Nervous Monday: Stocks Predict Future?

With the latest round of woes for presumptive presidential high-bidder Hillary Clinton, the pseudo-liberal East Coast money establishment has been in an uproar since late last week.

We can see there were two drivers to this gnawing sense of fear: One was polls showing Donald Trump was back in the lead by several measures. The other was that the long-simmering debate about Clinton’s health is more than a non-issue despite threatening a reporter and all the other strong-arm tactics employed to quash the buzz.

This weekend Hillary had a major health crisis which the NY Times chalks up to pneumonia. We’ll await more medically-qualified views than press reports because it has been an exceptionally long-running case. If you remember, it was “allergies” and now it’s “pneumonia.” Next week, a nickel side-bet says it will be something else.

Another small wager is it might not be Parkinson’s, Hashimoto’s, or any of the other dire rumors floating around on the web.

A more plausible driver could be Foot & Mouth disease. I spied the first overt symptom when she called half the republican base “deplorable.” I don’t like being called names.

That is something she quickly tried to “walk back” but it got traction too quickly in some quarters with headlines like “I’m Deplorable and I’m Proud.” Walking-back is not something in the Clinton genome.

Should Ms Clinton become unable to continue the campaign, I’m sure there will be unschooled attempts to make her into an historical clone of Franklin Roosevelt. But at least Roosevelt was able to complete scheduled appearances. Ms Clinton has a problem with even that, lately.

There’s another issue, as well: If Hillary isn’t getting well-enough to campaign, who would step in to run in her stead? Bill Clinton can’t, and despite fear-mongerers who have been predicting an Obama-decreed postponement of elections (a rumor on the ‘net for more than a year) the 22^nd Amendment slaps those theories down.

“Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.”

A late Clinton withdrawal should logically leave Tim Kaine in the demo driver’s seat. While he may fit the basic profile (e.g. Harvard Law) he’s not exactly overwhelming in the name-familiarity department. He would be easily Trumped and that bothers the big money types.

Democrats have a problem.

Not that there weren’t other indicators of the future Friday. John Kerry indeed worked out a “cease-fire” in Syria this weekend, but the odds of that being durable seem to us low due to the nature of the parties involved.

A looming “Nightmare on Wall Street” is this problem of interest rates perhaps putting in a bottom. While that could lead to a 1929-style blow-off in the markets, my friend Robin Landry points out that these is a possibility that the fifth Elliott wave is already done. And if that’s the case, we could test 2,080 shortly. Should that crumble, there some 1,980’ish resistance, but lower down it’s the 1,850 level.

While that would be terrible, you ain’t tracking the bigger picture.

Suppose a Wave 1 down is from 2190 down to 1850. Let’s say a 340 point move.

Next think of a 100 point bounce. Up to 1,950. That’d be the Wave 2 bounce.

From there? Elliott might drop another 1.618 times the 340 point first wave. (550 points)

So we take 1,950 minus 550 which suggests a bottom around 1,400. Remember, though, this is only the Wave 3. The real damage comes with the Wave 5 down following a Wave 4 bounce.

Yes, we will have financial turmoil long before that for several reasons.

For one, derivatives exposures while supposedly hedged “about evenly” might blow up. Reason? Symmetry in positions is not perfect.

Then there will be one of the Too Big To Fails deciding this would be a fine time to hold-up the public with a massive bail-in. With Clinton that would be a slam dunk.

Trump, on the other hand, as a U Penn biz-whiz, might understand what TBTF really means.

In short, when TBTF happens the renounced debt becomes renounced savings.

Some where in here, the public at large will pick up on what the financial powers/money-changers have really done. They have stolen America and given us a half-rotten skeleton that has been hollowed out from the inside.

The challenge will be to fix it. Yes, it will hurt like hell and retirements will be slashed and so forth, especially things like defined benefit plans when the believed “assets” turn from a bond-like promise to something more like “best efforts” and then to “don’t blame us…”

All the while, the ill-gotten gains of the derivative gangs have only resulted in a single arrest, best I can recall and the derivatives industry has enjoyed the “water under the bridge.”

Americans have terrible memories for things like numbers. Easier to remember a cough.

But yes – it MIGHT all happen before the election.

The Fed/Plunge Protection Team has likely been nibbling (via offshore proxies) at the futures market. It’s how to “arb things up.”

Whether this is a “Bottoming Monday” (low odds) or whether we will have to wait for “Turn-around Tuesday” will make itself clear in due course.

The large problem, as I see it in the charts, is that long-wave pressures in the economy have been largely papered-over.

In Long Wave terms, we should have entered into the Greater Depression in the spring of 2001. Mid-2002 at the latest. Everything was in place. The all-time high (Internet Bubble) was solid, the bust was rolling up, unemployment was growing, and our old friend job-displacement was hard at work.

So we have to give government for averting the financial end of the world. Whether or not government had a direct or indirect (through woeful ignorance) of 9/11 events is not the point.

What IS the point this morning is to sit back and see how certain “strings are pulled” in order to maintain U.S. international supremacy.

The 9/11 events spurred the largest one-time hiring binge in recent memory – the birthing of the TSA.

In addition, AmeriCorp – the quietly growing background analog to the 1930’s Civilian Conservation Corp and the Works Progress Administration have rolled along.

Then, too, we look at the promotion of two (or is it five?) wars and the building of a nice solid path into WW III in the event the economic events aren’t papered-over just so.

Still, like the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike to hold back the sea, the government’s resources are not as great as the problem is large.

Richard Heinberg wrote a dandy book a few years back. It was all about the “peakiness” we have just been through. Peak in the Oil Patch, perhaps peaks in grain harvests, peak climate stability (oh, and the Sun is undershooting its solar cycle projections which means cooling ahead), and even lesser-considered peaks. Like Peak Fresh Water, for example. You ought to take a look at:  Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.

So here we are, sneaking up on the Fed meeting. Something of the Line in the Sand around 2,075-2,080. And the Peoplenomics trading model about to turn into outright shorting territory.

[Disclosure: I did tell subscribers I was front-running the model and went short last week and so yes, we made money Friday, at least on paper.]

After being down almost 130 Dow points earlier, those proxies have driving it up to -70 at the open. So we’ll just look at the data roll in, plug it into our “Brain Amp” spreadsheet, watch the MACD and let the market come to us.

In terms of real news? I don’t see a whole bunch to get excited about until Friday when Consumer Prices come out.

Overall, it’s a great morning to resume non-destructive pillow-testing.

Review:  Sully

Not often I will recommend a movie, but my CFI (chief fright instructor) sent in a dandy review that’s very much on point:

We went to see the movie “Sully” on Friday and found it to be spot on as far as the airline stuff except for one very small part where right after take off Sully says ” I never get tired of this view”  which is a busy time and Airline Pilots do not chit chat below 10,000 feet.  Other than that one tiny bit, the movie was awesome.  People who were at the movie stayed in their seats for a while after the movie was over…”

On our “A” list.. Amazon: Sully.