Tag Archives: markets

Every year, friend-of-the-site David Collum writes a detailed “Year in Review” synopsis full of keen perspective and plenty of wit.

This year’s is no exception.

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With this week’s twin announcements of new QE and a partial China trade agreement, the bulls are suddenly having the time of their lives.

So, does this mean happy days have returned? Have we been rescued from the mountain data warning of an economic slowdown and lower asset prices? Does the Fed — and now China, too — have our back again?

Is it time for investors to become optimistic once more?

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“We are on the precipice of the greatest retirement crisis in the history of the world. And that makes perfect sense because, first of all, we have the largest elderly population in the history of the world.

Just focusing on the United States: our elderly are woefully unprepared to retire. And in the decades to come we will witness millions of elderly American's, Baby Boomers and others, slipping into poverty. 'Too frail to work, too poor to retire' will become the new normal for many elderly Americans.”

So warns pension fraud whistleblower Ted Siedle.

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It's make or break time in the markets cautions Sven Henrick, technical analyst and lead market strategist for Northman Trader.

His weekly flurry of trendline charts warn that the major indexes have been compressing in rising wedges that increasingly point to a binary outcome: either a massive new leg up that will result in the market making new all time highs, or a bad breadown that could waterfall into a 2008-style correction.

His reams of data increasingly suggest that today's global elevated asset prices are in no way justified by the fundamentals of the underlying world economies. And that someday — perhaps quite soon — a reckoning long overdue will occur.

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Stocks provide a return to today’s investors via two mechanisms: dividends and capital gains.

Dividends provide and income stream which can be quantiatively values. Capital gains result from speculation — an expectation that future dividends will be higher than the market currently expects.

But what’s the value of a company that continuously pays no dividends and does not appear as if it ever will in the foreseeable future?

Former financier and current statistician Tan Liu, author of the recent book The Ponzi Factor: The Simple Truth About Investment Profits explains how many of today’s perpetually dividend-less companies traded on the public market are operating as ponzi schemes by definition.

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So, did the nauseating last few months of 2018 signal the end of the secular bull market? Or is the rebound that kicked-off 2019 a sign that the uptrend is still intact? Or it is just a dead-cat bounce?

Lance Roberts, chief investment strategist and chief editor of Real Investment Advice, returns to the podcast with fresh data that suggests the bear market that emerged late last year is still in play.

Of greater concern to him, though, is where things are headed from here.

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• More California cops and firefighters are paying for their pensions. Is it too late?
• Reports: Growing number of $100,000-plus public pensions in Illinois cost taxpayers
• India considers IL&FS sale among options to end debt crunch
• Italy's debt costs rise further at auction
• Australians face $700b wealth wipe-out as debt levels rated riskiest in the world: Morgan Stanley
• Treasury Sees 2018 Borrowing Needs Surging to $1.34 Trillion
• UK budget doesn't alter view of high public debt: Moody's
• Whopping 62 percent of jobs don't support middle-class life after accounting for cost of living
• Debt Alarm Ringing
• Treasury Sees 2018 Borrowing Needs Surging to $1.34 Trillion

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• The World Is Quietly Decoupling From The U.S. – And No One Is Paying Attention
• Chretien calls U.S. president 'unspeakable'
• Alexa, Should We Trust You?
• The Distortions of Doom Part 2: The Fatal Flaws of Reserve Currencies
• UK Issues First Ever 'Unexplained Wealth Order'
• Sears is in trouble: What shoppers should do if the company files for bankruptcy
• Wells Fargo customers are fed up. They could yank billions of dollars in deposits 
• This $69B Deal May Reshape Health Care as We Know It
• Elderly Chinese Army Veterans Stage Massive Protest Against Police Beatings
• South Africa’s Zulu Nation Joins White Farmers To Protest Government Land Seizures
• The Pentagon’s Push to Program Soldiers’ Brains
• Trump Insiders Ramp Up Rhetoric Against Russian Energy
• Dyer: Global warming report falls short of honest truth
• Climate change is making monster hurricanes like Michael harder to forecast
• Yellowstone geyser erupts, vomiting decades worth of trash across park
• How Feedback Loops Are Driving Runaway Climate Change
• Trump Administration Waives Environmental Laws for Texas Border Wall
• The Amazon used to be a hedge against climate change. Those days may be over.

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One of the most perplexing mysteries to us is that right as the Federal Reserve embarked on QE3 — which was a huge, enormous, $85 billion a month experiment — commodities began a multiyear decline within two weeks of that announcement. Concurrently, the world’s central banks plunged the world into steeply negative real interest rates, a condition that has almost always resulted in booming commodity prices — but not this time. Today, the ratio between commodity prices and equities is at one of, if not the most, extreme points in history.

To explain that gap, we talk this week with Brien Lundin, publisher of Gold Newsletter and producer of the New Orleans Investment Conference (where Chris and Adam are speaking on Oct 25-28):

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