Financial topics

[Higgenbotham]

Higgie, I don't know how you can stand this. I practically have an ulcer
from simply watching you do it every day.

This thing will break eventually. One thing I'll say about it. In normal markets, I've seen only one top and in the extreme, like in 2006 and 2007, I saw, and attempted to short, only two possible tops. The regulars here might remember I only mentioned one top in silver near the end and really only one low in bonds but that was also difficult because of the Fed manipulation. In the case of this stock market bubble, I've seen at least ten tops. That has never happened to me before and there is no way this is a normal market or even a normal bubble. The guy who should have an ulcer is Ben Bernanke but I don't think he realizes what he's done and what is coming. It's going to be awful.

I know you think this bubble shouldn't be happening, and just knowing the crazy extreme it's gone to is causing distress. I fall more into that camp myself because I don't believe the money is going to matter, whether I am right or wrong. I think it won't be too long that money will have no use in this system and the only thing that will matter is barter and survival.

[Higgenbotham]

Someone here mentioned Janszen in 2009, as being someone who thought another bubble was going to happen. This is what he says now.

What? You thought it could go on forever? The asset bubbles and re-bubbles and re-re-bubbles?

How many times can your reflate a torn up rubber raft?

Time to chuck it out and get a new one.

Except that there isn't a new one. This is it. The only one we got and we're all in it together.

And, gosh, looking back on it, over the past 20 years, maybe we shouldn't have taken it through Class V rapids twice loaded with beer kegs.

But here we are, cheek to cowl, in this giant, flaccid, half inflated economy, damage from the last two runs shoddily patched, headed over the rapids again. Without so much as a roll of duct tape.

While the usual bearish crowd was busy capitulating over the past six months and calling for continued growth and a good year for the markets in 2014, maybe not as booming great as 2013, I've been following the data and it takes me to a different place, to an epic and virtually unstoppable calamity.

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread ... ic-Janszen

This is the old thread from 2009.

http://gdxforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... nszen#p635

[Higgenbotham]

Higgie, I don't know how you can stand this. I practically have an ulcer
from simply watching you do it every day.

Here are the numbers and patterns that fit with this thing finally being at an end, from multi year down to multi hour. So I don't have huge concerns. There is a lot here and what I like about it is the market has missed it. I find it's best to take the trades nobody sees, especially after what they did see didn't work.

I'm not risking much money - I'm averaged in about 4 points over where the market closed Friday and have a stop in about 15 points over the levels and patterns I've calculated. The hard part comes if it comes down and I add on, then it immediately turns and melts up through these levels. Because once it gets under some of those lows on the lower red boundary of the hourly (bottom chart), my take is it's all over.

I've never shorted the Nasdaq 100 in my entire life but have been waiting 14 years to do it. The ending patterns on the daily and hourly are expanding triangle patterns which is what we get when the Fed has added "too much liquidity" into the system. The same thing happened in 2007. Big question is, does it happen again in the S&P 500 or just the Nasdaq 100. We can bet that now that those areas on the S&P 500 have been crossed many are looking for the expanding triangle from 2007 to repeat in the S&P 500. But they aren't looking at the Nasdaq 100 and maybe it won't repeat in the S&P 500 due to the fact that the biggest bubble is in the Nasdaq 100 this time.

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[John]

We've had stories of a rash of banker suicides recently, but it turns
out that lawyers as a group are committing suicide a lot more.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/19/us/lawyer ... index.html

The suicide rate has been going up generally, with Boomers leading
the way, especially since the financial crisis. It's easy to
understand the reasons why Boomers would commit suicide --
nothing really to live for, facing old age in poverty, terminal
illnesses.

But why would well-to-do Gen-Xers commit suicide?

It's easy to forget how much criminality there's been in the last
decade, since the Gen-Xers came to power. There was the creation and
sale of trillions of dollars in fraudulent mortgage-backed securities
by thousands of bankers -- not a single one of which has gone to jail.

Analysts on CNBC lie constantly about stock valuations. There
isn't even a pause any more. The lying is just part of the culture.
That's criminal activity if anyone cared.

Then there's the Gen-Xer-in-chief in Washington. Does anyone, even
his supporters, believe a word he says any more? And it doesn't
matter. As I've said, if Obama picked up a gun and shot and killed
Michele, then the NY Times and NBC News would blame it on the
Republicans.

Probably nothing is worse right now than Obamacare. Each day, it
destroys another part of the economy, just as Bashar al-Assad's barrel
bombs destroy innocent people's neighborhoods in Syria. But it
doesn't matter to Obama.

As I've said before, this is the standard Nomad/Gen-X nihilistic
paradigm: Destroy everything so that you can start over with a blank
slate, also sometimes stated as "You have to break a few eggs to make
an omelet." The Gen-Xer-in-chief believes that if enough of the
economy is destroyed, then Obamacare will survive, and his name will
go down in history for government medical care.

All of these are examples of massive criminality that's been
going on in the past decade, which would have been completely
unthinkable when the Silents were in charge.

So let's get back to the lawyers. If you're a Gen-Xer who's committed
a crime, the lawyer is the person you go to. If you're the lawyer,
then you may be aware of multiple criminals among your clients who
have committed crimes that no one cares about. Perhaps that's causing
depression among those Gen-X lawyers who still have a conscience.

Here's an article about Frank Luntz, the well-known pollster
who works for both Fox and CBS news.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... tz/282766/

He's been severely depressed since last year, according to the
article, because of what he called the "negativity" in politics. But
I would call it "criminality." These politicians aren't just being
negative: They're purposely lying to defraud people, which would be a
criminal activity in many cases.

The criminality going on today is obvious and pervasive, though few
people talk about it. If the suicide rate is going up among lawyers
and other well-to-do Gen-Xers, then that has to be the reason.

[Higgenbotham]

It seems like many of the banker suicides have been taking place in Europe. Now this article has come out on Friday:

European Banks Avoiding Risky Loan Disclosure Face Review

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-1 ... eview.html

Apparently these bankers have been making additional risky loans to avoid writing off loans that have already gone bad.

“What’s scaring investors is the question of whether banks are giving money to companies that deserve to go bankrupt and keeping them alive to avoid recording losses,” Mascia Bedendo, an assistant professor of finance at Bocconi University in Milan, said in a phone interview.

Some firms may need to “disappear in an orderly fashion” rather than be recapitalized or merged with other banks, Daniele Nouy, hired as chief of the ECB’s regulator in December, said in a Financial Times interview published Feb. 10 and posted on the central bank’s website. She didn’t name any lenders.

[Higgenbotham]

The criminality going on today is obvious and pervasive, though few
people talk about it. If the suicide rate is going up among lawyers
and other well-to-do Gen-Xers, then that has to be the reason.

I found some statistics on this.

They are among at least a dozen lawyers in Kentucky who have committed suicide since 2010, including three in Louisville and three in Northern Kentucky. Half died in the past 12 months. All were men, their average age 53, and most were trial lawyers.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... s/2383627/

State Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham, who wrote about the topic in the Russellville News Democrat Leader last year, said some lawyers ("broken-hearted idealists," he calls them) just give up.

"They learn that justice is not always done. Innocent people are abused and some go to prison. People guilty of terrible wrongs go free," Cunningham wrote.

[John]

The criminality going on today is obvious and pervasive, though few
people talk about it. If the suicide rate is going up among lawyers
and other well-to-do Gen-Xers, then that has to be the reason.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/19/us/lawyer-suicides/

I found this article. It is anecdotal but the majority of lawyer suicides they profiled were Boomers.

OK, so I need to rework what I said, but presumably the clients were Gen-Xers.

John

[Higgenbotham]

OK, so I need to rework what I said, but presumably the clients were Gen-Xers.

I would tend to believe that is the reason. For example, in the article posted above, I saw this:

The younger Dinwiddie said he believes his father's practice — a mix of grim criminal, divorce and domestic-violence cases — contributed to his father's suicide.

"Just reading his cases I got depressed," said Jay Dinwiddie, who reviewed them as executor of his father's estate. "I got a crash course in law, and it is not what it is cracked up to be."

I think Dinwiddie was 63 and it would appear that most of his caseload would have come from Gen Xers.

[John]

I would add that having to deal with divorce cases must be the
most depressing thing in the world.

[Higgenbotham]

I would add that having to deal with divorce cases must be the
most depressing thing in the world.

I mentioned the below last month.

Suicide is also a growth sector. I have found out about 4 in the past year or maybe two, all personal acquaintances at one time. One stabbed himself through the heart and another shot his daughter, then shot himself through the abdomen and heart. Both had been swallowed up by the family court system which is what led to the suicides.

I never would have thought either of these guys would commit suicide. But there was something about getting involved with the legal system as it exists today that did them in. Both were Gen X.