SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Stocks Ignore Bad ADP Employment, Sell off on ECB

Stocks tried to shake off some pretty bad macroeconomic numbers from this morning. I have included a chart of them below.

However, the stock market's rally was dumped hard as the ECB announced into the close that they would no longer allow banks to accept Greek debt as collateral.

 

More on this in the gold and silver commentary above.

Stocks pretty much went off on the lows. This market has the resilience of meringue, and all the character of a cotton candy soufflé.

 

Without QE I am struggling to see how stocks can keep scaling their lofty heights, especially with the wheels starting to fall off the real economy.  And they are, despite the puffery from the Fed and the sell side of the Street, the paid strategists whose primary strategy is to keep you 'fully invested.'

 

Some incident will occur, and then the truth will be revealed, and non-related parties properly scapegoated for spoiling our great and glorious Recovery.  We are the world, we are exceptional, we cannot fail.

 

The elite will lie, and the people will pretend to believe them.  Heck about 20 percent of the American public will believe almost anything if it is wrapped with the right prejudice and appeal to passion.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Same Old Schemes, Ending Badly

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard warned Tuesday regulatory changes haven’t solved the too-big-to-fail problem in banking, adding that he’d support a break-up of the biggest banks in the U.S.

“It’s naive to think that macro prudential tools as they exist today are sufficient” to tackle new bubbles without notable help from Federal Reserve interest rate policy, Mr. Bullard said. He was referring to the suite of tools the Fed and other agencies have to intervene in a targeted fashion when authorities believe financial markets have become unstable.

WSJ, Bullard Calls For Breaking Up Nation's Biggest Banks

 

Robert Johnson recognizes that rampant inequality could be the death of us all. “People need to know there are possibilities for their children, that they will have the same opportunity as anyone else,” he said at Davos. Johnson continued, “There is a wicked feedback loop. Politicians who get more money tend to use it to get even more money.”

That’s the money they get from the plutocrats who pull their strings; in the past three elections alone, the financial sector has given $256 million to Republicans and $153 million to Democrats.

USA Today recently editorialized, “Wall Street got its swagger back not long after the bailout, which is no surprise.  Its culture is built on greed and ego.  What is more surprising is how quickly Congress again became Wall Street’s errand boy.”

Michael Winship, The Super-Rich Can't Hide From the Rest of Us

If called on their bets, the Comex cannot come up with the bullion to answer it, except at much higher prices.  And I am talking about many hundreds of dollars higher, probably into the 2,000 range, unless they can get the government/judiciary to allow them to declare some favorable sort of force majeure as they did in the case of MF Global.

 

The only real doubt in my mind is how badly leveraged the New York and London crowd are, and how many cross claims exist for each ounce of physical metal.  I suspect it is worse than I think.

 

Kyle Bass said the same thing, so let the apologists, the little Lord Haw Haw's, dismissively chew on that one. 

 

It is a scam.  It is tolerated by the kleptocracy.  Remember this when the time comes.  They know.

The regulators and the Fed and the Congress are turning a blind eye to the corruption because they can, no one calls them on it, and it suits their very personal preferences.

 

The BRICS are calling the Anglo-American banking cartel's bluff, one bar of bullion at a time.

 

That is the situation in a nutshell.

 

Tick tock.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Financial Sector Is a Subsidized Money Machine

Just 10% of Americans own 91 percent of the nation's stocks and mutual funds, according to economist Edward Wolff. Most of the remainder is held by a "middle class" that is steadily losing ground. The bottom 60% is almost entirely shut out.

Stock owners, some of whom made billions of dollars last year, can defer their income taxes indefinitely, pay a reduced capital gains tax when they decide to cash in, or pass on the capital gains tax-free to their heirs.

Making money is all a game to the super-rich -- redistribution toward the top, trickle-down delusions, tax avoidance, and even, for some of them, dabbling in criminal activities.

Paul Buchheit, Super Bowl For the Rich

Chipotle beat on earnings but missed on revenues and a few growth measures. That's a refrain you will hear quite often in these days of dodgy GAAP rules and accounting antics. The priced-for-perfection stock was down 5 percent after hours.  Who knows if it will stick.  It's all a game.

Factor orders missed by a mile this morning.

Oil has rallied back over 50. It is not clear what this means exactly since the price discovery process is badly broken by leveraged speculation.  Hey, weren't we just here about six years ago?

I suspect there was a steep overshoot to the downside that can be attributed to 'gamesmanship.'

 

S&P 'settled' for 1.4 Billion for its active participation in the massive mortgage fraud perpetrated by Wall Street.  It was just a cost of doing business. 

There will be another financial crisis, and another attempt to bail out the perpetrators by their shrine maidens in the Congress. 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

NAV Premiums of Precious Metal Trusts and Funds - Why There Is No Recovery

 

Another 7,285 ounces of gold bullion were redeemed from the Sprott Physical Gold Trust.

My friend Arby had an interesting observation.  I have not checked it out specifically.  I thought Australia was in second place, but I have not looked at the latest figures for 2014.

 

But if the numbers are generally right, which they seem to be, it gives us some idea of the magnitude of what is going on.

US 52 WEEKS gold mine production 2014 (estimate from Mineweb) ... ...    210 tonnes

China first 3 WEEKS gold imports 2015 (calculated by Koos Jansen)      .... 202 tonnes

The largest producer of gold is China, second Russia, third USA.

The two largest producers are net importers of their world leading mining output.  The third largest producer is a net exporter.

 

And then there's Australia, but I'm not sure that they even know what they're doing as one of the attendant nations.

 

No matter what the exact numbers and who makes the most, gold is flowing from West to East. 

Anyone who does not understand this is missing one of the most dramatic monetary phenomena of this century.

I wonder who will blink first in this 'suicide squeeze.'  Because that is what this latest gold pool is becoming.

Speaking of monetary phenomenon, the professor of numbers and all things housing Tony Sanders notes that Mortgage Bonds Have Underperformed the Worst Since 2008 on Refi Risks.

 

As part of a different discussion, I noticed the other week that the Fed stepped up purchases of agency mortgage debts considerably since they 'ended QE' and own a boatload of them.

 

Janet and Bill Dudley must be running handcarts up and down Wall and Broad Streets telling the Banks to, 'bring out your dead.'

 

Fan and Fred buy them, and the Fed buries them.   With nothing going to the people whose homes are being foreclosed.   

And finally,  Zerohedge reminds us this morning that the numbers indicate that the biggest flows of capital into the US equity markets are from.. wait for it... companies using their profits to buy back their own stocks, by far.

 

So the Fed is using its ability to print money to buy bad debts from the Banks which they created to cheat their customers, and companies are using the outsized profits they are obtaining through government subsidies and underpaying their workers to buy back their own stock and enrich their upper management. 

 

And as Wall Street On Parade reminds us this morning, the corporatized media, owned by a handful of corporations, is cheerleading all this, and is very much captured by the crony capitalist culture.

 

And people wonder why there is no recovery.  Who says they want one, when this new normal is paying off for a privileged few so well.  And they get to buy even more of the remaining productive assets on the cheap.

 

That's trickle down stimulus, par excellence.

 

Related:  The Big Lie:  5.6% Unemployment