Quoth the Raven's Chris Irons, whose brilliant diagnosis of the wealth inequality problem was published over the weekend and called to your attention here --
https://www.gata.org/node/24758
-- today marvels at the resilience of what the world still somehow calls its financial markets. His analysis, highlighted by ZeroHedge, is headlined "The Only Bear Case Left Is Extinction," is posted in the clear at his internet site here --
https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/the-only-bear-case-left-is-extinction
-- and argues that government intervention has nullified any market signals that might come from any developments around the world, up to and including the extinction of the human race.
"And even then," Irons writes, "I'm not sure some lone server in the basement of the New York Fed wouldn't still be bidding the Dow up to all-time highs. ...
"For nearly two decades investors have been conditioned by repeated intervention to interpret every crisis through the same framework. If a problem emerges and threatens economic activity, policymakers respond. If financial markets become unstable, liquidity appears. If leverage starts unwinding too rapidly, some combination of central banks, governments, emergency facilities, lending programs, bond purchases, fiscal packages, regulatory adjustments, or carefully crafted press conferences eventually arrives to stabilize conditions. The details change from crisis to crisis, but the lesson remains remarkably consistent.
"The 'adults' in the room simply refuse to tolerate prolonged asset deflation.
"Investors have learned this lesson so thoroughly that it has fundamentally altered behavior. Risk is no longer evaluated in terms of the damage an event might cause. Risk is evaluated in terms of the probability that policymakers will permit the damage to fully occur. Since the answer has repeatedly been 'probably not,' investors have become increasingly comfortable treating every negative development as a temporary inconvenience on the road toward even greater liquidity."
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Of course this reads a bit like a summary of the message GATA has been pressing almost from its formation in 1998.
At GATA's Washington conference back in 2008 -- 18 years ago -- your secretary/treasurer remarked in a phrase that still resonates among veterans of the tin-foil hat army, "There are no markets anymore, just interventions":
https://www.gata.org/node/6242
As for human extinction, in 2012 your secretary/treasurer wrote --
https://www.gata.org/node/11426
-- "If the Northern Hemisphere was destroyed in a nuclear war, the Federal Reserve, JPMorganChase, and HSBC would get some brokers to Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg to sell gold futures massively and drive the price down by at least 5%.
"Kitco market analyst Jon Nadler would crawl out from the rubble and opine to the cockroaches that the gold price had fallen because so many gold buyers had been killed, as he always had predicted would happen.
"CPM Group's Jeff Christian would telephone New Zealand not to worry because he was flying down with reams of gold-colored paper that would work just as well in Wellington as it did in New York as long as nobody asked what was behind it.
"And the World Gold Council would console itself with whatever high-fashion models could be found wearing nose rings in French Polynesia.
"But with London and New York razed, at least we'd be spared more contrived rationalizations about the strange market action from the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal."
Of course, GATA's sometimes-wearying work is not proprietary. It is shared freely in the hope of clearing a path to a better and more democratic world. That path can get lonely so it's a delight to be joined on it by someone as brilliant as Irons. You might want to consider subscribing to his letters:
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