In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and John Rubino discuss:

• Trade Wars
  • Suddenly arising with Russia and China
• Modern Monetary Theory
  • A delusion that dates back to the days of John Law
• A Great Crash Indicator
  • RV sales are sending a warning sign
• Risky Real Estate
  • Private equity will sell fast when times get bad

Chris and John discuss the looming trade wars with Russia and China, the long-term implications of the worldwide credit binge, and the indicators that will presage a systemic correction. John shares his assessment of one of his most trusted crash indicators, RV sales:

This is a typical cycle for RVs. It’s a big toy and people are cocky now because they’ve been working for a little while. They have extremely easy credit. Interest rates are incredibly low. If you’ve got a decent credit score you can buy an RV for 2 or 3% interest and a lot of people are taking advantage of that, just as they spent the last three or four years taking advantage of incredibly cheap car loan terms, and running, basically, an auto sales bubble. They’ve kind of shifted to RVs now, which is yet another sign that the cycle is nearing an end.

This "recovery" is 8 years old now. The typical recovery is 6 years. So we already have an expansion that’s a couple of years longer than normal. It’s actually the third longest since World War II. Which means that, everything else being equal, we should be pretty close to the end of this cycle and ready for a downturn. And now you’ve got indicators like RV sales going just parabolic, indicating that, at least in that little section of the market, money is incredibly easy and buyers are euphoric. And that’s also a sign that things are nearing the end. There are lots of other signs, but that’s one.

Every time there’s a bubble in an asset class, there’s always a new reason for it that appears to explain it. But historically the explanation never holds. The cycle still reasserts itself at some point. And things go back to normal. And I suspect that’ll be the case with RVs at some point.

Executive Summary

• How overvalued is the system?
• The biggest errors that got us to this point
• What to expect during the big reset
• Taking necessary action

If you have not yet read Part 1: The Mother Of All Financial Bubbles, It's Time To Worryavailable free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

What will the coming reset look like when it finally arrives?

This is the operative question everybody should be asking themselves because, believe me, the bankers and politicians are already frantically at work on the only question they care about: Who, instead of us, is going to eat the losses?

Let me be clear. The coming reset is going to be very, very painful. Part of me just wants to rip the proverbial Band-Aid off and get on with it, yet part of me dreads what’s coming and is in no hurry to see it arrive. Talk about being ambivalent!

The big picture looks like this: Ray Dialo’s firm Bridgewater Associates, a mega-money management firm, put together the below chart of the IOUs of the US (most other countries look the same, so feel free to extrapolate for Japan, or most of the EU, or the UK).

There are, simply, too many promises that cannot be kept. At a recent ICV wealth conference (just this week) one of the speakers was a man named Bradley Belt, former executive director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).

I asked him if there were any possible solutions to the staggering risks posed by the data in this chart. And who, if anyone, is working on them?

He answered that... » Read more