American Idolatry

A reality tv host for President. You can't make this shit up. Here comes Running Man...

I for one am glad Trump is President. He embodies everything that is wrong with this era, so he deserves the honour of taking this Roman circus to its grave: he's fake, arrogant, ignorant, vain, narcissistic, semi-literate, buffoonish and morally void. Not to say that he is alone in these attributes by any means. Only to say that it's rare to find so many asinine qualities in one reality tv host...

What has changed in the past 10 years since 2008 aside from further debt accumulation? This society has become a lot dumber, that's been the primary change. It was an obligatory trade-off post-Lehman to pretend that we could fix all of the problems by repeating all of the same failed solutions.

I was ruminating on this 2008-deja-vu fake reflation dilemma confronting today's Fed:

As we see, unlike today, back then the CPI was at a decade high which confounded monetary policy at that time. Note the gap between inflation and short-term rates then versus now. Having normalized policy, they were attempting to ease the end-of-cycle decompression from transitory "inflation" to bubble bust. Of course it didn't work very well in the event. This time, having NOT normalized earlier in the cycle, today's policy dunces are trying the brick wall approach instead...

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that "reflation" in 2008 was transitory to say the least. As was the bubble in oil driving it all...

Now of course, the names have changed but the dunces remain the same. Trump just nominated a hawkish Fed chief to unwind all of the economic benefits from his tax cut. Can anyone tell this guy he's as dumb as a fucking post? I suppose they've tried.

For their part, the Fed are merely chasing the ghost of reflation, because it's impossible to reflate an economy that's been outsourced to China.

As they say, the cure for high prices is oil futures collapse...

And speaking of oil implosion, the World ex-U.S. is tracing out the same fractal as 2014, which of course was the last time oil super-imploded. This chart is all any gambler needs, to see that the world is sliding back into bear market:

Note that in 2014, the world tagged the 200 day (red), bounced back to the 50 day (blue), and then imploded lower. S&P volatility is a tad more elevated this time around...

In summary, record bond shorts are now massively leveraged to record oil longs. In their own happy little fake reflationary circle jerk.