The Bubbles still left to pop- With Robert Kiyosaki, Harvey Dent, Stan Harley

Robert Kiyosaki, best known as author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, does a regular (weekly, I think) radio show/podcast about different aspects of money, investing, and the economy.  He gets some really good, really smart people on this show.  This is a scary, but very good show, with Harry Dent and Stan Harley talking about the current bubbles in stocks and real estate.  These guys are seeing historically economic BIG bubbles that are getting close to popping.

"The greater the bubble, the greater the burst." 

- Harry Dent, in the interview above

It's late August 2020, as I'm writing this.  In my opinion, we are now 11 months into what I'm calling The Phoenix Great Depression.  That's my own term, but I see this as the beginning of a 5 to 7 year (minimum) economic downturn.  There are a couple of long term trends and cycles, and several shorter term ones, that have brought me to my conclusion.  This current crisis started with the seizing up of the Repo Market, in the banking industry, in September of 2019.  The Federal Reserve (aka The Fed), had to begin injecting billions of dollars, weekly, then daily, into the financial system, to simply keep the banking system from collapsing.  That slipped under most people's radar.

Then, the Covid-19 coronavirus (aka Sars Cov-2), hit U.S. shores, which was the "black swan" event that tipped the U.S. stock markets into collapse.  As we all know, the shutdowns have led to all kinds of problems, millions have lost their jobs, mandatory business shutdowns, and tens of millions of people now struggling to simply pay rent.  I saw a huge economic collapse coming, and have been blogging about it for three years.  

The two guys in the interview above, Harry Dent and Stan Harley, have come so very similar conclusions, using completely different cycles and models.  One of the things that is amazing to me about our current economic mess, is that several, really smart economic thinkers, investors, and forecasters, have come to the same conclusion about a huge peak and then crash, right now, in this 2019-2022 period.  But all of these thinkers (myself included), have come to very similar conclusions, from very different forecasting directions.  We're all looking at different data sets, different cycles and theories, but coming to the conclusion that this is going to be a historically huge economic downturn.  You can easily discredit me, I'm a bum, but it's hard to deny the thinking of Robert, Harry, and Stan above, as well as Ray Dalio, Jim Rogers, and several others.  Even internet marketing expert and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk has been waiting for this collapse, and has talked about it.

That said, this interview above is one of the most intelligent looks at what's happening in the economy these days.  If you're interested in running a business in the next few years, and/or investing, watch/listen to this interview above.  It's a lot to take in, so maybe watch it a couple times, or until it begins to make sense.  

Yesterday, I predicted that the Nasdaq would drop before 8,000, before the November 3rd U.S. presidential election, and I predicted really low numbers for the Dow and the S&P 500 as well.  All conventional wisdom, all common sense right now, says it's completely INSANE to think that The Fed would let the stock markets drop before the election.  The Fed's main job right now (in many people's eyes), is to get Donald Trump re-elected.  I know my prediction seems completely nuts.  My January 26th prediction that the Dow would drop below 19,000, was also completely nuts, according to conventional wisdom then.  Yet, it happened.  

My reasoning for yesterday's crazy prediction is that we are now sitting on several financial bubbles, any of which could collapse at any time, triggering the collapse of the rest.  When one really begins to go, it will start to topple the others.  That toppling will lead to a world financial system wide crisis, and that will bring down the currently over-inflated stock markets.  Here's a quick list of businesses and markets that will hit crisis point, could reach a collapse point, and trigger a mess that would bring down stocks, and everything else.

-SLABS (Student Loan Asset Backed Securities) market- There's no good data, but probably 50%-70% of student loans are being paid right now.  When this market goes, everything topples.

-CMBS (Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities) market- Commercial real estate?  Yeah, not good these days.  When this market collapses, like subprime MBS and CDO's in 2008, other things start collapsing as well.

-CLO (Collateralized Loan Obligations) market- CDO-type investments made from business loans.  Business loans in 2020?  Yeah, not a good bet after the Covid-19 shutdowns.  Smaller than the two above, but if this collapses, it will start the other two above toppling.

-Deutsche Bank- It's been struggling for many years.  If it goes bankrupt, it will send shock waves through the worldwide financial system.  That will start other houses of cards falling.

-A major banking/corporate bankruptcy in the U.S.-  Boeing is known to be struggling.  GE is known to be struggling.  Capital One is known to be struggling.  Many other major corporations are loaded with debt and struggling under the crazy conditions the pandemic and 2020 has thrown at us.  If one MAJOR corporation goes bankrupt, especially one tied to banking, it will send shock waves through the financial system, and these other things begin to topple.

-Serious evidence of a likely Joe Biden presidential win-  If the polls turn dramatically in Biden's favor, Wall Street will react, believing much less money will be thrown at them in the future, sending markets down.  The stock markets are completely detached from the real world economy, and from reality, at this point.  We're at a Tulip Mania level, and there WILL be a huge correction sometime.  Personally, I think a Democrat presidential victory is likely, and is basically our only hope of survival as a nation and democracy.  Just for the record, I'm an independent, and not a fan of Joe Biden.  But we need a semi-functional government, and less money thrown at Wall Street, and more at the American Public, to get through the current, and the coming crises.  Short term, the markets will throw a temper tantrum, and drop significantly, giving us the much needed correction.  In the long term, this will help the economy, bringing all types of assets down to real world values.  This alone could drop the stock markets before the election.  My personal thinking right now is that one of the things above, not a big Biden lead in the polls, will be the cause of the drop, but huge poll numbers for Biden COULD send markets down pre-election.

-There are many other things that could send all these houses of cards tumbling before the election.  Bad Q3 earnings for major businesses, major commercial real estate numbers dropping significantly, national residential real estate numbers dropping significantly, a large virus surge in a major city, causing another short term shutdown.  Lots of things COULD happen, any one of which would send all these houses of cards toppling down.  My bet is that one of these will happen before the election, and will cause massive chaos in other areas, which will ultimately bring down the hyper-inflated stock prices.  There are just too many possible triggers of potential collapse for The Fed to continue to prop everything up for two more months.  This is very similar to my thinking in January.  

I know this is a very controversial call, we'll see how things play out.

Warren Buffet sold all his Goldman Sachs stock? But they run the world...

This video talks about the recent stock trades of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment business headed by legendary investor Warren Buffet, and his lesser known partner, Charlie Munger.  If you go to about 1:12 in the video, you can pause it and read the list.  

Way back in the early 1990's, as a geeky, 20-something, BMX freestyler guy, I wanted to be ridiculously rich.  Like most young guys, I thought that if I could find a way to become rich quickly, I could avoid working lame jobs, and do what I wanted all day, which was mostly riding my BMX bike.  

Unlike most young guys, I started reading and learning about real estate, money, economics, and all things money related.  One thing I began to do was study the Forbes 400 magazine every year.  That was a pretty new thing back then, and had been coming out annually for 6 or 8 years when I first picked on up.  The Forbes 400 is an issue of Forbes magazine where they listed the 400 richest people in the United States, how much those people were worth, and two or three paragraphs about each person.  It comes out each fall.  Reading the Forbes 400, year after year, was incredibly enlightening in a financial sense.  First I learned that about 1/3 of the 400 richest people inherited their money.  So the first lesson, if you want to get rich really quick, is to find one of those people with a huge inheritance, and marry them.  That didn't appeal to me.  There were no hot, young, Kylie Jenner types on the list then.  

The next lesson in the early 1990's, was that most of the major fortunes were families who owned old, well known, industrial companies, like Levi Strauss, Seagrams, and M&M/Mars candy, businesses like that.  In the early 1990's, tech billionaires were a new thing, and there were only a few.  Most of the fortunes were from old, well established, industrial age companies, ones that were still primarily owned by one family.  Another big category then was real estate tycoons, largely self-made developers who bought lots of apartment buildings over their lifetimes.  No, not Donald Trump, he was (and still is) anything BUT self-made.  As we know now, his dad set him up in business, and he's been propped up by his late father, others ever since.  But guys like Donald Bren with the Irvine Company, and some other New York real estate magnates then, actually did build real estate empires, and become super rich.

One of the biggest surprises I learned from studying those early Forbes 400 magazines, was that only one guy (later his partner Charlie Munger made the list), Warren Buffet, actually became super rich from investing in stocks.  One guy.  That's it out of the 400 richest Americans.  As it turns out, investing in the stock market is actually one of the worst ways to try and become super rich.  Stocks have their place, in "normal" times.  But they get sketchy during recessions and depressions, particularly for inexperienced investors and speculators.  The vast majority of the super rich back then, and now, built a huge business, and then took that already successful business public, so everyone could buy stock shares in it.  The billionaires of the world, old and new, made their billions by taking a large company public.  Buffet did that to a degree, but primarily built the nation's third biggest fortune by investing in stocks of other businesses.

 Even more interesting, Buffet and Munger are the most boring kind of investors that exist.  They spend their days reading, back home in Omaha, Nebraska.  They research all kinds of companies, and try to find established businesses with well known brand names (like Coca-Cola or Dairy Queen).  Then they watch the markets, day by day.  When a recession, or some kind of downturn hits, the everyday stock traders would freak out, and often sell lots of shares of a perfectly good company, really cheap.  The market panic days are what Warren and Charlie lived for, and still live for.  Basically, they had a list of companies they thought were solid in business and in management, and when the markets sold those companies cheap, Warren and Charlie would buy a big position.  Then they went back to reading and researching every day... and they waited.  Once the market turmoil calmed down, people realized the solid companies were still solid companies, and stock prices went back up.  And so did the stock price of Berkshire Hathaway.  That's called "value investing," and Warren Buffet learned it from an early mentor.  Value investing is the exact opposite of what dumb ass Millennial investors (and dumb ass Gen Xers and Boomers), are doing right now, which is buying hype, not businesses.  They'll learn... pretty soon.

Berkshire Hathaway was originally a textile mill that Buffet invested in.  Later, he bought chunks of insurance companies, which got a lot of money coming in from premiums.  That money needed to be invested well, so the companies would have the money needed to pay for insurance claims.  Berkshire morphed into a holding company as the textile business faded, and Warren and Charlie just kept buying large positions in solid businesses, with well known brand names, when those businesses shares were selling cheap.  Even more weird, Buffet very rarely sells shares.  

But we're in really crazy times right now, largely unprecedented, even in the decades Warren and Charlie have been investing.  Buffet will turn 90 in a week, and Munger is 96 now.  They've seen A LOT.  These guys both were kids DURING the Great Depression.  They remember it, to some degree.  That's probably why they're sitting on about $140 billion in "cash" right now.  They know shit's gonna get a lot crazier in the next couple of years, and they're ready for some chaos. 

In the video above, we see Buffet sold their positions in several airlines.  OK, that makes sense right now, airlines are screwed for at least a couple of years.  He sold out of RBI (Burger King, Popeye's Chicken, and Tim Horton's in Canada).  Hmmmm, OK, restaurants are struggling I can see that one.  But then I saw Buffet sold a huge chunks of several banks.  OK, that's big, Warren and Charlie see trouble in banking in the future.  But they sold 100% of Goldman Sachs?  Wow.

Goldman Sachs is basically the investment bank that tells the U.S. government what to do with money.  Seriously.  Check out this article, current Treasury Department secretary Steve Mnuchin is a Goldman guy.  Steve Bannon worked for Goldman.  Former Goldman Sachs people have been Tresaury Secretaries, economic advisors, worked at The Fed.  No bank in recent times has had more influence on the U.S. government, than Goldman Sachs.  And Warren Buffet just sold ALL of Berkshire Hathaway's shares in Goldman Sachs.  Warren and Charlie see something pretty brutal coming our way to make a decision like that.  They've literally walked away from one of the 2 or 3 most powerful banks in the world.  Wow.  That's big.  

Oh, by the way, Berkshire Hathaway stock can be yours for $322,126 per share, right now, if you're interested...

Let's play Jenga.... again... 12 years later

The classic "Jenga block" scene from the movie The Big Short, describing how the 2008 financial meltdown happened.  This scene is the best visual explanation of how debt, loans of one kind or another, are repackaged and sold, as "new" investments.  This simple metaphor of the Jenga block tower gets the basic idea across.  Since the Great Recession,mortgage backed securities and CDO's have been frowned upon.  So other forms of debt have been repackaged and sold in a very similar fashion.  Now lots of people aren't paying those loans back.  That's what makes the "Jenga tower" investments collapse.

In 2008, it was $1.3 trillion in subprime mortgage debt collapsing that brought the financial world to its knees, and sent something like 6 million homeowners running from their houses.  It's worse now.  MUCH WORSE.  According to this Forbes article from 6 days ago, more than 106 million different loans in the United States are not being paid back at the moment.  When people stop paying their loans, whether they just skip payments, or get into a deferment or forbearance program, money stops flowing into the bank or holder of the loans.  So the bank has less money to make their payments, and all these "assets," bundles of loans, aren't worth as much.  So the bank's financial position is less stable.  When enough people don't pay their loans, the investments made up of hundreds or thousands of loans, lose value, and that's when the Jenga towers collapse.

Right now, because of most people's paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, combined with 45 million people laid off and the Covid-19 shutdown, we have more people not paying their debts than at any time in history.  But it's not just one Jenga tower of subprime mortgages (which were home loans to sketchy people), like in 2007-2009.  We have several Jenga towers, with millions of people not paying their loans, that make up those Jenga towers.  That's what's on the verge of collapsing right now, a whole table full of Jenga towers.  And those towers are propping up the whole world's economy.

SLABS- Student Loan Asset Backed Securities- are basically the student loan version of the subprime mortgage bonds and CDO's in the clip above.  $1.3 trillion in subprime loans going bad triggered the financial collapse of 2008. There are roughly $1.6 trillion in student loans, making up the SLABS market right now.  A year ago, 40% of those loans weren't being paid on time, according to Nerdwallet.  It's safe to say a lot more student loans, making up those SLABS, aren't being paid now.  Why is there so much student loan debt these days?  Because investment banks have been making huge fees selling SLABS for 12 years.  They needed tons of loans to create them, so student loan money was easy to get.

To be fair, $1.3 trillion of these loans are "secured" by the U.S. government.  So what happens if those loans don't get paid.  Does the U.S. just eat that $1.3 trillion and write it off?  No one knows.  Yet.  One major difference between SLABS today, and the subprime bonds and CDO's in 2008, is that for every CDO and bond then, for every mortgage, there was a house that loan was for.  So the bank had a house to sell when the loan was foreclosed.  With student loans, the only collateral is the student's brain.  You can't foreclose a brain. 

CLO's- Collateralized Loan Obligations- This market is very similar to SLABS and CDO's, but it's made of of commercial (business) loans.  There are only about $700 billion ($.7 trillion) of these CLO's out there.  We all know how well America's businesses are doing right now, and how solid they are, to pay back all of these loans.  Another Jenga Tower.  Banks and insurance companies in the U.S. hold most of these investments, as far as anyone can tell.  So when these collapse, banks and insurance companies will be in in trouble.  Which ones?  We don't know.

CMBS- Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities- These are commercial (business) mortgages for commercial properties, repackaged, and sold as investments.  This is a little bitty Jenga tower, was a mere $96.7 billion last year (2019).  Who pays these mortgages?  Retail stores, mostly.  Ever hear of the Retail Apocalypse?  Yeah, those retail stores struggling and going belly up month after month, that's what this Jenga tower is based on.  Sounds solid to me.

And then there's the corporate bond market, another way that huge businesses raise money.  These days, companies that are damn near insolvent, like Boeing in March, sell billions of dollars in bonds, and then the Federal Reserve creates money from thin air, and buys those bonds, that Boeing knows it will never be able to pay off.  All the money The Fed creates out of thin air makes the dollars in your wallet or bank account worth less, which will lead to high inflation, at some point.  Maybe hyper-inflation.  This is how "zombie companies" are created, and that's a whole 'nother debt mess to be dealt with.

In any case, we have the three major Jenga Towers above, totaling somewhere around $2.4 trillion, and people and businesses not paying over 100 million different loans in the last two months.  That's nearly double the amount of debt that triggered the 2008 economic collapse, and a much greater number of people and businesses not paying that debt.  What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, this is one reason I'm calling this a Great Depression when we're only a few months in.  After these bubbles pop, and they WILL pop, it will take years to sort the underlying mess out.  Things are going to get much crazier financially before they improve to any large degree.