President Of The Idiocracy

I'm guessing that Mike Pence will be President sooner than anyone expects. When the shit goes down, people are going to realize they just elected Bozo the clown to run the country...

The average age of Trump's new cabinet to overthrow Cuba, is about 400 years old, which is balanced out by the First Lady. Who doesn't plan to spend any time in the frumpy old White House. Because she can't wear her official uniform:

RepubliCon ultra-hypocrites spent a decade going after Bill Clinton for his indiscretions and now they elected the biggest braggart womanizer in history. 

President Camacho: "I just grab 'em by the pussy"

Babbo Natale Rally In Jeopardy

Let's see, reflationary false dawn/Cyclical headfake PLUS a looming Fed rate hike.

And just to be clear, the Fed has never actually been dumb enough to raise interest rates at this point in the cycle. 

They've held rates twice before...
Fedrate (black) with One year Treasury (red) and JnJ:

OPEC circle jerk, Wednesday.

And...

Brexit 3.0 this Sunday:

"If "no" wins in next Sunday's referendum — most polls put it about 6 percentage points ahead of the "yes" camp — market turmoil and turbulence should follow"

"Senior bankers and officials said that the worst-case scenario was where a failure of Monte Paschi's complex €5bn recapitalisation and bad-debt restructuring demanded by regulators would translate into a wider failure of confidence in Italy and imperil a market solution for its ailing banks,"

Renzi, 41, has staked his political future by suggesting he would resign if he were to lose, and the first projections of the result are due just before midnight Rome time.

Volatility in the euro against the dollar approached levels seen just after Trump’s win as markets adjusted to the possibility that a defeat for Renzi might trigger early elections and gains for Five Star Movement, a populist group that wants a referendum on Italy’s membership of the euro.

NOWHERE TO HIDE: Duped By Dunces

Idiocratic logic has reached its end game.

Best case scenario:

1) OPEC members agree to cut production

“The outcome of the meeting is likely to be some form of compromise by the medium-size and smaller producers as they are desperate to get Saudi Arabia on board, and most will assume both that they can cheat with some degree of impunity, and that observance of quotas will weaken over the course of several months"

"We'll target Q2 output and then we'll all cheat to get back to Q3 record output. They won't notice, they're proven serial idiots"

2) OPEC reaches no agreement

3) OPEC freezes output at record levels. Which is the dumbest fucking thing I've heard of in my entire life

4) Postpone until next circle jerk. Which is the same as #2

Meanwhile, the sector(s) that will do best if they don't reach an agreement:

MW: "Here's How Ugly It Could Get"

"If doomsday happens, the bright spots will be airlines and ocean shipment companies, both which benefit from weak oil."

Airlines have already priced in $0 oil:

And blind man says, Marine Transportation doesn't benefit from lower oil. Because oil is carried by Marine Transport.

Duh.

What does that leave...

Big Cap Tech/Internet
Retail
Financials
Small Caps
High Beta
Low Beta/Yield
Biotech/Pharma
Emerging Markets
Rest of World

Utilities

Keynesian bombing of foreigners

Where Wall Street hides at the end of every economic cycle...

The Zero Sum Dow Casino aka. Greater Tool Theory

Convincing dedicated morons that a global Ponzi economy featuring unprecedented wealth inequality is a zero sum game, is an impossible task. They want to find out for themselves. Likewise, convincing those same morons that the Dow Casino is a zero sum Ponzi scheme is equally impossible. They want to find out for themselves. 

Therefore, once they find out the second inconvenient reality, they will instantly realize they were also wrong on the first inconvenient reality. In the meantime, the entirety of the lamestream media were wrong on Brexit and wrong on Trump, in the span of just four months, so the noose is getting ever-tighter on the de facto Idiocracy, in broad daylight. 

Zero sum casino visualized:

As U.S. stocks climb, the "yield" or return on investment has been going lower. For the first time ever, in any cycle...

S&P Earnings yield (red) with global GDP growth:

Meanwhile, momentum traders make any excuse to buy stocks, solely under the auspice of the greater fool theory. Because there is no other reason to own stocks at this juncture other than to expect an even bigger dunce to come after. Only to find out the biggest dunce is already in the market....

"Fortunately, while value issues outperform growth titles in both small- and large-stock segments, blah, blah, blah..."

Small cap growth / value ratio:

Small Caps / large caps with small banks (black):

What does all of this mean? It means there's no way out...

Dry Ships gives us just the latest example of greater fool theory in action...

The word from Vienna is that things are not going well for OPEC. In fact, they are going surprisingly poorly.

"We're going to need somebody to go in and rescue it. This could end early tomorrow unless Khalid" — Saudi oil minister Khalid al-Falih — "can come in and restore order

"What I hear is kind of crazy. The fear in town is it's Doha redux. Everybody's worst nightmare," she said.

The Idiocracy is being buried in real-time, by their own serial bullshit...

Ponzi World Is Running Out of People To Exploit

According to a tabloid prophecy circulating via internet, the U.S. economy will collapse as soon as the last true Communist, Fidel Castro, dies. The irony would be biblical since we all know that this global Ponzi Scheme is a Socialist conspiracy. Because what else could it be?

Let me start by saying that I am not an apologist for Communism, Capitalism, Socialism or any other 'ism. My forthcoming book will make clear on that subject. However, I'm waiting to publish it until the Idiocracy at large shits a sufficiently large brick to clear some of the low hanging detritus and otherwise command some attention. 

According to Margaret Thatcher, the gibe against Socialism was that "eventually you run out of other people's money". Well right back at ya honey, because when it comes to global Ponzi Capitalism - eventually you run out of people to exploit. And 'sadly' we've finally reached that latent juncture. 

And yet, I'm still stumbling across ass wipe written by boy-men blaming this global ponzi scheme on "Socialism":

"the left is hell bent on stripping those who produce of their liberty and assets"

Too late. Corporations already did that. Where did this narrative come from, 1975? You can fool Nascar RepubliCons every day all day, but unfortunately you can't fool everyone. 

Apparently it was all a Socialist scheme to hand the entire planet over to Multinational corporations for fun and profit. Trump's totally unforeseen election was another Socialist conspiracy; and 1% of citizenry having more wealth than everyone else combined, well you know...what else could it be, we can't possibly blame extreme greed. Because greed is good, everyone knows that. 

Sure. Could it be that we live in a society that is wholly devoid of conscience and is now caught between false narratives - on the left and right, neither of which explains how we got here, nor provides a solution for how to move forward? We are literally surrounded by false narratives proferred by charlatans who themselves don't seem to comprehend that we are in the advanced stages of Ponzi, hence much of what they deem to "believe in" only exists as a function of their willingness to extrapolate collapse into the indefinite future. Most if not all of what they are clinging to is already gone or on the verge of getting wiped off the map. An entire way of life that is wholly insolvent. Their egos have muscle memory where the fantasy appendage of national 'greatness' no longer exists.  

Getting back to the half-read article cited, never confuse acts of extreme desperation aka. confiscating physical cash, with a 'conspiracy'. Being a society of corrupt dunces is not a plan. 

Given all of the asinine ploys our thought dealers have attempted so far, I personally believe that mass printing and distribution of physical currency is merely a matter of time. 

It's their last option, and it will only come after most of the fake wealth has already vanished into thin air.  

Occupy Island Reversal of Fortune

Forrest Trump brought the Santa rally forward by an inconvenient month. This entire Ponzi scheme now hinges on OPEC. What could go wrong?

Deja Vu of last year, the dollar reversed at the beginning of December, two weeks ahead of the Fed meeting...

There's only one problem - EVERYTHING else thinks it's the end of December...

Biotech

Emerging Markets

NYSE breadth momentum

S&P breadth

Internet stocks

Retail stocks aka. Amazon

Risk Impairity

Low volatility implosion funds

Real Estate

And the entire rest of the world...

On the "bright side", Utilities "led the rally" again today...

And General Dynamics was up again today...

Appetite For MAXIMUM Self-Destruction

Home gamers are about to self-destruct at the hands of their "trusted advisors", who have the veracity of a dart throwing chimp, and the integrity of a used car salesman...

First off, despite all of the congratulatory backslapping over Buy the Fake Dow (BTFD) at all time highs, under the surface, active traders got systematically obliterated this year, which I showed recently via the hedge fund tracking ETF:

Conflict of redemption. Visualized:

Meanwhile, SillyCon Valley is shitting bricks right now...

Here we see IPO proceeds by year (Current year is year to date through 11/28):
http://www.renaissancecapital.com/ipohome/press/ipovolume.aspx

Here we see retail broker Schwab with the IPO mutual fund...

"Aw fuck, not this again!!!"

Yes, this IPO Mutual Fund

Here we see Rydex Bearish asset level with the fake Dow...

Momentum is the ONLY THING that matters right now to stock gamblers...

Value Line’s benchmark hasn’t been setting records this month, even as the S&P, Dow and other better-known indexes have been leaping to new highs. It is instead continuing to wrestle with milestones from the late 1990s...

"That implies the rally for U.S. stocks has room to run."

Let's see, the average stock is not participating in this rally, which either means that the rally has room to run, or everything about this rally is totally fake, especially the people who HAVE TO believe in it. Choose carefully...

Globalization Is Bankrupt

Morally, intellectually, and financially...

The Corporate Idiocracy is too dumb to survive. We're watching Darwin's magic in real-time:

"I am going to cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy — including shale energy and clean coal — creating many millions of high-paying jobs"

With those words last week, Trump gave zero incentive to OPEC and non-OPEC producers alike to voluntarily reduce production. In other words, his idea of helping the oil industry is to subsidize more capacity in the middle of history's worst oil glut. The Idiocracy's biggest mistake is never questioning how people who are as dumb as a post can know everything. Including the impossible.

When the U.S. first started running massive trade deficits vis-a-vis Japan, many economists at the time howled in protest, knowing full well that a secular trade deficit implies axiomatic debt accumulation. Fast forward a few decades and the trade deficit is seldom mentioned outside of hollow campaign speeches. The global multinational arbitrage estate sale IS the de facto business of the day. 

In the meantime, Jeff Bezos has nearly perfected his strategy of entirely bypassing the U.S. economy by sourcing in the cheapest Third World sweatshops, shipping to automated warehouses and now seeking to drop ship to yuppy door steps by drone. 

Black Friday may have been a bust at the mall, but sales were booming online, hitting new records this weekend. All well and good except none of it stopped to have any impact on the U.S. economy aside from increasing debt levels. Amazon's zero sum take no prisoners strategy comes at the expense of mall retailers who hire real people, albeit at low wages.

In other words, it's the end-game for a corporatized Idiocracy that believes in the mystical powers of the jobless consumer, which is an obligatory fabrication created by the charlatans of Supply Side Economics.

And it only ends with one outcome: The bankruptcy of Globalization itself which is approaching the moment of revelation. When stoned gamblers realize they own shares in worthless companies selling merchandise to bankrupt "consumers".

And what does it mean to have record online sales? It means your stock gets sold, because it's already priced in...and because in the casino, "more" is never enough...

Retail

In Clowns We Trust

The best case scenario this week is that OPEC "agrees" to a cut in output amounting to 1.1% of global daily output. The exact same amount that output has risen since September...

And while that's not happening, junk bonds, Emerging Markets, Energy stocks and oil itself - all massively leveraged to serial OPEC bullshit - will be getting marked down to year-end reality for the third year in a row:

Global oil production
https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/global_oil.cfm

While stoned gamblers are ALL IN for their Santa Trump Rally...

Dow with investor cash balances:

While the Fed is left cock in hand for their punk ass .25% rate increase. I mean "reflation" for dedicated serial fucktards with the attention span of a coked up flea...

This Week In Ponzi: The Sum Of All Lies

This week, a convergence of "events" will reveal that there are no sectors left to support the Dow Casino...

So let's run through sector by sector to reveal the fantasies and delusions underlying each sector...

Start with Energy stocks which I just covered. Energy is massively leveraged to Oil which is massively leveraged to OPEC bullshit...

Banks, Financials, Small caps:
Just enjoyed the biggest three week rally since October 2008, however, the yield curve crashed this week, leaving a chasmic divergence between banks and interest rates.

The Russell/Dow ratio with small banks:

Retail
Likewise retail has had a massive rally for no reason whatsoever. However, Black Friday sales are coming in lower than last year, which portends badly for the sector...

Kohl's Department Stores:

Transports
Transports have been the least-performing sector, especially Marine Transportation. However, now that Dry Ships and the other junk stocks in this sector have finished their 1,000% parabolic rally to nowhere, the sector will roll over...

Dry Ships:

Railroads

Yield
High dividend stocks got monkey hammered by the Trump reflation rally, but bounced this past week. Just remember that Utilities are "leading"...

Utilities:

Big Cap Tech
Likewise, the tech sector was shellacked by Trump and the rotation from the *new* economy, back to the Eisenhower economy...

Biotech/Pharma
Had a massive run after the election because it was clear that the nascent price fixing probe would be  overturned by the clean-sweep Republican Congress. Now, that corruption-based bounce is ending...

Housing
Housing stocks bounced recently, but are now rolling over due to higher interest rates compliments of Forrest-Trump-O-Nomics...

Toll Brothers, McMansions:

Emerging Markets/China
As I also wrote late this week, the third episode of Fed Policy by Police Squad will final implode EM/China:

What's left?

Keynesian Bombing of Foreigners:
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics versus Foodstamps:

Guns AND Foodstamps
Obama's legacy visualized. Foodstamps dipped at the end because they were cut twice by Congress...

And of course, High Beta
High Beta is the last refuge of Wall Street trying to make up for a year of underperformance, in five weeks...

Good luck with that, fucking morons: