Juggling Dynamite

As fresh-faced CNBC hosts come and go, a few guests have decades of real life market experience. Fewer still are independents free to call conditions as they seem them, unconstrained by their corporate sales targets for proprietary financial products and services. Marc Faber summarizes several of the key issues working against financial stability and sustainability of current asset prices in this clip.

Marc Faber, publisher of the “Gloom, Boom & Doom Report,” discusses his market outlook.  Here is a direct video link.

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is a board made up of 60 different central bank heads, that meets bi-monthly in Basel, Switzerland and bizarrely issues reports where they talk about central bankers (ie., themselves) in the third person.   Rather like a Monty Python skit where the clerk at one counter pretends they are not the same guy you spoke with at the other. Their latest missive is classic.  After two decades of aiding and abetting devastating financial bubbles, they are once more warning see Central banks raise alarm about new crash after steep rise in lending.

Here they are: “keeping interest rates too low for long could raise financial stability and macroeconomic risks further down the road, as debt continues to pile up and risk-taking in financial markets gathers steam.”

As “risk-taking in financial markets gathers steam”?  Hmm.  As shown in this chart from Lance Roberts, having just grown back their losses for the second time since 2000, buy and holders are once more ‘fully in’ at a secular peak in valuations with average cash levels less than 5% for most managers, ETFs, mutual funds and Do-it-yourselfers.  Convinced once more that this time is different, they will be selling for the exits at the next cycle bottom as they did in the last two.  Central banks are the architects of this nightmare on Main Street, and investor lemmings play a leading role in their own demise. Sad story!

It started with a substitute teacher in Tennessee who believed that evolution should be taught in the classroom. What followed was a fiery debate that rocketed around the world.

The Scopes Trial reminds us that science has often upset the establishment. Kai Wright explores how the powerful have tried to convince us that science gets it wrong.

Then Amanda Aronczyk looks at just when we began to doubt the whole idea of climate change. She’ll take us back to that day in 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen warned the United States Congress that climate change was real.  Here is a direct video link.