There are three financial hurricanes hurtling towards our country and most people are oblivious to the coming catastrophe. The time to prepare is now, not when the hurricane warnings are issued.

Hussman makes his usual solid case that stocks and bonds are as overvalued as they have ever been in the history of investing. People are under the false impression that bonds are always a safe investment. The fact that you are already getting a negative real return on bonds doesn’t seem to compute with math challenged Americans. Over the next ten years you will absolutely lose money in bonds.

Liquidity in both the stock and bond markets is thinning considerably. In bonds, quantitative easing by global central banks has resulted in a scarcity of available collateral, a collapse in repo liquidity, and increasing frequency of delivery failures, all of which is shorthand for a bond market that is becoming less liquid and more fragile to any credit event. Meanwhile, risk premiums are minuscule. Avoiding a negative total return on 10-year bonds now requires that interest rates must not rise by even one percentage point over the next three years. Bond yields have historically covered investors against a meaningful change in yields before resulting in negative total returns. On a one-year return horizon, bond yields presently cover investors for a yield change amounting to only about 0.25 standard deviations – matching mid-2012 as the lowest level of yield coverage in history.

The fragility of the economic, financial, and social systems of the U.S. is at extreme levels.

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