Recession – Page 3 – The Burning Platform

WILL TRUMP ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY WHEN THIS SHITSHOW IMPLODES?

Donald J. Trump has taken credit for making America’s economy great again. He’s been crowing about all the jobs being created, the soaring consumer confidence and record highs in the stock market. It’s all because the Donald has inspired Americans about our glorious future.

But, a funny thing has been happening in the real world. The economy has gone into the shitter and GDP will be lucky to reach 1% in the first quarter of his presidency. The bullshit consumer confidence surveys mean absolutely nothing. Feelings don’t mean shit. What consumers do is what matters.

67% of the US economy is dependent upon Americans spending money they don’t have on shit they don’t need. And they’ve dramatically reduced that spending. If consumers are so confident, why are a record number of major retailers going bankrupt and closing 3,500 stores in 2017? Mom and pop retailers have been shuttering for years.

If the narrative about a dramatically improving housing market was true, why would furniture store sales and building material store sales be falling? They wouldn’t. It seems even the spendthrift millennials have run out of dough, as restaurant sales are in free fall. Restaurant chains have begun closing units now. It has only just begun.

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The auto industry ponzi scheme has come to an end, as billions in subprime loans to deadbeats is finally coming home to roost. If you lend money to idiots with no means to repay you, the loans will go bad. Auto sales have begun to fall and will continue to fall for the next couple years, as this house of cards built on the Fed’s easy money collapses.

How in the world does anyone with two brain cells believe the average American has the ability to keep increasing their spending when their wages are stagnant, real household income is falling, and Obamacare continues to siphon what little cash they might have. There is no Obamacare replacement on the horizon, which means no tax cuts. But there is the promise of new wars across the globe. We got that going for us.

Trump is a self proclaimed PR genius. As this economy spirals downward, followed by the stock market, I wonder if the Donald will step up and accept responsibility for the debacle when it happens. He needs to reap what he sows and accept responsibility if he is going to boast about his success in reviving the economy. Right Trumpeteers?

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STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

If you prefer fake news, fake data, and a fake narrative about an improving economy and stock market headed to 30,000, don’t read this fact based, reality check article. The level of stupidity engulfing the country has reached epic proportions, as the mainstream fake news networks flog bullshit Russian conspiracy stories, knowing at least 50% of the non-thinking iGadget distracted public believes anything they hear on the boob tube.

This stupendous degree of utter stupidity goes to a new level of idiocy when it comes to the stock market. The rigged fleecing machine known as Wall Street has gone into hyper-drive since futures dropped by 700 points on the night of Trump’s election. An already extremely overvalued market, as measured by every historically accurate valuation metric, soared by 4,000 points from that futures low – over 20% – to an all-time high. Despite dozens of warning signs and the experience of two 40% to 50% crashes in the last fifteen years, lemming like investors are confident the future is so bright they gotta wear shades.

The current bull market is the 2nd longest in history at 8 years. In March of 2009, the S&P 500 bottomed at a fitting level for Wall Street of 666. In a shocking coincidence, it bottomed on the same day Bernanke & Geithner forced the FASB to rollover like mangy dogs and stop enforcing mark to market accounting. Amazingly, when Wall Street banks, along with Fannie and Freddie, could value their toxic assets at whatever they chose, profits surged. The market is now 240% higher.

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WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? (PART TWO)

In Part One of this article I exposed the establishment narrative of a strong economy as rubbish by providing hard data regarding imploding gasoline usage, failing bricks and mortar retailers and plunging restaurant sales.

“Inflation may indeed bring benefits for a short time to favored groups, but only at the expense of others. And in the long run it brings ruinous consequences to the whole community. Even a relatively mild inflation distorts the structure of production. It leads to the overexpansion of some industries at the expense of others. This involves a misapplication and waste of capital. When the inflation collapses, or is brought to a halt, the misdirected capital investment—whether in the form of machines, factories or office buildings—cannot yield an adequate return and loses the greater part of its value.Nor is it possible to bring inflation to a smooth and gentle stop, and so avert a subsequent depression.” – Henry Hazlitt – Economics in One Lesson

Inflation is the opium of the masses. The establishment’s interest in dumbing down the masses through government controlled public school indoctrination couldn’t be clearer than examining the chart below. The average non-thinking, math challenged, iGadget distracted, media controlled pawn thinks their household income has risen by $6,000 since 2008 because they have no understanding of Fed created inflation.

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A BIASED 2017 FORECAST (PART ONE)

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.” – Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to see a live one hour interview with Michael Lewis at the Annenberg Center about his new book The Undoing Project. Everyone attending the lecture received a complimentary copy of the book. Being a huge fan of Lewis after reading Liar’s Poker, Boomerang, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and Moneyball, I was interested to hear about his new project. This was a completely new direction from his financial crisis books. I wasn’t sure whether it would keep my interest, but the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their research into the psychology of judgement and decision making, creating a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases, was an eye opener.

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions. They are mental shortcuts that usually involve focusing on one aspect of a complex problem and ignoring others. These rules work well under most circumstances, but they can lead to systematic deviations from logic, probability or rational choice theory. The resulting errors are called “cognitive biases” and many different types have been documented.

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CIVIL WAR II – FOURTH TURNING INTENSIFYING (PART I)

“History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe -1997

As we enter the final stretch of this vitriolic, deplorable, venomous, propaganda saturated, deceitful, rigged presidential election spectacle, it becomes painfully obvious this Fourth Turning is careening toward bloodshed, bedlam, confrontation, and civil war. The linear fixated establishment, who fancy themselves intellectually superior to the irredemables, are too blinded by their sociopathic, increasingly audacious subversion of the Constitution, to grasp the level of rage and disillusionment of a white working class that has been screwed over for decades.

As the Wall Street shysters frantically accelerate their embezzlement of what remains of middle class wealth, with the Fed and the corporate media propagandists as their wing-men, the country devolves into a corporate fascist state. The disposition of the nation grows dark like the sky before an approaching deadly blizzard. As passions boil over and violence portends, this Fourth Turning hastens towards a bloody decade ahead with an uncertain climax.

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Humpty-Dumpty—–Teetering On The Eccles Building Wall

Guest Post by David Stockman

The Eccles Building trotted out Vice-Chairman Stanley Fischer this morning. Apparently his task was to explain to any headline reading algos still tracking bubblevision that things are looking up for the US economy again and that Brexit won’t hurt much on the domestic front. As he told his fawning CNBC hostess:

“First of all, the U.S. economy since the very bad data we got in May on employment has done pretty well. Most of the incoming data looked good,” Fischer said. “Now, you can’t make a whole story out of a month and a half of data, but this is looking better than a tad before.”

You might expect something that risible from Janet Yellen——she’s just plain lost in her 50-year old Keynesian time warp. But Stanley Fischer presumably knows better, and that’s the real reason to get out of the casino.

What is happening is that after dithering for 90 months on the zero bound the Fed has run out the clock. The current business cycle expansion—as tepid as is was— is now clearly rolling over. So the Fed has no option except to sit with its eyes wide shut while desperately trying to talk-up the stock market.

And that means happy talk about the US economy, no matter how implausible or incompatible with the facts on the ground. No stock market correction or sell-off of even 5% can be tolerated at this fraught juncture.

That’s because the U.S. economy is so limp that a proper correction of the massive financial bubble the Fed and other central banks have re-inflated since March 2009 would send it careening into an outright recession. And that, in turn, would blow to smithereens all of the FOMC’s demented handiwork since September 2008, and indeed since Greenspan launched the era of Bubble Finance back in October 1987.

So when Fischer used the phrase “the incoming data looked good”, he was doing his very best impersonation of Lewis Carroll’s version of Humpty Dumpty. “Good” is exactly what our monetary politburo says it is:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

The fact is, the “lesses” have it by a long shot, but the Fed cannot even whisper a word about the giant risks, challenges and threats which loom all across the horizon.

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A Recession Is Imminent, According To Albert Edwards

Via Benzinga

Albert Edwards of SocGen (Societe Generale SA (ADR) SCGLY 5.88% has held a bearish view for quite some time and on Friday released a new note to clients, which is merely a follow-up from previous bearish reports.

Edwards said in early January that the S&P 500 index could collapse by 75 percent to the 550 level. He followed up in April by saying that a “tidal wave” of corporate default is looming and this will propel the US into a recession.

As far back as 2013, Edwards predicted that the price of gold will surge to $10,000 an ounce, the S&P 500 index will bottom at around the 450 level and 10-year U.S. Treasury yields will trade at sub-1 percent.

Why Is This Time Different?

“In the aftermath of the latest, weaker than expected, nonfarm payroll data, economists are certainly more worried,” Business Insider quoted Edwards as saying in his latest research note. “The excellent folks at Advisor Perspectives highlight the Feds Labour Market Conditions Index as suggesting a recession is imminent (the cumulative peak is an average of nine months ahead of the start of recession and we are now four months beyond a peak.”

Edwards has been expecting an “Ice Age” for stocks since 2013, which would consist of a multi-decade downturn for stocks and financial assets. The “Ice Age” is also characterized by “lower lows and lower highs for nominal economic quantities,” driving a “re-rating of government bonds and the de-rating of equities.”

“The secular bear market only ends when cyclically adjusted valuation measures reach rock bottom (such as the Shiller PE on the bottom line),” he added in his note. “Each successive recession sees huge downturns, usually to new lower lows of both prices and valuations. That is why we reiterated our view early this year that in the coming recession the S&P will bottom at 550, a 75 percent decline from current levels.”

Bottom line, the equity market is heading into a “cold, dark, and damp” space, and only time will tell how accurate his forecast is.

Initial Jobless Claims Soar Most In 11 Years To 15-Month Highs

The last nail in the MSM narrative of economic recovery. Jobs are always a lagging indicator. The retailer results this week have been disastrous. Kohl’s and Macy’s shit the bed. Consumers aren’t spending money they don’t have anymore. All those Obama jobs barely pay the bills. Obamacare is bankrupting small businesses and using all those gas savings windfalls. Now companies are handing out pink slips at a rapid pace, while gas prices have surged by 30% in the last three months. Best time to buy stocks. Right?

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/12/2016 08:36 -0400

The last great hope indicator of the bullish narrative appears to have broken as today’s initial jobless claims soars 20k to 294k – the highest since Feb 2015. Seemingly confirming the dismal payroll print, one can only wonder how long before this catches ‘down’ to the weakness in PMI/ISM survey employment data and the hard macro data. The last 3 weeks have seen initial claims soar by the most since 2005…

This is the first time claims have risen YoY since Nov 2012…

Catch ‘up’ time…

It begins!

11 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Rapidly Deteriorating Even As The Stock Market Soars

Even the doomers like Snyder get it wrong about the “soaring” stock market. Why do people believe false narratives rather than observe the pure, cold hard facts? The S&P 500 closed at 2,064 yesterday. It closed at 2,064 on November 21, 2014. The stock market hasn’t gone anywhere in 18 months. I don’t think that can be classified as “soaring”. It has gone nowhere since the Fed turned off the QE tap. As earnings continue to plunge, with no new QE in sight, and the economy in recession for the average person, the PE ratio of the market approaches unsustainable heights. I’m sure this will end well. Right?

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

We have seen this story before, and it never ends well. From mid-March until early May 2008, a vigorous stock market rally convinced many investors that the market turmoil of late 2007 and early 2008 was over and that happy days were ahead for the U.S. economy. But of course we all know what happened. It turned out that the market downturns of late 2007 and early 2008 were just “foreshocks” of a much greater crash in late 2008. The market surge in the spring of 2008 was just a mirage, and it masked rapidly declining economic fundamentals. Well, the exact same thing is happening right now. The Dow rose another 222 points on Tuesday, but meanwhile virtually every number that we are getting is just screaming that the overall U.S. economy is steadily falling apart. So don’t be fooled by a rising stock market. Just like in the spring of 2008, all of the signs are pointing to an avalanche of bad economic news in the months ahead. The following are 11 signs that the U.S. economy is rapidly deteriorating…

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LIES, LIES AND OMG, MORE LIES

It’s that time of year again. It’s open enrollment for health plans at my employer. They are biggest employer in Philly and have the most leverage possible with the insurance companies. They have such good leverage that my premiums are going up “only” 9.8% this year for a basic HMO plan. Based on what I hear from others, I should be thankful for just a 9.8% increase.

This isn’t a new development. Since I’ve been tracking all my expenditures using Quicken since 1991, I know exactly what my annual health insurance costs have been every year. Obamacare was passed in 2009 and began to be implemented in 2010. Obama declared that families could expect $2,500 of savings per year. I know for a fact my annual medical expenses were $2,000 higher in 2015 than they were in 2010.

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