November 16, 2017 | Last Time This Happened, Part 2: Consumers Are Both Confident And Broke

Elliott Wave International recently put together a chart (click here or on the chart to watch the accompanying video) that illustrates a recurring theme of financial bubbles: When good times have gone on for a sufficiently long time, people forget that it can be any other way and start behaving as if they’re bulletproof. They stop saving, for instance, because they’ll always have their job and their stocks will always go up.

Then comes the inevitable bust.

On the following chart, this delusion and its aftermath are represented by the gap between consumer confidence (our sense of how good the next year is likely to be) and the saving rate (the portion of each paycheck we keep for a rainy day). The bigger the gap the less realistic we are and the more likely to pay dearly for our hubris.

Where are we today? Worse than in 2006 and nearly as bad as 1999. Both of those years were followed by several really bad ones.

John Rubino November 16th, 2017

Posted In: John Rubino Substack

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