THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM CLIVE MAUND 8:28.19. You may subscribe to him at “clivemaund.com”
https://www.clivemaund.com/article.php?id=5142
Many years ago I was in New York city and one hot Summer afternoon I visited a local store and bought several big red shiny apples, which I took home in a brown paper bag. While most of them were fine, the first one I bit into had rotted from the core outwards to just beneath the surface all over so that, while it looked perfectly normal from the outside, almost all of the interior was brown and rotting. Needless to say, I did not continue to eat it. The reason for mentioning this is that this is exactly the situation we have with the US economy right now – everything looks fine, but beneath the surface it is completely rotted out and set to implode.
Debt in the US has risen to fantastic unimaginable levels especially when you factor in unfunded liabilities. This debt is simply unpayable and it never will be honored, which means that the creditors are set to lose a lot of money. This debt load is the reason why every effort is being made to keep interest as near to zero as possible. This involves monetization on a vast scale that will eventually crash the dollar. Who but an idiot buys the debt of a bankrupt State? – oh yes, the Pension funds.
Amongst the many factors that are converging at this time to precipitate a stockmarket crash and a depression is the fact that the bullmarket of recent years has been almost entirely due to stock buybacks. When companies buy back their stock, instead of investing in the future of the company or the industry they are simply “goosing” their stock price, and the purpose of that of course is to make them look better on paper and provide nice fat bonuses for top executives. Stock buybacks during the 1920’s are what contributed to the great crash of 1929 and the early 30’s and made it worse, and afterwards they were outlawed, but in recent times corruption led to the slackening of the law so that they have again become the norm. The situation has become really extreme now with the market having been propelled higher due to over $5 trillion of stock buybacks over the past 10 years, a situation which is clearly unsustainable.