John wrote:I just heard Kramer on CNBC say that people are stopping him
on the street saying, "How do I get some Facebook?"
He said he's never seen anything like it.
Then he said, "It's just like 1999."
John
Well, just like Einstein's theories portend the possibility of reverse time travel, who says that one can't find a metaphysical way to go from a Fourth Turning to a Third — in where "it's just like 1999"? Just apply a Facebook IPO, and it's magic — and Prince can provide the theme song to all this, of course —Best regards/Cheers, Marc
If people would just stop for a minute and think, their lives would be so much easier, but the sad fact is they don't.
Who am I talking about here? Mainly myself in particular.
The point being that if this bubble lasted three times as long as it did in the 1920's, then the subsequent events are bound to be different and may also be 3 times as much in some fashion.
The 1920's bubble started in 1921 and ran until 1929. This bubble started in 1982 and ran until 2007. It lasted 3 times as long.
The 1920's had one stock market bubble and one and only one price peak. This bubble had 3 price peaks - one in 2000, one in 2007, and one in 2011. The middle one was the highest.
There was one rebound from the 1929 crash. It topped in April 1930. No other rebound came close to that.
There were 3 rebounds from the 2008 crash. One made its high in April 2010, one in May 2011, and the last one is making its high now. The middle one will probably be the highest.
Why is it that I can't see things that a 2 year old could see? It really does look to be that simple.
OK, now I will hold up my fingers and count - one, two, three. I think I got it.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.
It may not go exactly that way but it sure seems like it could be that simple. The idea, though, is a 2 year old child could easily see what I could not due to being bound up in complexity.
Related to that, I've noticed something interesting with the Facebook IPO.
Last year, when that rumor first surfaced, some traders got very excited and came up with the idea that the market would soar all the way to the day of the Facebook IPO. That excitement was coincident with the May 2011 high.
Of course, the next logical event is that the actual news of the Facebook IPO coincided with the current high, which in most cases is a lower high.
However, I espect many will be thinking and hoping that the high will come in May, when the IPO is projected to happen. It could but it also seems probable that it will be a lower high but he will get his money before the bottom falls out completely. He must realize it's coming.
While the periphery breaks down rather slowly at first, the capital cities of the hegemon should collapse suddenly and violently.
The bubble still hasn't really deflated yet. The stock market is still about double the trend value. It started going above trend value in 1990. It was a bit above trend value in the 1980's, but fell back by 1990. After that, it went up again and was at 130 percent of trend value when the bubble truly began.
I fear I must disagree about the bubble, the fact is, the bubble never broke. We live in an era where the excesses of the bubbles are accepted as the new normal. A drop to 5000 and staying there would have been a burst bubble, a drop to 2000 would indicate an overcorrection and stocks would be cheap. It never happened.
And this in truth is the lasting Bernake achievement. He's managed to keep the markets above normal for so long that any drop to an actual correction to the norm would be considered the end of the world.
I wouldn't say that it's 1999 again. I'd say that it's 2007 again. I
remember how amazed I was at that time to see the stock market going
to 250% of trend, with some people predicting that it would soon reach
Dow 50000. Today's jobs report seems to have sealed the deal that the
stock market has nowhere to go but up.
Yeah, people are celebrating the latest jobs report, stating that we're on the way to recovery. Basically, we're celebrating that unemployment didn't go up again. Personally, I was expecting it to do just that. Looks like we're forgetting that what's going on in Europe and China is going to have an effect on us as well.
It constantly perplexes me that the markets keep going up in spite of underwhelming performance in the real economy. Today's job report was much worse than the fawning anchors reported. Fewer people are in the labor force and of the new jobs created, most were part time. I am convinced that what is different this time is the scale of intervention by the fed in the markets. These markets are completely manipulated. They buy futures to levitate the market upward. They suppress the price of money with ZIRP, and even then are the buyer of first and last resort in the Treasury market. The official statistics are fabricated fiction. This is the major reason that none of Higgy's cycles are predictive. Eventually they will lose control. But as Keynes opined, "the markets can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent", especially when there is an actual invisible hand making it so. Who knows what events in the real world will upset their apple cart? The generational crash is coming, but the time scale may be much more delayed than any of us ever imagined.
They're trying to spin it around to help the president. If the circumstances were different, i guarantee they'd be screaming "Depression". I read that the underemployment rate actually went up, although that part's not easy to find. Let's also keep in mind the quality of these new jobs. I'd bet most of them are low paying, even if they aren't part time.
—Best regards/Cheers, Marc