Did you know that stocks are falling like a rock? One graph of the S&P below shows this is indisputably a hard-fact truth and no wonder: US Factory orders are unexpectedly shrinking. Morgan Stanley just forecast US earnings to decline by 16% this year. The Baltic Dry Bulk Index, a measure of bulk transoceanic shipments of resources, is rapidly falling. And Adam Taggart affirms what I’ve been warning about over the past few weeks — that the debt-ceiling deal that just passed will hasten our decline into recession by devastating the bond market and interest rates.
How does this fact about the S&P’s plunge square with the S&P’s soaring rise that has taken Apple back up to its record high and that has dominated the news? Well, that question almost answers itself, and one headline to a simple graph below explains why that is so. The bottom line is, though, stocks are falling hard and falling broadly. That, however, is to be expected in an economy that Charles Hugh Smith describes in the stories below as a stimulus-speculation economy now that the stimulus that drove the speculation is all being sucked away by the nation’s central planners.
And why is that great sucking sound being heard? Well, it’s the one thing the mainstream financial media doesn’t spend much time talking about (or any). That’s why you have The Daily Doom and other alternative-press publications of its kind to square the news up with realty. Let me provide a few examples from today’s news stories:
Today’s lead story asks if China is headed for Japan-like stagnation, but it claims economists say the worst for China is likely behind it. I doubt that economist can predict much of anything right. Many of them can’t even understand the past right. The article blames the stagnation on China being too quick to remove stimulus, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room that the article and its establishment economists avoid completely:
Why did China need stimulus in the first place? Well, too much government interference, too much ignorant central planning that thinks it knows more than it does are the overarching answers. To be more specific, China’s government engineered a virus that it, then, released on itself. That is “fake news” that became fact — you know, the kind CNN refuses to carry and even counters until reality breaks out of the bondage they seek to keep it in just like the virus broke out in Wuhan.
Now, China knew the virus could be serious because they engineered it. That is clearly why their response was so overwhelming right from the beginning. Government overreacts when it tries to solve the huge problems it created. You can see that all over today’s news, and I’ll spell some of it out for you.
Like most central planners, China’s attempts to save their own world made it worse. They responded to their self-created Covid contagion in the most ham-fisted way of all governments. We will long remember the images of people trapped in an apartment that was on fire because the Chinese government screwed the doors and windows shut on all apartments from the outside in order to save the people from Covid contamination via containment of people, not viruses. So, the people died in the fire. We will remember how China closed down entire metropolitan cities and ports to force containment of the disease they created.
It became politically impossible to continue with their policies because they were about to face a peasant revolt from people who didn’t want to burn to death in their apartments. So, the government then suddenly ended its zero-Covid policy with no rational explanation for why it was so necessary for months but was instantly not necessary at all, and, of course, Covid, in a population that had developed no natural immunity, surged! So, their economy took more damage.
The upshot is that all these brute attempts to force humanity into apartment prisons, as well as prisons of the mind, destroyed the Chinese economy to where it needs stimulus (artificial life support) in order to continue and still needs it. The US did the same thing in Trump’s final year, locking down the whole economy, under forced-Fauci, mandating massive changes in human behavior and creating huge economic turmoil that still cripples the labor market, causing the continued shortages mentioned in some of today’s other stories, but particularly the unending tightness in the labor market that lowers production.
Let’s note that, at the end of the day, all the self-righteous vaccine Nazis who thought they had the right to force-fire people, not caring in the least about destroying their livelihoods or sending them to early retirement — the people who banned the Great Unwashed from public places and who thought they had to right to force experimental medicine into the veins of anyone they wanted to — all of them did not do one bit better in the fight in the end against Covid than those who remained unvaccinated. In fact, those who got vaccinated four times did worse!
