Nothing Matters Until It Explodes Spectacularly

Most people are not willing to call an end to this idiot bubble, because they don't want to stand out in the crowd...

What we've learned in this era is that when people see ludicrous speculation in markets they merely assume it will become even more asinine before it ends. Hence, it conveniently has no known end point. So we're told.

Stop me any time...

First, let me set this up - back near the top of stock market in early 2007, the housing bubble was already collapsing in many parts of the country and investors were already realizing that subprime loans were a disaster in the making. So ironically as the crisis escalated and investors backed off of subprime mortgages, Wall Street cooked up even riskier leveraged bets in order to juice returns and entice investors:

March 30th, 2007:

Wall Street Cooks Up Even Riskier Exploding Subprime "Innovations"

"With the subprime mortgage crisis making investors wary of collateralized debt obligations, or bonds secured by other bonds, Wall Street is cooking up even riskier deals offering bigger returns to lure hedge fund investors"

That same year when the Fed began lowering interest rates, the global hunt for yield accelerated which allowed Wall Street to sell ever riskier subprime-loaded time bombs to money managers desperate to meet their annual return targets. In July of 2007, the CEO of Citigroup Chuck Prince was asked his thoughts on the escalating subprime crisis. He said he believed the Fed had it under control and therefore his bank was going to keep "dancing while the music is playing".

Now we are hearing the same rationlizations today being applied to Ponzi schemes:

"Dogecoin is now valued at more than $50 billion, exceeding Ford Motor Co. and many other companies with extensive histories...Stock market operators who have been around for a few cycles know the sentiment implications of something like Dogecoin: time to grab the canned goods and head for the bunker"

As former Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Chuck Prince infamously said in 2007 right before the subprime mortgage bubble burst and caused a financial crisis, the music is still playing, so you have to keep dancing."

The author goes on to claim that it was rational to keep gambling in 2007 and 2008 amid escalating levels of risk. He admits that when the crash took place, the people who were most off guard were "the experts", whereas many "perma-bears" had already predicted the inevitable outcome. In other words, since no one can predict the exact day when insanity will end, gambling up until the very day of meltdown is the rational choice. However he admits that if people had known the extent of what was coming, it would have made sense to de-risk ahead of time. But he claims that the extent of meltdown is also  conveniently unknowable ahead of time. 

Call it the monetization of practiced ignorance. It can come as no surprise that the financial media who are now forced to cover joke-memed crypto currencies must find a rationale for this insanity that ensures a perma-bullish outcome. Otherwise, their subscriber base would collapse like a cheap tent. One wonders how many more times the general public will look back fondly at all of these dunce "experts" and the dumbfuck media and laugh at their corrupt excuses for ignoring conflict of interest. I will go out on a limb and say this is the last time.

Here we see that the magnitude of the Ponzi Crypto bubble exceeds the size of the subprime bubble and is 100x the size of the Gamestop debacle. It will be extreme irony if the Crypto Ponzi bubble peaked the very same week that Bernie Madoff died. So far, that indeed does appear to be the case.

This chart best combines all of the excesses of this era into one exploding weapon of mass destruction. Crypto searches on Google have exploded to an all time high this week. Which is deja vu of January 2018. And of course the combined magnitude of crypto market cap and stock market margin balances far exceeds what attended the 2018 explosion:

I wrote an essay on the impending Bitcoin/Blockchain collapse, but it's too long to include this time around. So without all of the background technical jargon, here is my overall hypothesis regarding the long-term instability of Bitcoin and crypto currencies:

My overall hypothesis regarding price stability is that speculators drive prices higher due to the liquidity/scarcity  constraints designed into the Bitcoin network. Miners react by adding additional computing power to the network, which takes place on a lagged basis. This time lag between supply and demand is a prime opportunity for price manipulation aka. pump and dump schemes. In time, the mined supply increases to match demand. At that point, the price momentum slows and then reverses, at which point speculator demand vanishes and the miners are left selling mined Bitcoin into a bidless market. At that point, the price very rapidly resets back down to the marginal cost of mining which is defined by the underlying cost of server capacity and electricity. In other words, miners arbitrage away all excess profit from the crypto network as one would expect from basic economic theory. Unlike gold production there are no major barriers to entry for crypto mining. The cost of these bubbles and busts accrues to latecomer speculators.

In addition, miners can easily switch from one crypto currency to another, so they pick up and move to whichever crypto currency offers the best profit margins. At present that is no longer Bitcoin. Which is why the Bitcoin hashrate collapsed last weekend when Dogecoin went vertical. The same thing happened in 2018 when all of the other cryptos started outperforming Bitcoin. As a consequence the Bitcoin transaction fee has exploded back to levels not seen since January 2018:

I posted this chart yesterday on Twitter:

A couple of weeks ago I described the blockchain death spiral hypothesis, which posits that in a large enough crash, miners will leave the Bitcoin network en masse which would prevent anyone from buying and selling Bitcoin. For long-term holders this may not seem like a problem, but for hedge funds and leveraged Robinhood home gamers it's a huge problem.  If  speculators have illiquid holdings, then brokers will sell whatever other liquid collateral is available. Which is why asset correlations converge at 100% in downside panics. One could imagine that having $2 trillion in illiquid crypto sitting in speculator accounts could have massive spillover effects in other markets. The Bitcoin price could be collapsing and yet it would be impossible to sell Bitcoin, so everything else gets liquidated instead.

On that note, I will point out that Ethereum has the clearest wave count. As we see it's trending in correlation to Momentum stocks which have entered their third wave down. 

In summary, it could turn out that Bernie Madoff perfectly timed two cycle end explosions. 

We haven't heard this in a while...

Pigs To The Slaughter

In what can only be described as human history's biggest mass con job, central banks have systematically desensitized gamblers to all risk. They are now cycle high fat, dumb, and happy. I call it monetary euthanasia...

Compliments of central bank alchemy, the shortest bear market in history yielded the best one year market gain to an all time high in market history. In addition, inflation expectations are the highest since the end of the last cycle, retail investor speculation is cycle high, and now we learn that the market is two decade overbought. 

All late cycle indicators peaking at "the beginning of a new cycle". 

One of the indicators I haven't shown recently, shows the ratio of mid cap stocks to the large cap Dow. What we see is that mid caps peak relatively early, they underperform for a while and then they burst higher at the end of the cycle due to short covering. In addition, commodity stocks (second pane) outperform at the end of the cycle and of course inflation expectations are highest at the end of the cycle:

This fraudulent recovery which is based solely upon asset inflation has seen some ludicrous moves in asset prices. However, few sectors are as insane as the retail sector which was blighted by the pandemic. And yet, it's the top performing sector over the past year. This entire sector has been "Gamestopped" higher amid record store closures.

Which has fulfilled the circular mirage of "recovery" based upon capital misallocation. 

Another thing you don't see at the beginning of a cycle is cycle high IPO/SPAC issuance:

Herein lies the problem:

Over the course of this 12 year continuous monetary bailout cycle, investors have become more and more complacent. I use a ratio of NYSE down volume over up volume to show the degree of panic selling.

Back in 2008 when it was the end of the cycle, panic selling peaked. Subsequently, we have seen lower peaks over the course of the cycle. We are to believe that the lowest level of selling in the entire cycle marks the beginning of a new cycle.

Sure.

What we are about to witness is 12 years of pent up selling, which will make 2008 look like a picnic. 

And then everyone will know what we know. It's the end of the cycle. 

And this is no time for bullshit from the same proven assholes who lied last time. 

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.