The Last Bailout For Capitalism

The Banana Republican party has long measured its success by how many idiots they can con. No honest person could compete with the river of sludge they produce on a daily basis. This last bailout con job has worked far better than they can afford...

The modern version of "capitalism" consists of absconding with as much money as possible from any source available. What used to be called "theft", is now called "Trumponomics":

Today on CNBS, Jim Cramer said this in regard to all out government efforts to curtail mass layoffs:

"I hope this means that capitalism won't turn out to be as rapacious as we all expected it would be under these circumstances"


Cramer knows full well what is going to happen in the coming weeks as the jobless claims swell from 280,000 two weeks ago, to 3.3 million last week, to potentially double that number this current week. Cramer knows that the good old days of rapacious capitalism will soon be "ESG'd" out of existence. Which is why he and all of the other "capitalist" observers assiduously ignore the embarrassing fact that once again this latest massive effort to bailout capitalism is coming from the public sector.

Another example, Stephen Moore, the co-author of Trumponics, penned similar sludge on Zerohedge yesterday decrying the stimulus bill's provisions to bolster pay for unemployed workers. He skipped past the parts about bailing out airlines and Boeing with public money, he skipped the part about Trump's $500 billion corporate slush fund full of public money, and he only questioned giving a modest increase in unemployment benefits to workers as being anti-capitalist. Moore invokes Ayn Randian pulp fiction to make his case: 

“Government help to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.”
- Ayn Rand


Moore then asserts that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the second most influential book next to the bible. To which I say, in life we are offered the Christ and the Anti-Christ. Choose more carefully next life Mr. Moore.

Let's explore this Ayn Randian fantasy in which government doesn't bail out capitalism at this critical juncture. What if as Ayn Rand implored, we didn't help business, but instead let the chips fall where they may? I can tell you what would happen, there would be a smoking crater 90 days from now where this over-leveraged capitalist economy used to be. Which is where this gets interesting, because it appears that Stephen Moore is about to get his wish of a biblical hard landing. 

Contrary to ubiquitous belief, there is NOTHING stimulating about this bailout bill. You can't pay people to stay at home and do nothing and count that as "GDP". ALL of this bailout money is anti-GDP - it's paying people to stay at home in order to suppress layoffs for the next 90 days. 

When companies all reach for mass layoffs at the exact same time, you get the vertical collapse in GDP that the American model is now famous for - this "system" only seems to work because it's backstopped with insane amounts of public money. We are always told in the depth of crisis, that we must bailout the system to save the system. Apologists never tell us why a system that lauds personal accountability constantly needs to be saved with public money. Because they are intellectually and morally brain dead. 

Be that as it may, GDP is now heading towards zero for the foreseeable future. And this last gun to head bailout of capitalism is merely papering over the damage taking place to the underlying economy. Consider that last week's jobless claims were equal to one third of the layoffs from the great recession. The Fed's own estimates this week predict 32% unemployment which is 47 million people. That figure is 5x the great recession.

These fools all think that the Coronavirus is the problem and therefore once that passes, the economy will "rebound" back to normal. They never stop to think that maybe laying off close to 50 million people is now the REAL problem. 


Getting back to Trump Casino, having just witnessed Super Crash  - the largest and most severe market crash in history, I am now calling this next phase Everything Crash. Because looking across myriad broken charts and sectors from one asset class to the next, it appears that everything is now pointed in the same direction - down. The Casino is seven months overbought and the first quarter just ended, so the algos no longer have to artificially prop up the market.


These mega bailouts have succeeded in conning morons:

"About 70% of institutional clients think that a 20% climb for stocks is more likely than another 20% tumble"

Overall, Only 4% of investors in the Gallup poll say now is a time to sell stocks to protect your value"



"Overbought"

The market is rolling over exactly where Amazon rolled over last month:

Semis back-tested the 50 day during the last bailout bounce, this time they back-tested the 200 day:

You ain't seen nothing yet

Bailout? What bailout?

Bailout? What bailout?

No surprise, the Energy industry is lining up for bailouts. Per this article below, there are many reasons why shale oil deserves to fail - overleverage and past subsidies among others. However, the author seems to omit the fact that it's an environmental disaster. He also omits the fact that the ESG movement left this sector bidless well before Coronavirus. So what he really wants is a bailout from responsible investing. Because if it's one thing these people can't stand it's responsibility for themselves. For everyone else, it's "the system". 

Here we see that it was Trump's "energy independence" fantasy that imploded this sector from the outset:

In summary, Stephen Moore is about to get his wish for a hard landing sans bailout. 

I predict he isn't going to like real capitalism as much as he thinks. 

I also predict that Banana Republicans who have sent Trump's approval to a record high are not going to like real capitalism either. Especially when they are all expecting a bailout and instead are about to get financially obliterated.

By their own cadre of criminals

A Leap Of Fantasy

Going into this debacle, belief in the MAGA Kingdom required a leap of faith, now it requires a leap of fantasy. Which apparently isn't a bridge too far for today's Trump zealots. Meanwhile we are now learning that the only true bottleneck in Globalization is toilet paper. You can't make this shit up...

I thought I was well stocked up on toilet paper going into this debacle until my daughter came home from college and usage spiked 5,000%. Now I'm starting to panic. I'm not above hoarding from my own family.

It's sad what this society will believe out of sheer desperation. They have been well-conditioned to believe the official narratives and never think for themselves. Now we are seeing the perilous downsides of a society overrun by marketing-driven sociopaths. The U.S. political system has been systematically dumbed down to a popularity contest, now collapsed down to the lowest intellectual denominator called "Trump". We live in a groupthink Borg of obedient corporate zombies seeking affirmation from like-minded fools.

Speaking of leap of fantasy, the new "CARES" act for small business - passed on Friday - is turning into a monumental clusterfuck right now. The goal of the program is to carry small businesses through the virus shutdown. The way it works is that a small business takes a loan to pay their rent and payroll through the crisis and if they retain 90% of their employees, the loan is forgiven at the end. If they don't retain 90% of their employees because the business fails in the meantime, they are saddled with a large debt and a non-existent business. It's Supply Side economics taken to its logical conclusion - unlimited debt for businesses amid non-existent demand. 

Moving along in bailout utopia, the most lethal delusion now being believed is that the Fed can keep asset prices elevated across the board in every market. While their intrinsic valuations (aka. earnings) collapse to zero:

"The Federal Reserve has unleashed what’s frequently been called a bazooka in its efforts to calm markets. Its next step could be to go nuclear"

Dipping into one of the riskiest parts of the capital markets would have seen like fantasy only a few months ago. But a lot has changed."

I've often used the analogy of bricks - just because someone pays a million dollars for a brick doesn't make every brick in the world worth a million dollars. In order to corner a market and control prices, the central banks would need to buy ALL of the assets not just a part of them. Otherwise, price discovery will continue to be driven by the underlying fundamentals. The rush back into corporate bonds and munis this past week is guided by the delusion that the Fed will now control those markets with small scale liquidity programs. 

This path of desperation is well worn - the Bank of Japan owns over HALF of all Japanese ETFs and has expanded their balance sheet more than any other central bank.

Any questions?

The delusion of central banks attempting to corner all markets at the same time brought up a painful memory for me this past week:

In March 1980, forty years ago, at the age of 12 I made the first investing mistake of my lifetime. The Hunt Brothers from Texas were attempting to corner the silver market, and in the event drove the price up several hundred percent. There was a widespread belief in a silver shortage so the public was panic buying silver. I told my Dad I wanted to put ALL of my savings into silver, so he went with me to buy physical silver. The price collapsed one week later.

"On Thursday, March 27, 1980, following the attempt by brothers Nelson Bunker Hunt, William Herbert Hunt and Lamar Hunt to corner the silver market. A subsequent steep fall in silver prices led to panic on commodity and futures exchanges."

Which gets us to now:

“Sales are going through the roof,” Jason Cozens, founder and CEO of Glint told MarketWatch in a telephone interview. “We are breaking records everyday.”

What we are seeing in the gold market is the exact same thing we are seeing with toilet paper - panic buying and virus-related supply chain bottlenecks, fueling more panic buying:

"The current disruption to gold production is tiny (around 1%); more importantly, there are ample above-ground stocks that could be enticed out at a (higher) price."

It's the delusions surrounding gold and every other asset class that are far more lethal. It's this ubiquitous belief that central banks can create "reflation" out of thin air. 

"Going forward, gold is bound to benefit from the massive monetary and fiscal stimulus that is extremely inflationary. 

"Overall, as day follows night, so inflation follows deflation, and Gold is not waiting around"

Indeed. Gold gamblers have been front-running central banks for over a year now. You would think that they would eventually clue in to the fact that it's not coming. The roadmap that EVERYONE is using, including the analyst in the above article, is the one vis-a-vis 2008. However, what we saw back then was a -30% drawdown in gold and a very quick retracement in bond yields. Something that isn't going to happen this time with an entire global economy offline at the same time. 

Something that has NEVER happened before. 

It's all just a leap of fantasy, wholly disconnected from the fundamentals of reality. The economy is shutdown, there is no transmission mechanism for reflation to occur. And yet these fools believe in it anyways.

They are all of the same mind that if enough idiots believe something, then it must be true. 

"There's strength in numbers"

2020 Predictions

We are being lied to constantly from all sides, which is why it behooves us to have our own economic construct going forward. Some say it's a fool's errand to attempt to predict the future, I say it's a fool's errand to subscribe to Kool-aid laced pablum. None of what I write is politically correct. So those who are easily triggered would be best to move along to CNBS or Faux and Friends. These are assumptions based on currently available information which I will modify on an ongoing basis as visibility improves...

These are my economic assumptions for the coming 12 months:

As of March 30th, 2020

The death toll from the Coronavirus will continue to rise by the thousands, plateauing sometime in April remaining plateaued in May and beginning to recede by June.

The jobless claims will be measured in the millions and will continue well into the summer. The peak will come AFTER the economy is re-opened. 

The elderly will be disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus, while the young are disproportionately affected by unemployment. The competition between the health crisis and the economic crisis will turn up the heat to MAXIMUM panic mode. 

The ancient geezers in Trump's base, who could least afford to ignore this virus, have been under the persistent Trump-propagated belief that the virus is a liberal hoax. Soon they will see exploding infections and the highest mortality rates, caused by their own gullibility and a FATAL belief in their false saviour. Trump's body count among his alt-Christian base will be exorbitant. His approval rating will collapse like a cheap tent.

Historians will say that the Roman Senate's decision NOT to impeach Trump in the days before the virus outbreak, was literally fatal to his base. Trump and his useful Idiocracy will ultimately be viewed as complicit in the genocide of their constituency. The signature Republican policy of exploiting rampant ignorance will be relegated to the dustbin of history. The party that knows no shame, will finally know shame for the rest of time.

YES.

The liberal-biased media will continue to understate the economic impacts of the shutdown. The right-biased media will continue to overstate the strength of Trump economy. For both sides, these biases will be fatal. 

The unemployment rate will be 30% by 2021, which is in-line with Fed estimates. 

QE won't work this time around. QE only works when asset prices are going up, not when they are going down. QE works to accelerate momentum and to create asset bubbles. It does not prevent asset bubbles from exploding. QE does nothing for the economy. This was the experience of China and Japan and will now be the experience of the clueless Fed. The much-vaunted "wealth effect" will now operate in reverse. It will suppress investor confidence, business confidence, and consumer confidence. Those hiding in gold will be duly monkey hammered.

The mega fiscal stimulus package is already DOA. Too little too late. As it was with the tax cut, the liquidity tightening effects of $3 trillion treasury issuance will far outweigh the nominal economic impacts. The deflationary impacts of the Coronavirus shutdown are orders of magnitude larger in size than the stimulus package. The jobless claims to date are nothing compared to what is coming. The economy is now in a deflationary feedback loop in which the collapse in demand is causing more collapse in demand. 

There will be no more corporate bailouts after this one. Public appetite to bailout profligate corporations that binged on debt to buy back stock will be zero. The mainstay Republican platform of socialism for the rich is over. Muni bonds and corporate debt will head to zero. These entities will soon be unable to afford their debt service payments. Credit bubble collapse is inevitable if not imminent. 

Stocks won't bottom until we see widespread investor panic. Central banks and algos have already lost control over risk assets as we've seen from record limit down overnight crashes. The market will continue to trade in a widening volatility range. The Fed is about to lose control over ALL markets at the same time. At some point closure of the market for days or weeks is likely. The stock market rally will be viewed as the bottom. It won't be. 

The oil market is on the verge of wholesale implosion. Crude is heading for zero as storage for excess crude is running out.

We are almost there already:

Rampant deflation of everything will continue unabated until MMT for the masses arrives in size.

Trump will be voted out of office in November. Joe Biden only needs to stay alive for seven more months, a challenge in and of itself. 

MMT for the masses will arrive by December.

All of the lies that were bought and believed in the past decade will soon turn to dust and blow away in the wind.

Sadly, there is no zen second life for fools who believe they are above the inconvenient truth.

Panic In The MAGA Kingdom

There is only one thing that will lead to a tradeable stock market rally - brick shitting panic in the MAGA Kingdom. What is keeping Trump Casino from finding bottom is non-stop bailouts, bullshit, and buffoonery. Which are the ONLY things the Trump era will be remembered for...

This past week's shock and awe $1 trillion monetary bazooka got the S&P back to where it was trading Tuesday the week prior (March 17th). At this rate, the Fed should just go to eTrade and starting handing out checks to trapped gamblers. 

However, in the coming week(s) it gets far more interesting. As of Friday's stimulus bill signing, the Fed is on the hook to finance a $3 trillion 2020 Trump deficit, record corporate bond issuance, and soon record municipal bond issuance. All in the middle of a credit crisis with global spreads blowing out cycle wide. While junk bonds and EM bonds go bidless.

There is no concern that they will be successful:

"State and local governments around the nation are confronting a severe economic downturn of uncertain depth and duration."

Yet the municipal bond market—where defaults are historically rare—should weather the current storm"

To be sure, there is now more risk in the municipal bond market. The coronavirus has caused much of the economy to shut down, putting local budgets under strains. Income-tax and sales-tax revenues are likely to decline"


In other words, budgetary outlays to combat the virus are going up, while state and local revenue is going down. Which will mean new bond issuance across the country.


The Fed doesn't even have control over the repo crisis and the Treasury market, but now they are going to control a global credit explosion.

Sure.

Meanwhile, this past week, Trump's approval rating rose despite his non-stop buffoonery. I should say because of his non-stop buffoonery. So far, there has been no amount of incompetence and idiocy that can shake his base. It's the exact same complacency we see in the markets, based on a denialistic belief in fairy tales. These shared over-confident beliefs must crash and burn before this market can be trusted from the long side. So far the decline has been brutal in the face of complacency. A testament to how much pain these zombies can take. Constant bailouts and constant bullshit have kept panic in check so far. Nevertheless, one could not have imagined a more Darwinian ending to this era of fraud and criminality. Proof that Mother Nature has her little surprises for over-confident hairless monkeys. 


Getting back to the casino, what we need to see to put in a tradeable low, specifically, is a hard selloff in these last MAGA cap Tech stocks: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Apple. These are still viewed as safe havens:

Here we see the Nasdaq 100 middle pane. In the top pane we see the MACD indicator showing the distance between the 50 and 200 day moving averages. It's a measure of momentum. Until we see a death cross (50 below 200), we won't reach bottom:

Here is the close-up view of Bailout-utopia:

If you think it's been fun so far, wait to see what happens when these last MAGA caps give up their bid. The machines will go into meltdown mode. 

Here we see that the oil volatility index reached a new record high this week, and yet oil speculators INCREASED their long positions despite the collapse in crude oil.

Indication of extreme complacency from too many bailouts. 

Outside of t-bills, there is nowhere to hide in Trump Casino. Those who are adhering to traditional investment advice, are about to get wiped off the map by their trusted psychopaths.

"Stay the course"

In summary, until the Trump Idiocracy gives up on bailouts, bullshit, and buffoons, Trump Casino is going much lower.

Return On Intelligence (ROI) Is Rising

For over a decade straight, being a willful idiot had high return on investment. Those days are over. From now on, being a denialistic fool is fatal. We are now witnessing the extreme downsides of ad-sponsored pablum...

This week I heard Fed chief Jay Powell say that the U.S. economy was in a good place going into this biblical crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only were monetary policy reserves the lowest in history relative to the cycle, but the repo crisis was out of control, the deficit was record wide, and GDP was slowing. Ex-debt, the U.S. was already in recession prior to the Coronavirus. Meanwhile, the repo crisis that began last August amid record Treasury issuance, is about to get 3x worse due to the just signed mega stimulus bill.

We will now see how the Fed can rescue every asset class in the world at the same time as the Treasury is collapsing global liquidity 3x worse than the 2019 repo collapse.

Picture this x 3:

No surprise, corporate debt issuance skyrocketed to a new record this week on the heels of the Fed's entry into the corporate bond market.

"Still, the record bond issuance came at a cost. The investment-grade bond index soared to a roughly 350 basis point spread over U.S. Treasuries, compared to a low of 100 basis points, as borrowing cost even for the most credit-worthy companies soared"

While the investment-grade bond market is booming, there has been no new issuance of junk-rated bonds by U.S. companies since March 4, the longest lull since the 2008 financial crisis."


As I said, the Fed can buy some soon-to-be junk bonds in the corporate bond market if they want, but they are price takers. They are in no way controlling the cost of debt:

The decade of non-stop lying now just went into overdrive. The carbon harvest will be biblical in scale.

On the right, many Faux News acolytes are still propagating Trump's hoax theory. Which means that many at-risk individuals, particularly the Trump elderly, are foolishly exposing themselves to the virus. Red state governors are going out of their way to ignore advice from the medical profession:

"In recent days, a growing contingent of Trump supporters have pushed the narrative that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump’s reelection efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible"

Mississippi’s governor issued an order defining almost all businesses as “essential” — including auto repair, bars and restaurants"

I actually think they are partly right. The liberal left is far too willing to ignore the economic consequences of this shutdown. I don't think it's a hoax however, I think it's because the medical profession are not trained to consider economics. I also agree that there is now a political aspect to seeing this as a way to take down Trump. As if he needs any help.

Nevertheless, the liberal media are convinced that re-opening the economy would be the worst possible decision. In their minds, this shutdown is all temporary and their 401ks will be at all time highs within a year. However, when they come to realize this is a new depression. When they realize their kids are going to be living at home forever. When they realize their ludicrous levels of college debt are non-amortizing. They will see this differently. In the meantime, they are too busy walking the plank of well-practiced faux outrage to realize there is NO SAFETY NET beneath this economy anymore.

In other words, there is now large amounts of LETHAL politicized disinformation on both sides. One side is medically lethal, and the other side is economically lethal.

Both sides are trapped in a groupthink circle jerk of like-minded dunces. Neither side is capable of accepting the truth anymore. That's what a decade of intellectual pablum will do. 

As always, the lies are embedded within the underlying assumptions. Safely tucked away where they won't be questioned. Always the right questions aimed at the right set of "guests", pre-approved to blow smoke up everyones' asses. Everyone gets what they want - their own ad-sponsored version of what won't happen.

Telling the truth has come at a high social cost over the past decade. We now live in a populace that is instantly triggered by inconvenient facts and data. Preferring to curl up in the fetal position and be served infotainment pablum. Nevertheless, the return on intelligence is arriving right on time - both in terms of our health and finance. For those who decided they didn't want to be a levered call option on an age of rampant self-delusion.

The longest cycle in U.S. history, that somehow ended abruptly "without any warning", right in the middle of a mid-cycle adjustment.

In Bailouts We Trust

The decade of bailouts is bookended by two existential bailouts. That's capitalism baby. This week was very likely the last bailout for corporate criminals. Rage will now rise by the day. Social mood is turning down on criminality. It's not as much fun as it used to be...

Now that our trusted psychopaths have created the largest combined fiscal and monetary thermonuclear bomb in history, it's time to take it for a spin:

At some point in all of this madness, there will be a real buying opportunity for a decent bounce lasting more than a few days, however, I am not of the mind that this bailout was the missed chance. What is missing from a tradeable bottom is capitulation and panic. So far the decline has been very orderly, albeit on heavy volume. It was more of a machine selloff, while humans bought the dip. The VIX only spiked because hedgers reached for S&P put protection, however, the TRIN (sell pressure) never spiked. Meanwhile, as we know, the heavy selling never reached Tech.

In this next phase down, I predict panic emanating overnight from Emerging Markets, which received no bailout. Throughout this first leg down, the S&P futures were limit down at least five times overnight. More times limit down in three weeks than in thirty years.

Now, the casino is nine months overbought compliments of the largest sugar rally since 1931. Which by the way was near the beginning of the Great Depression. The way they write these headlines, you would think that was something to celebrate. The Dow didn't final bottom until March 1932, down -90% from the top.

Leaving the fiscal package aside, which just got signed and will take weeks and months to take effect, THIS was the real stimulus behind this week's sugar rally:

$1 trillion of monetary stimulus in two weeks:

One thing we know is that the economic data will continue to worsen week by the week. Gamblers will be told to look across the Grand Canyon and look forward to the light at the end of the tunnel - the freight train of deflation coming straight at them. From an economic data standpoint, the waters will be murky enough to give plausible deniability to today's perpetual denialists. For the majority who have staked their future on studied ignorance, their final implosion will merely be business as usual.


Retail Closures Set To Explode 

Short-term the market could bounce around at these levels, however a "re-test" of the recent low is inevitable. 

Here we see the NYSE Composite vis-a-vis 2008:

Here is where it gets interesting.

Semiconductors are rolling over deja vu of the last big stimulus bounce three weeks ago:

We are looking for an NYSE breadth thrust of the likes that occurred at other major trading lows:

I don't trust the bond market right now. The Fed started buying investment grade bonds this week, but they are only taking up to 20% of the market. Which means that bond prices will trade based upon ubiquitous downgrades, which will be coming hard and heavy in the coming weeks. Much of what is considered investment grade will very soon be downgraded to junk and hence outside of Fed purview.

This week, Ford Motor and Delta Airlines among many others were downgraded to junk. Which means that the companies that need help the most, are SOL:

"The Fed’s measures don’t extend help to those companies with credit ratings below investment-grade, leaving a $1 trillion market of highly leveraged issuers without aid"

WTI crude oil is on the verge of cracking $20 this coming week:

Social mood is turning down, and the key support for stocks just disappeared:

NYT: The Stock Buyback Binge Is Over


"Over the weekend, as Congress worked to fashion a $1.8 trillion stimulus package for the economy, President Trump lent his support to provisions in the bill meant to block companies that receive federal money from using it to buy back shares."

Buyback activity will slow dramatically, both for political and practical reasons,” Goldman Sachs stock market analysts wrote in a research note published on Monday."

In summary, this "bailout" is 100% bullshit short-covering sugar rally.

The new TARP was just signed. 

Any questions?