Everyone is so special

Before the author died at 22, she was another college kid wondering what her contribution would be

Salon.com

Everyone is so special

10 Bisexual Celebrities That Everyone Keeps Labeling As Gay Or Straight

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10 Bisexual Celebrities That Everyone Keeps Labeling As Gay Or Straight

Persistent Surveillance Systems Pre-Crime Aerial Panopticon Watches City-Wide Area,Tracking Everyone

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Persistent Surveillance Systems Pre-Crime Aerial Panopticon Watches City-Wide Area,Tracking Everyone

Record Jobs For Old Workers; Everyone Else - Better Luck Next Month

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Record Jobs For Old Workers; Everyone Else - Better Luck Next Month

How Will The Economy Improve In 2014 If Almost Everyone Has Less Money To Spend?

Is the U.S. consumer tapped out?  If so, how in the world will the U.S. economy possibly improve in 2014?  Most Americans know that the U.S. economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending.  If average Americans are not out there spending money, the economy tends not to do very well.  Unfortunately, retail sales during the holiday season appear to be quite disappointing and the middle class continues to deeply struggle.  And for a whole bunch of reasons things are likely going to be even tougher in 2014.  Families are going to have less money in their pockets to spend thanks to much higher health insurance premiums under Obamacare, a wide variety of tax increases, higher interest rates on debt, and cuts in government welfare programs.  The short-lived bubble of false prosperity that we have been enjoying for the last couple of years is rapidly coming to an end, and 2014 certainly promises to be a very “interesting year”.

Obamacare Rate Shock

Most middle class families are just scraping by from month to month these days.

Unfortunately for them, millions of those families are now being hit with massive health insurance rate increases.

In a previous article, I discussed how one study found that health insurance premiums for men are going to go up by an average of 99 percent under Obamacare and health insurance premiums for women are going to go up by an average of 62 percent under Obamacare.

Most middle class families simply cannot afford that.

Earlier today, I got an email from a reader that was paying $ 478 a month for health insurance for his family but has now received a letter informing him that his rate is going up to $ 1,150 a month.

Millions of families are receiving letters just like that.  And to say that these rate increases are a “surprise” to most people would be a massive understatement.  Even people that work in the financial industry are shocked at how high these premiums are turning out to be…

“The real big surprise was how much out-of-pocket would be required for our family,” said David Winebrenner, 46, a financial adviser in Lebanon, Ky., whose deductible topped $ 12,000 for a family of six for a silver plan he was considering. The monthly premium: $ 1,400.

Since Americans are going to have to pay much more for health insurance, that is going to remove a huge amount of discretionary spending from the economy, and that will not be good news for retailers.

Get Ready For Higher Taxes

When you raise taxes, you reduce the amount of money that people have in their pockets to spend.

Sadly, that is exactly what is happening.

Congress is allowing a whopping 55 tax breaks to expire at the end of this year, and when you add that to the 13 major tax increases that hit American families in 2013, it isn’t a pretty picture.

This tax season, millions of families are going to find out that they have much higher tax bills than they had anticipated.

And all of this comes at a time when incomes in America have beensteadily declining.  In fact, real median household income has declined by a total of 8 percent since 2008.

If you are a worker, you might want to check out the chart that I have posted below to see where you stack up.  In America today, most workers are low income workers.  These numbers come from a recentHuffington Post article…

-If you make more than $ 10,000, you earn more than 24.2% of Americans, or 37 million people.

-If you make more than $ 15,000 (roughly the annual salary of a minimum-wage employee working 40 hours per week), you earn more than 32.2% of Americans.

-If you make more than $ 30,000, you earn more than 53.2% of Americans.

-If you make more than $ 50,000, you earn more than 73.4% of Americans.

-If you make more than $ 100,000, you earn more than 92.6% of Americans.

-You are officially in the top 1% of American wage earners if you earn more than $ 250,000.

-The 894 people that earn more than $ 20 millionmake more than 99.99989% of Americans, and are compensated a cumulative $ 37,009,979,568 per year.

It is important to keep in mind that those numbers are for the employment income of individuals not households.  Most households have more than one member working, so overall household incomes are significantly higher than these numbers.

Higher Interest Rates Mean Larger Debt Payments

On Tuesday, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries rose to 3.03 percent.  I warned that this would happen once the taper started, and this is just the beginning.  Interest rates are likely to steadily rise throughout 2014.

The reason why the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries is such a critical number is because mortgage rates and thousands of other interest rates throughout our economy are heavily influenced by that number.

So big changes are on the way.  As a recent CNBC article declared, the era of low mortgage rates is officially over…

The days of the 3.5% 30-year fixed are over. Rates are already up well over a full percentage point from a year ago, and as the Federal Reserve begins its much anticipated exit from the bond-buying business, I believe rates will inevitably go higher.

Needless to say, this is going to deeply affect the real estate market.  AsMac Slavo recently noted, numbers are already starting to drop precipitously…

The National Association of Realtors reported that the month of September saw its single largest drop in signed home sales in 40 months. And that wasn’t just a one-off event. This month mortgage applications collapsed a shocking 66%, hitting a13-year low.

And U.S. consumers can expect interest rates on all kinds of loans to start rising.  That is going to mean higher debt payments, and therefore less money for consumers to spend into the economy.

Government Benefit Cuts

Well, if the middle class is going to have less money to spend, perhaps other Americans can pick up the slack.

Or maybe not.

You certainly can’t expect the poor to stimulate the economy.  As I mentioned yesterday, it is being projected that up to 5 million unemployed Americans could lose their unemployment benefits by the end of 2014, and 47 million Americans recently had their food stamp benefits reduced.

So the poor will also have less money to spend in 2014.

The Wealthy Save The Day?

Perhaps the stock market will continue to soar in 2014 and the wealthy will spend so much that it will make up for all the rest of us.

You can believe that if you want, but the truth is that there are a whole host of signs that the days of this irrational stock market bubble are numbered.  The following is an excerpt from one of my recent articles entitled “The Stock Market Has Officially Entered Crazytown Territory“…

The median price-to-earnings ratio on the S&P 500 has reached an all-time record high, and margin debt at the New York Stock Exchange has reached a level that we have never seen before.  In other words, stocks are massively overpriced and people have been borrowing huge amounts of money to buy stocks.  These are behaviors that we also saw just before the last two stock market bubbles burst.

If the stock market bubble does burst, the wealthy will also have less money to spend into the economy in 2014.

For the moment, the stock market has been rallying.  This is typical for the month of December.  You see, the truth is that investors generally don’t want to sell stocks in December because they want to put off paying taxes on the profits.

If stocks are sold before the end of the year, the profits go on the 2013 tax return.

If stocks are sold a few days from now, the profits go on the 2014 tax return.

It is only human nature to want to delay pain for as long as possible.

Expect to see some selling in January.  Many investors are very eager to start taking profits, but they wanted to wait until the holidays were over to do so.

So what do you think is coming up in 2014?  Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years. Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream. If you want to know what things in America are going to look like in a few years read his new book The Beginning of the End.

SHTF Plan – When It Hits The Fan, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

How Will The Economy Improve In 2014 If Almost Everyone Has Less Money To Spend?

How Will The Economy Improve In 2014 If Almost Everyone Has Less Money To Spend?

Is the U.S. consumer tapped out?  If so, how in the world will the U.S. economy possibly improve in 2014?  Most Americans know that the U.S. economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending.  If average Americans are not out there spending money, the economy tends not to do very well.  Unfortunately, retail sales during the holiday season appear to be quite disappointing and the middle class continues to deeply struggle.  And for a whole bunch of reasons things are likely going to be even tougher in 2014.  Families are going to have less money in their pockets to spend thanks to much higher health insurance premiums under Obamacare, a wide variety of tax increases, higher interest rates on debt, and cuts in government welfare programs.  The short-lived bubble of false prosperity that we have been enjoying for the last couple of years is rapidly coming to an end, and 2014 certainly promises to be a very “interesting year”.

Obamacare Rate Shock

Most middle class families are just scraping by from month to month these days.

Unfortunately for them, millions of those families are now being hit with massive health insurance rate increases.

In a previous article, I discussed how one study found that health insurance premiums for men are going to go up by an average of 99 percent under Obamacare and health insurance premiums for women are going to go up by an average of 62 percent under Obamacare.

Most middle class families simply cannot afford that.

Earlier today, I got an email from a reader that was paying $ 478 a month for health insurance for his family but has now received a letter informing him that his rate is going up to $ 1,150 a month.

Millions of families are receiving letters just like that.  And to say that these rate increases are a “surprise” to most people would be a massive understatement.  Even people that work in the financial industry are shocked at how high these premiums are turning out to be…

“The real big surprise was how much out-of-pocket would be required for our family,” said David Winebrenner, 46, a financial adviser in Lebanon, Ky., whose deductible topped $ 12,000 for a family of six for a silver plan he was considering. The monthly premium: $ 1,400.

Since Americans are going to have to pay much more for health insurance, that is going to remove a huge amount of discretionary spending from the economy, and that will not be good news for retailers.

Get Ready For Higher Taxes

When you raise taxes, you reduce the amount of money that people have in their pockets to spend.

Sadly, that is exactly what is happening.

Congress is allowing a whopping 55 tax breaks to expire at the end of this year, and when you add that to the 13 major tax increases that hit American families in 2013, it isn’t a pretty picture.

This tax season, millions of families are going to find out that they have much higher tax bills than they had anticipated.

And all of this comes at a time when incomes in America have been steadily declining.  In fact, real median household income has declined by a total of 8 percent since 2008.

If you are a worker, you might want to check out the chart that I have posted below to see where you stack up.  In America today, most workers are low income workers.  These numbers come from a recent Huffington Post article…

-If you make more than $ 10,000, you earn more than 24.2% of Americans, or 37 million people.

-If you make more than $ 15,000 (roughly the annual salary of a minimum-wage employee working 40 hours per week), you earn more than 32.2% of Americans.

-If you make more than $ 30,000, you earn more than 53.2% of Americans.

-If you make more than $ 50,000, you earn more than 73.4% of Americans.

-If you make more than $ 100,000, you earn more than 92.6% of Americans.

-You are officially in the top 1% of American wage earners if you earn more than $ 250,000.

-The 894 people that earn more than $ 20 million make more than 99.99989% of Americans, and are compensated a cumulative $ 37,009,979,568 per year.

It is important to keep in mind that those numbers are for the employment income of individuals not households.  Most households have more than one member working, so overall household incomes are significantly higher than these numbers.

Higher Interest Rates Mean Larger Debt Payments

On Tuesday, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries rose to 3.03 percent.  I warned that this would happen once the taper started, and this is just the beginning.  Interest rates are likely to steadily rise throughout 2014.

The reason why the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries is such a critical number is because mortgage rates and thousands of other interest rates throughout our economy are heavily influenced by that number.

So big changes are on the way.  As a recent CNBC article declared, the era of low mortgage rates is officially over…

The days of the 3.5% 30-year fixed are over. Rates are already up well over a full percentage point from a year ago, and as the Federal Reserve begins its much anticipated exit from the bond-buying business, I believe rates will inevitably go higher.

Needless to say, this is going to deeply affect the real estate market.  As Mac Slavo recently noted, numbers are already starting to drop precipitously…

The National Association of Realtors reported that the month of September saw its single largest drop in signed home sales in 40 months. And that wasn’t just a one-off event. This month mortgage applications collapsed a shocking 66%, hitting a 13-year low.

And U.S. consumers can expect interest rates on all kinds of loans to start rising.  That is going to mean higher debt payments, and therefore less money for consumers to spend into the economy.

Government Benefit Cuts

Well, if the middle class is going to have less money to spend, perhaps other Americans can pick up the slack.

Or maybe not.

You certainly can’t expect the poor to stimulate the economy.  As I mentioned yesterday, it is being projected that up to 5 million unemployed Americans could lose their unemployment benefits by the end of 2014, and 47 million Americans recently had their food stamp benefits reduced.

So the poor will also have less money to spend in 2014.

The Wealthy Save The Day?

Perhaps the stock market will continue to soar in 2014 and the wealthy will spend so much that it will make up for all the rest of us.

You can believe that if you want, but the truth is that there are a whole host of signs that the days of this irrational stock market bubble are numbered.  The following is an excerpt from one of my recent articles entitled “The Stock Market Has Officially Entered Crazytown Territory“…

The median price-to-earnings ratio on the S&P 500 has reached an all-time record high, and margin debt at the New York Stock Exchange has reached a level that we have never seen before.  In other words, stocks are massively overpriced and people have been borrowing huge amounts of money to buy stocks.  These are behaviors that we also saw just before the last two stock market bubbles burst.

If the stock market bubble does burst, the wealthy will also have less money to spend into the economy in 2014.

For the moment, the stock market has been rallying.  This is typical for the month of December.  You see, the truth is that investors generally don’t want to sell stocks in December because they want to put off paying taxes on the profits.

If stocks are sold before the end of the year, the profits go on the 2013 tax return.

If stocks are sold a few days from now, the profits go on the 2014 tax return.

It is only human nature to want to delay pain for as long as possible.

Expect to see some selling in January.  Many investors are very eager to start taking profits, but they wanted to wait until the holidays were over to do so.

So what do you think is coming up in 2014?  Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

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The Economic Collapse

How Will The Economy Improve In 2014 If Almost Everyone Has Less Money To Spend?

Why Everyone Is So Mad About "The Wolf Of Wall Street"

At Alternate Viewpoint, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by Alternate Viewpoint and how it is used.

Log Files

Like many other Web sites, Alternate Viewpoint makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

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Alternate Viewpoint does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on Alternate Viewpoint.


• Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to Alternate Viewpoint and other sites on the Internet.


• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on Alternate Viewpoint send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

Alternate Viewpoint has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. Alternate Viewpoint"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.

Why Everyone Is So Mad About "The Wolf Of Wall Street"

Red Light Cameras On The Decline, As Everyone Realizes They Don’t Make Roads Safer, They Just Make Money

Tech Dirt – by Mike Masnick

For many years we’ve written about the problems of red light cameras. Installed over the past few years in many cities, the public statements supporting them were always about increased safety on our roads. However, as we’ve noted, plenty of studies showed that the cameras actually tended to increase accidents, showed little to no safety benefit, and were almost always driven by monetary incentives. Because of this, there were numerous reports of various municipalities actually deciding to decrease the time on yellow lights, thereby getting more money from tickets, but massively increasing the safety risk. Multiple studies have shown that the one way to make intersections safer is to increase the yellow light time — but in order to make more money, many were decreasing it (often below legal limits).   

The anger over these tactics has been increasing quite a bit over the past few years and a variety of cities decided to cancel their programs, causing the leading company providing these systems (who takes a large cut of every ticket), Redflex, to face some financial difficulties.

It appears that the trends are definitely against red light cameras. Cyrus Farivar has a great article (though, annoyingly paginated) about the decline in red light cameras, noting that 2013 was the first year where more red light camera systems were turned off than turned on.

Redflex’s US operations took a hit in 2013 as the company installed 54 new systems—but removed 101. Redflex’s recent fiscal report (PDF) shows that its after-tax net profits in a six-month period have dropped by half: plummeting from $ 7.1 million in the first half of 2012 to $ 3.6 million in the first six months of 2013.

Meanwhile, the article also takes on the various “competing studies” concerning red light cameras, and pointing to one study that compared a whole bunch of the studies, evaluated their methodologies, and found that the ones that showed benefits to red light cameras, almost invariably had dreadful methodologies that didn’t take into account the basic variability in accidents at any given intersection, and the likelihood of a return to the mean (in short: intersections with an abnormally large number of accidents frequently see that amount go down the following year — and red light camera makers and the studies supporting them rarely took into account that variability, but assigned such a decrease to the cameras). When correcting for such problems, the study of studies found the data showed that red light cameras are a problem, not a solution:

The meta-analysis concluded that, when only the best studies were considered, “The results of the meta-analysis are rather unfavorable for RLCs… According to the results from these studies, right-angle collisions are reduced by about 10 percent, rear-end collisions increase significantly by about 40 percent, and the overall effect on all types of crashes is an increase by about 15 percent. Only studies with weaker study designs yield results that are more favorable for RLCs.”

The study which those researches said had the best methodology also found significant negative impact overall:

the increase in costs from the increase in rear-end crashes more than offset the reduction in costs from the decrease in red light running crashes.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of the end for red light cameras. We’re all for making intersections safer, but the way to do that is to increase the time on yellow lights — and for places that still don’t have this: have a brief interval where lights in both directions are red, rather than switching simultaneously to red in one direction and green in the other. And yes, every time I make that last point, people who don’t live in places where that’s the case marvel that any place in the world has this, but it’s true in many, many places. Switching that to having an interval with both directions red, plus a longer yellow light, will actually make people safer, and yet… it doesn’t make any more money, so very few have been willing to make this simple switch.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131218/00014725598/red-light-cameras-decline-as-everyone-realizes-they-dont-make-roads-safer-they-just-make-money.shtml

Red Light Cameras On The Decline, As Everyone Realizes They Don’t Make Roads Safer, They Just Make Money

Cops and Feds Routinely ‘Dump’ Cell Towers to Track Everyone Nearby

Photo: barryskeates/Flickr

The nation’s mobile phone carriers received more than 9,000 requests last year for cell-tower dumps, which identify every mobile phone at a particular location and time, often by the thousands.

The revelation, revealed in a congressional inquiry, underscore that domestic authorities, from the FBI to the local police, are performing a massive amount of surveillance on Americans on domestic soil sometimes without probable-cause warrants.

Figures provided by the nation’s largest carriers T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, and smaller companies like C-Spire and Cricket, show that the carriers overall got as many as 1.1 million requests for customer cellular data last year. They’ve earned tens of millions of dollars processing the data, the records show.

The governments requests, most of which were honored, include data for, among other things, the geo-location of a device, call detail records, texts message contents, voicemail, cell tower dumps, wiretapping, subscriber information, and websites visited.

But the most startling figures show that the authorities are obtaining information on the whereabouts of perhaps thousands of people at once, often by a judge’s signature based on assurances from the authorities that the data is relevant to an investigation.

A myriad of factors determine how many people are caught in the web of one of these so-called “cell-tower dumps” or “searches,” including the time, location and a mobile-phone tower’s capacity. The data from a dump can provide a wealth of information regarding whoever is carrying a mobile phone in a tower’s area — from the phone number to various device information pointed to a phone’s account.

According to Verizon: (.pdf)

Although we do not specifically track the details of each tower request, our experience is that we typically receive requests for less than 30 minutes (e.g., where law enforcement is already able to pinpoint the time of a crime). But we also receive requests covering more than an hour (e.g., where there has been a crime spree). When we receive a demand for a longer period, cognizant that the cell tower dump will contain many mobile device numbers, we will often ask law enforcement to narrow the scope of the time period or accept reports run for shorter, incremental periods, even if the longer time period was approved by a judge. The number of mobile device numbers per cell tower dump depends on many factors including the location of the tower and the time day. A major event (like the Boston Marathon) may lead to a substantial increase in the number of mobile device numbers communicating with a tower at a given time.

Sprint said it “provided approximately 6,000 cell tower searches (.pdf) to law enforcement agencies.” T-Mobile did not answer the question.

The responses were released today as part of an inquiry by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts).

“As law enforcement uses new technology to protect the public from harm, we also must protect the information of innocent Americans from misuse, said Markey, who is a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. “We need a 4th amendment for the 21st century. Disclosure of personal information from wireless devices raises significant legal and privacy concerns, particularly for innocent consumers. That is why I plan to introduce legislation so that Americans can have confidence that their information is protected and standards are in place for the retention and disposal of this sensitive data.”

The disclosures come amid revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that National Security Agency snoops are harvesting as many as 5 billion records daily, without warrants, to track mobile phones as they ping nearby cell towers across the globe.

The law on cell-site locational tracking — while generally favorable to the government — is far from clear. Courts are offering mixed rulings on whether warrants are needed, and the Supreme Court has yet to take a case to resolve the issue.

Markey’s proposed legislation, which he is expected to drop within the coming weeks, would require probable-cause warrants for mobile-phone location tracking “to believe it will uncover evidence of a crime. This is the traditional standard for police to search individual homes.”

Chris Calabrese, the legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “The idea that police can obtain such a rich treasure trove of data about any one of us without appropriate judicial oversight should send shivers down our spines. There is an easy fix to part of this problem – President Obama and members of Congress should pass legislation that updates our outdated privacy laws by requiring law enforcement to get a probable cause warrant before service providers disclose the contents of our electronic communications to the government. Anything less is unnecessarily invasive and un-American.”

The figures, meanwhile, while showing that the carriers are all over the map in terms of whether warrants are required for dumps, also reveal that the carriers keep the data for differing time periods, too. For example, U.S. Cellular and Verizon keeps cell-tower data for a year. T-Mobile (.pdf)  and Sprint retain it for 180 days and AT&T five years. Markey would like to see a nationwide, uniform approach to that.

AT&T said the average cell-tower dump was 80 minutes. (.pdf) The company said it charged $ 10.3 million last year furnishing thousands of request for data to the authorities last year. Verizon, which reported 2,400 tower dumps, said it charged “less than” $ 5 million last year to comply with all government demands for customer and cell-site monitoring.

Threat Level

Cops and Feds Routinely ‘Dump’ Cell Towers to Track Everyone Nearby

Luke Brinker: National Review Online: Everyone Should Get "Passes" For Using Anti-Gay Slurs

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Luke Brinker: National Review Online: Everyone Should Get "Passes" For Using Anti-Gay Slurs

"A Market Likely To Suck Everyone In To Its Last Updraft "

"A Market Likely To Suck Everyone In To Its Last Updraft "
http://currenteconomictrendsandnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/3ad7a__Corrigan_0.jpg

From Sean Corrigan Of Diapason Commodities Management

Material Evidence

At present the whole world is happy to treat the post?Shutdown US as a Goldilocks fable. Herein, such good macro numbers as do occur are eitherdeemed an aberration soon to reversed as the supposed disruption of the budget dispute filters its way into the reckoning, or else they serve to underpin the assumptions of higher earnings to come. Weaker ones – like the just?released NFP – are also welcome for their prophylactic effect since they can only continue to disarm an already bedraggled flock of Fed hawks, leaving the rest of us hoarsely Yellen for more.

So, in the run?up to book closing, we may see everyone scramble out to their waiting Sopwith, silk scarf flapping jauntily in the slipstream of the ‘crate’s’ spinning propellers, to the exultant cryof, “Chocks away, Ginger!? Off will go our heroes, soaring not so much to a tumult in the clouds as to the wide, blue yonder of ever higher equity prices and ever fatter bonus cheques.

Ye Gods! Even that discredited old hack, Alan Greenspan ? the man who bears as much responsibility as anyone for the hypertrophy of state- supported finance and thus for the havoc it continues to wreak ? is at it, trying to tell us that because of a low ‘equity premium’ (read: ludicrously intervention?depressed bond yields), the ‘momentum’ of stocks ‘is still relatively up’.

Such a market is therefore likely to suck everyone in to its last, Plinian updraft no matter how stretched everything becomes and no matter how great the risk of being cast into perdition in the pyroclastic collapse to come. That said, one cannot fail to be tempted by the fact that margin debt is in the stratosphere (a new dollar high and a fraction of market cap only outdone in QI’00); sentiment is heavily bullish (the AAII Bull?Bear index is at levels only once beaten to any significant degree in the past since the start of 2006; while that same index multiplied by stock prices is in the 97th percentile of a quarter?century sample), put?call skews are high and vols are low.

In turn, this means that our favourite ‘Blue Sky’ indices (index levels divided by volatility measures, such as OEX/VXO) are off the charts. Indeed, that particular example is now 2.7 sigmas over a 28?year mean, in a 99th percentile which has only once been surpassed, at the start of 2007, before the first rumblings of the CDO cyclone and sub?prime tsunami were audible to any but the most perceptive listener. In Germany, the DAX/VDAX equivalent sits at a major, new 21?year high, a whopping 3.7 sigmas over its period mean.

There are one or two other technical signals, too. The S&P500 ex?financials has all but completed a handsome?looking long?term profile during the DDIE. The financials, meanwhile, have retraced 50% of their LEH?AIG meltdown. Nasdaq has been on one of Didier Sornette’s exponential accelerations, climbing more ever more rapidly on ever shorter timeframes up into the top few percent of another clean, projected top mapped out off the 2009 lows. Looking further back in time, since that same 2009 nadir, the DJIA has ascended by an amount only exceeded in the run up to 1920, 1929, 1937, 1987, and 2000 – all of them major tops. Juicy!

What we must caution here, however, is that anyone tempted to lean into this particular wind must have the patience to wait for signs of even a temporary exhaustion before setting shorts. Critical, too, will be the discipline to stop out if and when those initial selling ‘tails’ start to fill back in, for fear that this is a signal that the mania has not yet ended and that the buyers of dips are still all too dominant.

Zero Hedge

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