Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
The majority of middle class wealth is locked up in unproductive assets or assets that only become available upon retirement or death.
One of my points in Why Governments Will Not Ban Bitcoin was to highlight how few families had the financial wherewithal to invest in bitcoin or an alternative hedge such as precious metals.
By the SRSrocco Report,
The U.S. Deepwater Offshore Oil Industry is a trainwreck in the making. The low oil price continues to sack an industry which was booming just a few short years ago. The days of spending billions of dollars to find and produce some of the most technically challenging deep-water oil deposits may be coming to an end sooner then the market realizes.
With the market now deep in what BofA has called a "Icarus Rally" melt-up phase, it is not surprising that retail investor cash levels are among the lowest ever as Joe Sixpack scrambles - as he always did just before the market crashes - to buy everything that institutions have to sell (and as we showed last week, they have a lot to sell). Recall that in its Q2 earnings call, discount retail brokerage Schwab confirmed that retail cash levels are near the lowest ever:
Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.
The Grim Reaper has taken his scythe to the Venezuelan bolivar. The death of the bolivar is depicted in the following chart. A bolivar is worthless, and with its collapse, Venezuela is witnessing the world’s worst inflation.
While all eyes have been focused on the collapse in US equity market volatility and its unending upward ramp in the face of 'event risk' large and small, the complacency has crossed the Pacific and crushed China's stock markets to a shadow of their former selves.
While we noted yesterday the seasonal tendency towards lower volatility around this time of year...