The Morning Line

Bitcoin mania hit an air pocket on Sunday with a so-far $11,500 plunge from last week's record-high $64,858. Groping for an explanation, Bloomberg and other mainstream sources attributed the drop to speculation that the U.S. Treasury might crack down on digital-money laundering. Yeah, sure. This tired story has been marking time for a decade, ever since the days when only a few hardcore gamers knew about blockchain money. Now it is being reheated and served up as a convenient explanation for bitcoin's nuttiness, much as stories about "tariff fears" and "vaccine hopes"' were trotted out each and every time mass psychosis seized traders. Crypto fans had better get used to the crackdown story. Recall that it took almost two years for the news media's tariff-war allegory to die a natural death. This occurred when the "war" itself became too convoluted for the supposed experts to explain. Eventually, and mercifully, they came to realize that they were only embarrassing themselves when they tried.  Now financial writers have trained their wellspring of ignorance on the latest tabloid story involving markets -- the epic mania in cryptocurrency. While this may be a welcome respite from sensationalist blather about how Reddit kids were crushing the hedge funds, it hardly serves to explain bitcoin's rabid swings. So let me try, even though the simple explanation is voodoo stuff that will never surface on Bloomberg or Jim Cramer's vaudeville show. 'Hidden Pivots' Rule! First understand there is no rational explanation for the day-to-day histrionics of deranged markets. The overarching mania is not hard to understand. It exists, and intensifies until climax, because speculators increasingly become convinced they can get rich quickly and with little actual work.  However, short-term whoops, dives and spasms can be explained and even predicted only by using charts.  Thus can we assume

The inflation trade is struggling for loft, a potential victim of its own, wild popularity. “We don’t have strong reflation-trade momentum at the moment because people are waiting for more data,” said Daniel Tenengauzer, markets strategy chief at Bank of New York Mellon. By his logic, all that it would take to stoke inflation would be a little more…inflation. So much for investors' supposed collective prescience. Tenengauzer and his flock should instead be asking themselves when was the last time every investor on the planet got on the same side of a bet and made money. Answer: never. That hasn’t stopped them from praying that Tuesday’s release of CPI numbers for March will show a significant jump. Don’t these guys know that the harder they hope for statistical evidence of inflation, the less likely it is that the markets will move their way if and when it comes? Buy the rumor, sell the news, as the saying goes. Prominent among those who have made money for clients in the past by betting against the popular wisdom is Lacy Hunt, chief economist at Hoisington Investment Management.  The firm’s official position is that “inflationary psychosis” has gotten too far ahead of the real thing. Hunt is an old-timer who well understands how inflation fears can flout reality – for decades, even --causing otherwise astute investors to do the wrong thing. That was the case from about 1980 on, when the few un-fearful investors who stuck with Treasurys made a bundle, racking up capital gains of 15% or more in many years. They outperformed the herd because bond prices at the long end of the yield curve are highly leveraged inversely to small decreases in short term rates. There were blips against this strategy, of course, such as in 1991, when nearly everyone

Biden’s $2.2 trillion ‘infrastructure’ plan is quite ambitious as far as Government boondoggles go. But what if it’s just the Democrats' opening bid? “We can do $10 trillion!” exhorted Alexandria Octavio-Cortez in a wild-eyed remark that is unlikely to be challenged by fellow Democrats or the New York Times.  Even $10 trillion would be chump change, however, if Biden’s Trojan horse for the Green New Deal births the full-Monty environmental and civic transformation envisioned by AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and some other socialist zealots on the Hill. It is ironic that Biden chose Pittsburgh as a backdrop last week to showcase the pandemic era's first fiscal-stimulus monstrosity. Pittsburgh has been a model for urban redevelopment in the post-War era, having avoided getting sucked into an economic quagmire by its dying steel industry. Instead, the 'Iron City' transformed itself into an urban success story with massive investment in health care, banking, higher education, parks and cultural amenities. Is the Federal Government capable of deploying funds so judiciously?  It seems unlikely at a time when America's political leadership has embraced the practice of financing vast Federal outlays with money from trees. Note also that Pittsburgh’s regeneration was achieved over many decades with private investment that sought maximum economic returns. In contrast, Biden's plan seeks maximum political returns and contains little actual spending on potholes. With a partisan emphasis on social engineering, it seems more likely to clone Detroit's dereliction than Pittsburgh's prosperity. 'Racist' Highways Indeed, only a reported 5% of the proposed new trillions is earmarked for the repair of roads and bridges. A significant share of what remains evidently would go toward social tinkering and -- heaven help us! -- improving the weather. That’s what Pete Buttigieg, among others, has in mind, believing as he does that the transportation sector

The technological wizardry that has given us smart phones, desktop computers, electric cars and flat-screen TVs has masked a pernicious decline in America’s standard of living since the 1950s. One area where this is painfully obvious is the deterioration of customer service. Recall the scene in Back to the Future when a car pulls into a filling station and three attendants jump up to pamper it. One checks under the hood, another makes sure the tires are properly inflated and a third pumps 28-cent gas.  Director Spielberg intended this as a wry comment on how much companies valued their customers back then, and how hard they worked to keep us happy. These days, most companies care so little about us that they have cut off access to phone support, even for the most serious problems. The Death of Support A friend recently spent more than fifty hours trying to clear up a billing problem with Amazon. She could not access her account, and each time they reset it she would find herself locked out again the next morning. Although Amazon offers limited phone support, in this case it was useless because the problem was deemed “technical” and unrelated to a merchandise screw-up. It took literally hundreds of phone calls to get nowhere, and every call was impeded by the familiar gauntlet of voice menus. Even with a case number, it took 20 minutes to reach a supervisor. At least a dozen of these guys interceded along the way, creating a daisy chain of broken promises and meaningless apologies. Where abusing customers is concerned, Facebook is in a class by itself, so inscrutable, opaque and coldly uncaring that one might think they’d outsourced call support to North Korea. I was spending as much as $5,000 a month with them on advertising;

I've avoided the pandemic, politics and economic doomsday as topics recently because there's only so much one can say about them. This is especially true of the coming bear market.  Coming exactly when, you might ask? Of course, even the very best of us gurus is unlikely to produce the correct answer, other than in after-the-fact promotional material that shamelessly bends the truth.  My own technical work suggests the market may already have topped, since most of the major indexes have stalled within inches of Hidden Pivot targets I'd drum-rolled weeks or even months earlier. IWM, for one, has yet to surpass the 234.82 objective disseminated to subscribers six weeks ago.  A proxy for small-cap stocks, it peaked at 234.53 on March 15 and has sold off moderately since.  Similarly, a QQQ target at 337.10 that first appeared here five weeks ago caught the peak of a spike on February 16 that hit 338.19. And there was a well-advertised, very long-term DIA target at 327.27 that has been exceeded only slightly so far. Rotate This, Mack! Ordinarily I'd be pretty jazzed about all of these possible tops occurring more or less simultaneously and within easy distance of compelling Hidden Pivot targets.  I tend to rely solely on my charts rather than on my gut in order to be reasonably certain about market trends and turning points; but in this instance I am drawn to more subjective evidence. Specifically, the machine-like rotation of buying from one sector to the next that has been occurring routinely is evidence that the crooks who make their living at it are still very much in control of the game. Thus whenever stocks are falling, we can safely infer it is because the crooks are keen to accumulate them at lower prices. Rotation also provides an

The rabid mania that has seized the world of investables has gotten so much ink lately that I thought I'd explore an equally curious phenomenon with a far greater impact on our daily lives. Have you noticed how time seems to have taken wing during the pandemic?  Each Friday follows the last so quickly that, speaking as a man in his 70s who is rounding the final turn, I struggle to invent ways to keep the months and years from slipping away with equally alarming speed. I have a possible solution, one that could work for you as well that I will tell you about it in a moment. But first let me ask whether you’ve experienced the same thing yourselves. For me, the speed-up of time started to become unsettling when the interval between haircuts seemed to grow shorter and shorter. I typically let six weeks go by, but lately my hair has started to look pretty shaggy after only a few weeks. Or so it seemed. When I started recording the date of my last clip-job on an Outlook calendar, I discovered that what had felt like a mere three or four weeks since my last haircut was actually closer to the normal six weeks. Too Much Urology The same seeming compression of time has occurred in other areas of my life. Dental appointments spaced at four months have begun to feel as though they are popping up twice as often. Biannual visits to my urologist now stare me in the face seemingly every time I flip the calendar. I can hardly keep up with Outlook reminders to send out birthday cards, and yearly payments for life insurance, long-term care coverage and golf-club membership are coming due relentlessly. What could account for this feeling that time is accelerating?

 No one said it would be easy to get short at the top. This bull market is proving especially challenging to fade because the herd knows how grotesquely overvalued stocks are. With so many traders eager to bet the 'don't' line, the broad averages have started to behave like El Diablo (see photo above). The Dow has staged three 600-point-plus rallies-to-nowhere since peaking two weeks ago, but none lasted for more than a day. Although bull riders must hang on for eight seconds to claim a prize, traders could conceivably have to endure weeks or even months of loco price action to hit it big. Many will get busted up badly trying. The 'everything bubble', as it is called, is wherever one looks:  stocks, bonds, real estate, art...African American Barbie dolls. There are more homes listed for $5 million and up than there are Smiths in the Manhattan phone directory. Ironically, gold and silver are among the few investable assets that are not in a bubble. That tells you how badly the players have misjudged the risks of a financial cataclysm. They've gone all-in on bitcoin instead, as though scarcity alone could make cryptocurrency money, a store of value or a hedge against the crash that is coming. Fed Quackery Fed Chairman Powell's every utterance has been the obsessive focus of economists and pundits who make their living taking the central bank's monetary quackery seriously. Does anyone actually believe that credit stimulus will produce an economy healthy enough to service the trillions of dollars in debt we've accumulated desperately trying to keep an asset bubble from deflating? The effort is not only doomed, it is likely to to produce a deflationary collapse featuring a strong dollar and crushing real rates of interest. Sound impossible? Not with everyone on the 'inflation'

The global credit-blowout has stoked fears of a money-printing catastrophe like the one that wrecked Germany's economy a hundred years ago, planting the seeds of World War II.  However, even a cursory look at the Weimar hyperinflation of 1921-23 reveals why it is extremely unlikely to happen again, especially on a global scale.  It was a local event involving physical paper currency that would be nearly impossible to replicate using a global reserve dollar, particularly at a time when digital transactions overwhelmingly dominate. The German hyperinflation featured literal boxcars of D-marks delivered weekly to the biggest employers. The country was a 'union shop', so to speak, and the sums sent to workers ahead of each payday were continually renegotiated to include an adjustment for inflation. The system was put in place in order to hold down unemployment and worker unrest. It worked so well, at least initially, that the Germans enjoyed lower joblessness in 1920-22 than some of the Allied nations that had defeated them in The Great War. Money by the Boxcar The money-filled boxcars pushed the exchange rate to an extreme, in 1923, of 4.2 trillion marks per dollar. However, the periodic spikes in money creation that quickly ramped inflation to this level were caused not chiefly by official money-printing, but by employers who issued their own scrip. This was by agreement with the German government, which was fearful of riots if workers were not paid on time. In fact, Germany's money presses, stressed to the limit, did break down a couple of times during the 1921-23 period. Employers reacted to this emergency with such patriotic vigor that it was immediately following each of their scrip-a-loozas that inflation took unfathomable leaps. No similar mechanism or infrastructure exists to ramp up the physical supply of U.S. dollars. Although it

They don't ring a bell at the top of bull markets, as the saying goes, but perhaps this time it will be different.  Indeed, every sentient guru and talking head who is not shilling for Wall Street is properly bearish, and even the chimpanzees who make their living rotating Other People's Money into flavor-of-the-month investment themes were beginning to doubt the stock market's sanity. If a much-needed 10,000-point drop in the Dow is coming, consider it electroshock therapy.  Unfortunately, it'll probably take a lot more than that to purge the markets of mental illness as serious as we've seen in recent years. Speaking as a trader and a chartist, I'm looking forward to the violent price swings that likely lie ahead. The Hidden Pivot Method turns out to work best when things get really crazy, as occurred during the dot-com mania and the Great Financial Collapse of 2007-08.  It will be interesting to see whether the Reddit kids have scared off institutional heavies who might otherwise get short up the wazoo over the course of a bear market. My hunch is that they will still short like crazy but avoid doing so in individual stocks that could attract dangerous attention. Keeping Suckers in the Game Getting short will not be a piece of cake, since a bear market as long overdue as this one is going to attract many players who are all-too-eager to pick tops. We've tried it ourselves recently using Hidden Pivot targets that precisely nailed peaks in several indexes, although not in IWM, a small-cap vehicle that still has a major target outstanding 4% above, at 234.82. Like so many amateurs, we got spooked out of some DIA puts on Wednesday when the Dow rallied nearly 500 points. That's the way it's going to be the whole