Something is Coming
Lately I’ve been staring at graphs of the major stock indices almost constantly during trading hours. It just feels good when they go down, and man have they ever been tumbling these past few months. The NASDAQ, Dow Jones, and S&P 500 have all fallen more than 20% from their record highs of December 2021, which means that they’ve officially entered what finance weirdos call a ‘bear market.’ Obviously in December 2021 the highs these indices saw were based on complete bullshit quantitative magic performed by the governments of the western world to make sure that the financial aspect of their grip on power stayed numerically solid, and obviously every normal person can feel in their gut that numerically is the only way governments like ours can rule anymore. This situation I’ve described isn’t anything new. In response to the 2008 financial crisis the US government decided it was going to let the corpses of its dead financial corporations stay operational (or at least most of them, RIP Lehman) by pumping enough money into their rotting gullets that they no longer needed to turn a profit to operate. We live in a financial Weekend at Bernie’s where the only thing our collective governments can do to maintain their own legitimacy is keep up a facade of normal operations and pretend that nothing is wrong while our society gets sicker and sicker until there’s nothing left.
Well, there’s nothing left. After enough time staring at the major indices I’ve started branching out a little to the harder stuff to get a fix. I understand what it means that the US treasury yield curve is inverted, and I know that when the 10 year yields go over 2.5% from their recent norm of between 0.6%and 1.6% we’re probably in for trouble since it becomes financially infeasible for many companies, especially tech companies, to continue to operate without cheap loans, since their margins are so small (indeed if they exist at all. Many, e.g., Spotify, have only ever lost money and are funded completely by venture capital which is now drying up because the rich — even the dumbest of the dumb venture capitalists — know what’s going on right now). Let me check my notes here… oh, they just hit 4% on Wednesday. Damn that rules.
I’ve also learned that when the dollar spikes relative to other currencies that’s not a good sign. When every economy is weak people want to trade in what they have for the currency of last resort, even if that currency comes from an economy that’s also weak. After the appointment of absolute moron Liz Truss as prime minister of the UK, her near-immediate implementation of a reform completely removing the top tax bracket in that country caused the pound to hit a record low exchange rate with the US dollar which nearly cascaded into what one analyst now-famously called a ‘near-Lehman moment.’ This whole thing is balancing on a knife’s edge. It will collapse, and my bet is that it does before Halloween. My god is it going to feel so good when it finally does. Just today the talk is that Credit Suisse is near insolvency. The economies of our society are so unprecedentedly interconnected and therefore so unprecedentedly intercontaminated as everyone tries to financialize and pawn off all of their ever-multiplying risk that any major problem anywhere in the western world will probably start this thing off.
It’s so funny looking at thumbnails from the daily finance headlines of the guys the stock exchanges pay to dress up and act like they still trade on the floor so people can take photos. It’s so good when they have to act sad because the number goes down.
There’s a weird dialectic going on here. Up to a certain point, if the news reports act like the economy is doing well, people will trade like it’s doing well, causing the economy to improve, and if they act like everything’s imploding people will sell every stock they have to avoid continued losses. Nowadays, the odd time that stocks end the day slightly up from their usually multi-year record low opening you’ll see a million headlines going, “Dow Jones Bounces Back!” and of course by opening the next business day all these meager gains are typically lost again. This phenomenon is more well known as it applies to the speeches of the chair of the federal reserve, which have a history of being deliberately and strategically vague and mealy-mouthed to prevent an effect on the economy. A great reminder of how bullshit this all is.
But why am I laughing? How can I possibly be enjoying this when it’s going to come back around to me and mine before anyone who actually deserves it? Well, to an extent that’s definitely the case, barring the fact that the Bed Bath & Beyond guy did definitely deserve it and it did come back to him before me. I quit my job that I hated in December because I would rather do nothing than keep working with people I didn’t like on projects that I didn’t care about, performing tasks I found convoluted and infuriating. It’ll probably be quite hard for me to get another job. It’s not like I’m ignoring any of this, I’m just also laughing when it’s funny. And if you’re not laughing, I can understand if you’re just not paying attention, but if you are paying attention maybe that says something about to which economic system your subconscious allegiances lie, hm?
