Recession hit Germany in November. Earnings recession hit the US in October. Meanwhile China posted a -13% Q4 and a -20% Q1 and we're all used to presuming those numbers are 5-7% high. They're probably 10% high. Nobody really wants to examine the happy fiction that China is somehow back in business. I mean, dude. 19,804. That's the number the Dow closed at on Inauguration Day, 2017. "American Carnage." At 10am this morning we hit 19882. They shut down... Vegas. $120B GDP in 2018 according to FRED. I saw some internal hospital communication last night that said, in one isolated line, "this is the crisis of our time." February was The Before Time. We're in the In Between Time. And we're waiting for The After Time. But as me and my kid walked back from the grocery store yesterday I told her "your kids are going to read about this in their history books" and I meant it. Nobody's shooting at you but this is going to be an epoch of tremendous political, social and economic upheaval. Keep in mind: this is what the accelerationists wanted, this is why Steve Bannon tried to get Trump in the White House. To Burn It The Fuck Down. It is burning.
I keep finding articles like this one between overall trends to individual companies like Marriott Hotels or Regal Theaters. This is insane.
Agreed with kleinbl00. Seeking Alpha has been full of posts about the growing threat of corporate debt, coco bonds, stock buybacks, and all kinds of cheap credit maladies (hi-jinks) for the last five years. This has been referred to as the Everything Bubble. All prices are inflated due to central banks pumping cash into the system. The authors of these posts consistently warned that a day of reckoning would come. They warned that tightening of credit would leave a great many companies unable to service their debt, in many cases, the debt they used to buy their own stock to increase shareholder value. A tightening of credit, they argued, could result in events that could spiral out of control. None of those Seeking Alpha authors said that a global pandemic resulting in a retail and service and travel and entertainment and production armageddon would cause the Everything Bubble to pop. They were expecting a pin. This is a shotgun blast. We have a recession. So, who is knocking at the door?
