All EM markets will sharply spike. That’s what happens in general during a funding squeeze, we’ve seen it over the past few years while the Fed was tightening; for example the Turkish Lira damn near hyperinflating (though there’s other causes for that too).
If you’re talking interest rates there’s only 1 country that really matters. And it’s not looking good.
If Australia goes, that’s just another ~20 million people country down the drain. If Greece needs another bailout in this situation the entire euro is done for. The Northern countries will not bail Greece out again. There will be a revolt if they even try. And nothing was fixed because the debt to GDP was still growing.
Hi, I am near 70 yo, not very tech. savvy. Like playing on line Mahjong and an old text only type game “Kingdom of Loathing.” I want something not all blood and bashing, but where I can learn some skill, the way you have honed your strategy skills. I am good at logic, symbolic, math, not so much. Any cheap game suggestions? Thanks.
Normalcy bias will get your ass killed. Or worse yet it will get someone else killed or very sick.
It was my brother in law’s bday last wednesday. He and my sister are in the Villages in Fl. He was 85. How he made it that far is a testament to my sister taking care of him. Their son and his wife flew down from New Jersey for the bday. They flew back home on Sunday. Today my other sister informed me that they were going out to dinner tonight. I lost it and started yelling in the phone. My sister said , my other sister told her well it’s not in the Villages it is only on the East And West coast. I was speechless. Then when I could speak again I asked how would they know it wasn’t in the Villages since it can be transmitted by asymptomatic people for 2 weeks maybe more. I then asked if anyone in the Villages has been tested. She said she did not know. I told her she was not to see our sister and brother in law for 2 weeks if they stayed home. If they didn’t the 2 week clock would have to start from when they went out again. My great nephew just got back from a CRUISE with his wife.
This my friends is a small example of my stupid family. Now I just found out my sister’s son is being tested on Long Island N.Y. for covid 19. My sister and brother in law plan on driving back to N.Y. sometime between the end of March to April 15th.
I am currently self isolating with my wife and the virus is at least 180 miles away. How I escaped the stupid gene I will never know but thank you God.
This friends is the normalcy bias of the average Amerikaan. They will blissfully kill each other and others. I give up
Ohhhhhh now you’re hitting my specialty 
There are TONS of games that fit that description. But it very much depends on what kind of strategy you’re looking for. So i’ll list a few.
The most strategic genre is 4x, so called 4X strategy games (Which stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate). They generally play slow, even turn based. The majority take place in space, though there are others. These games go veeeery deep, especially the classical stuff like Europa Universalis IV or Hearts of Iron IV. You need an university class to get the most out of those games. But a good game to start with is Stellaris. It’s fairly intuitive as far as Paradox games go (a well known publisher of strategy games).
Those games work both in expanding militarily and diplomatically. You can’t just fight the world. Until, yknow, you can if you play your cards right.
Then there’s the Real Time Strategy genre. Honestly there’s only one game that’s worth it above all others right now and that’s Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition. Looks nice with the classic AoE2 balance with an updated menu, mod support, very lively community etc. But these do require you to be a tad faster; as you now have to worry about build orders and such.
Don’t have to go all professional about it; but you will meet players online that you can’t beat because of speed not strategy if you play competitive. I personally enjoy a good Comp Stomp more (get a friend, you vs 6 AIs aaaaand go).
Now there’s also a bunch of puzzle games if you’re more into light thinking and maybe a little bit of quick reactions. There’s tons that are easy to find, but a few of the less conventional ones (but also very entertaining) are Portal and Portal 2. Don’t be misled by the first person view; it’s a physics puzzle. If you wanna go hard on Logic and Obtuse things, The Witness and it’s ilk may be more in your ally.
None of this is touching Sims, or Simulators. There are strategy games that seek to more closely emulate life, which fall under Simulator games (and no i’m not talking about Goat Simulator, though if you wanna have a laugh). Stuff like the Democracy series; where you simply set policy for a virtual populace and watch them complain.
There’s also City builders like Cities Skylines that lets you run a city for the non-violent strategy games. Might not seem like it until your main traffic road gets congested and you have to figure out how to reroute your trucks outside the residential areas.
I’ll toss in Besiege as well. It’s less strategy, more creativity. Try and build medieval siege engines out of blocks. But good for a laugh. As well as the Civilization series (Civilization 5 is a game i played alot) which also focuses on building up your civilization and conquering others.
That is just the start There’s many more, i’m sure there’s one for your liking
https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Strategy/
This is why i came here to begin with. I tweeted it at Chris but i might need some backup on this one. It’s very important cause something just broke.
Please read this entire twitter thread i made last December. I made it after looking into the Repo crisis myself, trying to find the interest rates (cause ZH wasn’t updating fast enough to my liking) and i ended up on the DTCC GCF Repo site (https://www.dtcc.com/charts/dtcc-gcf-repo-index). I downloaded the historical data after i spotted a weird meltup at the end of each month, and i went a digging.
And i found the pattern dated back to the 31st of december 2009 when the Repo rate for treasuries went negative out of nowhere. Ever since then, there have been shenanigans. It slowly built up until the repo rate went negative again in 2011; after that there’s a strong pattern to be found until the repocrisis of 2019.
Point is. Something just changed at the start of the week that made me say something big was up. A week and a half later; it’s pretty much clear what. But then it did this:
https://twitter.com/DesoGames/status/1239677094696796166
I can guarantee you that is not good. That is very, very, very much not good. I’m still not entirely sure what is causing those moves. But i do know some shenanigans put in place a decade ago have just evaporated.
So i need the tribe’s help on this one. Including some smarter-then-me people chris knows. Cause i can feel it’s connected. I just don’t know how.
Kevin Patterson practices medicine in Nanaimo, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, and on Salt Spring Island, BC. He specializes in general internal and critical care medicine, and his field includes the promotion of health and prevention of disease. Among the acclaimed books he’s authored is the novel Consumption, which focuses on diseases amongst the Inuit.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/03/15/Kevin-Patterson-COVID/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=160320
Hi Deso,
The only market I understand is the supermarket…can you explain your last post ? You sure seem to know your stuff, but I don’t follow… What do you think is happening nad what does it mean to someone like me?
Thanks, Kathy
The singularity people are “on this” on the business side. They did a sales presentation from their [paid] entrepreneurial base today. They presented a few statistics. No idea how accurate, but thought some of the fancy graphs were interesting. Here’s the link for the videos.
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/covid-19-virtual-summit/
DNA sequencing: crowdcast.io/e/covid-19-virtual-summit/clips/5e6feb414013d000514d7620
Economics https://www.crowdcast.io/e/covid-19-virtual-summit/clips/5e6ff8e043fba30043db61fc
Testing: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/covid-19-virtual-summit/clips/5e700f81af674f004911e4ab
Hi folks, As you all know, things are rapidly deteriorating on many, many fronts. I’ve curtailed most out-of-home excursions and have been using PPE and distancing for any interactions near others. This week I’m going into self-imposed full isolation as of 5 p.m. on 3/19, after my last obligatory, unavoidable tasks (I have two in-person doctor appointments this week that couldn’t be delayed or provided virtually).
I’ve been prepping in earnest since 2015 and significantly accelerated my efforts due to creaky financial markets last Sept. (repos) and Dec. (QT crash); then into mid-Jan. to present with coronavirus.
These past several weeks I’ve been helping to alert and assist family members minimize coronavirus exposures and otherwise prepare for this pandemic, financial crisis and related impacts. There are a few gaps in our preps but overall we’re in much, much better shape to weather this crisis(es) than most Americans. I’m still very anxious about what lies ahead. As Deso says, prepare for losses on many levels. I’ll be calmer once loved ones are settled by Friday this week (or earlier if necessary) to the extent possible, sheltering in place.
I and my loved ones owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to Chris, Adam, the PP team and this extraordinary PP tribe for helping us to comprehend, plan and take action early enough to survive this mess. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
Please take care all. Stay alert, healthy and safe.
Hey Desogames:
I know you are new to the PP tribe, so let me mention some of the tribal customs, namely: we don’t do politics here and we don’t do religion here. Please lay off the president–if I understand your posts correctly, he is not your president anyway.
Trump is perfectly correct in saying that the market will take care of itself. Chris has been beyond frustrated for years now that the Fed has used its power to fight any downturn in the market. He puts quotation marks around “market” to emphasize that our markets have been manipulated for so long that they no longer fulfill the function of price discovery. And Chris is right.
For years, the Fed has been effective in manipulating the “market”–driving it higher and higher. No more. The interest rate tool is simply not effective against the coronavirus effect. Now that the Fed has been shown to be impotent in dealing with the current raging coronavirus honey badger, the market will sort itself out over time. As it should.
A lot of people are going to be hurt as the market sorts itself out, but there is not much that can be done about that. The Fed should never have inflated the market (it is not their job!) and people should not have bought on to the idea that “this time it is different”. It isn’t different. The Fed and other central banks blew a big bubble and the coronavirus is popping it.
The markets are going to correct…very painfully. Finally.
So please lay off the president. Keep politics out of this discussion. Let’s try to help each other through this. We don’t need more division among us.
While I am asking for favors, please also lay off the “f…” word, either as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb. I know the younger generation uses it continually…but not the older generation. Rightly or wrongly, older folks tend to discount the knowledge/intelligence of someone who is addicted to that word. I have read your posts enough to know you have some important insights to share. They will have more impact if you can cut out the profanity.
Thanks.
That’s the thing. I track patterns but i’m not privvy to the very inner workings of the repo market. There are people who are; but i have no way of reaching them. Chris probably does; he just had those smart people on his show after all. They will be able to tell what the hell is up with that pattern.
I only instinctively know i’m looking at the problem the Fed is looking for. The MBS rate taking a dive. Because what the pattern i found says, as i understand it, is that the number cannot go negative. Every time it bounces deeply below 0 there’s either a crisis going on like in 2011 or they’re throwing money at the market like after december 2009.
See that’s the weird thing. The whole crash happened in 08/09, but not from december 09 into '10. The bailouts where in full swing by then. Obama had been president almost a year.
The pattern of those melt ups at the end of the month doesn’t exist before then. Out of nowhere, the MBS repo rates cratered in the end of december 2009. I mean it crashed negative HARD.
To back up a bit, around i think december 15th of last year, Zoltan Poszar, who built the repo market, issued a warning there’d be another crash by years end because of funding issues around the “turn”, or the last funding day of the year. A day later Powell promised to print $500 billion dollars in repos through year end to prevent this “bad turn” from happening, indicating how bad that problem was. the problem being a spike upwards in rates like in september 2019.
But this rate cratering downwards lines up well with the build up of the pattern in the repo rates. AKA; the 1st time it cratered, the pattern appeared in pieces, after the 2nd time it dipped negative, the pattern completed itself and both MBS and Treasury repos began having these “melt ups” at the end of the month.
Point is; you’d expect a steady line. Sure, it moves up and down with events. But when it starts moving up at the end of the month, in a fairly regular pattern… That’s man made. That’s not some world event doing that. You could say; maybe it’s end of the month funding or balance sheet movements. But then it’d be more regular. Why one month yes and the other month no? Why does the melt up in march stop happening?
The pattern also seems to change and die out with the rising of the rates Jay Powell did from 2016 onwards. As rates rise, the melt ups lessen in frequency and in strength (thats what the multiples indicate).
Now all of this is based around the “bad turn” principle. Printing alot of money to prevent a massive melt up such as in december 2018. But when you look at the moves in percentages, previous year turns where either much worse, and nobody gave a shit, or they didn;t exist at all. There’s clearly no correlation between printing money and when the end of the year turn happens or not. Either it does or it doesn’t, not both. Meanwhile the repomarket just kept humming along.
The change in the pattern i found however does explain why the repo market went on the fritz. Whatever that pattern was, they need to bring it back, or whatever Bernanke in 2009 was trying to prevent will happen.
What that is i don’t know. All i know is, i see a pattern that has to be man made, cannot be linked to quarter end balance sheet changes by big banks (cause it’s too random for that) but it does line up with JP Morgan, as ZH aledges, slowly draining liquidity out of the repo market over a period of about a year.
The problems is probably marginal liquidity if i had to guess. There’s just no margin to absorb shocks. For whatever reasons, if that melt up pattern doesn’t happen at the end of a month, everything tanks. Where it before was possible to not have that end of the month melt up pattern, that is no longer possible, because the moment it stopped everything died.
so whatever is causing that melt up must also be a clue to the solution of this problem. If there’s a crash without the melt up, and no crash with it, we need a melt up. Not to mention the melt ups became really pronounced even in september after the repo crisis. So who or what is causing it and why? And what is it to begin with? Because i have no idea why end of the month spikes prevent huge drops or middle month spikes.
It makes no sense. But i can still smell a rat. I can hear a ghost. So i need a couple of ghost busters
Would it be possible for those who want to discuss the market, gold, silver etc have their own thread? Those who are new to the site and who want Honey Badger info can more easily find it?
Papp R. et al. Oscillococcinum® in patients with influenza-like syndromes: A placebo-controlled double-blind evaluation. British Homeopathic Journal 1998, 87, 69-76
Desogames, you seem to enjoy pushing the limits here but you really are getting to the point where the benefits of your knowledge are being outweighed by the BS you cause. Throttle it back a bit guy, please.
There’s a time and place for being an asshole, and this isn’t it.
There is already a group on PP that discusses precious metals:
https://peakprosperity.com/forums/peakprosperity-discussions/general-discussion-and-questions/financial/gold-silver/
And @davefairtex does a daily (or nearly so) post on PMs, which generally is linked from the Daily Digests. Here is the latest:
https://peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/pm-weekly-market-commentary-03-13-2020/
By INSISTING upon using the F-word it cheapens this site and to a new visitor appears to be on par with say a Jerry Springer discussion.
Being articulate surely you can get a point across without trying to be the sites vulgar badass. How about, the brainy, helpful guy?
Didn’t I see something in the sites guidelines about vulgar, foul language?
AKGrannyWGrit
Well, you didn’t sway me with your logic, reasoning or choice of words. Too bad you refuse to follow the standards of this site.
Rather Not See This Place Turn Into Zerohedge
Hey people, we don't have time for a pissing contest here, so secure all this nonsense and stick to the reason we all come here: the urgency of the world situation at present. You/we all have something to contribute, so do it! My US$0.02 Mike, from the Florida Gulf CoastI work for a home health agency. We do not do medical assistance but help with baths, cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, laundry. I asked my owner today what the status of agencies like ours is. She said the government has yet to decide if we are “essential workers.”
Here’s my question. I want to support my clients but I am age 68. Do I try my best to follow personal protection (hand washing, wipes, sanitizer) while being physically close to these folks? I own N95 masks but that would frighten my clients.
Or do I protect my own health and stay home? My health is great and I have no chronic health problems.
When I see doctors and nurses fall deathly ill, who have the best PPE, what makes me think I am immune?