Japan

"Deteriorating market breadth and herding into an ever-narrower number of stocks is classic market top behavior. Currently, there are many other warning signs that are also being ignored. The merger mania, the stock buyback frenzy, the year-over-year declines in corporate sales and falling earnings for the entire S&P 500 index, the plunges this year in the high-yield and leveraged loan markets, the topping and rolling over of the massive (record) level of stock margin debt... and I could go on."

Keynes is dead – unfortunately his etatiste nonsense didn’t expire with him. Meanwhile, the long run is catching up with those who have so far failed to die.

Optimism in US equity futures appears to have returned, and as of this moment US equity futures are higher by 9 points to 2060 as the attention shifts to what, according to BofA, is truly the most important ever. It is unclear just how the algos would take a second consecutive major disappointment in a row: should today's NFP print be well below the 200,000 consensus, December rate hike odd will tumble and the EUR will surge even more after declining modestly from overnight highs just below 1.10, leading to even more losses in European equities and spilling over to the US. 

But just like in 2008, the “experts” at the Federal Reserve are assuring all of us that everything is going to be just fine.  This is the exact same kind of mistake that the Federal Reserve made back in the late 1930s.  They thought that the U.S. economy was finally recovering, and so interest rates were raised.  That turned out to be a tragic mistake.

"Given the surge back towards the all-time highs in the S&P 500, we think that the best might be over for US equities and that indices might range trade more in 2016. We have downgraded US equities to neutral. This takes our overall equity weighting down to neutral, in many respects an extension of what we’ve been doing for most of this year as richer and richer asset markets, against a global background of economic risks, have made us more cautious."

"How does all this play out? Timing is the key because as gamblers know there isn’t an endless stream of Martingale chips – even for central bankers acting in unison. One day the negative feedback loop on the real economy will halt the ascent of stock and bond prices and investors will look around like Wile E. Coyote wondering how far is down. But when? When does Martingale meet its inevitable fate? I really don’t know; I’m just certain it will."

Yesterday's market swoon which unwound all of Tuesday's gains on concerns about a hawkish Fed and fears about terrorism in the US, are now completely forgotten, and have been replaced with the latest daily round of pre-ECB euphoria, driven by hopes that Mario Draghi will announce even more dovish details to Europe's Q€ 2 than just a 10 bps rate cut and a boost to QE more than €10 billion, both of which have been already priced in.

The very first major economic collapse in recorded history occurred in 218-202 BC when the Roman Empire experienced money troubles after the Second Punic War. As a result, bronze and silver currencies were devalued. As HowMuch.net depicts in the video below economic collapses date back thousands of years. While many countries today still feel the effects of the most recent Global Financial Crisis, it is important to note that economic troubles are not unique to the present-day, but rather date back to some of the oldest civilizations.

The resistance to such an awakening is understandable if still lamentable. If recession is truly the looming assurance, as it increasingly appears, that would mean not just the end of the recovery but the end of “accommodation” as a given force. In other words, Janet Yellen and the OECD start backwards from their endpoint because of their unshakable faith in monetarism, a faith that actually defines how they think an economy does work (and how they produce the core assumptions in their models); should that path from here to there completely unravel, so, too, does their assumed power and philosophy.

The EU’s political leaders and other elites are committed to holding the European Union together. To them, united Europe is an article of faith. They hold the idea with as much ferocity and fervor as any religious belief. But while the European Union is a wonderful political idea, it’s economically terrible. And the EU nations will have to face up to bearing enormous costs to save the Europe we wished for.

Overnight, Credit Suisse became the latest bank to join Goldman, JPM and increasingly more banks in predicting that 2016 will be a year in which investors will want to rotate out of equities. Specifically, the second largest Swiss bank said that it is "we reduce our equity weightings to our most cautious strategic stance since 2008 and take our mid-2016 S&P 500 target down to 2,150, the same as our end-2016 target." Here are the five reasons why CS just looked at the mounting wall of worry... and began to worry.

The world’s three largest economies, the US, China and Japan are already in recession. These countries represent nearly a third (29%) of global GDP. A stock market crash is coming.

The third stock market collapse of this century is near at hand. The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented commodity deflation and CapEx depression - the payback for 20 years of lunatic monetary stimulus and credit expansion. Yet the central banks are powerless to stop the payback. When the Fed announces a rate increase after 84 months of dithering next week in the face of GDP growth that has already decelerated to barely 1% this quarter the jig will be up. Monumental money printing has failed. Soon there will be no place to hide - not even in the Tremendous Ten.

It is only logical that a day after the S&P500 surged, hitting Goldman's 2016 target of 2,100 more than a year early because the US manufacturing sector entered into a recession, that Europe would follow and when Eurostat reported an hour ago that European headline inflation of 0.1% missed expectations of a modest 0.2% increase (core rising 0.9% vs Exp. 1.1%), European stocks predictably surged not on any improvement to fundamentals of course, but simply because the EURUSD stumbled once more, sliding by 40 pips to a session low below the 1.06 level.

The central banks are simply trapped. They have bought in bonds under the theory that this will stimulate the economy by injecting cash. But there are several problems with this entire concept. This is an elitist view to say the least for the money injected does not stimulate the economy for it never reaches the consumer. This attempt to stimulate by increasing the money supply assumes that it does not matter who has the money... The attempt to “manage” the economy from a macro level without considering the capital flow within the system is leading to disaster.