MNP Consumer Debt Index Reaches Lowest Point Ever Recorded as COVID Lockdown Measures Continue
As pandemic-related economic pain and wage losses continue, there are signs 2020’s financial stressors will continue to exact a toll well into 2021. Now in its fifteenth wave, the MNP Consumer Debt Index has dropped to 89 points, the lowest point since it was introduced in June 2017… “We’re almost one year into the coronavirus crisis and financial confidence has reached a new low across the country. Financial anxiety is understandably much higher among those directly impacted by job loss, declining wages and business closures,” says Grant Bazian, president of MNP. “The Index shows financial pressure is mounting for a large proportion of the country.”
NFIB Survey: Sends A Strong Warning About Small-Cap Stocks
The Fed’s Inconvenient Truth: Inflation Is “M.I.A.”
The Fed pushed the money supply higher by nearly $3 trillion or 70% throughout 2020. At the same time, GDP is $600 billion less than it was at the beginning of 2020. As a result, velocity has sharply declined. GDP is recovering nicely but remains below levels of a year ago. The Fed expects to push the money supply higher at a 15% rate this year. All else equal, velocity will likely further decline and offset the money supply growth.
... This all before 2020. Facing 2021, there are now 10 million fewer jobs in the United States, as well as almost 2 million new jobs that never happened (a number already insufficient to begin with), still more than 900 thousand weekly jobless claims indicating more destructiveness, and, in many places, an undeterred belief none of this will matter because…”stimulus” of the same untruthful, unstable kind which has been introduced by those who don't want to realize, or anyone else to realize, the situation for what it truly has become.
David Rosenberg: Life is not going back to normal even if the market doesn’t see it yet. Ready or not America is headed back into recession
BAML: The Flow Show
Rabobank: The Reflation Trade Is Coming Into Question Already
It is not even the end of January 2021 and yet the great global meme for the year --“The Reflation Trade”-- might be coming into question already. That’s right: the market may have binge-watched the whole thing in just three weeks.
Of course, the “Reflation Trade” was never related to underlying economic fundamentals. These have been lowflationary/deflationary for decades, as we have explained many times before. The disruption of Covid-19 is widely recognised as having accelerated our underlying labour vs. capital and monopoly/monosophy-power MNCs vs. powerless SMEs dynamics.
Yes, we have official recognition that we need more fiscal policy. Hurrah. But most of that spending is in the rear-view mirror already; and it is merely putting the same, and often *less*, back into the economy than is taken out by state-imposed virus restrictions
Bubble Fare:
The Speculative “V”. Hussman.
Market cycles haven’t ceased to exist. It’s just that historically reliable “limits” haven’t been effective in recent years. So we’ve become content to gauge the presence of speculation or risk-aversion, without immediately becoming bearish once speculation has become outrageous. While sufficiently extreme conditions can still hold us to a neutral market outlook, the shift to a bearish outlook requires deterioration or divergence in our measures of market internals, which are our most reliable gauge of whether investor psychology is inclined toward speculation or toward risk-aversion. A week ago, our primary measures of market internals shifted to a negative condition. That shift was a bit surprising, because it was driven by components that capture market behavior across “debt securities of varying creditworthiness.” Interestingly, those debt-sensitive components were also the first to shift negative at the 1987 and 1929 peaks.
…
I continue to expect a loss in the S&P 500 on the order of 65-70% over the completion of the current market cycle. As I noted about my 83% loss projection for tech stocks in March 2000, “if you understand values and market history, you know we’re not joking.” A loss on the order of 65-70% would merely bring the S&P 500 to historical norms that have been followed by historically run-of-the-mill returns.
COVID-19 notes:
Last week’s edition focused on some cautionary reasons for on-going concern; this week’s has a couple of items with reasons for optimism
Wall Street Declares "The Beginning Of The End Of The COVID Crisis"
WHO warns that
PCR COVID tests are more likely to give false positives
Tweet of the Week:
GenZ trading veterans
Quote of the Week:
“So much has been written about the power of exponential growth, yet it never seems to sink into the brain of the body politic. We’ve all heard about lilies on the pond and rice on the checkerboard. Maybe we need to put it in terms of humans on the planet. If our global population of 7.8 billion grew at 1% — a tenth of a percentage point slower than the current rate — we’d have 21 billion people on the planet. Yes, that’s 21 billion at 2121.”
Pic of the Week:
Roads built by the Roman Empire
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
COVID Fare:
Right On Cue For Biden, WHO Admits High-Cycle PCR Tests Produce COVID False Positives.
In short, a positive PCR test in the absence of symptoms means nothing at a Ct of higher than 30, according to the experts interviewed by the New York Times and according to Jaafar et al. Yet positive tests is the number CNN loves flashing on the screen. … What I have referred to as the “casedemic” since September will be magically solved just in time for Joe Biden to look like a hero. For doing absolutely nothing.
Study to Describe the Safety, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of RNA Vaccine Candidates Against COVID-19 in Healthy Individuals
Official Title: A PHASE 1/2/3, PLACEBO-CONTROLLED, RANDOMIZED, OBSERVER-BLIND, DOSE-FINDING STUDY TO EVALUATE THE SAFETY, TOLERABILITY, IMMUNOGENICITY, AND EFFICACY OF SARS-COV-2 RNA VACCINE CANDIDATES AGAINST COVID-19 IN HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS
Actual Study Start Date: April 29, 2020
Estimated Primary Completion Date: July 30, 2021
Estimated Study Completion Date: January 27, 2023
Political Fare:
Donald Trump Was a Warning Shot.
In the end, Donald Trump didn't destroy the American political system. He showed the world how corrupt, undemocratic, and reactionary it already was.
Epitaph for a Post-Trump America
What did they think trust-fund Donald was going to do? Fall on his sword for a whistleblower/journalist? Trump is, after all, still just Trump.
This was the plan. Trump needed to finally be defeated. His followers humiliated. There was never going to be an Assange pardon.
There was never going to be a big declassification.
He was never allowed to burn the place down.
If any of that was going to happen it would have happened ages ago.
And this is why I’m happy Trump is gone. Because did you really want to live through another four years of pathetic virtue signaling, bureaucratic inertia, media lies and shameful pandering?
No, today the collapse of the U.S. will be on the watch of the people who orchestrated it. It won’t have the consent of a majority of the people, but if we were really honest with ourselves that’s how it was under Obama, Bush the Lesser and Clinton.
Trump was a guy who made things interesting but he also ensured we would be disabused of any notion of dissidence.
Today is the day Trump supporters can finally grow up. He wasn’t Orange Jesus sent to save America from itself. There was never a plan.
Trump was just a guy in over his head doing something no President did since Calvin Coolidge, giving a shit about what America means for Americans.
That’s why he had to be destroyed and that’s why we ultimately have to put him behind us.
Joe Biden Was Right About the Lies in Our Politics. But He’s Repeatedly Been One of the Liars
There’s an old adage that you know a politician is lying because you see their lips moving — but this culture of lying, built up over decades, is something different. Three decades after Bill Clinton was quite literally impeached for lying, lying is ubiquitous. We don’t experience momentary storms of fabrications or untruths — deceit is now the entire environment in which politics exists.
Media Cheers DC Under Military Occupation
Instead of applying a modicum of skepticism to this gigantic show of military force, much of which appears to be “security theater” in its purest form, our vaunted media is doing little other than cheering it on. And of course, inflating the threats being cited as justification for it. They can repeat over and over again that what occurred on January 6 at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” and therefore everything and anything is justified to retaliate, but everyone with a brain by now should be able to recognize that the government was never at a greater than 0% risk of being overthrown that day. Fear-inducing terms like “insurrection,” “domestic terrorism,” “seditious conspiracy,” “armed rebellion,” and others have been marshaled intentionally to inure the public to extreme actions such as the swiftly-executed corporate censorship purge and now, the transformation of the country’s capital into a military fortress.
It’s doubly odd because the deployment of military personnel to various cities last summer, though generally welcomed by locals and intended to quell what had genuinely been a sudden outburst of destructive chaos, was depicted by media members at the time as the rawest incarnation of violent fascism.
Super excited for America to finally get rid of its racist corrupt right-wing asshole of a president, hopefully by sometime in the next four to eight years.
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