Stock Market

58 Facts About The U.S. Economy From 2015 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

December 23, 2015December 23, 2015 by Michael

The world didn’t completely fall apart in 2015, but it is undeniable that an immense amount of damage was done to the U.S. economy. This year the middle class continued to deteriorate, more Americans than ever found themselves living in poverty, and the debt bubble that we are living in expanded to absolutely ridiculous proportions. Toward the end of the year, a new global financial crisis erupted, and it threatens to completely spiral out of control as we enter 2016. Over the past six months, I have been repeatedly stressing to my readers that so many of the exact same patterns that immediately preceded the financial crisis of 2008 are happening once again, and trillions of dollars of stock market wealth has already been wiped out globally. Some of the largest economies on the entire planet such as Brazil and Canada have already plunged into deep recessions, and just about every leading indicator that you can think of is screaming that the U.S. is heading into one. So don’t be fooled by all the happy talk coming from Barack Obama and the mainstream media. When you look at the cold, hard numbers, they tell a completely different story. The following are 58 facts about the U.S. economy from 2015 that are almost too crazy to believe…

#1 These days, most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. At this point 62 percent of all Americans have less than 1,000 dollars in their savings accounts, and 21 percent of all Americans do not have a savings account at all.

#2 The lack of saving is especially dramatic when you look at Americans under the age of 55. Incredibly, fewer than 10 percent of all Millennials and only about 16 percent of those that belong to Generation X have 10,000 dollars or more saved up.

#3 It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make each month.

#4 For the first time ever, middle class Americans now make up a minority of the population. But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.

#5 According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle class households declined by 4 percent from 2000 to 2014.

#6 The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.

#7 In 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income. Today, that number has plummeted to just 43 percent.

#8 There are still 900,000 fewer middle class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but our population has gotten significantly larger since that time.

#9 According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#10 For the poorest 20 percent of all Americans, median household wealth declined from negative 905 dollars in 2000 to negative 6,029 dollars in 2011.

#11 A recent nationwide survey discovered that 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that “the American Dream is dead”.

#12 Since hitting a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004, the rate of homeownership in the United States has been steadily declining every single year.

#13 At this point, the U.S. only ranks 19th in the world when it comes to median wealth per adult.

#14 Traditionally, entrepreneurship has been one of the primary engines that has fueled the growth of the middle class in the United States, but today the level of entrepreneurship in this country is sitting at an all-time low.

#15 For each of the past six years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened. Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.

#16 If you can believe it, the 20 wealthiest people in this country now have more money than the poorest 152 million Americans combined.

#17 The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.

#18 If you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket, that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of all Americans.

#19 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.

#20 An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.

#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.

#22 In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.

#23 According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.

#24 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.

#25 The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.

#26 According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.

#27 Police in New York City have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, and the homeless crisis there has gotten so bad that it is being described as an “epidemic”.

#28 If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.

#29 According to a Census Bureau report that was released a while back, 65 percent of all children in the U.S. are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.

#30 According to a report that was published by UNICEF, almost one-third of all children in this country “live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income”.

#31 When it comes to child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 “wealthy nations” that UNICEF looked at.

#32 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.

#33 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.

#34 There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.4 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.3 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

#35 According to a recent Pew survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.

#36 53 percent of all Americans do not even have a minimum three-day supply of nonperishable food and water at home.

#37 According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the U.S. government was actually using honest numbers the unemployment rate in this nation would be 22.9 percent.

#38 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, only about 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#39 The labor force participation rate for men has plunged to the lowest level ever recorded.

#40 Wholesale sales in the U.S. have fallen to the lowest level since the last recession.

#41 The inventory to sales ratio has risen to the highest level since the last recession. This means that there is a whole lot of unsold inventory that is just sitting around out there and not selling.

#42 The ISM manufacturing index has fallen for five months in a row.

#43 Orders for “core” durable goods have fallen for ten months in a row.

#44 Since March, the amount of stuff being shipped by truck, rail and air inside the United States has been falling every single month on a year over year basis.

#45 Wal-Mart is projecting that its earnings may fall by as much as 12 percent during the next fiscal year.

#46 The Business Roundtable’s forecast for business investment in 2016 has dropped to the lowest level that we have seen since the last recession.

#47 Corporate debt defaults have risen to the highest level that we have seen since the last recession. This is a huge problem because corporate debt in the U.S. has approximately doubled since just before the last financial crisis.

#48 Holiday sales have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

#49 The velocity of money in the United States has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. Not even during the depths of the last recession was it ever this low.

#50 Barack Obama promised that his program would result in a decline in health insurance premiums by as much as $2,500 per family, but in reality average family premiums have increased by a total of $4,865 since 2008.

#51 Today, the average U.S. household that has at least one credit card has approximately $15,950 in credit card debt.

#52 The number of auto loans that exceed 72 months has hit at an all-time high of 29.5 percent.

#53 According to Dr. Housing Bubble, there have been “nearly 8 million homes lost to foreclosure since the homeownership rate peaked in 2004”.

#54 One very disturbing study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either currently have medical bill problems or are paying off medical debt. And collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills from about 30 million of us each and every year.

#55 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has risen to a whopping 1.2 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, that total has more than doubled over the past decade.

#56 Right now, there are approximately 40 million Americans that are paying off student loan debt. For many of them, they will keep making payments on this debt until they are senior citizens.

#57 When you do the math, the federal government is stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day.

#58 An astounding 8.16 trillion dollars has already been added to the U.S. national debt while Barack Obama has been in the White House. That means that it is already guaranteed that we will add an average of more than a trillion dollars a year to the debt during his presidency, and we still have more than a year left to go.

What we have seen so far is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg. About six months ago, I stated that “our problems will only be just beginning as we enter 2016″, and I stand by that prediction.

We are in the midst of a long-term economic collapse that is beginning to accelerate once again. Our economic infrastructure has been gutted, our middle class is being destroyed, Wall Street has been transformed into the biggest casino in the history of the planet, and our reckless politicians have piled up the biggest mountain of debt the world has ever seen.

Anyone that believes that everything is “perfectly fine” and that we are going to come out of this “stronger than ever” is just being delusional. This generation was handed the keys to the finest economic machine of all time, and we wrecked it. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have culminated in a crisis that is now reaching a crescendo, and this nation is in for a shaking unlike anything that it has ever seen before.

So enjoy the rest of 2015 while you still can.

2016 is almost here, and it is going to be quite a year…

The Rate Hike Stock Market Crash Has Thrown Gasoline Onto An Already Raging Global Financial Inferno

December 20, 2015December 20, 2015 by Michael

If the stock market crash of last Thursday and Friday had all happened on one day, it would have been the 7th largest single day decline in U.S. history. On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 367 points after finishing down 253 points on Thursday. The overall decline of 620 points between the two days would have been the 7th largest single day stock market crash ever experienced in the United States if it had happened within just one trading day. If you will remember, this is precisely what I warned would happen if the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. But when news of the rate hike first came out on Wednesday, stocks initially jumped. This didn’t make any sense at all, and personally I was absolutely stunned that the markets had behaved so irrationally. But then we saw that on Thursday and Friday the markets did exactly what we thought they would do. The chief economist at Gluskin Sheff, David Rosenberg, is calling the brief rally on Wednesday “a head-fake of enormous proportions“, and analysts all over Wall Street are bracing for what could be another very challenging week ahead.

When the Federal Reserve decided to lift interest rates, they made a colossal error. You don’t raise interest rates when a global financial crisis has already started. That is absolutely suicidal. It is the kind of thing that you would do if you were trying to bring down the global financial system on purpose.

Surely the “experts” at the Federal Reserve can see what is happening. Junk bonds have already crashed, just like they did in 2008. The price of oil has crashed, just like it did in 2008. Commodity prices have crashed, just like they did in 2008. And more than half of all major global stock market indexes are already down at least 10 percent for the year so far.

You don’t raise interest rates in that kind of an environment.

You would have to be utterly insane to do so.

The Federal Reserve has thrown fuel onto a global financial inferno that is already raging, and things could spiral out of control very rapidly.

As far as this upcoming week is concerned, we have now entered “liquidation season”. Investors are going to be pulling their money out of poorly performing hedge funds before the end of the calendar year, and as CNBC has pointed out, more hedge funds have already failed in 2015 than at any point since the last financial crisis…

Liquidation season occurs when clients of poorly performing hedge funds ask for their money back. It tends to occur at the end of a quarter or year. In response, hedge funds must sell stocks in the open market to raise the money that needs to be returned to investors.

That means if a hedge fund performed poorly this year; it is probably flooded with liquidation requests right now. In fact, there have been more failed hedge funds this year than any time since 2008.

The dominoes are starting to fall. We have already seen funds run by Third Avenue Management, Stone Lion Capital Partners and Lucidus Capital Partners collapse. Amazingly, there are some people out there that are still attempting to claim that “nothing is happening” even in the midst of all of this chaos.

As they say, “denial” is not just a river in Egypt.

And this crisis is going to get even worse as we head into 2016. Egon von Greyerz, the founder of Matterhorn Asset Management, is convinced that we will soon see “one disaster after another”…

Greyerz predicts, “I think we will have one disaster after another, first in the junk bond market, then in emerging markets and, after that, the subprime markets. Subprime car loans and student loans I see as another massive problem area. It is going to be one thing after another that will unravel. Since 2008, when the world almost went under, we have printed or increased credit by 50% or by $70 trillion, and the world economy is still struggling to survive. I think the real change in confidence will come down when markets come down. . . . I think things will come down very quickly.”

And I think that he is right on target. The global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, and when one financial institution fails, it inevitably affects dozens of others. And the failures that we have already seen are already spreading a wave of fear and panic that may be difficult to stop. The following comes from Business Insider, and I think that it is a pretty good explanation of what we could see next…

Funds such as Third Avenue and Lucidus close, liquidating their portfolios.
Investors, spooked by the closures and the risk that they might not be able to get their money out of these funds, make a rush for the exits while they still can.
That creates even more selling pressure.
Funds sell the assets that are easiest to sell as they look to reduce risk, which pushes the selling pressure from the risky parts of the market to the higher-quality part of the market.
Things evolve from there.

If you have been waiting for the next financial crisis to arrive, you can stop, because it is already unfolding right in front of our eyes.

The only question is how bad it is going to become.

In the final analysis, I find myself agreeing quite a bit with Charles Hugh Smith, the author of “A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All“. He believes that the ridiculous monetary policies of the Federal Reserve have played a primary role in setting the stage for this new crisis, and that now this giant financial “Death Star” that they have created “is about to blow up”…

By slashing rates to zero, the Fed ruthlessly eliminating safe returns for savers, pension funds, insurers and the millions of people with 401K retirement nesteggs. In effect, the Fed-Farce has pushed everyone into risk assets–and then played another Dark Side mind-trick by masking the true dangers of these risky assets.

As oil-sector debt blows up, as junk bonds blow up, and emerging markets blow up, we are finally starting to see the real costs of going over to the Dark Side of endless credit expansion and throwing the gasoline of near-zero interest rates on the speculative fires of financialization.

The Fed’s hubris has led it to the Dark Side, and now its Death Star of impaired debt, phantom collateral, speculative frenzy and bogus mind-tricks is about to blow up.

Personally, instead of saying that it “is about to blow up”, I would have said that it is already blowing up.

We have already seen trillions upon trillions of dollars of wealth wiped out around the world.

Energy companies are failing, giant hedge funds are going under, and the 7th largest economy on the entire planet has already plunged into “an outright depression“.

Everyone that warned of financial disaster in the second half of 2015 has been proven right, but this is just the beginning. Now that the Federal Reserve has thrown gasoline onto the fire, our problems are only going to accelerate as we head into 2016.

So for the upcoming year, let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.

December 14th To 18th: A Week Of Reckoning For Global Stocks If The Fed Hikes Interest Rates?

December 13, 2015December 13, 2015 by Michael

Are we about to witness widespread panic in the global financial marketplace? This week is shaping up to be an absolutely critical week for global stocks. Coming into December, more than half of the 93 largest stock market indexes in the world were down more than 10 percent year to date, and last week stocks really started to slide all over the world. Here in the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down about 600 points over the past week or so, and at this point it is down more than 1000 points from the peak of the market. That brings us to this week, during which the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates for the very first time since the last financial crisis. If that happens, that could potentially be enough to accelerate this “slide” into a full-blown crash.

And just look at what is already happening. Trading for stocks in the Middle East has opened for the week, and we are already witnessing tremendous carnage…

Following Friday’s further freefall in crude oil prices, The Middle East is opening down notably. Abu Dhabi, Saudi, and Kuwait are lower; Israel is weak and UAE and Qatar are tumbling, but Dubai is worst for now. Dubai is down for the 6th day in a row (dropping over 3% – the most in a month) extending the opening losses to 2-year lows. The 11% drop in the last 6 days is the largest since the post-China-devaluation global stock collapse. Leading the losses are financial and property firms.

Things in Asia look very troubling as well. As I write this, the Japanese market has just opened, and the Nikkei is already down 508 points.

In recent days I have been explaining to my readers how everything is lining up in textbook fashion for another major market crash. In particular, the implosion of junk bonds is a major red flag. Late last week, Third Avenue Management shocked Wall Street by freezing withdrawals from a 788 million dollar credit mutual fund. The following comes from Bloomberg…

A day after a prominent Wall Street firm shocked investors by freezing withdrawals from a credit mutual fund, things only got nastier in the junk-bond market. Prices on the high-risk securities sank to levels not seen in six years and, to add to the growing sense of alarm, billionaire investor Carl Icahn said the selloff is only starting.

“The meltdown in High Yield is just beginning,” Icahn, who’s been betting against the high-yield market, wrote on his verified Twitter account Friday.

Icahn’s comments come as junk-bond investors, already stung by the worst losses since 2008, are the most nervous they’ve been in three years after Third Avenue Management took the rare step of freezing withdrawals from a $788 million credit mutual fund.

What Third Avenue Management just did was absolutely huge. Now investors that have money in any similar funds are going to be racing to get it out. We could be on the verge of a run on bond funds that is absolutely unprecedented. This is so obvious that even CNBC’s Jim Cramer is sounding the alarm…

Friday was a day where Cramer’s ears were burning with concern because of the troubles discovered with a high yield bond fund run by Third Avenue Management. It decided to bar investors from getting their money out of its Focused Credit Fund, because it could not meet demands to get cash back to them in an orderly way.

This was significant because when it tries to sell the bonds needed to satisfy these orders for redemptions, it could destroy the high yield bond market because there are no buyers anywhere near the amount that they want to sell.

“I cannot emphasize enough just how disconcerting this move is,” Cramer said.

I know that for the ordinary person on the street, all of this sounds very complicated.

But it basically comes down to this – anyone that has a lot of money invested in these bond funds is in danger of getting totally wiped out.

In a situation like this, it is those that are “first out the door” that come out as the winners. I like how Wolf Richter explained what we are currently facing…

It works like this: When an “open-end” bond fund starts losing money, investors begin to sell it. Fund managers first use all available cash to pay investors. When the cash is gone, they sell the most liquid securities that haven’t lost much money yet, such as Treasuries. When they’re gone, they sell the most liquid corporate paper. As they go down the line, they sell bonds that have already lost a lot of value. By now the smart money is betting against the fund, having figured out what’s happening. They’re shorting the very bonds these folks are trying to sell.

The longer this goes on, the more money investors lose and the more spooked they get. It turns into a run. And people who still have that fund in their retirement account are getting cleaned out.

Bond funds can be treacherous – especially if they hold dubious paper, which is never dubious until it suddenly is. And when they get in trouble, you want to be among the first out the door.

I would anticipate that we will see more junk bond carnage this week – especially if the Fed raises rates.

And as I have discussed previously, a stock crash almost always follows a junk bond crash. If the Fed does raise rates this week and stocks do start falling significantly, one key day to watch will be Friday. JPM’s head quant Marko Kolanovic has warned that “the largest option expiry in many years” will happen on that day…

This important event falls at a peculiar time—less than 48 hours before the largest option expiry in many years. There are $1.1 trillion of S&P 500 options expiring on Friday morning. $670Bn of these are puts, of which $215Bn are struck relatively close below the market level, between 1900 and 2050. Clients are net long these puts and will likely hold onto them through the event and until expiry. At the time of the Fed announcement, these put options will essentially look like a massive stop loss order under the market.

A perfect storm for stocks is brewing, and this week could potentially be one of the most chaotic that we have seen in a very long time.

But of course the Federal Reserve could decide to surprise us all by not raising rates, and that would change things substantially.

So what do you think will happen this week?

Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…

The Global Commodity Crash Tells Us That A Major Deflationary Financial Crisis Is Imminent

December 10, 2015December 10, 2015 by Michael

If we really are plunging into a deflationary global financial crisis, we would expect to see commodity prices crash hard. That happened just before the great stock market crash of 2008, and that is precisely what is happening once again right now. On Thursday, the Bloomberg Commodity Index closed at 79.1544. The last time that it closed this low was 16 years ago. Not even during the worst moments of the last recession did it ever get so low. Overall, the Bloomberg Commodity Index is down more than 28 percent over the past 12 months, and it has plummeted by more than half since mid-2011. As a result of this stunning commodity collapse, extremely large mining companies such as Anglo American are imploding, giant commodity trading firms such as Glencore and Trafigura are in full-blown crisis mode, and huge portions of the global financial system are in danger of utterly collapsing.

In recent days, I have been trying to stress that many of the exact same patterns that we witnessed just prior to the great stock market crash of 2008 are happening once again. This includes the staggering crash of commodity prices that we are currently witnessing, and even CNN acknowledges that there are parallels to what we experienced seven years ago…

The last time raw materials like copper and oil were this cheap, an economic depression loomed just around the corner.

It’s no secret that commodities in general have had a horrendous 2015. A nasty combination of overflowing supply and soft demand has wreaked havoc on the industry.

But prices for everything from crude oil to industrial metals like aluminum, steel, copper, platinum, and palladium have collapsed even further in recent days.

As I mentioned above, this crash in prices is hitting mining companies really hard. Just this week, the fifth largest mining company in the entire world announced a massive restructuring and will be laying off tens of thousands of workers…

In the latest example of just how bad things have gotten, Anglo American–the world’s fifth largest miner–just kitchen sink-ed it, announcing a sweeping restructuring, a massive round of layoffs, and a dividend cut. The company will reduce its assets by some 60% while headcount will be cut by a whopping 85,000 or, nearly two-thirds.

Overall, the U.S. has lost approximately 123,000 good paying jobs from the mining sector since the end of 2014. And if commodity prices stay low, this sector is going to continue to bleed good paying jobs.

Meanwhile, investors have been dumping the debt of any companies that have anything to do with commodities. This has significantly contributed to the emerging junk bond crisis that I discussed in my last article. As I write this, a high yield bond ETF known as JNK has fallen all the way down to 34.31, which is the lowest that it has been since the last recession. For much more on the junk bond implosion, I would encourage you to read an article that Wolf Richter just put out entitled “Bond King Gets Antsy as Junk Bonds, Which Lead Stocks, Spiral to Heck“.

So why are commodity prices falling so rapidly?

Many analysts are pointing to the economic slowdown in China as the primary reason. For years, the Chinese economy voraciously gobbled up commodities from sources all over the planet, but now things are changing. The Chinese economy is really, really slowing down, and some recently released numbers give us some clues as to the true extent of that slowdown…

-Chinese exports fell 6.8 percent in November on a year over year basis after being down 6.9 percent on a year over year basis in October.

-Chinese imports were down 8.7 percent in November on a year over year basis.

-Chinese manufacturing activity has been contracting for nine months in a row.

-Last week, the China Containerized Freight Index plummeted to 718.58 – the lowest level ever recorded.

And of course it isn’t just China. Goldman Sachs says that the seventh largest economy on the entire planet, Brazil, has plunged into a “depression“. And as I pointed out the other day, of the 93 largest stock market indexes in the entire world, an astonishing 47 of them (more than half) are down at least 10 percent year to date.

Even though stocks slid in the U.S. this week, the major indexes still seem somewhat stable. But this is a bit of an illusion. Yes, the biggest names on Wall Street are still flying high for the moment, but shares of a multitude of smaller and mid-size firms have been plummeting. At this point, nearly 70 percent of all U.S. stocks are already below their 200 day moving averages. This is yet another thing that we would expect to see just before the bottom falls out for stocks.

Everything that I have been writing about this week (see here and here) is perfectly consistent with all of my warnings from earlier this year.

We are plunging into a deflationary financial crisis in textbook fashion. And if the Federal Reserve actually does decide to go ahead with an interest rate hike next week that is just going to make things even worse.

But most people are not patient enough to watch a process play out. Most people that write about “the coming economic collapse” hype it up like it is going to be some sort of big Hollywood blockbuster that is going to happen over a week or a month and then be over. That is definitely not the way that I see things.

To me, “the economic collapse” is something that has been happening for decades, that is still in the process of happening right now, and that will continue to happen as we move forward into the future. The long-term trends that are ripping our economy to shreds continue to intensify, and our leaders are not doing anything to fix our underlying fundamental problems.

And the financial crisis that I warned would start during 2015 and accelerate in 2016 has already begun. More than half of all major global stock market indexes are down by at least 10 percent year to date, and some of them have plummeted by more than 30 or 40 percent. Trillions of dollars of wealth has been wiped out around the globe, and this is just the beginning.

All of the numbers tell us the same thing.

Big trouble is ahead.

My job is to inform you of these things. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.

Guess What Happened The Last Time Junk Bonds Started Crashing Like This? Hint: Think 2008

December 8, 2015December 8, 2015 by Michael

The extreme carnage that we are witnessing in the junk bond market right now is one of the clearest signals yet that a major U.S. stock market crash is imminent. For those that are not familiar with “junk bonds”, please don’t get put off by the name. They aren’t really “junk”. They simply have a higher risk and thus a higher return than other bonds of the same type. And yesterday, I explained why I watch them so closely. If stocks are going to crash, you would expect to see a junk bond crash first. This happened in 2008, and it is happening again right now. On Monday, a high yield bond ETF known as JNK crashed through the psychologically important 35.00 barrier for the very first time since the last financial crisis. On Tuesday, high yield bonds had their worst day in three months, and JNK plummeted all the way down to 34.44. When I saw this I was absolutely stunned. This is precisely the kind of junk bond crash that I have been anticipating that we would soon witness.

Normally, stocks and junk bonds track one another very closely, but just like before the 2008 crash, they have become decoupled in recent months. Anyone that even has an elementary understanding of the financial world knows that this cannot continue indefinitely. And when they start converging once again, the movement could be quite violent.

When I chose to use the word “carnage” to open this article, I was not exaggerating what is going on in the junk bond market one bit. On Tuesday evening, Jeffrey Gundlach used the exact same word to describe what is happening…

Jeffrey Gundlach, the widely followed investor who runs DoubleLine Capital, said on a webcast on Tuesday that the junk bond market has come under severe selling pressure ahead of the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting next week.

“We are looking at real carnage in the junk bond market,” Gundlach said. Gundlach also said it was too early to buy high-yield junk bonds and energy debt securities. “I don’t like things when they go down every single day.”

Sometimes a chart can be extremely helpful in understanding what is going on. The following chart was posted by Zero Hedge on Tuesday, and it shows that yields on the riskiest junk bonds are heading into the stratosphere…

And for those that are not familiar, it is important to note that when yields go up, bond prices go down. So the chart above is what a “crash” looks like.

Another “leading indicator” that I watch is the behavior of Dow Transports.

Dow Transports started crashing before the Dow Jones Industrial Average did back in August, and now it is happening again…

Dow Transports are in reverse. Down over 3% today, the biggest drop since the Black Monday collapse, Trannies are now below the lows of the Bullard bounce from October 2014 and down a shocking 16% in 2015. This would be the first four-quarters-in-a-row drop in Transports since 1994 and the worst year since 2008…

In addition, we are also seeing trouble signs erupt at major financial institutions just like we did during the run up to the 2008 crash. For example, I have been concerned about Morgan Stanley for quite a while, and on Tuesday we learned that they have just laid off more than a thousand workers…

Struggling Morgan Stanley slashed 1,200 jobs around the world in recent days, a person familiar with the matter told CNNMoney.

The cuts were broad-based and eliminated 25% of the positions within the fixed income and commodities businesses, the person said. Those divisions are grappling with tumbling trading revenue and shrinking fees.

Morgan Stanley also eliminated about 730 back-office jobs like human-resources and IT positions.

Virtually all of the things that we would expect to see just prior to a 2008-style stock market crash are happening right now.

If just two or three leading indicators were flashing red, we could have a really good debate about what they might mean.

But the fact that virtually all of the numbers are screaming a warning at us should mean that the debate is over. Anyone with an open mind should be able to very clearly see what is coming next.

Very quickly, let me give you just 10 signs that indicate that we are right on the precipice of a major recession and a very substantial financial downturn…

1. Global GDP growth has gone negative for the first time since 2009.

2. Corporate earnings growth has turned negative.

3. S&P 500 net profit margins are steeply declining. According to Tony Sagami, “since 1973, there has been only one 60 bps decline in S&P 500 net profit margin that didn’t lead to a recession.”

4. In October, U.S. imports of goods declined by 6.6 percent on a year over year basis.

5. In October, U.S. exports of goods declined by 10.4 percent on a year over year basis.

6. U.S. manufacturing is contracting at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last recession.

7. Corporate debt defaults have risen to the highest level that we have seen since the last recession.

8. Credit card numbers that were recently released show that holiday sales have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

9. The velocity of money in the United States has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.

10. Of the 93 largest stock market indexes in the entire world, 47 of them (slightly more than half) have already plunged at least 10 percent year to date.

Just like in 2008, other global financial markets are imploding ahead of a U.S. collapse.

On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down another 162 points, but we are still within 1000 points of the market peak that was set earlier this year. We are still in far better shape than most of the rest of the world, but that will soon change.

I can’t think of a single leading indicator that is telling us that everything is going to be okay. All of the numbers are pointing to major trouble ahead. So I hope that you are being smart and doing what you can to get prepared while there is still time.

Guess What Happened The Last Time The Price Of Oil Plunged Below 38 Dollars A Barrel?

December 7, 2015December 7, 2015 by Michael

On Monday, the price of U.S. oil dropped below 38 dollars a barrel for the first time in six years. The last time the price of oil was this low, the global financial system was melting down and the U.S. economy was experiencing the worst recession that it had seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As I write this article, the price of U.S. oil is sitting at $37.65. For months, I have been warning that the crash in the price of oil would be extremely deflationary and would have severe consequences for the global economy. Nations such as Japan, Canada, Brazil and Russia have already plunged into recession, and more than half of all major global stock market indexes are down at least 10 percent year to date. The first major global financial crisis since 2009 has begun, and things are only going to get worse as we head into 2016.

The global head of oil research at Societe Generale, Mike Wittner, says that his “head is spinning” after the stunning drop in the price of oil on Monday. Just like during the last financial crisis, we have broken the psychologically important 40 dollar barrier, and there are concerns that we could go much lower from here…

One analyst told CNBC that he believes that we could soon see the price of U.S. oil go all the way down to 32 dollars a barrel…

“We’re in a tug-of-war between a heavily shorted market and a glut of oil in the U.S. and globally, as Saudi Arabia continues to produce oil at elevated levels to maintain market share,” said Chris Jarvis at Caprock Risk Management, an energy markets consultancy in Frederick, Maryland.

“Couple this with a strengthening dollar as the market anticipates a U.S. rate hike this month, oil is heading lower with a near term target of $32 for WTI.”

Analysts at Goldman Sachs are even more pessimistic than that. According to Business Insider, they are saying that we could eventually see the price of oil go below 20 dollars a barrel…

At OPEC’s meeting on Friday, member countries decided to set its production level at 31.5 million barrels per day, and did not agree on what the new limit should be.

After OPEC’s meeting, commodity strategists at Goldman put out a note saying that oil prices could plunge another 50% in the coming months, as the oil market tries to rebalance the supply and demand situation.

That may sound really good to you, especially if you fill up your gas tank frequently. But the truth is that plunging oil prices are exceedingly bad for the U.S. economy as a whole. In recent years, the energy industry has been the primary engine for the creation of good jobs in this country, and now those firms are having to lay off people at a frightening pace. Not only that, CNBC’s Jim Cramer is warning that many of these firms may actually start going under if the price of oil doesn’t start going back up soon…

“This is not ‘longer and lower;’ this is ‘longer and much lower.’ There’s companies that are not going to be able to fund with futures; there’re companies that are not going to be able to get credit,” Cramer said on “Squawk on the Street.”

Cramer made his remarks after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries decided not to lower production on Friday.

“This was a devastating blow for the U.S. oil industry,” Cramer said.

On Monday, we witnessed another benchmark that we have not seen since the last financial crisis.

I watch a high yield bond ETF known as JNK very closely. On Monday, JNK broke below 35 for the first time since the financial crisis of 2008. Just like 40 dollar oil, this is a key psychological barrier.

So why is this important?

As I discussed last week, junk bonds crashed before stocks did in 2008, and now it is happening again. If form holds true, we should expect U.S. stocks to start tumbling significantly very shortly.

Meanwhile, another notable expert has come forward with a troubling forecast for the global economy in 2016. Just like Citigroup, Raoul Pal believes that there is a very significant chance that we will see a recession next year…

Former global macro fund manager Raoul Pal says there’s now a 65% chance of a global recession.

In July, Pal predicted that the Institute of Supply Management’s (ISM) manufacturing index would break the key level of 50 late in 2015.

On December 1, the ISM broke the 50 level for the first time since the 2008 recession, reaching 48.6.

“I use the ISM as a guide to the global business cycle, not just the US cycle,” Pal told Business Insider.

What amazes me is that so many people out there cannot see what is happening even though the next great crisis has already started. The evidence is all around us, and yet so many choose to be willingly blind.

Instead of fixing our problems after the last crisis, we just papered them over with lots of money printing and lots more debt. And of course all of this manipulation just made our long-term problems even worse. I really like how Peter Schiff put it recently…

What’s happening is pretty much what we would anticipate. I don’t see from the data any real economic recovery, certainly not in the United States.

We’re spending more money, but it’s not because we’re generating more wealth. We’re generating more debt. We’re using that borrowed money to consume and so temporarily it feels that we’re wealthier because we get to spend all that money… but we have to come to terms with paying the bill.

The bills are going to come due. Right now interest rates are being kept at zero which makes it possible to service the debt even though it’s impossible to repay it… at least we can service it. But once interest rates go up then we can’t even service it let alone repay it.

And then the party is going to come to an end.

Indeed – the party is coming to an end, and a new financial crisis is playing out in textbook fashion right in front of our eyes.

Hopefully you are already prepared for what is coming next, because it is going to be extremely painful for the U.S. economy.

27 Major Global Stocks Markets That Have Already Crashed By Double Digit Percentages In 2015

December 6, 2015December 3, 2015 by Michael

Anyone that tries to tell you that a global financial crisis is not happening is not being honest with you. Right now, there are 27 major global stock markets that have declined by double digit percentages from their peaks earlier this year. And this is truly a global phenomenon – we have seen stock market crashes in Asia, Europe, South America, Africa and the Middle East. But because U.S. stocks are only down less than a thousand points from the peak earlier this year, most Americans seem to think that everything is just fine.

The truth, of course, is that everything is not fine. We are witnessing a pattern similar to what we saw back in 2008. Back then, Chinese stocks and other major stock markets started crashing first, and then U.S. stocks followed later.

And it appears that we may have entered the next leg down for markets in the western world this week. The Dow was down another 252 points on Thursday, and all of the major stock indexes in the U.S. are now negative for the year except for the NASDAQ. Unless there is a major turnaround in the coming weeks, the six year winning streak for U.S. stocks is likely over.

But when you step back and look at what has been happening globally, a much more ominous picture emerges. I spent much of the afternoon looking at stock market charts for the largest economies all over the globe. What I discovered was financial carnage that was much worse than I anticipated.

It turns out that there are 27 major global stock markets that have fallen by more than 10 percent from peaks that were set earlier this year. If you want to verify this information for yourself, just go to Trading Economics. As you can see, many of these stock market declines have been quite impressive…

1. China: down more than 30 percent

2. Saudi Arabia: down 26 percent

3. Germany: down about 13 percent

4. United Kingdom: down close to 12 percent

5. Spain: down 15 percent

6. Brazil: down more than 22 percent (13,000 points overall)

7. Kuwait: down 14 percent

8. Turkey: down 16 percent

9. India: down close to 12 percent

10. Chile: down 11 percent

11. Columbia: down about 30 percent

12. Peru: down more than 40 percent

13. Bulgaria: down more than 20 percent

14. Greece: down more than 30 percent

15. Poland: down about 19 percent

16. Malaysia: down 10 percent

17. Egypt: down 32 percent

18. Indonesia: down 18 percent

19. Canada: down 12 percent

20. Ukraine: down 45 percent

21. Morocco: down 13 percent

22. Ghana: down 17 percent

23. Kenya: down 27 percent

24. Australia: down 13 percent

25. Nigeria: down more than 30 percent

26. Taiwan: down 15 percent

27. Thailand: down 20 percent

We have not seen numbers like these since 2008, and trillions of dollars of stock market wealth has been wiped out globally. So the “nothing is happening” crowd is simply dead wrong. Stocks are already crashing all over the planet. Just because the big U.S. stock market crash has not happened quite yet does not mean that a major global financial crisis is not happening.

But do you know what is crashing here in this country?

Junk bonds.

At this point, yields on the riskiest junk bonds have risen to levels that we have not seen since the last financial crisis. As I have discussed repeatedly, yields on junk bonds spiked dramatically just before the stock market crash of 2008, and now it is happening again…

This is precisely the kind of behavior that we would expect to see if a major U.S. stock market crash was imminent. Personally, I watch the junk bond market very, very closely because it is such a key leading indicator. And according to Jeffrey Snider, it appears that “something” is starting to cause junk bonds to sell off at an alarming pace…

There isn’t much as far as confirmation, but it increasingly appears as if “something” just hit the triple hooks (CCC) in the junk bond bubble. At least as far as one view of it, Bank of America ML’s CCC implied yield, there was a huge selloff that brought the yield to a new cycle high (low in price) above even the 2011 crisis peak.

But just like in 2008, a lot of people will not heed the warnings because they don’t have the patience to watch long-term trends play out.

We live in a society where we expect constant instant gratification. We have instant coffee, video on demand and 48 hour news cycles. If something does not happen immediately, most of us quickly lose patience.

On my other website, I include a lot more stories about things that are trending in the news. For example, earlier today I wrote about the horrible shootings in San Bernardino, California and I explained why I believe that Islamic terror is now more of a threat to the American people than ever before.

But on this website I like to take a broader view of things. For months, I have been warning that conditions were perfect for another major global financial crisis, and since that time events have been unfolding in textbook fashion.

And as you can see from the numbers above, we have already entered a new global financial crisis. If you tried to tell someone in China, Brazil or Saudi Arabia that a financial crisis was not happening, they would just laugh at you. We need to start learning that the world doesn’t revolve around the United States.

Of course the U.S. is heading for tremendous difficulties as well. This is something that I covered yesterday. All of the fundamental economic numbers are absolutely screaming “recession”, and yet most of the “experts” are still forecasting good things for the coming year.

Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. None of the problems that caused the crisis the last time around have been fixed, and most of our “leaders” seem blind to what is happening at this moment even though the exact same patterns that played out in 2008 are playing out once again right in front of our eyes.

If you have been waiting for the next global financial crisis, you can stop, because it is already here.

As we move toward the end of 2015, let us hope for the best, but let us also get prepared for the worst.

Alarm Bells Go Off As 11 Critical Indicators Scream The Global Economic Crisis Is Getting Deeper

December 2, 2015December 2, 2015 by Michael

Economic activity is slowing down all over the planet, and a whole host of signs are indicating that we are essentially exactly where we were just prior to the great stock market crash of 2008. Yesterday, I explained that the economies of Japan, Brazil, Canada and Russia are all in recession. Today, I am mainly going to focus on the United States. We are seeing so many things happen right now that we have not seen since 2008 and 2009. In so many ways, it is almost as if we are watching an eerie replay of what happened the last time around, and yet most of the “experts” still appear to be oblivious to what is going on. If you were to make up a checklist of all of the things that you would expect to see just before a major stock market crash, virtually all of them are happening right now. The following are 11 critical indicators that are absolutely screaming that the global economic crisis is getting deeper…

#1 On Tuesday, the price of oil closed below 40 dollars a barrel. Back in 2008, the price of oil crashed below 40 dollars a barrel just before the stock market collapsed, and now it has happened again.

#2 The price of copper has plunged all the way down to $2.04. The last time it was this low was just before the stock market crash of 2008.

#3 The Business Roundtable’s forecast for business investment in 2016 has dropped to the lowest level that we have seen since the last recession.

#4 Corporate debt defaults have risen to the highest level that we have seen since the last recession. This is a huge problem because corporate debt in the U.S. has approximately doubled since just before the last financial crisis.

#5 The Bloomberg U.S. economic surprise index is more negative right now than it was at any point during the last recession.

#6 Credit card data that was just released shows that holiday sales have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

#7 As I mentioned yesterday, U.S. manufacturing is contracting at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last recession.

#8 The velocity of money in the United States has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. Not even during the depths of the last recession was it ever this low.

#9 In 2008, commodity prices crashed just before the stock market did, and late last month the Bloomberg Commodity Index hit a 16 year low.

#10 In the past, stocks have tended to crash about 12-18 months after a peak in corporate profit margins. At this point, we are 15 months after the most recent peak.

#11 If you look back at 2008, you will see that junk bonds crashed horribly. Why this is important is because junk bonds started crashing before stocks did, and right now they have dropped to the lowest point that they have been since the last financial crisis.

If just one or two of these indicators were flashing red, that would be bad enough.

The fact that all of them seem to be saying the exact same thing tells us that big trouble is ahead.

And I am not the only one saying this. Just today, a Reuters article discussed the fact that Citigroup analysts are projecting that there is a 65 percent chance that the U.S. economy will plunge into recession in 2016…

The outlook for the global economy next year is darkening, with a U.S. recession and China becoming the first major emerging market to slash interest rates to zero both potential scenarios, according to Citi.

As the U.S. economy enters its seventh year of expansion following the 2008-09 crisis, the probability of recession will reach 65 percent, Citi’s rates strategists wrote in their 2016 outlook published late on Tuesday. A rapid flattening of the bond yield curve towards inversion would be an key warning sign.

Personally, I am convinced that we are already in a recession. There is a lag in the official numbers, so often we don’t know that we are officially in one until it is well underway. For example, we now know that a recession started in early 2008, but in the summer of 2008 Ben Bernanke and our top politicians were still insisting that there was not going to be a recession. They were denying what was actually happening right in front of their eyes, and the same thing is happening now.

And of course if the government was actually using honest numbers, we would all be talking about the recession that never seems to end. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, honest numbers would show that the U.S. economy has continually been in recession since 2005.

But just like in 2008, the “experts” at the Federal Reserve are assuring all of us that everything is going to be just fine. In fact, Janet Yellen is convinced that things are so rosy that she seems quite confident that the Fed will raise interest rates in December…

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen signaled Wednesday that the Fed is all but certain to raise interest rates this month for the first time in nearly a decade, saying that gains in the economy and labor market have met the central bank’s goals.

Her comments at the Economic Club of Washington amount to the strongest indication the Fed has provided so far that it will take action at a December 15-16 meeting.

This is the exact same kind of mistake that the Federal Reserve made back in the late 1930s. They thought that the U.S. economy was finally recovering, and so interest rates were raised. That turned out to be a tragic mistake.

But this time around, any mistake that the Fed makes will have global consequences. The rising U.S. dollar is already crippling emerging markets all around the globe, and an interest rate hike will just push the U.S. dollar even higher. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “The U.S. Dollar Has Already Caused A Global Recession And Now The Fed Is Going To Make It Worse“.

Many people are waiting for “the big crash”, but the truth is that almost everything has crashed already.

Oil has crashed.

Commodities have crashed.

Gold and silver have crashed.

Junk bonds have crashed.

Chinese stocks have crashed.

Dozens of other stock markets around the world have already crashed.

But the “big event” that many are waiting for is the crash of U.S. stocks. And just like in 2008, it is inevitable that a U.S. stock crash will follow all of the other crashes that I just mentioned.

Sometimes I get criticized for issuing these kinds of alarms. But just think of how many people could have been helped if they would have known that the financial crisis of 2008 was going to happen ahead of time.

The exact same patterns that we experienced back then are playing out once again right in front of our eyes, and the more people that we can warn in advance the better.

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