Top Performing IPO Has No Revenue

Janet Yellen: "Biotech valuations are stretched"
The Yanis Varoufakis school of observation.

Market cap: $2.1 billion

And here's an $8 billion Biotech with no revenue...

Catch a Falling Knife

Since December, Etraders have spent $41.5 billion playing Jed Clampett via the USO oil ETF

Now they are underwater and the oil keeps flowing faster than ever. Another leg down in oil and the S&P is toast.

Impatient for Collapse: MAXIMUM SHOCK AND AWE

Global financial markets are anxious to determine if the Fed will drop the word "patient" from interest rate guidance this week

The trap is set, because the 'stealth' bear market started last July:

Commodities:

Short Dollar: Human History's Largest Short Squeeze

$9 trillion of offshore dollar debt. 50% higher than 2008. Thank you Bernankenstein. Anyone having dollar liability and assets in another currency is fucked company. It's subprime x7.

Barrons, Mar. 13, 2015

Global Markets Versus Reality, The Great Divide

[According to] the Bank of International Settlements, ... non-U.S. borrowers have increased their dollar indebtedness by some 50% since the financial crisis, to $9 trillion from $6 trillion."

"And as the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank are engaging in their own quantitative easing, pushing the greenback higher against the yen and euro, these dollar debtors are getting pressured by the prospect of having to pay back their loans in dearer dollars. In trading parlance, it’s a classic short squeeze."

The Scylla and Charybdis of Diverging Interest Rate Policy

Again, this idea that U.S. interest rates will now go higher while every other country's interest rates will go lower, while $9 trillion in offshore dollar debt gets dismembered from both ends at the same time, is a fantasy of the first order. In 2008, Central bank policy was coordinated. Not now:

All compliments of six years at 0% and $4 trillion of quantitative easing. 

Free money !!!

Bounding Into The Abyss

One of the problems with psychopaths is that they can never admit when they don't have a fucking clue what they are doing 

The ECB started its much anticipated bond buying program this week, the goal being to buy up sovereign bonds, thereby lowering interest rates, and "stimulating the economy"

The Post-2008 European wreckovery visualized:

German Bond Yields, since 2008
Interest rates are only about 3% lower than they were during Lehman...

Liquidity Trap

"A liquidity trap is a situation, described in Keynesian economics, in which injections of cash into the private banking system by a central bank fail to decrease interest rates and hence make monetary policy ineffective. Common characteristics of a liquidity trap are interest rates that are close to zero and fluctuations in the money supply that fail to translate into fluctuations in price levels."

Japanification: A society that lies to itself constantly while everything goes down the drain.

Social Mood Is Turning Down: Deflating Back To Reality

In Y2K they sold worthless IPOs, amid great enthusiasm

In 2003-2007, they sold toxic subprime mortgages to great enthusiasm

Post-2008, they sold the Middle Class amid decade-high enthusiasm:

The Monetization of An Etrader
The red line is the equity put/call ratio inverted. The black line is the internal health of the NYSE vis-a-vis % of stocks above 200 DMA. Speculative optimism peaked last July and has been waning since:

When the Idiocracy realizes that they were conned again by the exact same psychopaths as last time, the ammunition will fly.

Bubble Refraction: Blinded By Bullshit

Every piece of information flowing out of the lamestream media is distorted by the bubble

The headline selection itself - Missing airliners, bombing foreigners, special interest stories, terrorism, Bill Cosby. Anything to avoid reality. That's what bubbles do, they give everyone an excuse to ignore what is really going on in the world and instead focus on minor diversions that are blown out of all proportion. We're above worrying, we outsourced that problem. Why should we be concerned about the economy? That's a detail.  

The lamestream media floods the Idiocracy with constant irrelevant bullshit:

And all along the risks accumulate quietly in the background while converts to the newfound optimism grow by leaps and bounds. Soon everyone is 'bought in' to the bubble, whether through stocks, or a new house, more debt, upgraded lifestyle. At that point, the bubble becomes a self-reinforcing momentum machine - no external stimulus needed. Although ongoing trillions of Central Bank liquidity can only add nitrous oxide to the fuel mix. 

Ultimately, people take on so much risk that they can only see the bubble. They are incapable of seeing the risk. They are incapable of envisioning a future state that doesn't involve 'more', because they wouldn't be solvent in a future that doesn't bring more.

Pessimism (aka. realism) is anti-social behaviour
And our society encourages optimism, it's the choice for winners. Pessimism is for losers - it's strictly anti-social behaviour. Everyone wants to maintain a stiff upper lip, in order to avoid ostracization. To admit that 'this' is not working is to admit personal failure. Somehow it's working for everyone else except 'me'. Personally, I don't have this problem, since I don't have any friends in the first place. So I'm not encumbered by the need to impress someone who doesn't exist. 

We are bred to take risk and strive for 'more'. Ninety percent of the time, optimism works great and pays off. Ten percent of the time, optimism is a lethal bias that ends in self-implosion. 

We're in one of those times now when unfounded optimism is lethal. They can't see the bubble, because they are the bubble. 

Save, Survive, Thrive

There are three phases to this clusterfuck

We are currently in the pre-collapse phase of saving as much liquid assets as possible and otherwise paying down debt, in preparation for the collapse. 

The Thinning of the Herd

Post-collapse we will enter the survival phase by which we use our powers of conservation and our savings to ensure that we come out the other end of this catastrophe, intact. Any head start is better than nothing. The ability to maintain optimism and otherwise prevail through adversity is critical, at all levels of income or wealth. Dopamine addiction means depression and 'self-abandonment'; a compromised will and ability to survive. The worst thing to do is to panic and make short-term irrational decisions. There will be plenty of other people to do that already. Not everyone survives what comes next. Not everyone will want to. 

Finally, responsibility

Past the debt liquidation phase (which is absolutely critical to the survival of this species and this planet), 'this' generation whichever one survives, will finally take responsibility for building a new economy based upon long-term sustainability, wherein inputs equal outputs, economically and environmentally. The days of the multinational marketing shell extracting obscene profits by buying in one locale from factory slaves and selling in another locale to debt slaves, will be over. What the *new* economy should look like, is in the eye of the beholder. 

Suffice to say that all of the 'new' economic models will seem to work for a while, but only the ones that learn from the lessons of history will survive in the longer-term. Communism, Socialism and Capitalism all failed for the exact same reason. They all seemed to work fine for a while, but were eventually hijacked to work for a smaller and smaller insider clique at the expense of the broader majority. They all turned into a zero sum game between the few and the many. Apologists would say they were 'bastardized' along the way, - ok, so what, who is to say they won't be bastardized all over again? Self-interest has a way of hijacking every model, so accountability has to be somehow assured. Under Globalization, that relentless erosion of the majority's well-being has been continuing for decades, but always carefully obfuscated from mainstream view. We live in a fabricated Matrix in which everything is made to appear much better than it really is. A generation of dedicated fakers and liars, no one willing to admit that the "dream" is not working for them. 

Finally, let's keep in mind that there are many people out there who are all ready well ahead of the game with respect to survival. For them, there can be no collapse, because there was no bubble. The thin veneer of civilization will be peeled back in short order for all to see, and we can assume that the accumulated inhumanity, desensitization, and decadence won't be pretty. 

Nothing can get better until it gets worse.

Why Iran Hates The West. And Always Should

The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) aka. "British Petroleum":

"By 1951 Iranian support for nationalisation of the AIOC was intense. Grievances included the small fraction of revenues Iran received. In 1947, for example, AIOC reported after-tax profits of £40 million ($112 million)—and the contractual agreement entitled Iran to just £7 million or 17.5% of profits from Iranian oil. In addition, conditions for Iranian oil workers and their families were very bad."

"Later in March 1951, the Iranian parliament (the Majlis) voted to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and its holdings, and shortly thereafter Iranians democratically elected a widely respected statesman and champion of nationalisation, Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister"

"Britain was unable to subvert Mossadegh as its embassy and officials had been evicted from Iran in October 1952, but successfully appealed in the U.S. to exaggerated anti-communist sentiments, depicting both Mossadegh and Iran as unstable and likely to fall to communism as they were weakened"

The anti-Mossadeq plan was orchestrated under the code-name 'Operation Ajax' by CIA, and 'Operation Boot' by SIS (MI6). In August the American CIA with the help of bribes to politicians, soldiers, mobs, and newspapers, and information from the British embassy and secret service, organized a riot which gave the Shah an excuse to remove Mosaddeq.

1979: The Iranian Revolution...

The Recovery Has Been Cancelled Due to Lack of an Economy

This will be the first non-recovery in United States history. The U.S. will not be raising interest rates while the rest of the world is lowering them, to believe so is asinine.

Despite Fed tough talk, there will be no interest rate normalization in this cycle, for the first time in United States history:

Fed Funds Rate: Turning Japanese

This wreckovery is running on bullshit...