Most Popular
1. It’s a New Macro, the Gold Market Knows It, But Dead Men Walking Do Not (yet)- Gary_Tanashian
2.Stock Market Presidential Election Cycle Seasonal Trend Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
3. Bitcoin S&P Pattern - Nadeem_Walayat
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
4.U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - Raymond_Matison
5. How to Profit from the Global Warming ClImate Change Mega Death Trend - Part1 - Nadeem_Walayat
7.Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - Nadeem_Walayat
9.It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - Stephen_McBride
10.Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - Richard_Mills
Last 7 days
Nvidia Numero Uno in Count Down to President Donald Pump Election Victory - 5th Nov 24
Trump or Harris - Who Wins US Presidential Election 2024 Forecast Prediction - 5th Nov 24
Stock Market Brief in Count Down to US Election Result 2024 - 3rd Nov 24
Gold Stocks’ Winter Rally 2024 - 3rd Nov 24
Why Countdown to U.S. Recession is Underway - 3rd Nov 24
Stock Market Trend Forecast to Jan 2025 - 2nd Nov 24
President Donald PUMP Forecast to Win US Presidential Election 2024 - 1st Nov 24
At These Levels, Buying Silver Is Like Getting It At $5 In 2003 - 28th Oct 24
Nvidia Numero Uno Selling Shovels in the AI Gold Rush - 28th Oct 24
The Future of Online Casinos - 28th Oct 24
Panic in the Air As Stock Market Correction Delivers Deep Opps in AI Tech Stocks - 27th Oct 24
Stocks, Bitcoin, Crypto's Counting Down to President Donald Pump! - 27th Oct 24
UK Budget 2024 - What to do Before 30th Oct - Pensions and ISA's - 27th Oct 24
7 Days of Crypto Opportunities Starts NOW - 27th Oct 24
The Power Law in Venture Capital: How Visionary Investors Like Yuri Milner Have Shaped the Future - 27th Oct 24
This Points To Significantly Higher Silver Prices - 27th Oct 24
US House Prices Trend Forecast 2024 to 2026 - 11th Oct 24
US Housing Market Analysis - Immigration Drives House Prices Higher - 30th Sep 24
Stock Market October Correction - 30th Sep 24
The Folly of Tariffs and Trade Wars - 30th Sep 24
Gold: 5 principles to help you stay ahead of price turns - 30th Sep 24
The Everything Rally will Spark multi year Bull Market - 30th Sep 24
US FIXED MORTGAGES LIMITING SUPPLY - 23rd Sep 24
US Housing Market Free Equity - 23rd Sep 24
US Rate Cut FOMO In Stock Market Correction Window - 22nd Sep 24
US State Demographics - 22nd Sep 24
Gold and Silver Shine as the Fed Cuts Rates: What’s Next? - 22nd Sep 24
Stock Market Sentiment Speaks:Nothing Can Topple This Market - 22nd Sep 24
US Population Growth Rate - 17th Sep 24
Are Stocks Overheating? - 17th Sep 24
Sentiment Speaks: Silver Is At A Major Turning Point - 17th Sep 24
If The Stock Market Turn Quickly, How Bad Can Things Get? - 17th Sep 24
IMMIGRATION DRIVES HOUSE PRICES HIGHER - 12th Sep 24
Global Debt Bubble - 12th Sep 24
Gold’s Outlook CPI Data - 12th Sep 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

More Wall Street Propaganda

Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2019 Sep 10, 2019 - 12:26 PM GMT

By: Michael_Pento

Stock-Markets

One of the best examples of Wall Street’s propaganda machine at work is its willingness to dismiss recessionary signals. The inverted yield curve is a perfect example. Case in point, look at the story that was put out on Market Watch dated November 27th 2006—exactly one year before the Great Recession officially began, the stock market started its decline of more than half and the global economy started to collapse.

Here’s how some on Wall Street and the Fed described what was happening on the precipice of the global financial crisis regarding the inversion of the yield curve at that time: “Bernanke, and his predecessor Alan Greenspan, have attributed the inverted yield curve to a ‘global savings glut’ that has sparked fervid demand for Treasuries and U.S. corporate bonds. Economists have noted that this buying spree is inconsistent with the possibility of a looming recession. In the past inverted yield curves have been harbingers of recession, but a number of economists, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, do not think this is the case in the present instance.”



A few years earlier, Alan Greenspan told Congress during his annual testimony on November 2005 that he:

“Would hesitate to read into the actual downward tilt of the yield curve as meaning necessarily as it invariably meant 30 or 40 years ago. This used to be one of the most accurate measures we used to have to indicate when a recession was about to occur. It has lost its capability of doing so in recent years."

In 2006, his successor Ben Bernanke appeared to be even more confident that the flat yield curve was caused by the "significant increase in the global supply of savings" and nothing to say about the faltering economy. In his March 2006 speech to the Economic Club of NY Bernanke stated he “would not interpret the currently very flat yield curve as indicating a significant economic slowdown”  instead he bloviated on about four other anomalies adding to the demand for US long term debt that was putting downward pressure on the long end of the curve. First and foremost, among his excuses was strong international demand for US debt. Perhaps it was his indifference to the curve inversion that caused him to assure investors in May of 2007 in a speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,

“Given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited.”

In other words, he wanted investors to ignore the yield curve inversion because in the Fed’s infinite wisdom everything was just fine.

The first lady Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, is now taking her turn assuring investors of the yield curve’s irrelevance; explaining very recently on a Fox Business Network interview dated August 14th, 2019:

“Historically, [the yield curve inversion] has been a pretty good signal of recession and I think that’s when markets pay attention to it, but I would really urge that on this occasion it may be a less good signal.”

And, turning to the current dictator of monetary policy, Jerome Powell, he said in his March of 2018 news conference that while the inverted yield curve has had its prescience in the past,

 “but a lot of that was just situations in which inflation was allowed to get out of control, and the Fed had to tighten, and that put the economy into a recession.  That’s really not the situation we’re in now.”

The Fed and Wall Street are great at concocting stories to claim that it is different this time. One of their favorite and reliable false narratives is that an inverted yield curve is not a harbinger of recession. Well, this time is most likely not at all different, despite the fact that a never-ending parade of gurus come on financial news networks and explain why this time the yield curve inversion is irrelevant.

What is the major point here? Besides the fact that central bankers and Wall Street Shills never learn their lessons, it is that an inverted yield curve is not some exogenous event that is coincidently linked to recessions. It is always a sign of a slowing global economy and the imminent collapse of unstable asset bubbles that were built on cheap credit. This is because an inverted yield curve causes credit to shut down. When the difference between where banks can borrow funds (short end of the curve) and what income their assets can generate (long end of the curve) shrinks towards zero, the incentive to lend money erodes. And, since the slowing economy dramatically increases the risk of loan defaults, lending institutions become much more reticent to extend new credit at low margins to those that have higher potential to default. The result is a significant reduction in the amount of money created; the same money that fuels these asset bubbles and the overleveraged economy.

Therefore, the inverted yield curve isn’t different this time, and the countdown to recession and equity market collapse has begun. An official recession has always occurred in less than two years after the initial inversion. And in 60% of those inversions since 1955, the stock market topped out just three months after the date of that first inversion, according to BOAML. It should be noted that the spread between the Fed Funds Rate and the 10-year Note has already been negative for the past four months. Indeed, the August report from the ISM proved that the manufacturing recession in the US has officially arrived.

The sad truth is there’s a record amount of debt extant in the world that sits on top of a massive global bond bubble. From which central banks—because of their love affair with ZIRP and even NIRP--have almost no room left to remediate a recession and market collapse. That is, other than the full deployment of massive helicopter money—where new money is created by governments and central banks and then handed out directly to the private sector. What could possibly go wrong with that?

This is why a static buy and hold, or dollar-cost averaging investment strategy isn’t working any longer. You have to know what sector of stocks to own and when it is time to short stocks or bonds; or both. Such are the consequences of having both fixed income and equities in a record-breaking bubble together for the first time in history.

Michael Pento produces the weekly podcast “The Mid-week Reality Check”, is the President and Founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies and Author of the book “The Coming Bond Market Collapse.”

Respectfully,

Michael Pento

President

Pento Portfolio Strategies
www.pentoport.com
mpento@pentoport.com

Twitter@ michaelpento1
(O) 732-203-1333
(M) 732- 213-1295

Michael Pento is the President and Founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies (PPS). PPS is a Registered Investment Advisory Firm that provides money management services and research for individual and institutional clients.

Michael is a well-established specialist in markets and economics and a regular guest on CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, FOX Business News and other international media outlets. His market analysis can also be read in most major financial publications, including the Wall Street Journal. He also acts as a Financial Columnist for Forbes, Contributor to thestreet.com and is a blogger at the Huffington Post.               

Prior to starting PPS, Michael served as a senior economist and vice president of the managed products division of Euro Pacific Capital. There, he also led an external sales division that marketed their managed products to outside broker-dealers and registered investment advisors. 

Additionally, Michael has worked at an investment advisory firm where he helped create ETFs and UITs that were sold throughout Wall Street.  Earlier in his career he spent two years on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  He has carried series 7, 63, 65, 55 and Life and Health Insurance www.earthoflight.caLicenses. Michael Pento graduated from Rowan University in 1991.

© 2019 Copyright Michael Pento - All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

Michael Pento Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in