Congress managed to avert a recurring crisis last Thursday, as it passed a short-term appropriations bill that will keep the lights on in the hallowed halls of Washington through December 3rd.
That leaves members with the rest of what Hayes Brown calls “the to-do list from hell” — at the top of which is what to do about the debt ceiling.
“Big Short” big shot Michael Burry is repeating his warning that the U.S. stock market is in the midst of a major crash.
Burry, who’s famous mainly for his bet against subprime mortgages during the Great Recession, is equating current market conditions to the crashes in 2008 and 2000.
Burry tweeted yesterday, “Crypto crash. Check. Meme crash. Check. SPAC crash. Check. Inflation. Check. 2000. Check. 2008. Check. 2022. Check.”
The Scion Capital Management chief’s latest pronouncement comes during a period of prolonged pain for especially paper market investors.
The S&P 500 is down about 18% since January 1st (it hit -24% in mid-June), while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has plummeted about 15% (its 2022 low is -19.8%).
And the techy Nasdaq has fallen about 9% (it’s been as low as -35%) over the same period – all at or into bear territory.
Popular “meme stocks” have struggled during this virtually all-encompassing downturn.
Bed Bath & Beyond shares are down more than 51%, AMC shares have plunged nearly 70% and GameStop shares have fallen about 37% this year.
Burry has also called out weakness in SPACS – special purpose acquisition companies – which boomed during the stock market’s surge after its plunge in March 2020 but have cooled considerably over the last year.
Meanwhile, bitcoin is down more than 60% this year and has dived below $19,000.
Well, last week’s meetings of the IMF and World Bank weren’t exactly the equivalent of an Inaugural Ball.
In fact, there apparently wasn’t much festiveness at all. Instead, Neil Irwin and Courtenay Brown report, there was – and is – “a deep sense of foreboding among the world's financial elite.”
One Near East financial official said at a Group of 30 event on Saturday, we have entered "an era of enduring uncertainty and fragility."
Irwin and Brown warn that leaders around the globe “face a situation in which the policy toolkit of the 2010s is no longer readily available.
“Fiscal and monetary policy is constrained by the pandemic, war and climate change.”
On the one hand, things in the nation’s capital appeared on the surface similar to how they looked before the pandemic was unleashed:
Limos lining up at luxury hotels and crowded gates at Dulles International Airport for the Saturday night Lufthansa flights to Frankfurt; too big to fail banks throwing top-shelf receptions attended by badge-wearing people in dark suits. You get the picture.
But the challenges that now lie beneath that growingly unstable surface have changed in a profound way since then.
The Federal Reserve and their international peers are aggressively – some say obsessively – raising interest rates to try to bring down inflation, after a decade that saw central banks trying novel and, in many instances, untested, methods to goad prices higher.
Boy, did that ever work!