Déjà Vu All Over Again

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts

The bears are holding the line.

Nothing in my outlook has has changed.

I expect gold and silver will run if stocks run, and will move lower if stocks sell off. What exactly might cause either thing to happen is not yet known of course, but we roughly know what to look for.

The Presidential debates are tonight. I will be enjoying a good book.

I have finished all the 'Berlin Noir' books by Philip Kerr (the trilogy, and then all the additional), and will now read his lesser known novel about Sir Isaac Newton,  involving the great thinker as a detective of all things. I suppose it will be in the manner of all these faux Sherlock Holmes stories that are now becoming popular, no doubt encouraged by the Robert Downey Jr. variant movies, although Mr. Holmes has been an established and enduring genre of its own.

There is a new TV show as well, Elementary, with Lucy Liu as Watson. It was all right, but rather thin compared to the UK show 'Sherlock' now coming out with its third series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and a wonderful Watson played by Martin Freeman, probably one of my favorites  I have been a 'Baker Street Irregular' since the age of 9 when I received the two volume annotated edition of the canon by William S. Baring-Gould.  I still have it kicking around somewhere I think.  I am afraid I have lost control of my library again.

Thank you for your patronage. Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Jobs and QE

The US produced two good economic numbers this morning that exceeded consensus, in the ADP employment report and the ISM Services index.

The markets popped on that good news, but then the rally faded and could not break out of the symmetrical triangle on the SP 500 futures.

The news from China overnight was not good, and Europe continues to weigh heavily. And of course Europe, especially Spain and Greece among others, remains highly unsettled.

Most daytraders still do not understand that the world has changed a bit, and some of the usual things that would goose stocks in the States are intermingled with this little thing called 'the rest of the world.'

The US Presidential debates are tonight and the Unemployment claims are tomorrow. We will also get some news on European interest rates. We will get the latest FOMC minutes on Thursday afternoon.

The Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday is expecting an add of 120,000 jobs and a slight tick higher in the unemployment percentage to 8.2%. Some fellow on financial TV was saying that expectations for jobs on Friday were 60,000 to 100,000 which did not seem right so I looked expectations up on Briefing.com. For 'private sector' jobs ex gov expectations are for an add of 130,000.

The Secret Deal Between the Democrats and Republicans To Control the Presidential Debates

"The only way to forestall the work of criticism (critical thought) is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice."

Northrop Frye

Would you be surprised to learn that secret deals between the two major US political parties and the major news media control access to the Presidential debates, thereby controlling the discussion, turning them into show pieces and beauty contests obsessed with the trivial and the technicalities of performance art, rather than substantive discussions of the issues?

Did you wonder why third party messages and non-corporately sponsored ideas are completely ignored in the discussions, debates, and for the most part in the 'free press?'

It appears that for at least once the Democrats and Republicans were able to agree on something. They agreed to monopolize access to the presidential debate, with the help of a compliant and greedy corporate media, in a way that would almost certainly violate the antitrust laws, assuming these politicians were subject to any laws but their own.

This is not a serious and original discussion of the issues. This is bread and circuses. Bread for the media and the politicians, and circuses for the people.