Market Crash

"To find the real source of the system's excessive fragility, the regulators will need to look much closer to home... The Federal Reserve remains the largest market manipulator ever, and the desperate yield-chasing, hair-trigger markets that it created were the primary cause of that crash and the inevitable ones yet to come."

Of course no two financial crashes ever look exactly the same. The crisis that we are moving toward is not going to be precisely like the crisis of 2008. But there are similarities and patterns that we can look for. Sadly, most people are not willing to learn from history. Even though it is glaringly apparent that we are in a historic financial bubble, most investors on Wall Street cannot see it because they do not want to see it. This next financial crisis will be strike number three. After this next crisis, there will never be a return to “normal” for the United States.

The endgame has indeed arrived. At the very least, the international elites seem to think success is within their grasp, for they now openly expose their own criminality. But they do so in a way that attempts to divert blame or to rationalize their actions as being for the "greater good." All signs and evidence point to what the IMF calls the "great global economic reset.”" The plans for this reset do not include U.S. prosperity or a thriving dollar.

Just as China was closing for trade and Europe was opening, something previously unseen happened: no, not another another GPIF or Virtu inspired marketwide stop squeeze, those are quite recurring these days. It was virtually every Bloomberg terminal around the globe suddenly going dark.

"In some instances, malfunctioning algorithms have interfered with market functioning, inundating trading venues with message traffic or creating sharp, short-lived spikes in prices as a result of other algorithms responding to the initial erroneous order flow."... "If liquidity is as bad as it is now, what’s going to happen when things really get adverse?” said Richard Schlanger, who co-manages about $30 billion in bonds as vice president at Pioneer Investments in Boston.

Randolph Duke: Money isn't everything, Mortimer.
Mortimer Duke: Oh, grow up.
Randolph Duke: Mother always said you were greedy.
Mortimer Duke: She meant it as a compliment.

The Treasury flash crash and similar recent events in currency markets are "shots across the bow," Jamie Dimon says in his latest letter to shareholders. The JPM chief goes on to warn, as we have for years, that declining liquidity in credit markets is likely to exacerbate future crises: "The likely explanation for the lower depth in almost all bond markets is that inventories of market-makers’ positions are dramatically lower than in the past. For instance, the total inventory of Treasuries readily available to market-makers today is $1.7 trillion, down from $2.7 trillion at its peak in 2007. The trend in dealer positions of corporate bonds is similar."

In retrospect, we almost feel bad for Gregg: after all in the new paranormal, in which the market is manipulated, fragmented and broken from the top (central banks) all the way to the very bottom (HFTs) with the sole purpose of pushing it ever higher in a futile attempt to restore confidence and retail investor participation in what is so clearly a rigged casino it is not easy pretending everything is fine when everything is on the verge of total collapse at any given (nano)second, and where the only recourse to coordinated selling is for the markets to break. Literally.

"The Fed has been pushing everybody into the public markets... it makes sense to reduce your exposure to the most trafficked assets."

According to hedge fund legend Julian Robertson, the Fed must act and hike rates soon because “the economy warrants it and I think [the Fed is] not crazy enough just to let this thing boil over into complete explosion. I am looking at a bubble that is almost sure to pop at some time and I don't know when it's going to happen, but I know it's going to happen. The bigger this bubble gets, the bigger the burst." What happens then: "I don't think it's at all ridiculous to think of a selloff like we saw in 2008."

The higher financial markets rise, the harder they fall. It would be one thing if stocks were soaring because the U.S. economy as a whole was doing extremely well.  But we all know that isn’t true. The warning signs are there – if you are willing to look at them.

When an economic crisis is coming, there are usually certain indicators that appear in advance...

Blogger Ben’s work is already done. In his very first substantive post as a civilian he gave away all the secrets of the monetary temple. The Bernank actually refuted the case for modern central banking in one blog. The truth is the real world of capitalism is far, far too complex and dynamic to be measured and assessed with the exactitude implied by Bernanke’s gobbledygook. In fact, what his purported necessity for choosing a rate “somewhere” actually involves is the age old problem of socialist calculation.

Forget about Rig Counts, we need to see Producer Counts go down considerably, until that happens the oil market hasn`t bottomed.

It’s time for the Japanese to get seriously scared now. Like many other countries, Japan – and its political class – creates a false image of enduring prosperity by letting its central bank increasingly buy up ever more of its sovereign bonds. It’s a total sleight of hand, there is nothing left that’s real. There’s no there there. This is of course the same as what happens in Europe. And it’s precisely because central banks buy up all these bonds, that their yields scrape the gutter. It’s a blueprint for killing off the last bit of actual functionality in an economy.