Jeremiah Babe, PM 1/24/22:
"Plunge Protections Team Saves Stock Market From Meltdown;
Economy In Shambles; Manipulation Danger"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, January 24, 2022
Gregory Mannarino, "Stock Market Bloodbath Leads To Massive Buying At The Low; Economy Continues To Crater
Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/24/22:
"Stock Market Bloodbath Leads To Massive Buying At The Low;
Economy Continues To Crater"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (also known as M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can't appreciate the galaxy's impressive extent in planet Earth's sky.
This entertaining composite image compares the angular size of the nearby galaxy to a brighter, more familiar celestial sight. In it, a deep exposure of Andromeda, tracing beautiful blue star clusters in spiral arms far beyond the bright yellow core, is combined with a typical view of a nearly full Moon. Shown at the same angular scale, the Moon covers about 1/2 degree on the sky, while the galaxy is clearly several times that size. The deep Andromeda exposure also includes two bright satellite galaxies, M32 and M110 (below and right)."
The Poet: Charles Bukowski, “Mind and Heart”
“Mind and Heart”
“Unaccountably we are alone,
forever alone,
and it was meant to be
that way,
it was never meant
to be any other way -
and when the death struggle begins
the last thing I wish to see is
a ring of human faces
hovering over me -
better just my old friends,
the walls of my self,
let only them be there.
I have been alone but seldom lonely.
I have satisfied my thirst
at the well of my self
and that wine was good,
the best I ever had,
and tonight, sitting,
staring into the dark
I now finally understand
the dark and the
light and everything
in between.
Peace of mind and heart arrives
when we accept what is:
having been born into this strange life
we must accept
the wasted gamble of our days,
and take some satisfaction in
the pleasure of leaving it all behind.
Cry not for me.
Grieve not for me.
Read
what I’ve written
then forget it all.
Drink from the well
of your self and begin again.”
- Charles Bukowski
"I Do Not Think..."
"I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long."
- Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel"
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And if they're really intelligent they'll take one
look and turn around and go home...
Full screen recommended.
"We Are Very Much Afraid..."
"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
Free Download: Paulo Coelho, "Like The River Flowing"
"A breathtaking collection of reflections from one of the world's best loved storytellers, Paulo Coelho. In this riveting collection of thoughts and stories, Paulo Coelho, the author of ‘The Alchemist’, offers his personal reflections on a wide range of subjects from archery and music to elegance, traveling and the nature of good and evil.
An old woman explains to her grandson how a mere pencil can show him the path to happiness…instructions on how to climb a mountain reveal the secret to making your dreams a reality…the story of Ghengis Khan and the Falcon that teaches about the folly of anger – and the art of friendship…a pianist who performs an example in fulfilling your destiny…the author learns three important lessons when he goes to the rescue of a man in the street – Paulo shows us how life has lessons for us in the greatest, smallest and most unusual of experiences.
Freely download "Like The River Flowing", by Paulo Coelho, here:
"If We Falter..."
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.
The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic
feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse."
- John Stuart Mill
"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
Market Data Center - Live Updates:
As the FED frantically buys everything in sight...
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
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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."
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"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."
"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."
"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
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CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
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Latest market analysis 1/24/22
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Jan 24th to 25th 2022
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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
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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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"
"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!"
"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."
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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
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