Thursday, 28 October 2021 — Wollongong, Australia

By Greg Canavan Editor, The Rum Rebellion

[6 min read]

Dear Reader,

After hitting all-time highs (again) in recent days, US stocks took a breather overnight.

The Dow fell 0.75%, the S&P 500 declined 0.51%, while the gravity-defying NASDAQ managed to remain flat. The small-cap Russell 2000 fell nearly 2%!

There were notable falls in some commodity prices too.

Copper fell around 2.3%...

WTI oil sank 3%...

Gold and silver managed modest gains though, and bond yields rallied.

All this can be put down to a bit of profit taking. Just another day in the markets. Nothing to see here.

But today, I want to zoom out a bit. I want to take a look at the forest, not the trees.

Let’s have a look at a few charts.

First, Apple. This is a long-term weekly chart. It shows a company in a healthy long-term upward trend…until the madness of COVID hit:

The share price went vertical. What’s interesting is what happened AFTER that initial vertical melt-up. As you can see, the shares continued higher, but in a much more volatile pattern. At the same time, the MOMEMTUM of the upward move began to decline (see the MACD indicator at the bottom of the chart).

MACD is a type of momentum indicator. The divergence between price and momentum is a concern. But more than that is the absolute move in the MACD to levels well beyond anything seen in the history of Apple’s trading.

It’s the same picture with Google (or Alphabet, as the parent company is called).

You can see the post-COVID surge in price and momentum. Again, it’s well beyond anything seen in Google’s history:

Then there’s the other tech titan — Microsoft. This is interesting because it has a long trading history and was part of the tech bubble in 2000.

After that bubble burst, it took Microsoft 16 years to get back to its bubble highs:

From there though, you’ve seen another bubble develop. This one is a fair bit bigger…

Again, note the momentum is well above the dotcom highs. In fact, it’s four times as high!

What’s behind this surge?

Sure, tech companies have profited enormously from the COVID lockdowns. But prices are now trading on very high multiples of what are potentially peak-cycle earnings for these companies.

In a normal world (and, no doubt, with the benefit of hindsight), this is madness.

I think you can simply put it down to the surge of dumb money into passive index funds. Got a spare stimmy cheque? Whack it in an S&P 500 ETF.

The market’s going up? Want to be a part of it but don’t know where to invest? Whack it in an S&P 500 ETF.

Want to jump on the tech stock trend? Buy a NASDAQ 100 ETF!

Can you imagine the trillions of dollars flowing into these funds that don’t give a hoot about fundamentals and valuations?

And can you imagine the damage these same trillions will cause when they realise making money isn’t as simple as jumping on the end of a massive trend and look to get out?

My mate Vern Gowdie reckons this is all part of the ‘Everything Bubble’. In fact, he sees tech stocks as one of four ‘Code Red’ investments. You can read about the other three here in his excellent report.

That tech stocks are in a bubble is not in doubt. Where I differ from Vern is the idea that ‘everything’ is in a bubble.

Take precious metals, for example. Gold and silver peaked in 2011. They are both currently trading below those peaks. Silver is well below it, while gold only marginally so.

Oil is still well below its peak of 2008, as is uranium from its 2007 peak.

In my view, there will always be opportunities to invest. You just need to focus where everyone else isn’t.

Right now, tech and large-cap stocks appear to be capturing just about every marginal dollar that goes into the market. Certainly every passive dollar…

So keep that in mind when looking to allocate your capital. If you get the timing wrong, it can take many, many years to recoup your losses.

Better still, read Vern’s report before you do anything else. It makes for sobering but important reading in these crazy times…

Regards,

Greg Canavan,
Editor, The Rum Rebellion

By Bill Bonner Editor, The Rum Rebellion

Dear Reader,

It’s classic, isn’t it? A group is successful. It expands its wealth and power. The wealth softens it…the power corrupts it.

And then, its elites begin running the whole system just to keep the jig up, so as to preserve their wealth and power.

The elites control the ‘traffic signals’. Their role is not to tell others where to go, but simply to make it easy for them to get there.

Remember what it takes to create a prosperous, fair economy? Honest money (that no one can fiddle)…honest judges (protecting freedom and property rights)…and honest prices (set by buyers and sellers, not the government).

That is, the signals have to be neutral and true. Like traffic lights on the highway, they should not favour any special group…or any special cause…but rather, help everyone get home safely.

Simple maths

Instead, the US’s elites have falsified the signals to benefit themselves.The top 10% of the population now owns almost all US businesses — 89% of the stock market.

So when stock prices rise…almost US$9 out of every extra US$10 goes into their pockets.

Let’s do some simplified maths…

If you buy a US Treasury bond with a 10% yield, it’s roughly the same as buying a whole company with a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 10. Either way, you’d expect to earn back your investment in 10 years.

But if the feds push the bond yield down to 1%…it will take you 10 times as long to earn back your money — 100 years.

Who wants to wait 100 years? And who knows what the dollar will be worth a century from now?

That’s why the smart money borrows at low interest rates…and rushes over to more promising assets — stocks, cryptos, and even NFTs.

That’s why the P/E ratio on the S&P 500 is about twice its long-term average. And that’s how the elite got so much richer than everyone else.

False signals

So how do you force up stock prices? You falsify the signals.

The simplest way is to push down bond yields…which is what the Federal Reserve has been doing, vigorously, for the last 12 years.

Everybody knows that rigging the bond market is an idiotic thing to do. Price fixing is always a disaster, whether it is done by Emperor Diocletian in the third century, in his Edict on Maximum Prices…or by Richard Nixon in his ‘wage and price controls’ of 1971.

Typically, you need an ‘emergency’ to cover your tracks.

In 2008, the big emergency was the collapse of the mortgage finance bubble.

10-year T-bonds were trading with a yield around 4%. The Fed knocked that to the floor; the 10-year yield hasn’t topped 4% since then — even as inflation went to 5% this year.

Even with the emergency over, the stock market roaring back, and the ‘greatest economy ever’, according to Donald Trump…the Fed has continued to hold the yield down (it’s currently 1.65%).

Assets gone wild

But now, the deciders are acting out of greed and self-interest, not the public interest.

Absurdly low bond yields — like traffic lights on the fritz — sent asset prices into nutty territory. The Dow is up 450% since its 2009 low.

Overall, the stock market added some US$40 trillion in value from its 2009 low to today (based on the Wilshire 5000, which tracks all American stocks actively traded in the US)…while the economy barely limped along.

And since nine out of 10 of these new dollars went to the elite top 10%, it gained a total of about US$36 trillion from this stock market manipulation alone.

Meanwhile, cryptos went wild…NFTs went crazy…meme stocks went bananas…

…and serious speculators went broke, waiting for a correction.

Gridlock

But the phony traffic signal didn’t just make rich people richer. It also snarled traffic in all directions, caused gridlock in key sectors…and major pile ups in others.

The US government owed US$10 trillion in September 2008. Now, only 13 years later, the debt is US$28 trillion.

US corporate debt has surged way beyond its traditional levels too…to US$11 trillion. That’s nearly double what it was in 2008.

Businesses borrowed, not for new investments that would produce more goods and services, but to buy back their own stocks. And to pay their managers big bonuses. And even to speculate — like MicroStrategy — on Bitcoin [BTC].

And as businesses shifted from the hard work of producing valuable goods and services to making money by gambling with cheap debt, real output declined.

After 2008, manufacturing went into a slump and never recovered. Even in nominal terms, manufacturing output is lower today than it was 13 years ago.

No return

And now…it’s ‘inflate or die’.

The feds inflate by buying bonds. Buying bonds keeps interest rates low. With US$85 trillion in total debt, every 1% increase in real interest rates costs the nation US$850 billion in extra debt service. A 5% increase (back to more normal rates) would cost US$4.2 trillion.

If the feds stop printing money and allow Treasury yields and interest rates to return to normal, in a matter of seconds, the whole flimflam blows up.

And yet, ‘inflating’ is eventually fatal, too.

And as the debt grows larger, it takes more and more debt to have any effect.

When total debt was around US$25 trillion, as it was in 2000, another US$1 trillion of money printing could give the economy a big boost. Now, at US$85 trillion of total debt, US$1 trillion more is hardly noticed.

That’s why the Biden Administration proposed US$3.5 trillion in additional spending. It needs big numbers — and big deficits — to keep the party going.

Congress balked. But come the next ‘emergency’, hold onto your hat.

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Rum Rebellion