Saturday, November 30, 2019

Stolen Money: The Secret To Effortless Wealth

Those who believe this is all just "corruption as usual", are about to learn a lesson in morality they can't afford...

95% of the morally challenged approve of this con job, thank you very much:




Three rate cuts, $300 billion in Fed-printed money, and $1 trillion in inter-generational (deficit) theft later and the year of free money is reaching for the best gain since the Asian financial crisis, 1997. The $200 trillion question - does Santa reward fraud, corruption, and rapacious criminality in Trump Casinos?

Historically, no - they all failed for the exact same reason: Too much borrowed money chasing too much bullshit. This one will be no exception.

The chasmic Federal deficit is hiding recession.

"GDP"











No surprise, China is now hardening their trade stance in response to Trump signing the Hong Kong support bill. Of course, many observers assumed there would be "no backlash" from this gambit. Apparently not willing to wait until the weekend to discover otherwise.

Sunday:



"Trump’s signing of the Hong Kong bills presented by Congress did not help foster the first stage of a deal"

This week's entire rally was predicated upon this fake news from Faux News:








Crude oil is at key support



"Oil prices tanked early on Black Friday on rumors that OPEC’s leading members aren’t willing to deepen output cuts."

Bloomberg estimates that Russia hasn’t fully complied with the deal for 8 months in a row."





The real reason OPEC can't agree to cut production:




"Energy independence"





Ponzi reflation is rolling over













"The forward price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500, the most common indicator for market valuation that measures current share price relative to per-share earnings estimates for the next 12 months, has climbed to levels last seen around December’s monster sell-off."






This was the best start to a year since 1987:

January 18th, 2019:





There have been three major tax cuts for the rich in the past three decades, each paid for with borrowed money aka. inter-generational theft. 

I predict this one will be the one that teaches the final lesson that crime does not pay. 








Friday, November 29, 2019

Exorbitant Privilege And Rented Conceit

The problem with a vacation from reality, is that when it ends someone needs to be able to face facts, free of chemical influence. For obvious reason corporate Disney World has not been cultivating that skill - today's primary business model being the monetization of useful idiots...

This coming year will reveal the deficit in leadership that has been achieved with corporate-sponsored denial. The dollar reserve currency has been funding exceptional ignorance for far too long.






It's not just Trump who has been chosen.





"It’s been called the “exorbitant privilege”; it might also be termed “the indestructible curse.”

"It was Valery Giscard d’Estaing, French finance minister and later president, who called the dollar’s global role an “exorbitant privilege.” By this, he meant that the United States could pay for imports simply by printing more money...There’s a “something for nothing” quality to the dollar’s status that — paradoxically — also fuels discontent with globalization."


There is no paradox to be found. U.S. workers pay the full price for this exorbitant privilege through a higher dollar and reduced export competitiveness. The U.S. rentier class, the wealthy, are the sole beneficiairies via surplus global capital inflows. This is precisely what Trump's trade team doesn't understand about global trade. And why the trade deficit is near record wide - to finance the Trump fiscal deficit.

Vietnam is winning the trade war:





Those who believe that the two largest economies in the world can rearrange the "indestructible curse" without causing massive capital dislocation, are in for the surprise of a lifetime. 





We should know the time we live in, sadly grasshoppers are always the last to know. The closer winter approaches, the more they rage against the closing reality. As it is now, with this Trumptopian vacation from responsibility. Not even the slightest clue what banquet of consequences has been set before them.

How it always ends.

ClubOrlov: License To Kill:

"As the endgame approaches, those still nominally in charge of the collapsing empire resort to all sorts of desperate measures—all except one: they will refuse to ever consider the fact that their imperial superpower is at an end, and that they should change their ways accordingly."


I can't tell who is more "triggered" right now, the Millenials fearing their epochal time has come. Or the Boomer geezers knowing their time has gone. Kunstlerite Trump apologists torching what remains of their credibility in their existential Bonfire of the Sanities. Desperately trying to blame someone else for the unmitigated disaster they've created. Sadly, history won't see it that way.

The Xanax is flowing all around.

For their part, Gen X may as well not even exist. The Prince Charles of generational power transfer. Stop-gap frat boys and black out drunks arriving at consciousness for the first time in their disheveled lives.

Make no mistake, when their :15 minutes of fame is stubbed out like a cheap cigarette, the underwear will be mighty stained when the masses at large finally realize that Disney World has systematically cultivated NO LEADERSHIP.




"Let's see, there's Sneezy, and Dopey, and give me a minute..."








Black Friday

This society can explain away ANY risk, when the free money is flowing...

It seems so long ago that we saw multi-month high Hindenburg Omens. Just last week:

"The Hindenburg Omen is a technical indicator that was designed to signal the increased probability of a stock market crash. It compares the percentage of new 52-week highs and lows to a predetermined reference percentage to predict the increasing likelihood of a market crash."






Here is where it gets interesting:

A 10 day moving average of NYSE Hindenburg Omens.

Here we see a very clear head and shoulders top. We also see that on the left shoulder, the H.O. signal peaked prior to the top, then there was a melt-up rally, a lower peak in the H.O. signal and then VIXPlosion 1.0:





The NYSE Composite has finally returned to the left shoulder peak, this week:





For whatever algorithmic window dressing reason, ALL of the major sell-offs in the past two years began just after month end. In addition, as we see now, Emerging Markets rolled over first:





The largest IPO of the year is over, so this can all end now. After all, Hong Kong is in the worst recession in a decade, and China Financial warning signs are EVERYWHERE:









From a social mood perspective, it's difficult to discern a clear pattern when markets are so heavily manipulated by central banks and window dressing algos. 

Nevertheless, one appeared this week compliments of revenueless Biotech stocks. Clinical trial stocks are the riskiest companies in the entire market. Most don't even have sales yet.

Now going parabolic:






Financial Asset Managers





The top performing IPOs of the past year, each appeared at the three higher highs in the S&P:








Major indications of global risk are necessarily being ignored, as always

Latin American currencies in particular are getting hammered











"Everyone is online"











In summary, it was the ideal week for a Terminal Idiocracy to go ALL IN:





"You'll never get a better buying opportunity than this"
















Thursday, November 28, 2019

The American Revelation

"We give thanks for simulated prosperity, and a leader who knows better than anyone else how to achieve it"






Despite RECORD stimulation, social mood is turning down a year early on Trump. According to this chart, there is negligible likelihood he gets re-elected. When the casino implodes, his approval rating will collapse like a cheap tent.

One by one Republicans are figuring out this is all a MASSIVE con job.

Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracker





Trump just triggered potential meltdown by signing the Hong Kong support bill. Because what else to do when the only market closed in the world is the U.S.?


“I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, and the people of China"


Exactly one year ago at the G20 summit, the fake trade truce triggered global meltdown into the end of the year. Which is why now, fake trade deal or no fake deal, it won't matter.

"After a year of non-stop negotiation, we've finally reached an agreement to roll back tariffs to where they were this time last year, and another truce. These Twitter escalations are exhausting"








You know you're an optimist when:





Even at this late stage, there are no shortage of apologists for the corporate status quo. People who gladly put corporate profit ahead of human life. A well-trained cabal of salesmen, and marketing spinmasters, solely preoccupied with making the quarter. The model is disintegrating in broad daylight amid unprecedented wealth inequality, environmental catastrophe, self-medicated euthanasia, and of course America's imploding corporate health care system. By far, the worst in the developed world in terms of costs, life expectancy, and numbers of uninsured. Getting worse by the day, due to the aging population and runaway cost increases. And yet no political solution is even on the horizon. The off-limit subject. After all, there are still a small majority who are on the ever-dwindling life raft of corporate-provided health insurance. When that capsizes in the coming recession, everyone will "get it" at the exact same time. $10/hour JUST to pay for employee health insurance, is in no way sustainable. It's high time for the arrogant among us to look themselves in the mirror and finally admit, "Hey guess what, we don't know what the fuck we're doing, because guess what, we never did".





In the meantime, while that's not happening, the corporate impulse to shop and spend is as strong today as ever, despite the steady erosion of the erstwhile middle class. The well-programmed Borg, addicted to instant gratification in every direction.

Those who have not heeded the 2008 warning and otherwise sought a more inner-directed life, squandered this critical decade to addiction. Stillness of the mind being the only natural way to tame dopamine addiction.

Anyone who speaks out against the de facto instant gratification model becomes the new Unabomber. A convenient way to dismiss those who question all of the underlying assumptions - the foundational layer of lies upon which modern corporate Disney World stands. We never see the losers, we only see the winners. Survivor bias on a global scale. Bill Gates now spending all of his time informing the world's poor how good they have it.

It can come as no surprise that the end of this consumption orgy has attended the largest and most buffoonish lies in U.S. history. Told by the biggest circus clowns in history. Because that's what it took to paper over the chasmic gaps in the Disney facade amid rising mass shootings. 

Here we see the cost of this delusion measured in mass shootings:



Of course any apologist for greed can easily explain away these types of alarming statistics, because in today's super Idiocracy even third grade math is now a conspiracy. Opponents of gun control inform us that this surge in shootings is not due to the deluge of "black gun" assault rifles and para-military equipment that has been unleashed in past decades, it's instead due to the rampant mental health crisis.

In other words, what we have is a glut of (semi) automatic assault rifles in the hands of the least mentally stable society in U.S. history. Children going to school with bullet-proof backpacks. What I want to know is what is causing all of this anxiety?

Unlike most Unabombers today, I don't predict an armed revolution. That was so one decade ago, black president end-of-world theory. I've come to realize that the corporate lifestyle is the most efficient killing machine ever devised. There is not enough ammunition in the world to match the carbon reduction that will be caused by the addiction to the consumption status quo. The opioid crisis was NOT a coincidence. Nor was it a conspiracy. It was merely the logical corporate supply response to the chasmic "gaps" in health coverage that have been created by a model that encourages bad consumer choices while making treatment options ever-more expensive. It's a dead end way of life, literally.

Fortunately, there is an inexpensive inoculation to this alluring death trap:  Read a book, eat a salad, and go for a walk. All apparently beyond the grasp of the lumbering herd. Caught in the death grip of corporate addiction. 

No surprise, this entire farce can be easily ignored by today's perma-smiling corporate TV mannekins, evincing the intelligence of a dead gopher. The assumptions are ignored, because the lies ARE the assumptions. Go off script once, and never be seen again in public. One must never "trigger" the audience by telling the inconvenient truth. Might cause the herd to stampede.

All of which is why the sudden death of this gong show can only come as a massive surprise to the useful Idiocracy, the PhDs in money printing, and the used car salesmen concerned solely with making the quarter. 

In other words, everyone you know.





Wednesday, November 27, 2019

The Super Dunce, Or The Ones That Follow?

History will say that the Banana Republican Senate granted Trump exceptional powers of mass deception...


Why? Because Trump was chosen to do God's work, ending this Roman Circus once and for all.

But never take my word for it:








Make no mistake, this WILL BE biblical.






Social mood theory posits that emotions move markets. However, under the current Disney markets paradigm, now markets move emotions...

"The wealth effect is a behavioral economic theory suggesting that people spend more as the value of their assets rise. The idea is that consumers feel more financially secure and confident about their wealth when their homes or investment portfolios increase in value. They are made to feel richer, even if their income and fixed costs are the same as before."









This is the first time in U.S. history wherein policymakers are specifically seeking to generate the wealth effect in order to drive the economy. There are many "reasons" to propagate this simulation of prosperity:

- To manipulate consumer sentiment, as indicated above
- To increase Trump's chances of re-election
- To lubricate the IPO market
- To allow corporate insiders to cash out

- To maximize Wall Street bonus


Apparently no one seems to have a problem with this level of fraud. It's not even a political issue right now. Three years ago right before the election, Trump blamed Janet Yellen for creating the wealth effect to bolster Clinton's election chances. The Fed at that time was in the process of normalizing policy and removing stimulus. Three years later and the Fed has lowered rates three times in 2019 and increased the balance sheet. The greatest stimulus since 2009. 


THE BANANA REPUBLICAN DOUBLE STANDARD IS ON FULL DISPLAY

The great white dope gets away with abuses of power on a daily basis, that no other president has even attempted. Including rampant fraud, unprecedented in U.S. history.



Which is why the fake wealth effect has created a chasmic gap between fantasy and reality. Particularly around the myth of the independently wealthy "consumer".


2019 is now seeing record store closures, 35% higher than 2009.








How "consumers" feel about the future, is no longer attached to their own spending. 

Apparently everyone is convinced that everyone else is out shopping:







The same disconnect is on open display in the casino itself.

Wherein only a small cadre of momentum stocks are attending this "new all time high". Which is why the latest delusion is that the rest of the market is now going to catch up with the mega cap bubble stocks. Unfortunately, that is never going to happen.


















An entire year of Dow Theory non-confirmation: