September 2015

The Dow Has Already Fallen Nearly 900 Points From The Peak Of The Market

Financial Crisis Stocks - Public DomainIn an eerie repeat of what we witnessed in 2008, U.S. stocks are steadily sliding throughout the summer as we head toward the month of September.  From August 1st, 2008 to September 1st, 2008 the Dow fell by nearly 700 points.  And of course we all remember what happened the following month.  Right now, we are watching a similar thing happen.  The Dow has plummeted nearly 700 points since July 16th, and it is down nearly 900 points from the peak of the market back in May.  At this point the Dow has now fallen for six days in a row and eleven of the last thirteen.  Of course most of the talking heads on television are still insisting that everything is going to be just fine and that a repeat of 2008 is not possible.  So what do you think?  Should we trust them?

Personally, I find that I put a lot more faith in cold, hard numbers than in what the talking heads on television have to say.  And at this moment, the cold, hard numbers are telling us that another financial crisis in imminent.

This is one of the reasons why I am such a fan of Zero Hedge.  Nobody stays on top of the hard financial numbers like Zero Hedge does.  And according to Zero Hedge, market internals are absolutely screaming that a U.S. stock market crash is right around the corner…

In early 2007, market internals began to weaken dramatically. Talking heads and asset gatherers said fears were overblown, risk was contained, Fed has it under control, stay the course. Six months later, the equity markets began to collapse and then accelerated lower. Today, in an eery case of deja vu all over again, it has been six months now since US equity market internals began to decouple from the manipulated index levels that manufacture wealth and happiness across America… what would you do?

Here is the chart that immediately followed that paragraph.  As you can see, we are repeating the exact same pattern that we witnessed back during the last financial crisis…

Internals - Zero Hedge chart

Meanwhile, the second largest stock market in the world is already crashing.  The Chinese have spent approximately 1.3 trillion dollars propping up stocks in China, but they just continue to fall.  They were down again on Wednesday night, and nobody is quite sure when the carnage is going to end.

And remember, Chinese stocks started to crash before U.S. stocks did in 2008 as well.

Another eerie similarity to 2008 is the behavior of oil.  In the summer of 2008, the price of oil crashed hard, and then a stock crash followed a couple of months later.

Well, guess what?

The price of oil is crashing hard once again.  The following comes from CNBC…

Oil set multi-month lows on Thursday as investors and traders sought clues about the market’s next bottom after a large drop in U.S. crude inventories failed to boost prices.

A bigger-than-expected build in U.S. gasoline stockpiles last week proved more important to investors than crude storage numbers that came in three times below forecast on Wednesday.

U.S. crude was down 50 cents at $44.65 a barrel at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT), after touching a 4½ month bottom at $44.20.

Why can’t more people see the signs?

They are so obvious.

We are also getting indications that the real economy is starting to be affected by all of this chaos.  The mainstream media has been very quiet about this, but the number of job cuts just hit a four year high…

Challenger, Gray & Christmas has released its monthly job cuts for July, and it is ugly. The 105,696 job cuts was the highest number since 2011. To put this in perspective, the July job cuts total is a whopping 136% higher than the 44,842 job cuts reported in June, as well as 125% higher than the in same report a year ago.

The July report showed that the last time more than 100,000 job cuts were announced was back in September 2011, when there were some 115,730 layoffs.

Another bad trend is that July’s surge now brings the year-to-date job cuts up to a total of 393,368. That is 34% higher than the run rate for the same period in 2014.

If alarm bells are going off in your head right now, that is good, because they should be.

A 34 percent increase in job cuts is not a good thing.

Of course it would probably help if the Obama administration was not bringing in far more immigrant workers than the limits that have been officially set by Congress.  Just check out these numbers…

In written responses to the Senate Judiciary Immigration and the National Interest Subcommittee Republicans obtained by Breitbart News, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reveal that the Obama administration has been approving work authorizations for immigrants beyond admission limits and for some categories of immigrants that Congress never intended to work in the U.S.

Beyond those limits each year, these new and renewed work permit approvals amounted to about 1.23 million in fiscal year 2009, 1.08 million in FY 2010, 970,277 in FY 2011, 1.24 million in FY 2012, 1.68 million in FY 2013 and 1.24 million in FY 2014.

Also, this is the first time that imports and exports have both been declining on a year over year basis since the last recession.  Just check out this chart and this chart.

When imports and exports are both falling, that means that economic activity is slowing down.  And we are seeing a similar thing happen all over the planet.  At this point, global trade has fallen by a total of about 2 percent over the past six months.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Just like in the summer of 2008, global economic activity is diminishing and things in the financial world are lining up in textbook fashion for a major crisis.

But for those that are not convinced by now, there is not that much more that I can do.  I could keep throwing out numbers and charts and graphs, but if people refuse to see the truth they simply will not see it.

Less than a month from now, we will officially be in the danger zone.

September is coming, and I truly hope that you are already prepared for it.

Commodities Collapsed Just Before The Last Stock Market Crash – So Guess What Is Happening Right Now?

Grid Stock Exchange Economy Finance - Public DomainIf we were going to see a stock market crash in the United States in the fall of 2015 (to use a hypothetical example), we would expect to see commodity prices begin to crash a few months ahead of time.  This is precisely what happened just before the great financial crisis of 2008, and we are watching the exact same thing happen again right now.  On Wednesday, commodities got absolutely pummeled, and at this point the Bloomberg Commodity Index is down a whopping 26 percent over the past twelve months.  When global economic activity slows down, demand for raw materials sinks and prices drop.  So important global commodities such as copper, iron ore, aluminum, zinc, nickel, lead, tin and lumber are all considered to be key “leading indicators” that can tell us a lot about where things are heading next.  And what they are telling us right now is that we are rapidly approaching a global economic meltdown.

If the global economy was actually healthy and expanding, the demand for commodities would be increasing and that would tend to drive prices up.  But instead, prices continue to go down.

The Bloomberg Commodity Index just hit a brand new 13-year low.  That means that global commodity prices are already lower than they were during the worst moments of the last financial crisis…

The commodities rout that’s pushed prices to a 13-year low pulled some of the biggest mining and energy companies below levels seen during the financial crisis.

The FTSE 350 Mining Index plunged as much as 4.9 percent to the lowest since 2009 on Wednesday, with BHP Billiton Ltd. and Anglo American Plc leading declines. Gold and copper are near the lowest in at least five years, while crude oil retreated to $50 a barrel.

“This commodity bear market is like a train wreck in slow motion,” said Andy Pfaff, the chief investment officer for commodities at MitonOptimal in Cape Town. “It has a lot of momentum and doesn’t come to a sudden stop.”

Commodity prices have not been this low since April 2002.  According to Bloomberg, some of the commodities being hit the hardest include soybean oil, copper, zinc and gasoline.  And this commodity crash is already having a dramatic impact on some of the biggest commodity-producing nations on the globe.  Just consider what Gerald Celente recently told Eric King…

We now see that the Australian dollar is at a six-year low against the U.S. dollar. What are Australia’s biggest exports? How about iron-ore and other metals.

If we look at Canada, their currency is also now at a six-year low vs the U.S. dollar. Well, Canada is a big oil exporter, particularly some tar sands oil, which is expensive to produce.

We also now have the Brazilian real at a 10-year low vs the U.S. dollar. Why? Because it’s a natural resource rich country and they don’t have a strong market to sell their natural resources to.

Meanwhile, the Indian rupee is at a 17-year low vs the U.S. dollar. This is because manufacturing is slowing down and there is less development. If the Americans aren’t buying, the Indians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese — they’re not making things.

All of this is so, so similar to what we experienced in the run up to the financial crisis of 2008.  Just a couple of days ago, I talked about how the U.S. dollar got really strong just prior to the last stock market crash.  The same patterns keep playing out over and over, and yet most in the mainstream media refuse to see what is happening.

Something else that happened just a few months before the last stock market crash was a collapse of the junk bond market.

Guess what?

That is starting to happen again too.  Just check out this chart.

I know that I must sound like a broken record.  But I think that it is extremely important to document these things.  When the next financial collapse takes place, virtually everyone in the mainstream media will be talking about what a “surprise” it is.

But for those that have been paying attention, it won’t be much of a “surprise” at all.

When the stock market does crash, how far might it fall?

During a recent appearance on CNBC, Marc Faber suggested that it could decline by up to 40 percent…

The U.S. stock market could “easily” drop 20 percent to 40 percent, closely followed contrarian Marc Faber said Wednesday—citing a host of factors including the growing list of companies trading below their 200-day moving average.

In recent days, “there were [also] more declining than advancing stocks, and the list of 12-month new lows was very high on Friday,” the publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“It shows you a lot of stocks are already declining.”

Others, including myself, believe that what we are going to experience is going to be even worse than that.

We live in such a fast-paced world, and most of us don’t have the patience to wait for long-term trends to play out.

If the stock market is not crashing today, to most people that means that everything must be fine.

But once it has crashed, everyone is going to be complaining that they weren’t warned in advance about what was coming and everyone will be complaining that nobody ever fixed the things that caused the exact same problems the last time around.

Personally, I am trying very hard to make sure that nobody can accuse me of not sounding the alarm about the storm that is on the horizon.

The world has never been in more debt, our “too big to fail” banks have never been more reckless, and global financial markets have never been more primed for a collapse.

Amazingly, there are still a lot of “experts” out there that insist that everything is going to be okay somehow.

Of course many of those exact same “experts” were telling us the same thing just before the stock market crashed in 2008 too.

A great financial shaking has already begun around the world, and it will hit U.S. financial markets very soon.

I hope that you are getting ready while you still can.

Lindsey Williams, Martin Armstrong And Alex Jones All Warn About What Is Coming In The Fall Of 2015

Warnings - Public DomainNot since the financial crash of 2008 have so many prominent people issued such urgent warnings about a specific time period.  Almost daily now, really big names are coming out with chilling predictions about what they believe is going to happen during the second half of 2015.  But it isn’t just that these people have a “bad feeling” about things.  The truth is that we are witnessing a confluence of circumstances and events in the second half of this year that is unprecedented.  This is something that I covered in a previous article that went mega-viral all over the Internet entitled “7 Key Events That Are Going To Happen By The End Of September“.  Personally, I have never been more concerned about any period of time than I am about the second half of 2015.  And as you will see below, I am definitely not alone.

Just a few days ago, I received an email that contained a chilling message from Lindsey Williams.  You can view the same message that came to my email right here.  According to Lindsey Williams, the elite insider that he is in contact with told him that there will be a global financial collapse between September and December of this year…

WARNING!

From Lindsey Williams: I just received an email from my Elite friend.

My Elite friend indicated that they have a World Wide Financial Collapse scheduled between September and the end of December 2015

You may have just THREE (3) months to prepare!

I have a ton of respect for Lindsey Williams, and I would listen to what he has to say very carefully.  Back in 2008, an elite insider told him that the price of oil would drop from $140 a barrel to $40 a barrel, and it happened.  This time around, Williams has been telling us throughout 2013 and 2014 that a global financial collapse was not going to happen during those years, and he was right about that.

But now he is sounding the alarm that one is going to come by the end of this calendar year.

Martin Armstrong is someone else that has been sounding the alarm about the second half of this year.

In fact, Armstrong says that he has “warned that the Big Bang was coming 2015.75” since 1985.

In the past, I have written entire articles about economic cycle theories and what they indicate is coming in our future.

Armstrong has developed one of his own, and he calls it the Economic Confidence Model.  According to the ECM, the “sovereign debt Big Bang” is scheduled to happen by the end of 2015.  And it turns out that the time period that Armstrong has been pointing to lines up with a whole bunch of other significant events as well…

There are many aspects that are lining up with the turn in the ECM (Economic Confidence Model) from the Blood Moon and the Jewish Year for forgiving the debts, to France imposing restrictions on cash in September, and even in Germany the laws that protected about half a million people so-called dachas there in East Germany expire. To date, a law protecting the tenant against dismissal by the municipality will also expire October 3, 2015. Everywhere we look, there are changes coming to a head, right down to the U.S. Federal budget with 2015.75.

In case you are tempted to dismiss this as nonsense, Armstrong has pointed out that his ECM has been accurate “to the day” in the past…

Of course the 1987 crash bottomed to the day with the ECM confirming that was the low. The same took place in 1994 where the U.S. share market bottomed right to the day, once again confirming this was an important low.

So will the ECM be right again this time?

Only time will tell, but it should be noted that the global bond market is already starting to crash.  If Armstrong ultimately turns out to be correct, we could be on the verge of a major turning point…

This next turning point should be the peak in the concentration of capital and confidence in government. From there on out, 2015.75 should mark the change in trend where people will start to disbelieve government on a grand scale. The debt markets that peak precisely with the target are going to get the worst of it.

Other financial experts are issuing similar warnings, even if they aren’t being quite as specific.

For example, just consider what Jim Rogers had to say recently…

I suspect in the next year or two we will see some kind of major, major problems in the world financial markets.

I would suspect when we have this correction, it’s going to cause central banks to panic. There’s going to come a time when there is not much the central banks can do when they have lost all credibility. When governments have lost all credibility. They will print and spend and borrow, but there comes a time when people are just going to say We don’t want to play this game anymore. And at that point, the world has serious, serious problems because there’s nothing to rescue us.

Perhaps the most sobering warning of all that I have come across in recent days is from Alex Jones.

In the video posted below, he explains that he recently received “two different calls” from “extremely prominent wealthy people” warning him about what is coming by the end of this year and asking him why he isn’t leaving the United States “before October”.

In other words, these individuals believe that something really big is going to happen by the end of September.  This dovetails perfectly with what I have already been warning about.

In this video, Alex also explains that large numbers of insiders are now quietly leaving the country.  I have never seen him quite like this.  I think that so many of us are just in shock that the things that we have been warning about for so long are now actually happening.  Watch this video for yourself and see what you think…

In the financial markets, we are also seeing signals that many people believe that big trouble is right around the corner.  For instance, according to Dana Lyons we haven’t seen bets that the VIX will rise at this level since just before the financial crash of 2008…

As most observers are aware, the VIX tends to rise as the stock market declines. Thus a rising VIX is associated with bad markets. The interesting thing about present conditions in VIX options is that the Put/Call Ratio (using a 21-day average) is at the lowest level since the summer of 2008. That means that there are more bets on a rising VIX versus bets on a falling VIX than we have seen in 7 years. And again, a rising VIX is associated with bad markets.

In other words, investors are betting a tremendous amount of money that we are going to see a rise in volatility in the financial markets in the months ahead.  And as I have explained so many times before, during times of high volatility markets tend to go down very rapidly.  So these bets will pay off very handsomely if there is a financial crash this fall.

Meanwhile, the manager of one of the largest bond funds in the UK is warning that a “systemic event” could soon hit global financial markets and that it is wise to have some “physical cash” at home just in case there is some sort of major emergency.  The following comes from Zero Hedge…

The manager of one of Britain’s biggest bond funds has urged investors to keep cash under the mattress.

Ian Spreadbury, who invests more than £4bn of investors’ money across a handful of bond funds for Fidelity, including the flagship Moneybuilder Income fund, is concerned that a “systemic event” could rock markets, possibly similar in magnitude to the financial crisis of 2008, which began in Britain with a run on Northern Rock.

“Systemic risk is in the system and as an investor you have to be aware of that,” he told Telegraph Money.

The best strategy to deal with this, he said, was for investors to spread their money widely into different assets, including gold and silver, as well as cash in savings accounts. But he went further, suggesting it was wise to hold some “physical cash”, an unusual suggestion from a mainstream fund manager.

This sounds like what I have been saying for years.  I am a big believer in not having all of your financial eggs in one basket, and I do believe that it is wise to have at least some emergency cash at home.

But to hear it from a member of Britain’s financial elite is definitely unusual to say the least.

Sadly, just like last time, most people are not listening to the warnings.  Back in the summer of 2008, my wife and I went up to visit her parents.  I sat on their sofa and told them that a great financial collapse was about to unfold and that it would shake the entire world.  Of course just a few months later that is exactly what happened.

Now we are on the verge of an even greater financial collapse, and still I find that there are a lot of people out there that are doubters.  Most of these doubters have an immense amount of faith in the system, and they are confident that this debt-fueled bubble of false prosperity that we are currently enjoying can somehow last indefinitely.

I truly wish that the hopeless optimists were right.

I truly wish that I could live out my days in peace and quiet in a world that was safe and stable.

Unfortunately for all of us, things are about to change in a major way.  When it starts happening, don’t forget that there have been people that have been warning you that this would happen all along.

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