Last updated: August 4, 2018
Today is
 

Nick Chase has been producing The Contrarian’s View for more than 25 years. He has been especially adept at identifying impending systemic failures and stock market crashes.









Data

  1. -NYSE “Timer’s Trend” signals since 1982

  2. -NASDAQ “Timer’s Trend” signals since 2000

  3. -NYSE raw data

  4. -NASDAQ raw data

  5. -computer program (in Chipmunk BASIC for the Macintosh)


Support Materials

Debt Overhang (1/17/1993)

Report - Barack Obama: Long Form Birth Certificate (6/29/2011), typewriter font analysis I (6/7/2011) and II (7/18/2011), Birth Certificate PDF (color) for inspection, B&W version from AP (4/27/2011)

Guthrie photos: Original I and II and color-corrected I (7/15/2011)

PDF seal, Guthrie seal (7/15/2011)

Pixel v POTUS (Tom Harrison) (7/27/2011)

Birth Certificate pitch test (7/30/2011)

Scanning Analysis by “CM” (8/3/2011)

Discourse and Conflict (Tim Adams’ masters thesis) (8/18/2011)

Arpaio report - Obama BC PDF (3/1/2012)

Zebest report - Obama BC PDF (3/1/2012)

Oblivious to the Obvious (4/10/2012)

How I Learned to Love Savannah Guthrie (4/11/2012)

Birth Certificate Whac-A-Mole (5/30/2012)

What Did Savannah Guthrie Really See? (6/11/2012)

Piercing the Cone of Silence (6/12/2012)

Secrets Revealed (6/15/2012)

Monckton report (6/27/2012)

Were Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Really Married? (7/7/2012)

Arpaio report II (7/17/2012)

Garrett Papit report (7/17/2012)

Zebest report #3 Obama LFBC (7/18/2012)

Phony Document Gives Birth to a Cover-up (7/27/2012)

Long Form Birth Certificate of Obama is a Forged Document (2012)

Obama Built This Forgery (12/24/2012)

Warning: You Are About to Read a “Forbidden” Column (4/4/2013)

The Still-Forgotten Obama Lie (5/14/2013)

Mike Zullo Affidavit (5/19/2013)

Barry Soetoro’s Birth Secret (8/8/2013)

Figures for Birth Secret: BLF, BS, BSP, CN1, DN1, DN2, DP, FDF, FDT, FSO, G1, G2, JSA (2mb), JSA (0.8mb), LHQ, MP1, MP2, MP3, OFS (PDF), OFS, PP, PPA, ROT, RSI, SFA, SSP, SYP (8/8/2013)

Donald “Birther” Trump Is Back! (8/12/2013)

What Reggie Love Had to Say about the Obama Birth Certificate (8/16//2013)

Trump Forced President to Search Mom’s Keepsakes for Birth Certificate (11/9/2013)


Favorite Financial Links

  1. -Fiend SuperBear

  2. -Urban Survival

  3. -The Daily Reckoning

  4. -Financial Sense

  5. -Safe Haven

  6. -Comstock (Thursdays)

  7. -Financial Armageddon

  8. -Gold Eagle

  9. -Peter Grandich

  10. -Acting Man (Pater Tenebrarum)

  11. -Gonzalo Lira

  12. -Mish


Worth Reading

President Trump (12/28/2015)

No Bear Market in Gold (5/20/2013)

Gold Slam is a Massive Wealth Transfer fro Our Pockets to the Banks (4/16/2013)

Fed Desperate to Save System (4/3/2013)

Does 1979 newspaper column shed light on 2008 campaign story? (9/23/2012)

How Sturdy Is the Obama Narrative that ‘Keeps Us Silent’? (4/7/2012)

The Rebirth of Birthers? (4/6/2012)

Silence of the Lapdogs (3/22/2012)

More of the Same (9/9/2011)

The Worst Is Yet to Come (9/6/2011)

President’s approval of the American public slips (9/4/2011)

World Economy Hanging by a Thread (9/2/2011)

If You Thought August was Bad... (8/26/2011)

Stock Fear Ceiling (8/26/2011)

The Winds of Change (8/24/2011)

There They Go Again (8/24/2011)

Keynesian Solutions... (8/23/2011)

Boomer Retirement (8/22/2011)

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion.. (8/22/2011)

Bernanke’s Worst Nightmare (8/19/2011)

Extraterrestrial Economic Plan... (8/16/2011)

Krugman’s War Cry... (8/16/2011)

Financial Repression of Investors (8/11/2011)

Welcome to the Age of Instability (8/11/2011)

Crony Capitalism at Work (8/11/2011)

Stock Market Decline Just the Beginning (8/10.2011)

Five Things You Need to Know About the Economy (8/2/2011)

Gold and Silver Beyond the Limit (7/29/2011)

Insiders Selling at Unusually Fast Pace (7/29/2011)

This Country Defaulted Long Ago (7/29/2011)

A Thousand Pictures.... (7/27/2011)

Scariest Jobs Chart Ever (7/8/2011)

Feds Force State & Local Government Insolvency (7/7/2011)

The Next, Worse Financial Crisis (7/6/2011)

The Promises That Cannot Be Kept (7/6/2011)

Greece Is a Kleptocracy (6/28/2011)

Lying About Debt Crisis! (6/27/2011)

Why We Are Totally Finished (6/27/2010)


 

Stock Market & Portfolio Comment

December 29, 2015 - A presidential candidate with a commanding lead in the polls by Christmas, as Donald Trump currently has, stands a greater than 50% chance of becoming his party’s eventual presidential nominee. So I have written a lengthy treatise, “President Trump”, which appears under “Worth Reading” in the right-hand column, analyzing the Trump candidacy and what his presidency might look like. Kindly note that I am not endorsing Donald Trump for president.

July 14, 2015 - When I wrote my end-of-June comment, it seemed to me at the time that Greece's deteriorating finances would not, by themselves, be a "black swan" event triggering a global financial meltdown of some kind. Since then, things have deteriorated considerably. The latest "agreement" forced upon the Greeks effectively makes Greece a vassal state of Germany, where the Greek people have no say in their future (their majority-"no" vote having been ignored by both the EU and their own leaders) and where their country is sucked dry of its assets and what's left of its economic health.

Let's be honest: Greece will never be able to repay its debtors. You know that, most economists know it, and Germany and the other countries of northern Europe also know it. If Greece were an individual or a company, it would declare bankruptcy, pay off its lenders at 10 or 15 cents on the euro, and start over. As a country it should be able to renounce its debt and start over with a new currency. But it is trapped in the Eurozone, and effectively ruled by central bankers and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Turning the Greeks into serfs reminds me of the reparations that Germany paid (or was supposed to pay) to the allies after losing World War I. Failure to meet payments led to French and Belgian occupation of the Rhur (Germany's industrial heartland) in 1923, and to the massive German hyperinflation which destroyed the middle class, and then led to the rise of Hitler. You would think the Germans would be the last people to make such a stupid mistake, with future political consequences unknown but almost guaranteed to be unpleasant.

So why the stubbornness? On the surface, it would appear that the pigheaded politicians are so wedded to the idea of One Europe (financially integrated now, with the objective of eventual political integration) that they refuse to admit defeat even when defeat is inevitable. Or possibly, they feel if they let Greece escape their Euroclutches, that Spain, Portugal and Italy will soon follow.

But I think there's more going on here. To me, the most significant aspect of the "agreement" is that the EU (primarily Germany) refuses to take a haircut on (write down) Greek debt, when this is precisely what Greece needs the most in order to have a fresh start. Why? Because the eurofinancial system cannot withstand a big haircut. In other words, the Eurocrats are risking a likely unstable political situation (and almost-certain breakup of the EU and the euro) in the future because writing down Greek debt today would cause a financial collapse today. The banks are that leveraged, and have that much bad debt, and are so entwined in derivatives, that they cannot survive a declared Greek bankruptcy/haircut.

In addition, we have the Chinese stock markets crash. Bubbles are not a problem when the are blowing up, but when they pop they impoverish the investing masses (the latecomers to the bubble). And the Chinese government and businesses have responded by suspending trading, prohibiting short-selling, and prohibiting large institutions from liquidating their stock holdings. These are all confidence- and liquidity-destroying actions which guarantee an especially severe bear market in Chinese stocks.

In short, world financial distress is on a sharp upswing. The 86-billion-Euro "bailout of Greece" (meaning, the bailout of the banks and countries which lent money to Greece) is already inadequate (ultimately more than 130 billion will be needed), and technically the bailout does not even begin until September (Greece is on life support until then), about the same time Chinese stocks will have regressed to pre-bubble levels. And for that Greek bailout to happen, all of the political requirements have to align - first the Greek parliament must go along with the scheme, then the IMF and the countries of the EU must unanimously agree.

Thus the months of September and October 2015 look like they will be an especially difficult time for financial markets. In 2008, it was quasi-private entities - banks, brokerages and insurance companies - that went belly-up, to be rescued by governments and their central banks. This time around, it is the governments and central banks themselves that are at risk of blowing up, and there is no rescuer of last resort for them.

I currently give about 2:1 odds that the September/October timeframe will see some sort of financial meltdown similar to what happened in 2008, and possibly much worse.

June 29, 2015 - Last December I wrote, expect a January selloff, a spring rally, and a pretty dismal rest of the year for 2015. Well, that was one super-long “spring rally”, actually lasting into the first week of summer. But overall, it wasn’t much of a rally, with “Timer’s Trend” for the Dow essentially whipsawing all year, and with the Dow now negative for the year; while the NASDAQ “Timer’s Trend” has been whipsawing since mid-March, and especially during the last two months.

But the bankruptcy of Greece, long-anticipated but never fully discounted, as you can see from today’s sharp selloff in the markets, is likely the tipping point between bull and bear. (You didn’t think that Germany was going to keep pouring money into Greece forever, did you?) And there were plenty of warnings: The DowTransports and energy stocks have been bearish since last fall; the Advance/Decline lines (on which the “Timer’s Trend” indicators are based) have been bearish for two months; and sentiment indicators, valuations, and margin debt are at historic extremes (from which levels , historically, stocks have yielded negative returns for about a decade).

So my view that the second half of 2015 is going to be really dismal for stock bulls has not changed. Because the bull market in financial assets is so excessive, thanks to government-forced near-zero interest rates, it is exceedingly vulnerable to “black swan” events (like Greece, but Greece isn’t big enough to qualify by itself); but even if we see only white swans in the near future, the trend of financial asset values is still downward. Gold, mining and energy stocks will  likely also be under pressure for a while longer, but risk of war (and disruption of oil supplies) will likely give a boost to energy shares, and gold will soon reassert its countertrend role as real money while the world’s liquidity falls into a debt-eating black hole.

December 27, 2014 -Most investors, speculators and prognosticators see clear sailing and new highs ahead for stocks in 2015. Oil is cheaper, consumers are optimistic, U.S. unemployment is declining, the Fed is currently benign, and corporate earnings are projected to increase. What could possibly go wrong?

A better question to ask might be, what could possibly further go right? Well, the Fed could step on the monetary gas again with a new QE, I suppose, but that seems unlikely at the moment. More frightened money from Europe and the Mideast could flow into our stock market, pressuring prices upward - a real possibility, as our modest stock rise measured in dollars looks like a parabolic rise when measured in rubles or yen - but this has already been largely discounted (linear projection by investors). Or, long-term bond rates could decline even further, pushing more money into stocks in search of yield.

Measure these suppositions against things that have already gone wrong. First, bearishness (pessimism) is at historic lows, both for stocks and precious metals; and history shows that when most everybody is like-minded, storm clouds lie just over the horizon. Stocks are in a Fed-induced bubble and are historically overvalued (in the sense that 5- and 10-year returns from these levels are likely to be nil or negative), thus sensitive to a “pinprick” of bad news or a Black Swan event, though this stock bubble is not as great as NASDAQ in 2000 or real estate in 2008. Europe is (again) tipping into recession - even Germany, Japan’s latest QE program has failed to revive its moribund economy, and the Chinese economy is softening from excess debt loads. Real household wealth in the U.S. continues its decade-plus long decline. Also, the world’s largest banks still remain technically insolvent (when their assets are marked to market), yet they persist in excessive derivatives trading.

Finally, we have the warnings issued by the stock market itself. The October and December abrupt and scary plunges, complete with significant Hindenburg omens, are not “normal” corrections but are symptomatic of a stock market that is ready to, and wants to plunge at the least excuse, perhaps to then be “rescued” by the Fed buying stock-index futures. Well, that situation can’t last forever. Maybe we’ll see a few more of these scary plunges before the plunge that finally announces the bear market has arrived, but arrive it will. You should recognize these abrupt plunges and recoveries for what they are - warning signals for a stock market which is at a generational top, like the rumblings of a volcano before it erupts. And you don’t want to get caught in the hot-ash cloud or lava flow.