Posted: 21 Jan 2016 Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG
We are about three weeks into 2016, and we are witnessing things that we have never seen before. There were two emergency market shutdowns in China within the first four trading days of this year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has never lost this many points within the first three weeks, and just yesterday we learned that global stocks had officially entered bear market territory.
Overall, more than 15 trillion dollars of global stock market wealth has been wiped out since last June. And of course the markets are simply playing catch up with global economic reality. The Baltic Dry Index just hit another new all-time record low today, Wal-Mart has announced that they are shutting down 269 stores, and initial jobless claims in the U.S. just surged to their highest level in six months. So if things are this bad already, what will the rest of 2016 bring? The Dow was up just a little bit on Thursday thankfully, but even with that gain we are still in unprecedented territory. According to CNBC, we have never seen a tougher start to the year for the Dow than we have in 2016… The Dow Jones industrial average, which was created in 1896, has never begun a year with 12 worse trading days. Through Wednesday’s close, the Dow has fallen 9.5 percent. Even including the 1.3 percent gains as of noon Thursday, the Dow is still down nearly 8 percent in 2016.But even with the carnage that we have seen so far, stocks are still wildly overpriced compared to historical averages. In order for stocks to no longer be in a “bubble”, they will still need to decline by about another one-third. The following comes from MarketWatch… Data from the U.S. Federal Reserve, meanwhile, say U.S. nonfinancial corporate stocks are now valued at about 90% of the replacement cost of company assets, a metric known as “Tobin’s Q.” But the historic average, going back a century, is in the region of 60% of replacement costs. By this measure, stocks could fall by another third, taking the Dow all the way down toward 10,000. (On Wednesday it closed at 15,767.) Similar calculations could be reached by comparing share prices to average per-share earnings, a measure known as the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, commonly known as CAPE, after Yale finance professor Robert Shiller, who made it famous.Of course the mainstream media doesn’t seem to understand any of this. They seem to be under the impression that the bubble should have lasted forever, and this latest meltdown has taken them totally by surprise. Ultimately, what is happening should not be a surprise to any of us. The financial markets always catch up with economic reality eventually, and right now evidence continues to mount that economic activity is significantly slowing down. Here is some analysis from Brandon Smith… Trucking freight in the U.S. is in steep decline, with freight companies pointing to a “glut in inventories” and a fall in demand as the culprit.In addition, another very troubling sign is the fact that initial jobless claims are starting to surge once again… The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits in mid-January reached seven-month highs, perhaps a sign that the rate of layoffs in the U.S. has risen slightly from record lows.Since the last recession, the primary engine for the creation of good jobs in this country has been the energy industry. Unfortunately, the “oil boomtowns” are now going bust, and workers are being laid off in droves. As I mentioned the other day, 42 North American oil companies have filed for bankruptcy and 130,000 good paying energy jobs have been lost in this country since the start of 2015. And as long as the price of oil stays in this neighborhood, the worse things are going to get. A lot of people out there still seem to think that this is just going to be a temporary downturn. Many are convinced that we will just go through another tough recession and then we will come out okay on the other side. What they don’t realize is that a number of long-term trends are now reaching a crescendo. For decades, we have been living wildly beyond our means. The federal government, state and local governments, corporations and consumers have all been going into debt far faster than our economy has been growing. Of course this was never going to be sustainable in the long run, but we had been doing it for so long that many of us had come to believe that our exceedingly reckless debt-fueled prosperity was somehow “normal”. Unfortunately, the truth is that you can’t consume far more than you produce forever. Eventually reality catches up with you. This is a point that Simon Black made extremely well in one of his recent articles… Economics isn’t complicated. The Universal Law of Prosperity is very simple: produce more than you consume.Sadly, the time for avoiding the consequences of our actions is now past. We are now starting to pay the price for decades of incredibly bone-headed decisions, and anyone that is looking to Barack Obama, the Federal Reserve or anyone else in Washington D.C. to be our savior is going to be bitterly disappointed. And as bad as things have been so far, just wait until you see what happens next. 2016 is the year when everything changes. |
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Posted: 20 Jan 2016 04:14 PM PST
It’s official – global stocks have entered a bear market. On Wednesday, we learned that the MSCI All-Country World Index has fallen a total of more than 20 percent from the peak of the market. So that means that roughly one-fifth of all the stock market wealth in the entire world has already been wiped out.
How much more is it going to take before everyone will finally admit that we have a major financial crisis on our hands? 30 percent? 40 percent? This new round of chaos began last night in Asia. Japanese stocks were down more than 600 points and Hong Kong was down more than 700 points. The nightmare continued to roll on when Europe opened, and European stocks ended up down about 3.2 percent when the markets over there finally closed. In the U.S., it looked like it was going to be a truly historic day for a while there. At one point the Dow had fallen 566 points, but a curious rebound resulted in a loss of only 249 points for the day.
As bad as things are in the U.S. right now, the truth is that we still have a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the planet. Around the world, many major stock indexes are already down more than 30 or 40 percent. Overall, the MSCI All-Country World Index is now down 20 percent, which officially puts us in bear market territory…
Much of this chaos is being driven by the price of oil. On Wednesday the price of U.S. oil dropped below 28 dollars a barrel for a while, and as I write this article Brent crude is still below 28 dollars a barrel.
As energy prices continue to plummet, this is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on junk bonds. On Wednesday JNK actually dipped beneath 32.00 for a time before rebounding at the end of the day. I expect to see junk bonds continue to crash during the days ahead as investors feverishly race for the exits.
And of course global economic fundamentals continue to deteriorate as well. Global trade is absolutely imploding and shipping rates have fallen to unprecedented levels. If you can believe it, Bloomberg is reporting that it is now actually cheaper to rent a 1,100 foot merchant vessel than it is to rent a Ferrari…
I could hardly believe that when I first read it.
But this is the kind of thing that we would expect to see happen when the greatest financial bubble in world history bursts.
The 200 trillion dollar global debt pyramid is now collapsing all around us, and the former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements is warning that we could soon be facing “an avalanche of bankruptcies”…
Of course it is a little late in the game to be warning us about this now.
At this point there is very little that can be done to stop the collapse that is already happening.
White went on to tell the Telegraph that things are going to become “uncomfortable for a lot of people who think they own assets that are worth something”…
For years, I have been warning that the global financial system is an incredibly shaky house of cards, and now we have finally reached the endgame.
But the mainstream media in the United States is telling everyone not to panic. Instead of a time to sell, the mainstream media is urging people to jump in and take advantage of all of the “great deals” in the stock market right now. I really like what Mike Adams of Natural News had to say about what we are seeing…
The financial chaos that has erupted in recent weeks has really caught a lot of people by surprise, but my readers knew that it was coming well in advance.
For months, I have been warning about this exact kind of scenario.
The deflationary financial meltdown that started during the last six months of 2015 is now making headlines all over the planet, and what we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
The bears have gotten out of their cages, and global investors are running for cover. Nobody is exactly sure what is going to happen tomorrow, but without a doubt the entire world will be watching.
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The stock market is in far worse shape than we are being told.
As you will see in this article, the average U.S. stock is already down more than 20 percent from the peak of the market. But of course the major indexes are not down nearly that much.
As the week begins, the S&P 500 is down 9.8 percent from its 2015 peak, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 10.7 percent from its 2015 peak, and the Nasdaq is down 11.0 percent from its 2015 peak. So if you only look at those indexes, you would think that we are only about halfway to bear market territory. Unfortunately, a few high flying stocks such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google have been masking a much deeper decline for the rest of the market.
When the market closed on Friday, 229 of the stocks on the S&P 500 were down at least 20 percent from their 52-week highs, and when you look at indexes that are even broader, things are even worse.
For example, let's take a look at the Standard & Poor's 1500 index. According to the Bespoke Investment Group, the average stock on that index is down a staggering 26.9 percent from the peak of the market:
Indeed, the Standard & Poor's 1500 index—a broad basket of large, mid and small company stocks—shows that the average stock's distance from its 52-week high is 26.9 percent, according to stats compiled by Bespoke Investment Group through Friday's close."That's bear market territory!" says Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group, the firm that provided USA TODAY with the gloomy price data.
So if the average stock has fallen 26.9 percent, what kind of market are we in?
To me, that is definitely bear market territory.
The rapid decline of the markets last week got the attention of the entire world, but of course this current financial crisis did not begin last week. These stocks have been falling since the middle part of last year. And what Bespoke Investment Group discovered is that small cap stocks have been hurt the most by this current downturn:
Here's a statistical damage assessment, provided by Bespoke Investment Group, of the pain being felt by the average U.S. stock in the S&P 1500 index:* Large-company stocks in the S&P 500 index are down 22.6 percent, on average, from peaks hit in the past 12 months.* Mid-sized stocks in the S&P 400 index are sporting an average decline of 26.5 percent since hitting 52-week highs.* Small stocks in the S&P 600 index are the furthest distance away from their recent peaks. The average small-cap name is 30.7 percent below its high in the past year.
After looking at those numbers, is there anyone out there that still wants to try to claim that "nothing is happening"?
Over the past six months or so, the sector that has been hit the hardest has been energy. According to CNN, the average energy stock has now fallen 52 percent:
And then there's energy. The dramatic decline in crude oil prices rocked the energy space. The average energy stock is now down a whopping 52 percent from its 52-week high, according to Bespoke. The only thing worse than that is small-cap energy, which is down 61 percent.
If you go up to an energy executive and try to tell him that "nothing is happening," you might just get punched in the face.
And it is very important to keep in mind that stocks still have a tremendous distance to fall. They are still massively overvalued by historical standards, and this is something that I have covered repeatedly on my website in recent months.
So how far could they ultimately fall?
Well, Dr. John Hussman is convinced that we could eventually see total losses in the 40-55 percent range:
I remain convinced that the U.S. financial markets, particularly equities and low-grade debt, are in a late-stage top formation of the third speculative bubble in 15 years.On the basis of the valuation measures most strongly correlated with subsequent market returns (and that have fully retained that correlation even across recent market cycles), current extremes imply 40-55 percent market losses over the completion of the current market cycle, with zero nominal and negative real total returns for the S&P 500 on a 10-to-12-year horizon.These are not worst-case scenarios, but run-of-the-mill expectations.
If the market does fall about 40 percent, that will just bring us into the range of what is considered to be historically "normal." If some sort of major disaster or emergency were to strike, it could potentially push the market down much, much farther.
And with each passing day, we get even more numbers that seem to indicate that we are entering a very, very deep global recession.
For instance, global trade numbers are absolutely collapsing. This is a point that Raoul Pal hammered home during an interview with CNBC just the other day:
Looking at International Monetary Fund data, "the year-over-year change in global exports is at the second lowest level since 1958," Raoul Pal, Publisher of the Global Macro Investor told CNBC's "Fast Money" this week.Basically, it means economies around the world are shipping their goods at near historically low levels. "Something massive is going on in the global economy and people are missing it," Pal added.The steep decline in 2015 exports is second only to 2009, when the global recession led to a 37 percent drop in export growth.
We have never seen global exports collapse this much outside of a recession.
Clearly we are witnessing a tremendous shift, and it boggles my mind that more people cannot see it.
As for this current wave of financial turmoil, it is hard to say how long it will last. As I write this article, markets all over the Middle East are imploding, stocks in Asia are going crazy, currencies are crashing and carry trades are being unwound at a staggering pace. But at some point, we should expect the level of panic to subside a bit.
If things do temporarily calm down, don't let that fool you. Global financial markets have not been this fragile since 2008. Any sort of a trigger event is going to cause stocks all over the world to slide even more.
And let us not minimize the damage that has already been done one bit. As you just read, the average stock on the Standard & Poor's 1500 index is already down 26.9 percent. The financial crisis that erupted during the second half of 2015 has already resulted in trillions of dollars of wealth being wiped out.
When people ask me when the "next financial crisis" is coming, I have a very simple answer for them.
The next financial crisis is not coming.
The next financial crisis is already here.
An angry bear has been released after nearly seven years of hibernation, and the entire world is going to be absolutely shocked by what happens next.
Michael T. Snyder is the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and author of The Beginning of the End.
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