The Morning Line

China is easy to hate, since their leadership is at heart a bunch of double-dealing, lying commie rats. (And yes, the evidence is more than a little persuasive not only that they unleashed a deadly virus on the world, but that they took clandestine steps to protect themselves from it before going public with the bad news). There is nonetheless something to admire and even envy in the way China's leaders have been going about economic reform. For starters, Xi Jinping has declared war on tech companies perceived as having little to contribute to China's goal of economic, geopolitical, financial and cultural dominance. Not coincidentally, most of the targeted companies are in the same businesses as America's hottest firms: consumer goods, advertising, real estate, ride-sharing, finance, gaming and entertainment. Xi's denying Chinese firms in these sectors access to U.S. capital markets is akin to Biden's issuing a fatwah against glorified ad agencies like Google and Facebook, banning Twitter for incitement and casting out the moneylenders at Morgan Stanley. The CCP's clean-up campaign took an interesting -- some might say promising -- turn last week when they banned effeminate men from TV. It remains to be seen how a generation of children will fare in the relative absence of yin-saturated popular culture, but if it eventually produces a Chinese John Wayne, the West will face an even tougher adversary down the road. Terminal-Stage Consumerism It's not simply a matter of targeting the kinds of companies we associate with America's terminal-stage consumerism, income inequality and decadence. The CCP's reforms are also designed to shift investment capital toward industries positioned to provide a brighter economic future for the Chinese people, and to grow an economically robust middle class. This policy implicitly rejects and rebukes an American-style capitalism that has atrophied to the point

Jackson Hole hubris was operating at full strength last week as investors around the world anxiously awaited the announcement on Friday that would send the markets into hyperdrive. The broad averages had in fact churned impassively for several days ahead of whatever lame twaddle concerning The Tapeworm lay in store. The question of when the Fed will begin to tighten following a loosening binge that has persisted more or less continuously for a hundred years is the focus of portfolio managers' tiny, febrile brains these days. How quickly they forget! For taken together, the last dozen or so Tapeworm utterances, hints and titillations would seem to imply that if tightening is coming at all -- which everyone knows it is not -- it's unlikely to commence before, oh, maybe the end of 2022 or, for good measure, 2023. Vague enough for you? This dovish meme has been recycled so many times that it's a wonder it can still send shares soaring. And yet it does, alternating with fleeting dips of feigned fear and dread whenever the Fed even whispers that it will someday be necessary to bring its surreal balance sheet into a semblance of control. Colloquially this is known as "taking away the punch bowl," an annoyingly dumb cliche coined by a benighted news media to make the somewhat esoteric concept of tightening go down easier with readers who are rightly confused about the bottom line. Getting High in August Still, you have to give the charlatans who manage our expectations their due, since they've riveted investors' attention whenever someone affiliated with the central bank farts, burps or clears his throat. On Friday, Fed Chairman Powell did all three, metaphorically speaking, in promising there would be some tapeworming of monthly bond purchases by  the end of this year. We've

[Editor's note: The following was sent out to clients in mid-July by my friend Doug Behnfield, a financial advisor and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in Boulder, CO.  Long-time followers of Rick's Picks will be familiar with Doug's work, since his thoughts have appeared here many times. I have always referred to him not only as the smartest investor I know, but one of the smartest guys. He still is. I am grateful to him for allowing me to share his insights with you. However, I must I must apologize for some formatting changes that were necessary due to typographical limitations on my end. Doug's original letter was meticulously footnoted, and some text that was bullet-pointed I have rendered in paragraph form. Otherwise, the content is unchanged. RA] In all 44 years as a Financial Advisor (aka Account Executive, stockbroker), I have never been aware of any respected stock market pundit that “called the top” in close proximity to the actual beginning of a true Bear Market. However, an associate once gave me a report late in 1987 that had been issued in July, 1987 written by Justin Mamis entitled The Philosophy of Tops. He wrote it just three months before the Crash of October 1987. It has been in my permanent file for decades and I dragged it out a few months ago to remind me how utterly difficult it is to know how high is too high (or how low is too low) in the stock market. After all this experience in the business, I wish I knew, or that I knew someone who knew, on a timely basis. But, alas, it has been too much to ask. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t accumulated a meaningful amount of market wisdom over the years. As

There is increasing confusion in America about how to handle the rapid spread of Covid’s delta variant. The stock market can usually tell us how much fear is out there, but this time Wall Street seems, if not quite clueless, then certainly heedless. The broad averages have moved steadily higher in recent weeks, caused more by nervous short-covering than by any particular bullishness. There have been no dramatic surges, only a steady, ratcheting ascent that suggests an army of bears have been hard at it, trying to get short at a major top. The irony is that if they would just relax, bull-mania would end overnight, since the rally is drawing its punching power more from buyers driven by desperation than from any other source. With or without them, though, a very important peak is not likely far off. Delta-lockdown worries are bearing down on markets and nearing the red zone as state governors respond with increasingly onerous restrictions on 140 million Americans who have not yet been vaccinated. One-Upping DeBlasio Here in Florida, there are signs that serious trouble could be brewing in the nation’s school systems. In Palm Beach County last week, more than 400 students were quarantined just two days into the school year. Although most of them have not tested positive for Covid, contact tracing has put their school year in limbo. Unfortunately, such turmoil could prove to be a mere squall in comparison to the gathering firestorm in big coastal cities. In New York City, for one, DeBlasio announced last week that the un-vaccinated would be barred from indoor dining, gyms, bars and other places. Not to be outdone, California’s true-blue mayors have already one-upped him with edicts that go even further to restrict movement and commerce. As of Friday, Los Angeles reportedly was considering

Bloomberg missed the real news in its flippant headline, "Return to the Office Five Days a Week? How About Never Again". The article was just family-page pap about how work-from-home employees aren't complaining about the indefinite postponement of a back-to-the-office mandate. With the delta variant on a headline rampage, exile in suburbia seems to suit most of them just fine, and to hell with the 6:00 a.m. commute. The much bigger meaning of this is certain to become the subject of newspaper headlines in years to come, when America's biggest cities are further along the road to bankruptcy and obsolescence. Bloomberg's editors will probably be the last to see this trend developing, so eager have they been to cheer-lead New York City's supposed recovery from the lockdown. They would have readers believe, for one, that the billionaires who fled to Florida, which has no income tax, are eager to return to the Big Apple, where they would face an 11% income levy just for the privilege of watching DeBlasio run New York even deeper into the ground. Paper-Shuffling Sector Bloomberg.com's blithe optimism aside, it's painfully obvious that the U.S. economy, most particularly the colossally large paper-shuffling sector, no longer needs skyscrapers to conduct business. Nor will workers have much use for the services and amenities associated with those skyscrapers and with city life itself. This implies that buses, trains, trolleys and taxicab fleets, restaurants, stores, concert halls, parks, theaters and so many other things that make urban living worth the hassles will be used less and less over time. Do you see the economic problems this will create? If Bloomberg's editors do, they didn't say so; for nowhere in the article was there any mention of the fact that user-based revenues associated with urban amenities will either have to be

If you're worried that interest rates are about to explode because of inflation, the graph above would seem to offer comfort. From a visual standpoint, the gentle rollover that has occurred over the last several months has sapped the vigor from a menacing spike that had pushed yields on the 10-Year Note from 0.40% at the start of the pandemic to a high of 1.76% in early April. The surge also failed to surpass previous highs near 2%, suggesting there is considerable resistance at that level. For the time being, this holds positive implications for the U.S. economy, since T-Note rates largely determine how much mortgage and corporate borrowers must pay for loans. It also helps to sustain the illusion of a stability in the global banking system. That's because even a small tightening of the interest rate screw would have dire consequences if applied to the $2 quadrillion of borrowing amassed in the derivatives market. These financial instruments are used ostensibly for hedging, but over time their use has expanded to accommodate leveraged speculation on a cosmic scale. A Network of Nerves What would it take to crash this market? No one has a clue, although it is probably fair to say that it is as complex, and therefore ultimately as fragile, as a human nervous system. The synaptic connections are based on trust rather than neurons, however, and that is why a systemic failure would likely be total rather than merely in one "hemisphere" or the other. A further implications is that if stress levels got high enough, something akin to a stroke would result. Fortunately, with ten-year rates at a current 1.24%, we are well below the danger zone. That's equivalent to a blood-pressure reading of perhaps 130/80. Realize, however, that this seemingly normal reading exists only

My astute friend Greg Hunter at USA Watchdog weighed in recently with such a despairing outlook for the dollar that it's probably a good time to determine whether the charts support this view. Here’s the post from his site, which over the years has featured my own thoughts on deflation, the global economy and other topics: The Fed keeps telling us that inflation is going to be transitory, and things will fall in price and go back to normal soon. Nobody is buying this in the real world where people are watching their dollars fall in value and are paying more for just about everything. In simple terms, the dollar is tanking. Maybe this is why JP Morgan is the first big bank (with many to follow) that is putting high-net-worth clients into crypto currencies. Bo Polny says this is all part of a “Jubilee year which began in September of last year and ends in early September of this year.” Polny says, “Expect to see in the next four to five weeks a fall of the dollar, the world’s reserve currency. This could start as early as next week causing a run into tangible asset that include gold, silver and crypto currencies like Bitcoin. All hell is about to break loose on evil.” Sounds ominous, for sure. However, it flatly contradicts a forecast I’ve held to for decades – that deflation would ultimately wreck the global economy, driving the dollar into such scarcity that many, if not most, Americans would have to barter to survive. This may seem hard to believe at the moment, given the Fed’s unprecedented monetary blowout and the illusory prosperity it has created. Most of the digital cash has gone into investable assets, triggering a seemingly unlikely run-up in stocks during a year of Covid

The latest attempt to move the global economy away from the dollar’s dominance involves a plan by Biden to issue $650 billion of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) through the IMF. Ardent fans of the greenback needn't worry, however, since this sum, as large as it seems, is just a drop in the bucket compared to a derivatives market that supplies more than $2 quadrillion to the world’s biggest financial players. The dollar is the only currency big enough to handle their action, which dwarfs global trade in actual goods and services of no more than $90 trillion. Under the circumstances, it’s unlikely the dollar will be replaced any time soon. The $650 billion supposedly will enhance global liquidity, as though more liquidity were needed in a world where financiers can borrow practically unlimited quantities of money for next to nothing.  China’s communist government is backing the SDR expansion, although for reasons that are doubtless different from Biden’s. One suspects that globalists have Biden’s ear and that he is unwittingly going along with them because, well, because he was witless to begin with. For its part, China undoubtedly thinks more funny-money loosed in the ether can only be a good thing, since the CCP's main enterprise these days is helping poor countries go deeper into hock for Belt & Road projects. Pinto Beans for the Poor The SDR initiative is being touted as a way to make the world more “green” and “sustainable,” which is another way of saying that anyone who opposes it is trying to make life even more miserable for the poor. Arguably, they will in fact be better off, since even if $600 billion of Biden’s giveaway goes toward purchasing fleets of Bentleys and sumptuous vacation homes for Third World dictators, the $50 billion that eventually trickles

Rick's Picks subscribers ended the week transfixed by a powerful rally in the E-Mini S&Ps whose inevitable destination was 4362.25. Why inevitable? Mainly because a chat-room ace whose trading system has been getting the big swings exactly right lately had said so the day before. If he were a pistol sharpshooter, this trick would be akin to turning a Roosevelt dime into a pinky ring at fifty paces. For not only had he chiseled the 4362.25 target in stone, he also provided the time of day when a profitable short position he'd advised earlier was to be exited and reversed for a further gain of as much as $3000 per contract.  You'd have to have been there to believe all of this, but even allowing for a little hyperbole, the feat handily refutes 'fundamentalists' who think technical analysis is voodoo. Fools Well Equipped Surprising as it may seem, however, the ability to predict trend and target with seemingly uncanny precision does not guarantee easy profits.  On the contrary, the opposite sometimes obtains, since the violent countertrend swings that invariably punctuate rallies tend to shake the confidence of even the most fervent believers.  In technical terms, it is a matter of valleys exceeding peaks as a stock makes it way higher. Thus does each $3 leap beget a pullback of $2 or more, subjecting the trader to at least $2 of risk for each new $1 of profit gained at the next high. Since no prudent system for managing risk can survive this rollercoaster ride, it is mostly fools who get rich, at least for a while, staying with spectacular rallies. Experienced traders understand that corrections tend to be as vicious as trends are steep, a fact that impels them to take partial profits on the upswings.  One can always play