This Time Is Different, It Just Ends The Same

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

This past weekend, I was in Florida with Chris Martenson and Nomi Prins discussing the current backdrop of the markets, economic cycles, and future outcomes. A bulk of the conversations centered around the current “everything bubble” that currently exists globally. Elevated valuations in stock prices, extremely low yields between in “junk bonds,” or intense speculation around “cryptocurrencies” all suggest we have entered once again into “bubble” territory.”

Let me state this:

“Market bubbles have NOTHING to do with valuations or fundamentals.”

Hold on…don’t start screaming “heretic” and building gallows just yet. Let me explain.

Stock market bubbles are driven by speculation, greed, and emotional biases – therefore valuations and fundamentals are simply a reflection of those emotions.

In other words, bubbles can exist even at times when valuations and fundamentals might argue otherwise. Let me show you a very basic example of what I mean. The chart below is the long-term valuation of the S&P 500 going back to 1871.

First, it is important to notice that with the exception of only 1929, 2000 and 2007, every other major market crash occurred with valuations at levels LOWER than they are currently. Secondly, all of these crashes have been the result of things unrelated to valuation levels such as liquidity issues, government actions, monetary policy mistakes, recessions or inflationary spikes. However, those events were only a catalyst, or trigger, that started the “panic for the exits” by investors.

Market crashes are an “emotionally” driven imbalance in supply and demand. You will commonly hear that “for every buyer, there must be a seller.” This is absolutely true. The issue becomes at “what price.” What moves prices up and down, in a normal market environment, is the price level at which a buyer and seller complete a transaction.

In a market crash, however, the number of people wanting to “sell” vastly overwhelms the number of people willing to “buy.” It is at these moments that prices drop precipitously as “sellers” drop the levels at which they are willing to dump their shares in a desperate attempt to find a “buyer.” This has nothing to do with fundamentals. It is strictly an emotional panic which is ultimately reflected by a sharp devaluation in market fundamentals.

Bob Bronson once penned:

“It can be most reasonably assumed that market are sufficient enough that every bubble is significantly different than the previous one, and even all earlier bubbles. In fact, it’s to be expected that a new bubble will always be different than the previous one(s) since investors will only bid up prices to extreme overvaluation levels if they are sure it is not repeating what led to the last, or previous bubbles. Comparing the current extreme overvaluation to the dotcom is intellectually silly.

 

I would argue that when comparisons to previous bubbles become most popular – like now – it’s a reliable timing marker of the top in a current bubble. As an analogy, no matter how thoroughly a fatal car crash is studied, there will still be other fatal car crashes in the future, even if the previous accident-causing mistakes are avoided.”

He is absolutely right. Comparing the current market bubble to any previous market bubble is rather pointless. Financial markets have already studied and adapted to the causes of the previous “fatal crashes” but this won’t prevent the next one.

I previously discussed George Soros’ theory on bubbles which is worth reviewing at this juncture:

“First, financial markets, far from accurately reflecting all the available knowledge, always provide a distorted view of reality. The degree of distortion may vary from time to time. Sometimes it’s quite insignificant, at other times it is quite pronounced. When there is a significant divergence between market prices and the underlying reality the markets are far from equilibrium conditions.

 

Every bubble has two components:

1. An underlying trend that prevails in reality, and; 


2. A misconception relating to that trend.

 

When a positive feedback develops between the trend and the misconception, a boom-bust process is set in motion. The process is liable to be tested by negative feedback along the way, and if it is strong enough to survive these tests, both the trend and the misconception will be reinforced. Eventually, market expectations become so far removed from reality that people are forced to recognize that a misconception is involved. A twilight period ensues during which doubts grow, and more people lose faith, but the prevailing trend is sustained by inertia.

 

As Chuck Prince, former head of Citigroup, said, ‘As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We are still dancing.’ Eventually, a tipping point is reached when the trend is reversed; it then becomes self-reinforcing in the opposite direction.”

Typically bubbles have an asymmetric shape. The boom is long and slow to start. It accelerates gradually until it flattens out again during the twilight period. The bust is short and steep because it involves the forced liquidation of unsound positions.

The chart below is an example of asymmetric bubbles.

The pattern of bubbles is interesting because it changes the argument from a fundamental view to a technical view. Prices reflect the psychology of the market which can create a feedback loop between the markets and fundamentals.

This pattern of bubbles can be clearly seen at every bull market peak in history. The chart below utilizes Dr. Robert Shiller’s stock market data going back to 1900 on an inflation-adjusted basis with an overlay of the asymmetrical bubble shape.

There is currently a strong belief that the financial markets are not in a bubble. The arguments supporting those beliefs are all based on comparisons to past market bubbles.

The inherent problem with much of the mainstream analysis is that it assumes everything remains status quo. However, the question becomes what can go wrong for the market?

In a word, “much.”

Economic growth remains very elusive, corporate profits appear to have peaked, and there is an overwhelming complacency with regards to risk. Those ingredients combined with an extraction of liquidity by the Federal Reserve leaves the markets more vulnerable to an exogenous event than currently believed.

It is likely that in a world where there is virtually “no fear” of a market correction, an overwhelming sense of “urgency” to be invested and a continual drone of “bullish chatter;” markets are poised for the unexpected, unanticipated and inevitable reversion.

As Chris Martenson recently penned:

“I hate to break it to you, but chances are you’re just not prepared for what’s coming.

 

These bubbles – blown by central bankers serially addicted to creating them (and then riding to the rescue to fix them) – are the largest in all of history. That means they’re going to be the most destructive in history when they finally let go.

 

Millions of households will lose trillions of dollars in net worth. Jobs will evaporate, causing the tens of millions of families living paycheck to paycheck serious harm.

 

These are the kind of painful consequences central bank follies result in. They’re particularly regrettable because they could have been completely avoided if only we’d taken our medicine during the last crisis back in 2008.  But we didn’t. We let the Federal Reserve –the institution largely responsible for creating the Great Financial Crisis — conspire with its brethren central banks to ‘paper over’ our problems.

So now we are at the apex of the most incredible nest of financial bubbles in all of human history.”

I am not trying to scare the “bejeebers” out of you, but he is right.

“All financial assets are just claims on real wealth, not actual wealth itself.  A pile of money has use and utility because you can buy stuff with it.  But real wealth is the “stuff” — food, clothes, land, oil, and so forth.  If you couldn’t buy anything with your money/stocks/bonds, their worth would revert to the value of the paper they’re printed on (if you’re lucky enough to hold an actual certificate). It’s that simple.

 

But trouble begins when the system gets seriously out of whack.

 

‘GDP’ is a measure of the number of goods and services available and financial asset prices represent the claims (it’s not a very accurate measure of real wealth, but it’s the best one we’ve got, so we’ll use it). Look at how divergent asset prices get from GDP as bubbles develop.

“What we see in the above chart is that the claims on the economy should, quite intuitively, track the economy itself.  Bubbles occurred whenever the claims on the economy, the so-called financial assets (stocks, bonds, and derivatives), get too far ahead of the economy itself.

 

This is a very important point. The claims on the economy are just that: claims.  They are not the economy itself!”

Take a step back from the media, and Wall Street commentary, for a moment and make an honest assessment of the financial markets today. If our job is to “bet” when the “odds” of winning are in our favor, then exactly how “strong” is the fundamental hand you are currently betting on?

This “time IS different” only from the standpoint that the variables are not exactly the same as they have been previously. Of course, they never are, and the result will be “…the same as it ever was.”

Market Goes "Full Bitcoin"

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Market Review

What the “heck” was that?

This past week seemed to be the story of Christmas coming early. Earlier this week the markets surged higher on hopes that “Ole’ St. Tax Cuts” would soon be here. But that dream seemed to be short-lived on Friday, at least at the open, as General Mike Flynn seems to embody the “Grinch” trying to steal Christmas.

But at the end of it all, not much actually changed. Well, except for the fact that volatility not only made an appearance as stock prices swung wildly in both directions, but also in Treasury rates. As expectations of tax reform grew, rates spiked higher but then sank just as quickly as fears of turmoil in the Administration sent money into the safety of bonds.

As shown above, despite all of the “sound of fury” the S&P advanced 1.53% for the week while rates, not surprisingly as money rotated from “safety” to “risk,” ticked up from 2.3% to 2.4%. However, while volatility finished week only up mildly, intra-week we saw volatility jump to nearly 15 before settling back at 11.

The sharp advance, as the market went all “bitcoin,” pushed well into 3-standard deviation territory above the longer-term moving average with overbought conditions pushing extremes. While the backdrop remains decidedly bullish, the sharp moved higher has all the earmarks of an exhaustion move which suggests some profit-taking cool things off over the next couple of weeks. 

While the market is extremely overbought, the bullish trends remain intact. Furthermore, the month of December tends to bullish for equities which keeps portfolios allocated towards equity risk currently.

With the tax bill now out of the Senate, the real work begins as the House bill and Senate bill will go to conference to work out the rather substantial differences between the two bills. With neither bill even remotely approaching a “fiscally conservative” that will actually lead to stronger economic or reduced debts and deficits, it is a huge windfall for corporations.

This, of course, raises the question as to how much of the “tax cuts” are already priced into the markets.

One thing to be cautious of is the possibility this could well be a “buy the rumor, sell the news” event as we move into the New Year. As I stated last week, I see two potential outcomes:

1. A tax bill clears Congress reducing taxes which leads to tax-related selling by money manager to lock in gains at a lower tax rate that will not have to be paid until 2019, or;


2. The tax bill fails, a still likely scenario, which leads to tax-related selling by money manager to lock in gains on which taxes will not have to be paid until 2019, 

Let me repeat from the last newsletter:

“As I see how December plays out, I will be seriously looking at adding a short-hedge to portfolios before year end. I will keep you apprised.”

This weekend, I am traveling to Florida to give a presentation on the markets and will be joined by some of my friends like Chris Martenson and Nomi Prins. It promises to be fun and I will fill you in on any great insights next week.

The Bitcoin Ramp – Is It Sustainable?

by Michael Lebowitz, CFA

The explosive rise of Bitcoin (BTC) has taken the investing world by storm, and for good reason. Over the past six months alone BTC has quadrupled in value. Since 2012, it has risen over 200,000%. To put that into context, had one invested 10k in 2012 they would be worth over $20 million today. The graph below shows the meteoric rise.

There are predominantly two camps with strong opinions on what the future holds for BTC. One generally believes it to be the currency of the future while the second camp thinks BTC is another financial bubble. Given BTC’s increasing popularity we thought it would be helpful to present these two competing perspectives and then offer our own assessment.

Believers

Believers in BTC claim it is quickly becoming a widely accepted global currency. To better understand their view let’s see how BTC meets the definition of a currency, both as a means of transacting (money) as well as a store of value.

Money: money is anything that two parties can agree is acceptable in exchange for goods and services. For example, if I pay you a case of beer to mow my lawn, the beer, in this instance, is money. However, for “money” to be widely accepted, the masses must ascribe similar value to it.  While there is an increasing number of vendors accepting BTC, it is nearly impossible to use BTC to meet your everyday needs. Further, the value, or price of money, needs to be relatively stable to be effective. If a dollar bill bought you a case of beer today, but only a single bottle tomorrow and a keg the following week, few consumer or vendors would trust the dollar’s value. BTC’s value can fluctuate 5-10% on an hourly basis

Store of value: a store of value is something that allows one to save money and retain its value. When we save money we want comfort in knowing the money we earned can buy us the same amount of goods and services tomorrow that it can buy today. Again, the extreme volatility of the price of BTC makes it difficult to project how much purchasing power a BTC will buy you in the future. All currencies fluctuate but typically nowhere near the degree we are witnessing in BTC.

If the extreme price movements of BTC subside it is possible that BTC can serve as a widely accepted currency and the believers could be correct.

Deniers

A second camp believes BTC is a financial bubble. The chart below compares BTC to other recent investment fads.

You will notice in all instances above the bubbles rise steadily in price before transitioning to an exponential increase prior to collapse. Often, in the so-called euphoric phase, prices go well beyond the point most investors think is reasonable. In this respect, BTC is following the path of prior bubbles.

Bubbles are not solely defined by price movements, but more importantly by a lack of supporting fundamental value. If you subscribe to the value of BTC as does the first camp, the rapid increase in price may well be justified. If you believe there is no value, BTC is showing the classic pattern of most bubbles.

Our Take

We believe BTC can rise even further from current levels. That said, we question whether it has any meaningful fundamental value. In the textbook on sound investing, Security Analysis, Benjamin Graham, and David Dodd define investing as follows:

“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”

Based on this very clear definition of terms, there is no way to classify BTC as anything other than speculation. Furthermore, while we agree with those in camp one that BTC might one day be universally accepted as money and a reliable store of value, we have one major problem with which to contend.

To help you grasp our issue, consider that an investor who bought Bitcoin a few years ago and sold it today would have accumulated a remarkable gain. Even better, unlike a capital gain on stocks, bonds, real estate and all other financial assets, that profit is tax-free.

Now ask yourself, how long will the government allow investors to avoid paying taxes on gains in BTC? Further, will the U.S. government, or any other government, cede control of its currency and ultimately the economy? We expand on this concept below from a primer we wrote on cryptocurrencies- Salt, Wampum, Benjamins – Is Bitcoin next?

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution states the purpose of the Federal government is to:

“…form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

In other words, the government’s role is to protect the freedoms and liberties of its citizens. If the government has no ability to fund itself and is unable to provide defense and law enforcement it cannot uphold the Constitution. More precisely – the sovereignty of any nation, regardless of its form of government, rests upon the strength and integrity of its currency.

Summary

There may still be gains ahead for BTC, but the volatility of its price and still low adoption as a means of transacting pose obvious problems. The bigger risk, however, is given government incentives to impose taxes on the public and manage economic activity, the speculative value currently being ascribed to BTC does not seem durable and is therefore unlikely to survive.

Here’s What Works For Me

by Doug Kass

“And I said to myself, ‘This is the business we have chosen."” –Hyman Roth, “The Godfather” 

To me, stock price deception is seen with more frequency today than in any time in modern investment history.

Our markets, influenced by massive central bank liquidity and dominated by passive strategies (ETFs, risk parity, and volatility trending), not only are inhibiting price discovery but also are artificially influencing price action — “buyers live higher and sellers live lower” — to both the upside and downside.

In some measure, this is reducing the authenticity and validity of stock prices and charts and is hurting the value of technical analysis, which may be basing its decisions, in part, on artificial patterns/prices/data. On the other hand, it benefits those who view the market without emotion and who are willing to buy extreme weakness and sell extreme strength.

Yesterday underscored the reasons why and how I look at stocks. I would emphasize, again, that I do not have a concession on the process and I recognize that others have different approaches that provide good investment returns.

But I have a logic in my approach and Wednesday’s bifurcated action and its selective and often extreme volatility underscores some of these principles that I have adopted over the last four decades and provides some additional lessons:

* Avoid Volatile and Unpredictable Stocks — It’s Gambling: In the last two days, Riot Blockchain Inc. (RIOT) has had a range from about $12 to $25. There has been no news to account for that volatility and random action.Other collateral bitcoin plays such as Social Reality Inc. (SRAX) and Xunlei Ltd. (XNET) have had similarly large trading ranges. No specific company news there, either. Given my risk profile, I never will trade in these stocks. Others believe differently and believe they successfully can skate on this thin ice, but I will stick to my risk appetite, and I believe all but a few professionals may be kidding themselves in rationalizing these stocks “tradeability.” This also explains my reluctance to trade bitcoin, which had a trading range yesterday of $9,290 to $11,377 — again, on no news.

 

* No Matter What the Charts Say, I Prefer to View Every Trade/Investment Based on an Assessment of Reward vs. Risk — Seize Those Opportunities: The dynamic of an upside/downside calculation and determining discounts or premiums to intrinsic value form the basis for my trading and investment decisions. Recently, I successfully traded two retail stocks, Macy’s Inc. (M) and Dillard’s Inc. (DDS) , on this basis. Consider Twitter Inc. (TWTR) , which at $22 a share looked technically solid. Nevertheless, I sold off a large portion of my position between $22 and $22.50 recently based on an assessment of a less-favorable upside/downside ratio. Others bought based on an improving chart. Both I and they are likely comfortable with our decisions, but the purpose of this missive is to further explain my tenets and methodology.

 

* There Are Many Great Charts That Lie at the Bottom of the Sea: Though one or two days don’t make a market, the artificiality of the markets may be underscored by two stocks yesterday — Micron Technology Inc. (MU) and Square Inc. (SQ) . Both recently looked fantastic technically. Embraced by many a talking head in the business media, both have been schmeissed in recent sessions. Like the Nasdaq 100 ((QQQ) was down $3 yesterday), they all looked good on the charts until they didn’t, and all provided little indication to prepare traders for the reversals. At times like these, it is increasingly dangerous to buy stocks on breakouts. Buying calls on these stocks moves one further to the end of the risk curve. This strategy may work well for some time in a trending market, but a swift directional change can evaporate profits and eviscerate a portfolio. Again, such a strategy should be limited to professionals, and even that body of traders may suffer from a steady diet of options activity, as academic studies show.

 

* Do Not Underestimate the Impact of Price Momentum Strategies on Individual Stocks and Sectors: Over the last month, technology, especially of a FANG kind, has soared and other areas such as retail have collapsed. The possible artificiality of both moves was evident in the reversals this week and yesterday. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) , as an example, was down by more than $45 on no news yesterday. Retail stocks such as M and DDS rose by 10% on Wednesday and 20% in the last week, also on no news. This may underscore (1) the reduced value of analyzing stocks on price technically, and (2) that opportunities are provided for those who are emotionless and have a sense of intrinsic values and legitimate upside/downside calculations.

 

* A Diversified Portfolio Is a Preferable Course: Jim “El Capitan” Cramer detailed the value of this approach late yesterday in a well-thought-out column, “‘Am I Diversified?’ May Be Boring, but It Can Help Avoid the Pain.” Please reread it. As a matter of course, and as most are now aware, I keep my individual stock positions as a low percentage of my total overall portfolio and often have 40 to 50 portfolio names. I am always diversified in position size (typically at about 2% to 3% each) and in sector exposure (limited to 15% of the portfolio). Recognize that when a trader or investor is only buying “good” charts, that is not being diversified. Rather, it is part of a process that leads to a binary outcome that may end badly given the likely artificiality of prices.

Bottom Line

The artificiality of stock prices has accelerated in recent years with the domination of passive investment strategies.

I will not trade/invest in stocks solely on the basis that they “look good” on the charts in this sort of setting, which is dominated by influences that create an under-appreciated degree of price deception.

For these reasons and others I will not buy breakouts and sell breakdowns; this may be the wrong approach in the environment we are now in.

Rather, an approach to buying value and breakdowns and selling seemingly irrationally based prices and breakouts is my investment cup of tea based on the fundamental and dynamic assessment of intrinsic values relative to the current prices.

Others disagree and I respect their ability to navigate differently. I am not taking a shot at their approaches; rather, I am saying what serves me well and what may serve the majority of conservative risk-based investors and traders well.

This is how I am handling the markets these days, and, frankly, will forever.

And … buckle up.

You"re Just Not Prepared For What"s Coming

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

I hate to break it to you, but chances are you"re just not prepared for what’s coming. Not even close. 

Don"t take it personally. I"m simply playing the odds.

After spending more than a decade warning people all over the world about the futility of pursuing infinite exponential economic growth on a finite planet, I can tell you this: very few are even aware of the nature of our predicament.

An even smaller subset is either physically or financially ready for the sort of future barreling down on us. Even fewer are mentally prepared for it. 

And make no mistake: it"s the mental and emotional preparation that matters the most. If you can"t cope with adversity and uncertainty, you"re going to be toast in the coming years.

Those of us intending to persevere need to start by looking unflinchingly at the data, and then allowing time to let it sink in.  Change is coming – which isn"t a problem in and of itself. But it"s pace is likely to be. Rapid change is difficult for humans to process. 

Those frightened by today"s over-inflated asset prices fear how quickly the current bubbles throughout our financial markets will deflate/implode. Who knows when they"ll pop?  What will the eventual trigger(s) be? All we know for sure is that every bubble in history inevitably found its pin.

These bubbles – blown by central bankers serially addicted to creating them (and then riding to the rescue to fix them) – are the largest in all of history. That means they"re going to be the most destructive in history when they finally let go.

Millions of households will lose trillions of dollars in net worth. Jobs will evaporate, causing the tens of millions of families living paycheck to paycheck serious harm.

These are the kind of painful consequences central bank follies result in. They"re particularly regrettable because they could have been completely avoided if only we’d taken our medicine during the last crisis back in 2008.  But we didn"t. We let the Federal Reserve --the instiution largely responsible for creating the Great Financial Crisis -- conspire with its brethern central banks to "paper over" our problems.

So now we are at the apex of the most incredible nest of financial bubbles in all of human history.

One of my favorite charts is below, which shows that even the smartest minds among us (Sir Isaac Newton, in this case) can succumb to the mania of a bubble:

It"s enormously difficult to resist the social pressure to become involved.

But all bubbles burst -- painfully of course. That’s their very nature.

Mathematically, it"s impossible for half or more of a bubble"s participants to close out their positions for a gain. But in reality, it"s even worse. Being generous, maybe 10% manage to get out in time.

That means the remaining 90% don’t. For these bagholders, the losses will range from "painful" to "financially fatal".

Which brings us to the conclusion that a similar proportion of people will be emotionally unprepared for the bursting of these bubbles.  Again, playing the odds, I"m talking about you.    

How Exponentials Work Against You

Bubbles are destructive in the same manner as ocean waves. Their force is not linear, but exponential. 

That means that a wave"s energy increases as the square of its height. A 4-foot wave has 16 times the force of a 1-foot wave; something any surfer knows from experience.  A 1-foot wave will nudge you.  A 4-foot wave will smash you, filling your bathing suit and various body orifices with sand and shells.  A 10-foot wave has 100 times more destructive power. It can kill you if it manages to pin you against something solid. 

A small, localized bubble -- such as one only affecting tulip investors in Holland, or a relatively small number of speculators caught up in buying swampland in Florida -- will have a small impact.  Consider those 1-foot waves.

A larger bubble inflating an entire nation’s real estate market will be far more destructive. Like the US in 2007. Or like Australia and Canada today.  Those bubbles were (or will be when they burst) 4-foot waves. 

The current nest of global bubbles in nearly every financial asset (stocks, bonds, real estate, fine art, collectibles, etc) is entirely without precedent. How big are these in wave terms? Are they a series of 8-foot waves? Or more like 12-footers? 

At this magnitude level, it doesn"t really matter. They"re going to be very, very destructive when they break.

Our focus now needs to be figuring out how to avoid getting pinned to the coral reef below when they do.

Understanding "Real" Wealth

In order to fully understand this story, we have to start right at the beginning and ask “What is wealth?”

Most would answer this by saying “money”, and then maybe add “stocks and bonds”. But those aren"t actually wealth. 

All financial assets are just claims on real wealth, not actually wealth itself.  A pile of money has use and utility because you can buy stuff with it.  But real wealth is the "stuff" -- food, clothes, land, oil, and so forth.  If you couldn"t buy anything with your money/stocks/bonds, their worth would revert to the value of the paper they"re printed on (if you"re lucky enough to hold an actual certificate). It’s that simple. 

Which means that keeping a tight relationship between "real wealth" and the claims on it should be job #1 of any central bank. But not the Fed, apparently. It"s has increased the number of claims by a mind-boggling amount over the past several years. Same with the BoJ, the ECB, and the other major central banks around the world. They"ve embarked on a very different course, one that has disrupted the long-standing relationship between the markers of wealth and real wealth itself. 

They are aided and abetted by both the media and our educational institutions, which reinforce the idea that the claims on wealth are the same as real wealth itself.  It’s a handy system, of course, as long as everyone believes it. It has proved a great system for keeping the poor people poor and the rich people rich.

But trouble begins when the system gets seriously out of whack. People begin to question why their money has any value at all if the central banks can just print up as much as they want. Any time they want. And hand it out for free in unlimited quantities to the banks. Who have their own mechanism (i.e., fractional reserve banking) for creating even more money out of thin air.

Pretty slick, right?  Convince everyone that something you literally make in unlimited quantities out of thin air has value. So much so that, if you lack it, you end up living under a bridge, starving. 

Let"s express this visually.

“GDP” is a measure of the amount of goods and services available and financial asset prices represent the claims (it"s not a very accurate measure of real wealth, but it"s the best one we’ve got, so we’ll use it). Look at how divergent asset prices get from GDP as bubbles develop: 

(Source)

What we see in the above chart is that the claims on the economy should, quite intuitively, track the economy itself.  Bubbles occurred whenever the claims on the economy, the so-called financial assets (stocks, bonds and derivatives), get too far ahead of the economy itself.

This is a very important point. The claims on the economy are just that: claims.  They are not the economy itself!

Yes the Dot-Com crash hurt.  But that was the equivalent of a 1-foot wave.  Yes, the housing bubble hurt, and that was a 2-foot wave.  The current bubble is vastly larger than the prior two, and is the 4-foot wave in our analogy -- if we’re lucky.  It might turn out to be a 10-footer.

The mystery to me is how people have forgotten the lessons of prior bubbles so rapidly.  How they cannot see the current bubbles even as the data is right there, and so easy to come by.  I suppose the mania of a bubble, the "high" of easy returns, just makes people blind to reality.

It used to take a generation or longer to forget the painful lessons of a bubble. The victims had to age and die off before a future generation could repeat the mistakes anew. 

But now, we have the same generation repeating the same mistakes three times in less than 20 years. Go figure.

In this story, wishful thinking and self-delusion have harmful consequences. It"s no different than taking up a lifelong habit of chain-smoking as a young teen.  Sure, you may be one of the few who lives a long full life in spite of the risks, but the odds are definitely not in your favor.

The inevitable destruction caused by the current froth of bubbles is going to hurt a lot of people, institutions, pensions, industries and countries.  Nobody will be spared when these burst.  The only question left to be answered is: Who’s going to eat the losses?

This is not a future question for a future time; it"s one that"s being answered daily already.  Pensioners are already taking cuts.  Puerto Rico will not be fully rebuilt.  Shale wells drilled when oil was $100/barrel, but being drained empty at $50/barrel, represent capital already hopelessly betrayed. Young graduates with $100,000 of student debt face lost decades of capital building. The losers are already emerging.

And there’s many more to follow.  This story is much closer to the beginning than the end.

The bubbles have yet to burst. We’re just seeing the water at the shore’s edge beginning to retreat, wondering how large the wave will be when it arrives. Hoping that it’s not a monster tsunami.

The End Is Nigh

History"s largest bubbles have had the exact same root cause: an expansion of credit that causes leverage to go up faster than the income available to service it.

Simply put: bubbles exist when asset price inflation rises beyond what incomes can sustain. They are everywhere and always a credit-fueled phenomenon.

(Source @hussmanjp )

Look at the ridiculous trajectory of the S&P 500, especially since Trump got elected. I don’t know about you, but pretty much everything that has happened in the US over the past year has been either a diplomatic clown show or a financial cruelty to the average citizen. And yet prices have risen at their highest pace in two decades?

My view is that the Trump election was a totally unexpected black swan shock for the global central banking cartel, and it freaked out.  With the Dow down -1,000 points in the late night hours following Trump"s surprise win, the central banks dumped gobs and oodles of money into the equity markets to prevent carnage.

All that money calmed investors and sent prices roaring higher over the following months. The resulting 80-degree rocket launch will hurt a lot when it comes back to earth. Good going central banks!

This is all happening when we’re as close as ever to a military (if not nuclear) confrontation with North Korea, Russia is busy beefing up its war machine, Saudi Arabia has pivoted away from the US towards China and Russia, and most of our European allies are inching away from us.

Meanwhile, the FCC is about to rule against the vast majority of the public and allow US corporations to turn the internet into a pay-for-play toll road -- completely undermining the core principle of the most transformative and useful invention of the millennium. By eliminating net neutrality the FCC has ruled "against" you, and "for" the continued usurious profits of the cable companies. 

Worse, heath care premiums continue to increase by double-digits each year. They"re going up by a horrifying 45% in Florida and 57% in Georgia, to name just two unfortunate states out of many.

And to really rub salt in the wounds of the nation, the DC swamp is busy passing a tax change that will further drive an enormous gap between the 0.1% and everybody else by lowering taxes on corporate profits (already the lowest in the world if you measure both tax on profits and value-added taxes). 

How to pay for the massive cost of this deficit-exploding bill?  Easy, just eliminate deductions for average people (such as the state and local tax deductions) and begin taxing the waived tuition of graduate students. That’s right, the government helped to massively bloat tuition fees via massive lending to students and then wants to squeeze the poorest and hardest-working among them.

I wish I were kidding here. But like a cruel joke re-told at the wrong moment, the GOP is busy destroying the meager and precarious financial situation of our citizens just so it can toss a few more dollars into the already-bloated wallets of the richest people in the country. 

The long rise of the ultra-wealthy is not some mystery.  It arose as a predictable consequence of the financialization of, well…everything that began in the 1980’s:

The above chart speaks to a deeply unfair system that punishes hard working people in order to give more to those who merely shuffle financial instruments around or own financial assets.

This is the system that the Fed is working so hard to preserve. This is the system that Washington DC is working so hard to sustain. 

It’s flat out unfair and punitive.  It both punishes and rewards the wrong folks, respectively.  Debtors are provided relief while savers are punished.  The young are saddled with debts and face impossible costs of living mainly to preserve the illusion of wealth for a little longer for the generation in front of them.

For so many reasons, folks, none of this is sustainable. If the system doesn"t crash first under the weight of its excessive debts or the puncturing of its many asset price bubbles, the brewing class and generational wars will boil over if the status quo trajectory continues for much longer.

In Part 2: When The Bubbles Burst... we detail what to expect as the unraveling starts. When these bubbles burst, as they inevitably must, the aftermath is going to be especially ugly.

Understand the likely path the carnage is going to take and position yourself wisely ahead of the crisis -- so that you and those you care about can weather the turmoil as safely as possible.

Remember: the role of bubble markets is to injure as many people as badly as possible when they burst. Don"t be one of the victims.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

 

If The Saudi Arabia Situation Doesn"t Worry You, You"re Not Paying Attention

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

While turbulent during the best of times, gigantic waves of change are now sweeping across the Middle East. The magnitude is such that the impact on the global price of oil, as well as world markets, is likely to be enormous.

A dramatic geo-political realignment by Saudi Arabia is in full swing this month. It’s upending many decades of established strategic relationships among the world"s superpowers and, in particular, is throwing the Middle East into turmoil.

So much is currently in flux, especially in Saudi Arabia, that nearly anything can happen next. Which is precisely why this volatile situation should command our focused attention at this time.

The main elements currently in play are these:

• A sudden and intense purging of powerful Saudi insiders (arrests, deaths, & asset seizures)


• Huge changes in domestic policy and strategy 


• A shift away from the US in all respects (politically, financially and militarily)


• Deepening ties to China


• A surprising turn towards Russia (economically and militarily)


• Increasing cooperation and alignment with Israel (the enemy of my enemy is my friend?)

Taken together, this is tectonic change happening at blazing speed.

That it"s receiving too little attention in the US press given the implications, is a tip off as to just how big a deal this is -- as we"re all familiar by now with how the greater the actual relevance and importance of a development, the less press coverage it receives. This is not a direct conspiracy; it"s just what happens when your press becomes an organ of the state and other powerful interests. Like a dog trained with daily rewards and punishments, after a while the press needs no further instruction on the house rules.

It does emphasize, however, that to be accurately informed about what"s going on, we have to do our own homework. Here"s a short primer to help get you started.

A Quick Primer

Unless you study it intensively, Saudi politics are difficult to follow because they are rooted in the drama of a very large and dysfunctional family battling over its immense wealth.  If you think your own family is nuts, multiply the crazy factor by 1,000, sprinkle in a willingness to kill any family members who get in your way, and you"ll have the right perspective for grasping how Saudi "politics" operate.

The House of Saud is the ruling royal family of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (hereafter referred to as "KSA") and consists of some 15,000 members. The majority of the power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of roughly 2,000 individuals.  4,000 male princes are in the mix, plus a larger number of involved females -- all trying to either hang on to or climb up a constantly-shifting mountain of power.

Here"s a handy chart to explain the lineage of power in KSA over the decades:

(Source)

We’ll get to the current ruler, King Salman, and his powerful son, Mohammed Bin Salman (age 32), shortly.  Before we do, though, let’s talk about the most seminal moment in recent Saudi history: the key oil-for-money-and-protection deal struck between the Nixon administration and King Faisal back in the early 1970’s.

This pivotal agreement allowed KSA to secretly recycle its surplus petrodollars back into US Treasuries while receiving US military protection in exchange.  The secret was kept for 41 years, only recently revealed in 2016 due to a Bloomberg FOIA request:

The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.

 

It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.

 

“Buying bonds and all that was a strategy to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S.,” said David Ottaway, a Middle East fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. But politically, “it’s always been an ambiguous, constrained relationship.”

(Source)

The essence of this deal is pretty simple. KSA wanted to be able to sell its oil to its then largest buyer, the USA, while also having a safe place to park the funds, plus receive military protection to boot. But it didn’t want anybody else, especially its Arab neighbors, to know that it was partnering so intimately with the US who, in turn, would be supporting Israel.  That would have been politically incendiary in the Middle East region, coming as it did right on the heels of the Yom Kipper War (1973).

As for the US, it got the oil it wanted and – double bonus time here – got KSA to recycle the very same dollars used to buy that oil back into Treasuries and contracts for US military equipment and training.

Sweet deal.

Note that this is yet another secret world-shaping deal successfully kept out of the media for over four decades. Yes Virginia, conspiracies do happen. Secrets can be (and are routinely) kept by hundreds, even thousands, of people over long stretches of time.  

Since that key deal was struck back in the early 1970s, the KSA has remained a steadfast supporter of the US and vice versa. In return, the US has never said anything substantive about KSA’s alleged involvement in 9/11 or its grotesque human and women’s rights violations. Not a peep.  

Until recently.

Then Things Started To Break Down

In 2015, King Salman came to power. Things began to change pretty quickly, especially once he elevated his son Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to a position of greater power. 

Among MBS"s first acts was to directly involve KSA into the Yemen civil war, with both troops on the ground and aerial bombings.  That war has killed thousands of civilians while creating a humanitarian crisis that includes the largest modern-day outbreak of cholera, which is decimating highly populated areas.  The conflct, which is considered a "proxy war" because Iran is backing the Houthi rebels while KSA is backing the Yemeni government, continues to this day.

Then in 2016, KSA threatened to dump its $750 billion in (stated) US assets in response to a bill in Congress that would have released sensitive information implicating Saudi Arabia"s involvement in 9/11.  Then-president Obama had to fly over there to smooth things out.  It seems the job he did was insufficient; because KSA-US relations unraveled at an accelerating pace afterwards.  Mission NOT accomplished, it would seem.

In 2017, KSA accused Qatar of nefarious acts and made such extraordinary demands that an outbreak of war nearly broke out over the dispute. The Qatari leadership later accused KSA of fomenting ‘regime change’, souring the situation further.  Again, Iran backed the Qatar government, which turned this conflict into another proxy battle between the two main regional Arab superpowers.

In parallel with all this, KSA was also supporting the mercenaries (aka "rebels" in western press) who were seeking to overthrow Assad in Syria -- yet another proxy war between KSA and Iran.  It"s been an open secret that, during this conflict, KSA has been providing support to some seriously bad terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other supposed enemies of the US/NATO.  (Again, the US has never said "boo" about that, proving that US rhetoric against "terrorists" is a fickle construct of political convenience, not a moral matter.)

Once Russia entered the war on the side of Syria"s legitimate government, the US and KSA (and Israel) lost their momentum. Their dreams of toppling Assad and turning Syria into another failed petro-state like they did with Iraq and Libya are not likely to pan out as hoped.

But rather than retreat to lick their wounds, KSA"s King Salman and his son are proving to be a lot nimbler than their predecessors. 

Rather than continue a losing battle in Syria, they"ve instead turned their energies and attention to dramatically reshaping KSA"s internal power structures:

Saudi Arabia’s Saturday Night Massacre

 

For nearly a century, Saudi Arabia has been ruled by the elders of a royal family that now finds itself effectively controlled by a 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman. He helms the Defense Ministry, he has extravagant plans for economic development, and last week arranged for the arrest of some of the most powerful ministers and princes in the country.

 

A day before the arrests were announced, Houthi tribesmen in Yemen but allied with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, fired a ballistic missile at Riyadh.

 

The Saudis claim the missile came from Iran and that its firing might be considered “an act of war.”

 

Saudi Arabia was created between the two world wars under British guidance. In the 1920s, a tribe known as the Sauds defeated the Hashemites, effectively annexing the exterior parts of Saudi Arabia they did not yet control. The United Kingdom recognized the Sauds’ claim shortly thereafter. But since then, the Saudi tribe has been torn by ambition, resentment and intrigue. The Saudi royal family has more in common with the Corleones than with a Norman Rockwell painting.

 

The direct attack was undoubtedly met with threats of a coup. Whether one was actually planned didn’t matter. Mohammed Bin Salman had to assume these threats were credible since so many interests were under attack. So he struck first, arresting princes and ex-minsters who constituted the Saudi elite. It was a dangerous gamble. A powerful opposition still exists, but he had no choice but to act. He could either strike as he did last Saturday night, or allow his enemies to choose the time and place of that attack. Nothing is secure yet, but with this strike, there is a chance he might have bought time. Any Saudi who would take on princes and clerics is obviously desperate, but he may well break the hold of the financial and religious elite.

(Source)

This 32 year-old prince, Mohammed bin Salman has struck first and deep, completely upending the internal power dynamics of Saudi Arabia. 

He"s taken on the political, financial and religious elites head on. For example, pushing through the decision to allow women to drive; a provocative move designed to send a clear message to the clerics who might oppose him. That message is: "I"m not fooling around here."

This is a classic example of how one goes about purging the opposition when either taking over a government after a coup, or implementing a big new strategy at a major corporation.  You have to remove any possible opponents and then install your own loyalists. According the Rules for Rulers, you do this by diverting a portion of the flow of funds to your new backers while diminishing, imprisoning or killing all potential enemies.

So far, Mohammed bin Salman"s action plan is par for the course. No surprises.

The above article from Stratfor (well worth reading in its entirety) continues with these interesting insights:

The Iranians have been doing well since the nuclear deal was signed in 2015. They have become the dominant political force in Iraq. Their support for the Bashar Assad regime in Syria may not have been enough to save him, but Iran was on what appears to be the winning side in the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah has been hurt by its participation in the war but is reviving, carrying Iranian influence in Lebanon at a time when Lebanon is in crisis after the resignation of its prime minister last week.

 

The Saudis, on the other hand, aren’t doing as well. The Saudi-built anti-Houthi coalition in Yemen has failed to break the Houthi-led opposition. And Iran has openly entered into an alliance with Qatar against the wishes of the Saudis and their ally, the United Arab Emirates.

 

Iran seems to sense the possibility of achieving a dream: destabilizing Saudi Arabia, ending its ability to support anti-Iranian forces, and breaking the power of the Sunni Wahhabis. Iran must look at the arrests in Saudi Arabia as a very bad move. And they may be. Mohammad bin Salman has backed the fundamentalists and the financial elite against the wall.

 

They are desperate, and now it is their turn to roll the dice. If they fall short, it could result in a civil war in Saudi Arabia. If Iran can hit Riyadh with missiles, the crown prince’s opponents could argue that the young prince is so busy with his plans that he isn’t paying attention to the real threat. For the Iranians, the best outcome is to have no one come out on top.

 

This would reconfigure the geopolitics of the Middle East, and since the U.S. is deeply involved there, it has decisions to make.

So given Yemen, Syria, and its recent domestic purges, Saudi Arabia is in turmoil. It"s in a far weaker position than it was a short while ago.

This leaves the US in a far weaker regional position, too, at precisely the time when China and Russia are increasing their own presence (which we’ll get to next).

But first we have to discuss what might happen if a civil war were to engulf Saudi Arabia.  The price of oil would undoubtedly spike. In turn, that would cripple the weaker countries, companies and households around the world that simply cannot afford a higher oil price. And there"s a lot of them.

Financial markets would destabilize as long-suppressed volatility would explode higher, creating horrific losses across the board.  That very few investors are mentally or financially prepared for such carnage is a massive understatement.

So..if you were Saudi Arabia, in need of helpful allies after being bogged down in an unwinnable war in Yemen, just defeated in a proxy war in Syria, and your longtime "ally", the US, is busy pumping as much of its own oil as it can, what would you do?

Pivot To China

Given its situation, is it really any surprise that King Salman and his son have decided to pivot to China?  In need of a new partner that would align better with their current and future interests, China is the obvious first choice.

So in March 2017, only a very short while after Obama"s failed visit, a large and well-prepared KSA entourage accompanied King Salman to Beijing and inked tens of billions in new business deals:

China, Saudi Arabia eye $65 billion in deals as king visits

Mar 16, 2017

 

BEIJING (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia’s King Salman oversaw the signing of deals worth as much as $65 billion on the first day of a visit to Beijing on Thursday, as the world’s largest oil exporter looks to cement ties with the world’s second-largest economy.

 

The deals included a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between giant state oil firm Saudi Aramco and China North Industries Group Corp (Norinco), to look into building refining and chemical plants in China.

 

Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC) and Sinopec, which already jointly run a chemical complex in Tinajin, also agreed to develop petrochemical projects in both China and Saudi Arabia.

 

Salman told Xi he hoped China could play an even greater role in Middle East affairs, the ministry added.

 

Deputy Chinese Foreign Minister Zhang Ming said the memorandums of understanding and letters of intent were potentially worth about $65 billion, involving everything from energy to space.

(Source)

This was a very big deal in terms of Middle East geopolitics.  It shook up many decades of established power, resulting in a shift away from dependence on America. 

The Saudis arrived in China with such a huge crowd in tow that a reported 150 cooks had been brought along to just to feed everyone in the Saudi visitation party.   

The resulting deals struck involved everything from energy to infrastructure to information technology to space.  And this was just on the first visit.  Quite often a brand new trade delegation event involves posturing and bluffing and feeling each other out; not deals being struck.   So it’s clear that before the visit, well before, lots and lots of deals were being negotiated and terms agreed to so that the thick MOU files were ready to sign during the actual visit.

The scope and size of these business deals are eye catching, but the real clincher is King Salman"s public statement expressing hope China will play "an even greater role in Middle East affairs."

That, right there, is the sound of the geopolitical axis-tilting. That public statement tells us everything we need to know about the sort of change the Salman dynasty intends to pursue. 

So it should have surprised no one to hear that, in August this year, another $70 billion of new deals were announced between China and KSA. The fanfare extolled that Saudi-Sino relations had entered a new era, with “the agreements covering investment, trade, energy, postal service, communications, and media.”

This is a very rapid pace for such large deals.  If KSA and China were dating, they’d be talking about moving in together already. They"re clearly at the selecting furniture and carpet samples stage.

As for the US? It seems KSA isn"t even returning its calls or texts at this point.

You Ain"t Seen Nothing Yet...

All of the above merely describes how we arrived at where things stand today.

But as mentioned, the power grab underway in KSA by Mohammed bin Salman is unfolding in real-time. Developments are happening hourly -- while writing this, the very high-profile Prince Bandar bin Sultan (recent head of Saudi Intelligence and former longtime ambassador to the US) has been arrested.

The trajectory of events is headed in a direction that may well end the arrangement that has served as the axis around which geopolitics has spun for the past 40 years. The Saudis want new partners, and are courting China hard. 

China, for reasons we discuss in Part 2 of this report, has an existential need to supplant America as Saudi Arabia"s most vital oil customer.

And both Saudi Arabia and China are inking an increasing number of strategic oil deals with Russia. Why? We get into that in Part 2, too -- but suffice it to say, in the fast-shifting world of KSA foreign policy, it"s China and Russia "in", US "out".

Maybe not all the way out, but the US clearly has lost a lot of ground with KSA over the past few years.  My analysis is that by funding an insane amount of shale oil development, at a loss, and at any cost (such as to our biggest Mideast ally) the US has time and again displayed that our ‘friendship’ does not run very deep.  In a world where loyalty counts, the US has proved a disloyal partner. Can China position itself to be perceived of as a better mate? When it comes to business, I believe the answer is ‘yes.’ 

In Part 2: The Oil Threat we couple these developments with China and Russia’s recent efforts to drop the dollar from trade, especially when purchasing oil, and clearly see the unfolding of the biggest new driver of the world’s financial, monetary and geopolitical arrangements in 50 years.

We also explain why, unless something very dramatically changes in either the supply or demand equation for oil, and soon, we can now put a timeline in place for when the great unraveling begins.  Somewhere between the second half of 2018 and the end of 2019 oil will dramatically increase in price and that will shake the foundations of the global mountain of debt and its related underfunded liabilities.  Think 9.0 on the financial Richter scale. 

Let me be blunt - you have to have your preparations done before this happens.  You really, really want to be a year early on this (at least).  When it starts happening, the breakdown will progress faster than you can react.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

 

Are You Infuriated Yet?

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

More and more, I"m encountering people who are simply infuriated with how our "leaders" are running (or to put it more accurately, ruining) things right now. And I share that fury.

It’s perfectly normal human response to be infuriated when an outside agent hurts you, especially if the pain seems unnecessary, illogical or random.

Imagine if your neighbor enjoyed setting off loud explosives at all hours of the day and night. Or if he had a habit of tailgating and brake-checking you every time he saw your car on the road. You’d been well within your rights to be infuriated.

Or to use a much more common example from the real world : When your politicians repeatedly pass laws that hurt you in favor of large corporations -- that, too, is infuriating. Especially if those actions run directly counter to their campaign promises.

There’s a lot of be infuriated about in the world today, so go ahead and embrace your rage. By doing so, you’ll be in a better mindset to understand things like Brexit, Catalonia, and Trump, each of which is a reflection of the fury of your fellow citizens, who are finally waking up to the fact that they"ve been victims for too long.

An easy prediction to make is that this simmering anger of the populace is going to start boiling over more violently in the coming years. Welcome to the Age of Fury.

"Over The Top" Dumb

Do you ever get the sense that, as a society, we"re being dangerously reckless? Perhaps so dumb that we might not recover from the repercussions of our stupidity for many generations, if ever?

There are economic and financial idiocies in motion that are, by themselves, unsolvable predicaments without a peaceful solution. But when combined with resource depletion and declining net energy, they"re positively intractable.

Take for example the hundreds of trillions of dollars-worth of underfunded entitlement and pension promises. Those promises cannot be kept and they cannot be paid. Everybody with a basic comprehension of math can conclude as such.

Yet we continue to operate as if the opposite were true. We comfort ourselves that, somehow, all the promised future payouts will be made in full -- even though the funds are insolvent, their returns are much lower than the actuarial projections require, and payout demand mercilessly rises each year.

Spoiler alert: This isn’t some future disaster lying in wait. It’s unfolding right now.

Take these headlines spanning the past several years:

• Congress approves plan to allow pension cuts (Dec 2014)


• 273,000 union workers and retirees brace for pension cuts (May 2, 2016)


• In unprecedented move, pension plan cuts benefits promised to retirees (Jan 27, 2017)  -- note the laughable use of "unprecedented" here


• Teamsters face 31 percent pension cut (Mar 7, 2017)


• New York State Teamsters pension fund cuts approved (Sept 13, 2017)

When it comes to broken retirement promises, the future is now. It will be with us for a very long time.

Why? Because the math simply doesn’t work. It’s broken, it’s been broken for a long time. You can"t put too little in the piggy bank at the start, then raid it over time, and still expect to have enough at the end.

And yet we, as a society, have preferred to pretend as if that weren’t the case. Which, it turns out, was a terrible “strategy.”

But if you think that"s bad, you’re going to positively hate this chart:

The pension liabilities now blowing up are contained within the thin green smear in the middle of this chart. Think on the nation"s inability to handle that single crisis, and now reflect on how overwhelmed it"s going to be by the far larger predicaments that lie elsewhere on the chart.

The Infuriating Plunder-fest That Is Health Care

The Medicare liabilities (the orange and largest band on the above chart) are immense, and will only become more so as our largest demographic, the baby boomers, further ages. But they become especially infuriating when seen in the larger context of the racketeering that drives the health care system in the United States.

Instead of doing anything constructive about the high number of IOUs building up within Medicare, Washington DC politicians are sidestepping the most obvious elements that contribute the most to the problem. Enormously wasteful, the “healthcare” system is entirely out of control and spiraling deeper into an abyss that threatens to literally destroy the most productive segment of the US social structure: the middle and upper middle classes.

That should be a topic of serious discussion in the halls of power. But none is being had.

Literally each day brings worse news on the skyrocketing costs of healthcare. But, as with most topics,  the media mostly focuses on the symptoms (prices) rather than the causes of the issue.

The real culprits here are the insurance cartel and a hospital system that has the most unfair, incomprehensible, and inhumane billing process ever devised. One easy to grasp feature of both the insurance companies and conspire to pay the executives far more than they actually deserve or are truly worth.

Health care premiums for 2018 set to go up by as much as 50 percent

Oct 5, 2017

 

Several states have announced rates for health insurance premiums on the Obamacare exchanges for 2018. Topping the list is Georgia, with rates that are 57 percent higher than last year, while Florida said some premiums will be 45 percent higher.

 

Among the reasons for these increases is the uncertainty about the future of the Affordable Care Act. President Donald Trump has vowed to repeal and replace the health care law, which was passed under his predecessor President Barack Obama.

 

Insurers are raising premiums in the face of repeated threats from President Trump to stop funding so-called cost-sharing reductions, payments to insurers that cover out-of-pocket costs for some low-income consumers. Trump previously referred to these payments as “bailouts” for insurance companies and threatened to stop making the payments so as to “let Obamacare implode”.

(Source)

That’s the story the health insurers are going with: they have to raise rates because they"re uncertain whether they will get AS MUCH LOOT under the new rules being considered as they did under the utterly disastrous Obamacare provisions.

How much loot are we talking about? Look at this chart of the stock price of United Healthcare (UNH) since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare):

If this chart showing massive near-4x gains in just 5 years, coupled with your steep annual premium increases, doesn’t infuriate you, you are just not getting it.

Even if your employer pays for your health care (somewhat obscuring the true impact of premium increases), the cost to you is fewer and lower pay increases, as well as steady yearly reductions in covered services along with higher co-pays and deductible amounts.

Still not infuriated? Ok, maybe this will do the trick. Here how much executive compensation at the major insurers was last year:

(Source)

The average family health care insurance premium in 2016 was $18,764, meaning that Mark Bertolini from Aetna alone required 100% of the premiums from more than 2,200 families just to pay him in 2016. Of course, the “C-suite” of these health care insurers are loaded with other high-paid parasites who are just as busy gouging the young and old alike.

This is a complete travesty and joke. Congress and the Senate, sitting on their deservedly low approval ratings, pretend they cannot do anything about it. Too complicated they say. Bullshit I say. Go after the obscene pay packages and profits of the insurance industry as a first matter of business. Then make it a crime for hospitals to bill people differently for the exact same services.

That’s a no-brainer. Can you imagine if your mechanic had a secret pricing formula for every customer that was, literally, based on their maximum ability to pay? Nobody would stand for it, it’s disgusting that we tolerate this when it comes to something as vital and necessary as our health and even lives.

Fury, not tolerance, is what"s needed now.

Conclusion (to Part 1)

The future has arrived. The pension losses are here and just getting started and the future will have a lot more of those sorts of broken promises.

The health care insurance crisis has been with us for 20 years or so now and Obamacare just put some extra accelerant on that fire, which is now consuming middle class households by the tens of thousands.

Both the pension and health care crises are infuriating and self-inflicted wounds. We could have avoided them by making wiser choices in the past. We didn"t. We could limit their damage by making better choices today. We almost assuredly won"t.

Current conversations and proposals are thinly disguised sleight-of-hand movements whose purpose is to deflect attention from the thefts underway. Anybody who studies the system and its math comes to the same conclusion: the corporations have all the power and they are misusing it for private gain.

Why there aren’t more politicians willing to call a spade a spade and actually protect their constituents is a real mystery. But the next wave of populist candidates certainly won’t be. People are sick and tired of being asked to give more and more while corporations and wealthy elites keep taking more and more.

It’s simply infuriating.

But that’s not the worst of it. The mistakes we are making right now in terms of energy policy and ecological destruction are far more dangerous to your personal health, liberty and future prospects than a simple market crash.

In Part 2: It"s Time For Action, we uncover the hidden downside risks in today"s financial markets and explain how, as destructive as a coming market crash will be, the longer-term damage to society and risks to your well-being are rooted in the potential breakdown of the systems we depend on to live. As with pensions and health care, we are pursuing similar dangerously misguided policies in our farming & food systems, extraction of industrial resources, and ecological management -- to name just a few.  There"s an appropriate time for fury. And that time is now -- provided we use the anger to spur us into constructive action. Get your fury on. Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

 

Too Good For Too Long...

I"m writing this from my home in Sonoma County at the end of an intense week of witnessing firsthand the devastation caused by the many current fires burning in northern California. While it"s hard to focus on anything other than the moment-to-moment developments of this still-unfolding disaster (which I"ve been chronicling here), it"s already clear that the implications for my part of the state will last for many, many years to come.

It"s amazing how instantly the status quo where I live has changed. The world my neighbors and I lived in when we all went to bed on Sunday night simply no longer existed by the time we woke up on Monday morning. Lives have been lost. Entire neighborhoods - thousands of homes - have burned to the ground. Businesses, hospitals and schools are now shuttered.

Having now experienced this personally -- on top of watching news reports over the previous weeks of similarly abrupt "before/after" transitions in Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico, Mexico City, Las Vegas and Catalonia -- I have a new-found appreciation for the maxim that when it arrives, change happens quickly -- usually much more quickly than folks ever imagined, catching the general public off-guard and unprepared.

We humans tend to think linearly and comparatively. In other words, we usually assume the near future will look a lot like the recent past. And it does much of the time.

But other times it doesn"t. And that"s where the danger lies.

The Cruel Math

In 1987 a Danish physicist named Per Bak released a landmark paper introducing the concept of self-organized criticality. Bak observed that complex systems draw stability through an ongoing cycle of corrective collapses that keep the overall system from becoming too over-extended.

His point is best understood by watching a sand pile being formed. The pile rises as more grains of sand are added to it, until it hits a critical mass. At that point, the addition of more sand grains is likely to cause a limited collapse of the pile. The more grains of sand added, the more frequent these localized collapses are:

The key takeaway is that the end result of these collapses is that the overall size and shape of the sand pile as a whole is maintained -- i.e. the smaller corrections are necessary for maintaining the ongoing stability of the larger system (in other words, the sand pile retains a constant shape over time)

Without them, the system would grow unchecked until toppled by other laws of physics, yet at this point the energy displacement of the collapse is so large that the system is destroyed or re-set (in other words, the sand pile would rise in height over time until it collapsed entirely)

In his later 1996 book, How Nature Works, Bak showed how the same rules apply to the complex systems around us -- earthquakes, traffic jams, biological evolution, forest fires, the distribution of galaxies in the universe — and financial markets, too.

His findings are universal to complex systems. Ongoing smaller corrections are necessary for long-term stability of the larger system. And while you can"t predict exactly when the next correction will occur, the longer it takes to happen, the larger it will be (as it has more pent-up energy to displace). 

Another way to look at this is: If the smaller corrections don"t happen, the system is being set up for a much bigger and more painful collapse in the future.

In many ways, we"re seeing this manifest via the rash of recent disasters.

Let"s look at hurricanes. 2010-2016 was one of the most mild periods on record when it comes to damaging storms making landfall in the US. For whatever reason, the usual seasonal "smaller corrections" just weren"t happening as frequently in the Atlantic.

Bak"s work would predict an increasing probability of an unusually busy season of destructive hurricanes to arrive. And, right on cue, 2017 has now been recognized as the 9th most-active Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history (and the season isn"t over yet!). Underscoring the point, September 2017 proved to be the #1 single most active month for Atlantic tropical cyclones on record.

Similarly, the US West is coming off of a long stretch of regrettable forestry management practices -- logging large trees, fire suppression, and livestock grazing -- which reduced the natural occurrence and frequency of smaller-scale forest fires that prevented the build up of combustible flora. As a result, the system has become much more vulnerable to unchecked fires -- a situation made worse by the effects of the prolonged recent drought (just as the warmer temperature of the Gulf of Mexico is making hurricanes there more potent). Which is why the American West is experiencing its third most severe fire season in history this year.

Et Tu, S&P?

Don"t forget that Bak"s rules for complex systems also apply to financial markets.

With that in mind, it makes the inexorable mania and lack of micro-corrections since 2009 downright frightening. Just take a look at this price chart of the S&P 500, which is currently in its second-longest-ever bull market run:

We see that as stock prices have been on a one-way ride higher over the years, downside volatility has dried up, to the point where it now practically no longer exists:

Going back 55 years, the average cumulative intra-day losses over a 25-day period is about 660 basis points, or 6.6%. As of yesterday (October 10), the last 25 days have seen a grand total intra-day loss of just 96 basis points, or 0.96%. If that seems small, it is.

In fact, outside of the period ending November 26, 2014, this is the smallest cumulative 25-day intra-day loss in the past 46 years – and the only one registering less than 100 basis points.

(Source)

Just as (until this fall) with the US east coast and hurricanes, or like my corner of California with wildfires, things since 2010 have been "too good for too long" for the financial markets. The usual cycle of smaller corrections has not been allowed to happen, resulting in an unnatural build-up of the system to a height from which a destructive re-set is increasingly probable.

How much longer this can continue is anyone guess. But Bak"s work explains why it can"t go on forever, and why the resulting collapse will be more devastating the longer it takes to happen. And with the world central banking cartel set to reduce total global QE -- just as with hotter water temperatures in the Gulf -- the conditions for catastrophy are ratcheting up.

We are getting closer and closer to the day when we awake to find the markets we had the day before no longer exist. Change happens that fast, even with financial markets. If you think you"ll be one of the smart ones to sell your current positions before things get too bad, talk to someone who was invested in the market on October 19, 1987 when it suddenly lost nearly 25% of its value in just a few hours.

While you"re at it, talk to someone in Houston, Tampa Bay, Puerto Rico or Mexico City. Or I can put you in touch with one of my friends from Santa Rosa. Any one of them will tell you how stunningly swiftly fate can upend your best-laid plans.

Takeaways From Tragedy

Fortunately this week, I was one of the lucky ones. My family and property were spared.

But I can"t say the same for many in my community. From their loss, as well as from the threat I experienced earlier this week when the fires were much closer, here are some of the key learnings that came out of this crisis:

• Preparation only matters if it"s done in advance. And it matters a LOT -- Those who had "go bags" and disaster kits in place before the fires fared much better than those who didn"t. They were able to evacuate faster, more safely, and with better self-sufficiency. And even a few small steps can make a big difference. I found that already having a stash of emergency cash as well as several containers full of gas for my car put me at a great advantage when it first looked like we were going to have flee our home. Putting it more bluntly: if you don"t have some sort of emergency prep kit at this point, you"re being unforgivably reckless. Need guidance on what to put in it? Read our free Guide To Emergency Preparedness.


• People matter much more than property -- for those who had only minutes to flee the flames, they only cared about getting their loved ones to safety. All the "stuff" they accumulated in life didn"t even factor into their thinking at that moment. The big learning here? Don"t let possessions take an undue importance in your life. A disaster can quickly take them from you, and when forced to choose, you"ll pick people over things every time. So instead, place your focus on nurturing the relationships you value and maximizing the quality of time you can spend with those people. If you could use some professional help in this area and are having trouble finding it, consider contacting the therapist we endorse (full disclosure: she"s my wife)


• Community is priceless -- no one can be prepared for everything. Community will provide for the things you lack. I"ve been blown away by the magnitude of the response from the generous folks living both within and without Sonoma County. As I wrote last week, tragedy offers a way for people to step into their best selves. Invest in your community now, so that it"s as robust as possible when you need to count on it. Looking for ways to build community? We have a free guide for that, too.

These learnings apply to any crisis, but of course, depending on the type -- natural, financial or otherwise -- additional preparations come into play.

In our recent report Part 2 -- Crisis Preparation: What To Do, we detail out, point-by-point, our complete list of the most important steps concerned individuals should take now -- before another disaster arrives -- to safeguard their investment capital, their property, and the personal security of their families. Because whether caused by Mother Nature or man"s own recklessness, we are due for more crisis. Don"t be caught unprepared. Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)