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As we grew up, nearly all of us were inundated with stories of our glorious national fathers, our beautiful democracies, and so on. And being young, we for the most part believed them. The system gave us our prosperity, our comfort, our medicine, our sense of importance.

Soon enough we learned that the system was also stupid and perverse, but we found a way around that contradiction by blaming one segment of the system or another: The Blues or the Greens or the Reds were the problem; it could not, must not, be that the system itself is the problem.

Then came 2020, and the system revealed its true face.

I suppose I should be fair and add that the system wasn’t always as rotten as it is now, but regardless, it wasn’t able to prevent the rot that overtook it.

2020, In A Nasty Little Nutshell

The system would like everything except the daily outrages (one for the Blues, one for the Reds) to go down the Memory Hole. So I think it’s important to recap the revelations of 2020:

The system decreed who could work and who couldn’t. This was not done democratically; it was done by edict. “Democracy” did nothing to stop it.

People were arrested for going to church or synagogue. This was the real disgrace of the police forces. Are there any orders from their paymasters they won’t enforce upon us?

Political gangs roam the streets, beating, threatening and burning. Make no mistake, these are covertly authorized political gangs, serving political ends. This vile tactic goes back to ancient Rome at least, where gangs of thugs beat opponents in the streets.

“Science” said one thing then the opposite, supporting whatever power wanted...

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The hidden recession of 2020

December 24, 2021

The hidden recession of 2020

After 20 months of economy-wrecking lockdowns and restrictions, 2019 is fondly remembered as a period of prosperous calm. Memories though, are deceptive. And in the days before we learned what gain-of-function meant, things were not as rosy as they now seem. Although the decade 2009-2019 was officially one of the longest periods of economic growth ever recorded, the rate of growth was anaemic – the media reporting on any quarter with more than 1.0% growth as if it heralded a return to the 1960s. And what growth there was owed more to additional debt than to improvements in productivity. The reality of the post-2008 years was of the mergence of an 80:20 economy in which the majority watched their prosperity evaporate, while a shrinking metropolitan salaried class fought a rear-guard defence of their income and status.

The political dam broke in 2016, with “the revenge of the places that didn’t matter” – aka Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. But few in the salaried class understood the economic decline which had spilled over into the political arena; preferring instead to blame it all on Russian bots. Nevertheless, whether the elites and their salaried lapdogs chose to understand the economic situation or not, the process of decline continued.

In the UK, Christmas 2018 had been the worse on record… until Christmas 2019 rolled around. And whereas Christmas 2018 had seen a big decline in discretionary spending, Christmas 2019 produced the first indicators of a decline in borderline essential spending too. We might choose to regard the humble Christmas pudding as something which can be lived without – although those who lived under Cromwell’s puritanical dictatorship might beg to differ – but a decline in sales – along with those of turkey and seasonal biscuits – points to a nation which was reining in its spending long before SARS-CoV-2 embarked upon the European leg of its world tour.

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2020 the “Worst Year Ever”–You’re Joking, Right?

December 29, 2020

2020 the “Worst Year Ever”–You’re Joking, Right?

So party on, because “the worst year ever” is ending and the rebound of financial markets, already the greatest in recorded history, will only become more fabulous.

Of the lavish banquet of absurdities laid out in 2020, one of the most delectable is Time magazine’s December 14 cover declaring that 2020 was the “worst year ever.” You’re joking, right? In history’s immense tapestry of human misery, it’s not even in the top 100 worst years.

Consider 1177 B.C., when many of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea and Mideast collapsed, and the survivors struggled through a pre-modern Dark Ages. This book assembles what is known about this catastrophic era: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

Then there’s 1644 A.D., when the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the Manchu invasion, a series of self-reinforcing misfortunes stemming from extremes of climate (a.k.a. The Little Ice Age) that left millions hungry and vulnerable to disease and the predation of roving bandit armies.

The Little Ice Age and the famine, conflicts, civil wars, coups, revolts and rebellions it launched killed between a quarter and a third of Eurasia’s population. Entire villages melted away as starvation drove the survivors to desperation. The misery stretched from western Europe to China, and lasted for decades.

This fascinating history lays it all out: Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.

Though it is now relegated to a footnote in history, the Antonine Plague of 165 – 180 A.D. decimated the Mediterranean, Mideast, North African and Eurasian regions, toppling regimes that had endured for ages and very nearly brought the Roman Empire to an inglorious end. Roughly one-fourth of the population died as the novel disease was distributed along Rome’s numerous trade routes, which stretched from Northern Europe to Africa and India.

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2020: The Year Things Started Going Badly Wrong

December 23, 2020

2020: The Year Things Started Going Badly Wrong

How today’s energy problem is different from peak oil

Many people believe that the economy will start going badly wrong when we “run out of oil.” The problem we have today is indeed an energy problem, but it is a different energy problem. Let me explain it with an escalator analogy.

Figure 1. Holborn Tube Station Escalator. Photo by renaissancechambara, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The economy is like a down escalator that citizens of the world are trying to walk upward on. At first the downward motion of the escalator is almost imperceptible, but gradually it gets to be greater and greater. Eventually the downward motion becomes almost unbearable. Many citizens long to sit down and take a rest.

In fact, a break, like the pandemic, almost comes as a relief. There is suddenly a chance to take it easy; not drive to work; not visit relatives; not keep up appearances before friends. Government officials may not be unhappy either. There may have been demonstrations by groups asking for higher wages. Telling people to stay at home provides a convenient way to end these demonstrations and restore order.

But then, restarting doesn’t work. There are too many broken pieces of the economy. Too many bankrupt companies; too many unemployed people; too much debt that cannot be repaid. And, a virus that really doesn’t quite go away, leaving people worried and unwilling to attempt to resume normal activities.

Some might describe the energy story as a “diminishing returns” story, but it’s really broader than this. It’s a story of services that we expect to continue, but which cannot continue without much more energy investment. It is also a story of the loss of “economies of scale” that at one time helped propel the economy forward.

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

If You Thought 2020 Was Bad, Watch What Happens In 2021

December 12, 2020

If You Thought 2020 Was Bad, Watch What Happens In 2021

In terms of the economy and the American social situation, 2020 is definitely one of the ugliest years on record, there’s really no way around it. That said, I get the impression that many in the public are operating under the assumption that we are about to cross over the peak of the mountain and it will be all downhill from here on. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

All eyes have been focused on the pandemic event, and the thinking is that once the pandemic is “over”, the crisis will be over and everything will go back to normal. But, as the globalists have been telling us since the outbreak began, the world “will never go back to normal again”. It’s not because of the pandemic, mind you, it’s because THEY won’t allow things to go back to normal. The “great reset”, as the World Economic Forum calls it, is meant to go on for many years. And, the globalists intend that every aspect of our lives be changed into something almost unrecognizable.

First I want to make it clear that I don’t expect the reset agenda to be successful. In fact, I think it’s going to fail miserably. The globalists have reached too far too fast and exposed themselves, and millions upon millions of people around the world and in America are not buying the pandemic narrative. But here is the problem; the pandemic is a distraction from a much greater threat, namely the economic collapse that is developing right now.

The financial downturn has been created by international banks and central banks through massive debt creation and inflationary stimulus measures. The initial spark for the wildfire took place in 2008, the economic threat has been under the noses of the public for quite some time…

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If You Feel Like Something Really, Really Bad Is About To Happen, You Are Definitely Not Alone

September 13, 2020

If You Feel Like Something Really, Really Bad Is About To Happen, You Are Definitely Not Alone

If this is “the recovery”, what are things going to look like once economic conditions start to deteriorate again? As you will see below, more than half of all households in some of our largest cities “are facing serious financial problems”, and Americans continue to file for unemployment benefits at a rate that the United States had never seen before prior to 2020. When 695,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits during a single week in 1982, it established a record which stood for nearly 38 years. But now we have been way above that old record for 25 weeks in a row. On Thursday, we learned that another 884,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

Weekly jobless claims were worse than expected last week amid a plodding climb for the U.S. labor market from the damage inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Labor Department on Thursday reported 884,000 first-time filings for unemployment insurance, compared with 850,000 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The total was unchanged from the previous week.

Of course it is always important to look at the non-adjusted numbers, and according to those numbers we actually saw an increase over the previous week…

The Labor Department changed its methodology in how it seasonally adjusts the numbers, so the past two weeks’ totals are not directly comparable to the reports from earlier in the pandemic. Claims not adjusted for seasonal factors totaled 857,148, an increase of 20,140 from the previous week.

This is the second week in a row that the non-seasonally adjusted initial claims have risen.

That definitely wasn’t supposed to happen.

We are supposedly in a “recovery” right now, and things are supposed to be getting better.

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

Stock Market Crash 2020: Welcome To The End Game

July 18, 2020

Stock Market Crash 2020: Welcome To The End Game

Red Graph moving down on chart as recession or financial crisis 3d animation — GETTY

If this chart doesn’t make you think the crash is coming soon, then probably nothing will:

The Nasdaq is going vertical CREDIT: ADVFN

The Nasdaq is on its final run and is going vertical, a classic end of bubble move. This is trader heaven and turns into speculator hell for those who think that markets do grow to the skies. It could go up a long way in price but it won’t go for long in time. It could last to Christmas, it could fold tomorrow, but my feeling is that unless this bubble is cut down by the Fed, the final move will be large and quick.

You can refer to the dotcom crash for the general shape of what looks possible next.

The attempts by the government to pump up the economy with new money is resulting in it going straight into equities and straight into the tip of the equity spear, the giant high beta story stocks. This is a malfunction of the QE mechanism that supports asset prices and slowly trickles the benefits of this support down the pyramid of wealth. Now the game is up because the new money is going straight into this bubble of financial assets that are spiralling up out of control.

If we now get a Nasdaq bull vertical that is the end of the chapter of the process, it will be followed by a devastating crash as everyone dashes to the exit in a blaze of wealth destruction.

The Federal Reserve needs to get a lid on this fast and it appears to be trying to by tapering its balance sheet, but the bubble is still fizzing and if it does not stop soon it will do what bubbles generally do, erupt then collapse. The final eruption before collapse looks to be underway and we should only hope it doesn’t happen.

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2020 Is The Year The Unseen Becomes Seen

July 18, 2020

2020 Is The Year The Unseen Becomes Seen

2020 is the year of Julian Assange’s extradition trials, the Kafkaesque proceedings by which the US government is attempting to imprison the WikiLeaks founder for the rest of his life as punishment for exposing US war crimes. Assange started an innovative leak publishing outlet on the premise that corrupt power can be fought with truth, and corrupt power responded by silencing and jailing him. They’ve proved him right about everything, right in front of everyone.

2020 is the year people began protesting police brutality, and police responded with ferocious and widespread acts of brutality. The massive deluge of video footage from these brutal police responses went viral all over the world. The argument about police brutality culture in the US police state was won clearly and decisively, right in front of everyone.

2020 is the year the most powerful government on earth responded to a pandemic virus with the largest upward transfer of wealth in history, leaving massive global corporations with record-high stocks while killing small businesses and throwing the rank-and-file public to the wolves after handing some of them a paltry $1200, all while failing spectacularly to address the threat of the virus itself. This financial abuse is happening right out in the open, right in front of everyone.

2020 is the year this same government’s electoral process is being exposed in front of everyone for the sham it has always been, as two corrupt racist right-wing warmongering dementia patients who’ve both been accused of rape are placed head-to-head in what will inevitably be the single dumbest presidential race in the nation’s history. Neither of these two men are capable of forming a coherent sentence, and their presidential debates will make them a laughing stock of the whole world, right in front of everybody.

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Why Every Person In America Needs To Become A Prepper During The Second Half Of 2020

June 27, 2020

Why Every Person In America Needs To Become A Prepper During The Second Half Of 2020

It has been on my heart to write this article for a few days, but I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to write. 2020 has already been one of the worst years in modern U.S. history, and it looks like the next six months are going to be extremely challenging as well. But even though most Americans are expecting that things will return to “normal” in 2021 and beyond, the truth is that the “perfect storm” that we are witnessing is only in the very early stages. All of the old cycles are ending, all of the bubbles are bursting, and we are starting to experience the consequences of decades of incredibly foolish decisions. So even though the remaining months of 2020 will be chaotic, the truth is that things are going to get progressively worse as the years move along. That means that you should use this period of time to prepare for what is ahead of us, because at some point the window of opportunity to prepare will be closed for good.

COVID-19 should have been a wake up call for all of us. Lockdowns were implemented very suddenly once the virus started to spread in the U.S., and shortages of key items began to happen. To this day, many retailers are still limiting the number of items that you can buy in certain categories. Hopefully this has helped people to understand that if you have not stocked up in advance, you may not be able to go out and get what you need when a major crisis strikes.

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New Reading of Mayan Calendar Suggests That the End of the World is This Weekend

June 18, 2020

New Reading of Mayan Calendar Suggests That the End of the World is This Weekend

As if 2020 wasn’t bad enough, now we have crackpot scientists spinning doomsday-themed hoaxes, superstitions and tall tales.

(TMU) – 2020 has really been one hell of a year. Not only have we seen a global pandemic that’s showing little signs of losing steam, but we’ve also seen social unrest, people’s livelihoods vanish into thin air, a tanking economy, plagues of locusts, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and massive firestorms.

If you think that we might be heading fast toward Armageddon, who can blame you?

But according to some conspiracy theorists on Twitter, the Mayan prophecy about a cataclysmic end of the world that supposedly would bring the world to a crashing halt on Dec. 21, 2012, was actually misinterpreted – instead, the calendar theorizers suggest, the Mayan doomsday will supposedly happen this week or next.

In a series of tweets last week that has since been deleted, scientist Paolo Tagaloguin wrote:

“Following the Julian Calendar, we are technically in 2012. The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into Gregorian Calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian Calendar (1752-2020) times 11 days = 2,948 days. 2,948 days / 365 days (per year) = 8 years.”

JL Bookings@jlbookings · Jun 12, 2020 Replying to @jlbookings

In a since deleted tweet, scientist Paolo Tagaloguin reportedly said: “Following the Julian Calendar, we are technically in 2012.

“The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into Gregorian Calendar is 11 days.

JL Bookings@jlbookings

“For 268 years using the Gregorian Calendar (1752-2020) times 11 days = 2,948 days. 2,948 days / 365 days (per year) = 8 years”.

Following this theory, June 21, 2020 would actually be December 21, 2012, a date you may recognize.

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

The Crash Of 2020 Is Now Worse Than The Great Depression

March 20, 2020

The Crash Of 2020 Is Now Worse Than The Great Depression

Back in December, someone in China made bat soup (at least according to the officially accepted narrative that doesn’t get you banned on Facebook, Twitter, etc), and the rest is history: in the next three months, the global equity market has lost $24 trillion in value, more than the $22 trillion in US GDP. And here is a staggering chart from BofA putting the crash of 2020 in its historic context: in the past month, the US stock market has crashed faster than both the Great Depression and Black Monday, and in terms of the total drawdown, the crash of 2020 is now worse than 1929 and is fast approaching 1987.

Below, courtesy of BofA CIO Michael Hartnett, are several other stunning observations on the Crash of 2020:

Calls for Fed corporate bond buying, New Deal fiscal policies, new Plaza Accord to stabilize US$, closure of stock exchange coincide with week of Wall St devastation.
Peak-to-trough crash in global equity market cap = $24tn (c/o US GDP = $22tn).
Monday’s 12.0% drop Dow Jones = 3rd largest crash all-time (c/o -20.5% Oct 19th 1987, -12.9% Oct 28th 1929 – Chart 2).
Liquidation of “safe havens” e.g. gold & US Treasuries (TLT ETF sank 20% after oil shock); epic US$ surge reflects funding pressure of excess US$-denominated debt & zero liquidity.
Leverage in bond & stocks savaged (see REM, PFF, EMB, homebuilders like TOL – Chart 3); bond yields rise + bank stocks fall = classic sign of deflationary bear market.
Feral Wall St means vicious bear market rallies…WTI oil surged 24% today.
Stock exchange has closed just 4 occasions: 1914 & WW1, 1933 bank holiday, 1963 Kennedy assassination, 2001 9/11.
Global “lockdown” on movement people, goods, services unprecedented but note June 1930 passage of protectionist Smoot-Hawley bill saw US stocks -16.5% in one month.

And some additional views:

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2020 Crash

February 29, 2020

2020 Crash

Complacency came before the fall. All of 2019 market participants ignored the non existent earnings growth. Too strong was the now pavlovian reflex to chase easy central bank money. Too trusting in central banks to again produce a reflation scenario that would make all the troubles go away.

Everything was ignored and markets and stocks were relentless chased higher into some of the highest market valuations ever. Even the coronavirus was ignored. A dip to buy in January they said. AAPL warning? Let’s ignore it and buy AAPL to new all time highs again.

Nothing mattered until it did.

Then markets crashed last week. Perhaps not in percentage terms, but in terms of vertical velocity to the downside it was unmatched in history. The fastest 15% correction off of all time highs ever and by far.

Worse, months of buyers of stocks and markets at high valuations suddenly found themselves trapped as the bottom fell out inside of a few days:

$NYSE, the broader index dropping below the January 2018 highs and closing below the summer 2019 lows now showing an index that has gone nowhere in 2 years and the recent highs being a complete mirage.

The big message: It was not different this time. Bears were right. Full stop.

$DJIA fell all the way to the June 2019 low taking out 9 months of buying:

Don’t anybody tell me everybody sold the top. No, lots of buyers are trapped at much higher prices and are now again dependent on central banks coming to the rescue.

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

1937

February 12, 2020

1937

We’ve talked about the year 2000 comparison (Party like it’s 1999). In 2020 markets went onto a similar structural tear just having rammed relentlessly higher. In 2000 markets famously topped in March following the Fed’s Y2K inspired liquidity injections in 1999 as markets had vastly disconnected from fundamental reality. Now that the truth is out we also know that markets are now vastly disconnected from fundamentals.

And the 2000 comparisons still hold water on a number of measures, price to sales, price to ebitda, market cap to GDP and of course relative weightings in favor of the few as the rally continues to narrow.

The top 2 stocks now have gone complete vertical especially as it relates to their weighting in the S&P:

This chart from Carter Worth on Fast Money last night and even he pointed out how in the lead up to the 2000 top there was some back and forth, but not here, just completely uninterrupted vertical.

One of the 2 stocks being Microsoft, a stock that now has nearly doubled since 2019 with a market cap expansion of over $700 billion for a total market cap of over $1.4 trillion. Historic.

And add the top 4 and their market caps you get this same vertical picture:

Everything screams reversion and correction, but nothing. The market just keeps going up and they keep buying the big cap tech stocks. Risk free. Or so it seems.

And given the large weightings of these few stocks $NDX just keeps ramping up vertically as well, also far outside the monthly Bollinger band:

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

Will Coronavirus Be the Black Swan that Pops the Bubble of Everything in 2020?

January 28, 2020

Will Coronavirus Be the Black Swan that Pops the Bubble of Everything in 2020?

Will coronavirus be the Black Swan that brings down the global economy in 2020? In my article, “The Things We Believe That are Untrue”, I discussed how governments worldwide have been hiding recessionary numbers from global citizens since 2008. Consequently, with the world economy already so weak, if coronavirus causes substantially slower economic growth rates, it could serve as the pin that finally pops the unsustainable Bubble of Everything.

So what is the coronavirus, and is the media concern surrounding it justified? A coronavirus is a type of normally mild virus that causes non-lethal respiratory viruses, but sometimes can be lethal, as has been the case with the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China. The particular trait that makes coronavirus especially sinister, however, is that, unlike its previous siblings of SARS and MERS, the Wuhan coronavirus is contagious during its asymptomatic incubation period of one to fourteen days, and therefore, can be transmitted from carriers that appear to be healthy although they already have been infected. Consequently, because its method of transmission is so stealth, it is truly difficult to assess how many people have been infected, even though media reports put the number at 2,000 to 4,000 with 100 dead thus far.

Since the transmission rate has been estimated at 2.5 people for every infected person, and the asymptomatic incubation period is up to two weeks, with 2,000 to 4,000 symptomatic people reported, realistically, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people could potentially be already infected, depending upon the rate of transmission from infected to non-infected. Furthermore, with many Chinese traveling outside of China for the long Lunar New Year holiday, there really is no way to estimate, at the current time, how many others outside of China have been infected with the Wuhan coronavirus.

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2020 Will Be A Crucial Year For Oil

January 7, 2020

2020 Will Be A Crucial Year For Oil

It’s the start of a new year and a new decade, and the oil market is as unpredictable as ever.

Will OPEC+ extend its cuts? Will U.S. shale finally grind to a halt? Is this the “year of the electric vehicle”? Here are 10 stories to watch in 2020.

Shale debt, shale slowdown. The debt-fueled shale drilling boom is facing a reckoning. Around 200 North American oil and gas companies have declared bankruptcy since 2015, but the mountain of debt taken out a few years ago is finally coming due. Roughly $41 billion in debt matures in 2020, which ensures more bankruptcies will be announced this year. The wave of debt may also force the industry to slam on the breaks as companies scramble to come up with cash to pay off creditors.

Year of the EV. Some analysts say that 2020 will be the “year of the EV” because of the dozens of new EV models set to hit the market. In Europe, available EV models will rise from 100 to 175. The pace of sales slowed at the end of last year, but the entire global auto market contracted. EVs may struggle to keep the pace of growth going, but EVs are capturing a growing portion of a shrinking pie.

Climate change. 2020 starts off with hellish images from the out-of-control Australian bushfires. 2019 was one of the warmest years on record and the 2010s was the warmest decade on record. As temperatures rise and disasters multiply, pressure will continue to mount on the oil and gas industry. As Bloomberg Opinion points out, climate change has surged as a point of concern for publicly-listed companies. Oil executives are betting against climate action, but they are surely aware of the rising investment risk. In the past two months, the European Investment Bank is ending financing for oil, gas and coal, and Goldman Sachs cut out financing for coal and Arctic oil. More announcements like this are inevitable.

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

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