U.S. Political, Financial Manias Have Peaked

We’re at the end of an era, says my colleague Bob Hoye of Institutional Advisors. Political craziness in the U.S. has peaked with a wacky socialist scheme to soak the rich for money to pay scientists and bureaucrats to control the weather. No less idiotic is the entrenched notion that the Fed can prevent the financial bubble it created from bursting. This delusion will end when the inevitable bear market arrives. As for the Green New Deal, says Hoye, it will collapse when enough voters come to understand that “climate scares have been rigged for grant money and to impose a new world order.” For most Americans, the end of these two manias cannot come soon enough. Click here for Hoye’s superb essay, which sees parallels in the collapse of Rome and in popular uprisings going back to ancient Egypt.

  • none February 18, 2019, 12:28 pm

    2002 bear market low SPY advanced 107% to the 2007 top. RSP advanced 183% during the same period. Why hasn’t anyone noticed?

  • none February 18, 2019, 12:09 pm

    1) On Dec 24, only 1% of stocks in the S&P 500 closed above their 50-day moving avg, one of the most extreme oversold levels in history.
    After an 18% vertical rally over the last 8 weeks, that number now stands at 92%, one of the most extreme overbought levels in history.

    2) Continuing, the very ‘bullish extreme’ of a new high in the AD Line, is again great concern as it has become over the last 9 years a ‘polluted’ process.

    The NYAD is a useful indicator, and divergence signals have led to all major tops over the last 51 years.

    This has led to the myth the market cannot top without this signal.

    But, the NYAD has missed ‘all the corrections in the current bull market’, including the 21.5% drop in July 2011 which was the fastest fall in prices ‘ever’ in stock market history.

    The AD Line and its signals as well as ‘all other breath indictors derive from the data’ is not as reliable as prior to this bull market, or it does not signal corrections <22%.

    Why has it stopped working?

    QE is the obvious difference in the 2009-2017 bull market, but we should also consider how the liquidity is used to buy index funds and ETFs.

    The BOJ annual JPY 6+/- trillion in ETF purchases is just one example, seeing that a ‘mania has taken place the ETF’, that popularity is so extreme it has ‘polluted’ many such breath indicators as well as volume indicators.

    This ‘Buying mania’ of the continuing biding of huge baskets of stocks masks any selling by other participants.

    The NYAD diverged in previous tops due to ‘market breadth narrowing’ as there was a rotation into heavier weighted stocks. This rotation is still taking place but observing the process is taking place in a different way as in other markets. Take note of the equal weighted S&P 500 ETF (RSP) compared to the S&P 500 itself. The $VALUG index recently breaking the Trump low, and towards rotation of of 10b-18 stock values towards the GE created by J.P. Morgan’s son and Thomas Edison, and the bankrupted company of S (Sears) these are longer term statements towards the fact that an entire era is shifting away from what was in place.

    3) On Christmas Eve, 2018 (12-24-2018) , the INDU and the CRB Index (which is to commodities as the Dow is to stocks and equities) both slumped to a ‘20 month low’. In fact, that particular day was the most bearish in history for both markets at the same time on the same day. It was a scenario never before seen in history.

    However, the day after Christmas Eve, 2018, the INDU and the CRB Index both posted the largest one day gain in history. Stocks and commodities staged back-to-back history making performances separated by Christmas day. And the rally off the December 26, low carried into the opening week of 2019. From this time period, The rise in DXY is no longer affecting GC this recent and longer term shift is investment flow changes, is a finer tuning that the out flow of equities is far greater than many see.

    4) 3 Economic crisis were started in 2001, 2008 when markets SPX/INDU hit extreme low oversold support levels and then retuned to test ‘lower’ price and lower higher resistance levels.

    I notice net flick had not 1 movie or a special for the President Holiday.

    Have a great holiday today Rick.

    God Bless America

  • Rich February 17, 2019, 6:02 pm

    Hope Bob’s not out of the market or short…

    Manias in markets can last decades

    Market selling just 54 % of previous Market/Book high in 2000

    Market sentiment just off lows of last 3 years

    https://bit.ly/2tK0xxU

    Market rotation into Commodities dead since 2011

    Trumpeteers doubting their #1 wall of worry

    VBK + 28 % since Christmas Eve

    What’s not to like ?

  • John Jay February 15, 2019, 9:17 am

    Your friend’s essay is an intelligent summation of a problem that never has a happy ending.

    That problem is not Debt.
    The obscene concentration of wealth means an ever shorter Proscription List can put Paid to that problem with very few “Casualties.”

    The “Problem” is the world’s population explosion that has taken it from 2 billion in the 1920s to 8 billion today. All made possible by the huge advances in science, especially agriculture and medicine. The hard fact of life is that there is no real use for most of that 6 billion increase in 100 years. They wind up in horrible poverty, but still having as many children as possible. And now the “Camp of the Saints” scenario is playing out before our eyes.

    And due to the geometric logic of the formula Low IQ Electorate+Politics=Idiocracy we are doomed to mass casualties, sooner or later.

    Now the Betos and Ocasios want to tear down our border walls, terminate ICE, and shout “All are welcome” to the perpetually increasing useless tailings of the population explosion.

    The hard fact of life is housing, jobs, welfare funds, hospitals, jail cells, schools and transportation do not spring by magic from the ground to accommodate millions of penniless vagrants. The invaders have been slowly recreating the conditions they fled from right here in the USA. The tipping point has been reached.
    And the hard fact of life is that problem will resolve itself by mass casualties, most likely by a great die off by some combination of disease and starvation.

    Sadly, Freud was right:
    “I have found very little that is good about people………most of them are trash….this is something you cannot say aloud…..”
    From his letter to Pfister, 1918
    Full quote here, 5th paragraph of quotes down:
    https://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/freud'sillusion.htm