Stock market

Is the Stock Market Now “Too Big to Fail”?

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marketCharles Hugh Smith – Correspondent Bart D. recently speculated that the U.S. stock market was now “too big to fail,” that is, that it was too integral to the global financial system and economy to be allowed to fail, i.e. decline 40+% as in previous bubble bursts.

The U.S. stock market is integral to the global financial system in two ways.Now that investment banks, pension funds, insurers and multitudes of 401K retirement plans are dependent on current equity valuations, a crash would impair virtually the entire spectrum of finance from hedge funds to banks to insurers to pension plans.

A decimation of these sectors would impact the U.S. economy and thus the global economy very negatively.

By turning the health of the economy into a reflection of the stock market, the Status Quo has made the stock market into the one bellwether that matters. In effect, the stock market is now integral to the economy as a measure of sentiment and evidence that all is well with the economy as a whole.

The stock market is now the signal everyone follows: if stocks are rising, we’re told that means the economy is healthy. Conversely, if stocks decline sharply, the implication is the economy is weak.

In other words, it’s not just valuations that make stocks integral to the economy and Status Quo–the market’s signaling is now the key to sentiment.In economist Michael Spence’s work, the information available to participants is asymmetric: roughly speaking, those on the “inside” have better information than those on the “outside.”

The stock market addresses this asymmetry by signaling what’s really going on via price: if the market sells off, that tells even those with little other information that all is not well in the economy. Continue reading →

My Bailout Is Bigger Than Yours’ – China Is Buying More Time To Buy More Gold Before Joining The SDR-basket

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Secular Investor – Every western media outlet was reporting about how the Chinese bubble was deflating at an extremely fast speed as its stock market decreased by 30% from 5,200 points to roughly 3,500 points before rebounding towards 4,200 points. It seemed like the world was heading towards Armageddon until the Chinese government stepped in to rescue the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

stockSource: stockcharts.com

It quickly instated new measures to ensure the stock market would have a ‘soft’ landing. The Chinese government announced pension funds were suddenly allowed to purchase shares which suddenly generated almost 100 billion dollars in additional support for its falling stock exchange. This first step wasn’t enough, and the Chinese government asked/forced the brokers to step in by pumping an additional few dozen billions of dollar in the market to stop the freefall. In its final move, China has instructed a $483B state-owned fund to start purchasing shares on the open market to ensure there’s a bidder for stock other people want to dump. Continue reading →

Freedom, Where Are You? Not In America Or Europe

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PaulCraigRobertsWhen the former Goldman Sachs executive who runs the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that he was going to print 720 billion euros annually with which to purchase bad debts from the politically connected big banks, the euro sank and the stock market and Swiss franc shot up. As in the US, quantitative easing (QE) serves to enrich the already rich. It has no other purpose.

The well-heeled financial institutions that bought up the troubled sovereign debt of Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain at low prices will now sell the bonds to the ECB for high prices. And despite depression level unemployment in most of Europe and austerity imposed on citizens, the stock market rose in anticipation that much of the 60 billion new euros that will be created each month will find its way into equity prices. Liquidity fuels the stock market.

Where else can the money to go? Some will go into Swiss francs and some into gold while gold is still available, but for the most part the ECB is running the printing press in order to boost the wealth of the stock-owning One Percent. The Federal Reserve and the ECB have taken the West back to the days when a handful of aristocrats owned everything.

The stock markets are bubbles blown by central bank money creation. On the basis of traditional reasoning there is no sound reason to be in equities, and sound investors have avoided them.

But there is no return anywhere else, and as the central banks are run by the rich for the rich, sound reasoning has proved to be a mistake for the past six years. This shows that corruption can prevail for an indeterminable period over fundamentals. Continue reading →

We’ve Habituated To A Rigged, Fraudulent Market

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“Fraud generates risk, and risk eventually breaks out in the “safest” parts of the financial plumbing, the ones nobody gives a second thought to because they’re “low risk.”” – C H Smith

CharlesHughSmithLet’s go all the way back to the last time a central banker actually spoke the truth in public: December 5, 1996, 18 long years ago. It was on that day that Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan gave a typically dry speech that hinted stocks could actually become overvalued (gasp!) due to irrational exuberance and subsequently plummet when rational valuations returned:

 

Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

Global stock markets promptly sold off hard at the shocking revelation that stocks might actually become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions. This sharp reaction to a fundamental truth about markets–that they are prone to the irrational exuberance of participants, and the computer trading programs keyed to this momentum magnify the irrationality–caused central bankers to avoid any upsetting truth from then on. Continue reading →

The Flight Back Down To Reality Ahead For The Rich

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Six years ago this month, in the midst of the Great Recession, Lehman Brothers, one of the most well-known investment banks in the U.S. economy, filed for bankruptcy.

At the time, Lehman’s bankruptcy sparked widespread worries…and the U.S. financial system teetered on the verge of collapse. For those of us who remember that time, there was too much uncertainty.

So, the Federal Reserve and the government stepped in to help the crumbling U.S. economy. Loans were made to companies that were “too big to fail,” interest rates fell to historic lows, and trillions of dollars in new money was printed (out of thin air).

Six years later, is the U.S. economy better off now?

Looking at Wall Street today, it looks like things couldn’t be better. The markets are close to all-time highs. The big banks are in better shape; their profits are rising and executives’ incomes and bonuses are big once again.

And speculation is back, big-time. As just one example, Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ/FB) recently reached a market capitalization of more than $200 billion in hopes that the company will be able to make more money on mobile ads. Facebook is trading at a price-to-earnings multiple of 100! Continue reading →