Are you ready to grasp at straws as the financial world collapses all around us? Here’s a nice thick meaty one to grasp. Changyou.com Limited (CYOU), a Chinese producer of online games, reported really positive earnings yesterday while pretty much everything else was in total freefall. It was enough to keep the stock stable yesterday. Apparently, the coronavirus is juicing at-home gambling behavior. People under quarantine have nothing better to do. On that logic, it looks like the adult entertainment industry could also get a nice corona bump, but the only public porn company I know of that you can invest in is RCI Hospitality (RICK), and that one was down 16% yesterday. Problem is, RCI operates adult nightclubs, off limits to those in quarantine. Unless, of course, the U.S. gets entirely locked down like Italy and creative customers and dancers start self-quarantining at strip clubs for a month. That would be entertaining.

Anyway, let’s address the elephant in the room. Everyone is now panicking. Regular readers of this column may remember an esoteric essay I put together last September entitled “On cryptocurrencies, gold, quantum financial mechanics and fiat black holes”. The point of that article was that if and when the Federal Reserve forces interest rates on the U.S. dollar into negative territory, then all commodity markets – which are all dollar-denominated – would be locked into permanent backwardations. Negative dollar interest rates would be a disincentive to hold dollars through time, so anyone with any cash would prefer to hold real assets instead, only using cash itself for immediate expenses. The result would be sudden unexpected consumer price inflation and a financial black hole would form that would suck all fiat currencies into nothingness.

I am only one flawed imperfect human and I could be wrong. I have no crystal ball. But from what I am seeing right now we look to be only one final step away from this financial black hole actually forming. The only thing missing is an announcement of global, coordinated central bank action to unleash a torrent of liquidity to “help markets” and ensure “economic growth”. That would most likely push the dollar officially into negative interest rate territory. The dollar is already circling that would-be event horizon, judging by the collapsing dollar index over the last two weeks.

If there is an announcement of this sort from the world’s monetary cartels, which could happen any day now judging by the level of global market panic right now, all debt that can be sold to central banks, will be. The fiat currency that sellers of this debt will get from central banks in that event will then be traded for real assets in a flood to tangible value, and central banks will completely lose control of everything faster than they can even realize what the hell is going on. The saddest part is, for all their Econ PhDs, they won’t even come close to ever understanding why any of this happened at all. They are all completely clueless.