Market Crash

Seth Klarman recently remarked:

"All the Trumans – the economists, fund managers, traders, market pundits –know at some level that the environment in which they operate is not what it seems on the surface…. But the zeitgeist is so damn pleasant, the days so resplendent, the mood so euphoric, the returns so irresistible, that no one wants it to end."

Klarman is here referring to the waning days of this third and greatest financial bubble of this century. But David Stockman's take is that the crack-up boom now nearing its dénouement marks not merely the season finale of still another Fed-induced cycle of financial asset inflation, but, in fact, portends the demise of an entire era of bubble finance.

I clearly have a very hard time reconciling a U.S. stock market making new all-time-highs almost daily, especially in the face of what most economists consider to be a weak domestic economy with negligible growth prospects.  Moreover, when you layover the thoroughly stalled and certainly weaker overall global economic picture, it’s even harder to rationalize.  Finally, throw into the mix the gravity of threatening geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and Russia, the two nations with the largest stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons on earth, and the market actually welcomes it.  Something majorly does not add up, well, to this Idiot anyways.

President Obama released his 2015 budget proposal this week...and as expected, it contained even more language about his MyRA initiative. As we’ve discussed so many times in the past, IRAs are an irresistible kitty for such a bankrupt government. The US government itself estimates that over $5 trillion is tucked away in American retirement accounts. They need that money. Your money. The US government is struggling to come up with new funding sources… and retirement accounts are by far the easiest target. Why? Because the majority of retirement accounts at trapped at big Wall Street banks, which are all de facto agents of the government. All the Treasury Department has to do is make a phone call. Yesterday’s budget announcement constitutes the next phase: automatic enrollment.

Mainstream media discussion of the macro economic picture goes something like this: “When there is a recession, the Fed should stimulate. We know from history the recovery comes about 12-18 months after stimulus. We stimulated, we printed a lot of money, we waited 18 months. So the economy ipso facto has recovered. Or it’s just about to recover, any time now.” But to quote the comedian Richard Pryor, “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?” However, as Hayek said, the more the state centrally plans, the more difficult it becomes for the individual to plan. Economic growth is not something that just happens. It requires saving. It requires investment and capital accumulation. And it requires the real market process. It is not a delicate flower but it requires some degree of legal stability and property rights. And when you get in the way of these things, the capital accumulation stops and the economy stagnates.

Concerns about the possibility of the Chinese property bubble bursting affecting economic growth in China and the world is supporting gold.

Global gold prices may have been manipulated on 50% of occasions between January 2010 and December 2013, according to analysis by Fideres, a consultancy. Pension funds, hedge funds, commodity trading advisers, futures traders and ordinary investors are likely to have suffered losses as a result. Many of these groups were "definitely ready" to file lawsuits.

Celente again warned of the economic parallels with the 1930’s and said that we are again seeing recession and depressions, currency wars, trade wars and that this would lead to actual wars. His free webinar and Q & A tomorrow will look at ways to protect yourself from these risks in 2014 and beyond.

The market correction that begin in January appears to be subsiding, at least for the moment, as Yellen's recent testimony gave markets the promise of the continuation of Bernanke's legacy. With the markets back into rally mode, for the moment, this week's "Things To Ponder" focuses on some of the bigger issues concerning the effectiveness of QE, investing and "77 reasons you suck at managing money."

On Tuesday, new Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen went before Congress and confidently declared that "the economic recovery gained greater traction in the second half of last year" and that "substantial progress has been made in restoring the economy to health".  This resulted in glowing headlines throughout the mainstream media such as this one from USA Today: "Yellen: Economy is improving at moderate pace".  Sadly, tens of millions of Americans are going to believe what the mainstream media is telling them.  But it isn't the truth.  As you will see below, there are all sorts of signs that the economy is taking a turn for the worse.

Once again the smell of NAPALM is in the air

If the stock market were already crashing then it would be simple to blame the dismally sad rash of dead bankers in the last week on that - certainly that was reflected in 1929. However, for the third time in the last week, a senior financial executive has died in what appears to be a suicide. As Bloomberg reports, following the deaths of a JPMorgan senior manager (Tuesday) and a Deutsche Bank executive (Sunday), Russell Investments' Chief Economist (and former Fed economist) Mike Dueker was found dead at the side of a highway in Washington State. Police said the death appeared to be a suicide.

There is one major problem when the entire market is a rigged casino (by both the Fed and HFTs), favoring degenerate gamblers over traditional investors: at the first whiff of trouble everyone bails. Or as BofA politely puts it, "Typically flows follow returns and this week was no exception." In the past week, trouble whiffed, and the degenerate gamblers, loaded up to the gills with record margin debt hightailed it out of the casino, leading to the largest weekly equity fund outflow in over two years! Add some record leverage to the equity withdrawal, continued EM turbulence, ongoing Japanese deflation exports, oh and of course the ongoing Fed taper which has been solely responsible for all S&P gains since 666, and suddenly you have all the ingredients for a broad market crash.

While 2014 has not quite panned out (so far) as the traveling-strategist-roadshow would have hoped, the last few days have been outright perilous for the record high numbers with bullish sentiment sucked into a world of central-bank-suppressed volatility and jawboned utopia. The following charts show where the pain has been (e.g. Greece, Spain, Argentina, European banks) and where it has not been (e.g. gold miners, China, Philipinnes, and Egypt) with the US indices sitting squarely in the middle with some of their biggest losses in months. For now, the BTFATH'ers are absent - even though the drooling mouths of asset-gatherers are demanding the 'cash on the sidelines' use this 2-3-4% drop from the all-time highs to load the boat for retirement heaven... However, some have increasing concerns...

One couldn't make this up:

• S.KOREA TO HOLD EMERGENCY MEETING ON JAN. 26 TO DISCUSS MARKETS

US equity investors have not been this "euphoric" since the peak of the US equity market in 2000. As Citi's Tobias Levkovich notes, while he is longer-term a believer is the secular bull, one has to remember that there can be a secular run with substantive bumps along the way. No one questions the 1982-2000 equity bull market but there were some awful moments in that 18-year period including the stock market crash of 1987 and the sharp pullback in 1990 as well as in 1998. With Citi's proprietary Panic/Euphoria model at levels that imply an 80% probability of a negative return in the next 12-months, Levkovich warns chasing the tape simply on the basis of momentum may not be a good strategy since expecting another 25%-30% appreciation in 2014 seems rather excessive.