"Panic-like Selling Emerges Monday As Stock Market Tumbles and Dow Skids Over 1,000 Points"

"Panic-like Selling Emerges Monday As

 Stock Market Tumbles and Dow Skids Over 1,000 Points"

Last Updated: Jan. 24, 2022 at 12:32 p.m. ET

- https://www.marketwatch.com/

Market Data Center - Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data

As the FED frantically buys everything in sight...

CNN Fear And Greed Index:

- http://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/

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"What A Week. And What a Weekend!"

by Bill Bonner

"The Nasdaq is off to its worst start since 2008. Back then it fell 13.6% in the first 14 trading days of the year. By Friday’s close it was down over 11% year-to-date here in 2022. If things keep tracking this way, it will be the worst January since the inception of the index in 1971, according to Dow Jones Data.

Will Bitcoin save you? Maybe in the long-run. But in the short-run, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency is down 23.6% year-to-date and over 50% from its high near $70,000 last year. This kind of volatility is nothing new for speculative assets, although it IS unusual for an asset whose supporters claim it is also a store of value.

There is plenty of pain to go around. Look at the chart below, sent by our colleague Dan Denning over the weekend. Warren Buffett (the compounding tortoise) has caught up with Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood (the hare) and her racy Ark Innovation ETF (ARRK).

Click image for larger size.

Both Buffett and Wood are still up since the beginning of the pandemic in the first quarter of 2020. Both benefited from the Fed’s war against normalcy… with a huge expansion in the Fed’s balance sheet and much lower interest rates. The big question now is: what next?

If it’s a ‘super bubble,’ as Jeremy Grantham, the 83-year old founder of Grantham Mayer van Otterloo, says, the major indexes may fall by 50% or more. Grantham’s math is roughly the same as ours. About $35 trillion in ‘wealth’ will be wiped out.

In other words, the real bear market hasn’t even begun. Real bear markets last months and years, not days and hours. And by the time they’ve done their work, no one is trying to find the bottom any more. At the bottom of a bear market, no one wants to talk about innovation, NFTs, or decentralized finance."

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

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"Inflate or Die"

"The Whole World is Crashing - Brace for Impact"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 1/24/22:

"The Whole World is Crashing - Brace for Impact"

"Name something that is not affected by the supply chain problems right now? We are seeing a worldwide problem with everything. Prices are going up around the globe on everything. Nothing is successful in being done to stop this."

"How It Really Is"

 

"A Real American Hero"

"A Real American Hero"

by Jim Kunstler

"Wonder much about the eerie blank demeanor of Erin Burnett, who delivers the 7:00 o’clock news on CNN? I sure do. It’s a creepy kind of fraught blankness, like what the Vietnam grunts used to call the thousand-mile stare, denoting their guilty involvement in a morally odious enterprise. Of course, one must follow CNN in order to discern what fresh bullsh*t the governing regime is serving up day-to-day from its steam-table of perfidy and bad faith. Does the lady hate her job that much? Or does that farbissiner face signify mere simmering contempt for the audience of deplorable elderly gorks receiving said bullsh*t over their pitiful TV trays of Ensure on Froot Loops? Or maybe a miniature Donald Trump lives in her head dressed in a little red devil suit with horns, stabbing her parietal lobes with his tiny pitchfork?

Seeing as how Ms. Burnett is the mouthpiece for the Progressive Woke news media in the primest evening slot, does that glowering visage represent the peculiar joylessness of the political Left, a movement steeped in a special kind of shame induced by the irritating failure of its ideas to comport with reality? This is the joylessness of people bunkered too deep in anomie to even find pleasure in their own sadism. Thus, the hint of bored indignation: how dare you not believe the bullsh*t I am delivering on behalf of your betters… who know what’s good for you?

Or maybe the girl is just on quaaludes.

Anyway, nothing serves as a better barometer of how things are going in the struggle over the fate of this tortured land than Erin Burnett’s scowling puss. And where is this country going? I will tell you: straight into a dark passage of the profoundest political discord, an epochal nightmare of loss and death brought on, it begins to seem, deliberately, by the folks in charge. They are being found out, and the fact that they remain in charge spells ever more obvious danger among all concerned as the truth of their crimes emerges.

Sunday, at the March Against Mandates in our nation’s capital, the resistance to Covid vaccine tyranny laid it out, none with plainer eloquence than Bobby Kennedy: "We love the United States Constitution. And we have witnessed over the past 20 months a coup d’etat against democracy and the demolition, the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And starting with the censorship. James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson all said the same thing: we put freedom of speech in the first amendment because all of the other rights that we were trying to protect relied on that right. If you give government the license to silence its critics, you have given them the capacity to commit any atrocity they want, and to obliterate all the amendments and rights in the constitution."

The message is getting through and the tyrants are running scared. They are perhaps having bad dreams involving torches and pitchforks. Naturally CNN took the lead in attempting to defame Mr. Kennedy as an anti-Semite for mentioning the name of Anne Frank in alluding to the Nazi insanity of the last century and people’s desperate efforts to escape it. CNN said:

"The son of former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy has a long history of spreading vaccine misinformation…. Sunday’s event, billed as a protest against vaccine mandates, featured speakers repeatedly spreading misinformation about vaccines and showcased several bigoted comparisons to the Holocaust. At least one man was seen displaying a yellow Star of David, which Jews were required by law to wear as an identifier in Nazi Germany."

So, wearing a Star of David now makes you an insurrectionist in the twisted logic of Wokery. How stupid and confused are they? Anyway, heroes emerge out of adversity. Let them pile it on, insulting history and reality. In fact, Bobby Kennedy stood in the cold at the Lincoln Memorial as a heroic figure for these times, giving a speech that carefully and succinctly denoted the stupendous criminality of the US public health bureaucracy and the corporate-government fascist partnership with Pharma Inc. that has poisoned hundreds of millions of Americans in a medical experiment that has only begun to kill possibly more people than the Nazis ever dreamed of murdering. There has not been a more important public utterance in this land than RFK Jr.’s since this century began.

Meanwhile, the Covid tyranny collapses across Western Civ. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK tossed his country’s entire Covid restriction program into the dumpster last week as the truth about vaccine failure and injuries became impossible to avoid. The Czech Republic and Ireland followed. France made noises about lifting her policies in February. For now, Germany and Austria remained locked-into their Teutonic obedience neurosis, but how much longer can that last? Or does it finally break up the EU? Large street protests rocked European cities Sunday, too. The vaccines have lost their credibility as sacred totems against the accelerating chaos in the advanced nations of the world, who stand to lose the very advancements in prosperity, comfort, and convenience they enjoyed in the centuries of energy super-abundance.

What awaits now is mayhem in the financial markets, the banking system, and national currencies - underway even as you read this. It’s not enough that the people of Western Civ have been battered by a contrived assault on their physical health; now they’ll watch themselves go broke and hungry. Maybe even the monsters of idiocy behind president “Joe Biden” can cook up a world-beating hypersonic war over a country we have next-to-zero national interest in just to make things perfect. I can’t wait to see the look on Erin Burnett’s face as the history of the future unspools."

- https://kunstler.com/

"Economic Market Snapshot 1/24/22"

"Economic Market Snapshot 1/24/22"

Updated as available.

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"The more I see of the moneyed classes,

the more I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates

- https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary

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CNN Market Data:

- http://money.cnn.com/data/markets/

CNN Fear And Greed Index:

- http://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/

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Latest market analysis 1/24/22

- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

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A comprehensive, essential daily read.

Jan 24th to 25th 2022

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

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Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

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Daily Job Cuts

- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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And now, the End Game...

Gregory Mannarino, "Pre-Markets Under Pressure; Fear/Safety Trade Under Way"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/24/22:

"Pre-Markets Under Pressure; 

Fear/Safety Trade Under Way"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Massive Food Shortages At Target! Empty Shelves Everywhere!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures with Danno, 1/24/22:

"Massive Food Shortages At Target!

 Empty Shelves Everywhere!"

"In today's vlog we are at Target with empty shelves everywhere! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a massive food shortage! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"

"How It Really Is"

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

by Charles Hugh-Smith

"Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people. This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD.

The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.

I’ve mentioned the book "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire" a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization. It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.

In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor. The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Kondratieff and others, and Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations. All three are playing out globally in the present.

In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues: the rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.

Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma. Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.

Now the plan–for lack of any real plan–is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.

Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.

Which brings us to luck. As a general rule, historians seek explanations which leave luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and action and cycles. Yes, cycles and human action influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.

If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors, then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history. It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power in the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse. That was good judgement by Pius but also good luck.

As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs. (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of sea water, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.) That was bad luck for the dinosaurs, and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.

The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)

In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us. We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control – technology, wise investments and policies, etc. The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.

We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.

I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” The next five years might have us singing this line with feeling."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com

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Albert King, "Born Under A Bad Sign"

"It Is Our Fate..."

"Well, it is our fate to live in a time of crisis. To live in a time when all forms and values are being challenged. In other and more easy times, it was not, perhaps, necessary for the individual to confront himself with a clear question: What is it that you really believe? What is it that you really cherish? What is it for which you might, actually, in a showdown, be willing to die? I say, with all the reticence which such large, pathetic words evoke, that one cannot exist today as a person, one cannot exist in full consciousness, without having to have a showdown with ones self, without having to define what it is that one lives by, without being clear in ones mind what matters and what does not matter."

- Dorothy Thompson

"Consider The Possibility That This Is Already The Dystopia You Fear"

"Consider The Possibility That This 

Is Already The Dystopia You Fear"

by Caitlin Johnstone

"Consider the possibility that the Orwellian dystopia you fear is already here and has been in place for many years, you just haven’t noticed because you’re still allowed to watch Netflix or buy a gun or say whatever you want to say within a small impotent online echo chamber.

Consider the possibility that the powerful are already getting everything they want from you, right now, exactly as things are, and that any suspicious action you see them taking isn’t them constructing a cage for you but them tightening the bolts on a cage that was quietly built around you some time ago.

Consider the possibility that while they’ve been training you to watch out for communism and microchips and overt totalitarianism, they’ve been covertly transforming us all into mindless gears in a machine constructed to serve their interests which challenges them in no way, shape or form.

Consider the possibility that tyrants have evolved an understanding that you can exert a lot more control over a population with mass-scale psychological manipulation than you can with overt force, and that they have been developing the science of that mass-scale psychological manipulation for over a century.

Consider the possibility that we’re like a woman who always feared winding up in a physically abusive relationship like the kind depicted on television, and then wound up in a psychologically abusive relationship where her very mind is bent to the will of her abuser in every way.

Consider the possibility that just like in a psychologically abusive relationship, we’re manipulated into believing things are fine and that we give our abuser everything he wants of our own free will and that any problems that arise come from us and not our abuser, and that we are so well-trained at this that we’ve even learned to gaslight ourselves.

Consider the possibility that governments forcefully seizing control of all media and transforming them into official state propaganda outlets would actually be far less efficient at mass brainwashing than our current system in which people believe they are getting accurate information from a free and honest press.

Consider the possibility that if the powerful were able to surgically implant microchips in our brains and control everything we think and do, what they’d make us think and do would not be significantly different from what the overwhelming majority of us already think and do.

Consider the possibility that the dystopia we’ve been worried about has already been ushered in, not from any of the directions we’ve been conditioned to anticipate, but through the simple fact that the human mind is far more hackable than we’ve been conditioned to believe.

Consider the possibility that while we’ve been trained to fear communist authoritarians taking over and forcing us to obey their will, capitalist authoritarians have had us marching to the exact drumbeat they desire for generations. And we only think this is freedom because we’ve been trained to think that.

Consider the possibility that you’ve been trained to believe freedom looks like being able to buy a gun which we all know you’ll never use against the powerful, or choose from 197 kinds of potato chip at the grocery store, when really that mindless consumption is just you turning the gears of your own prison.

Consider the possibility that real freedom isn’t being able to consume whatever advertisers have convinced you to consume, it’s being able to think with a mind that has not been molded by the powerful, to educate yourself in an information ecosystem that is not locked down by those who rule over you, and to speak the truth without having your speech stifled by oppressive dominators.

Consider the possibility that the only thing keeping us from creating heaven on earth is our inability to clearly see what’s going on in our world and thus strategize a truth-based path out of this mess, and that the powerful know this, and that that’s why they work so hard to keep us from seeing clearly.

Consider the possibility that the real obstacle to terrestrial harmony is not so much opposing ideologies as the fact that all attempts to see clearly what’s really going on in our world are being actively obstructed by propaganda, by Silicon Valley manipulation, and by government secrecy.

Consider the possibility that the bastards succeed not by overtly quashing dissent but by covertly quashing all will towards dissent, and that we succeed not by trying to ward off a dystopia that’s already here but by working to awaken the giant within our brothers and sisters from its propaganda-induced coma.

Consider the possibility that real freedom means all of humanity awakening from our dehumanizing role as brainwashed gear-turners for the capitalist machine and uncorking the wild unpredictable brilliance within us that our oppressors have worked so hard to keep bottled up.

Consider the possibility that there is so much more to us than we’ve been permitted to know, and that the only thing keeping us from achieving our true potential as a species at this point in history is a propaganda-induced misunderstanding of what is freedom and what is slavery."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"This Sucker's Going Down..."

"This Sucker's Going Down..."

by MN Gordon

"By now, anyone with half an inkling of curiosity about why prices and values don’t add up has traced the divide back to the money itself. It’s not hard to see. Asset prices, like houses and the major stock market indexes, have lost all visible connection with the underlying economy. However, wage growth has stagnated; over the last 40 years low level wages have only increased by $0.32 per hour in real inflation adjusted terms. Stocks and residential real estate, at the same time, have gone to the moon.

Even with the NASDAQ’s 11.2 percent decline from its all-time closing high set on November 19, the index is still up over 110 percent from its March 2020 low. What will it take for the NASDAQ to crash back to earth?

Something else that has gone to the moon is government debt. In 1980, the national debt was $908 billion. Today it’s over $29.8 trillion. That’s an increase of over 3,181 percent. Over this time, however, gross domestic product (GDP) has only increased 632 percent – from $2.86 trillion to $20.94 trillion.

Of course, these are merely the facts and figures. The effects to countless Americans are hard to measure. But, by and large, the last 40 years have been a great disappointment for the American worker – and an absolute boon for the political elites.

In addition to asset prices and government debt, social discontent has also gone to the moon. Here in the LA Basin, for example, some of America’s most resourceful fellows have taken to emulating the corruption found in Washington and on Wall Street. They’re looting stores and plundering freight trains as a matter of business. Daring professions like these flourish when hard work and playing by the rules no longer pays. What’s really going on…

Spineless Money: To begin, the nation, in nearly every aspect, is failing. Such is the fate of nations who adopt spineless money. More specifically, as 20th century currency analyst Franz Pick observed: “The fate of the nation and the fate of the currency are one and the same.” We’ve seen that spineless money is synonymous with spineless nations. Nero’s Rome. Revolutionary France. Weimar Germany. 1980s Argentina. Zimbabwe. You name it…

Once a country’s economy and finances have been corrupted by fiat the fate of the nation is doom and disaster. Yet it didn’t have to be this way. A balanced budget. Stable currency. Limited government. Industrious populace. Personal responsibility. Rule of law. Commonsense. These, and similar sensibilities, would have prevented all the wild moonshots. Instead, we got lies, corruption, teachers unions, arbitrary rules, monster debt, Anthony Fauci, fake money, woke, and a dependent populace.

Abhorrence like these, again, go back to the money… Management of a spineless currency by central planners always falls to frequent debauchery…followed by short episodic periods of crushing austerity. The central planners never seem to get it right. Their extreme intervention lurches the economy from boom to bust. Now they’ve done it again…

In advance of the Federal Reserve’s forthcoming rate hikes, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note eclipsed 1.8 percent. This is the highest its been since January 2020 – two months before the federal government declared a national emergency on coronavirus. At the same time, the 2020 and 2021 fiscal year deficits, which covered much of the coronavirus period, were a combined $5.9 trillion. Much of this was financed via printing press money from the Federal Reserve.

The Greatest Crackup the World’s Ever Known: Should it be any surprise that consumer prices, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), are increasing at an annualized rate of 7.0 percent – or over 15 percent when using 1980s calculation methods? More importantly, do you really think hiking the federal funds rate 50 basis points is going to cut it? This may cause a tantrum on Wall Street, but it won’t do much to control raging consumer price inflation…

Let’s be clear, consumer price inflation has nothing to do with rising prices or greedy corporations. But it has everything to do with declining money. This can’t be said enough. When the quantity of money goes up, the value of each money unit goes down. The systematic destruction of the dollar has been compounding for over 107 years; since the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. And it has been going on in earnest since President Richard Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. But that’s not all that has been going on…

The plundering, corruption, and lies of public officials are criminal. Federal Reserve Presidents have been buying and selling stocks to front run their market swinging policy decisions for years. Members of Congress have long been trading off insider information related to their legislative wheeling and dealing. Indeed, the fate of the nation and the fate of the currency are one and the same. We’re headed for complete financial, moral, and political collapse. But it’s not all bad…

You can count your blessings. You have front row seats for the greatest crackup the world’s ever known. The dollar’s doomed. The nation is too."

- https://economicprism.com/

"This Is A Choice..."

“To desire and strive to be of some service to the world,

to aim at doing something which shall really increase the

happiness and welfare and virtue of mankind -

this is a choice which is possible for all of us;

and surely it is a good haven to sail for.”

- Henry Van Dyke

"You Can Avoid Reality..."

 

"Markets Full Of Desperation; Speculative Frenzies Will Implode; Prepare For Doom; Wage Slavery"

Jeremiah Babe, PM 1/23/22:

"Markets Full Of Desperation; Speculative Frenzies Will Implode;

 Prepare For Doom; Wage Slavery"

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"Desperation"? As of 4 years ago these psychopaths had bought, on margin, $2.4 QUADRILLION of derivatives. God knows what it is today. Any drop in price will trigger an incomprehensible tsunami of margin calls which they cannot possibly meet, resulting in universal global bankruptcy.

- https://steemit.com/money/

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With no exaggeration, this video is a perfect metaphor for what's

 coming, as the Good Ship World Economy encounters the Derivatives Wave..

Full screen recommended.

God help us...

"Jeremy Grantham Turns Apocalyptic: Stocks To Crater 50% In Largest Wealth Destruction In US History"

Full screen recommended.

"Jeremy Grantham Turns Apocalyptic: 

Stocks To Crater 50% In Largest Wealth Destruction In US History"

by Epic Economist

"Investing legend Jeremy Grantham is once again sharing an apocalyptic forecast for U.S. stocks. In a recent note, he warned that the market is headed to a brutal crash and that we’re all about to witness the largest wealth destruction event in modern history. Over the past few years, the GMO founder has quietly turned from bullish to bearish on the U.S. stock market. He has been sounding the alarm about a potential financial disaster since June 2020. And after correctly calling the last three financial bubbles, he said this one is the ‘Real McCoy,’ and that the current rally is absolutely ‘crazy’.

However, in 2021, Grantham’s warnings of an imminent crash didn’t come true. In August, he said that a spectacular crash was coming within a few months. Right after that, he cautioned investors that the bursting of this epic bubble was going to be the most important investing event of our lives. This time around, he might have underestimated how determined the Fed is to avoid another financial meltdown amid a bumpy economic recession. But even though he’s got the timing wrong, that doesn’t mean he’s not right.

In the last days of December, U.S. stocks have started to plunge, especially in the tech sector, where the bubble has actually burst. Now that the Fed support is finally fading away, a reversal in this downward trend seems nearly impossible. That’s why, a couple of days ago, 83-year-old Grantham publish his gloomiest note yet, titled "Let The Wild Rumpus Begin,”* in which he exposes that we are currently living in a superbubble - the fourth of the past century - and just as during the crash of 1929, the dot-com bust of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008, Grantham is "certain" the bursting of this bubble has begun. The iconic value manager sees the S&P plunging by at least 50% to 2,500 from its all-time high of 4,800 reached just a few weeks ago. The Nasdaq Composite, on the other hand, which has closed in correction territory last Wednesday, is about to face an even bigger and far more painful correction.

The expert has been seeing signs that something was terminally broken in the market since last February, but it wasn’t until recently that indicators started to show the same. The bursting of this superbubble has become crystal clear after dozens of the most speculative stocks began falling. For example, Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF, has already crashed by 52%, and so did the shares of the electric car maker, Rivian. And then, the Russell 2000, an index of mid-cap equities that normally outperforms in a bull market, fell behind the S&P 500 in 2021. In fact, most bubbly assets that are sensitive to central bank liquidity have been significantly lower over the past month.

While Grantham is one of the last remaining legendary investors and value managers that have been on Wall Street for over 50 years, calling boom and bust cycles for almost as long, according to Bloomberg's Erik Shatzker, the veteran's predictions are largely dismissed by today's investors. They often ask, "how could the S&P 500 advance 26.9% in 2021 if stocks were set to go down, especially when Grantham was warning of an epic crash early last year?"

But instead of disproving his case, Grantham argued that the strength in blue-chip stocks at a time of weakness in speculative assets only reinforces it: “This has been exactly how the great bubbles have broken,” he stressed. “In 1929, the flakes were down for the year before the market broke, they were down 30%. The year before they’d been up 85%, they had crushed the market". Simply put, the market veteran is alerting about the same kind of market leverage that led Goldman Sachs to ring the alarm last month, when the bank observed that 51% of all market gains since April are from just 5 overvalued tech stocks.

Having seen the same trends playing out in every past superbubble is what gives him so much confidence in predicting this one will crash in a similar manner. This is the "most dangerous breadth of asset overpricing in financial history,” he writes. And as it always happens, the stock market bubble has begun to deflate from the riskiest end of the market first – as it has been doing since December, Grantham wishes us all good luck because that's what we're all going to need in the dark times that are fast approaching."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​

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*Freely download “Let The Wild Rumpus Begin,” 

by Jeremy Gantham, here:

- https://www.gmo.com/globalassets/

Don't worry about a 50% drop, long before that something 

inescapably terrifying will happen. See above post...

Musical Interlude: Vangelis, “Beautiful Planet Earth”

Full screen mode recommended.

Vangelis, “Beautiful Planet Earth”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“M13 is one of the most prominent and best known globular clusters. Visible with binoculars in the constellation of Hercules, M13 is frequently one of the first objects found by curious sky gazers seeking celestials wonders beyond normal human vision.

M13 is a colossal home to over 100,000 stars, spans over 150 light years across, lies over 20,000 light years distant, and is over 12 billion years old. At the 1974 dedication of Arecibo Observatory, a radio message about Earth was sent in the direction of M13. The featured image in HDR, taken through a small telescope, spans an angular size just larger than a full Moon, whereas the inset image, taken by Hubble Space Telescope, zooms in on the central 0.04 degrees.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160727.html

“On The Meridian Of Time...

“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”

- Henry Miller

"Write Your Worries On The Sand..."

“I walked slowly out on the beach.

A few yards below high-water mark I stopped and read the words again:

WRITE YOUR WORRIES ON THE SAND.

I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell.

Kneeling there under the vault of the sky,

I wrote several words, one above the other.

Then I walked away, and I did not look back.

I had written my troubles on the sand.

The tide was coming in.”

- Arthur Gordon

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "Mysteries, Yes"

"Mysteries, Yes"

"Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds

will never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads."

~ Mary Oliver

"I Am An Enemy..."

“Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.”

- George Bernard Shaw

The Daily "Near You?"

Waxhaw, North Carolina, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Emergency Food; Food Shortage; Empty Shelves"

Full screen recommended.

Tommy Bites Homestead - Prepping, PM 1/23/22:

"Emergency Food; Food Shortage; Empty Shelves"

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: This Week Will Make Or Break The Market"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/23/22:

"Markets, A Look Ahead: 

This Week Will Make Or Break The Market"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Once You Eliminate The Impossible..."

"Most Do Not Fully See..."

“Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”

- M. Scott Peck

"$1 Billion a Day - That’s How Much Top 10 

U.S. Billionaires Added to Their Fortunes During Pandemic"

by Jake Johnson

"The 10 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have added roughly $1 billion to their collective fortune every day - or around $12,600 per second - since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed millions of people across the globe and thrown countless lives into chaos.

The billionaire wealth update comes courtesy of the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), which released an analysis Wednesday estimating that the combined net worth of the 10 richest people in the U.S. has more than doubled since March 2020, reaching $1.35 trillion this week. “The pandemic has been very good to American billionaires, especially the top 10,” said ATF executive director Frank Clemente, who noted that billionaires’ pandemic profits will likely not be taxed because they consist largely of unrealized capital gains.

Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) proposal to subject the unrealized capital gains of the mega-wealthy to taxation has gone nowhere in Congress. “Their obscene rise in wealth - all of it potentially untaxed - stands in stark contrast to the lot of America’s working families, who’ve struggled through almost two years of a health crisis and economic uncertainty including most recently, rising prices,” Clemente said. “Chairman Wyden’s Billionaires Income Tax would better align the fortunes of America’s richest of the rich with the needs of average Americans.”

That breaks down to $1 billion every day. Each made about the same in a single minute as the average American household earns in an entire year.

This can't continue. pic.twitter.com/gcaxL7ZN7M

- Americans For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) January 19, 2022

ATF’s analysis is the latest in a series of new studies highlighting the extent to which the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the decades-long trend of soaring wealth inequality in the U.S. and worldwide. Earlier this week, as Common Dreams reported, Oxfam International released an analysis showing that the 10 richest men in the world have doubled their combined wealth since the pandemic began. Meanwhile, the anti-poverty group noted, “the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of Covid-19.”

On Tuesday, a coalition of progressive organizations including the Fight Inequality Alliance and the Institute for Policy Studies estimated that a modest annual wealth tax on global millionaires and billionaires would raise $2.52 trillion dollars a year, enough money to lift 2.3 billion people out of poverty.

In an open letter published Wednesday morning, a group of more than 100 rich individuals voiced support for such a tax, warning that “history paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like.” “For all our well-being - rich and poor alike - it’s time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich,” reads the letter, which was addressed to political and economic elites. “If you don’t, then all the private talks won’t change what’s coming - it’s taxes or pitchforks. Let’s listen to history and choose wisely.”

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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Madame DeFarge, where are you now that we need you?