By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at [5]
Yesterday I was speaking with a business partner who's in Hong Kong for some meetings. He mentioned that many Chinese see the collapse in the stock market as an American conspiracy ahead of the IMF currency decision.
It's curious how humans can be so blind to the obvious. I understand that losing money is an uncomfortable thing. Your friends may stop talking to you, your wife will almost certainly sleep with your friends and you may commit suicide. All those things may happen, but blaming it all on foreigners?
Could it have something to do with handing out leverage like candy to kids, and encouraging complete novices to buy stocks trading at 50x reported earnings (though, whether or not Chinese earnings are real is probably more easily told by reading the inside of a fortune cookie than from reported financials)?
It's curious that any talk about foreign capital shorting Chinese stocks and leading to the collapse manages to make it past the common sense barrier. Foreigners own less than 2% of the market and can't even directly short stocks [6].
The Chinese authorities, having been provided a blueprint for such situations by their Western counterparts, have now gathered up all the cutlery and crockery in Beijing, and together with the kitchen sink are throwing it at the problem. It's quite the show.
It'll bounce for sure. Markets always do, but then they normally slide further.
I'm of the opinion that the lows are not in. Why? For the same reason cow's eyeballs are cheaper than fillet. Because we're still looking at the eyeballs, but they're priced as if they're fillet.
Then this morning I received the following message from a friend (names redacted):
I was at IAH (Houston) this morning, waiting for xxxx to show up so we could jump down to Belize to surprise xxxx and grab a quick dive, sitting at E2 minding my business, when the attack started.
A UAL staffer frantically runs down the concourse and up to the E2 counter, where the gate agent has just logged in, saying breathlessly, "It's gonna be a long day - we just got HACKED!!!" You could tell by their body language that they were close...
She then ran off to tell the bad news elsewhere.
Since I was 12 feet from her, and no one else was there yet, I chatted her up, and she said "It's so weird - 90 seconds ago everything was fine - now jets are just all over the place."
None of this was reported - but it was spooky. There were military choppers suddenly in the air at the perimeter of the airspace, and Concourse E was in disarray for hours, but especially when the first planes landed.
It was like something/someone had control of UAL - for example, folks coming in from Cancun ended up coming in where the flight from Dallas was supposed to get off - and both the passengers and the UAL ground crew were very confused as to why an international flight ended up in C while a local ended up at E.
Flights were having near misses coming in because "All UAL computers were 'wonky.'" (a quote from a pilot to me after he detoured one of those flights) UAL staff were visibly spooked.
When I read that the NYSE had "technical problems" a few minutes later, it seemed pretty obvious what was going on - I was remarking to a buddy on the phone that xxxx and I were standing in the middle of a cyber war.
It was very surreal to see CNN playing the "official party line" about UAL/NYSE/WSJ all having technical difficulties today in this "Black Swan" (as we moved gates for the third time, a few hours after we were supposed to have landed) and even the obese idiots were hissing at the TV screens and saying, "How stupid do you think we are?"
Fascinating to observe. Someone must be having so much fun with this grand game. I just wish I was more than an itty bitty pawn.
Like pieces of a puzzle I then read an article on Zero Hedge [7] showing a cyber war in action. This photo taken the morning of the NYSE attack.
Curious that St. Louis is being targeted
A computer glitch?
Is this how the next major conflict starts?
- An emotionally charged, levered and overvalued market does what all emotionally charged, levered, overvalued markets do - It falls!
- Someone must be blamed...
- Someone is blamed...
- Someone is attacked...
- The attackee decides to retaliate and suddenly we're in a punch up!
When one then considers that the "crazy woman", aka Hillary may just be the next POTUS, and realizing that her understanding of the world outside of her field of already myopic vision amounts to "us" and "them", then all of this becomes a realistic outcome.
I've seen the woman, and there is a disturbingly George Bush-like squint in those dull eyes. No plan. No plan, but opinions coming out of every pore. Dangerous ones!
I need a stiff drink.
- Chris
"Everyone's quick to blame the alien." - Aeschylus