Central Banks

"Rising rates and falling profits are not a good combination for asset prices, so we will turn sellers of risk in early 2016."

Take note, these charts signal that the bull markets of the last six years are ending. The markets are primed for another Crash, just as they were in 2000 and 2007.

Yesterday’s hike still leaves U.S. monetary policy extremely loose, and Fed officials have signaled they will act cautiously from to nurture a very tenuous recovery indeed.

"The party's over and bond investors who always tend to be more sober types, realize this and have headed for the exits whereas equity investors are so intoxicated they haven't realized that the music has stopped. Equity investors are still gyrating around the dance floor - just as in 1999 and 2007... I believe the Yellen Fed will soon be treated with the same contempt the Greenspan Fed was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. And they will deserve it."

It appears that a main preoccupation of economists – the self declared “behavioral economists” prominent among them – is to show how dumb people are as consumers and in assessing risks. Drawn to logical conclusion, this implies that economists, advising benevolent dictators are the solution. In ancient Greece people flocked to oracles and sought guidance.; today, Councils of Economic Advisers, IMF, OECD, Nobel prizes sustain perceptions that "macro- strology" and much else of what economists do is "science."

Now, slave, get back to work, if you have a job, and make sure you save some energy for your other part time employment as you will be going to those jobs later today. 

Grant Williams is very skeptical of the Fed’s ability to continue to control markets much longer.

How much do you think your paper currency will be worth 23 centuries from now? Or even 23 years? Or potentially even 23 months?

China did everything it could to prevent a collapse and it still happened.  How do you think other countries will do?

The upside is ephemeral, illusory or wishful thinking; the downside is real and lasting.

We have reached the apogee of history’s greatest credit inflation. Now we’re hurtling into a prolonged worldwide deflation. You can already see this deflation in the plunge of oil, iron ore, copper and other commodity prices. We are in uncharted waters after nearly 20 years of madcap money printing by the Fed and other central banks. The world’s central banks are finally out of dry powder. They no longer have the means to inflate the global credit and financial bubble. That’s why today’s FOMC meeting is the most crucial inflection point since 1929.

Grant Williams sets the context for tomorrow's FOMC meeting, where the Federal Reserve is widely expected to hike interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade. To say he is very skeptical of the Fed's ability to continue to control market forces much longer is a gross understatement...

We’ve already gotten a taste of what happens when asset classes finally “adjust” to underlying “demand” with the commodity markets: having operated based on Central Bank money printing for five years, they then wiped out ALL of those gains in six months.

Where most analysis on oil markets tends to fall short is on the depth of analysis vs. reading headlines and group think, the latter of which is heavily shaped by misinformed media and government propaganda.