Is This The Biggest Financial Bubble Ever? Rubino: "Hell Yes It Is!"

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Is This The Biggest Financial Bubble Ever? Rubino: "Hell Yes It Is!"

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

If you’re over 40 you’ve lived through at least three epic financial bubbles: junk bonds in the 1980s, tech stocks in the 1990s, and housing in the 2000s. Each was spectacular in its own way, and each threatened to take down the whole financial system when it burst.

But they pale next to what’s happening today. Where those past bubbles were sector-specific, which is to say the mania and resulting carnage occurred mostly within one asset class, today’s bubble is spread across, well, pretty much everything – hence the term “everything bubble.”

When this one pops there won’t be a lot of hiding places.

Way too much money

Most bubbles start when an influx of outside cash sends the price of something up dramatically. This captures the imagination of the broader investing public and the process takes on a life of its own, culminating in an orgy of bad decisions and eventually a wipe-out of the easy fortunes made on the way up.

So to understand the everything bubble, let’s start at the beginning with that influx of outside money. This time it’s coming from the Federal Reserve in what can only be described as the mother of all print runs. M2, a medium-broad measure of the US money supply, has more than tripled so far in this century, and lately the arc has gone vertical, rising by nearly a third in just the past year.

All this extra money has to go somewhere, so no surprise that it’s flowing in lots of different directions. Among the recipients:

Fixed income

The bond and money markets, made up of instruments that pay interest, are in the aggregate far bigger than the world’s stock markets. And they’ve been booming, with interest rates falling steadily for four straight decades. Since bond prices are the reciprocal of bond yields, the next chart can be read as an epic bull market in bonds, one which has gained steam in the past year as massive currency creation has forced fixed income investors (who have to invest new cash somehow) to buy bonds regardless of what they yield. 

To further illustrate how uniquely dysfunctional the world’s bond markets have become, here’s a chart going back to the 1300s showing that today’s rates aren’t just low by modern standards, but are the lowest in human history. Which is another way of saying today’s bond bubble dwarfs anything anywhere ever.

The hopeless position in which pension funds and retirees find themselves is summed up in the following headline: Junk buyers desperate for debt are pressing companies to borrow.

Stocks, of course

The most obvious bubbles happen in stocks, because “the market” gets top billing in both the financial media and the psyches of investors. And after a long, slow slog out of the depths of the Great Recession, US stocks have in the past couple of years blown through all previous valuation records. That’s right, this market is now a bigger bubble than those of 1929 and 1999, and it’s still going strong.

Pretty much any popular stock valuation indicator backs up this assertion, but the most dramatic is probably the “Buffet Indicator,” so named because legendary investor Warren Buffet uses it to decide how to allocate his billions. It’s also easy to understand: chart the aggregate market capitalization of all US stocks against GDP and there you are. When stocks are low versus GDP, they’re underappreciated and undervalued; when high compared to GDP they’re overvalued. Today they’re higher than ever before, including just before the last two major bear markets.

Want some other bubbliscious indicators? Here you go: Right now, more stocks are trading at over 10 times sales than in 1999 at the height of the dot-com bubble. And the number of “zombie” companies, i.e., those that have to borrow to cover their existing debt service and will collapse if cut off from new credit, has never been higher.

Housing

This one is a surprise because it was the epicenter of the last bubble, and very seldom does an asset class reinflate so quickly. But hey, all that money has to go somewhere, and houses are the American dream yadda yadda. In the past couple of years, home prices in many places have blown through their 2006 bubble highs, and are now accelerating. Note the hockey stick inflection at the far right of the following chart.

Today, you can google “home prices” and get dozens of headlines like these:

CoreLogic: December home prices rise at fastest rate since 2014

Are we trapped in another housing bubble? A rapid rise in home prices has some experts worried

In metro Denver housing market, double-digit price gains carry over in 2021

As the hedge fund guy in The Big Short says after visiting Florida, “Yep, it’s a bubble.”

Cryptocurrencies – this generation’s dot-coms?

Cryptos weren’t around for any previous bubbles so their role in what’s coming isn’t yet knowable. What is clear is that they’re behaving like dot-com stocks in the 1990s, with bitcoin (think Amazon.com) soaring parabolically if erratically…

… and hundreds of lesser coins with a wide variety of future prospects (think eBay, AOL, Pets.com) also soaring on a torrent of fiat currency rocket fuel. Here’s the second most valuable crypto:

The conclusion: Even if cryptos end up dominating some future monetary system, their parabolic arcs in the here and now scream “bubble!”

As for moral hazard …

A true bubble is more than just soaring prices. It also features people behaving in ways that with hindsight will seem totally incomprehensible. Think previous bubbles’ daytraders and home flippers making fortunes doing things that experts normally find difficult. And recall the huge amounts of money that once poured into things that in normal times would have little appeal to rational investors. Collateralized Debt Obligations (bonds that were somehow comprised of subprime mortgages and AAA-rated) and mutual funds holding dot-com stocks with no earnings — and no realistic prospect thereof — are prominent examples from the recent past.

Today’s world offers some even better examples of moral hazard, including:

SPACs

These are companies that go public without assets or earnings or any of the other impedimenta typical of IPOs. You give them your money and they’ll figure out how to put it to work. Why? Because they’re geniuses who claim to have made fortunes in the past few years, and you apparently have way too much cash and no productive uses for it. There are even SPAC ETFs that offer exposure to the whole “sector.”

Rock star money managers

In typical bubbles, a handful of money managers roll the dice on the bubble asset and win big. Bigger than big. They make ridiculous amounts of money and are hailed as geniuses and courted by reporters and politicians hoping to bask in their reflected glory. Then of course the bubble pops and the geniuses crash and burn along with their favorite speculations.

The everything bubble’s supernova is the ARK Innovation ETF, run by hitherto obscure (and now household name) Cathie Wood. Her “innovation”? She loaded up on Tesla stock right before it embarked on an epic (and inexplicable) 1000% run that made it more valuable than the ten biggest carmakers on the planet combined.

Wood is still long and strong Tesla in addition to many other prominent bubble assets, and will apparently use the torrent of money now pouring into her fund to roll the dice on an even bigger scale.

High-tech daytraders

This list wouldn’t be complete without the Reddit/Robinhood traders who are having a ball chasing a wide variety of stocks straight up while tormenting hedge funds on the other side of those trades. See When Predator Becomes Prey.

Mutually-exclusive solutions

So here we are, with all the typical bubble pathologies on full display, but for multiple bubbles rather than just one. And a government determined to levitate all those bubbles simultaneously, even at the expense of rising inflation. See Jim Rickard’s latest, Hyperinflation Can Happen Much Faster Than You Think. 

What happens when one of these bubbles bursts? The others burst too, in short order. You can’t have an epic, systemically dangerous bust in one big sector and placid good times in all the others. Markets – now more interconnected than ever – simply don’t work that way.

Meanwhile, the actions necessary to fix some of these bubbles are mutually exclusive. A stock market or housing bust requires much lower interest rates and bigger government deficits, while a currency crisis brought on by rising inflation requires higher interest rates and government spending cuts. Let everything blow up at once and there will be literally no fixing it. And the “everything bubble” will become the “everything bust.”

Tyler Durden Wed, 02/10/2021 - 05:00

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COVID-19 mRNA Shots Are Legally Not Vaccines

Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

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UK Government Considering Knocking On Doors Of Vaccine Refusniks, Report

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UK Government Considering Knocking On Doors Of Vaccine Refusniks, Report

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

The UK government is considering a plan to despatch council staff to knock on the doors of those who have refused to take a coronavirus vaccine, in an effort to coerce refusniks into taking the shot, according to a report.

The London Metro reports that Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi told MPs he wanted to identify ‘at an individual level’ those who have been offered the vaccine but turned it down.

The report states that the plan is being hatched amid fears that a sizeable amount of the population are ‘sceptical’ of the vaccine.

Zahawi said that the role of the council staffers would be to determine why people are refusing the vaccine and then “see what might convince them” to change their minds.

Zahawi refused to confirm how the Government will know who has not taken the vaccine, but did admit during a radio appearance on the BBC that everyone who has taken the shot has been registered in a national immunisation vaccination system.

“We absolutely will look at how we are addressing the issue of refusal rates,” Zahawi said.

While Zahawi touted a high uptake of vaccines among British people, it emerged that around 20% of social care workers have refused to take the vaccine.

In December, a poll found that around a third of people in the UK do not want to take the vaccine.

The notion of government staff knocking at the doors of refusniks has prompted fears that the British government is keeping a database of vaccine skeptics.

A similar scheme has been implemented in Spain.

With so called ‘vaccination passports’ looming, a non-vaccinated database could enable the government to cross check who they are issuing the ‘freedom passes’ to, and ensure that only the vaccinated are allowed to integrate back into society.

Tyler Durden Tue, 02/09/2021 - 05:00

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Out, and proud

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They had to destroy democracy in order to save it.

Time published a story that provides absolutely astonishing details and framing of activities that took place around the 2020 election. As readers, you deserve a detailed analysis of this story and the people and organizations involved. The recounting of the story in Time is longer than a chapter in many novels. Time says additional details will be provided in a series of articles over the next several days. This article is an introduction.

The title is provocative enough. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The story goes on to describe in precise detail a coalition of various powerful special interest groups that united, beginning a year before the election, to ensure Joe Biden would win.

I’ll quote as extensively as I like from the Time article, without linking to it. Let the shitlib propaganda pimps find their own way to up the hit count, says I. Here’s the archive.is snapshot instead.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

And now you know just how it was that the Hunter Biden scandal got quashed so handily.

They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.”

Which, of course, they were.

His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics.

By such OUTRAGES AGAINST “DEMOCRACY”!!! as, oh, requiring valid ID to vote; expunging corpses from the eligible-voter rolls; checking to be sure voters hadn’t relocated; etc. Gee, what would we ever have done without these paragons of virtue looking out for us? Apart from perhaps being able to hold a, y’know, free and fair election, I mean?

Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

Deadly violence—wherein a Trump supporter and USAF vet was wantonly, needlessly murdered by a trigger-happy Mordor On The Potomac orc, and the other deaths were basically due to heart attack or stroke.

Deadly violence, forsooth. Hasn’t been near enough of it to suit some of us, bitch. Not yet, anyway. Still early innings, though.

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

Democracy, along with the Constitution, liberty, and the very concept of unalienable rights, is as dead as America That Was is. It rankles tremendously to be lectured about the system’s “fragility” by the very goddamned filthbags that, over the course of many decades, labored so diligently to weaken its foundation, reducing it to the smashed, smoking ruin it now is.

If, after reading the rest of the thing, you aren’t filled with a blistering rage at the sure and certain knowledge that this is just another example of The Enemy—flush with his ill-gotten triumph, secure in its totality and permanence—openly laughing in the faces of Real Americans, then I really don’t know what more there is to say to you. In another article of which you should read the all, Ace puts it this way:

This is the part of the war where they have shot most of the survivors, and are now engaging in psyops to humiliate and degrade whoever is still alive. They are now admitting they rigged the election so that we understand that there is nothing we can do about it — we are a defeated people, they want us to know, and they intend to rule us.

He’s right, and you know he is. The question now is: what, if anything, are Real Americans to do about it?

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Facing the facts

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We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

There are a lot of people posting B.S. from “credible sources” about how Biden will be in power for 9 weeks, or how the military really is in DC to protect us, or (do I really have to make a 3 page line item list?) I’ll skip that.

I understand that in some cases people can’t come to grips with the fact that everything really is lost. So they post crap about “what is going to happen” and general blah said blah or my lawyer said blah or Sidney released blah or whatever blah blah blah – none of it has merit.

FACT: The communists seized the country. The coup is complete.

And it was well planned, where Obama rigged the military to make sure they went along with it.

It is OVER. Trump is not secretly being president behind the scenes, no one is waiting for anyone to prove how bad they are before they get arrested and the military is not running the country.

People need to come to grips with this, because hopeful stories are paralyzing them like a frogs under a bright light, preventing them from jumping to action.

Sitting still like it is business as usual right now is exactly what the communists want, while they pile more and more and MORE troops into DC to eliminate all danger for them while they shred the country.

That is what the military is there for – to support the coup.

For the record: No election will work. The last one did not work, and they are solidifying and rooting in the fraud to heights beyond what it took to simply steal it like flipping a switch last time. We are not going to vote our way out of this.

For the record: There will be no “charge of the light brigade” and Trump is in charge of NOTHING. It will be ALL darkness from here on out.

It’s the blackest of black pills, and I only wish I knew of a plausible argument to be made that it isn’t so. It’s also a must-read—especially for anyone still locked in denial’s thrall, clinging to the forlorn hope of some miraculous last-second reprieve.

(Via Wes Rhinier)

Update!class="ud"> Another grim wake-up call.

The FBI’s missing-in-action response to plain view evidence of massive vote fraud in the presidential election seems poles apart from the agency’s enforcement priority to bring to justice the Capitol rioters. It is more reminiscent of slow-walking White House declassification efforts in the matter of Crossfire Hurricane, or stonewalling the release of subpoenaed documents requested for Senate hearings into the Russia hoax. One wonders little that Biden is pleased with the work Wray has been doing and would be keeping him on as director.

On November 3, we went to bed in America. On November 4, we woke up in Venezuela. But simply rigging the election in soft coup style through bloodless machinations to deny a second Trump term doesn’t end the vendetta. Election Day was but the opening salvo in the Democrat game plan to dupe Americans into abdicating their own liberties. Through dozens of executive actions, our freedoms are being purloined in plain sight and over the lethargic objections of Republican lawmakers.

Any objections they make, lethargic or otherwise, are dishonest. They’re fully-paid up partners, playing their assigned role on the Democracy Kabuki stage.

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LA Times Columnist Has Difficulty Reconciling the Kindness of Her Neighbors and Their Support for Donald Trump

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The following article, LA Times Columnist Has Difficulty Reconciling the Kindness of Her Neighbors and Their Support for Donald Trump, was first published on Big League Politics.

Los Angeles Times political columnist Virginia Heffernan recently wrote an op-ed admitting that she has a hard time reconciling the kindness of her neighbors and the fact that they’re Trump supporters. She compares them to Hezbollah, the Nation of Islam, and Nazis, implying that individual people who do nice things may still hold contemptible beliefs or belong to contemptible groups.

In a column titled “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?”, Heffernan describes the neighbors at her “pandemic getaway” house as Trump supporters who courteously plowed their driveway and did it well. Heffernan realizes she owes them thanks, but because they’re “as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans,” she wonders “how much thanks” they actually deserve.

She called her neighbors “staunch partisans of blue lives,” adding that “there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in the neighborhood.”

A few paragraphs later she acknowledged, presumably without irony, that “loving your neighbor is evidently much easier when your neighborhood is full of people just like you.”

Heffernan compared the kindness of her Trump-supporting neighbors to the various individually magnanimous actions of Hezbollah members and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Not only that, she also compared it to the “politeness” of Nazi occupiers that an upper-middle-class French family recalled while she was living with them as a teenager.

Heffernan’s op-ed concludes by saying she can’t absolve her neighbors for supporting Trump, whom she describes as having a “near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans,” but that she can offer “a standing invitation to make amends” instead.

“Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.”

Continue reading: LA Times Columnist Has Difficulty Reconciling the Kindness of Her Neighbors and Their Support for Donald Trump ...

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Jake Tapper and Chris Hayes Lose Their Minds 'Inciting' Against GOP And Reveal Next Step to Control the Narrative

I wrote a piece earlier in response to Bruce Springsteen’s first commercial ad for Jeep for the Super Bowl. I left it with the hope that sanity will prevail because as Americans, we have shown that ability to triumph over all odds. I do believe that sanity and the truth will ultimately triumph.

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Respected doctor and bioweapons researcher believes Covid vaccines are a form of 'weaponized medicine'

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An award winning spinal surgeon and former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons believes that current coronavirus vaccines are dangerous bioweapons being deployed against the people. Dr. Lee Merritt, who previously studied bioweapons while serving as an orthopedic surgeon in the United States Navy for 9 years, sat on the board of the Arizona Medical Association, and has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, believes that mRNA-altering coronavirus vaccines currently being distributed in the United States are rewriting our genetic code to make us vulnerable to a second virus later on. "I believed early on in February that this was a biologically manipulated bioweapon because the minute that anybody popped up with data suggesting that they were censored," she said in an interview last month with The New America.

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Vaccination and Censorship: The Truth Will Set Us Free

Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

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NY Doctor Proved Everyone Wrong About Hydroxychloroquine

Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

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