Stock Market Crash 2018

Remember This Friday The 13th – Americans Are More Optimistic About The Stock Market Than They Have Ever Been Before

Happy days are here again for the U.S. economy – at least temporarily.  On Friday, U.S. stocks hit another brand new record high.  It seems like we are saying that almost every day lately, and most investors are absolutely thrilled by this seemingly endless surge.  Global stocks are surging too – today world stocks hit a new record high for the 4th consecutive day in a row.  But of course it isn’t just stock prices that are rising.  As the week ended, pretty much everything was up, and we also got some good news about consumer sentiment.  According to the new University of Michigan survey that was just released, U.S. consumers are the most optimistic about the economy that they have been since 2004…

The consumer sentiment index, a survey of consumers by The University of Michigan, rose to 101.1 in October, far ahead of the 95 economists polled by Reuters anticipated.

“Consumer sentiment surged in early October, reaching its highest level since the start of 2004,” Richard Curtin, chief economist for the Surveys of Consumers, said in a statement.

And according to that same survey, we have never been more confident that the stock market will continue to go up than we are right now…

Americans have never been more confident that that stock market will rally further in the next 12 months…

Of course it kind of makes sense why U.S. consumers would be feeling so good about the markets.  After all, stocks have only seemed to go up and up and up since the end of the last financial crisis.

But as I have written about so frequently in recent months, our financial markets are even more primed for a crash than they were in 2008, and we have received warning after warning that stock valuations are ridiculously inflated and must come crashing down at some point.

Plus, the “real economy” continues to send us some very troubling signals.  The U.S. economy lost jobs last month for the first time in seven years, and we just learned that General Motors is laying off more workers…

Starting in mid-November and going through the rest of the year, General Motors will close its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant – its only remaining factory in its hometown – and lay off about 1,500 workers, “people familiar with the plan” told the Wall Street Journal. When the plant does resume production, output will be cut by 20%, and 200 people will be out of a job.

Back in 1999, the plant produced over 200,000 Cadillacs and Buicks a year. This year, it might barely produce 80,000 vehicles.

The truth is that we are in the terminal phase of the greatest debt bubble in human history, and all over the planet prominent names in the financial world are warning about what is just around the corner.  For example, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble is deeply concerned about what he is seeing…

Outgoing German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has warned that spiraling levels of global debt and liquidity present a major risk to the world economy.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Schäuble said there was a danger of “new bubbles” forming due to the trillions of dollars that central banks have pumped into markets.

He also warned of risks to stability in the eurozone, particularly those posed by bank balance sheets burdened by the post-crisis legacy of non-performing loans.

And James Rickards is completely convinced “that a financial crisis is certainly coming”…

The bottom line is that a financial crisis is certainly coming. In my latest book, The Road to Ruin, I use 2018 as a target date primarily because the two prior systemic crises, 1998 and 2008, were 10 years apart. I extended the timeline 10 years into the future from the 2008 crisis to maintain the 10-year tempo, and this is how I arrived at 2018.

Yet I make the point in the book that the exact date is unimportant. What is most important is that the crisis is coming and the time to prepare is now. It could happen in 2018, 2019, or it could happen tomorrow. The conditions for collapse are all in place.

It’s simply a matter of the right catalyst and array of factors in the critical state. Likely triggers could include a major bank failure, a failure to deliver physical gold, a war, a natural disaster, a cyber–financial attack, and many other events.

If you look at how stock prices have behaved so far this year, it looks suspiciously just like the bubble that formed in 1987 just before the market crashed.

The conditions for an absolutely historic stock market crash already exist, and they have existed for quite some time.  None of our long-term problems have been solved, and with each passing day this colossal financial bubble just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I definitely concur with James Rickards.  A major financial crisis “is certainly coming”, and because of all the irrational optimism that we are witnessing at the moment most Americans will be completely and utterly blindsided by what is ahead.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Our Disneyland Economy

Disneyland is known as a place “where dreams come true” and where every story always has a happy ending.  But there is going to be no happy ending for the U.S. economy.  Wishful thinking has resulted in one of the greatest stock market rallies in history in recent months, but like all childhood fantasies, it won’t last.  The real economy continues to deteriorate, and we can see this even right outside of the gates of Disneyland.  Every night growing numbers of homeless people sleep on the pavement just steps away from “the happiest place on Earth”.  It can be fun to “play make believe” for a while, but eventually reality always catches up with us.

Without a doubt, the stock market has been on a tremendous run.  Since Donald Trump’s stunning election victory in November, the market has been setting record high after record high, and it is now up a total of 17 percent…

The Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded its 23rd all time high of 2017 yesterday closing at 21,532.  There have been a total of 120 days where the markets have closed since President Trump’s inauguration on January 20th.  The ‘DOW’ has closed at all time highs 23 of those days for nearly 20% or one-fifth of the days the market has been open.  The market is up 9% since the inauguration. 

Since the election on November 8th the DOW has closed at record highs an amazing 40 times!   Nearly one-fourth or 24% of the 168 days the markets have closed have been record highs since the November 8th election.  The market is up 17% since the election!

If this surge was supported by hard economic data, that would be something to greatly celebrate, but that has not been the case at all.

Instead, stock prices have become completely disconnected from economic reality, and now we are facing one of the greatest stock bubbles of all time.  As Graham Summers has pointed out, stocks are now trading at price to sales ratios that we haven’t seen since the very height of the dotcom bubble…

Earnings, cash flow, and book value are all financial data points that can be massaged via a variety of gimmicks. As a result of this, valuing stocks based on Price to Earnings, Price to Cash Flow, and Price to Book Value can often lead to inaccurate valuations.

Sales on the other hand are all but impossible to gimmick. Either money came in the door, or it didn’t And, if a company is caught faking its sales numbers, someone is going to jail.

So the fact that stocks are now trading at a P/S ratio that matches the Tech Bubble (the single largest stock bubble in history) tells us that we’re truly trading at astronomical levels: levels associated with staggering levels of excess.

There is no possible way that this is sustainable, and just like before the 2008 crisis a whole host of experts are warning that disaster is imminent.  One of them is John Mauldin…

Looking with fresh eyes at the economic numbers and central bankers’ statements convinced me that we will soon be in deep trouble. I now feel that it’s highly likely we will face a major financial crisis, if not later this year, then by the end of 2018 at the latest. Just a few months ago, I thought we could avoid a crisis and muddle through. Now I think we’re past that point. The key decision-makers have (1) done nothing, (2) done the wrong thing, or (3) done the right thing too late.

Having realized this, I’m adjusting my research efforts. I believe a major crisis is coming. The questions now are, how severe will it be, and how will we get through it?

And even though the stock market has been surging deeper and deeper into bubble territory in recent months, the middle class has continued to shrink and poverty has continued to grow all over the country.  In fact, because so many homeless people have been sleeping at bus shelters across from Disneyland lately authorities decided to completely remove the benches that they had been sleeping on…

The vanishing benches were Anaheim’s response to complaints about the homeless population around Disneyland. Public work crews removed 20 benches from bus shelters after callers alerted City Hall to reports of vagrants drinking, defecating or smoking pot in the neighborhood near the amusement park’s entrance, officials said.

The situation is part of a larger struggle by Orange County to deal with a rising homeless population. A survey last year placed the number of those without shelter at 15,300 people, compared with 12,700 two years earlier.

But simply removing benches will not make the problem go away.

Homelessness has been growing so rapidly in Los Angeles that the the L.A. City Council actually asked Governor Jerry Brown to formally declare a state of emergency.

And in New York City, street homelessness is up 39 percent over the past year.

This is where the real economy is heading, but a rising stock market makes for much happier headlines.

Many major cities around the nation are passing laws to essentially make it illegal to be homeless.  Forcing homeless people to go somewhere else may mask the problem for a while, but it certainly doesn’t do anything to solve it.  In my new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters”, I talk about how real love is not just about loving those that are just like us.  Rather, real love is about caring for people no matter what they look like and no matter what they are going through.

Unfortunately, the economic suffering that we are seeing right now is just the beginning.

Just like in 2008, the major financial crisis that is coming is going to greatly accelerate our economic problems.  And just like last time, millions of people are going to lose their jobs, and millions of people are going to lose their homes.

Homelessness is already worse in many parts of the nation that it was during the depths of the last recession, and what we are going to see during the next economic downturn is going to be absolutely unprecedented.

So don’t look down on those that need a helping hand, because in the not too distant future you may find yourself needing some help.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Janet Yellen Says A New Financial Crisis Probably Won’t Happen ‘In Our Lifetimes’ But The BIS Says One Could Soon Hit ‘With A Vengeance’

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is quite convinced that the United States will not experience another financial crisis for a very long time to come.  In fact, she is publicly saying that she does not believe that another one will happen “in our lifetimes”.  But there are other central bankers that see things very differently.  In fact, a new report that was just released by the Bank for International Settlements is warning that a new financial crisis could soon strike “with a vengeance”.  So who is right?

It would be nice if it turned out that Yellen was right.  Nobody should want to see a repeat of what happened in 2008, and Yellen seems extremely confident that she will never see another crisis of that magnitude…

“Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far but I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be,” Yellen said at an event in London.

Even though the U.S. national debt has roughly doubled since the start of the last financial crisis, and even though corporate debt has roughly doubled since then as well, and even though U.S. consumers are more than 12 trillion dollars in debt, and even though the top 25 U.S. banks have 222 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives, Yellen believes that our financial system “is much safer and much sounder” than it was in 2008…

“I think the system is much safer and much sounder,” she said. “We are doing a lot more to try to look for financial stability risks that may not be immediately apparent but to look in corners of the financial system that are not subject to regulation, outside those areas in order to try to detect threats to financial stability that may be emerging.”

I have a feeling that these words may come back to haunt her, and the fact that she has more power over the performance of the U.S. economy than anyone else does is more than just a little bit frightening.

The truth is that signs of a major new economic downturn are emerging all around us, and many are warning that the next great financial crisis is just around the corner.  For example, just consider what a new report from the Bank for International Settlements is saying.  The Bank for International Settlements is widely regarded as “the central bank of central banks”, and this new report is warning that we could be heading for “a financial boom gone wrong”…

A new financial crisis is brewing in the emerging economies and it could hit “with a vengeance”, an influential group of central bankers has warned.

Emerging markets such as China are showing the same signs that their economies are overheating as the US and the UK demonstrated before the financial crisis of 2007-08, according to the annual report of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Claudio Borio, the head of the BIS monetary and economic department, said a new recession could come “with a vengeance” and “the end may come to resemble more closely a financial boom gone wrong”.

And of course many of the most trusted analysts in the financial world agree with the BIS.  In fact, Dr. Doom Marc Faber is predicting that stocks could soon decline “by 40 percent or more”…

If the man often hailed as the original “Dr. Doom” is right, the stock market could see another “lurch” higher — at which point investors may want to cash out quickly and run for cover.

Marc Faber, the editor of “The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report’ and a perennial bear, isn’t backing down from his latest dire prediction that would send stocks plummeting by 40 percent or more.

A drop of that size could take the S&P 500 Index down from Friday’s closing price of 2,438 to 1,463.

In the end, we shall see who is right and who is wrong.

And let us certainly hope that another crisis like the one we saw in 2008 does not happen any time soon, because tens of millions of Americans are completely unprepared for one.

According to a brand new survey that was just released, almost half the country currently spends as much or more money than they make each month…

Nearly half of Americans say their expenses are equal to or greater than their income, according to a new study from the Center for Financial Services Innovation. And for those 18 to 25 the percentage is over half, up to 54%.

“Half of America has no financial cushion,” says Jennifer Tescher, president and CEO of CFSI, which released the study. “They are living really close to the edge.”

And another recent survey discovered that 69 percent of all Americans do not have an adequate emergency fund.

With so many of us living on the edge, our society is extremely vulnerable to a major financial shock.  And when one finally does happen, a lot of people are going to get knocked out of the ranks of the middle class very rapidly.

Even though things seem relatively stable for the moment, poverty is on the rise all over the country.  For example, according to the Daily Mail the number of homeless people in Los Angeles has risen by 23 percent over the last year…

According to a new count released in May, the number of homeless people in the Los Angeles area jumped by 23 percent in the last year to reach nearly 58,000. Of those, some 5,000 are veterans, the highest number of homeless veterans of any city in the country and a near 60 percent increase over the previous year.

And we are seeing similar things in cities all over the nation.

The United States is in the midst of a long-term economic decline that goes back for decades.  Our economic infrastructure has been gutted, our middle class is now a minority of the population, and we have piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world in a desperate attempt to maintain a standard of living that we have not earned.

Hopefully Janet Yellen is right and hopefully the next major financial crisis will be put off for as long as possible.

But whether the next financial crisis comes quickly or not, the truth is that the U.S. economy is going to continue to decline if we continue to make the same kinds of incredibly poor decisions that we have been making for a very long time.

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