The Real Peak Complacency

Stocks are at record highs while volatility is at a record low. Which is another way of saying that investors aren’t as worried as they probably should be about the coming year.
That’s okay. Price corrections (with their attendant volatility spikes) are normal and natural ways for markets to teach overconfident investors a little humility. Think of them as the financial word’s forest fires, clearing out the underbrush of misconception, malinvestment, and hubris.
But there’s another area of Peak Complacency that is neither natural nor benign. And that’s cyberspace. Americans – and Europeans and Japanese – have moved most of their financial lives online just as hackers and other cyber-enemies get the upper hand. Recently:
Credit rating agency Equifax – apparently through its own incompetence – allowed hackers to access and presumably copy and sell ‘sensitive personal information’ of 146 million Americans. Online portal Yahoo upped the number of accounts that were hacked in 2013 to – get this – 3 billion. The National Security Agency admitted that its state-of-the-art hacking tools were stolen by hackers and are now available for sale on the dark web. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) suffered more than 50 data breaches between January 2015 and December 2016, exposing ‘personally identifiable information (PII) of U. S. citizens.’

This post was published at DollarCollapse on OCTOBER 9, 2017.