As Murphy's Law predicts, today's market upheaval has occurred while Chris is on the road. He wrote this alert in the morning as the markets were opening. He will post updates later today when back in the office. ~ Adam
The multiple global bubbles in search of a pin may have found one in Greece. The carnage there is clearly accelerating, and the central planners are straining mightily to get control back.
While the odds favor them doing so, the risk is very high that they may not and that we are now in the 'descent' phase that follows the inevitable ending of the 'virtuous' phase (if we can call it that) of the money-printing experiment.
This is an official alert, meaning I'm going to top off anything that needs topping off in my preparation list – cash, food, fuel – the basics. Not because I am expecting these things to disappear here in the US as they have in Greece, but simply because I cannot be 100% certain they won’t.
A risk is something where you know the probabilities involved. Ask me the chances of flipping a coin and getting heads four times in a row and I know the answer. Uncertainty is when we don’t know the probabilities involved.
Is there a 0.0001% chance of a Greek style banking/financial disaster striking the whole world? Or is it 5%? I don’t know. But if I knew it was 0.0001%, I might choose to do nothing at all; while if I knew it was 5%, I’d pen this alert to you as quickly as possible and then run around with the same urgency as if a major forest fire was bearing down on my property.
The point is we cannot assess the risks anymore. None of us can. Nobody knows what’s on the bank’s balance sheets because of the explosion of so-called “Tier 3” assets which have no observable or measurable inputs to define their value. It’s not necessary that you understand anything at all about Tier 3 assets except that the bankers themselves understand them perfectly well, and this explosion means they don’t even trust their own institutions, let alone the next one.
When a system based on trust and confidence has hollowed out those very same concepts to the point of absurdity, things can unravel in a skinny minute when the starting gun is finally fired.
by kugscheese 
