Wall Street Remains Clueless—Even As The Brown Stuff Heads Straight Into The Fan

The Dow should have been down 500 points Tuesday. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the market’s current lofty valuation makes no sense in the first place.

The fact is, the brown stuff is now heading straight for the fan.

Didn’t the odds of a major geo-political calamity just take a huge turn for the worse in the airspace over the Syria-Turkey border?

At the same time, wasn’t yesterday’s GDP update just one more reminder that the global economy is sinking into a deflationary contraction? And that our so-called domestic recovery cycle is getting very long in the tooth and is essentially running on the fumes of inventory accumulation?

Yet the Wall Street gamblers and robo-traders seem to think that pricing this global accident waiting to happen at 22X reported S&P 500 earnings is no big deal. And that comes on top of the fact that the long-running corporate earnings expansion cycle is over, as attested to by both the GDP report and the Q3 SEC filings.

At $94 per share, S&P reported earnings came in 11% below last year’s $106 per share. And that was before the most recent headwinds became evident.

To wit, Syria is rapidly taking on the complexion of the Balkans in June 1914. The resulting backwash of Islamic State terrorism and millions of refugees streaming deep into the interior of Europe threatens to elicit a political and economic lockdown and a potential Thermidorian Reaction.

The rise of rightwing nationalism, in fact, would end the European Union as we know it.

And this is occurring even as Asian exports to Europe plunge, dragging Japan into its 5th recession in seven years and China ever closer to a thumping hard landing.

So the market at 22X amounts to a bubble floating toward a pin.

And folks, there are sharp objects cropping up everywhere on the planet—starting with Tuesday’s incident on the Syrian border.

This wasn’t a minor stray pitch. It was evidence that a half-dozen lethally-armed outside combatants are lined-up in a circle firing capriciously into the hodge-podge of sectarian tribes, political factions and marauding militias that have metastasized within the boundaries of a shattered former state.

The idea that Russian planes threatened Turkey and deliberately violated its airspace is ludicrous. By the attestation of US officials themselves, the incursion was hardly measureable, if it happened at all:

US officials told NBC “They were in Turkish airspace only 2 to 3 seconds, a matter of seconds” before the Turkish F-16s attacked.

Two to three seconds?

Why in the world would Washington’s Turkish “ally” in the fight against the Islamic State, and the NATO member located closest to the front line and with the largest military in Europe, put a near act of war on a such a hair trigger rule of engagement?

Alas, its because Turkey is not at war with ISIS. Instead, its megalomaniac President is in the midst of a monumental power grab designed to transform Turkey into a Gaullist dictatorship with himself at the helm.

To that end, his incendiary shootdown of a Russian Su-24 warplane was designed to pander to domestic constituencies sympathetic to the Turkmen villages in northwest Syria now being bombed by the Russians.