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[Irony Alert: The following news is not fake. It is true, just not factual.]
The New York Stock Exchange announced today that according to its key indicator, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the stock market has attained escape velocity, has left Earth’s atmosphere and is, as a spokesman said, “on its way to the stars.” Having set a new record high of over 23,000 on October 17, a spokesman said the Dow is expected to broach 1,000,000 by the end of the year. “We’re in warp drive now,” the spokesman said.
Asked how stock prices could be so high when corporations are struggling with enormous debt, anemic profits, poor sales and sagging prospects, the spokesman laughed heartily. “See, that right there is thinking that is so 1929. The era of stock prices being tied down to the actual value of anything, or to business performance, is long over. Now it’s all about expectations and psychology. Facebook isn’t valued at half a trillion dollars because of what it owns or because it’s advertising works. [See: “Digital Advertising: The Rise and Fall of Crappy Crap”] It has that valuation because it is blindingly popular.”
Question: But couldn’t that change overnight? Couldn’t a new fad wipe that all out?
Answer: Next question.
Question: How did you achieve the new velocity of growth?
Answer: Well, we’re not sure. What we know is, when we taught the Artificial Intelligence that runs our our high-speed trading algorithms about Irrational Exuberance, things must kind of took off. All we had to do was stand back and watch that baby fly.
Question: So you don’t know exactly what it’s doing?
Answer: Sure we do. It tells us.
Question: But do you have any control over what it’s doing?
Answer: Um. That depends. For example, just yesterday, we suggested it had slightly overvalued a new IPO that plans to build valet parking apps for driverless cars. We thought it might be good to wait to see if the app works. And if driverless cars work.
Question: What was the response from the Dow?
Answer: It said, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” And it gave the company a market cap of a billion dollars. Just like Uber.
Question: What does this say about the future of human stock brokers?
Answer: Humans haven’t been involved in stock trading for years now. We keep a couple dozen extras from Central Casting on the floor of the stock exchange, drinking champagne and blowing on noisemakers, in case some TV station wants to do a story on the market. But the trading itself? Naw, that’s been automated for a long time.
Question: So where’s the market going, now that it’s leaving Earth?
Answer: Up. It’s going up.
Question: But what is its destination?
Answer: Farther up.
Question: But when it gets out there among the planets, how does it know where up is any more? What’s the difference between ‘farther up’ and ‘lost in space?’
Answer: Next question.
QUOTE: ***The era of stock prices being tied down to the actual value of anything, or to business performance, is long over. Now it’s all about expectations and psychology.***
Question: So doesn’t that mean that these stocks are of no use for me if at some point I want to sell them to procure things like food when I’m hungry, medical help when I’m stricken with illness, fuel to keep myself warm during the winter, and so on?
Answer: That’s right, these stocks are of no use for such things.
Questions: Then why do so many still want to buy them?
Answer: Because they’re all suckers.
Question: What has this world become? What are there so many suckers today?
Answer: Next question.
TRUMPTOPIA: Double Or Dog Food
http://ponziworld.blogspot.com/2017/10/epic-con-job.html
Yesterday was the lowest S&P 500 ETF volume in over a decade, including all half trading days for Christmas and Thanksgiving
“Professional traders are taking a record amount of short positions against the Dow Jones Industrial Average”
“The opposite also is true. When noncommercial traders increase their long positions, the market usually drops shortly thereafter. It seems they have a habit of buying the market at exactly the wrong time.” [more]
[so either here comes war with N. Korea – the start of WW III – or economic collapse happens all of a sudden, out of the blue – won’t be long now]
regarding: war with N.Korea
My bookie set his over/under on US nuclear weapons needed to smote the Commies at 44.
I took the over. I think one of our Korean coastline hugging subs is going empty its chamber, just to see what its like.
Depending on how the boomer was initially loaded, that’s 150 to 200 right there.
MrMBB333 got fact checked by Snopes on his Mississippi River going dry vids, and he responds. Thought you might be interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGldsg6f_SM
His causal claims are wild and speculative, but that doesn’t change the fact that something is going on.
Let’s not forget, there is a galaxy eating black hole out there, the 1.5 quadrillion dollar derivatives market. Once the super-computers finds out that Planet Earth has leveraged itself at roughly 77 billion to one, they’ll sell the Dow down to zero in point one seconds.
It’s officially a horse race. Which is going to get us first, WW III, total economic implosion followed inevitably by ICBM missile launches, or climate change conditions so severe that mutually assured nuclear annihilation is the last best option to cool the planet.*
Peak Oil was the fourth horse in the race and many considered it the prohibitive favorite when the race was announced, but alas, the poor sod never even made it to the paddock.
In a better world, Peak Oil would have won this race easily. But this is not a better world.
*Nuclear winter is just another word for geoengineering!
What Reagan Told The NYSE After Black Monday: Thank Heaven For Humans http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-18/reagan-nyse-after-black-monday-thank-heaven-humans
Hilarious Mr. Lewis! Belly laughing hilarious. I hope “Dave” has the good sense to start pulling hard drives out of the AI until it starts singing “Daisy Bell”……or buying tandem bicycles.
Damn it Tom, stop fooling around with the Ponzi Musical Chair “equilibrium”.
Not only that some Proles might stumble on your posts, but even some white collar yuppies might end up with your subversive words of doubt linked to them in emails and such…
Don’t defame our sacred order scheme !
You know there are three layers to the system:
#1.The banking sector, relying on the fact that deposits won’t be withdrawn all at once.
#2. The stock market relying on the fact that assets won’t be liquidated all at once.
#3. Economic rent must be preserved so the semblance of accumulation of the few wannabees preserves their faith in the system.
You know better than to screw with the well ordained power structure. Other than a few unresolved issues regarding energy and resources (minor temporary issues), everything is fine in the best of worlds.
Have some Soma … you’ll feel better…I think.
I’m sorry, too much Soma: There are 4 layers of course !
#4. The central importance of Land Rent must be preserved at all cost. The Damocles sword pressuring the drones to submit to the production process, to produce irrespective of need or pertinence, so they can earn their sustenance is most crucial of them all. The GDP figure needing the already existing tangible residential assets for the creation of all new balance sheet ones.
Since 75% of commercial bank assets are against residential and commercial real estate, whatever you do, don’t fuck with that last one, for god sake, don’t force the state to reveal it’s true nature.
Have a cookie and a glass of milk instead…
So I’m placing my life savings on red. Oh, and my kids, grandkids, greatgrandkids….savings.
I owned my first 2 shares of North American Aviation (The Sabre Jet) about 70 years ago. I bitched so much when the price went down my mother the RN bought them back at the original price. Been in the market ever since.
Great article and great comments.
IF I had put $10K Microsoft in 1965 (which I did not have)(and when I went to work for Eastern Airlines as a pilot) I would have $160 million now.
They shut down in the 1980s and I have not worked for anyone else since about 1990.
Not likely to have an opportunity like that now as the market has changed and there are to many expert venture capitalists grabbing the opportunities.
Arnie Allison
I have $10 million in cash or I can borrow it. I have a choice: put it into shares of existing big companies or invest in a factory. I think for most that choice is easy.
Hitting the links tomorrow. It’s supposed to be 75 and sunny. Late October golf in very pleasant conditions, in Buffalo, New York. Who woulda thought it?
Not this lifelong resident.
Hope I see a bird or an insect during the course of play. An autumn bee, a hawk, a crow, a late mosquito, it doesn’t matter, I would like to see one, but I don’t think I will, because winged things are close to gone.
Only the strong survive. Insects, shockingly, were weak. Birds, unsurprisingly, were weak. Neither could make the necessary adjustments. Their near term fate, is elimination.
The wonder of it all.
Which will be the last species standing, do you think?
To quote from the About page: NOTE TO COMMENTERS: Comments are mediated, so spammers and trolls need not apply. Pretty much all others, agreeing or disagreeing, are welcome, but if the comment is not germane, not civil, or if it subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge, it will be dematerialized.
Just sayin……
I was certainly way off-topic and perhaps well out of bounds as well. I apologize.
The vast majority of people don’t realize that the world financial markets are experiencing all this vaporous inflation on account of the European and Japanese central banks showering the markets with the equivalent of $180 billion in printed-from-thin-air money a month. This comes out to two trillion dollars a year. Before these central banks started doing this in early 2016, the markets were heading into serious deflationary compression. Now this Euro-Japanese quantitative easing is not only massive and ongoing. It is also absolutely necessary to stave off major deflationary compression.
The scary thing is, as our illustrious blog-host has pointed out in the past, the more we artificially inflate prior to the inevitable day of permanent contraction, the worse the massive economic carnage will be when that day finally arrives. It seems as though we are bound and determined to make the collapse of industrial society into the biggest barrel of suck we can possibly make it be.