If you think there is an epic amount of hyperbolic bullshit right now, you are not imagining things. Market manipulation is off its meds. How useful is it to keep "stocks" bullshitted to all time highs while the sheeple are robbed blind by proven criminals? After all, if today's risks were actually priced in, price signal would surely cause them to prematurely question this record con job. The retirement crisis is a primary example of where everything good has been swapped out for everything fraudulent. For fun and profit.
Investing has never been riskier, but you would never know it listening to today's financial used-car-salesmen. All anyone needs to do is buy and hold, maintain faith in money printing, and believe in imagined realities. Simple. Because in Disney markets, as long as you never sell, you can never take a loss. And of course you can never take a gain. A lesson in unrealized gains that took 25 years to break-even in 1929.
Hugh Hendry Explains Disney Markets:
"There are times when an investor has no choice but to behave as though he believes in things that don't necessarily exist. For us, that means being willing to be long risk assets in the full knowledge of two things: that those assets may have no qualitative support; and second, that this is all going to end painfully. The good news is that mankind clearly has the ability to suspend rational judgment long and often."
I wanted to explain in plain terms the reality behind today's retirement crisis. For that purpose, I noticed that Josh Brown, often featured on CNBS, took a swipe at the index-bubble theory, saying that Michael Burry should know better. I suggest Josh Brown should know better himself if he took time away from selling used Pintos. By ignoring trade war risk, global recession risk, market concentration risk, liquidity risk, interest rate (non-normalization) risk, earnings risk, record corporate debt, and record Federal debt, he finds no such bubble to be found. Stay the course of being fat, dumb, and happy.
That's his entire argument.
He divides recent investment history into three eras - the traditional pension era. The 1990-2007 "active management" era. And the more recent passive management era.
He maintains that this current passive indexing era is merely a return to the good old days when working people focused on working instead of investing. Which is a total fabrication. Back during the traditional pension era, working people didn't have to worry about their investments because they were guaranteed a certain monthly pension amount upon retirement. This was called "defined benefit". It was the job of the pension manager to allocate capital among asset classes and rebalance as appropriate. It was passive to the employee and very active on the part of the pension manager.
The "system" that abides today is the exact opposite. It's called "defined contribution" meaning the investor knows how much is going in monthly, but has no idea what lump sum will come out of the casino years from now. Which is why retirement anxiety is so high right now. Today, the "passive investor" is someone who generally does nothing to manage their investments, neither prudently allocating among asset classes nor diversifying within stocks. Instead, they are passively indexed to an ever-narrower field of high risk momentum stocks - unknowingly becoming less and less diversified.
While the smart money hits their bid.
Exiting Trump Casino.
Gamble at your own risk.
"Make Big Oil Implode Again"
"Duke Energy — the largest utility in the U.S., which for years had resisted renewables — announced this week that it would reach an interim target of 50% carbon emission reductions by 2030, 100% by 2050. Or that Daimler, credited with inventing the modern gasoline engine, announced it will cease all research and development related to internal combustion in favor of electrification."
Exxon Mobil dropped out of the S&P 500′s top 10 stocks for the first time in nine decades"
