Tag Archives: Stock market crash

New Fed Chairman Will Trigger A Historic Stock Market Crash In 2018, by Brandon Smith

Posted on February 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

Brandon Smith further elucidates his hypothesis that the Federal Reserve will deliberately make the stock market crash. From Smith at alt-market.com:

Ever since the credit and equities crash of 2008, Americans have been bombarded relentlessly with the narrative that our economy is “in recovery”. For some people, simply hearing this ad nauseam is enough to stave off any concerns they may have for the economy. For some of us, however, it’s just not satisfactory. We need concrete data that actually supports the notion, and for years, we have seen none.

In fact, we have heard from officials at the Federal Reserve that the exact opposite is true. They have admitted that the so-called recovery has been fiat driven, and that there is a danger that when the Fed finally stops artificially propping up the economy with constant stimulus and near zero interest rates, the whole farce might come tumbling down.

For example, Richard Fisher, former head of the Dallas Federal Reserve, admitted a few years ago that the U.S. central bank has made its business the manipulation of the stock market to the upside:

What the Fed did — and I was part of that group — is we front-loaded a tremendous market rally, starting in 2009.It’s sort of what I call the “reverse Whimpy factor” — give me two hamburgers today for one tomorrow.

I’m not surprised that almost every index you can look at … was down significantly.

Fisher went on to hint at the impending danger (though his predicted drop is overly conservative in my view), saying: “I was warning my colleagues, don’t go wobbly if we have a 10-20% correction at some point…. Everybody you talk to … has been warning that these markets are heavily priced.”

One might claim that this is simply one Fed member’s point of view. But it was recently revealed that in 2012, Jerome Powell made the same point in a Fed meeting, the minutes of which have only just now been released:

“I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.

 

To continue reading: New Fed Chairman Will Trigger A Historic Stock Market Crash In 2018

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Posted in Banking, Collapse, Debt, Financial markets

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Swan Song Of The Central Bankers, Part 1: Last Week Wasn’t An Error, by David Stockman

Posted on February 14, 2018 | 1 comment

David Stockman thinks the last two weeks kicked off what will be a multi-year bear market in stocks. SLL has made that prediction a few times and been wrong (so too has Stockman), but it wouldn’t be a surprise if Stockman was right this time. From Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:

Last week’s twin 1,000 point plunges on the Dow were not errors. Instead, these close-coupled massacres, which wiped out $4 trillion of global market cap in two days, marked the beginning of a bear market that will be generational, not a temporary cyclical downleg.

What hit the casino wasn’t an air pocket; it was a fundamental change of direction, signaling that the three decade long central bank experiment with Bubble Finance has now run its course.

Moreover, this epochal pivot is not tentative or reversible in any near-term time frame that matters. That’s because the arrogant but clueless Keynesian academics and apparatchiks who run the Fed think they have succeeded splendidly and that the US economy is on the cusp of full-employment.

So they’re now hell-bent on positioning the central bank for the next downturn. That is, they are reloading their recession-fighting “dry powder” thru interest rate normalization and a second giant experiment—-this time in shrinking their balance sheet by huge annual amounts under a regime called quantitative tightening (QT).

Needless to say, both the magnitude and the automaticity of this impending monetary shock are being completely ignored by Wall Street in favor of bromides like “the market knows” QT is coming because the Fed has been transparent in its forward guidance.

So what? Knowing the steamroller is coming doesn’t stop you from getting crushed if you remain in its path. In fact, the $600 billion annualized bond dumping rate incepting in October is a fearsome number; it’s larger than the entire $500 billion Fed balance sheet as recently as the year 2000.

By your way, that had taken 86 years to accumulate through two world wars, the Great Depression and 9 lesser recessions. Yet that monumental change of dimension has faded from the working knowledge of Wall Street punters and commentators alike only be virtue of the insane 9X expansion to $4.5 trillion that occurred over the subsequent 14 years.

Moreover, you can count on the Fed’s impending bond selling spree to get a turbo-charge from the bond pits.

To continue reading: Swan Song Of The Central Bankers, Part 1: Last Week Wasn’t An Error

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Posted in Collapse, Debt, Economy, Financial markets, Government, Investing

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America is in Terminal Decline, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on November 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

Here’s some more hard core doom porn. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

John Rubino recently posted a graph from Bob Prechter’s Elliot Wave that points to some ominous signs. It depicts the S&P 500, combined with consumer confidence and savings rate. As the accompanying video at Elliott Wave, What “Too Confident to Save” Means for Stocks, shows, when the gap between high confidence and low savings is at its widest, a market crash -often- follows.

In 2000, the subsequent crash was 39%, in 2007 it was 54%. We are now again witnessing just such a gap, with the S&P 500 at record levels. Here’s the graph, with John’s comments:

Consumers Are Both Confident And Broke

Elliott Wave International recently put together a chart that illustrates a recurring theme of financial bubbles: When good times have gone on for a sufficiently long time, people forget that it can be any other way and start behaving as if they’re bulletproof. They stop saving, for instance, because they’ll always have their job and their stocks will always go up. Then comes the inevitable bust. On the following chart, this delusion and its aftermath are represented by the gap between consumer confidence (our sense of how good the next year is likely to be) and the saving rate (the portion of each paycheck we keep for a rainy day). The bigger the gap the less realistic we are and the more likely to pay dearly for our hubris.

 

 

John is mostly right. But not entirely. Not that I don’t think he knows, he simply forgets to mention it. What I mean is his suggestion that people stop saving because they’re confident, bullish. To understand where and why he slightly misses, let’s turn to Lance Roberts. Before we get to the savings, Lance explains why the difference between the Producer Price Index (PPI) and Consumer Price Index (CPI) is important to note.

Summarized, producer prices are rising, but consumer prices are not.

To continue reading: America is in Terminal Decline

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Bull In a China Shop, by Jim Quinn

Posted on October 29, 2017 | Leave a comment

According to Jim Quinn (and SLL), we’re headed towards a Minsky Moment. From Quinn at theburningplatform.com:

“So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

I had read Nassim Taleb’s other best-selling tomes about risk, randomness and black swans – Fooled by Randomness & The Black Swan. They were not easy reads, but they were must reads. He is clearly a brilliant thinker, but I like him more because he is a prickly skeptic who scorns and ridicules academics, politicians, and Wall Street scumbags with gusto. There were many passages which baffled me, but so many nuggets of wisdom throughout each book, you couldn’t put them down.

When his Antifragile book was published in 2012, the name intimidated me. I figured it was too intellectual for my tastes. When I saw it on the shelf in my favorite used book store at the beach, I figured it was worth a read for $9. I’m plowing through it and I haven’t been disappointed.

His main themes are more pertinent today than they were in 2012. He published The Black Swan in 2007, just prior to one of the biggest black swans in world history – the 2008 Federal Reserve/Wall Street created financial collapse. His disdain for “experts” like Bernanke, Paulson, and Wall Street CEOs, and their inability to comprehend the consequences of their actions and in-actions as the financial system was blown sky high, was a bulls-eye.

As usual, all of Taleb’s warnings and rational analysis of how the world really works have been forgotten or ignored, as the actions of the captured Fed, corrupt DC politicians, and greedy Wall Street shysters propel the nation and the world toward another historic financial collapse. The “experts” will be proven to be knaves and fools once again.

To continue reading: Bull In a China Shop

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Personal Recollections From The Crash Of 1987: “There Was No ‘Smart Money’ That Day!” by John S. Lyons

Posted on October 15, 2017 | 1 comment

We’re coming up on October 19, the 30th anniversary of a hellacious stock market crash. Will the market crash soon? Probably not, its usually trends down for a period before it crashes. That was the case in 1987, when the stock market topped out in August. From John S. Lyons at LyonsSharePro.com via zerohedge.com:

Personal Recollections of the Crash of 1987 on its 30th Anniversary

“There was no ‘smart money’ that day.”

What do the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the beginning of Desert Storm and 9/11 have in common? Provided you are old enough to recall JFK’s assassination, the answer probably is that you remember exactly where you were on the day of those events. If not that old, there is most likely another event that is so memorable that you recall where you were and what you were doing at that moment.

Being in the securities business for many, many years, the Crash of ’87 on October 19th of that year is right up there with JFK’s assassination and 9/11 as one of the mind-numbing catastrophes I’ve witnessed.

In retrospect only, it was fortunate that I had entered the brokerage business in 1969 and immediately weathered a 36% market decline into 1970. On the heels of that decline, I then endured one of the worst bear markets in modern history in 1973-74 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost 50% of its value. As a result, I was weaned on risk in my new profession. And I learned early on that if a career that centered around the stock market were to be endurable, I had to find a way to practice risk management.

As a result, I developed a risk model during the 1970’s as a means of guarding against such disastrous losses in the future. Fortunately, the model has been of very valuable assistance, protecting clients from every major decline since its inception in 1978. Its Sell Signals have occurred prior to insignificant declines as well, but its risk avoidance guidance supersedes those times. On September 25th of 1987, for example, our model issued a Sell Signal and I sold over half of my clients’ holdings. I was reminded just recently by an associate of mine at that time about how he passed by my office that day and was amazed at the pile of sell orders on my desk.

To continue reading: Personal Recollections From The Crash Of 1987: “There Was No ‘Smart Money’ That Day!”

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