Markets Plunge, Bitcoin Surges, Pre-Fed Meeting

With less than a week until Grand Wizard Yellen names the proper interest rate for all the world,, the markets looked near collapse.

The S&P had its worst week since August, closing down nearly 2% and the Dow Jones industrial average fell 309.54 points on Friday, or 1.76 percent, to 17,265.21 with every component in the index ending down. Small caps sold off as well. The Russell 2000 index fell 5.1 percent for the week, its biggest weekly percentage decline since May 2012.

Brent crude futures fell to an almost seven-year low, while U.S. crude futures fell to just above $35 a barrel. Junk bonds continued to collapse and Third Avenue Management said it was trying to liquidate a roughly $1 billion junk bond fund in the biggest failure in the US mutual fund industry since the 2008 financial crisis.

Seems like a perfect time to raise rates, doesn’t it!

This is the corner the Fed has been painting itself into for years. In the past as markets collapsed, the Federal Reserve would ease rates to break the fall. Now we have nearly ever major sector collapsing on the cusp of a potential Fed rate hike for the first time in more than nine-and-a-half years!

With the Fed scheduled to announce its 0.25% rate hike, Janet Yellen said last week, “When the Committee begins to normalize the stance of policy, doing so will be a testament … to how far our economy has come in recovering from the effects of the financial crisis and the Great Recession. In that sense, it is a day that I expect we all are looking forward to.”

Yes, what a recovery! What a testament to Keynesian economics that 1 in 6 people in the US are on food stamps and the labor force participation rate is at a 38 year low!

Now, with debt levels at monstrous levels worldwide due to low/zero/negative interest rates, things should work out just fine as they raise rates.

Not.

Bitcoin, in the meantime, has surged all week, one of the only markets in the world that has risen.

Next week we’ll have our year-end wrap-up for subscribers and a look ahead at what will be an incredibly volatile and dangerous 2016 for almost everybody except TDV subscribers. War in the Middle East and near-Asia, false flag terrorism at home and abroad, increasingly confiscatory government policies, authoritarian approaches to travel and emigration around the world – none of this is new to us. We’ve been predicting it all along.

Many of these predictions – and what to do about them – end up in our TDV newsletter, which we’ve been offering at a special low-price, but that will go up on Dec 21. So. if you haven’t subscribed to our groundbreaking newsletter at US$39.95, please do so now. The accuracy of our predictions has proven out over and over in these past few months and our investments strategies have netted some large gains including a 50%+ gain in bitcoin and a 4,000%+ gain in August during the first wave of the collapse.

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Originally Appeared At The Dollar Vigilante