We’re headed toward another big credit explosion and I think what’s happened in the oil market is will trigger that. The perfect poster-child of what’s going to happen to the stock market is what’s happened to Kinder Morgan stock. – interview with CrushTheStreet.com
It speaks volumes about the corrupted nature of our financial markets that this news report does not cause a huge downward price adjustment in the entire stock market: Big Banks Brace For Oil Loans To Implode. This is, minimally, t $500 billion issue and that number does not incorporate at all the size of the derivatives exposure to oil sector debt. Move along, nothing to worry about here…it’s reminiscent of circa 2007, when Bernanke stated that the problems developing in the mortgage market were “contained.”
And speaking of Kinder Morgan, I listened to the Kinder Morgan conference call because I’m working on stock report on KMI. I forgot what a Broadway play production these investor calls are. Richard Kinder is a grade-A snake-oil salesman. Everyone seems to have forgotten that he was the COO of Enron when Enron’s Ponzi scheme was being constructed. He was college buddies with Ken Lay. But he left in 1997, buying out an Enron pipeline subsidiary with William Morgan. Everyone thinks Richard Kinder is squeaky clean and they don’t associate him with Ken Lay. It’s emblematic of the ignorance, denial and fraud embedded in our system. KMI has been issuing debt to make its dividend payments and the only reason they cut their dividend is because their bankers told them they would have trouble issuing more debt this year. Kinder kept referencing the possibility of stock buybacks on the call. Are you kidding me? You can visualize the sycophantic big bank analysts writing everything down word for word in order to regurgitate them robotically in farcical equity reports designed to suck more idiots into the stock.
More on Kinder Morgan soon. As for the manipulation of the gold market, I’ve mostly managed to separate my emotions from the attacks on gold. When you think about it, they have no choice. The ONLY way they can support their lies about the relative health of the economy and financial system is by attacking gold and making sure the price doesn’t take off. Just like they can print an unlimited amount of dollars using Bernanke’s infamous “electronic printing press” to defer the collapse of the banking system, they can print an unlimited amount of paper gold certificates in order to use the paper trading apparatus of the Comex to keep the price contained. Like all paper schemes, this one will fail spectacularly. The only unresolved issue is timing. That’s impossible to predict.
CrushTheStreet.com and I discussed these topics in depth and others, including China and the U.S. economy: