{"id":29037,"date":"2017-12-21T06:56:44","date_gmt":"2017-12-21T11:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29037"},"modified":"2017-12-21T06:56:44","modified_gmt":"2017-12-21T11:56:44","slug":"santas-stock-market-rally-tears-of-joy-or-just-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29037","title":{"rendered":"Santa&#8217;s Stock Market Rally: Tears of Joy, Or Just Tears?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/blogdec17\/santa-rally12-17.html\">Santa&#8217;s Stock Market Rally: Tears of Joy, Or Just Tears?<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><i>Everyone who believes risk has disappeared has fallen for the con. <\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>Judging by this year&#8217;s version of Santa Claus&#8217;s reliable year-end stock market rally, risk has vanished<\/b>, not just in stocks but in bonds, junk bonds, housing, commercial real estate, collectible art&#8211;just about the entire spectrum of tradable assets (with precious metals and agricultural commodities among the few receiving coals rather than rallies).<\/p>\n<p><b>One of the maxims of this site is: <i>risk cannot be made to disappear, it can only be cloaked, hedged or offloaded onto others<\/i>.<\/b> In other words, when the magician makes the white rabbit disappear, the physical rabbit does not in fact vanish; it is merely transported out of sight of the enthralled audience.<\/p>\n<p><b>And so it is with risk in markets.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Risk is now viewed as something that can be reliably sold as a more or less guaranteed source of easy profits. In the present-day perception that risk has been eradicated from the markets, it makes little sense to hedge against risk; hedging is a waste of capital when there&#8217;s no risk in sight.<\/p>\n<p><b>This suggests risk is either being cloaked and\/or offloaded onto punters who aren&#8217;t aware that risk is piling up in their portfolios.<\/b> If risk is being masked, every participant is exposed to risk that is being hidden behind policies (the Fed has our back,&#8221; etc.), statistics (everything&#8217;s coming up roses everywhere) and the diminishing premium for hedges.<\/p>\n<p>If risk is being offloaded onto unsuspecting participants, then we must look to the poker table for guidance: <b>if you can&#8217;t identify the marks, you&#8217;re the mark.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>In other words, if we can&#8217;t identify the chumps who have unknowingly accepted all the accumulated risk, then we&#8217;re the chumps.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Santa&#8217;s Stock Market Rally: Tears of Joy, Or Just Tears? Everyone who believes risk has disappeared has fallen for the con. Judging by this year&#8217;s version of Santa Claus&#8217;s reliable year-end stock market rally, risk has vanished, not just in stocks but in bonds, junk bonds, housing, commercial real estate, collectible art&#8211;just about the entire [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[127,587,690,17605,1138],"class_list":["post-29037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-of-two-minds","tag-risk","tag-santa-rally","tag-stock-market"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29038,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29037\/revisions\/29038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}