It's definitely different this time...
The 2008 analog lines the current trajectory up with August 2008 right after Treasury Secretary Paulson told the world reassuringly that:
"Our economy has got very strong long-term fundamentals. And you know, your policy-makers and regulators here - we're very vigilant."
And we all know what happened next...
h/t @ChrisBrady12
Could never happen again?
Yeah you're probably right...
Just as we first warned in September 2013, so it seems the view of "helicopter money" being imminent is now becoming more mainstream as the powers that be slowly propagandize the benefits.
If dropping interest rates to zero was Unorthodox Policy #1 and QE was Unorthodox Policy #2 then it seems very possible Helicopter Money will be Unorthodox Policy #3. Whether this new level of expansionism, with all the hopes and theoretic power it is supposed to hold, can generate growth of the red-hot rather than lukewarm kind remains to be seen.
Two weeks ago, before the market was shaken by the most recent bout of volatility, one which led to the dramatic outcome of Birdgewater's Pure Alpha suffering two consecutive 5% weekly losses as reported earlier, we received a tip from an insider that as a result of substantial losses at Citadel's internal hedge fund Surveyor, Ken Griffen's organization was not only laying off numerous portfolio managers and traders, but that the unwinds of the associated portfolios were a direct reason for the selloff suffered at the beginning of the month.
Yesterday, one of the best-known providers of energy market intelligence thanks to its massive private and patented network of land, sea, and satellite monitors, Genscape, held a webinar titled the "Current state of the global oil market" in which it covered all the core aspects that investors in the oil space find concerning, among which the following:
Last year, virtually all the very “serious people” threw in the towel on global growth and trade.
It’s been apparent for quite some time (like say, a couple of years) that the slump in trade growth has likely become structural and endemic as opposed to transient and cyclical in the post crisis world.