QUESTION: What about what China did by buying stocks a few years ago to stop the hang sang from dropping

ANSWER: Do not confuse attempts to support a market from actually being able to do so. This is the same as Keynesian economics that government could prevent recessions. Larry Summers admitted the government cannot even forecast such events. Not only during the Great Depression did companies jump in to buy their shares during the crash to try to prevent the decline. Most of the companies that took that action actually failed for they bought the stock back trying to hold the price and lost needed cash reserves. They could not sell stock again nor could the borrow.

During the collapse of the Nikkei after 1989, companies held believing that the government would support the market. When they realized the government could not then the government encouraged us to bail out the Japanese corporations. We helped well over 300 public companies issuing a note to buy their portfolios at their cost with 10-year payouts and each note had to be approved by the Japanese government individually. If the governments were able to actually prevent declines, then they would. But nobody can do that for the size of the public at large far outweighs any institution, group of institutions, or banks.

People would rather believe in conspiracy theories than simply look at the reality. Attempts to manipulate markets ALWAYS fail because the majority is far greater than any minority. The trend is made by the MAJORITY. A panic sell-off like the Crash of 1987 took place BECAUSE there was no bid – not that there was a massive short position. Scare the MAJORITY and they then try to sell, you find no bid and that is how a flash crash unfolds. This is why outlawing short positions is destructive for the only person with the courage to try to catch a falling knife is the one who is taking profit – not initiating a long position.

COMMENT: It looks like the Plunge Protection Team had a field day with the 1,000 rally in the Dow. Back in the 70s I read a small article near the back page of the WSJ that said that the CIA was using two small obscure banks in the Midwest to trade futures. The way they do it is to buy the futures and force the floor traders to stop selling. Then they pile it on and force the shorts to cover.

CM

ANSWER: That is really impossible. I have NEVER found a market that has EVER defied our model. The market bottomed precisely when it should have. Our Cyclical Array pinpointed the day well in advance. That proves there was nothing unusual. Last Friday the 21st, I wrote on the Private Blog: “We do have another Weekly Bearish Reversal at 22739 and a closing below that could warn of a Cycle Inversion meaning down into new week bottoming perhaps on the 26th and then rally into the following week for year-end and then turn back down into January.”

If what you are saying is true, then the government would never collapse and they are 100% in control of everything. That is just not the case. You are attributing power to them that they believe they have. However, if they had such power, then taxes would never rise for they are 100% in control and nothing would happen. Larry Summers, the father of negative interest rates, admitted in a Bloomberg interview that those in power can NEVER forecast a decline because it is a complex system.

I wrote on the Private Blog on December 24th: “The likelihood of lower lows into the 26th are good. But this week remains as a Panic Cycle so we can then see a whipsaw back up into the end of the week. Primary support still lies at the 21600 and 21450 level followed by 20002.”

Then on the day of the low, 26th of December, I posted on the Private Blog at 3AM for the European Open: “Often the bulk of a decline will unfold the day BEFORE the market closes. This is typically as natural human response of the fear of the unknown after the market reopens.”

I just do not see ANYTHING in the market behavior or patterns that would indicate something abnormal. The real explanation is just that all the selling took place on Monday as people feared it would collapse further on the 26th after the market opened. That has been the pattern for more than 100 years – panic before a close of the market for fear of the unknown. Sorry, great story about the Plunge Protection Team. A similar theory prevailed in Japan that the government would NEVERallow the Nikkei to fall. It did, and that belief led to a 19-year depression in share market price, but 26-year economic depression which did not begin to shift trend until 2015.75.

There have been attempts to create a Plunge Protection Team before. The banks got together to try to save the market back in October 1929. Here is the Los Angeles Times from October 26th, 1929 talking about the Stabilizing Forces to save the market. They failed to prevent the Great Depression.

Nobody can step in front of a falling market and survive. Nevertheless, despite the continued failure of such efforts, this myth is always spun. Anyone who believes that such a Plunge Protection Team can even survive never bothers to look at history.

ANSWER: The entire problem of lowering interest rates to “stimulate” the economy demonstrates that central banks cannot really manage anything. This theory is based upon the idea that if rates are cheap then you will borrow. They fail to even understand HOW the economy functions. The stock market and the economy has NEVER peaked with the same level of interest rates TWICE in history. If you BELIEVE the market will double you will pay 20% interest for a year. If you do not BELIEVE the market will rise at all, you will not borrow at 1%.

Pension funds were based upon the idea that at 8% you double your money in less than 10 years compounded. The system of a pension cannot function at interest rates of 1-3%. This is why states are raising taxes and going broke. They have to make up the losses on investments. Then throw in the corruption of governments. They directed pensions to be “conservative” and thus must own typically more than 50% government bonds up to 85% generally and some are at 100% like Social Security. The lower rates on government bonds, the greater the losses and thus taxes must be raised to compensate for state pensions.

Then, so many funds ran into Emerging Markets to try to compensate for the losses on government bond holdings. Spanish banks ran into Turkish debt which they assumed would become a member of the Eurozone. Turkey was one of the first members of the Council of Europe in 1949, and it became an associate member of the EEC in 1963, joined the EU Customs Union in 1995 and started accession negotiations with the European Union in 2005. However, ever since Erdogan, all negotiations with Turkey to join the EU came to an end in 2017.

Therefore, the Fed realizes that the next crisis is a pension crisis and they need to raise rates to help try to bail out the pension funds. They will not be able to raise the rates fast enough to avoid the crisis coming very rapidly which will contribute to raising tax rates and further suppressing economic growth into the future

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; Your analysis is really remarkable. When the Dow was making new highs in October you said it was not breaking out. Then you said it would correct to retest the monthly support. You even warned that the bulk of the decline was always before the holiday as fears would grow for what would happen after the market reopened. You always get the highs and you even named the day of the low this week the week before. How can your arrays do this? I know that they do. My question is have you put any effort into discovering why cycles work in the first place?

HD

ANSWER: That is a question I get often and it seems to me to be up there with is there God and what is the meaning of life? All I can say is the foundation of EVERYTHING is a cycle. Here is how sound travels known as the Doppler effect.

Sunlight also travels in waves. Change the frequency and you get a different effect. There is a cycle to absolutely everything around us. The Arrays are composed of a correlation of 72 individual models. Then there is a global correlation to the frequencies of all other markets. So there is not a single cycle that you can reverse-engineer from an array. It just does not work that way. We simply do cycles differently than most people in the cyclical analysis arena.

So why do they work? Perhaps that is just the key to the universe itself. The earth travels around the universe and reaches the same spot once every 25,800 years. We also are born, we live, and then we die – the cycle of life. Then at the core of everything lies the fractal design within nature. It is more than just a Mandelbrot Set. We have children who are copies our ourselves taking bits of both parent’s DNA. That is the process of cyclical reproduction by self-referral.

Then there is the Lorenz Stange Attractor which was the fascinating cyclical behavior of weather systems, which of course are ignored by the Global Warming people. In effect, they are no different from the people who executed others who dared to say the earth was round instead of flat.