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Risk Was Never Low, It Was Only Hidden

October 4, 2021

Risk Was Never Low, It Was Only Hidden

The vast majority of market participants are about as ready for a semi-random “volatility event” as the dinosaurs were for the meteor strike that doomed them to oblivion.

Judging by euphoric gambler–oops I mean “investor”–sentiment and measures of volatility, risk of a market drop has been near-zero for the past 18 months. But risk was never actually low, it was only hidden. When it emerges, it’s a surprise only to those who mistakenly thought risk had vanished.

As Benoit Mandelbrot explained in his book The (Mis)behavior of Markets, crashes are an intrinsic feature of systems like stock markets. These risks are not generated by specific human actions or sentiment but by the system itself.

Just as humans make subconscious decisions and then conjure up quasi-rational justifications for their choice after the fact, market participants always conjure up some event or decision as the cause of the crash. Favorites include central bank policy error, black swan events (“bolts from the blue”), earnings surprises, technical levels were breached, and so on.

Mandelbrot’s insights reveal why markets crash without any policy error or other fabricated- after-the-fact justification: as those who witnessed the collapse of Japan’s massive credit-asset bubble in 1989-1990 observed, markets just stopped going up and started falling.

Risk is a reflection of many dynamics, but the key dynamic few participants seem to understand is the inherent instability of complex systems: surface tranquility is not an accurate reflection of the actual state of stability or risk, no mater how long the period of tranquility stretches.

The human mind rebels at the dominance of quasi-random crashes, as our hubris and need to be in charge generates an illusion of control:…

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The Boomer Bomber, Naked Emperors and the End of Civility

October 28, 2018

The Boomer Bomber, Naked Emperors and the End of Civility

Recently Hillary Clinton picked herself up off the couch to declare that it was time to end being civil to her political opponents.  Honestly, I thought this statement rich from someone who has so many dead bodies her scattered behind her.

Being an Enemy of Hilly has a very short lifespan.

But, her statement itself is nothing more than the latest mask being removed by the global oligarchy I like to call The Davos Crowd in their pursuit of retaining their illusion of control over the direction of the world we live in.

That’s right, illusion.  They don’t actually control anything.  If they did they wouldn’t be freaking out right now.  They wouldn’t be paying Hondurans to storm the U.S. Border, mailing fake pipe bombs to themselves or rigging elections.

In short, they wouldn’t be losing.

Always remember, control is an illusion.  The Emperor is always naked.

And no would-be-Emperor is more naked than Hillary Clinton (Yes, I apologize for the image this metaphor conjures up).

But now, at least, I have your attention.

Because the reality is that Hillary’s call for the End of Civility is one that was also always coming.  Those that have the most to lose by a shift in the power structure are always the ones who resort to ever more histrionic behavior to protect their place.

And Hillary is the very definition of that type of person.

But, this article isn’t about Hillary per se.

It is simply a reminder that Hillary is the symbol of where the Progressive left’s end game always was.  Politics is the art of masking the use of violence to achieve political and social goals.

It is the process of empowering the State, itself an instrument of violence, to impose one group’s will over that of another.

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Beware Central Banks’ “Illusion Of Control”; Spitznagel Warns “If The Fed Hikes, Markets Will Go Down Very, Very Hard”

September 17, 2016

Beware Central Banks’ “Illusion Of Control”; Spitznagel Warns “If The Fed Hikes, Markets Will Go Down Very, Very Hard”

Central banks have created a bubble in the stock market, which will come down “very, very hard” when it finally prices in a series of Fed rate hikes, said Universa’s Mark Spitznagel, warning that “the markets are absolutely not positioned for this.”

CNBC anchors were stunned into relative silence as Spitznagel unleashed truth-bomb after truth-bomb. Those ‘facts’ are just hard to argue with…

Key Excerpts…

CNBC: Well what’s the precipitating factor?

Spitznagel: Well, the ultimate cause of that would be the fact that the central banks got us here in the first place. Ultimately, my view is that central banks are the cause of bubbles.

CNBC: So you’re betting essentially that the central banks, whether it be the Fed or the ECB, they can’t unwind the trade that they put on years ago. It’s going to be a messy unwind for their trade.

Spitznagel: There’s no doubt about that.

CNBC: But is that really a black swan? Because you’ve got all these people at Delivering Alpha talking about it, isn’t a black swan supposed to be something that nobody is talking about? Godzilla attack on Tokyo, out of the blue, or something like that?

Spitznagel: So it’s great that everyone’s talking about this now. I had a little less company a few years ago when this was sort of building and now it’s so obvious, you know, the casual user has become an addict, and now we’re concerned about this. And that’s great. But you’re right it’s not a black swan. The reason I’m going to still call it a black swan is because the markets still price it as a black swan.

...

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The Federal Reserve: Illusion of Understanding, Illusion of Control

October 28, 2015

The Federal Reserve: Illusion of Understanding, Illusion of Control

The net result is nonsensical policies that fail to achieve their stated objectives.

We live in an era of illusion: the illusion of understanding, and the illusion of control.

Few institutions reflect these illusions better than the Federal Reserve, though the Pentagon, Congress, the Imperial Presidency, the sick-care cartel and the higher education cartel are certainly giving it a run for its money.

The foundation of the illusion of understanding is data–Big Data. That the Fed has no idea of how the real economy actually functions is painfully apparent. But the state’s vast flood of data, neatly organized into slop-troughs that suggest precision, creates a very compelling illusion of understanding: media shills go to absurd lengths to treat bogus or marginal data as the equivalent of the tablets brought down by Moses.

Sorry, Corporate Media: the unemployment rate and the official rate of inflation are not real. They are illusions rigged to lull the masses and enrapture the simulacrum experts living high on the hog in academia, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and think-tanks.

Here is the reality, as expressed by IMF Chairwoman Christine Lagarde: what passes for precise data is a guesstimate at best, and a carefully executed distortion at worst.

The net result is nonsensical policies that fail to achieve their stated objectives. Even more tragicomic, the spokespeople tasked with presenting this failure to the Great Unwashed are forced to speak gobbledigook that borders on the psychotic if taken at face value.

For example, Janus Yellen must claim she is planning to raise interest rates while also proclaiming that she’s keeping rates at zero for the indefinite future. If a non-Elite person rambled on in this fashion, they would be tossed in jail as a 51-50 (involuntary psychiatric hold).

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Stock market confessions, chaos, complexity and the illusion of control

September 6, 2015

Stock market confessions, chaos, complexity and the illusion of control

In the old days of the Chinese Cultural Revolution those who said or did something perceived by the Chinese authorities to be counter-revolutionary were forced into public confessions–and then humiliated, imprisoned or even put to death.

It seems that old ways die hard. Last week the new China–the one that had thrown off the yoke of the Cultural Revolution–televised forced confessions by people who dared to say that the Chinese stock market may not be a great place to put your money these days.

In addition, Chinese government officials are cracking down on short sellers–those who borrow stock to sell, hoping to buy it back at a lower price. Officials are prohibiting large holders of stock from selling for six months, and they are flooding brokerages with easy credit to encourage those brokerages and their clients to buy stocks with borrowed money. Who would have guessed that still nominally communist China would go to such great lengths to protect the most prominent symbol of out-of-control capitalism, a stock market bubble?

It seems that the government has forgotten the essence of a marketplace of stocks, namely, that for every buyer there must a seller. When those wishing to sell shares are denied the opportunity, they are likely to become increasingly doubtful that the denial is for their own good. The whole point of a stock market is to lessen the risk of investing in a company by making it possible to sell one’s shares at a moment’s notice when the need for cash or the opportunity for a better investment arises.

Marketplaces for investments are inherently unstable. The participants react to constantly changing conditions and perceptions. If markets were entirely predictable and transparent, there would be very little money to be made since everyone’s perception of the risks they were taking and the rewards they might reap would be identical.

 

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