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Market Update: A Titanic Disaster Ahead?
Market Update: A Titanic Disaster Ahead?
Tech stocks now in a classic blow-off top
At this point, as go the leading Tech stocks, so go the markets.
So much capital has crammed into the tech sector this year that it boggles the mind. Tech stocks now make up 40% of the market cap of the S&P 500.
And despite their huge size, they continue to race higher. Nearly. Every. Single. Day.
Here’s a chart of six of the biggest tech companies. Over just the past 7 trading days, they have increased a combined total of half a trillion dollars in market cap. That’s $500 billion, folks — in just a week!
(Source)
Looking at Amazon’s (AMZN) stock price, up nearly 20%(!) since the start of July, we see a trajectory that we’re familiar with — a near-vertical blow-off top:
(Source)
This is the classic manic ending to an asset price bubble — as seen when Bitcoin hit 19,000 in late 2017 and when silver hit $49/oz in 2011. For further affirmation, watch this short video chapter from Crash Course on Bubbles.
In a way, this is comforting to see because it gives us confidence this insane, mindless, unjustified market euphoria will end soon. We just need to be prepared for the predictable violent aftermath when it does.
As we do each week, we’ve once again asked the lead partners at New Harbor Financial, Peak Prosperity’s endorsed financial advisor, to share their latest insights on the end of Great Tech Bubble and what comes next.
We spend a fair amount of time in this week’s video asking New Harbor for actionable options to protect recent gains from a potential pull-back, as well as how to position for a larger market melt-down if indeed Tech soon reverses and we experience a crash greater in magnitude than what we suffered in February:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
TOTAL MARKET INSANITY: Toyota vs. Tesla
TOTAL MARKET INSANITY: Toyota vs. Tesla
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.
The new generation of millennials and even the baby-boomers have fallen HOOK, LINE, and SINKER for the glamour and glitter of technology. So, if we ask most Americans about our future energy predicament, their knee-jerk reply is that “Technology will solve all of our problems.” This is quite hilarious when, in fact, complex, sophisticated technology is a massive ENERGY BLACK HOLE. The more technology we throw at a problem, the more energy is consumed.
Thus, this brings me to my comparison of Toyota Motors vs. Tesla Inc. Toyota was the largest auto manufacturer in the world in 2018 but was overtaken by Volkswagon last year. Toyota didn’t produce any electric cars in 2019 but plans on rolling out ten new EV models in 2020. However, if we compare the market fundamentals for Toyota and Tesla, investors have gone completely insane.
Currently, Tesla’s market cap is worth $259 billion compared to $206 billion for Toyota. Why did investors push Tesla’s stock up to $1,400 a share ($259 billion market cap) when its total revenues in 2019 were only a little more than Toyota’s net income profits? As you can see, Toyota posted $19 billion in net income profits on total revenues of $278 billion compared to Tesla’s $862 million net income loss on $24.3 billion in revenues.
Again, a perfect example of the investor mindset today. Profits don’t matter, just technology, regardless if it continues to lose money.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
It Doesn’t Matter What You Think, Reality Is What It Is
It Doesn’t Matter What You Think, Reality Is What It Is
It doesn’t matter what you think, the reality we face is what we are seeing here on the ground. Reality is what it is and our government will as usual muddle through with poorly thought out politically correct solutions geared to kick the can down the road. This brings me little delight. I have gone a bit quiet lately because of how events are slowly unfolding, the keyword, in this case, is slowly. Rather than a wave washing over us we are experiencing a troubling drip after drip of bad news which a majority of the population has now come to accept as normal. You can put lipstick on a pig but no matter what you tell yourself, it is still a pig.
In some ways what is happening to people across the world could be compared to what occurred when the white-man came to America. The Indians slowly traded their freedom for baubles and what they did not trade away was slowly taken by force. In this analogy, technology is the shiny promise unto which we sadly surrender our future. Beware, those that claim the promise technology is the key to a better future are not quick to share its rewards.They prefer to turn us into mindless slaves and government is a tool they employ in their efforts.
Exploding debt and a slow recovery following the 2008 financial crisis. Many of us claimed it really was not a true recovery but rather a debt-fueled false economy. All this continued with the aid of a few major distractions which took our eyes off the ball. Then the corona-virus hit. Looking back, the first diversion was the emergence of ISIS and the wave of refugees that destabilized Europe and the second was the trade war with China.
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Our Fate Is Sealed, Vaccines Won’t Matter: Four Long Cycles Align
Our Fate Is Sealed, Vaccines Won’t Matter: Four Long Cycles Align
A Covid-19 vaccine, or lack thereof, will have zero effect in terms of reversing these cycles. Call it Fate, call it karma, call it what you will, but the cycles have aligned and nothing can stop the unraveling of all that was foolishly presumed to be permanent.
We like to think we’re in charge and that technology conquers all, but history moves in cycles that are larger than any person, corporation, elite or (gasp) technology. My first version of the chart below was drawn in 2008, when the Global Financial Meltdown revealed the cracks in the happy-story facade of permanent wonderfulness based on the amazing magic of borrowing / printing ever greater sums of currency, a.k.a. “money.”
Longtime correspondent Cheryl A. suggested I revisit the alignment of long-wave cycles, and so let’s start by what the study of cycles is not: it is predictive in terms of trends and turning points, not precise time or amplitude targets. In effect, the study of cycles is the study of human nature as it plays out in long-term social, political and economic dynamics.
Sir John Glubb’s succinct and deeply informed 1978 essay The Fate of Empires lists these stages of social development and decay that manifest as the rise and decline of empires:
The Age of Pioneers (outburst or Boost Phase)
The Age of Conquests
The Age of Commerce
The Age of Affluence
The Age of Intellect
The Age of Decadence
The slippery slope to collapse–decadence–is characterized by greed, corruption, irreconcilable internal political rifts, moral decay, frivolity, materialism–hmm, sound familiar?
The global status quo sped through The Age of Intellect (postmodernism) with little to show for the vast expenditure of resources, and is now firmly in the final terminal stage of decadence and collapse.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Sergey Young: Will Technology Save Us?
Sergey Young: Will Technology Save Us?
Are the pessimists wrong to bet against human ingenuity?
“Technology will save us!”
That’s the most common pushback we receive to Peak Prosperity’s concerns about the dangers of exponential resource depletion, overpopulation, and overindebtedness/overconsumption.
And it’s understandable: technological advancement has achieved wonders for mankind’s standard of living at an accelerating pace over the past several centuries. Billions have been lifted out of poverty. Human health and longevity (covid-19 aside) have been greatly boosted. We have conquered the earth, seas, air and space.
Are the pessimists wrong to bet against human ingenuity?
To explore that question head-on, Chris sits down this week with Sergey Young, founder of the Longevity Vision Fund and “right hand man” to Peter Diamandis of Singularity and XPRIZE fame.
A self-described technology optimist, Sergey has created a $100 million fund to counteract the damaging consequences of aging. He’s set for himself the goal to live to be 200 years old (in the body of a 25 year old) and to find an affordable way for everyone else to do the same.
Interestingly, while Sergey is much more sanguine about society’s future prospects than we are here at Peak Prosperity, he acknowledges that the pragmatic realists are a necessary ‘yin’ to the tech passionistas’ ‘yang’.
For an optimistic futurist, Sergey is surprisingly respectful of and in agreement with our focus on sustainability and on practical models for living within our means. He admits that technology isn’t a cure-all, and goes as far to say that if the future were simply left to the starry-eyed dreamers, we’d take a lot of leaps of faith that wouldn’t end well.
For one of the most balanced conversations on this topic we’ve yet experienced, click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Sven Henrich (44m:45s)
You’re Being Conditioned to Live in a “Smart City” – Resist It
You’re Being Conditioned to Live in a “Smart City” – Resist It
And at the dead center of it all is Eric Schmidt. Well before Americans understood the threat of Covid-19, Schmidt had been on an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign pushing precisely the “Black Mirror” vision of society that Cuomo has just empowered him to build. At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants — with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies.
– The Intercept: Screen New Deal
Each crisis in the 21st century has been aggressively and ruthlessly wielded into a massive wealth and power grab by the American oligarchy and national security state. The big power grab following 9/11 centered around whittling away constitutional rights via mass surveillance in the name of “keeping us safe”, while the money grab after last decade’s financial crisis concentrated wealth and assets into fewer hands while entrenching financial feudalism and making the Federal Reserve and mega banks even more powerful.
Despite the success of this diabolical and intentional concentration of money and power, there’s still too much privacy, freedom and independent wealth around for the imperial oligarchy to feel comfortable. As such, the current pandemic is being used to put the finishing touches on whatever little political and economic freedom remains in these United States.
The lessons learned from prior crises are being rolled out simultaneously this time around while people remain incapacitated at home due to Covid-19. The 2008/09 financial collapse taught those in power they can get away with unprecedented, unaccountable theft during an economic and stock market crash. Similarly, 9/11 demonstrated people will relinquish civil liberties without much protest when immersed in a state of fear.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Do we need farmfree food?
Do we need farmfree food?
Because of how badly we humans have treated soils and animals and how we destroyed bio-diversity, it is understandable that people are looking for other ways of producing food. The food tech sector hosts legions of entrepreneurs (mostly with background in the IT sector) seeking venture capital and researchers looking for grants to “disrupt” a sector which they claim is archaic. Most of them are based on the view that farming in general, and livestock farming in particular, is inefficient and wasteful. The environmental journalist George Monbiot writes in an article in the Guardian titled Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet.
“Eating is now a moral minefield, as almost everything we put in our mouths – from beef to avocados, cheese to chocolate, almonds to tortilla chips, salmon to peanut butter – has an insupportable environmental cost. But just as hope appeared to be evaporating, the new technologies I call farmfree food create astonishing possibilities to save both people and planet. Farmfree food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale.
“One of the promising initiatives mentioned in the article is the Finnish company, Solar foods. It claims that it has found a way to commercially produce hydrogen oxidized bacterial protein from electricity. The technology is actually known since the 1960s and has not taken off because of the prohibitive costs. In a research article, co-written by the founders of Solar Foods as late as 2019, it is concluded, that only the cost of energy required to produce microbial protein is higher than the price of soybeans, even if capital and other operational costs are not taken into account.
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Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity
Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity
The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the twin processes of globalization and planned obsolescence are deficient and moribund. Globalization was predicated on a number of assumptions including the perpetuity of consumerism, and the withering away of national boundaries as transnational corporations so required.
What we see instead is not a globalization process, but instead a process of rising multipolarity and a rethinking of consumerism itself.
Normally a total market crash and unemployment crisis would usher in a period of militant labor activity, strikes, walk-outs and community-labor campaigns. We’ve seen some of this already. But the ‘medical state of emergency’ we are in, has effectively worked like a ‘lock-out’. The elites have effectively flipped-the-script. Instead of workers now demanding a restoration of wages, hours, and work-place rights, they are clamoring for any chance to work at all, under any conditions handed down. Elites can ‘afford’ to do this because they’ve been given trillions of dollars to do so. See how that works?
All our lives we’ve been misinformed over what a growing economy means, what it looks like, how we identify it. All our lives we’ve been lied to about what technical improvement literally means.
A growing economy in fact means that all goods and services become less expensive. That cuts against inflation. Rather all prices should be deflating – less money ought to buy the same (or the same money ought to buy more). Technical innovation means that goods should last longer, not be planned for obsolescence with shorter lifespans.
Unemployment is good if it parallels price deflation. If both reached a zero-point, the problems we believe we have would be solved.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bill Gates Crosses the Digital Rubicon, Says ‘Mass Gatherings’ May Not Return Without Global Vaccine
Bill Gates Crosses the Digital Rubicon, Says ‘Mass Gatherings’ May Not Return Without Global Vaccine
A recurring theme among conspiracy theorists is that the elite are just waiting for the right moment to roll out their ‘mark of the beast’ technology to remotely identify and control every single human being on the planet, thus sealing their plans for a one world government. And with many people willing to do just about anything to get back to some sense of normalcy, those fears appear more justified with each passing day.
In the Book of Revelation [13:16-17], there is a passage that has attracted the imagination of believers and disbelievers throughout the ages, and perhaps never more so than right now: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark…”
Was John of Patmos history’s first conspiracy theorist, or are we merely indulging ourselves today with a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? Whatever the case may be, many people would probably have serious reservations about being branded with an ID code even if it had never been mentioned in Holy Scripture. But that certainly has not stopped Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has been warning about a global pandemic for years, from pushing such controversial technologies on all of us.
In September 2019, just three months before the coronavirus first appeared in China, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, quietly announced it was undertaking a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization” and only uses the “most successful approaches”.
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Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies — and We Fall for Them
Tech Giants Rely on Big Lies — and We Fall for Them
From ‘the cloud’ to ‘free’ services, we’ve been conned by tech babble.
Remember when we spent our days “surfing” the “information superhighway?”
The 1990s dotcom bubble, when some tech companies spent as much as 90 per cent of their budgets on advertising, brought a flood of hype-driven technobabble designed to lure venture capitalists.
Twenty years later, some tech giants have revenues greater than the GDPs of small countries and have the power to influence election outcomes in major ones.
The need to cut through the hype churned out by the tech giants’ marketing departments has become even more acute.
Here are three techno-utopic terms we should ban in the 2020s.
1. There is no ‘cloud’
“The cloud,” we should have learned by now, simply means “someone else’s computer” (and not necessarily someone trustworthy).
The term is brilliant branding. Selling people on “cloud storage” is a lot easier than convincing them to hand over all their data to a corporation.
And the idea makes sense. With the advent of wide access to high-speed connectivity, it’s efficient — and cheaper — to shift storage and processing from individual devices to central sites.
But there is no safe, secure cloud. Security breaches have exposed millions of users’ accounts — on Dropbox, Amazon, Google and others. Companies have handed files over to authorities, sometimes without a fuss or a word. And Edward Snowden has revealed practically limitless government spying on data moving through the internet.
Where data ends up, how it gets there, and the laws and security processes that govern both are pretty darned important.
The clouds, where the gods live, have always been humanity’s favourite storage place for all that is out of reach of questioning and understanding.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Suppressing Dissent Guarantees Disorder and Collapse
Suppressing Dissent Guarantees Disorder and Collapse
The frantic efforts of am exploitive elite to eliminate dissent only accelerates the regime’s path to collapse.
Regimes that are losing public support always make the same mistake: rather than fix the source of the loss of public trust–the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many– the regime reckons the problem is dissent: if we suppress all dissent, then everyone will accept their diminishing lot in life and the elites can continue on their merry way.
What the regimes don’t understand is dissent is the immune system of society: suppressing dissent doesn’t just get rid of pesky political protesters and conspiracy theorists; it also gets rid of the innovations and solutions society needs to adapt to changing conditions. Suppressing dissent dooms the society to sclerosis, decline and collapse.
Dissent is the relief valve: shut it down and the pressure builds to the point that the system explodes. Regimes that no longer tolerate anything but the party line fall in one of two ways: 1) the pressure builds and the masses revolt, tearing the elite from power or 2) the masses opt-out and stop working to support the regime, so the regime slowly starves and then implodes.
Here in the U.S., the suppression of dissent is the work of the corporate media and the Big Tech monopolies: Facebook, Twitter and Google. As Mark St.Cyr and I discuss in a new no-holds-barred podcast (1:08 hours, 4 segments), Big Tech is effectively suppressing dissent via shadow banning, de-platforming and de-monetization:– shadow banning: the audience who gets to see your content is throttled back to a fraction of your pre-shadow-banning audience.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Power, the Acceleration of Cultural Evolution, and Our Best Hope for Survival
Power, the Acceleration of Cultural Evolution, and Our Best Hope for Survival
These days I’m deep in the process of writing a book on power—both physical power (humanity’s power over nature) and social power (the power of some people over others). The book’s first few chapters explore the historical process by which we developed our currently awesome powers, starting with control of fire, simple stone tools, and language. Once we had these, the pace of human empowerment picked up dramatically. We didn’t have to wait for biological evolution to slowly deliver improved organs; cultural evolution could rapidly supply new ideas, behaviors, and tools—which often took the forms of prosthetic organs (such as clothing and weapons) that enabled us to take over habitat from other creatures.
While the pace of cultural evolution was much faster than that of biological evolution, major cultural innovations like the domestication of plants and animals, the creation of the first states, and the emergence of the earliest empires were still spaced thousands of years apart. However, our sudden access to the storable, portable, and concentrated energy of fossil fuels, starting roughly in the 19th century, sped up cultural evolution to the point where disruptive cultural innovations began to be separated by mere decades, sometimes just years.
One of the factors driving cultural evolution is the rebounding interaction of technology and language. Writing, the alphabet, printing, the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, internet, and social media have sped up and spatially expanded human interaction, giving us the ability to cooperate in ever larger groups, in effect granting us expanding power over space and time.
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Imagination, STEM and Reading Lolita in Tehran
Imagination, STEM and Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi, author of the international bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, explains that the title of her book came from her diary in which she kept track of activities that were no longer allowed in post-revolutionary Iran, but which people engaged in as a form of resistance. One of those activities was reading Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, about a middle-aged professor of literature who finds himself sexually pursuing a 12-year-old girl—a tale that is not exactly consistent with Islamic revolutionary clerical sensibilities.
Nafisi spoke recently to a small gathering I attended at the home of a friend about her life, her writings and her fears for American democracy. She shared her concerns that warning signs are all around signaling the decline of democratic life in her adopted country. She did so in part by invoking a recurrent theme in the academic world to which she belongs. That world contains two cultures which seem forever split, the sciences and the humanities.
The craze over so-called STEM—science, technology, engineering and math—in education policy and practice has devalued the development of individual imagination which Nafisi regards as the cornerstone of an educated mind. Instead, cultivation of the imagination is replaced with the notion of a “race” against the Chinese and other commercial rivals to dominate world markets with new, domestically developed technologies.
No thought is given to whether those technologies will enhance our individual lives. More likely, those technologies—the cellphone was much on her mind—are designed to do our imagining for us. You might say that the STEM crowd is substituting their imagination for ours. (Here and below I mix in my own reactions to Nafisi’s presentation.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
It Bears Repeating: Renewables Alone Won’t End the Climate Crisis
It Bears Repeating: Renewables Alone Won’t End the Climate Crisis
‘We have to look at downsizing, degrowth, using less.’
Although the media still portrays climate change as some vague threat to “the environment,” it is really a self-made blitzkrieg that is already destabilizing a highly energy-intensive and complex human civilization.
Greta Thunberg has spoken prophetically: our civilized house is on fire.
But our collective politicians, blinded by ideology and technological illusions, refuse to panic, let alone call the community fire department.
They behave as though they can just build another house somewhere else on Mars, and then watch the conflagration on Netflix
In that previous analysis, I quoted a Colorado professor, Roger Pielke Jr., who recently noted in Forbes that if we really wanted to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, and we solely choose wind power as the solution, we’d need to build and deploy 1,500 wind turbines on about 300 square miles every day for the next 30 years.
We can’t do that, of course, because of physics and economics. Pielke was simply illustrating the scale of the challenge if we thought that renewables could do all the work for us.
But a great many readers questioned Pielke’s math; others questioned his motivation. Others questioned my sanity in quoting such a fellow.
Having written about energy for 30 years (and my best scribbling on the matter remains The Energy of Slaves), I thought Pielke’s numbers, which can vary with wind power due to location and size of blades, were largely accurate and conveyed the enormity of the task at hand, especially if we think our energy crisis is just a substitution problem.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Technology Spurs On Our Ability To Deceive
Technology Spurs On Our Ability To Deceive
Caught between the forces of mainstream media and government propaganda it seems we can believe nothing we see or hear. Much of this problem is rooted in the agendas of large companies and those who control them. These companies have become so big and powerful that they now influence government’s message and direction. Fake news and false flags have left many of us having a difficult time deciding what is real, adding to this is the rapidly growing ability of computers to generate and alter human images. This is all about to go to a whole new level.
Margrethe Vestager, the European Union Antitrust Chief, is busy touting that the EU’s influence gives it the opportunity and power to shape the world. She insists the EU is ready to take on companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon which she contends has used their power to undermine competition, keep out innovation and collect data on us. This has given these companies great power to manipulate society. Google did this when it used the power of its search engine to favor its own comparison shopping service. While the EU has signaled it is going to make several big companies use their power in a way that’s fair and doesn’t discriminate the fact is this is easier to say than do.
The EU plans to do this by flexing its muscle with a combination of competition policy and regulation changes, however, whether it will be successful remains to be seen. Like many people, I remain dubious. These powerful companies already are overly involved with shaping the message of media and government propaganda are about to unleash upon society a great deal more computer-generated models and images. These have advanced to where they blur reality and diminish the need for humans to act as spokespeople or to represent organizations.
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