{"id":545544,"date":"2010-04-27T23:34:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-28T03:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dailyreckoning.com.au\/?p=8710"},"modified":"2010-04-27T23:34:56","modified_gmt":"2010-04-28T03:34:56","slug":"is-it-the-end-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/545544","title":{"rendered":"Is It The End Of Time?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oh my&#8230;oh my&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Locusts&#8230;earthquakes&#8230;tornadoes&#8230; What next? Fire and Brimstone!<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a plague of locusts eating crops in Australia&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Earthquakes are becoming more common&#8230;after devastating quakes hit Haiti and then Chili.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We could definitely feel it in Buenos Aires,&#8221; said our friends. &#8220;It was very unsettling. The heavy blinds we have up outside began smacking against the house as if there were a wind storm. But there wasn&#8217;t any wind.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Then, a volcanic eruption in Iceland grounded air travelers between Europe and the US&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>And now deadly tornadoes have ripped into the Southern US&#8230;and a &#8220;giant fireball&#8221; was spotted in the Midwest.<\/p>\n<p>Is it the &#8220;end of time&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>Probably not.<\/p>\n<p>At least, you&#8217;re probably better off betting against it. That is, 9 times out of 10, time continues. Every time people think that something totally new has come along, it turns out that it&#8217;s not so new after all.<\/p>\n<p>Like all those goofballs who thought a &#8220;new paradigm&#8221; meant eternally rising stock market prices in &#8217;99&#8230;or real estate prices that went up forever in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;d think these people would have learned their lesson when the crash\/Great Recession of &#8217;07-&#8217;09 wiped out $30 trillion worth of nominal wealth. But they&#8217;d been exercising their optimism for so long that it&#8217;s in pretty good shape. Now, comes the rebound and they&#8217;re ready to flex their good-time muscles again.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Los Angeles Times<\/em> reports, for example, that people are &#8220;flipping houses in South LA again.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Emerging markets have soared &#8211; almost recovering all that was lost. And consumers, who had retreated from spending money once they realized they didn&#8217;t have any, are once again on steroids &#8211; pumping up sales to give the impression of a healthy recovery.<\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s a report that the small fry are finally getting back into the stock market. After staying on the sidelines for the last two years, they&#8217;re now getting up the confidence to tempt the fates. Good luck to them&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Of course, it&#8217;s perfectly normal for people to believe the de- leveraging is over. Who wants to cut back? Who wants to accept a lower standard of living? Who wants to admit that he&#8217;s been a fool? Instead, he&#8217;ll tell himself:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;ll all blow over&#8230;&#8221; &#8220;Things are back to normal&#8230;&#8221; &#8220;The feds have the situation under control&#8230;&#8221; &#8220;Now it&#8217;s safe to get back into stocks&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the key indicators are still weak or undecided.<\/p>\n<p>New jobless claims went up unexpectedly last week. The Baltic Dry index is still telling us that there is no genuine pick-up in world trade. The feds&#8217; new homeowner tax credit will expire soon &#8211; with property auctions and bank repossessions at record levels&#8230;and foreclosures taking their biggest jump in five years.<\/p>\n<p>Robert Shiller warns that we should expect another dip in the housing market.<\/p>\n<p>And the Fed itself tells us that it will keep its &#8220;extended period&#8221; of emergency low rates a while longer.<\/p>\n<p>What is all this telling us?<\/p>\n<p>That the Great Correction continues&#8230;and that there is far more danger on the downside than there is reward on the upside.<\/p>\n<p><em>Barron&#8217;s<\/em> Big Money Poll tells us that bonds are the most detested asset class. Frankly, we don&#8217;t like them either. But the Great Correction will eventually take a whack at stock prices&#8230;and real estate prices&#8230;and commodity prices&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>..bonds could be the only major asset to escape!<\/p>\n<p>The big money could be dead wrong&#8230;just as the small money is almost always wrong. Bonds might go up as the de-leveraging continues.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll wait to see what happens&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Bill Bonner<br \/>\nfor The Daily Reckoning Australia<\/p>\n<p>Similar Posts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailyreckoning.com.au\/geithner-says-long-time-repair-housing-market\/2010\/03\/29\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Monday March 29, 2010\">Geithner Says it Would Take a &#8220;Long Time&#8221; to Repair the Housing Market<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailyreckoning.com.au\/natural-market-correction\/2008\/09\/22\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Monday September 22, 2008\">A Battle Between a Natural Market correction and an Artificial Attempt to Avoid it<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailyreckoning.com.au\/is-it-really-the-end-of-the-dollar-carry-trade\/2009\/10\/27\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Tuesday October 27, 2009\">Is It Really the End of the Dollar Carry Trade?<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailyreckoning.com.au\/investors-are-thinking-inflation-is-coming-but-it-isnt-here-yet\/2009\/07\/29\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Wednesday July 29, 2009\">Investors Are Thinking: Inflation is Coming, But it Isn&#8217;t Here Yet<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailyreckoning.com.au\/the-greatness-of-a-depression-is-commensurate-to-the-governments-efforts-to-prevent-it\/2009\/05\/04\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Monday May 4, 2009\">The Greatness of a Depression is Commensurate to the Government&#8217;s Efforts to Prevent It<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!-- Similar Posts took 37.892 ms --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh my&#8230;oh my&#8230; Locusts&#8230;earthquakes&#8230;tornadoes&#8230; What next? Fire and Brimstone! There&#8217;s a plague of locusts eating crops in Australia&#8230; Earthquakes are becoming more common&#8230;after devastating quakes hit Haiti and then Chili. &#8220;We could definitely feel it in Buenos Aires,&#8221; said our friends. &#8220;It was very unsettling. The heavy blinds we have up outside began smacking against [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4277,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-545544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4277"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}