Welcome to 2021, and a week that is sure to be interesting.
The subject at hand, however, is “the four most dangerous words in the investment business.” Any gray-haired investment professional will tell you that those words are “this time it’s different.” Perhaps a corollary statement is that the main lesson of history is that people never learn history lessons.
Our debt problems (and inflating the currency to bail out of them) promises to be the key 2021 theme. It is the issue that has the greatest potential to take the country down. We are at risk of losing the US Dollar’s reserve currency status in due time. No country in world history has maintained its reserve currency status for more than three or four generations. Note what happened to the British Pound post the Great Depression, World War II, and the last major monetary reset. The US Dollar overtook the British Pound as the world reserve currency.
Yet, we seem inclined to make the same mistakes as the Brits and the Dutch before them. A nation with the ability, much less the fortitude, to tax its citizens would not be $20 trillion in debt. There is no tax base now, nor will there ever be, to pay back this debt.
Heaven forbid what will happen if interest rates begin to rise. The only way out for any government in such a predicament, as history teaches, is inflation. Inflation will not be a pretty picture for any average citizen of any country. Moreover, as the Global Monetary Reset begins to take shape, the necessary currency adjustments to convert to digital currencies promise to be brutal to the average worker. Unfortunately, the picture is somewhat dystopian and promises another major wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. Naturally, it is being sold as the opposite.
I am covering all of this and more in my 2021 outlook video. I will issue the final version after the Georgia Senate elections and after the Congressional Electoral College certification is resolved this week. The outcome of these events will significantly alter my views – though the outcome seems to favor the Democrats at the moment.
The Navigator Algorithms are coming into the first week of 2021 in cash, after an 896% return in 2020. The two primary indexes – the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 – are tucked up into the corner of rising wedge patterns. This pattern tends to lead and end trends. In the “daily” and “weekly” chart contexts, we are likely ending the first phase of the rally trend from the March lows.
Don’t get me wrong; I believe that we are still in a liquidity-driven bull market, and there is still time to prepare for what lies ahead. If Biden is seated and Janet Yellen takes the helm at the U.S. Treasury – you can be sure that the liquidity firehose will be doubled and tripled, and that will boost asset prices short-term.
For now, though, the rising wedge pattern usually leads us into a normal correction that retraces up to a third or so of the prior advance. Given the liquidity in the markets, the correction may be more subdued than normal, but it will present in some form. This normal (and healthy) correction is what I expect to unfold beginning in the next week or two. If not, we will find our way back into the market with the next Navigator Algorithm buy signals.
In the meantime, this is a time to begin to batten down the hatches. The storm brewing is likely 12 to18-months out, but everything seems to accelerate more rapidly these days. We have the nominal 80-day cycle topping in the current time frame, with some larger cycles topping in the spring. The market could pounce on any of these cycles to begin digesting the Great Reset. I can be relatively certain of the outcome, but the timing is more difficult to predict.
Make no mistake, the outcome I am expecting is unpleasant; at least if the wealth you have accumulated is left unprotected. Properly positioned, you can stay with the top 2% of the country whose wealth will thrive and survive.
You really have two choices. You can prepare for what lies ahead, protect yourself, and maybe even benefit. Or, you can be wiped out along with a lot of other innocent and uninformed people. I am not telling you anything you probably don’t already feel in your gut. But there is enough runway in front of us that there is time to get prepared.
More to follow in the video later this week…
A.F. Thornton