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Today was the option expiration on the Comex, and those options which are 'in the money' and have not been settled for cash are now converted to March futures positions.
Depending on the size and distribution of those conversions we may see some 'action' in the front month because they are sometimes notoriously weak hands and will receive at least one 'gut check.'
The trends remain as they are, without regard to the short term 'wiggles.'
I made the call for gold, and slightly thereafter silver, based on a fundamental analysis of the US economy and the actions of the Federal Reserve. This was when the prices were 275 and 4.50 respectively. I see no reason to change anything yet.
When the fundamentals change and information becomes more universally disclosed, then the market will clear and reach stability. Until then the safe havens from the dollar credit bubble will continue to go higher in spite of the gimmickry and perception management of the monied interests and their financial engineers. They have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and are trying to bluff and rationalize their way out of it to their personal benefit, as they have done throughout their lives.
Here comes the most important test for US equities, for the rest of the week and especially over the weekend.
They have fallen to levels that have typically sparked a new round of buying in this protracted liquidity rally for another melt up higher on thin volumes.
The end of this will come, but perhaps not yet. The market must tell us what is hidden and must be revealed.
This strikes to the heart of what I have called the credibility trap.
The US government cannot effectively deal with the financial crisis and the required credible reforms because in fixing the problems they would necessarily expose the underlying fraud, and endanger the very powerful status quo that funds them and their political campaigns.
This is more difficult to manage than a liquidity trap because the very means of remedy have been co-opted. The doctors caused the illness, and cannot pursue a cure without admitting their malpractice, which may not have been done in simple error but with complicity.
So this malaise and period of selective recovery will continue until there is a another, more destructive crisis that finally clears away the fog of corruption. Or there is some exogenous event to distract the people to some other problem, to change their focus. 'Never waste a crisis' as they say in the Washington Beltway.
"It is not those who advocate, but those who prevent, stabilizing transfers of purchasing power, who are the true Marxists. These self-styled capitalists do not espouse Marx’s theories, but they do something much worse: They perform them. They behave in precisely the way that Marx expected capitalists to behave. They cripple the American system’s greatest strength — its ingenuity, flexibility, adaptability. They prevent the sort of collective action through which earlier generations proved that capitalism could made be consonant with decent, stable, and broadly prosperous societies. In doing so, they risk proving Marx right."
Steve Randy Waldman said this here and I think he is brilliantly right. This is becoming less a struggle to recovery as it is an obsession with personal greed and the will to power gone horribly wrong, corrosive to social structure through corruption, and veering towards the dangerously self-destructive.
Are fellows like Governor Walker of Wisconsin and his backers the Koch brothers 'performing Marxists?' lol I have often wondered if Greenspan was a Randian fifth columnist leading fiat money to its ideological conclusion, but certainly not a Marxian.
Or could it just be that current events and crises bring out and show us who we really are, and hopefully, offer to change us? Those who hold other people in contempt are ever more contemptible, the would be masters ever more deceitful, and obsessive greed leads the few into rough hands and dark cellars. How much wealth did Mubarak and Gaddafi really need after all? Is there not some pathology clearly in evidence with these man-gods, and even in the minor deities on Wall Street? Sad little boys and broken men become dark spirits, seeking to fill the hole in their beings with things, people, all possessions without savour, a wreckage of devices. And even more sad the husks and shadows of people, never at peace, who follow after in their wake, like swirling leaves pulled fitfully along with the wind.
Hell is truly the inability to feel love, empathy, and compassion, knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
Strange days, I am sad to say. Change is in the wind, and is starting to blow like a hurricane, as cycles come round again.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
W. B. Yeats
Both austerity and stimulus will falter in the mire of imbalanced, broken systems and corruption. The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery.
