Meltdown

"What scares me, or what worries me, is what the next downturn in the economy looks like, with asset prices where they are and a lesser ability of central banks to ease monetary policy."

In today's centrally planned world, the proliferation of NIRP means that nothing is sacred - not even a Swiss bank account...

With a complex and disaster-prone system of interdependence causing social strife and chaos, why not just simplify everything with a global currency and perhaps even global governance? The elites will squeeze the collapse for all it’s worth if they can, and a Fed rate hike may be exactly what they need to begin the final descent.

The OECD is well aware of the possibility that a Fed hike could plunge emerging markets into chaos. Nevertheless, the time to hike is apprently now...

It seems increasingly likely the next Global Financial Meltdown will arise in the FX/currency markets. The core paradox - that central banks can't control both domestic and global FX markets with the same set of policies - cannot be resolved by printing $1 trillion, or even $5 trillion. Printing money to fix one problem leads to another set of problems that are only made worse by additional money-printing.

This gold coin 2000 years ago buys the same amount of bread today as it did when Jesus Christ was born. That is a real safe haven asset…

The world is becoming increasingly chaotic and the American people are seeking a leader who can bring order, make tough decisions, and capture the zeitgeist of this moment in history. They are in search of a prophet generation (Boomer) Grey Champion, whose arrival marks the moment of darkness, adversity and peril as the Fourth Turning careens towards its climax. The Grey Champion doesn’t necessarily have to be a good person, but they must lead and display tremendous confidence in their cause and path. Franklin, Lincoln, and FDR have many detractors, but during their Fourth Turnings, they most certainly led, casting aside obstacles (sometimes illegally) and enduring dark days and bleak prospects for success. Is there someone of that stature ready to lead the American people now?

48 hours - that's how long it took Citi's chief economist Willem Buiter to issue a report which was just as dire as Daiwa's, but because Citigroup is much more reliant on keeping it traditionally bullish clients as happy as possible, one had to read between the lines to get to the bottom line.  This is Citi's punchline: "A global recession starting in 2016, led by China is now our Global Economics team's main scenario. Uncertainty remains, but the likelihood of a timely and effective policy response seems to be diminishing."

"It looks to me a bit like a bubble again with essentially a tripling of stock prices since 2009 in just six years and at the same time people losing confidence in the valuation of the market."

"All this points to weaknesses in domestic and international policy arrangements - arrangements that have so far been unable to constrain sufficiently the build-up and unwinding of hugely damaging financial booms and busts across countries.Hence a world in which debt levels are too high, productivity growth too weak and financial risks too threatening. This is also a world in which interest rates have been extraordinarily low for exceptionally long and in which financial markets have worryingly come to depend on central banks' every word and deed, in turn complicating the needed policy normalisation. It is unrealistic and dangerous to expect that monetary policy can cure all the global economy's ills."

"Of all the possible risk scenarios the meltdown scenario is, realistically speaking, the most likely to occur. It is actually a more realistic outcome than the capital stock adjustment scenario. If China’s economy, the second largest in the world, twice the size of Japan’s, were to lapse into a meltdown situation such as this one, the effect would more than likely send the world economy into a tailspin. Its impact could be the worst the world has ever seen."

China's global meltdown-inducing "adjustment" continues unabated as fixed asset investment is weakest since 2000.

"A 'policy error' rate hike might well result in positive correlations among equities, commodities and bonds, due to a combination of risk off and higher rates. In this case it is not entirely clear how risk-parity funds would rebalance: A potential candidate for inflows would be currencies, and in particular the dollar. This would only put additional upward pressure on the dollar, reinforcing the “policy error” nature of the hike."

We're beginning to believe the nation will not be unified behind a common cause when the coming financial eruption unleashes molten lava of chaos, punishing economic distress, civil strife, class warfare, race wars, and ultimately global war. As Strauss and Howe foretold, the establishment (aka corporate fascist military industrial surveillance state) has seen a sequential loss of popular trust as their blatant corruption, sociopathic stranglehold on the levers of power, and unrelenting greed have angered the critical thinking aware citizens of this country. The next leg down in this Greater Depression will sever the remaining trust, disintegrating any remaining support for the existing civic order. What comes next will be heavily dependent upon whether the 5% to 10% of liberty minded believers in the Constitution are able to gain the trust of the masses.

As a rule, the only people worse at their jobs than weathermen are economists and the only real difference between the two professions is that when the weatherman gets it wrong, you get caught in the rain without an umbrella, but when an economist that someone installed in the Eccles Building gets it wrong, there’s the very real potential for the financial universe to collapse.