Category: Bear Market News

How’s this for some New Years optimism? The new head of the IMF, who took over from Christine Lagarde in November, warned that the global economy could soon find itself mired in a great depression. Read More.

Over the past several months, we have witnessed one of the greatest stock market rallies in American history. The S&P 500 has gone 70 days in a row without a 1 percent loss, and most weeks we have seen one daily surge after another. If stock prices were exploding because the underlying U.S. economy was performing extremely well, we would have reason to celebrate. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. Read More.

Last weekend, we pointed out that according to the latest flow data as compiled by Deutsche Bank’s Parag Thatte, virtually every segment of the market – from institutional to retail investors, and systematics such as quants, risk-parity, vol-targeters, and CTAs – were essentially “all-in” stocks. Read More.

In the court of investor opinion, the verdict is in. The Federal Reserve is guilty of quantitative easing. Never mind that Chairman Jerome Powell tells everyone his efforts to shore up funding markets are “in no sense” QE. Try as policy makers may, they’ve lost the ability to convince people that Treasury purchases aren’t at least partially why the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up almost 4,000 points since late August. Read More.

Herbert Stein, a prominent economist and adviser to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The fact that his remark is obvious makes it no less profound. Simple denial or wishful thinking tends to dominate economic debate. Read More.

Since September the Fed has increased the size of its balance sheet by $414 billion or 11% in less than four months. It’s the fastest rate at which the Fed has printed money in its history. The Fed insists that this “repo” program is not the reinstatement of “Quantitative Easing.” In one sense the Fed is correct. This money printing program is a direct bailout of the big banks. And now the Fed is proposing to start bailing out hedge funds: Read More.

With all eyes continuing on the events in Syria, the SkyNet SellBots took control in the overnight futures session, sending US stocks sharply lower at the open of trading on Wall Street. From there,  the Plunge Protection Team aka the SkyNet BuyBots jumped right in to quash the sell-off, and started a rally all the way into the close. The DJIA ended higher by 68 points (0.2%) and the NASDAQ gained 50 points (0.5%).

Stay tuned as the battle of the SkyNet StockBots continues.

Good economic news over the last couple months belies the fact that a recession could strike as soon as March 2020. Read More.

Central banks around the world will continue printing money as long as it’s necessary, says legendary investor Jim Rogers, calling it “madness.” He talks to RT’s Boom Bust about the state of the global economy and what could be over the horizon. Read More.

Parabolic moves end when the confidence that the parabolic move can’t end becomes the consensus. The consensus seems to be that the stock market is on its way to much higher levels, and soon. The near-term targets for the S&P 500 (SPX, currently around 3,235) range from 3,500 to 4,000, with longer-term targets reaching “the sky’s the limit.” Read More.

Money manager Michael Pento says forget about the sky high stock market because everything is being propped up with massive global money printing.

Recently an annual ritual took place. Wall Street analysts setting year end price targets for the S&P 500 for the new year. Don’t act surprised but these latest price targets are higher for 2020. Why is it not a surprise? Because Wall Street always projects higher price targets. No matter what. Read More.

Equity market booms are far from alike, and their symptoms and causes differ as well. In the past two decades there have been two fundamentally different types of equity market booms that resulted in the market valuation of US companies relative to Nominal GDP soaring to equivalent record highs. Read More.

If you’re buying stocks here with both hands and feet, these are the ‘facts’ you’re accepting… The market has never, ever been more complacent…

The market has never, ever been more highly priced. The last time that the S&P 500’s price-to-sales (far harder to manipulate that P/E) was March 2000 (right before the dotcom collapse) and late Jan 2018 (right before VIXmageddon)… Read More.

If this is what “the good times” look like, how nightmarish are “the bad times” going to be? In America today, more than 500,000 of us are homeless, about 40 million of us are living in poverty, 50 percent of all workers make less than $33,000 a year, and 70 percent of us have cried about money. But at least the economy has been “growing”, right? Well, in this article I would like to address that. Even if you believe that the highly manipulated economic growth numbers that the government puts out are legitimate, they still show that we are in one of the worst economic stretches in all of U.S. history. Read More.

Anyone looking at the hollowed-out, fragile shell of a Fed-managed “market” as a system realizes a crash that runs away from central planning control is already baked in. The last thing punters and pundits expect is a stock “market” crash, yet a “market” crash is already baked in and here’s why: real markets have internal resilience (they’re anti-fragile, to use Nassim Taleb’s phrase), and central-planning manipulated “markets” don’t. Read More.

Earlier we pointed out something which under normal circumstances would be seen as an ominous sign (although the current market is anything but normal as Morgan Stanley pointed out), namely the market’s record euphoria and pervasive trade optimism amid what Nomura dubbed was an “explosive” increase in hedge fund net exposure to US stocks, traditional harbingers of a violent risk reversal. Read More.

All I want for Christmas is an unmanipulated market, because manipulated markets always crash big and crash hard. Virtually every market in America is heavily manipulated by the Federal Reserve, which creates currency out of thin air to either buy assets (outright market manipulation) or distribute to financiers, banks and corporations, which then manipulate the markets with their own profiteering (stock buybacks, leveraged buyouts, derivatives, etc.). Read More.

With all eyes on The Kabuki Drama of The Impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, the SkyNet StockBots largely stayed on the sidelines. US stocks zigged and zagged in a narrow range into a modestly mixed close. The DJIA dropped by 28 points (0.1%) and the NASDAQ gained 4 points (0.1%).

Stay tuned as the battle of the SkyNet StockBots continues.

The Trump administration used the hammer of tariffs to negotiate a bi-lateral trade agreement with China, but in doing so also influenced a change in domestic monetary policy. The tariff-led negotiations were part of Trump’s team trade strategy, but were the tariffs also a tool to persuade a change in monetary policy? Whether it was or not, the Fed has now unwittingly entered into symbiotic relationship with fiscal policy and questions over autonomy could very well influence future policy decisions jeopardizing financial stability in the process. Read More.

On Friday, all the major stock markets finished the week at weekly highs in record territory. Positive data on personal income and spending helped push stocks higher to close out the week. Everybody keeps cheering the “strong economy,” but during his podcast Friday, Peter Schiff said the in truth, the US economy is the biggest bubble ever. And it’s being driven by the most reckless combination of monetary and fiscal policy in history.

Negative rates are the destruction of money, an economic aberration based on the mistakes of many central banks and some of their economists who start from a wrong diagnosis: the idea that economic agents do not take more credit or invest more because they choose to save too much and therefore saving must be penalized to stimulate the economy. Excuse the bluntness, but it is a ludicrous idea. Read More.

Consider that last month we reported that according to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has now hit $250 trillion and is expected to rise to a record $255 trillion at the end of 2019, up $12 trillion from $243 trillion at the end of 2018, and nearly $32,500 for each of the 7.7 billion people on planet. “With few signs of slowdown in the pace of debt accumulation, we estimate that global debt will surpass $255 trillion this year,” the IIF said in the report. Read More.

“A lot of people have started talking about how we are moving away from monetary dominance to fiscal, and thus inflation will start rising,” said the CIO. “Even Germany is seen to be cracking,” he said. We were talking about asset allocation, which was an easier exercise back when the 10yr treasury yield was double today’s 1.82% and the Shiller PE ratio was half today’s 30.38. Read More.