11.27.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Watch: Edward Snowden Opines On Censorship, Biden, And At-Risk Press Freedoms
Glenn Greenwald

The NSA reporting of 2013, enabled by the heroic whistleblowing of Edward Snowden, was widely perceived at the time time to be about violations of the right to privacy. It was, of course, about that, but the revelations implicated numerous other vital liberties, including free speech, a free press, the need for transparency over state actors and especially the always-lurking security state, and the dangers of allowing governments to make the most consequential decisions in the dark, with no democratic consent or accountability. Read More

11.26.20- Didn’t We Learn This Lesson
400 Years Ago?
Simon Black

Exactly 400 years ago, 102 Pilgrims were staring down what promised to be a brutal winter, after first coming to shore, and setting up a tiny village in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The industrious, God-fearing Pilgrims decided to pull together and pool their resources and efforts to better survive winter. They created a commune, and elected a Governor to call the shots. Read More

11.25.20- The Real Villain Is The Fed
Peter Schiff

On his podcast, Peter Schiff talked about the big stock market rally. He said it’s not really about the presidential election, or the COVID vaccine, or excitement about Joe Biden. The rally is all about the Federal Reserve. And it always has been.

Pres. Donald Trump took the opportunity to call a press conference to tout the Dow record. “The stock market’s just broken 30,000 — never been broken, that number. That’s a sacred number, 30,000, and nobody thought they’d ever see it,” Trump said. Read More

11.24.20- Here Comes the New Recession
Jim Rickards

Let’s start with the basics. There’s no evidence that lockdowns work to stop the spread of coronavirus. None. This is not guesswork.

After ten months of the pandemic, we have data from more than twenty major countries around the world that have tried lockdowns in various forms. The lockdowns range from extreme (as happened in Victoria in Australia) to moderate (Sweden) to non-existent (South Dakota). Read More

11.23.20- JPMorgan Admits It Was Wrong About End Of Bitcoin Bull Run, Renews $140,000-Plus Price Forecast
Tyler Durden

At the time of this writing, the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin has seen its value skyrocket to around $19,000  after dropping down to around just $4,840 in mid-March.

This is significant because the all-time high for the cryptocurrency is $19,783 back in December of 2017, only to drop down to as low as $3,122.

Within the past year, the price of Bitcoin has more than doubled, posting close to $10,000 in growth in the last two months alone. Read More

11.21.20- Three Conditions for a Free Market Economy
Tom Dyson

Greetings from the Little School for Libertarian Kids in the Teton Mountains…

Kate and I are running an experiment. We have three kids, ages 12, 10, and 8. Instead of sending our kids to school, we educate them ourselves.

And instead of pursuing traditional educational goals, like getting good test scores and getting accepted to college, we adopted a completely different educational standard… Read More

11.20.20- Wall Street’s Back to “Full Bull”
Brian Maher

As the bad penny returns to its sender, as the dog returns to its vomit… Wall Street returns to its bull.

That is, Wall Street is nearing “full bull.”

Thus concludes Bank of America Chief Investment Officer Michael Hartnett.

We might add a four-letter scatological conclusion to “bull”… yet our harsh Presbyterian standard forbids it. Read More

11.19.20- NASDAQ Considering Moving to Texas
Joseph P. Farrell

So many people sent me versions of this story it would be impossible to thank each individually, but the numbers of people who did so clearly indicate that our “Gizars” are still on top of their game. Indeed, I am blogging about this story because it has my suspicion meter in the red zone. Here’s a version shared by M.G.: Read More

11.18.20- The Velocity of Money Is Increasing
Bill Bonner

Marta works for us at our house at the ranch. She comes down from her mountain puesto (outpost) on foot, a hike of about six hours.

She and her family are about as unsophisticated about money as anyone in Christendom. They live in a mud house, with a dirt floor and no microwave nor washing machine.

Their hands are as hard as boot leather. They get no newspapers. They see no TV. They are not readers of the Diary. Read More

11.17.20- Engdahl on theat Pfizer Vaccine...
Joseph P Farrell

Well folks I’m back. As you know, I took last week off just to recalibrate and rest, and to catch up on emails. As you can imagine, my inbox was flooded (and I mean flooded) with emails containing articles about (surprise surprise), election fraud, so I took the week off also to sort through as many as I could. Accordingly, this week’s honorable mentions may have two parts: one about the election fraud articles, and the other about articles on other topics. In posting articles, always remember we’re not approving or disapproving of their contents nor vouching for them, merely bringing them to your attention to make up your own minds, rather than let SeeBS, Faux, or the other propatainment and “social” media make it up for you. Read More

11.16.20- Get ready for the “Work From Home” Tax
Simon Black

Once upon a time, long long ago in a dreamworld far far away, banks actually used to be capitalists.

They were wealth creators. They wanted to do business with their customers. They facilitated important trade and commerce. They acted responsibly and conservatively with other people’s money.

Now it’s a totally different story. Read More

11.14.20- How You Can Use the Power of Compounding to Supercharge Your Wealth
Jason Bodner

When it comes to investing, the thing many people get wrong is perspective. Most investors are happy to take $100 now, not knowing it could be $500 with a little patience.

Bobby Bonilla got it right.

From 1988 to 1991, Bonilla was one of the best players in Major League Baseball. He was a six-time All-Star and won three Silver Slugger awards.

But in 1999, while he was playing for the New York Mets, Bonilla’s career started to fizzle out. And the Mets decided to buy out the remaining $5.9 million on his contract.  Read More

11.13.20- Dueling Perspectives On China's Economic Reality
Kyle Bass and Michael Pettis

View Video

11.12.20- Even stricter COVID lockdowns are coming, and they are going to be extremely devastating for the U.S. economy
Michael Snyder

Are you ready for another nightmare?  Earlier this year, the COVID lockdowns that were instituted all over the nation resulted in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s and forced more than 60 million Americans to file claims for unemployment benefits.  After seeing how well that first round of lockdowns worked, one of the “scientists” that will be telling Joe Biden what to do about this pandemic wants to do it again.  Yes, you read that correctly.  During an interview with Yahoo Finance, Dr. Michael Osterholm said that what we really need to do to get this pandemic under control is to lock the entire country down for four to six weeks… Read More

11.11.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The Mother of all Elections
Donald Jeffries

Those of us who are awake expected something like this. Perhaps not quite so blatant or heavy handed. But the in-your-face, Mafia-style voter fraud that has permeated the 2020 presidential election surprised even the most hardened critics of our crumbling country. 

When I ended my appearance at 11 pm eastern time on Jeff Rense’s show on election night, Donald Trump was comfortably ahead in all the key states he needed to win, with a very high percentage of the vote counted. It was exceedingly strange how the networks refused to call those states for him, while putting states with lower percentages of the vote counted, and a smaller lead for Biden, in the former vp’s column. Read More

11.10.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Fauci Versus Frontline Doctors and Science - Pandemic Malpractice
Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn

Americans suffer and die unnecessarily in this pandemic. Frontline doctors are ready and willing to use an effective at home/outpatient remedy. But they are being blocked because their medical freedom has been squashed. Dr. Anthony Fauci has ensured that the government only addressed the COVID-19 pandemic through contagion control and hospital treatment. Missing is what other nations have pursued: early home/outpatient treatment to keep people with symptoms and/or a positive test result out of hospital. Which is why they have much lower death rates. Read More

11.09.20- What is at stake is so much more
than just this election…
Michael Snyder

If we don’t stand up now, we may not ever get another chance.  I haven’t written much since the day of the election, and that is because like most people I have been transfixed by the bizarre drama that is unfolding on the national stage right now.  An election is literally being stolen right in front of our eyes, and if we allow them to get away with this there won’t be any limits to what they think they can get away with in the future.  I have been writing about election fraud for many, many years, but in the past it was always more subtle.  Unfortunately, they were not so subtle this time around.  Here in 2020, they were so desperate to prevent another four years of Trump that they decided to dramatically overplay their hand. Read More

11.07.20- One Guaranteed Outcome
For the Next President
Peter Reagan

Can 2020 possibly get any crazier than it already is? We ask the question because, at the time of this writing, the next president still hasn’t been declared.

That said, one thing that does seem clear is that both the House and the Senate are going to end up even “tighter” than in Trump’s first term.

This is likely to be true for at least the next four years, even if Republicans don’t gain the House majority. Read More

11.06.20- Warning, the U.S. is Becoming
a Banana Republic
Graham Summers

The U.S. is in very serious trouble. The integrity of the U.S. election has been damaged, possibly irreparably. There has been clear and obvious fraud. And everyone who isn’t a partisan hack knows it. Regardless of your political views, it is very clear that NONE of this looks appropriate. In the last five days we’ve seen:

1. Multiple states stop counting votes on election night.
2. Multiple states find tens of thousands of votes that benefit Joe Biden to a degree that is statistically impossibly.
3. Clear examples of dead people voting.
4. Counties in which more people voted than were registered.
5. States called for Biden when a ridiculously low percentage of votes were counties (Virginia 1%, Arizona 7%, etc.). Read More

11.05.20- Alt-Market Calls It Again: As Predicted In July, 2020 Election Will Be Contested
Brandon Smith

Just as I successfully predicted the outcome of the 2016 election months in advance, my predictions on the 2020 election are now coming to pass. In July of this year in my article ‘Election 2020: The Worst Case Scenario Is The Most Likely One’, after I outlined the strange factors surrounding Biden and Trump, I stated that:

“These factors and more lead me to predict that Election 2020 will be a contested election which ends with Trump staying in office but accused of usurping the democratic process. This outcome is the worst possible outcome and also the most advantageous for the globalist establishment.” Read More

11.04.20- COMING RIOTS: Bigger Story Than The Actual Election (And Wall Street
Isn’t Ready For That)
Jim Rickards

Tomorrow’s the big election we’ve been anticipating for months. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is the most important presidential election since the 1860 election that put Abraham Lincoln in office, leading to the Civil War.

So, who’s going to win?

Those paying attention to the pre-election frenzy know the polls are all over the place. As recently as this past weekend, a New York Times poll showed Trump behind Biden by 6 points in Pennsylvania, while the Trafalgar Poll showed Trump ahead by 1 point in the same state. Read More

11.03.20- A Biden Presidency Will Mean
A Faster US Collapse
Brandon Smith

The election of 2020 is perhaps the most bizarre affair in modern American history; not since the post Civil War turmoil of reconstruction and the election of 1876 have we seen the nation divided so completely along ideological lines. Questions of states rights vs. federal power were at the forefront at that time, and the presence of federal troops in the American south was a primary voting concern. The Democrats were the party of the Confederacy, the Republicans were the party of the Union. Though they had lost the war, southerners were finding ways to strike back during the elections. Read More

11.02.20- Welcome To The Zombie Global Economy
Jonahtan Rochford

Governments the world over have been lamenting the lack of productivity growth for the last 15 years. In Australia this has been somewhat masked by our enormous population growth, which means that our GDP growth numbers look good on a headline basis but anaemic on a per capita basis. One standout explanation for at least part of this is the increasing proportion of companies in developed nations that meet the criteria of being zombie companies. Due to their over-indebtedness and lack of profitability, these companies tend to make investment decisions based on short term outcomes. Longer term investment in research, equipment and employees is cut back. Read More

10.31.20- The Fed Will Monetize All Of The Debt Issuance
Lance Roberts

There has been a rising concern as of late about surging inflation as the Government injects more stimulus into the economy. While it seems logical, the reality will be quite different as weak economic growth rates force the Fed to monetize the entirety of future debt issuances.

The Inflation Premise

To fully explain why the Fed is now trapped, we must start with the inflation premise. The consensus expectation is the massive increases in monetary stimulus will spark inflationary pressures. Using the money supply as a proxy, we can compare the money supply changes to inflation. Read More

10.30.20- Has the post-election stock market crash already begun?
Michael Snyder

Is this rush for the exits going to turn into a stampede?  Stock prices have been plummeting in recent days, and most of the talking heads on television have been blaming the declines on the COVID-19 pandemic.  Yes, it is true that the number of confirmed cases in the United States is spiking again, but I don’t think that alone is enough to account for what we have been witnessing.  Instead, I believe that the primary reason why stocks have been tumbling is because there is so much uncertainty about what is going to take place next week.  Investors hate uncertainty, and it appears that many of them would prefer to be on the sidelines rather than gamble on the outcome of this election. Read More

10.29.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The “Wokeness” Wars Coming to Your Town  
Philip M. Giraldi

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron” describes a 2081 America in which the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution of the United States have together mandated that all Americans must be made completely equal. No one is allowed to be more intelligent or handsome or more physically capable than anyone else. The standards are enforced by a Handicapper General, an elderly woman named Diana Moon Glampers armed with a shotgun, who mandates the wearing of disfiguring masks for those who are thought to be too beautiful while tiny radios are mounted inside the ears of intelligent people, programmed to go off at intervals and disrupt any thoughts. Those who are stronger or faster than others are required to wear heavy weights around their wrists and ankles. Read More

10.28.20- “Unless the US stops printing money, the dollar will collapse”
Claudio Grass

This has serious implications for investors and savers…

We’re less than one week away from the US election, and yet this sense of utter confusion, bitter political conflict, and economic uncertainty that has been ominously hovering over the nation, as well as the rest of the world, doesn’t seem to have subsided. The country still appears to be in a directionless state, with its economy in serious trouble and its society dangerously fragmented.  Read More

10.27.20- David Einhorn: "This Is An Enormous Tech Bubble" And It Popped On September 2, 2020
Tyler Durden

For those who have not followed David Einhorn's crusade against central bank money printing, and the epic bubble these cluless academic hacks have created, his views on the "enormous tech bubble" we are currently living through and published in his latest letter to investors of his Greenlight hedge fund (which returned 5.9% in Q3) will provide some unique perspective. Read More

10.26.20- Would a Biden Presidency Be Better Than Another Four Years of Trump?
Bill Bonner

We recently learned a new word. Actually, it’s a very old word: Enantiodromia.

Naturally, the Greeks thought of it. As our colleague, Joel Bowman, tells it, it describes the “tension of opposites”… the rise and fall… the yin and yang… the first shall be last…

Want to see it in action… in the flesh? Just look in the mirror. What was once young becomes old.

People, companies, nations… all rise and fall. Read More

10.24.20- Ben Hunt: Inflation Ahead!
Adam Taggart

Why the investing world is about to change

Ben Hunt — highly respected fund manager, author, and former professor/entrepreneur/venture capitalist — says that to be successful in managing your wealth, there’s only one question that matters:

Are we entering a deflationary future, or an inflationary one?

The strategies and appropriate investment targets for each are extremely different, so you’d better answer correctly. Read More

10.23.20- An Emerging Markets "Doom Loop" Time Bomb Emerges, And Inflation Could Set It Off
Tyler Durden

While both we - and most other analysts - have been focusing on soaring debt and QE since the covid pandemic, DB's Jim Reid correctly points out that this has been mostly in the context Developed Markets. But how have Emerging Markets funded themselves in the pandemic? The answer, as Reid writes in his Friday "Chart of the Day" note, is "via leveraging its banking system by a combination of moral suasion, liquidity provision from central banks, steep yield curves (encouraging carry trades), regulatory policies (reserve requirement cuts and easier accounting rules), and falling loan-to-deposit ratios (higher savings/weak demand) freeing up balance sheets." Read More

10.22.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: There Is A Solution To Big Tech Censorship - But No Politician Will Touch it
Brandon Smith

The issue of censorship by major tech companies is a precarious one, and I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the nature of the debate. There are some complexities, but it can all be boiled down to this:

Big tech social media conglomerates argue that their websites are like any other private business and that they are protected from overt government interference by the US Constitution. In other words, they have a right to platform or deplatform anyone they choose. Of course, this is the exact OPPOSITE of what most leftist groups have argued in the past when it comes to private businesses refusing to cooperate with people they disagree with on basic principle, such as LGBT activists, but let’s set that hypocrisy aside for now. Read More

10.21.20- And Now, for Something Entiely Different: Mr. Trump and Fraudulent Election Balloting
Walter E. Block

Mr. Trump is quite justified in worrying aloud about the possibility of voter fraud what with absentee balloting and reliance on, ugh, the US Postal Service.

The instances of chicanery in this regard are too numerous to deserve specific mention. It is not for nothing that their product is widely known as “snail mail.” This is the group that loses money by the billions, not the millions. Read More

10.10.20- Why Gold?
Jim Rickards

Why gold?

That’s a question I’m asked frequently. It’s usually followed by a comment along the lines of, “I don’t get it. It’s just a shiny rock. People dig it out of the ground and then put it back in the ground. What’s the point?”

I usually begin my reply by saying, “It’s not a rock, it’s a metal” and then go from there.

I have a lot of sympathy in these conversations. The fact that people don’t know much about gold today is not exactly their fault. The economics establishment of policymakers, academics and central bankers have closed ranks around the idea that gold is a taboo subject. Read More

10.19.20- No, The Stock Market Isn't A "Leading Indicator" Of Economic Prosperity
Chris Calton

“STOCK MARKET UP ANOTHER 300 POINTS,” Donald Trump tweeted on October 12, with characteristic overcapitalization. “GREATEST LEADING INDICATOR OF THEM ALL!!!”

President Trump’s use of the stock market as an economic indicator is hardly unusual.Democrats like to tout the stock market performance under Obama as a counterpoint to Trump’s boasting. This type of thinking, which equates stock market performance with economic health, is widespread. It’s also somewhat understandable; by the twentieth century, middle-class stock ownership had become the standard strategy for saving and investing, giving most citizens a personal interest in market activity. When the market goes up, investors benefit, and this makes market activity a powerful political issue.Read More

10.17.20- Great Unknowns of 2021: Blurry Monetary Policy, Rising Inflation
Peter Reagan

Given today's 24-hour news cycle, President Trump's bout with (and recovery from) COVID-19 is old news.

But in looking back at those uncertain few days, an article on Nikkei notes that the simple tweet announcing he got sick sent oil prices "tumbling $2 a barrel." From a single statement, that's a fairly substantial impact.

And due to his support for renewable energy, Joe Biden has had a similar impact on oil prices: Read More

10.16.20- The economic implosion of 2020: Job losses ramp up again as millions of Americans continue to slide into poverty
Michael Snyder

The mainstream media keeps trying to convince us that things are about to get a whole lot better for the U.S. economy, but instead they just keep getting worse.  On Thursday, we learned that another 898,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week.  That was the highest number that we have seen since August, and it is yet more evidence that a new wave of layoffs has begun.  But according to the experts that the mainstream media relies upon, this wasn’t supposed to happen.  According to them, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits was supposed to be steadily tapering off as the U.S. economy shifted into recovery mode.  Unfortunately for all of us, those experts have been dead wrong. Read More

10.15.20- “This is Going to be One
for the Record Books”
Doug Casey

Just because society experiences turmoil doesn't mean your personal life has to. And a depression doesn't have to be depressing. Most of the real wealth in the world will still exist—it will just change ownership.

What is a depression?

We’re now at the tail end of a very long, but in many ways a very weak and artificial, economic expansion. At the same time we’ve had one of the strongest securities bull markets in history. Both are the result of trillions of new dollars created over the last decade. Right now very few people are willing to consider the possibility of tough times—let alone The Greater Depression. Read More

10.14.20- We Destroyed the World’s Greatest Economy for No Reason
Jim Rickards

Everyone knew the second quarter of 2020 was going to be a disaster, and it was. The U.S. economy fell by 31.4% (annualized) in the second quarter.

But, the expectation was that we’d have a V-shaped recovery with a sharp bounce-back in the third quarter, a reopening of closed businesses, rehiring of the unemployed and a rising stock market.

But so far, the economy is not following the script laid out for it by the politicians and experts. Read More

10.13.20- The Theory That Will
Revolutionize Economics
George Gilder

Back in April 1998, when the price was $14.47, I urged the readers of the then Gilder Technology Report to buy Amazon (AMZN).

Having gone public in 1997, Amazon had surged to more than a billion-dollar market cap.

Jeff Bezos himself had signed me up for the service at a dinner party at Microsoft scientist Charles Simonyi’s castle on Seattle’s Lake Washington. As the inventor of Word, Simonyi was a Microsoft star, and his shine reflected on Bezos. Read More

10.12.20- Lift up the Rocks and See the Snakes
Clarice Feldman

As media polls continue to mislead about the state of the presidential race, there are many reasons to believe the Democrats are crazed with fear that they will be trounced more soundly this time -- as they should be, given their nominees. Here are some indicators to me: The majority of voters think they are better off now than they were four years ago; the crowds at Trump rallies are enormous and Biden can barely pull a 10-person minyan; outside of university towns there are few Biden-Harris signs up, but American flags (a safe sign when Trump signs would be stolen) are seen waving on front lawns and guns are flying off the shelves to people who have lost faith in their elected local officials to protect them. There are more, of course, but believe what the media would call your own lying eyes. Read More

10.10.20- Monetary distortions of GDP in 2021
 Alasdair Macleod

This article explains the effect of monetary inflation on GDP. Nominal GDP is directly inflated by additional money and credit, so GDP growth is simply a reflection of additional money in the economy. It gives no clue as to the underlying economic situation. Whether the monetary planners know it or not, targeting GDP growth with monetary expansion is a tautology. They only succeed in covering up a deeper recession, the cost of which will become apparent subsequently as the currency’s purchasing power declines. And despite the wealth destruction being wrought by currency debasement, in the coming months we will see monetary expansion deployed more aggressively.  Read More

10.09.20- We No Longer Have Markets – Only Interventions
Dave Kranzler

The entire economic, financial and political system is skating on thin ice…

The actual quote is:  “There are no markets anymore,  just interventions – GATA.”  The only people who deny that Central Banks and Governments prop up the financial markets are those who are completely ignorant of the facts, tragically naive or those who stand to benefit from some way from the market manipulation.  Et tu, Bill Fleckenstein? Read More

10.08.20- My Biggest Fear...
Bill Blain

“Acting on you best behaviour, turn your back on Mother Nature..”

Who won the US vice-presidential debate? Was it particularly relevant?  Safe and dull.  The consensus seems to be it was a succession of boring statements rather than watching candidates perform under pressure.  Trump tweeted Harris was a “Gaffe Machine” – meaning 40% of the US electorate now know that to be an irrefutable truth.  Democrats say she aced it with her forensic destruction of the Trump response to Covid. Pence came over as competent – which in Trump world means he is A+. Next…? Read More

10.07.20- Get Ready for Chaos
Jim Rickards

There’s less than a month until Election Day. Once the votes are in, the die will be cast for the next four years, perhaps longer. Trump or Biden? The difference could not be more clear, and the stakes could not be higher for you and your investments.

Again, this is the most consequential election of our lifetime. Read More

10.06.20- Americans Still Running on Fumes of Stimulus, Now Vanishing
Wolf Richter

Income sags from eerie stimulus-spike. But consumers hadn’t spent all their stimulus & unemployment money, instead paid down credit cards & padded bank accounts. Now they’re drawing on them.

This is how Americans “in aggregate ” – all mixed together, with all class and wealth inequalities mercifully blurred out of the picture – are navigating this twisted economy that has been powered by stimulus payments, extra unemployment payments, and support payments for companies so that they don’t lay off their people. Read More

10.05.20- There are Three Things China Still Fears About America. The Dollar is One of Them
Mark Dittli

Few Western observers know China better than The Honorable Kevin Rudd. As a young diplomat, the Australian, who speaks fluent Mandarin, was stationed in Beijing in the 1980s. As Australia's Prime Minister and then Foreign Minister from 2007 to 2012, he led his country through the delicate tension between its most important alliance partner (the USA) and its largest trading partner (China).  Read More

10.03.20- And Now for Something Entirely Different: Re. That Antarctic Quattuoropus Story
Joseph P. Farrell

WARNING: this one is so strange that I think it’s safe to say that I’m somewhere between 99 and 100% skeptical of it, but even then, it’s worth passing along and filing away in your “Strange Stuff and Rumors about Antarctica” file. To be sure, I think this story has all the distinct “odor” of one of those stories that occasionally comes along that has been deliberately planted on the internet, perhaps to have a bit of fun, or perhaps just to track to see where it travels in cyber space, and who picks it up and talks about it. It was shared by C.J.D.M., but before we can get to it, first a little background as to why I’m sharing it at all, given my skepticism. Read More

10.02.20- The emerging evidence of hyperinflation
Alasdair Macleod

Note: all references to inflation are of the quantity of money and not to the effect on prices unless otherwise indicated.

In last week’s article I showed why empirical evidence of fiat money collapses are relevant to monetary conditions today. In this article I explain why the purchasing power of the dollar is hostage to foreign sellers, and that if the Fed continues with current monetary policies the dollar will follow the same fate as John Law’s livre in 1720. As always in these situations, there is little public understanding of money and the realisation that monetary policy is designed to tax people for the benefit of their government will come as an unpleasant shock.  Read More

10.01.20- The Empire of Uncertainty
Charles Hugh Smith

Anyone claiming they can project the trajectory of the U.S. and global economy is deluding themselves.

Normalcy depends entirely on everyday life being predictable. To be predictable, life must be stable, which means that there is a high level of certainty in every aspect of life. Read More

09.30.20- Monetary and Fiscal Policy Won’t Help
Jim Rickards

Remember all those “green shoots?”

That was the ubiquitous phrase used by White House officials and TV talking heads in 2009 to describe how the U.S. economy was coming back to life after the 2008 global financial crisis.

The problem was we did not get green shoots; what we got was more like brown weeds. Read More

09.29.20- U.S. Stock Market Hits
Record 77% Overvalued
Egon von Greyerz

According to the popular market cap to GDP ratio, the U.S. stock market, collectively, is about 77.0% overvalued. Despite the worst economic backdrop since the Great Depression, stocks have held up reasonably well since the March 23 bottom. While it’s true that the stock market has disconnected from the underlying economy, it has also done so in the past. With such an extreme level of overvaluation, it does beg the question, “Are we witnessing the formation of another bubble?” Read More

09.28.20- Don’t Fall Victim to Investment Hype
Jeff Brown

Emma’s Note: Emma Walsh here, managing editor of the Diary.

Regular readers know that stock investing isn’t our usual beat.

But we know that many of our readers like to invest. And we know that the media hype can make some investments seem almost irresistible. Read More

09.26.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Arresting People For Not Wearing Masks Is Another Giant Step Toward Total Tyranny
Michael Snyder

If anyone doubts that the country that many of us loved so much is almost totally gone, just look at what is going on all around the U.S. right now.  People are actually being arrested and put in prison for not wearing masks.  If authorities are willing to get this extreme during a relatively minor pandemic, what are they going to do to us when a true national emergency breaks out?  I certainly don’t have anything against anyone that wants to wear a mask, and I certainly don’t have a problem with officials that want to encourage everyone to wear one.  But when it gets to a point where the police are actively hunting for “non-conformers” and are dragging them off to prison in handcuffs, that should tell all of us that we aren’t living in a free country anymore. Read More

09.25.20- The Most Dangerous Investing Decision You Can Make
Sam Jacobs

What is the most dangerous investing decision you can presently make?

Your choices are these:

A): Buying and holding through thick, through thin, through peak, through valley

B): Loading up on “FAANG” stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) — plus Microsoft

C): Chasing biotechnology stocks in pursuit of a COVID vaccine jackpot Read More

09.24.20- And Now. for Something Entirely Different: California... The Golden State in Utter Decay
P.F. Whalen

California is a mess; no secret there.  But the degree of decline that befalls it, and the quickness with which that decline is moving, seems to be largely ignored, particularly by Californians themselves.  The nation's most populous state, and arguably its most naturally beautiful, is falling apart virtually everywhere we look.  Yet state and local governments not only insist on moving forward with leftist policies, but continually double down by moving even farther left, and the state's voters return them to office with ever-increasing electoral margins.  California's current approach to virtually all aspects of society — the economy, environment, legal system and culture — is unsustainable, and the time for reckoning is rapidly approaching. Read More

09.23.20- The Layoffs Are Just Beginning
Jim Rickards

UNEMPLOYMENT skyrocketed in March and April, during the worst stage of the pandemic and the lockdowns that followed.

The unemployment rate approached 15% in April and total initial claims for unemployment benefits exceeded 59 million between March and August.

This was the worst episode of unemployment since The Great Depression in the early 1930s. Read More

09.22.20- "This Kind Of Thing Is Enough To Make One Go To The Pub. Oh, We Can't: It's Past 10pm..."
Michael Every

Stocks went down yesterday, which is generally considered to be a very, very bad thing that needs some serious “Don’t worry, this won’t last” headlines from Bloomberg. Not my bag, however. Let’s go a whole different route: gestalt.

Gestalt psychology is a school that emphasizes organisms perceive entire patterns or configurations, not merely individual components. The view is sometimes summarized using the adage, "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." Within global markets where the psychology is that sums are made by only looking at the parts, not the whole, I often want to cry “Oy gestalt!” Read More

09.21.20- How the Stock Market Got to be Out of Touch with Reality
David Stockman

International Man: Thanks to the shutdowns, economic activity on main street is at a standstill. Government, corporate, and personal debt is skyrocketing. Yet, the stock market is in a mania. Has the stock market become out of touch with reality, and if so, what are the consequences of that?

David Stockman: Both ends of the Acela Corridor have lost their marbles. This year, Uncle Sam borrowed $4 trillion in six months, the Fed printed $3 trillion in three months, and Wall Street drove the S&P 500 to 52X reported LTM earnings in the context of a deeper economic plunge than occurred in the worst quarter of the 1930s. Read More

09.19.20- This Is How Long the Bubble Will Last
Jim Rickards

THE underlying economy (U.S. and global) has a strong deflationary bias. Central banks can’t tolerate deflation, so they respond with inflationary measures such as money printing, zero rates and guarantees of all major securities markets.

Those policies won’t actually cause inflation, for reasons explained below. But, they will cause bubbles in certain asset classes, especially stocks.

There’s a serious question as to whether the central bank “inflationary measures” will actually work. They won’t. Read More

09.18.20- China is killing the dollar
Alasdair Macleod

In the wake of the Fed’s promise of 23 March to print money without limit in order to rescue the covid-stricken US economy, China changed its policy of importing industrial materials to a more aggressive stance. In examining the rationale behind this move, this article concludes that while there are sound geopolitical reasons behind it the monetary effect will be to drive down the dollar’s purchasing power, and that this is already happening. More recently, a veiled threat has emerged that China could dump all her US Treasury and agency bonds if the relationship with America deteriorates further. This appears to be a cover for China to reduce her dollar exposure more aggressively. The consequences are a primal threat to the Fed’s policy of escalating monetary policy while maintaining the dollar’s status in the foreign exchanges. Read More

09.17.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Western Wildfires Are Due to Arson and Stupidity, Not Climate Change
Chris Talgo

Unfortunately, we are living in a world where facts don’t matter much anymore. For instance, the wildfires that have swept across the western United States over the past few weeks are being almost universally blamed on climate change, even though the facts tell otherwise.

The fires in California and Oregon are not due to climate change. They are due to arson and sheer stupidity on the part of many, including those who are responsible for the environmental stewardship that is supposed to prevent them in the first place. Read More

09.16.20- Down-to-Earth Aspects of the US Economy in Near-Real Time
Wolf Richter

Long way to go, after 6 months of Pandemic.

The US economy is completing the sixth month of the Pandemic. So how is the recovery going, as seen by the near-real-time indicators that have sprung up as a result of the Pandemic? The raw unadjusted data of these indicators compare daily or weekly data this year to how it was just before the Pandemic, or how it was at the same time last year.

There is some roughness in this data. For example, this year, Labor Day fell on September 7; last year, it fell on September 2 (prior week). So there are some wild fluctuations as Labor Day data gets compared to non-Labor Day data. Independence Day was similar. But that’s raw data. Read More

09.15.20- Isn't It Obvious We Need a New System?
Charles Hugh Smith

Why do we tolerate such a corrupt, undemocratic, exploitive, elite-dominated system? Because we have no other choice? No, we do have a choice.

Isn't it obvious that we need an alternative economic system that isn't controlled by corporations, the government and the central bank for the exclusive benefit of insiders and elites? Isn't it obvious that the current system has failed the majority of participants, and hence the ubiquitous sensations of: Read More

09.14.20- Economic Doom Due to the Covid Response Is on the Horizon and Beyond
Gary D. Barnett

“Only a psychopath would ever think of doing these things, only a psychopath would dream of abusing other people in such a way, only a psychopath would treat people as less than human just for money. The shocking truth is, even though they now have most if not all of the money, they want still more, they want all of the money that you have left in your pockets, they want it all because they have no empathy with other people, with other creatures, they have no feeling for the world which they exploit, they have no love or sense of being or belonging for their souls are dead, dead to all things but greed and a desire to rule over others.”  - Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism Read More

09.12.20- Teetering FAANG Stocks
Raising Critical Questions
Peter Reagan

Late last year, the FAANG companies - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, 
Google - took a big hit due to an antitrust probe.

In 2018, they shivered, as fears of trade war escalation took a big chunk out of their profits.

These are just two recent examples of many that have caused uncertainty for the FAANG stocks. Yet so far, nothing has really impacted them. Which leads us to today…Read More

09.11.20- University Study Concludes: Fire Did Not Bring Down Building 7 on 9/11
AE911Truth

View Video

09.10.20- A September Stock Market Crash?
Michael Snyder

Many of us have been waiting to see what surprises the month of September would bring, and it appears that a stock market crash may be one of them.  Even the most ardent market optimists were admitting that the absurd bubble that had developed over the course of the summer was completely unsustainable, and the only real debate was over when it would finally burst.  So is this it?  Stock prices have certainly plunged quite dramatically over the last several trading sessions, but it is always possible that things could stabilize for a little while.  But whether it happens in September, October, November, December or next year, the truth is that everyone knows that a crash is coming. Read More

09.09.20- The Shifting Dollar Confidence And The Rise Of Gold: Why The Precious Metal Is Outperforming The World’s Reserve Currency
Shaun Djie

The global pandemic has plagued the economy with uncertainty for nearly half a year. Despite early reports of a miracle vaccine, doubts and re-infections have once again cast skepticism on returning to what life once was. The unpredictability of the pandemic coupled with the mounting tensions between the US and China have seesawed asset classes—sinking the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar to a two-year low. In contrast, gold prices soared past US$2000, reaching an all-time high as concerns of the spread of the virus weighed on the world. Read More

09.08.20-Sound Money Is Key to Defending Our Liberties
Thorsten Polleit

The title of this article epitomizes what the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) called the “sound money principle.” As Mises put it:

The sound-money principle has two aspects. It is affirmative in approving the market’s choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government’s propensity to meddle with the currency system.1

It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realise that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of right.2  Read More

09.07.20- Holiday Rant: “Are ‘we the people’ going to let that happen?”
Erik at NeverHadaJob.com

It's always the same plot: an economy gets into trouble and the Bolsheviks show up. They come with different names: National Socialists (Nazis), Bolsheviks (Russia), but the commonality is a hungry populace. The WW1, Treaty of Versailles destroyed the German economy, making a path for Hitler who, not long before he became chancellor, was the head of an insignificant party. Same with the Bolsheviks—they had a couple percent of the vote. And China, devastated by the Japanese in WW2, turned to Mao.  Read More

09.05.20- Weekend Rant: The Hard Math of Demography
Addison Wiggin

Demography is destiny, they say.

The early classical economists — Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Marshall, and others — were keenly interested in the role that the young and the aged played in building wealth.

Living at a time when birth rates were high and populations were expanding, they wanted to determine how demographic growth changed wages, savings, and output; which classes benefited; and whether a larger population was a long-term blessing.  Read More

09.04.20- Signs Of Trouble As We Make The Turn Toward The Fall?
Michael Snyder

Over the past several months we have been witnessing one of the most gloriously irrational stock market rallies in U.S. history.  Even CNN is admitting that this is “the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes”, but stock prices have just kept going higher and higher until this week.  Several months ago the Federal Reserve decided to do whatever it took to rescue the financial markets, and their exceedingly reckless behavior fueled a speculative boom that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  But now it appears that the boom may be ending.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 807 points on Thursday, and it appears that Friday could be another very challenging day for Wall Street. Read More

09.03.20- Negative Interest Rates Have Arrived
Brian Maher

We are often warned that negative interest rates are an approaching menace — not an immediate menace.

Yet are negative rates already reality in the United States? Has the unholy day already arrived?

Today we don the sleuth’s cap, step into our gumshoes… and unearth evidence that negative interest rates are not the future menace… but the present menace.  Read More

09.02.20- United Airlines To Slash 16,370 Jobs
As Air Travel Sinks
Tyler Durden

United Airlines joined American Airlines in the latest round of massive job cuts as the virus pandemic continues to batter the travel and tourism industry. 

United said, in an internal memo, seen by Fox Business, that it will furlough 16,370 workers on Oct. 1. This includes 2,850 pilots, 6,920 flight attendants, and 2,010 technicians.  Read More

09.01.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Ron Paul On The "CDC Bombshell" -
Only 6% Of 'COVID Deaths' From Only COVID
Ron Paul

Over the weekend the Centers for Disease Control dropped a bombshell report on coronavirus/COVID deaths:

of the approximately 165,000 "COVID deaths", less than ten thousand died from COVID.

The rest had on average 2.6 serious additional diseases, with the addition in most cases of extreme advanced age. Read More

08.31.20- Much Worse Is Coming
Michael Snyder

It has been heartbreaking to watch what has been transpiring on the streets of America in recent months.  Our founders intended for us to be united by a common set of values, but now our differences are literally tearing our nation to pieces.  Americans are fighting other Americans in the streets, and that should make all of us incredibly sad.  Does anyone out there actually believe that all of this violence will be resolved by the upcoming election?  If anything, rising political tensions are likely to make the violence even worse, and if the result of the presidential election is contested by either side that could easily take things to an even higher level.  We have entered such a dangerous chapter in American history, and I am extremely concerned about the months ahead. Read More

08.29.20- The U.S. Will See a
Monetary Regime Change
Dan Denning

“I’m not buying it. Things like that don’t happen in America. If anything, the dollar will be the last man standing. You guys are going to lose a lot of money.”

That was the response of a friend in the investment industry who reads my work. He obviously took issue with my claim about what’s driving all asset prices.

The claim?

That what you’re witnessing in financial markets is the decline of paper money relative to precious metals. This “monetary regime change” is driven by government debts over 100% of GDP and rising annual government deficits. Read More

08.28.20- America's Coming Double Dip
Stephen Roach

Soaring financial markets are blithely indifferent to lingering vulnerabilities in the US economy. But the impact of consumers' fear of COVID-19 on pandemic-sensitive services are unlikely to subside, undermining the case for the uninterrupted recovery that investors seem to expect.

The double dip is not a dance. It is the time-honored tendency of the US economy to relapse into recession after a temporary recovery. Over the years, it has happened far more often than not. Notwithstanding frothy financial markets, which currently are discounting the nirvana of an uninterrupted V-shaped recovery, there is a compelling case for another double dip in the aftermath of America’s devastating COVID-19 shock. Read More

08.27.20- "Blind Hypoxic Euphoria" - What The Market Is Missing
Bill Blain

"No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is still delighting his scent with the flowers of spring."

Stock markets continue to grind higher. Why? There are reasons to be cheerful – global earnings haven’t been a bleak as feared, economies are posting some stronger than expected numbers, and the absolute numbers around the pandemic are improving in terms of better outcomes and fewer deaths. There are even a few analysts claiming we’re still headed towards a V-Shaped Recovery – although it won’t now be until mid 2021 – which sounds pretty much their best-case scenario is one year missing from Global Growth. Read More

08.26.20- What Are You Going To Do
As Our Money Dies?
Adam Taggart

In our recent article It’s Time To Position For The Endgame, Chris Martenson explained how the US Federal Reserve and its sister central banks around the world have been engaged in the largest and most egregious wealth transfer in all of history — one that has been drastically exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic.

The official response, tremendous monetary stimulus by the central banks paired with massive fiscal stimulus from national legislatures, has been pitched as “saving the system”. Read More

08.25.20- Beloved Country. Unloved Hedge.
Vitaliy Katsenelson

I usually love writing. I get up early every morning, make a cup of coffee, put on my headphones, and look forward to discovering what my subconscious will surprise me with.

Not this time.

I hated every minute I spent working on this article.

There are many reasons for this.

A few times, as I wrote, I got close to a line I don’t like to cross – the politics line. I rarely discuss politics even with my friends. I have occasional political discussions with my kids (I try to show them all sides). I don’t allow broadcasts of political debates in IMA hallways. They don’t have the intellectual rigor we require in our research.  They bring unwanted toxicity, resolve nothing, and nobody’s mind ever gets changed.  Read More

08.24.20- Global Bankruptcies Soar Despite Trillions In Liquidity
Daniel Lacalle

Misguided lockdowns have destroyed the global economy and the impact is likely to last for years.

The fallacy of the “lives or the economy” argument is evident now that we see that countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Austria, Sweden or Holland have been able to preserve the business fabric and the economy while doing a much better job managing the pandemic than countries with severe lockdowns.  Read More

08.22.20- Weekend Rant: Governments Are Faking It, And Copying Each Other
Jeffrey Tucker

A mystery for months is how it is that so many governments in so many different places on earth could have adopted the same or very similar preposterous policies, no matter the threat level of the virus, and without firm evidence that interventions had any hope of being effective. 

In the course of two weeks, traditional freedoms were zapped away in nearly all developed countries.  Read More

08.21.20- 2020 Is An Economic Nightmare – And Things Just Got Even Worse
Michael Snyder

More than a million Americans were not supposed to be losing their jobs every week by the time we got to the middle of August.  By now, vast hordes of unemployed Americans were supposed to be returning to their old jobs and economic activity was supposed to be returning to normal levels.  But it hasn’t happened that way.  Instead, the U.S. economy continues to unravel at a steady pace.  Every week more businesses go under, more layoffs are announced and more people get behind on their bills.  What we have already been through has been far worse than anything that we experienced during the last recession, and it appears that this new economic downturn is entering yet another new phase.  On Thursday, we learned that another 1.106 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week… Read More

08.20.20- As the Bubble Slowly Pops, the Economic Chain Reaction Is Now in Progress
Max Rangeley

As the Bubble Slowly Pops, the Economic Chain Reaction Is Now in Progress

Much has been written about the economic consequences of covid-19, yet, just as in many of the analyses of the Great Depression and the 2008 crisis, the years of accumulating debt preceding the event do not attract the attention they deserve. Covid-19—or to be more precise, the lockdown—has initiated a cascading liquidation of the debt bubble that has been building for a generation. From the early 1980s, each recession has been responded to with iteratively lower interest rates. Read More

08.19.20- The Great Election Fraud: Will Our Freedoms Survive Another Election?
John W. Whitehead

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

And so it begins again, the never-ending, semi-delusional, train-wreck of an election cycle in which the American people allow themselves to get worked up into a frenzy over the misguided belief that the future of this nation depends on who we elect as president. Read More

08.18.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Trump Agonistes
Jeff Deist

Can Donald Trump, against all odds, still win in November?

It would be a remarkable political feat, on par with his stunning upset in 2016. A global pandemic (however statistically dubious) ravages the country, while riots ravage major US cities. The US economy produces a third less than it did a year ago, 40 million people are out of work and dependent on federal benefits, and 60 percent of all restaurants may go under. Millions of Americans will not pay rent, mortgages, or credit card bills for the foreseeable future. Millions of their kids will not go to school at all, or will simply stare at their teachers on Zoom. Others wear face shields and sit behind plastic screens at their desks. College football, a religion in America, may well be canceled altogether. Trump’s own Manhattan is a ghost town. And the media is intensely aligned against him. Read More

08.17.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Jefferson on the Family and Liberty
David Gordon

Thomas Jefferson has valuable things to say about two key criticisms of the free market. I learned about these from reading C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind (Encounter Books, 2019) Thompson has done an immense amount on research on the thought of the leading figures of the American Revolution, and I urge everyone to read this excellent book. Read More

08.15.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The Selloff
Ted Butler

I hadn’t planned on writing about the very sharp selloff that started yesterday (Tuesday) in gold and silver, but can’t imagine anything more on investors’ minds – mine included. No amount of prior mental foresight fully prepares most for the type of selloff underway – no declarations of an overbought technical condition, warnings of increase price volatility or of big shorts’ being backed into a corner and not giving up without a fight. Here, I would bow to that noted philosopher, Mike Tyson, “everyone has a plan until he’s punched in the face.” Read More

08.14.20- An Unexpected Systemic Crisis Is for Sure
Alasdair Macleod

Downturns in bank credit expansion always lead to systemic problems. We are on the edge of such a downturn, which thanks to everyone’s focus on the coronavirus, is unexpected.

We can now identify 23 March as the date when markets stopped worrying about deflation and realised that monetary inflation is the certain outlook. That day, the Fed promised unlimited monetary stimulus for both consumers and businesses, and the dollar began to fall. Read More

08.13.20- Could Wall Street Lose the Election?
Charles Hugh Smith

Two simple regulations would drive a stake through Wall Street's corrupt, evil heart.

While the corporate media is focused on the presidential election, perhaps the more interesting question is: could Wall Street Lose the election? That is, could Wall Street face potentially fatal restrictions regardless of who wins?

If this seems farfetched, consider the history of abrupt social-political-financial turn-arounds that surprised the mainstream. Off the top of my head I would point to Big Tobacco and environmental controls on Big Industry. Read More

08.12.20- This Isn’t Going To Be Good At All
Michael Snyder

By now I am sure that you have heard the news.  Joe Biden has chosen Kamala Harris as his running mate, and the mainstream media is lavishing her with praise.  Of course the focus of the election coverage will soon return to Biden and President Trump, but the American people will want to keep a very close eye on Harris, because she could soon be the president of the United States.  And I am not talking about in 2024 or 2028.  At this point, Joe Biden’s mental and physical health are declining so rapidly that there is absolutely no guarantee that he will even make it to November.  And even if he makes it to November and is able to win the election, there is no guarantee that he will be able to make it through his first term. Read More

08.11.20- The Economy Is Mortally Wounded
Charles Hugh Smith

A fully financialized, totally debt and speculation-dependent economy is terminal once leverage and debt stop expanding exponentially.

We all know the movie scene in which the character is wounded but dismisses it as no big deal, and then lurches into the closing sequence where we discover the wound was not inconsequential, it was mortal, and the character expires. 

That's a fair depiction of the economy--both the U.S. and the global economy.The rapt audience is assured it's just a flesh wound and the character will soldier on, teeth nobly gritted, and that sets up our surprise when he/she tragically expires in the climatic scene. Read More

08.10.20- "The Brutal Reality Of Slowdown
Is Becoming Clearer"
Bill Blain

Who Pulled the Plug?

“Unnervingly coherent and laughably mindless”

This morning’s opening quote isn’t an independent assessment of the Morning Porridge – but is lifted from a newspaper article on Artificial Intelligence.  It ends on a very scary tag: the AI is asked if it is conscious and responds:

“To be clear, I am not a person.  I am not self-aware.  I am not conscious.  I can’t feel pain.  I don’t enjoy anything.  I am a cold, calculating machine designed to simulate human response and to predict the probability of certain outcomes.  The only reason I am responding is to defend my honour.” Read More

08.08.20- The Origins of the Dollar's Value
Frank Shostak

Why does the dollar bill in one's pocket have value? The value of money is established, according to some experts, because the government in power says so. For some commentators the value of money is on account of social convention. What this implies is that money has value because it is accepted. And why is it accepted? …because it is accepted! Obviously this is not a good explanation of why money has value.1

Let us try another approach. Demand for a good arises from its perceived benefit. For instance, people demand food because of the nourishment it offers them. Likewise, people demand money not for direct use in consumption, but in order to exchange it for other goods and services. Money is not useful in itself, but because it has an exchange value—it is exchangeable in terms of other goods and services. Read More

08.07.20- Raoul Pal: ‘It May Not Be Worth Owning Any Asset Other Than Bitcoin’
Turner Wright

Raoul Pal, CEO and founder of Real Vision, says Bitcoin may soon become his only asset for long-term investments.

CEO and founder of Real Vision Raoul Pal says his “conviction levels” in Bitcoin are rising on a daily basis as he compares the crypto asset to traditional investments on various timescales.

Applying economic cycle theory in a series of charts posted to Twitter on Aug. 6, the former Goldman Sachs fund manager stated that although many investors choose gold as an alternative to fiat, Bitcoin (BTC) has been the only asset in the world to “offset the growth of the G4 balance sheet.” The G4 refers to the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank. Read More

08.06.20- The Unraveling Will Accelerate
Charles Hugh Smith

Since the first news of pandemic in late January, I’ve been discussing potential accelerants to the unraveling of our fragile financial system.

The system appears stable until a catalyst pushes it off the cliff.

Catalysts come in a variety of forms, from the apparently modest “straw that breaks the camel’s back” to a broad awakening that the status quo simply isn’t capable of adapting successfully to new realities. Read More

08.05.20- China Will Soon Be Able To Close Off The Straits Of Hormuz And The Red Sea
Michael Every

The world is rightly shocked today by the terrible explosion that devastated Beirut, and our thoughts go out to the people of Lebanon. The cause is still unknown, but visual evidence and official government statements suggest it was a tragic accident due to storing fireworks next to up to 2,750 tons(!) of ammonium nitrate. Despite denials from daggers-drawn Israel and Hezbollah, even a region rife in conspiracy theories had dismissed thoughts of this being either (Lebanese) politics or regional geopolitics (indeed, Israel has offered medical assistance given Beirut’s hospitals are overflowing)…until US President Trump blurted out his generals had told him it looked like a bomb and “attack” of some kind. Speculation or confidential information? Either way, it’s explosive. Read More

08.04.20- The Dollar Standard
Slipping Out of Control?
Alastair Crooke

Should confidence in the dollar begin to evaporate, all fiat currencies will sink in tandem – as G20 Central Banks are bound by the same policies as…

As commentators focus on the hospitalisations of two Gulf monarchs, and permutate likely succession issues, they may miss the wood for the succession trees: Of course, the death of either the Emir of Kuwait (91 years old) or King Salman of Saudi Arabia (84 years old) is a serious political matter. King Salman’s particularly has the potential to upturn the region (or not). Yet Gulf stability today rests less on who succeeds, but rather on tectonic shifts in geo-finance and politics that are just becoming visible. Time to move on from stale ruminations about who’s ‘up and coming’, and who’s ‘down and out’ in these dysfunctional families. Read More

08.03.20- "Massive Consequences Are Coming..."
Bill Blain

“Wait a minute. You just flash that thing, it erases her memory, and you just make up a new one?”

A new month and what new madness for markets is the question?  Non Farm Payrolls is the big one due on Friday… What will it tell us about the state of the US economy and indicate for the globe?  Read More

08.01.20- We Are Experiencing Economic Devastation On A Scale That America Has Never Seen Before
Michael Snyder

For a very long time we have been warned that a U.S. economic collapse was inevitably coming, and now it is here.  Fear of COVID-19 and unprecedented civil unrest in our major cities have combined to plunge us into a historic economic downturn, and nobody is exactly sure what is going to happen next.  On Thursday, we learned that U.S. GDP was down 32.9 percent on an annualized basis last quarter.  That officially makes last quarter the worst quarter in all of U.S. history, and many people believe that this new economic depression is just getting started.  But of course not all areas of the country are being affected equally.  According to USA Today, states such as Hawaii, Nevada, Michigan and New York were hit particularly hard last quarter… Read More

07.31.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Martial Law Is Unacceptable Regardless Of The Circumstances
Brandon Smith

Back in 2014, hundreds if not thousands of conservatives and liberty movement activists converged on a farm in rural Clark County, Nevada. The purpose was to protest the incursion of federal government agents onto the property of the Bundy family, who had defied pressure from the Bureau of Land Management to stop allowing their cattle to feed on “federal land” in a form of free ranging. It was a practice that had been going on for decades and one that was required for the Bundy farm to survive, ended by environmental laws protecting a tortoise. Read More

07.30.20- Why Are There so Few Female CEOs?
Walter E. Block

It’s for the same reason there are so few women on death row

Despite all the efforts of equalization, women in high-ranking corporate positions are still exceedingly rare. But they are almost as rare in the dredges of society – and the reasons for both run deeper than sexism.

It is more than passing curious that at a time when women constitute roughly half the workforce, and are in the actual majority in terms of earning college degrees, there are still so few female CEOs. The distaff side accounts for CEOs in only 167 out of 3,000 large companies, which translates into a rather modest 5.5 percent of the total. Read More

07.29.20- Silver’s Biggest Weekly Gain in 40 Years
Frank Holmes

The best performing precious metal for the week was silver, up 17.79 percent. Silver had its biggest weekly gain in nearly 40 years and could keep soaring. The metal hit its highest level since 2013. Mike McGlone, commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence says the white metal could eventually climb to $30 an ounce amid a broad-based bull market for precious metals. McGlone predicts the metal will stay between $20 and $25 for an extended period before moving higher. The Global X Silver Miners ETF had a ninth straight day of inflows and the iShares Silver Trust saw five consecutive days of money flows. Read More

07.28.20- Coca-Cola Confronted by Big Problem in its Second Largest Market. For Once, Political Connections Failed. Oct 1 is the Date
Wolf Richter

Per-person consumption of soft drinks in Mexico is the highest in the world. But due to link of obesity to Covid deaths, sugary drinks now face their nemesis.

When billions of people are forced to hunker down at home for months on end, unable to visit their favorite restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theme parks or other leisure venues, they tend to drink fewer soft drinks, as the Coca-Cola Company can attest. In the second quarter, when roughly a third of the world population was put through some form of lockdown, the company’s global revenues slumped 28% year-over-year, to $7.2 billion. It was its largest drop in quarterly revenue in more than 30 years. Read More

07.27.20- Europe Bails Out Its Failed States with “Common” (i.e., German) Bonds
John Rubino

The “European Project” was designed with something like the current crisis in mind.

The adoption of a common currency was just the first, politically easiest, step in a process that would eventually – its architects hoped – culminate in something like the United States, where a bunch of different geographic and cultural entities are subordinate to a central government that handles war, diplomacy, and finance. Read More

07.25.20- A Lost Year – Where Do You Go From Here?
Peter R. Quinones

The point of no return may have been reached. The effects of the government-mandated shutdowns due to Covid-19 on businesses — especially small businesses — may not be known for months, even decades, but anyone who is paying attention is beginning to realize we are somewhere new. A place no one could’ve predicted at the beginning of 2020 when onlookers were just anticipating an ugly election year. They got more, much more. Read More

07.24.20- The Numbers Tell Us That The ‘Economic Recovery’ Is Dead And Businesses Are Failing At a Staggering Pace
Michael Snyder

Even though economic conditions were absolutely awful, during the month of June the mainstream media kept insisting that the U.S. economy was “recovering” and the stock market kept surging on every hint of good news.  But now the “economic recovery” narrative is completely dead, because the numbers clearly show that the U.S. economy is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.  On Thursday, the Labor Department announced that another 1.416 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week. Read More

07.23.20- “Don’t Fight the Narrative”
Jim Rickards

It’s widely believed that the stock market looks ahead and discounts the future. But consider this November’s presidential election…

Joe Biden has a substantial lead over President Trump in the polls. But Biden’s platform is not what you would call market friendly. For example, it calls for a 39.6% tax rate on dividends and capital gains.

But the stock market is near all-time highs again, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average nearing 27,000, the S&P over 3,200 and the Nasdaq actually at record highs. Read More

07.22.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: How Lincoln Destroyed the United States
Paul Craig Roberts

The title of Thomas J. DiLorenzo new book, The Problem with Lincoln, is an understatement. Lincoln was far more than a problem.  He was the worst disaster ever to befall the United States.

Lincoln destroyed the federal republic established by the founding fathers, and he destroyed the Constitution that protected it. He violated every provision of, and every Amendment to, the Constitution.  He then rewrote, in effect, the Constitution and left the 10th Amendment out. Read More

07.21.20- Brown Weeds, Not Green Shoots
James G. Rickards

Remember “green shoots?”

That was the ubiquitous phrase used by White House officials and TV talking heads in 2009 to describe how the U.S. economy was coming back to life after the 2008 global financial crisis.

The problem was we did not get green shoots, we got brown weeds.

The economy did recover but it was the slowest recovery in U.S. history. After the green shoots theory had been discredited, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner promised a “recovery summer” in 2010. Read More

07.20.20- Welcome To The Crazed, Frantic Demise Of Finance Capitalism
Charles Hugh Smith

The cognitive dissonance required to ignore the widening gap between the real economy and the fraud's basic machinery--speculation funded by "money" conjured out of thin air--has reached a level of denial that can only be termed psychotic.

When scams start unraveling, the scammers become increasingly frantic to maintain the illusion of legitimacy and the delusion of guaranteed gains that are the lifeblood of every scam. One sure sign that the flim-flam is about to collapse is the manic rise of FOMO, fear of missing out, as the scammers jam the Ponzi scheme's stellar returns to new extremes. Read More

07.18.20- Humpty Dumpty System is Irreparable
Egon Von Greyerz

What does it take to break the global financial system? Well, we obviously know what it takes since the system is already broken. Broken by debts, broken by deficits, broken by a fractured financial system, and broken by false markets as well as fake money.

So just like Humpty Dumpty, the system has already had a big fall. But the world still believes that this is all a fairytale with a happy ending. No one wants to recognise that Humpty is totally broken and irreparable. Read More

07.17.20- Calibrating The Craziness
David Robertson

After a record drawdown in the first quarter and a record rebound in the second quarter, no one is disputing that the first half of 2020 has been memorable. What is open for question is whether the first or the second quarter is a better portent for the foreseeable future.

There is no doubt that public policy is part of the equation. While overwhelming policy responses to the Covid-19 related lockdowns certainly affected the markets, the Fed didn’t force anybody to do anything either. The key to managing through this is understanding what has happened and why. Read More

07.16.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: “Lockdown 2.0”... This New Wave Of Lockdowns Will Ensure The U.S. Remains In An Economic Depression Through The 2020 Election
Michael Snyder

Another wave of lockdowns has begun, and that is really bad news for the U.S. economy.  The first wave of lockdowns resulted in the permanent closing of more than 100,000 U.S. businesses, colossal lines at food banks around the nation, and the loss of tens of millions of jobs.  Needless to say, this new wave of lockdowns will make things even worse, and some are speculating that this is precisely what Democrats want.  If the U.S. economy continues to fall apart as we approach the election in November, the thinking is that this will make President Trump look bad and will make it more likely that people will cast votes for Democrats. Read More

07.15.20- Where Markets are Still Free
Tyler Durden

In the words of Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd we will never return to free market capitalism. If central bank intervention truncates risk in any market then that risk becomes unquantifiable.  So where are markets still free and the risk acceptable?  Using digital hedge fund Bitcoin Enhanced as an example I suggest investors can find freedom by investing in non-fiat digital assets using the same business model VCs have been using for years.

The search for free markets begins by asking where are they not free?  Where does the market rely on fiat money?  Which asset carries the risk of centralised counterparties for its operation or trading? Read More

07.14.20- A Serious Message From Chris Martenson
Chris Martenson

Time is running short to brace for impact

Like a windstorm toppling a hollowed-out tree, SARS-CoV-2 didn’t cause the current recession so much as it exposed how rotten things already were.

Even before SARS-CoV-2, households were struggling. Far too many were limping along without any savings at all, one crisis away from financial ruin. Read More

07.13.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Constitutional Republic Versus Pure Democracy: How The US Election Process Has Changed
Sam Jacobs

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

- Pledge of Allegiance, with a revision made in 1923

Conservatives are generally quick to point out that America is a republic, not a democracy. But what really is the difference, and are they even right? Read More

07.11.20- The Insane U.S. Budget Deficit
Just Went Ballistic
Birch Gold Group

In recent years, as the government has run annual deficits nearing $1 trillion, they’ve continued to hit the debtceiling, which is supposed to keep spending in line. But each time, Congress has voted to raise the ceiling so they could continue paying obligations.

These actions are not without controversy, and you’re about to read one reason why…

The recent pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have added a new dimension to this year’s federal deficit. Uncle Sam has had to go on a spending binge to keep things afloat. But nothing like the “spending binges” of the past few years. Read More

07.10.20- ‘What Were You Thinking?’ Part Deux
Jesse Felder

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post titled, ‘What Were You Thinking?’ in reference to a famous Scott McNeely quote from the aftermath of the Dotcom bust:

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

07.09.20- Total Market Insanity: Toyota vs. Tesla
Steve St Angelo

The present market insanity reminds me of the similar mentality of Americans right before the 1929 stock market crash and the pre-1999 Tech Bubble.  However, the big difference today is that technology has destroyed the ability of investors to understand the meaning of VALUE.  The notion that technology makes the world better fails the test of time, especially when you read Joesph Tainter’s book, THE COLLAPSE OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES. Read More

07.08.20- The U.S. Economy Hasn’t Experienced Anything Like This Since The Great Depression Of The 1930s
Michael Snyder

The recession of 2008 and 2009 was bad, but it was nothing like this.  Even though this new economic downturn is only a few months old, we are already seeing numbers that we haven’t seen since the worst parts of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  More than 48 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits over the past 15 weeks, well over 100,000 businesses have permanently closed their doors, and civil unrest has turned quite a few of our major cities into war zones.  But not all areas of the country are being affected equally. Read More

07.07.20- Investing in a World Gone “Covidious”
George Gilder

How do you invest in a world gone covidiously cuckoo?

In Agora founder Bill Bonner’s take: wandering through life facelessly suspended “between six feet apart and six feet under?”

In a country that locks down its healthy and productive citizens, while refusing even to bother, let alone lock up, crazed mobs of masked arsonists and burglars in the streets? Read More

07.06.20- Year Zero
Matt Taibbi

On America's birthday, celebrating the corporate-sponsored revolution

It’s the Fourth of July, and revolution is in the air. Only in America would it look like this: an elite-sponsored Maoist revolt, couched as a Black liberation movement whose canonical texts are a corporate consultant’s white guilt self-help manual, and a New York Times series rewriting history to explain an election they called wrong. Read More

07.04.20- Important Update: ER Doc –
The Truth About COVID 19
Dr. Kelly Victory, MD

View Video

07.03.20- Prices are going to rise - and fast!
Alasdair Macleod

With stockmarkets barely ruffled, few are thinking beyond the very short-term and they are mostly guessing anyway. Other than possibly the very short-term as we emerge from lockdowns, the economic situation is actually dire, and any hope of a V-shaped recovery is wishful thinking or just brokers’ propaganda. But for now, monetary policy is to buy off all reality by printing money without limit and almost no one is thinking about the consequences. Read More

07.02.20- Great news from the most prosperous nation on earth
Simon Black

By the mid-1990s, the economy of Zimbabwe was in serious trouble.

The national government under its dictator Robert Mugabe had spent years confiscating private property– real estate, businesses, factories, bank deposits, etc.

And unsurprisingly, this had a disastrous effect on the economy. Read More

07.01.20- The Insanity Of The Political Left And The Balkanization Of The US
Brandon Smith

Can leftists and conservatives of our modern era peacefully coexist within the same society?  If someone asked me this question only ten years ago I would have said “Sure, it’s possible”.  Today, the answer is a resounding “No way”.  The political divide has become so vast that there is simply no chance for the two sides to reconcile or come to reasonable terms, and make no mistake, this is not a two-sided disaster; the majority of the damage is being done by one side of this equation. Read More

06.30.20- Forget the V, W or L Recovery: Focus on N-P-B
Charles Hugh Smith

The only realistic Plan B is a fundamental, permanent re-ordering of the cost structure of the entire U.S. economy.

The fantasy of a V-shaped recovery has evaporated, and expectations for a W or L-shaped recovery are increasingly untenable. So forget V, W and L; the letters that will shape the future are N, P, B: there is No Plan B.

All the hopes for a recovery were based on a quick return to the economy that existed in late 2019. All the bailouts and stimulus programs were based on this single goal: a quick return to The Old Normal. This was Plan A. Read More

06.29.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: You Don’t Have To Take the Gates Vaccine
Bill Sardi

According to news sources at least one COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine may be licensed by the Food and Drug Administration before the November 2020 election. 

The decision to vaccinate will likely be the biggest healthcare decision any American will ever make in their lifetime.  Will Americans voluntarily line up and get immunized against the COVID-19 coronavirus?  The vaccine will have been rushed to market.  All of its side effects won’t be known till millions of Americans have been vaccinated. Read More

06.27.20- V-Shaped Narrative Dies As Commercial Real Estate Bust Accelerates
Tyler Durden

The last week of June marks the time when investors lost hope for a V-shaped economic recovery as confirmed COVID-19 cases are exponentially rising in Texas, Florida, and California, and the Tri-state area imposed quarantine restrictions on travelers. Reopening in some of these states has also been delayed as retailers close up brick and mortar shops for a second time. 

With that being said - the V-shaped recovery narrative is imploding - as many on Wall Street indiscriminately bought stocks (some used picking Scrabble letters to buy) as their belief in the Federal Reserve's money-printing would lift the economy out of one of the worst downturns since the 1930s.  Read More

06.26.20- The Looming Bank Collapse
Frank Partnoy

After months of living with the coronavirus pandemic, American citizens are well aware of the toll it has taken on the economy: broken supply chains, record unemployment, failing small businesses. All of these factors are serious and could mire the United States in a deep, prolonged recession. But there’s another threat to the economy, too. It lurks on the balance sheets of the big banks, and it could be cataclysmic. Imagine if, in addition to all the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, you woke up one morning to find that the financial sector had collapsed.  Read More

06.25.20- Virus pummels commercial real estate, could end long boom
Ken Sweet

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans are likely to see more “for rent” signs in the coming months as many businesses devastated by the coronavirus pandemic abandon offices and storefronts and potentially end a long boom in the nation’s commercial real estate market.

Hotels, restaurants and stores that closed in March have seen only a partial return of customers, and many may fail. Commercial landlords have already reported an increase in missed rent payments. They expect vacancies to rise through the end of the year. Read More

06.24.20- Not a silk purse…
Bill Blain

“We need to ensure financial support is available to companies so they can afford to remain shut.”

Stock markets are determined to surge. The World Bank’s Carmen Reinhart is warning about the dangers of confusing rebound with recovery. European PMIs rose spectacularly, but remain far below normal. JP Morgan is talking about the sharpest, deepest and shortest recession on record. The US Treasury head is pontificating about further fiscal stimulus. There is a massive bubble around Tech stocks – a bubble within a bubble within a bubble as some describe it. Every single senior market talking-head is warning of dangers ahead. The new-minted day-trading hot-shots scream buy, buy, buy! (Which will likely morph into: “bye, bye!” fairly soon.) Read More

06.23.20- The decline of the U.S. dollar could happen at ‘warp speed’ in the era of coronavirus, warns prominent economist Stephen Roach
Mark DeCambre

Stephen Roach, a Yale University senior fellow and former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman, tells MarketWatch that his forecast for a sharp deterioration of the U.S. dollar could be a very near-term phenomenon, not an event that looms off in the distance. 

“I do think it’s something that happens sooner rather than later,” the economist told MarketWatch during a Monday-afternoon interview. Read More

06.22.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: George Floyd Was Not Killed By Police
Paul Craig Roberts

George Floyd was not killed by police.  According to the toxicology report, Floyd died from a concentration of Fentanyl in his blood three times the fatal dose. Fentanyl is a dangerous opioid 50 times more potent than heroin. You can read the analysis here. A link is provided to the autopsy report.

Think about this for a minute.  What becomes of a society in which facts do not matter? The US media, Democrat Party, white liberals, and the sorry excuse for a leftwing are so primed for “white racism” that they jumped to their desired conclusion and egged on riots and looting that resulted in massive property damage in multiple cities, some deaths, many injuries, and much damage to racial relations.  Read More

05.20.20- The crisis goes up a gear
 Alasdair Macleod

Introduction

The most important mistake economists and financial watchers make is to assume events and prices tomorrow are simply projections of those of today. It is the basis of all economic and financial modelling. Yet despite the hard lessons of experience economic forecasters persist with their misleading models.

Nowhere is the failure of linear projection from the past more important than in the lifeblood common to everything. While knowing that state-issued currencies change in their utility over time, almost no one expects their demise, other perhaps at some point in the far distant future. But what if this generally linear expectation is as wrong as all other forecasting models?  Read More

06.19.20- One weird sign of trouble
in the banking sector
Simon Black

It was only a few generations ago that most people spent their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born.

They grew up, lived, worked, and retired, all in the same place. And that was normal.

Travel and relocation didn’t really become commonplace until after World War II. But even then, the most common reason people moved was because of a job.  Read More

06.18.20- Retail Sales Headlines Are
A Complete Joke
Dave Kranzler

The stock market promoting mainstream media this morning reported “U.S. Retail Sales Rose Record 18% in May” (e.g. the Wall St Journal).  The S&P futures jumped from up 45 points to up 90 points.

But, as usual, the details are in the fine print of the report itself, and it’s apparent that nobody in the financial media bothered to look beyond the headlines. Read More

06.17.20- Trust No One
Michael Krieger

The title of today’s post is not meant to be taken literally. I trust plenty of people. I trust friends who’ve demonstrated their trustworthiness over the years. I trust my family. Having people in my life I love and trust makes everything far more meaningful and pleasant. I hope people reading this likewise have a circle of trust they’ve built over the years.

On the other hand, you should never trust anyone or anything that hasn’t given you good reason to do so, and if someone or something gives you good reason not to trust them, you should never forget that. The more power a person or institution has in society, the less trustworthy they tend to be. I don’t say this because it’s fun to be cynical, I say this because my life experience has demonstrated its accuracy.  Read More

06.16.20- A dollar crash is virtually inevitable, Asia expert Stephen Roach warns
Stephanie Landsman

The stronger dollar era may be on borrowed time.

Stephen Roach, one of the world’s leading authorities on Asia, is worried a changing global landscape paired with a massive U.S. budget deficit will spark a dollar crash.

“The U.S. economy has been afflicted with some significant macro imbalances for a long time, namely a very low domestic savings rate and a chronic current account deficit,” the former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Monday. “The dollar is going to fall very, very sharply.” Read More

06.15.20- This Is Why We Are Facing A 6 Week Countdown To Immense Economic Despair…
Michael Snyder

Many of the emergency economic measures that were put into place to support the American people financially throughout this pandemic are about to disappear, and that means that big trouble is on the horizon.  Right now, we are in the midst of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Economic activity has fallen dramatically, more than 100,000 businesses have permanently closed, and more than 44 million Americans have lost a job so far in 2020. Read More

06.13.20- “Trash Stock” Speculation Signals Dangerous Trend
Birch Gold Group

Last year’s yield curve inversion and repo market troubles are both longer term signals for the end of a market cycle.

While not perfect, we can add an increase in “trash stock” speculation as another potential signal for the peak of the market cycle.

That signal may have arrived, according to ZeroHedge:

In nearly every market cycle, speculation in low-quality, virtually valueless and literally bankrupt stocks, marks a market top. Read More

06.12.20- Rabobank: So Silly It Hertz
Michael Every

“Do we get the emergency Fed meeting today or next week?”

I joke, of course. Yet that is what a host of financial market participants new and old will be thinking or hoping as they wake following a trading session which saw the Dow -6.9%, 10-year Treasury yields down 17bp at one point (now up 3bp to 0.70%), and the USD surge the most in two months against many crosses. Read More

06.11.20- No, The U.S. Economy Will Definitely Not Be Returning To “Normal”. In Fact, Things Will Soon Get Even Worse.
Michael Snyder

2020 has been quite a year so far.  It has been one nightmare after another, and yet the economic optimists continue to insist that economic activity will soon snap back to normal levels somehow.  So the economic optimists aren’t really alarmed by the fact that the core areas of our major cities have been torched, gutted and looted by rioters, because they assume that all of this violence is just a temporary phenomenon and that any damage that has been done can be repaired.  And they aren’t really alarmed by the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to escalate again.  In fact, over the last seven days we have seen the number of newly confirmed cases around the globe hit levels that we have never seen before.  Read More

06.10.20- A Crash in the Dollar Is Coming
Stephen Roach

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The era of the U.S. dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s primary reserve currency is coming to an end. Then French Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing coined that phrase in the 1960s largely out of frustration, bemoaning a U.S. that drew freely on the rest of the world to support its over-extended standard of living. For almost 60 years, the world complained but did nothing about it. Those days are over.

Already stressed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. living standards are about to be squeezed as never before. At the same time, the world is having serious doubts about the once widely accepted presumption of American exceptionalism. Currencies set the equilibrium between these two forces — domestic economic fundamentals and foreign perceptions of a nation’s strength or weakness. The balance is shifting, and a crash in the dollar could well be in the offing. Read More

06.09.20- Rabo: "Insolvent US Companies Should Take The Fed's New Bailout Loans
And Just Buy The S&P"
Michael Every

Whirlpools and Whirlwinds

The S&P is now up for the year. Which is pretty much what one would expect against the backdrop of the World Bank calling a deep global recession, the worst US economic downturn since the 1930s, and the worst civil unrest since 1968. Regardless, companies with no income but cool names are up. Openly bankrupt firms are being panic bid. Retail money is pouring in to the market; risk parity funds are pouring in too as volatility comes down; and market shorts have largely been covered, while soon we will get the next leg-up as we actually go long. Read More

06.08.20- America’s Moving Toward
a Dangerous Future
Dan Denning

After falling 35% in less than 30 days in February and March, the S&P 500 rallied 35%. It’s now down about 1.6% for the year.

Where next? How about an 80% crash from here on the S&P 500? Maybe you think the Federal Reserve won’t let that happen. But consider this…

Wall Street Perversity

The initial down moves from the 1929 and 2000 crashes were matched by almost identical up moves. It was only after those huge dead cat bounces that the real bear market took hold. Read More

06.06.20- As Economies Reopen, the US Dollar Faces This Triple Threat
Peter Reagan

The U.S. dollar’s status as the global reserve currency has been under attack for many years. But today, these attacks seem to be expanding and intensifying.

Let’s look at three recent developments.

Big Bank Bets Against the Dollar

Now that most state economies have at least started to reopen, Goldman Sachs is betting against the dollar, according to a recent CNBC article Read More

06.05.20- The Coming Bond and Real Estate Collapse and Where the Next Bubble Will Be
Doug Casey

International Man: The bond super bubble continues to get bigger. Interest rates seem to be headed even lower from here. Is this the blow-off top in the bond market?

What do you think will cause central banks to lose control and for interest rates to head higher?

Doug Casey: Even with the Fed bailing out major institutions—which it will continue to do, just like back in 2008–2009—the fundamentals underlying many businesses are so bad that a lot of them are going to collapse. I’m not just talking about the obvious candidates—retail, restaurants, airlines—but across the board. Read More

06.04.20- To Cure Every Corrupt Industry (Including Law Enforcement), the Solutions are the Same
J. Kim

While all the expressed outrage on Twitter and Instagram about police brutality produce temporary endorphin feelings of satisfaction, the reality is that opinions in the absence of action change nothing. Punishment that acts as a deterrent and accountability are the keys to ending police brutality. These are two keys that provide the foundation to ending any type of criminality in any industry, whether that industry is law enforcement, healthcare, or banking. Without both, and without the punishment focusing on personal punishment enforced upon the individual perpetrator, criminality will always remain rampant and/or systemic in whichever corrupt industry reform is attempted. Read More

06.03.20- Key Economic Indicators Are Weirdly Inverted. It’s a Warning Sign.
Matthew Zeitlin

As the United States enters the fourth month of a combined public health and economic crisis, data on the state of the economy and the personal finances of individuals have gone weirdly inverted—and may do so again.

The inversion came in the form of figures showing Americans’ collective income rising by double-digits, even as tens of millions of people lost jobs, incomes, and businesses. It’s a statistical oddity caused by Congress’ massive infusion of cash into the economy. It suggests that the economy may be even more precarious than previously believed, because when government help dries up, there will be less purchasing power supporting the broader economy. Read More

06.02.20- Think Coronavirus Caused the Crash? These Two Charts Beg to Differ
Matt Lampert

Just about everyone thinks the coronavirus pandemic slammed global stock prices in February and March. Entire countries shut down; businesses closed up shop; unemployment soared. People stopped spending money beyond the essentials, so conventional wisdom would indeed expect stocks to slide as a result. Yet consider the below chart of the Shanghai Composite, China's primary stock index. Far from prompting a new bear market, the chart shows that the novel coronavirus appeared in Wuhan after a dozen-plus years of net decline in Chinese stock prices. Did the bear market instead prompt the pandemic? Read More

06.01.20- We're Living The Founding Fathers' Nightmare: America Is Corrupt To The Core
Charles Hugh Smith

Our ruling elites, devoid of leadership, are little more than the scum of self-interested, greedy grifters who rose to the top of America's foul-smelling stew of corruption.

The Founding Fathers were wary of institutional threats to liberty and the citizenry's sovereignty, which included centralized concentrations of power (monarchy, central banks, federal agencies, etc.) and the tyranny of corruption unleashed by small-minded, self-interested, greedy grifters who saw all elected offices and positions of government influence as nothing more than a means to increase their own private wealth. Read More

05.30.20- Weekend Rant: As The World Burns
Chris Martenson

Personal safety & security are quickly becoming more important in this era of growing social rage

Decades of unfairness are now boiling over in the United States in the form of protests, riots, burning buildings and violence.

Minneapolis is on fire – literally – and the unrest has spread to numerous other major cities. Read More

05.29.20- There Will Be A Lot More Rioting, Looting And Civil Unrest As The U.S. Economy
Continues To Crumble
Michael Snyder

What we have been witnessing on the streets of Minneapolis is just the beginning.  Our nation is so deeply divided, and a large portion of the population is losing faith in the basic institutions that govern our society.  Personally, I don’t know how anyone can watch the video of what happened to George Floyd without having an emotional reaction.  Police brutality has been a massive problem in the United States for many years, and it has gotten to the point where most of the country no longer has faith in the police.  Of course the rioters are not helping their cause by burning down the communities that they are supposedly defending.  And after causing so much chaos on Wednesday night, protesters were back in the streets of Minneapolis on Thursday… Read More

05.28.20- An Economy That Cannot Allow Stocks to Decline Is Too Fragile To Survive
Charles Hugh Smith

The fragile ice shelf of speculative bets and debt clinging to the mountainside is making strange creaking sounds– will you listen or will you ignore it because ‘the Fed has our back’?

Feast your eyes on the chart below of the Nasdaq 100 stock market Index, which is dominated by the six FAAMNG stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Google which now account for over 20% of the U.S. stock market’s capitalization. Read More

05.27.10- The “Lockdown” Has Turned America Into a Despotic, Cash-Strapped Basket-Case
Mike Whitney

“… and when we look back on this in two years time, from the ruins of our economy and the ruins of our liberty, we will want to see some kind of justice, that the people who made this decision should pay a penalty for what they’ve done.” Peter Hitchens

Economic activity across the country has collapsed, GDP is shrinking at the fastest pace on record, and the economic data is worse than anytime in history. Every sector of the economy is contracting and every economic indicator is pointing down. According to economist Nouriel Roubini, the country is headed towards a decade of “depression and debt”, and that is probably an understatement. Read More

05.26.20- America Is Dead and Buried
Doug Casey

View Video

05.25.20- Holiday Rant: The Slippery Slope to Despotism: Paved with Lockdowns, Raids and Forced Vaccinations
John W. Whitehead

You have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask, you have no right to open up your business… And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm.”- Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor

You have no rights.

That’s the lesson the government wants us to learn from this COVID-19 business.

Well, the government is wrong. Read More

05.22.20- CRITICAL Price Level Could Prompt A BIG MOVE In The Stock Market After Holiday
Chris Vermeulen

As technical traders and researchers, we’ve been paying very close attention to the GREEN ARC Fibonacci resistance level on the SPY as a key level for the US stock market and any hope of a continued upside price rally.  The SPY has traded near this level for the past three weeks and appears to be attempting a bit of an upside breakout right now.  Yet, we understand a long holiday weekend is upon us in the US, Memorial Day, and after a big upside GAP on Monday, the US stock market has stalled over the past few days. Read More

05.21.20- "Somebody Is Dumping Everything": Mystery Investor Pukes $333M In Real Estate ETF In Dark Pool Trade
Tyler Durden

Post-coronavirus pandemic, nobody really knows what the real estate market will look like. Will people travel less? Will we work from home more often? Will commercial and residential real estate be able to keep their respective bids once current leases run out?

We've found at least one investor who doesn't want to stick around and find out. Read More

05.20.20- Modern Monetary Theory:
The little-known consequence of the
massive coronavirus bills
Steve St Angelo

The worst part about spending $6 trillion or more on coronavirus recovery isn't what's in it. The worst part is what happens if it doesn't destroy us.

How many articles have you read lately that started off with a variation of the phrase, “These are strange times”? It’s the understatement of the millennium. Before the coronavirus crisis, if we saw someone in a grocery store wearing a face mask, we might casually wonder, “What’s wrong with him?” Today, if you walk into a grocery story without a face mask, people will indignantly wonder and sometimes ask out loud, “What the hell’s wrong with him?” Read More

05.19.20- Another week, another $3 trillion bailout
Simon Black

At precisely 9:26pm this past Friday night, May 15th, the House of Representatives in the United States passed the “Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act.”

For short, they call it the HEROES Act.

And yes, it’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

Bear in mind that Congress passed the first bailout bill– the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act” on March 14th. That set the taxpayers back $1.3 trillion.  Read More

05.18.20- Our Indefensible Media
Arnold Ahlert

Dispatch columnist David French has written an article defending the mainstream media, asserting that much of the criticism coming from precincts on the Right is “lazy and cheap,” “outright dishonest,” and “marked by wild and imprecise generalizations that impose collective punishment for individual failings.” He adds, “Moreover, media critics frequently ascribe evil motives to members of the press and pretend that the press has greater capabilities than it really does — thus rendering it even more culpable when it inevitably makes mistakes.”  Read More

05.16.20- Overpriced Stocks May Be Bubble
Ready to Pop
Peter Reagan

Even if local and state governments hadn’t shut down businesses in attempts to mitigate the coronavirus, the U.S. economy was still set up to take on a number of economic challenges.

But now, there’s one additional challenge being considered by billionaire David Tepper: over-inflated stock prices:

Billionaire hedge fund investor David Tepper told CNBC on Wednesday the stock market is one of the most overpriced he’s ever seen, only behind 1999. His comments sent stocks to a session low… He also said some Big Tech stocks like Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet may be “fully valued.” Read More

05.15.20- The Biggest Economic Threat Today
Brian Maher

Kind heaven, no! A fresh economic scourge is upon the land. Announces CNN:

“New Threat to the Economy: Americans Are Saving Like It’s the 1980s.”

Is a higher evil possible? Thus we are informed:

Americans are slashing their spending, hoarding cash and shrinking their credit card debt as they fear their jobs could disappear during the coronavirus pandemic… Read More

05.14.20- Total Catastrophe of
the Currency System
Egon von Greyerz

As the Nasdaq makes a new high for the year, the world outside the stock market timebomb is falling apart. For example the UN agency, The International Labour Organisation (ILO) reports that 1.6 billion jobs are at risk in the global economy. That is half of the global workforce of 3.3 billion. Particularly vulnerable are the 2 billion people in the informal economy. For most of these vulnerable people, this means no income, no food and no security reports the ILO. This is a human tragedy on a massive scale and most people in the Western world are totally unaware. Read More

05.13.20- The Worst Is Yet to Come: Contact Tracing, Immunity Cards and Mass Testing
John W. Whitehead

No one gets spared the anguish, fear and heartache of living under the shadow of an authoritarian police state.

That’s the message being broadcast 24/7 with every new piece of government propaganda, every new law that criminalizes otherwise lawful activity, every new policeman on the beat, every new surveillance camera casting a watchful eye, every sensationalist news story that titillates and distracts, every new prison or detention center built to house troublemakers and other undesirables, every new court ruling that gives government agents a green light to strip and steal and rape and ravage the citizenry, every school that opts to indoctrinate rather than educate, and every new justification for why Americans should comply with the government’s attempts to trample the Constitution underfoot. Read More

05.12.20- Five Viral Lessons
John Mauldin

We live in truly historic times. “There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen,” says a quote usually attributed to Vladimir Lenin. It certainly fits now.

For thousands of years, people who lived through what we call “history” didn’t realize it. We are the exceptions. We’re seeing history and we know it. The Vietnam War was certainly historic, but the coronavirus killed more Americans in the last two months than died in that long conflict. The Great Depression was historic but by some indicators we are well on the way to matching it. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo missions were historic, but right now even more massive, world-changing technology and biotechnology are being hastily developed under pressure. Read More

05.11.20- The Worst Jobs Report in History
Brian Maher

The good news first:

Today’s unemployment figures were not as cataclysmic as feared. Consensus came in at 22 million.

Here is the bad news:

Today’s unemployment figures were cataclysmic nonetheless. Read More

05.09.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: No Trust: The Tree of Liberty is Parched
Ben Bartee

What did they do to the news? Walter Cronkite asks from the grave.

The nanny state, aided and abetted by a corporate news media thirsty for scared viewers confined to their homes, is about to jumpstart the nagging micro-management to level-10 warp speed – with the help of the neoliberal propaganda arms of the establishment formerly known as the free press. The rotten neoliberal 4th estate and the soulless cowards that staff them have to go. Read More

05.08.20- 52% Of Small Businesses "Expect To Be Out Of Business Within Six Months";
Shocking New Survey
Michael Snyder

Anyone that was hoping for a “quick recovery” for the U.S. economy can forget about that right now.  Yes, many states are attempting to “reopen”, but in most cases it will be a multi-stage process that takes many months to complete.  Meanwhile, fear of COVID-19 is going to keep many Americans from conducting business as usual even after all of the restrictions have been finally lifted.  Even now, many of the stores, restaurants and movie theaters that have reopened are seeing very, very few customers.  Unfortunately, millions of small businesses are not going to be able to survive in such a depressed economic environment for very long. Read More

05.07.20- Don’t Bet on America
Bill Bonner

“Never, ever bet against America,” says the Oracle of Omaha, perhaps exaggerating.

Countries, like individuals, make mistakes. And they have their seasons. It was a bad idea to bet against America throughout most of the 20th century. That, of course, is when Warren Buffett got the idea.

But this is the 21st century. America’s capital industries are losing value. Its GDP growth is slowing. Its government – technically insolvent already – prints $1 million PER SECOND to cover its deficits. Its military is engaged in pointless meddles all over the world. Its menfolks’ life expectancy is falling. Its Swamp is rising. Read More

05.06.20- This “Cure” for the Economy
Could Kill It
James Rickards

The economy remains under lockdown, although some states are beginning to relax restrictions. As with so many other aspects of American life, there’s been a red state/blue state divide.

Red states are generally more willing to reopen their economies, while harder-hit coastal blue states are generally more reluctant to open theirs. Read More

05.05.20- Stocks Bottomed and Rallied 30%
Based on a Lie
Graham Summers

If you’ll recall, on March 23rd 2020, the Federal Reserve stated that it would begin buying both U.S. Treasuries and corporate bonds with unlimited funds.

The announcement was historic in nature: never before in its 107-year history had the Fed bought corporate bonds before. IN fact, it was technically illegal for the Fed to do this as the Federal Reserve Act of 1933 expressly forbid the Fed from buying corporate bonds and other risk-assets. Read More

04.04.50- Why Assets Will Crash
Charles Hugh Smith

This is how it happens that boats that were once worth tens of thousands of dollars are set adrift by owners who can no longer afford to pay slip fees. 

The increasing concentration of the ownership of wealth/assets in the top 10% has an under-appreciated consequence: when only the top 10% can afford to buy assets, that unleashes an almost karmic payback for the narrowing of ownership, a.k.a. soaring wealth and income inequality: assets crash. Read More

05.02.20- The Market Isn’t Done Falling
Nick Giambruno

As early as January 2017, I said to expect “a stock market collapse at least as severe as 1929 or 2008.” And, “I think there’s a very high chance of a stock market crash of historic proportions before the end of Trump’s first term.”

It wasn’t a lucky wild guess, but the conclusion I came to after putting together the different pieces to see the big picture, which is what we do at Crisis Investing. Read More

05.01.20- "It's A Crock Of S**t!" - Here's Why I am so Furious This Morning
Bill Blain

I am deeply uneasy about what’s happening in financial markets

The Coronavirus has completely turned the global economy on its head. It will create the most profound changes to the way we live and our future prospects – we are all beginning to realise that. There is not going to be a V-Shaped recovery. Many lives will be shattered and ruined in its wake.

Yes, what I saw yesterday confirms two terrible truths we’ve long denied: Read More

04.30.20- No American Will Be Spared from Impending Public Pension Bailouts
Birch Gold Group

After the 2008 financial crisis, huge companies like AIG asked for billions in bailout cash, claiming they would close up shop if they didn’t get the funds.

The truth of the matter is that they had screwed up and wanted U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill. This situation left a bad taste in the mouths of most Americans. Read More

04.29.20- The Coming Greater Depression of the 2020s
Nouriel Roubini

While there is never a good time for a pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis has arrived at a particularly bad moment for the global economy. The world has long been drifting into a perfect storm of financial, political, socioeconomic, and environmental risks, all of which are now growing even more acute. Read More

04.28.20- BREAKING: White House Eyes Second Round Of Direct Payments To Americans
Matt Stoller

A White House economic adviser said Tuesday that the Trump administration is “studying very carefully” whether to provide another round of stimulus checks beyond the one-time, $1,200 direct payments, which he said could be part of a Phase 4 deal.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told reporters on the White House driveway that those who qualify could receive another check. Read More

04.27.20- How the Unicorn Blowup & Oil Bust Bleed into Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities
Wolf Richter

CMBS get to eat it all: Amid overvalued vacant collateral, there is a new thingy: Tenants delaying rent payments and landlords asking for forbearance.

The office segment of the commercial real estate market – and the debt and the commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) that are backed by it – are going through serious gyrations on a combination of factors. Companies have figured out how to make work-from-home manageable. Other companies are moving out, leaving buildings vacant, or are deferring rent payments. Read More

04.25.20- Weekend Rant:
A Conservative Resurrection?
Paul Craig Roberts

Conservative magazines have pretty much disappeared along with conservatives in education, popular culture, politics, publishing, media, and Hollywood.  Magazines that helped to sustain stable families, good manners, the value of integrity, moral behavior, tending to one’s own garden, and Christian virtues such as compassion have been replaced by neoconservatives advocating war for American hegemony.  

One magazine that lingered, Chronicles, was a mild and not very exciting voice, but recent issues under the new editorship of Paul Gottfried have resurrected trenchant writing and analysis of America’s perilous degeneration into a Tower of Babel. Read More

04.24.20- Business Owners Understand Why the Economy Can't Just Be "Reopened"
Christopher E. Baecker

My oldest turned seventeen last month. To commemorate the occasion, she and I watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’d taken her to her first (allegedly) rated-R movie a couple years ago to see the quite good Baby Driver, but this was Tarantino.

Brad Pitt won an Oscar for portraying Cliff Booth, the personal stuntman for Leonardo DiCaprio’s struggling actor Rick Dalton. Early on, Cliff consoles Rick after Rick interprets a dinner meeting as a signal that he is officially a “has-been.” The next morning, as he’s dropping Rick off on set, Cliff reassures him that “you’re Rick [expletive] Dalton. Don’t you forget it.” Read More

04.23.20- Trump Says "No" To World Money
James Rickards

Over the course of 13 years as a media commentator and nine years as a bestselling author, I’ve had frequent occasion to state the following:

“In 1998, Wall Street came together to bail out a hedge fund. In 2008, the Federal Reserve stepped forward to bail out Wall Street. Each crisis was worse than the one before. In the next crisis, who will bail out the Fed?”

This was more than just rhetoric. It was a clinical description of a pattern of worsening crises on an approximately 10-year tempo, along with escalating bailouts. Read More

04.22.20- "Negative" Oil?
Bill Holter

Please note, this article was posted for subscribers Monday morning after suggesting “negative oil” on Saturday’s weekly call.

I made the comment on Saturday’s call, “we had negative interest rates, now we wait for negative oil prices”. I received a few questions because the negative price of anything makes no sense right? Well actually it does. Because demand has dropped so precipitously and production has continued unabated, supply is piling up. In the real world this is a huge problem because the oversupply must be stored somewhere. Oil is now being stored on previously empty tankers because land based storage facilities are overflowing. Read More

04.21.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: What if the Lockdown Was All
a Big Mistake?
Dr. Ron Paul

From California to New Jersey, Americans are protesting in the streets. They are demanding an end to house arrest orders given by government officials over a virus outbreak that even according to the latest US government numbers will claim fewer lives than the seasonal flu outbreak of 2017-2018.

Across the US, millions of businesses have been shut down by “executive order” and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Americans, who have seen their real wages decline thanks to Federal Reserve monetary malpractice, are finding themselves thrust into poverty and standing in breadlines. It is like a horror movie, but it’s real. Read More

04.20.20- Is Private Equity Having Its Minsky Moment?
Matt Stoller

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Today I’m going to write about how private equity is reacting to the pandemic and the bailouts. PE is heavily indebted, and therefore is at high risk in a shock. I’m going to explore PE’s vulnerability, and how the industry is engaged in a political strategy to repurpose the Federal Reserve to its ends. I’ll also explore whether their strategy can work. Read More

04.18.20- Coronavirus in the U.S.:
Fauci Versus Trump
Bill Bonner

SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – The liberal establishment press – The New York Times, The Washington Post – maintains that Dr. Fauci is the voice of reason and science. Donald Trump they regard as a paragon of prejudice and ignorance.

Fox News and the right-wing media trust Trump’s instincts. They believe the medical bureaucrats are trying to bring him down. But we are in a credulous age. People are ready to believe anything. Read More

04.17.20- The looming derivative crisis
Alasdair Macleod

The powerful forces of bank credit contraction are at the heart of a rapidly evolving financial crisis in global derivatives, whose gross value is over $600 trillion; an unimaginable sum. Central banks are on course to destroy their currencies through unlimited monetary expansion, lethal for bullion banks with fractionally reserved unallocated gold accounts, while being dramatically short of Comex futures. Read More

04.16.20- Will it be an Inflationary or Deflationary Depression?
Doug Casey

At some point, the economy is no longer controlled by individual citizens in the marketplace but by government “planners,” who find they have only one of two alternatives: stop “stimulating” and permit a full-scale credit collapse, or continue stimulating until the dollar loses all value and society breaks down.

Depending on which they choose, we will have a depression characterized by deflation or by hyperinflation. Read More

04.15.20- Coronavirus And The Coming Financial Revolution
Michael Kern

The coronavirus pandemic is one of the biggest and unprecedented seismic shifts in the global economy that we’ve ever seen in modern history, and it’s just getting started.               

Already, economies around the world are shutting down. The federal reserve has pumped trillions into the United States economy in just a matter of days. Global supply chains have collapsed as entire Chinese industries went dark. And this is just the first stage. We’re heading into a year’s long recession that will have far-reaching consequences, some of which we can predict with near certainty, and some of which will be entirely unpredictable. Read More

04.14.20- Total system failure will give rise
to new economy
Pepe Escobar

Covid-19 driven collapse of global supply chains, demand and mobility will painfully spawn next great tech-led economic models

Is the world on a collision course with the financial and economic equivalent of a meteor impact with shock wave? Fractal illustration: AFP

Nobody, anywhere, could have predicted what we are now witnessing: in a matter of only a few weeks the accumulated collapse of global supply chains, aggregate demand, consumption, investment, exports, mobility. Read More

04.13.20- Buy The Tumor, Sell the News
Charles Hugh Smith

The fictitious valuation of the stock market will eventually re-connect with reality in a violent decline.

No, buy the tumor, sell the news ™ is not a typo: the stock market is a lethal tumor in our economy and society. Buy the rumor, sell the news encapsulates the old traders’ wisdom that markets rise on the sizzle of hope, promises, projections, Federal Reserve pimping (see below), tax cuts, etc. etc. etc., not on the actual steak of sales and profits. Read More

04.11.20- Markets and Black Swans
Jim Rickards

I began studying complexity theory as a consequence of my involvement with Long-Term Capital Management, LTCM, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998 after derivatives trading strategies went catastrophically wrong.

After the collapse and subsequent rescue, I chatted with one of the LTCM partners who ran the firm about what went wrong. I was familiar with markets and trading strategies, but I was not expert in the highly technical applied mathematics that the management committee used to devise its strategies. Read More

04.10.20- The Greatest Financial Crisis & Global Hyperinflation That Will Spread Like Coronavirus
Egon von Greyerz

A Hyperinflationary Depression has always been the inevitable end to the biggest financial bubble in history…

A Hyperinflationary Depression has always been the inevitable end to the biggest financial bubble in history. And this time it will be global. Hyperinflation will spread from country to country like Coronavirus. It could start anywhere but the most likely first countries are the US and the EU or ED (European Disunion). They will quickly be followed by many more like Japan and most developing countries. Like CV it will quickly jump from country to country with very few being spared. Read More

04.09.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Michael J. Burry (The Weird Genius in the Movie “The Big Short”): “End the Lockdown”
Vigtlant Citizen

Michael J. Burry is mostly known for predicting the 2007 mortgage crisis months in advance and for inspiring the movie “The Big Short”. In the midst of COVID-19 panic, this financial genius (who usually values his privacy) created a Twitter account to communicate one single message: End the lockdown

The movie The Big Short was inspired by the true story of Michael J. Burry, the weird and slightly autistic hedge fund manager who shorted the mortgage bond market in 2007 (his role was played by Christian Bale). Read More

04.08.20- The Greatest Idiot...
Bill Blain

“The greatest idiot is a man who thinks strong stock markets are an indication of economic health.“

Yesterday was a curious day in markets... The good news ran out of steam and the rally faded... Reality rears its head again? Was it just a bull phase in a bear market, or something more significant? Does the market realise just how deep the crisis has bit into the real economy? Read More

04.07.20- The global food supply chain wasn’t designed for this
Simon Black

In the early 1980s, doctors and medical researchers around the world were confounded by the growing number of young, otherwise healthy patients who were dying of rare infections that typically only occurred in people with very weak immune systems.

The situation was so alarming that the CDC in the United States set up a special task force in 1982 to study the condition.  Read More

04.06.20- The JackPot Chronicles Scenario 1: Force Majeure
Mark E. Jeftovic

Force Majeure means:

a chance occurrence or superior force that renders a contract unenforceable and frees all parties from their obligations under it.

We are frequently told that there exists some manner of “Social Contract” to which we are implicitly bound by virtue of being alive. This implied Social Contract confers legitimacy upon the institutions that order our world, the national governments, the central banks, the miltary and police. And by extension certain communication outlets and media are endowed with a status of official curators over the narratives around institutional power. Read More

04.04.20- Government and Economics
Made Dead Simple
James D. Best

There are only two types of governments.  Two.  That's it.  There are those where the people control the government and those where the government controls the people.  Likewise, there are only two types of economic systems: economies where free markets control commerce and economies where bureaucrats control commerce.

It's that simple.  Really. Read More

04.03.20- What Is America Going To Look Like With Tens Of Millions Of Unemployed Workers?
Michael Snyder

In all of U.S. history, we have never seen a spike in unemployment like we are witnessing right now.  Last Thursday it was announced that more than 3.2 million Americans had filed new claims for unemployment benefits during the previous week, and many believe that the number that will be announced this Thursday will be even larger.  By the way, the previous all-time record for a single week was just 695,000.  So what is happening right now is absolutely nuts.  49 percent of U.S. companies anticipate conducting layoffs within the next 3 months, and the St. Louis Fed is projecting that the unemployment rate in this country will soon rise to 32 percent.  Before the coronavirus pandemic started shutting virtually everything down, approximately 158 million Americans were employed, and so we could soon have tens of millions of unemployed workers on our hands if the St. Louis Fed’s projection is accurate. Read More

04.02.20- Italy's Communist Recipe for Disaster
Giacomino Nicolazzo

Montecalvo, Lombardy, Italy . “As I sit here in my involuntary isolation, it was just reported that overnight 743 more people died and 5.249 new cases have been reported. This brings the total cases of infection to 69,176 and the body count to 6,820. We take relief in knowing that 8,326 people have recovered so far. (Numbers as of 3/24, 8:30pm in Italy)

Most towns here in Italy, from the upper reaches of the Alps to the ancient shores of Sicilia and Sardenia, while not deserted, are closer to being ghost towns than the bustling centers of tourism, business and daily life they were just a few weeks ago. Read More

04.01.20- Is the U.S. Able to Handle COVID-19? – Global Prospects Hang on This Question
Alastair Crooke

Eventually, the coronavirus will subside; but what will America look like when it does?

As the lockdowns across Europe began to bite, the U.S. Establishment began its ‘wobble’. The more elegant amongst élite circles pointed to a dangerous mis-match in timelines: The medical advice has been: ‘lockdown until the virus begins to subside’, but that advice encompassed too, the possibility of Covid-19 returning later in the year in a Phase Two, thus requiring further personal distancing. Hands shot high in absolute horror amongst some business and Wall Street leaders: Could the U.S. economy sustain such a prospect? Might not a long shutdown inflict permanent damage? Would there even be an economy left – to resurrect – in the wake of ‘peak Coronavirus’? Read More

03.31.20- The Economic Depression Of 2020: Many Of The Restaurants, Bars And Retailers That Have Closed Will Never Open Again
Michael Snyder

It appears that we are heading into the worst economic downturn of the post-World War II era, and that is going to be true no matter how this coronavirus pandemic ultimately plays out.  There are some that believe that this virus will only kill thousands, and there are others that are warning that it could kill millions, but everyone can agree that this outbreak is causing an unprecedented amount of fear.  And even once this pandemic starts to fade, a certain percentage of the population will continue to be afraid to go to restaurants, bars and other small businesses that are open to the public. Read More

03.30.20- Forced Liquidation
James Howard Kunstler

Historians of the future, pan-roasting fresh-caught June bugs over their campfires, may wonder when, exactly, was the moment when the financial world broke with reality. Was it when Nixon slammed the “gold window” shut? When “maestro” Alan Greenspan first bamboozled a Senate finance committee? When Pets.com face-planted 268 days after its IPO? When Ben Bernanke declared the housing bubble “contained?”Read More

03.28.20- No, You Do Not Hear the Fat Lady Warming Up
Bob Moriarty

Those who never predicted a financial collapse in the first place are now edging closer to the swamp to dip their toes into the water. Now they are suggesting, perhaps we could have a recession."

Forget that. You cannot have every supply chain in the world chopped in two and have a recession. A depression was baked into the cake before the Corona popped out of the six-pack. The US government dumping a $6 trillion dollar bailout for their buddies that has more pork in it than the butt of a two-ton pig is the proverbial pissing up a rope. We are in a depression. The entire financial system, education system, medical system, political system, hell, the entire artifice needs a total reset. Read More

03.27.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Can This Pandemic Usher in
a New Era?
Patrick J. Buchanan

To fight the coronavirus at home, France is removing all military forces from Iraq.

When NATO scaled back its war games in Europe because of the pandemic, Russia reciprocated. Moscow announced it would cancel its war games along NATO’s border.

Nations seem to be recognizing and responding to the grim new geostrategic reality of March 2020: The pandemic is the real enemy of us all, and while we fight it, each in his own national corner, we are in this together. Read More

03.26.20- Professor Malinen: The Euro Won’t Survive This Crisis
Jan Nieuwenhuijs

To better understand the economic consequences of the Corona pandemic, I wanted to interview an expert on economic crises. Namely, Tuomas Malinen.Malinen is the CEO and Chief Economist of GnS Economics, a macroeconomic consultancy. He’s also an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of Helsinki. He has studied economics at the University of Helsinki and New York University. His focus is on economic growth, economic crises, central banks, and the business cycle. Read More

COVID-19: Market panic and how to navigate through it
Jonathan M Mergott

I haven't written any market updates in some time, and was quite surprised to be receiving requests for one.  I am going to attempt to go over as much as possible without devolving into a rant.  There is so much happening to analyze and consider, everything from the markets, to politics and of course the corona virus pandemic, and every bit of it is interconnected and affecting the outcomes of everything else.  I am going to break this into individual sections analyzing the important issues, markets, and ending with a feasible investment and savings plan for people to follow as we navigate through some of the most volatile markets in this country's (and the world's) history. Read More

03.24.20- COVID-19 Data Study: Ammunition Sales Continue to Soar in Response to
Coronavirus Panic
Molly Carter

Updated March 22, 2020: As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread across the United States, its impact can be seen in every community. Businesses and schools are closed, the stock market is exceptionally volatile, and store shelves are empty as the American public has scrambled to prepare for the worldwide pandemic and social distancing prescribed by the WHO and CDC. Read More

03.23.20- This Is Not a Recession
Hunter Hastings

Economists and Wall Street analysts are using the word recession to describe the looming plunge in output in the US economy. We’ll just make the point early that economists, exhibiting the typical emptiness of their failed science, can’t even agree on the definition of recession.

Undeterred by lacking a definition, the geniuses at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere on Wall Street are unrestrained in predicting the imminent arrival of the condition they can’t describe. Read More

03.21.20- The Crash of the “Everything Bubble” Is Here – And It’s Not Going Away Anytime Soon
Brandon Smith

Last November, in an article titled ‘The Economic Crash So Far: A Look At The Real Numbers’, I outlined the reality of statistical fraud by governments and central banks to hide the ongoing economic downturn. The Everything Bubble, perhaps the biggest debt fueled bubble in history, has been propping up the global economy for several years, but began to waver dramatically at the end of 2018, as the Federal Reserve tightened liquidity conditions into economic weakness (just as they did in 1929 and in the early 1930’s as the Great Depression took hold).

In that article, I warned: Read More

03.20.20- Banks are going to drown in an ocean of defaults
Simon Black

On November 6, 2000, then US presidential candidate George W. Bush told a crowd of cheering supporters, “they misunderestimated me.”

Now, if English is not your native language, allow me to clear the air: ‘misunderestimate’ is not a word. But then again, George W. Bush was legendary for hilarious slip-ups like this.

There are entire books dedicated to his ‘Bushisms,’ the ridiculous made-up words and incomprehensible sayings that became routine for the 43rd US President. Read More

03.19.20- Quantum Computing. Honeywell
and JP Morgan Chase
Joseph P. Farrell

This is a really important story that was shared by K.J. (to whom a big thank you!). Honeywell, it seems, has created the world’s most powerful quantum computer, replacing Google’s claim. Or at least, that’s the story. And we’ve all been seeing these stories for some time now, about how quantum computers are the next leap forward, able to handle orders of magnitude more calculations than ordinary Tray super-computers, and do so much faster.

So what’s the big deal here? Why another story about quantum computing and “the latest breakthrough”? Read More

03.18.20- S&P 500 Plunged Most Since 1987, Gave Up in 18 Days the 42% Gains of Past 3 Years. Boeing Shares Collapsed
Wolf Richter

It started out ugly Sunday night and ended uglier today. Sunday evening, stock futures plunged 5%, hit limit down, and trading was halted. Futures remained pinned at limit down without further trading. When stocks started trading in the morning during regular hours, the S&P 500 Index opened at 2,490, down -8.1%. This was below the limit down rule during regular hours where trading should stop for 15 minutes if the index drops 7%. But it had blown through this limit-down from the first moment. Read More

03.17.20- "What The F**k Are These Guys Smoking...?"
Bill Blain

“Well, it has to happen. Because if it doesn’t happen, we hit the wall next week. We’re already in breach.”

Happy St Patricks day.

Meanwhile… back in Today

Yesterday was another nasty day – uncertainty, panic and fear fuelling the worst fears for the market. The scale of capitulation was massive – Treasuries heading for zero percent, stocks biggest down day for 33 years, and gold sliding because investors literally have nothing else to sell to meet margin calls. If you aren’t out yet, you are stuck. Forget liquidity – it’s impossible to exit even liquid index ETFs. Read More

03.16.20- When the Coronavirus Scare Is Over, Economic Armageddon Will Remain!
Gary D. Barnett

“Only a psychopath would ever think of doing these things, only a psychopath would dream of abusing other people in such a way, only a psychopath would treat people as less than human just for money. The shocking truth is, even though they now have most if not all of the money, they want still more, they want all of the money that you have left in your pockets, they want it all because they have no empathy with other people, with other creatures, they have no feeling for the world which they exploit, they have no love or sense of being or belonging for their souls are dead, dead to all things but greed and a desire to rule over others.” ~ Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism Read More

03.14.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: WOW! Watch Term Limits Advocate SHRED Congress!
Nick Tomboulides

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03.13.20- Predictions are hard. But here goes…
Simon Black

We certainly live in extraordinary times.

Even people who have been irrationally dismissive of the Corona pandemic up until this point finally had to wake up and smell reality yesterday. The NBA. Tom Hanks. European travel ban.

Our human brains, while magnificent and inspiring, are also wired in bizarre ways. We’re filled with countless ‘cognitive biases’ which affect our judgment, usually for the worse. Read More

03.12.20- The Butterfly Effect
Scott Minerd

The market is waking up to not just the viral contagion of coronavirus, but also to financial, economic, and geopolitical contagion.

If I had written a commentary on how 4,000 people dying from the flu would topple global financial markets, I think I would have been deemed insane. Yet today that is exactly the story. Read More

03.11.20- “The Most Critical Time Since the Financial Crisis”
Brian Maher

“We’re faced with the most critical time since the financial crisis.”

This we have on the grim authority of money man Sven Henrich.

Last evening prepared us for this morning’s hells…Read More

03.10.20- Why the Fed Won’t Save the Market
Michael Snyder

We haven’t seen anything like this since the last financial crisis erupted in 2008.  Wall Street has been gripped by a tremendous amount of fear, and the volatility that we are witnessing would have been unimaginable just a couple of months ago.  On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2,013 points.  To put that in perspective, the largest single day decline that we witnessed in 2008 was just 777 points.  A disagreement between Saudi Arabia and Russia about oil prices coupled with increasing concern about the coronavirus pushed many traders into panic mode, and the result was absolutely stunning.  Hopefully stock prices will bounce back throughout the rest of this week, but many experts are warning that this is just the beginning of the carnage.  The stock market crash of 2020 is here, and the losses are already staggering.  Just consider these facts… Read More

03.09.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: The Virus is a Time Machine
Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Around mid-January I started including coronavirus news in the daily Automatic Earth “Debt Rattle” news aggregators, and wrote the first essay on the topic on January 29. Tons of people since have asked why, but I thought the virus had “potential”. Though not everybody would agree, I still think that. So the Debt Rattles are full of coronavirus these days.

For a proper understanding, we must remember that China was 4-5 weeks too late in reporting the disease, and after that the west was 4-5 weeks late in acting on the news. This happens simply because a politician who cries wolf will have a short career, and reporters, certainly today, follow that same model. Read More

03.07.20- What Your Financial Advisor Isn’t Telling You About Bitcoin
Teeka Tiwari

If you have a financial advisor, you’ll probably want to fire them after you read this.

You see, many Wall Street firms won’t tell you the truth about bitcoin – at least, not yet.

Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan ban their financial advisors from talking about bitcoin. Wells Fargo advisors can only hand out research “primers” on bitcoin – if their clients ask about it. Read More

03.06.20- Will This Coronavirus Outbreak Cause A New Financial Crisis And
A Horrifying Economic Collapse?
Michael Snyder

The term “black swan event” is increasingly being used to describe this coronavirus outbreak, and many are concerned that what we are headed for will be much worse than what we experienced in 2008 and 2009.  Already, we have witnessed a staggering drop in global demand, Wall Street has had to deal with the wildest week in eight years, and people all over the globe are hoarding toilet paper, face masks and hand sanitizer.  That may sound like a plot from one of my books, but it is not.  This is actually happening, and it appears that we are still only in the very early chapters of this crisis. Read More

03.05.20- Stock Market Overmedicated on FedMed, Patient Goes into Cardiac Arrest
David Haggith

The Federal Reserve on Tuesday gave the market a double-dose of exactly what it thought the market needed, and the market just about died! On the theory that, if a little is good, more is better, the Fed gave a double cut of interest. It did not go as planned.

At first, the medicine hit like nitroglycerin tablets, and the patient’s heart leaped. You can see how instantly the patient bolted up on the operating table in the graph, but the double dose the Fed administered was too much, and by the end of the day the patient’s vital signs were down 785 points. Read More

03.04.20- Peniaphobia Prevails
Michael Ballanger

Sector expert Michael Ballanger charts tumbling markets amid the scare of a coronavirus pandemic.

(Peniaphobia: fear of poverty)

This weekend, newsletter writers the world over are scrambling to explain to their paid subscribers why they are now showing losses in portfolios that were supposed to be showing gains, and especially because it was only two weeks ago that the S&P 500 hit all-time highs at 3,393.52. Without going into a long diatribe over the multiple warnings I issued in January, Mother Nature (or a bioweapons lab) has provided the pinprick that has now popped the global equities bubble, triggering a gargantuan rush to the exits and liquidity. Read More

03.03.20- Why The Coming Economic Collapse Will Not Be Caused By Covid-19
Matthew Ehret

With last week's collapse in the stock market, the internet has been set ablaze with discussion of a new crash looming on the horizon (even with today's record-breaking point-gain in the Dow). The fact that such a chain reaction collapse was only kept at bay due to massive liquidity injections by the Federal Reserve’s overnight repo loans should not be ignored. Read More

03.02.20- Globalization and Our Precarious Medical Supply Chains
F. William Engdahl

The grave risks and dangers in the process of worldwide out-sourcing and so-called globalization of the past 30 years or so are becoming starkly clear as the ongoing health emergency across China threatens vital world supply chains from China to the rest of the world. While much attention is focused on the risks to smartphone components or auto manufacture via supplies of key parts from China or to the breakdown of oil deliveries in the last weeks, there is a danger that will soon become alarmingly clear in terms of global health care system. Read More

02.29.20- Market Meltdown Update
Adam Taggart

Sentiment has snapped. Did the 10-year bull market just end?

We’ve been covering the spread of the coronavirus so intently over the past 30 days that we’d understand if you might have forgotten that, actually, we usually focus on many other topics on this website than global pandemics. Read More

02.28.20- The Great Melt-up Melt Down
David Haggith

That didn’t take long. Just a month ago, I wrote, “Stock Market More Overpriced and Perilous Than Anytime in History,” stating that the market was poised for a big fall because “some of the market’s most fundamental valuation metrics are now printing at levels never seen before…. This market is tripping on some pricy hallucinogens.”

And here we are! A single black swan has knocked the legs out from under the bull. It’s not a full-blown correction yet (requiring indices fall by, at least, 10%) or a crash (20% or more), though it looks like it could hit that mark by the end of today. That would be a full correction in just four days. Read More

02.27.20- The Greatest Depression Just Began. This is no Drill
Bob Moriarty

Exactly a month ago I warned that the Corona Virus outbreak was going to pop the “Everything Bubble.” I did something fairly subtle. I buried my main message under a whole heap of cow manure. It doesn’t make a rat’s ass if I was right or wrong about calling for a market crash in October or the Fed dumping piles of new crisp $100 bills onto a bonfire in September. Read More

02.26.20- “1984” Has Come to China
James Rickards

You’re probably familiar with George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; (it’s often published as 1984). It was written in 1948; the title comes from reversing the last two digits in 1948.

The novel describes a world of three global empires, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, in a constant state of war.

Orwell created an original vocabulary for his book, much of which is in common, if sardonic, usage today. Terms such as Thought Police, Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak and memory hole all come from Nineteen Eight-Four. Read More

02.25.20- When the world became unrecognizable in less than a decade
Simon Black

In the year 1520, exactly 500 years ago, a German scholar named Johan Schoner completed a map of the world that was widely considered to be humanity’s most advanced understanding of geography at that time.

To us, Schoner’s map is pretty amusing.

There’s scarcely any American continent. Instead he drew some amorphous blobs to mark Brazil and the ‘West Indies’. And there’s a very narrow body of water where the Pacific Ocean is supposed to be, separating Brazil and India.  Read More

02.24.20- Coronavirus Slams Chinese Economy
Jim Rickards

How bad is the coronavirus pandemic in China? It’s worse than the Chinese government knows and worse than the world believes.

Here are the official statistics on the coronavirus (technically COVID-19) as of today: There are 75,685 confirmed infections worldwide, with 98% of that total in China alone. Of those cases, 82.5% are in the single province of Hubei, mostly centered in the city of Wuhan, with 11 million residents.

Of the over 75,000 worldwide cases, there have been 2,236 deaths; that’s a mortality rate of roughly 2.5%. If a 2.5% mortality rate sounds low, it’s not. That’s roughly comparable to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919–20 that killed 50 million people by some estimates. Read More

02.22.20- The American dream of retirement isn’t going to be fulfilled, says Raoul Pal
Alessandra Malito

Are baby boomers investing too much in risk? This former hedge fund manager says so

Older Americans looking to retire may want to reassess their investment portfolio before the next market downturn. 

There are many strategies to invest for retirement, but if they include loading up on stocks in your old age, they’re dangerous, says Raoul Pal, former hedge fund manager and chief executive officer and co-founder of financial media company Real Vision. Read More

02.21.20- It’s Too Late to Make America Great Again
Bill Bonner

RANCHO SANTANA, NICARAGUA – Children shouldn’t have to learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. And some facts are too brutal even for adults.

That things go down as well as up… and get worse as well as better… is blindingly obvious to everyone over 55. But it will come as a rude shock to today’s investors.

So will today’s insight: that there are hard seasons in human life as well as soft ones. Read More

02.20.20- We’re in an Age of
Technological Stupidity
Bill Bonner

RANCHO SANTANA, NICARAGUA – We’re down here on the Pacific coast. Lovers in one another’s arms. Birds in the trees. And even the old men like it.

Here’s our little cottage:>>>

But even down here in the tropics, our Dear Readers’ comments reach us. Here’s one:

“Our economy is the best it has been maybe ever. Read More

02.19.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Why the Tax Man Won’t Let
Cannabis Go Legit
Jim Hoffer

With the Democratic primaries underway, the candidates’ rhetoric has started to feel like a posturing contest. They all seem to think that voters want to back the candidate who’s most interested in raising taxes, so they try to outdo each other with talk about fantastical “wealth tax” constructs that will wipe out everyone’s debt.

As impressive as this showmanship is, a thriving economy and a balanced budget are already within our reach – no redistribution of wealth required. We just need to stop leaving money on the table. The legal and fiscal mess that currently surrounds legal marijuana proves this point. Read More

02.18.20- Q4 Earnings Shocker: Excluding The FAAMGs, Net Income Is Down 7.5%
Tyler Durden

Yesterday we showed readers a remarkable statistic from the latest Weekly Kickstart report by Goldman's David Kostin: according to the chief Goldman US equity strategist, whereas modest S&P500 earnings growth in Q4 was set to finally end a 4 quarters-streak of negative EPS growth, with S&P earnings per share set to rise by a modest 2% Y/Y, virtually all of the earnings upside came from just the top 5 biggest companies: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google (aka FAAMG), which collectively saw their EPS rise by a whopping 16% (mostly on the back of record stock buybacks which reduced the number of shares outstanding thus lowering the denominator in the EPS calculation). Read More

02.17.20- Coronavirus and credit – a perfect storm
Alasdair Macleod

This article posits that the spread of the coronavirus coincides with the downturn in the global credit cycle, with potentially catastrophic results. At the time of writing, analysts are still trying to get to grips with the virus’s economic impact and they commonly express the hope that after a month or two everything will return to normal. This seems too optimistic.

The credit crisis was already likely to be severe, given the combination of the end of a prolonged expansionary phase of the credit cycle and trade protectionism. These were the conditions that led to the Wall Street crash of 1929-32. Given similar credit cycle and trade dynamics today, the question to be resolved is how an overvaluation of bonds and equities coupled with escalating monetary inflation will play out. Read More

02.15.20- Minerd: There Is a "Stunning Cognitive Dissonance" Just Like Before
the Start of World War II
Tyler Durden

Guggenheim Partners' Scott Minerd warned in a new market outlook titled "Peace for Our Time: The coronavirus is a looming economic problem" that the Covid-19 outbreak in China is the latest red flag for investors could prick the corporate debt bubble. 

Minerd says, "cognitive dissonance in the credit market is stunning." He compares today's uncomfortable and eerie stillness in the corporate bond market to the late 1930s, right before the Nazis started bombing Britain. Read More

02.14.20- The Coming Decade Will Be Bad For Just About Everyone, Except Goldbugs
John Rubino

The coming decade will be especially grim for the super-rich, whose wealth creation will implode. Here’s why…

Poetic Justice Coming For The 1%

To understand just how grim the coming decade is likely to be for the world’s super-rich, let’s start with three premises: Read More

02.13.20- Our "Come to Mao" Reckoning and the Next Cultural Revolution
Charles Hugh Smith

Only fools are blind to the potential for this uprising to extend to Apple and the rest of Corporate America's greedy exploiters who've been delighted to profit from the protection of the CCP.

Let's start our "Come to Mao" reckoning with the obvious:

To the U.S. stock market:
The coronavirus ravaging China doesn't matter.
China doesn't matter.
1,500 deaths don't matter, 5,000 deaths don't matter, 50,000 deaths don't matter, 500,000 deaths don't matter.
10,000 coronavirus cases don't matter, 100,000 cases don't matter,
1,000,000 cases don't matter. Read More

02.12.20- The Forces That Degenerate an Empire
Bill Bonner

We’re doing a lot of things that are very good, including waste and fraud – tremendous waste and tremendous fraud. – Donald J. Trump

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – Day by day, the empire ages… drooping unto death.

Yesterday came news that Bernie Sanders narrowly won the New Hampshire primary. Read More

02.11.20- Just 4 Companies Account For 67% Of The S&P 500’s YTD Returns
Nick Colas

In mid-December 2019 we published a list of the 11 worst performing names in the S&P 500. The purpose of that exercise was twofold. First, buying the laggards at the end of a calendar year into tax loss selling anticipating a bounce in the New Year is a common hedge fund strategy – a turbo-charged play on the January Effect. Second, any big loser that does not rally once that selling stops is in real trouble. Read More

02.10.20- The end of the global economy
Richard (Rick) Mills

The Trump administration has just granted its Commerce Department sweeping powers to slap tariffs on countries it decides are manipulating their currencies to the detriment of the United States and its exporting companies.  

For some this will come as news; at AOTH, it is confirmation that our earlier warning, reported here, has come true. Read More

02.08.20- Tesla Stock Price Volatility a Sign of 'Frothy' Market
Peter Reagan

Near the end of a bull run, it's fairly common for "frothy" conditions to develop in the financial markets. This often occurs shortly before bubbles pop.

According to Investopedia, "Froth refers to market conditions preceding an actual market bubble, where asset prices become detached from their underlying intrinsic values as demand for those assets drives their prices to unsustainable levels." Read More

02.07.20- When Trust Evaporates
Chris MacIntosh

I thought I’d compare the current Wuhan zombie apocalypse bat virus to that of SARS and see what is similar this time around…and what is not.

Now, I’m not going to get into which virus wins the “I killed more faster”, (thus far, it was SARS with a fatality rate of 9.6% vs 2.8%). Or which is more infectious (SARS again, though Coronavirus can spread while still incubating). Or join the silly debate of whether we should eat bats (they carry the disease, so ummm…NO). Rather, I’m going to focus on what’s been different in terms of the reaction globally…and why this is important. Because let’s face it, statistically, you’re still far more likely to be killed by some dolt crossing the centerline while watching his Insta feed…and nobody is running around like chickens screaming…don’t drive, don’t drive. Read More

02.06.20- How are Stocks Going Up While Earnings Go Down?
Tom McClellan

The primary driver of stock prices is supposedly earnings, right? So how is it that earnings as a percentage of GDP have been falling since a peak in late 2014, and yet the major averages like the DJIA and SP500 are up 60% since then?

This week’s chart looks at some data which is buried deep within the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ report on National Income and Product Accounts. You can find it  here, then go to table 1.10, line 15. Like I said, it is deep. Read More

02.05.20- When Pelosi Ripped Trump’s Speech In Half, Was It A Harbinger Of What Is About To Happen To America During This Election?
Michael Snyder

It is a rare thing to witness a truly iconic moment happen on live television, but that is precisely what tens of millions of Americans had the opportunity to do on Tuesday night.  At the conclusion of President Trump’s State of the Union address, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped her copy of Trump’s speech in half in front of a nationwide audience.  We have never seen anything like that before in the entire history of this country, but of course so many unprecedented things have taken place during Trump’s presidency.  Pelosi is claiming that she did not plan in advance to rip the speech in half, and at that moment she probably wasn’t doing much thinking at all, but it is a moment that will live in all of our memories for the rest of our lives. Read More

02.04.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Deplatformed... How Big Tech Companies & Corporate America Subvert the Second Amendment
 Sam Jacobs

Twitter permanently banned the libertarian financial website Zero Hedge from the platform on Friday—January 31st after it published an article questioning the involvement of a Chinese scientist in the outbreak of the deadly Coronavirus.

Anyone familiar with the Bible is familiar with the Mark of the Beast: Without this mark, no man may buy or sell. Read More

02.03.20- Coronavirus Creating Worries of an Economic “Black Swan”
Birch Gold Group

The quickly-spreading coronavirus is understandably causing worry in the markets.

Originating in Wuhan, China, the virus moved from animals to humans at a local food market. Since then, it has since spread to other parts of China and beyond.

Jim Rickards compares this virus with a potential economic “contagion” that can result as the concern over the virus turns into panic and causes distress. Read More

02.01.20- Will The Coronavirus Outbreak Cause A Massive Stock Market Crash?
Michael Snyder

Could it be possible that this coronavirus outbreak will be the trigger that finally bursts the biggest stock market bubble in U.S. history?  As I have discussed previously, stock prices in the United States were the most overvalued that they have ever been during the month of January, and our stock market has never been more perfectly primed for a huge meltdown.  But stock prices are all about what investors believe will happen in the future, and if they remain convinced that the future is bright then perhaps this stock market bubble could persist for a while longer.  Unfortunately for Wall Street, this coronavirus outbreak is starting to create a wave of fear in the financial community.  In fact, concern about the coronavirus pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 600 points on Friday, which represented the worst day for the Dow since last August... Read More

01.31.20- Estimating the shape
of the coming crisis
Alasdair Macleod

We don’t know what will trigger the crisis, but a likely candidate is foreign selling of US dollars combining with a collapse in the US government’s finances. Perhaps the coronavirus will turn out to be a black swan event, but the underlying conditions for an economic and monetary crisis already exist.

This article looks at alternative outcomes. It concludes that the current situation bears a worrying resemblance to the collapse of John Law’s Mississippi scheme exactly 300 years ago. The key to understanding why this is so is because of the link forged between asset prices and fiat currencies. One fails, and they both fail, more rapidly than the most bearish bear might expect. Read More

01.30.20- More than 250,000 Chinese people will have coronavirus by early February, warns researcher
Ethan Huff

We’re just a few days away from month two of what’s shaping up to be quite the tumultuous new year, and researchers from the United Kingdom are now warning that the number of coronavirus cases is about to turn exponential.

In a model assessing the potential fallout from this highly contagious outbreak, this team of experts is expecting that more than 250,000 Chinese people will contract coronavirus by the turn of February – a number significantly higher than the roughly 6,200 cases that are currently being reported. Read More

01.29.20- Blink and you miss it: The U.S. yield curve inverts again
Karen Brettell

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A closely watched bond market phenomenon has again flashed yellow, but investors are loathe to give it much weight.

Yields on the 10-year Treasury note briefly fell below those of the 3-month bill early Tuesday for the first time since October, on concerns over the economic impact of the coronavirus. An inverted yield curve has historically been an indicator of looming recession as it tends to reflect worries over future growth among bond investors. Read More

01.28.20- The Black Swan Event Begins
Chris Vermeulen

As the Asian markets opened on late Sunday, traders expected a reactionary price move related to the threat of the Wuhan virus and the continued news of its spread.  The US Dow Jones futures markets opened close to -225 points lower on Sunday afternoon and were nearly -300 points lower within the first 25 minutes of trading.  Gold opened $10 higher and continued to rally to a level above $15 higher.

If this is early price activity, or a reactionary price move, related to fear of what may come, then the warnings signs are very clear that global traders and investors believe this virus outbreak may very well turn into a major Black Swan event. Read More

01.27.20- The Federal Government Has Devalued the Dollar Since 1971
Bill Bonner

Inflation is always and everywhere a rip-off.
– Bill Bonner

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – The nice thing about inflation, at least from the feds’ point of view, is that it doesn’t leave fingerprints.

Today’s dollar, for example, is worth only three cents of the pre-1971 dollar. But who dunnit? Who stole 97 cents out of every dollar? Read More

01.25.20- Irrational fears of deflation
Alasdair Macleod

The benefits of a deflation of prices brought about by a combination of sound money and markets free from government intervention have been demonstrated to be the best economic environment, the denial of which in favour of inflationary financing has led to repeated monetary and systemic failures.

This article explains how this has come about and puts the record on deflation straight. The development of macroeconomic theory had to deny the benefits of a deflation of prices, unbelievably telling us we need higher prices to stimulate our consumption. Read More

01.24.20- Don’t Mess With the U.S. (Financially)
James Rickards

I’ve been documenting financial warfare in my articles for years, but it still doesn’t get the mainstream attention it deserves.

Because as you’ll see below, it can directly impact your wealth.

Financial warfare tools include account seizures and freezes, expulsion from global payment systems, secondary fines and penalties on banks that do business with targeted entities, embargoes, tariffs and many other impositions. Read More

01.23.20- The Corporate Debt Bubble Is A Train Wreck In Slow Motion
Brandon Smith

There are two subjects that the mainstream media seems specifically determined to avoid discussing these days when it comes to the economy - the first is the problem of falling global demand for goods and services; they absolutely refuse to acknowledge the fact that demand is going stagnant and will conjure all kinds of rationalizations to distract from the issue. The other subject is the debt bubble, the corporate debt bubble in particular. Read More

01.22.20- You’ll be surprised to see what investment has destroyed the S&P 500
Simon Black

The year was 1990, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse.  The Berlin Wall was still in the process of being destroyed, and East and West Germany were set to reunify later in the year.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February, and the South African government began talks to end Apartheid soon after.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August. Read More

01.21.20- Swift Impeachment Trial and Acquittal Coming Up
Mike "Mish" Shedlock

01.20.20- Tech Expert Shares Five Predictions
for 2020
Jeff Brown

2019 was an incredible year for technology…

5G wireless networks went live in cities around the world on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. Artificial intelligence accelerated faster than anybody predicted. And precision medicine technology is on the cusp of rewriting health care as we know it today.

This is such an exciting time to be a technology investor. And we have a lot to look forward to in 2020. Read More

01.18.20- Got Gold? - David Rosenberg Warns "We're Going To Have Helicopter Money"
Christoph Gisiger

David Rosenberg, Chief Economist & Strategist of Rosenberg Research, doesn’t believe in the sustainability of the stock market rally, and warns that investors may be disappointed at the end of the year. He is bullish on energy stocks - and predicts that the gold price will surge to $3000.

Mr. Rosenberg is also the author of Breakfast with Dave, a daily distillation of his economic and financial market insights. Read More

01.17.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Northam Declares State of Emergency in Virginia Because “armed militia groups plan to storm the Capitol”
Daisy Luther

The drama in Virginia has escalated again as Governor Ralph Northam declares an official State of Emergency before January 20th’s “Lobby Day” protests.

Citing violence that erupted in Charlottesville during a Unite the Right rally in 2017, Northam said that there are credible threats that “armed militia groups plan to storm the Capitol” during Monday’s rally. In an executive order,  he announced he is banning all weapons from Capitol Square for the day. Read More

01.16.20- Instability Rising: Why 2020 Will Be Different
Charles Hugh Smith

In 2020, increasing monetary and fiscal stimulus will be the equivalent of spraying gasoline on a fire to extinguish it.

Economically, the 11 years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 have been one relatively coherent era of modest growth, rising wealth/income inequality and coordinated central bank stimulus every time a crisis threatened to disrupt the domestic or global economy.

This era will draw to a close in 2020 and a new era of destabilization and uncertainty begins. Read More

01.15.20- 2020 - Year of Living Dangerously (Pt 2)
Jim Quinn

In Part One of this article I detailed my inability to predict the timing of events during this Fourth Turning, while maintaining the catalysts of debt, civic decay, and global disorder continue to drive the world towards a cliff.

“Every schoolchild will know what happened next, from the Oh-Ohs to the 2020s, as the Fourth Turning unfolded—but academics will surely debate how and why it came to pass. In his history, this great-great-grandson of today’s baby girl will reflect on what the Fourth Turning came to mean for his own time and generation. His history is not yet written. What will it be?” – Strauss & Howe Read More

01.14.20- 2020 - Year of Living Dangerously
Jim Quinn

“A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.”  - Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

The shocking crime being committed during this century under the unscrupulous initiative of a few evil men is ongoing and no longer hidden from those willing to open their eyes and see the truth. As conspiracy theorists have proven to be right through the sacrifice of Snowden, Assange, and other patriots for truth, the Deep State psychopaths have double downed and are blatantly flaunting their power and control over the levers of government, finance and media. Read More

01.13.20- Surf’s Up!
Chris Martenson

The wave of change is finally here. Are you prepared to ride it?

Nothing seems right anymore.

In whichever direction we choose to look, things are unraveling at a quickening pace.

Welcome to the Fourth Turning; and with it, a profound loss of trust in institutions and government.

Such lack of social cohesion is a hallmark of a Fourth Turning. Sadly, it’s happening at a time when society desperately needs to pull together, set aside our differences, and make some really big decisions. Read More

01.11.20- Predictions for the 2020s
Dimitri Orlov

While many commentators see it fit to publish their predictions for the year ahead, I find a single year to be too fine-grained for any meaningful forecast. For me, plus or minus five years is about the right size of the error bars to place on any prediction with regard to timing, making it possible to time any major change to within a couple of decades. And it just so happens that another decade has gone by since I published my last set of predictions for the United States in the 2010s and it is therefore time to come up with a new set, for the 2020s. Read More

01.10.20- Sex, Drugs & Reality Distortion
Jamie Keech

It’s 1972, the US is withdrawing from Vietnam and the Godfather has just been released.

A Reed College dropout is on his way to meet a new student at his dorm-room to sell him a typewriter.

After knocking on the buyer’s door, eager to get the deal done, he tries the handle and steps inside only to find his would be buyer enthusiastically mid-coitus. Read More

01.09.20- And Now, for Something Entirely Different: Bolsheviks want to shut down Puerto Rico’s tax incentives
Joe Jarvis

[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Sovereign Man team member Joe Jarvis, who recently moved to Puerto Rico.] 

Local Puerto Ricans invariably tell me I’m overpaying on rent, and that I could have found a cheaper place to live.

I’m sure that’s true. But somehow I’m not upset about my gorgeous view over the ocean and private roof deck.

Beautiful beaches are right in front of me, along with three pools, a gym, and tennis courts. Read More

01.08.20- A New Gold Standard:
Orderly or Chaotic?
James Rickards

Over the past century, monetary systems change about every 30 to 40 years on average. Before 1914, the global monetary system was based on the classical gold standard.

Then in 1945, a new monetary system emerged at Bretton Woods. I was at Bretton Woods this past summer to commemorate its 75th anniversary.

Under that system, the dollar became the global reserve currency, linked to gold at $35 per ounce. In 1971 Nixon ended the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold. For the first time, the monetary system had no gold backing. Read More

01.07.20- How Money Printing Contributes to America’s Downward Spiral
Bill Bonner

One does not see malinvestment at the time of money printing. Price increases are delayed and uneven, due to the Cantillon Effect whereby the early receivers of new money are able to purchase goods and services at existing prices. Later receivers or those who do not receive the new money at all suffer higher prices and a reduction in their standards of living. Even then most people do not link higher retail prices with a previous expansion of the money supply.

It would be hard to invent a more effective method for the destruction of modern society.

– “The Hidden Link Between Fiat Money and the Increasing Appeal of Socialism” by Patrick Barron Read More

01.06.20- "World War 3? The US Has Crossed A Red Line... But It’s Not The One They Think"
Michael Every

“World War Three!” is trending on social media the day I return to work after two weeks off deliberately not reading any news for once: ironic given my reputation for being bearish about geopolitics. Markets, of course, have failed to react much: Middle-East bourses closed down 2-4% on Sunday, which is not exactly end of the world stuff; WTI futures are up around 3%, again not a real panic; while US 10-year yields were down from 1.94% intraday Thursday to 1.79% as of the Friday close - but the weak US ISM survey (47.2 headline; 46.8 new orders; 45.1 employment) could be to blame for that alone. Read More

01.04.20- How Trump Could Really Make US Industry Competitive Again
David Stockman

International Man: Trump’s America First economic policy seemed to help him win the 2016 election. He promised to renegotiate America’s trade deals and bring jobs back to the United States.

As president, Trump has used tariffs and other protectionist measures to try to reduce the trade deficit.

What do you think of Trump’s trade policies and tariffs? Read More

01.03.20- New Rules for the New Decade
Bill Bonner

My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, situation excellent, I am attacking. – Marshal Ferdinand Jean Marie Foch

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – A new year! A new decade! And it’s going to be great.

Back in the 18th century, people went to insane asylums to laugh at the crazy people. Today, we only have to turn on the TV or read the news.

That’s progress! And it just gets better and better.

But we need to put it in perspective… Read More

01.02.20- The Cold, Hard Facts Which Prove That The Past Decade Was Actually Quite Awful For The U.S. Economy
Michael Snyder

If this is what “the good times” look like, how nightmarish are “the bad times” going to be?  In America today, more than 500,000 of us are homeless, about 40 million of us are living in poverty, 50 percent of all workers make less than $33,000 a year, and 70 percent of us have cried about money.  But at least the economy has been “growing”, right?  Well, in this article I would like to address that.  Even if you believe that the highly manipulated economic growth numbers that the government puts out are legitimate, they still show that we are in one of the worst economic stretches in all of U.S. history. Read More

01.01.20- Global Financial System Is A Big Rube Goldberg Machine
Bruce Wilds

While pondering the current economy that is becoming more of a conundrum every day, I stumbled upon an analogy I would like to share. The global economy is like a giant "Rube Goldberg" machine.It is a ridiculously complicated contraption built to perform what should normally be a simple task. Rube Goldberg machines often mimic the real world in that they are goal-oriented with many parts comingtogether to complete a task. Read More