Warning: the Smart Money and the Smartest Money Both Smell Inflation
By Graham Summers
If you want to make money investing, you first need to understand the structure of the asset classes in our current financial system.
Everyone likes to go bonkers over stocks, but the reality is that the stock market is in fact one of the smallest and least liquid markets on the planet. All told, US stocks are roughly $26 trillion in market cap.
By way of contrast, the US debt markets (Treasuries, corporate, municipal, local, etc.) is well north of $60 trillion.
And the currency markets (which cannot be accurately measured because every trade involves a currency pair) trades over $5 trillion per day.
Put simply, currencies are the "smartest" money, followed by bonds, and then finally stocks. So when a seismic change takes place, currencies and bonds pick up on it LONG before stocks do.
With that in mind consider that the $USD is collapsing, having gone almost straight down for 12 months.
Now consider that the US Treasury bond market, is falling in price, resulting in yields spiking above their 20-year downtrend.
BOTH of these assets are forecasting the same thing: INFLATION.
Inflation forces the $USD DOWN and bond yields UP.
So we've got both the "smart" money and the SMARTEST money forecasting the same thing.
And it's going to blow up the Everything Bubble.
All of the debt that has been added to the system since 2008 was done so at ridiculous risk valuations courtesy of the Fed intentionally creating a bubble in bonds.
Put another way, the Fed chose to deal with the 2008 crisis by creating a bubble in US Treasuries: the most senior asset class in the US financial system.
However, these bonds trade on inflation.
When inflation rises, so do bond yields.
When bond yields rise, bond prices fall.
When bond prices fall, the Everything Bubble bursts.
Best Regards
Graham Summers
Chief Market Strategist