We Are Witnessing Unusual Stock Market Behavior That Is Unlike Anything That We Have Seen Since 2008
Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
July 5, 2018
We have not seen Wall Street this jumpy since just before the great financial crisis of 2008. As I have explained so many times before, when the waters are calm and there is low volatility, markets tend to go up. And when the waters are choppy and volatility starts to spike, markets tend to go down. That is why the behavior that we have been witnessing from investors during the first two quarters of 2018 is so alarming. A high level of market turnover is often a sign of big trouble ahead, and according to Bloomberg our financial markets “are churning at the fastest rate since 2008″…
From junk bonds to emerging-market stocks, market turnover is through the roof, reaching multi-year highs. Within the S&P 500 Index, investors traded more than $2.9 trillion worth of shares in each of the past two quarters, a feat last achieved in early 2008.
Bloomberg is not prone to hyperbole, and so when they say that “market turnover is through the roof”, I hope that you will take that statement seriously.
We truly are facing a scenario that Wall Street has never seen before. The Wilshire 5000 stock index to nominal GDP ratio has been hovering near all-time highs, and what that tells us is that stock prices are more overvalued today than they have been at any other point in modern American history. Meanwhile, all sorts of red flags continue to indicate that big trouble is on the horizon, but most investors are ignoring those red flags.
But if you look closely, it is becoming clear that the most savvy investors are getting out while the getting is good. In a previous article, I explained that the “smart money” is getting out of stocks at a pace that we have not seen since just before the last financial crisis. Fortunately for them, the “dumb money” has been willing to buy what they are selling at these massively inflated prices.
We see a similar spike in the “churn rate” when we look at emerging markets. In fact, Bloomberg says that we have not seen this much volatility in emerging market stocks since the international financial crisis of 1998…
It’s a similar story for developing-nation assets at the mercy of a strengthening U.S. dollar and trade tensions. Volume on the MSCI Emerging Market index reached $1.9 trillion in the three months through June, the most since 1998 when a wave of currency devaluations and defaults ripped through emerging economies from Thailand to Russia.
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, global stocks lost approximately 10 trillion dollars in value during the first six months of 2018.
Just think about that.
10 trillion dollars is almost half of the U.S. national debt.
If global stocks continue to fall at a similar pace during the second half, it is only a matter of time before U.S. stocks get absolutely slammed.
The Rest…HERE
