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If Anyone Doubts That We Are In A Stock Market Bubble, Show Them This Article
If Anyone Doubts That We Are In A Stock Market Bubble, Show Them This Article
The higher financial markets rise, the harder they fall. By any objective measurement, the stock market is currently well into bubble territory. Anyone should be able to see this – all you have to do is look at the charts. Sadly, most of us never seem to learn from history. Most of us want to believe that somehow “things are different this time”. Well, about the only thing that is different this time is that our economy is in far worse shapethan it was just prior to the last major financial crisis. That means that we are more vulnerable and will almost certainly endure even more damage this time around. It would be one thing if stocks were soaring because the U.S. economy as a whole was doing extremely well. But we all know that isn’t true. Instead, what we have been experiencing is clearly artificial market behavior that has nothing to do with economic reality. In other words, we are dealing with an irrational financial bubble, and all irrational financial bubbles eventually burst. And as I wrote about yesterday, the way that stocks have moved so far this year is eerily reminiscent of the way that stocks moved in early 2008. The warning signs are there – if you are willing to look at them.
The first chart that I want to share with you today comes from Doug Short. It is a chart that shows that the ratio of corporate equities (stocks) to GDP is the second highest that it has been since 1950. The only other time it has been higher was just before the dotcom bubble burst…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Growth Delusion
There is an idea that wields power unlike any other. Faith in it is truly global: crossing national and ideological barriers and defining the logic of every major economy in the world today.
That idea is economic growth. The faith is that growth is not only desirable but necessary. What is meant by growth is represented by one little big number: Gross Domestic Product (GDP). From Athens to Beijing, Moscow to Washington, political aspirations and economic achievements are rooted in GDP. We all use it to measure the health of our economies: it’s a one-stop measure for success.
Its logic reigns with little resistance. Indeed, most people in or out of power are unconscious of its role, let alone its dominance. But, based on a controlling yet largely invisible assumption, GDP leaves us with a very narrow and misleading notion of success and progress.
What exactly does GDP measure? When we say, ‘The tree has grown’, we tend to have a reasonably good sense of what that means. But what we mean by saying that a company has grown gets a lot more complicated: more employees? Better products? Higher sales?
What, then, does it mean to say that something as big and complicated as the economy has grown?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The American Dream – Moonshine and Scam
The American Dream – Moonshine and Scam
Infection
When we left you yesterday, we were trying to connect the bloated, cankerous ankles of the US economy to the sugar rush of its post-1971 credit-based money system.
Today, we look at the face of our government. It is older… with more worry lines and wrinkles. But whence cometh that pale and stupid look?
That is also the result of the same advanced diabetic epizootic that has infected American society.
Soft and Mushy
After real money and real savings left the economy circa 1971, GDP growth rates fell. Wages atrophied. And now, for the first time in 35 years, American business deaths outnumber business births. The body economic grew soft and mushy – unable to hold itself erect or to stand on its own two feet. Thenceforth, it needed the crutch of increasing credit.
The new credit-based monetary system meant that Americans had less real wealth. But until 2007, they could still get what they wanted by borrowing. Few noticed that they were borrowing from the company store and becoming slaves to their credit masters.
No one ever figured out how to create gold. So, Washington insiders changed the money system in two steps. In 1968, LBJ asked Congress to end the requirement for the dollar to be backed by gold. And in 1971, “Tricky Dicky” ended the direct convertibility of dollars to gold.
With the new dollar, unbacked by gold, they could create all the money they wanted. After the 1970s, instead of earning more money, or borrowing from the savings of his neighbors, the typical American had to grovel to the elite who controlled the credit machine.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
US Economy Heads Toward Zero Growth in Q1
US Economy Heads Toward Zero Growth in Q1
GDPNow: Wall Street’s promise of Escape Velocity is a joke.
The consistency with which nearly every report on the US economy has deteriorated over the last few months is astonishing. Only the jobs report has been spared that sharp downdraft. So we blame the weather, which in parts of the US was truly atrocious, while in other parts, particularly in California, it was gorgeous.
Too gorgeous. This is supposed to be our rainy season, but every day the sun is out as we’re heading into our fourth year of drought. Yet the drought isn’t what keeps people from shopping or companies from ordering equipment. So out here, we’re baffled when the weather gets blamed.
Today’s durable goods report for February was another shot at this wobbly edifice of the US economy.
New orders for manufactured durable goods dropped by 1.4%, the Census Bureau reported. It was the third decrease in four months. Transportation equipment fell 3.5%, also the third decrease in four months. Excluding transportation, new orders – “core” durable goods – fell 0.4%, down for the fifth month in a row.
And Core Capital Goods New Orders, considered an important gauge of business spending, fell 1.4%, down for the sixth month in a row. The weather is really hard to blame for this, so folks blamed the strong dollar and slack demand in the US and globally.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Oil Price Crash and Economic Slow Down in China
The Oil Price Crash and Economic Slow Down in China
Two of the factors in the oil price crash are well constrained: 1) oversupply of expensive light tight oil (LTO) in North America and 2) the decision of OPEC to not cut production. The third possible factor of weak global demand is not so easy to constrain but the current oil price crash bears many of the same hallmarks as the 2008 finance crash. This has lead to speculation that weak global demand, stemming from masked economic woes, may also be playing a key role.
In response to this, commenter Javier sent me a collection of 10 charts that he had collected from various internet sources together with his commentary that forms the basis of this joint-post. These charts tell a clear story of a major economic slowdown in China. This most certainly will be implicated in the ongoing oil price weakness. The $10,000 question is will China make a cyclical rebound like it has done in the past?
Figure 1 GDP growth. YoY = year on year % change. Note many charts are not zero scaled. China’s economy is still growing at 7% per year but has slowed down dramatically from 12% 5 years ago. Such change has happened before, notably between 1994 and 1998 linked to the Asian currency crisis. The oil price hit $10 per barrel in 1998. And in 2007 to 2009 an even more sharp fall related to the financial crash was also accompanied by a crash in the oil price.
Javier points out that in a country with rapid population growth a higher GDP growth rate is required than in a country with stable or declining population and he suggests that 7% is in reality approaching recessionary levels.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Canadian Housing Bubble Has Begun To Burst
The Canadian Housing Bubble Has Begun To Burst
Don’t look now but slumping crude prices are hitting the Canadian housing market like a freight train. Energy accounts for 10% of Canadian GDP and around 25% of exports and the swift fall in oil prices is having a profound effect in the nation’s oil producing regions. Take Calgary for instance, where single-family home sales fell 34% last month. As the following chart shows, Alberta derives some 30% of its provincial revenues from energy royalties and as one TD analyst quoted by the Calgary Herald recently noted, “the effects of significantly lower oil prices had already turned up in resale activity, with sales in Calgary and Edmonton down more than 40 per cent and 30 per cent respectively, from October to January [and] as resale activity slows, prices usually follow.”
Depressed crude prices will create a $7 billion annual revenue shortfall for the province while GDP growth, which had been running at around 4%, is expected be just under half that this year, withsome analysts predicting the economy will contract. Here’s CIBC’s outlook for instance:
The Alberta government’s own assessment of the economic situation is deteriorating rapidly.
From the Alberta fiscal update:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 3
One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 3
In the previous installments of this series, we discussed the hidden and often unspoken crisis brewing within the employment market, as well as in personal debt. The primary consequence being a collapse in overall consumer demand, something which we are at this very moment witnessing in the macro-picture of the fiscal situation around the world. Lack of real production and lack of sustainable employment options result in a lack of savings, an over-dependency on debt and welfare, the destruction of grass-roots entrepreneurship, a conflated and disingenuous representation of gross domestic product, and ultimately an economic system devoid of structural integrity — a hollow shell of a system, vulnerable to even the slightest shocks.
This lack of structural integrity and stability is hidden from the general public quite deliberately by way of central bank money creation that enables government debt spending, which is counted toward GDP despite the fact that it is NOT true production (debt creation is a negation of true production and historically results in a degradation of the overall economy as well as monetary buying power, rather than progress). Government debt spending also disguises the real state of poverty within a system through welfare and entitlements. The U.S. poverty level is at record highs, hitting previous records set 50 years ago during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The record-breaking rise in poverty has also occurred despite 50 years of the so called “war on poverty,” a shift toward American socialism that was a continuation of the policies launched by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
C’mon Angela, Let Them Greexit
C’mon Angela, Let Them Greexit
With each passing day it becomes more obvious that Europe is heading for an epochal financial conflagration. So buy-the-dip if you must, but don’t believe for a minute that the US has decoupled. When the euro and EU eventually implode it will rattle the bones of every gambler and algo left in the casinos anywhere on the planet.
Yes, the school yard name calling and roughhousing now going on in Europe makes it appear that behind the sturm und drang there is some negotiations happening. But the truth is there is nothing to negotiate. Greece is so completely and terminally bankrupt that there is no solution other than default and greexit.
To insist that Greece service the entirely of its staggering $350 billion of debt, as does Germany and the troika apparatchiks, is to advocate the extinguishment of democracy in Greece and its reduction to a colonial mandate of Brussels; and in the process, to eliminate any semblance of economic life among the debt serfs who would inhabit it.
Its just math. Sooner or later interest rates must normalize. For a country with Greece’s profligate fiscal history, there is no possibility that the interest carry cost on a public debt load equal to 175% of GDP could be any less than 6-7% in the absence of EU guarantees.That means that the Greek state’s annual interest bill would approach 10% of GDP before paying down a single dime of principal.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Lenin Was Right …
Lenin Was Right …
Bear Markets Do Happen
Today… the second of the speech about the end of the world we recently gave at Doug Casey’s La Estancia de Cafayate. (You can catch up on the first part here.) As Yogi Berra would say, America is going to come to a fork in the road… and it’s going to take it.
Right now, the Fed isn’t as aggressive as the European Central Bank (which is set to pump €1.2 trillion into the financial markets by way of its QE program) or as innovative as the Bank of Japan (which is buying stock market funds as well as bonds by way of its QE).
Valuations are at extreme highs on Wall Street. Take Warren Buffett’s favorite measure – market cap to GDP. With an eight-month exception at the height of the dot-com boom (and you know what happened next), the value of all outstanding S&P 500 shares is the highest it has been relative to US GDP in the last 100 years.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank is warning that S&P 500 earnings per share will be flat this year when compared with 2014. Retail sales are down about 9% on an annual basis over the past three months. And the US GDP has slowed to an annual rate of just over 1%… with the possibility of a surprise recession on the horizon. Besides, crashes and bear markets happen. This seems as good a time as any.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Economy Finally Reaches “Escape Velocity,” Heads South
Economy Finally Reaches “Escape Velocity,” Heads South
It’s hard to measure the growth rate of a vast, complex economy with just one number, accurately, and on a timely basis.
The Chinese found an ingenious solution. They decree the growth rate and announce it in advance, and that’s about what the number says when it comes out. It’s faster than any other major country can produce its GDP numbers. It avoids nasty surprises and doesn’t need messy revisions. Whether or not establishing statistical data by decree is an accurate reflection of reality is a hotly disputed topic.
But then, the accuracy of any statistical data is a hotly disputed topic.
In the US, it’s a slog to get to the final answer. Quarterly changes in GDP, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, come in a series of estimates. The first estimate gets all the press, but subsequent revisions in the second and third estimates can be significant. Further revisions follow over the years. By the time the BEA has a fairly good handle on what actually happened back in the day, no one cares anymore.
So the Atlanta Fed started a new approach in 2011. The forecasting model is supposed to reflect a more immediate picture of the economy. Taking into account economic data when it is released, the model adjusts its GDP forecast accordingly and closer to real time. It has plenty of quirks. It’s jumpy as it reacts to incoming monthly data that is itself highly volatile and subject to revision. But it’s a good indication of where the economy has been going over the past few months.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The EU’s Stalinesque “4 Year Plan”
The EU’s Stalinesque “4 Year Plan”
They Didn’t Want to Call it the “5 Year Plan”
We have already commented on previous occasions on the EU’s “investment plan” (see: “EU Planning to Spend Money it Doesn’t Have” for details), which is bound to result in the production of countless white elephants across Europe (such as Poland’s “ghost airports”). These investments are apt to “boost GDP” in a number of countries, but will very likely leave nothing but proverbial bridges to nowhere behind. It is going to be yet another giant waste of scarce resources.
Apparently the EU has now given its placet to a “Four Year Plan” with the aim of investinf €315 billion, with various EU governments vying for the best place at the trough. It seems they didn’t want to make it a “Five Year Plan” – that would have been too reminiscent of the Soviet GOSPLAN agency, so a four year plan was adopted. However, what they may not have been aware of is that Stalin actually gave orders that the Soviet Union’s five year plans had to be fulfilled in four years:
An old Soviet GOSPLAN poster: “Let’s fulfill the five year plan in four years!”
As Reuters reports on this latest giant boondoggle thought up by the administrative apparatus of the European socialist superstate project:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 2
One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 2
Consumer spending in the U.S. accounts for approximately 70 percent of gross domestic product, though it is important to note that the manner in which “official” GDP is calculated is highly inaccurate. For example, all government money used within the Medicare coverage system to pay for “consumer health demands,” as well as the now flailing Obamacare socialized welfare program, are counted toward GDP, despite the fact that such capital is created from thin air by the Federal Reserve and also generates debt for the average taxpayer. Government debt creation does not beget successful domestic production. If that was a reality, then all socialist and communist countries (same thing) would be wildly enriched today. This is simply not the case.
That said, the swift decline in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. over the past two decades, including a considerable 33 percent overall decline in manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2010, leaves only the consumer and service sectors as the primary areas of employment and “production.” The service sector provides about three out of every four jobs available in America, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The truth is that America actually produces very little that is tangible beyond Big Macs, pharmaceuticals and the occasional overpriced fighter jet that doesn’t function correctly and is filled with Chinese parts. All three will kill you at varying degrees of speed…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What Happens to the Stock Market if the U.S. Follows the World into Recession?
What Happens to the Stock Market if the U.S. Follows the World into Recession?
History is rather unkind to blind faith in central banks, just as the rising U.S. dollar and stagnant sales are being very unkind to corporate profits.
The quasi-religious faith that central banks can push stock markets ever higher regardless of real-world realities may well be tested in 2015-2016. The global economy spiraling into recession (a.k.a. a period of slow growth–heh) raises two questions:
1. Can the U.S. economy decouple from the global economy, i.e. keep expanding production, sales, income and payrolls while the rest of the global economy falters?
2. What happens to the U.S. stock market if/when the U.S. follows the rest of the world into recession?
My colleague Dave P. at Market Daily Briefinghas posted information on a recession detector based on the work of economists Chauvet and Piger.
In essence, the model considers four data series: real personal income, nonfarm payrolls, industrial production and real final sales (as a percentage of change). If all four are rising, the probability of recession is low.
If all four roll over and decline, the probability of recession (generally defined as a decline in gross domestic product for two consecutive quarters) approaches 100%.
This makes intuitive sense: if personal income, industrial production, real final sales and payrolls are all declining, how can GDP continue expanding?
For context, let’s start with a chart I published earlier this week of new manufacturing orders–which look unambiguously recessionary:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
China Is A Monumental Economic Trainwreck—–The Evidence Is Mounting Rapidly
China Is A Monumental Economic Trainwreck—–The Evidence Is Mounting Rapidly
How Fast is China Growing?
Analyst estimates of Chinese growth keep getting lower and lower. Yet, those declining estimates have all been from a lofty level: From 10% to 9%, to 8% to 7.5%.
China’s growth target for 2015 is 7.0%.
Many question those growth estimates. I certainly do. Chinese growth is not consistent with energy demand, raw materials, or personal consumption. Worse yet, growth does not factor in pollution or malinvestments in vacant housing, vacant malls, vacant airports, etc.
Malinvestments, pollution, and State-Owned-Entreprise (SOE) boondoggles (fraud is actually a better word) should all subtract from current GDP. Instead, fraud, pollution, and malinvestments have been buried and will remain buried until it’s impossible to hide them.
I assumed China was growing slowly. After all, 7% is one hell of a lie. However, I now wonder if China is growing at all.
What caused my double take was a fascinating presentation by Anne Stevenson-Yang, Co-Founder of JCap and author of China Alone: The Emergence from, and Potential Return to Isolation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Currency Wars… Are Not Working
Currency Wars… Are Not Working
While none of the current batch of currency-devaluing Central Bankers would admit that their policies are designed to weaken the currency, enhance competitiveness, and hail a new bright future of growth for their nation (by printing money), it is clear that is the chosen textbook-based path chosen. However, as the following charts show, it’s not working…
Massive devaluation in Japan… economic growth expectations slowing…
Massive devaluation in Europe… economic growth expectations slowing…
And then there’s The US…
(though note the last few weeks’ surge in the USD has sparked some deterioration in the economic outlook).
* * *
Clearly the answer to Japan and Europe’s problem is more devaluation…
