BIS

Good Thing Debt Doesn't Matter! </sarc>

It appears a double in a week has prompted - just as we saw yesterday - some more profit-taking in Bitcoin as after topping $500 earlier today, the virtual currency has plunged (considerably more than yesterday) to $368 in late US trading as a high volume selling program was unleashed on the virtual currency.

The stock market has been soaring, but all of the hard economic numbers are telling us that a major global recession is here.  This is so reminiscent of what happened back in 2008.  Back then, all of the fundamentals were screaming “recession” by the middle of that year, but the equity markets didn’t respond until later.  It appears that a similar pattern is playing out right now. Just like in 2008, the irrational optimists are going to keep chanting their happy mantras for as long as they possibly can.

Following what has been a tremendous surge in bitcoin, which as we noted earlier had doubled from its August lows, rising as high as $420 less than an hour ago, a furious selling program was unleashed moments ago taking down the digital currency by nearly $50 on a sudden and dramatic surge in volume.

“A predicted global meltdown passed without event. But there are enough warning signs to suggest we are sleepwalking into another disaster”.

At least parts of the Fed all the way back in 1979 appreciated how Greenspan and Bernanke’s “global savings glut” was a joke. Rather than follow that inquiry to a useful line of policy, monetary officials instead just let it all go into the ether of, from their view, trivial history. But the true disaster lies not just in that intentional ignorance but rather how orthodox economists and policymakers were acutely aware there was “something” amiss about money especially by the 1990’s. Because these dots to connect were so close together the only reasonable conclusion for this discrepancy is ideology alone. Economists were so bent upon creating monetary “rules” by which to control the economy that they refused recognition of something so immense because it would disqualify their very effort.

"... judging from market-based implied measures of longer-term inflation expectations, the effectiveness of the ECB’s announcements has proved limited so far."

- Goldman Sachs

"The rise in household savings rates amid so much central bank support is paradoxical to us, and mimics what we highlighted in the credit market earlier this year. Companies in Europe are deleveraging, not releveraging"

Gold will also be vulnerable towards the end of an interest rate tightening cycle as was the case in January 1980. Today, central banks including the Fed  are having difficulty raising interest rates in even a small nominal way.

Far from being some trivial problem that can be fixed by pressing "print", central banks operating from a negative equity position face the possibility of i) losing their independence as they have to be recapitalized at the behest of the government, ii) being forced into policy decisions (or, perhaps more appropriately "in"decisions) that they might not otherwise make, and iii) losing the ability to control the narrative, thus heightening market concerns about the loss of omnipotence.

“October is a particularly dangerous month to speculate in stocks. Followed by July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.” – Mark Twain

The "very serious people" are starting to get nervous, because while most other "commodities" have seen their prices plummet in the biggest crash since Lehman, gold just went green for the year. Enter Goldman Sachs: "While our base case remains for higher US real rates and lower gold prices, there are significant risks that our forecast for gold price weakness is pushed out, should the Fed surprise us and remain on hold in December."

It was clear what was about to happen in Syria only because we understood one important fundamental – that there are no “sides” in any modern conflict, only proxies fighting on a global chessboard controlled by the same elitist interests. Syria represented a perfect catalyst for a planetary scale conflict triggered between East and West in a way that could divert attention from internationalists. Modern war, whether through kinetics or economics, is almost always theater designed to distract and terrorize the masses, which are the true target of any conflagration.

First The Bank of Japan destroyed the Japanese bond market, and then, back in May we warned that The Bank of Japan had 'broken' the stock market. Now, it appears the all too obvious consequences of being the sole provider of buying power in an antirely false market are coming home to roost as Nomura reports the "temporary suspension" of new orders for 3 leveraged ETFs - the largest in the world - citing "liquidity of the underlying Nikkei 225 futures market."

When China was closed for one week at the end of September, something which helped catalyze the biggest weekly surge in US stocks in years, out of sight meant out of mind, and many (mostly algos) were hoping that China's problems would miraculously just go away. Alas after yesterday's latest trade data disappointment, it was once again China which confirmed that nothing is getting better with its economy in fact quite the contrary, and one quick look at the chart of wholesale, or factory-gate deflation, below shows that China is rapidly collapsing to a level last seen in 2009 because Chinese PPI plunged by 5.9% Y/Y, its 43rd consecutive drop - a swoon which is almost as bad as Caterpillar retail sales data.