Juggling Dynamite

Without ongoing manipulation from central bank jiggers, brazen HFT skimmers and corporations un-GAAP’ing their earnings and blowing up their balance sheets to buy back their own shares, the stock market would be a fragment of its present level today. That much is clear. The harder questions are to what end and where next? Bulls think the sky’s the limit and none of this matters so long as prices are going up!!  Bears worry that the farce is a farce and inherently unsustainable.

After bouncing back 13% since February 11 (similar to previous moves in October 2014 and 2015- in green bars below) the cyclical trend for the broad markets remains negative to date.  The below chart is of the 1900 company NYSE composite Index courtesy of my partner Cory Venable and captures the big picture of a market which remains more than 9% below its highs of last May.

Note to bulls: making back losses is not investment progress and higher prices on lower fundamentals do not make assets more ‘attractive’ as investments, just the opposite. With central bank announcements in the rear view mirror once more and investor flows continuing to exit into rallies, the question is who or what can continue to prop up an over-bought, dramatically over-valued market from the weight of a global downturn in revenue?

Remember when the cigarette industry argued and advertised that their products were actually good for the chest and funded research and politicians that championed their cause? Here we are again…See: Congress infected with climate change deniers.

99% of scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by human activity. How is it possible that 6 in 10 Americans are represented by climate deniers? Here is a direct video link.

Electric vehicles are a massive part of the efficient transportation evolution, self-driving cars will be too, but shared transportation is critical in lowering urban congestion and increasing capital efficiency ie., less cars need to be bought, less car loans and much less spending on maintenance and repairs– huge savings for consumers.

Uber didn’t start out with grand ambitions to cut congestion and pollution. But as the company took off, co-founder Travis Kalanick wondered if there was a way to get people using Uber along the same routes to share rides, reducing costs and carbon footprint along the way. The result: uberPOOL, the company’s carpooling service, which in its first eight months took 7.9 million miles off the roads and 1,400 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air in Los Angeles. Now, Kalanick says carpooling could work for commuters in the suburbs, too. “With the technology in our pockets today, and a little smart regulation,” he says, “we can turn every car into a shared car, and we can reclaim our cities starting today.”  Here is a direct video link.