Updated 2019 Just what is this BEAST the Bible speaks of? Many scholars claim it is a man. Others say it is the internet. Well, let's just see what has occurred since March 2009 to arrive at what it might be. The stock market in the United States has generally moved up since its inception. This is of no surprise since our system lacks the necessary safeguards to prevent a widening wealth divide, not to mention the ponzi effect from the population increasing, even if it means allowing in millions of unlawful entrants to keep it going, as there is a wealth effect enjoyed by the wealthy when there are more inflows going in the equity markets than outflows and to have a stable, steady-state population, the wealthy would not be able to exploit the system to get rapid gains as it could otherwise. And there is of course the major effect of inflation, due much to the Federal Reserve Bank. Note looking at the graph of the DOW from 1920 to 1980. Then extrapolate onto the present year. You would see the trend approaching around a number of about 4K, not 26K where it sits today. This is from several things, but one item in particular dwarfs the others from 2009 onward. Firstly, there is the big falsehood that 401-K and personal retirement accounts of the middle class going into the stock market would be benefiting the middle class when in fact it HURTS the middle class. I go into this on my stockmarketrealities site stressing that the nominal gains made by most all in the middle class are negated by the inflation they helped to create. There has been a large influx of new money going in the stock market from the middle class without any significant outflows, up until around year 2005. Secondly there is inflation caused by the Federal Reserve, and that inflation is much greater than the official 2% or less figure put out by both government and the Federal Reserve. However, the inflation rate is not so great as to effect the stock market being 4 times higher than it was only ten years prior! Thirdly and the most significant of all the effects is the egregious, highly treasonous, US Treasury Department manipulation through its trading desk in New York that is facilitated by endless borrowing from the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve here acts like a bad drug dealer, knowing the US Treasury Department has a big drug fix and will let it continue borrowing until perhaps at a time when the secret shareholders of the Federal Reserve say enough is enough and forces the US government to pay up. Just what could our government give up? The US may end up having to hand over a significant portion of its land, expediting the transformation into the New World Order. The manipulation was greatly facilitated by constant propaganda by Obama (and now Trump in an even more heightened manner), the media, complicit pseudo-economists, and of course by the big players in Wall Street to try to keep people going long the market. THINK HARD FOR A MOMENT, why is it so important for the US government to throw the people’s money into the stock market, borrow recklessly to keep manipulating up the market? It might possibly be to give the illusion that the economy is in good shape when it is not, permitting the wealthy to extract more from the middle class in the usual arrangements of owner to employee disproportionate earnings, extraction of more money from the middle class through oppressive rents, and also to make a large money grab in the stock market as, NOW THIS IS KEY, the government uses the people’s money to prop it up along with a good number of those in the middle class who choose ignorance of the actual economy and stock valuations and made the decision to sell their souls to the central banks beast in trying to get big undeserved gains by going long which great enriches the wealthy without corporations to improve – in fact the corporations could be in effect zombies in that they are standing with the support of the Federal Reserve’s easy money policy of near zero percent interest rates for the past 10 years. The stock market is the biggest and easiest playground where the wealthy can extract as much money from the middle class as it can before the big game collapses, and the US government is giving away everyone else’s money to them simultaneously! I do not see how anyone could make the argument that the zero percent interest rates are helping the economy, how the middle class is benefiting, how society is made better or anything else that’s suppose to be good apart from the fact that the wealthy are accelerating their wealth accumulation. The end results from the low interest rates and unlawful upward manipulation of the stock market are savers are being thrown under the bus and this includes tens of millions of elderly relying on bank interest to help them survive, diligent investors far on the correct side of fair value in the stock market are unjustly forced to lose, housing costs have become greatly unaffordable, the wealth divide has gotten to a third world status and more and more from the middle class are becoming homeless to the point of being at a record number today. The Federal Reserve’s actions, even admittedly, are to inflate asset prices. This helps the wealthy, not the poor or middle class. This is fundamental. There is more pain now than in the lesser depression of the 1930’s but it’s masked now with lies, a manipulated up market, and social programs in place giving just enough to most people to prevent a revolution. There is an actual 25% unemployment rate despite the claims made by government, a real GDP growth rate that is deeply negative and has been for the past 11 years. I understand many will scoff at my pronouncements but it is true what I say. The masses have been brainwashed with so much propaganda that the truth seems unbelievable! Now more on the stock market, valuations are 4 to 8 times too high based on historical measures for an economy in the toilet. Large and mid-caps are on average 4 times too high and small caps about 8 times too high. See my write up at http://russell2000valuation.blogspot.com. Short sellers are basically the only real investors as they have a good sense of what fair value is and are on the correct side of it. Anyone going long an overpriced market are gamblers yet gamblers have been coddled at the expense of the wise. This is absolute corruption. The Federal Reserve from 2009 kept lying about ending its quantitative easing program which involves buying up bonds through its POMO (permanent open market operations) and promised to quickly ramp up interest rates, This lying that went on for year after year kept the rightful short sellers in the market , holding their positions, knowing the market would have to go down in the direction of fair value. Sad thing is, whenever the market started collapsing, a sudden surge in upward manipulation occurred and usually went on for months catapulting the market to new highs. I made note of some of these events on the site, http://classactionfed.blogspot.com/. Now where do corporate profits fit in? They hardly mean a thing now. Look back to pre-1980 PE ratios to get a better perspective on this. One must not factor in post-1980 PE ratios because these years had magnificent inflows due to the middle class entering the stock market. The median PE ratio is under 13 and in bad times it is around 6-8. What is the PE ratio today? It's around 25 for the major indices and hovering around 100 for small caps, reflective of the Russell 2000. The propagandists want to paint the picture that valuations are “stretched” but won’t use the term “overpriced”. Relative to an average year, valuations are 2 to 4 times too high without taking into consideration that PE ratios compress to about half in bad times. The propagandists, notably the pseudo-economists who are provided free media coverage by the major media outlets, want you to think the average PE ratio is 15 and no matter how terrible the economy is, you are suppose to compare today's PE value with the average PE value. Now how does this makes any sense at all? Why would you make a comparison of a PE value during a period of a depression, no matter how well masked it is like today, with PE values on average over all years? Why wouldn't there be a comparison of similar economic conditions? Well, the stock pumping crowd wouldn't want you to be armed with relevant data so they keep hitting people with misinformation and outright lies. Now go look up in a search engine, the article I wrote back in 2012 "This 2X Overpriced Stock Market" as well as the one entitled "Negative 10% Real GDP Growth Unmasked". Here you will see the game made by our government exposed in how it improperly computes the real GDP growth rate. When armed with the facts, one would see there are absolutely no values in the stock market to be going long. The only rational way to put money into play in the stock market would be to short the market. But how does the market keep going up when profits are declining, the cost of living for most everyone keeps going up, and our bank interest is taken away to prevent us from spending? To be fair, corporate profits did get a spike up from the Trump tax cuts but this cannot be expected to continue as the economy continues to crumble. Prices will have to fall to keep operations going else stagflation takes over and the flow of money slows down, possibly even more. (I will son present to the public why the taxation of corporations is a zero-sum gain in the very near future). The simple answer to the continuance of the market going up is the Federal Reserve is right there with its plunge protection team and yes the US Treasury Department has its hands in it as well. This rigging of the markets is corruption. It’s one thing for an entity to step in if stock prices themselves are somehow manipulated to go lower, as a safeguard to an external malicious attack, but this is not the case. The market has been overpriced at or soon after March 2009 and each time the market gets manipulated up from a downfall based on fundamentals, the market gets more and more overpriced. There’s no protection from a plunge in the contemporaneous sense of the word but a constant saving and manipulating up the market even higher. This neither helps the economy nor society! There are diligent investors who are getting crushed out of no fault of their own and in addition, the middle class is getting fleeced from the inflation the market produces as that inflation spreads throughout the rest of the economy such as putting upward pressure on home prices. It is my belief and I am certain of many others that there should not be a plunge protection team as we see its blatant abuses in recent years. Better yet, a better stock market system that is fair and would prevent much of the rife we presently have should replace the current one. I devised one such system and put it in my book, "Thoughtful Living". Basically, instead of having a static number of shares and dynamic price thereof, you switch the two in having a dynamic number of shares and a static price. Such a system could not be manipulated by the central banks by toying with the money supply, directly or indirectly buying stocks, could not be stripping the middle class of wealth and handing to the wealthy as they are doing presently as the stock market gains would be tied to one and only one thing: corporate earnings, and only those which the corporations decide to give to shareholders. I sent the SEC the system more than 5 years ago but no public comment or push onto the stock exchanges has been made. While a better system is not being implemented, there should at least be an equally off-setting BUBBLE PROTECTION TEAM, but seems like the wealthy controlling the central banks would not like such a team. Our system appears to operate in a one-sided fashion: do everything possible to create an ever-widening wealth divide, no matter how it ruins society and the economy. I for one will not be ignorant of the actual economy and historical valuations. Valuations as we see today are outlandish, nothing fundamental at all holding up stock prices. It should be known well to all who go into the market that it is rigged like never before in history. So you can make the choice, do you take the risk of betting on more manipulation or do you invest in being on the correct side of fair value? To the many who simply see money given to them at seemingly no risk, they made the choice of selling their soul, avoiding all the facts and pertinent indicators pointing to a fanatically overpriced market. These persons are exacerbating the overpriced market to further corrupt it and they apparently are very happy with their decision as evidenced by hundreds if not thousands of comments I read on news stories and of videos. They act so smug that they are making money effortlessly and ridicule those on the correct side of fair value. These previously unheard of valuations, the constant rigging of the market suggests there is something very sinister going on. One may look at how nicely the market was falling at the end of December 2018, but then on December 26, 2018, the DOW shot up a thousand points and in less than two months after it added another three thousand points! If this is not manipulation of biblical proportions I do not know what else is! I and others who are on the correct side of fair value keep getting crushed all so some special interests are protected. With the rumblings of a New World Order, first world countries getting reduced to third world countries, the astronomical debts of central banks throughout the world to manipulate up stock markets, the enormous personal, government, and corporate debt that is present now unlike ever before suggests there is going to be a great schism soon. Putting this into biblical context one may very well make the assertion that the collective central banks throughout the world is the BEAST or at least is in some major aspect thereof.