Sunday, October 12, 2014

No Formal Phisix-Financial Commentary this week; Start of the Breakdown?

It’s due time for me to take a weekend recess from my weekly regular market updates to spend valuable scarce time with my family. 

Anyway here is the music by 1980s new wave band, Tears for Fears’ (TFF), a favorite of mine, with the “Start of the Breakdown” from their first album "The Hurting" (youtube source here)



The basic theme of the all the music from “The Hurting” album has been on emotional distress and the primal scream therapy.

So TFF singer and songwriter Roland Orzabal may have vented his “primal scream” through the morose song when faced with their past “breakdown”

Considering that markets across the globe have essentially risen and has become heavily dependent from central bank subsidies or inflationary steroids, those artificial monetary stilts have been fundamentally unsustainable. Thus, a systemic "breakdown" from all accrued imbalances over the past years, for me, signifies an issue of a WHEN and not an IF. 

And as I have been documenting here, various international political agents have recently been hurriedly jumping on the bandwagon to warn of its symptoms, e.g. excessive risk taking, extremely low volatility, chasing the markets, substantially stretched valuations, et. al.

It is not clear yet whether the heightened global market volatility over the past weeks presages the advent of such a monumental "breakdown" or if current events merely reflects on seasonality or cyclicality.

All these will ultimately be revealed by time

Yet if my hunch is right that this may be early phases of THE "breakdown", or as Credit Bubble Bulletin's Doug Noland recently observed "it appears that the global bubble has been pierced", then this would be bad news for “bullish” stock market consensus (as well as for the bubble segments of every economy that has embraced on such steroids).

As fund manager Dr. John Hussman recently wrote, “Somebody will have to hold stocks over the completion of the present cycle, and encouraging one investor to reduce risk simply means that someone else will have to bear it instead”. 

Since every financial security transaction requires a buyer and seller, financial market meltdowns would imply steep financial losses for each buyer of securities from current record "high" extremely overpriced levels.

The prospect of such staggering losses may be accompanied by eventual emotional distresses too...which brings back the memories and relevance of TFF's music.




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