This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

Global stock markets and some treasury markets have become a rather spectacular farce over the past ten years, so much so that there are many people in the investment world that actually believe the long running bull market rally will “never end”. My view of stock markets has always been the same – they are an economic placebo; a psychological crutch that is exploited by central banks and governments to dupe the public into thinking our financial system is stable, even while the rest of the economy is in steep decline.

Stock markets are one false indicator, among a few (such as rigged GDP numbers, rigged inflation, as well as rigged unemployment stats), which keep the masses in the dark… at least, for a while.  I covered this issue in depth in my recent article ‘The Crash In Economic Fundamentals Is Accelerating’.  In every bubble in modern history, there comes a moment in time when central banks are either forced to let the fraud collapse, or, they deliberately allow the fraud to collapse. Banks and countries can only fake a recovery for so long, and very often, global elitists gain political and social advantages by simply letting the system crash for a time.

Central banks started out working in tandem in 2009 to bring about a reversal in the symptoms global debt and derivatives crisis. The calculated and close cooperation in policy initiatives between central banks that were supposed to be politically and economically opposed to each other proved what many of us had long suspected; that global economic management was indeed real, and that the likely source was the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). This fact had been exposed by journalists before, and even openly admitted to on occasion by banking moguls and globalists, but to see it in action was something else entirely.

After the Federal Reserve began the taper of QE, other central banks around the world started picking up some of the slack. Obviously, the Fed had the world reserve currency at its disposal, making it the premier market manipulator, but as it backed away from this role (and it IS backing away despite what some in the alternative media believe), the EU, Japanese and Chinese central banks have continued to stimulate and keep markets afloat.

This all came to an abrupt stop in December of last year. Markets were greeted with the unsettling prospect that the Fed was not going to back off of its policy tightening, and that interest rates were going to meet the Fed’s neutral rate of inflation. They were also greeted with the reality that the Fed was going to continue cutting its balance sheet at an accelerated pace well into 2019, thus removing liquidity from markets now addicted to artificial stimulus and dollar flow. This was going to eventually kill the primary source of the stock rally, which was corporate stock buybacks; a legal form of market manipulation fueled by easy debt from central banks.

The party was ending, and stocks began to tank.

But, as with every other market crash of the past century, massive bounces are inevitable. The farce was not quite over yet. While the Fed added a few calming words to its rhetoric, its tightening policies did not change. If there was a “plunge protection team”, the Fed was NOT a part of it. Plunge protection came from a rather surprising source the past four months, namely China.

The global stock plunge pulled a 180-degree turnaround starting at the end of December and into January of this year at the same moment China announced reinvigorated stimulus measures. This stimulus was also initiated at the same time as talk of a “trade deal” began to hit the mainstream media, giving hope that the long trade war was about to end instead of becoming worse. Global markets loved the move by China, and rallied around their QE measures, which have continued unabated into the second quarter of 2019 […]

via China Has Propped Up Global Markets Since December — Is This About To End? — © blogfactory