Imagine for a moment that the price of all your investments - your stocks, your retirement portfolio, your house - suddenly drop in half this year. Now imagine that on top of that inflation suddenly picks up, making your cost of living skyrocket.
That would be pretty awful, right?
Well, this might not be just some theoretical thought exercise.
Highly respected financial researcher Jesse Felder warns us that these twin dangers of a market crash and higher inflation actually could indeed happen in the near future.
For many months now we've been sharing the mounting abundance of data points revealing that today's markets are historically unprecedented levels of over-valuation. To our list, Jesse adds record margin debt levels, which have NEVER been higher compared to GDP than they are now:
Margin debt is a measure of how speculative the investing environment is: the more margin debt outstanding, the more speculative the time. So we are now living in the most speculative moment EVER.
Like many of our recent past guest experts like Grant Williams, Jim Rogers, Steen Jakobsen and Jim Bianco, Jesse foresees high inflation as the biggest existential threat to markets and the economy going forward. That by itself would puncture the euphoria supporting today's asset prices.
So, ugly as it is to contemplate, we may be dealing with declining markets and rising inflation as 2021 progresses.
Adam Taggart is the President and Co-Founder of Peak Prosperity. He wears many hats, but his basic job is to handle the business side of things so that his fellow co-founder, Chris Martenson, is free to think and write. Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the 'startup thing' (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch. Most importantly, he's a devoted husband and dad.