This Orgy Of Excess. Is Leveraged To DogeCoin

We still don't know why the cryptos crashed. It could be that the last fool was found. Like Gamestop, cryptos are uniquely suited to the Congressionally approved Ponzi investment strategies hatched on Reddit...

The intended design behind Bitcoin and other cryptos is to create scarcity. As price moves higher, the amount of supply becomes increasingly constrained by the mining algorithms, difficulty level, and available hashrate/computing power. Therefore, liquidity becomes constrained as well. These were precisely the conditions that attended the massive Gamestop short squeeze. However, the scarcity factor for Gamestop came from the fact that hedge funds had borrowed the shares and were forced to buy them back. Low liquidity is a critical requirement for parabolic price moves, but unfortunately it cuts both ways. Which is why Bitcoin is known for its two way volatility. It will never be a stable currency. It's a speculative toy. The rest of the cryptos are even worse. There are now over 6700 cryptos and they are proliferating like rabbits. The fact that they are all 100% correlated should serve as a warning sign to speculators. 

New "flash loans" are allowing crypto speculators to use cryptos as collateral to buy other cryptos. In the same way that 2007 era subprime CDOs were built upon other subprime CDOs creating  instantly exploding CDO "squared", which had the shelf life of a rotten banana. 

We now have a similar thing in Crypto Ponzi schemes: 

“In a way, flash loans make everyone a whale” said Nikola Jankovic, community manager at flash loan provider DeFi Saver, referring to the crypto industry nickname for large investors who are often able to move markets by themselves."

Leveraged cryptos are the ultimate form of speculation. It's the crack cocaine of gambling, so it should come as no surprise that the crypto bubble is one of the last and largest speculative bubbles to burst.

Ponzi King Mike Novogratz warned last week that we are seeing a blow-off top in crypto speculation:

"I've seen a lot of weird coins like dogecoin and even XRP have huge retail spikes, which means there's a lot of frenzy right now."

"In the next week, certainly we could have some volatility because of the excitement around Coinbase."

Indeed, we have already started to see some volatility. I showed this chart below on my Twitter feed which overlays the Google trends search term "Crypto", onto a graph of the Global Dow. As we see, they peaked simultaneously in 2018. This time, crypto searches peaked back in February with the Nasdaq and is having a double top now with the Global Dow. We also see that margin debt peaked in early 2018 when the crypto bubble exploded. This time however, a "washout" in crypto could have carry-over effects into mainstream financial markets. Why? Because now, BitCon has gone mainstream and is the "most crowded" hedge fund trade of 2021. In addition, Robinhood now allows stock gamblers to buy cryptos on their platform.

It's the equivalent to linking the U.S. banking system to the subprime housing market in a speculative housing mania. It's a bad idea, considering there is now record margin debt AND crypto is a $2 trillion market cap - almost three times larger than in 2018. It's a disaster wanting to happen. 

The way I see it, the same way Gamestop fueled a manic reach for risk that exploded in February, the Coinbase IPO fueled a manic reach for risk that is peaking now. 

The question on the table is if a $20 billion pump and dump scheme almost crashed the market, what does that portend for a $2 trillion pump and dump scheme that is 100x larger?

Feb. 17th, 2021:

April 17th, 2021:

“It’s reminiscent of GameStop” 

Indeed.

Buy And Explode

Up until now, the buy and hold 100% indexed strategy has vastly outperformed hedge funds, market timing, and in particular "value investing". Per the rules of Japanification, buy and hold is about to come to a disastrous ending. And along with it the standard advice given by all of today's investment advisors...

Zero percent interest rates were the warning that all of today's stock market gains are a Ponzified illusion. Contrary to ubiquitous belief, printed money is not the secret to effortless wealth. 

Market academics who take a "value" approach to markets will say that today's astronomical valuations imply forward returns that are zero for decades into the future. Wouldn't that be nice? A market that holds its gains at a permanently high plateau giving the same risk free return as cash, with the potential for upside acceleration. In other words, the most bearish interpretations of today's asinine valuations merely portend the same return as sitting in cash. Their academic view is that these Ponzi markets are a risk to FORWARD returns. 

Unfortunately, that's not how it works in reality. Markets don't hold extreme over-valuation through recessions and depressions. What will happen is that ALL of this prior decade's gains will evaporate in a very short period of time. And instead of forward returns being impinged upon, unhappy campers will find that it was all of their prior illusory gains that have been obliterated.

At that point, people will start to question the wisdom of throwing good money after bad. After 1929 the market lost 90% into 1932 and then it took 25 years to get back to break even. Not everyone has that kind of time. 

As a side note, today's academics who talk about "valuations" in a market supported by a 20% Federal debt accumulation fully conflated as "GDP", are every bit as corrupt and delusional as the Wall Street assholes selling SPACs by the hundreds. It's clear now that the system will have to explode spectacularly before today's sheeple realize that neither economists nor financial "experts" can be trusted anymore. 

Personally, I don't expect the 1930s scenario to play out to that extreme again. I see more of a trading range market. Central banks will do everything to prop up the market, however the damage will be deep. And the financial damage will flow out to the economy, in a feedback loop that portends far lower corporate profits in the future. Which means that ALL of today's rosy economic predictions are now leveraged to Bitcoin. Faith in the system is what is about to implode. Two-way volatility will be epic.

That said, when the majority lose their faith in Ponzi markets that will set up a tradable buying opportunity. Not mind you based upon a return of the masses but solely based upon central bank alchemy. In other words, the market will trade between panic and liquidity. What does this have to do with the economy? Absolutely nothing. Ignoring the sturm und drang will be prerequisite to eking out a return in roller coaster markets.  

Think about it another way, what remains of today's professional pension managers i.e. state and local pensions have fallen drastically behind their investment targets, which is a direct consequence of zero interest rate policy for over a decade straight. No actuaries predicted an entire decade of zero interest rates. As a consequence, these pensions are now onboarding far too much risk which is pushing them to the verge of wholesale insolvency with respect to future payouts. If these professionals with their actuaries can't manage money on a risk adjusted basis in this fraudulent environment how is a home gamer going to do it? We have a crisis in professionally managed pensions, but home gamers on auto pilot have figured out that mass ignorance was the solution all along.

Sure. 

In summary, the buy and hold retirement that today's investment advisors are selling to their clients, is 100% fiction. It's the natural result of corporations eliminating company pension plans and shifting all burden for retirement onto people who don't know what they are doing. It's become a con man's paradise predicated upon extrapolating the past 90 years of market returns into the indefinite future, while conveniently ignoring the experience of the Great Depression. During the 1930s, there were ten bull markets (+20%) and ten bear markets (-20%). One a year on average. Buy and holders didn't break even again until 1955.  

Ironically, the only people who can profit from Suze Orman's advice to dollar cost average going forward, are the ones who ignored her advice to date.

Another irony is that the reason why so few people see this crash coming, is because dumb money flowing into the major indices has kept them pinned to all time highs, while beneath the surface both the economy AND the broader market imploded.

A Ponzified feedback loop of self-delusion.

Chain Reaction

Here is my prediction for how the global margin call unfolds. Bearing in mind that this is all very subjective. Gamble at your own risk...

First off, late this past week Suze Orman warned of an imminent crash. As a registered perma-bull, she clearly is not an alarmist and so for her to see great risk means that the risk must be asinine stupendous. However, in the tradition of the buy and hold investment advisor profession, Orman never recommends selling stocks. The advice she gives is what one would give a twenty year old. Dollar cost average in the future. For those who are closer to retirement her advice is useless with regards to protecting them from risk. Investment advisors only ever recommend buy and hold. They never attempt to time the market. 

If Orman is right, then all she did was add to the prevailing angst and confusion. The vast majority of people won't get out if the crash is imminent. 

Here's what to do: Nothing

Getting back to the point of this post, Millennials are now massively leveraged to imploding Tech bubbles, cryptos, and junk stocks. So their gamified portfolios are the locus of maximum risk. 

I believe one of the first bubbles to explode will be crypto currencies, given that they have an established history of exploding. These are the only markets that are open on the weekends and as I write Dogecoin has already dropped -50% and is staging a weak bounce. Third, I've noticed that Ethereum is currently 90% correlated to the Nasdaq. Of the major cryptos, Ethereum has been outperforming Bitcoin recently as it often does at an impending reversal. 

After crypto Ponzi schemes, the next weakest link is Chinese stocks. Biden's China policies are merely continuing Trump's four year aggression. I predict it will all backfire spectacularly. 

U.S. markets and the Nasdaq in particular are extremely exposed to Chinese Tech stocks which are trading like bricks. These will be the first stocks to test the March 2020 lows and they will drag down many U.S. Tech ETFs along with them.

The next most vulnerable trades are all of the various bubbles that formed in 2020: EVs, Biotechs, Work from Home, Cloud Internets. In other words Ark ETFs.

The Work From Home stocks have the clearest corrective wave pattern:

Biotechs are the next sector that will retest the March 2020 lows.

When all of last year's Tech bubbles final explode along with crypto, Chinese stocks, and Ark ETFs, then Millennials will get margined out en masse. Nasdaq volumes will skyrocket beyond anything we've seen before. Brokers will go offline for hours at a time.

Volatility will explode and vol targeting algos will dump S&P futures day and night. It took central banks three weeks to get markets under control last year, this year it will take at least as long, but the carnage will be an order of magnitude greater.  

It will be a massive clusterfuck, beyond anything previously imagined.

Hard to believe, I know. 

Rigged To Explode

This cycle will end the exact same way it started, with broke Millennials protesting Wall Street corruption. This time however, there will be no rich assholes laughing at them, because their last bailout is in the rear view mirror...

As the market approached the February high I said there were more red flags than a Chinese parade. Since the Nasdaq crashed and burned and was resurrected, the red flag parade has become far larger:

The market is now a giant casino. Everyone is now playing against everyone else. It's clear that today's gamblers enjoy looking around the Blackjack table at all the people they hope to plunder in a zero sum game. Today CNBC and Marketwatch were lauding a crypto called "Dogecoin". It was started as a joke on the crypto market, but then it garnered the attention of billionaires Mark Cuban and Elon Musk so now it has zoomed from four cents to forty cents over the past few weeks "minting overnight millionaires". What they forgot to mention is that these millionaires are benefiting at the expense of those coming in at the end of the pump and dump. The many are minting the wealth of the few. Sound familiar? It's the S&P 500 in crypto form. Somehow a forty cent pump and dump scheme is now front page news.

As I pointed out yesterday, the Nasdaq has now round tripped back to the February opex high. Both stimulus rallies lasted the same amount of time - six weeks. The Nasdaq has now filled all of the open gaps from its breakdown in February. Now all of the open gaps are below the market and the options manipulation "stimulus" is set to expire. 

 

Revisiting the red flags that were evident in February, we notice that risks have only grown exponentially in the meantime. 

First of all, the SPAC bubble (not shown) with respect to listings has doubled in magnitude over the past two months, even though many deals are now failing and many SPACs are trading below net asset value. 

Next, from a positioning standpoint, the Rydex ratio peaked in February and it's making an even higher peak this month:

Active Managers were extremely bullish in February, then they got extremely bearish and now they've round-tripped back to la la land. In addition to gamblers going ALL IN at the end of the cycle, this robo rally has been fueled by bears capitulating en masse:

The crypto market was at $1.4 trillion in market cap in February and now it's at over $2 trillion. So that Ponzi scheme grew much larger. As a measure of social mood we can see that Dogecoin fever peaked in February as well, however that % gain was TWICE as large as this recent rally:

Those are the similarities to February - all indicating that risks have grown in the meantime. Here are the major differences:

First off, most Tech stonks did not join this latest round trip to all time highs on the Nasdaq. Here we see the ultra popular Ark ETF is obeying the opex rollover signal:

Unlike the Nasdaq, the NYSE keeps making new highs, but it too is highly manipulated by the monthly options cycle. New lows keep expanding with every passing opex and are correlated to Nasdaq new lows:

Here we see options expiration relative to the S&P 500. As we see, new lows on the NYSE and Nasdaq are becoming more sensitive to declines in the S&P 500:

What this tells us is that a handful of mega cap stocks are holding up the market in this liquidity driven robo rally.

We've seen similar times when the mega cap Tech went into melt-up mode. September, October, and November:

In summary, this is the longest melt-up rally in the past five years when measured by the % gain from the last tag of the 100 day moving average. 

Which is what one would expect at a super cycle top.

That no one sees coming.

The Madoff Moment

Systemic risk is record high right now because gamblers have been assured it's low, so they were given free money to leverage up to infinity in a "risk free" market. Bueller?

"Leverage is the use of debt (borrowed capital) in order to undertake an investment or project. The result is to multiply the potential returns from a project. At the same time, leverage will also multiply the potential downside risk in case the investment does not pan out"

Way back in 2008 as the banking dominoes fell one by one, corrupt policy-makers jailed Bernie Madoff for his collapsing Ponzi scheme at the exact same time as they were bailing out Wall Street for imploding the global financial system. It was a reward for corruption that would spawn an ensuing decade+ of ever-increasing decadence that will cost today's true believers in criminality far more than they can afford...

We got news today that Madoff died after serving time in jail for a crime that is now commonplace in today's markets. By today's standards, Madoff was a pioneer in Ponzi markets. A man before his time.

Step back and realize that it's no one's job to predict when it's the end of the cycle. Economists are always wrong in real-time which is why they always back date recessions after the fact. They are always driving the car forward by looking in the rear view mirror of stale data. When they finally realize the economy is off a cliff, it's far too late. Wall Street is even worse. Money managers don't get paid to sit in cash. They are not paid to time the market, so they don't. Which means they will never reach a consensus to sell everything. Or anything for that matter. That's the "buy side". The sell side of course is far worse, since they get paid to sell stonks and bonds to their clients. So their research is riddled with conflict of interest. Therefore what do all of these "experts" do? They ALWAYS assume we are in an expansion and a bull market. Because most of the time they will be right, and if they happen to be wrong, they will all claim that it was a Black Swan event. Nassim Taleb's theory of Black Swan events  has been used to exonerate Wall Street from rampant malfeasance time and again. All of which means that home gamers are blissfully clueless. They  eagerly believe the eternally bullish forecasts they are fed, because don't want to believe anything else. 

What this means is that anyone who wants to REALLY know what is going on in the economy has to do their own research and form their own viewpoint, based upon logic, facts, and history.

The lies that have piled up since 2008 have become ever larger and more ludicrous. Each resulting crash has been more sudden and brutal than the last. The epicenter of today's big lie is very similar to the one perpetrated in late 2008. A fake recovery attended by a failed bailout. As the financial dominoes fell in late 2007 and early 2008, policy-makers remained optimistic that the financial crisis was under control. Even after Lehman declared bankruptcy (Sept. 15th 2008), policy-makers, banksters, and investors were optimistic that the risk was contained. The massive monetary and fiscal bailout had worked and therefore the dreaded end-of-cycle de-leveraging was avoided. Except the bailout hadn't worked, because there had been no real de-leveraging in the mortgage market, in the corporate debt market, and of course in the stock market. 

Sound familiar?

Fed Chief Jay Powell was on Sixty Minutes Sunday Night:

SCOTT PELLEY: "The chances of a systemic breakdown like in 2008 are what today?"

JEROME POWELL: "The chances that we would have a breakdown that looked anything like that where you had banks making terrible loans and investment decisions -- and having low levels of liquidity and weak capital positions, and thus needed a government bailout, the chances of that are very, very low. Very low."

There are many extreme risks being ignored right now. I posted them on my Twitter feed this week, here they are again. 

However, suffice to say that by assuring investors there are no risks and then by inoculating them from losses and providing infinite leverage, the Fed itself is by far the biggest risk. 

"We’ve had many more inquiries over the past year than we would normally about people wanting to utilize their assets to get transactions"

In a bull market, share pledging can make the bets more lucrative...But the risks are also doubling when the market turns volatile"

Fortunately, central banks have dampened volatility and given everyone a false sense of low risk.

On the topic of fraudulent recovery, yesterday we got consumer inflation data and based upon the headlines one would assume the U.S. is becoming Zimbabwe. This latest "surge" in inflation leaves the CPI 4% lower than it was in 2008 right before the Lehman crash. 

Somehow serial inflation fearmongers have never once been right, but they still assume they know what they're doing. As always, arrogance and ignorance are a bad combination. 

What we notice is that even though the CPI is 4% lower than it was in 2008, the concern over inflation via Google Trends (lower pane) is higher today. This is what happens when you impoverish the middle class, even small price increases seem like a big deal. Wages and prices can go lower but they can never go higher. 

Today I had a major epiphany that the Nasdaq and momentum stocks are now 100% driven by the monthly options expiration cycle. Which explains why these tops keep occurring four weeks apart.

The massive call option buying by the Reddit gang is literally pushing the market higher into opex week. And then the "gamma" lift runs out of gas and then reverses creating a gamma crash. Gamma is the variable hedging factor that market makers use to hedge their call option (delta) exposure arising from selling call options. As these options head towards expiration, the amount of stock that market makers must hold to offset their short call position declines with option decay, so they sell. Essentially option gamblers are renting capital to manipulate the market. All of this Reddit-driven market manipulation is of course widely accepted and widely ignored. 

 

What happens at 'c' is TBD. 

This week combined crypto market cap surpassed $2 trillion up from $1 trillion at the start of the year. Up 1,000% year over year.

There are thousands of cryptos now and they are all predicated upon the greater fool theory. 

Looking back on this era, historians will say that ironically the week Bernie Madoff died, is the week that Ponzi schemes became widely accepted.

According to the New York Times:

"Digital currency, once mocked as a tool for criminals and reckless speculators, is sliding into the mainstream"

Traditional banks are helping investors put their money into cryptocurrency funds"

On Wednesday, digital or cryptocurrencies took their biggest step yet toward wider acceptance when Coinbase, a start-up that allows people to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, went public"

Got that? A late cycle tool for criminals and speculators is sliding into the mainstream facilitated by the very first  criminals who were legitimized in this cycle. 

You can't make this shit up.

Party Like It's 1929

Central banks continue to expand their idiot bubble, and it's standing room only. When it explodes this time, they will all learn the hard way there's no one left to implode...

There is no safety net beneath this fool's gambit, there is only human history's largest margin call. 

Over twenty years ago the Fed had kept its policy loose into late 1999 due to the impending millennial date change. It was believed that since most mainframe computer software had been programmed with a two digit variable year and a hard-coded '19' century, that planes would fall out of the sky when the century changed and the year wrapped around from 99 to 00. Therefore, those of us in the IT industry spent the latter half of the 1990s either recoding existing systems or in many cases upgrading to SAP, Peoplesoft, and Oracle ERP systems. In the meantime, the Web 1.0 internet Dotcom bubble was taking off, Cisco, and the other networkers were implementing massive bandwidth upgrades, semiconductor demand was skyrocketing and GDP was chugging along at a 30 year high 7% annualized amid the highest rate of employment in U.S. history (employment/population ratio) and far above anything seen since. Meanwhile the Fed was printing money to ensure systems didn't explode. 

What could go wrong?

While others partied like it's 1999, us geeks were on call that night of New Year's 1999 in case our systems crashed. But as we counted down towards midnight and watched Asia's New Year go off without a hitch, we all started to wonder in what time zone the world was going to end. 

Of course when the New Year passed and there were no planes sticking out of the ground, the stonk market EXPLODED higher into 2000 greased by an overly cautious Fed. It ramped all the way into mid March and then EXPLODED lower. 

Fast forward to 2020 and whereas the Y2K era witnessed the final melt-up in the decade-long Web 1.0 bubble in on premise InfoTech, this era is witnessing the final melt-up in the decade long Web 2.0 cloud internet migration. The COVID lockdown  massively accelerated the migration and adoption of cloud based IT systems. Entering the New Year of 2021, as vaccines arrived and COVID restrictions started to lift deja vu of the Y2K date change, no surprise the Tech sector exploded lower this past February due to the mass rotation back to economic cyclicals about a month ahead of the Y2K timeline. 

I put this chart up a couple of weeks ago showing that the 48 week rate of change in the Nasdaq then and now was identical. We also now know that the rate of change in margin debt is identical as well. 

The Dotcom bubble capped off what was at the time the longest expansion in U.S. history. This COVID bubble caps off the new longest expansion in U.S. history. This era eclipses that era in terms of duration, over-valuation, IPO issuance, fiscal and monetary stimulus overload, and of course this era has zero interest rate safety net, whereas that era had a 6% cushion on rates.

All of which puts this bubble in Ludicrous Mode: 

As I showed in my last post, IPOs this year have already eclipsed the full year Y2K and are closing in on the record full year 2020. Tomorrow happens to be the biggest IPO of the year so far. It's the crypto currency exchange "Coinbase" which is going public at an all new standard for ludicrous valuations in this era.

At its last private equity valuation, Coinbase is worth FOUR Nasdaq exchanges or 1.5 NYSE (ICE parent) exchanges. According to Fortune Magazine, in no sane world does the math compute. What is more, however, is that the entire platform is massively levered to crypto currencies which are in their own mega bubble. In other words, this stock is a mega bubble priced at an insane multiplier of ANOTHER mega bubble.

"Nothing better epitomizes the zaniness ruling financial markets these days than the great expectations surrounding the Coinbase IPO slated for April 14"

"When you do the numbers, there's no way to make an argument for owning this stock with a straight face."

Is it a coincidence that Bitcoin which is the Ponzi foundation for this all new Ponzi scheme has remained well bid into this seminal stock debut? I suggest not. Wall Street is not above bidding up assets short-term in order to keep speculative interest alive long enough to exit their underwriting deals:

The February top which was eight weeks ago in February (16th), was a mere warm-up for what is coming. Last year when Nasdaq breadth crashed (lower pane) panic ensued, whereas this year gamblers bought the dip with both hands. Unfortunately markets don't bottom on mass complacency, which is why breadth is already rolling over for a much larger crash this time around. 

 

In summary, future generations will kind of understand the Dotcom bubble as I described it above. To a lesser extent they will understand the concept behind using homes as ATM machines in 2008. This pandemic bubble however is 100% Idiocracy. 

We are trapped in an idiot bubble and the central bank plan is to keep making it bigger until it reaches the inevitable Minsky Moment. Those gamblers who need to know the exact date of "inevitable" before they stop partying like it's 1999, will soon be wishing they had a time machine instead...

No Respect For Risk

One year ago in late February, central banks were easing heavily, gamblers were partying hard, risks were growing exponentially, and then the bottom fell out with "no warning"...

What has changed in the interim? Last year gamblers were ignoring the pandemic, this year they are ignoring the pandemic's aftermath. The only other thing that has changed is that leverage has increased astronomically. In the spirit of Fooled By Randomness, central banks have created a cabal of over-leveraged morons who believe they are gambling geniuses.

Which is why the revelation that they are not, will be a "Black Swan" event. A large cataclysmic event unforeseen by those who have their heads up their own asses. 

The headlines from January and February 2020 are interchangeable with the ones we are seeing right now:

Jan. 28, 2020
2020 Is Shaping Up To Be a Strong Year For IPOs

2020 was indeed the strongest year ever, but first the market crashed and margined gamblers were wiped out. Minor detail.

In 2021, the market for IPOs is far frothier. As of the end of March, 2021 has already surpassed the entire year 2000 in total IPOs:

4/1/2021:

Compared to 2021, 2020 got off to a slow start even before the meltdown. Wall Street will keep dumping IPOs until the market explodes.

It's a tradition, why stop now?

Options speculation hit records early last year, but this year's surge makes last year's look miniscule by comparison:

Feb. 13th, 2020

"Single stock options volumes have gained 77% in the last six weeks, continuing to gain after starting the year at an all-time high"

As the month of February 2020 wore on and the pandemic grew worse, there was this warning:

Feb. 19th, 2020

Mania Has Taken Over The Market, There Is No Respect For Risk

And then "out of nowhere". Kaboom. The worst high to low crash in market history.

Fast forward one year and Bill Hwang's story is straight out of Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness. An arrogant cocky trader finds early success in the markets, so he keeps doubling down and parlaying his gains into ever larger bets, until he explodes spectacularly.

He lost his entire net worth of $20 billion in two days. 

There are now untold numbers of Bill Hwang's in these markets. Newbies who now think they are investing geniuses. They've been bailed out by central banks so many times, they believe they are invincible.

However the other deja vu story that keeps getting ignored is the fact that corporate debt markets were already on the ropes last year. And ironically, the COVID pandemic saved the Ponzi market, by making it far bigger.

Jan. 22, 2020

"One of the consequences of the [central banks] easing again...is that they’re feeding the zombies, the walking-dead businesses that would be out of business by now if it wasn’t so cheap and easy to get credit"

Today 50 percent of the investment-grade market is rated BBB, and in 2007 it was 35 percent"

Got that? The end of cycle zombies were on the ropes, but they got refinanced one more time thanks to a pandemic. Now the Fed no longer has magical abilities to buy corporate bonds in the secondary market, and the LQD bond ETF just experienced record outflows. What the central banks did was kicked the debt can one more time. 

However we are to believe that the pandemic "fixed" the corporate debt problem by making it far larger. Only zombies would believe such a thing:

In summary, the glue fumes from this latest central bank asset recovery are wearing off, so they need a new excuse to intervene in markets.

In the meantime, the margin clerks will be showing today's newbies how to sell stonks. Because they apparently didn't learn that lesson last year.

When they get wiped out, central banks will come back in to buy the dip again. 

The machines are about to get Bill Hwang'd x 100 and Skynet will be offline by the end of it all.

Position accordingly.