Currency Crisis: High Alert

These largely ignored dislocations in Emerging Market currencies are exactly where we should be looking for the source of the next major global asset crash...

Deflation v.s. Hyperinflation: Purge the Excess

[Updated: August 30th, 2013]
I just read this article on ZH stating that we are doomed to suffer an endless cycle of bubbles and financial crises. Unfortunately, this bubble/bust hypothesis is not a prediction, it's an investment strategy. The current bubble resulted from Wall Street's massive bailout, a stooge Fed, a corporate class willing to throw their colleagues under the bus, and politicians and media willing to turn a blind eye to the entire fiasco. Anyone who thinks that these same factors will obtain after yet another financial collapse, has their head up their own ass. Only the elites don't understand that this time will be "different"...

Belief in the Impossible: Comfort-Seeking for Old Men

In the movie Prometheus, a highly evolved species, having originally created humanity, was planning to return to earth to destroy all humans. Apparently humanity's hundred thousand+ year killing spree, having wiped out almost every other species, and destroying the planet, and killing its own kind at an ever-escalating rate, had convinced the higher species to correct its own mistake. Good idea.

The Corporate Sociopath

We are witnessing in real time the inevitable manic blow-off top in the multi-decade orgy of corporate excess. No one should be the least bit surprised that public corporations are the ultimate embodiment of sociopathic behaviour. After all, the incentives to behave in a single-minded profit-seeking manner were purposely embedded in the corporate business structure. At least that's what I was taught at Business School...

Is This a Great Fucking System? Or What?

As we await the inevitable crackle of gunfire when stewed masses awaken from their Kardashian-watching food coma to realize that global elites sold everything that wasn't bolted down, we are reminded daily of the overwhelming depths of depravity of the current crony capitalist "system". Today, Steve Ballmer resigned from Microsoft and the stock is up 7% on the news. Apparently he just made over $750 million due to the spike in the stock arising from his own resignation. You can't make this shit up...

Reality Check 2013: No Man's Land

Social Mood Already Peaked - A Long Time Ago...

The fundamental premise of Elliot Wave Theory is that the stock market is the ultimate barometer of social mood, hence wave patterns in the stock market represent the ebb and flow of euphoria and despair. Therefore, I was confounded this week when presented with two different EW predictions - one saying U.S. markets were going higher, the other saying they were going lower. Which of these two predictions would most accurately predict the peak in social mood and hence the Dow? The answer of course is - neither. The U.S. stock market is no longer an accurate barometer for global social mood because social mood peaked a long time ago. Right now, broader society is merely experiencing a manic short-term, Dow-induced sugar rush sponsored by Central Banks and HFT Bots. Only Wall Street and billionaires are at new all time highs in wealth and confidence...

The Hunger Games Economy: Anarchy is on Deck

Extreme poverty is spreading rampantly across history's wealthiest country even though asset values have never been higher and the ultra-wealthy have never been richer. The bread crumbs falling off of the table are no longer sustaining the growing ranks of people discarded by the global ponzi scheme. The Central Bank engineered sugar high in social mood is rolling over concurrent with the stock market which means false euphoria is on the verge of turning to realization and rage. If people are suffering now with asset values at all time highs, then mass poverty on an unprecedented scale will occur after the crash.

Brace yourself. It's going to get Fucking Ugly. There is zero doubt about it...

Pre-occupy Wall Street: Self-Assured-Destruction

The dunces who ignored and/or derided OWS, have assured Wall Street's collapse. Under the aegis of "careful what you wish for", the Idiocracy got its wish to leave Wall Street alone and otherwise maintain the status quo. Wall Street can't be saved from itself anyway - it's too corrupt, too powerful, too connected, but most importantly too greedy to be changed. Left alone it will continue on its merry path towards self-destruction...

How to Become A Third World Nation

Exactly 40 Years Ago, The U.S. Economy Hit a Crucial Fork in The Road

In 1973, for the first time in U.S. history, median inflation-adjusted wages for men began to stagnate. Women's average wages continued to increase, but mostly because they have always been lower than men's...

The Economy is Deflating - The "Bond Bubble" Is Bullshit...

Those pushing the Treasury bond "bubble" thesis were merely advancing their own interests and otherwise ignoring the basic facts staring them in the face. The reality is that during the periods when the Fed has been active, bond prices have fallen (interest rates rose), but as soon as the Fed takes its foot off the gas then bonds rise and interest rates fall. All of which is highly consistent with the the fact that this sick and broken economy is already in deep deflation...

Obama Is Mayor McJob

A Totally Bogus "Recovery"
This entire four year "recovery" is one massive lie propagated by apologists for the status quo. Unfortunately, an economy does not consist of borrowing ludicrous amounts of money to buy millions of temporary part-time jobs, while legacy industrial capacity is shipped offshore. Yet somehow a mystical combination of the Dow levitating to a new high and corporate profits at unprecedented obscene levels, has convinced the Idiocracy that the economy is improving. Every other statistic, including jobs, is moving in the wrong direction. Today was another monthly jobs report. As usual, the headline number of ~162,000 new jobs, was totally meaningless. As ZH reports, fully 77% of the jobs created so far this year were part-time McJobs...

The Only Three Things That Matter Right Now

I just read on ZH that only one factor - long-term interest rates matters right now. I submit that there are three levers in this equation which when they start moving in the wrong direction will end this latent clusterfuck post haste...

The Big, Bigger, and Biggest Bubbles

Most society's that have an asset bubble are flattened for decades or more - one and done. Think of Japan and the Nikkei in the late 1980s. Since that bust, their economy and markets have gone nowhere for a quarter of a century. 

Somehow, this Idiocratic society has managed to manufacture three of history's largest asset bubbles in a row - each one of greater magnitude than the last. I assume that this is some sort of a record...