The Elites Are Privately Warning About a Crash

Many everyday citizens assume powerful global financial elites operate behind closed doors in secret conclaves, like the scene of a Spectre board meeting in the recent James Bond film.

Actually, the opposite is true. Most of what the power elite does is hidden in plain sight in speeches, seminars, webcasts and technical papers. These are readily available from institutional websites and media channels.

It’s true that private meetings occur on the sidelines of Davos, the IMF annual meeting and G-20 summits of the kind just concluded. But the results of even those secret meetings are typically announced or leaked or can be reasonably inferred based on subsequent policy coordination.

What the elites rely on is not secrecy but lack of proficiency by the media.

The elites communicate in an intentionally boring style with lots of technical jargon and publish in channels non-experts have never heard of and are unlikely to find. In effect, the elites are communicating with each other in their own language and hoping that no one else notices.

Still, there are some exceptions. Mohamed A. El-Erian is a bona fide member of the global power elite (a former deputy director of the IMF and president of the Harvard Management Co.). Yet he writes in a fairly accessible style on the popular Bloomberg website. When El-Erian talks, we should all listen.

In a recent article he raises serious doubts about the sustainability of the bull market in stocks because of reduced liquidity resulting from simultaneous policy tightening by the Fed, European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England.

He says stocks rose on a sea of liquidity and they may crash when that liquidity is removed. This is a warning to other elites, but it’s also a warning to you.

But it’s not just El-Erian who’s sounding the alarm…

You’ve heard the expression “the big money.” This is a reference to the largest and most plugged-in investors on Earth. Some are mega-rich individuals and some are large banks and institutional investors with a dense network of contacts and inside information.

At the top of the food chain when it comes to big money are the sovereign wealth funds. These are funds sponsored by mostly wealthy nations to invest a country’s reserves from trade or natural resources in stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds.

As a result, sovereign wealth fund managers have the best information networks of any investors. The chief investment officer of a sovereign wealth fund can pick up the phone and speak to the CEO of any major corporation, private equity fund or hedge fund in the world.

Among sovereign wealth funds, the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) is one of the largest, with over $354 billion in assets. So what does the head of GIC say about markets today?

Lim Chow Kiat, CEO of GIC, warns that “valuations are stretched, policy uncertainty is high” and investors are being too complacent.

GIC allocates 40% of its assets to cash or highly liquid bonds and only 27% of its assets to developed economy equities.

Meanwhile, the typical American small retail investor probably has 60% or more of her 401(k) in developed economy equities, mostly U.S.

But it may be time for everyday investors to listen to the big money. They are the ones who see financial crashes coming first.

The bottom line is, a financial crisis is certainly coming. In my latest book “The Road to Ruin,” I use 2018 as a target date primarily because the two prior systemic crises, 1998 and 2008, were 10 years apart. I extended the timeline 10 years into the future from the 2008 crisis to maintain the 10-year tempo, and this is how I arrived at 2018.

Yet I make the point in the book that the exact date is unimportant. What is most important is that the crisis is coming and the time to prepare is now. It could happen in 2018, 2019, or it could happen tomorrow. The conditions for collapse are all in place.

Original source https://dailyreckoning.com/elites-privately-warning-crash/