01.22.19- This Is What Scares Ray Dalio The Most
Tyler Durden

Exactly one year ago, a bulled up Ray Dalio, head of the world's largest hedge fund made a prediction he would probably rather forget: "We are in this Goldilocks period right now. Inflation isn't a problem. Growth is good, everything is pretty good with a big jolt of stimulation coming from changes in tax laws," Ray Dalio told CNBC in January 2018 during last year's Davos event.

But the soundbite that Dalio was most memorable for, was the following: "There is a lot of cash on the sidelines. ... We're going to be inundated with cash," he said. "If you're holding cash, you're going to feel pretty stupid." Read More

01.21.19- The Arrival Of The Credit Crisis
Alasdair MacLeod

Those of us who closely follow the credit cycle should not be surprised by the current slide in equity markets. It was going to happen anyway. The timing had recently become apparent as well, and in early August I was able to write the following:

“The timing for the onset of the credit crisis looks like being any time from during the last quarter of 2018, only a few months away, to no later than mid-2019.” Read More

01.19.19- Rising Credit-Card Use Shows Consumers Are Strapped
Danielle DiMartino Booth

Even though evidence is mounting that the U.S. economy may be soon heading into a recession, there are plenty of analysts who say that the surge in credit card borrowing is a sign of strong confidence among households. That’s hardly the case. In fact, households’ confidence in the future growth of their incomes has been cooling since late last summer, which means borrowers will only reach for what’s in their wallet to compensate for what their paychecks will not cover.

Many working adults have no recollection of credit card borrowing not being a mainstay among their financing options. But then, few would be able to identify a Diners Club card, which was a popular brand during the 1980s “yuppie” era when Americans first began to embrace credit card spending in earnest. These days, consumers are not keen to lean on credit cards, due to a cultural and financial shift in the industry. Read More

01.18.19- Stock Market Volatility Reflects Systemic Instability
Dave Kranzler

The post-Christmas stock rally extended through Wednesday as the small-cap and tech stocks led the way, with the Russell 2000 up 14.3% and the Nasdaq up 12.5%. The SPX and Dow are up 10.4% and 10.1% respectively. During the stretch between December 26th and January 17th, the Russell 2000 index experienced only two down days.

Make no mistake, this is primarily a vicious short-covering and hedge fund algo momentum-chasing rally. It’s a classic bear market move with the most risky and most heavily shorted stocks experiencing the greatest percentage gains. But the rally has also been accompanied by declining volume. When abrupt rallies or sell-offs occur with declining volume, it’s a trait that conveys lack of buyer/seller-conviction. It also indicates a high probability that the move will soon reverse direction. Read More

01.17.19- Something Wicked This Way Comes
John Mauldin

For a couple of years now, the economic narrative has shown a comparatively strong US against weakness in Europe and some of Asia (NOT China). The US, we are told, will stay on top. I agree with that, as far as it goes... but I’m not convinced the “top” will be so great.

Americans like to think we are insulated from the world. We have big oceans on either side of us. Geopolitically, they serve as buffers. But economically they connect us to other important markets that are critical to many US businesses. Problems in those markets are ultimately problems for the US, too. Read More

01.16.19- The Worst Possible Environment For Stock Market Investors
Jesse Felder

“For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.” -Warren Buffett

“My greatest discovery was that a man must study general conditions, to size them so as to be able to anticipate probabilities.” -Jesse Livermore

It’s popular these days to note that valuation is not a good timing tool. While it may be helpful in understanding the prospects for long run returns it just has little utility for those focused on the near term. At the same time, technical analysis, or more precisely trend analysis, can be helpful in understanding the short-term dynamics in the markets but has little value for those trying to understand the likely trajectory and velocity of stocks over a longer period of time. Read More

01.15.19- The Decline And Fall Of The European Union
Charles Hugh Smith

This exhaustion of the neocolonial-neofeudal model was inevitable, and as a result, so too is the decline and fall of the European integration/exploitation project.

That a single currency, the euro, would fracture rather than unite Europe was understood long before the euro's introduction as legal tender on January 1, 2002. The euro, the currency of 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union, is only one of the various institutions tying the member nations of the European union together, but it is the linchpin of the financial integration touted as one of the primary benefits of EU membership. Read More

01.14.19- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The War Against America’s Only
Anti-War Candidate
Gordon Duff

Born in American Samoa, Representative (Major) Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a Democrat and, far more than Trump, someone who stands against hypocrisy and fakery of every kind, is now running for President of the United States. Unlike Trump or Clinton or Obama or Romney or so many, Tulsi is military, a decorated combat veteran.

Unlike all of them, she is openly against war as a basis for American “diplomacy.” Read More

01.12.19- Apple Takes Hit in Projected Revenue – Blames Trade War With China
Birch Gold

In September 2018, we showed how FAANG companies were “bracing for impact” because of trade war tensions between the U.S. and China.

Now it appears we have our first trade war “casualty” in the form of a major hit to projected Q1 sales for Apple. CNBC has the scoop:

Apple lowered revenue guidance to $84 billion, down from the $89 billion to $93 billion it had previously projected. The company lowered gross margin to about 38 percent from between 38 percent and 38.5 percent. Read More

01.11.19- The scenarios of the collapse
Tuomas Malinen

2019 has started more calmly after a very volatile year-end in the markets. Focus has been on the trade deal between China and the US and the words of the central bankers, most notably those of Jay Powell. However, this is all just a distraction, a side-show. The market volatility was only the first sign of an approaching global economic crisis, as we warned in December 2017.

As the recent PMI figures across the globe show, a global downturn has started and the world is utterly unprepared for it. The global imbalances that have been growing for years cannot lead to anything else than a global crisis . However, there are different paths the crisis could take. Read More

01.10.19- The Year of Living Dangerously
John Mauldin

Remember when it was a January ritual to fill in the new year on your blank checks? If you’re under 50, probably not. That we can now avoid that chore is one of life’s unsung little pleasures. But this time of year still comes, and by popular demand I must tell you what I think 2019 will bring.

In a nutshell, I expect to spend this year Living Dangerously. Yes, I’m thinking of the 1982 film starring a very youthful Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, based on an earlier Christopher Koch novel. It has an Asian setting and features corrupt politics, neophyte journalists, international intrigue plus a gender-bending Chinese dwarf. If you aren’t sure how all those fit together, then welcome to 2019. We are all stuck in this craziness and can only make the best of it.Read More

01.09.19- 2019 Headwinds Are Getting Stronger
Jim Rickards

In 2017, every prominent economic forecasting entity was shouting from the rooftops about “synchronized global growth.” This was a reference to the fact that not only were certain economies growing, but they were all growing at the same time.

Chinese GDP growth had come down but was still substantial at 6.85%. U.S. GDP growth was posting solid gains of 3.0% in the second quarter of 2017 and 2.8% in the third quarter. Japan and Europe were not growing as quickly as the U.S. and China, but growth was still accelerating from a low level.

Synchronization was a big part of the story. Growth was not isolated and episodic. Growth was fueling more growth in what seemed to be a sustainable way. The world economy was firing on all cylinders. Read More

01.08.19- Monetization & Markets (Or Why Fundamentals Don't Matter, Liquidity Does)
Chris Hamilton

Being I'm not an economist nor associated with any financial or investment institutions nor do I have anything for you (dear reader) to buy or sell, I have total freedom to say what I please and freedom to share what I see.

In that spirit, I round back on the Federal Reserves balance sheet versus the curious case of excess reserves of the mega-banks. Last week I detailed that every time the Fed has ceased adding to its balance sheet or outright reduced, the outcome has been decidedly negative for asset prices (HERE). However, like everything, there is a little more to the story. Read More

01.07.19- 5 Things Ocasio-Cortez Doesn't Want You To Know About Her "Green New Deal"
Justin Hawkins

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, the self-described democratic socialist who has become a media sensation, is pushing for enactment of a radical plan called the Green New Deal that would ban the use of all fossil fuels from U.S. electricity generation, agriculture and manufacturing by 2030.

The Green New Deal would dramatically reshape the U.S. economy and add tens of trillions of dollars to the national debt. Read More

01.05.19- Trump Is A Pied Piper For
The New World Order Agenda
Brandon Smith

In my last article, 'The Fed Is A Suicide Bomber With A Deeper Agenda', I explored and dismantled recent propaganda surrounding the Federal Reserve's tightening actions, including the propaganda that Jerome Powell is some kind of rogue central banker who is rebalancing the system for the good of the nation. To summarize the points made in that article:

The Fed deliberately created the "Everything Bubble" so that it could be deliberately imploded at the proper time - in other words, the crash we have been witnessing so far during the final quarter of 2018 and continuing into 2019 is a controlled demolition of the economy. Jerome Powell is not some "rebel" going against the easy money dictates of the Fed. Jerome Powell is playing the role that has been given to him. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen's job was to inflate the bubble. Jerome Powell's job is to crash the bubble. Read More

01.04.19- The “Stock Market Crash Of 2018” Is Rapidly Transforming Into
“The Financial Crisis Of 2019”
Michael Snyder

Stock markets are crashing all over the world, we are seeing extremely violent “flash crashes” in the forex marketplace, economic conditions are slowing down all over the globe, and fear is causing many investors to become extremely trigger happy. The stock market crash of 2018 wiped out approximately 12 trillion dollarsin global stock market wealth, but things were supposed to calm down once we got into 2019. But clearly that is not happening. After Apple announced that their sales during the first quarter are going to be much, much lower than previously anticipated, Apple’s stock price started shooting down like a rocket and by the end of the session on Wednesday the company had lost 75 billion dollars in market capitalization. Meanwhile, “flash crashes” caused some of the most violent swings that we have ever seen in the foreign exchange markets… Read More

01.03.19- Last Week Was Your Last Chance to Get Ready For What's Coming
Graham Summers

Last week’s rally was the result of multiple interventions.

“Someone” took advantage of the extremely light holiday volume to ramp markets higher via indiscriminant buying. The media is trying to portray this action as the result of “investors” or “value seekers” but neither of those groups was involved.

This was a clear and obvious buying program made by “someone” who didn’t want stocks to officially enter a bear market by falling 20%. One of the key “tells” that this was manipulation is that underperformers like banks and homebuilders didn’t lead the rally. Read More

01.02.19- 2019 Market Meltdown: What
The New Year Brings
Steve St Angelo

If history is our guide, we are on track for a severe market meltdown in 2019. While the U.S. broader indexes remained in record territory for most of 2018, December turned out to be a complete disaster for stocks. So, even though the markets have reversed higher from their Christmas Eve lows, this is nothing more than a bear market rally.

It’s really that simple. Thus, all the hype about “Fed Market Rigging” to push the markets up a record 1,000 points following the Christmas Eve massacre, becomes white noise as markets always correct higher after a massive selloff, with or without the Plunge Protection Team (PPT). Furthermore, the notion put forth by members of the Alt-Media suggesting that the Fed rate hikes will cause another market crash, and wealth transfer makes no sense in an EROI Collapse (Energy Returned On Investment). Read More

01.01.19- 2019, Ding! Ding! Margin Call USA
James Howard Kunstler

Welcome to the American hall of mirrors... and mind the broken glass all over the floor. That’s Nature’s way of saying the country has run out room to punk itself. 2018 was the consolidation of bad faith in everything we do: politics, the news media, economics & finance, show biz, regular biz, jurisprudence, medicine, education, and relations between men and women — the year of peak dishonesty and self-deception. Of course, the trouble with dishonesty is that it doesn’t comport with Reality, and Reality being Mother Nature’s husband, bats in the cleanup position. Entering 2019, the bases are loaded with delusions, misdirections, and turpitudes. I shall get right to it without further throat-clearing. Read More

12.31.18- How Blockchain’s Creating the New Financial System
Marco Wutzer

The year was 1763. The brutal Seven Years’ War for supremacy in Europe, and control of colonies in India and the Caribbean, had just ended.

Prussia had emerged as a major power in Europe. But the war had dealt a heavy blow to Prussia’s aristocrats… They were broke.

Fast-forward to August 29, 1769.

To ease financial distress, the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, signed into law a new financial instrument that would turn things around… and grow into a major new asset class. Read More

12.29.18- Beware the Young Bear!
Adam Hamilton

Stock markets are forever cyclical, an endless series of alternating bulls and bears. And after one of the greatest bulls in US history, odds are a young bear is now gathering steam. It is being fueled by record Fed tightening, bubble valuations, trade wars, and mounting political turmoil. Bears are dangerous events driving catastrophic losses for buy-and-hold investors. Different strategies are necessary to thrive in them.

This major inflection shift from exceptional secular bull to likely young bear is new. By late September, the flagship US S&P 500 broad-market stock index (SPX) had soared 333.2% higher over 9.54 years in a mighty bull. That ranked as the 2nd-largest and 1st-longest in US stock-market history! At those recent all-time record highs, investors were ecstatic. They euphorically assumed that bull run would persist for years. Read More

12.28.18- This Is Exactly The Kind Of Behavior That You Would Expect During A
Stock Market Implosion…
Michael Snyder

If a doctor tells you that his patient’s condition is swinging up and down wildly,is that a good sign or a bad sign? Of course the answer to that question is quite obvious. And if a doctor tells you that his patient’s condition is “stable”, is that a good sign or a bad sign? Just like in the medical world, instability is not something that is a desirable thing on Wall Street, and right now we are witnessing extreme volatility on an almost daily basis. On Thursday, the Dow was already down several hundred points when I went out to do some grocery shopping with my wife, and at the low point of the day it had fallen 611 points. But then a “miracle happened” and the Dow ended the day with an increase of 260 points. Read More

12.27.18- Certainty Is Fraying
Charles Hugh Smith

As we look ahead to 2019, what can we be certain of? Maybe your list is long, but mine has only one item: certainty is fraying.

Confidence in financial policies intended to eliminate recessions is fraying, confidence in political processes that are supposed to actually solve problems rather than make them worse is fraying, confidence in the objectivity of the corporate media is fraying, and confidence in society's ability to maintain any sort of level playing field is fraying.

When certainty frays, capital gets skittish. Predicting increased volatility is an easy call in this context, as capital will not want to stick around to see how the movie ends if things start unraveling. The move out of stocks into government bonds is indicative of how capital responds to uncertainty. Read More

12.26.18- Individual Preparations Have National Implications
Tom Chatham

With the recent release of reports from government agencies that warn of potential risk from long term grid failure, it is only prudent to evaluate your readiness for potential problems in our future. Catastrophic events have a habit of showing up unannounced.

When the population is capable of caring for itself following an event, it frees up government assets to devote to fixing the problem rather than taking care of the population. As we have seen in the past, even in the best cases, government assets cannot provide everything the population wants following an event. They can only provide the most basic needs and this decreases in proportion to the number of people that require assistance. Read More

12.25.18- Wokesterdom, The PPT, & "The Sorcerer's Apprentice Scenario"
James Howard Kunstler

And this solemn night a great stillness falls upon the land as the Leviathan of Washington is sent to its room to get its mind straight, and the USA gets on with collapse in earnest. There will be no visions of sugarplums for the Deep Staters as the government enters its induced coma, only premonitions of anarchy and insolvency, and perhaps some dim nostalgia for that golden age when things seemed to work in America. On the plus side of things, this may be the last year of Christmas shaming. Even the Wokesters of Wokesterdom appear weary and bored with Wokesterism — isn’t that a blessing? Read More

12.24.18- The European Project Comes To An End
T. Dankers

The end of the EU and the Balkans as China’s foothold in Europe grows...

Though the end of the European Union is inevitable, the proponents of a further integrated or federal superstate are busy making a last effort to achieve their goal.

The opposition against the project is mounting with every day. Europe is suffering from economic stagnation, and is facing a demographic calamity. Read More

12.22.18- Is U.S Dollar on the verge of a major currency crisis?
Tom Lewis

According to the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio the US dollar could soon fall as much as 30% which could leave it looking like the Turkish Lira. The chairman of Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio has warned that the US economy is on the verge of a major currency crisis due to the unaffordable buildup of debt.

Dalio warned recently in an interview through Bloomberg that the US might have to go through a similar type of inflationary debt crisis which is currently being suffered by emerging market economies like Argentina and Turkey. Read More

12.21.18- Time Is Money, Money Is Time
Alasdair Macleod

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

-Macbeth

Our limited time, our brief candle as Shakespeare’s Macbeth had it earlier in the soliloquy quoted from above, may count for very little in the grand scheme of things, but is of the utmost importance to each of us personally. Unlike the other dimensions, height, breadth and depth, the fourth is almost infinite, but individuals enjoy only a small part of it, our three-score years and ten. Time moves on. What really matters is not wasting it. Read More

12.20.18- This Market Will Double Next Year
Adam English

A major new market is about to rapidly open up in the recreational marijuana industry.

New York looks like it’ll be the next state to fully legalize, and it is going to be a big deal.

For some perspective, it has half the total population of California, and a bit more than half the population of all of Canada.

But when you take a look at the bigger picture, this is just a drop in the bucket for what is about to come. Read More

12.19.18- The 7 Stages of a Financial Bubble
Robert Kiyosaki

“Is there a market bubble?” That’s the question I’m asked repeatedly. When I reply honestly, “I hope so,” the person asking me will sometimes get angry.

“You want the market to crash?” asked one young man incredulously, at an event where I was a featured speaker.

“Yes,” I replied. “I love market crashes.”

Apparently not wanting to hear the rest of my explanation, he stomped off muttering something like “moron.” Read More

12.18.18- Good News About the Coming Crash
Bill Bonner

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – The last leaves are falling from the trees. And the last days of December are counting down, like the quiet moments before an execution.

Friday, the Dow fell nearly another 500 points.

From Bloomberg:

Investors rushed out of U.S. equity funds in the second-biggest weekly exit on record, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, as the market sell-off pushed traders to seek safe havens.Read More

12.17.18- Here’s why the Fed won’t save the stock market, despite its worst December start since 1980
William Watts

Another brutal week left the stock market with its worst start to a December in 38 years, and a meeting of Federal Reserve policy makers might not offer the relief some investors are pining for when they conclude a two-day policy meeting on Wednesday, says one economist.

How bad was it? Stocks ended a week of often whipsaw trading with a decided move to the downside Friday. Read More

12.15.18- The Yield Curve Flattens And Bank Stocks Plunge. Here’s The Connection –
And The Prediction
John Rubino

Despite all the ominous press being devoted to the soon-to-be-inverted yield curve, it’s not always clear why such a thing matters. In other words, how, exactly does a line on a graph slipping below zero translate into a recession and equities bear market, with all the turmoil that those things imply?

The answer (which is both simple and really easy to illustrate with charts) is that banks – the main driver of our hyper-finacialized society – still make at least some of their money by borrowing short and lending long. They take money that’s deposited into savings accounts and short-term CDs (or borrowed in the money markets) and lend it to businesses and home buyers for years or decades. Read More

12.14.18- Crash alert!
Bill Holter

People continually ask “when” will it happen? For the last 6 months we have responded “it is happening right before your very eyes”! In fact, as of this morning 52% of global markets are now down over 20% from their highs and qualifying as bear markets. Please understand the financial backdrop these weakening markets are falling into. Bluntly, the world is facing a giant margin call that cannot be met.

Liquidity had become extremely tight even as markets made their high water marks. It is this lack of liquidity which threatens to become a self reinforcing flash crash to hell via margin calls. “Don’t worry” they say, central banks will come to the rescue. There is one fundamental problem with this line of thought, the value of the issued currencies themselves. There is zero mathematical way to service and pay off current debt with current currency values … currencies must be massively printed and thus devalued if they are to pay off the mountains of debt! Read More

12.13.18- The Makings of a Global Debt Crisis
Are in Place
Jim Rickards

In 2017, the financial world was filled with talk of synchronized sustainable growth in major economies for the first time since before the 2008 global financial crisis. This was being proclaimed by global financial elites including Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF.

Now that vision is in ashes. Synchronized global growth has turned into a synchronized global slowdown. Growth has already turned negative in two of the world’s largest economies, Japan and Germany, and is slowing rapidly in the world’s biggest economies, China and the U.S. Read More

12.12.18- Behold Chaos: Two Months
Of Market Headlines
Tyler Durden

Feel like you are losing grip of a market which appears to be entirely under the control of headline-scanning algos and CTAs? You are probably not alone. Below we have pulled a little over two months of Bloomberg summary headlines from the Bloomberg Macro Squawk Wrap starting with October 2, just before Chair Powell's speech declaring that the neutral rate is "a long way off" and continuing through today.

So for those who feel nostalgic and want to relive the past 10 weeks, feel free to count the various verbs - such as wither, snap, fall, bounce, drop, gain, sag, fluctuate, surge, rally, falter, hammer, waffle, sputter, trample, and so on, describing the daily market action since the start of October in the below summary headlines. Read More

12.11.18- European Threats
John Mauldin

Someone asked recently how many times I had “crossed the pond” to Europe. I really don’t know. Certainly dozens of times. It’s been several times a year for as long as I remember.

That makes me an extremely unusual American. Most of us never visit Europe, except maybe for a rare dream vacation. And that’s okay because our own country is wonderful and has a lifetime of sights to see. But it does affect our perspective on the world. Many of us don’t fully grasp how important Europe is to the US and global economy.

We may soon get a lesson on that. I’ve talked about Italy’s ongoing debt crisis, which is not improving, but Europe has other problems, too. Worse, events are coalescing such that several potential crises—all major on their own—could strike at the same time, and not too long from now. As I’ve been saying for about three years, there is no reason for the US to have a recession on its own. Read More

12.10.18- "We Don't Think It's Time To Panic Yet" As Heavy-Duty Truck Orders Plummet
Tyler Durden

One of the charts that has kept deflationists asleep at night for the past two years and provided cover to the Fed it its tightening strategy was the one below showing the exponential surge in transportation prices as a result of an acute scarcity of truck drivers which has sent trucking prices soaring, and led to a historic spike in Class 8 truck orders as supply scrambles to keep up with demand (much of which is the result of businesses rushing to front-load trade ahead of even higher tariffs with China). Read More

12.08.18- The U.S. Dollar is Set to Implode says Bridgewater Founder Ray Dalio
Joaquin Monfort

The U.S. Dollar could soon fall as much as 30% in a sell-off that could leave it looking like the bombed out Turkish Lira, according to the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world.

The U.S. economy is a ticking time bomb with a detonator set for about 2 years time, according to Ray Dalio, the chairman and founder of Bridgewater.

He warned again in another interview with Bloomberg News this week that the world's largest economy will suffer an inflationary depression that is accompanied by a 30% sell-off in the Dollar. Read More

12.07.18- Historic Debt Is At The Core Of Our Economic Decline
Brandon Smith

As I predicted just after the 2016 presidential election, a sordid theater of blame has exploded over the state of the U.S. economy, with fingers pointing everywhere except (in most cases) at the true culprits behind the crash. Some people point to the current administration and its pursuit of a trade war. Others point to the Federal Reserve, with its adverse interest rate hikes into economic weakness and its balance sheet cuts.

Some blame the Democrats for doubling the national debt under the Obama Administration and creating massive trade and budget deficits. And others look towards Republicans for not yet stemming the continually increasing national debt and deficits. Read More

12.06.18- Grab Your Share of the Corporate Tax Windfall… One Takeover at a Time!
Zach Scheidt

Remember when you were a kid and someone gave you cash for your birthday or some other holiday?

There was nothing better than that feeling of having extra money that you could spend on anything you wanted.

My go-to was always Nike basketball shoes. Somehow I believed with the newest shoes, I’d be able to jump just a bit higher and score a few more points for my team. Read More

12.05.18- Somebody Pressed The Panic Button On Wall Street – Bank Stocks And Tech Stocks Crash As The Yield Curve Inverts
Michael Snyder

Stocks aren’t supposed to crash in December. Most of the time we see a nice “Santa Claus rally” to close out the year, and so what happened on Tuesday is definitely extremely unusual. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 799 points, which was the fourth largest single day point decline in stock market history. In fact, there was not a single day during the entire financial crisis of 2008 when the Dow dropped by as many points as it did on Tuesday. Many believed that this “stock market correction” would be limited to October, but then it stretched into November, and now it has extended into the “safe month” of December. What in the world is going on out there? Read More

12.04.18- Market Analyst: The Stock Market Will Lose 60%, Or $20 Trillion In Next Crash
Mac Slavo

Market analyst John Hussman, who is a market bear, has claimed that the stock market will lose about $20 trillion in the next crash. That is equal to 60% of the market value.

Hussman has been warning that stock valuations have been extreme for years, and is long overdue for a return to historical norms, according to Investopedia. “The only time we’ve ever seen a confluence of risk factors anywhere close to those of today was the week of March 24, 2000, which marked the peak of the technology bubble,” he wrote in a recent blog postquoted by Business Insider. Read More

12.03.18- The Approaching Storm
Gary Christenson

Peter Schiff explained “What Happens Next.” This article takes his “likely sequence of events” and expands the discussion.

His sequence:

Bear Market
Recession
Deficits explode
Return of ZIRP and QE
Dollar tanks
Gold [and silver] soars
CPI spikes
Long-term rates rise
Federal Reserve is forced to hike rates during a recession
A financial crisis without stimulus or bailouts.

Expanding on his sequence: Read More

12.01.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Anchorage, Alaska Is Devastated By A Giant 7.0 Earthquake
Michael Snyder

We just got more evidence that our planet is becoming increasingly unstable. On Friday a magnitude 7.0 earthquake destroyed homes, ripped apart roads and destroyed infrastructure all throughout Anchorage, Alaska. According to the USGS, the earthquake hit at 8:29 AM and the epicenter was approximately 7 miles north of Anchorage. That quake was followed by a highly destructive magnitude 5.7 aftershock just a little while later. Alaska Governor Bill Walker has declared a state of emergency, and the entire region is in a state of chaos. Unfortunately, as global seismic activity continues to increase, more quakes like this are inevitable. Like Alaska, the entire west coast of the United States sits directly along the “Ring of Fire”, and many have warned that “the Big One” is coming sooner rather than later. Read More

11.30.18- Weekend Rant: The Criminalization of Politics
Tyler Durden

The system is crooked. So why bother, right? Most Americans don’t vote don’t care. Up to 30% don’t file don’t pay taxes. That’s real freedom! As we explain in our book Splitting Pennies – the world is not as it seems.

Personally, I watched the fixing of the 2000 election from ground zero in Palm Beach County Florida. The registration of dead voters, the confusion over the chads, getting prisoners to vote Republican. Gore should have won by a much larger margin (not that I wanted Gore to win, I’m speaking like an objective observer). Being a trader, I wasn’t much interested in voting or politics which was unusual, as I went to a school where Dan Quail and George Bush Sr. were visitors at our mock political rallies, friends of mine were some of Bush’s biggest donors. Read More

11.28.18- Could GE’s Slow Collapse Ignite A Financial Crisis?
Dave Kranzler

Will GE be the proverbial “black swan?” – It had come to my attention that General Electric was locked out of the commercial paper market three weeks ago after Moody’s downgraded GE’s short term credit rating to a ratings level (P-2) that prevents prime money market funds from investing in commercial paper. Commercial paper (CP) is an important source of short term, low-cost, liquid funding for large companies. At one point, GE was one of the largest users of CP funding. As recently as Q2 this year, 14.3% of GE’s debt consisted of CP. Now GE will have to resort to using its bank revolving credit to fund its liquidity needs, which is considerably more expensive than using CP. Read More

11.28.18- Could GE’s Slow Collapse Ignite A Financial Crisis?
Dave Kranzler

11.27.18- Is Crypto Finished?
Simon Black

Think back to this time last year, around 2017’s Thanksgiving holiday in the US. . .

As you probably remember, BITCOIN was the dominant theme of the day, whether around the dinner table or in the news headlines.

Crypto prices had soared throughout 2017, climbing from $1,000 at the beginning of the year to around $7,500 by last November’s Thanksgiving holiday. Read More

11.26.18- Has This Become A “Short Everything In Sight” Market?
John Rubino

One of the strangest things about this strangest-ever expansion has been the way pretty much everything went up. Stocks, bonds, real estate, art, oil – some of which have historically negative correlations with others — all rose more-or-less in lock-step. And within asset classes, the big names behaved the same way, rising regardless of their relative valuation.

This seemingly indiscriminate buying created a paradise for index funds that simply accumulate representative assets in their chosen sectors. And it made life a nightmare for the higher-order strategies of hedge funds that get paid to beat the market. Read More

11.24.18- 438 Stocks on the NYSE Have Already Plunged 40%-94% from 52-Week Highs
Wolf Richter

Bloodletting beneath the surface. Big names too. Here they are.

It’s barely a correction, technically speaking, with the S&P 500 down 9.9% from its all-time closing high, the Dow down 9.2%, the Nasdaq down 14%, and the Russell 2000 small-caps index down 15%. But beneath the surface, there has been some serious bloodletting for many stocks.

For example, 438 stocks among the 2,051 or so stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) have plunged between 40% and 94% from their 52-week highs. Read More

11.23.18- Events Are Finally Aligning Better With Our Predictions
Adam Taggart

Chris and I have been clear about this: the central banks inflated the post-GFC “recovery” much higher and for much longer than we thought possible.

Multiples higher. And years longer.

So to much of the world, Peak Prosperity’s warnings of the inevitable repercussions were dismissable. Hey, the sky’s not falling and my portfolio continues to go up each month. Therefore, you guys are wrong.

Hard logic to argue with when the ears are then shut. Read More

11.22.18- Multiple Risks Are Converging on Markets
Jim Rickards

One of the questions I am asked most frequently in my global travels is what will be the cause of the next financial crisis. This question is asked by those who understand that this crisis is coming but want to pin down the date or a specific turn of events that will help them know when to react.

My answer is always the same: We can be certain the crisis is coming and can estimate its magnitude, but no one knows exactly when it will happen or what the specific catalyst will be. Read More

11.21.18- The world economy is looking awfully shaky all of a sudden
Eshe Nelson

The world’s third- and fourth-largest economies are shrinking. The European Union is battling with the UK and Italy over Brexit and a deficit-boosting budget, respectively. Traders are reeling from a plummet in oil prices that sent shockwaves through the stock market.

Needless to say, it’s going to be a busy day. Here’s a quick catch-up on what’s happening: Read More

11.20.18- The Good Times For The Markets Are Over – The Bad Times Are About To Hit
Graham Summers

“…what’s now unfolding is no longer due to just trade tariffs and rate hikes. By the time October ended, an astonishing 89% of global assets were in the red for the year.”

Global growth is officially dead. The markets picked up on this first, with Copper, Lumber, Industrial Metals and other economically sensitive asset classes collapsing starting in May. Read More

11.19.18- GE, Nvidia, Nordstrom, Bitcoin All Tank, And The Fed Notices
John Rubino

The sense that something isn’t right out there just got a lot stronger. And the Fed, in response, is now tiptoeing back towards QE. Let’s start with the sudden bad news:

Chipmaker Nvidia plunges after missing on revenue and guidance

(CNBC) – Nvidia stock fell as much as 19 percent Thursday after the company reported earnings for the third quarter of its 2019 fiscal year, which ended on Oct. 28. Read More

11.17.18- Jim Cramer On The U.S. Economy: “Many CEOS Have Told Me About How Quickly Things Have Cooled”
Michael Snyder

A lot of people are shocked by how rapidly things are beginning to move. The U.S. economy is slowing down at a pace that we haven’t seen since the last recession, and this is something that I have been tracking extensively. But now the slowdown is so obvious that even some of the biggest names in the mainstream media are talking about it. For example, just take a look at what Jim Cramer of CNBC is saying. For a long time, he was touting how well the U.S. economy was doing, but now his tune has completely changed. According to Cramer, a lot of corporate executives have “told me about how quickly things have cooled”, and he says that many of them are shocked because this “wasn’t supposed to occur so soon”… Read More

11.16.18- Stagflation, Here We Come!
Bill Bonner

What I’ve learned at the Federal Reserve is a new language which is called “Fed speak.” You soon learn to mumble with great incoherence. – Alan Greenspan

Alan Greenspan is alive and well. Aged 92, he was on TV yesterday telling viewers that “unless they get control of the debt,” there will be hell to pay.

Greenspan is one of the most interesting characters in modern economics. And, unlike his successors, Bernanke and Yellen, he is not just an academic simpleton. He once had a very clear idea of how economies work. He saw the critical role of gold, for example, and warned that removing it from the monetary system would lead to trouble. Read More

"The Collapse Has Begun" - GE Is Now Trading Like Junk
Tyler Durden

Two weeks after we reported that GE had found itself locked out of the commercial paper market following downgrades that made it ineligible for most money market investors, the pain has continued, and yesterday General Electric lost just over $5bn in market capitalization. While far less than the $49bn wiped out from AAPL the same day, it was arguably the bigger headline grabber.

The shares slumped -6.88% after dropping as much as -10% at the lows after the company’s CEO, in an interview with CNBC yesterday, failed to reassure market fears about a weakening financial position. The CEO suggested that the company will now urgently sell assets to address leverage and its precarious liquidity situation whereby it will have to rely on revolvers - and the generosity of its banks - now that it is locked out of the commercial paper market. Read More

11.13.18- Understanding the
Global Recession of 2019
Charles Hugh Smith

Isn't it obvious that repeating the policies of 2009 won't be enough to save the system from a long-delayed reset?

2019 is shaping up to be the year in which all the policies that worked in the past will no longer work. As we all know, the Global Financial Meltdown / recession of 2008-09 was halted by the coordinated policies of the major central banks, which lowered interest rates to near-zero, bought trillions of dollars of bonds and iffy assets such as mortgage-backed securities, and issued unlimited lines of credit to insolvent banks, i.e. unlimited liquidity.

Central governments which could do so went on a borrowing / spending binge to boost demand in their economies, and pursued other policies designed to bring demand forward, i.e. incentivize households to buy today what they'd planned to buy in the future. Read More

11.12.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The State weaponizes education to create ignorance
Jon Rappoport

Independent Education: the crisis and the crossroad

A hundred fifty years ago, at least some Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on the use of the faculty called Reason.

Formal debate, science, and law all flowed from that source.

A common bond existed in some schools of the day. The student was expected to learn how Reason operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as on a long table, the visible principles: Logic. Read More

11.10.18- Why the Post-Election Rally
Will Extend Into 2019
Nomi Prins

This midterm election season seems like it lasted forever. There was certainly no shortage of ads, media dissections of every sound bite they could get their hands on and more than enough negativity to go around.

We all know the outcome. The Democrats took the House, while Republicans kept control of the Senate and even expanded their majority.

That means even though the Democrats won the House, the “blue wave” that Democrats were hoping for did not really materialize. Read More

11.09.18- The Election’s Finally Over. Now Things Can Go Back To “Normal”: Rising Interest Rates, Rising Debt, Rising Volatility
John Rubino

As contentious as the US midterm elections were, there was never a scenario in which they mattered. Any possible configuration of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate would have yielded pretty much the same economy going forward: Ever-higher debt, upward trending interest rates and (through the combination of those two) rising volatility.

So with the sideshow now in the rear view mirror, we can get back to our new normal. From this morning’s media reports: Read More

11.08.18- The United States Is Going Broke
Jim Rickards

Those who focus on the U.S. national debt (and I’m one of them) keep wondering how long this debt levitation act can go on.

The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is at the highest level in history (106%), with the exception of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. At least in 1945, the U.S. had won the war and our economy dominated world output and production. Today, we have the debt without the global dominance.

The U.S. has always been willing to increase debt to fight and win a war, but the debt was promptly scaled down and contained once the war was over. Today, there is no war comparable to the great wars of American history, and yet the debt keeps growing. Read More

11.07.17- This is what’s happened to stocks after every midterm election since World War II
Stephen McBride

It’s good news, even though Americans are on edge about politics

Unlce Sam wants you ... to invest.

Are you prepared for Tuesday? It’s going to be a crucial day for the stock market.

If the polls are correct, President Trump and Republicans are in big trouble. There’s an 85% chance Democrats will seize control of the House of Representatives from Republicans, according to statistical analysis firm FiveThirtyEight. Read More

11.06.18- The One Election Scenario That Would Be A “Disaster” For The Financial Markets
Michael Snyder

On Tuesday night all of the speculation about the midterm elections will mercifully be over, and there is one potential outcome that is being called a “disaster” for the financial markets. Over the past couple of years, stock prices have soared to unprecedented levels, and Wall Street has seemed to greatly appreciate the pro-business environment that President Trump has attempted to cultivate. Regulations have been rolled back, corporate taxes have been reduced significantly, and many corporate executives no longer fear that the federal government is out to get them. But after Tuesday, everything could be different. Read More

11.05.18- Omega: the rest of 2018
Tim Knight

From Slope of Hope: In the middle of last month, I offered up the post Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in an effort to lay out what I thought were some possible paths for the market. Out of an infinity of possibilities, I described four possible pathways, and the most bearish of them all, "Delta", unfolded beautifully. Here was the prediction at the time.

When the market started falling, I was tormented by the prospect that it was just another January 29-February 9 blip. That is, a tease for the bears which would simply result in bitter disappointment. Almost the entire world felt this way, and with good reason: the bears have been cheated for nine solid years, and the BTFD crowd has been winning, so why should it be any different this time? Why not sustain such a thing until, oh, the year 2397? Read More

11.03.18- Global Equity Market At A Crossroads
Dana Lyons

Global equity markets are testing levels potentially critical to the survival of the bull market.

As this stock market correction progresses, it is natural to consider what levels may be effectivein halting the decline. We have recently taken a stab at a couple potential “support” levels in the U.S. market with excellent success, so far. Those posts include Monday’s The Mother Of All Support Levels on the broad Value Line Geometric Composite which held precisely, as well as a few Premium Posts at The Lyons Share covering key sectors, which also held on cue: Market Leaders At Must-Hold Levels and Finally Some Support To Bank On (if you’d like to see these posts, shoot us an email at [email protected] and we’d be happy to share). Read More

11.02.18- Washington’s Silent Weapon for Not-so-quiet Wars. “A World Full of Dollars”, A 2019 Global Economic Crisis
F. William Engdahl

Today by far the deadliest weapon of mass destruction in Washington’s arsenal lies not with the Pentagon or its traditional killing machines. It’s de facto a silent weapon: the ability of Washington to control the global supply of money, of dollars, through actions of the privately-owned Federal Reserve in coordination with the US Treasury and select Wall Street financial groups. Developed over a period of decades since the decoupling of the dollar from gold by Nixon in August, 1971, today control of the dollar is a financial weapon that few if any rival nations are prepared to withstand, at least not yet. Read More

11.01.18- I Was Asked: “How & When Will the Next Financial Crisis Happen?”
Wolf Richter

China has a lot of balls in the air at the moment.

FocusEconomics asked me and a bunch of other illustrious luminaries, “How and when will the next financial crisis happen?”

First things first. A “financial crisis” is somewhat of a latex-term that can be defined in many ways and stretched in many directions. For our purposes, a recession or a stock-market crash is by itself not a financial crisis. They’re more or less normal parts of the credit cycle – or the business cycle as it used to be called. Read More

10.31.18- Be Prepared for a Cheaper Dollar
James Rickards

When will the strong dollar weaken? Ultimately, the answer is whenever the Treasury wants.

When the Treasury is not overly concerned with the dollar, market forces can prevail to raise or lower the exchange rate compared with euros, Swiss francs, yen or any other currency.

Sometimes, other central banks intervene to raise or lower their currencies relative to the dollar and the U.S. does not seem to care. China is notorious for this. Japan and Switzerland are other practiced currency manipulators. Read More

10.30.18- Is The Long-Anticipated Crash
Now Upon Us?
Chris Martenson

Is this the market's breaking point?

I admit: I'm a permabear.

This is no surprise to those who know and have followed me over the years. But I'm publicly proclaiming my 'bearishness' because doing so might open up a needed and long overdue dialog.

Here's my fundamental position: Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

Cutting to the chase, this is why I predict a major crash/collapse across stocks, bonds and real estate is on the way. Read More

10.29.18- An Update on the Doom Index
Joe Withrow

The Doom Index remains at 6 again this quarter, as we continue to see a “tale of two economies.”

Our financial metrics are flashing warnings signs… But our real economy metrics remain relatively healthy and robust.

Today, we’ll share some of the highlights from the data that makes up our Doom Index.

We won’t have time to cover each of the 11 indicators (for an update on what the Doom Index tracks, go here). However, our mission is to give you a broad look at what the Doom Index is telling us now and what it could suggest for the future. Read More

10.27.18- The Bull is Dying
Egon von Greyerz

Bulls are not killed off easily, They are strong, fierce and have real staying power. And this is what should be expected at a top of a secular bull market. Injured or weakened, the bull will still go on which is the case with many stock markets. Whilst some markets have peaked globally, others show strength. A week ago markets were ruffled by major falls, Was that the signal for the end of a multi decade bull or was it just another brief correction before the bull breaks out to much higher levels? With a further fall this week, the Dow is now down 2,000 points in October which certainly confirms that the bull is seriously injured, maybe fatally? Read More

10.26.18- Bob Moriarty: I Think We’re Seeing The Start Of The Real Crash
Bob Moriarty

321gold founder Bob Moriarty has been calling for a broader market crash to occur in October for the last few months. With the turmoil we’ve seen across global markets in the last couple of weeks it looks like Bob’s prognostication is playing out according to script. Energy & Gold caught up with Bob Moriarty at the end of last week to discuss topics ranging from gold & silver mining shares to what’s going on with Novo Resources to the Saudi assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Without further ado here is Energy & Gold’s October 2018 conversation with Bob Moriarty… Read More

10.25.18- Stock Market Crash! The Dow Has Now Plunged 2,368 Points From The Peak Of The Market
Michael Snyser

The level of panic that we witnessed on Wall Street on Wednesday was breathtaking. After a promising start to the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average started plunging, and at the close it was down another 608 points. Since peaking at 26,951.81 on October 3rd, the Dow has now fallen 2,368 points, and all of the gains for 2018 have been completely wiped out. But things are even worse when we look at the Nasdaq. The percentage decline for the Nasdaq almost doubled the Dow’s stunning plunge on Wednesday, and it has now officially entered correction territory. To say that it was a “bloodbath” for tech stocks on Wednesday would be a major understatement. Read More

10.24.18- As Midterms Approach, Prepare for Market Volatility
Jim Rickards

Here’s the lay of the land. The Senate is currently divided between 51 Republicans and 49 Democrats (including two Independents who caucus with the Democrats). A change of two seats in favor of the Democrats will give Democrats control of the Senate under the leadership of Chuck Schumer of New York.

Of the 100 Senate seats, 35 are up for election in 2018. Those 35 Senate seats are currently divided among 24 Democrats, two Independents who caucus with Democrats and nine Republicans. Simply put, the Democrats have more turf to defend and potentially more to lose. Read More

10.23.18- "Time To Prepare For The Next Crisis":
One Of China's Largest Funds Is Getting Ready To Dump Stocks
Tyler Durden

A few days after we reported that the investment vehicle of Sweden's most powerful family, the Wallenbergs, has begun preparations for the next global crisis, concerns about the future have spread to one of China's largest state-backed asset manager which runs about HK$139 billion ($18 billion) in assets, and which said it was preparing to sell shares in as many as 30 stocks on concern that valuations worldwide have peaked. Read More

10.22.18- "ECB Is Worst-Run Central Bank In The World" - Felix Zulauf Sees 30% Plunge In US Stocks "Taking The World With It"
Lauren Rublin

Felix Zulauf was a member of the Barron’s Roundtable for about 30 years, until relinquishing his seat at our annual investment gathering in 2017. While his predictions were more right than wrong, it was the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his analysis of global markets that won him devoted fans among his Roundtable peers, the crew at Barron’s, and beyond. Simply put, Felix, president of Zulauf Asset Management in Baar, Switzerland, always knew—and still knows—better than most how to connect the dots among central bankers’ actions, fiscal policies, currency gyrations, geopolitics, and the price of assets, hard and soft. Read More

10.20.18- The Global Dollar Shortage is Here –
And It’s Becoming A Big Problem
Adem Tumerkan

Another week and another signal flashing red to deal with. . .

The credit market – in my opinion – is indicating an inevitable ‘crunch’ coming up. And even worse – we’re seeing the global dollar shortage deepening.

Many readers know I haven’t exactly been shy about focusing on this dollar shortage problem all year – you can read more here, and here.

Personally – I think this may be the trigger that kicks off a brutal, worldwide, financial crisis. . . Read More

10.19.18- The Party Is Over
Egon von Greyerz

“What a difference a day makes”! Well we didn’t get the sun and the flowers like in Dinah Washington’s song but more like storm and showers. For the ones who don’t remember Dinah, Amy Winehouse made a more recent version of the song. Last week I warned investors again, in the strongest tone possible, of the risks in markets. So what triggered it? Was it the Fed’s interest rise? Or was it the trade war with China? Or maybe it was Kavanaugh?

We mustn’t believe that we can predict the exact time something will happen. Nor do we know what will cause a turn in markets. But what we have known for quite some time is that markets have been extremely vulnerable to a turn. Read More

10.18.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Federal Judge "Shocked" To Find Obama State Dept Lied To Protect Hillary From Email Server Lawsuits
Tyler Durden

The noose appears to be tightening further around the law-less behaviors of the Obama administration in their frantic efforts to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

As Fox News reports, the transparency group Judicial Watch initially sued the State Department in 2014, seeking information about the response to the Benghazi attack after the government didn't respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Read More

10.17.18- Of What Am I Now Certain?
Avi Gilburt

I am certain of death. I am certain of taxes. And, I am certain of tax reform. (Sorry, that was an old tax attorney joke.)

However, non-linear financial markets never lend themselves to certainty. Rather, the best we can do is look for clues that provide us with high-probability perspectives. That is what I use Elliott Wave analysis to do, in addition to supporting sentiment readings.

One of the noted indications that a major top is being struck is when formerly bearish analysts and market participants begin to suggest buying the dip. And, amazingly, analysts that I have watched be consistently bearish for at least the last three years are now providing us with reasons as to why we should be buying this dip. Read More

10.16.18- Don't Mistake the Stock Market
for the Economy
Patrick O'Hare

Please, can we get some bad economic news? Is that too much to ask?

That's not too much ask, it's just really dumb to ask for it. Nevertheless, we have heard it asserted in the face of the recent sell-off that bad economic news would be good news for the stock market.

Why would that be? The assumption is that bad economic news would get the Federal Reserve off the stock market's back and help tamp down the concerns about rising interest rates that precipitated the sell-off. Read More

10.15.18- ‘Great Depression’ ahead? IMF sounds dire warning
William Pesek

Massive government debts and eroded fiscal buffers since 2008 suggest global dominos await a single market crash

Is another “Great Depression” on the horizon? It would be easier to dismiss these words from Nouriel Roubini, Marc Faber or other doom-and-gloom prognosticators. Coming from Christine Lagarde’s team, though, they take on a new dimension of scary.

The International Monetary Fund head isn’t known for breathlessness on the world stage. And yet the IMF sounded downright alarmist in its latest Global Financial Stability report, stating that “large challenges loom for the global economy to prevent a second Great Depression.” Read More

10.13.18- Has "It" Finally Arrived?
Chris Martenson

With the recent plunge in the S&P 500 of over 5%, has the long-anticipated (and long-overdue) market correction finally begun?

It’s hard to say for certain. But the systemic cracks we've been closely monitoring definitely got an awful lot wider this week.

After nearly a decade of endless market boosting, manipulation and regulatory neglect, all of the trading professionals I personally know are watching with held breath at this stage. The central banks have distorted the processes of price discovery and market structure for so many years now, that it’s difficult to know yet whether their grip on the markets has indeed failed. Read More

10.12.18- Rising Interest Rates Start Popping Bubbles... End Of This Expansion Is Now In Sight
John Rubino

Towards the end of economic expansions, interest rates usually start to rise as strong loan demand bumps up against central bank tightening.

At first the effect on the broader economy is minimal, so consumers, companies and governments don’t let a slight uptick in financing costs interfere with their borrowing and spending. But eventually rising rates begin to bite and borrowers get skittish, throwing the leverage machine into reverse and producing an equities bear market and Main Street recession. Read More

10.11.18- How to safely ignore everything that happened yesterday
Simon Black

Stock markets around the world were crushed yesterday…

The Dow Jones fell 800 points, its biggest dump since February. The Nasdaq fell 4% (its worst day in seven years).

Japan fell 3.9%. Chinese stocks fell 5.2% to their lowest since 2014.

And people are freaking out (the market’s fear gauge, the volatility index (VIX) surged 43.9% yesterday).

I’ve been writing for months that the current bull market could easily go on for another few years… or it could all come crashing down tomorrow. Read More

10.10.18- Has the derivatives volcano already begun to erupt?
David Golman

The risk remains that dollar credit will seize up globally, with disastrous consequences for countries that have to borrow dollars to cover deficits

The cure for the last crisis always turns into the cause of the next one. The economies of southern Europe – Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal – nearly collapsed in 2011, and Europe’s monetary authorities responded with negative interest rates.

So did Japan. Europeans and Japanese pay to hold cash or own 10-year German government bonds, which means that every pension fund and insurer will fold in a finite time horizon. They responded by exporting more, saving more, and buying American assets that still pay a positive, if low, real yield. Read More

10.09.18- How America Goes the Way of Argentina
Bill Bonner

BERLIN – Berlin is not a particularly attractive city – at least, not from our hotel room near the famous avenue, Unter den Linden. The buildings are all monumental, graceless, and blockish.

For years, the city has attracted young people from all over. It has some of the cheapest apartments in Europe and a lively, bohemian art scene.

It also has a generous social welfare system that makes it easy to live here with relatively little money. Read More

10.08.18- Ron Paul Warns A 50% Stock Market Decline Is Coming...And There's No Way To Stop It
Tyler Durden

Is Ron Paul about to be proven right once again?

TheEconomiCollapse.com's Michael Snyder thinks so. For a very long time, Ron Paul has been one of my political heroes. His willingness to stand up for true constitutional values and to keep saying “no” to the Washington establishment over and over again won the hearts of millions of American voters, and I wish that there had been enough of us to send him to the White House either in 2008 or in 2012. To this day, I still wish that we could make his classic work entitled “End The Fed” required reading in every high school classroom in America. He was one of the few members of Congress that actually understood economics, and it is very sad that he has now retired from politics. With the enormous mess that Washington D.C. has become, we sure could use a lot more statesmen like him right now. Read More

10.07.18- Market Report:
A financial storm is brewing
Alasdair Macleod

This week, gold rose slightly on balance, while silver maintained its climb out of a deep pit. In early-morning European trade today (Friday) gold was trading at $1199, up $7 from last Friday’s close. Silver was unchanged on the week at $14.50, but as can be seen on our headline chart, silver’s relative performance since the mid-September lows is encouraging.

For fiat currencies, things are hotting up. US Treasury yields going through the roof, illustrated by this immensely bearish chart of the 10-year US Treasury bond yield. Read More

10.06.18- We Just Witnessed The Biggest U.S. Bond Crash In Nearly 2 Years – What Does This Mean For The Stock Market?
Michael Snyder

U.S. bonds have not fallen like this since Donald Trump’s stunning election victory in November 2016. Could this be a sign that big trouble is on the horizon for the stock market? It seems like bonds have been in a bull market forever, but now suddenly bond yields are spiking to alarmingly high levels. On Wednesday, the yield on 30 year U.S. bonds rose to the highest level since September 2014, the yield on 10 year U.S. bonds rose to the highest level since June 2011, and the yield on 5 year bonds rose to the highest level since October 2008. Read More

10.05.18- Debts & Deficits: A Slow Motion Train Wreck
Lance Roberts

Last Friday, I discussed that without much fanfare or public discussion, Congress decided to push the U.S. into deeper fiscal irresponsibility with the passage of another Continuing Resolution (CR). To wit:

“The House on Wednesday passed an $854 billion spending bill to avert an October shutdown, funding large swaths of the government while pushing the funding deadline for others until Dec. 7.

The bill passed by 361-61, a week after the Senate passed an identical measure by a vote of 93-7.” Read More

10.04.18- Bad Financial Moon Rising
William White

A decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, global debt levels are higher than in 2008, lending has moved into the opaque realm of asset management and private equity, and the dollar is surging. Given the proliferating risks, another financial crisis and downturn could be in store.

BASEL – No one should overestimate economists’ powers of understanding. Just as the magnitude of the global downturn that began in mid-2008 took most economists completely by surprise, so did the sclerotic nature of the recovery. Similarly, economic forecasts appear to be nothing more than hopeful extrapolations of recent growth. Read More

10.03.18- Our Delusional Economy Is Poised To Slam Into The Brick Wall Of Reality
Chris Martenson

While life has always been uncertain, today our choices matter more than ever. The decisions each of us make today will determine if we thrive, merely survive, or fail during the future time of upheaval ahead.

The window of opportunity to change course for humanity is all but closed. There’s simply no more time to hope that somehow, magically, the world’s entire energy complex will suddenly evolve to a bountiful and sustainable new plane — whether by market forces, by maverick billionaires like Elon Musk, or by happy accident.

As we hammer home constantly here at Peak Prosperity, energy is everything. Without it, our society simply can’t function. Read More

10.02.18- Merkel’s End Could Spark EU Breakdown
Tom Luongo

The pieces have been moving into place for months now. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has seen her power within German political circles wane for more than a year. Italy’s opposition to the European Union’s budget rules is stiffening.

Bond yields are beginning to not just rise, but blow out uncontrollably.

The Fed keeps raising rates to arrest inflation not supported by increased wages.

Brexit talks are at a standstill. Read More

10.01.18- The Stock Market Just Crashed In Italy, And Argentina Has Panic-Raised Interest Rates
To 65 Percent
Michael Snyder

In the 9th largest economy in the world, the financial markets are crashing, and in the 21st largest economy in the world the central bank just raised interest rates to 65 percent to support a currency that is completely imploding. Whilethe mainstream media in the United States continues to be obsessed with all things Kavanaugh, an international financial crisis threatens to spiral out of control. Stock prices are falling and currencies are collapsing all over the planet, but because the U.S. has been largely unaffected so far the mainstream media is mostly choosing to ignore what is happening. But the truth is that this is serious. The financial crisis in Italy threatens to literally tear the EU apart, and South America has become an economic horror show. Read More

09.29.18- Yes, The Stock Market Is Just As ‘Stupid-Bat-$hit-Crazy Expensive’ Today As It Was
At The Peak Of The DotCom Mania
Jesse Felder

At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking? Read More

09.28.18- New Vehicle Sales “Collapse” And Pending Home Sales “Plunge” As America’s Economic Slowdown Accelerates
Michael Snyder

In late 2018, the bad economic news just keeps rolling in. At a time when consumer confidence is absolutely soaring, the underlying economic numbers are clearly telling us that enormous problems are right around the corner. Of course this is usually what happens just before a major economic downturn. Most people in the general population feel like the party can go on for quite a while longer, but meanwhile the warning signs just keep becoming more and more obvious. I have been hearing from people that truly believe that the economy is “strong”, but if the U.S. economy really was in good shape would new vehicle sales be “collapsing”?… Read More

09.27.18- The U.S. Housing Market and Home Builders Are In Trouble
Adem Tumerkan

Many of you know that I haven’t been exactly bullish on the U.S. housing market – especially the construction stocks.

That’s why in early March I wrote about and recommended betting against the home builders (you can read that here and see how we structured it).

I specifically made bets against KB Homes (Ticker: KBH) because they target first-time home buyers. And I believed the lofty expectations from out-of-touch economists would fall flat (which they have).

Since then, news after news has come out showing that the housing market is faltering. Read More

09.26.18- Doug Casey on the U.S. Economy
Justin Spittler

Justin’s note: The U.S. economy is booming.

According to the government, U.S. GDP (gross domestic product)—a broad measure of economic growth—rose by 4.2% year-over-year. That’s the highest mark in four years. U.S. wages are growing at the fastest rate in nine years. Unemployment is at its lowest level in 18 years. And jobless claims are at a 48-year low.

This is great news for everyday Americans. That’s obvious. The question is… how much longer can the U.S. economy fire on all cylinders?

So I got Doug Casey on the phone to get his take… Read More

09.25.18- Khazarian mafia seeks Chinese protection as military tribunals loom
Benjamin Fulford

The satan-worshipping Khazarian mafia is in a frenzy of fear as military tribunals loom. As a result, they are offering the world (as if it were theirs to give) to China in exchange for protection, according to Gnostic Illuminati and Asian secret society sources. In addition to this, they are threatening to unleash pandemics, blow up the Yellowstone Caldera, set off a massive EMP attack, and cause other mayhem in a futile effort (as these attempts will be neutralized) to blackmail themselves out of the reach of long-delayed justice. Also, they are carrying out a foolish and widely derided smear campaign to derail the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Read More

09.24.18- What Comes Next
Adam Taggart

Previews of the coming reckoning

All things have a beginning, a middle and and end.

And now, more than 3,480 days into the current bull market, the longest in history, we can say with high confidence we are very close to its end.

Why?

For manifold reasons that are multiplying fast. So many, in fact, that each of the key speakers at the recent Peak Prosperity/Contra Corner Summit in New York City had difficulty finding enough time to enumerate them all during the six-hour event. Read More

09.22.18- Hong Kong and the road to recovery
Alasdair Macleod

We are following the road to perdition

There is increasing awareness that another financial crisis is in the offing, and, of course, everyone has an opinion as to what will trigger it and what form it will take. But there is broad agreement that since the Lehman crisis ten years ago, instead of resolving the problems that led to that crisis, governments and their monetary authorities have allowed the underlying position to deteriorate. Read More

09.21.18- Stock Prices Are Surging Because Corporations Are Spending More Money On Stock Buybacks Than Anything Else
Michael Snyder

The primary reason why stock prices have been soaring in recent months is because corporations have been buying back their own stock at an unprecedented pace. In fact, the pace of stock buybacks is nearly double what it was at this time last year. According to Goldman Sachs, S&P 500 companies spent 384 billion dollars buying back stock during the first half of 2018. That is an absolutely astounding number. And in many cases, corporations are going deep into debt in order to do this. Of course this is going to push up stock prices, but corporate America will not be able to inflate this bubble indefinitely. At some point a credit crunch will come, and the pace of stock buybacks will fall precipitously. Read More

09.20.18- This time is different
because there’s free tequila…
Simon Black

We poke a lot of fun at the MANY absurdities we see in this current bubble.

As we’ve discussed countless times over the past few years, there are consequences from the fact that central bankers have conjured trillions of dollars out of thin air and pushed down interest rates to zero.

Stock, bonds and real estate are at or near record highs. Bankrupt countries are issuing trillions of dollars of debt with negative yields (not to mention, serial defaulter Argentina was able to issue 100-year bonds…) Read More

09.19.18- How Politics Poisoned the Earth
Bill Bonner

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – Yesterday, we looked at what the U.S. republic has become: a vast swamp of idlers, chislers, cronies, and insiders… all angling for the meat in someone else’s burger.

Politicians and public servants no longer retire to their hamlets and farms once their tour of duty is over. Instead, they sign up for a post-career money-grab as consultants and lobbyists… scheming with the feds to get favors for their clients.

But how come? Aren’t the insiders always eager to take advantage of the outsiders? What’s new? Read More

09.18.18- The Next Financial Crisis
Is Right on Schedule (2019)
Charles Hugh Smith

After 10 years of unprecedented goosing, some of the real economy is finally overheating: costs are heating up, unemployment is at historic lows, small business optimism is high, and so on — all classic indicators that the top of this cycle is in.

Financial assets have been goosed to record highs in the everything bubble.Buy the dip has worked in stocks, bonds and real estate — what’s not to like?

Beneath the surface, the frantic goosing has planted seeds of financial crisis which have sprouted and are about to blossom with devastating effect. There are two related systems-level concepts which illuminate the coming crisis: the S-Curve and non-linear effects. Read More

09.17.18- Ten years after the crisis… they’re doing the same thing and expecting different results
Simon Black

“Holy Crap– turn on your TV! This is crazy!”

It was Sunday, September 14, 2008. Exactly 10 years ago to the day.

My friend Jeff called me and told me to turn on the television—where I saw dozens of people on the streets of Manhattan filing out of a skyscraper carrying boxes full of their office junk.

They were all employees of Lehman Brothers, one of the largest investment banks in the world.

Lehman was hours away from filing bankruptcy in what would go down as THE biggest bankruptcy in US history. Read More

09.15.18- Ten Years After the Crash,
We’ve Learned Nothing
Matt Taibbi

The great financial catastrophe of our times is still badly misunderstood, and led to grotesque consequences, including the election of Donald Trump

Ten years ago, on Saturday, September 13th, 2008, the world was about to end.

The New York Federal Reserve was a zoo. Imagine NASA headquarters on the day a giant asteroid careens into the atmosphere. That was the New York Fed: all hands on deck, peak human panic. Read More

09.14.18- Bubble Within a Bubble — Why You Won’t Beat Other Stock Investors to the Exit
in the Next Crash
Jeff Clark

Did you know you can blow a bubble within a bubble? It’s a fun thing for kids. What’s not so fun is that the stock market is doing it right now. And when another crash occurs, this dual-bubble scenario could make it harder to get out before other investors.

First, let’s take a look at the bubble within a bubble.

This Market Has FAANGs. Read More

09.13.18- Look out for Emerging-Market
Contagion Effects
Nomi Prins

Even though summer technically lasts until Sept. 21, the reality is that after Labor Day, markets often snap into a hectic fall mode.

A recent Reuters article notes that, “President Donald Trump’s relentless “America First” trade push is hurting confidence in many countries, rising U.S. interest rates are putting strains on emerging economies and currency problems have hit crisis levels in Argentina and Turkey.”

When considering the markets over the last few weeks and seeing how the Turkish lira in particular has fallen 40% against the dollar since the start of the year, I'm thinking back to my first job on Wall Street. Read More

09.12.18- From Buenos Aires To Nashville: The Emerging Market Crisis Spreads
From Periphery To Core
John Rubino

This is the last emerging market crisis story for a while, promise. But one angle – exactly how a plunging currency in a far-off place affects supposedly stable markets like the US – is worth exploring because it’s happening right this minute.

Let’s start with the choices facing an American or European investor who needs a decent return, but who finds that interest rates have fallen to the point where traditionally safe things like bonds and bank accounts no longer yield enough. Read More

09.11.18- The Next Recession:
3 Critical Warning Signs
Bluford Putnam and Erik Norland

The next recession: What are the warning signs? What might it look like? How will markets react?

The nearly decade-long U.S. economic expansion may look a little long in the tooth, but it is not about to end due to old age. Economic expansions need a catalyst that triggers a downward spiral of consumer and business retrenchment. The most common recession catalyst for the United States has been the collision of rising interest rates with heavy debt loads, corporate valuations that appear to have run ahead of free-cash-flow generation, or both. Add trade tensions and geo-political uncertainties, which may work to slow global growth, and it seems like the current situation has the potential to trigger a recession. Read More

09.10.18- New Trade War “Shockwave” Has FAANG Companies Bracing for Impact
Birch Gold

September is known to be a rough month for the market. But in 2018, it could evolve into what may become known as the “Year the Trade Wars Exploded.”

New trade tensions stem from POTUS supporting new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports. An already weary market is starting to show increased concern.

That new concern is coming in the form of increased volatility according to a recent Forbes report (emphasis ours): Read More

09.07.18- Apocalypse, Or Not?
Alasdair Macleod

Members of the American libertarian movement, particularly extremist preppers, are often associated with a belief that a complete breakdown in society is the only outcome from government economic policies and will lead to complete social disintegration. At the centre of their concerns is monetary destruction, with other issues, such as the erosion of personal freedom and the right to bear arms, important but peripheral. They cite history, particularly the hyperinflationary collapses, from Rome to Zimbabwe, and now Venezuela. They draw on Austrian economic theory, which fans their dislike of government and their expectation of total chaos. Read More

09.06.18- Wall Street Veteran Warns of Big Near-Term Market Correction
Peter Reagan

Lakshman Achuthan, a Wall Street veteran at the ECRI (Economic Cycle Research Institute), doesn’t share in the optimism of a strong U.S. market.

In fact, he criticized Wall Street last year on “the quality spread between junk bonds and corporate debt.”

In a CNBC report from February, later confirmed by the S&P slowing down in March of this year, he continued:

That’s showing a signal from a very liquid, very smart bond market keying off of some concern about relatively higher default risk as the economy slows. This happens every time we have a slowdown, and it’s corroborating what we picked up in our leading indexes… Read More

09.05.18- America’s Finances Seem Fishy
Bill Bonner

POITOU, FRANCE – The last days of summer are dwindling down… to a precious few. It is the best time of year here in France.

The sun has cooled. The days are shorter; the nights are still and clear. The leaves turn yellow and drift to the ground, a few at first… and then, many. Stirred to life by the occasional breeze, they gather in corners and cover the drains.

And over everything hangs an air of languid grace… like a beautiful corpse an undertaker. Read More

09.04.18- The Whole System Is Rigged
Chris Martenson

From elections to media to the markets, it's all controlled

As the dog days of summer wind down, it’s hard not to notice how the climate is suffering brutally right now across many areas of the globe.

Crop failures have hit hard across Europe. Australia is under an intense drought. Warm water representing ‘archived heat’ has penetrated deep into the arctic. Coral reefs are dying through mass bleachings. The stocks of ocean fisheries are in deep trouble. Insect and bird populations remain in a state of collapse.

It couldn't be any more clear that our society's demands for ever-more "growth" are taking an increasingly dangerous toll. "Growth" is now the enemy of life on the planet; yet there are precious few leaders willing to admit as much. Read More

09.03.18- 27 Ways to Make Money
From Your Small Farm
Mary Wickison

Many people think farmers have enviable lives. If you're a farmer, however, you may think otherwise. You work non-stop for very little money. Sometimes you feel like a prisoner to your buyers, and occasionally you wonder how much longer you can keep going. The weather seems to be against you, and you feel like you are working for nothing.

Though small farmers believe their lives are far from ideal, I can't think of any farmer who would switch to a life in the city. So how do you get the best of both worlds? How can you maximize profit from your land, small farm or homestead? You don't have to stop at growing crops. Read More

09.01.18- Corporate Debt Steering U.S. Straight Into Economic Iceberg
Peter Reagan

The U.S. Economy is approaching an “economic iceberg” in the form of an insane corporate debt load.

Companies in the U.S. have taken on a record $6.3 trillion in debt. This is more corporate debt than 2007, just before the last major recession.

And according to S&P’s analysis, which looked at 2017 year-end balance sheets for non-financial corporations, the riskiest borrowers are more leveraged than they were even during the financial crisis. Read More

08.31.18- Debt Is Destroying The Economy, And Washington Is Desperate To Distract You
Dave Kranzler

"Those who see no Lehman-like episode on the horizon did not see the last one." - highly regarded writer, George Will, in a National Review article titled, "America Is Overdue For Another Economic Disaster."

Lost in the largely meaningless political Kabuki theatre being staged on Capitol Hill is the fact that the economy is deteriorating. Real average weekly earnings in July declined for production and non-supervisory workers. It was down 0.01% from June to July and down 0.22% from July 2017. For all employees, real average hourly earnings declined 0.20% from June to July but was flat year over year. Read More

08.30.18- Homebuilder Shares Dramatically Underperforming: Consumer Confidence
Didn't Help
Mike Mish Shedlock

Homebuilder shares are down 12% to 23% while the stock market is up 9%. Housing data has been miserable.

The Wall Street Journal reports Home-Builder Shares Miss Out on Stock Rally

Consumer confidence tracking near 18-year highs, strong corporate earnings and soaring retail sales haven’t translated into gains across the housing market—something that has kept home-builder shares from reclaiming the highs they hit at the start of the year. Read More

08.29.18- The Greatest Fake Bull Ever
David Stockman

Now that the raging robo-traders have tagged a double top at 2897 on the S&P 500 it isworth remembering that the booming stock market is the greatest Fake Bull in history. It is entirely a function of massive central bank liquidity injections into the financial system that have transformed Wall Street and other global trading venues into virtual gambling casinos.

Indeed, in today's fraught environment it can be well and truly said that the chartmonkeys have become deaf, dumb and blind to everything happening on Planet Earth external to the gaming tables where they slosh around in their cups. After all, to use the latest evidence, what could be more indicative of a political system fixing to implode than this weekend's utterly phony and disgustingly undeserved deification of the late Senator John McCain? Read More

08.28.18- 10 Numbers That Prove That America’s Current Financial Condition Is A Horror Show
Michael Snyder

America’s long-term “balance sheet numbers” just continue to get progressively worse. Unfortunately, since the stock market has been soaring and the GDP numbers look okay, most Americans assume that the U.S. economy is doing just fine. But the stock market was soaring and the GDP numbers looked okay just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008 as well, and we saw how that turned out. The truth is that GDP is not the best measure for the health of the economy. Judging the U.S. economy by GDP is basically like measuring the financial health of an individual by how much money he or she spends, and I will attempt to illustrate that in this article. Read More

08.27.18- To Understand America's Neofeudal Economy, Start with Extortion
Charles Hugh Smith

Here is the result of America's neofeudalism: soaring wealth and income inequality.

Let's spin the time machine back to the late Middle Ages, at the height of feudalism, and imagine we're trying to get a boatload of goods to the nearest city to sell. As we drift down the river, we're constantly being stopped and charged a fee for transiting one small fiefdom after another. When we finally reach the city, there's an entry fee for bringing our goods to market. Read More

08.25.18- Some thoughts on the
‘longest bull market ever’
Simon Black

Well, it happened. Yesterday the US stock market broke the all-time record for the longest bull market ever.

This means that the US stock market has been generally rising for nearly a decade straight… or even more specifically, that the market has gone 3,453 days without a 20% correction.

That’s a pretty big milestone. And there’s no end in sight. So it’s possible this market continues marching higher for the foreseeable future.

But if you step back and really look at the big picture, there are a lot of things that might make a rational person scratch his/her head. Read More

08.23.18- MOPE Has Failed And The World Is About To IMPLODE Economically – TIME NOW!
Jim Sinclair

We will keep this short and to the point. As time goes by, you will come to know all the ingredients to the fact that economic law lives and is in the process of reasserting itself like a hot solar storm on the surface of the sun.

MOPE has failed and the world is about to implode economically and socially because of it. Your question to all of us has been when will all this happen. The answer is now. The means to this occurrence is accelerating uncontrollable volatility in the world fiat currency markets. The rise in the dollar here and now is due to Richard Russell’s thesis of the synthetic dollar short. This can be easily understood by remembering that the currency you borrow will fluctuate. If that movement is up, then you are at a loss considering where it was trading when your borrowed it. Read More

08.23.18- More Evidence The Economy Is Deteriorating
Dave Kranzler

“Financial-market and economic prospects remain far shy of the hype and headlines, amidst tanking consumer optimism and negative revisions to recent reporting.” – John Williams, Shadowstats.com

The economy may seem like it’s doing well if you are part of the upper 10% demographic. Though, in reality, for most of the upper 10%, doing “well” has been a function of having easy access to credit. NASA Federal Credit Union is offering 0% down, 0% mortgage insurance for mortgages up to $2.5 million. Read More

08.22.18- Currency Woes
Alasdair Macleod

This week’s collapse of the Turkish lira has dominated the headlines, and it is widely reported that this and other emerging market currencies are in trouble because of the withdrawal of dollar liquidity. There are huge quantities of footloose dollars betting against these weak currencies, as well as commodities and gold, on the basis the long-expected squeeze on dollar liquidity is finally upon us.

Doubtless Triffin’s dilemma is dominating these speculators’ thoughts, telling them demand for the dollar as the reserve currency is infinite. This article points out that foreign financial entities as a whole already possess most of the excess liquidity created by monetary expansion of the dollar since the Lehman crisis. Read More

08.21.18- If You Read Between The Lines, Global Economic Leaders Are Telling Us
Exactly What Is Coming
Michael Snyder

Sometimes, a strongly-worded denial is the most damning evidence of all that something is seriously wrong. And when things start to really get crazy, “the spin” is often the exact opposite of the truth. In recent days we have seen a lot of troubling headlines and a lot of chaos in the global financial marketplace, but authorities continue to assure us that everything is going to be just fine. Of course we witnessed precisely the same thing just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke insisted that a recession was not coming, and we proceeded to plunge into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Is our society experiencing a similar state of denial about what is ahead of us here in 2018? Read More

08.20.18- What Truckers & Railroads Just Said about the US Economy
Wolf Richter

It’s cyclical.

The transportation sector is a reflection of the goods-based economy in the US. Demand has been blistering across all modes of transportation. Freight shipment volume (not pricing… we’ll get to pricing in a moment) by truck, rail, air, and barge, according to the Cass Freight Index jumped 10.6% in July compared to a year earlier. This pushed the index, which is not seasonally adjusted, to its highest level for July since 2007.

The dynamics in the transportation sector are “clearly signaling that the US economy, at least for now, is ignoring all of the angst coming out of Washington D.C. about the trade wars,” the report by Cass said. Read More

08.18.18- Weekend Rant: The Anatomy of a Crisis: A Strong Dollar and Disappearing Liquidity
Adem Tumerkan

Since March – the dollar’s rallied over 7%. And it’s caused the Emerging Markets to implode.

But the bigger problem is what lies ahead.

And that’s a global dollar shortage – which the mainstream continues to ignore. . .

I’ve touched on this a couple months back. Wondering when the mainstream would start to realize that the stronger the dollar gets – the more pressure global economies will feel. Read More

08.17.18- “Asia Will Be the Next Source of Downside Systemic Risk for Financial Markets”
Wolf Richter

“Excess liquidity usually leads to the misallocation of capital, masking any balance sheet constrains. As this tide of excess liquidity recedes, it reveals the misallocation of capital and the mispricing of risk,” Nedbank CIB strategists Neels Heyneke and Mehul Daya write in a note. And this is particularly the case for excess dollar-liquidity in the Emerging Markets (EMs).

Sovereign credit ratings – such as those issued by Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch – of the emerging market countries have dropped sharply since late 2016. Read More

08.16.18- You Should Fear the Emerging Market Debt Bubble
Nomi Prins

Global debt has ballooned since the financial crisis as central banks have distorted markets and fueled debt bubbles in particular.

A lot of the increase in global debt has come from emerging market (EM) economies, especially China. In fact, a record amount of EM debt has accumulated during the past decade, mostly in dollars. A large portion of that debt is therefore denominated in U.S. dollars.

That’s why I’ve long argued that the first shoe to drop in the next crisis would likely be EM debt.

Borrowing is not a problem when dollars are cheap. Low interest rates mean the cost of servicing that debt is low. Read More

08.15.18- Keep Your Eye on China
James Rickards

The trade war is beginning to take its toll on China as the Chinese economy is losing momentum. Beijing has pledged to increase small-business lending and increase infrastructure investment to help offset the impact.

Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura Intl. in Hong Kong, said, for example, “The Chinese economy will get worse before getting better. It takes several months to turn around. Beijing will step up credit easing and fiscal measures to deliver a recovery and prevent financial troubles such as a rise of bond defaults.”

But with a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 250%, China is already well into the danger zone. How much debt-financed stimulus can it take? Read More

08.14.18- The Heroic Assumptions Behind Today’s Unprecedented Equity Valuations
Jesse Felder

What is the opposite of a margin of safety? That is a question this market has had me asking myself for some time now. A margin of safety is a discount to intrinsic value that provides a safety net in the result of an error in analysis or unforeseen negative developments. The opposite of a margin of safety then is a premium to intrinsic value than can vanish even if your analysis is correct or things go unexpectedly in your favor. There are times when a security reaches a valuation such that even if everything goes right you’re unlikely to profit. The price has already discounted a perfect outcome. This “priced for perfection” scenario is the opposite of a margin of safety and this is currently where the stock market finds itself today. Read More

08.13.18- How 3D Printing is
Revolutionizing Housing
Luken Surge

The housing industry is like a roller coaster.

The housing crash left houses empty and people homeless. Some neighborhoods are still littered with empty and decaying homes, some having stood empty going on 10 years now.

By this point, a lot of these homes aren’t even worth repairing. Since the crash, there has been a lot of conversation, and demand, for more housing options.

And why not? Engineers have discovered cheaper, more eco-friendly and sustainable housing options. Why not use them? Read More

08.11.18- Facebook’s crash is everybody’s problem
Dan Denning

A little over two weeks ago, Silicon Valley giant Facebook reported what one analyst described as “nightmare guidance.”

The social media giant reported that its user growth in the U.S. and Canada had flatlined… and that it was losing users in Europe.

Then, the company’s CFO, David Wehner, said he anticipated that rising costs would outpace sales growth in 2019, as the company grapples with better policing of fake news, hate speech, fake accounts, and election manipulation on its platform.Read More

08.10.18- Contagion has Not Been
in the Spot Light for Years
David Becker

It’s been several years since the markets started using the word contagion. During the European debt crisis, this word was used constantly as traders worried that issues with Greece and Spain and Portugal would spread across Europe. Today, the markets are discussing another contagion as the Turkish Lira plunged 10% moving up to a higher of 6.25 versus the greenback before tracing some of its losses and settling near the 5.93 level. The close on Thursday was closer to 5 Turkish Lira per US dollar. The catalyst that drove the Lira lower seemed to be a lack of government concern that investors are waiting for an outline of a new economic plan. Read More

08.09.18- In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream
Frank Rich

If you were standing in the smoldering ashes of 9/11 trying to peer into the future, you might have been overjoyed to discover this happy snapshot of 2018: There has been no subsequent major terrorist attack on America from Al Qaeda or its heirs. American troops are not committed en masse to any ground war. American workers are enjoying a blissful 4 percent unemployment rate. The investment class and humble 401(k) holders alike are beneficiaries of a rising GDP and booming stock market that, as measured by the Dow, is up some 250 percent since its September 10, 2001, close. The most admired person in America, according to Gallup, is the nation’s first African-American president. Read More

08.08.18- Mathematical Adjustments
Don’t Change Reality
Lance Roberts

Yesterday, I discussed the mathematical adjustment to the GDP calculation that added $1 trillion to economic growth. To wit:

“Where did a bulk of the change come from? A change in the calculation of “real” GDP from using 2009 dollars to 2012 dollars which boosted growth strictly from a lower rate of inflation. As noted by the BEA:

“For 2012-2017, the average rate of change in the prices paid by U.S. residents, as measured by the gross domestic purchasers’ price index,was 1.2 percent, 0.1 percentage point lower than in the previously published estimates.” Read More

08.07.18- Why the Boomers Are Going Broke
Bill Bonner

POITOU, FRANCE – We were taken aback on Friday by the ferocity of our dear readers’ comments. [Read more in today’s Mailbag.]

What were they so sore about? we wondered.

Son of Satan

Of course, we are frequently wrong about a great number of things. When connecting the dots, we are bound to draw a few stray lines. And we will no doubt be proven wrong in many of our opinions and predictions. Read More

08.06.18- "The Market Has Two Broken Legs": Why Morgan Stanley Doubled Down On Its Bearish Call
Tyler Durden

Last Monday, Morgan Stanley made quite a splash with its contrarian call, when in the aftermath of a handful of poor tech results, most notably from Facebook which lost as much as $150BN in market cap due to slowing user growth, the bank's chief equity strategist Michael Wilson boldly predicted that "the selling has just begun and this correction will be biggest since the one we experienced in February."

Worse, Morgan Stanley cautioned that a liquidation in tech/growth "could very well have a greater negative impact on the average portfolio if it's centered on Tech, Consumer Discretionary and small caps" due to the disproportional ownership of this group of stocks by professional and retail investors. Read More

08.04.18- It’s More Than Just FANG Stocks Investors Should Be Worried About
Jesse Felder

With the FANG stocks faltering lately investors are starting to become concerned about their impact on the broader market. And there is certainly something to this. Statistically speaking, these market generals have become increasingly important to the broad market indexes recently so it only stands to reason that an important reversal here could make for a more difficult equity environment in general. Read More

08.03.18- Icarus Flies, but FAANGs Fall from the Gaping Maw of US Stock Market –
And My Blog is Still Here
David Haggith

As we pass from early summer into late summer today, stocks on all the major indices open the day on the slide. The “Tech Wreck,” as it is being called, has been noted by many, as I’ll detail here. That is in spite of the fact that the last of the great FAANGS just reported its most stellar quarter ever. (See below.)

In a statement that agrees with me on the January-February stock market plunge being the first leg of a downward journey that is taking its second leg down now, Morgan Stanley rings the warning bell, saying you need to “prepare for the biggest stock market sell-off in months.” Read More

08.02.18- According To The “Buffett Indicator”, The Stock Market Is More Primed For A Crash Than It Has Ever Been Before
Michael Snyder

Warren Buffett’s favorite indicator is telling us that stocks are more overvalued right now than they have ever been before in American history. That doesn’t mean that a stock market crash is imminent. In fact, this indicator has been in the “danger zone” for quite some time. But what it does tell us is that stock valuations are more bloated than we have ever seen and that a stock market crash would make perfect sense. So precisely what is the “Buffett Indicator”? Well, it is actually very simple to calculate. You just take the total market value of all stocks and divide it by the gross domestic product. Read More

08.01.18- Fabulously Fake Facts – “G” in GDP Stands for “Gullibility”
David Haggith

While glowing presidential proclamations about US GDP growth last week did nothing to prevent the stock market from rushing headlong over the cusps of a FAANG stock ledge, the market is taking a breather today. So, let’s take a breather and go back and look at why that GDP report had no bite.

Quite simply, I think stock investors looked at the surfacing of real problems in their favorite FAANG stocks and, so, failed this time to find any fun in the frivolous fiction of government factoids. GDP reportage has been fake for years, and it is no less fake under Trump than under any other president. Fake is where you find it. You can find it as much on Fox as on CNN. Read More

07.31.18- This ‘prophet of doom’ predicts stock market will plunge more than 50%
Sue Chang

Hussman sees Nasdaq sinking 57%, Dow tumbling 69%

John Hussman, president of Hussman Investment Trust, describes himself as an economist, a philanthropist, and a “realist optimist often viewed as a prophet of doom” on his Twitter profile. That last bit may be the one investors care about on Monday as the stock market shows signs of unraveling on the back of the tech sector’s stumble.

Hussman’s claim to fame includes forecasting the market collapses of 2000 and 2007-2008. Since then, however, he’s also become known as a permabear for his repeated calls for sharp stock market declines and his oft-repeated mantra of “overbought, overvalued, overbullish” as the bull market continues into its ninth year by some measures. Read More

07.30.18- Is Cryptocurrency ‘The Mother of all Bubbles’? This Visualization Puts Things in Perspective
Raul Amoros

The sheer magnitude of how much money there is in the world can be quite staggering—and hard to understand. What if you could visualize every market in the world as a bubble?

Earlier this year the total U.S. stock market cap surpassed $30 trillion. It then lost more than $1 trillion in a single month. Apple might very well become the first company worth over $1 trillion in the modern era. The U.S. national debt surpassed $21 trillion, and the deficit for next year is expected to add another $1 trillion. But just how big are these numbers? Can we get some perspective? Read More

07.28.18- Big Housing Market Bubble “Pop” Imminent – Already Happening in Key Markets
Birch Gold

The U.S. has enough bumps on the road with mortgages following a similar script to 2008, the unwinding of QE, and the slowly rising “Goldilocks Economy” that’s about to have a hangover.

Well strap in, because housing sales in key markets are all signaling the imminent deflation of a massive housing bubble. And the dangerous thing about this kind of bubble popping is that the effects can last for decades.

The U.S. just went through a long period of low interest rates that fueled demand for housing and inflated housing prices. Read More

07.27.18- Big Stocks Rock NASDAQ as Two FAANGs Bite the Dust
David Haggith

Two of the original FAANG stocks that carried the US stock market higher throughout the Fed’s fake recovery from the Great Recession have revealed in the past week how quickly overpriced, bubblicious stocks can turn on investors and bring a rising index down.

Overnight, Facebook lost $150 billion in value, which was a drop of over 20%, putting the stock, at opening, in its own bear market. By the end of the today’s actual trading (Thursday) the stock had settle at down $119 billion (-19%), which still set a record as the worst corporate crash in the history of the US stock market. Read More

07.26.18- U.S. Trade Wars Enter
Dangerous New Phase
Birch Gold Group

The trade war between the U.S., China, EU and other countries has been heating up for a few months now.

Here are some revelations about this trade war (so far), specific to China:

A trade war will likely help China.
China will fight back vigorously if it keeps escalating.
China has a nuclear option they haven’t used yet.

In spite of these revelations and a host of others, the Trump Administration still insists on pursuing these protectionist measures. But that insistence may now be harboring new consequences. Read More

07.25.18- Will The Impending US Economic Collapse Usher In Socialism?
Avi Gilburt

Benjamin Franklin was purported to have said “that which hurts, also instructs.” Yet, society, as a whole, has a very short memory. Thus, lessons learned through the pain of generations gone by often are quickly forgotten.

We have very few people left worldwide who actually lived through the Great Depression. While I have been told many stories by my grandparents of what it was like to live through the 1930’s and 1940’s, I clearly do not have first-hand experience. Yet, I would assume that I still have a better understanding of that time period than most of the people reading my words today. Read More

07.24.18- All Hell Will Break Loose
With Record Risk
Egon von Greyerz

Financial and precious metals expert Egon von Greyerz (EvG) vaults gold for clients at two secret locations on two continents. EvG is sounding the alarm about record breaking global risk and warns, “With this risk, people have to take insurance. This business is not a business, it is a passion, and I have a passion to help the few people that see the risks. . . . I think your best wealth preservation will be gold.”

In closing, EvG says, “. . . At some point, all hell will break loose. There is no question about it. It could be something very serious coming this autumn. The whole political system is fighting against Trump, and that is going to be tough, very tough. . . . The markets are giving me the signal that things are going to turn in the autumn, and you can easily find a number of catalysts for this to happen.” Read More

07.23.18- The Economy is Cracking Up. Are You?
David Haggith

Economic cracks big enough to drive a car industry into are opening up all over the globe. Trade gaps are opening up between major allies. Widening spreads between the dollar and other currencies are shredding emerging markets. As we start into summer, these cracks and several others described below have become big enough to get everyone’s attention, just as I said last year would become the situation.

I had, as readers here know, predicted the same for last summer but revised my timing to this summer after Trump was elected and the hope for tax cuts lit on fire one of the world’s greatest stock rallies. Those tax cuts are also creating another rapidly rising gap between government revenue and government spending. Read More

07.21.18- The Returning Specter of “Stagflation” is Haunting the U.S. Economy
Peter Reagan

Generally, you need three ingredients for stagflation: high unemployment, high inflation, and slow (or slowing) economic growth.

We currently have, or are nearing, all three of these criteria.

And the U.S. has been here before, with stagflation dominating the economy from 1973 to (at least) 1979. But this time, the underlying circumstances are different.

Let’s start with growth… Read More

07.20.18- Weekend Rant: Will Politics Decide The Future of The Financial Markets?
Chris Marcus

Does it ever feel like the financial markets have become heavily intertwined with the current political arena? Where in many cases natural supply and demand have become irrelevant, and instead asset prices often revolve around the latest gossip about potential Fed or government actions.

Unfortunately today’s markets have evolved to the point where the latest political decree can significantly impact what happens. And along those lines, there’s been ample speculation that the powers that be may be planning a financial reset. With many feeling that gold and silver will be reset higher, while perhaps much of the global debt is somehow cancelled out (keep in mind U.S. president Donald Trump does have extensive experience with the bankruptcy code). Read More

07.19.18- Pay Attention Moment- Time to wake up from your Summer Slumber
Plunger

The economies of the world are at an inflection point. Enough data points have now presented themselves to be able to see the outlines of a major shift in the markets of the world. We are at a pay attention moment. There comes a time when a successful investor must make some hard decisions to position himself to be able to take advantage of opportunities down the road. The markets are telling us now is such a moment.

It’s time to sit up and pay attention to what Mr. Market is trying to tell us. Read More

07.18.18- We Need A Law,
And Kudlow Needs To HANG
Karl Denninger

I'm tired of this horse**** and those who promulgate it and then cause the nation to self-destruct, along with intentionally blowing asset bubbles through this policy that destroys the lives of millions, need to have that behavior defined as a death-sentence felony with punishment to be meted out by public hanging.

Kudlow once again ran the same crap he ran during the Reagan years about "supply-side" tax cuts, admitting that they boosted deficits (duh) but trying to argue they were akin to a business investment and would be recovered through higher growth. Read More

07.17.18- Introducing Mike Maloney's Market Fragility Index: What It’s Saying Now
Jeff Clark

A funny thing happened in the middle of one of Mike Maloney's deep-research sessions recently. As you know, he just released a brand new presentation, but while analyzing the stock market he wasn't satisfied with the way most valuation measures were calculated. With all due respect to Warren Buffet, even his indicator fell short in Mike’s view. It was time for something new, something more insightful, something more accurate.

Mike’s refusal to settle for “good enough” culminated in his own metric: the Market Fragility Index. Here’s your peek into this brand new economic indicator, found in Part II of his 5-part Early Warning Report… Read More

07.16.18- 15 Flashpoints That Could Produce A "Perfect Storm" In H2 2018
Michael Snyder

Events are beginning to greatly accelerate, and many believe that the ingredients for a “perfect storm” are starting to come together as we enter the second half of 2018.

Other than the continual drama surrounding the Trump presidency, things have been quite calm for the past couple of years. We have been enjoying a time of peace, safety and relative economic prosperity that a lot of Americans have begun to take for granted. But great trouble has been brewing under the surface, and many are wondering if we are about to reach a major turning point. Our planet is being shaken physically, emotionally and financially, and it isn’t going to take much to push us over the edge. Read More

07.14.18- “I Don’t Know About You,
but I’m Worried”
Brian Maher

“What trade war?” asked an Op-Ed writer in Tuesday’s Washington Post, triumphantly.

“Investors on Monday continued shrugging off fears that President Trump’s escalation of trade hostilities will put a dent in share prices.”

We almost pity the poor fellow — all that egg he had scrape from his face.

The Dow Jones tumbled 219 trade-warring points yesterday — and once again turned negative on the year. Read More

07.13.18- The Market Gods Are Laughing
Bill Bonner

President Trump escalated the trade war yesterday, making a kamikaze attack on a vast armada of Chinese imports – $200 billion in total – headed for California.

The Chinese say they will retaliate.

Phony Wars

Last month, we opined that the trade war wouldn’t go any better than Vietnam… or Iraq… or any of the feds’ other phony wars – against drugs, poverty, or terrorists.Read More

07.12.18- Mass Stupidity Plagues Zombie Markets and Zombie Journalists
David Haggith

“Asian markets rallied on Monday, extending their gains at the end of last week, following another strong US jobs report that reinforced confidence in the US economy and helped settle trade war nerves.” (Newsmax)

So the majority of investors in Asia (and in the US) see the latest COMPLETELY MEDIOCRE AT BEST jobs report as assurance that trade wars are not going to impact the US economy.

Really? Read More

07.11.18- Here’s Where the Next Crisis Starts
Jim Rickards

So many credit crises are brewing, it’s hard to keep track without a scorecard.

The mother of all credit crises is coming to China with over a quarter-trillion dollars owed by insolvent banks and state-owned enterprises, not to mention off-the-books liabilities of provincial governments, wealth management products and developers of white elephant infrastructure projects.

Then there’s the emerging-markets credit crisis, with Turkey and Argentina leading a parade of potentially bankrupt borrowers vulnerable to hot money capital outflows and a slowdown of growth in developing economies. Read More

07.10.18- The Great Reset
Monetary Metals

Before it collapsed, the city of Rome had a population greater than 1,000,000 people. That was an extraordinary accomplishment in the ancient world, made possible by many innovative technologies and the organization of the greatest civilization that the world had ever seen. Such an incredible urban population depended on capital accumulated over centuries. But the Roman Empire squandered this capital, until it was no longer sufficient to sustain the city (we are aware the story is more complicated than this).

After the collapse, the population fell to about 8,000 people. Some fled and arrived at safe places, but surely most perished. Read More

07.09.18- Experts Warn Of Chaos For The U.S. Economy As China Declares That “The Biggest Trade War In Economic History” Has Begun
Michael Snyder

Nothing is going to be the same after this. On Friday, the United States hit China with 34 billion dollars in tariffs, and China immediately responded with similar tariffs. If it stopped there, this trade war between the United States and China would not be catastrophic for the global economy. But it isn’t going to stop there. Donald Trump is already talking about hitting China with an additional 500 billion dollars in tariffs, which would essentially cover pretty much everything that China exports to the U.S. in a typical year. The Chinese have accused Trump of starting “the biggest trade war in economic history”, and they are pledging to fight for as long as it takes. Read More

07.07.18- 70% Stock Market Crash
to Strike August 1, Economist Warns
Jeff Yastine

Several noted economists and distinguished investors are warning of a stock market crash.

For example, former budget director for the Reagan White House, David Stockman recently raised a red flag when he declared an economic collapse is imminent. He went on to say: “There surely is a doozy just around the bend.”

Scott Minerd, Chairman of Investments and Global Chief Investment Officer of Guggenheim Partners, warns: “The markets are potentially on a collision course for disaster … once we reach a peak we’ll probably see a 40% retracement in equities.” Read More

07.06.18- Inflation Rearing Its Ugly Head
Alasdair Macleod

The world of finance and investment, as always, faces many uncertainties. The US economy is booming, say some, and others warn that money supply growth has slowed, raising fears of impending deflation. We fret about the banks, with a well-known systemically-important European name in difficulties. We worry about the disintegration of the Eurozone, with record imbalances and a significant member, Italy, digging in its heels. China’s stock market, we are told, is now officially in bear market territory. Will others follow? But there is one thing that’s so far been widely ignored and that’s inflation. Read More

07.05.18- We Are Witnessing Unusual Stock Market Behavior That Is Unlike Anything That We Have Seen Since 2008
Michael Snyder

We have not seen Wall Street this jumpy since just before the great financial crisis of 2008. As I have explained so many times before, when the waters are calm and there is low volatility, markets tend to go up. And when the waters are choppy and volatility starts to spike, markets tend to go down. That is why the behavior that we have been witnessing from investors during the first two quarters of 2018 is so alarming. A high level of market turnover is often a sign of big trouble ahead, and according to Bloomberg our financial markets “are churning at the fastest rate since 2008″…Read More

07.04.18- Holiday Rant: The Fourth of July Has Nothing to Do with the Military
Laurence M. Vance

The Fourth of July is supposed to be celebrated as Independence Day—the day when the thirteen American colonies officially dissolved the political bands that connected them with Great Britain. As the Declaration of Independence concludes:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. Read More

07.03.18- The Perfect Double Cross
Ted Butler

For the past few weeks, I’ve been intensely focused on what I believe to be a double cross in COMEX gold futures by JPMorgan of other trading entities, particularly other commercial participants. I would define the double cross as JPMorgan positioning itself so flawlessly so as to be nearly perfect in its execution, including the avoidance of any widespread knowledge of what has occurred. After all, a double cross always includes the element of surprise and this one promises to be a doozy. Read More

07.02.18- Emerging Market Crisis Spreads To The Core, Central Banks Face Catch-22
John Rubino

One of the things giving “data-driven” central banks wiggle room on their pledge to tighten monetary policy is the fact there are several definitions of inflation.

In the US the thing most people think of as inflation is the consumer price index, or CPI, which is now running comfortably above the Fed’s target. But the Fed prefers the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, which tends to paint a less inflationary picture. And within the PCE universe, core PCE, which strips out energy and food, is the data series that actually motivates Fed action. Read More

06.30.16- Epocalypse Ahead on Highway to Hell for Global Economy and US Stock Market
David Haggith

First I said I believed the US stock market would plunge in January, but I also said that January would not be the biggest drop, but just the first plunge that begins a global economic collapse: the big trouble for the economy and the stock market, I said, would show up in “early summer.” That’s when the stock market crash that began in January would take its second big leg down, and global economic cracks would become big enough that few could deny them. Read More

06.29.18- The stock market is days away from setting a bearish record
Ryan Vlastelica

The Dow and S&P 500 are 10 trading days away from their longest corrections since 1984

The U.S. stock market is a few days from hitting a notable milestone, but it isn’t one that investors will feel particularly good about.

Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.93% and the S&P 500 SPX, +0.64% have been mired in correction territory for months, ever since Feb. 8, when concerns that inflation was returning to the economy sparked a selloff that led to their dropping 10% from record levels hit earlier in the year. Read More

06.28.18- What’s the Yield Curve?
Matt Phillips

‘A Powerful Signal of Recessions’ Has Wall Street’s Attention

You can try to play down a trade war with China. You can brush off the impact of rising oil prices on corporate earnings.

But if you’re in the business of making economic predictions, it has become very difficult to disregard an important signal from the bond market.

The so-called yield curve is perilously close to predicting a recession — something it has done before with surprising accuracy — and it’s become a big topic on Wall Street. Read More

06.27.18- The battle lines are being drawn between gold and fiat as the new global
financial system draws nearer
Daily Economist

We have written numerous times before about how the East is preparing for a return to some form of a gold standard while the West tries to hang on to a dying system of debt based fiat currency. And with the heads of the IMF and Bank of England are both signalling that the world is well underway towards the transition to a new global financial system, the battle lines are being drawn as to which side will win out.

Ironically it is not completely divided between East and West, as a few European governments have been hedging their bets by repatriating their gold from offshore over the past few years. But the race to accumulate gold has been primarily relegated to a few countries such as Russia, China, India, and Turkey, where combined they hold very powerful 'Trump Cards' as their economies, and along with the rest of the BRICS nations, make up 40% of the world's population. Read More

06.26.18- REVEALED: A Shocking S&P Prediction
Brian Maher

In August — if the gods are kind — this bull market will become the longest in modern history.

The “Great Expansion” from November 1990–March 2000 holds the current, jeopardized record.

But how much longer can the show run?

And how much higher can the S&P rise before the black curtain falls?

Today we go crystal-gazing… steal a forbidden glimpse of the future… and report a bizarre vision. Read More

06.25.18- The End Of the (Monetary)
World As We Know It
Christoph Grizzard

The most significant event in monetary history since 1971 occurred last week. An event that threatens to upend the global balance of power, the economy of the world, and your portfolio.

To understand the significance of this event and the potential scale of its consequences, a little monetary history is in order.

For at least 5000 years, gold and silver have been considered intrinsically valuable, and therefore have been used as a store of wealth and as money. Governments and societies throughout time have used actual silver or gold as their coined currencies. Read More

06.23.18- Ike Was Right!
Bill Bonner

We wait for the world to fall apart.

The Dow is still more than 1,000 points below its high; so we presume the primary trend is down. Treasury yields – on the 10-year note – are near 3%… twice what they were two years ago. So we presume the primary trend for bonds is down, too.

If we’re right, we are at the beginning of a long slide… down, down, down… into chaos, destitution, and destruction.

Our working hypothesis is that General Eisenhower was right. Read More

06.22.18- Sane People Absolutely Know Better!
Gary Christianson

Most sane individuals believe these basic truths.

We cannot borrow our way out of debt.
We cannot spend our way into prosperity.
We cannot tax ourselves into wealth.

We trust sane individuals also understand the following.

We can’t fix an excessive debt problem with more debt. (Central bankers disagree…)
We can’t support a more expensive military and federal government with a decreasing work force, massive debt and weak economy. (Governments disagree…)
Unbacked paper money always returns to its intrinsic value – zero. (Most of the world lives in denial.) Read More

06.21.18- Markets Confront Shocking Paradox
Brian Maher

“Can a tightening be considered effective if financial conditions… ease?”

Claudio Borio, head of the Bank for International Settlements’ Monetary and Economic Department, here poses a thumping question.

The Federal Reserve bumped interest rates 0.25% one week ago today — its seventh rate hike since 2015.

The Fed is also hard at the business of quantitative tightening.

It has unloaded $112 billion of maturing bonds since it began last October. Read More

06.20.19- Bullish, at All Costs: Why Wall St. Bankers Lie to You All the Time
Frank Holmes

Wall St. banks primarily exist to enrich their executives, to make as much money as them as they can. If that behavior should happen to make money for shareholders, that’s a positive side effect, as it can help these executives keep their jobs for as long as possible, enabling them to enrich themselves to the greatest possible extent.

Aiding and abetting each other and the publicly traded companies they do business with is a big part of the job. It is requisite that they pretend to always be bullish on the market, to always maintain the public line that it is a great time to invest, to put more money at risk. Read More

06.19.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Study Confirms Most Psychopaths Live in Washington D.C.
Joe Jarvis

Murphy also included the District of Columbia in his research, and found it had a psychopathy level far higher than any other state. But this finding is an outlier, as Murphy notes, as it’s an entirely urban area and cannot be fairly compared with larger, more geographically diverse, US states. That said, as Murphy notes, “The presence of psychopaths in District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture found in Murphy (2016) that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere.”

Surprised? I didn’t think so. But still, fun to get some scientific confirmation. Read More

06.18.18- "The Global Bond Curve Just Inverted": Why JPM Thinks A Market Crash May Be Imminent
Tyler Durden

At the beginning of April, JPMorgan's Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou pointed out something unexpected: in a time when everyone was stressing out over the upcoming inversion in the Treasury yield curve, the JPM analyst showed that the forward curve for the 1-month US OIS rate, a proxy for the Fed policy rate, had already inverted after the two-year forward point. In other words, while cash instruments had yet to officially invert, the market had already priced this move in. Read More

06.16.18- The West Line Is Telling Us
Where We Are Headed
Tom Chatham

The west line theory states that the shipping center of the world moves in a westward direction slowly over the centuries. It started in the mid east and has moved west through the Mediterranean, Europe, North America and now sits over Asia. A shipping center usually implies a production center as well giving that area great wealth. The U.S. was the previous shipping and production center in the world. We now find ourselves on the back end of prosperity and all that it entails.

We are not the first nation to find ourselves in this position. Those nations that came before us had to deal with a slower, smaller economy following the westward shift of the line. We must now do so as well. Read More

06.15.18- All US Homes Are Overvalued
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

My long time pal Jesse Colombo, now at Real Investment Advice, recently linked on Twitter to a Zero Hedge article, which quoted CoreLogic as saying more than half of American homes are overvalued. CoreLogic calls itself “a leading provider of consumer, financial and property data, analytics and services to business and government.”

Well, CoreLogic is way off. All American homes are overvalued. How can we tell? It’s easy. It’s so easy it’s perhaps no wonder that people overlook the reasons why. But we all know them: The Fed has pushed some $20 trillion down the throats of the financial system. It has also lowered interest rates to near zero Kelvin. Read More

06.14.18- What's Wrong with the Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics
Charles Hugh Smith

Beneath the surface signals of an eternally rising stock market and expanding GDP, we all sense something is deeply, systemically wrong with the U.S. economy. These nine structural dynamics generate secondary dynamics, all of which are toxic to social mobility, sustainable prosperity, accountability and democracy:

1. The financialization of the economy, which transformed services, credit, risk and labor into commodities that could be traded globally. Financialization generates enormously asymmetric returns: those with access to low-cost credit, global markets and expertise in finance collect the lion's share of gains in income and wealth. Read More

06.13.18- "If You Ever Needed Proof That Central Banks Have Crushed These Markets,
There You Have It"
Richard Breslow

It's been a while since we featured the grouchy version of Richard Breslow, Bloomberg's "Trader's Notes" author, who is back with a bang with his latest missive, explaining why "Ignoring Current Events Just Makes You a Slave" and why the mockery of centrally-planned "markets" has gone on long enough...

This was billed as the most important week of the year for global markets. And we made it almost through Monday before “exhausted” traders were being advised to shuffle back to their safe rooms to get lost in watching the upcoming soccer matches. Boo hoo. Read More

06.12.18- The Volcano of Debt
Craig Hemke

Just as gravity propels the lava from Kilauea inexorably toward the sea, a mountain of public and private debt looms over today's markets.

Earlier this week, the Boards of Trustees for both U.S. Social Security and Medicare released their latest updates on the "solvency" of the programs. The advisories can be read here:https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM/index.html

Though it's common knowledge that these programs are vastly underfunded, the degree to which the pending crisis is accelerating should come as a shock to all Americans. Read More

06.11.18- Consumer Spending Contraction: Two Charts That Horrify Keynesians
Dave Kranzler

“While the decline in housing activity has been significant and will probably continue for a while longer, I think the concerns we used to hear about the possibility of a devastating collapse—one that might be big enough to cause a recession in the U.S. economy—have been largely allayed…” – Janet Yellen 1/22/07

The propaganda is always laid on the heaviest just ahead of The Fall. The employment report showing sub-4%, with nearly 96 million working age people not considered part of the labor Force, is possibly the penultimate fabrication. Read More

06.09.18- The US Government Will Destroy the Dollar, Because It’s the Only Option Left
MN Gordon

Once you realize that there is no solution to the government’s debt death spiral, it’s only natural to wonder why so few people seem to realize or care that this is the case.

If you’re doing well right now, what else really matters? The stock market seems to be on a bizarro perpetual escalator to neverending prosperity, despite rafts of economic fundamentals that paint a portrait of debt-bloated, weak economy, oceans of free debt have been available for years on end to fund lifestyles well beyond earned means, and so long as one has sufficient exposure to risk assets, why bother worrying about big-picture insolvencies that are still years away? Read More

06.08.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: It’s official... Medicare trust fund will run out of money in 8 years
Simon Black

Two days ago the respective Boards of Trustees for Medicare and Social Security released their annual reports for 2018.

As usual, the numbers are pretty gruesome... and the reports plainly stated what we’ve been talking about for years: the trust funds for both Social Security and Medicare are going to run out of money.

Soon.

In the case of Medicare, the Trustees project that its largest trust fund will be fully depleted in 2026, just eight years away. In the context of retirement, that’s right around the corner. Read More

06.07.18- The Three Crises That Will Synchronize a Global Meltdown by 2025
Charles Hugh Smith

We’re going to get a synchronized global dynamic, but it won’t be “growth” and stability, it will be DeGrowth and instability.

To understand the synchronized global meltdown that is on tap for the 2021-2025 period, we must first stipulate the relationship of “money” to energy: “money” is nothing more than a claim on future energy. If there’s no energy available to fuel the global economy, “money” will have little value.

The conventional economists assure us that energy is now a small part of the overall economy, so fluctuations in energy prices will have a limited effect on global prosperity. But what’s left of global prosperity when energy is unable to meet current demand at any price that consumers can afford? Read More

06.06.18- The Dead Cat Bounce in the US Dollar is OVER
Graham Summers

It never fails.

Any time the $USD begins to rally, even a little bit, the deflationists come out in full force proclaiming that it’s the start of some major bull market that will blow up the financial system.

Take this latest bounce in the $USD.

Having staged one of the worst annual returns in years in 2017 (down over 14%), the $USD was BEYOND oversold. Throw in the fact that traders were RECORD short the $USD and record long the Euro, and the stage was set for a $USD bounce. Read More

06.05.18- Three critical lessons from Europe’s recent mini-meltdown
Simon Black

Trying to trace the origins of the latest political crisis in Italy is like… well… trying to trace the origins of the decline of the Roman Empire.

There simply is no good starting point.

You can’t talk about the decline of Rome without a lengthy discussion of how destructive Diocletian’s Edict on Wages and Prices was in the early 4th century.

But you’d have to go further back than that and discuss all the lunatic emperors preceding him, all the way back to Caligula. Read More

06.04.18- The Reality and Consequences of the U.S. Economic Blind Spot
Birch Gold Group

In our recent “U.S. economic blind spot” article, we explored what the economic blind spot is. Now it’s time to examine the world events surrounding it, and the potential those news brings.

Our first stop is Iran. Recent trade sanctions against Iran might be the last straw for other countries who’ve tolerated U.S. protectionist policies that maintain the dollar’s dominance as central reserve currency.

Secretary of State (and former CIA director) Mike Pompeo has already stated the U.S. intends to “crush Iran” with trade sanctions. Read More

06.02.18- History Is Clear, Central Banks Fail To Assure Economic Stability
Richard M. Ebeling

The world has been plagued with periodic bouts of the economic rollercoaster of booms and busts, inflations and recessions, especially during the last one hundred years. The main culprits responsible for these destabilizing and disruptive episodes have been governments and their central banks. They have monopolized the control of their respective nation’s monetary and banking systems, and mismanaged them. There is really nowhere else to point other than in their direction.

Yet, to listen to some prominent and respected writers on these matters, government has been the stabilizer and free markets have been the disturber of economic order. A recent instance of this line of reasoning is a short article by Robert Skidelsky on “Why Reinvent the Monetary Wheel?” Read More

06.01.18- A Nervous Market Gets Skittish in Its Prelude to Downside Stampede
Frank Holmes

If you’ve never seen an out-and-out cattle stampede in person, it’s difficult to convey the power and the dynamics that drive it. But I’ll try.

First, you get a general sense of restlessness in the herd. The cattle snort, get jumpy, sway their heads…they’re nervous, and none of them are really sure why, except the rest of them seem to be nervous too. Which makes them all more nervous. Which makes them more agitated.

Then little pockets of cattle will start to lurch, move quickly, but not much, in one direction. They all get skittish, trying to figure out if this is really going to happen or not. The noise increases. You can almost feel the heat rise as the stress levels rise. Read More

05.31.18- The Threat of Contagion
Jim Rickards

Each crisis is bigger than the one before. In complex dynamic systems such as capital markets, risk is an exponential function of system scale. Increasing market scale correlates with exponentially larger market collapses.

This means that the larger size of the system implies a future global liquidity crisis and market panic far larger than the Panic of 2008.

Today, systemic risk is more dangerous than ever. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, have a larger percentage of the total assets of the banking system and have much larger derivatives books. Read More

05.30.18- Death of the Great Recovery Part 3: Housing Collapse 2.0 Has Begun
David Haggith

It’s simple math — an equal and opposite reaction. After a long spell of QE took mortgage interest down to the lowest it has ever been, a long spell of QT (quantitative tightening) is going to take it back up again. That’s why I forecasted another housing collapse with confidence last year:

Rising mortgage rates will certainly cause housing sales to fall. Prices will follow for those houses that have to sell because, as mortgage interest rises, people won’t qualify for as large a mortgage as they do now. It’s all part of the developing Epocalypse in which multiple industries collapse into the final depths of the Great Recession as the fake recovery fades out of existence like a mirage. Read More

05.29.18- A Spiking Dollar =
Emerging Market Chaos
John Rubino

The dollar collapse thesis – which ends with all fiat currencies achieving their intrinsic value of zero — doesn’t preclude some thrills and chills along the way, in which some currencies fall faster than others and wreak havoc on various parts of the global economy.

This might be one of those times, as instability in the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Latin America sends worried capital pouring into the US, pushing the dollar up from its recent lows: Read More

05.28.18- Record Mortgage Refinancing –
The Next Sound You Hear May Be “Pop!”
Birch Gold Group

With average incomes in the U.S. generally remaining flat, simple math says when mortgage rates get high enough, the market will have to correct.

Believe it or not, cash-out refis now represent a whopping 36% of total mortgage applications.

And borrowers are not refinancing to get a “lower rate,” but instead to get cash out from the equity in their home to pay for living expenses and to pay down higher interest consumer debt. Read More

05.26.18- This Is The End Of The Euro
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

The Spanish government is about to fall after the Ciudadanos party decided to join PSOE (socialist) and Podemos in a non-confidence vote against PM Rajoy. Hmm, what would that mean for the Catalan politicians Rajoy is persecuting? The Spanish political crisis is inextricably linked to the Italian one, not even because they are so much alike, but because both combine to create huge financial uncertainty in the eurozone.

Sometimes it takes a little uproar to reveal the reality behind the curtain. Read More

05.25.18- The Relevance Of Hayek’s Triangle Today
Alasdair Macleod

Most of us are aware of the inflationary pressures in the major economies, that so far are proving somewhat latent in the non-financial sector. But some central banks are on the alert as well, notably the Federal Reserve Board, which has taken the lead in trying to normalise interest rates. Others, such as the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England are yet to be convinced that price inflation is a potential problem.

Virtually no one in the central banks, government treasury departments, or independent analysts see the real inflationary danger. Read More

05.24.18- Economic Collapse Isn’t Coming To America – It’s Already Here
Daisy Luther

“nearly half of the families in America are struggling to pay for…economic collapse isn’t just “coming.” It’s HERE.”

You know all those reports about how lots of Americans can’t afford a $1000 surprise expense like a medical bill or a car repair? Well, forget additional expenses. It turns out that nearly half of the families in America are struggling to pay for food and rent. And that means that the economic collapse isn’t just “coming.” It’s HERE.

United Way has done a study on a group of Americans they call ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. The study found that this group does not make the money needed “to survive in the modern economy.” Read More

05.23.18- 77 Million Square Feet Of Retail Space And Counting – America’s Retail Apocalypse Is Spiraling Out Of Control In 2018
Michael Snyder

In 2017 we absolutely shattered the all-time record for retail store closings in a single year, and this year it looks like we are going to shatter the record once again. In fact, there are some that are projecting that up to 9,000 retail stores could close by the time that we get to the end of this calendar year. Already, the amount of retail space that has shut down is simply jaw-dropping. If you total up all of the retail store closings that have been announced so far in 2018, it accounts for 77 million square feet of retail space. Let that number sink in for a bit. Many shopping centers and strip malls around the country already have a post-apocalyptic feel to them, and more “space available” signs are going up with each passing day. Read More

05.22.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: When Things Fall Apart: A Graduation Message for a Dark Age
John W. Whitehead

“When the rivers and air are polluted, when families and nations are at war, when homeless wanderers fill the highways, these are the traditional signs of a dark age.”— Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Those coming of age today will face some of the greatest obstacles ever encountered by young people. They will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Read More

05.21.18- The Global Economic Tide is
Quickly Receding
Paul Craig Roberts

The global economy is now stranded as the central-bank tide runs out. By the end of this year, the collective monetary inflow from all the central banks of the world, which rose to a high-water mark of $2-trillion per year, will have ebbed to zero. After that, it runs net negative for years to come.

One can sense the effects of this tidal change in how we have moved from enthusiastic talk of “synchronized global growth” at the start of the year to clear realization everywhere that such growth ended as quickly as it began. January turned out to be peak high tide on all the shores of the world. Read More

05.19.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Beyond Hegemony And A Liberal International Order
Gordon Adams

America’s place in the world is experiencing an historic turning point. All the mumbo-jumbo about being the “exceptional” and “indispensable” nation, the natural “leader” of something called the “West,” the guarantor of some kind of international system of “rules” is finally being cast into the dustbin of history.

This moment is not just about leaving the Iran nuclear agreement, or even the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate agreement. It is not simply attributable to the unpredictable, childish impulses of the current president. Nor is it the result of Obama’s failure to enforce a red line in Syria, or “leading from behind” in Libya. It is not even about Bush’s invasion of Iraq with the goal of regime change, setting in motion the destruction of what political stability existed in the Middle East. Read More

05.18.18- New Trade Friction May Disrupt U.S. Dollar’s Dominance in Global Markets
Peter Reagan

Sometimes it feels like the U.S. drinks a little bit too much of their own “dollar domination Kool-Aid.”

It seems like the U.S. assumes foreign countries will just keep storing the bulk of their forex reserves in the greenback. And as a result, the country keeps running deficits and borrowing cheap money year after year.

But now, as the U.S. invokes different measures of protectionism, and tensions build while the U.S threatens to pull out of NAFTA completely, it may be time to put that assumption to rest. Read More

05.17.18- It gets worse: Tesla now has to compete with $50,000 electric BMWs going for $54/month
Simon Black

As if things weren’t bad enough for beleaguered Tesla…

The company lost $1.1 billion in cash in the last quarter, executives are leaving the company in droves, it’s facing production issues with its Model 3 and, as I recently discussed, Elon Musk insulted analysts on the latest earnings call by dismissing their questions – regarding the company’s survival – as “boring” and “boneheaded,” (just after shareholders approved his obscenely large pay package).

Now, in addition to all that, the company has to compete with BMW leasing its $50,000 i3 electric vehicle for only $54 a month. That’s not a typo. Bloomberg recently confirmed you could lease an i3 for less than your monthly cable bill. Read More

05.16.18- What Happens If Other Investors Start Thinking Like “Bond King” Jeffrey Gundlach?
Chris Marcus

In recent months the wave of sovereign gold repatriation has continued as Turkey and Hungary have been added to the list of nations requesting their gold back. But now the interest in gold is even spreading into the mainstream investment fund sector, as recently “Bond King” Jeffrey Gundlach has added himself to the list of investors who are bullish on gold.

Perhaps the real surprise is that it has taken as long as it has. Because while there has been demand on a sovereign level, especially from nations like China, India, and Russia, the general Wall Street opinion of the precious metals sector has not been favorable in recent years. Read More

05.15.18- Even the Official, Heavily Massaged Inflation Measure is Now at 2.5%
Graham Summers

This is getting downright silly.

If you want any evidence that the Powers That Be are doing everything they can to mask the real rate of inflation, you don’t need to look any further than the CPI data released on Thursday.

While energy, housing, healthcare, and numerous other prices are exploding higher, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) somehow managed to claim that inflation only rose a measly 0.2% in April.

They were able to do this because used car prices and airfares dropped.Yes, those two issues somehow eclipsed the rise in healthcare expenses, energy prices, housing prices, and even food prices. Read More

05.14.18- Behold The Sudden Stop. Risk of Emerging Markets Collapse
Daniel Lacalle

The recent collapse of the Argentine Peso and other emerging currencies is more than a warning sign.

It could be the arrival of a “sudden stop”. As I explain in Escape from the Central Bank Trap (BEP, 2017), a sudden stop happens when the extraordinary and excessive flow of cheap US dollars into emerging markets suddenly reverses and funds return to the U.S. looking for safer assets. The central bank “carry trade” of low interest rates and abundant liquidity was used to buy “growth” and “inflation-linked” assets in emerging markets. Read More

05.12.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Time To Choose
Chris Martenson

Will you be an agent of depletion or regeneration?

There’s a vast revolution underway. And it’s time to pick sides.

Your choice couldn't be more critically important. Quite possibly, the entire fate of the human species hangs in the balance.

It's time to decide: Will you be an agent of depletion or regeneration?

For many centuries, humans have consumed the natural resources around them at a rate far faster than the planet can replenish. Until recently this didn't pose an existential problem, as fresh deposits could be tapped through the discovery of new continents or development of new technologies. Read More

05.11.18- Meet America’s next pension casualty: the inventor of chocolate sprinkles
Simon Black

In 1923, a young Jewish immigrant from a small town in modern-day Ukraine founded a candy company in Brooklyn, New York that he called “Just Born”.

His name was Samuel Bernstein. And if you enjoy chocolate sprinkles or the hard, chocolate coating around ice cream bars, you can thank Bernstein– he invented them.

Nearly 100 years later, the company is still a family-owned business, producing some well-known brands like Peeps and Hot Tamales.

But business conditions in the Land of the Free have changed quite dramatically since Samuel Bernstein founded the company in 1923. Read More

05.10.18- The Donald's Fabulous Fiscal Folly And Wall Street's Wile E. Coyote Moment
David Stockman

There has never been a more fiscally clueless team at the top than the Donald and his dimwitted Treasury secretary, Simple Steve Mnuchin. After reading the latter's recent claim that financing Uncle Sam's impending trillion dollar deficits will be a breeze, we now understand how he sat on the Board of Sears for 10-years and never noticed that the company was going bankrupt.

In any event, fixing to borrow upwards of $1.2 trillion in FY 2019, Simple Steve apparently didn't get the memo about the Fed's unfolding QT campaign and the fact that it will be draining cash from the bond pits at a $600 billion annual rate by October. After all, no one who can do third-grade math would expect that the bond market can "easily handle" what will in effect be $1.8 trillion of homeless USTs: Read More

05.09.18- The World's Biggest Hedge Fund Derisks Massively, Goes Short Stocks
Tyler Durden

Early in 2018, we detailed Bridgewater's massive short bet against Europe, peaking at a record total short against the EU's biggest companies of around $22 billion. At the time we noted that, since Bridgewater is not known for picking individual stocks, the manager’s position was the result of a view on the wider economy according to James Helliwell, chief investment strategist of the Lex van Dam Trading Academy.

"Whilst the extent to which it may be an outright short bet is uncertain, I suspect that it was seen as a relatively cheap hedge against existing global equity exposure." Read More

05.08.18- The Dreaded "S-word" Threatens a Return
Brian Maher

A fearsome bogeyman may be stalking the American economy…

Dormant for decades, many considered it permanently licked.

But some have picked up its grisly scent… and discovered its approaching footprints.

What is this fee-fi-fo-fum?

And why its possible return?

Today we investigate the reports… weigh the evidence… and hazard a judgment. Read More

05.07.18- Stocks Perfectly Poised to Plummet Past Point of No Return
David Haggith

We are now well into the year when I said stocks would plunge in January and would prove to be a gaping “crack” in the economy by summer, and look at how seriously the market has fallen apart since it started to drop in the last week of January:

It was just three months ago that stock-market investors were being swept up by a euphoria pinned to the idea of economic expansion taking hold harmoniously across the globe—a dynamic that hadn’t occurred since the 1980s, and one that was expected to extend into 2018. Read More

05.05.18- You can now use Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin to buy and sell Gold and Silver
Koos Jansen

BullionStar is pleased to announce that it has added Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin as transactional currencies for both buy and sell orders on the BullionStar website.

Many BullionStar customers are already be familiar with using Bitcoin when buying and selling gold, silver and platinum bars and coins, as BullionStar has been accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment since May 2014. BullionStar was one of the first bullion dealers worldwide to offer customers the ability to buy and sell physical precious metals using Bitcoin. Now with the addition of Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, BullionStar is again one of the first bullion dealers in the world to offer customers the ability to transact in these other leading cryptocurrencies for both buy and sell orders.Read More

05.04.18- Capitalism has new rules. And they’re seriously messed up.
Simon Black

It was just a month and a half ago that Tesla approved an eye-popping long-term pay package, worth as much as $50 BILLION to founder and CEO Elon Musk.

And on Wednesday afternoon, Tesla held its first corporate earnings call since then.

You’d think that Elon would have been gracious and professional, anxious to demonstrate that the shareholders’ trust in him has been well-placed.

Instead the call was filled with contempt and disrespect, with Elon outright refusing to answer questions that he deemed ‘boring’. Read More

05.03.18- One Of Two Things Is About To Happen Now That We’ve Reached ‘Debt Saturation’
Bill Holter

It Is “Debt Saturation” Plain And Simple!

I have tried to explain this concept many times before but never had a chart to do it with. Please note the start date of the chart is 1971, this is not by any coincidence as that was the year the U.S. dollar became fully fiat and backed by nothing but “faith”. Before getting started, it is important to understand what August 15, 1971 really meant and why Nixon took us off the gold standard. The obvious is because with France and other nations demanding conversion of dollars into our gold, it would have only been a few short years before our stockpile was completely depleted. Read More

05.02.18- What Lies Beyond Capitalism And Socialism?
Charles Hugh Smith

The status quo, in all its various forms, is dominated by incentives that strengthen the centralization of wealth and power.

As longtime readers know, my work aims to 1) explain why the status quo -- the socio-economic-political system we inhabit -- is unsustainable, divisive, and doomed to collapse under its own weight and 2) sketch out an alternative Mode of Production/way of living that is sustainable, consumes far less resources while providing for the needs of the human populace -- not just for our material daily bread but for positive social roles, purpose, hope, meaning and opportunity, needs that are by and large ignored or marginalized in the current system. Read More

05.01.18- Here's The Largest Export of Every State in the U.S. for 2017
Jeff Desjardins

Last year, the U.S. exported $2.3 trillion worth of goods to international customers.

The country’s main exports are exactly what one would expect, with categories like aircraft, refined petroleum, vehicles, vehicle parts, and computer chips constituting the biggest chunk of overall goods.

However, today’s infographic from HowMuch.net zooms down to the state level, where things get much more interesting. Some states tow the line by exporting one of the major U.S. goods, while others specialize in categories that you probably couldn’t ever guess. Read More

04.30.18- Entertain a Clown and You Become Part of the Circus
Doug “Uncola” Lynn

If I were the devil, I would desire the most efficient system of governance whereby maximum control could be exerted over the greatest amount of people at any given time. I would identify those who stood in my way and take them down either by force or subversion. There would be no room in my world for individuality, free thought, or vain imaginings of anything, or anyone, more powerful than me. As an orchestrator of chaos, the only unity I could tolerate would be that which served both my means and ends.

Without a doubt, divide and conquer would be my means and one world under me would be my objective. Read More

04.28.18- Bitcoin vs The Old World Order
Marc Zorn

In the beginning of 2017, you could buy 1 Bitcoin for around $700-$900. Throughout the summer, Bitcoins price started to soar and seemed to reach new highs on almost a daily basis. In the fall of 2017, Bitcoin continued its impressive run, doubling in price in a 30 day period while breaking through the much anticipated $10,000 USD mark. On December 7th, Bitcoin went parabolic and breached $19,000 USD before settling in the $15,000 – $17,000 range. Even long-term Bitcoin enthusiasts were shocked at this price movement. With these spectacular new highs, more people are discovering Bitcoin and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for media pundits to write Bitcoin off as some cypherpunk fad or anomaly. Make no mistake, for better or for worse, Bitcoin has arrived in a big way and it has officially put the financial world on notice. Read More

04.27.18- Marijuana Kills
Justin Spittler

Marijuana kills.

Not people, obviously. There’s never been a single recorded marijuana overdose death ever. Not one.

I’m talking about the competitors. But just who are marijuana’s competitors? Well, that’s a tricky question.

You see, marijuana doesn’t just get people high. It’s also medicine. And it has industrial uses. But for today’s essay, I’ll stick to the other so-called vices: tobacco and alcohol.

Today, I’ll show you why marijuana is a huge, direct threat to Big Tobacco and Big Alcohol. But let me first tell you why you should listen to me…Read More

04.26.18- Where Have All the Dip Buys Gone?
Brian Maher

Where have all the dip buyers gone?

The Dow Jones plunged another 423 points yesterday… its fifth consecutive losing day.

The S&P slipped 35 points, the Nasdaq a hellacious 121.

Stocks have endured more daily losses of at least 1% this year… than the past two years combined.

And it is only April. Read More

04.25.18- Stocks Finally Wake Up to Higher Inflation. It Isn't Pretty
Graham Summers

The ugly reality of inflation has begun to raise its head.

As we have noted previously, inflation is WELL above the Fed’s so-called target of 2%. Indeed, two of the Fed’s own in-house measures of inflation (the NY Fed UIG and Atlanta Fed Sticky Inflation measures) are clocking in at 3.14% and 2.5%, respectively.

That, in of itself, is a REAL problem for the debt-based financial system. Since 2008, the US has added over $9 trillion in public debt along with another $3 trillion in corporate debt, and $1.2 trillion in consumer debt.

ALL OF THIS was based on the assumption that interest rates would stay low. Read More

04.24.18- From Fake Boom to Real Bust
MN Gordon

Paradise in LA LA Land

More is revealed with each passing day. You can count on it. But what exactly the ‘more is of’ requires careful discrimination. Is the ‘more’ merely more noise? Or is it something of actual substance? Today we endeavor to pass judgment, on your behalf.

Normally, judgment would be passed on a Thursday, but we are making an exception. [PT]

For example, here in the land of fruits and nuts, things are whacky, things are zany. Last month, State Senator, Dick Pan, introduced Senate Bill (SB) 1424, which would require California based websites to utilize fact checkers to verify news stories prior to publishing them. Read More

04.23.18- A Dollar Collapse – And Gold Revaluation – Is Inevitable
Steve St Angelo

“Furthermore, in the main, historians educated as Keynesians and monetarists do not understand the economic history of money, let alone the difference between a gold standard and a gold-exchange standard. These similar sounding monetary systems must be defined and the differences between them noted, for anyone to have the slimmest chance of understanding this vital subject, and its relevance to the situation today…

…The pricing of financial assets, and today’s extraordinarily low interest rates indicate that a flight from the dollar is the last thing expected in financial markets. If they were still alive, de Gaulle and his economic advisor, Jacques Rueff, would be instructing the ECB, as successor to the Bank of France.” Read More

04.21.18- “The System Will Have To Collapse”
Dave Kranzler

The public pension fund system is approaching apocalypse. Earlier this week teachers who are part of the Colorado public pension system (PERA) staged a walk-out protest over proposed changes to the plan, including raising the percentage contribution to the fund by current payees and raising the retirement age. PERA backed off but ignoring the obvious problem will not make it go away.

Every public pension fund in the country is catastrophically underfunded, especially if strict mark-to-market of the illiquid assets were applied. Illinois has been playing funding games for a few years to keep its pension fund solvent. In Kentucky, where the public pension fund is on the verge of collapse, teachers are demanding a State bailout. Read More

04.20.18- Things Work Until They Don’t
Tom Chatham

As the world begins its next adventure in financial chaos and rolls over to expose its soft underbelly of lies and deceit that have been perpetrated on the public, those that see the truth have been warning the people once again. You can give people the truth but you cannot make them believe it. That is for them to come to grips with.

Trade wars are usually bad for all parties in the end but between the beginning and the end there can be some surprising developments. Human actions and delusions on the part of the public can produce strange results at times. All of our systems are based on trust. When that trust is lost, everything will come crashing down. Until then, things will go on. Read More

04.19.18- Why Half of the Country’s Banks Could Disappear
Justin Spittler

Forget tech stocks. If you want to make 10 times your money, look at bank stocks.

Regular readers aren’t used to hearing that, and for good reason. You see, bank stocks aren’t Casey Research’s bread and butter. Our specialty is in natural resource stocks and making bets on assets that other investors want nothing to do with. With that said, bank stocks obviously don’t fall in the commodity basket.

But they could be one of today’s top contrarian plays.

At least, that’s what Strategic Investor editor E.B. Tucker thinks. I know this because I heard E.B. give a speech on the topic last week in Miami, Florida. It was one of the best presentations I heard all week. Read More

04.18.18- Criminal Referral Issued For Comey, Clinton, Lynch And McCabe;
Rosenstein Recusal Demanded
Tyler Durden

Eleven GOP members of Congress led by Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) have written a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Attorney John Huber, and FBI Director Christopher Wray - asking them to investigate former FBI Director James Comey, Hillary Clinton and others - including FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, for a laundry list of potential crimes surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Recall that Sessions paired special prosecutor John Huber with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz - falling short of a second Special Counsel, but empowering Horowitz to fully investigate allegations of FBI FISA abuse with subpoena power and other methods he was formerly unable to utilize. Read More

04.17.18- Why We May Be Headed For Another ‘Minsky Moment’
Jesse Felder

I recently ran across a terrific chart in Grant’s Interest Rate Observer that got me thinking about Hyman Minsky and The Financial Instability Hypothesis. After remaining relatively unknown during the course of his lifetime, Minsky really came to fame in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis as his hypothesis helped to explain what left most economists baffled: the fundamental cause of the crisis. Clearly, though, he has been forgotten just as quickly because, considering where we stand today, it’s obvious the economists with the greatest power to prevent another crisis have still not adopted his insights into their frameworks. Read More

04.16.18- Russia’s Real Endgame
Jim Rickards

Russia’s Putin has never taken his eye off the ball. His ambition is not global hegemony or European conquest. Putin seeks what Russia has always sought: regional hegemony and a set of buffer states in eastern Europe and central Asia that can add to Russia’s strategic depth.

In Syria, Russia has the warm water port of Tartus — which is important when you consider that most Russian ports are ice-bound for months of the year.

It is strategic depth — the capacity to suffer massive invasions and still survive due to an ability to retreat to a core position and stretch enemy supply lines — that enabled Russia to defeat both Napoleon and Hitler. Putin also wants the modicum of respect that would normally accompany that geostrategic goal. Read More

04.14.18- This Really Is The Everything Bubble: Even Subprime Mortgage Bonds Are Back
John Rubino

Record student loan balances? Check. Trillion dollar credit card debt? Check. Six tech stocks dominating the Nasdaq? Check. Subprime auto loans at record levels? Check.

All that’s missing is subprime mortgages and we’d have every bubble base covered. Oh wait, those are back too, just under a different name:

Subprime mortgages make a comeback—with a new name and soaring demand

They were blamed for the biggest financial disaster in a century. Subprime mortgages – home loans to borrowers with sketchy credit who put little to no skin in the game. Read More

04.13.18- Russia Has "Irrefutable Evidence" UK Staged Syrian Chemical Attack
David Stockman

As the blame game over the alleged chemical attack in Syria escalates ahead of what is expected to be an imminent, if contained, air strike campaign by the US, UK and/or France against Syria, on Friday morning, Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow had “irrefutable evidence” that the attack – which allegedly killed more than 40 people in an April 7 chemical weapons strike on the former rebel outpost of Douma -was staged with the help of a foreign secret service.

“We have irrefutable evidence that this was another staged event, and that the secret services of a certain state that is now at the forefront of a Russophobic campaign was involved in this staged event,” he said during a press conference according to AFP. Read More

04.12.18- SPX Resistance May Prompt a Massive Short Squeeze
Chris Vermeulen

Our analysis continues today with this research of a potential Short Squeeze in the SPX and other broader markets. As you are probably well aware, we have been nailing the markets with our detailed analysis for quite a while. Our Advanced Analytical tools have called nearly every move. Nearly two weeks ago we called a massive market bottom to form in the US markets – well before just about anyone else even saw a bottom formation. In fact, we have already banked 10% profit on the first half of our best-cherry-picked setup for subscribers and it’s continuing to rally more.

Today, we are calling the potential for a massive upside breakout move on what we believe is a massive Short Squeeze position just above resistance in the SPX. Take a look at these charts. Read More

04.11.18- Nobody Is Prepared for the Long-Term Pain That’s Coming
Peter Schiff

The stock market continued its yo-yo ways on Friday. After three straight days of healthy gains, the Dow Jones Industrials fell 572 points to end the week, closing below 24,000. The Nasdaq also plunged, dropping 161 points.

Peter Schiff has been saying for weeks this is a bear market. Well, now even Pres. Trump has said investors may see some short-term pain in the stock market. But the president says it will all be worth it because we will get long-term gain, referring to the benefits we’ll reap when we win the trade war. In his most recent podcast, Peter said that’s not how it’s going to play out. Read More

04.10.18- Recent Geopolitical Events "Raise Probabilities Of Capital-, Cyber-,
And Even Shooting-Wars"
Ray Dalio

Summary: Nowadays, we can’t avoid considering geopolitical developments because they are playing a greater than normal role in affecting economies and markets.

Recent geopolitical developments have led me to raise my probabilities of trade and other types of wars, such as capital wars, cyber wars (and possibly even shooting wars).

To be clear, I’m not saying they’re probable, and I’m not sure that my assessment is right. I’m just saying that it seems to me that the odds have increased relative to where they were, and I am just sharing the thinking that leads me to that conclusion. Read More

04.09.18- The Roller Coaster to Nowhere
James Rickards

There are four major factors driving the market. The factors are growth, trade wars, geopolitics and regulation of technology.

Each of the four factors has its own internal contradictions, in effect a binary outcome for each. This means there are 16 possible paths the market might follow (24 = 16). No wonder the market acts confused.

With regard to growth, the bulls expect a boost from the Trump tax cuts. They are also anticipating inflation due to strong job creation, rising labor force participation and a low unemployment rate. They expect interest rates to rise but consider this more a sign of economic strength than a cause for concern. Read More

04.07.18- Why A Dollar Collapse Is Inevitable
Alasdair Macleod

"Naturally, the smooth termination of the gold-exchange standard, the restoration of the gold standard, and supplemental and interim measures that might be called for, in particular with a view to organizing international credit on this new basis, will have to be deliberately agreed upon between countries, in particular those on which there devolves special responsibility by virtue of their economic and financial capabilities." - General Charles de Gaulle

We have been here before – twice.

The first time was in the late 1920s, which led to the dollar’s devaluation in 1934. And the second was 1966-68, which led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System. Read More

04.06.18- The world’s most powerful banker sees chance of “market panic”
Simon Black

The most powerful banker in the world, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, just released his annual letter to shareholders.

Behind Warren Buffett's annual missive, Dimon’s letter is probably the most read and deliberated executive report out there.

For one, Dimon is one of the most connected and respected men in finance.

And given his bank’s massive size (it earned $24.4 billion on $103.6 billion in revenue last year) and reach (it’s a giant in consumer/commercial banking, investment banking and wealth management), Dimon has incredible visibility and intel on what’s going on around the world. Read More

04.05.18- Elon Musk Jokes About Tesla’s Debt – But the Joke Could Be on the U.S.
Peter Reagan

The U.S. Debt is almost a joke at this point, but it’s not a funny one. Especially since there is another lingering debt weighing down the economy…

Corporate (and consumer) debt.

We’ll get to how corporate and consumer debt is helping to strangle the economy in just a minute (on top of everything else). But first, let’s take a peek at one example of the complacent attitude that currently fuels a big part of the U.S. corporate economy… Read More

04.04.18- The Era Of The Fed "Put" Is Over
Adam Taggart

It now wants lower asset prices (just not too fast)

To all those investors expecting the Fed to step in to backstop the recent weakness seen in the stock market, Wolf Richter warns: The cavalry isn't coming.

After years of force-feeding too much liquidity into world markets, the central banking cartel is now aware of the Franken-markets it has created. And now with a new head at the US Federal Reserve, and soon at the ECB, central bankers have shifted their priority from supporting asset prices to now actively engineering lower prices.

They just don't want prices to drop too far too fast. Read More

04.03.18- Wyoming Is Challenging The Fed, Can It Become America's "Crypto Valley"?
Tho Bishop

The DC Swamp continues to fester, but there is still interesting work being done at the State level.Particularly interesting is what we've seen so far this year in Wyoming.

Earlier this month, the Wyoming legislature became the latest state to modify their state laws to challenge the Federal Reserve's monopoly on money.

As Mike Maharrey wrote for the Tenth Amendment Center:

Titled the Wyoming Legal Tender Act, the new law defines gold and silver specie as “legal tender,” meaning it will be recognized as a medium of exchange for the payment of debts and taxes in the state. Practically speaking, gold and silver specie will be treated as money, putting it on par with Federal Reserve notes in Wyoming. Read More

04.01.18- The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Chris Martenson

Looks like we're in for a much rockier ride than many expect

This marks our our 10th year of doing this. And by “this”, we mean using data, logic and reason to support the very basic conclusion that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.

Surprisingly, this simple, rational idea -- despite its huge and fast-growing pile of corroborating evidence -- still encounters tremendous pushback from society. Why? Because it runs afoul of most people's deep-seated belief systems. Read More

03.31.18- Surviving The Next Great Depression
Tom Chatham

Numerous economists and investors are warning of another great financial crisis to come but few people want to listen to them. No crisis is ever exactly like the last one and the next great depression will be different from the last one. In the last depression those who had money were in a good financial position to ride it out but the next depression will see those with fiat money drowning in it as it becomes worthless.

Very few Americans have any significant savings today. Most live on credit and those with savings have it stored in financial instruments that will be wiped out as the bankers collapse the system to hide the theft they have been involved in for decades. Those who think they will retire with their IRA, pensions or social security will find them all gone never to return leaving them with no means to care for themselves. Read More

03.30.18- Why Markets Should Continue to Rise This Year
Nomi Prins

A government shutdown was averted last Friday when President Trump signed a $1.3 trillion, 2,232-page omnibus bill. The deadline was midnight Friday and the bill came out late Wednesday.

No one really had the time to go through it, and that’s on purpose.

The fact that no one really knew what was in it — besides the drafting committees and the lobbyists who crammed it full of pork — speaks volumes about how the people’s business is conducted in our democracy.

Theoretically, we still live in a republic, but the question is: Who exactly represents whom in Washington? Read More

03.29.18- Trader: Four Reasons Why "The Worst For Markets Is Yet To Come"
Tyler Durden

Following a recent barrage of negativity from former Lehman trader and current Bloomberg macro commentator, Mark Cudmore, who warned that stocks are likely to continue sliding as a short squeeze in bonds sends yields lower, overnight his Bloomberg Markets Live colleague and macro commentator, Garfield Reynolds, echoed Cudmore's growing pessimism, urging readers to "Rest Up This Easter Because Markets Face an Ugly Q2" and that "the worst for markets is yet to come" for four reasons he lists below.

His full Macro View is below: Read More

03.28.18- America's State Wreck Gathers Steam: The Donald's War Cabinet
And The Fiscal Doom Loop, Part 2
David Stockman

Last week the Donald's incipient trade war got Wall Street's nerves jangling, but that wasn't the half of what's coming.

To wit, Trump has now essentially formed a War Cabinet and signed a Horribus spending bill that is a warrant for fiscal meltdown. Indeed, the two essentially comprise a self-fueling doom loop which means Washington’s descent into fiscal catastrophe is well-nigh unstoppable; it’s all over except for the screaming in the bond pits. Read More

03.27.18- "Tesla, without any doubt,
is on the verge of bankruptcy."
Simon Black

Just a few days ago, shareholders of Tesla approved an almost comical pay package for their cult leader CEO Elon Musk that could potentially put $50 BILLION in his pocket over the next decade.

Let’s put this figure in perspective: at $5 billion per year, Musk would make more than every single CEO in the S&P 500. COMBINED.

In other words, if you add up the salaries of all the CEOs of the 500 largest companies in America, it would still be less than the $5 billion per year that Mr. Musk stands to earn. Read More

03.26.18- Now It Begins - America's State Wreck
Gathers Steam
David Stockman

Now it begins. They bought the February 8th dip just like the previous 40 odd plungelets in the stock averages since the March 2009 bottom, expecting another ka-ching in the easy money lane of the casino.

But this time it didn't work. The market had been retreating for days and then tumbled 724 Dow points yesterday allegedly on the Donald's $50 billion tariff assault on the China trade. Not surprisingly, the overnight follow-through in Asia was downright bloody with Shanghai down 3.4%,the Nikkei lower by 4.5% and China's NASDAQ equivalent off by more than 5%. Read More

03.24.18- Trump Will Use the
“Nuclear Option” on Trade
Jim Rickards

What we have seen so far are just the opening shots of the coming trade war. Think of it as the Battles of Lexington and Concord that opened the Revolutionary War. Much larger tariffs and penalties are waiting in the wings.

Trump will soon receive a report under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. That report has been almost a year in preparation and will reveal that China has stolen over $1 trillion in U.S. intellectual property.

Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 is the “nuclear option” when it comes to trade wars. Read More

03.23.18- Hyperinflation Speculation
Gary Christenson

This article was written for Miles Franklin by Gary Christenson. This is speculation on a complex subject

Hyperinflation myths:

a) Hyperinflation occurs in banana-republics and not modern western countries.

b )Hyperinflation cannot occur in the United States because the U.S. issues dollars – the reserve currency. Read More

03.22.18- Recession: When You See It,
It Will Be Too Late
Lance Roberts

“There are no signs of recession. Employment growth is strong. Jobless claims are low and the stock market is up.”

This is heard almost daily from the media mainstream pablum.

The problem with a majority of the “analysis” done today is that it is primarily short-sighted and lazy, produced more for driving views and selling advertising rather than actually helping investors.

For example:

“The economy is currently growing at more than 2% annualized with current estimates near 2% as well.” Read More

03.21.18- US Stock Market – The Flight to Fantasy
Pater Tenebrarum

Divergences Continue to Send Warning Signals

The chart formation built in the course of the early February sell-off and subsequent rebound continues to look ominous, so we are closely watching the proceedings. There are now numerous new divergences in place that clearly represent a major warning signal for the stock market. For example, here is a chart comparing the SPX to the NDX (Nasdaq 100 Index) and the broad-based NYA (NYSE Composite Index). Read More

03.20.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Head of Secret Pentagon Program Says UFOs Can “Warp Space-Time” - What??
Jon Rappoport

Luis Elizondo, former head of a secret Pentagon program studying UFOs, is now extending his recent remarks about craft witnessed in our skies…

In an interview with the UK Daily Star (2/8), Elizondo made the following boggling comments:

“For the first time, we have a compelling picture that what we are seeing is explained in our current understanding of physics, advanced physics, and quantum mechanics.” Read More

03.19.18- Nobody Thinks It Would Happen Again
Doug Noland

WSJ: "Ten Years After the Bear Stearns Bailout, Nobody Thinks It Would Happen Again."

Myriad changes to the financial structure have seemingly safeguarded the financial system from another 2008-style crisis. The big Wall Street financial institutions are these days better capitalized than a decade ago. There are "living wills," along with various regulatory constraints that have limited the most egregious lending and leveraging mistakes that brought down Bear Stearns, Lehman and others. There are central bank swap lines and such, the type of financial structures that breed optimism. Read More

03.17.18- Just How Long Is This Fuse Anyway? The Countdown to Fiat Armageddon
Charles Hugh Smith

Humankind has conducted this experiment before. Many times. We know it doesn’t work. And yet, because it hasn’t happened to us, here, in very recent history, we somehow think it will.

Anytime you hear someone say ‘But this time is different’, take your physical silver and gold and run. Fiat currency dilution always, always, always ends in systemic collapse.

Don’t be one of the majority who will be left wondering how they didn’t understand it was nothing more than ink on paper all along. Read More

03.16.18- Derivatives - A Recipe For Disaster & Systemic Collapse
Egon von Greyerz

Gambling is according to Wikipedia the wagering of money (or something of value) on an event with an uncertain outcome. Three elements are required for gambling, consideration, chance, and prize. Thus, you make a bet and if you are lucky you win a prize but you can also lose it all. Gambling has been around for thousands of years and maybe longer. The first 6-sided dice dates back 3000 years. Eventually gambling became more organised as casinos were established. The first well known casino was set up in Venice in the early 1600s. Read More

03.15.18- How New Tariffs and A Trade War Could Affect You
Birch Gold Group

Last week, President Trump announced his plan to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports. These tariffs would be applied to all foreign countries equally, although Trump has suggested exemptions for Canada and Mexico if they come to agreement on a new NAFTA deal.

It’s been a few years since the U.S. had any significant tariffs in place. What could be the potential impacts of this new move?

Tariffs on steel and aluminum will cause increased costs for products made with those imported materials such as cars and cans. Read More

03.14.18- Are The Bears About To Fumble?
Avi Gilburt

Do you think we will ever see a week of market moves associated with news events for which you will not shake your head?

Week after week I think analysts say something so stupid that I just want to scream. As I have pointed out so many times over the years, I keep hoping that some form of sanity will grip pundits one day. I keep hoping that they may wake up and recognize the error of their ways. But, alas, I continue to long for that day.

So, whenever the market moves, everyone goes through the exact same thinking process: “Hey, look. The market just saw a big move. Let’s go see what news caused this move.” Read More

03.13.18- Is The Dot.Com Bubble Back?
Lance Roberts

Let me start out by saying I hate market comparisons.

While history certainly does “rhyme,” they are never the same. This is especially the case when it comes to the financial markets. Chart patterns may align from time to time, but such is more a function of pattern-fitting than anything else.

However, when it comes to fundamentals, standard-deviations, extensions, etc., it is a different story. A recent article by Ryan Vlastelica brought this to mind. Read More

03.12.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Why a “Media Blockade”
Could be Right for You
Joe Jarvis

There are things that matter, and there are things that you can control. There are few things that matter and that you can control. Focus on these.

For instance, preventing global nuclear war matters. But you cannot control it.

You can control what color car you drive. But this doesn’t really matter.

But eating healthy matters, and you can control it. Read More

03.10.18- Dow 12,000, Then Bitcoin $30,000
Theodore Butler

You may find this shocking, but I believe the Dow could drop to 12,000. And, as a consequence, bitcoin could rally to $30,000.

You read that right. How?

The writing is on the proverbial wall and the panic is setting in on Wall Street. And in markets around the world, for that matter. Don’t think for a minute that the one- or two-day rallies we’re seeing are a sign of things to come for the stock markets…

Because they aren’t. Read More

03.10.18- One Of History’s Most Accurate Indicators Of Financial Crisis Is Literally
Reaching New heights
Simon Black

“All are being built at a time when financial markets are near all-time highs…it’s possible that these historical examples are just wild coincidences.”

On April 15, 1185, over eight centuries ago, a powerful earthquake struck the East Midlands region of England near the town of Lincoln.

Modern scientists estimate the magnitude of the earthquake at 5.0 on today’s Richter scale… which was a pretty big deal back then.

Medieval England didn’t have any earthquake-proof construction methods, and much of the region was leveled to the ground. Read More

03.08.17- The Truth About Inflation and Gold
Adam English

Here is a little dose of reality for all of those inflation naysayers out there:

76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
65% of Americans say they don't own their homes.
53% of Americans have no money in the stock market, even through retirement accounts.

Together, these three depressing facts mean a vast majority of Americans have seen their wealth and income crushed by inflation.

Your wealth needs to have grown 220% over the last 30 years to have outpaced inflation. Read More

03.07.18- China’s Coming Financial Meltdown
Jim Rickards

Anbang Insurance Group is one of China’s largest and most aggressive financial institutions. It is known for its huge customer base, high leverage, and fast-paced deal making.

At least it was until the Friday before last.

That’s when Anbang was taken over by the Communist Chinese government. You can call that takeover, “a bailout with Chinese characteristics.” Read More

03.06.18- The Arithmetic of Risk
John Hussman

The collapse of major bubbles is often preceded by the collapse of smaller bubbles representing ‘fringe’ speculations. Those early wipeouts are canaries in the coalmine. Once investor preferences shift from speculation toward risk-aversion, extreme valuations should not be ignored, and can suddenly matter to their full extent.

A month ago, I noted that prevailing valuation extremes implied negative total returns for the S&P 500 on 10-12 year horizon, and losses on the order of two-thirds of the market’s value over the completion of the current market cycle. With our measures of market internals constructive, on balance, we had maintained a rather neutral near-term outlook for months, despite the most extreme “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes in U.S. history. Read More

03.05.18- Make Your Choice:
Change By Pain Or Insight
Chris Martenson

It's time to make the decision. Choose wisely.

Most experienced investors know the four most dangerous words are: This time is different.

It never is.

And yet one of my key predictions here at Peak Prosperity is that The next twenty years will be completely unlike the last twenty years.

So am I saying that things really will be different this time? Read More

03.03.18- The warning shots of 2007
Steven Saville

For a market analyst there is an irresistible temptation to seek out one or more historical parallels to the current situation. The idea is that clues about what’s going to happen in the future can be found by looking at what happened following similar price action in the past. Sometimes this method works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Assuming that the decline from the January-2018 peak is a short-term correction that will run its course before the end March (my assumption since the correction’s beginning in late-January), the recent price action probably is akin to what happened in February-March of 2007. In late-February of 2007 the SPX had been grinding its way upward in relentless fashion for many months. Read More

03.02.18- The Albatross Of Debt: The Stock Market's $67 Trillion Nightmare, Part 2
David Stockman

In Part 1 we postulated that the chart below embodies nothing less than the nightmare that will be coming to Wall Street right soon. It means, in effect, that you can climb the financial tiger's back for an extended time, but when you reach the mane its generally impossible to get off alive.

Needless to say, we have reached the mane. What drove the US economy for the past three decades was debt expansion----private and public--- at rates far faster than GDP growth. But that entailed a steady ratcheting up of the national leverage ratio until we hit what amounts to the top of the tiger's back---that is, Peak Debt at 3.5X national income. Read More

03.01.18- The Albatross Of Debt: The Stock Market's $67 Trillion Nightmare, Part 1
David Stockman

This is getting pretty ridiculous. For old times sake, we recently checked on the Federal debt level during the month we arrived in the Imperial City as a 24-year old eager beaver. That was June 1970 and the Federal debt held by the public was $275 billion.

Mind you, while that number wasn't exactly diminutive, it had taken all of 188 years to accumulate. That is to say, Uncle Sam had borrowed an average of $28,000 per week during the 9,776 weeks since George Washington was sworn in as the nation's first president. Read More

02.28.18- The Secret Force Behind
Today’s Rigged Markets
Nomi Prins

Markets were up again big today and volatility was down. But we haven’t seen the last of rising volatility, nor of the central banks’ attempts to thwart it.

This week, new Fed Chair Jerome Powell will be giving his first congressional testimony, and you can be sure that markets are waiting on his words with bated breath.

Before his testimony, the Fed will be releasing its Monetary Policy Report, which will also give an indication to the direction of Fed policy.

Because these will be his first official comments as Fed chair, Powell will want to both make a personal mark and make sure markets don’t panic over his remarks. Read More

02.27.18- 2018: The Year Of The Margin Call
John Rubino

Analysts disagree about which indicator is best for calling market tops, but the easiest to understand — and the most tragic — is probably margin debt.

This is money borrowed by (usually individual or “retail”) investors against their existing stocks to buy more stocks. Investors tend to do this when markets are rising and using leverage seems like an effortless way turbocharge their gains. But eventually the market turns down, leaving stock portfolios insufficient to cover related margin debt and generating “margin calls” in which brokers demand more money and/or start liquidating customer portfolios. This sends the market down sharply and indiscriminately, as fairly-valued babies are dumped along with overvalued bathwater. The result: a quick, brutal bear market. Read More

02.26.18- Big DOW Drop Only the Appetizer, “Main Course” Still Coming
Birch Gold Group

The DOW suffered a net-drop of 1,175 points on February 5. By many standards, a drop like that would be considered the worst single drop during a given market cycle.

But in this case, it might only be a hint of a much bigger market crash to come later this year. Analysts at Morgan Stanley said it best…

The U.S. stock market only had a taste of the potential damage from higher bond yields earlier this year, with the biggest test yet to come, according to Morgan Stanley. Read More

02.24.18- Why The Most Recent Market Sell-Off Was Just The Beginning
Simon Black

“The market doesn’t know what to do with negative inputs today… much less some really bad news.”

On October 19, 1987, the Dow experienced its biggest one-day percentage loss in history – plunging 22.6%.

It was “Black Monday.” The selloff was so fast and so severe, nothing else even comes close.

The second worst percentage loss for the Dow was October 28, 1929 (also Black Monday) when the exchange fell 12.82%. It fell another 11.73% the next day (you guessed it… “Black Tuesday”). Then the Great Depression hit. Read More

02.23.18- Because Now is Not Forever; Deficits Will (Really, Really) Matter
Michael Lebowitz

The Federal Reserve (Fed) has increased the Fed Funds rate by 125 basis points or 1.25% since 2015, which had little effect on bonds until recently. Of late, however, yields on longer-maturity bonds have begun to rise, contributing to anxiety in the equity markets.

The current narrative from Wall Street and the media is that higher wages, better economic growth and a weaker dollar are stoking inflation. These forces are producing higher interest rates, which negatively affects corporate earnings and economic growth and thus causes concern for equity investors. We think there is a thick irony that, in our over-leveraged economy, economic growth is harming economic growth. Read More

02.22.18- Calm Before The Inflationary Storm
Gold Telegraph

The economy has been showing great gains, and that positive trend is fueling fears of a surge in inflation. The Consumer Price Index, the key predictor of inflationary trends, rose .05 percent in January, which greatly exceeded the anticipated rise of 0.2 percent. The market reacted as expected as stocks fell, and government bond yield rose.

The Fed is keeping a close eye on these developments, and that could fuel the inflation fears. The fear of rising prices includes most economic sectors, from gasoline, housing, food, healthcare, to clothing.

Predictably, the market reacted immediately to the CPI rise with a 100-point loss after opening, even though the decline was quickly reversed. Investors are anticipating that the Federal Reserve could raise their interest rates three or more times by year-end. Read More

02.21.18- When Budget Deficits Will Really Go Vertical
MN Gordon

Mnuchin Gets It

Master of the Mint and economy wizard Steven Mnuchin and his wife at the annual ritual greenback burning festival.

United States Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin has a sweet gig. He writes rubber checks to pay the nation’s bills. Yet, somehow, the rubber checks don’t bounce. Instead, like magic, they clear. How this all works, considering the nation’s technically insolvent, we don’t quite understand. But Mnuchin gets it. He knows exactly how full faith and credit works – and he knows plenty more. Read More

02.20.18- Financial mega-battle to escalate in late February, early March
Benjamin Fulford

The secret battle for the planet earth is entering a critical phase over the coming weeks, especially in the realm of finance, where an epic three-way battle is raging, multiple sources agree. In this battle, cryptocurrencies and the Chinese yuan are fighting each other, as well as fighting to replace the current privately-owned Western central bank petrodollar, Euro, and Japanese yen-based system.

In the biggest move, the gauntlet has been cast by the Chinese as they challenge the U.S. petrodollar, with the formal announcement of a March 26th start for gold-backed-yuan oil futures trading. Asian secret society sources say the Year of the Dog, which is just starting, usually brings volatility (in this case presumably in the financial markets) before things settle down into a new normal as the year progresses. Read More

02.19.18- Special Edition - A Must-Read Crypto Alert
Rich Jacobs

I’m liking what I see from the crypto markets lately.

It may sound foolish or dangerous to say this, but hear me out.

If you look at the myriad attacks on crypto over the last month, the return to November 2017 pricing and the recent settling and smoothing of the market, I can understand your skepticism.

Look, I get it. Recently, there have been a lot of negative forces beating down the crypto market: Read More

02.17.18- According to Deutsche Bank,
Here's What's Going on With the Dollar
Sandeep Kanihama

There are other technical reasons out there but while most on Main Sreet and some on Wall Street have been scratching their heads as to why the dollar has been in a precipitous decline when the Fed has been jacking rates and yields have been rising, an FX strategist George Saravelos at Deutsche Bank has come up with an answer.

Bellow are his key points. Read More

02.16.18- XIV Implosion & the Implications for Gold
Kevin Vecmanis, P.Eng

This week we saw the beginning of the implosion of one of the most crowded trades in the world. We’re talking, of course, about the short VIX trade. I say “the beginning” because the short VIX trade is multi-faceted and has deep roots in the business cycle that we’re in. Like most stories in the market, you need to back up from the tree-line in order to get a view of the forest rather than the trees.

First, think "implosion" is too strong of a word?

What is VIX, and what is being “Short VIX”? Read More

02.15.18- Gold, U.S. Dollar, And Inflation
Kelsey Williams

Gold is all the rage right now. And some apparently think that if you aren’t outright ‘bullish’ you are unaware or unintelligent.

Those who ply the trade for a living (i.e. advisors, investors, traders, writers) all seem to be on the same page. Even fundamentalists and technical analysts are teammates. Sort of.

The U.S. dollar is in the headlines, so naturally, most of the explanations and expectations for gold’s ‘big move’ center on U.S. dollar weakness. And they should. But some additional explanation is necessary. Read More

02.14.18- What Just Changed?
Charles Hugh Smith

The illusion that risk can be limited delivered three asset bubbles in less than 20 years.

Has anything actually changed in the past two weeks? The conventional bullish answer is no, nothing's changed; the global economy is growing virtually everywhere, inflation is near-zero, credit is abundant, commodities will remain cheap for the foreseeable future, assets are not in bubbles, and the global financial system is in a state of sustainable wonderfulness.

As for that spot of bother, the recent 10% decline in stocks: ho-hum, nothing to see here, just a typical "healthy correction" in a never-ending bull market, the result of flawed volatility instruments and too many punters picking up dimes in front of the steamroller. Read More

02.13.18- The PPT is the Only Thing Stopping an Outright Crash
Graham Summers

The markets have changed and many are going to get “taken to the cleaners.”

Last year, 2017, was a not a normal year for stocks. Stocks as an asset class are not meant to go straight up without even a 1% pullback. But that is precisely what happened for nearly an entire year.

Now that massive market rig is over. And anyone who continues to invest as though it’s 2017 is going to get annihilated in the coming weeks. The only thing that stop an all out crash in stocks was clear and obvious intervention in the markets by Central Banks. Read More

02.12.18- Billionaire Investor Warns of Impending Stock Market “Earthquake”
Birch Gold Group

We’ve been using the market like a casino. Except, “this casino is on steroids” according to billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

Icahn thinks the stock market is getting dangerous for the average person. His reasoning? Over-leveraged ETFs (exchange traded funds).

This past week, that danger manifested, with the DOW dropping 1000+ points on Monday and then again on Thursday.

It looks like the stock market “casino” will be calling your bets in 2018. In fact, Mr. Icahn says this is just the beginning, and the market equivalent of an earthquake is looming right around the corner… Read More

02.10.18- When will the next credit crisis occur?
Alasdair Macleod

The timing of any credit crisis is set by the rate at which the credit cycle progresses. People don’t think in terms of the credit cycle, wrongly believing it is a business cycle. The distinction is important, because a business cycle by its name suggests it emanates from business. In other words, the cycle of growth and recessions is due to instability in the private sector and this is generally believed by state planners and central bankers.

This is untrue, because cycles of business activity have their origin in the expansion and contraction of credit, whose origin in turn is in central banks’ monetary policy and fractional reserve banking. Cycles of credit are then manifest in variations of business activity. Cycles are the cause, booms and slumps the consequence. It follows that if we understand the characteristics of the different phases, we can estimate where we are in the credit cycle. Read More

02.09.18- End of Fake Recovery
David Haggith

It took sixteen months to build the exceptionally steep Trump Rally, and just one week to eliminate a quarter of it. While I wouldn’t call that jolting reversal a stock-market crash in the ordinary sense, the largest one-day point fall in the history of the market (by far) certainly marks a massive change in market conditions. From this point forward, it won’t be the same market it was.

Those who are critical of my belief that the US stock market would crash by January 2018, may try to dodge the significance of these tumbling days by saying that eleven-hundred-plus points aint what it used to be. Read More

02.08.18- Here’s the big secret to know about the stock market’s next move
Vitaliy Katsenelson

I’ve been asked to comment on the most recent market decline. My initial reaction was, markets go up and they go down. America is a great country but the US Constitution doesn’t guarantee always-rising markets. I sat down and I wanted to write a reassuring message. I wanted to express my empathy. Somehow, I found that my reservoir of empathy was empty: After recent decline the market is still up twenty-something percent from the beginning of 2017.

And then I stumbled on Dalio and Wilson predicting what the market will do next, and I have to confess, I started writing and could not stop. (I apologize ahead of time for the rantiness of this message.) Read More

02.07.18- Is The 9-Year-Long Dead-Cat-Bounce Finally Ending?
Charles Hugh Smith

Ignoring or downplaying these fundamental forces has greatly increased the fragility of the status quo.

The term dead cat bounce is market lingo for a "recovery" after markets decline due to fundamental reversals. Markets tend to bounce back after sharp declines as participants (human and digital) who have been trained to "buy the dips" once again buy the decline, and the financial media rushes to reassure everyone that nothing has actually changed, everything is still peachy-keen wonderfulness.

I submit that the past 9 years of market "recovery" is nothing but an oversized dead cat bounce that is finally ending. Here is a chart that depicts the final blow-off top phase of the dead cat bounce: Read More

02.06.18- Corporate Bond Market in Worst Denial Since 2007
Wolf Richter

It’s just a question of how disruptive the adjustment will be, whether it will be just a painful sell-off or junk-bond mayhem.

Treasury securities have been selling off and Treasury yields have been rising, with the two-year yield at 2.15% on Friday, the highest since September 2008, and the 10-year yield at 2.84%, the highest since April 2014. Rising yields mean that bond prices are falling, and this selloff has been an uncomfortable experience for holders of Treasury securities.

But corporate bonds have been in their own la-la-land, and even Tesla, despite its cash-burn rate that should scare the bejesus out of investors, was able to sell $546 million in bonds last week – bonds collateralized by lease payments it receives from customers. Read More

02.05.18- ECONOMIC CRASH LIKELY? Stock Market Insanity & Risk Reaching Nose-Bleed Levels
Steve St Angelo

With the Dow Jones Index falling 665 points today, the risk of a large market correction has just increased significantly. Ironically, I discussed the very indicators that were setting up for a huge market correction in my newest video which I recorded on Tuesday. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the video posted on my Youtube channel on Friday morning and now on my website until late in the evening.

Regardless, the 665 point decline is just the beginning. Oh sure, we could see a continued selloff and then a move towards 27,000 or even higher. But, for the stock market to move up to 27,000 or 30,000 means absolutely nothing. Well, maybe it provided investors with a brief feeling of higher wealth until the markets really crashed. Read More

02.03.18- ‘THIS IS IT!’: Gold & Silver Are Telling Us The MEGA Stock Market Bubble Is Bursting
Gregory Mannarino

Gregory says it’s a bloodbath in the bond & stock markets, and when the stock market crashes, it’s not getting back up in our lifetimes. Here’s why…

Gregory Mannarino provides a timely update as the stock market may be finally bursting. This is because of the hard sell-off in the bond market. Gregory says if the bond market sell-off continues, this is it for the stock market.

If the debt bubble is in fact bursting, Gregory says we’re in a lot of trouble. Gregory says “this is the third and final bubble”. This is it. The bubble of all bubbles. Read More

02.02.18- SocGen's Edwards: Get Ready for Negative 10-Year Interest Rates
Tom Eckett

Société Générale's bearish strategist Albert Edwards has told Investment Week he believes US 10-year Treasury yields will fall to as low as -1%, as he warned of "double bubble trouble" in US markets.

Edwards previously forecast that US 10-year yields will fall below zero but told Investment Week these could go as low as -1% in "the depth of the next recession" as they converge "totally" with Japan and Germany.

"Sound ridiculous? German 10-year yields were -0.2% last July," he added. Read More

02.01.18- Misleading with Numbers: It's Worse When the Government Does It
Gary Galles

Major international comparisons have long concluded that Americans’ ability to effectively utilize mathematics is inadequate. Such conclusions divide students, parents, teachers and administrators into camps that share little more than blaming others for the problems. However, it is unclear whether all the finger-pointing indicates a real desire to overcome our innumeracy. In fact, we systematically misuse numbers to distort reality because we want to fool ourselves, making our ineptitude no surprise.

One of today’s most obvious misleading number games is grade inflation. Teachers have accommodated student desires for higher grades to the point that the median GPA of graduating college seniors has risen around a full grade point since it was about 2.2 in 1965. Read More

01.31.18- Panic Grips U.S. Financial Markets As The Dow Falls 362 Points –
Worst Drop In More Than A Year
Michael Snyder

It isn’t going to be a surprise when U.S. stock prices fall 50, 60 or 70 percent from where they are today. The only real surprise is that it took this long for it to happen. Even after falling 362 points on Tuesday, the Dow Jones industrial average is still ridiculously high. In fact, the only two times in our entire history when stocks have been this overvalued were right before the stock market crash of 1929 and right before the dotcom bubble burst. Not even before the financial crisis of 2008 were stock valuations as absurd as they are right now. Read More

01.30.18- What Will End the Bull Market?
Clif Droke

One of the most commonly asked questions among market participants and non-participants alike is, “What will cause the stock market to stop rising?” Normally, investors would be thrilled at the prospect of a perpetual rise in equity prices. Yet, with so few direct participants nowadays compared to former years, there is a growing desire among many for a major decline which will allow non-participants to buy stocks at a much lower price. As we’ll discuss in this commentary, that scenario will likely remain a pipe dream for an extended period before it ever becomes a reality. Read More

01.29.18- Peter Schiff: "We're Near The Endgame... And Trump's Gonna Be The Fall Guy"
Mac Slavo

Peter Schiff isn’t known for mincing words or sugarcoating the evidence. The financial broker and economist said in an interview “the economy is going to blow up like a bomb,” and when that happens, Donald Trump will take all of the blame.

Not even a full minute into an interview with Alex Jones of Info Wars, Schiff says “it’s not a good thing” that the economy is going to crash and burn. “Unfortunately, that’s what Trump has inherited from Obama. But it’s not even really just Obama, it’s the federal reserve. It’s the monetary policy that has been passed like a baton from Clinton to Bush to Obama and now to Trump. And we’re near the end of the game and unfortunately, Trump’s gonna be the fall guy. This thing is all gonna collapse while he’s president.” Read More

01.27.18- Russia and China Are Dead Serious About Ditching the Dollar
F. William Engdahl

The Russian government has recently announced it will issue nearly $1 billion equivalent in state bonds, but denominated not in US dollars as is mostly the case. Rather it will be the first sale of Russian bonds in China’s yuan.

While $1 billion may not sound like much when compared with the Peoples’ Bank of China total holdings of US Government debt of more than $1 trillion or to the US Federal debt today of over $20 trillion, it’s significance lies beyond the nominal amount. It’s a test run by both governments of the potential for state financing of infrastructure and other projects independent of dollar risk from such events as US Treasury financial sanctions. Read More

01.26.18- Why the Next Downturn “Will Not Look Like 2008”
Wolf Richter

Nine years of scorched-earth monetary policies come home to roost.

There are always cycles. The current cycle started at the bottom of the Great Recession and will last “until central banks put on the brakes,” said Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, in an interview with Bloomberg. “We’re in a perfect situation, inflation is not a problem, growth is good, but we have to keep in mind the part of the cycle we’re in.”

We’re “in the late stage of the cycle, a period that might last two years,” he said without specifying how far we’re already into that late stage. We do know that the Fed is gingerly taking the foot off the gas though it hasn’t yet slammed on the brakes. Read More

01.25.18- January 25th: Today’s
Single Best Place To Invest
David Haggith

Today, I want to give you the single best place to invest in the stock market.

But don’t give me all the credit.

Because I’m stealing this directly from an investing legend.

His name is Joel Greenblatt. And in his classic 1997 book, You Too Can Be A Stock Market Genius, he made one thing perfectly clear…

“The facts are overwhelming… stocks of spinoff companies significantly and consistently outperform the market averages. Read More

01.24.18- The Bubble That Could Break the World
David Haggith

The key to bubble analysis is to look at what’s causing the bubble. If you get the hidden dynamics right, your ability to collect huge profits or avoid losses is greatly improved.

Based on data going back to the 1929 crash, this current bubble looks like a particular kind that can produce large, sudden losses for investors.

The market right now is especially susceptible to a sharp correction, or worse.

Before diving into the best way to play the current bubble dynamics to your advantage, let’s look at the evidence for whether a bubble exists in the first place…Read More

01.23.18- According To These 3 Measures The Stock Market Is Now Literally Off The Charts
Jesse Felder

The first chart comes from my friend, John Hussman, and shows his margin-adjusted version of the cyclically-adjusted price-to-earnings ratio. This improved version of the CAPE ratio (improved because it has a greater negative correlation with future 12-year returns) shows equity valuations have now surpassed both the dotcom mania peak in 2000 and the 1929 mania peak. Read More

01.22.18- America Is Bankrupt And Washington Doesn't Care
Doug Bandow

These poseurs of fiscal responsibility are about to drive up debt to its highest levels since World War II.

The United States is effectively bankrupt, but that doesn’t matter to the GOP. Once evangelists of fiscal responsibility and scourges of deficit spending, Republicans today glory in spilling red ink. The national debt is now $20.6 trillion, greater than the annual GDP of about $19.5 trillion. Alas, with Republicans at the helm, deficits are set to continue racing upwards, apparently without end. Read More

01.20.18- “Trump Bump” Not Enough to Salvage U.S. Dollar
Peter Reagan

The “Trump bump” seems to be turning into a light tap for the U.S. Dollar. It has lost all of its post-election gain, and is starting 2018 off on the wrong foot.

The dollar is trading at the lowest level in 3 years, and that follows a whopping 10% decline in 2017. Additionally, a heightened amount of turmoil that has recently surrounded Trump has contributed to what seems like a cloudy future for the dollar.

But political turmoil is just the beginning of what has been ailing the dollar… Read More

01.19.18- 7 Reasons To Avoid The S&P 500 In 2018
Tyler Durden

We are barely out of the gates in 2018 and the S&P 500 is up over 4%. From just looking around me it is clear entrepreneurs and consumers are optimistic about the future. For much of the last decade the general public wouldn't touch equities with a ten foot pole. Now people are taking on debt to buy as much cryptoassets as possible. I don't share this optimism and primarily look for investments outside of the U.S. and in special situations and investments that may have low or negative correlation to the general direction of the market. Seven reasons why I want to be very careful going into 2018: Read More

01.18.18- New York Fed President Predicts
a “Hard Landing”
Peter Reagan

In a recent speech at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in New York City, William Dudley, the New York Fed President, voiced his economic concerns for the coming year and beyond.

Though inflation is low, Dudley warned the economy is growing at an “above-trend pace” while the labor market is tightening, and will be boosted further by the recently enacted tax legislation.

All this is happening despite the Fed hiking rates by 125 basis points over the last two years, which suggests the three further planned hikes for this year may not make much of a difference either. Read More

01.17.18- Is It True? Do Low Rates Justify High Valuations
Peter Cook

When the financial media continuously repeat an opinion as fact, it spawns a mainstream narrative, which produces a powerful effect on investor psychology. One mainstream narrative, repeated with certainty, is low interest rates cause high stock market valuations, which is supported by the public statements of investment luminaries such as Warren Buffett.

A related mainstream truth is rising rates will cause high stock market valuations to fall. In fact, recently, both Bill Gross and Jeffrey Gundlach have commented on the level of 10-year Treasury rates and why they are destined to go higher. Gundlach even went further, suggesting that if 10-year rates were to rise above 2.63% (currently 2.55%), stock prices would begin to fall. Read More

01.16.18- The Great Reset
Bob Moriarty

The "Everything Bubble" is bursting. This is going to get ugly.

I suspect it began with the top in Bitcon and the other 1300-1400 related pseudo currencies back in December. I did an interview in the first week of December where I said Bitcon was in a bubble. I believed it would do the same thing every other bubble in history did. It was going to crash and take all the money of most of the investors. The piece was posted on the 10 th of December. When I did the interview, Bitcon had been going virtually straight up for months and was about $16,858, a new high. Read More

01.15.18- More Colliding Ships...
Is There Something Going On?
Joseph P. Farrell

In my News and Views from the Nefarium last Thursday (Jan 11th), I prefaced my remarks about the Franco-Chinese summit by pointing out that these past two weeks have seen some strange stories, stories suggesting that while the war between the great powers for hegemony may not have gone hot, it's at least much warmer than before. For example, in the space of a few days, we've seen (1) the US launch, and as quickly lose, a classified space satellite; (2) ships colliding in the Aegean Sea and in the Persian Gulf, and (3) Russia shoot down over a dozen drones which it claims "Syrian militants" shot at Russian bases. Read More

01.13.18- My Financial Road Map for 2018
Nomi Prins

In last year’s roadmap, I forecast that 2017 would end with gold prices up and the dollar index down, both of which happened. I underestimated the number of Fed hikes by one hike, but globally, average short term rates have remained around zero. That will be a core pattern throughout 2018.

Central banks may tweak a few rates here and there, announce some tapering due to “economic growth”, or deflect attention to fiscal policy, but the entire financial and capital markets system rests on the strategies, co-dependencies and cheap money policies of central banks. The bond markets will feel the heat of any tightening shift or fears of one, while the stock market will continue to rush ahead on the reality of cheap money supply until debt problems tug at the equity markets and take them down.Read More

01.12.18- Nasty Dark Clouds Are Forming On The Financial Horizon
Steve St Angelo

Some nasty dark clouds are forming on the financial horizon as total world debt is increasing nearly three times as fast as total global wealth. But, that’s okay because no one cares about the debt, only the assets matter nowadays. You see, as long as debts are someone else’s problem, we can add as much debt as we like… or so the market believes.

Now, you don’t have to take my word for it that the market only focuses on the assets, this comes straight from the top echelons of the financial world. According to Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2017, total global wealth increased to a new record of $280 trillion in 2017. Here is Credit Suisse’s summary of the Global Wealth 2017: Read More

91.11.18- 2018: The Year of Living Dangerously
Jim Rickards

I’m calling 2018 “The Year of Living Dangerously.”

That description might seem odd to lot of observers. Major U.S. stock indexes keep hitting new all-time highs. 2017 went down as the first calendar year in which the Dow Jones industrial average was up for all 12 months.

Even in strong bull market years there are usually one or two down months as stocks take a breather on the way higher. Not last year. There’s been no rest for the bull; it’s up, up and away. Read More

01.10.18- Bitcoin Isn’t the Bubble - The Global Financial System Is
Michael Krieger

Last week, I was offered an opportunity to write an opinion piece for The Hill. I took advantage of the offer and put something together addressing the whole “is Bitcoin a bubble” debate, and I’m pleased to say it was published earlier this morning.

It’s important to me that I don’t just preach to the choir when it comes to my unconventional views, and I hope this will help me reach a wider and more mainstream audience.

Below are a couple brief excerpts from the piece, published in full at The Hill: Read More

01.09.18- If Everyone Knows Pensions Are Screwed,
Why Are They Investing In The Exact Same Fashion?
Jesse Felder

The brewing pension crisis has been well-documented by a number of platforms and pundits over the past few years. But there are two charts that put it into perspective for investors who find themselves in the same boat as pension managers looking for returns in a world nearly devoid of them.

The average pension fund assumes it can achieve a 7.6% rate of return on its assets in the future. As noted in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, the majority of these assets are invested in the stock market. The rest are invested in bonds, real estate and alternatives. An aggregate bond index fund yields 2.5% today. Real estate investment trusts, as a group, yield nearly 4%. Read More

01.08.18- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Russiagate Turns On Its Originators
Paul Craig Roberts

Russiagate originated in a conspiracy between the military/security complex, the Clinton-controlled Democratic National Committee, and the liberal/progressive/left. The goal of the military/security complex is to protect its out-sized budget and power by preventing President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia. Hillary and the DNC want to explain away their election loss by blaming a Trump/Putin conspiracy to steal the election. The liberal/progressive/left want Trump driven from office.

As the presstitutes are aligned with the military/security complex, Hillary and the DNC, and the liberal/progressive/left, the Russiagate orchestration is a powerful conspiracy against the president of the United States and the “deplorables” who elected him. Nevertheless, the Russiagate Conspiracy has fallen apart and has now been turned against its originators. Read More

01.06.18- The Value Of Bitcoin
Chris Martenson

So... in the past week, I’ve been asked for advice on Bitcoin by my brother-in-law, my local realtor, and close friends from as far away as Texas.

None of them cared to learn what it actually is. Or how it works. They just wanted to understand why suddenly so many folks they know are trying to buy Bitcoin hand over fist. And, of course, should they buy in now, too?

If you (or people you care about) have similar questions, this report is for you. Read More

01.05.18- Leveraged Economy Blows Up In 2018
Steve St Angelo

Enjoy the good times while you can because when the economy BLOWS UP this next time, there is no plan B. Sure, we could see massive monetary printing by Central Banks to continue the madness a bit longer after the market crashes, but this won’t be a long-term solution. Rather, the U.S. and global economies will contract to a level we have never experienced before. We are most certainly in unchartered territory.

Before I get into my analysis and the reasons we are heading towards the Seneca Cliff, I wanted to share the following information. I haven’t posted much material over the past week because I decided to spend a bit of quality time with family. Furthermore, a good friend of mine past away which put me in a state of reflection. This close friend was also very knowledgeable about our current economic predicament and was a big believer in owning gold and silver. So, it was a quite a shame to lose someone close by who I could chat with about these issues. Read More

01.04.18- A Return to Financial Sanity?
Gary Christenson

Financial sanity and stability may not return, but we can protect our assets and learn from the discussion.

The DOW, S&P500, NASDAQ and other markets sell at all-time highs. However, many imbalances exist within our financial world.

This is not new – things have been crazy before, are now, and will be again. But to regain financial sanity we need:

From “Doug Casey on the New Fed Chair” Read More

01.03.18- How the Fake Boom Ends
Bill Bonner

Americans are richer than ever

U.S. household assets stand at $97 trillion.

All over the world, “wealth” is surging, too… with the value of global stocks near a record high of $100 trillion.

But there’s a hitch: We allege that this wealth was built on fake money. If we’re right, is the wealth fake, too?

Cometh the Grim Reaper

The Fed’s ultra-low interest rates over the past eight years have created the biggest pile of debt in history. Read More

01.02.18- The Inescapable Reason Why the Financial System Will Fail
Charles Hugh Smith

Credit cannot expand faster than fundamentals forever

Modern finance has many complex moving parts, and this complexity masks its inner simplicity.

Let’s break down the core dynamics of the current financial system.

The Core Dynamic of the “Recovery” and Asset Bubbles: Credit Read More

01.01.18- A Bedtime Story
Bill Bonner

We are explaining our money system to our grandson, James, now 14 months old…

His mother tries to get him to go to bed at 9 p.m. But the little boy’s internal clock is still on Baltimore time; it tells him it is much too early to go to sleep.

Grandpa takes over, drawing out the monetary system like a general spreading a map on a field table. “Here is the enemy,” he says gravely. “They have us completely surrounded. We’re doomed.”

James grumbles. He squirms. He has a sunny, optimistic temperament. But we think our explanations are sinking in.

He seems to understand… Read More

12.30.17- Ron Paul: ‘We Are On The Verge Of Something Like What Happened In ’89 When The Soviet System Just Collapsed’
Damir Mujezinovic

Ron Paul does not believe the U.S. will break into separate countries, like the Soviet Union did, but expects changes in the U.S. monetary policy, as well as the crumbling of the country's "overseas empire."

The godfather of the Tea Party movement and perhaps the most prominent right-leaning libertarian in America, Ron Paul, believes the economic boom the United States experienced under President Trump could be a “bit of an illusion.” Mr. Paul sees inequality, inflation, and debt as real threats that could potentially cause a turmoil. Read More

12.29.17- Investment prospects for 2018
Alasdair Macleod

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, and in financial markets we simply cannot know tomorrow’s prices. All we can do is make assessments of the factors that can be expected to influence them.

Economists’ forecasts today, with very few exceptions, are a waste of time and downright misleading. In 2016, we saw this spectacularly illustrated with Brexit, when the IMF, OECD, the Bank of England and the UK Treasury all forecast a slump in the British economy in the event the referendum voted to leave the EU. While there are reasonable suspicions there was an element of disinformation in the forecasts, the fact they were so wrong is the important point. Yet, we still persist in paying economists to fail us. Read More

12.28.17- The True Consequence of Ending the Gold Standard (In One Chart)
Graham Summers

The single most important chart for understanding the current state of the US financial system is the following:

In simple terms, the above chart reveals that once the US abandoned the Gold Standard completely in 1971, the amount of debt in the US financial system skyrocketed relative to the real economy.

As a result of this, by the time the mid-1990s rolled around, debt levels in the US financial system had become a systemic risk: with this much leverage in the system, even a brief bout of debt deflation (when debt markets deflate) would induce a systemic crisis. Read More

12.27.17- Would This Have Happened Under President Hillary? Holiday Retail Sales Soar Compare To Last Year
Michael Snyder

We are nearly a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, and the economic numbers continue to look quite good. On Monday, we learned that U.S. retail sales during the holiday season are projected to be way up compared to 2016. Yes, there are all sorts of economic red flags popping up all over the place, and I write about them regularly. And without a doubt, 2017 has been one of the worst years for brick and mortar retail stores in a very long time. But when something good happens we should acknowledge that too, and many are giving President Trump credit for the fact that retail sales are projected to be up 4.9 percent this holiday season compared to last year... Read More

12.26.17- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: "Why I'm Hopeful"
CharlesHugh Smith

A more human world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo.

Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome. Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn't leave much to be happy about.

The most hopeful thing in my mind is that the Status Quo is devolving from its internal contradictions and excesses. It is a perverse, intensely destructive system with horrific incentives for predation, exploitation, fraud and complicity and few disincentives. Read More

12.25.17- Epic Stimulus Overload
Doug Nolan

Ten-year Treasury yields jumped 13 bps this week to 2.48%, the high going back to March. German bund yields rose 12 bps to 0.42%. U.S. equities have been reveling in tax reform exuberance. Bonds not so much. With unemployment at an almost 17-year low 4.1%, bond investors have so far retained incredible faith in global central bankers and the disinflation thesis.

Between tax legislation and cryptocurrencies, there’s been little interest in much else. As for tax cuts, it’s an inopportune juncture in the cycle for aggressive fiscal stimulus. And for major corporate tax reduction more specifically, with boom-time earnings and the loosest Credit conditions imaginable, it’s Epic Stimulus Overload. History will look back at this week - ebullient Republicans sharing the podium and cryptocurrency/blockchain trading madness - and ponder how things got so crazy. Read More

12.23.17- What the Falling Dollar Means for Gold Prices in 2018
Peter Reagan

2017 has not been a good year for the dollar. Despite traders brimming with optimism after Trump got elected, and the Fed’s best efforts, the dollar is at its lowest in ten years.

As the year comes to an end, it’s down more than 7% compared to other key currencies.

Weak inflation and doubts over Trump’s ability to deliver on his legislative promises have contributed to the greenbacks’ decline. This, together with strong economic growth and strict monetary policies in the global economy, have played a pivotal role in the dollar’s weakness. Read More

12.22.17- 7 Reasons Why The US Cannabis Industry Is About To Be "Rocked"
Tyler Durden

As DataTrek's Nicholas Colas reminds us, recreational marijuana sales become legal in California starting on New Year’s Day 2018. Given that one in eight Americans live in the state, this move will have major implications for the entire US legal cannabis industry.

So, to address any pent up investor questions, Colas has put together a list of 7 major points about the rollout in terms of regulations, taxes, revenue estimates, potential banking solutions, and employment consequences. Read More

12.21.17- The Silver Bullet:
2018: Irrational Complacency
Alberto Gallo

“Your loving give me such a thrill
But your love don’t pay my bills
Now give me money
That’s what I want”
Money – Barrett Strong, 1959

Ten long years after the crisis, volatility and fear seem to have disappeared from financial markets. A synchronous global expansion coupled with persistently loose monetary policy has produced a goldilocks environment for all assets. Will it work for another year? Read More

12.20.17- Gold, The Economy, Cryptocurrencies And Irrational Exuberance
Dave Kranzler

The current tax legislation isn’t some thoughtful reform to benefit Americans. It’s a quickly planned looting through a broken window in our nation’s character. – John Hussman

John Hussman wrote a must-read essay titled: “Three Delusions: Paper Wealth, A Booming Economy and Bitcoin (link).” The crypto/blockchain delusion has exceeded the absurdity of the dot.com and housing bubble eras. I was shorting fraud stocks happily in both eras. I’m short a company now called Riot Blockchain. If you look at its description in Yahoo Finance, it bills itself as a developer of technologies applied to animal (“non-human”) medicine. It recently changed its name to Riot Blockchain from Bioptix Inc. Prior to calling itself Bioptic Inc, it called itself Venaxis. Read More

12.19.17- “Dark Money” Runs the World
Nomi Prins

Few people know financial markets’ biggest secret…

For the last 40 years, most people believed the stock market always goes up. Simply buy and hold long enough, the theory went, and you could sit back and watch the money accumulate in your account. No thought or hard work needed.

It was a nifty strategy — until the idea burned most investors in 2008. Almost a decade later, the scar tissue is still fresh for many investors.

Even today, after the U.S. stock market has rallied by 271% since the bottom on March 6, 2009 — nearly tripling investors’ money — only about half of Americans are invested in the stock market, according to NPR. That’s down from two-thirds compared to a decade ago.Read More

12.18.17- From Bitcoin to Hashgraph: The Crypto Revolution - Hidden Secrets of Money Ep. 8
Mike Maloneey

View Video

12.16.17- Stop Treating Bitcoin Like A Stock
Jordan Stephens

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt so compelled to drink in my life than the past week watching Bitcoin. It’s like watching apaper airplane bounce in the wind that could either nosedive any moment or catch another swift gust upward.

I get it. It looks like a really volatile stock ripe for quick profit or financial demise at the roll of some dice, and if we keep treating it this way, that’s exactly how it will remain.

Investing in stock drives the production of better goods and services, but currency isn’t a commodity which will depreciate due to the nature of its own decay. It’s not a service which could lose its public appeal in a few years. Intellectual property is a closer metaphor, but a dollar will still never hold intrinsic value, ironically, unless it is one day viewed as an antique. Read More

12.15.17- Inflation Can Return Much Faster
Than You Think
James Rickards

Consumer price inflation has remained persistently low, despite the Fed’s best efforts. This has led many people to ask where the inflation is, because the Fed has created trillions of dollars since the financial crisis.

But there has been inflation. It’s just been in assets like stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. How about bitcoin? Bitcoin increased about $2,000 yesterday alone! It’s trading at about $16,000 as I write. We’ve never seen anything like it.

The bottom line is, we’ve seen asset price inflation, and lots of it, too. Read More

12.14.17- Have Stocks Reached A Permanently Rigged Plateau?
Fall Street

A painting recently sold for a record $450 million, a blanket recently sold for $1.5 million, Bitcoin has gone ballistic, and Cramer thinks there are ‘bubbles’ everywhere except stocks. Are these the types of signals that bears have been waiting for? In a word, maybe.

The problem with calling for an end to the good times is that there has been so many false contrarian signals in recent years it is as if the very idea of “risk/reward” has been temporarily laid to waste.

To use a quick example, in early 2016 alarm bells were ringing as junk bonds were imploding, confidence was sliding, and technical market levels were being struck. At the time it looked like the bull was done. Read More

12.13.17- A Question for Every Investor
Michael Lebowitz

Recently we received the following question from a subscriber:

“If a correction in the stock or bond markets comes, the Central Banks will buy stocks with printed money, like the Japanese Central Bank, etc. Will there ever be a shakeout of the garbage and junk in the system? I am losing all confidence.” –Ron H.

Questions like Ron’s that suggest the decay of capitalism and free markets should raise concerns for anyone’s market thesis, bullish, bearish or agnostic. What stops a central bank from manipulating asset prices? When do they cross a line from marginal manipulation to absolute price control? Unfortunately, there are no concrete answers to these questions, but there are clues. Read More

12.12.17- Today’s Current, Biggest Bubble Ever As Shown In Just Three Charts
(Spoiler Alert: It’s NOT Bitcoin)
John Rubino

John Rubino says “It’s always shocking to see the numbers we’re dealing with, but even more so lately…”

Each quarter, Credit Bubble Bulletin’s Doug Noland posts a “flow of funds” report that analyzes the debt and securities markets data released by the Fed in its Z.1 Report. It’s always shocking to see the numbers we’re dealing with, but even more so lately as history’s biggest financial bubble starts to dwarf its predecessors.

Here’s some of the scarier data in chart form, with Noland’s commentary: Read More

12.11.17- Investment Potpourri
Bill Gross

1. Prior market tops (1987, 2000, 2007, etc.) allowed asset managers to partially “insure” their risk assets by purchasing Treasuries that could appreciate in price as the Fed lowered policy rates. Today, that “insurance” is limited with interest rates so low. Risk assets, therefore, have a less “insurable” left tail that should be priced into higher risk premiums. Should a crisis arise because of policy mistakes, geopolitical crises, or other currently unforeseen risks, the ability to protect principal will be impaired relative to history. That in turn argues for a more cautious and easier Fed than otherwise assumed.

Economists prior to Keynes viewed “modeled” as well as “real time” economies as self-balancing, but subject to imbalances from external shocks like oil prices. Rarely did theory incorporate finance and credit as one of those potential earthquakes. Read More

12.09.17- Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 4
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Dr. D: Well, all parts of the system rely on accurate record-keeping. Look at voting rights: we had a security company where 20% more people voted than there were shares. Think you could direct corporate, even national power that way? Without records of transfer, how do you know you own it? Morgan transferred a stock to Schwab but forgot to clear it. Doesn’t that mean it’s listed in both Morgan and Schwab? In fact, didn’t you just double-count and double-value that share? Suppose you fail to clear just a few each day. Before long, compounding the double ownership leads to pension funds owning 2% fake shares, then 5%, then 10%, until stock market and the national value itself becomes unreal. And how would you unwind it? Read More

12.08.17- Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 3
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Dr. D: The money, the unaccountable, uninhibited release of tokens can do more than just buy centuries of hard labor in seconds, it‘s also a method of control. Banks, our present issuers of money, can approve or destroy businesses by denying loans. They can do this to individuals, like denying loans to unpopular figures, or to whole sectors, like gun shops. They can also offer money for free to Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla, which have no profitable business model or any hope of getting one, and deny loans to power plants, railroads, farms, and bridges as they fall into the Mississippi.

The result is banks and their attending insiders are a de facto Committee of Central Planners in the great Soviet style. What is fashionable and exciting to them can happen, and what they dislike or disapprove of for any reason can never happen. And once on a completely fiat system, this is how capital is allocated through our entire system: badly. Read More

12.07.17- Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 2
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Dr. D: You have to understand what exchanges are and are not. An exchange is a central point where owners post collateral and thereby join and trade on the exchange. The exchange backs the trades with their solvency and reputation, but it’s not a barter system, and it’s not free: the exchange has to make money too. Look at the Comex, which reaches back to the early history of commodities exchange which was founded to match buyers of say, wheat, like General Mills, with producers, the farmers. But why not just have the farmer drive to the local silo and sell there? Two reasons: one, unlike manufacturing, harvests are lumpy. To have everyone buy or sell at one time of the year would cripple the demand for money in that season. This may be why market crashes happen historically at harvest when the demand for money (i.e. Deflation) was highest. Secondly, however, suppose the weather turned bad: all farmers would be ruined simultaneously. Read More

12.06.17- Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist – 1
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

A while ago, I asked a regular commenter at the Automatic Earth, who goes by the moniker Dr. D, to try and write an article for us. Not long after, I received no less than 31 pages, and an even 12345 words. Way too long for today’s digital attention spans. We decided to split it into 5 chapters. After we work through those 5, we’ll post it as one piece as well. Dr. D, who insists on sticking with his nom de plume, picked his own topic, and it’s -fittingly- bitcoin. A topic about which one can cover a lot of ground in 12345 words.

Now, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t throw in my own two Satoshis: Dr. D claims that “..everyone has an equal opportunity to solve the next calculation..”, but while that may perhaps have been sort of true at the very start, it isn’t now. It’s not true for the computerless or computer-illiterate, for those too poor to afford the electricity required by bitcoin mining, and for various other -very large- groups of people. Read More

12.05.17- It’s Not Really About Bitcoin Price Surging, It’s Fiat Currencies In Free Fall
Joseph Young

According to Stefan Molyneux, a highly regarded Canadian podcast host, it is more important to recognize the free fall of fiat currencies, more so than to acknowledge the exponential growth rate of Bitcoin.

Molyneux says:

“It's not so much that Bitcoin is going through the roof - it's that fiat currencies are in free fall, but only Bitcoin is noticing.”

The decline of fiat currencies

For many decades, governments have had absolute control over the global finance sector and monetary policy through the fiat currency system. Read More

12.04.17- Plunder Capitalism
Paul Craig Roberts

I deplore the tax cut that has passed Congress. It is not an economic policy tax cut, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with supply-side economics. The entire purpose is to raise equity prices by providing equity owners with more capital gains and dividends. In other words, it is legislation that makes equity owners richer, thus further polarizing society into a vast arena of poverty and near-poverty and the One Percent, or more precisely a fraction of the One Percent wallowing in billions of dollars. Unless our rulers can continue to control the explanations, the tax cut edges us closer to revolution resulting from complete distrust of government. Read More

12.02.17- Carmageddon for Tesla
Wolf Richter

This is where Hype Goes to Die.

Today was the monthly moment of truth for automakers in the US. They reported the number of new vehicles that their dealers delivered to their customers and that the automakers delivered directly to large fleet customers. These are unit sales, not dollar sales, and they’re religiously followed by the industry.

Total sales in November rose 0.9% from a year ago to 1,393,010 new vehicles, according to Autodata, which tracks these sales as they’re reported by the automakers. Sales of cars dropped 8.2%. Sales of trucks – which include SUVs, crossovers, pickups, and vans – rose 6.6%. Strong replacement demand from the hurricane-affected areas in Texas papered over weaknesses elsewhere. As always, there were winners and losers. Read More

12.01.17- Bitcoin Soars After CFTC Approves Futures Trading: First Trade To Take Place Dec.18
Tyler Durden

Bitcoin is back over $10,000 after the the CFTC confirmed what had been previously reported, namely that it would allow bitcoin futures to trade on two exchanges, the CME and CBOE Futures Exchange, also granting the Cantor Exchange permission to trade a contract for bitcoin binary options.

The CFTC announced that through a process known as "self-certification," CME and Cboe stated that their contracts comply with U.S. law and CFTC regulations. The US commodity regulator also said that the it held “rigorous discussions” with the exchanges that resulted in improvements to the contracts’ designs and settlement. Read More

10.09.18- How America Goes the Way of Argentina Bill Bonner

10.05.18- Debts & Deficits: A Slow Motion Train Wreck Lance Roberts

08.31.18- Debt Is Destroying The Economy, And Washington Is Desperate To Distract You Dave Kranzler

08.20.18- What Truckers & Railroads Just Said about the US Economy Wolf Richter

08.11.18- Facebook’s crash is everybody’s problem Dan Denning

07.04.18- Holiday Rant: The Fourth of July Has Nothing to Do with the Military Laurence M. Vance