Infinite Unknown

- Four Signs That We’re Back in Dangerous Bubble Territory (Peak Prosperity, May 21, 2013):

Stocks, bonds – everything – at risk

…

Tags: Bonds, Bubble, Collapse, Debt, ECB, Economy, EU, Europe, Fed, Federal Reserve, GDP, Global News, Greece, Japan, Paul Krugman, Stock Market, Unemployment

- America’s Bubble Economy Is Going To Become An Economic Black Hole (Economic Collapse, May 22, 2013):

What is going to happen when the greatest economic bubble in the history of the world pops?  The mainstream media never talks about that.  They are much too busy covering the latest dogfights in Washington and what Justin Bieber has been up to.  And most Americans seem to think that if the Dow keeps setting new all-time highs that everything must be okay.  Sadly, that is not the case at all.  Right now, the U.S. economy is exhibiting all of the classic symptoms of a bubble economy.  You can see this when you step back and take a longer-term view of things.  Over the past decade, we have added more than 10 trillion dollars to the national debt.  But most Americans have shown very little concern as the balance on our national credit card has soared from 6 trillion dollars to nearly 17 trillion dollars.  Meanwhile, Wall Street has been transformed into the biggest casino on the planet, and much of the new money that the Federal Reserve has been recklessly printing up has gone into stocks.  But the Dow does not keep setting new records because the underlying economic fundamentals are good.  Rather, the reckless euphoria that we are seeing in the financial markets right now reminds me very much of 1929.  Margin debt is absolutely soaring, and every time that happens a crash rapidly follows.  But this time when a crash happens it could very well be unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  The top 25 U.S. banks have more than 212 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives combined, and when that house of cards comes crashing down there is no way that anyone will be able to prop it back up.  After all, U.S. GDP for an entire year is only a bit more than 15 trillion dollars.

But most Americans are only focused on the short-term because the mainstream media is only focused on the short-term.  Things are good this week and things were good last week, so there is nothing to worry about, right?

Continue reading »

Tags: Bill Gross, Bonds, Bubble, Collapse, Debt, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, GDP, Global News, Japan, PIMCO, Stock Market, U.S., Wall Street

- S&P 1666 (ZeroHedge, May 17, 2013)

Tags: Economy, Global News, S&P 500, Stock Market, U.S.

- S&P Downgrades Berkshire From AA+ To AA, Outlook Negative (ZeroHedge, May 16, 2013):

Obviously with Buffett a major shareholder of Moody’s, the only place where a downgrade of Berkshire could come from was S&P. Moments ago, the rating agency that dared to downgrade the US for which it is being targeted by Eric Holder’s Department of “Justice”, did just that. Continue reading »

Tags: Berkshire Hathaway, Economy, Global News, Moody's, NYSE, Rating, Standard & Poor's, Stock Market, U.S., Warren Buffett

- Bank Of Japan Head:”No Bubble Here” As Nikkei Rises 45% In 2013 (ZeroHedge, May 15, 2013):

Take a good look at the chart of the Nikkei below:

Supposedly this is the same chart that the new BOJ head, Haruhiko Kuroda, was looking at when he was responding to Japanese lawmakers during a session of the upper-house budget committee, where he flatly rejected an opposition-party member’s argument that the recent rapid rise in the Tokyo stock market is out of line with Japan’s real economy. “At this moment I do not think they are in a bubble,” Kuroda said. And everyone believes him, just Because central bankers are so good at objectively observing how contained subrpime is big the asset bubbles their ruinous policies create.

Incidentally, all this happens as the Nikkei225 closed at 15096, and is up 45% in 2013 alone! It will easily surpass the Dow Jones Industrial Average in absolute terms once tonight’s trading session begins, considering the ongoing pounding the Yen is sustaining in today’s session.

From the WSJ:

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Tags: Economy, Global News, Haruhiko Kuroda, Japan, Nikkei, Stock Market

- Despite Abenomics Japan’s Sharp Post Biggest Loss In 100 Years (ZeroHedge, May 14, 2013):

As reported earlier, at least one prominent hedge fund manager, Dan Loeb, is very bullish on Sony (or at least has played his cards well enough to buy the stock 50% lower and is using today’s ramp to offload to unwitting momentum chasers as he did with Herbalife). Whether he is merely using the opportunity to earn some activism brownie points on the background of the overall levitation of the Japanese stock market, or is genuinely convinced there is upside for Sony remains to be seen. However, anyone who thinks that Japanese corporates have no place to go but up, is kindly urged to take a look at one-time Japanese electronics titan Sharp, which posted a whopping loss of $5.36 billion, the biggest loss in the company’s 100 year history.

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Tags: Collapse, Economy, Government, Japan, sharp, Stock Market

This time it’s different!

- Meet Dylan The Day-Trader, Or When Fundamentals No Longer Matter (ZeroHedge, May 12, 2013):

Only 25, self-described ‘risk-taker’ Dylan Collins plays the markets with a pot of more than $1 million – $100,000 of his own money earned from trading over the past two years, the rest provided by his bosses and partners at AMR Capital Trading. As The Washington Post reports, Dylan exclaims, “trading is fun; for me this is the dream job;” but as they note, for most of us, day trading conjures up the image from the dot-com era of some dude in his pajamas with a two-day growth of beard logged on to a Charles Schwab account buying Nortel Networks and Pets.com on margin. But have no fear for – New York-based AMR, a division of G-2 Trading, is a lot more disciplined and sophisticated than that – specializing in “momentum trading,” riding hot stocks up and cold stocks down, taking advantage of the irrational herd behavior that characterizes financial markets. “I understand the idea that maybe you’d want to do something more meaningful, but I don’t think I need to worry about that at my age,” Dylan explains as he exploits momentary mispricings and sudden spikes in volume.

The thing about this kind of trading is that you don’t have to know very much about the companies whose shares you are buying or selling. “So much of trading is just about intuition,” he adds brushing off how quickly knife-catching turns to blood (as the BTFD strategy backfired on Sino-Forest and Digital Domain). Continue reading »

Tags: Collapse, Economy, Global News, Society, Stock Market, U.S.

- Marc Faber: “Something Will Break Very Badly” (ZeroHedge, May 10, 2013):

During an interview with The Globe and Mail, ‘Gloom, Boom, and Doom’s Marc Faber unleashed some awful truthiness about gold “I buy gold every month”, real estate “bubble territory”, and the likelihood of a crash in smoke-and-mirrors-like asset markets.

Q: Is it a good time to buy gold?

Faber: Nobody knows whether it’s a good time to buy gold or not…as I have repeatedly said in my reports, I buy gold every month and on the recent decline I bought more at $1,400 and I have an order at $1,300 and one at $1,200 and one at $1,100 an ounce. But they were not filled, just the $1,400.

I will never sell my gold, as I repeatedly told people. …. My maximum allocation to gold at present time is 25 per cent of assets.”

Q: Mr. Faber, you have indicated you believe there will be a market crash this summer. Can you tell us what might precede such an event?

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Tags: Economy, Global News, Gold, Marc Faber, Stock Market

- Argentina’s Modest Proposal: Buy Bonds Or Go To Jail (ZeroHedge, May 11, 2013):

While Argentina’s recent extraordinary attempts at central planning have been widely documented, ranging from freezing supermarket prices in a (failed) attempt to control inflation, to banning advertising in a (failed) attempt to weaken the private media, so far nothing has worked at stabilizing the economy and preventing the collapse in the domestic currency (if leading to such humorous viral videos as #mequieroir). Ironically, this is both good and bad news. It is good news because as we showed two days ago, even the ludicrous speed rise in the Nikkei has been a snail’s pace compared to that other unknown “Nation 1.” We can now reveal that while Japan is Nation 2, Nation 1 is that inflationary basket case Argentina, and specifically its Merval stock index. Continue reading »

Tags: Argentina, Bonds, Cristina Kirchner, Debt, Economy, Global News, Government, Inflation, Japan, Politics, Stock Market

- Stocks Are Officially in a Blow Off Top (ZeroHedge, May 9, 2013):

This is the culmination of Bernanke’s life’s work. In his mind he has succeeded in saving capitalism by spending trillions of Dollars pushing stocks higher.

It doesn’t matter that the US hasn’t experienced 3% GDP growth a SINGLE year since he took the Fed.

Continue reading »

Tags: Ben Bernanke, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Stock Market, U.S., Wall Street