CRAP

In the current deluge of wannabe leaders clamoring for attention and trying to convince us that they are the boss who should be applying rules to us, it strikes me that all of them are looking backward and none are looking forward. So, since none of this crowd is going to venture anywhere outside of their hermetically sealed status quo, we’d like to offer an example of something a real leader might say...

The Carnage continues in China (and across AsiaPac) as Japan propagandizes and China throws more kitchen sinks at the market to stop the malicious sellers...

The trouble is that it’s not inconceivable Trump could get elected. Farfetched, perhaps, but not out of the question. The USA is heading for a very rough patch of history — as those of you with your eyes on the stock indexes lately may suspect. The country stands an excellent chance of waking up some morning soon to discover it is broke and broken. When that happens, all the anxiety and animus will be focused on looking for scapegoats, and they are likely to be the wrong ones. World leaders considered Hitler a clown in the early going, too, you know.

What happens when we roll back into the next official recession, unemployment soars, and consumers really stop spending? What is revealed when you look under the hood of this economic recovery is that it is a complete and utter fraud. The recovery is nothing but smoke and mirrors, buoyed by subprime auto debt, really subprime student loan debt, corporate stock buybacks, and Fed financed bubbles in stocks, real estate, and bonds. The four retailers listed below are nothing but zombies, kept alive by the Fed’s ZIRP and QE, as they stumble towards their ultimate deaths. The coming recession will be the knife through their skulls, putting them out of their misery.

And the catalyst was... crap China data means moar stimulus (except pork prices are soaring), oil rumors (denied), JPY (stalled), Fischer (same old), and Lockhart... or maybe it's just your standard Monday morning stop run...

... in under a minute, the hateful script had taken offline the entire system in much the same manner as chucking a spanner into a running engine might stop a car. The databases, as always, were flushing their precious data onto many different disks as this happened, so massive, irreversible data corruption occurred. That was it, the biggest computer system in the bank, maybe even the world, was down. And it wasn't coming back up again quickly. At the time this failure occurred there was more than $12 TRILLION of trades at various stages of the settlement process in the system. This represented around 20% of ALL trades on the global stock market.

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

This is full on mania and with inventory building up, people are starting to crunch the numbers more carefully.  I’m curious, how does someone justify a 144% increase on this place?  As we all know, real estate is essentially a game of musical chairs, especially in boom and bust California.  Someone is trying to cash in on a lottery ticket here for Venice.

Athletes in next year's Summer Olympics here will be swimming and boating in waters so contaminated with human feces that they risk becoming violently ill and unable to compete in the games. An AP analysis of water quality revealed dangerously high levels of viruses and bacteria from human sewage in Olympic and Paralympic venues — results that alarmed international experts and dismayed competitors training in Rio, some of whom have already fallen ill with fevers, vomiting and diarrhea.

If you feel you’ve had enough Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) related scandals for one lifetime, you’ve come to the wrong place...

“We want to get people out of their ruts. Have you been masturbating the same way for 20 years?” the instructor asked rhetorically. “How’s that going for you? Would you like to try something new?”

It's true that “the authorities” want the price of financial assets (stocks, bonds) to go up, and the price of hard assets (commodities) to go down… which is exactly what has happened. So do governments and central banks ever lose? In the old days, they lost all the time. In one extreme example, an individual hedge fund took out the entire Bank of England. But central banks are currently on a massive winning streak. So to answer the question, “Will we ever have a crisis,” you need to answer the question, “Will we ever be allowed to have one?”

A shocking and uncharacteristic display of common sense

"With this brewing crisis around Greece, the fact the Shanghai stock market is exposing all kinds of uncomfortable truths about China, (for instance, the lack of competitiveness, overleverage, massive over-expectations in valuations, the failure of the stock market as “bread and circuses” for the middle classes, and the fears of the party at a troublesome time), and the big bond reversal in the last quarter… and its perhaps surprising that things aren’t a whole lot worse. It’s no wonder global commodity markets are flimsier than a chocolate tea-pot. The first half of the year was pretty torrid… but it could still prove pleasant  compared to what may be coming. I’m wondering if Global Markets are poised on the edge of the precipice about to take a step forward?"

How can it be implied that the markets are too fragile to deal with an unexpected raise of interest rates to (gasp) 1/4 of 1%, if all the “data” we were told (or sold) has been showing signs of all this “improvement?” The question still remains: How does any Ivory Tower prognosticator, or Wall Street talking head, square all these circles? Simple – they don’t. They just act as if it they didn’t or won’t happen. Or, just continue to act as if we’re too dumb to answer. This is complacency, idiocy, and more – all turned up to 11!