market crash – The Burning Platform

BREXIT & THE FOURTH TURNING

I took a long walk on the boardwalk with my wife and mother last night, after a long day of packing, doctor appointments, travel, unpacking, food shopping and buying enough liquor to get me through the next week. I was confident the oligarchs had the Brexit vote rigged in their favor. I went to bed exhausted at 10:00.

I wake up this morning to global pandemonium. I just wanted to ride my bike on the boardwalk in peace, but Noooo. First it was raining, so I have to wait for the showers to end. Then I flip on the radio and hear about stock markets around the world crashing because the British people grew some balls and told their keepers to fuck off.

My first thought upon hearing the news was “Fourth Turning”. It’s all about the mood of the people in these countries. The establishment is constantly baffled during Fourth Turnings because they think their old methods of propaganda, fear and control will continue to work. They don’t realize the cyclical nature of history and how the current generational configuration will lead to earth shattering change and a complete destruction of the existing social order. Brexit is just another brick in the wall.

I also find it interesting that over the last month or so some of the most renowned investing billionaires in the world have announced their bearishness and had placed large bets on such an outcome. George Soros is the perfect example. He switched his position to shorting the market recently. Then he constantly blathered in the press about what a disaster Brexit would be for global markets. Then the captured legacy media convinced the world Brexit would never happen. When it “shockingly” happened last night, stock markets around the world crashed. Soros and his billionaire cronies made hundreds of millions in profits. Meanwhile, the poor schmuck with his 401k gets clobbered again.

Since I was 100% wrong in my prediction regarding Brexit, you can take my following observations with a grain of salt. But this is what I see:

This further cements the coming showdown between the people and the establishment (politicians, bankers, mainstream media).
The EU is dead. France, Italy and other EU countries will push for the same referendum and the people will vote out.
The insolvent banks across Europe were never fixed. The central bankers just extended, pretended, and printed more debt. Bank failures will trigger further economic strife.
The credibility of central bankers around the globe will completely disintegrate as their one trick pony method of easy money has proven to be an immense failure for the people.
With the disintegration of the EU, the possibility of civil chaos and war with Russia goes up dramatically.
It will be interesting to see if the Fed and their Wall Street banker puppeteers can stop the stock market from dropping by its destined 30% to 50%. The overvaluation is drastic and this could be the Lehman moment, or at least the Bear Stearns moment.
The credibility of the corporate mainstream media has further disintegrated as they again have been revealed as nothing but propaganda mouthpieces for the establishment. Their anti-Brexit poll numbers were fake. They are not journalists, but cheerleaders for their corporate sponsors.
The constant media bashing of Trump and cheerleading for Clinton will be disregarded by the silent majority in the U.S. Their polls and opinions can be completely ignored and dismissed. The people of this country who don’t live in NYC, DC, LA, or SF are pissed off. Their mood is dark. They want change. The only person who will give them change is Trump.
I’m more convinced than ever that Trump will win the presidency in November. This is a Fourth Turning. The status quo never wins during a Fourth Turning.

Fourth Turnings never peter out. They intensify to a crescendo of turmoil, chaos, violence, war, and bloodshed. This Fourth Turning intensification just got turned up dramatically. It will eventually be turned up to 11.

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Has The Market Crash Only Just Begun?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/19/2016 21:10 -0500

Having successfully called the market’s retreat in the fall of 2015, Universa’s Mark Spitznagel is not taking a victory lap as he warns Bloomberg TV that “the crash has only just begun.”

Investors are facing the most binary “let’s make a deal” market in history in Spitznagel’s view: choose Door #1 to bet on Keynesianism, central planners, and monetary interventionism; or Door #2 to bet on free markets and natural price discovery.

“There is massive cognitive dissonance here,” Spitznagel explains as history teaches us that door #2 is the right choice… but it’s not possible to do that today as investors have been coerced to choose door #1, but when door #1 is slammed open “we will see that dreaded black swan monster.”

That is what is going on right now:

“Investors want to go with The Fed when it’s working – like David Zervos… the problem is, when do you know that it is not working?”

“At some point this stops working…”

“the market is going through a resolution process, transitioning from the cognitive dissonance of Door #1 to the harsh reality of Door #2… if everyone were to change doors at the same time, that is a market crash… it can’t be done in a non-messy way.”

Must watch reality check behind the smoke and mirrors we call markets… (we note Mark’s excellent analogy starting at around 3:10)

IF YOU THINK THAT WAS A CRASH….

Last week’s volatility to the downside was entirely predictable, as the first leg down during this ongoing market crash reached the correction stage of 11%. The technical bounce was a given, as the 30 year old HFT MBAs on Wall Street have been trained like rats to BTFD. In their lemming like minds, it has worked for the last six years of this Federal Reserve created “bull market”, so why wouldn’t it work now. Last week was their first lesson in why it doesn’t work during bear markets, and we’ve entered a bear market. John Hussman seems amused at the shallowness of the arguments by Wall Street shills and CNBC cheerleaders about the future of the stock market in his weekly letter. After this modest pullback from all-time highs, the S&P 500 is still overvalued by 92%:

Following the market decline of recent weeks, the most reliable valuation measures we identify now project average annual nominal returns for the S&P 500 of about 0.5% in the next 10 years. On a broad range of historically reliable valuation measures (see Ockham’s Razor and the Market Cycle) the May peak in the S&P 500 reached valuations averaging about 114% above run-of-the-mill historical norms – more than double the valuation levels that have historically been associated with the 10% average expected market returns that investors have enjoyed over the long-term. At present, those measures have retreated to about 92% above historical norms.

Keep in mind that low interest rates don’t raise the estimated 10-year expected return on stocks from the current 0.5% level. Low interest rates only make the low expected return on stocks somewhat more “acceptable” because the alternatives are similarly dismal. The Federal Reserve’s policies of zero interest rates and quantitative easing have done nothing but to encourage yield-seeking speculation, bringing valuations to extreme levels, and leaving prospective future investment returns equally depressed.

Those who assert that high equity valuations are “justified” by low interest rates are actually (and probably unknowingly) saying that 0.5% expected returns on equities over the coming decade are a-okay with them. But it’s critically important to understand that while low interest may help to explain why current market valuations have been driven to obscene levels, low rates do not change the relationship – the correspondence – between elevated valuation levels and dismal subsequent long-term market returns.

It is time to assume crash positions because we have not experienced anything approaching a crash thus far. We’ve hit nothing but an air pocket. As Dr. Hussman points out so succinctly, market crashes do not happen at the peak. There is usually an initial 10% to 14% decline as the smart money exits stage left, then the lemming dip buyers pile in and drive the market back up, but fail in bringing it above the initial high. It’s only then that sentiment deteriorates, support levels are broken, and all hell breaks loose. That time is coming.

Continue reading “IF YOU THINK THAT WAS A CRASH….”

The Roseanne Roseannadanna market

John Hussman with more facts for you to ignore. The market is going to crash. It might be a Greek default, a Chinese bubble bursting, or a Wall Street hedge fund blowing up. It’s always something. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Much of the investment world seems to view present conditions as a “Goldilocks market” where economic growth is positive enough to avoid recession, but not fast enough to provoke the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates. Even if these views on economic growth and Federal Reserve policy are correct, it hardly follows that stock prices will advance. S&P 500 returns are only weakly correlated with year-over-year GDP growth and have near-zero correlation with year-over-year changes in earnings. Likewise, the stance of the Federal Reserve has much less power to distinguish investment outcomes than investors seem to believe, which they might realize even by remembering that the Fed was easing aggressively and persistently throughout the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 market collapses.

In contrast, we find profound differences in market outcomes across history depending on the combined status of valuations, market internals, and broader measures of market action (which include, for example, overvalued, overbought, overbullish syndromes). Some of these combinations, from most to least favorable, are:

1) Favorable valuations that are newly joined by a shift to favorable market internals;

2) Unfavorable valuations, coupled with favorable market internals, and without overvalued, overbought, overbullish features – which is an environment where speculation is reasonable;

3) Favorable valuations but without favorable market internals – where we observe positive average market returns but higher variability than in any other classification;

4) Unfavorable valuations, favorable market internals, but the emergence of overvalued, overbought overbullish features – which typically results in what I call “unpleasant skew”: a tendency toward persistent, marginal new highs, punctuated by “air pockets” that can wipe out weeks or months of progress in a handful of sessions, though the risk of a deeper crash becomes significant only after market internals also deteriorate;

5) Unfavorable valuations and unfavorable market internals, coming off of a recent period of overvalued, overbought, overbullish conditions – which represents the most severe return/risk profile we identify, and captures the bulk of historical market crashes.

Continue reading “The Roseanne Roseannadanna market”