"Dude, Where's the Economy?"

The recovery has been postponed until the economy returns from China

So that's what this was all about...

1 Year Treasury Rates:

Another year of corporate "synergies" and 0% interest rates, should fix everything

Atlas Shirked

Davos Breakout Session: 

"How the obscenely wealthy can escape the consequences of obscene wealth" 

The Guardian Jan. 23, 2015

As inequality soars, the nervous super rich are already planning their escapes

"With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said."

Unfortunately, New Zealand is part of the Ponzi Scheme

You don't escape from a Ponzi Scheme, and there is no way to stop it from collapsing. At its most fundamental level, a Ponzi Scheme is merely an accumulated liability with no offsetting asset. Billionaire wealth is an illusion, it's a fiction. It was printed out of thin air by Central Banks and upon collapse, it will return to its original state - nothing. Will there be a sequence and order to the financial asset "liquidation"? I'm counting on it; however nothing is assured. Suffice to say no one is immune from the consequences of this Globalized disaster. 

Not even the people who primarily caused it:

The top 85 billunaires own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion slaves.

Ayn Rand would be so very proud.

Denialation By Ponzi Scheme

All societies live and die by their asinine assumptions, this one will be no different.

These are the basic questions economists should have asked to spare themselves from bankruptcy:

Q: How can we print so much money without (hyper)inflation?

There are two reasons why Money Printing (aka. QE) never led to hyperinflation, as it did in the Weimar Republic and to a lesser extent the 1970s 'Stagflation':

The first reason of course is mass Third World outsourcing, as depicted by capacity utilization below. Today's output gap is chasmic, and under the current "free trade" paradigm it will remain chasmic. There is an unending supply of cheap Third World labour to tap into:

Muppets to the Slaughter

The lemmings just ran off the cliff

CNBC: Jan. 27th, 2015:

ZH: Jan. 27th, 2015

2015 earnings will be lower than 2014, which in turn were lower than 2013

Perfect Timing:

"More lenders are lowering down-payment requirements, allowing borrowers to commit 3%—or even less—of a home’s purchase price to get a mortgage. Many had been requiring down payments of at least 20% since the recession began."

"The moves come as mortgage originations declined substantially last year. Lenders gave out an estimated $1.12 trillion in mortgages in 2014, down 39% from a year earlier and the lowest amount since 1997"

The fiscal trade attention deficit. Fatal.

U.S. Recession

Treasury Bonds have been screaming recession for months. Now sector by sector, stocks are indicating recession as well.

The recent Dow high was December 29th. Back in 2007, stocks peaked six weeks before the recession officially started. Some sectors peaked before the recession started, some peaked after. Many of the sectors that peaked AFTER the recession had begun last time, have already peaked months ago.
Energy exploration is the new subprime, which just crashed taking heavy construction, industrial machinery, basic materials and energy with it.

Casinos down. Booze and Cigarettes now leading.
Brewers are the only sector that peaked AFTER Lehman in 2008, because everyone wanted to get shit faced, one last time. I think we all see where I'm already going with this...

Skynet: Controller of the Matrix

MW: Jan. 26, 2015

Russians Tried to Destabilize HFT

Like trying to make McDonald's unhealthy

First, off Russians programmed HFT. Secondly, it's already pre-programmed for instability, as we have found out about 1,000 times since 2010. There is no point in destabilizing something that is already inherently unstable. For the record, the programmers were American Russians, not to be confused with Russian Russians.

While Etraders were mesmerized by the Dow, the post-2008 economic crater was being dug twice as deep

How Skynet constructs the Dow illusion on minimal volume:
First find some nearby market moving 'event', then sell volatility against the event (ECB, Fed, BOJ etc.). Next, take away liquidity (depth) to slow volume down to nothing, so institutions can't sell in any size, which lowers realized volatility. Then use the futures to walk the market higher, running all stops and taking out all day-trading shorts. Cover the volatility short after the event. Do this long enough until everyone capitulates and volume is essentially zero, like now:

Black Swan Inevitability
Unfortunately, this con job has succeeded at convincing the vast majority that it can continue forever. Life outside of the Matrix (aka. the linear extrapolation of the impossible), brings its own health benefits, but it's not for the attention deficit. Betting against human history's largest bubble, is not a game for those who seek the seductive comfort of conformity.

Buy The Fucking All Time Lie

S&P with Fed Balance Sheet

Unfortunately both stopped going up at the exact same time

S&P With Rydex Asset Allocation (Bull: Bear) Ratio

The usual bagholders showed up right on time:

Fiddling While Rome Burns

Another Davos Ponzi Party Over.

The failed states are stacking up like cord wood while everyone pretends this is all "business as usual". This week it was Yemen. Next week...[Insert any country here].

Today's "elites" can't face the problem, given that they are the problem. 85 billionaires now having as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people. History's largest ponzi scheme without any possible comparison. 

Microsoft with Fed Balance sheet

Both peaked at the same time. Coincidence?

Given enough time and neglect, most problems fix themselves, and the people who caused them.

Megalomaniac Overdrive: The God Complex @Full Insanity

Bring back Rambo - He hasn't lost one war yet. He even won Vietnam after it was over.

CNN Jan. 24, 2015

Troops on front lines in Iraq?
Pentagon says yes (again)...

Jan. 25, 2015:

Troops in Yemen? 

Senators McCain and Feinstein call for boots on the ground.

Jan. 24, 2015:

Troops in Ukraine? 
U.S. Special Forces in Ukraine

When your own country is falling apart, it's Manifest destiny to fix everyone else's instead.

Success is purely a function of how many people you bomb. 

Only huge amounts of bombing will win radicalized youth over to junk food and junk culture.

Spectacle 2015: Collapse of The Globalized Empire

404-Plane Not Found.

WSJ, Jan. 25: Malaysian Airlines Site Hacked

ISIS will conveniently infotain the Idiocracy while everything implodes in real-time.