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MARKETS… WE GOT TROUBLE: Debt & Brain-Dead Retail Investors Prop Up Stocks

MARKETS… WE GOT TROUBLE: Debt & Brain-Dead Retail Investors Prop Up Stocks

As the Dow Jones Index hits another all-time high today, smart money is rushing to the exits.  You see, smart money knows when something is too good to be true.  Unfortunately for the retail investor who is suffering from acute BRAIN DAMAGE, they are doing quite the opposite.  As institutions sellout on each new market price rise, retail investors are happily buying… hand over fist.

And why shouldn’t they?  These are good times.  Well, maybe not for Americans living in Houston, parts of Florida, California or in Puerto Rico.  Whatever happened to the news on the massive flooding and hurricane damage in Houston, Florida and Puerto Rico?  I remember seeing videos of Miami Beach High-Rise Condos with seawater 5-8 feet surrounding the entire area.  Does anyone have an idea of what happens to electrical systems when salt water floods buildings?  It’s not good.

Regardless… the amount of destruction major U.S. cities have experienced in the past three months is like nothing we have witnessed before.  Regrettably, a lot of these homes and businesses will never be rebuilt.  Not only don’t we have the money to do it, more importantly, we also don’t have the available energy.  While the massive destruction by hurricanes, flooding and fire have not impacted the stock market currently, they will.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, retail investors are propping up the markets.  However, they aren’t the only ones, or should I say, the only factor in keeping the markets from falling off a cliff.  Thanks to Uncle Sam, total U.S. debt has increased by $590 billion in just the past month and a half.  Here is a table of U.S. debt  from the data published by the fine folks at TreasuryDirect.gov:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fed Will Blink

Honest Profession

GUALFIN, ARGENTINA – The Dow rose 174 points on Thursday. And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said we’d have a new tax system by the end of the year.

Animal spirits were restless. But which animals? Dumb oxes? Or wily foxes? Probably both.

Since Thursday there have been two additional very spirited up days with large gaps – this is very rare in the DJIA, particularly from such a high level after a ~240% rally since the lows made 8 years ago… it continues to feel like a blow-off (and it happens against the backdrop of a sharp slowdown in money supply growth) – click to enlarge.

But what caught our attention were the central bankers strutting across the yard and crowing with such numbskull cackles that even barnyard animals would be embarrassed by them. There was a time when central banking was an honest profession.

Central bankers provided financing for the government. They backed the banking system, too, by holding savings as reserves, which they lent to solvent member banks in emergencies. They were tight-lipped, tight-laced, and tightwads. Their role was to say “no” more often than “yes.”

When the king wanted money to fight in a war… or build a bridge… the banker would give the terse reply: “Sire, we don’t have any.” Real money was backed by gold. And credit had to be backed by real money, which meant it had to be saved. Savings were limited, as was money.

Cackling central planners – this reminds us of the “FOMC meeting laughtrack” of 2003-2007 – the more Fed members laughed at their meetings, the closer the economy and financial system came to the near fatal implosion of 2007-2009. Do today’s monetary bureaucrats have more of a clue than their predecessors just before the GFC? The answer is an emphatic no – they have simply doubled down and blown an even bigger credit and asset bubble.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is It Just A Coincidence That The Dow Has Hit 20,000 At The Same Time The National Debt Is Reaching $20 Trillion?

Is It Just A Coincidence That The Dow Has Hit 20,000 At The Same Time The National Debt Is Reaching $20 Trillion?

Dow Fueled By DebtThe Dow Jones Industrial Average provides us with some pretty strong evidence that our “stock market boom” has been fueled by debt.  On Wednesday, the Dow crossed the 20,000 mark for the first time ever, and this comes at a time when the U.S. national debt is right on the verge of hitting 20 trillion dollars.  Is this just a coincidence?  As you will see, there has been a very close correlation between the national debt and the Dow Jones Industrial Average for a very long time.

For example, when Ronald Reagan took office in 1991, the U.S. national debt had just hit 994 billion dollars and the Dow was sitting at 951.  And as you can see from this chart by Matterhorn.gold via David Stockman, roughly that same ratio has held true throughout subsequent presidential administrations…

Dow Fueled By Debt

During the Clinton years the Dow raced out ahead of the national debt, but an “adjustment” during the Bush years brought things back into line.

The cold hard truth is that we have been living way above our means for decades.  Our “prosperity” has been fueled by the greatest debt binge in the history of the world, and we are greatly fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.

We would never have gotten to 20,000 on the Dow if Barack Obama and Congress had not gotten us into an extra 9.3 trillion dollars of debt over the past eight years.

Unfortunately, most people do not understand this, and the mainstream media is treating “Dow 20,000″ as if it is some sort of great historical achievement

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stock Market Suffers Worst Start to the Year Ever – What Does it Mean?

From December 30 to the end of the first week trading week of January, the DJIA has declined by roughly 7.7% (approx. 1,370 points) and the SPX by roughly 7.6% (approx. 160 points). This was nothing compared to the mini-crash suffered by China’s stock market early this year, which continued this morning with the Shanghai Composite (SSEC) declining by another 5.33%. The SSEC has put in an interim peak at approx. 3684 on December 23 and has since then fallen by slightly less than 670 points, or about 18%. Most of the decline occurred in the first week of January.

1-SPX nowS&P 500 Index, daily. The year has begun with a big sell-off in stock markets around the world – click to enlarge.

Although the sell-off in the US stock market was comparatively mild, it still ended up as the worst first trading week of January in history. Had January started out on a positive note, the mainstream financial media would have been full of reminders of how bullish a strong showing in the first week of January was, and what a good omen it represented for the rest of the year. Instead they felt compelled to tell us why a weak start to the year should be ignored.

The contortions went as far as one analyst informing us last week that the sell-off was actually happening “in a parallel universe”. As our friend Michael Pollaro has pointed out to us, central planning worshiper Steve Liesman told CNBC viewers last week that the terrible trade numbers (both imports and exports kept declining) were actually a positive, because they would “subtract less from GDP” – as imports have declined at an even faster pace than exports. Such unvarnished nonsense can only spring from the fevered minds of Keynesians and Mercantilists.

2-US exports and imports…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stock Market Crash 2016: This Is The Worst Start To A Year For Stocks Ever

Stock Market Crash 2016: This Is The Worst Start To A Year For Stocks Ever

Stock Market Collapse 2016We have never had a year start the way that 2016 has started.  In the U.S., the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 have both posted their worst four-day starts to a year ever.  Canadian stocks are now down 21 percent since September, and it has been an absolute bloodbath in Europe over the past four days.  Of course the primary catalyst for all of this is what has been going on in China.  There has been an emergency suspension of trading in China two times within the past four days, and nobody is quite certain what is going to happen next.  Eventually this wave of panic selling will settle down, but that won’t mean that this crisis will be over.  In fact, what is coming is going to be much worse than what we have already seen.

On Thursday I was doing a show with some friends, and we were amazed that stocks just seemed to keep falling and falling and falling.  The Dow closed down 392 points, and the NASDAQ got absolutely slammed.  At this point, the Dow and the NASDAQ are both officially in “correction territory”, and some of the talking heads on television are warning that this could be the beginning of a “bear market”.  But of course some of the other “experts” are insisting that this is just a temporary bump in the road.

But what everyone can agree on is that we have never seen a start to a year like this one.  The following comes from CNN

The global market freakout of 2016 just got worse.

The latest scare came on Thursday as China’s stock market crashed 7% overnight and crude oil plummeted to the lowest level in more than 12 years.

The Dow dropped 392 points on Thursday. The S&P 500 fell 2.4%, while the Nasdaq tumbled 3%.

 

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Via ConvergEx’s Nicholas Colas,

The 30 stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average currently trade for an average of 14.8x next year’s consensus earnings.  But… Everyone knows Wall Street analysts are always too optimistic, so what if we just look at the lowest estimate for each company?  That “Worst Case scenario” P/E is 16.7x – not “Cheap”, but not crazy expensive either – and incorporates a decline in earnings from 2015 of 1.5%.

As tempting as it is to say “Buy stocks” with this math, the truth is hazier. In reality, markets currently discount this “Worst case” as the “Base case”.  With the 10 year Treasury yielding 2.1%, that 16.7x multiple is where stocks should actually trade.

The driver of this market pessimism sits at the top of the income statement – the Street’s worst case revenue estimates call for a decline of 1.7% in 2016.  Now, Q3 earnings season is unlikely to provide much comfort here; why should corporate managements go out on a guidance limb when their stocks are down on the year?  All this points to further volatility in October, and with a bias to the downside.

Of all the words of tongue or pen, the dumbest are these: “What’s the worst that could happen?”  I imagine every stupid stunt ever uploaded to Youtube started life with that question.  Skateboard off the roof of your parent’s house into the pool…  Taunt the chimps at the zoo…   Jump a bike over 17 of your friends…  That phrase is cursed.  Even a movie of the same name, starring Martin Lawrence and Danny DeVito, only has a 10% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

In financial markets, however, this is one of the most important questions you can ask.  A few examples:

Every hedge fund uses some form of risk management to understand the worst case scenario for their portfolio. In general, the larger the firm and more complex the strategy, the more elaborate the analysis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Stock Market Crash 2015: The Dow Has Already Plummeted 2200 Points From The Peak

Stock Market Crash 2015: The Dow Has Already Plummeted 2200 Points From The Peak

Crack The Sky - Public DomainThose that watched their stocks steadily increase in value for years are now seeing all of that “wealth” disappear at a staggering pace.  The only way you actually make money in the stock market is if you get out in time, and many Americans are discovering that all or most of their gains have already been wiped out.  At this point, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dipped below where it was at the end of the 2013 calendar year.  That means that nearly two years of gains have already been obliterated.  On Friday, the Dow was down another 272 points, and it is now down more than 2200 points from the peak of the market back in May.  For months, I have been detailing how things were setting up for this kind of financial crash in textbook fashion, and now events are playing out just as I warned.  But this is just the beginning – what is coming next is going to shock the world.

We have already seen the 8th largest and 10th largest single day stock market crashes in all of U.S. history happen within the past few weeks.  In fact, it was actually the very first time that we have ever seen the Dow fall by more than 500 points on consecutive trading days.

On August 25th, I warned that there would be some huge rebound days where we would see lots of “panic buying”, and on August 26th we witnessed the 3rd largest single day stock market increase in all of U.S. history.

Headlines all over America trumpeted the “fact” that the stock market had “recovered”, but the mainstream media failed to mention that the only two better days for the stock market were right in the middle of the stock market crash of 2008.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

During Every Market Crash There Are Big Ups, Big Downs And Giant Waves Of Momentum

During Every Market Crash There Are Big Ups, Big Downs And Giant Waves Of MomentumTsunami Tidal Wave - Public DomainThis is exactly the type of market behavior that we would expect to see during the early stages of a major financial crisis.  In every major market downturn throughout history there were big ups, big downs and giant waves of momentum, and this time around will not be any different.  As I have explained repeatedly, markets tend to go up when things are calm, and they tend to go down when things get really choppy.  During a market meltdown, we fully expect to see days when the stock market absolutely soars.  Waves of panic selling are often followed by waves of panic buying.  As you will see below, six of the ten best single day gains for the Dow Jones Industrial Average happened during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.  So don’t be fooled for a moment by a very positive day for stocks like we are seeing on Tuesday.  It is all part of the dance.

At one point on Tuesday, the Dow was up over 400 points, and many of the talking heads on television were proclaiming that the stock market had “recovered”.  This is something that I predicted would happen yesterday

And if stocks go up tomorrow (which they probably should), all of those same “experts” will be proclaiming that the “correction” is over and that everything is now fine.

No, everything is not “fine” now.  The extreme volatility that we are witnessing just tells us that more trouble is coming.  Early on Tuesday the market was “burning up energy” as short-term investors sought to “buy the dip”.  But now that wave of panic buying is subsiding and the Dow is only up 240 points as I write this.

Overall, the Dow is still down more than 2,200 points from the peak of the market.  Even though I specifically warned that a market crash was coming, I didn’t expect the Dow to be down this far in late August.  Even after the “rally” we witnessed today, we are still way ahead of schedule.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Why It Really All Comes Down To The Death Of The Petrodollar

Why It Really All Comes Down To The Death Of The Petrodollar

Last week, in the global currency war’s latest escalation, Kazakhstan instituted a free float for the tenge. The currency immediately plunged by some 25%.

The rationale behind the move was clear enough. The plunge in crude prices along with the relative weakness of the Russian ruble had severely strained Kazakhstan, which is central Asia’s largest crude exporter. As a quick look at a chart of the tenge’s effective exchange rate makes clear, the pressure had been mounting for quite a while and when China devalued the yuan earlier this month, the outlook for trade competitiveness worsened.

What might not be as clear (on the surface anyway) is how recent events in developing economy FX markets following the devaluation of the yuan stem from a seismic shift we began discussing late last year – namely, the death of the petrodollar system which has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance and was, until recently, a fixture of the post-war global economic order. 

In short, the world seems to have underestimated how structurally important collapsing crude prices are to global finance. For years, producers funnelled their dollar proceeds into USD assets providing a perpetual source of liquidity, boosting the financial strength of the reserve currency, leading to even higher asset prices and even more USD-denominated purchases, and so forth, in a virtuous (especially if one held US-denominated assets and printed US currency) loop. That all came to an abrupt, if quiet end last year when a confluence of economic (e.g. shale production) and geopolitical (e.g. squeeze the Russians) factors led the Saudis to, as we put it, Plaxico’d themselves and the US.

The ensuing plunge in crude meant that suddenly, the flow of petrodollars was set to dry up and FX reserves across commodity producing countries were poised to come under increased pressure. For the first time in decades, exported petrodollar capital turned negative.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This 2 Day Stock Market Crash Was Larger Than Any 1 Day Stock Market Crash In U.S. History

This 2 Day Stock Market Crash Was Larger Than Any 1 Day Stock Market Crash In U.S. History

Sunrise Globe Earth Planet Space - Public DomainWe witnessed something truly historic happen on Friday.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 530 points, and that followed a 358 point crashon Thursday.  When you add those two days together, the total two day stock market crash that we just witnessed comes to a grand total of 888 points, which is larger than any one day stock market crash in U.S. history.  It is also interesting to note that this 888 point crash comes in the 8th month of our calendar.  Perhaps that is just a coincidence, and perhaps it is not.  It just struck me as being noteworthy.  This is the first time that the Dow has dropped by more than 300 points on two consecutive days since November 2008, and we all remember what was happening back then.  Overall, this was the worst week for the Dow in four years, and there have only been five other months throughout historywhen the Dow has fallen by more than a thousand points (the most recent being October 2008).  Of course we still have six more trading days left in August, so there is plenty of time remaining for even more carnage.

By itself, the 530 point plunge on Friday was the ninth worst stock market crash in all of U.S. history.  The following list of the top eight comes from Wikipedia

#1 2008-09-29 −777.68

#2 2008-10-15 −733.08

#3 2001-09-17 −684.81

#4 2008-12-01 −679.95

#5 2008-10-09 −678.91

#6 2011-08-08 −634.76

#7 2000-04-14 −617.77

#8 1997-10-27 −554.26

Another very interesting thing to note is that the largest stock market crash in U.S. history took place on the very last day of the Shemitah year of 2008, and now we are less than a month away from the end of this current Shemitah year.

It is funny how these strange “coincidences” keep happening.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

We Have Already Witnessed The First 1300 Points Of The Stock Market Crash Of 2015

We Have Already Witnessed The First 1300 Points Of The Stock Market Crash Of 2015

New York Stock Exchange - Photo from Wikimedia CommonsWhat has been happening on Wall Street the past few days has been nothing short of stunning.  On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 358 points.  It was the largest single day decline in a year and a half, and investors are starting to panic.  Overall, the Dow is now down more than 1300 pointsfrom the peak of the market.  Just yesterday, I wrote about all of the experts that are warning about a stock market crash in 2015, and after today I am sure that a lot more people will start jumping on the bandwagon.  In particular, tech stocks are getting absolutely hammered lately.  The Nasdaq has fallen close to 3.5% over the past two days alone, and it has dropped below its 200-day moving average.  The Russell 2000 (a small-cap stock market index) is also now trading below its 200-day moving average.  What all of this means is that the stock market crash of 2015 has already begun.  The only question left to answer at this point is how bad it will ultimately turn out to be.

When stocks were booming, tech stocks were leading the way up.

But now that the market has turned, tech stocks are starting to lead the way down

The Dow and the S&P 500 are negative for the year. The so-called “FANG” stocks – Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google – were some of the biggest losers, and helped send the Nasdaq more than 2% lower. Biotechs also suffered big losses; the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF fell 4% to a three-month low. The Vix, which gauges market expectations for near-term shifts in the S&P 500, surged more than 21%.

And Twitter is absolutely imploding.  It has fallen below its IPO price, and at this point it is now down 65 percent from the peak.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The Stock Market Will Start To Fall In July? The Dow Plummeted More Than 500 Points Last Week

The Stock Market Will Start To Fall In July? The Dow Plummeted More Than 500 Points Last Week

Falling - Public DomainWas last week a preview of things to come? There are quite a few people out there that believe that the stock market would begin to decline in July, and that appears to be precisely what is happening. Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 530 points. It was the biggest one week decline that we have seen so far in 2015, and some are suggesting that this could only be just the beginning. By just about any measurement that you might want to use, the stock market is overvalued. But we have been in this bubble for so long that many people have come to believe that this is “the new normal”. In fact, earlier today someone that I know dropped me a line and suggested that our financial overlords may be able to use the tools at their disposal to get this current bubble to persist indefinitely. Unfortunately, the truth is that no financial bubble ever lasts forever, and right now some very alarming things are starting to happen behind the scenes. Over the past couple of weeks, the smart money has been dumping stocks like crazy, and the lack of liquidity in the bond markets is beginning to become acute.  Could it be possible that another great financial crisis is just around the corner?

Last week took a lot of investors by surprise. The following is how Zero Hedgesummarized the carnage…

-Russell 2000 -3.1% – worst week since Oct 2014 (Bullard)
-Dow -2.8% – worst week since Dec 2014
-S&P -2.1% – worst week since Jan 2015
-Trannies -2.8% – worst week since Mar 2015
-Nasdaq -2.2% – worst week since Mar 2015

The talking heads on television were not quite sure what to make of this sudden downturn. On CNBC, analysts mainly blamed the usual suspects…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

 

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