The Morning Line

Inflation fears are at a generational peak, pushing our stubbornly unfearful Fed chairman against a wall. He may yet prove right in saying inflation will be transitory, but for reasons that should comfort no one. In the meantime, the U.S. dollar seems resistant to the nervous chatter while Treasury bonds, although struggling for altitude, continue to hold their own. Both are near the middle of their respective trading ranges for the last five years, presumably waiting for more persuasive evidence that the inflation we've seen to date is about to go out of control. An obvious reason this has yet to occur is that wages have barely budged relative to the soaring cost of groceries and consumer goods. But how high can inflation go, one might ask, when the broad middle class can no longer afford stuff? Answer: Only so far. The wealthy will not have much of a counter-effect, either, since the trillions they've banked from the bull market will get plowed back into financial assets and real estate, not CPI items. Meanwhile, the theory that raising the minimum wage creates inflation has been tested and refuted by a pandemic-strained job market. What it does most clearly is destroy jobs. McDonald's may have rolled over on paying burger flippers $15 an hour -- what choice did they have? -- but they have minimized their pain by revamping the restaurants so that as few as three or four employees can run an outlet, including the drive-through. For customers, this means it now takes ten minutes to order a burger using a kiosk, compared to 90 seconds when there was someone behind the counter taking orders. Virtually all labor-intensive businesses continue to find new ways to operate with fewer employees, and many of them, including banks, are on the verge of

If I had to pick one chart that shows why the bull market is probably not over, it would be the one above. To be sure, the 157.26 peak recorded by Apple shares a month ago was a great place for an important top to have occurred; this chart shows why. But THE top? I have my doubts. For if this were so, it would rank as one of the most visually boring summits ever achieved. For permabears who have waited patiently for a fitting climax to the most most insane bull market of them all, it would be like finding a WaWa Market at the top of a Himalayan peak they'd almost died scaling. Setting the Hook A few forecasters had precisely predicted a potentially important top at or very near $157, including your editor. Some of us even profited from put butterfly spreads purchased a month earlier that more than quintupled in value with AAPL's 12% drop so far. But it could be pressing one's luck to hold out for more, since the downtrend seems to be struggling increasingly and made no progress at all last week. Perhaps the selloff will turn nasty in the week ahead. But if so, keep in mind that a plunge to the green line would actually be bullish, tripping a 'mechanical' buy signal based on Rick's Picks' proprietary Hidden Pivot Method.  It would also imply an eventual rally to as high as 187.93. This scenario is congruent with one I raised here last week -- i.e., that the stock market will rally to yet one more record high, setting the hook in bulls and short-covering bears alike. A steep plunge in the weeks ahead would make a reversal to new highs even more persuasive, and therefore more deadly. Whatever happens, AAPL is

The chart above shows how bull-market tops are made when nearly everyone is expecting one. That's the case now -- for so many good reasons that I won't bother with a checklist. Just take my word for it: the bull is dying. Most of the reasons the pundits are giving would have us believe the stock market is somehow connected to reality. I won't insult your intelligence with such claptrap, since you get enough of that on CNBC.  I'll simply mention my own good reason for thinking the Big One has begun: The so-far all-time high in QQQ, a speculative vehicle that tracks stocks favored by the chimps and lunatics who pretend to manage your money, hit an all-time high at 382.75 on September 9 that came within three pennies of a target I'd drum-rolled back in January. Stocks have gone steeply downhill since, giving my magic number a fighting chance to nail it. But perhaps not, or at least not yet. For if Mr. Market is going to set the hook as firmly as possible before taking no prisoners, it wouldn't hurt for him to push the broad averages, or at least the lunatic stocks, above the September 9 top that has begun to look so promising to permabears. After such a nasty tumble as occurred last week, new highs could set up a knockout punch much like the one that occurred in IBM. The peak that I've labeled "False top" occurred in mid-2009, and it came within relative inches of a major Hidden Pivot target I'd disseminated to subscribers months earlier. Imagine my elation when IBM dove sharply for eight weeks after getting within spitting distance of my magic number. Unfortunately, I was so busy patting myself on the back that I failed to notice the waxing vigor

[Recently I wrote here that the world's biggest financial institutions are in Evergrande muck up to their eyeballs, even if they claim that their exposure is small in relation to their respective assets. The trouble is, the supposed assets are as ethereal as Evergrande's grotesquely inflated real estate holdings. In the guest commentary below, Shawn Brown, a San Francisco friend from the hedge fund world, raises the possibility that behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Fed is attempting to shore up the financial system ahead of potentially massive Evergrande shock-waves that have yet to be felt.  RA ] Who are the 80 Participating Counterparties in the daily $1 Tr+ Reverse Repurchase Facility, and why are almost half of the Primary Dealers foreign?  It appears Chinese real estate developer Evergrande is going to stiff offshore creditors in a proposed restructuring designed to zombify the property giant.  Is this a dry run for the Fed’s rapidly approaching hyper-hypothecated Treasuries moment? Friday, approximately 50 unidentified counterparties had their access to daily RRP doubled from $80 Billion to $160 billion.  According to  ADVRatings.com, only seven banks in the world have a market cap greater than $160 billion, and four of them are, dubiously, Chinese.  Former NY Fed, IMF and U.S. Department of the Treasury employee Zoltan Pozsar says the counterparties are “sterilizing reserves.”  If that’s true, the Fed is about to unleash a literal tsunami of liquidity (perhaps up to $5T) heading into fiscal year end to back-stop the Evergrande contagion and subsequent flight to safety. A Hypothecation Problem The Fed has a serious hypothecation problem, and it is also the reason they’re talking taper: everyone is quickly realizing Evergrande collateral is about to take a 50%+ haircut.  The Fed continues to throw shade with terms like "accommodative," "full employment," "low inflation," "climate change," Covid --

Bears had a rare chance to get short with impunity last week -- arguably the first such free-money opportunity since the bull market began more than 12 years ago. With the Evergrande saga unfolding in real time, shares appeared to be doing a Wile E. Coyote ahead of Friday's opening. Their gravity-defying behavior reflected one of those deft manipulations where DaBoyz greet whatever fragile bids show up in the early going with a feather-light touch. On Friday, playing it by the book, they scaled back their offers until the very last of the idiots from Mars doing the  buying were fully satisfied. The result was that stocks hovered aloft for just long enough that traders who had gotten things exactly right -- i.e., realized that Evergrande's failure could make the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management look like a furniture-store liquidation -- must have begun to doubt themselves. It was only after the opening bell that they came to their senses with the apparent realization that any selling done on Friday was all but certain to look fortuitous come Sunday evening.  Stocks began to fall, but not nearly as steeply as they are likely to fall in the days, weeks and months ahead. Indeed, I am publishing this commentary ahead of Sunday's resumption in trading to drive home my point, which is this: Evergrande's imminent implosion could turn out to be the biggest speculative collapse in history. It is going to take down many big players, causing a chain reaction that will definitively end the buying mania that has gripped shares since Covid-19's "bullish" failure to put civilization into eclipse. Up to Their Eyeballs For now, don't believe talking-heads blather about how Black Rock, Goldman Sachs et al. hold only relatively small stakes in Evergrande.  The truth is, when you

The weekend brought an autumnal breeze to much of the Eastern Seaboard, and with it raised hopes in some quarters that seasonality will trigger a long overdue avalanche in the stock market. Even a few bulls are hoping for this, since only a rip-snorting stampede out of shares can disperse the potentially explosive, hydrogen-saturated layers of hubris that have accumulated over Wall Street since stocks bolted into the blue 18 months ago. The astounding rally during a global pandemic has made the rich effortlessly richer while doing little to help the broad middle class. It has also undeservedly burnished the reputation of portfolio managers who have done little more than throw Other People's Money at a relative handful of stocks. They've been winning like crazy for more than a decade, so who could blame them for believing their amazing run of luck will continue forever? Of course that's the way things always feel at important tops, even if the Wall Street Journal and other cheer-leaders for investors' salacious fantasies will try their hardest to explain why this time it really is different. Love that Kamala! Most of us know better and can smell a top that is becoming increasingly pungent with each fresh instance of unsettling, if not to say appalling, news. The President's steepening mental decline, for one. The New York Times, the Washington Post and even the Wall Street Journal  will somehow find things to like about Kamala Harris when it's time to cheer her on, but there's no pretending she'll be any more effective than Biden.  And there's the delta variant, a contagion so robust that it could conceivably put the world into a second lockdown that will make the first seem like a global street festival. You could always argue that the market has become completely

China is easy to hate, since their leadership is at heart a bunch of double-dealing, lying commie rats. (And yes, the evidence is more than a little persuasive not only that they unleashed a deadly virus on the world, but that they took clandestine steps to protect themselves from it before going public with the bad news). There is nonetheless something to admire and even envy in the way China's leaders have been going about economic reform. For starters, Xi Jinping has declared war on tech companies perceived as having little to contribute to China's goal of economic, geopolitical, financial and cultural dominance. Not coincidentally, most of the targeted companies are in the same businesses as America's hottest firms: consumer goods, advertising, real estate, ride-sharing, finance, gaming and entertainment. Xi's denying Chinese firms in these sectors access to U.S. capital markets is akin to Biden's issuing a fatwah against glorified ad agencies like Google and Facebook, banning Twitter for incitement and casting out the moneylenders at Morgan Stanley. The CCP's clean-up campaign took an interesting -- some might say promising -- turn last week when they banned effeminate men from TV. It remains to be seen how a generation of children will fare in the relative absence of yin-saturated popular culture, but if it eventually produces a Chinese John Wayne, the West will face an even tougher adversary down the road. Terminal-Stage Consumerism It's not simply a matter of targeting the kinds of companies we associate with America's terminal-stage consumerism, income inequality and decadence. The CCP's reforms are also designed to shift investment capital toward industries positioned to provide a brighter economic future for the Chinese people, and to grow an economically robust middle class. This policy implicitly rejects and rebukes an American-style capitalism that has atrophied to the point

Jackson Hole hubris was operating at full strength last week as investors around the world anxiously awaited the announcement on Friday that would send the markets into hyperdrive. The broad averages had in fact churned impassively for several days ahead of whatever lame twaddle concerning The Tapeworm lay in store. The question of when the Fed will begin to tighten following a loosening binge that has persisted more or less continuously for a hundred years is the focus of portfolio managers' tiny, febrile brains these days. How quickly they forget! For taken together, the last dozen or so Tapeworm utterances, hints and titillations would seem to imply that if tightening is coming at all -- which everyone knows it is not -- it's unlikely to commence before, oh, maybe the end of 2022 or, for good measure, 2023. Vague enough for you? This dovish meme has been recycled so many times that it's a wonder it can still send shares soaring. And yet it does, alternating with fleeting dips of feigned fear and dread whenever the Fed even whispers that it will someday be necessary to bring its surreal balance sheet into a semblance of control. Colloquially this is known as "taking away the punch bowl," an annoyingly dumb cliche coined by a benighted news media to make the somewhat esoteric concept of tightening go down easier with readers who are rightly confused about the bottom line. Getting High in August Still, you have to give the charlatans who manage our expectations their due, since they've riveted investors' attention whenever someone affiliated with the central bank farts, burps or clears his throat. On Friday, Fed Chairman Powell did all three, metaphorically speaking, in promising there would be some tapeworming of monthly bond purchases by  the end of this year. We've

[Editor's note: The following was sent out to clients in mid-July by my friend Doug Behnfield, a financial advisor and senior vice president at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in Boulder, CO.  Long-time followers of Rick's Picks will be familiar with Doug's work, since his thoughts have appeared here many times. I have always referred to him not only as the smartest investor I know, but one of the smartest guys. He still is. I am grateful to him for allowing me to share his insights with you. However, I must I must apologize for some formatting changes that were necessary due to typographical limitations on my end. Doug's original letter was meticulously footnoted, and some text that was bullet-pointed I have rendered in paragraph form. Otherwise, the content is unchanged. RA] In all 44 years as a Financial Advisor (aka Account Executive, stockbroker), I have never been aware of any respected stock market pundit that “called the top” in close proximity to the actual beginning of a true Bear Market. However, an associate once gave me a report late in 1987 that had been issued in July, 1987 written by Justin Mamis entitled The Philosophy of Tops. He wrote it just three months before the Crash of October 1987. It has been in my permanent file for decades and I dragged it out a few months ago to remind me how utterly difficult it is to know how high is too high (or how low is too low) in the stock market. After all this experience in the business, I wish I knew, or that I knew someone who knew, on a timely basis. But, alas, it has been too much to ask. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t accumulated a meaningful amount of market wisdom over the years. As