But what exactly are they doing with the cash?
Don't want to hold onto it, everyone says devaluation and inflation is coming.
Bitcoin and gold are kinda flat. I expected them to shoot up as uncertainty hedges. What gives?
Except you can't time it like that. Inflation eats your savings all the time, while recessions are short.
I have a friend who's been saying "stocks are too risky" since about 2010. He prefers the predictable ~3% inflation...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/10-year-treasury-yield-junk...
Unfortunately it is hard to predict if that rate will stay high enough. Previously I had 'cash' in iBonds which for a while paid 8-9% early in the pandemic when inflation was high. If none of the above pays well enough I look into treasuries, or CDs.
That’s why financial advisors tell you to keep a mix of stocks and bonds, trending towards a greater percentage of bonds depending on your risk tolerance and as you get older. (Because bonds have lower returns than stocks, historically, but are also less volatile.)
Careful with this, it's not always true and which kind and duration of bonds is important.
If I had the same $1000 in stock, and it lost 11% of its value in 2 days, I might worry about it being worth close to $0 by the end of the month.
Stocks could still continue to fall, but they aren't going to slide to zero.
The few stocks I might have specifically invested in? Possible.
The decision to sell is not straightforward, even given the current situation. It would probably be the wrong decision for the average person unless you really know what you are doing.
But right now, sell sell sell is a forgiveable reaction.
The recovery started only after 2020 ish. Today it is around ~1,500.
Edit: Oh now I see. I had a typo. I meant to say the crash happened after 2008 not 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin...
Buy Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) and hold them to maturity. (Don't buy TIPS funds, their value fluctuates based on interest rates. Buy actual TIPS instead, at either Fidelity or Vanguard.)
It sure would be nice to have a competent, organized opposition that does more than finger wag and tsk tsk in a scornful tone
You can’t fight someone like that within the rules, and right now the left will throw anyone who starts breaking the rules in jail while consistently being unable to hold the opposition accountable.
It’s enforced self destruction.
The only people the left are capable of holding accountable appear to be other people on the left, or disposable flunkies on the right, so the only thing the left appears to be accomplishing with this approach is self destruction, or clearing out deadwood on the right.
Mostly just self destruction.
The left is people like Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Nader, Norman Finkelstein, Vandana Shiva, Chris Hedges, Michael Parenti, Cornel West.
The left has almost no organized political power in the US. Except for a few city councils and a couple state houses, it's zero.
When people use "the left" as a catch-all for "not us", some broad brushed painting of "outsiders" this isn't a serious conversation, they're just waving their arms around and making sounds.
No. Instead deportations increased, incarceration went up, there were tax cuts and more deregulation...
Either you don't know what left means or you're imagining things.
The Democrats in practice and in policy, are a conservative party, in material terms of actual implemented politics and the Republicans are the right wing party.
They did things like protect against junk fees and go after phone scammers but pursuing financial criminals is hardly leftism just because the right wing doesn't do it. Bush and Reagan would have done that.
Reagan and Bush did a bunch of prosecutions during S&L...
It's a conservative party and a right wing party.
There is no center, there is no liberal, there is no left.
There was no right until Trump. There was Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan but they didn't go anywhere.
I can fully acknowledge this and not just look at things I don't like and say "bah! Right wing"
Once you can look at things that you don't like and not say "bah! Far left!" Then we can to have a meaningful conversation.
Until then you are acting in bad faith
It's the same one who believes in jewish space lasers, that there's secret tunnels under the getty, that hillary clinton is an actual child sacrificing witch, that there's a secret basement in a pizza parlor, that the holocaust was fake and simultaneously that 6 million wasn't enough.
Those people are not using reality and there's nothing we can talk about because they simply make things up based on fantasy and fiction
2) That’s just fantasy near as I can tell. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_Sta...] has many, many references of folks calling themselves and their own party ‘left’ or ‘center-left’.
It’s very common. As is ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’.
3) I’ve never seen anyone on that side of the aisle calling themselves ‘right’, ‘conservative’, etc.
So who is just imagining things?
And the underlying problem is that - like is typical when dealing with effective narcissists - the reason this is the case is because of the reality distortion and manipulation being done by the guilty party.
They pre-poison the well, so in order to respond effectively the opposition has to be ‘the bad guy’, which exposes them to attack, because now the narcissist has ‘proof’ that the opposition is the actual bad guys. It’s evil genius really.
It’s why the only actually effective way to deal with narcissists is either 1) ignoring them (can’t do that and survive when the narcissist has power - which is why they tend to be power seeking), or 2) applied consequences, aka usually violence.
International money is now flowing out of US assets. This is a shift from the past few years where the US has seen historic inflows that kicked into overdrive with the AI wave. The pairing of stronger dollar and rising US assets made us equities especially attractive for international investors. This peaked with the US exceptionalism trade during the beginning of the Trump presidency, and now as a response to tariffs you are seeing dollar down stocks down which is making the sell-off especially painful for international participants.
Before the recent tariff shock, those previous narratives were already coming to an end. European equities have been ripping. That's one place where money has been flowing from big players like hedge funds.
A lot of the money has gone into deleveraging. When you look at prime broker data you can see that hedge fund positioning, large asset manager positioning, vol control, CTA, and most of the big market participants have been heavily lowering exposure for a solid month now. Remember that cash can go to lowering leverage.
The bond question is very much in play. You are correct that bonds have not been catching a bid. The consensus outlook was moving to stagflationary, and bonds had other hair like the US still having a lot of debt to term out (and newly issue... deficits are running Huge despite the news of cuts in inconsequential places as far as overall budget), and some more recent theater releases about consumer inflation expectations were frankly shocking, and that feeds into the fed's response function when it comes to cutting rates and helping out a bond rally cycle. This is part of the reason you're seeing money go, well, a lot of other places! Like European banks, gold, etc over the past few months. Now we're in a full on recession trade, and this debate is in overdrive. Fed cuts were increasingly priced in, bonds caught a bid, but Powell spoke very recently and said there was too much uncertainty to even consider cuts which pulled back those rate cut expectations. Opinions that are in conflict are priced into various aspects of the market right now, and this will play out in the coming weeks.
On to Gold. I think it's fine to simplify it and say that Gold sniffed the danger out. It's been on a face ripping rally for a while now, and what you see now is a great setup for the trading phenomenon of "sell the news." Once everybody is long there's no one left to buy and only sellers can come in from there. When markets get hot like that, you get fast money coming in that is prone to selling on small down moves (because they're only joining the bandwagon to make "easy" money, and they're not interested in losing even a little bit of money. They are also often tourists in that they do not have deep knowledge of the investment product so when something like gold selling off when it should be going up happens, there is a fear response.
That said, the gold selloff today is significant. Have heard two commentaries on this, and both agree it's a sign of margin calls and liquidation/sharp capitulation. In extreme sell-offs you see all correlations go to the one, and there is a "dash for cash" to meet collateral requirements and shore up risk metrics. You can also see signs of this in FX markets. Some other commentary from today confirmed stres in treasury liquidity, which is a "safe haven" but also gets liquidated in dash for cash situations.
And this does partially answer "where the money is going". T Bills. That's what everyone wants when battening down the hatches.
Gold is indeed best viewed as an uncertainty hedge rather than an inflation hedge. That's a good observation. It's really a hedge against systemic fragility though things like people being unsure of Central Bank policy... Tariffs.... Etc. It's not exactly a day-to-day extreme market volatility hedge. Some of the cash is going literally into hedges! Volatility itself is hugely being bid up right now. That stuff is even better than cash because it has negative correlation to risk assets.
Stitch everything together and you get a pretty good backdrop for the current sell-off. It even helps explain things like the 2-day back to back action, where day one was a huge selloff but it was somewhat orderly because everyone was coming in with fairly low exposure, so panic didn't really set in until day two (and he's selling feedback loops often continue until liquidation is forced, which marks a bottom for buyers to take a stab at. Nobody wants to step in during a steep grind down of price).
Relevant charts. Not all of them have the labels in-chart, but it's all significant data. Ex: here's a real data point that isn't in the charts below, but is a typical example of this sort of data. "High volatility is expected to generate 80 billion USD in equity supply from macro strategy funds over the next week if conditions continue": https://ibb.co/album/KNBSw2
Powell said the Fed isn't changing its plans to keep combating inflation from Trump's first term.
TLT is worth considering, though maybe we'll see Elon decide the treasury will default on bond payments.
Increased money supply isn’t the only cause of inflation (e.g., stagflation). Uncertainty about how to price goods—especially for goods in the middle of supply chains—could cause supply disruptions. It’s a self-inflicted version of the Covid supply disruptions.