No wonder! Janet Yellen's repeated assertion that there is full employment is believed implicitly by the mavens of the stock markets. However, smarter people know that (1) 23% of working-age Americans have given up looking for a job, because there are virtually none to be had, whereas (2) Yellen treats those 23% as though dead. However, the not so bright mavens of industry and the stock market read her claim of full employment as a signal that there are millions of Americans out there who can and will buy their products. Wrong! Because of their stupidity the mavens of the stock market push their stocks ever higher. In the meanwhile those with common sense know that the deepest stock market crash of all times will soon take place. Corrolary: The silver and gold presently being depressed will skyrockt when the crash arrives.

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The stock market is turning into a sloppy, ugly mess—and it could get worse

By Mark DeCambre

Published: Oct 14, 2016 5:06 p.m. ET

Dow industrials on pace for longest streak of monthly losses in 5 years. Here are some of the reasons behind the slide

It is rough out there.

 It is getting dicey out there for Wall Street investors, although stocks eked out a modest rise on Friday.

U.S. equities have been bouncing around lately. And the trend has been predominantly lower. Although it hasn’t been the sort of dizzying tumble for equities that would elicit an instant spike in fear, it has been, however, the kind of plodding descent that has the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.22%  down nearly 300 points since the end of July.
 
In fact, the Dow and the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.02%  are on the verge of tallying three straight months of declines, with October shaping up to be the ugliest monthly fall since January—the month after the Federal Reserve raised rates for the first time in a decade. (Friday’s jump on better bank earnings will have to be factored after the close.)

But, if the Dow posts a loss in October it would be the first time the blue-chip index logged three consecutive monthly declines since the period ended in September 2011. The S&P 500 notched three consecutive monthly loses earlier this year, ended February.

On Friday, stocks ended nearly flat, with only the Dow posting a significant gain buoyed by a rise in the banking sector’s Goldman Sachs Group GS, +1.85% Friday’s wobbly moves, where stocks started off sharply higher before fading, has characterized a market that appears to be increasingly on tenterhooks. Here’s what may be contributing to the recent spike in Wall Street anxiety levels:

1. October trade

Ryan Detrick, senior market strategist at LPL Financial, points out that October is inherently a volatile month for stocks. “October has a reputation as a month you better buckle your seat belts for a reason. Nearly all the volatility records seem to take place during this month,” Detrick said in a recent research note.
 
Read: Will October kill yet another bull market?

Detrick points out that 10 of the largest one-day drops were in October, dating back to 1928 (as the following table shows):

2. Ominous charts point to a crash (a la October 1987)

A number of analysts are pointing to the possibility of a big selloff in stocks, citing bearish technical patterns. Murray Gunn, technical analyst at HSBC, in a Wednesday note said investors should look out below if the S&P 500 closes between 2,116-1,991 and if the Dow industrials breach the 17,992-17,063 level. The thinking behind that call is those levels represent recent lows that may trigger buying by computer-driven traders and other investors. In other words, those levels then tend to act as so-called support. But slipping below them can mean a painful dip into darkness.

Other market statisticians, including Carter Braxton Worth of Cornerstone Macro, have pointed out that although stocks have been hovering around all-time records, their recent crawl lower is a bad sign and suggests that equities are gradually breaking down.

Here’s a chart of important levels for the S&P 500 put together by MarketWatch’s Tomi Kilgore:

On Thursday, the S&P 500 hit a low of 2,114 before bouncing back, while the Dow’s Thursday low was 17,959, before rebounding somewhat. Still, Murray said “the possibility of a severe fall in the stock market is now very high,” and compared recent moves in stocks with those that preceded the 1987 stock-market crash.

3. Weak corporate earnings

Alcoa Inc. AA, -1.16% delivered weak third-quarter results to unofficially kick off earnings season. S&P Global Market Intelligence warned that earnings season is turning out to be a story of tepid growth, down 1.2% for the third quarter. S&P said particular attention needs to be paid to the consumer-discretionary sector, which includes brands like Nike Inc. NKE, -0.79% Ford Motor Co. F, +0.00% and Staples Inc. SPLS, -1.18% and is on track to report its lowest quarterly results since 2012 (as the chart below shows):

Why is this bad? Weak earnings can mean there is not a lot of fundamental justification to buy stocks, which are considered risky compared with, say, the U.S. 10-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, +0.00% Better earnings from stocks mean that investors are getting good value for their buck. Weak or stagnant earnings suggest that investors are overpaying. And there have been a raft of market participants pointing to bubbles forming in the market, citing things like price-to-earnings ratios.


Indeed, S&P 500 companies are expected to post their sixth straight quarter of declining earnings, according to FactSet data. And although it is still early in the season, several corporations have issued profit and/or sales warnings over the past few weeks. That all implies that there is still weakness in the economy, despite a labor market that has been chugging along. Tepid earnings are a big reason the market is bound to sink, or, at the very least, can’t go much higher, some industry experts argue.

4. Biotech woes

The biotech market can be a canary in the coal mine as a measure of risk-taking. And it is starting to lose steam after a nice run, trading below both its 50-day and 200-day moving averages, as gauged by the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF IBB, -1.86% Falling below or trading above a moving average is usually interpreted as a measure of momentum.
 
Problems in biotech are multiple, but the primary forces could be centered on a scaling back of general risk appetite, as the sector is a proxy for bullish bets on U.S. stocks, and as a bet on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has been critical of biotech companies, which can pressure the sector if investors believe she’s likely to win the race for the White House.

5. The pound and the dollar

The pound GBPUSD, -0.5386% which has been battered by intensifying talk of the U.K.’s plan to exit from the European Union, is hovering around its trade-weighted low, while the dollar has been creeping higher.

The dollar DXY, +0.55% has been a headwind for stocks and its abrupt surges higher on shifting views of a rate increase by the Federal Reserve have been disruptive to markets of late. A stronger buck means reduced sales for U.S. multinationals when money is repatriated into dollars. And a sustained rise could cause companies to lower their earnings outlooks for future quarters. The dollar has surged almost 3% so far in October.

Meanwhile, the pound’s steady drop has been a cause for worry because it is unclear how the U.K.’s economy will fare amid the tumbling currency, despite the benefits it offers the FTSE 100 UKX, +0.62% which is comprised predominantly of multinational companies that profit from exporting goods. Uncertainty in Europe is a problem that can cause jitters for the U.S., because it hints at broader global problems.

6. China

Concerns about China’s economy have resurfaced. Lackluster export data on Thursday reminded investors of the view that the world’s second-largest economy is petering. In August 2015, it was China’s stock-market woes and its sluggish economy that sent global markets into a tailspin.

7. U.S. presidential election

Like the market, Trump has been on a losing streak.

 

Republican candidate Donald Trump’s recent debacles have begun to lead some strategists to believe that a victory for Clinton isn't just assured, but that Democrats might see sufficient gains during the November elections to gain control of the House. That is not viewed as a categorical good thing for the market—financials KBE, +0.48% XLF, +0.47%  and the aforementioned biotech sector have been wobbly

To be sure, there is plenty of time to right the stock-market ship. Earnings could surprise to the upside and calm may set in after the election, pushing the S&P 500 and the Dow to fresh records, but right now it is looking a bit iffy.

Market columnist Mark Hulbert says the market is setting up for a monster rally and points out that the Dow has gained an average of 6.8% from its lowest point in October through the end of that same year.

 

More from MarketWatch

• Trump 'Regrets' Crude Words He Spoke About Women in 2005
• Here’s how much Apple may profit from Samsung’s exploding phone disaster
• Coal-mining boss: ‘Tesla is a fraud’

Listen to this radio interview with economists Paul Craig Roberts and Michel Chossudovsky. As explicitly stated by the latter, by listening to these interviews you will learn more about today's grave economic situation than a Ph.D. student in economics. Don't laugh. I've experienced the same sort of thing in "pure" science, where certain "truths" become dogma and any scientist who dares to disprove them risks losing his livelyhood. “In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” -- George Orwell

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Welcome to PaulCraigRoberts.org
My new book, The Failure Of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution Of The West, is available in ebook form at Barnes & Noble and at Amazon.com.
Click Here.

PCR interviewed by KPFA California

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March 30, 2013 | Original Here

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/90132

Guns and Butter

"The Bubble Economy" with Paul Craig Roberts and Michel Chossudovsky. The three bubbles in the U.S. economy: the bond market, the stock market, and the dollar; a negative real interest rate; off-shoring of jobs; the Cyprus banking crisis where deposits are now considered risk capital; the effect of austerity measures; economics as taught in academia and as portrayed by the media.

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"Confidence is U.S. Treasuries is dying, and if confidence in U.S. government debt completely collapses at some point we could literally be looking at financial Armageddon."

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10 Signs That Confidence In U.S. Treasuries Is Dying And That Financial Armageddon May Be Approaching

Go here for original.

Selling government debt is a gigantic confidence game.  For decades, investors all over the globe have gobbled up massive amounts of U.S. debt at incredibly low interest rates because they believed that it was a certainly that they would be paid back and be able to make a little bit of profit on top of it.  Unfortunately, things have changed.  Confidence is U.S. Treasuries is dying, and if confidence in U.S. government debt completely collapses at some point we could literally be looking at financial Armageddon.  Why is that so?  Well, when the world totally loses faith in U.S. Treasuries, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries will have to keep going up until enough investors are found to buy them.  But much higher interest rates will mean much higher interest on the national debt and thus much higher federal budget deficits.  That will erode confidence in U.S. Treasuries even further.  In the end, a vicious cycle of eroding confidence and higher interest rates could ultimately lead to hyperinflation as the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve flood the system with endless amounts of paper money to try to keep the system solvent.

Faith in U.S. Treasury bonds is absolutely critical if the world financial system is going to continue to operate in a stable manner.  In the post-World War 2 era, U.S. Treasuries have been largely viewed as the absolutely safest investment out there.  So if there comes a point when the market for U.S. Treasuries completely collapses, it is going to cause unprecedented financial chaos.  The worldwide derivatives market, which is already highly unstable, would almost certainly implode.  Credit markets all over the globe would seize up.  Global trade would quickly grind to a standstill.

This isn't going to happen overnight (hopefully).  Rather, the loss of confidence in U.S. Treasuries is something that is likely to take months or even years to play out.  But once that confidence is gone, it is not something that will be able to be rebuilt easily.

Think of it this way - once you drive a car off a cliff, is it easy to reconstruct it?

Of course not.

Well, that is where we are headed with U.S. Treasuries.

The Federal Reserve is flooding the system with new dollars, Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress seem poised to pass a new tax deal which does not include corresponding spending cuts which will cause U.S. government budget deficits to become even more bloated, and there is a tremendous lack of faith both in U.S. political leaders and in the Federal Reserve at this point.

The rest of the world is losing faith that the U.S. government is going to be able to handle all of the debt that it has accumulated.  We may be approaching a "tipping point" soon.

The following are 10 signs that confidence in U.S. Treasuries is dying....

#1 The financial community is extremely concerned that the tax deal that Barack Obama is pushing is going to dramatically increase U.S. government budget deficits over the next two years.  On Monday, Moody's warned that if Barack Obama's tax deal with the Republicans becomes law, it will increase the likelihood that Moody's could soon be forced to slash the rating of U.S. government debt.

#2 Already there are signs that some bond investors are looking for the exits.  Last week, U.S. Treasuries suffered their largest  two day sell-off since the collapse of Lehman Brothers back in September 2008.

#3 The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds set a six-month high on Monday before pulling back a bit.  Most analysts believe that Treasury yields are going to push significantly higher in coming weeks.

#4 This trend of rising yields has been going on for a while.  In fact, yields on 10-year Treasury bonds have been steadily rising since October 7th.

#5 Even before the recent tax deal was announced there were already troubling signs regarding the growth of U.S. government debt.  The U.S. government budget deficit rose to $150.4 billion in November, which was the largest November budget deficit ever recorded.

#6 It is not just the new tax deal that has investors around the globe spooked.  The truth is that the rest of the globe reacted very negatively to the new round of quantitative easing that the Federal Reserve announced back in November.  The Federal Reserve is flooding the system with liquidity and the rest of the world is not amused.

#7 The American people have less faith in the Federal Reserve and in the financial system than at any other point in recent memory.  For example, a new Bloomberg National Poll has found that a majority of Americans now want the Federal Reserve to either be held more accountable or to be abolished entirely.

#8 Investors all over the globe are starting to wake up and realize that America's debt problem is unsolvable.  David Bloom, the currency chief at HSBC, raised eyebrows when he recently stated that "if yields are rising because people think America's fiscal situation is unsustainable, then its Armaggedon."

#9 There is also a growing feeling among investors that the Federal Reserve simply does not care about the danger of inflation, and this is making bondholders very nervous.  Stephen Lewis of Monument Securities recently put it this way....

"There is a feeling that the Fed doesn't care about inflation – in fact, wants more of it – and that is certainly not in the interest of bondholders."

#10 Over the next 12 months, the U.S. government is going to be rolling over trillions of dollars in debt along with all of the new borrowing that it is going to be doing. In fact, the U.S. government is somehow going to have to find a way to finance debt that is equivalent to 27.8 percent of GDP in 2011.

For years our politicians have told us that "deficits don't matter", but the truth is that they do matter.  The national debt of the United States is now the biggest debt in the history of the world by far, and yet most Americans do not seem to grasp the absolute financial horror that we are facing as a nation.

In the end, debt is always painful.  It can be a lot of fun to run out and buy a beautiful new house, a couple of brand new cars and to run your credit cards up to the max, but eventually it catches up with you.  Well, the same thing is now happening to us on a national level.

We are getting to the point where eventually we are not even going to be able to service the debt that we have already piled up.  Once that happens we can either declare national bankruptcy or we can try to hyperinflate our way out of trouble.

Meanwhile, the once great U.S. economic machine is dying as well.  The only reason we have been able to survive with all of this debt as long as we have is because of how powerful our economy has been.

But over the past couple of decades, the big global corporations that now dominate our economy have shipped thousands of factories and millions of jobs overseas.

The mighty economic machine which is supposed to provide funds to pay off all of this debt is being dismantled right in front of our eyes.

There was no way in the world that U.S. government debt was going to be sustainable even if our economy remained vibrant and healthy.  The sad truth is that U.S. government debt is approximately 13 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.

But now that the "real economy" is dying a savage death there is simply no hope that this thing is ever going to turn around.  The only thing left to do is to take bets on when the implosion is going to happen.

All of this "great tax cut debate" nonsense going on in Washington D.C. right now is just a bunch of incompetent politicians running around rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Perhaps these tax cuts will provide enough of a short-term economic boost to get many of them re-elected in 2012.  Meanwhile, our long-term economic problems continue to get a lot worse.

It has become quite obvious that Barack Obama is completely clueless about the economy, and what is even sadder is that the "highly educated" Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, seems almost equally as clueless.

Unfortunately, Americans have become so dumbed-down that they don't even realize that their leaders are incompetent.  In fact, as sad as it is to say, most Americans you will meet on the street probably cannot even tell you what U.S. Treasuries are.

Let us hope and pray that investors around the globe continue to have at least some confidence in U.S. Treasuries for at least a little while longer.  When "financial Armageddon" finally does happen, it isn't going to be pleasant for any of us.

So enjoy these happy economic times while you still have them, because at some point things are going to get a whole lot worse.

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Better to Get Out of the Stock Market while the Gettin's Good!

They Call this Season "Fall" for a Reason
by Dave Lindorff
The Public Record
Sept 28th, 2009

So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of the money because we needed to “get the banks lending again”?

Well, now Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, is telling us that all that money, and more than $2 trillion in loans, accomplished nothing. In an interview with Lagan Sebert, published in Huffington Post, Barofsky says, “We were told by Treasury that the purpose of the TARP fund was to increase lending. But we haven’t increased lending.”

Well yeah, that’s true. Just ask any ordinary working stiff. My little bank, the Harleysville National Bank here in eastern Pennsylvania, far from expanding lending, has been shutting down customer credit lines. As a bank manager told me, they were “reviewing all our equity lines” in light of declining property values (actually, property values in our area north of Philadelphia have remained pretty stable).

In general, banks across the country have been canceling credit lines, closing credit card accounts on customers deemed risky—including small businesses—and making it very hard to get a new mortgage. (They’ve also been raising all kinds of fees, ripping customers off in other ways, but that’s another story.)

And that goes for the biggest banks that got billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds.

Barofsky has been trying doggedly to find out whatever happened to all that money of ours that was shoveled out to the banks, and as he reports, he’s been working not just without any help from the Treasury Department, but actually against the active resistance of Treasury, which he accuses of having tried to dissuade him from even looking into it.

“My biggest surprise,” he says, “is when we announced an audit (of TARP), Treasury went out of their way to say…it would be a big waste of time.”

He says Treasury officials including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, claimed that it would be impossible to find out where the money went, on the argument that money is “fungible”—that is to say all money is the same. Of course this is a cynical and ridiculous assertion. If it were true, there would be no job for auditors, since all auditors do is look to find out where money went. (Imagine telling an IRS auditor that it is a waste of time auditing your books, because money is fungible!)

In any event, Barofsky has gone about his work, with or without the backing of the Obama Treasury Department, and what he found is that instead of lending out the money that they were provided with by taxpayers, the banks have been “acquiring other institutions, sitting on it, paying down credit lines,” and, of course, paying out obscene bonuses to executives.

The one thing the banks are not doing is lending.

But then, as I wrote last February, it was silly to think that by shoveling money into banks during a record recession, the banks would then lend it out. First of all, there was the awkward reality that good companies were and still are not looking to borrow money. Rather, they are trying to pay down debt and get their balance sheets on more solid ground to survive a period of low or declining sales and earnings.

The only companies that would be trying to borrow right now would be the ones that were on the rocks, and wanted money just to stay afloat. And what banker would lend to them? And second, if the banks could make more money by investing their new cash instead of making risky loans with it, why would they lend? So most of them just used the money to invest in Treasury Bonds.

The long and the short of it is that we’ve been taken for a very big and costly ride by banks that created a huge crisis and that then got the government to bail them out of it with our money, and by two administrations, one Republican and now one Democratic, that have been submissive and willing servants of the big banks.

The big surprise to me has been Paul Volcker, who I mistakenly took to be an over-the-hill relic and Wall Street patsy. The former Carter and Reagan-era Federal Reserve Board chairman, currently chair of President Obama’s economic advisory panel, is publicly warning that the president’s bank policies are preserving a system of giant banks that are “too big to fail,” and are risking further, even larger bailouts.

Barofsky agrees, saying that since the bailout, under Obama’s bank policies, big banks already deemed “too big to fail” have become even bigger, and he concludes, “We may be in a far more dangerous place today than we were in a year ago,” for having told certain financial companies that we will not let them fail.

Little wonder that the smart money—that would be the insiders in corporate boardrooms and executive suites—is reportedly selling shares as fast as they can be sold, with the experts reporting that insider sales of company stock are running 31:1 on the sell side. The explanation: with layoffs still running at over 500,000 a month, and nobody hiring, these executives don’t see anything in the year ahead or even longer that is likely to put the economy on a renewed growth path.

Putting these bits of news together doesn’t paint a pretty picture: We’ve got an economy that appears headed for at best a long period of stagnation and, more likely, for a second downturn, once the effect of last March’s stimulus package wears off. We’ve got a financial system that has been propped up artificially, its balance sheets soggy with underwater mortgages and worthless derivatives, and its executives holding assurances that they can count on the government bailing them out no matter what stupid or self-serving decisions they make.

We’ve got an economy that is 70% based upon consumer spending, in which one in five people is unemployed or involuntarily underemployed. We’ve got a nation that hardly makes anything, at the same time that its currency is sinking like a stone, making imports increasingly expensive, And we have a stock market that has been inflated into a giant bubble, just waiting to pop.

October should be an interesting month this year.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net