2022-05-20
Bear Trap or Bombs Away, Bitcoin Awaits
Bulls Will Be Wiped Out
Anything can happen in the short-term, of course bear market rallies happen without any Fed intervention.
Having said that, here is a paywalled article at ZH:
ZH: "80% Chance Of Dread": Every Time This Happened Before, The Fed Bailed Out The Market
Unless inflation risk is eliminated, the Federal Reserve cannot save the stock market. Or it could save it in nominal terms, but it would hyperinflate the U.S. economy. With the protests outside Supreme Court justices over Roe v Wade...it's frankly absurd to even think the Fed would try to do it. They are stupid, but not that stupid.
The only way it can be done in current conditions is direct buying of stocks. If they went the traditional QE route, bonds would collapse in a panic and the stock market would be below 1000 by next year. The Fed would have to print enough money and pump it directly into stocks such that stock prices outrun double-digit inflation and brush off soaring interest rates.
Maybe a bailout is coming. Maybe the world is still trapped in the QE-economy 2008—20?? That scenario involves a collapse in commodities and stocks ahead. Since commodities have barely moved yet, the major indexes would probably have to test March 2020 lows at a minimum. If inflation/commodities don't come down, then it is a bear market for sure because no rescue is coming.
Defund the Police
China Rate Cuts are Bearish
Markets may bounce for whatever reason short-term, most likely no reason. Yet longer-term, Chinese rate cuts are unequivocally bearish.
2022-05-19
10-Year Reversal
Fed Still Blowing the Housing Bubble
🚨BREAKING: FED schedules $16.5BN MBS purchases for next 2 weeks, bringing total thru May 26 to $34.5BN.
— Occupy The Fed Movement (@OccupytheFeds) May 13, 2022
FED's own forecast of MBS principal payments for all May: $24.3BN. No explanation for discrepancy with rates now higher.
Housing inflation continues to soar out of control. pic.twitter.com/KCMFpnOKBA
Double Bottom Holds, But Weak Bounce
Monkeypox Spreading in the Homosexual Community
Back in 2018, I wrote in Socionomics Alert: Avoid Norwegians to Avoid STDs:
Socionomics theory says rates of STD infection should rise in periods of negative mood. Along with a general rise in disease/pandemic risk, the periods of negative mood also correlate to looser sexual morality.The post was created by a domestic advertisement that upset Norwegians because it implied they have high rates of STDs. I wrote:The last major period of negative mood produced the AIDS virus and the subsequent rise in mood in the 1980s and 1990s saw a major effort towards combating it. This period of negative mood will be far more negative and last far longer than the 1970s decline. Antibiotic-resistant STDs and their rapid spread is one sign of negative mood.
The key point here is not the ad itself, but what the people creating the ad are thinking about. During periods of falling mood people shift from social concern (such as banning smoking, attacking junk food, making life healthier for everyone) to a personal concern. This ad is clearly a sign warning you to protect yourself from everyone else. Social mood has turned.Sure fits with what we've seen the past couple of years, no?
HYG Gap Filled
Double Bottom on ES
Not Buying It
Positioned Short, Thinking Long
2022-05-18
Wayfair Update
Reversal Patterns Busted on Major Index
Energy and Tech
The ratio has almost doubled this year with XLE rising over 50 percent and XLK down about 20 percent.
Below is a chart with a blue line at the 1.50 ratio along with a table showing various XLK prices for given XLE prices. As a rule of thumb, there is still around 40-percent of the S&P 500 Index in tech and companies that trade like tech stocks despite being in other sectors. XLK has a flat return if XLE gets to around $200 and that ratio, a doubling of XLK requires XLE at $400 or better than a quadruple.
If one expects structurally higher energy costs moving forward, the outlook for tech is grim and/or the outlook for energy is very bullish. There is no reason to be investing in tech or in the major indexes with their massive tech exposure, unless one doesn't expect inflation/higher energy. A return to the 2009-2020 economy.
Bonds are Everything
Chinese Yields Slide Again
2022-05-17
Another Prediction Moving Forward: Call to Boot Turkey from NATO
It seems like no matter which way the West goes, Turkey finds itself in conflict. I still expect it will eventually be expelled or voluntarily leave Western organizations such as NATO.CNN: Putin's useful allies are throwing a wrench in the works
So, what to do about these toxic delays being forced by Hungary and Turkey? The answer is sadly simple -- play the same game Putin's been playing for years. When you can't win by traditional rules, go around them.In this case, do carve-outs. Make Orban and Erdogan irrelevant. All 26 other EU members should simply implement the oil embargo. And NATO should simply pave the way for Sweden and Finland's accession.
What's the worst Hungary or Turkey could do -- sue? Pull out? There was a lot of thought given toward banishing Turkey from NATO anyway -- especially after Erdogan bought Russian S-400 air defense systems from Russia three years ago.
Perhaps now is precisely the moment simply to stand up to these lone strongmen who have managed to burrow their way deeply into democratic institutions.
Coal Runs to the Full Fib Extension
The Great Replacement
Benjamin Braddock: Which do you think is the greater threat to Western European countries: the masses of immigrants themselves, the political and economic interests that encourage them to come in, or the apathy of a society that gives in to a hyperbolic egalitarianism that swallows them whole?Renaud Camus: This is a most excellent question, to which I find it impossible to answer, except by saying that the three threats you very adequately circumscribed are not only equals, but each the conditions and the result of the other two. When Christians were in the Roman arenas, it was of little use, for the rare disapproving witnesses, to incriminate the lions and their butchery behavior. Great Replacement, as I have said a hundred times, would not be possible without what I have called “Little Replacement”, Le Petit Remplacement (it is the title of a fat collection of six essays): the substitution of cultural industries to culture, of entertainment to the Corpus, of popular and mass culture to high culture, which amounts more or less to the disparition of culture just as Great Replacement amounts to the disappearance of indigenous peoples, cultures, and civilizations. Hebetude is the condition of the successful and peaceful process of genocide by substitution. A specific feature of the present colonization of Europe is its triangular structure, very similar to the triangular structure of the old Transatlantic slavery: the people who accomplish it are not the forces or the mechanisms which most want and promote it. In global replacement there are the replacists, who want and organise the replacement, the replacers, who accomplish it, and the replacees, who are its victims. The masses of immigrants are obviously the most pressing threat (they are more than a threat, since they are already in place, and more often than not citizens). We can resist some of their specific actions, but to castigate them on principles would be just as absurd as to castigate the lions in the circus. And to castigate the machines, the mechanisms of global replacism and the Machination, it would be essential not to be machines ourselves, or computers. But it is indeed global replacism, or davocracy, which is the archenemy.
Fantasyland Economics
The Fed Doesn't Have Control
Spruce Point's Latest
Greens BTFOd Again: Solar Increases Emissions, Toxic Air Pollution
North State Journal: Duke Energy application points finger at solar for increased pollution
Duke spokeswoman Kim Crawford confirmed that increased solar power on the state’s electric grid is increasing emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx), a dangerous air pollutant. She said that reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could also reverse if current solar growth continues without policy changes.People working on real, tangible, specific problems are doing good work. Ocean acidification, micro plastics and so on, conservationists saving natural habitats. The focus on climate change and alternative energy has sucked up money and attention though, and here is yet another piece of evidence that they are giant scams.Climate advocates blame increases in manmade gases like CO2 for global warming and have promoted solar power as environmentally clean.
An increase in emissions triggers the need to rethink national energy policy, experts say.
Crawford provided measurements showing that even on sunny days — when solar power is at its maximum output — more NOx pollution is released into the air than would occur if no solar electricity were used and natural gas were used instead.
If solar is indeed increasing emissions, then my confidence in "madmade climate change" being a 100-percent false rises above 90-percent confidence. This would be the killshot for me because my chief complaint about solar was that it doesn't create enough energy, and not enough reliable energy. The switch to solar didn't make sense because it was going to increase energy costs and harm the economy, when nuclear would lower energy costs, help the economy and also eliminates emissions:
That’s because traditional power plants — including cleaner burning natural gas plants — must scale back electric generation to accommodate solar energy surging onto the system when the sun rises, and power back up when the sun sets and solar energy dissipates. That starting and stopping reduces efficiency and incapacitates emission control devices, increasing pollutant levels.If alterative energy increases emissions, which it obviously does with Germany talking about how a return to coal may be necessary, how come the people making computer models didn't know that? If you have climate models predicting emissions and you think Man is making the emissions, then you need to model human behavior in response to various policies. They don't do that accurately though, in fact it looks like they have the sign wrong. The next question is, what other variables are they screwing up, weighting wrong, assuming is geometric or arithmetic when it is vice versa, or ignoring entirely?
Man does clearly impact the environment. Concrete-coated cities have their own microclimates. Dams and manmade lakes, ocean pollution, air pollutions and so on exist. But when an entire movement and industries are built on computer models selling the climate change narrative and those very same people push a solution that makes things worse, not better, then one must call the entire effort into question.
It was a joke in the 1990s that greens were watermelons because international socialists who lost their sinecures and/or credibility when the Soviet Union collapsed moved into environmentalism. Soviet central planning and Green economics with solutions like wind and solar grew from the same intellectual branch. Many people were surprised by the Soviet collapse, so they are again as Western economies are being seriously hobbled by the same line of thinking.
The goal has always been rip roaring inflation that destroys developed economies. Nations and peoples can only be made equal in misery.