First, this just in:
Speculators buy financial assets AHEAD of the recovery under the assumption that fundamentals will catch up later. However, unlike every other cycle in U.S. history, in this cycle, that never happened. Nevertheless, that did not stop them from mis-allocating capital:
The cycle of greed and fear with Average stock (red) and Fed Funds rate (black):
Credit markets go through their own "Minsky" cycle:
In this cycle, we face Ponzi risk from subprime auto loans, junk bonds, Municipal bonds, European Ponzi bonds, corporate buyback loans, Emerging Markets, Leveraged loans, and China.
"Speculative finance units are units that can meet their payment commitments on "income account" on their liabilities, even as they cannot repay the principle out of income cash flows. Such units need to "roll over" their liabilities"
"For Ponzi units, the cash flows from operations are not sufficient to fulfill either the repayment of principle or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations."
"Over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance."
"The financial instability hypothesis is a model of a capitalist economy which does not rely upon exogenous shocks to generate business cycles of varying severity. The hypothesis holds that business cycles of history are compounded out of the internal dynamics of capitalist economies, and (ii) the system of interventions and regulations that are designed to keep the economy operating within reasonable bounds. "
This is not a Ponzi scheme, this is a super Ponzi:
