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"Gamma", "vega", CTAs, risk-parity, vol-neutral, central bank vol-suppression, the soaring popularity of (inverse) VIX ETFs , and so on: over the past year there have been countless attempts to explain why despite the surging political uncertainty in recent years, and especially since the US election...

... global equity volatility, both implied and realized, has tumbled to record lows, sliding even below levels not even seen before the 2008 financial crisis.

There may be a much simpler reason.

By the SRSrocco Report,

The coming GREAT DEFLATION will impact the value of Gold and the Dollar much differently than what most analysts are forecasting.  Unfortunately, most analysts do not understand the true underlying value of gold or the U.S. Dollar, because they base their forecasts on information that is inaccurate, flawed or imprecise.

This is due to two faulty theories:

monetary sciencesupply-demand market forces

When all other sources of economic growth appear tapped out, there is always the military-industrial complex coming to the rescue of US GDP with the sale of arms and equipment to the world's biggest purchaser of weapons: Saudi Arabia. Because when one looks beyond the pageantry, pomp and circumstance of Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia, the main purpose behind the president's visit is precisely that: selling weapons, some $350 billion over the next decade, according to estimates.

China's copy of Manhattan is no longer a ghost town, Bloomberg reports. But that doesn't mean it has forever forestalled a "day of reckoning" for its debt-fueled growth.

Back in 2006, some of the wall street banks (ahem, Goldman) managed to layoff quite a bit of their mortgage risk to unwitting European and Asian investors who, in their desperate 'search for yield', had no idea they had just been conned into stepping in front of a freight train.  Now, it seems that the same thing may be happening yet again with another favorite wall street structured product, Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs).