Imagine ...

... if Russia or China or Iran or whoever managed with whatever means to shut down the Internet for some period of time. The world has become so dependent on this technology that I believe such an event would cause societal extremis. Just imagine:

- The millions if not billions of people being deprived of their latest news fix from the many Internet sites that now substitute for newspapers. Then a robbery in Peoria or a flood in Perth would not seem quite so important ...

- Social media no longer giving millennials and the other young "gens" the latest updates of the going-ons in their electronic tribe. Face to face communication might just reappear ...

- Tweeters and other instant-message purveyors not being able to comment in real-time to the latest political and social outrages. Politics would then become less strident ...

- Bloggers and other opinion writers being constrained to the lethal gauntlet of trying to get their letters to the editor published in their dying local newspaper ...

- The lack of a e-mail capability making snail-mail letters and FAXes the fallback methods of text communications. Postal carrier mail delivery loads would therefore skyrocket ...

- Television news and opinion programming being deprived of the wellspring of news items from around the world ... instead, being forced to report only about local fires, weddings and traffic accidents ...

- Terrorists and [blank] Lives Matter protesters not being able to coordinate the logistics of their sit-ins or suicide bombings. Wouldn't that be a shame? ...

- Stock market trading being required to go through a telephone call to a broker ... trading volumes would decline dramatically ...

- On-line shopping disappearing ... Amazon, Alibaba, etc. would quickly fold and dying shopping malls would suddenly be reborn. UPS and FedEx package volumes would crater ...

- On-line banking, credit card transactions and money transfers vanishing. Cash would reemerge as the primary unit of commerce ...

But now thinking about it, I'm not entirely sure that the world would be that much worse off ...


Afterward: I forgot ... imagine all the government workers who would be forced to be productive instead of watching porn all day ...

Timber!!

One by one the big trees in the stock market are getting axed. First it was Alibaba, then Exxon, then Apple, then Twitter, then Disney, then Tesla, then Fitbit ... many of these high fliers after reporting stellar quarters. The only biggies who seem to have escaped this clear-cutting so far have been Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (the FANG group as christened by Jim Cramer.) What's going on? Yes China is slowing down and may, in fact, be in a recession. And yes, the Federal Reserve Bank is likely going to start raising interest rates next month. But earnings of these mentioned forest-floor timbers have still been improving and future guidance is still positive. So what is wrong?

To me the dramatic price-drops in these mostly high PER (price earnings ratio) stocks are presaging a general market sell-off sometime soon. Generally in stock market down-drafts, it is the high-flying stocks that suffer the most ... and since these stocks have been the investments of last resort as weakness permeated most other market segments (see: Where to Invest), it is now their turn in the barrel. In fact, I suspect that any real weakness in the FANG group will be the final indication that a major stock market correction is upon us.

So keep your powder dry ...