YELLEN, DRAGHI, KURODA: DERANGED LAB RATS

The stock market has regained all of its loses year to date as economic indicators continue to flash red, corporate profits continue to plunge, consumers continue to spend less at retailers, real wages continue to fall, and housing sales continue to decline. The entire dead cat bounce has been generated through corporate stock buybacks, Wall Street lemmings trying to make up for their terrible year to date investing performance, and central bankers who will stop at nothing to verbally manipulate markets higher – since their monetary machinations over the last seven years have been a miserable failure in reviving the real economy.

As John Hussman points out, the market is poised to deliver nothing over the next decade, with a 40% to 55% “dip” in the foreseeable future. I wonder how many barely sentient, iGadget addicted, non-questioning, normalcy bias dependent zombies are prepared for a third Federal Reserve generated market collapse in the last 15 years?

From a long-term investment standpoint, the stock market remains obscenely overvalued, with the most historically-reliable measures we identify presently consistent with zero 10-12 year S&P 500 nominal total returns, and negative expected real returns on both horizons. From a cyclical standpoint, I continue to expect that the completion of the current market cycle will likely take the S&P 500 down by about 40-55% from present levels; an outcome that would not be an outlier or worst-case scenario, but instead a rather run-of-the-mill cycle completion from present valuations.

The only people who can’t see the recession in front of their noses are central bankers who are paid to lie, obfuscate, and mislead; corrupt politicians trying to get elected or re-elected; and media pundits whose job is to keep the sheep sedated with positive propaganda and a never ending stream of trivialities and drivel. The average person has been experiencing a recession for the last eight years, with stagnant wages, rising living costs, no return on their savings, and rising taxes. Now, even the manipulated government economic statistics can no longer hide the true deterioration, as Hussman describes.

From an economic standpoint, recall that economic deterioration typically follows a well-defined sequence, with weakness in what I call the “order surplus” (new orders + backlogs – inventories) followed by deterioration in industrial production (which retreated again last month) and by real retail sales (which have declined for two consecutive months), then real personal income (which is the next measure to watch here), and typically followed only then by weakness in employment indicators. Nothing in recent weeks has changed our assessment of an imminent likelihood of recession, though as I’ve regularly noted, the immediacy of that expectation would be deferred if our measures of market internals improve significantly. Though employment is a lagging indicator, we would still watch for an increase in weekly unemployment claims above roughly 330,000, a decline in aggregate weekly hours over a 3-month period, and an increase in the unemployment rate to about 5.3% or higher to confirm the actual start of a recession.

The central banker action plan of monetary easing, negative interest rates, printing trillions of new fiat, currency debasement, and buying the bad debt of the criminal banking cabal, has not improved the lives of average people living in the real world. They have improved the net worth of the .01% who rule the world. They have succeeded in making the ultra-rich ultra-richer.

They, without a doubt, have made the lives of senior citizens far worse, the lives of middle income working class families ghastlier, and the lives of millennials just entering the workforce debt saturated and hopeless. Their deranged machinations have set in motion a global collapse which will make 2008 look like stroll in the park on a warm spring day.

Consider central bankers. For the past several years, global central banks have pursued increasingly deranged monetary policies, creating massive distortions in financial markets. It’s easy to point to these effects on the financial markets, as Bernanke, Kuroda, Draghi and other central bankers have emphasized, as evidence that central bank policy is “working.” What we, and others, have found, is that all of this deranged monetary policy has raised the level of GDP, industrial production, and employment by barely 1% from what would have been expected in the absence of these interventions.

It appears the sole purpose of these psychopathic central bankers is to talk up financial markets. Nothing else matters in this warped world of the financial elite. Dick Fisher, former Dallas Fed President, in a moment of truth revealed the Fed purposely injected the stock market with heroine and cocaine in order to stimulate gains. Now they’ve created an addict. They need ever increasing doses to be satisfied.

The ruling lords of the plantation reap the short term high, while the lowly slave peasants reap all of the pain, withdrawal symptoms, and ultimately death. As Hussman points out, even the vaporous benefits have a shorter and shorter high, as the markets are so ridiculously overvalued, the savvy insiders sell into every false rally. Meanwhile, Goldman and their fellow Wall Street co-conspirators sell to their muppet clients, just like 2008.

On January 29, a week after insisting that a move to negative rates was not under consideration, Bank of Japan Governor Harohiko Kuroda announced a rate cut to -0.1%. On February 18 he reiterated that the BOJ was prepared to ease further. He wavered on that stance at the end of February, but shifted again last week, saying that a move to even deeper negative rates was possible. Meanwhile, facing economic erosion in Europe, Mario Draghi came out on February 15 saying “we will not hesitate to act.” He followed on March 10 with his “bazooka” including a rate cut to -0.4%, an increase in the pace of QE, and a broadening of ECB purchases to include investment-grade, non-bank corporate bonds. On Wednesday, Janet Yellen announced that the expected pace of Fed rate hikes this year was likely to be slower than expected, as a result of weak global economic conditions and widening credit spreads.

Aside from a one or two-day knee-jerk response, these moves have had very little sustained impact on the equity markets. Japan’s Nikkei index is down about 5% since the day after Kuroda’s rate-cut announcement. The Dow Jones EuroStoxx Index is also down since the day after Draghi’s bazooka. One suspects that the response of the S&P 500 to Yellen’s dovishness will be similarly short-lived, though we need not rely on that. Given the continued sequence of erosion in economic measures, central bankers continue to point to the financial markets as evidence that their policies are “working.” Now even those effects have become unreliable.

When global markets logically got off to a horrendous start this year, based upon plunging corporate profits, consumers no longer able to support consumption based economies, governments collapsing under the weight of immense levels of bad debt, war raging in the Middle East, plunging oil prices due to a global recession, currency devaluation wars, and civil chaos spreading around the globe, the central banker alarm was sounded by the global ruling elite. Save us!!!

The imminent 50% plunge in global stock markets would put a crimp in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. They needed time to unload their holdings on the dumb money and go short before letting the house of cards crash down again. You can smell the desperation of the deranged central banker lab rats, as they frantically push the bar for more stock market gain pellets. But, the number of pellets is dwindling rapidly. Time is running out.

This sudden escalation of dovish pronouncements by central bankers isn’t sound monetary policy, being conducted based on demonstrated cause-and-effect relationships between policy tools and the real economy. No, this is an extinction burst. Central bankers are behaving like lab rats frantically pressing a bar in hope that more food pellets will come out of the chute. They ain’t comin’.

These deranged lab rats have failed to positively impact their economies in any way. Every sentient critical thinking person in this world knows you grow an economy through savings and investing those savings in productive capital. When deranged central bankers penalize savers with negative interest rates they destroy the economy. It’s really that simple. The Fed and their other central banker cronies are the reason productivity, investment and real wages have stagnated for the last 30 years. A world based on debt financed consumption will ultimately collapse under the weight of the debt.

Look, there’s one thing we know for certain in economics. The amount of saving in an economy must be precisely equal to the amount of real investment in the economy (factories, buildings, equipment, capital goods, and inventory). That’s not a theory. It’s an accounting identity. The problem with punishing saving in order to encourage more consumption is that it’s ineffective, and also leaves the economy with nothing to show for it. The wealth of a nation consists of its stock of real private investment (e.g. housing, capital goods, factories), real public investment (e.g. infrastructure), intangible intellectual capital (e.g. education, inventions, organizational knowledge and systems), and its endowment of basic resources such as land, energy, water, and the environment.

The central bankers and their Wall Street controllers have already guaranteed the third bubble bursting collapse in the last fifteen years. This time we have stock, bond, commercial real estate, and housing bubbles all poised to collapse simultaneously. Their easy money, QE, ZIRP, and accounting fraud schemes have guaranteed a catastrophic financial collapse. The longer they persist on flogging academic theory Keynesian solutions which have proven to be the exact opposite of what should have been done, the more likely we will experience a worldwide economic disaster.

Monetary authorities have now become little more than lab rats on a frantic extinction burst. If there are no adults in the room among our policy-makers who are willing to pursue the appropriate substitute behavior – expanding productive investment through fiscal means – we’re going to have a deeper and more concerted global economic downturn than is already likely. I remain convinced that monetary authorities have already ensured a financial collapse in the coming years that is baked-in-the-cake as a result of obscene valuations. That outcome will unfold nearly regardless of economic prospects.

By encouraging acute financial distortions, enabling massive issuance of speculative-grade securities and stock buybacks at near-record valuations, and repeatedly diverting national savings toward speculative malinvestment, the concerted behavior of central banks is increasingly pushing the global economy toward financial crisis and depressed long-term growth. There is no hope for long-term economic prosperity if we place our faith in the monetary policies of deranged bankers and ivory tower college professors. All they can do is to buy interest-earning bonds and replace them with zero-interest paper. How ignorant must we be to believe that financial bubbles will carry us to prosperity without consequences, and how many collapses must we endure before we focus on strengthening our own legs?

It’s sad that “we the people” continue to allow deranged captured academics, under the complete command of the banking cabal, to control the destiny of our country. They have failed for 103 years, but we continue to bow down to these central bankers as if they knew what they were doing. They do know how to debase the currency, obfuscate true inflation, prop up financial markets through monetary manipulation, and generate prodigious amounts of propaganda and misinformation to coverup their true purposes. The people will sit idly by until these deranged rats destroy the world. By then it will be too late to take the path laid out by John Hussman. We are destined to be eaten by these deranged lab rats and their deranged monetary policies.

The irony of economics is that when we pursue policies that encourage speculative malinvestment and make productive investment scarce, the pie gets smaller but a larger share of it goes to the owners of existing capital. The “rents” are always highest for those resources that are most scarce. If we really want more jobs, higher labor productivity, stronger growth, better real wages, a balanced income distribution, and a return to long-term economic prosperity, only an expansion of real productive investment – at every level of the economy – will do the job. Ever more deranged monetary policy will not.

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”Henry Ford

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bb

Well from my limited view things look ok for now.They got us running hard right now.Spring is a good time for expedited services like FedEx. Not sure why .They are also hiring at many terminals . Not only drivers but for management positions .I realize if the banks start collapsing the trucking industry won’t be far behind.A lot of the trucking industry is set up for same day or week deliveries so if the trucking companies stop delivering food and other supplies the big urban areas will probably be burning within a week . Sucks but I’m afraid it coming.

Good job Admin , I enjoy your post about the economy. Worries me sometimes but keeps me informed.

Suzanna
Suzanna

Admin.,

This one is even better than the other piece you just wrote, Voting To Destroy
The Establishment: “We Now Can Plainly See the Left Wing and Neo-Con Wing
Both Have The Same Agenda.” Excellent piece and so very true. The two groups
are “outing themselves” but either don’t realize it or don’t care.

It is better for me because the political theater is not possible to quantify,
and is fraught with emotion. And, we have the violence. The perps are
known but there is no justice.

YELLEN, DRAGHI, KURODA: DERANGED LAB RATS is logical and even I
can “get it.”

Thank you! for being one of the smarties.

sheila morgan
sheila morgan

Good suggestions . I learned a lot from the insight , Does anyone know where my company might be able to get access to a sample a form example to work with ?

mike in ga
mike in ga

Artificially propping markets up around the world is getting very, very expensive. When she blows, there’s gonna be one heckuva lot of broken windows to fix. I used to watch markets religiously but not now because they’re no longer price-discovery markets, they’re price-propping markets. All done to keep the mark to market model from failing so the insurance cos, pension funds, banks, etc. don’t topple.

Ford’s comment was over 100 years ago, IIRC, and the revolution is not yet. According to the commentary of Hussman and our tireless Admin, above, we may reach the Keynesian endpoint of debt saturation before the public wises up to the game. A stock market collapse of 50% bothers me less than the societal effects of so many of these epochal events happening at once.

2016 is gonna be one for the history books.

Suzanna
Suzanna

“The recent National Science Foundation audit of the University of Washington shows that federal grant mismanagement continues to run rampant. Last year the federal government awarded over $600 billion in grant funding, more than doubling in the past 15 years. The number and scope of federal grants makes it almost impossible to provide adequate oversight” said Justin Bogie, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

“Congress should follow regular order in the upcoming appropriations cycle and use it as an opportunity to examine the benefits of these programs and eliminate or consolidate poor performers to make the process more efficient, effective, and accountable. Otherwise, taxpayers will continue to find themselves paying for other people’s pajama parties,” Mr. Bogie said.

The fish rots from the head down, (gov and central bankers) and now everyone thinks
it is okay to steal. We have suffered a massive loss of ethics!

http://wastefraudandabuse.org/u-washington-wastes-science-grant/

from 3/10/16

Westcoaster
Westcoaster

Good one, Admin, but I didn’t learn anything new.

warts
warts

Mike, we’ve already reached debt saturation. Negative interest rates are the proof.

Robert Gore

Not to worry, the central bankers and politicians can still call on the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and the Easter Bunny, and they still have a decent supply of Magic Beans.

wdg
wdg

“The people will sit idly by until these deranged rats destroy the world.”

They are more than deranged but evil to the core since what they do is not by ignorance or incompetence or flawed economic models but by design. The design is to enrich the cabal of bankers and other oligarchs controlling the world while enslaving the people of the US and the entire western world. We are the lab rats and the modern serfs in a feudalistic system designed for us. The quote from Carroll Quigley’s book “Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time” first published in 1966 provides clear evidence on the methods and objectives of global control which is a world system of financial control. Carroll Quigley’s analyses had the benefit of unfettered access to CFR files for two years which is why his book is so illuminating and important.

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank…sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”

Suzanna
Suzanna

https://larouchepac.com/20160321/stop-hiding-disaster-face-it-and-take-responsibility

Please, take a look, find out what else they are doing behind our backs.

Greg in NC
Greg in NC

Good article. I have a hard time believing we make it to the election without the bubble popping first. They may be able to hold it together if they want to, but the way it is going, they may be better off pulling it prior.

Suzanna
Suzanna

“This video will make you cry”…Bill Still

https://youtu.be/pnjx58S0Oc0

ottomatik

Tying back to an earlier post of yours, 1000 banksters in jail for Savings and loans(not Niel Bush though), none for the 08 melt down. The entire management team for Department of Justice including
Eric Holder have RETURNED to Covington & Burling, main Client, wait for it……Goldman.
So before the meltdown Goldman, after the meltdown, Goldman, during the meltdown, well obviously, Goldman.
Our entire system has suffered Fascist coup, bank on that.

BUCKHED
BUCKHED

Mike in Ga….you may be right, 2016 may be a doozy. I’m not sure at this point . I thought each year of 2010-2015 would be the year and each year I wait with anticipation only to be disappointed . I really thing sometime between 11/15/2016 and 2017 will be the year . Especially if Trump is elected. A collapse could be used to tell folks how a political outsider like Trump can never help us out of the quagmire . What’s the old saying…never let a disaster go to waste .

Hey Robert…they’ve already tried Santa,Tooth Fairy etc . Now they’ll try the “Magic Peeps ” since it’s Easter .

starfcker
starfcker

Don’t know why I didn’t read this yesterday. Jim, seems to me you’re starting to draw conclusions here, much more precisely than in the past, and I’d say on first read, dead on. I’ve seen people, in the past, accuse you of writing the same piece, over and over. Hardly the case. When I have some time this evening, I want to study this one a bit. Lots of information, and clear eyed conclusions. Great stuff.

starfcker
starfcker

“Only the return of real productive investment, on every level of the economy, will do the job.” People forget where returns come from

Kill Bill
Kill Bill

Dont worry the deranged political class of los wacko (district of corruption) led by the likes of Hilarity and Juan Rump will fix this.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!

Undeniable
Undeniable

When the international financial system’s debt balloon explodes it will destroy the current world system. Upon its collapse, the globalists will collectively, and convulsively, climax in the orgiastic wet dream of their “new world order” and within the visions of thier desired ultimate power.

The father of our modern financial system, John Maynard Keynes, identified the process (in his book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”) as follows:

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

And

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Bob
Bob

NIRP seems to be a bridge too far, even a few bridges too far. It carries the risk that it is so different, and so noticeable, and so out of the realm of normalcy and sanity, that everyone could look up at once, panic, and run for an exit that isn’t really there.

So, to be clear, NIRP seems to be just plain stupid. NIRP appears to be a form of financial cannibalism! WHY risk that? There is really nothing NIRP could possibly achieve that QE can’t. Why risk it? And for what!? TPTB could possibly keep all the musical chairs games going for years more with QE, and things might actually turn out to be survivable for most of us…eventually.

But NO! NIRP seems way too strange and different for mass psychology to absorb. NIRP will most likely crash and burn, and God knows how much of everything might get caught up in the resulting conflagration…May God bless us and keep us all!

Beano McReano
Beano McReano

Printing money allowed credit to expand. But it also built a house of cards. Under this scenario it takes only one more card to bring the entire house down.

No one seems to know what card next will do it. But they DAMN keep on try ‘n!!!

Suzanna
Suzanna

NIRP? no good, but I hear USA brought derivatives to Germany
and now Germany is giving them back…Should the bottom fall out,
I fear the banks will close, with any $ in them (our $) just disappearing.

updated q day:

http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx

ottomatik

There are scenarios that could see the stock market soar from current levels, namely, helicopter money. The words are floating around again, who will argue?
Buy stocks, bet on the criminals, it’s probably a safe play, not that I am going to…..

sangell
sangell

It is ironic that a Federal Reserve whose remit is to promote price stability and, more recently, full employment in the United States, is now more concerned with the S&P index and Chinese GDP than anything else.

I’m not convinced it is out to ‘help the rich’ just those who work in the financial world. The days when a multi-millionaire could relax and invest in tax free munis or collect dividends from a safe stock portfolio are gone. No, today one must be alert to every nuance in Central Bank speak and follow the tremors in currency markets. There is no more ‘buy and hold’, alpha or secure investments anywhere.

I’ve compared today’s stock,bond and currency markets as akin to being trapped in a casino where you can win ( or lose) chips but you can never cash them in and leave because Central Banks, at the behest of the financial industry, must keep everybody at the tables wagering.

the tumbleweed
the tumbleweed

They were running out of excuses, cold winter, warm winter, boring Super Bowl. But now we have “early Easter stifling sales.” This new excuse, err explanation will surely stave off the crash and recession for the rest of 2016.

gman
gman

wanted to read your article, but the hot asian sex slave girls ad was just too much.

gman
gman

“NIRP appears to be a form of financial cannibalism! WHY risk that?”

because you’re the meal.

hold still.

gman
gman

“Good one, Admin, but I didn’t learn anything new.”

“learn”? it’s doom porn. you’re not supposed to learn anything, you’re supposed to thrill to the rhetoric.

Homer
Homer

Admin says, “It’s sad that “we the people” continue to allow deranged captured academics, under the complete command of the banking cabal, to control the destiny of our country. … but we continue to bow down to these central bankers as if they knew what they were doing.”

Whatdaya mean ‘we’. You got a frog in your pocket?

People have little resources to extradite themselves from this mess and don’t have many alternatives.

The reason this cabal of bankers and their toadies have traction is that someone is making a lot of money out of it. I’ll give you three guesses who. It starts with G and ends in ment. In your delirium, you think they are on your side. All the metrics and history portends otherwise.

I use to be innocent, but as I grew older, the impact of Evil that I saw in the world, left me breathless. I entertained the thought that mankind was deserving of extinction, written off as a failed experiment.
But…I also saw small acts of kindness. Something as small as a smile to lighten the burden of a homeless person. A random act of charity to another human being. I thought, perhaps, this is how God works in the world. Here a little, there a little and soon a little leavening will leaven the whole loaf. It may take awhile. Eternity is a long time and, if anything, God is patient.

It may take a total collapse of the economic system to wake up the unwashed many. That’s what I’m expecting, but I’m not happy about it. Reality is a sure antidote for delirium.

Homer
Homer

gman–NIRP is stealing from the past. Credit is stealing from the future and that is all used up. It’s simple, go where the money is. Say, sayonara to your bank account, IRA’s, 401K’s, pensions and the gold in your teeth. Soon, America will truly a land of equality. Equality in poverty, misery, and slavery.

Homer
Homer

Sorry, but I do want you to know that I have faith and am not nihilist. Faith is hope for things unseen, not yet manifested. Why worry if you can pray?

EL Coyote
EL Coyote
Blakey
Blakey
gman
gman

“It’s simple, go where the money is.”

we are the money.

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