Reality

Instead of Listening to Idiots Talking Their Book ... Let's Fact-Check the Myths

It appears European and US oil & gas stock investors (and Dow Transports lovers) believe they know better than commodity traders when it comes to some kind of future reality in which miracles of growth can happen. The disconnect between European oil & gas stocks, US energy stocks, and Trannies relative to crude oil has never been bigger...

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

"If you just exclude all the bad stuff, earnings look quite good."

There is no way Fed policy can be win-win-win for all participants.

Having fallen for 20 straight days, crushing the hopes and dreams of the mid-year bounce - and thoroughly breaking down from seasonally positive tendencies - The Baltic Dry Freight Index has collapsed to all-time (back to 1984) record lows. As on shipping broker exclaimed, “This market is looking like a disaster and the rates are a reflection of that. It is looking scary for the market and it doesn’t look like there is going to be any life in the market in the near term.”

Having detailed the "perverted nonsense" that is the collapsing and negative US swap spreads (here, here, here, and here) and noted money manager's concerns that the big question remains whether there is "something bigger brewing under the surface that so far hasn’t been pinpointed yet," it appears Goldman Sachs feels the need to 'explain' the anomaly in what appears an effort to calm fears about the broken money markets. Of course, we don’t have to figure out what the “market” is saying about a negative spread because it isn’t saying anything other than “something” is wrong and even Goldman admits this signals funding and balance sheet strains are worsening since August.

In 2016 just three countries will grow above Goldman's blended global average growth rate of 3.6%: India, China and Indonesia.

The Fed has created a dead end street for everyone not in their .1% clientele... We’re all muppets to the banking cabal running this morally and financially bankrupt military empire of debt.

The ECB has real policy choices they will have to choose between, and the implications are real. A further foray into negative deposit rates, extension and enlargement of QE, even a less likely change to the main financing rate. Each choice has externalities internally and is also likely to provoke a reaction from other affected countries. The Riksbank and SNB will be watching as closely as EGB traders. The ECB is in easing mode. The Fed plans to tighten. Relative value trades have further to play out

Westerners have a deep history of a culture of myths (see Joseph Campbell).  We love to believe in Santa Claus, "The American Dream," the Tooth Fairy, housing market always goes up, and countless others.  So it's easy for us to be 'terrorized' by a myth; that hiding behind every corner are evil 'terrorists' waiting to blow themselves up because 'they hate our freedoms.' 

The 9 Ways to Stop Terrorism

While await a full blown European version of the Patriot Act, we can say that the second part of the forecast just came true, because this morning The European Commission announced it had adopted a package of measures to strengthen control of firearms across the European Union and meant simply to make it "difficult to acquire firearms."

Stripped of accounting gimmicks, real GDP growth shows economic collapse. And it will culminate in another stock market crash.

Is the US about to go Icelandic (or Chinese) on Wall Street executives for their role in packaging bad mortgages in the lead up to the financial crisis? Probably not, but at least we can pretend...