In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and John Rubino discuss:
- Vexing Volatility
- How the VIX is being used to drive the markets
- We Can't Handle Losses Anymore
- Why the market is now incredibly vulnerable to downturns
- Our Captive System
- Until it breaks, the system is run to serve the banks, not us
- The Death Of The Living Wage
- The hollowing out of the middle class continues
Lots of sobering material packed into this week's Off The Cuff discussion between Chris and John. While there are signs of growing instability to be found nearly everywhere, both are very concerned about the extreme fragility of today's financial ""markets"". At the slightest sign of weakness, tremendous interventions now happen on a daily basis to keep prices from falling, even by a single percent.
The reason why is that the system is too vulnerable for ANY degree of loss to be sustained without fear of collapsing it. As John explains:
I think the big take away from this is that we really can’t handle a garden variety bear market anymore. It used to be that a 20% drop in stock prices was painful, at least for the 1% who owned all the stocks and bonds; but it certainly wasn't an existential threat to the system. But today, that has changed.
We are so highly leveraged that it’s not clear that a 20% drop in the stock market would be something we can tolerate. It might cause a cascade failure of the leveraged
by cmartenson 
