Executive Summary

• There are too many signs of deflation to deny it's winning the day
• Why China's weakening will accelerate the global economy's decent
• Why this next crisis will be worse than 2008
• What will it look like if things really get out of control (how bad could things get?)
• The best investments to be making now, before the rout

If you have not yet read The Deflation Monster Has Arrived, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Too Many Warning Signs To Talk About

The deflationary monster is here and there are almost too many warning signs to list, let alone fully describe.

So I’ll just list and link them…you can follow up on the details if you want, it’s the ‘general vibe’ I want to get across.

Here are the signs of a weak economy that we are dealing with:

• Oil in the $20’s (!!)
• Copper under $2
• Baltic Dry Shipping Index at the lowest ever at 383 and down ~50% in the past year.
• Wal-Mart closing 269 stores, 154 in the US.
• Business inventories to sales at new cycle highs
• U.S. freight volume falls for first time in almost three years
• US retail sales fall 0.1% in December
• Empire State index weakens to recession lows.
• South African rand hits new all-time lows in 2016
• Brazil’s Real Falls Sharply Against Dollar
• Brazil Unemployment Rate Rises to 9%
• Canadian Dollar Hits 13 Year Low Against US Dollar
• U.S. Energy Junk Bond Spreads At Record Width
• Nigeria’s Currency Plummets On Open Market
• Mexico’s Peso Hits New All-Time Low
• Chinese Stocks Enter Bear Market (again)
• European Stocks Enter Bear Market

The pattern here is one of rapidly slowing economic activity and mounting pain starting “from the outside in” as emerging markets and the poor people within the core countries bear the brunt at first.