“Remember the word “bubble”, you heard it here first...”
Donald Trump, December 19th 2015.
Love him or hate him there is one thing nobody can deny:
Donald Trump knows a lot about the US economy!
He is part of the top 1% running this country and has built a multi-billion dollar fortune
So is the Republican frontrunner full of hot air again?
Or is this a slip of the tongue from somebody who knows more than he is willing to share with the rest of us
THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION WILL SHOCK EVEN HARDCORE ?LIBERALS.
Here what Trump had to say about this “bubble” on December 19th 2015.
“We could be in bubble and that bubble could crash and it's not going to be a pretty picture. You know the market is going down big league the last couple of weeks. But we could be in a big fat bubble and if that bubble crashes it's a problem. The word bubble, remember the word bubble... you heard it here first... I don't want to sound rude but I hope that if it explodes it's going to explode now rather than 2 months into another administration.”
If you too are feeling scared or confused, than this presentation will shed light on what's really happening right now.
If give me just 10 minutes of your time,
I promise that by the end of this article you will understand more about the economy than many Harvard graduates.
A BIZARRE ECONOMIC CYCLE INTIMATELY LINKED TO EVERY US ELECTION SINCE THEN.
But to understand how this bizarre pattern works, we need to take a short look back at 1999.
It seemed like a totally different America than the one we are living in today.
The stock market was booming thanks to the internet companies, affectionately called “the dot coms”.
For many Americans, investing in the internet companies seemed like the quickest way to become rich.
More and more people put their savings into the stock market driving it higher and higher.
They gambled their money on the hope that they could sell these stocks for 2 to 3 times their value.
And everybody was praising the Clinton administration for creating the biggest economic growth in US history.
FOR A TIME IT WORKED.
TO MANY, IT SEEMED LIKE THE PARTY WOULD NEVER END.
Even the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan said:
“Technology is creating a new economy, one where the old rules no longer applied”.
The FED was so confident that in February 2000 it began raising the interest rates to their highest level since 1995.
At the same time, bad economic data started to come in.
The previous holiday season that was supposed to bring big profits to internet based companies was a major disappointment.
And it was not just online shopping... ordinary Americans bought less and consumption was dropping.
While the nation was preparing the next election, the house of cards built around the stock market started to collapse.
ON THE 12TH OF APRIL 2000, THE NASDAQ DROPPED BY 386 POINTS.
It was the largest drop ever recorded and by the end of the next week, Wall Street had lost almost a quarter of its value.
The long economic boom of the late 90s became a gigantic bust.
Bush was entering at a time when the NASDAQ had lost 60% of its value, erasing 7 trillion dollars of American wealth.
Clinton's economy grew on the back of the dot com bubble. And now, everybody was looking to Bush to get the economy going again.
But before going any further, let's take a short step back and see what we can learn from this:
An economic bubble grows around an asset that becomes very attractive to investors.
In the 90s this asset was the internet company stock.
Greed attracts more and more people who gamble their money hoping that prices will go up and they will sell for a profit later.
When people are blinded by the bubble they think that growth will never end.
This delusion is fueled by the media, economic experts and even the FED.
At this point something very interesting happened: as the economy showed signs of slowing down the FED raised the interest rate.
And, curiously, some months before the next US election, the bubble bursts crating massive economic pain.
We now have a theory that we can put to the test:
- A bubble emerges and grows on low interest rates.
- Investors and speculators are “all in” as the experts say everything is fine and growth will continue.
- The FED raises interest rates before the next Presidential election.
- The economy begins to slow down.
- The bubble bursts and the next President has to deal with the aftermath.
IF THIS SOUNDS CRAZY TO YOU RIGHT NOW, LET'S PUT THE THEORY TO THE TEST.
Before the 2008 election another bubble burst.
The asset this time was houses.
The Federal Reserve had cut interest rates from 6% in 2001 to 1% in 2003.
Rock bottom interest rates created a huge demand for mortgages as they were cheaper to pay off. Everybody wanted a house and that pushed prices up. You could get rich just by becoming a homeowner as the price kept going up!
Soon, even people who could not afford to make a down payment or could not provide proof of a steady income and collateral were given loans to purchase new homes.
If these people defaulted on their payments, the bankers didn't care. They would be left with the house, an asset that was rising in price. These no down payment, no collateral mortgage loans called subprime mortgages were given to millions of low income families.
Now, the bankers had a brilliant idea... bundle up the normal mortgages with the subprime ones and sell them to other banks, pension funds, hedge funds and sovereign funds. Mortgage payments generated huge profits and demand was high for this new type of speculative contract now called Collateralized Debt Obligations or CDO's. No one thought a mass default on mortgage payments was possible.
Banks Big and small gambled on CDOs thinking that prices will continue to rise.
HIGH PROFITS, LOW RISK... CDOS PRACTICALLY SOLD THEMSELVES BECAUSE THE HOUSING MARKET COULD NEVER COLLAPSE...
This created the housing bubble.
The experts appeared all over mainstream news assuring everyone that housing was not a bubble.
The Federal Reserve now started to increase interest rates.
By 2007 the interest rates had reached 5.25% and many families with subprime mortgages could not afford to make the monthly payments and their homes were foreclosed. As more and more houses went up for sale, the prices started dropping. Consumption plummeted. A new crisis had begun. At it would reach its peak in fall 2008, right before the elections.
House prices tanked. Banks and other investment funds found that their bulletproof, high profit CDOs became worthless. No one wanted to buy CDOs or houses anymore. It was a financial bloodbath.
The banking giant Lehman Brothers had bet on mortgages and was left holding assets nobody wanted anymore. On the 15th of September it filed for bankruptcy. During November 2008, Americans lost more than a quarter of their collective net worth. U.S. stocks were down by 45% from its 2007 high. Housing prices had dropped 20% from their 2006 peak. Total US household wealth went down by $14 trillion.
Through the banking giants Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan and Goldman Sacks, the big traders of CDOs the crisis had spread to the world
... and now stocks and property values plummeted everywhere. The economy of the world entered a deep recession.
All this happened as our nation was preparing to choose its 44th President. The housing bubble burst 2 months before the election.
SO HOW DOES OUR THEORY STAND:
- We have a new housing and subprime mortgage bubble created by low interest rates. Many Americans thought housing was a secure investment. The banks gambled huge sums of money on CDOs.
- The “experts”, again, said everything was fine.
- The economy started to weaken in late 2007.
- The Fed increased the interest rates.
- The bubble violently burst just as Americans were preparing to vote the 44th President of the United States.
Everything that happened in 2000 happened again in 2008.
Only this time the bubble was bigger and the damage was global and massive.
The theory is proven correct.
So... what about right now?
There is an election coming this November.
WILL THERE BE ANOTHER ECONOMIC CRISIS?
Well... in December 2015 the Fed started to increase interest rates. For the past 5 years the rate has been close to 0%.
Another rate hike is expected in January and in February.
The economy is already showing signs of stress:
Right now, the Bloomberg Commodity Index hit a 16 year low. The last time this happened was August 2008. Commodities represent all the goods being traded around the world, everything from oil to coffee, sugar, steel and copper. When their price slumps it signals a slowdown in the world economy.
Oil is reaching its 2008 low point.
The last time the price of oil was this low, the global financial system was melting down. It's happening again. And this time it will hit the US economy much harder because of the “shale miracle”.
CNBC's Jim Cramer is warning that many US oil companies will become bankrupt if the price of oil remains this low.
The price of copper too has plunged all the way down to $2. The last time it was this low was just before the stock market crash of 2008.
Corporate debt defaults have risen to the highest level that we have seen since the last recession.
Consumption is slowing down: In October, U.S. imports of goods declined by 6.6 percent on a year over year basis. U.S. exports of goods declined by 10.4 percent on a year over year basis. 2015 was the worst year for holiday spending since 2008.
U.S. manufacturing is contracting at the fastest pace that we have seen since the last recession.
If just one or two of these indicators were flashing red, that would be bad enough.
The fact that all of them seem to be saying the exact same thing tells us that big trouble is ahead.
Facing all of this negative data the experts claim everything is fine.
Obama said in his State of the union that the economy is fixed.
John G. Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo: “The Economy is fundamentally strong [...] Housing is booming, technology is booming, commercial real estate is booming.”
Michael Bloomberg: “In all fairness to Obama during the last few years jobs have been created and the jobless rate is way down.”
Lloyd Blankfine, CEO of Goldman Sacks: “The United states is growing as a trend 2.5% - 3% trend growth.”
FOLLOWING OUR CHECKLIST WE HAVE:
- An election year;
- An economy showing real weakness
- The FED raising interest rates;
- The experts saying everything is fine
THE ONLY THING THAT'S MISSING IS THE BUBBLE THAT TRUMP WARNED WILL BURST BEFORE THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS.
Does he know something we don't?
Well, to understand exactly what a bubble is, we need to look back at the dot com and the mortgage/CDO bubbles.
In both cases, people thought they had something that would never stop growing, something too big to fail.
In both cases, socks and housing attracted huge sums of money, driving their prices way beyond the actual value. This is just like gambling... buyers get the asset hoping they will sell it in the future for a profit. When the bubble bursts, those who are left with the asset suffer huge loses.
RIGHT NOW, I MUST ASK YOU GIVE ME YOUR FULL ATTENTION.
The following 5 minutes will be shocking and a little bit tricky to understand.
And I hope you are sitting down for this.
My prediction for 2016 is that we will see a banking collapse that will make the 2008 crisis look like a Sunday afternoon picnic.
This coming crash will wipe out the entire US financial sector and take with it savings, deposits, retirement funds, pensions... it will be nothing short of a financial bloodbath.
How can this be possible?
Well... remember how bubbles are created when something seems to grow indefinitely? The delusion is that something is too big to fail... but the bigger the bubble becomes the faster it fails. Right now, people think Big Banks can't fail because of their size and importance to the world economy. It is as blatant as their name suggests.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
On September 18th, 2008 – Hank Paulson the US Secretary of the Treasury told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy could collapse "within 24 hours."
What took place next was undoubtedly the biggest blackmail in history. The threat: keep the Big Banks alive...or else the economy implodes and depositors lose their money. In December 2008 the first of many financial stability measures was put into place.
The FED's mission from now on was to keep the big banks alive no matter what. Economists calculated that the total cost of the various measures put into place to accommodate Big Banks was in excess of $20 trillion up to this year. The Too Big To Fail Banks now had a taxpayer sponsored safety net. The message was clear: do whatever risky business you want, we've got your back!
AND THIS IS HOW CONGRESS AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE CREATED THE ULTIMATE BUBBLE... THE TOO BIG TO FAIL BUBBLE.
The idea that the Too Big to Fails were going to get cut down to size after the financial crisis has turned into a giant myth. In fact, they've become bigger.
JPMorgan Chase, No. 1 among banks in total assets, has seen its base swell to more than $2.5 trillion. The company's deposit base alone has grown by 29 percent since the end of 2008.
The so-called Big Four institutions—JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo—continue to distance themselves from the pack, with some $8.2 trillion in total assets. That's 154 percent more than the rest of the top 50 banks combined.
Unfortunately, the old saying “the bigger they are the harder they fall” will prove correct... and when they collapse the result will be nothing short of catastrophic for the world economy.
But for a bubble to inflate you also need an asset on which speculation or rather gambling has become so rampant and so over the top that a disaster is just waiting to happen.
LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO THE WORLD'S BIGGEST AND MOST DANGEROUS CASINO:
It's called the derivatives market and right now the total net worth of all outstanding derivatives contracts is a staggering 552.9 trillion dollars according to the Bank for International Settlements.
552.9 TRILLION DOLLARS.
Let that number sink in for a moment!
Total US debt right now stands close to 19 trillion and most Americans find that shocking. But very few have any idea of how big this financial market is. The entire economy of the world in REAL goods and services is evaluated at around $78 trillion annually... the derivative market is 7 times the value of every good and every service provided around the world in an entire year. At first, I thought this number was too big to be real. But, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Independent Bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury confirms it.
Feel free to check these numbers once the presentation is done and you will find that they are 100% accurate.
Make no mistake, you are looking at the biggest bubble in the history of mankind. Something 7 times greater than the entire economy of the world.
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS A DERIVATIVE?
A derivative is a speculative contract, a bet placed on stocks, mortgages, interest rates, the price of commodities like gold, silver, coffee, oil or the possibility of a company or even a nation to default... basically, right now, there is nothing of economic worth that does not have some sort of derivative attached to it. All derivatives are bets.
This is not a metaphor, an analogy, or a generalization. The players on the derivative market gamble trillions on the future price of the asset to which the derivative is attached to.
Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction“. And he was proven right.
The CDOs that lead to the crash of 2008 were derivatives as they drew their value form interest payments on mortgages and housing prices. They were traded on this market just like all the other derivatives. And they were just a tiny part of the market. In 2008 there were about $500 billion worth of CDOs. That was only a very tiny fraction of the derivatives market. Yet it was enough to almost collapse the economy of the world.
Remember how I said that this is the world's largest casino?
In a nutshell, the derivatives market or more correctly put, the derivatives casino is where Big Banks and other financial institutions place their bets on every aspect of the world economy.
YET WITH THESE BETS, EVERYBODY LOSES.
So how much did the Big US banks bet on derivatives?
Well, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has the exact numbers:
Citigroup
Total Assets: $1,808,356,000,000 (more than 1.8 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $53,042,993,000,000 (more than 53 trillion dollars)
JPMorgan Chase
Total Assets: $2,417,121,000,000 (about 2.4 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $51,352,846,000,000 (more than 51 trillion dollars)
Goldman Sachs
Total Assets: $880,607,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $51,148,095,000,000 (more than 51 trillion dollars)
Bank Of America
Total Assets: $2,154,342,000,000 (a little bit more than 2.1 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $45,243,755,000,000 (more than 45 trillion dollars)
Morgan Stanley
Total Assets: $834,113,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $31,054,323,000,000 (more than 31 trillion dollars)
OVERALL, THE BIGGEST U.S. BANKS COLLECTIVELY HAVE MORE THAN 247 TRILLION DOLLARS OF EXPOSURE TO DERIVATIVES CONTRACTS.
That is an amount of money that is more than 13 times the size of the U.S. national debt, and it is a ticking time bomb that could set off financial Armageddon at any moment. This is gambling on the future of the world economy on an unprecedented scale. And just like every other bubble before it, the Too Big to Fail Derivatives Bubble will burst. This is proven economic theory.
The bubble to end all bubbles... because of its sheer size. It's inflated to a size far greater than the Dot Com bubble and the mortgage/CDO bubble combined.
This is the final piece of the puzzle.
The Fed interest rate hike, the experts claiming everything is ok, the real economy slowing down and the bubble that has inflated to an unsustainable size.
If history repeats itself, 2016 will be the year big banks come crashing down.
And the FED and our government are totally powerless to stop them. Their safety net is made out of straws. It took extraordinary efforts to prop up the big banks in 2008.
During Obama's presidency, the US debt doubled reaching almost $19 trillion yet the economy grew at a modest pace of 2% per year. Compare that to the doubling of the derivatives market and you begin to realize the level of economic pain we are about to feel. This will make the Great Depression of the ‘30s and the Great Recession of 2008 feel like a picnic.
SO WHAT WOULD A CRASH LOOK LIKE?
You need only to picture what happened in Greece to get an idea
3:19:00 μ.μ.
OXIA
