Friday, March 7, 2014

Double or Dog Food: ALL IN @Dow Casino (Yes, again)

I have come to realize that my thesis regarding the stock market is flawed - because people are not as oblivious to the insane risks as they desperately pretend to be. Most people playing the stock market right now know that it's a long shot. They know they've been burned before. However, unfortunately, they've been conned by their investment advisors and Wall Street into believing that it's the only way they can retire. 

So really, today's investors are nothing more than compulsive gamblers, playing the market like it's a lottery - all in, double or dog food...meanwhile the Wall Street croupiers laugh while they sweep the influx of dumb money straight into offshore bank accounts...

Rage Against the Old Age Home
Blogging isn't as much fun as it used to be. It used to be about "raging against the machine", breaking down the "Wall", rejecting "the Borg" (Assimilation).

Now, it has devolved into flogging geriatric seniors who are clinging to a bygone illusion - a society of degenerate gamblers letting it all ride one more time. Even the buffoons in charge are pitiful. Post 9/11 they were so hubristic and aggressive. Now they're the same set of circus clowns, but a little older, a lot grayer, a lot less certain. They've lost their swagger. The curtain is open and the Wizard of Oz realizes he's being watched, so he fiddle fucks around a bit longer with some last minute smoke and mirrors. The Matrix is flickering. The Wall is coming down.

Globalization is Already Collapsing
For Globalization this moment is like East Germany circa 1990, a lifetime of fighting against Soviet-era oppression culminates with sledgehammers furiously pounding a brick wall. And then seemingly out of nowhere, the fucking thing suddenly collapses as if it had never even been there in the first place. The Soviet Union was collapsing years before the wall came down, the wall was merely the primary physical icon representing that era. Globalization's wall is the Dow. It's merely an icon of this era, even now doing its job of fooling the masses into believing that the status quo is indefinitely sustainable, all as collapse takes place steadily in the background.

All Things Fake Are Now Disintegrating
As a blogger, there is really no challenge in predicting a train wreck when it's already happening in slow motion. One can pick up any propagandized lamestream news source and read between the lies to realize that all things fake are now disintegrating. As long as the Dow remains artificially levitated, literally every other social and economic factor can deteriorate into the abyss without so much as one word from the Idiocracy. The age of sociopathic boy-men making up new and more fantastical lies just to cover up the previous lies, is coming to an obvious bad ending. A lifetime of pretending has depleted them of any ability to face reality.

In a word it's fucking pathetic. Ok two words. I didn't sign up to excoriate FauxTarded old people, soiling their Depends, while flailing around with their ETrade accounts, playing Tesla roulette. 

Shearing the Sheeple One More Time
My latest insight came from this ludicrous article I read to today in Wall Street Journal about companies rushing to cash in on the latest IPO craze. This of course, in a nutshell is how the stock market works: Either insiders at existing companies are issuing options to themselves and then buying back the exercised stock using corporate profits, or as we find things at this rare yet even more extreme juncture - massive volumes of new stock come to market as new companies dump copious stock onto the gambling public who are the bagholder of last resort. Wall Street knows that the window of opportunity is limited because there is an ever-diminishing number of fools with money out there who can be conned into buying overpriced stock at the very top of the market: 
  1. "The pace at which companies are making new public filings for IPOs is at levels not seen since 2000"
  2. Valuations accorded to these companies are the highest since 2000 at 14.5x sales (the median P/S ratio for existing companies is 1.85)
  3. "That surge of interest "is bringing lots of companies out of the woodwork that couldn't have gone public in the past,"
  4. "So far this year, nearly three-quarters of companies that have gone public are unprofitable"
Wall Street makes huge profits from this orgy of greed of course, so they will be the last to put the brakes on it. Regulators look the other way, since this is "free markets" in operation. And the media pretend that this time will for some reason turn out to be totally different than the last two times, even though the current level of frothiness exceeds that seen at the top in 2007.

Double or Dog Food: Let it ride, one more time
Here is the really sad part about this entire fiasco. All of these articles constantly compare everything to Y2K as if that level of greed is some sort of benchmark to be reached before things become really insane. Meanwhile, every other benchmark of economic health has only steadily deteriorated for 15 years.

Therefore, all of this really is just a slow motion train wreck. A lottery for people who inherently know that it's now just all or nothing.

Sadly, this is not Y2K:
The real economy has been getting steadily worse for 15 years:

Labor Participation (red line) and Household Median Income Peaked 15 years ago



Consumer Non-Confidence With Total U.S. Debt
I will let you figure out which is which...

The joy of 0% interest rates:
No surprise, jobless "consumers" implicitly realize they are being buried in debt, literally

TOTAL DEBT HAS RISEN 300% IN 20 YEARS - HOLY FUCK



Dow Casino: Inflation Adjusted
Let it ride, one more time...



Pathetic.