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Everyone Was Talking About A Stock Bubble… Just Before The Last Bubble Burst

One of the more painfully clueless observations made by pundits in recent weeks is that just because everyone is talking about a bubble, there can not possibly be a bubble.

Naturally, if one is tuned to only filter any bubble mentions, one will naturally have a cognitive bias of interpreting the world only through the eyes of “bubble watchers.” The flipside of course is that not everyone is a mindless member of the herd, rushing headlong into whatever precipice awaits lemmings just around the corner, and can still do simple math and recall what fundamentals looked like (as a reminder, forward multiples in 2007 looked very cheap too…before EPS for the S&P in 2008 plunged by over 50% which in retrospect would have made those forward multiples 100% higher).

But simple logic failure aside, what empirical evidence shows is that while there has been indeed a pick up in internet mentions of “stock bubble” according to Google Trends, it is still well below its prior high… hit in May 2007 and October 2007, just before and at the very peak of the last stock bubble.

We can only assume that the same pundits that somehow are getting airtime now, were the same ones who said in the summer of 2007 when the S&P had hit its prior, non-QE assisted all time high, that just because everyone is talking about a bubble there can’t possibly be a bubble…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/a8j8mbf6GgI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

New York City May Ban Vaping Because It Looks Like Smoking

The New York City Council is
considering a ban on the use of electronic cigarettes in bars,
restaurant, and other “public places”—not because there is any
evidence that the devices pose a hazard but because they look
too much like regular cigarettes. Councilman James
Gennaro, a sponsor of the proposed ban, tells The New York
Times, “We see these cigarettes are really starting to
proliferate, and it’s unacceptable.” Why is it unacceptable?
According to the Times, “Mr. Gennaro said children who
could not differentiate between regular and electronic smoking were
getting the message that smoking is socially acceptable.”

So it is not the product that bothers Gennaro as much as the
message it supposedly sends. Presumably he would have the same
complaint if people started wearing T-shirts proclaiming that
“Smoking Is Cool,” although banning those might be constitutionally
problematic. Might there be a way to address Gennaro’s concern
about the impact that the sight of vaping has on impressionable
young minds without resorting to the use of force? I’m just
spitballing here, but maybe parents could explain to their children
the difference between e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine in a
propylene glycol vapor, and conventional cigarettes, which deliver
nicotine in a cloud of toxins and carcinogens generated by burning
tobacco. Even if Gennaro does not trust parents to educate their
offspring about such matters, surely a measure short of a total ban
could accomplish the goal he has in mind. How about taking a page
from the city’s regulations regarding
toy guns by restricting e-cigarettes to bright
fluorescent colors, so they can be readily distinguished from the
real thing?

Some might question Gennaro’s premise that children should never
see adults doing something (or seeming to do something) that
children are not supposed to do. If kids must be shielded from the
sight of vaping because it looks like smoking, perhaps they also
should be shielded from the sight of drinking—not just of alcoholic
beverages but of any drink that resembles an alcoholic beverage.
After all, how does an innocent child know the difference between
O’Doul’s and Budweiser, or between a Coke that contains Jack
Daniels and one that does not?

Gennaro’s rationale for banning vaping in bars and restaurants
actually is similar to the motivation for banning smoking in bars
and restaurants. The official rationale for such laws is protecting
employees, and their popularity can be explained by the simple fact
that most people find tobacco smoke distasteful, whether or not
they actually worry about the long-term health consequences of
sitting in a smoky bar for 30 years. But from a “public health”
perspective, the real payoff, in terms of reducing morbidity and
mortality, is deterring smoking by making is less convenient and
less socially acceptable. Gennaro worries that e-cigarettes will
undermine that goal.

That seems rather implausible, since the main selling point of
e-cigarettes is that they eliminate tobacco, its combustion
products, and the health hazards associated with them. Although the
Times says vaping in public remains legal thanks to
“a loophole” in New York’s smoking ban, the truth is that vaping
remains legal precisely because vaping is not
smoking. By seeking to equate the two, control freaks like
Gennaro may achieve the opposite of their avowed aim, increasing
rather than reducing smoking-related illness. As Craig Weiss,
president of the e-cigarette company NJoy, tells the
Times, “If you make it just as inconvenient to use an
electronic cigarette as a tobacco cigarette, people are just
going to keep smoking their Marlboros.”

Yesterday Zenon Evans
noted that Chicago also is considering a ban on vaping.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/28/new-york-city-may-ban-vaping-because-it
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China Re-Escalates, Deploys Warplanes To Air Defense Zone

A few days ago, in the latest escalation over the its territorial dispute with Japan regarding several islands in the East China Sea, China unveiled a so-called “Air Defense Identification” zone, shown on the map below, which includes not only the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in question, but stretches from South Korea all the way to Taiwan, and which requires that any overflights submit their plans to Beijing in advance.

The response by Japan and the US was immediate, with Japan blasting China’s retaliation to its own annexation of the Senkakus a year earlier and demonstratively neither Japan Airlines nor ANA complying with China’s demands, while the US, demonstrating its allegiance to Japan, flew B-52 bombers above the Air Defense Zone.

China promptly responded to what it perceived was Western hypocrisy:

China’s announcement to establish an Air Defense Identification Zone in East China Sea has drawn criticism from the United States and Japan, yet their blame is wrong.

Their logic is simple: they can do it while China can not, which could be described with a Chinese saying, “the magistrates are free to burn down houses while the common people are forbidden even to light lamps.”

It is known to all that the United States is among the first to set up an air defense zone in 1950, and later more than 20 countries have followed suit, which Washington has taken for granted.

However, as soon as China started to do it, Washington immediately voiced various “concerns.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday voiced concerns over the zone, fearing it might “constitute an attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” and a White House spokesman on Monday called the Chinese announcement over the weekend “unnecessarily inflammatory.”

…

Japan set up such a zone in the 1960s and it even one-sidedly allowed the zone to cover China’s Diaoyu Islands. But when China set up the zone covering the Diaoyu Islands, Tokyo immediately announced it “unacceptable” and Abe even called China’s move “dangerous.” It is totally absurd and unreasonable.

In one word, both Washington and Tokyo are pursuing double standards.

The latter should not come as a surprise to China, and the reason why such double standards are allowed to exist in a US superpower legacy world is because neither Japan nor the US believe China would actually dare to re-escalate further. However, in a world in which the US is no longer an undisputed superpower (especially in the aftermath of the Syrian debacle in which Putin schooled the Obama administration) that is changing.

The first clear indication that China would not just sit there and do nothing, came overnight when China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, passed through the Taiwan Strait on Thursday morning on its way to a training mission in the South China Sea.

Naturally, the training mission is just the pretext. China’s long-running if dormant feud with Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, is perhaps the best proxy of US interests in the region, where thanks to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the US sells arms and provides military training to the Taiwanese armed forces. China considers US involvement disruptive to the stability of the region, and made that quite clear in 2010 when Obama announced the decision to sell $6.4 billion in military hardware to the island leading to threats of economic sanctions from the mainland.

Which is why China crossing the Straits of Taiwan for the first time with its brand new aircraft carrier is nothing short of a message to Obama. From Xinhua:

It took about 10 hours for the carrier and its four escort ships to get through the strait separating the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.

The Liaoning entered the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday afternoon after it left its home port in Qingdao of east China’s Shandong Province on Tuesday for the South China Sea on a scientific and training mission.

It was escorted by two missile destroyers, the Shenyang and Shijiazhuang, and two missile frigates, the Yantai and Weifang.

The narrative gets scarier:

“During the voyage, the carrier has kept a high degree of vigilance against approaches from foreign warships and aircraft, according to Liaoning Captain Zhang Zheng. This is the first time the carrier has conducted a cross-sea training voyage and passed through the Taiwan Strait since it was commissioned into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in September last year, according to Zhang.”

But where it gets worst is that as BBC reported minutes ago, China has not only sent a symbolic message to the US, but a very literal one to Japan and everyone else who thought China would just sit there and do nothing, when it dispatched its own warplanes over the air defense zone.

China has sent warplanes to its newly declared air defence zone in the East China Sea, state media reports.

The vast zone, announced last week, covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

China has said all planes transiting the zone must file flight plans and identify themselves, or face “defensive emergency measures”. But Japan, South Korea and the US have all since flown military aircraft through the area.

China’s state news agency Xinhua quoted an air force colonel as saying the the warplanes had carried out routine patrols. The zone includes islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, which are claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.

What happens next: will Japan once again prod the not so sleeping dragon, and continue flying commercial (and military) airplanes over China’s expanded zone of control, without preclearance with Beijing, and will the US send some more strategic bombers just to prove that Obama didn’t win the Nobel peace prize for nothing?

And will then China once again re-escalate, perhaps through an “accidental” engagement with what it “vigilantly” thought was an
offensive act by “foreign warships and aircraft?” resulting in a major diplomatic scandal or worse. Or will it simply, and more effectively, launch a salvo of a few hundred billion US Treasurys into the electronic ether, sending the 10 Year yield over 3% and the Fed scrambling to preserve its centrally-planned house of cards?

So, the ball is now in the court of Japan, which lately has been engaging in increasingly more desperate and irrational actions to preserve a sense of control over its imploding economy and the whole “Fukushima thing”, and which means that much more entertainment is imminent.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/qG6dMTcOJ9g/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Guest Post: The Fed Must Inflate

Submitted by Chris Martenson via The Ludwig von Mises Institute,

The Fed is busy doing everything in its considerable power to get credit (that is, debt) growing again so that we can get back to what it considers to be “normal.”

But the problem is that the recent past was not normal. You may have already seen this next chart. It shows total debt in the U.S. as a percent of GDP:

http://media.peakprosperity.com/images/Debt-to-GDP-Hoisington.jpg

(Source)

Somewhere right around 1980, things really changed, and debt began climbing far faster than GDP. And that, right there, is the long and the short of why any attempt to continue the behavior that got us to this point is certain to fail.

It is simply not possible to grow your debts faster than your income forever. However, that’s been the practice since 1980, and current politicians and Federal Reserve officials developed their opinions about “how the world works” during the 33-year period between 1980 and 2013.

Put bluntly, they want to get us back on that same track, and as soon as possible. The reason? Because every major power center, be that in D.C. or on Wall Street, tuned their thinking, systems, and sense of entitlement, during that period. And, frankly, a huge number of financial firms and political careers will melt away if and when that credit expansion finally stops. And stop it will; that’s just a mathematical certainty.

Total Credit Market Debt (TCMD) is a measure of all the various forms of debt in the U.S. That includes corporate, state, federal, and household borrowing. So student loans are in there, as are auto loans, mortgages, and municipal and federal debt. It’s pretty much everything debt-related. What it does not include, though, are any unfunded obligations, entitlements, or other types of liabilities. So the Social Security shortfalls are not in there, nor are the underfunded pensions at the state or corporate levels. TCMD is just debt, plain and simple.

As you can see in this next chart, since 1970, TCMD has been growing almost exponentially.

http://media.peakprosperity.com/images/Total-Credit-MD-10-24-2013%201-46-39.jpg

That tiny little wiggle happened in 2008-2009, and it apparently nearly brought down the entire global financial system. That little deviation was practically too much all on its own for the markets to handle.

Now debts are climbing again at a quite nice pace. That’s mainly due to the Fed monetizing U.S. federal debt just to keep things patched together. As an aside, based on this chart, we’d expect the Fed to not end their QE efforts until and unless households and corporations once more engage in robust borrowing. The system apparently needs borrowing to keep growing exponentially, or it risks collapse.

One could ask why credit can’t just keep growing. But there are many reasons to believe that the future will not resemble the past. Let’s start in 1980, when credit growth really took off. This period also happens to be the happy time that the Fed is trying (desperately) to recreate. Between 1980 and 2013, total credit grew by an astonishing 8 percent per year, compounded. I say “astonishing” because anything growing by 8 percent per year will fully double every 9 years. So let’s run the math experiment and ask what will happen if the Fed is successful and total credit grows for the next 30 years at exactly the same rate it did over the prior 30. That’s all. This is nothing fancy, and it is simply the same rate of growth that everybody got accustomed to while they were figuring out “how the world works.”

What happens to the current $57 trillion in TCMD as it advances by 8 percent per year for 30 years? It mushrooms into a silly number: $573 trillion. That is, an 8 percent growth paradigm gives us a 10-fold increase in total credit in just 30 years:

http://media.peakprosperity.com/images/Credit-market-debt-grown-8-pct.jpg

For perspective, the GDP of the entire globe was just $85 trillion in 2012. Even if we advance global GDP by some hefty number, like 4 percent per year for the next 30 years, under an 8 percent growth regime, U.S. credit would be twice as large as global GDP in 2043.

If that comparison didn’t do it for you, then just ask yourself: Why, exactly, would U.S. corporations, households, and government borrow more than $500 trillion over the next 30 years?

The total mortgage market is currently $10 trillion, so might the plan include developing an additional 50 more U.S. residential real estate markets?

So perhaps the situation moderates a bit, and instead of growing at 8 percent, credit market debt grows at just half that rate. So what happens if credit just grows by 4 percent per year? That gets us to $185 trillion, or another $128 trillion higher than today — a more than 3x increase. Again: for what will we borrow (only) $128 trillion for, over the next 30 years?

When I run these numbers, I am entirely confident that the rate of growth in debt between 1980 and 2013 will not be recreated between 2013 and 2043. But, I’ve been assuming that dollars remain valuable. If dollars were to lose 90 percent or more of their value (say, perhaps due to our central bank creating too many of them), then it’s entirely possible to achieve any sorts of fantastical numbers one wishes to see.

For the Fed to achieve anything even close to the historical rate of credit growth, the dollar will have to lose a lot of value. This may in fact be the Fed’s grand plan, and it’s entirely about keeping the financial system primed with sufficient new credit to prevent it from imploding.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/WjYOY09pikA/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The Pope Can Make All of Us More Thankful Today, Says Shikha Dalmia…

…in the Washington Examiner today, by stopping his yammerings
against capitalism.

In a speech this week he went on yet another anti-capitalistic
rant, claiming that the Pope “opinion” that “economic growth,
encouraged by the free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing
about greater justice and inclusiveness” has “never been confirmed
by the facts.”

This shows, notes Dalmia, that the Pope pays no attention to
Bono, which is a sign of good taste.

His judgement, however, is another matter. It seems the Pope
hasn’t put down his copy of Das Capital to actually look at the
world around him in quite a while. If he had, he’d not only notice
how it has raised living standards in countries where it has (sort
of) been tried (and these don’t include his native Argentina and
his new home, Italy). He’d also notice how these (semi)
capitalistic countries keep the Catholic Church and its charitable
mission going. She writes:

Capitalism puts more discretionary income in the pockets of
people to devote to charitable pursuits. It is hardly a coincidence
that America donates over $300 billion annually toward charitable
causes at home and abroad, the highest of any country on a per
capita basis.

The church itself is a big beneficiary of this capitalist
largesse, with its U.S. wing alone contributing 60 percent to its
overall global wealth. Some of this money comes from donations, but
a big chunk comes, actually, from directly partaking in capitalism:
The church is reportedly the largest landowner in Manhattan, the
financial center of the global capitalism system, whose income puts
undisclosed sums into its coffers.

So the new pope needs to be careful not to bite the hand that
feeds his institution and its work. Otherwise, neither he nor the
poor in whose name he is speaking will have much to be thankful
for.

Go
here for the whole thing.

Happy Thanksgiving.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/28/the-pope-can-make-all-of-us-more-thankfu
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US Stocks & Gold Rise As Brits Pound USD On Thanksgiving

With the bulk of the US still sleeping on this day of giving thanks, it is perhaps ironic that the Brits have been pounding away at the USD driving GBPUSD to 2013 highs. S&P futures jerked higher on the European open and clung to those gains, extending yesterday's small green close to new record highs (+4.5 points). US Treasury futures sold off modestly then recovered back to unch as the USD slipped gently lower (even as JPY weakness continued). Gold and silver are up around 0.5% from yesterday's close.

The Brits are punding (pun intended) the USD…

But that won't stop US stocks from rising…

Treasuries round trip from earlier weakness…

but gold has been limping higher (with no ubiquitous smackdown yet) since the US closed…

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/rISHmV9BFzA/story01.htm Tyler Durden

US Stocks & Gold Rise As Brits Pound USD On Thanksgiving

The Brits are punding (pun intended) the USD…

But that won't stop US stocks from rising…

Treasuries round trip from earlier weakness…

but gold has been limping higher (with no ubiquitous smackdown yet) since the US closed…

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/rISHmV9BFzA/story01.htm Tyler Durden

If You Were Out Shopping on Thanksgiving, You Wouldn't Be Reading This Right Now

[OK, granted, you could be reading this on
a phone or something.]

Here’s the lede from
my latest column at Time.com, which went live just
yesterday:

If there’s one thing even more uniquely American than choking
down mouthfuls of turkey no one wants, green bean
casserole no one admits to preparing, and pumpkin pie that no one
remembers buying on Thanksgiving, it’s going shopping all the time.
For god’s sake, George W. Bush counseled a nation still
reeling from the 9/11 attacks that when the going gets
tough, the tough go shopping. “Take your families and enjoy
life the way we want it to be enjoyed,” he said. Forget
baseball—shopping is the national pastime.

Given that, I’m genuinely
amazed at the pushback against plans by Walmart, Target,
and other major retailers to open their doors on a day that
everyone has off but no one has anything to do. Being disgusted by
the willingness of stores to open for business on, what, the
10th or 20th most solemn day of the year isn’t just
incomprehensible, it’s positively anti-American.

As Calvin Coolidge put it famously to a bunch of
newspaper editors back in 1925, “The chief business of the
American people is business.” Just as you can’t have Thanksgiving
without a meal that fully no one actually enjoys (and a guest list
that always seems only slightly less arbitrary, resentful, and
ill-mannered than the manimals in The Island of Dr.
Moreau), you can’t have a functioning free-market economy
without massive amounts of shopping. Every day is “Buy Nothing Day”
in North Korea and look where that’s got them.

Please check out the whole thing.

Please note that this column in no way is a call for mandatory
shopping or opening of stores on this or any other holiday. But it
is an argument for unfettering markets even on this hallowed day
(wait, is this Gettysburg sesquicentennial?).

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/11/28/if-you-were-out-shopping-on-thanksgiving
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If You Were Out Shopping on Thanksgiving, You Wouldn’t Be Reading This Right Now

[OK, granted, you could be reading this on
a phone or something.]

Here’s the lede from
my latest column at Time.com, which went live just
yesterday:

If there’s one thing even more uniquely American than choking
down mouthfuls of turkey no one wants, green bean
casserole no one admits to preparing, and pumpkin pie that no one
remembers buying on Thanksgiving, it’s going shopping all the time.
For god’s sake, George W. Bush counseled a nation still
reeling from the 9/11 attacks that when the going gets
tough, the tough go shopping. “Take your families and enjoy
life the way we want it to be enjoyed,” he said. Forget
baseball—shopping is the national pastime.

Given that, I’m genuinely
amazed at the pushback against plans by Walmart, Target,
and other major retailers to open their doors on a day that
everyone has off but no one has anything to do. Being disgusted by
the willingness of stores to open for business on, what, the
10th or 20th most solemn day of the year isn’t just
incomprehensible, it’s positively anti-American.

As Calvin Coolidge put it famously to a bunch of
newspaper editors back in 1925, “The chief business of the
American people is business.” Just as you can’t have Thanksgiving
without a meal that fully no one actually enjoys (and a guest list
that always seems only slightly less arbitrary, resentful, and
ill-mannered than the manimals in The Island of Dr.
Moreau), you can’t have a functioning free-market economy
without massive amounts of shopping. Every day is “Buy Nothing Day”
in North Korea and look where that’s got them.