Bear Market Rally

"This bear market rally was indeed a huge affair. But still not out of the realms of former bear market rallies, which are mostly forgotten today. A prime example is the rally following the 1929 crash.  Stock prices rose more than 50 percent, and contemporary economists declared the crisis over. But the crash was only the prelude to the devastating bear market that got going after the bear market rally of early 1930."

 Claus Vogt, Weiss Research

The Inflationary Boiling Frog

"The boiling frog story states that a frog can be boiled alive if the water is heated slowly enough — it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out. The story is generally told in a figurative context, with the upshot being that people should make themselves aware of gradual change lest they suffer a catastrophic loss." Source: Wikipedia

Inflation can sometimes be analagous to the "boiling frog". It gradually creeps in and slowly climbs. The term inflation is often debated. I align with the Austrian economic definition that inflation is the "expansion of credit". Deflation, the opposite, would be the contraction of credit. Traditional economic theory would state that inflation is the rising of prices and deflation would be the opposite. Austrian inflation can definitely lead to the rise in prices.

Our credit expansion since 1982 resulted in a significant rising in prices....homes, cars, food, fuel, stocks.... The Federal Reserve continues to expand credit at record levels. Prices could be heading to a new level, hyperinflation. I just received my medical insurance renewal that included a 20% increase from last year...... Are we that boiling frog!

Four Potential Outcomes

I believe that the future will follow one of these potential outcomes:

Potential Outcome #1: Major deflation (Robert Prechter’s long term projection)
We would incur a major decline in everything. 1929 would look easy compared to this one. Run for the hills with a bag of silver/gold pieces and a gun.

Potential Outcome #2: Inflationary depression (Jim Puplava’s long term projection)
Buy commodities and buckle your chinstrap.

Potential Outcome #3: A long term Zig-Zag (U.S. 70’s repeat or Japan 1990-current)
No major pain, up-down-up-down-up-down-up; buy a leisure suit, crank up the Led Zeppelin, and grow a beard…..it will be a long ride

Potential Outcome #4: Young/Old new president
He wow’s the country with his “change” vision and extensive plan and the credit orgy continues into the future. Party on Garth!!!!

If a meltdown is certain, I vote for the short painful one versus the long dragged out one. Consult your Japanese friends on this one.

“If the Bear Market continues (which I think likely) sooner or later it takes down even the strongest companies. “ Warren Buffet March 2008

I’m betting on Puplava’s forecast of massive inflation. Buy some Krugerrands and interest in an oil well.

My Predictions
· Oil: $150/barrel before $50/barrel
· Gold: $1500/ou before $500/ou
· Dow Jones Ind. Avg.: 5000 before 15000
· Next ten years will be the toughest we’ve ever experienced in our lifetime
· Next twenty much tougher than last twenty
· Next fifty much tougher than last fifty
· Military draft: within ten years, probably 5
· Brett Favre won’t be playing for the Jets next season
· Paris Hilton’s career tanks
· Saints win the Superbowl in 2010!!!
It ain’t all bad…………..

Spirals and Fibs

Last year I read a book called, The Spiral Calendar by Christopher Carolan.
http://www.calendarresearch.com/

I don't remember how I heard about the book, but on the initial look, it appeared "way out
there". Basically, the premise is that many things on the earth, including events, are aligned with the lunar cycles. Yes, we know that the tides are controlled by that and the fish are aligned with it, but that's about all we are buying. Well this book took the concept a little farther. In 1987, the author was a bond trader on the Pacific Exchange. He became fascinated with the stock market and through his research became curious about the similarities between the 1929 and 1987 market crashes. His initial research concluded that there were four similarities:
-Both had a small correction that ended in late spring
-Sharp rallies in both markets peaked in late summer
-Both markets attempted rallies in the early fall
-Both crashes occurred in October

His research led him to the lunar calendar. Here are some excerpts....
"The calendar that we use is the Gregorian calendar. It is an improve version of the Julian calendar named for Julius Caesar. Our calendar, with its Roman origin, does a very good job of keeping time. The time it keeps is solar time, the rotation of the earth around the sun once every 365.25 days. The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, which is
still in use to mark religious holy days. One of the holy days, Yom Kippur, fell exactly on the third point of the four market similarities in 1987, the fall market top. There is an old stock market adage,' buy on Rosh Hashanah, sell them on Yom Kippur'. Selling stocks on Yom Kippur in 1987 was a good thing to do. My desire to know when Yom Kippur fell in 1929 was the original impetus for my calendar investigations. With this calendar, I realigned the comparison of 1929 and 1987 stock charts. Four points are very similar. The crash of 1987 occurred on the same lunar date as the crash of 1929! The other three points each fall one day later on the lunar calendar than their 1929 counterparts. Within one day, the 1929 autumnal market top occurred on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. Could this be a coincidence? Now seen in lunar terms, the likeness is an empirical fact. Where there was similarity, there is now sameness. What appeared as a resemblance is revealed to be a replication. It was 1988 when I made the discovery of the lunar connection between the crashes. I understood immediately that this was an important advance in the understanding of both markets and man. However, it does not provide a method for forecasting market behavior by itself. It was a clue to the market's mechanism, and it points the direction I should look to for additional discoveries. It is not a new idea that the position of the moon and sun in the sky has influence on the behavior of man. Each event in 1987 occurred approximately 717 moons form the analogous point in 1929. I felt that if there were a larger pattern to be found, this number should turn out to be significant. My first inclination was to check if it was a Fibonacci number. My experience with Fibonacci numbers came through the work of R.N.Elliott and Robert Prechter and their analysis of the stock market." http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/number/gl/fibon.html
"Yet 717 is not a Fibonacci number. I wondered if 717 might be some permutation of a Fibonacci number, maybe a multiple or a square root. With calculator and pencil in hand, I proceeded through the sequence of Fibonacci numbers. When I entered the 29th Fibonacci number, 514,229 into the calculator and pressed the square root button...there was 717.0976. My first thought then is still very close in my memory: the world is a very beautiful place. Market panics have long been considered a mystery. The Spiral Calendar lifts the veil of mystery from the bouts of sudden fear that periodically sweep the market. This is a dramatic and convincing demonstration of the Spiral Calendar's role as the time piece and primary regulator of social human nature.”

“Yom Kippur is the ‘day of atonement’, when Jews are to atone with fasting for their past mistakes before God. The ancient myth associated with Yom Kippur is that a person’s behavior during the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will form the basis of a judgment by God which will determine his fate for the coming year. In 1987 and 1929, anyone who shorted stocks during those ten days was judged as successful by the market in the following weeks and, likewise, anyone who bought stocks during those ten days were quickly judged as damned.”

“These are threads that connect the knowledge and actions of the ancients and come down to our time as ritual and custom. In this so called age of science, we too readily dismiss much of our inherited culture. We do not have a reasoning power or brain capacity greater than that of those who live three or five thousand years ago. In the case of the Mesopotamians, we have not begun to equal the tradition of observation of nature over time that they accomplished.”

“In fact ultimately, when viewed as a societal whole, human actions assume the shape, structures and fractal patterns found elsewhere throughout nature.”
…..end of excerpt……

So what does all this “mumbo jumbo” mean????? Hell, I don’t know. All I know is this:
· Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst point loss in history
· Tomorrow, September 18, is Rosh Hoshanah, and
· September 27 is Yom Kippur

What any of this means, I have no idea, but it sure keeps me up at night!!!!