As The World Rolls Over
Brutal news is pouring in from pretty much everywhere.
US retail sales are flat and wholesale prices are falling. Big retail chains are missing on earnings and seeing their shares plunge.
Chinese nonperforming loans are soaring while imports, car sales and steel production are way down.
Oil is flirting with multi-year lows as tankers wander the ocean with nowhere to offload their crude. Other commodities like aluminum and copper are back at 2009 levels and still falling.
A general strike has paralyzed Greece and a far-left coalition is taking power in Portugal. Middle Eastern refugees keep pouring into Europe and no one seems to know where to put them. Eurozone growth is sliding back towards zero and the once-bulletproof Scandinavian countries are now the “sick men” of the region.
Argentine inflation is 35%, Brazil’s political/economic crisis is threatening to topple the government, and a giant copper mine just dumped millions of gallons of toxic sludge on some Brazilian villages.
Equities in Asia, Europe and the US are getting whacked as the sheer volume of bad news swamps the hope that European and Chinese QE programs will keep the asset price party going.
The world, in short, is rolling over. Debt monetization on the scale so far attempted has failed to stop the implosion of tens of trillions of dollars of bad paper, growth has stalled and geopolitics has begun to resemble the parking lot of a British soccer match, with scary people doing random, incomprehensibly violent things and no generally recognized authority able to impose control. Elections are now fearful rather than hopeful prospects and anti-status quo parties in France, Britain, Italy and Spain have become serious contenders.
And none of this is a surprise. It’s just what you get when you put monetary printing presses in the hands of governments and/or big banks.
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