Financial topics

[Higgenbotham]

It's interesting to watch various forecasts start to coalesce as time marches forward.

Explaining the Fall of Western Society As We Know It

QUESTION: Western Civilization will collapse by 2032.
I didn’t expect such a strong comment from you.
Specifically, what does this mean?

ANSWER: There is a serious risk that after 2032, this will be very much like the fall of Rome. At the lower threshold of risk lies that reality whereby at the very minimum we are looking at the collapse of centralized governments as took place in 1989 with communism. That will result in greater separatist movements and the breakup of national states as we know it today.

My more specific predictions would be:

• There will be a major global financial panic and crisis. Supply chains will break, resulting in unavailability of critical raw materials and components. Global trade will begin to shut down. As it begins to become apparent that the supply chain linkages are permanently broken, the global interlinked financial markets will shut down and cease to exist. This will all happen very quickly. It will not take years from the initial panic.
• The focus of governments will turn to controlling their panicked and hungry populations. Due to lack of availability of imported goods and adequate storage "sufficient to reconstitute" a system consistent with nation state government, this will prove to be too little too late and most government will devolve to the local level as populations lose faith in their national governments and the national governments lose the resources and ability to control their populations.
• There will be no large scale nuclear war. Instead, the population will be culled through starvation, local strife (including settling of long-standing scores) and disease. Wave after wave of pandemics will sweep the world.
• Similar to national economies and governments, centralized utilities will fail or become so decrepit as to be unsafe and unusable. All centralized utilities including the power grid will shut down permanently.
• The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.
• Life during the coming dark age will be similar to the last dark age but worse due to environmental damage and pollution.

[aeden]

Muppet masher convey A3 to A2 will not help.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02- ... ans-answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LndCI6aHwC8


Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 2010–11, and was scheduled to be introduced from 2013 until 2015; however,
changes from 1 April 2013 extended implementation until 31 March 2018 and again extended to 31 March 2019
https://www.historyonthenet.com/authent ... _Times.jpg

[Higgenbotham]

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02- ... ans-answer

Interesting, but at this point, the longer that the Fed can prolong the wealth transfer to the 97th percentile, the more pressure bubbles up from the socialists, separatists, and everyone else who is getting screwed by the 97th percentile. For that reason, Trump is not a shoo-in in 2020 as the article states.

[John]

> I was 52, almost 53, when I got my last job in 2014, but that
> doesn't at all negate what you're saying in general. I felt as if
> I was barely under the wire for being unemployable. I believe I
> was given an interview because they had some interview slots that
> hadn't been filled. There was no intention to hire me. During the
> interview, I was friendly and gracious, and dumbed myself down to
> the appropriate level. There was a woman who was 70 plus years old
> on the interview panel (i.e. a Silent) and I found out later she
> was the department head and a week from retirement. About 10
> minutes into the interview, she looked at the Gen X managers and
> gave them the signal that "you're going to hire this guy" and got
> up and walked out of the room. An hour after the interview ended,
> I had barely gotten home and got a call from the Gen X manager
> that I was being offered the job. Obviously, while that scenario
> was still barely possible in 2014, it is not possible in
> 2019.

Here are some notes I kept from a phone interview I had at the
end of November. This kind of thing was happening rarely two
years ago, but today it's the norm.

This was a phone screen interview on November 25 with someone named
Joe Ferrucci at Monster.com, interviewing me for a job.

After discussing my resume (which makes it pretty clear that I've been
around for a long time and I've done a lot of stuff), Ferrucci started
asking me questions about what I did in college. I'm rarely asked
questions like that any more, but I tried to be positive, so I took it
as an opportunity to explain how specializing in Mathematical Logic in
college had helped me and influenced my career as a software engineer.

He kept asking me questions about college, over and over and over, and
I kept adding to my previous answer. Finally, he came out with the
question he really wanted to ask: "What year did you graduate from
college?"

I was actually a shocked by this question, since he surely knows that
even asking that question is a violation of the law. And there was no
way I was going to answer that question.

So after a pause I said, "Haha, you don't want to ask me that
question. I'm an older person, so I've been around for a while."

Ferrucci said, "That's great! So you have a lot of experience!"

Haha. Anyway, that was the point that he pretty much rejected
everything I said. It was clear that, from the start, he only wanted
people of a certain age range, and that one of the objectives of the
interview was to find out how old I was and, once he found that out,
to go through the motions and then reject me with a lot of silliness.
It's clear that I absolutely never had any chance of getting that job,
since Ferrucci definitely only wanted people in a certain age range.

Anyway, I'm actually grateful that he handled the situation that way.
If Ferrucci hadn't asked about the college date, then he might have
assumed I was 40 yo, and then I would have had to go through an onsite
interview where I would have been rejected anyway, since I wasn't in
the right age range, so it would have been a total waste of time for
all of us, and totally humiliating for me. This kind of thing has
happened over and over, and it's only getting worse.

[Higgenbotham]

> I was 52, almost 53, when I got my last job in 2014, but that
> doesn't at all negate what you're saying in general. I felt as if
> I was barely under the wire for being unemployable. I believe I
> was given an interview because they had some interview slots that
> hadn't been filled. There was no intention to hire me. During the
> interview, I was friendly and gracious, and dumbed myself down to
> the appropriate level. There was a woman who was 70 plus years old
> on the interview panel (i.e. a Silent) and I found out later she
> was the department head and a week from retirement. About 10
> minutes into the interview, she looked at the Gen X managers and
> gave them the signal that "you're going to hire this guy" and got
> up and walked out of the room. An hour after the interview ended,
> I had barely gotten home and got a call from the Gen X manager
> that I was being offered the job. Obviously, while that scenario
> was still barely possible in 2014, it is not possible in
> 2019.

Here are some notes I kept from a phone interview I had at the
end of November. This kind of thing was happening rarely two
years ago, but today it's the norm.

A little more about the hiring process above. I was initially interviewed by a Millennial male who was about 30. The interview was mostly technical questions. I answered the majority of the questions and as I gave correct answers he would smile. At the end of the day, after he finished all the interviews, he called to say he was going to process my hire immediately and to come in and fill out some paperwork. He then informed the Gen X managers of the hire and forwarded my resume. They nixed his hiring decision and told him he would have to bring me to their offices (across town) to have a look. Then the rest of the story begins from above.

After the above happened, the Millennnial called me and his words were "They liked what they saw." My first thought when he said that was he gave it away - it was my age they were concerned about.

[aeden]

Sled dogs work for fish heads and have one view.
Snow shoes walk alone having solutions.
Sticky Wage cults must have fish heads leading the pareto blow out cults.
Ask Warren about price of fish heads.
Hunter versus seeker algo.

Matthew principle was a warning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TksqEIl1uxU

[aeden]

December in a nutshell.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02- ... x-leverage

The private sectors do not need or want the public analysts. It will confuse more people than the hunter seeker algos we discussed.Wed May 11, 2016 4:14 pm
We called here the hunter seeker.
The other mode as the Buckling column system used by Abraham, Abraham, & Shaw (1990)

Of course you mock us.

If you had Capitalism no Government would be needed since Lucius Quinctius led the forces to victory over the invading Aequi,
only to return to his small farm fifteen days later. You do not have Government today.

The savvy investors are castigated as digital dickweeds.

And we have the exact time stamp of it also.... t

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUKXhRikfPw

https://nypost.com/2015/11/11/venezuela ... drug-case/ yea old news

[Higgenbotham]

December in a nutshell.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02- ... x-leverage

whose core business model was, for lack of a better word, collecting pennies in front of a steamroller

As you probably surmised that was a variation of what I was doing with my bot smashing. Problem with that is, you'd better know when to change strategies before things get wild and wooly. I may have changed strategies a bit too soon, but that is when early is right, or maybe safe. December was still OK for my bot smashing strategy and skill set, but a full blown crash would not be. It would likely be a repetition of LTCMs equity curve.

[aeden]

I switched gears and the trend now make $en$e when I noted the Abrams dislocation model since
the cratering could not be stopped.
Populating the time series worked, and yes I got the Hell out.

An attractor that forms a loop like this is called a limit cycle. However, in this case the system doesn't start outside the loop and move into it as a final attractor. In this system any starting state is already in the final loop.

The time series of the predator-prey system was accurate.

26.3% Stocks 5.0% Bonds 68.7% Short-term reserves
Not including today's program basket #~term structures
I will factor the ratio of option to ucl to lcl
basically the Z score of that bucket change

HFTs to scalp micropennies. As to whether or not we experience another December-type "steamroller" event, it's not a question of if but when. And when that happens, the only Exodus will be that of the fund's investors, assuming of course that the fund won't need another Fed-mediated bailout, just like its far more infamous, and levered, 4-letter acronymed ancestor. t


mean-variance analysis do not even have a survival chance

[Higgenbotham]

As to whether or not we experience another December-type "steamroller" event, it's not a question of if but when.

The real question in my mind is how extreme it will be. December was more extreme than the first leg down in 1929 (20% vs 15%). A crash could potentially be more extreme than the 1929 crash, if that relationship continues to hold. It could also be longer lasting if this topping pattern is analogous with the sole exception being it is about 4X longer timewise than the 1929 topping pattern.

The eventual size of tonight's gap down may be the first clue.