US Deploys Troops Along Syria-Turkey Border

Just three days after Turkish warplanes killed at least 20 US-backed Kurdish fighters along the Turkey-Syria border as well as several Kurdish peshmerga troops on Mount Sinjar in northwestern Iraq, footage posted by Syrian activists showed the US has deployed troops and APCs in the contested region, in a move that could potentially drag the US in a conflict where it already finds itself mediating between two so-called US ally forces in the proxy war against Syria.

The Turkish airstrikes also wounded 18 members of the U.S.-backed People’s Protection Units, or Y.P.G., were criticized by both the U.S. and Russia. The YPG is a close U.S. ally in the theatrical fight against the Islamic State (whose real purpose is destabilizing the Assad regime); it is seen by Ankara as a terrorist group because of its ties to Turkey’s Kurdish rebels. The problem is that Turkey is also an ally of the US, although over the past two years relations between Turkey and all western NATO allies have deteriorated substantially for numerous familiar, and extensively discussed in the past, reasons.

On one hand, further clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces in Syria could potentially undermine the U.S.-led war on the Islamic State group. On the other, it risks taking an already unstable situation in Syria and escalating it substantially, should Turkey again find itself invading Turkey and/or Iraq.

Which is why the US appears to have deployed troops along the border: to serve as a deterrent to further Turkish attacks.

A senior Kurdish official, Ilham Ahmad told The Associated Press that American forces began carrying out patrols along the border Thursday along with reconnaissance flights in the area. She said the deployment was in principle temporary, but may become more permanent. Another Kurdish activist said the deployment is ongoing, adding that it stretches from the Iraqi border to areas past Darbasiyah in the largely Kurdish part of eastern Syria.

“The U.S. role has now become more like a buffer force between us and the Turks on all front lines,” he said. He said U.S. forces will also deploy as a separation force in areas where the Turkish-backed Syrian fighting forces and the Kurdish forces meet.

As noted above, the US intervention is meant to send a “a message of reassurance for the Kurds and almost a warning message” to the Turks, he said.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, did not dispute that U.S. troops are operating with elements of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) along the Turkish border, but he would not get into specifics. The SDF is a Kurdish-dominated alliance fighting IS that includes Arab fighters.

“We have U.S. forces that are there throughout the entirety of northern Syria that operate with our Syrian Democratic Force partners,” Davis said. “The border is among the areas where they operate.” He said the U.S. wants the SDF to focus on liberating the IS-held town of Tabqa and the extremist group’s de facto capital, Raqqa, “and not be drawn into conflicts elsewhere.”

* * *

Confirming that the proxy war in Syria is becoming ever less so, the U.S. has recently shifted from working quietly behind the scenes in Syria’s conflict toward overt displays of U.S. force in an attempt to shape the fight. Last month, about 200 Marines rolled into northern Syria backed with howitzers, significantly widening America’s footprint in a highly toxic battlefield. The Marines’ deployment came days after another intervention, when dozens of army troops drove outside the town of Manbij, riding Stryker armored vehicles, following an earlier conflagration of fighting between Syrian Kurdish troops and Turkish troops. The U.S. deployment in Manbij intentionally put Americans in the middle of that rivalry, hoping to cool it down.

The SDF retook Manbij from IS control, and Turkey said it won’t allow the town to be under Kurdish control, threatening to move on it. The American presence appears intended to reassure Ankara the Kurds don’t hold the town.

But the new deployment puts U.S. troops directly along the border with Turkey, another flashpoint, and immerses Washington into that increasingly hot fight. Should Erdogan happen to launch a strike against a zone containing US troops, he can simply say he was aiming elsewhere, although the retaliation by his NATO ally would be prompt.

It remains unclear if the US is now actively seeking to engage Turkey on the combat field, and is looking for a politically correct, and media friendly pretext to do so.  It is also unclear what a conflict between the US and Turkey would mean for the rest of NATO: it certainly would set a precedent, as never before has fighting broken out between two alliance members.

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Will Trump’s Tax Plan Pass: Here Is The Complete Probability Matrix

With global equity markets enjoying the biggest weekly inflow since the election on what BofA described was rising expectations of a Trump tax deal, the obvious question is “what is the probability of the Trump tax deal getting done.” And, as it turns out, that is also the wrong question, because as Morgan Stanley shows, the outcome from Trump’s tax proposal is not binary. In fact, there are nine distinct possible results, depending on how the various binomial outcomes pan out.

But first, here is a snapshot of how Morgan Stanley’s Michael Zezas sees the infamous one-pager (which was fully explained by Goldman Sachs earlier in the week).

A starting point, but we don’t think the timing of tax reform is advanced: The release is a signal that the White House is taking more of a leadership role on tax than they did on healthcare. Yet that fact alone doesn’t change the barriers to action and likelihood of delays (1H18 is our estimated timing), in our view, for the following reasons:

  1. Republicans still pursuing elusive healthcare deal – Until Republicans ‘cut bait’ on repealing & replacing Obamacare, they can’t practically start the detailed work of advancing tax reform through the budget reconciliation process. While we see little practical reason for Republicans to remain focused on healthcare, the recently proposed MacArthur amendment signals renewed dedication to the effort. As such, our concern is that they become bogged down in passing amendments to AHCA that satisfy the concerns of moderates, conservatives, and Senate reconciliation rules.
  2. A credible bipartisan path remains unclear – The tax plan offers several talking points that garner bipartisan agreement, but the policy details make that agreement more difficult than it appears. We don’t see evidence of a credible, bipartisan ‘workaround’ to reconciliation in this document. For example, personal tax breaks appear to favor the middle class by some measures (doubling the standard deduction), but the wealthy & high income earners by others (potential absolute dollar benefit of rate cuts, estate tax elimination). This leaves the plan open to criticism from the Democratic base, who have set a bar for what constitutes acceptable tax reform. Infrastructure & childcare plans have been suggested as bipartisan carrots, but were not detailed in this proposal.
  3. White House leadership doesn’t necessarily speed the process – While executive leadership earlier in the healthcare process might have been the right move, it’s not necessarily the case here given greater party unity around most tax reform concepts. Hence, leadership is just as likely to muddle and delay the process by creating larger ‘principles’ debates.

It is worth noting, that among the 9 or so distinct scenarios when lumped by probability outcomes, Morgan Stanley believes that there is a nearly 50% chance, 43% to be exact, that the result of Trump’s tax proposal will be a drag on the economy, with just a one in three chance that whatever Trump does will be a true stimulus (the other options are “mixed”).

Morgan Stanley’s takeaway:

We expect delayed and/or disappointing fiscal outcomes, but seemingly right-sized investor expectations may make this point academic in the near term. We concede that the release affirms that a timely tax-cut-driven fiscal stimulus is in play. But we’re not inclined to increase our current 33% odds of stimulus, either by reducing odds of failure to act in a timely manner or by limiting the odds of outcomes featuring pay-fors that alleviate potential deficits and carry near-term downside risks to the economy.

 

This point may be academic, though, in the near term, if investors have right-sized their expectations, permitting other factors to drive markets. Our US equity and Treasury strategy teams have noted that this is largely the case, and at our recent DC Macro Conference investors had muted expectations for a fiscal boost (58% did not believe a fiscal stimulus would come in the next 12 months; 68% believed a tax reform would not be delivered before the end of 2017). In the meantime, we of course will continue to watch for signs that fiscal optimism becomes a bigger market driver, hence elevating risks of fiscal & tax disappointment.

Finally, here is Morgan Stanley’s full Probability Decision Tree for tax reform:

Collapsing the various outcomes into “stimulus”, “drag” and “mixed” yields the following table:

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The Real Barack Obama is Finally Exposed to Everyone

There is no reason for the Democratic Party to exist.
– Jimmy Dore

I’ve been surprised by the number of people who lived in total denial about who Barack Obama actually was throughout his entire administration, suddenly pointing out the ethical and demoralizing implications of his recent decision to accept $400,000 for a speech to Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

For myself and countless others, the writing was on the wall from virtually day one when he appointed Wall Street sycophants Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to senior positions within his administration. Then came the polices, which were even more generous to Wall Street than any cynic could imagine. I posted countless pieces on Obama’s cronyism throughout his Presidency, constantly referring to him as an oligarch-coddling fraud, which his record unquestionably confirms.

It wasn’t just Wall Street either, although his protection and empowerment of that industry in particular was especially shameless. He coddled and elevated corporatism and cronyism in general throughout his eight years in office. As I observed in the 2015 post, Cronyism Pays – Eric “Too Big to Jail” Holder Triumphantly Returns to His Prior Corporate Law Firm Job:

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One Man’s Reality Check From “A Corner Of Flyover Red America”

Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

While the news waves groan with stories about “America’s Opioid Epidemic” you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what’s behind it, namely, the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens. I mean unspeakably literally. If you want evidence of our inability to construct a coherent story about what’s happening in this country, there it is.

I live in a corner of Flyover Red America where you can easily read these conditions on the landscapethe vacant Main Streets, especially after dark, the houses uncared for and decrepitating year by year, the derelict farms with barns falling down, harvesters rusting in the rain, and pastures overgrown with sumacs, the parasitical national chain stores like tumors at the edge of every town.

You can read it in the bodies of the people in the new town square, i.e. the supermarket: people prematurely old, fattened and sickened by bad food made to look and taste irresistible to con those sunk in despair, a deadly consolation for lives otherwise filled by empty hours, trash television, addictive computer games, and their own family melodramas concocted to give some narrative meaning to lives otherwise bereft of event or effort.

These are people who have suffered their economic and social roles in life to be stolen from them. They do not work at things that matter. They have no prospects for a better life — and, anyway, the sheer notion of that has been reduced to absurd fantasies of Kardashian luxury, i.e. maximum comfort with no purpose other than to enable self-dramatization. And nothing dramatizes a desperate life like a drug habit. It concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson once remarked, like waiting to be hanged.

On display in the news reports about the mystery of the opioid epidemic is America’s neurotic reliance on supposedly scientific “studies.” Never before in history has a society studied so much and learned so little — which is what happens when you resort to scientizing things that are essentially matters of conduct. It rests on the fallacy that if you compile enough statistics about something, you can control it.

Opioid addiction is just another racket, a personal one, in a culture of racketeering that is edging toward truly epochal failure, for the simple reason that rackets are dishonest, and pervasive dishonesty is at odds with reality, and reality always has the final say.

The eerie thing about reading the landscape of despair is that you can see the ghosts of purpose and meaning in it. Before 1970, there were at least five factories in my little town, all designed originally to run on the water power (or hydro-electric) of the Battenkill River, a tributary of the nearby Hudson. The ruins of these enterprises are still there, the red brick walls with the roofs caved in, the twisted chain-link fence that no longer has anything to protect, the broken masonry mill-races.

The ghosts of commerce are also plainly visible in the bones of Main Street. These were businesses owned by people who lived in town, who employed other people who lived in town, who often bought and sold things grown or made in and around town. Every level of this activity occupied people and gave purpose and meaning to their lives, even if the work associated with it was sometimes hard. Altogether, it formed a rich network of interdependence, of networked human lives and family histories.

What galls me is how casually the country accepts the forces that it has enabled to wreck these relationships. None of the news reports or “studies” done about opioid addiction will challenge or even mention the deadly logic of Wal Mart and operations like it that systematically destroyed local retail economies (and the lives entailed in them.) The news media would have you believe that we still value “bargain shopping” above all other social dynamics. In the end, we don’t know what we’re talking about.

I’ve maintained for many years that it will probably require the collapse of the current arrangements for the nation to reacquire a reality-based sense of purpose and meaning. I’m kind of glad to see national chain retail failing, one less major bad thing in American life. Trump was just a crude symptom of the sore-beset public’s longing for a new disposition of things. He’ll be swept away in the collapse of the rackets, including the real estate racket that he built his career on. Once the collapse gets underway in earnest, starting with the most toxic racket of all, contemporary finance, there will be a lot to do. The day may dawn in America when people are too busy to resort to opioids, and actually derive some satisfaction from the busy-ness that occupies them.

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NSA Reportedly Halts Warrantless Surveillance Of Americans’ Emails About Foreign Targets

In a somewhat shocking admission, if it is true, officials have told The New York Times that the National Security Agency is stopping one of the most disputed forms of its warrantless surveillance program.

The so-called "about the target" collection from network switches was first reported by The New York Times in 2013, but the issues surrounding NSA practices once again surged to the front page as 'excuses' such as this were allegedly used by the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign.

As The New York Times reports, The National Security Agency is stopping one of the most disputed forms of its warrantless surveillance program in which it collects Americans’ emails and texts to and from people overseas and that mention a foreigner under surveillance, according to officials familiar with the matter.

National security officials have argued that such surveillance is lawful and helpful in identifying people who might have links to terrorism, espionage or otherwise are targeted for intelligence-gathering. The fact that the sender of such a message would know an email address or phone number associated with a surveillance target is grounds for suspicion, these officials argued.

But privacy advocates argue that such broad collection of information means the agency, with help from telecommunications companies, is intercepting communications based on what they say, rather than who has sent or received it.

Of course, this raises two questions: 1) Can the sources be trusted?, and 2) if so, why now? Is there an 'event' looming that it would suit the administration best if it was made unaware of due to "interfering defenders of privacy"?

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Two Army Rangers Killed During Raid On ISIS Compound In Afghanistan

US military casualties abroad are starting to pile up again. Two weeks after the US dropped the MOAB over a cave complex in the Nangarhar region in Afghanistan, reportedly in an attempt to flush out ISIS operatives, on Friday the Defense Department reported that on Thursday two Army Rangers died during a raid on the same compound in Afghanistan.

Sgt. Joshua P. Rodgers, 22, and Sgt. Cameron H. Thomas, 23, were killed by small arms fire during an operation targeting the emir of the Afghan branch of the ISIS in Nangarhar province, the Pentagon said. Rodgers was from Bloomington, Illinois, and Thomas was from Kettering, Ohio. Both were on their third deployments to Afghanistan and assigned to a Ranger regiment based out of Fort Benning, Georgia, according to the Pentagon.   They were the second and third American servicemen to die in service this year. 

It was not clear if they were killed by ISIS soldiers, or worse, as a result of friendly fire. The Pentagon said it was investigating the latter possibility.

“That may have been what happened here,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said during a briefing Friday.

As CBS reports, the firefight in which they were killed took place south of an ISIS cave complex targeted in April by the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the U.S. in combat. The target of the raid was Abdul Hasid, the emir of ISIS Khorasan, the group’s Afghan branch. Hasid was believed to be hiding in the compound close to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The raid was conducted by 50 Army Rangers and 40 Afghan commandos on Thursday, the Pentagon said.

Rodgers and Thomas were killed in the opening moments of the ensuing firefight, which lasted for three hours and included air strikes by drones, AC-130 and Apache gunships and F-16 fighter jets. The military said the troops came under fire from “360 degrees.”

The U.S. has not confirmed whether Hasid was killed in the raid; It does, however, “suspect” that he was. About 35 ISIS fighters and several ISIS leaders were killed, the Pentagon said.

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Is The Dollar Bull Market Over? (And What That Would Mean For Your Portfolio)

Authored by Bryce Coward via Gavekal Capital blog,

Since the beginning of 2017, the US dollar has struggled against nearly every major currency, calling into question the idea that the US dollar is still in a bull market. Indeed, since the dollar made its cyclical high on the first day of 2017 trading, it has put in a series of lower highs and lower lows no matter how you measure it (chart 1).

The possible trend change is no doubt aided by President Trump  and several of his cabinet members making public statements to the effect that the US dollar is “too strong”. We’d also remind readers that any sort of deficit spending is likely to be financed from foreign sources, since US domestic savings is already at a low level. Such a scenario would add to the pressure on the dollar (chart 2).

So the question now becomes, if the USD bull market is over, what does that mean for my portfolio? The answer to this question is relatively simple. When the USD rises, US stocks tend to outperform foreign stocks in USD terms. When the USD falls, US stocks tend to underperform foreign stocks in USD terms.

Therefore, if we have indeed seen a peak in the US dollar – as the charts would suggest and the US government would like to affect – we’ve likely just seen the beginning of foreign equities outperforming US equities after a decade of the opposite occuring.

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US Rig Count Rise Continues As Crude Production Hits 20-Month Highs

From the May 2016 lows, the number of US oil rig counts have only declined 3 times and this week was no exception. Up for its 15th week in a row (+9 to 697), its highest level since April 2015, the rig count continues to pull US crude production higher, stymying OPEC efforts at balance, leaving the bullish case for oil fading fast.

  • *U.S. OIL RIG COUNT UP 9 TO 697 , BAKER HUGHES SAYS :BHI US
  • Texas added 11 rigs to 437, Oklahoma added 3 to 127
  • *U.S. GAS RIG COUNT UP 4 TO 171 , BAKER HUGHES SAYS :BHI US

One might argue that the rig count – which tracks the lagged crude price – may begin to stabilize here…

 

But crude production – which lags the rig count – has plenty of room to run…

 

As OilPrice.com's Nick Cunningham notes, the bullish case for oil is fading fast. Oil (and gasoline) prices have tumbled to their lowest since the OPEC deal was announced last year.

Major investors are also losing a bit of confidence in oil’s comeback. Hedge funds and other money managers took a breather in the buildup, buying up long positions in the most recent week for which data is available. Much of the rally in oil prices between the end of March and mid-April occurred as investors closed out short positions and took on bullish bets. Since then, however, hedge funds have slowed their net-long builds, a sign of waning confidence in higher oil prices.

Also, the futures market no longer looks all that encouraging. The contango is back, a sign of concerns about near-term oversupply. Front-month contracts are trading at a discount to later contracts, a situation that looks more bearish than it did just a few weeks ago. "Keep a wary eye on the Brent contango," Jan Stuart, energy economist at Credit Suisse Securities LLC, told Bloomberg last week. "Bellwether Brent time-spreads have been counter-seasonally widening.” That is just oil jargon for: “there is too much oil still swashing around and the market is getting anxious.”

Recognizing that the task of balancing the market is far from complete, OPEC’s monitoring committee, which was charged with overseeing compliance with the collective production cuts, has endorsed a six-month extension of the deal. The endorsement means that unless something unforeseen happens, OPEC will push for a passage of an extension at its official meeting in May. The only roadblock to keeping the cuts in place through the end of the year at this point is Russia, although most analysts don’t expect them to stand in the way.

That should help push oil prices back up. However, the meeting is several weeks away. In the short run, oil prices are floundering amid growing concerns about oversupply.

As has been the case since the beginning of the year, the main dynamic is how the OPEC production cuts stack up against the pace of growth from U.S. shale and others.

*U.S. FEB. CRUDE OUTPUT UP 2.2% M/M TO 9M B/D: EIA

By the end of the year, the U.S. could add 860,000 bpd of new supply, a sharp increase from expectations from just six months ago. The upward revision comes even as oil prices have failed to move much above the $50 per barrel threshold. In other words, U.S. shale drillers are “roaring back,” as Goldman Sachs recently put it, at a much faster clip than everyone expected. And the gains are coming even as oil prices are not rising as much as many had hoped.

On the other hand, the weakness in the market could be starting to deflate the momentum of U.S. shale – the blistering growth rate is starting to show some signs of slowing down. For the week ending on April 21, the shale industry only added 5 oil rigs back into operation, the lowest weekly figure since February. The previous five weeks saw rig count increases more than twice as high.

Luke Lemoine, an analyst at Capital One Securities in New Orleans, told Bloomberg that for the rig count, “the rate of change has slowed over the past several weeks. If commodity prices persist here, we expect the rig count to flatten out fairly soon.To some degree, the feverish uptick in drilling activity is killing off the rally at the industry’s own expense.

On top of too much supply from the U.S., some demand figures are raising some red flags as well. "It's the sense that too much gasoline and really a drop in U.S. demand in particular, but a little bit of softness in India and some other places, is going to lead to an undertow for refinery runs," Tom Kloza, who co-founded the Oil Price Information Service, told CNBC. "Back to the drawing board for crude oil prices," he said on Friday, at the close of a week that saw crude drop by 7 percent. Kloza added that the oil bulls that expect WTI and Brent to move into the $60 to $70 range are going to have to “come back to Earth.

The silver-lining for them, however, is that because the market is showing some cracks in it, OPEC almost has no choice but to extend the production cuts for another six months, for fear of risking a slide deeper into the low-$40s.

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Biggest Inflows Into European Stocks Since 2015, Just As The Economic Pullback Begins

Forget the “great rotation” out of bonds into stocks: 6 months into the so-called reflation trade, which so many strategists predicted would unleash a new era of euphoric stock buying driven by bond sales, it just isn’t happening; in fact bonds have seen fund inflows on 17 of the last 18 weeks. Instead, two other “great rotations” have emerged: one out of “active management” into passive, or hedge funds to ETFs, while the other – more recent one – is out of various asset classes and into Europe. It was this last rotation that was on display in the past week, when Europe saw the biggest inflows – approximately $2.4 billion – since December 2015, and the 5th consecutive week of inflows in a row.

This is likely just the beginning: as DB observes overnight, “There is a wall of money just waiting to come into Europe”, as fund flows into Europe lagged other developed markets in 2016.

There were other notable observations in the latest weekly EPFR fund flow report. In addition to the surge in European inflows, a total of $21 billion was allocated to equities, the most since the US election on hopes Trump’s “tremendous” tax proposal could boost risk assets; instead it was a dud. The US alone saw $13.8bn in inflows, the largest inflows in 19 weeks.

Once again, there was bad news for active managers: of the $21 billion in equity inflows, $21.6 billion went to ETFs, which means that mutual funds suffered another $0.5 billion in outflows.If even on near record inflow weeks, the active community can’t catch a bid, it may be time to start thinking career alternatives. On a YTD basis, ETFs have seen $167 billion in inflows, offset by $45 billion in mutual fund outflows.

Some more observations on the latest fund flows, via BofA:

  • Flows this week: show marked shift back to Joe Six Pack theme (link); $21bn inflows to equities, $10.9bn inflows to bonds, $0.2bn inflows to gold.
  • Inflows: renewed tax reform hope causes largest equity inflows since the US election (Chart 2); biggest inflows to European equities since Dec’15 ($2.4bn – Chart 3) after market-friendly French election; inflows to financials, tech, energy, US small caps
  • Outflows: defensive outflows from REITs, consumer, utilities, telcos

Broken down by region, style and sector:

  • US: largest inflows in 19 weeks ($13.8)
  • EM: 6 straight weeks of inflows ($1.8bn)
  • Japan: inflows 14 of past 16 weeks ($0.8bn)
  • Europe: 5th straight week of inflows, largest since Dec’15 ($2.4bn)
  • By style: US value fund outflows 5 of past 6 weeks ($0.6bn), inflows to US growth funds ($0.4bn); largest inflows to US small caps in 23 weeks ($4.0bn)
  • By sector: inflows to tech ($0.2bn, 8 straight weeks), financials ($1.2bn, largest in 7 weeks), energy ($0.2bn), healthcare ($0.1bn); outflows from materials ($0.9bn, 3 straight weeks), real estate ($0.2bn), consumer ($0.1bn), utilities ($0.2bn), telcos ($0.1bn)

With that in mind, it may be now too late to jump into the European stock market euphoria. In a note by Deutsche’s Sebastian Raedler, the great money inflow is coming just as the strong European economic data starts to revert back to the mean:

We have started to see a pull-back already with the April flash-implied level of 53.7 down from 54.3 in January. Of more concern for asset prices is the sharp fading in momentum, with the 6-month change in the global PMIs, a key driver of European equity price momentum, down from +2.5pts in January to just +0.6pts in April if the flash readings are confirmed.

DB’s warning: “The 6-month change will be negative by June even if the April flash-implied level of 53.7 holds, which would be consistent with negative equity price momentum.”

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Bubble Alert: Stocks Are Trading Based on Accounting Gimmicks and Fraud, Not Growth

Time to bust yet another hole in the “stocks are cheap” argument.

As we’ve already noted earlier this week, based on the only valuation metric that can’t be massaged, stocks are more expensive than they were in 2007 and on their way to tying the all-time high established in 1999.

Source: The King Report

Of course, few people use P/S to value stocks. Most people use Price to Earnings or Earnings Per Share (EPS), since this is meant to represent how expensive stocks are relative to the money a stockowner gains by “owning them.”

On that note, according to the “official data” the S&P 500 is sporting a P/E ratio of 25. This is supposedly “cheap” since it’s below the P/E ratios established in the past.

Unfortunately, this too has been shown to be a load of nonsense. As Lance Roberts has revealed, only 13% of today’s earnings per share results stem from actual “growth” via revenues. The rest are based on accounting gimmicks like buybacks, write offs and the like.

Put another way, 87% of earnings growth since the GREAT CRISIS has been the result of accounting gimmicks.

This is a 1 in 100 year type event. The fact that stocks have rallied to new all-time-highs based on this is like someone winning a Olympic Gold medal while hopping themselves up on every steroid imaginable.

The fall-out will be just as intense.

The below chart isn't a pretty one, but it's worth keeping in mind as stocks move ever higher into nosebleed territory based on accounting trickery.

This bubble, like all bubbles, will burst. And when it does, the market will crash, just as it did in 2000 and 2008.

We offer a FREE investment report outlining when the bubble will burst as well as what investments will pay out massive returns to investors when this happens. It's called The Biggest Bubble of All Time (and three investment strategies to profit from it).

We are offering just 1,000 copies to the general public. As I write this a mere 99 are left.

To pick up your FREE copy…

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Best Regards

Graham Summers

Chief Market Strategist

Phoenix Capital Research

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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