by kleinbl00

This will strike some as a silly argument, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the modern focus on entertainment marketing for financial risk products began in the Great Recession and its aftermath. When the financial ground isn’t steady underneath your feet, fundamentals don’t matter nearly as much as a fresh narrative. Why? Because the fundamentals are scary. Because you don’t buy when you’re scared. So you need a new perspective from the puppet masters to get you to buy, a new “conversation”, to use Don Draper’s words of advertising wisdom from Mad Men. Maybe that’s describing the price quote process as a “name your price tool” if you’re Flo, and maybe that’s describing Lucky Strikes tobacco as “toasted!” if you’re Don Draper. Maybe that’s a chuckle at the Mayhem guy or the Hump Day Camel if you’re Allstate or GEICO. Maybe, since equity markets are no less a financial risk product than auto insurance, it’s the installation of a cargo cult around Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Mario Draghi, such that their occasional manifestations on a TV screen, no less common than the GEICO gecko, become objects of adoration and propitiation.

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Look - I know that for the majority of you guys'n'gals, this stuff is boring AF. I know that stock shit is dreadfully uninteresting. But Ben Hunt is pretty readable and he's starting to get strident. And I'm in no position to give anybody investment advice and my crystal ball is no clearer than anyone else's but here's the narrative that's shaping up:

1) It's becoming really hard to make money in the stock market. Articles such as this point out that "fundamentals" - those things that companies do to earn money - are increasingly divorced from "valuations" - those prices that stocks are set at because people are paying them.

2) People are doing other things to make money. mk and I have talked about CoCo Bonds in the past. Commercial real estate is currently selling at GRMs between two and six. In 2010 it was closer to 12-18. What that means, basically, is that people are willing to make half to a third as much on their real estate investment than they were back when things were sane... either because the money is easier to come by or because their need for profit (any profit) is greater.

3) nobody paying attention thinks this shit can continue. Ben Hunt, a financial planner and fund manager, is basically advocating people to get the hell out of the stock market. Bloomberg reported this morning that even though the S&P500 is up $2 trillion in the past few months, short interest is over a trillion dollars. That means HALF the people who own stock in an S&P500 company right now are expecting it to go down.

4) It is not in the interest of the broader financial community to make you pay attention. Bank of America, for their part, figures that half of the S&P being short means that there'll be a humungous rally soon because everyone is going to have to sell their shorts rather than pay interest and dividends on it.

It's a common trope that no one could have predicted the crash of 2008. It is not, however, an accurate assessment. The truth is that lots of people predicted it, but only a very select few were in position to profit greatly. Lots of people saw the writing on the wall. I was one of them. It probably saved me thirty grand.

'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

- Upton Sinclair

Nobody at the Fed is making money predicting doom, and nobody at the banks are getting rich denying mortgages. Keep your powder dry. The guys that ran things in 2008? They're largely still running things.