuts to credit card companies. Winning.

Is the government carrying record debt immune to this? Nope.

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Hard Assets In An Age Of Negative Interest Rates

In a word, the hard asset vision is about building wealth outside the stock market. It refers to three main strategies overall: 

1) land ownership and/or farmland, forestry and agriculture

2) gold, other precious metals, and certain base-metal commodities, and

3) The (Old Masters/Classic Modern) art market.

Where this last is concerned, we mean art as investment and not art-as-commerce, such as that which contaminates today’s insipid and overpriced world of ‘Balloon-Dog’ bad art. The auction world of Rembrandt and Picasso; of El Greco and Gerhardt Richter has been on a tear, is smashing records, and cannot be ignored as an excellent safe-haven vehicle, as outstanding works of art traditionally always have been.

To begin with, physical gold and precious metals remain an investment enigma despite being market-leading performers for the past seventeen years. Gold is a must-have portfolio asset amid the aggressive debt levels and monetary debasement that have so unhinged the market. Silver, for its part, in addition to its prestige status, also has innumerable industrial applications and throughout the precious-metal bull market since 2000.

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Is The Bubble About To Burst? Student-Loan Delinquency Rates Rise For First Time In Years

Since the financial crisis, most market observers and economists have cheerfully ignored the aggregate student-debt load in the US, which recently swelled to an economy-threatening $1.4 trillion. Even as student-debt, which can't be discharged in bankruptcy, grew to represent 10% of the total US debt burden, defenders of the status quo pointed to declining default rates as evidence that the government-backed student loan industry wasn’t in danger of imploding.

But that may soon change.

As Bloomberg reports, the student-loan default rate in the US ticked higher during the second quarter for the first time since 2013. While it’s only one quarter of data, it should send a chill down the spine of government and private lenders, who have every reason to worry that this could be more than a temporary blip.

To wit, the share of Americans at least 31 days late on loans from the U.S. Department of Education ticked up to 18.8% as of June 30, up from 18.6% during the same period a year ago, according to new federal data. Meanwhile, about 3.3 million Americans have gone more than a month without making a required payment on their Education Department loans—up about 320,000 borrowers.

The rise interrupts a period of 12 straight quarters of declines in delinquency rates, according to numbers dating to 2013. It also comes at a time when US economic growth is nominally expanding (the BEA announced earlier today that the US economy expanded by 3.1% during the second quarter, an improvement over its previous estimate).

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What Financial Conditions Tell Us (Two Charts & A Prediction)

It seems every bank, including central banks, publishes a financial conditions index these days. And because financial conditions typically lead the economy, it makes sense to track them. In fact, they might contain even more information than they get credit for. They might offer the elusive “crystal ball” that foretells our economic fortunes.

Sound far-fetched? Spend a few minutes with this week’s pictures and talk, and you’ll be well equipped to judge for yourself. We start with seven of our favorite indicators, shown in the table below:

With one exception, all of the indicators measure a separate piece of the economy’s financial side. We add business earnings (the exception) because they interact closely with financial conditions. When earnings are healthy, stock prices and business credit conditions are usually healthy, too, whereas weak earnings usually weigh on stocks and credit.

Instead of melding the indicators into a single index, though, we think it’s more revealing to treat them individually. The chart below shows each indicator in the quarter before and the quarter of the last nine business cycle (BC) peaks, although with less data for lending standards, which the Fed began surveying for the first time in mid-1990.

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The Fed Has An Alarming Low-Inflation Problem

With all the talk of central bank hawkishness in the last week, one might assume there was some inflation to point to. It is quite the opposite. It is one thing to talk about inflation being below the Fed’s target of 2%, it is an entirely different issue to see it flirting with deflation! Shorter-term trends of core-inflation are very near to 0%, levels we haven’t seen since the great recession and the advent of quantitative easing.

In its most common form, inflation is quoted by measuring its percentage change compared its level 12 months ago, the so-called year-over-year (YoY%) metric. But, shorter-term periods can be measured to get a sense of more recent trends as well as if there is acceleration or deceleration in the metric. The shorter the period measured, the more volatility the metric has, and so year-over-year (YoY%) has become the standard. It also has the added benefit of eliminating any seasonal effects.

In the charts below, we show the two top-tier measures of consumer price inflation, the Fed-preferred core PCE deflator, and the core CPI; with its common year-over year (YoY%) format, 6 months back annualized, and 3 months back annualized. Comparing the three gives a sense of acceleration of deceleration. If the 3mo. is less than the 6mo. is less than the 12mo., there is deceleration and vice-versa, there is acceleration.

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Core Eurozone Inflation Surges To 4 Year High As CPI Nears ECB Target

Mario Draghi's job just became a little more difficult, because one day after the head of the ECB surprised markets with a more dovish statement than expected stressing risks for European inflation, on Friday morning Eurostat reported that Euro zone inflation rose by more than expected to the European Central Bank's target and core inflation increased to its highest level in four years.

Inflation in the 19 countries sharing the euro was 1.9 percent year-on-year, Eurostat estimated, up from 1.5 percent in March and just short of the four-year high of 2.0 percent recorded in February. The print was also above the 1.8% consensus estimate, even though German inflation data released on Thursday which also came in hotter than expected had prepared markets for a potential stronger figure for the bloc.

The April print (released before the month is even over) was also just shy of the ECB's medium-term target for inflation of 2 percent.

Overall inflation was higher primarily because of a 7.5% rise in energy prices and of 2.2% for unprocessed food. Prices for food, alcohol and tobacco went up by 1.5% in April, slightly lower than the 1.8% figure for March. In the services sector, the largest in the euro zone economy, prices rose by 1.8 percent in April, compared with 1.0 percent in March.

Core inflation, excluding volatile prices of energy and unprocessed food and which the European Central Bank monitors even more closely, jumped to 1.2% year-on-year in April from 0.8% in March, above market expectations of 1.0 percent. The core level was at its highest level since September 2013.

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U.S. Consumer Prices Post Largest Gain in Nearly Four Years

U.S. consumer prices recorded their biggest increase in nearly four years in January as households paid more for gasoline and other goods, suggesting inflation pressures could be picking up.

The Labor Department said on Wednesday its Consumer Price Index jumped 0.6 percent last month after gaining 0.3 percent in December. January's increase in the CPI was the largest since February 2013. In the 12 months through January, the CPI increased 2.5 percent, the biggest year-on-year gain since March 2012. The CPI rose 2.1 percent in the year to December. 

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the CPI rising 0.3 percent last month and advancing 2.4 percent from a year ago.

Inflation is trending higher as prices for energy goods and other commodities rebound as global demand picks up.

The so-called core CPI, which strips out food and energy costs, rose 0.3 percent last month after increasing 0.2 percent in December. That lifted the year-on-year core CPI increase to
2.3 percent in January from December's 2.2 percent increase.

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Peak Savings: Wall Street Faces 20 Years Of Retirement Withdrawals As Boomers Hit 70 1/2

The United States is a demographic time bomb, plain and simple.  Over the next 30 years, the U.S. economy will face an unrelenting demographic transition as ~75 million baby boomers exit the highest wage earning years of their life and start to draw down what little retirement savings they've managed to tuck away while wreaking havoc to the public "safety net" ponzi schemes, like Social Security, that will almost certainly be insolvent in a decade.

Per the U.S. Census Bureau, over the 30 years, the number of people in the U.S. over the age of 65 is expected to double while those 85 and up will triple.  Needless to day, the overall population growth of the United States is a fraction of that which means that millennials are about to get crushed by their parents....so it's probably a good thing they already live in mom and dad's basement.

In aggregate, per the Wall Street Journal, Boomers have saved $10 trillion in various tax-deferred saving accounts.  While that sounds like an impressive figure, with 75 million Boomers, it equates to an average of $133,000 per person which, needless to say, is insufficient to fund ~20 years of retirement. 

But while the Boomers, and by extension taxpayers, are facing a harsh future, Wall Street has made a killing in fees off of managing the ever growing balance of retirement accounts as Baby Boomers have come of age.  But that all looks set to change as America's aging population is forced by IRS regulations to take retirement withdrawals once they hit 70 1/2 years of age.

As illustrated by the chart below, over the past 2 decades Americans have consistently contributed more than they've withdrawn from tax deferred accounts, excluding recessionary periods.  But that all changed in 2013 and 2014 as the first wave of Boomers hit the magical age of 70.5 with a total of $25 billion of net withdrawals in 2014 alone.

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