Investors

Somebody Pressed The Panic Button On Wall Street – Bank Stocks And Tech Stocks Crash As The Yield Curve Inverts

Stocks aren’t supposed to crash in December.  Most of the time we see a nice “Santa Claus rally” to close out the year, and so what happened on Tuesday is definitely extremely unusual.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 799 points, which was the fourth largest single day point decline in stock market history.  In fact, there was not a single day during the entire financial crisis of 2008 when the Dow dropped by as many points as it did on Tuesday.  Many believed that this “stock market correction” would be limited to October, but then it stretched into November, and now it has extended into the “safe month” of December.  What in the world is going on out there?

It would be difficult to overstate the carnage that we just witnessed.  The Russell 2000 had its worst day in seven years, financial stocks plunged 4.4 percent, and as you will see below FAANG stocks lost enough money to literally buy McDonald’s.

There are many factors that are influencing the markets right now, but the biggest thing that spooked investors on Tuesday was an inversion of the yield curve…

Just when it looked like the battered bull was healing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered a drop of nearly 800 points Tuesday when the bond market sent an ominous signal: The yield on the two-year U.S. government bond rose above the interest rate paid out by five-year notes.

Why the pessimism over that obscure-sounding shift? Historically, when short-term rates rise above longer rates – which is dubbed an “inversion of the yield curve” – it signals an economic slowdown is coming.

However, it should be noted that the yield on two year bonds has not yet risen above the yield on 10 year bonds, and until that happens many investors will still not consider the yield curve to have “officially” inverted yet.

But any way that you want to look at it, what has been happening in the bond market is really bad news for the big banks, because it is going to eat into their profits.  In an article posted on Tuesday, CNN explained how this works…

The flattening yield curve also affects the income banks collect from lending, since banks pay interest on short-term rates and lend at long-term rates. They make money off the difference.

Once the yield on two year bonds fell below the yield on five year bonds, investors took that as a sign of big trouble for the financial sector, and they started dumping bank stocks like crazy…

The flattening yield curve caused investors to bail on bank stocks on concern the phenomenon may hurt their lending margins. The SPDR S&P Bank ETF (KBE) dropped 5.3 percent. Shares of J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America all declined more than 4 percent. Citigroup and Morgan Stanley both reached 52-week lows along with Regionals Financial, Citizens Financial and Capital One.

Of course this is just a continuation of a trend that has been building for quite some time, and at this point the damage that has been done is immense.

The following numbers come from Zero Hedge…

  • Global Systemically Important Banks are down 30% from 52-week highs.
  • US Financials down 14.5% from 52-week highs.
  • Goldman Sachs is down 33% from 52-week highs.

We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008, and we will want to watch the “too big to fail” banks very carefully during the weeks ahead.

Meanwhile, the FAANG stocks have been getting monkey-hammered as well.

By the end of the day on Tuesday, those stocks had combined to lose more than 140 billion dollars in market value…

  • Facebook fell 2.2 percent, losing $7.6 billion in implied market value
  • Amazon fell 5.9 percent, losing $50.8 billion in implied market value
  • Apple fell 4.4 percent, losing $38.5 billion in implied market value
  • Netflix fell 5.2 percent, losing $6.5 billion in implied market value
  • Alphabet fell 4.8 percent, losing $37.5 billion in implied market value

That would be enough money to buy McDonald’s.

Yes, I am talking about the entire company.

Yesterday, I talked about the psychological shift that we have been witnessing.  Instead of endlessly promoting the idea that the U.S. economy is “booming”, the mainstream media is now using phrases such as “economic slowdown”, “the next recession” and “market crash”.  Here are just a few examples…

–“Dow plunges nearly 800 points on rising fears of an economic slowdown”

–“Worry Less About Inflation and More About Recession”

–“The years of easy money in the stock market are coming to an end”

Normally, the markets get very sleepy during the time period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but that has not happened this year.

The markets will be closed on Wednesday due to the passing of former president George H.W. Bush, and perhaps this “time out” will have soothed a lot of nerves by the time the markets reopen on Thursday.

But as I have warned before, this crisis is not even close to being over.

In fact, it is only just beginning.

We have been waiting for a long time for the largest financial bubble in American history to burst, and now it is starting to happen.  It is being called “the Everything Bubble”, and as it implodes we are going to see things happen that we have never seen before.

When historians look back on this time of history someday, the crisis of 2008 will be just a footnote compared to what is coming.  It has taken decades of very foolish decisions to get us to this point, and the consequences for our unwise choices are going to be far more painful than most people would dare to imagine.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

Much Worse Than Expected: Experts Shocked As New Home Sales Plunge 8.9 Percent

The U.S. economy is definitely deviating from the script, and we just got more evidence that “Housing Bubble 2” is bursting.  Experts were expecting that new home sales in the U.S. would rise in October, but instead they plunged 8.9 percent.  That number is far worse than anyone was projecting, and many in the real estate industry are really starting to freak out.  And to be honest, things look like they are going to get even worse in 2019.  One survey found that the percentage of Americans that plan to buy a home over the next 12 months has fallen by about half during the past year.  Mortgage rates have steadily risen as the Federal Reserve has been hiking interest rates, and at this point most average Americans have been completely priced out of the market.  Home prices are going to have to come way down from where they are right now, and just as we witnessed in 2008, rapidly falling home prices can put an extraordinary amount of stress on the financial system.

It is hard for me to put into words just how bad this latest number is.  Even though I write about our growing economic problems on a daily basis, even I didn’t expect to see a number anywhere near this bad.  Sometimes a really bad number from one part of the U.S. can drag down the overall number, but that wasn’t the case this time.  According to Reuters, there were “sharp declines in all four regions”…

Sales of new U.S. single-family homes tumbled to a more than 2-1/2-year low in October amid sharp declines in all four regions, further evidence that higher mortgage rates were hurting the housing market.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday new home sales dropped 8.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 544,000 units last month. That was the lowest level since March 2016. The percent drop was the biggest since December 2017.

But of course it isn’t as if this latest report is coming out of nowhere.  The truth is that new home sales have fallen in four of the last six months, and so a very clear trend is now developing.

Sadly, most mainstream economists still don’t seem to be understanding what is happening.  According to Reuters, the consensus estimate was that we would see new home sales rise 3.7 percent in October, and so an 8.9 percent plunge came as a real shock.

New home sales have now missed expectations for seven months in a row, and the similarities to 2008 are starting to become undeniable.

Sales of previously owned homes have been falling as well.  In fact, in October we witnessed the largest drop for previously owned home sales in four years…

Sales of previously owned U.S. homes posted their largest annual decline since 2014 in October, as the housing market continues to sputter due to higher mortgage rates that are reducing home affordability.

If you want to blame someone for this mess, blame the Federal Reserve.

They created a “boom” in the housing market by pushing interest rates all the way to the floor during the Obama years, and now they are creating a “bust” by aggressively jacking up interest rates at a pace that our economy simply cannot handle.

If we had allowed the free market to be setting interest rates all this time, we would not be on such a roller coaster ride.

Just like during “Housing Bubble 1”, millions of Americans have been buying houses that they cannot afford, and that could mean another massive wave of mortgage defaults as this new economic downturn intensifies.  At this point, the debt to income ratio for mortgages insured by the FHA is at an all-time record high…

One worrying indicator: The average debt-to-income ratio for mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration, which makes up about 22% of the housing market, is now at its highest level ever.

This is yet another indication that we are even more vulnerable than we were just prior to the subprime mortgage meltdown during the last financial crisis.

Let me try to shed some light on what is coming next.  Even if economic conditions remained stable, housing prices would need to start falling dramatically in order to attract buyers.  In fact, we are already starting to see this happen in southern California and other markets that were once extremely “hot”.  As housing prices fall, millions of Americans will suddenly find themselves “underwater” on their mortgages.  In other words, they will owe more on their homes than their homes are worth.  During the last recession, many “underwater” homeowners ultimately decided to walk away rather than continue to service ridiculously bloated mortgages.

But the truth is that economic conditions are not likely to remain stable.  In fact, many are projecting that the approaching downturn will be even worse than 2008.

In such a scenario, millions of Americans will lose their jobs, and that means that millions of Americans will suddenly not be able to make their mortgage payments.  As a result, mortgage defaults will skyrocket and home prices will drop like a rock.  Just like last time around, there could be people that wake up one day and realize that they owe two or three times as much money on their mortgages as their homes are currently worth, and the stampede of people walking away from “underwater” mortgages could become an avalanche.

Needless to say, millions of mortgages suddenly going bad is a scenario that our financial system is not equipped to handle.  What happened in 2008 was absolutely catastrophic for our large financial institutions, and what is coming is going to be even worse.

Of course the big financial institutions will want the federal government to bail them out, but there may not be much of an appetite for more corporate bailouts this time around.

And considering the fact that we are already 22 trillion dollars in debt, we can’t exactly afford to be throwing money around.

The Federal Reserve has set the stage for a giant mess, and it is going to shake the housing industry to the core.

We should have learned from the mistakes that we made in 2008, but we didn’t, and so now we are going to pay a very great price for our negligence.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

 

George Soros Sold Huge Amounts Of Facebook And Netflix Just Before Tech Stocks Crashed

George Soros avoided a loss of more than 17 million dollars by dumping shares of Facebook, Netflix and Goldman Sachs just before the big crash started happening.  In other words, he made out like a bandit by selling at the peak of the market.  Is he smarter than all the rest of us, did he have some inside information, or was he simply lucky?  In recent months, tech stocks have lost approximately a trillion dollars in value, and many investors have been absolutely devastated.  But not George Soros.  According to the most recent filing with the SEC, Soros Fund Management was able to dump shares in Facebook and Netflix just in time…

Soros Fund Management, which Soros founded and chairs, exited social-network giant Facebook (FB) completely in the third quarter, while also slashing positions in Netflix stock (NFLX) and Goldman Sachs Group stock (GS). Those three stocks have tumbled in the fourth quarter so far, with Facebook and Goldman setting new lows Tuesday. They are down almost 20% and 15%, respectively, so far this quarter. Highflying streaming-content giant Netflix has tumbled almost 29% since the end of September.

Soros saved a chunk of cash by selling: Barron’s estimates that, had he maintained positions in those stocks, he would have unrealized losses of about $17.7 million so far in the fourth quarter.

Perhaps we will never know what prompted those moves, but with George Soros these strange “coincidences” have happened again and again throughout his career.

Unfortunately, the top executives at the major tech companies were not as prescient, and so some of them have literally lost billions of dollars…

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has lost a stunning $42 billion since early September, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as the e-commerce giant’s stock has dropped more than 25 percent.

Embattled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also taken a beating as reports indicate he’s lost some $34 billion since late July and is now worth $52 billion – ranking as the seventh-richest person in the world.

Google chiefs Larry Page and Sergey Brin have lost a combined $20 billion from their peak wealth in July as the search engine’s stock has dropped 20 percent and closed in a bear market on Monday for the first time since 2011.

Could you imagine losing 42 billion dollars?

If I lose 42 dollars I get upset.  So I couldn’t even imagine how I would feel if I lost $42,000,000,000.

The atmosphere on Wall Street has completely shifted over the last couple of months.  Not too long ago those of us that were calling for a bear market were being mocked, but nobody is mocking anymore.

One of the big things that has been propping up the stock market in recent years has been corporate buybacks.  In fact, I wrote a major article about this not too long ago that you can find right here.  Big corporations have literally been spending hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up their own stock prices, and many of these corporations have been going into tremendous amounts of debt in order to do this.

For a long time General Electric was one of the biggest offenders.  They borrowed billions upon billions of dollars for stock repurchases, and it worked for a while.  But now GE shares have been absolutely tanking, and they can’t keep the game going anymore because they are drowning in about 100 billion dollars of debt.  The following comes from an excellent Marketwatch article…

GE was one of Wall Street’s major share buyback operators between 2015 and 2017; it repurchased $40 billion of shares at prices between $20 and $32. The share price is now $8.60, so the company has liquidated between $23 billion and $29 billion of its shareholders’ money on this utterly futile activity alone. Since the highest net income recorded by the company during those years was $8.8 billion in 2016, with 2015 and 2017 recording a loss, it has managed to lose more on its share repurchases during those three years than it made in operations, by a substantial margin.

Even more important, GE has now left itself with minus $48 billion in tangible net worth at Sept. 30, with actual genuine tangible debt of close to $100 billion. As the new CEO Larry Culp told CNBC last Monday: “We have no higher priority right now than bringing those leverage levels down.”

GE was once one of the greatest corporations on the entire planet, but now they stand on the precipice of collapse because they were addicted to borrowing money for stock buybacks.

Of course GE is far from alone.  Other corporations that have gone into serious amounts of debt in order to fund share repurchases are also now paying a very great price for doing so.  Ultimately, it was a giant Ponzi scheme of epic proportions, but now the game is collapsing.

In my first novel, there is a stock market collapse that begins in the fall, and things begin to deteriorate very rapidly in this country thereafter.  Unfortunately, we are starting to watch a very similar scenario play out right in front of our eyes.  In recent years a booming stock market has been a big point of pride for a lot of Americans, but now that bubble is bursting.

For many people, money is more important than anything else in life.  In fact, a recent survey discovered that Americans find more meaning and purpose in life from “career” and “money” than they do from “faith”.

But when “the god of money” fails, how are most Americans going to respond?

I do not believe that the United States is going to handle another economic meltdown very well.  We are already a deeply angry and divided nation, but at least our debt-fueled “prosperity” has kept things relatively calm.

If that “prosperity” completely disappears, we are going to have a complete and utter national nightmare on our hands.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

Stock Market Crash: The Dow Has Fallen Nearly 2,500 Points And FAANG Stocks Have Lost A TRILLION Dollars In Value

Thanksgiving week was not supposed to be like this.  Normally things are slow in the days leading up to Thanksgiving as investors prepare to gorge themselves with turkey and stuffing as they gather with family and friends.  But this year the stock market is crashing, and Wall Street is in panic mode.  On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 24,465.64, which is nearly 2,500 points lower than the all-time high of 26,951.81 that was set in early October.  But as I noted yesterday, what has been happening to tech stocks is even more dramatic.  Each one of the FAANG stocks is now down by more than 20 percent, and they have combined to lose more than a trillion dollars in value.  We haven’t seen anything like this since the financial crisis of 2008, and at this point all of Wall Street’s gains for 2018 have been completely wiped out.

Fear is a very powerful motivator, and right now a lot of investors are feverishly getting out of the market because they are afraid of losing their paper profits.

One analyst is describing what is going on as a rush for the exits…

“The highways will be crowded this evening as the Thanksgiving rush will begin in earnest, but this morning investors are rushing for the exits,” Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group, wrote to clients on Tuesday.

But for many tech investors, the truth is that the cattle have already left the barn.

Just check out how much market capitalization the “big five” have already lost.  The following numbers come from CNBC…

  • Facebook: $253 billion
  • Amazon: $280 billion
  • Apple: $253 billion
  • Netflix: $67 billion
  • Alphabet: $164 billion

When you add those figures together, you get a grand total of 1.02 trillion dollars.

If you were alive when Jesus was born, and you spent a million dollars every day since then, you still would not have spent a trillion dollars by now.

A trillion dollars is an amount of money so vast that it is difficult to comprehend, and those that hesitated to sell at the peak of the market mania are never going to get that money back.

And many believe that the tech losses are just beginning because several of these companies have now entered “death cross” territory…

This could be the final nail in the coffin for the FANG trade.

Three of the companies within the big-tech quartet have entered into death crosses, with Facebook, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet seeing their 50-day moving averages cross below their 200-day moving averages.

We shall see what happens in the days ahead, but right now things do not look good.

Apple was supposed to be the strongest and most profitable of the FANG companies, but slowing sales have suddenly changed everything.  In fact, Goldman Sachs just cut their price target for the stock…

Goldman Sachs slashed its Apple price target on Tuesday. The firm said in a note there is a “weakness in demand for Apple’s products in China and other emerging markets,” as well as a disappointing reception for the iPhone XR model.

As the trade war intensifies, many in China have been encouraging a boycott of American goods.

Could this be one of the reasons why Apple phone sales are slowing over there?

The trade war is also being singled out as one of the reasons why the stock market as a whole is falling.  The following comes from CNN…

The losses have been sparked by a flurry of concerns about everything from higher interest rates and crashing oil prices to the US-China trade war. But the overarching theme is that investors are bracing for the end of the fantastic economic and profit growth that marked the past year. Analysts expect a deceleration in 2019 driven by tariffs, the fading impact of the tax cuts and higher borrowing costs caused by the Federal Reserve.

“Put simply, stocks have already started to price in the risk of an economic slowdown,” Goldman Sachs chief US equity strategist David Kostin wrote to clients on Tuesday.

Ultimately, people buy stocks because they believe in the future.  If investors believe that they will get more money back than they are originally investing, they will buy stocks.  But if they don’t believe that will be the case, they won’t buy stocks.

For a long time, there was a tremendous amount of optimism about the future on Wall Street, but now that has disappeared.  Without that relentless optimism, it is inevitable that stock ratios will return to their long-term averages, and the S&P 500 sales to price ratio is telling us that stock prices still have a very long way to fall.

But our system will not be able to handle a decline of that magnitude.  There is more leverage on Wall Street today than ever before, and a huge decline in stock prices would lead to a meltdown unlike anything we have ever witnessed.

If we break 20,000 on the Dow, the panic on Wall Street will be off the charts, and the flow of credit will be absolutely strangled. As a result, economic activity would crash at a pace that would make 2008 look like a Sunday picnic.

Our economy is more dependent on Wall Street than ever, and it is absolutely imperative that we have a healthy financial system.  Now that the financial system is starting to crumble, a lot of people are becoming highly alarmed.

But according to Larry Kudlow, we have absolutely nothing to worry about…

‘Corrections come and go,’ he told reporters at the White House, saying that the economy is strong overall.

‘I’m reading some of the weirdest stuff how a recession is in the future,’ Kudlow said. ‘Nonsense.’

‘Recession is so far in the distance I can’t see it,’ he said after appearing in a Fox Business Network interview.

It would be wonderful if Kudlow turns out to be correct.  But in “Get Prepared Now”, I warned about what can happen when we allow others to do our thinking for us.  What is happening on Wall Street should be obvious to everyone, and no amount of optimistic chatter is going to change that.

And the truth is that even the mainstream media is starting to acknowledge the reality of what we are now facing.  CNBC just took a poll of global finance executives, and they discovered that more than half of them believe that the Dow will fall below 23,000…

More than half of the members of the CNBC Global CFO Council think the Dow Jones Industrial Average will fall below 23,000 — roughly 2,000 points from its current level — before the stock market barometer is ever able to top the 27,000 level. The 23,000 level would equate to another 8 percent in decline among the Dow group of stocks before the selling stops.

Ultimately the Dow is going to go much lower than 23,000, and it will shake Wall Street to the core.

But for now, hopefully everyone can have a happy Thanksgiving, because it is likely that there won’t be many happy days for investors after that as this financial meltdown accelerates.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

All The FANG Stocks Are Now In A Bear Market And Facebook Investors Have Already Lost 39 Percent Of Their Paper Wealth

These large stock market declines are starting to become a regular thing, and tech stocks are getting hit particularly hard.  But we have been in a bull market for such a long time that many investors are having a difficult time comprehending what is happening.  Many just keep believing that their beloved tech stocks will eventually bounce back because they just can’t accept the fact that the party is over.  At this point, all of the “FANG stocks” have officially entered bear market territory.  Facebook is down 39.5 percent from their 52 week high, Amazon is down 25.4 percent, Netflix is down 35.6 percent and Google is down 20.3 percent.  And since many throw in Apple to make the acronym “FAANG”, we should also note that Apple’s stock price is now down more than 20 percent from the peak.  The tech stock crash that so many have been waiting for has arrived, and many analysts believe that it is going to get a whole lot worse.

The combined market value of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google has fallen by 610 billion dollars so far.

Just think about that for a moment.

Most Americans don’t even realize that tech stocks have been crashing, and many of them simply assume that their investments are safe.

And at one time Facebook was considered to be a very safe investment, but now 39.5 percent of the value of Facebook has already been completely wiped out.

It looks like November will be Facebook’s third month in a row in the red, and that will be the longest monthly losing streak that it has ever had.

A lot of people are shocked that this is happening so rapidly.  But really the only surprise is that it has taken this long for these massively overvalued stocks to crash and burn.

The truth is that these companies have been priced beyond perfection.  So when even the smallest piece of bad news comes along, investors can start to panic.

For example, one of the big reasons why Apple has declined so much is because production orders for all three of the new iPhones that were unveiled in September have been slashed.  It looks like iPhone sales are not going to be at quite the level everyone had anticipated, and Wall Street responded by throwing a huge temper tantrum.

And things look even more ominous for Facebook.  As Joel Kulina of Wedbush recently noted, the number of people that are using Facebook on a daily basis in North America is falling…

Joel Kulina of Wedbush says problems in the company have been evident longer than this month. “If you go back to that earnings report back in July, they missed across the board and what really jumps out at me is that we’re seeing declining daily and monthly active users in North America or stalling active user metrics in North America, declining in Europe and the only regions that are seeing growth is in Asia where the average revenue per user is much lower than the Western world,” Kulina said.

When Facebook decided to start censoring people for their political views on a massive basis, that was the beginning of the end for the company.  At this point they have alienated millions upon millions of users that were once addicted to the service, and that is damage that will never be repaired.

And it is inevitable that something newer, better and more engaging will eventually come along.  Not too long ago, MySpace was the unbeatable giant in social media, but then Facebook came along and crushed them.  Now it is clear that Facebook has peaked, and the void that is being created as Facebook declines will certainly be filled by someone else.

But what we are witnessing in the financial marketplace is not just about tech stocks.  This is a broad-based global decline, and it has been going on for quite some time.

In fact, just check out the following tidbit from Simon Black…

Deutsche Bank says 89% of all asset classes it tracks are negative this year – the worst year since 1901.

This is often how a big downturn begins: gradually, then suddenly. Asset prices stew and fester, slowly grinding downward for months while people maintain hope that prices will recover.

Yes, you read that correctly.

89 percent of all the asset classes that they track are down in 2018.

That is an absolutely astounding number.

We haven’t seen anything like this since the last financial crisis.  Most people seem to assume that the problems that caused the last financial crisis have been fixed, but that is not the case at all.  Instead, things were patched together and the global financial bubble was made even bigger.  Here is more from Simon Black…

Instead of giving million-dollar mortgages to unemployed borrowers with a history of default, investors are loaning billions of dollars to money-losing zombie businesses, or to governments that are already in debt up to their eyeballs, all while pretending these are safe, credible investments.

Total global debt back in 2008 was about $173 trillion, worth about 280% of GDP.

Today total global debt is $250 trillion, worth about 320% of GDP. It’s only gotten worse.

Now the “Bubble To End All Bubbles” is starting to burst, and great chaos is ahead.  What we experienced in 2008 and 2009 is nothing compared to what is in front of us, and most Americans have absolutely no idea what is coming.

At the moment, one key thing to keep a close eye on is the high yield bond market.

High yield bonds (also known as “junk bonds”) crashed really hard just before the financial crisis of 2008 erupted, and now it is happening again.

Even if high yield bonds didn’t go down any further, they have already dropped to a level that indicates that stocks still have a lot more room to fall.

But if high yield bonds do continue to plummet like this, it is a clear indication that it is time to put your crash helmet on.

These are interesting times, and I have a feeling that they are about to get a whole lot more interesting.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

“The Outlook For The Global Economy Has Deteriorated”: Oil, Copper And Lumber Are All Telling Us The Next Economic Downturn Is Here

Oil, copper and lumber are all telling us the exact same thing, and it isn’t good news for the global economy.  When economic activity is booming, demand for commodities such as oil, copper and lumber goes up and that generally causes prices to rise.  But when economic activity is slowing down, demand for such commodities falls and that generally causes prices to decline.  In recent weeks, we have witnessed a decline in commodity prices unlike anything that we have witnessed in years, and many are concerned that this is a very clear indication that hard times are ahead for the global economy.

Let’s talk about oil first.  The price of oil peaked in early October, but since that time it has fallen more than 25 percent, and the IEA is warning of “relatively weak” demand out of Asia and Europe…

The International Energy Agency said on Wednesday that while US demand for oil has been “very robust,” demand in Europe and developed Asian countries “continues to be relatively weak.” The IEA also warned of a “slowdown” in demand in developing nations such as India, Brazil and Argentina caused by high oil prices, weak currencies and deteriorating economic activity.

“The outlook for the global economy has deteriorated,” the IEA wrote.

Meanwhile, the price of copper has been declining for quite some time now.  The price of copper also fell substantially just before the last recession, and many analysts are pointing out that “Dr. Copper” is now waving a red flag once again…

The message of weakening demand on the oil front was reinforced by the falling price of copper. The base metal is often referred to as “Dr. Copper” on its presumed ability to forecast the peaks and troughs of business cycles since it is used in different areas of the economy such as homes, factories and electricity generation. Copper has served as a leading indicator of both recessions and economic booms.

The price of lumber is a “third witness” that indicates that big trouble is looming.

Last month, lumber dropped more than 10 percent, and that was the biggest monthly drop that we have seen in more than 7 years…

In October, prices for softwood lumber in the U.S. dropped 10.3% – the largest decline since May 2011, according to the Producer Price Index (PPI) release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The producer price index for softwood lumber has fallen 21.2% since setting the cycle and all-time high in June.

If oil, copper and lumber are all telling us the same thing simultaneously, don’t you think that we should be listening?

At this point, even Bloomberg is admitting that the global economy is heading toward “a generalized slowdown”…

These developments suggest the synchronized growth that the global economy has enjoyed in recent years is likely to be replaced by a generalized slowdown. Just take a look at the data out of Japan and Germany this week, which showed the world’s third- and fourth-largest economies contracted in the third quarter.

How many signs is it going to take before people start understanding what is happening?

Wells Fargo just notified about 1,000 employees that they will be laid off.  Job losses are starting to mount, and it is likely that we will start to see these sorts of news stories on an almost daily basis now.

And as the shaking on Wall Street accelerates, we are going to see more financial firms get into trouble.  In fact, we just witnessed the total collapse of OptionSellers.com.  The following comes from a notice that they sent to investors informing them that they lost all their money and that the firm is being liquidated…

I am writing to give you an update on the situation here with your account.

We have spent the week unwinding our short natural gas call position as expediently as possible.

Today which was to be the final day of liquidation, the market flared as prices appear to have been caught in a “short squeeze.”

The speed at which it took place is truly beyond anything I have seen in my career. It overran our risk control systems and left us at the mercy of the market.

In short, it was a rogue wave and it overwhelmed us.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in a catastrophic loss.

Our clearing firm, FC Stone now requires us to liquidate all positions. We hoped to have this done today. If not, it will be completed tomorrow.

Your account could potentially be facing a debit balance as of tomorrow. OptionSellers.com will be processing fee credits over the course of the coming days to help alleviate debit balances. What these will be will be determined after all positions are cleared.

This has in effect, crippled the firm. At this point, our brokers at FC Stone have been assisting us in liquidation.

Our offices will remain open and we will all still be here to answer your questions and process account closings. We will do everything in our power to ease what discomfort we can.

I am truly sorry this has happened.

I will be updating you again via memo in 24 hours.

Regards,

OptionSellers.com

Those investors are among the first to be completely wiped out, but they certainly won’t be the last.

The ironic thing is that Americans are less concerned about another crisis than they have been at any point since 2008 at a time when they should be more focused on getting prepared than ever.

You know that it is really late in the game when even Jim Cramer of CNBC is saying that the U.S. economy is really slowing down.  A few of my readers wrote me after that article because they didn’t like the fact that I had quoted Jim Cramer.  But I don’t think that they really got my point.  I was not endorsing Jim Cramer as some sort of financial guru.  Rather, I was pointing out that even mainstream media celebrities that were previously cheerleaders for the economy are now recognizing the reality of what we are facing.

Global economic activity is slowing down, and things are shifting very rapidly now.  The weather is already getting very cold, the mood of the nation is very dark, and it would only take a very small push to send us completely tumbling over the edge.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

This Wasn’t Supposed To Happen…

We have definitely deviated from the script.  According to virtually all of the “experts”, the stock market was not supposed to keep plummeting in November.  This was supposed to be the month when the market calmed down and things returned to normal.  But instead, November is starting to look a whole lot like October, and many investors are really starting to freak out.  U.S. stocks declined for a third day in a row on Monday, and all post-election gains have now been completely wiped out.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost another 602 points, and all of these large daily losses are really starting to add up.  It may still be a bit too early to call this a “major financial crisis”, but if stock prices keep plunging like this it won’t be too long before all hell starts breaking loose on Wall Street.

Goldman Sachs, GE and California utility stocks were some of the biggest losers on Monday, but it was Apple that made the biggest news…

Investors grew concerned after Wells Fargo analysts identified Apple as the unnamed customer that optical communications company Lumentum Holdings said was significantly reducing orders. The news sent Apple’s stock down 5 percent for the day. Lumentum shares plunged almost 33 percent.

Shares in other major tech stocks fell. Advanced Micro Devices gave up 9.51 percent, while Nvidia fell 7.84 percent. Micron Technology lost 4.27 percent. Banks and consumer-focused companies, and media and communications stocks also took heavy losses.

All along, tech stocks had been leading the bull market on the way up, but now things have completely shifted.

In recent weeks tech stocks have been absolutely cratering, and several of the biggest names are now officially in bear market territory.  The following summary comes from Wolf Richter…

  • Facebook [FB] dropped 2.4% today, to $141.55 and is down 35% from its peak in July.
  • Amazon [AMZN] dropped 4.4% to $1,636.85 a share and is down nearly 20%, from the peak on September 5, when shares nearly kissed for the briefest moment $1 trillion.
  • Alphabet [GOOG] dropped 2.6%. At $1,038.63, shares are down 18% from the peak in July.
  • NVIDIA [NVDA] plunged 7.8% today to $189.54 and is down 34.5% over the past six weeks and down 11% from a year ago.
  • Netflix [NFLX] dropped 3.1% today to $294.07 and has plunged 30% from its high in early July.
  • Microsoft [MSFT] fell 2.4% today to $106.87 and is down 7.5% from its peak at the beginning of October.

The environment on Wall Street is radically different than it was even six months ago.  Today, there are concerns about what a divided Congress will mean for the next two years.  Certainly there will be no more tax cuts, and many investors are bummed about that.  There are also concerns that the trade war between the United States and China will continue to escalate.  In addition, interest rates continue to rise, housing numbers continue to get worse, and we continue to get more evidence that the global economy is really starting to slow down.

And one thing that is really spooking investors right now is the surging U.S. dollar…

Stocks investors are spooked about a lot of things, and the strong dollar biting into earnings growth is now one of them.

The dollar index, which measures the greenback versus a basket of other currencies, jumped 0.7 percent on Monday to 97.58, a 17-month high. As the dollar rose, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 602 points to 25,387, and the S&P 500 was down nearly 2 percent to 2,726.

You may be tempted to think that a strong dollar would be a good thing, but in this financial climate it is definitely not.  As I have discussed previously, many emerging market countries binged on debt during the boom years, and much of that debt was denominated in U.S. dollars.  Now that the dollar is surging, that is making it much, much more difficult to service and pay back those loans.

Meanwhile, the price of oil continues to fall precipitously.  At this point, oil has now fallen for 11 days in a row…

Crude has now lost ground for 11 consecutive days, the longest slide since oil futures trading was introduced on the NYMEX in March 1983. The historic slump knocked oil into a bear market — barely a month after it hit four-year highs. Selling accelerated in extended trading, with crude breaking below $59 a barrel.

Monday’s drop signals skepticism from investors that Saudi Arabia will be able to quickly mop up a glut of supply that has suddenly emerged.

If you will remember, the price of oil also spiked dramatically and then fell like a rock just prior to the financial crisis of 2008.

Could it be possible that a similar scenario is playing out again?

In “Get Prepared Now”, I talked about what the coming financial crisis would mean for all of us, and I noted that many prepare for such a crisis by investing in precious metals.  So it is quite interesting to note that global central banks were voraciously buying gold during the third quarter of this year…

Gold is particularly attractive to central banks looking for safe, liquid assets. Central bank purchases of gold increased by 22% during the third quarter. That’s the fastest pace since the fourth quarter of 2015, according to Natalie Dempster, managing director for central banks and public policy at the World Gold Council.

Could this be a sign that the central bankers believe that a new crisis is looming?

Of course there are many of us that are stunned that things have already deteriorated so rapidly.  I expected that October would be bad, but I didn’t think that it would be that bad.

And many of us had anticipated that things would calm down a bit in November, and so a 602 point decline on Monday definitely came as a surprise.

Ultimately, it is just a matter of time before we witness a stock market crash far greater than we saw in 2008, but we can certainly hope that it will be put off for as long as possible.

However, the truth is that nobody can outrun the relentless march of time indefinitely, and time is most certainly running out for Wall Street.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Last Days Warrior Summit is the premier online event of 2018 for Christians, Conservatives and Patriots.  It is a premium members-only international event that will empower and equip you with the knowledge and tools that you need as global events begin to escalate dramatically.  The speaker list includes Michael Snyder, Mike Adams, Dave Daubenmire, Ray Gano, Dr. Daniel Daves, Gary Kah, Justus Knight, Doug Krieger, Lyn Leahz, Laura Maxwell and many more. Full summit access will begin on October 25th, and if you would like to register for this unprecedented event you can do so right here.

Wall Street Seems To Believe That Endless Gridlock And Political Turmoil Will Be Good For America

It is difficult not to admire the relentless optimism on Wall Street.  A divided Congress is going to guarantee two years of gridlock and political turmoil in Washington, but many in the financial community are choosing to interpret the election results as a positive sign.  They remember the “gridlock” during the Obama years, and they are hopeful that the next couple of years will be at least somewhat similar.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 545 points on Wednesday, and that was the largest post-midterm rally that we have seen in 36 years.  Stock prices normally go up the day after midterm elections, but Wednesday’s rally was definitely unusual…

Wednesday’s post-midterms rally was larger than the average gain that follows the contests. Goldman Sachs noted the S&P 500 has averaged a gain of 0.7 percent from the day before the elections to the day after midterms. Wednesday marked the biggest post-midterms gain for both the Dow and S&P 500 since the day after the 1982 contests, when the indexes surged 4.3 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively.

To a certain extent, it is likely that investors were greatly relieved that the worst case scenario did not play out.  As I noted on Monday, a blue wave that would have resulted in Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress would have meant big trouble for Wall Street, and many are very thankful that we were able to avoid that outcome…

Investors also avoided the most-feared Wall Street outcome, a so-called “blue wave,” or Democratic sweep of both chambers of Congress. That could have put the president’s economic policies under assault and boosted the odds of a Democratic House pushing for Trump’s impeachment.

“Everything played out according to script,” Stephen Innes, head of Asia trading at Oanda, told USA TODAY. “The Trump agenda is not in serious jeopardy.”

But are Tuesday’s results actually good news for Wall Street?

The optimists are pointing to history as evidence that gridlock in Washington is typically good for investors…

Legislative gridlock has historically been good for financial markets. In fact, in years with a Republican president and a Republican-controlled Senate and Democrat-run House in place, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index has posted average gains of 10.8 percent, according to data from Strategas Research Partners.

“A split Congress means that gridlock is more likely, and that’s been fine for markets in the past,” says Kate Warne, investment strategist at Edward Jones.

Unfortunately, that is not a fair comparison.

The times that we are moving into are not going to be anything like the “gridlock” that we witnessed during the Reagan, Clinton and Obama presidencies.

During the Obama era, Republican leadership got along with the White House fairly well.  And even though there was often some wrangling, Republicans almost always gave Obama most of what he wanted when it came to budget deals and other critical pieces of legislation.

Sadly, the next two years are going to be much different.  It will be the political equivalent of trench warfare, and the carnage is going to be off the charts.

Top Democrats in the House are already threatening to hit the Trump administration with a wave of subpoenas, and Trump is warning that if that happens he will adopt a “war posture”.  Throughout his career, Trump’s philosophy has always been that if somebody hits him he is going to hit them back even harder.

I want you to imagine the most graphic battle scene that you have ever watched on television, because that is what the coming years will be like.  There will be an all-out attempt to take down Trump and everyone around him, and Trump will respond by going after everyone that he perceives to be an enemy.  In the end, a lot of politicians are not going to make it, and our system of governance will be badly damaged.

And the truth is that we aren’t going to have to wait long for things to erupt.  According to the Baltimore Sun, “political war” has already erupted…

Washington plunged into political war on Wednesday in the wake of a split decision by voters in the midterm elections, with President Donald Trump ousting his attorney general and threatening to retaliate against Democrats if they launch investigations into his personal conduct and possible corruption in the administration.

The rapid shift to battle stations signaled the start of what is likely to be two years of unremitting political combat as Trump positions himself for reelection. For the first time, Trump will be forced to navigate divided government as Democrats who won the House pledge to be a check on his power and face pressure from their liberal base to block him at every turn.

The left has been holding back for months so that they would not alienate any potential voters, but now that the midterm elections are over they are free to start causing chaos again.

If you do not believe that we are headed for great political conflict, I would like for you to consider what has already happened within the past 24 hours…

-Major progressive groups such as MoveOn.Org announced that they are organizing “response events” in 900 U.S. cities on Thursday to protest the firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

-The White House pulled CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials.

-DC Antifa published the home addresses of Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and other prominent conservatives.

-A mob showed up outside Tucker Carlson’s home and warned him that they “know where you sleep at night” and ordered him to “leave town”.

As I have warned so many times, hatred and anger are growing to unprecedented levels in America.

Many had been hoping that the midterm elections would resolve much of the political tension in this country, but instead it looks like things are going to continue escalating quickly.

And it isn’t going to take very much at all to unleash major civil unrest.  The left already hates Trump more than any other president in American history, and one really bad move could set off an explosion of anger unlike anything we have ever seen before.

My friends, these are dark times, and I have a feeling that they are about to get a whole lot darker.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

The Last Days Warrior Summit is the premier online event of 2018 for Christians, Conservatives and Patriots.  It is a premium members-only international event that will empower and equip you with the knowledge and tools that you need as global events begin to escalate dramatically.  The speaker list includes Michael Snyder, Mike Adams, Dave Daubenmire, Ray Gano, Dr. Daniel Daves, Gary Kah, Justus Knight, Doug Krieger, Lyn Leahz, Laura Maxwell and many more. Full summit access will begin on October 25th, and if you would like to register for this unprecedented event you can do so right here.

 

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