Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2014: The Year The Psychopaths Drank Their Own Kool-Aid

The goal of this final collapse will be to wipe out Wall Street and as many UnHedged Funds as possible. By their own admission, it won't be difficult...

ZH: Dec. 31st, 2014
"There are times when an investor has no choice but to behave as though he believes in things that don't necessarily exist."

Stop me anytime...

"The truth? You have to reject it"
"For us, that means being willing to be long risk assets in the full knowledge of two things: 
that those assets may have no qualitative support; and second, that
this is all going to end painfully."

"Kindelberger's Manias, Panics and Crashes...has been absolutely detrimental to my investment performance for the last six years and as a result I have changed"

"I still believe that the attempt by central bankers to prevent the private sector from deleveraging via a non-stop parade of asset price bubbles will end in tears. But I no longer think that anyone can say when."

Gambling with Other People's Money. Visualized.
% Bearish 2-year moving average


The hook is set. This is the one that brings down the casino.

Well, At Least Wall Street and Billunaires Got Paid in 2014

IPO ETF


A staggering 47% of 2014 IPOs are already trading lower than their first day close (i.e. the price Etraders pay). With the market at an all time high...

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Corporate Colonization: End Game

Soon, visiting Barcelona will be like visiting Cleveland:

Globalization Is Collapsing. Yes, In Real Time

The human population has never been larger. The pseudo-recovery is entering its 7th year. Commodity demand is at levels first reached 12 years ago...

All commodities versus Dow


Just waiting for the Dow, since that's literally all that matters to the Idiocracy.

Flush this Lying Garbage Down the Toilet. For Good

The truth is unthinkable, so the lies just keep getting bigger


Picture Bernankenstein right now running around bragging that he saved the world by burying us in debt. The lies just keeping getting bigger and bolder, ever-more ludicrous. We are well past the lying stage and into the dementia stage. The psychopaths believe their lies, because they've been telling them for years and decades. They can't admit any of it's a lie or else it would all unravel. They would have to admit that they have no fucking clue what they are doing, and never did. The entire narrative would dissolve. When did the lies even begin? When did University and higher learning turn into a drunken frat party?

"Prepare for Melt-up": Airlines Up 60% Since October

The U.S. will continue to melt-up, while the rest of the world is melting down



MW: December 30th, 2014
"The Market Calm Before a Third Phase Bull Blowout"
"Investors just poured $36.5 billion into U.S. stocks last week, the biggest inflow on record. Foreign markets saw continuing net outflows".

Richard Russell: “My belief is that the coming of the stock market boom will envelope everything from housing prices to precious metals to all commodities,” 

Never mind that the airline index is up 60% since the October low i.e. 300% annualized

Deflation: "How Soon is Now?"

Deflation is consumption stolen from the future, which unfortunately is "Now"
The deflationary "hypothesis" is premised upon Third Grade logic and observation, which is now obvious in broad daylight. There are natural limits as to how much consumption can be stolen from the future, even - or indeed especially, in a 0% interest rate environment. When standards of living are falling versus rising, as they are now, then nominal interest rates can remain at zero, whereas real rates of interest/debt service are actually rising. Again, none of this is rocket science, it's all highly intuitive and unavoidable. Only by wiping out the legacy debts can the deflationary burden be lifted. And additionally, in PonziWorld, trade with Third World nations must also be curtailed or else unlimited labour deflation aka. poverty, will continue to be imported, destroying the Middle Class.

Peak Debt Visualized
1. There are natural limits to debt accumulation
U.S. Total debt as ratio of GDP - versus Fed Funds Rate



Monday, December 29, 2014

To Believe in Serial Psychopaths. Or Not. That Is The Only Question.

"Mission Accomplished"
MW: December 29th, 2014
"Bernanke: We saved the world, from us - we replaced subprime with higher quantities of cheaper debt. It was all a very delicate operation..."



Global Central Banks "fixed" their subprime cheap money experiment, by offering even cheaper money. The details of this remarkable "plan" are as follows:

The Skynet Illusion: Efficiently Separating Fools From Their Money

CNBS: December 29th, 2014
"The stock market's unprecedented consistency in 2014 generated a trading maxim that echoed on trading floors and social media on a daily basis: Buy the dip. And traders see no reason to abandon this simple, but money-making credo in the new year."

Record winning streak, unprecedented in stock market history
The S&P 500 had no losing streak longer than three days at any point this year. The prior annual record was four days.

"As a result of the bull run, the index closed at a record on 20 percent of the trading days this year, more than any year since 1995."

The Skynet One-Way Trip Visualized
Margin debt (black line) versus trading volume (red line)


Hedging Interrupted
Index Put/Call



Oil collapse? Russia? Greece? Dubai? Junk bonds? Commodities? Bogus recovery?
It's all good - Buy every dip and pray for ever-more fools to come after...

Thursday, December 25, 2014

The Extending and Pretending is Ending

Unlike 2008, Dow worshippers will be the last to know

Rest of World vs. Dow


Lies, Damn Lies, And Media Buffoons: What Makes this Possible

NY Times, December 23, 2014

"The American economy grew last quarter at its fastest rate in over a decade, providing the strongest evidence to date that the recovery is finally gaining sustained power more than five years after it began."

The "recovery" that wasn't:
A doubling in National Debt bought per capita GDP lower than 2007
Per Capita GDP adjusted for inflation and deficit




The Distribution of Income



Then there were none.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Extrapolating Dumbfuckistan: Is The Order of the Day

Do So At Your Own Risk


The key to speculation is not guessing what will happen, it's accepting what already has happened. With the goal of avoiding self-obliteration at the hands of proven psychopaths.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

1999 Deja Vu? Not Hardly

Borrowing money to buy stocks, visualized
NYSE Stock Market Margin Debt


The Hotel Californication Visualized
NYSE Margin Debt (all time high) versus NYSE Trading volume (multi-decade low)


They don't wake you up from a stoned coma, at the top
Rest of the World combined as a ratio of the S&P:


Corrupt zombies, after 2008, swore this would never happen again. They won't be in a position to make that mistake again. They had their day at the mall.

Monday, December 22, 2014

When the Music's Over

I know, we all see where I'm going with this...

IPO fun time and year-end bonus. Two things that go great together...


Thanks Goldman Skynet !

Better hurry though, because...

I'm Not Here for the Collapse. I'm Here for the Resurrection

Perhaps I should have been clear about that from the beginning.
The saddest part about this insane and immoral era is how many comfort-seekers just want to cling to "this". This pointless rat race to nowhere. Life reduced to Keeping up with the Kardashians and the Dow Jones's.

Humanity wasted. Money wasted. Resources wasted. Planet wasted. Youth wasted. Life wasted. All while vacuous buffoons clogged up the airwaves with non-stop bullshit. Who didn't think this was all ending when Hollywood actors were nominated to play President? Plenty of notice.

I'm not afraid of death, I'm afraid of not living, the way human beings were intended to live. This generation has to "fix" this, or there will be no next generations. Unfortunately, we can't get started until the pretending comes to an end. The Occupy Movement taught us that much.

Granted, not everyone survives what comes next, but let's face it, not everyone wants to. They had their day at the mall, betting it all on the status quo. Human call options. 

I'm an optimist, not a self-imploding denialist.

"What the Fuck Happened?"

From Greatest World Power in Human History, to Tallest Midget in the Circus


One day you're living in the most powerful nation in human history watching your fellow citizens driving a dune buggy on the moon.

Forty years later, there's no manned space program and draft-dodging politicians are cutting foodstamps for homeless veterans - pointing out that there's only enough "budget" for veterans to go to war, not come back from it.

All while NeoCon artists put every effort into carpet bombing foreigners into embracing highly "Exceptional" junk food and junk culture, while still other demented fucktards believe that the moon landings were faked.

Working backwards from today's Idiocracy, it is wholly implausible that the U.S. ever went to the moon, so anyone born in the South Park generation is fully justified in their inbred cynicism. Why would anyone who has never seen a deep space astronaut take flight, believe that someone walked on the moon almost half a century ago? At this point in time, those landings may as well have been fake for all the good they do the Kardashian-set. 

The slow passage of time convinces the masses that nothing has changed. When in fact everything has changed. The only thing left is the hubris.

But...
Granted, the U.S. is still the tallest midget in the Circus, at least in nominal Dow terms.



Pretending, is the name of the game

The Dollar Wrecking Ball is Swinging

Which over-leveraged banana republic will it take out next?


The Likelihood of a New Gold Standard
JH Kunstler via ZH, December 22, 2014
You had me at hello. 
But...

The Harvard Patented Solution for Insolvency: More Debt

Bail out lenders by giving borrowers more debt


Business Insider December 19th, 2014
"the Central Bank of Russia continues to provide refinancing in exchange for non-marketable securities that banks can generate in almost unlimited amounts"

Let's get this straight, Russia raises the interest rate to 17% to "defend the ruble", but then hands out unlimited amounts of newly printed money, taking fabricated "non-marketable" collateral as security. I call that a "brake stand" - the accelerator and brake fully applied at the same time. Should work great. Yet again, lenders get bailed out while borrowers get shafted with 17% interest rates.

HOW TO IMPLODE YOUR ECONOMY THE FASTEST WAY POSSIBLE. 
Triple the interest rate in less than one year, while oil and the ruble get cut in half:


This just in...
ZH: December 22nd, 2014
Borrowed too much, can't pay it back. Printed too much money. Currency collapsing Etc. Etc...

"The end of Ponzi World only comes once, but bonus comes every 365 days"

Sunday, December 21, 2014

"This Time Will Be Different" i.e. Collapse Sans Bailout

The Last Temptation of Liars and Psychopaths
"While we agree that some overvalued, money-losing companies like Twitter (ticker: TWTR), Workday (WDAY), and Splunk (SPLK) do recall the dot-com mania of 15 years ago, the situation today is fundamentally different."

Wall Street has figured out that the secret to maximizing profits is to incubate companies longer and then dump them onto the public at peak valuation.
"The market for privately owned companies has become today’s version of the Nasdaq in 1999. As of September this year, according to Dow Jones Venture Source, the median late-stage venture-capital-backed company was valued at $250 million, a record high and far larger than in the bubble days, when the median private-company valuation peaked at $89 million."


2014 and 2015 In Review: "Expect Total Disaster"

December 18th, 2014
"Every day – every single day – we are at risk of a market meltdown that would wreck our economy even worse than the 2008 crash did, or even than the 1929 crash did," Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told HuffPost. "Six years after the fact, we have taken no significant action to reduce the Wall Street gambling or 'too big to fail' concentration that caused the 2008 crash. If we can’t even implement the Volcker Rule, an extremely modest effort to stave off total disaster, then total disaster is exactly what we can expect."

Occupy Bread and Circuses: You Can't Reform Decadence

Newly-elected Republicans just repealed significant portions of the post-2008 Dodd-Frank legislation intended to prevent another financial collapse. 

Forbes, December 12th, 2014
"the bill also contained a provision, said to be written by Citigroup, repealing a key part of the Dodd-Frank Act."

"The provision enables the big banks once again to use insured deposits and other taxpayer subsidies and guarantees to gamble in the derivatives markets—the very type of business that drove the 2008 financial crisis and the economic devastation that followed."

"Wall Street had finally found the perfect moment to reshape financial regulation—less than three hours before the government was about to run out of money."

[The bill was signed into law this past week, by Obama]

“In the current election cycle, Wall Street banks and financial interests have so far reported spending more than $1.2 billion to influence decision-making in Washington, according to an updated report by Americans for Financial Reform. That works out to just under $1.8 million a day. It represents an average of about $2.3 million spent to elect or influence each of the 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives.”

AND, this just in...

Huffington Post, December 18th, 2014
"The Federal Reserve on Thursday granted banks an extra year to comply with a key provision of the Volcker Rule, a move that gives financial lobbyists more time to kill the new regulation before it goes into effect."

"The Volcker Rule is a key element of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that bans banks from engaging in proprietary trading -- speculative deals that are designed only to benefit the bank itself, rather than its clients."

"Every day – every single day –- we are at risk of a market meltdown that would wreck our economy even worse than the 2008 crash did, or even than the 1929 crash did," Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told HuffPost. "Six years after the fact, we have taken no significant action to reduce the Wall Street gambling or 'too big to fail' concentration that caused the 2008 crash. If we can’t even implement the Volcker Rule, an extremely modest effort to stave off total disaster, then total disaster is exactly what we can expect."

So be it. 

Saturday, December 20, 2014

The Big Money Has Already Voted

Thirty Year Treasuries
+ 26% Year to date (v.s. S&P +12%)


Someone always knows something, don't they?

Running from the Devil

Monetary Policy: Smoke Screen for Shock Doctrine
Monetary policy didn't cause the damage to the economy, it camouflaged the damage

Manufacturing Employment versus Fed Funds Rate
I think we all see where I'm going with this...



The Bread and Circuses Are Ending

The Empire is Collapsing from the Outside In
"The ancient Rabbis contrasted God's sovereignty with the rule of Rome. Rome seeks its own glory, wars against other peoples to subjugate them, revels in material existence, lives off the work of slave labor, allows many to die of poverty and starvation, and promotes entertaining circuses and gladiator spectacle. The Rabbis, picturing redemption, remark that the messianic age will be recognized when an end is brought to the rule of wickedness." - Solomon Schechter

Rest of World As a Ratio of S&P 500 (red line)
(w/S&P 500, black line)



Friday, December 19, 2014

Democracy Doesn't Work

...If people just want to be lied to all the time

They blame the politicians. Look in the fucking mirror. 

The liars are interchangeable. The lies are indispensable.

ALL IN: Double AND Nothing

A Doubling in U.S. debt, "bought":
Wealth inequality, low wage jobs, and child homelessness to record highs

And...
Consumer Sentiment at 8 year highs (93.8%)
% Bearish at multi-decade lows (black line) (14.9%)


We can't save people from themselves. 

This epic con job could only happen if people wanted it to happen.

BTFATH: Set-up for the HALO Crash

Don't think it can happen? That is of course the whole point.
By all logic, facts, and reason, this debt-sponsored fabrication should have collapsed a long time ago. Only Russian PhD programmers can explain mathematically how this all stays together minute by minute. So of course, when it didn't collapse on time, that gave the masses the plausible deniability they so desperately needed to believe in the indefinite impossible - a necessary and sufficient condition for self-implosion. Now that everyone is onboard with the Harvard borrow-your-way-out-of-debt-crisis strategy, the outcome of this final disaster will be ruthlessly devastating for the overwhelming majority, apparently as was intended all along, by the higher power.


Rule #1 of Survival: 
Never believe in lies, proven liars, or Spanish bond yields at 1.70%...

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

MAXIMUM EXPLOSION

The Harvard Ballistic Self-Implosion Is Designed For Maximum "Shock and Awe"

Step 1: Outsource the economy
Step 2: Print money to paper over the damage done in Step 1
Step 3: Close eyes and pretend this is all "business as usual"

Oil and Emerging Markets

When Genius Failed. To Exist

A Sanction Bomb: From Russia With Love


Bloomberg, December 17th, 2014


"Russian trade and financial linkages to the U.S. are small"
"...but Russian linkages to Europe are large"

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

2:1 Americans Support CIA 'Knowledge Sharing' Techniques

9:1 Americans pretend they're Canadian when they travel abroad

ABC News, December 16th, 2014


"Rectal Feeding and Rectal Hydration are Medieval"

80% of Republicans support the CIA's tactics
[the other 20% are too old to vote]

Obama Says We 'Tortured Some Folks'
["Shit happens man"]

I hope Walmart and Exxon appreciate what "we" do for them.


BTFATH: "There is no dissent on the market's future direction"

...the Necessary and Sufficient Condition for a HALO Crash

MW: Dec. 16th, 2014

OR, it means the Idiocracy just bought one dip too many...


Black Swans Flocking

Middle East Stocks
Saudi, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE (Holdings weighted by GDP)


Fracking Shellacking:


Humanity Bought, Sold, Bombed, Exploited, "Interrogated", Drone Attacked.

LOST


"Six family members were killed and one was seriously wounded in shootings at three locations in suburban Philadelphia, and a manhunt was underway for a former U.S. Marine"



Three dead in Sydney Hostage Siege




Decades of degrading War and Poverty coming home to roost

Monday, December 15, 2014

Bonus Interruptus

"There is no dissent on the market’s future direction"

Groupthink 
"Is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints, by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences."

BonusThink: 
When a bunch of overpaid clever dunces "collaborate" in assuring investors that stocks can only keep going up, in order to con the sheeple into throwing ever-more money into offshore bank accounts, until there is no one left to con and the entire ponzi scheme collapses with extreme dislocation. Yes, again. 

The only dissent is from Skynet, which controls 75% of the Market
NYSE 52 week highs - lows (weekly)



Globalization Doesn't Do Sanctions

Don't expect Dumb and Dumber to understand that, until well after meltdown

Bloomberg, Dec. 15th, 2014
Russia sees GDP down at least -4.5% with oil at $60

Brent Crude - currently in free-fall - ended the day at $60. One would think that a legitimate "stress test" wouldn't use today's price as the "worst case" scenario. 

Meanwhile...
Russia just raised their key interest rate by 7% to 17%. 
I'm sure that raising the interest rate by 70% on a relative basis will help the economy. 

And...
Eastern Europe: Leading the way down another -9.5% today


We Now Face Harvard Risk: Equivalent to A Hundred Lehmans

Disaster Refinanced
Unfortunately, via 3rd grade logic, the dunces who created this serial clusterfuck can't fix it. Their solution to a disaster caused by three years of 1% interest rates, was to give six years @ 0% interest instead:

Refinancing Disaster, visualized:


Harvard Risk Visualized


...the dunce or the one that follows?

Bitcoined by Deflation

The Russian Ruble has lost half of its (dollar) purchasing power in one year

Having lost 96% of its purchasing power since 1913, the dollar is now rising against all global assets (albeit w/question mark over the Dow)...


Sunday, December 14, 2014

Houston, YOU Have a Problem: Oil Demand Falling Faster Than Price

Despite the 50% drop in oil prices, the IEA just REDUCED its demand forecast


Occupy the Skynet Illusion: The Idiocracy's Last Lesson

It's the 12 days 'til bonus and Wall Street is ALL IN
The bonus has already been counted for this year...and for next...


Barrons, December 13, 2014
"Born in March 2009, today’s bull market is the fourth longest in history—and it isn’t about to end, despite last week’s shellacking."

"Wall Street’s top strategists expect the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index to rise 10% in 2015"

"There is no dissent on the market’s future direction"

You don't say...

Saturday, December 13, 2014

The Global Stock Market Rout Began in July

October was merely a failed bounce

Global stocks ex-U.S.:


Denialation: The problem that fixes itself