Why The Next Market Crash Will Be The Sharpest On Record

Leverage on top of more leverage all to prop up assets that may not even exist — Kolin Lukas

In 2009, short-seller Bill “Fleck” Fleckenstein pulled the plug, closing his positions and his fund. By successfully predicting Armageddon, he walked away with huge returns that rivaled the protagonists of the cult film The Big Short. The untold story, however, details how some speculators continued to predict further economic collapse, thinking the world was about to end.

But despite the financial system literally breaking in half, the authorities’ combination of bailouts, liquidity injections, and “asset relief” programs restored confidence, and those bearish speculators went bankrupt. It was this extraordinary confidence revival that created the foundations for the longest bull market in history, the idea that you could ignore reality, zombify the economy, and get paid for it.

Because… why create an improved system free of all existing bad ideas when you can simply restart the profit machine, and convince everyone to play along?

Over the past decade, economic growth has halved while investors have put their faith in the Fed to prop up the economy, producing an absurd range of financial assets and systems created…