Viewpoint: Market Mayhem, Don’t blame China

“It’s the economy, stupid.”
By Gerald Celente
Publisher, Trends Journal

Read the headlines. Listen to business-news broadcasts.

Across the western world, financial fingers are pointing to China as the culprit for both sparking the global equity-market meltdown — and keeping it going.

The first shot across the Dow — when it was trading some 2,000 points above Tuesday’s close — was blamed on the People’s Bank of China for cheapening its currency: “China risks clash with US as 1.9 percent devaluation surprises markets,” Financial Times, 12 August 2015.

Omitted from the headline blame game in FT and other business-news coverage was that US equity markets had been trending down since late July. Yet, as the global stock plunge accelerated over the next few weeks, and with the yuan devaluation story fading from the news, the business media blamed the selloff on China’s economic woes and how its slowing economy was impacting the global economy.

In fact, even Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump weighed in by warning that “China’s taking our jobs; they’re taking our money… they’ll bring us down… we have nobody that has a clue.”

Trump is wrong.

China is merely the canary in the collapsing global-equity mine.

Markets are tanking, currencies are collapsing and commodity prices, now at 16-year lows, are plummeting because the world is sinking deep into recession.

And, not only do we have a “clue” regarding why markets are tanking, on 6 August, in our Trends in the News broadcast, before the market meltdown began, we forecast that global equity markets would plummet by year’s end. And some two weeks before China devalued its currency, we predicted that action.

As we have noted, the formula is simple: When the US and Europe buy fewer consumer goods, China manufactures less of them. And the less China manufactures, the fewer raw materials and agriculture goods it imports from resource-rich nations. As resource-rich nations export fewer raw materials, their economies dramatically weaken, their currencies sink lower, inflation rises, unemployment rapidly grows… and out-of-work, cash-poor consumers consume less.

Indeed, it is not China’s economic woes or its currency devaluation that’s bringing down the markets.

As the famous slogan that was a centerpiece strategy in Bill Clinton’s 1992 race for the White House clearly summed up, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

And this time “it’s the global economy, stupid.”

As we had forecast since Washington’s “too big to fail” bailout schemes, global central banks’ low interest-rate policies and massive quantitative-easing liquidity injections, these measures would merely relieve the symptoms of the Panic of ’08. They were not, however, the cure.

Now, that multi-trillion-dollar money-pumping bubble, which overinflated equity markets, is quickly deflating. And so, too, are the economies and commodities pumped up with it.

This is more than a market correction; it’s a global recession.