Shark Infested Financial Markets

The top two questions people ask me when they learn that I’m a northern California surfer, are

1) whether I’m afraid of sharks or, 2) isn’t the water cold? The answer is yes to both.

Of course I’m afraid of natural born killers the size of small cars lurking beneath the murky surface in the ocean while I am floating on a thin layer of fiberglass wearing what might as well be a wounded seal suit three quarters of a mile from the shore. Who wouldn’t be?

So, why do it? Because the odds are very low that I will be ‘tasted’.  Plus I do it for sport, not for livelihood. Although, based on most people’s fear, you would think that the risk was much higher.

Money and wealth are a different matter, yet we have the same collective denial. Many consider the pursuit a sport, but no one understands the high-risk probability of being eaten alive. We are swimming in the collective waters of overvalued fantasies fueled by a currency that has been breaking since 1913, culminating in the parallel shift of power.

Of course the sharks are out there. All you can do is keep treading water. Have you ever seen one? No! If you see one, you know ‘it’ saw you long before that moment.

Money and, in particular, finance is a different story. We’ve all seen a big crash. Many of us managed to recover relatively unscathed. All of us have scars and visceral memory. Too few realize that we never fully capitulated last time around.

The banks are bigger, further above the law. We have more debt across the board; from trading margin, to corporate bonds, to sovereign debt. The policy has become increasingly invasive and threatening. If you look closely enough, you can see that they are out there.

This is not government and it’s not ‘country’ – it’s tyranny. There’s a difference. In the macro realm, the Cyprus bail-in became a template. Domestically, we have the myIRA template and are more and more stories of direct asset seizure.

But please heed the words of our friend Charles Hugh Smith from Oftwinds.com

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2015/03/orwell-and-kafka-do-america-how.html

All these forms of civil forfeiture in America are well documented:

Taken: Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken

Stop and Seize (six parts)

www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/collection/stop-and-seize-2/

Like the system – the banks or the government - visibility is enough to keep us all in check, afraid and in awe swimming with sharks. But the real danger is drowning in their designs for compliance. Maybe they’ll go too far because they didn’t do enough last time.

It all comes down to the flow of credit. The deflationary fear comes directly from the threat of liquidity freezing. When the flow stops, everything breaks.

“Many modern sharks breathe through a technique called ram ventilation. By swimming fast, these sharks actively force water into their mouths for processing. Usually, sharks that get their oxygen through ram ventilation can also change techniques if they need to. If they’re idling, they’ll use buccal pumping, but when they pick up speed, ram ventilation takes over.”

Everyone should be afraid of sharks.

You won’t see them unless they want to be seen. (The financial sharks make themselves known via their manipulations and price controls.) Eventually, the sharks will either attack directly or infest the waters to the point where no one ventures from the beach – the oceans of opportunity cut off forever.

As a result of decades which amount to over century of monetary policy failure, the sea is infested.

Most people will never see it coming.

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