a few days ago michael berry tweeted a scary stock market prediction it's scary and deep because it's predicting that the market crash is going to get a whole lot worse and the stock market crash is going to get much worse because the fed is going to stop trying to fight inflation and let it run wild so michael berry's prediction is that the 2022 stock market crash is only just getting started and it's going to be one of the biggest we've ever seen but the best bit is that most people didn't understand the tweet and took it to mean the exact opposite so let me go through what michael barry said analyze the data and talk about what the theory here is it's actually really interesting and it goes really deep so in this tweet michael bury says this supply glut at retail is the bull whip effect google it worth understanding for your investing endeavors deflationary pulses from this will lead to disinflation in cpi later this year which will mean the fed reverses itself on rates and qt cycles let's unpack this because this is a really important point i am generally not a big fan of michael berry he is very famous for predicting the financial crash back in 2008 although his prediction came way way too early but the thing with michael barry is that he is always promoting and advocating the next big market crash that will be the worst ever here he is in 2015 saying there are terrific stresses in the economy which means it is definitely about to crash and in 2017 saying the stock market is about to have a complete meltdown and world war three is about to erupt and in 2019 the biggest ever market crash is right on the doorstep and will take the market all the way down except the stock market just kept on going up and up and we have had one of the biggest ever bull runs in the history of the stock market the thing with predicting stock market crashes is that if you shout wolf enough times eventually you are going to be right because stock market crashes do happen from time to time there is a cycle a broken clock does happen to be absolutely bang on right twice a day and he has recently upped the ante with his catastrophic predictions on twitter saying that as interest rates rise stock market valuations are going to collapse but this tweet goes a whole lot deeper first he talks about the bull whip effect causing supply chain issues we are seeing and he is right the ball with effect in economics is the amplification and distortion of the natural supply and demand trends that can lead to massive unforeseen market effects in the right circumstances it can take the natural swings up and down in the supply chain and make them into a complete disaster it works a little bit like this think about a dealer that sells cars let's say that dealer sells 100 cars a month the pandemic hits the showrooms are shut everyone is panicking so nobody wants to go and buy a car so the dealer has a think about it and massively reduces his orders from the car manufacturer for the next few months they slash their orders down to just 40 cars a month and a couple months later at a board meeting of the car manufacturer they see that their orders have been completely slashed they have built up some inventory over the last couple of months so they expect the downward trend to continue and they decide that they don't want to produce cars that nobody's going to buy so they drop their production from 100 to just 30 as a result and because of that they immediately go and reduce their orders for parts with their suppliers down to 30 as well a month or two later the board of the parts supplier company sees that their orders from the car company are collapsing fast and are now down from 100 to just 30 and as they've been dropping they've been building up their inventory of parts and they are scared that they're building all these parts that nobody will use and they're going to cost the company a lot of money so they go and stop producing their parts and they reduce it all the way down to 20 of their normal production rate so the parts company reduces their orders from the raw materials and metals mining companies down to 20 as well and then a month later the board of the metal mining company goes and meets and sees that their orders are 80 down and they have also built a giant stockpile so they order production down by 85 to only 15 of their capacity so you can see how psychology and corporate strategy and the timing of these things can amplify this sort of problem quite drastically demand drops down by sixty percent around forty percent but the problem then amplifies all the way down and the mining companies now operating at just fifteen percent of their normal capacity and then the demand pigs back up and that gets the exact opposite effect happening but it's even worse now that's the bullwhip effect in action the car dealership suddenly sees a flood of new buyers turning up who postponed their car purchases because of the pandemic and the demand goes to above the norm to 140 percent of what the normal demand is the car dealer wants to make sure that they fulfill on the high demand and they place orders for 150 percent of the norm with a car manufacturer the car manufacturer sees a massive spike in demand for cars that is now 150 percent of the norm and says hey i don't want to run out i don't want to not supply enough while this demand is happening so they order 160 of the normal rate of car parts from the other company the parts manufacturer goes and orders 180 of their usual metals order and makes sure that they have a buffer and at the end of the chain you have the mining company boss and he's just laid off a bunch of people shuttered some of his minds got into financial trouble because of the mass reduction in capacity and he was running at 15 of normal production and now the orders turn up and he has to increase production from 15 all the way up to 180 and he can't do that overnight he doesn't only have to go back to full capacity which is hard enough but he has to increase production beyond that hire even more staff and expand the mining operation all of this is going to take time the parts manufacturer has to build new factories themselves to cope with the increased demand and so the prices of the raw materials skyrocket because there's just not enough supply in the supply chain the parts manufacturer has to increase their prices even more to allow for their own cost and to have some kind of a risk buffer just in case the metal price goes even higher the car company then has to raise their prices even higher still than the parts manufacturer and then the dealer goes and sticks their mark up on top and you can see the problem here the bigger the initial impulse to the bullwhip the bigger the way that you're going to get at the end and when you have a major once in a lifetime kind of event like covet turning up and the financial response to covered by the governments around the world the bullwhip effect from these is going to be pretty big that is the theory and here is where the point michael berry is making gets really interesting as the prices go up inflation naturally skyrockets and we're kind of seeing some of this happening right now and demand for high priced products drops in some industries that can cause a very big deflationary pulse because the sharp decline in demand can coincide with the massive ramp up in supply because the production has been ramping up new factories coming online all of that kind of stuff and this can have a very noticeable effect as inflation may stall or even drop significantly as a result and then the public opinion will go back to inflation being transitory it was successfully defeated it went away all by itself for the first time in history and the fed will immediately declare a victory they'll be praised from every single media outlet for stopping inflation without having to increase rates very much maybe even reduce the rates back to zero you know go and stimulate the economy now that inflation is gone and while all this is happening the next down wave of the bull whip would be coming because the dealer will reduce their orders to the car company by even more than the last time the car company will contract even more still and so on and so on down the chain and then when the next wave arrives everyone will be massively surprised when inflation suddenly goes back up and goes back up a heck of a lot faster and a heck of a lot higher than anyone expected and while the fed is toasting their success we may be staring in the biggest ever inflation spike in modern history it's certainly a really interesting theory and it does have a lot going for it a few days earlier michael berry tweeted question in 2022 what brings a christmas in july answer a disinflationary overstocked consumer recession at christmas and if michael berry is right the stock market crash that we have seen so far in 2022 will look like peanuts compared to what is yet to come it is definitely possible but the global economy is a very complicated beast and there are so many different factors to consider one of the arguments that michael berry uses a lot is the fact that the stock market is overvalued when you consider the schiller pe ratio this is the ratio that many people refer to of earnings of companies over the last 10 years to their current valuations the popular theory is that the average of this ratio is somewhere around 16 or 17. and right now we're at 29.5 so even after the market drops so far some economists including michael bury will say that the market is still massively overvalued there are several obvious problems with the logic of this argument though in the time of fast technology advances you would naturally expect this ratio to be higher because you have many newer companies that haven't been around a long time or were much much much smaller 10 years ago and their current valuation bears very little relevance to how much profit they made 10 years ago many of today's biggest companies like amazon or tesla are in a completely different place to 10 years ago in fact the markets can actually stay flat and the valuations cannot go anywhere at all and if those companies earnings remain at just the same level or grow ever so slightly then the schiller pe ratio can drop down significantly without any market crash happening because for the pe ratio to drop one of two things can happen you can either have a drop in prices which is what happens in a market crash and everyone says that is the only way that the shallow pe ratio can drop but it can also drop if you have an increase in those average earnings and most people citing this chat as evidence that a crash is absolutely definitely imminent tends to miss that point out and an even bigger question is why does the schiller pe ratio have to be a flat line what is the logical reason for that that the way that the companies were valued back in the 1880s 1890s early 1900s has to be exactly the same as how they are valued today people's life expectancies in a completely different place people's access to money and investing time frames the way that the whole financial system works and the maturity of it is a completely different place people's retirement age today is older than you would be expected to die back then if somebody gave you this chart and a crayon and told you to draw a best fit curve through this data as you see it based on the data alone and not based on your guesswork would you draw a straight line through it or could it possibly be that the relationship is not a flat line if you remember that in the late 70s and the early 80s there was a huge one-off inflationary spike and you go and say take that massive outlier out of the equation does it still look like a flat line to you the truth is it is very possible that michael berry is right and the market crash is going to get a whole lot worse it has happened before it will happen again but it is also very possible we're going to be looking back at this prediction along with every other one that michael berry has made in the last 10 years that turned out to be a complete dud if you are an investor and concerned whether your stocks might crash in all the way to zero in this market crash make sure you watch this video right here where i talk about which companies might get hit particularly hard in a recession thank you so much for watching and as always i'll see you guys later you.