Anger Mismanagement

A new bull market is coming that will wipe out many of the current bull markets.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Its chart looks good—building a base for decades, lately bursting through the top of its range. The ascent has been steep, pullbacks minor, and it looks like it’s gathering steam for a long run.

Anger is lifting off in what market technicians would call the first impulsive wave of a new bull market. That’s the technicians’ way of saying this is just the beginning. Punctuated by brief remissions, there are many more and much larger waves to come before this trend is exhausted.

One of the best technicians of them all, Robert Prechter, has spent his career analyzing the indicators and dynamics of social mood, his touchstone term that has yet to make it into the popular lexicon. By the time this trend exhausts, perhaps there will be more widespread recognition of both the term and its awesome power. The anger waves will lay waste to the best laid plans of mice, men, women, and whatever you want to call those witless, arrogant creatures who inhabit central banks, governments, and globalist fronts…and those who pull their strings.

Financial markets, particularly equity markets, are indicators of social moods. In the US, equity markets are at or close to all time highs, indicating buoyant optimism. They have rallied for almost ten years since touching bottom at the nadir of the financial crisis. However, the losses suffered by many investors and homeowners from the crisis, the bailouts of connected financial institutions, and the perpetrators’ escapes from punishment have not been forgotten. If they had been, Donald Trump would have never been elected.

That was anger’s break out moment, a clear indicator of an impending social mood trend change. Since then, the rancor has escalated, engulfing those who both despise and deify Trump. The internecine bloodletting has a long way to go, and it’s not confined to the US. Brexit was the European break out. Nationalist movements increasingly challenge the elite consensus on immigration and EU integration.

All this while economies are still supposedly expanding. $250 trillion in direct global debt and $1 quadrillion or more in derivatives and unfunded liabilities hang like a dagger over the world economy and financial system. Most income streams and assets are pledged as security for debt repayment, every debtor’s debt is a creditor’s asset in the interlinked global financial system, global debt is at an all-time high, and the finance industry is more concentrated than it was in 2008. It won’t take much for a financial brush fire to become a roaring conflagration.

When a trend reverses, there are portents before the reversal. If anger is blossoming during the so-called good times, imagine what happens during the bad. In relationships gone sour, there’s often a terminal moment when the partner who once could do no wrong can no longer do anything right. Every underlying motive is put in the worst possible light. The relationship is over.

Such is the nature of the world’s long-running infatuation with government. The average citizen is unaware of the intricacies of government debt issuance and central bank monetary policies. What they do understand is that since the global financial crisis, low interest rates have destroyed the return on safe saving—supposedly to rescue the economy and financial system—and encouraged debt and speculation.

The debt-with-more-debt rescue was never going to work. When the economy and financial system again fall apart, this time beyond rescue, and people are stuck with underwater speculations, debt they can’t repay, bankruptcy, and unemployment they’ll connect three dots: their troubles, low-interest rate policies promoted by governments and central bankers, and the beneficiaries of those policies, the much despised one percent.

There will be much less patience this time—practically nonexistent—when the architects of this impending disaster tell us how they’re going to get us out of it. The political and financial establishment will be the estranged lover at whom most people will just want to scream, “Shut the fuck up!” every time it opens its mouth. Anything the establishment does other than keep quiet—which won’t happen—will be anger mismanagement.

Angela Merkel is getting a taste of that. For many years she could do no wrong. Then she had the George Soros-inspired bright idea to allow a flood of mostly Islamic immigrants into Germany. The country’s indigenous birthrate had fallen far below replacement levels. The immigrants would supplement the shrinking labor force and fund the bloated welfare state. Except many of the migrants weren’t blessed with Germans‘ famous work ethic, they instead wanted to soak up the benefits, and many didn’t share Germans‘ famous devotion to law and order.

Angela’s entreaties to the better angels of Germans’ nature now fall on deaf ears. Her poll numbers are plummeting and seemingly every defection from her Christian Democratic Union party is a new member for the Alternative for Germany, which has a radically different view on Islamic immigration.

As often happens with former favorites when the crowd turns against them, Merkel and her dwindling band of supporters are calling the other side names—right wing extremists, crazies, fascists, neo-Nazis and the like. It’s having little effect. Who are you going to believe, religion of peace propagandists or the Fräulein next door who was raped by a Syrian refugee? This is all occurring as the German economy is one of the Europe’s strongest performers, before things head south.

There is an obvious connection between the inflow of Syrian refugees and the US’s incredibly botched strategy and execution in that tormented country. This has been a Deep State fiasco from day one, midwifed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. If Trump takes the Deep State bait and uses the impending invasion of Idlib as an excuse to stay in Syria, he deserves the knife they’re sticking in his back. Not one jot of the anger that propelled Trump to the presidency was because the US wasn’t involved enough in the Middle East.

Bob Woodward’s book excerpts and the anonymous New York Times editorial are products of Deep State desperation and weakness, not strength. Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, has an unconsciously revelatory title—they’re certainly afraid. Russiagate is dying a lingering death and the recent Hail Mary—Campaign Finance Violations—has suffered a quick demise. Now they’re tossing a Hail Hail Mary: use the 25th Amendment to drive Trump from office.

There’s a tiny chance they realize that many Americans are indifferent to their stratagems and are tuning them out. They may be dimly aware their tactics are counterproductive. That could be why Fear and the editorial were not brought them closer to the elections. Probably not, though—they have to know these excretions will be forgotten long before the election, and will only stoke Trump supporters’ bitterness. Thus, the 25th Amendment Hail Hail Mary is the probable Deep State motive.

The stock market looks due for a tumble, but SLL has been saying that for months. If it does tumble, history and Prechter’s theory of social mood suggest Trump’s support will tumble with it. That would be the Deep State’s best hope for a 25th Amendment coup. However, things may be different this time.

Trump was the anger candidate and he’s still got the field to himself. A stock market crash will enrage millions, but he’s the quintessential outsider and expert persuader. He may be able to direct that anger towards the insiders. He’s already criticized Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate hikes, and there’s no more of an insider than the Fed. It’s not hard to imagine his argument: we had a great stock market going, but the central bankers killed it

The Washington Post reported last week that a secret grand jury is investigating former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired in March. That may well be a first shot across the bow, the start of a concentrated legal fusillade. A Trump counterstrike, timed for the election, would focus attention and resentment on the powers the be and further solidify his, and by implication the Republicans’, support this fall.

The first wave of anger is cresting, to be followed by larger, more powerful waves. Whether Trump can surf them remains to be seen. No doubt, however, they’ll deluge the status quo potentates and their sand castles on the beach.