Tag Archives: 2015 financial crisis

Risk Turns Risky: Unpleasant Skew, Scale Dilation, and Broken Lines , by John Hussman

Posted on August 24, 2015 | Leave a comment

It is a good idea to read and understand this entire article, grasp the nuances, and study the graphs. From John P. Hussman at hussman.net:

Over the years, I’ve observed that overvalued, overbought, overbullish market conditions have historically been accompanied by what I call “unpleasant skew” – a succession of small but persistent marginal new highs, followed by a vertical collapse in which weeks or months of gains are wiped out in a handful of sessions. Provided that investors are in a risk-seeking mood (which we infer from the behavior of market internals), sufficiently aggressive monetary easing can delay this tendency, by starving investors of every source of safe return, and actively encouraging further yield-seeking speculation even when valuations are obscene. Once investors become risk-averse, as deteriorating market internals have suggested in recent months, vertical declines much more extreme than last week’s loss are quite ordinary.

The way to understand the bubbles and collapses of the past 15 years, and those throughout history, is to learn the right lesson. That lesson is not that overvaluation can be ignored indefinitely – we know different from the collapses that have regularly followed extreme valuations. The lesson is not that easy monetary policy reliably supports stock prices – persistent and aggressive easing did nothing to keep stocks from losing more than half their value in 2000-2002 and 2007-2009. Rather, the key lesson to draw from recent market cycles, and those across a century of history, is this:

Valuations are the main driver of long-term returns, but the main driver of market returns over shorter horizons is the attitude of investors toward risk, and the most reliable way to measure this is through the uniformity or divergence of market internals. When market internals are uniformly favorable, overvaluation has little effect, and monetary easing can encourage further risk-seeking speculation. Conversely, when deterioration in market internals signals a shift toward risk-aversion among investors, monetary easing has little effect, and overvaluation can suddenly matter with a vengeance.

To continue reading: Risk Turns Risky

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Is This Black Monday Crash The BIG ONE? It Doesn’t Matter, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on August 24, 2015 | Leave a comment

Raúl Ilargi Meijer of theautomaticearth.com gets it right:

After losing 11% last week, Shanghai this morning was down almost -9% at one point, after lunch went back up to -6.5%, and ended its day at -8.49%. A Black Monday for sure, but is this the BIG ONE? It really doesn’t matter one bit. Unless perhaps you persist in calling your self an investor, in which case we pity you, but not for losing your shirt. Because God knows we’ve said enough times now that there are no functioning markets anymore, and therefore no-one who can rightfully lay claim to the title ‘investor’.

Plenty amongst you will be talking about economic cycles, and opportunities, and debate how to ‘play’ the crash, but all this is useless if and when a market doesn’t function. And just about all markets in the richer part of the world stopped functioning when central banks started buying assets. That’s when you stopped being investors. And when market strategies stopped making sense.

Central banks will come up with more, much more, ‘stimulus’, but what China teaches us today is that we’re woefully close to the moment when central banks will lose the faith and trust of everyone. After injecting tens of billions of dollars in markets, which thereby ceased to function, the global economy is in a bigger mess then it was prior to QE. The whole thing is one big bubble now, and we know what invariably happens to those.

More QE is not an answer. And there is no other answer left either. Those tens of trillions will need to vanish from the global economy before any market can be returned to a functioning one, and by that time of course asset prices will be fraction of what they are now. It may not happen today, but that doesn’t matter: what’s important to know is that it WILL happen.

And if you keep being out there trying to outsmart a non-functioning market, you’ll get burned as badly as the millions of Chinese grandmas who already lost 20%+ so far just this month. And that’s just on their share holdings; Chinese property ‘markets’ will be at least as badly burned.

To continue reading: Is this Black Monday Crash The BIG ONE?

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Why the Bear of 2015 Is Different from the Bear of 2008, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on August 24, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Are there any conditions now that are actually better than those of 2008?

It’s tempting to see similarities in last week’s global stock market mini-crash and the monumental meltdown that almost took down the Global Financial System in 2008-2009. The dizzying drop invites comparison to the last Bear Market that took the S&P 500 from 1,565 in October 2007 to 667 on March 9, 2009.

But this Bear is beginning in circumstances quite different from 2007-08. Let’s list a few of the differences:

1. Then: Markets and central banks feared inflation, as WTIC oil had hit $133 per barrel in the summer of 2008.

Now: As oil tests the $40/barrel level, markets and central banks fear deflation.

2. Then: China had a relatively modest $7 trillion in total debt, considerably less than 100% of GDP.

now: China’s debt has quadrupled from $7 trillion in 2007 to $28 trillion as of mid-2014, an astonishing 282% of gross domestic product (GDP)

3. Then: Central banks had a full toolbox of unprecedented monetary surprises to unleash on the market: TARP, TARF, BARF (OK, that one is made up) rescue packages and credit guarantees, quantitative easing (QE), zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) and direct purchases of mortgages, to name just the top few.

Now: The central bank toolbox is empty: every tool has already been deployed on an unprecedented scale. Every potential new program is simply a retread of QE, yield curve bending, asset purchases, etc.–the same old bag of tricks.

4. Then: Central banks had a relatively clean slate to work with. Interventions in the market and economy were limited to suppressing interest rates in the post-dot-com meltdown era.

Now: Central banks have never stopped intervening since 2008. The market is in effect a reflection of 6+ years of unprecedented central bank interventions.

Rather than a clean slate, central banks face a global marketplace that is dominated by incentives to speculate with leveraged/borrowed money established by 6 years of central bank policies.

5. Then: Interest rates had rebounded from the post-dot-com lows in 2003. The Fed Funds rate in 2006-07 was above 5%, and the Prime Lending Rate exceeded 8%.

Now: The Fed Funds Rate has been screwed down to .25% for 6+ years–an unprecedented period of near-zero interest rates.

To continue reading: Why the Bear of 2015 Is Different

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