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Christmas Present

Christmas Present

Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday.

Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies, as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology.

It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of “chicken” with oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don’t know it. A lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed “pulled the trigger” on interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies — e.g. Brazil, Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.

As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud?

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

 

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Via ConvergEx’s Nicholas Colas,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Stock Markets Of The 10 Largest Global Economies Are All Crashing

The Stock Markets Of The 10 Largest Global Economies Are All Crashing

Globe InterconnectednessYou would think that the simultaneous crashing of all of the largest stock markets around the world would be very big news.  But so far the mainstream media in the United States is treating it like it isn’t really a big deal.  Over the last sixty days, we have witnessed the most significant global stock market decline since the fall of 2008, and yet most people still seem to think that this is just a temporary “bump in the road” and that the bull market will soon resume.  Hopefully they are right.  When the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 777 points on September 29th, 2008 everyone freaked out and rightly so.  But a stock market crash doesn’t have to be limited to a single day.  Since the peak of the market earlier this year, the Dow is down almost three times as much as that 777 point crash back in 2008.  Over the last sixty days, we have seen the 8th largest single day stock market crash in U.S. history on a point basis and the 10th largest single day stock market crash in U.S. history on a point basis.  You would think that this would be enough to wake people up, but most Americans still don’t seem very alarmed.  And of course what has happened to U.S. stocks so far is quite mild compared to what has been going on in the rest of the world.

Right now, stock market wealth is being wiped out all over the planet, and none of the largest global economies have been exempt from this.  The following is a summary of what we have seen in recent days…

#1 The United States – The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down more than 2000 points since the peak of the market.  Last month we saw stocks decline by more than 500 points on consecutive trading days for the first time ever, and there has not been this much turmoil in U.S. markets since the fall of 2008.

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

 

 

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