The global bond markets have been screaming an ugly message at us loud and clear, and I’m afraid that it’s not a positive one.
Amazingly, US Treasury bonds have soared early this year, taking the (TLT) up a stunning 40 points.
In the meantime, stocks have suffered the sharpest crash in history, plunging ten times faster than the worst days of the 1929 crash, down 37%.
The implications for your investment portfolio are so momentous and far-reaching that I am going to have to list them one by one.
Read them and weep:
1) The US is in a severe depression.
2) The pandemic is not even close to ending. US deaths topped 85,000 yesterday and may triple from here.
3) The presidential election has become a major source of instability, and no one has any idea of how this will all end. Trump is currently trying to bankrupt the US Post Office to frustrate mail-in voting.
4) The immigration crisis is reaching a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It has become our Syria, which landed four million immigrants in Europe.
5) The stock market is in the process of crashing…. Again, failing dramatically at the 200-day moving average. That “Sell in May” thing may work big time this year.
6) The Trump trade is toast. Financials, commodity, energy, coal, and industrial stocks are leading the charge to the downside.
7) Oil (USO) is in free fall and may go negative again, another classic recession predictor. For the first time in history. Most small and medium-sized energy companies will go under. Coal has dropped to a historic low of 19% of US electricity production, less than total alternative sources, and is never coming back.
8) Bitcoin is rocketing, up an eye-popping 100% since the crash began. This has become the big hot money trade of 2020 in addition to that other great flight to safety trade, gold (GLD).
9) The US dollar (UUP) is flatlining, wiping out the growth of the foreign earnings of US multinationals. Foreign economies are collapsing even faster than ours, taking their interest rates and currencies lower at warp speed.
10) The unemployment rate, now at all-time lows, not bottom out for months. The great irony here is that while the president vociferously campaigned on an aggressive jobs program, he may well preside over the biggest job losses in history. The Fed is targeting total unemployment of 52 million, worst than the Great Depression.
For more on this, please read my recent piece, “Why You Will Lose Your Job in the Next Five Years and What to Do About It” by clicking here.
There is another alternative explanation to all of this.
A certain Monty Python sketch about a parrot comes to mind.
That all we saw a giant short squeeze in the hedge funds’ core short position in bonds for the umpteenth time, and that we are almost done.
Hedge funds have grown in size to where they are now the perfect contrary market indicator. It is the classic “Too many people in one side of the canoe” trade. A Yogi Berra quote comes to mind; “Nobody goes there anymore because it is too crowded.”
There are other structural factors at play here which are hard to beat. For more on this, please read my opus on “Why Are Bond Yields So Low” by clicking here.
