Even a modest bear market will go a long way towards destroying the deep state. Deep State operatives are buying outright to control the trend of the market. What is their alternative?
The choice is to invest more outright or have ones wealth completely devastated by natural market forces. The Deep State has absolutely nothing to loose by using their own resources to support the value they already have. The only alternative is to absorb a guaranteed loss and run the risk of ceasing to exist.
With corporations buying back stock and Deep State operators adding to and holding positions, stock is so closely held that that they have pretty much cornered the equities market. The law of large numbers is now on their side. It will take an actual catastrophe to put the market into a bear market mode. Predicting the timing of an economic catastrophe for me is not doable. Predicting an eventual catastrophe is a piece of cake. That is like predicting an engine will be destroyed by throwing a pinch of salt in the gas tank every day. It is easy to figure the engine will be destroyed but picking an exact date is not that easy.
Ten years into this monetary experiment, central banks did create growth…
US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was about $15 trillion in 2008. Current GDP is about $22 trillion. That’s $7 trillion of economic growth.
Impressive… until you figure the cost of that growth.
Over the same period, the US national debt increased from $10 trillion to $22 trillion.
So, it took $12 trillion of debt to create $7 trillion of economic growth.
The marginal utility of all of this new debt is decreasing And it’s the same story all over the world.
The US economy is so dependent on cheap money, it can’t even handle 2% interest rates (the Fed hiked rates from 2.25% to 2.5% last December and stocks fell 20%).
But Europe is even worse. Europe has negative interest rates. And the European economy is so weak (it grew 0.2% in Q4), it can’t even handle ZERO percent interest rates.