Signs Of Apocalypse’s Approach?

Luxury Market declines in 2016 for the first time since 2009:

The global personal luxury goods market shrank by around one percent in 2016, marking the first year of negative growth for the industry since 2009, according to research released Monday by consultancy Bain & Company.

Yet the industry has recovered to notch up growth of around 4 percent in the first quarter of 2017, helped by weak comparisons from the year earlier period which had been strongly knocked by terrorism, according to the research. The consultants anticipate steady momentum for 2017 but a slowdown in its pace, with Bain & Company citing a year end forecast of 2 – 4 percent growth.

Authors of the research described the final quarter of 2016 as “encouraging”, citing first and foremost the reawakened appetite of mainland Chinese consumers for luxury purchases made both at home and abroad. This contrasts with the picture in Hong Kong and Macau where the trend of big losses in recent years may have slowed but has not yet reversed.

China continues to act as the linchpin in the global luxury market with Federica Levato, partner at Bain & Company, saying there isn’t another region or country in the near-term which will be able to assume the same role that the so-called Middle Kingdom has been playing.

Luxury purchases are made from the excess resources, so they may be a good measure of the extent of r or K. Clearly under Obama we were on the fast track to Apocalypse. The exuberance produced by Trump’s pro-business attitudes seems to be alleviating the restriction somewhat, but I expect that eventually the underlying fundamentals of our debt, as well as leftist intransigence will catch up to it. All we are waiting on is a good scare.

And on that note, Altair is getting out into cash:

Australian asset manager Altair Asset Management has made the extraordinary decision to liquidate its Australian shares funds and return “hundreds of millions” of dollars back to its clients, citing an impending property market “calamity” and the “overvalued and dangerous time in this cycle”…

“We think that there is too much risk in this market at the moment, we think it’s crazy,” Mr Parker said more candidly…

Mr Parker outlined a roll call of “the more obvious reasons to exit the riskier asset markets of shares and property”.

They included: the Australian east-coast property market “bubble” and its “impending correction”; worries that issues around China’s hot property sector and escalating debt levels will blow up “later this year”; “oversized” geopolitical risks and an “unpredictable” US political environment; and the “overvalued” Aussie equity market.

I am certain there is a scare coming, and it could even take things into Apocalypse. We know finance has a lot of clever rabbits in it, who view President Trump as satan incarnate. I assume they do not want him overseeing an economic revival, and they are planning on crashing things to try and forestall his reelection.

The only question is, when to do it. Do it too early and it can be blamed on Obama. Do it too late and President Trump may have the economy and jobs roaring, making inflicting a crash too difficult and costly. I don’t know when they will try it, but I hope the White House has a plan to lay the blame for it at the feet of the Democrats. If I were there now, I would begin creating a meme of how Democrats are constantly operating against President Trump’s efforts to shore up the economy. That way, when the collapse hits, the blame will be firmly at the feet of the leftist intransigence President Trump deals with every day.

Spread r/K Theory, because what is coming is the leftist’s fault