Oil can’t seem to get a break. After falling just below $27 last week, oil finally rallied back to $32 before falling back to just under $31 on Tuesday. An oversold bounce was naturally due, with perhaps a bit more to come. But the oil market’s doing exactly what I said it would – cratering!

Meanwhile, in la-la land, stocks have been so focused on the decline in oil prices that they just ignored the other big trigger for a stock decline.

And that came yesterday, when the Shanghai Composite index of Chinese stocks moved 3% below its August low of 2,850!

I wrote back in June of last year that the bubble in Chinese stocks looked ready to pop! Sure enough, it started the next day, fell about 32% in a month, rallied, then fell another 26% by late August. Together, that was a crash of 45%, from a high of 5,200 to a low of 2,850 in just two and a half months.

Then, after testing that level three times over the past two weeks – and avoiding it for several months – it finally broke beneath that level on Tuesday’s trading day in China.

I forecast back in early 2015 that oil would hit $30 to $32 by January of 2016 – and it went even lower than that. That was the other trigger for a global meltdown, as falling oil prices were bound to trigger the next junk bond collapse that is now already underway.

But at this point, I am now more worried about another major crash in Chinese stocks.

Think about it: have you seen another market, besides oil in late 2008, crash that much, that fast?

Sure, the word on Wall Street is that we don’t trade that much with China. And because we don’t “trade” with them, a greater slowdown there will not affect us that much.

What a lot of bull!

Isn’t it that very slowdown that has caused commodity prices to collapse and kill so many emerging countries; and their often U.S. dollar-denominated bonds; and create falling oil prices that also threaten our fracking industry and many junk bonds here?

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