by Chris Black
The further the economy deteriorated, and the higher real estate went while removing more and more disposable income, the higher stocks went.
Business Activity in US Contracts for First Time Since 2020
S&P Global flash composite measure falls to 47.5 in July
Services index contracts, while manufacturing gauge easesFlash composite purchasing managers output index slid 4.8 to 47.5, the weakest reading since May 2020 pic.twitter.com/4sSvvgMUjS
— Special Situations 🌐 Research Newsletter (Jay) (@SpecialSitsNews) July 22, 2022
It didn’t matter if the companies made a profit. It didn’t matter how much industries consolidated.
The major players programmed the market with HFT to always go up.
In the 1980s I remember going to amusement parks where acres of parking lots were filled to the brim.
You were elbow to elbow with hundreds of thousands of people, waiting over an hour to get on a ride. Before opening and after closing, traffic was bumper to bumper for twenty miles in either direction.
Today those parks are either closed, or can barely get a few thousand people in during the day.
In the early 1990s there were six malls within twenty minutes of where I lived. All of them were filled with stores, and all of them were packed with people.
There is only one left.
The Automile of car dealerships was vibrant with customers all the time. It has looked like a ghost town over the last decade.
I go to hotels and it would be a miracle if they were 10% occupied on any given day.
$21 trillion GDP? Horseshit.
The real economic activity in the United States has never been lower.
The idea that the USA somehow outputs four times the economic activity that it did in 1985 is absurd, maybe in fake dollar transfers between banks, not from real commerce/economic activity.