Bear Markets, Bare Markets, Bubbles, and Bullsh*t

Fraud has gone far beyond the markets of every kind and has integrated itself into our everyday way of life.

We live in an era of fraud in America. Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball… What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. It’s because, for fifteen thousand years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually, you get caught, and things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did.

-Mark Baum, 2008

I’m biased in a way few people in America nor elsewhere seem to be these days, and that’s in that I’m at least transparently biased. I’m openly admitting in my opening, that my opinions are shaped by my unique experiences, the beliefs that have derived from them, and my own way of thinking.

The quote posted at the top of this post is one of my favorites, from one of my favorite movies, The Big Short. For those who have never seen the movie, it’s about the financial market crash of 2008, which started in the housing market. It always starts in the markets of some kind, doesn’t it?

I’m of the belief we as a country, and maybe even as a global market, have never genuinely recovered from the events of 2008, and not just those noted in the film The Big Short or those of the financial and housing markets.

It was a time of transition of sorts, as social media was becoming more of a traditional form of media than those of the past, such as newspapers, Television, and radio. People either started believing what they read, without question or maybe even worse yet just for different reasons, began believing very little of what they read. This is because they were probably right not to, as much of it was probably bullshit, excuse my French.