Easy money is a rare thing in the markets. But, I agree, when it does come you must embrace it. It is a beautiful thing.
Bernanke has thrown down in the MMT corner. We'll see if these "theorists" are right or wrong in the next decade.
I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing asset confiscation and/or a multitude of MFG's if we did an encore performance of 2008.
It will be another couple of years before you see this crash. In the meantime, expect the markets to rise a lot more. That would be me my guess given the past patterns. But who of us really knows!? Dow 20,000 sometime before 2015!!
Be it noted that their are focused remedial actions that can be taken. For example, Greenspan was criticized for not tightening on the margin requirement to cool off excessive use of leverage. I think the Bernanke Fed should strongly consider tightening up a bit on margin requirements. That will cool down market volatility and should take some of the steam out. Is the housing market being manipulated? It is perfectly legal, of course, to hold inventory off the market in the expectation that prices will rise. Possibly the major players, Chase, Citi etc, are holding bank owned real estate off the market to create an artificial shortage in some markets with the intention of gradually putting more of their real estate on the market as prices rise. The Fed has it in their power to make it less advantageous for banks to hold onto real estate. All it requires is some creative thinking. The point is that there is a myriad of focused actions the Fed can take to keep asset bubbles from becoming unmanageably large. There will always be bubbles. But one thing I learned from studying Soros is that the formation stage of a bubble is clearly identifiable and therefore bubble extremes are preventable. Greenspan believed that market forces would eventually deflate these bubbles more or less harmlessly, because he believed in market equilibrium theory. According to Soros' Reflexivity Theory, however, this is faulty thinking. When markets get seriously out of whack they can, via positive feedback loops, get even more out of whack. I think Soros is correct, and if he is, then it is possible, through timely focused action, to head off the formation of major bubbles. Notice Roubini's use of the preposition "If" when he says: " If the exit cannot be navigated successfully, a dovish Fed is more likely to blow bubbles." That "If" qualifies his statement. We'll have to wait and see what happens, but I don't see it as a foregone conclusion that this time won't be any different from the last time. There are some very sharp economists working for the Fed. Until proven otherwise, I am going to assume they have learned something from past mistakes.
Bernanke totally missed the warnings about the housing crisis, when media pariahs such as Shiff and others were warning 3 years in advance. What Bernanke is.....is an astute ponzi operator. I give him high marks for that.
With all the so called liquidity sloshing around, what's inflation doing fall off the table? Source ------ And the meme is that buybacks are good because you're paying 85 cents to buy a dollar and yet the buybacks happen at tops not at the bottom of the market cycle: Source -------- Now everyone wants to own dividend stocks and some blogs are posting the long term stock returns. Where was all this back in 2009-2010? Back in 2010, there were quite a few blogs showing bonds beating stocks from the 1960's onward. No surprise: Source Everyone is back on the margin juice. I have a few more charts but I'm saving those for the recession thread that may or may not start up til the Merkel election.
Agree, the warning signs were all over, you can even pull up past articles and videos of him saying that there was going to be a soft landing, I mean how could you not see it happening. Peter Schiff was right on and he is still right on today with what he saying, its just a matter of time before this comes falling down again. BUBBLE ben bernanke has not a clue what he is doing, I will say this over and over again, just because equities are up 140% doesnt mean he knows what he is doing, all he is doing is creating one of the biggest asset bubbles in history and when this one comes down hard again there wont be more trillions to fix it....
Just listen to this guy speak.....how could anyone not know what was going on, he seems oblivious to every fucking question they ask him.... <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/INmqvibv4UU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>