“We’re Near The Very End”: Lawrence Lepard On Bitcoin, Gold & The Coming Crash

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

This is part 1 of an exclusive Fringe Finance interview with fund manager Lawrence Lepard, where we discuss the state of the economy, gold, bitcoin, catastrophic outcomes for the market, the supply chain in the country and more.

Lawrence Lepard (Photo: Kitco)

Larry manages the EMA GARP Fund, a Boston based investment management firm. Their strategy is focused on providing “Monetary Debasement Insurance”. He has 38 years experience and an MBA from Harvard Business School. On Twitter he is @LawrenceLepard.

Q: Hi, Larry. Thanks for joining me today. I wrote earlier this week about why I thought the NASDAQ could be primed for a crash. Let’s get right into it off the bat: what do you think could be the most likely catalyst for a market crash right now?

A: Very hard to say, think of it as like an avalanche. What snowflake is going to be the last one before it breaks free?

The market is insanely overvalued, but until now has proven that what is insane can become more insane. So you can’t short it. Frankly all price signals are broken and we could be in a “crack up boom”.

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Crisis, Crash, Collapse

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

We have a fine-sounding word for running with the herd: momentum. When the herd is running, those who buy what the herd is buying and sell what the herd is selling are trading momentum, which sounds so much more professional and high-brow than the noisy, dusty image of large mammals (and their trading machines) mindlessly running with the herd.

We also have a fine-sounding phrase for anticipating where the herd is running: front-running. So when the herd is running into stocks, those who buy stocks just ahead of the herd are front-running the market.

When the Federal Reserve announces that it’s going to make billionaires even wealthier with some new financial spew, those betting that stocks will never go down because the Fed has our back are front-running the Fed.

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Do You Believe in Magic?

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

The people pretending to run the world’s financial affairs do. The more layers of abstract game-playing they add to the existing armatures of unreality they’ve already constructed, the more certain it becomes that they will blow up all the support systems of a sunsetting hyper-tech economy that now has no safe lane to continue running in.

Virtually all the big nations are doing this now in desperation because they don’t understand that the hyper-tech economy is hostage to the deteriorating economics of energy, basically fossil fuels, and oil especially. The macro mega-system can’t grow anymore. We’re now in the de-growth phase of a dynamic that pulsates through history, as everything in the universe pulsates. We attempted to compensate for de-growth with debt, borrowing from the future.

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