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Over the past 100 years there has been a correlation between major equity bear markets, adjustments in one of the four “prices of money,” and gold bull markets. If we let history be our guide, the current equity bear market is signaling a new gold bull market, supported by changes in the price of money.

With equities in a bear market, and the Fed adjusting the price of money, we can expect a gold bull market in the coming years.

One of the more intriguing financial analysts of our times is Zoltan Pozsar, Managing Director and Global Head of Short-Term Interest Rate Strategy at Credit Suisse. In his writings of the past months, one of the things that caught my attention was his framework for multiple prices of money. Remarkably, when I looked up big historical changes in the price of the US dollar, they usually succeeded equity bear markets and introduced gold bull markets. Because equities are in a bear market as we speak, we can expect a gold bull market in the years ahead, enabled by the Federal Reserve changing the price of money.

First, let’s see how changes in the price of the dollar have caused gold bull markets in the past 100 years. Then we will add the stock market.

The Four Prices of Money and Previous Gold Bull Markets

Pozsar’s money framework, which he got from his intellectual mentor Perry Mehrling, states money has four prices:

1) Par, which is the price of different types of the same money. Cash, bank deposits, and money fund shares should always trade at a one-to-one ratio.
2) Interest rates, which is the price of future money.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

“Prepare For An Epic Finale” – Jeremy Grantham Warns Stock Market ‘Super Bubble’ Has Yet To Burst

August 31, 2022

“Prepare For An Epic Finale” – Jeremy Grantham Warns Stock Market ‘Super Bubble’ Has Yet To Burst

Having infamously spotted and profited from bubbles in Japan in the late 1980s, tech stocks at the turn of the century and in US housing before the 2008 financial crisis, GMO’s co-founder Jeremy Grantham laid out in his latest note to investors why the “super bubble” that he previously warned about hasn’t popped yet (despite this year’s somewhat chaotic market behavior).

“You had a typical bear market rally the other day and people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s a new bull market,” Grantham said in an interview with Bloomberg.

“That is nonsense.”

Specifically, the 83-year-old investors says that the surge in US equities from mid-June to mid-August fits the pattern of bear market rallies common after an initial sharp decline — and before the economy truly begins to deteriorate; and sees more trouble ahead because of a “dangerous mix” of overvalued stocks, bonds and housing, combined with a commodity shock and hawkishness from the Fed.

“My bet is that we’re going to have a fairly tough time of it economically and financially before this is washed through the system,’’ Grantham said.

“What I don’t know is: Does that get out of hand like it did in the ‘30s, is it pretty well contained as it was in 2000 or is it somewhere in the middle?”

In his note today, Grantham warns that we are entering the superbubble’s final act…

Executive Summary

Only a few market events in an investor’s career really matter, and among the most important of all are superbubbles. These superbubbles are events unlike any others: while there are only a few in history for investors to study, they have clear features in common.

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

Would the Last Market Bull With the Last Dollar Please Turn Off the Music?

May 3, 2021

Would the Last Market Bull With the Last Dollar Please Turn Off the Music?

Will the Last Market Bull With the Last Dollar Turn Off the Music

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

Reality always wins in the end.

It doesn’t matter if you’re excited about the economy or its outlook. Unless some economic scam is being perpetuated (unlikely), fundamentals always play a factor, and guide the U.S. economy through peaks and valleys.

Fundamentals like supply, demand, inflation, deflation, and so on. At some point, even the mainstream media “hype circus” won’t be able to manufacture enough consent to maintain any stock market illusions that things are “just peachy.” Reality always cuts through the noise, and we could be approaching that point right now.

For example, Brian Maher wrote: “The gap between stock market and economy presently spans to preposterous dimensions.”

Reality seems to agree. As you can see from the most recent Buffett Indicator, the market is valued 234% higher than GDP (88% above the historical average):

Current Market Valuation

No matter what you think of the indicator itself, the ratio of market value to GDP is plain as day. And its place in history, 2.9 standard deviations above the 30-year average, beats both the top of the dot-com bubble and the highs before the 2008 financial crisis.

Maher explains one possible reason why the ratio line shown on the chart above jumped so dramatically since early 2020:

More money has poured into stock funds within the past five months ($569 billion)… than the previous 12 years combined ($452 billion).

Market optimists like Art Hogan seem to attribute all of this “good market fortune” to, as he puts it, “an explosion in economic activity that likely will have some earnings growth in its wake.” This “likely” earnings growth at some unspecified point in the future doesn’t exactly sound like a prudent bet, does it?

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

How to Maintain a Bull Market After Coronavirus

May 15, 2020

HOW TO MAINTAIN A BULL MARKET AFTER CORONAVIRUS

Everyone thinks they know the cause and effect of the Federal Reserve’s response to crises such as 2008 and 2020. The Fed prints money to buy assets. This increases the quantity of money. And this causes prices to rise. The Fed wants this, because it thinks that inflation eases the burden on debtors. The mainstream wants this, because they have been brainwashed into thinking that inflation causes good effects such as employment. The critics decry this, because they see inflation as a tax.

This view is not even wrong.

The dollar is not money. It is just credit. And it’s not printed. It’s borrowed. An increase in the quantity of it does not necessarily cause commodity and consumer prices to rise. Just look at not one, but two drops in the price of oil. And not small drops, but epic collapses. Starting in June 2014, the price began to fall from $108. By January 2016, it had dropped to $26, a crash of 76%. Then it rose for a whole, hitting $77 by October 2018. It has been downward since then, to $66 this January, or -14%. It’s now $25, which is a further loss of 62%. This is not counting the brief plunge to -$38 on April 20—yes, those who had oil were obliged to pay someone to take it off their hands (thus debunking the notion that oil is like gold).

In other words, this not-even-wrong theory predicts a didn’t-even-happen price hike.

When a bank, pension fund, or investor sells a bond to the Fed, they do not go out and buy consumer goods. They buy another asset. This is why the result is not rising consumer prices, but rising asset prices.

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

2019: The Beginning Of The End (Free Premium Report)

January 2, 2019

2019: The Beginning Of The End (Free Premium Report)

What will happen next & what to do now

Welcome to our new readers and a very Happy New Year to everyone!

Now that it’s 2019, we’re going to start the new year here at Peak Prosperity by responding to the wishes of our premium subscribers and making our most recent premium report free to everyone.

For those unfamiliar with our work, it’s based on the idea that humanity is hurtling towards a disaster of our own making. Several powerful and unsustainable trends are all converging towards an ever-narrowing gap in the future.

Because of this, the individual and collective choices we make today take on ever-increasing importance. Our collective choices — around such issues as rampant money-printing by central banks, the failure to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, and tossing an entire younger generation under the bus because that’s most convenient for an older generation afraid of living within its actual means — are all pointing to a diminshed and disappointing future. We need to make better choices that align ourselves with these (and many other) looming realities.

This is our work here at Peak Prosperity.

For ten years now, we’ve been pointing out the many predicaments society faces. And we will continue our vigilance. No because we enjoy crisis, or that we relish delivering hard messages, but because these are the times in which we live — and those, like you, who are awake to reality, need unvarnished facts and data to make informed decisions.

So we offer to you, today, a peek behind our premium subscription curtain. The people who subscribe to our work do so to make themselves more resilient, as well as to support Peak Prosperity financially as we carry on our mission of “Creating a world worth inheriting”, which invoves bringing difficult messages to reluctant audiences.

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

Is the Greatest Bull Market Ever Finally Ending? (Hint: Follow the Money)

October 18, 2018

Is the Greatest Bull Market Ever Finally Ending? (Hint: Follow the Money)

The key here is the gains generated by owning US-denominated assets as the USD appreciates.

Is the Greatest Bull Market Ever finally ending? One straightforward approach to is to follow the money, i.e. global capital flows: assets that attract positive global capital flows will continue rising if demand for the assets exceeds supply, and assets that are being liquidated as capital flees the asset class (i.e. negative capital flows) will decline in price.

Global capital flows are difficult to track for a number of reasons. A significant percentage of global mobile capital is held in secretive offshore tax havens and “shadow banking,” and tracking global corporate capital flows is not easy. Capital held in precious metals may not be reported, and assets such as enterprises and collectible art may be grossly undervalued for tax purposes.

Toss in shadow holding companies, LLCs with obscure trails of ownership, etc. and a definitive account of global capital flows is ultimately a guesstimate.

Despite the limitations of tracking global wealth, Credit Suisse Research Institute’s (CSRI) issued Global Wealth Report 2017 gives us some clues about where capital is flowing in and where it’s leaving for safer, higher-yield climes.

The first step in measuring global capital flows is to note that conventional capital is denominated in currencies which fluctuate in relative value. Of the roughly $300 trillion in global assets (Credit Suisse pegs the total in 2017 at $280 trillion, but other estimates range well above $300 trillion), about $8 trillion or so is in precious metals, and a tiny sliver is in cryptocurrencies. (Bitcoin’s total market capitalization is currently around $112 billion and Ethereum’s market cap is around $21 billion–signal noise in the $300 trillion sloshing around the world seeking safety, low/zero taxes, capital gains and high yields.)

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

Albert Edwards: “Equity Investors Are Facing The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse”

October 11, 2018

Albert Edwards: “Equity Investors Are Facing The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse”

Even SocGen’s Albert Edwards was surprised at how quickly his latest predication was validated.

Recall that 3 weeks ago with the 10Y yield at 3.10%, with Edwards looking at the surge higher in 10Y Yields the SocGen strategist pointed out that the break in the 10y above 2.8% was not the key level that could mark the end of the secular bull market, but rather it was the 3.05% zone as shown in the chart below.

Commenting on this breakout, he said that rates might surge further and addressed whether this would mean the end his “Ice Age” thesis. As he noted, if investors “get the wrong side of a new multi-year bear market in government bonds, all investment portfolios will be shredded to ribbons as bonds are the cornerstone of most equity valuation models”.

Fast forward to today when in his latest note he writes “let me be totally honest: I was most surprised that the US 10y yield managed to smash through its multi-decade downtrend last week, mainly due to the fact that the CFTC data showed that speculators had already built unprecedented large short positions. It seemed that every man, woman and child was already bearish and so who was left to sell? Well clearly someone was! One thing that helped tip bond prices over the edge and take yields up to 3¼% was the fundamental support from stronger than expected economic data (see chart below). ”

Another factor for the latest breakout in yields which pushed the 10Y interest rate to fresh 7 years highs was the previously discussed economic exuberance by Fed Chair Powell who managed to convince markets that they were still too sanguine on their expectations on interest rates, “and the futures strip ratcheted up another notch towards the Fed dots.”

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

Bill Bonner: “America’s Economy Is On A Suicide Mission”

September 16, 2018

Bill Bonner: “America’s Economy Is On A Suicide Mission”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

Rain is coming down this morning. Buckets of it. The Carolinas are getting walloped by Hurricane Florence. Here in Ireland, another tropical storm, Helene, is said to be on its way. It is raining hard already.

Yesterday, we went up to the coast to see a village that has been preserved more or less as it was 100 years ago. The cottages were just as you might have imagined, whitewashed stone with thatched roofs.

On the coast, the winds blow so violently that the thatch must be lashed down with ropes to keep it from blowing off. Inside, each cottage had a little peat fire and just a few pieces of simple furniture.

These were tiny homes – barely as large as the typical American living room. But they were cute, cozy, and – as long as the fire was burning – fairly comfortable.

Meanwhile…

Bull Market Revival

In an unusually stark separation, the smart money and the dumb money seem to be taking leave of one another.

This week, the news seemed especially felicitous. Stocks moved higher on a wave of positive jobs data and opinion surveys.

The Dow now stands within 500 points of a new all-time high – which would signal a revival of the bull market that began in March 2009… or August 1982, depending on how far back you want to trace it.

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

A Bull Market For The History Books — Bear Market To Follow Shortly

March 12, 2018

A Bull Market For The History Books — Bear Market To Follow Shortly

If you’re getting the sense that stocks always go up, that’s because they’ve been doing so for a really, really long time. From CNBC today:

On the bull market’s ninth birthday, here’s how it stacks up against history

• The Dow has quadrupled during the bull market, which turned 9 on Friday.

• This is the biggest and longest bull market for the Dow post-WWII, according to Leuthold Group.

The bullish run in the Dow Jones industrial average — which celebrates its ninth birthday Friday — is the longest ever and the greatest percentage gain since World War II, according to Leuthold Group.

The corresponding run by the S&P 500, notes LPL Financial, is that benchmark’s second-largest and second-longest bull market ever, with only the 1990s stock market run led by technology stocks in the way.

Despite a more than 10 percent correction in equities last month following a burst of bullish activity, Leuthold’s Doug Ramsey doesn’t think the bull is done yet.

“Assuming the Dow Jones industrial average can exceed its late-January high on March 9th or thereafter, this cyclical bull market will become the first one ever to last nine years,” said Ramsey, his firm’s chief investment officer. “Historically, cycle momentum highs are usually followed by a push to even higher price highs over the next several months.”

The Dow hit an all-time high of 26,616.71 on Jan. 26, the same day the S&P 500 clinched its own record of 2,872.87. The major indexes are off their record highs 6.4 percent and 4.6 percent respectively.

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

The Risk of a Correction in the Equity Bull Market

January 25, 2018

THE RISK OF A CORRECTION IN THE EQUITY BULL MARKET

Rising commodity prices, including oil, are feeding through to PPI
Unemployment data suggests wages may begin to rise faster
Federal Reserve tightening will continue, other Central Banks may follow
The bull market will be nine years old in March, the second longest in history

Since March 2009, the US stock market has been trending broadly higher. If we can continue to make new highs, or at least, not correct to the downside by more than 20%, until August of this year it will be the longest equity bull-market in US history.

The optimists continue to extrapolate from the unexpected strength of 2017 and predict another year of asset increases, but by many metrics the market is expensive and the risks of a significant correction are become more pronounced.

Equity volatility has been consistently low for the longest period in 60 years. Technical traders are, of course, long the market, but, due to the low level of the VIX, their stop-loss orders are unusually close the current market price. A small correction may trigger a violent flight to the safety of cash.

Meanwhile in Japan, after more than two decades of under-performance, the stock market has begun to play catch-up with its developed nation counterparts. Japanese stock valuation is not cheap, however, as the table below, which is sorted by the CAPE ratio, reveals:-

Star_Capital_-_Equity_Valuations_31-12-2017

Source: Star Capital

Global economic growth surprised on the upside last year. For the first time since the great financial crisis, it appears that the Central Bankers experiment in balance sheet expansion has spilt over into the real-economy.

An alternative explanation is provided in this article – Is Stimulus Responsible for the Recent Improved Trends in the U.S. and Japan? – by Dent Research – here are some selected highlights:-

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

Bob Shiller Warns World’s “Priciest Stock Market” Could “Absolutely Turn Suddenly”

January 23, 2018

Bob Shiller Warns World’s “Priciest Stock Market” Could “Absolutely Turn Suddenly”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller told CNBC Tuesday that a market correction could come at any time and without warning…

“People ask ‘well what will trigger [a market correction]?’ But it doesn’t need a trigger, it’s the dynamics of bubbles inherently makes them come to a sudden end eventually…”

Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013 for his work on asset prices and inefficient markets, said that markets could “absolutely suddenly turn” and that he believed the bull market was hard to attribute totally to the U.S. political scene.

“The strong bull market in the U.S. is often attributed to the situation in the U.S. but it’s not unique to the U.S. anyway, so it’s hard to know what the world story is that’s driving markets up at this time, I think it’s more subtle than we recognize,”

Additionally Shiller writes in Project Syndicate that it is impossible to pin down the full cause of the high price of the US stock market, warning that this fact alone should remind all investors of the importance of diversification, and that the overall US stock market should not be given too much weight in a portfolio.

The level of stock markets differs widely across countries. And right now, the United States is leading the world. What everyone wants to know is why – and whether its stock market’s current level is justified.

We can get a simple intuitive measure of the differences between countries by looking at price-earnings ratios. I have long advocated the cyclically adjusted price-earnings (CAPE) ratio that John Campbell (now at Harvard University) and I developed 30 years ago.

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

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

October 5, 2017

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The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Tom Petty’s anthem for today’s investors

Man, what an awful stretch of events.

When I penned last week’s article on tragedy, little did I expect something as horrible as the Las Vegas massacre would immediately follow. And nearly lost in the headlines was the untimely passing of rock legend, Tom Petty, one of my all-time favorite musicians. Sure can’t wait for this week to be over…

In memory of Tom, I’ve been listening to a lot of his and the Heartbreakers’ best hits. The lyrics to one song in particular, The Waiting, well-captures an important message today’s investors should take to heart:

The waiting is the hardest part

Don’t let it kill you baby, don’t let it get to you

Those waiting for the financial markets to experience some sort (any sort!) of pullback have been waiting a long, looong time. How long?

It has been over 100 months (more than 8.5 years) since the current bull market began in April of 2009
It has been 15 months since the last (and very brief) drop of 5% in the S&P 500
This past September saw record low volatility, including a stretch now claimed to be “the most peaceful days in the history of the markets”
Since last year’s presidential election, at which point the markets were already considered dangerously overvalued, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up over 20%
As of this article’s publishing, the Dow, the S&P and the NASDAQ are all trading at record highs

Or, to put it visually:

The stock market is now 70% higher than it was at the previous bubble peak immediately preceding the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.

Reflect for a moment how painful the crash from Oct 2008-March 2009 was. How much more painful will a crash from today’s much dizzier heights be?

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

It’s better to turn cautious too soon…

July 31, 2017

It’s better to turn cautious too soon…

En route to Chile

One of the greatest investors in the world is getting worried…

Howard Marks is the billionaire founder of Oaktree Capital, one of the largest and most successful investment firms in the world.

A few times each year Marks write up his thoughts about financial markets– he calls them ‘investment memos’.

And he just released his latest one with a very clear message: it’s time to be cautious.

From Marks’ memo…

I think it’s better to turn cautious too soon (and thus perhaps underperform for a while) rather than too late, after the downslide has begun, making it hard to trim risk, achieve exits and cut losses.

Marks admits this bull market could continue. But he’s happy taking chips off the table in today’s particularly dangerous market.

Asset prices are high across the board – the S&P 500 is trading at 25 times trailing 12-month earnings compared to a long-term median of 15 – and prospective returns are low.

Meanwhile, we’re also seeing record-low complacency amongst investors.

Just this morning the Wall Street Journal published data from Yardeni Research showing that percentage of ‘bearish’ investors who believe that the market will fall is near its lowest level since 1987.

The Volatility Index (VIX), a statistic which measures ‘fear’ in the market place, is at its ALL-TIME lowest point in its entire 27-year existence – hitting 8.84 last week, compared to above 80 in 2008.

The VIX hit 8.89 on December 27, 1993. From Marks:

The index was last this low when Bill Clinton took office in 1993, at a time when there was peace in the world, faster economic growth and a much smaller deficit. Should people really be as complacent now as they were then?

Compare that today, where market pitfalls abound…

– North Korea is threatening to nuke the US
– Donald Trump is firing his entire cabinet

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

This Chart Shows the First Big Crash Is Likely Just Ahead

March 15, 2016

This Chart Shows the First Big Crash Is Likely Just Ahead

The story on Wall Street and CNBC continues to be that we’re in a correction and this is a buying opportunity. Even Warren Buffett joins the chorus of stock market cheerleaders for the skeptical public. Well, I agree with the skeptical public, not the experts here!

The bull market from early 2009 into May 2015 looks just like every bubble in history, and I’m getting one sign after the next that we did indeed peak last May. The dominant pattern in the stock market is the “rounded top” pattern:

S&P 500 rounded top

After trading in a steep, bubble-like channel from late 2011 into late 2014, with only 10% maximum volatility top to bottom, the market finally lost its momentum… just as the Fed finished tapering its QE. That’s because the Fed was the primary driver in this stock bubble in the first place!

But the first sign that the bubble had indeed peaked was the break of that upward channel last August. Surprise, surprise! Without the Fed’s stimulus, stocks started to sputter out!

With that sign we can point to what now looks like a series of major tops, in one major index after the next, since late 2014:

Dow Transports, November 2014.
Dow Utilities, January 2015.
The DAX in Germany and the FTSE in the UK: April, 2015.
The Dow and S&P 500: May 2015.
The Shanghai Composite: June 2015.
The Nasdaq, Biotech and the Russell 2000: July 2015.
And finally, the Nikkei in Japan: August 2015.

The Shanghai Index crashed 45% in 2.5 months, similar to the Dow in late 1929 on its first 2.5-month wave down. That one was so obvious that when I said it was about to burst, it peaked that day and rolled over the next!

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

Bert Dohmen Is Uber-Bearish and Here’s Why

February 20, 2016

Bert Dohmen Is Uber-Bearish and Here’s Why

Bert Dohmen, founder of Dohmen Capital Research, is uber-bearish and believes that it is time for investors to panic (before everyone else does) given a potential collapse of the stock market greater than what we saw in 2008.

Here’s what he had to say on Thursday’s podcast:

“Over a year ago we said that we are now in a transition year from a bull market to a bear market and from a growing economy to a recession—and this could be a very deep recession… now we see that we are finally there and more and more people are starting to realize it. But I raise the question here, ‘Is it too late to panic?’ Because…the advice given by so many analysts is ‘Don’t panic, don’t sell, don’t panic.’ And I say, ‘Yes, panic!’ And it’s not too late to panic. Panicking at the right time can save you a lot of money…

I predict in this bear market you will see the majority of stocks—majority meaning over 50% of the stocks—selling at $5 or less. Okay, just put that into your portfolio and see if you should be selling some stocks…

We here other analysts say, ‘Oh, this is nothing like 2008’ and I agree with that, but I say that because I think it’s going to be much worse. 2008 was really a crisis triggered by the subprime mortgage market and the confetti that the Wall Street firms distributed around the world. They took those subprime mortgages, put them into pools, they sold participations in these pools, in these CDOs…they got a triple-AAA rating on all this garbage and sold it around the world and then they started defaulting. That caused ripples throughout the financial system and a global financial crisis, okay; but it was basically a mortgage crisis—that’s how it started.

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

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