Withering on the Vine

This from "Financial Armageddon" -- once again, please follow link to original.

It's a far cry from "Blue Skies". Sometimes I think I'd be better off just playing music.

Isn't that what a lot of folks did during the last depression? Music and Movies --- or, "Don't think, and go to movies"


Withering on the Vine

The so-called Wall Street experts maintain that there's lots of small investor cash on the sidelines just waiting to come into the stocks. They also claim that the bull market won't end until these greater -- greatest? -- fools have thrown in the towel and joined the rally party. Are they right? Well, based on what Charles Hugh Smith, publisher of the Of Two Minds blog, had to say on the subject in a post entitled "U.S. Financial Markets: The Well Has Been Poisoned (Anger of the Honest Part II)," I suggest they don't hold their breaths waiting for it to happen:

When financial markets have become riddled with fraud, embezzlement and corruption that goes unpunished, then institutional players will avoid that market as crooked: the well has been poisoned.

The full consequences of what I termed The Rot Within: Our Culture of Financial Fraud and the Anger of the Honest (October 15, 2010) are now unfolding: the well has been poisoned. One of my most astute correspondents made a critical observation that I've seen nowhere else: once a market has been poisoned by fraud which goes unpunished, then institutional players will avoid that market as untrustworthy.

Without institutional trust and participation, the market then withers on the vine-- exactly what has happened to the U.S. mortgage securities market. The market for mortgage-backed securities has vanished, except for one player: the Federal Reserve, which has bought a staggering $1.2 trillion in the past 18 months to create the facsimile of an active market.

The well has been poisoned. The only mortgages being traded are those 100% guaranteed by the U.S. government: in effect, the risks intrinsic to a corrupted market have been shifted to the taxpayers, while the criminals who profited from the fraud and embezzlement got away scot-free.

...

The same distrust has poisoned U.S. stock markets. The high keening cry to "get into the market while stocks are cheap" which has been spewed daily for months on end on network TV and other channels of raw propaganda has been ignored by the "retail investor," a.k.a. the top 20% of Americans who have financial wealth to preserve and invest.

For 24 straight weeks, retail investors have been pulling tens of billions of dollars out of U.S. mutual funds and plowing hundreds of billions into low-yield Treasury bonds.

Why? Because they sense the stock market is hopelessly, deeply corrupt and by comparison Treasuries are trustworthy. You won't make a lot of yield in Treasuries, thanks to the Fed's zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP) which is designed to drive money into risky assets, but then you won't lose 40% like you did in 2008-09 or 2000-2002 in the stock market.

We can also see how insiders are responding to the knowledge that the well has been poisoned: they're selling 500 shares for every share they buy. This unprecedented cascade of insider selling has been noted elsewhere many times, as has the declining expectations for the "recovery" of U.S. CEOs.

Those who know the most are selling their shares as fast as they legally can, and are publicly expressing their lack of faith in the tricked-up "recovery."

The U.S. financial markets have been poisoned, with long-term negative consequences. Only crooks, fraudsters and "marks" (those who still believe the propaganda about the "recovery" and "stocks are cheap" poison) will be left in a stock market propped up by the same socialization of risk which keeps the flimsy facade of a mortgage market from crumbling. High-frequency trading machines create the illusion of a market, and State intervention via proxies and other corrupt games provides the liquidity needed to fund the facsimile of a "rising market" and a "recovery" in the U.S. economy. But the public isn't buying the fraud any longer; they finally "get it": The well has been poisoned and only a fool drinks from a poisoned well.

This is why we can safely anticipate a hollowed-out stock market which trades at a steep discount to its present propped-up levels in the years ahead--until the crooked players are indicted and the financial markets thoroughly cleaned. That will take political will which is completely lacking in the Demopublican-Republicrat status quo