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The Larger Lesson (Why A Crash Is Likely)

Look, the financial markets are broken — the US, in China, and largely everywhere else around the globe. The sad fact is that the regulators have utterly failed to impose any meaningful limits on the rise of the computers and their high frequency hi-jinks.

Now those computers dominate the entire market landscape for better and, eventually, worse.

The reason I say ‘worse’ is because the computers deliver the appearance, but not the reality, of market liquidity.

As long as they detect that everything is operating normally, or at least within their accepted bands or limits, then they indeed provide plenty of liquidity. But when events exceed those limits?

The computers just shut down, revealing the true lack of market depth. The key story of all markets, bonds, commodities, futures and equities, is that each has experienced a vast diminishment of liquidity.

Share volumes are down on the equity exchanges as fewer and fewer participants are willing play a rigged game. That’s not just…