Bear Market

The ratio of hires to job openings has been steadily falling.  The analysts the WSJ cited all felt that the growing number of job openings was a bullish sign, and that employers can’t find workers to fill the jobs they are offering because workers don’t have the skills employers need. However, The Journal failed to mention the other cause - that the jobs being offered are so crappy and so low paying, nobody wants to take them. More troubling though is the rise in layoffs, just as we saw in 2007...just before stocks turned down.

Wondering why stocks are surging this morning - aside from Fischer's comments, OPEC rumors, Greek bank recaps, and JPY ignition? Perhaps it is the veritable swarm of professional technical analysts out with notes warning of significant problems ahead. From John Hussman's refined Hindenberg Omen and Carter Worth's "sell stocks, breadth is a problem," to Oppenheimer's warning of "seasonals and weak internals," and Louise Yamada's "stocks are vulnerable, keep cash on sidelines" warning - it appears today's early bounce is as much about contrarian oversold bounce as it is about any macro news. But with 73% of the largest 1000 stocks at least 5% off their highs, stocks remain fragile as they push back towards highs.

"The future is unknown and we are not dealing with markets that are free markets anymore...now we have government interventions everywhere. [But] in the last say twelve months, I have observed an increasing number of academics who are questioning monetary policies. That's why I think they will take the gold away and go back to some gold standard by revaluing the gold say from now $1000/oz to say $10,000 dollars. An individual should definitely own some physical gold. The bigger question is where should he store it? because... the failure of monetary policies will not be admitted by the professors that are at central banks, they will then go and blame someone else for it and then an easy target would be to blame it on people that own physical gold because - they can argue - well these are the ones that do take money out of circulation and then the velocity of money goes down - we have to take it away from them... That has happened in 1933 in the US."

The omens are not good when momentum and quality become highly correlated, warns SocGen's cross-asset research group. Quality is now essentially price momentum and vice versa, and history tells us when these two strategies collide the omens are not usually good, as it is a phenomena usually associated with equity markets turning bearish. This becomes even more evident when they plug the factors into their bear market indicator... simply put, we are in a bear market!

It appears that after the great collapse of 2014, oil trading "god" Andy Hall refused to learn from his mistakes, and was convinced that oil would promptly rebound up to its historic levels. He was wrong, and as Reuters reports, after two consecutive months of 3% losses in May and June at which point he was up just 2% for the year, July was by far the cruelest month in history for the oil trader, a month in which he suffered a whopping 17% loss, one which lowered his aum by $500 million to $2.8 billion.

"The question for 2015 is whether Fed actions are going to take away the liquidity punch bowl, and create a problem for the next rally's ability to achieve escape velocity... We saw this principle of diminished liquidity back in 1998-2000, and again in 2007-08..."

18 of the 22 components in the Bloomberg Commodity Index have dropped at least 20% from recent closing highs, meeting the common definition of a bear market. As Bloomberg details, that’s the same number as at the end of October 2008, when deepening financial turmoil sent global markets into a swoon.

Will there be a financial collapse in the United States before the end of 2015?  An increasing number of respected financial experts are now warning that we are right on the verge of another great economic crisis.

Things not adding up with the current pricing structure...

From our perspective, the fundamental reason for economic stagnation and growing income disparity is straightforward: Our current set of economic policies supports and encourages a low level equilibrium by encouraging debt-financed consumption and discouraging saving and productive investment. We permit an insular group of professors and bankers to fling trillions of dollars about like Frisbees in the simplistic, misguided, and repeatedly destructive attempt to buy prosperity by maximally distorting the financial markets.

What if the assumptions about a U.S. economic recovery and Fed rate hikes were wrong? Could observers be mistaken now about the trajectory of the Dollar vs. the Euro as they were back in 2000? Confidence is the only thing that really undergirds modern fiat currencies. But confidence can be very ephemeral...disappearing as quickly as it arrives. The U.S. Dollar benefits from confidence that the Euro currency may just be unworkable, that the U.S. economy will continue to improve, and that the Fed will raise rates throughout the remainder of 2015 and into 2016. If these expectations are unfulfilled, there could be a Euro reversal.

"Increasingly concerned about the markets, I’ve taken more aggressive action than in 2007, the last time I soured on the equity markets. Let me explain why and what I’m doing to try to profit from what may lie ahead."

We have lived through a credit hyper-expansion for the record books, with an unprecedented generation of excess claims to underlying real wealth. In doing so we have created the largest financial departure from reality in human history. Bubbles are not new – humanity has experienced them periodically going all the way back to antiquity – but the novel aspect of this one, apart from its scale, is its occurrence at a point when we have reached or are reaching so many limits on a global scale. The retrenchment we are about to experience as this bubble bursts is also set to be unprecedented, given that the scale of a bust is predictably proportionate to the scale of the excesses during the boom that precedes it. Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing, meaning the downward spiral will continue for many years. China is the biggest domino about to fall, and from a great height as well, threatening to flatten everything in its path on the way down. This is the beginning of a New World Disorder…

Will the Japanese “monetary perpetuum mobile” ever get questioned by financial markets?