Stocks bubbled sideways today, digesting the recent gains, and treading water as additional earnings and economic news comes out.
I have made no secret of it, that the US equity markets seem very fully valued at this point, and are overdue for a stiff correction in the neighborhood of ten percent. That they have not even had a 3 percent correction in quite some time is a testimony to the amount of hot money and speculative froth underpinning them.
Peak hubris. We’re there on a number of fronts, socially, financially, and politically. I have not seen anything like this since the tech stock bubble. The housing bubble was much broader and deeper, and much more profound in the levels of its corruption. This one seems more like an ‘echo bubble.’
The amount of potentially destabilizing situations geopolitically are daunting, almost breath-taking. I won’t bother to list them here, but things in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe are showing signs of heaving the landscape out of place. Domestically things in the US are much more tense under the surface than anything I can remember in many years. The elite are doubling down on their winnings with a kind of race to the oncoming wall of bad karma.
And yet, it is all overlaid with a very devil-may-care mindset, bolstered by the most pernicious type of pride in a culture of death. All one has to do is to consider the recent choice of leaders from the mainstream political parties:Lady Macbeth and the narcissist Duc l’Orange.
Gold and silver continue to wind sideways. Bitcoin is an absolute speculative bubble, no doubt about it. It is a kind of tulipmania.
Politically both US parties are betrothed to big money special interests. The Republicans are unabashed and almost feral in their service to Mammon, to the point of being repulsive. The Democrats seek to cover their moral nakedness with the kind of hypocrisy that is the special provenance of the fallen. And fallen is about the best word I can think to describe them. Both of their houses are falling.
There are parallel situations to this in all of the developed countries. The best lack all conviction, and the worst are driven by passionate intensity.
So what is one to do? Perseverance seems to be the order of the day, as it has been so many times in the past. We have seen much worse, even in the past century, as anyone who studies history will know.
As we used to commonly say a long time ago, ‘keep the faith,’ especially in an era of faithlessness and general apostasy. This is our command, and our challenge.
