Recession

On Tuesday, it was announced that over seventeen million new vehicles were sold in 2015, the highest it’s ever been in United States history. While the media claims that this record has been reached because of drastic improvements to the US economy, they are once again failing to account for the central factor: credit expansion. The auto bubble has yet to burst, but its negative effects are already starting to gradually appear.

Perhaps weak manufacturing, construction, and trade data are mere outliers.  Maybe the Fed can see beyond the fog to clearly capture the big picture.  Or maybe the Fed has lost its marbles.  Their outlook doesn’t jive with that of the regular working stiff.

Here’s a newsflash that CNBC didn’t mention. According to the BLS, the US economy generated a miniscule 11,000 jobs in the month of December.

Time Magazine cover says she could lead the only Chinese democracy.  The same woman also said "Violence Is Normal in a Democratic Society"

"It’s no secret that Alberta’s economy is closely linked to the peaks and craters of oil prices—nominal GDP (not adjusted for inflation) swings in tandem with crude prices. It’s why Fort McMurray is like a wounded beast these days. MacKay’s neighbour got laid off this fall. “I watched the bank come and take his truck,” he recalls—it was that or not feed the kids."

Today, we bring our readers another RealVision excerpt of a reflexive "interview" in which Pal himself is in the hot seat, and goes into detail explaining the indicators he will be watching throughout 2016 that will suggest that a liquidity crisis is imminent.

The mainspring of Islamic extremism and militancy isn’t the moderate and democratic political Islam, because why would people turn to violence when they can exercise their right to choose their rulers? The mainspring of Islamic militancy is the despotic and militant political Islam of the Gulf variety. The Western powers are fully aware of this fact, then why do they choose to support the same forces that have nurtured jihadism and terroris?

"Some people are never too old to find new ways to lose money."

In March 2014 Wall Street’s ex-items S&P 500 earnings forecast for 2015 was about $133 per share; it ended up 20% lower at $106. Yet here they go again - the consensus for 2016 started out at $137 per share last spring, and is just now beginning to make its way back toward the high $120s. It is a barometer of the abject complacency and intellectual sloth that has descended on the casino owing to two decades of Fed coddling and seven year of free money for the carry trades. In the case of Chipotle, it was always just a burrito. In the case of the US and world economy and financial markets, it’s not even that.

The Treasury yield curve has collapsed since Janet and her band of inverse Robin-Hoods hiked rates into the worst earnings and manufacturing recession since the crisis. In fact, the spread between 2Y and 10Y rates has plunged 15bps since December's FOMC meeting to its flattest since 2008... so we ask simply - Dear Janet, please explain?

Bubbles don’t correct - they burst! Sure, U.S. stocks might have climbed out of the August correction. But too many small- and mid-cap stocks are in the red to say "the coast is clear." And these growing divergences in the market are showing that we are very, very close to bursting.

The good news - wholesale inventories are being worked off (falling 0.3% MoM in November - biggest drop since May 2013). The bad news - inventories are being worked off (crushing Q4 GDP hopes and Fed forecasts). The ugly news - Wholesale sales collapsed 1.0% MoM - the biggest drop in a year (leaving the spread between sales and inventories at a record high). The ugliest data of all - inventories-to-sales spiked to 1.32x - (the highest since 2008's crisis recession and as high as the worst in the 2001 recession!)

When will we know that the United States is really close to “normalizing interest rates”? The U.S. dollar will no longer exist, and (hopefully) neither will the Federal Reserve – the entity which promised to “protect” that dollar.

Now that the Fed has commenced its rate hike cycle, the jobs report suddenly takes on far less significance because only a massively "outlier" print will have an impact on Fed thinking, thinking which so far appears undented despite a raging manufacturing recession across the US. This means that the December jobs could be the "most important ever" only in retrospect.

The problem of reaching limits in a finite world manifests itself in an unexpected way: slowing wage growth for non-elite workers. Lower wages mean that these workers become less able to afford the output of the system. These problems first lead to commodity oversupply and very low commodity prices. Eventually these problems lead to falling asset prices and widespread debt defaults. These problems are the opposite of what many expect, namely oil shortages and high prices. This strange situation exists because the economy is a networked system. Feedback loops in a networked system don’t necessarily work in the way people expect.