"Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires. The usual object of terror is to draw one’s opponent into repressive blunders, and bin Laden caught America at a vulnerable and unfortunate moment in its history"
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower
I think we all see where I'm going with this...
This society has not even the slightest clue about world history, and more importantly they don't want to learn. Their entire existence is now predicated upon denial and amnesia. There is no audience for truth. The world is burning, so what else to do but focus on spectacle.
Twenty years in Afghanistan was not enough we are told. No doubt this pullout was a gong show - eerily reminiscent of the fall of Saigon in 1975. There is always going to be panic at the end when the empire is leaving. We are to believe that Biden was going to solve the riddle left by Bush, Obama/Biden? and Trump i.e. how to get a Stone Age Islamic patriarchy to embrace McDonald's, DisneyWorld and The Kardashians. No mean feat. America's longest blunder by far - twice as long as Vietnam the blunder it was ostensibly meant to erase.
Similarly in markets, forty years of deflation later and the greatest concern today is inflation. There has been no sign of inflation since 1980, nevertheless that is the number one fear. None of these fools realize that under the current global paradigm inflation is no longer possible. There is far too much debt and and the slightest rise in interest rates would implode the super credit bubble - a process that may already be underway. The next bailout will be for governments only. I predict no public appetite for a private sector bailout this time around. Which is going to leave far more bankrupt and margined out bagholders than existed in 2008. These sheeple are up shit creek already but they don't know it because they are dazzled by their asset supernova. I recently showed that social mood has collapsed vis-a-vis consumer confidence and yet somehow today's retail sales miss "surprised" markets. This is the first time in market history when the market is lagging even the most stale of data. Any blind man could see that consumer sentiment has collapsed, but not an economist. Case in point, perma bull Ed Yardeni says we are on the verge of the holy grail of Supply Side Voodoo Economics - a jobless economy.
Sheer nirvana.
Now, we only need to figure out how get robots to go shopping.
Meanwhile, at the cusp of jobless nirvana we just learned that the only faster market double off a bottom was 1933 when markets imploded soon after.
"It took the market 354 trading days to get there, marking the fastest bull market doubling off a bottom, according to a CNBC analysis of data from S&P Dow Jones Indices going back to WWII. On average, it takes bull markets more than 1,000 trading days to reach that milestone, the analysis showed"
As I mentioned in my last post, markets are going cold turkey on BOTH fiscal and monetary stimulus at the same time in September. In other words, the only "valid" reason to buy these insanely overvalued markets is going away in under a month. Which means the dilemma facing gamblers today is whether markets will crash BEFORE or AFTER stimulus removal. Either way, not long to find out.
In the meantime, Wall Street will continue to dump junk IPOs into this market until the market breaks and the inevitable global margin call arrives. Every time a new IPO is issued, money managers must sell an existing (usually) Tech stock to make room in their portfolios. Which is a big reason why Nasdaq breadth is imploding:
Another reason is because Emerging Markets and China in particular are now going bidless:
In summary, the biggest rally since 1933 sports the largest breadth divergence in forty years - driven by a Wall Street pump and dump that is now bet against by the same guy who predicted the subprime meltdown.
What's not to like?
What we learn from history is that hubristic morons don't learn from history.