From the Trenches World Report
Enforce our Bill of Rights
You can only be so dead, and that’s just “plain dead.” But there is also Feddy Krueger dead. The kind of dead that keeps on happening like a demonic death that won’t stay dead. It is in that nightmarish Elm St. light that I’m going to review the Federal Reserve’s death.
It’s happened via face-plant failures over past month that I’m going to lay out to show how savagely the Fed is dying a perpetual-motion death. Continue reading “How Dead is the Fed?”
The bust is on! Not only is the stock market crashing like never seen before (Dow down 3,000 points today!), but there are now deeply distressing breaks in the bond market. These staggering responses to Fed actions run counter to what is expected; but people are so focused on stocks, the are missing the more worrisome action. Continue reading “Big Bond Bubble Begins to Blow!”
Today’s crash wiped out almost the entire Trump Rally, going back to the day “The Donald” was elected President of the United States. The stock crash, rolling through our days like late-summer thunder, is a daily headline now, each day unimaginably worse than the record day before!
Charts can’t even keep up with the action. Because I couldn’t initially find one that matched the actual close, I had to draw a red line at the point to which the market actually plunged today: Continue reading “The Big Trump Dump! Dow Down 3,000 Points!”
Europeans are feeling like President Trump just dropped a COVID-19 economic bomb on the European Union. In response to his March 11th talk from the Oval Office, EU leaders said they did not see this coming. Was this a COVERT economic attack on the EU as some in the EU think? Continue reading “Did Trump Trade Wars Just Escalate to Germ Warfare?”
The bear roared today, ripping the ears off everyone, as the Dow and Russel 2000 both landed more than 20% below their last peak. Their 19-session rampage landed a record as the, steepest, fastest downhill bear run in the history of the US stock market.
The market’s waterfall run over the cliffs now looks like El Capitan. Continue reading “FuBEAR! Stocks Crash into Bear Market Faster than 1929!”
Today was the greatest crash in Wall Street history by one measure, and took down many other milestones. The Dow plunged 2,012 points in its largest single-session drop on record! Percentage-wise it was down 7.8%, which still knocked out decades of lows, leading to “Black Monday” being the hot search term on Google today as people sought a comparison worthy of this Monday crash. Continue reading “Dow Crashes 2,000 Points in Record Day! The Bear is at the Door.”
The World Health Organization now says the death rate of the new coronavirus is significantly higher than influenza, though much lower than earlier epidemics that had far less socio-economic impact, such as SARS, MERS, and Ebola. Continue reading “WHO Raises Death Rate and Risk of Coronavirus; One Expert Declares “WWII!””
The Federal Reserve on Tuesday gave the market a double-dose of exactly what it thought the market needed, and the market just about died! On the theory that, if a little is good, more is better, the Fed gave a double cut of interest. It did not go as planned. Continue reading “Stock Market Overmedicated on FedMed, Patient Goes into Cardiac Arrest”
The economy was already heaving in the toilet before COVID-19 dropped the lid on its head and sat on it. Sales, revenue, real earnings, manufacturing, and finally the services industry had all puked. Last week, stocks got the Great Flush as the market went down with the economy.
Be careful who you listen to in times of Great Depression. The permabulls are already telling their crowd now is the time to catch bargains and ride the market back up. Sit and think on that before your next movement. Continue reading “The Economy was Already in the Toilet before COVID-19 Flushed it”
It just can’t get bad enough, and I can ‘t write fast enough. The headlines at the end of the week are now stunning, so I’m going to share several of them along with some quotations from the bawling and dying market bulls. In just one week, this has become the fastest stock market plunge since the Great Depression! So, if you have a bull you love, save his bullish butt by nailing upper-story windows shut. Continue reading “It’s a Bloodbath, and There’s a Toaster in the Bathwater”
That didn’t take long. Just a month ago, I wrote, “Stock Market More Overpriced and Perilous Than Anytime in History,” stating that the market was poised for a big fall because “some of the market’s most fundamental valuation metrics are now printing at levels never seen before…. This market is tripping on some pricy hallucinogens.” Continue reading “The Great Melt-up Melt Down”
It is the senseless things of this world that sometimes knock sense into the high and mighty whose hubris causes them to believe they cannot fall. In this case, the tiny COVID-19 virus (coronavirus) is bringing down a global house of cards long perched to fall — locks, stocks, and barrels of oil. Continue reading “COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Economic Impact Sweeps Down on Global Economy Like a Fat Black Swan”
The public is always ready to panic over the next pandemic. We love a good movie like the old Ebola scare, Outbreak. We even have a name for the next mystery disease — the big one that is supposed to destroy us all like World War III or like the apocalypse — a scientific name. The World Health Organization has designated it with the generic place holder “Disease X.” But is its real name “COVID-19” as the latest coronavirus has just specifically been named? Continue reading “The True Danger of Coronavirus (COVID-19): What are the real risks of infection, death and a global pandemic?”
Who says there is no recession anywhere in sight? It depends on where you are looking. In short, manufacturing remains in recession; corporate profits remain in recession; freight remains deep in recession; Carmageddon remains in recession; and the Retail Apocalypse remains a recession for brick-and-mortar stores, while employment — the last holdout — is now also turning downward. Continue reading “The Glub, Glub, Glub of Recession Circling the Drain”
Employment has been the one stickler in my recession prediction for 2019, and finding a trustworthy measurement from the government’s statistics is like finding a virgin in a brothel. Depending on which official figures you look at, employment has refused to fall and new jobs are strong … or they stink. Continue reading “What to Make of the Bureau of Lying Statistics’ Contradicting Jobs Reports”
During its brief and utterly failed attempt to reduce its balance sheet (called quantitative tightening), the Federal Reserve only rolled off securities at a rate of $50 billion a month. It is now purchasing US treasuries at a rate of more than $55 billion a month: Continue reading “Federal Reserve Monetizing US Debt Faster than its Previous Tightening”
There is, at least, one highly recognized economist who agrees with me that a recession started forming in the summer of 2019 and is still emerging, in spite of the Fed’s strongest efforts to stop it — David Rosenberg: Continue reading “The Recession Called “Repocalypse””
The best time to size up the collapse in housing that I called almost two years ago will be when it is over — so we can visualize its full extent. Since it is now over by some measures, though not by others, this might be as good as we get for awhile as a moment when we can pause to take a broad scan of the full extent of our damages to date. However, as you’ll see below, we’re still clinging to the side of a cliff. We’re not back up on top. Continue reading “Sizing up the 2017-2020 Housing Cliff Hanger”
Having predicted last year that a recession would begin in the summer of 2019 and that it would likely start with a major repo crisis, I am now proven wrong by 2019’s fourth-quarter GDP. If the repo crisis that started in the final week of summer had actually been the start of a recession, we would have seen fourth-quarter GDP go negative. Instead, it came in at 2.1% growth. Continue reading “GDP is In, and Recession is Out … or is it?”
I’m not going to predict when and how the US stock market will crash as I did by laying out the stages of its fall for 2018. That was easy, but the times are different now.
Back then, the Fed had laid out a precise schedule for its tightening, and it was apparent to me where the big increases in Fed tightening would be sufficient to bring down the market that the Fed had artificially rigged. Continue reading “Stock Market More Overpriced and Perilous Than Anytime in History”