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January
25
2022

Ok, He’s Insane
Karl Denninger

The market certainly thinks so.

Don't kid yourselves folks; the headline out overnight that Biden is contemplating committing actual troops to Ukraine is why the dive this morning in the markets.

If you think any sort of armed conflict with Russia is a good idea you're out of your mind.  If you think projecting weakness toward them while at the same time doing anything that threatens their only 12-month deep-water port is going to turn out well you're crazy enough that you deserve the collapse of civil society or even nuclear attack you're risking.

Go sit in DC so if the missiles fly you get it first.

At least that way it will be over fast and probably won't hurt.

Need I remind you what I pointed out in 2014 and several times since when it comes to Crimea?  It's been abundantly clear that any global event that credibly threatens that access may well draw a canned sunshine response and it is logical if it does because no military on the planet will ever reasonably accept being de-fanged.

Obama's interference over there, which he did and which our various "fine folks" (CIA anyone?) love to get involved in was stupid.  If I, as an ordinary study of history, could figure out in a few minutes where the pain point was and that screwing with it risked a logically justified nuclear war the people who do this for a living damn well ought to have had that front and center in their minds.

Good luck folks; it's not like combining a bursting economic bubble caused by ridiculously profligate spending that cannot continue along with geopolitical stupiditydoesn't have a long history of producing things like....

global armed conflict?

Never mind that Putin ain't exactly a bunch of sand people with a handful of stingers.  This ain't Iraq folks.  In the US we've not taken actual combat losses in size since WWII.  Yeah, I know, Vietnam (and Korea for that matter) but both were a hell of a long time ago and were over there.  What happens when, in such a conflict, one of our carriers gets sunk and 5,000 GIs go to visit Davey Jones?  Do we have the stomach for that sort of loss because it will happen if we get into a shooting war with a real adversary, and Russia certainly qualifies.

Incidentally if you're curious about the market reaction the futures have bid and offer sizes that look like a holiday weekend.  Simply put in addition to all the otherstupidity making it all "electronic" means people can and do turn it off.  They did -- and went home.  The people with the big money are not in the index futures at all this morning, which is why you're seeing this.  Bid/offer stacks with fewer than 100 contracts on either side?  That's 4th of July weekend stuff and sets up a potential no-bull**** crash as there is nobody on the other side to take the trade.  Right now with a couple hundred lot order I could literally wipe the board in either direction.  In the middle of a regular trading day that's nuts.

Mr. Denninger, recent author of the book Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, is the former CEO of MCSNet, a regional Chicago area networking and Internet company that operated from 1987 to 1998. MCSNet was proud to offer several "firsts" in the Internet Service space, including integral customer-specified spam filtering for all customers and the first virtual web server available to the general public. Mr. Denninger's other accomplishments include the design and construction of regional and national IP-based networks and development of electronic conferencing software reaching back to the 1980s.

He has been a full-time trader since 1998, author of The Market Ticker, a daily market commentary, and operator of TickerForum, an online trading community, both since 2007.

Mr. Denninger received the 2008 Reed Irvine Accuracy In Media Award for Grassroots Journalism for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown.

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