Karl Denninger: Prophet or Madman?

Also known as KD (and "Genesis" on his tickerforum). He is saying pension funds are next. The famous ticker:

market-ticker.org...

to this date has 47659 views. Even scum of the earth (and apparent lowlife in scholarship as well) Hal Turner copied and pasted KD's ticker (thereby claiming, by admission, the intellectual property as his own), but that's not the point.

I was at the tickerforum last year. KD tossed out all of the "tinfoliers" and deleted the very thread itself, simple titled, "Tinfoil".

So, in the last few months his tickers have been really amazing, Mad Max stuff; he said things like (in the aforementioned ticker):

Civil unrest will break out before the end of the year. The Military and Guard will be called up to try to stop it. They won't be able to. Big cities are at risk of becoming a free-fire death zone. If you live in one, figure out how you can get out and live somewhere else if you detect signs that yours is starting to go "feral"; witness New Orleans after Katrina for how fast, and how bad, it can get.

Talking-up the apocalypse, KD is now more popular than ever.

This particular fellow paired documentary-footage of the first depression (being that the second is in our midst) with quotes from the famous ticker, and posted it as a video on youtube:

**LAST WARNING** The Great Depression II - kdenninger lays it down

Larger than life, walks and talks like he has a big stick. Everyone likes to be saved; at least someone to Lisa Simpson and stand up and scream for the sake of outrage.

My quandary, is KD a prophet or has he simply lost his mind? (Bare in mind that his stance on "tinfoilers".)

He is saying pension fund will be seized and a Mad Max scenario will play out...

Is he Lord Humungus or The Gyro Captain (as depicted in Mad Max 2 )?



KD is an archetype, we all are in some way. For the longest time he would get so infuriated with "tinfoilers," and I was there when he lambasted someone and deleted the thread for good in total disgust and rage...but, now, he is saying, within months, we will all be eating dog food.

Prophet or madman? If he is correct, it is the end to life as we know it.

Post-script: And for the record, I think he is a gifted orator and rhetorical scholar, yet he underlines and emboldens and enlarges text too much, which can subtract greatly from his writing.



[edit on 7-3-2009 by pluckynoonez]

So, yeah, i didn't answer my own question or give my 2 cents...I think he is a crazy/angry (in a good way) prophet.

KD has helped me make a LOT of money in the last 18 months.

He is an extremely good market evaluator, he knows what to look for and what it can (and usually does) mean for traders.

If you are a casual lurker, and not a gold star donor, you don't see even 1/4 of what is available on that site, including but not limited to KD's daily videos that talk about the daily market action on many stocks and indexes as well as the strategy for the next day.

Tinfoil has not been eliminated, but as it is a trader forum, if the tinfoil is not related to the markets, it doesn't belong there. Trust me, we still discuss plenty of tin over there.

There were a LOT of indicators pointing to a very bad market day at Thurs. close. Today *could* have been bad, but we did break up out of the channel at the end, which really only gives a bit more time for the slow steady bleed down.

He warns when the indicators say "It could get that bad." One of these time the indicators will be right.

Interestingly, if you go into the archives at www.market-ticker.org and read all the tickers in order they were posted (2 yrs worth, a lot of reading) you can then decide, is he a prophet, or just a very aware person trying to show (or as he says, document) what went wrong when and who is responsible either by action or inaction.

While I watched many friends and neighbors cry over the loss of the $$ in their 401Ks I was steadily making money, due largely to the advice and knowledge gained from KD and the gang at TF. I told every one of those friends and neighbors about the site and they all "poo-pooed" it then.

They wish they had listened now.

Edit to Add:

The video you posted in your OP is NOT made by Karl Denninger, though it uses his words.

[edit on 3/7/09 by redhatty]

reply to post by redhatty


When I said "this particular fellow..." the fellow in question was the poster/channel ID "george4title". I did not make that clear enough, my bad.

I haven't seen the "Tinfoil" thread there, I am not a Gold Star member. So with Gold Star you get to see the Tinfoil thread? It has other features? Investment advice of just suggestions? If you are a newbie, does it attempt to educate you to the basic understandings? I am not asking you to sell it, I just do not know how it works or what the content is about and how much use it could be.

reply to post by pluckynoonez


Tin Foil Hats is there

There is an entire sub-forum for newbies, you can ask questions, or review the posts already there, get recommendations for books to learn from, etc

There is a regular Elliot Wave Theory training thread

Sections that discusses different brokerages, Market Fundamentals, Technical/Trading, Specific Sectors, Economic Underlyers, and a bunch of casual sections that donors have access to as well as a special gold donor thread.

People post charts with analysis points to buy/sell at, and other indicators.

Karl does a daily "Ticks" thread that gives his ersonal insights to what the markets are doing.

The Newbie Forum is a great place to start, I especially recommend the Best Book thread, esp if you are new to trading.

Yes you can get advise, and strategy help from many members. It's also a very awesome community, even arguments are handled with class and adult mannerism

$20/month will get you a gold star. If you plan to trade, believe me, you will make the $$ back very fast. At $150 donation, you maintain gold star status for a year (monthly donations add up, but also roll off There is an faq page that explains it all.)

Remember, the Ticker is Karl's way of getting the world's attention. How he usually comes across is quite different - unless you break the rules of HIS forum.

Any other questions?? I'm happy to answer what I can

Thanks for the information, yet it feels there is no tomorrow. And, YET, that is precisely what Apollo Creed yelled at Rocky about. Maybe I should go forward, onward and upward, even though I want to flee to the mountains tonight...uh, this morning.

I can't see TINFOIL, I would need a Gold Star:

PERMISSION DENIED The function you attempted to execute requires permissions you do not have on your account. The function you requested is not available to you. Please click on your browser to return to your previously displayed page.

reply to post by pluckynoonez


Are you registered on the site? You can register for free, I know I could see Tinfoil before I became a gold donor, I don't know if that has changed.

I've been following Karl since August '07, he's neither a madman or a prophet, he's a daytrader and an intelligent guy. Some forum areas are not visible until you reach X amount of posts, like Tinfoil and the Bar.

ATS'rs would do well to lurk on that site. You do not want to discuss conspiracy theories there unless they are related to the financial markets.

Denninger is a brilliant trader and NOT given to flights of fantasy about the cause or effects of this crisis. If anybody else had said those things I wouldn't believe it for a moment, but coming from him, I'd say it's pretty certain. Yes, panic sex might be appropriate here Plucky.

reply to post by pluckynoonez


Guy seems like Chicken Little to me. Chicken Little with an over inflated sense of self-importance. He addresses tickers to the President for example. The President does not read it. He also runs his forum like a German POW camp. Sometimes I think the people in there have a stockholm syndrome thing going.

That being said, lately, I have found the discussions there to be marginally more interesting than ATS. If not for the fact that everyone here have already drunk the TEOTWAWKI kool-aid while people over there are still in the initial phases of absorbing it.

I've looked into the idea that pensions could cause mass-bankruptcy, and it checks out. I haven't done the math to see if he's correct about S&P=500 being the critical point, but I trust him, for the most part. My only gripe with KD is that he uses too many words and very little actual math in most of his blogs.

I haven't been able to find anything he's been wrong about, but sometimes he jumps the gun on things or over/under-estimates the time-span. I have a hard time seeing how Elliott Wave Theory can possibly work, but it does seem to work (most likely be capitalizing on some psychological tendency or something akin to the Wisdom of Crowds).

As he said: it's not tin if the math backs it up.

Actually, one thing that he is off base about is the degree of civil unrest that would ensue if SHTF. People typically point to Katrina as evidence that humans react to crisis in a savage manner, but we've actually found out that the initial reports were flat-out lies. Later examination found no sexual assault and only two murders in the Super Dome and convention center. That's two murders out of 40,000 people, in chaotic conditions in which people are starving to death and being done in by the rising temperatures. Big difference from the original story that "babies are being raped and children's throats are being slit." It was the "impoverished, black, savages" stereotype, and most of the population took it, hook, line, and sinker.

Who would have thought that the media would lie to us?

[edit on 7-3-2009 by theWCH]

I've followed Denninger's blog for a while now. I don't think he's a prophet or a madman. He seems like a pretty smart dude. He's been more right than most since this mess started, I'll keep reading till he's not. He recently won an Accuracy In Media award for his blog.

His post that you mention is one of the more alarmist and dire of any I've seen made. Even though I'm an ATS aficionado, if I read it unatributed I'd most likely blow it off. I take notice when Denninger goes that dark.

As far as the trading discussion on his board, it's top notch. I've seen people pay hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars for the T&A education that Karl had open to the public when he first started his site. When (if) the market ever turns around I'll re-evaluate TF from a trading perspective.

Update: first, we have sometime in the next 6 months before the bond market implodes (from a recent ticker):

The underlying problem is not the stock market. It is the credit (bond) market - that is, the underlying reality that there is too much debt out there in relationship to GDP, it cannot all be serviced, and as the economy contracts it feeds a vicious spiral where a default produces unemployment which drops both spendable income (and thus income available debt service) AND tax revenues, giving it to the credit market in all orifices. This is "deflationary destruction" and it is inevitable when government pushes off the normal cyclical cleaning out that recessions do, as our government has.

tickerforum.org...

And then KD is linking a "do not click on link" to Hal Turner from his website for Hal Turner's "baseball bankers" (that is not to say KD is endorsing such action, merely that he is highlighting the dangerous sentiment of outrage in this country).

I have many times referred to anger rising in the American population, but this little screed on The Internet makes clear exactly how pissed off some people are getting. I firmly believe that the law can be the best form of justice when people do really evil things, mostly because death at the hands of an angry mob is usually fast if brutal but life in prison always looking over your shoulder in the yard is a special kind of Hell. What the politicians need to understand is that when the public's demand for justice rises as it has been for the last year or so you can't placate it by getting 50 people to return bonuses from AIG or by putting Madoff in prison. You need to go get the bad guys - a lot of them - and try them in our public courts, with public indictments and public juries, and do it to enough of these malfeasors so that everyone "gets it" - if you pull this in the future, you WILL be brought to justice and punished, just like the guys who did it this time. Promises to do it "next time" won't do.

tickerforum.org...

Is that how we know when the end will come? When these rigid-minded people like KD's start alarming the bell? (My opinion of him has been stated previously, I think he is an incredibly bright and sensible human being, but he must now admit that "tinfoil" is becoming the new reality.)

Let no man know the time and all that, but maybe KD is that very alarm bell we all need....

www.youtube.com...

Just to further address the original question: I know for a fact that some very respected academic Economists watch Denninger's blog, for whatever that's worth.

[edit on 26-3-2009 by theWCH]

Originally posted by theWCH
Just to further address the original question: I know for a fact that some very respected academic Economists watch Denninger's blog, for whatever that's worth.

[edit on 26-3-2009 by theWCH]

That has never been in question. It is just that, in just a few recently released tickers he has

1. said the bond-market is done within the next 6 months
2. said "hey, check out this sicko Hal Turner!"

I think he is either off his game, or he is succumbing to the n/w/o?

We have 6 months left to have panic sex and go to a Noodles and Company...

www.youtube.com...

Scary graph

market-ticker.org...

We can do this the hard way or we can do this the catastrophic way, but whether we like it or not it will happen, because the mathematics of the situation make it inevitable - whether the government and "elites" like it or not. I will repeat what I said months ago - Barack Obama is our first Black President, and if he does not get his act together and stop this stupidity he is going to be our last President.

tickerforum.org...

Much more doom and gloom from KD. I appreciate his finger/pulse thing he has going. But we are as one poster said it: "tinfoil is the new reality."

I asked the mods to rename this thread to "Karl Denninger: Fresh Doom"

And quiet frankly, I am a little disappointed at my fellow ATSers. Maybe you are are not reading deep into this material or have no interest in this man's web-postings, but it is the freshest doom on the internet. I would think everyone here would want a bumper sticker of this man or some kind or something or other.

So, again, here is an his latest ticker (3/30/3009), a short one, about pension funds:

Oops. Under Millard's strategy, the pension agency was directed to invest 55 percent of its funds in stocks and real estate. That included 20 percent in US stocks, 19 percent in foreign stocks, 6 percent in what the agency's records term "emerging market" stocks, 5 percent in private real estate and 5 percent in private equity firms. What I warned of was the potential loss of your private pensions a few months back, if you remember. Here's the formula for your impending doom, if you forgot: 1. The S&P 500 goes to 300 as the "bailouts" and "handouts" collapse the economy. 2. The PGGC's equity investments are worth 20 cents on the dollar, the private equity and REITs are zeros. This puts the fund 40% underwater across-the-board. 3. It is unable to pay and goes to Congress. 4. Congress can't fund additional borrowing because the bond market has dislocated. 5. You get 10 cents on the dollar for your supposedly 'guaranteed' pension. Oh, and your Social Security and Medicare are cut by half (or more) too due to #4 at the same time. Congratulations America, this is the price of remaining asleep while the robber barons fleece the Treasury. Still think you ought to watch American Idol eh? I give this two, maybe three years before it plays out.

tickerforum.org...

So, 3 years out is not fresh doom by my standards, but it is nevertheless, doom on the most freshest on tap on the internet.

Worse before it gets better? All this bad news is accelerating.

And this guy replied in the same ticker-thread

We agree - but I doubt this is going to take two or three years. More like one to two. Kind of depends on how long the world keeps the U.S. on life support. Karl, the longer this insanity goes on, the more I come to believe that there is much happening below the radar - like what kind of renumeration was required to keep China from selling bucky down the river? Was it institutional - or (my guess) personal? My guess is that sooner or later something much more embarassing than the AIG bonus deal will come out and the collusion between U.S. decision makers and global monied interests will be exposed. Then things will get real interesting real fast. When folks come to understand that every U.S. citizen is paying taxes to support the lifestyles of the rich and famous, there will be a party - a necktie party.

So, less than a year.

When to bug-out? The more I read the ticker forum the more I think about going on a permanent camping trip somewhere, hunker down, and wait for the fireworks. Am I paranoid? Too much into panic-sex? What is with the world and this slow motion disaster? 9/11 was one day worth of heartache, this is going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on....

Something has got to snap. Something has to give. They can't torture us for this long and get away with it...or they already have. I am so mad right now!

[edit on 30-3-2009 by pluckynoonez]

The tickerforum is blowing up today:

This from KD,

I'm saying there is a very high probability that the bottom line is (a financial nuclear blast) And thehe AIG bailout was nothing more or less than an undisguised attempt to paper over the boom that has, in fact, already occurred. It appears that attempt has now failed, which means things will be getting very interesting very soon.

tickerforum.org...

A calm, a lull, before the storm. Obama playing grab-ass at the G20...shelter in place.

i cannot seem to navigate that forum. i can find nothing of particular relevant interest. what am i doing wrong? can you please link directly to a thread in which they are discussing current topics?

best...

Originally posted by tgidkp
i cannot seem to navigate that forum. i can find nothing of particular relevant interest. what am i doing wrong? can you please link directly to a thread in which they are discussing current topics?

best...

same here, the link goes to the forum not Karls daily blog post

keeping it current