While on the road and in the air, I'm going to share with you someone else’s deeper dive into our present state of affairs. I don’t know if the author, who goes by “Lamentor” is a he or a she; but, whatever it is, Lamentor does a detailed job in its article today of orchestrating a thorough summary of the world’s imperiled state, as well as dishing some prudent, albeit standard, advice on being prepared because there is not a whole lot more anyone can do about our present troubles other than take some practical measures of being prepared into you own hands as those above us hand these troubles down to the masses because of their own insanity and deeply corrupted lust for absolute power.
Unstable mountains
Longterm Treasury yields are now holding their heads continuously above the 5% level. We’re in a new financial environment that drastically changes the risk for stocks, which are at ludicrous levels, given the true state of affairs all around them anyway. The mere water that has welded together fractured strata in the form of ice is thawing under the heat of rising yields, and the strata are making sounds like they are getting ready to slide.
Expect some heavy crash landings when reality finally manages to thaw out investors’ sleepy heads, but who knows how long the crazies can keep breathing in the stratosphere … or keep thinking they are breathing? Who knows how long something that looks like a solid mountain to many can hold together before it entirely crumbles in surprise?
High tech has returned to its summit of being the sole strength holding up the stock market’s mountainous averages, but the profits reported by high tech are fake profits in the one sense that matters: They are built mostly out of the stock gains of all the shares that corporations have purchased almost incestuously in each other ventures. So the profits are nothing more than their own behemoth abilities to run each other’s stocks up in value because of their huge access to cash and loans. They are purely speculative paper profits that can vanish overnight.
When the cat gets let out of the bag, those fake profits that all the market makers are crowing about as being evidence of a “strong business economy” will instantly turn into losses on the downslope, and they will be a landslide. Such a large portion of corporate earnings have nothing to do with the services any corporation is providing for its clients. It is effectively the biggest most complex Ponzi scheme in market history.
This is unlike any market we’ve ever seen in that illicit intercourse between corporations is now being reported as profitable trade, but who am I to argue. Prostitution has always been lucrative, even if a high-risk trade. Its unusually intertwined nature makes it a likely victim of systemic rapid collapse, but I have little solid idea of when such unstable bedrock will collapse; however, the time will come when the summit topples off like that mountain in Tibet.
It actually looks more like the entire mountain I reported on in Thursday’s headlines in Germany that appears to be in a slow-motion state of imminent collapse as dust rises day after day from age-old cracks all over the mountain’s face that have never dusted before, and pebbles and occasional boulders tumble on all sides of the mountain, even though the mountain is not volcanic.
We’ve never seen a collapse like this if it happens, so geologists don't appear to know if a warning should be sounded. It is more like a “What on earth is going on here” kind of situation. Yet it is Germany’s highest peak, just like this is the stock market’s highest peak ever; so, if it does crumble under all of its own ponderous and seriously fractured weight as the ice in its veins thaws under the extreme recent summer heat, loosening the layers that have been wedged by frost but also welded by ice, it may be the collapse of a lifetime. (I’ve reposted the video below to save you from having to look it up.)
Maybe the crumbling stone of this enormous mountain that seems to be buckling under its own weight will all find a way to settle into a new equilibrium of repose made of large blocks stacked timorously on top of each other, but stable for awhile longer as we move back into winter’s freeze, again locking the rock back up. Maybe it won’t do as the mountain in Tibet did for similar reasons, surprising everyone when a peak that looked like solid rock gave way and slid to the distant valley floor. Pitty the villages, however, that wait underneath the mountain’s rumbling mass.
Pitty the investors who are standing beneath this top-heavy, poorly supported stock market if it suddenly gives way.
The good stuff follows:
