Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - The Improbable in Service to the Insatiable

"With only twenty millions of coin, and three or four hundred millions of circulating paper, public and private, nothing is necessary but a general panic, produced either by failures, invasions, or any other cause, and the whole visionary fabric vanishes into air, and shows that paper is poverty, that it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself."

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 1788

"People criticize owning bullion because there’s no yield. But there’s a reason everything else needs a yield, to compensate you for things like obsolescence risk, business-cycle risk and management risk, all of the things that gold does not have.

We’re not gold bugs, but there’s a reason humanity has tended to use gold as an alternative to man-made currency – it’s the only virtually infinite-duration asset in the world."

Matthew McLennan, First Eagle Funds


"But when you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty."

Congressman Howard Buffett (Warren's father)

The whole spectacle of the health of the global economy pirouetting on the decision of an American Banker, or perhaps more properly, the Viceroy of Wall Street, on whether to symbolically raise a benchmark interest rate, tied to an avalanche of internationally distributed paper claim checks for conceptual ephemera and political promises, must be one of the oddest things that we have come to take for granted in our modern society today.   Even moreso than the atavistic significance of the merely human, in an age when soulless, corporate behemoths freely roam across the land and the seas. 

 

At the height of the British Empire, it is not clear that even the dowager Queen Victoria held that sort of whimsical power.   This sort of individual discretion is more reminiscent of the barbarity of former ages, of pharaonic Egypt, of the Mongol hordes, or of the cults of the dark gods that fed on beating hearts torn from human sacrifices.

Such is the power of the modern religion of the markets, and with those who would displace any power greater than themselves to make way for the overheated imaginings of their restless wills and fancies.

 

Future generation must surely think that we are mad.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Transparency Games

"Hiding behind opacity, bankers rig the global financial markets for their personal gain. Today, seven large banks paid over $5 billion in fines for rigging the foreign exchange markets. These were the latest fines for bad behavior.

However, just to show that these fines will not change their bad behavior, yesterday a survey was released in which 1 in 4 bankers agreed that, hiding behind a veil of opacity, they would engage in illegal activity if they could make at least $10 million dollars.

In my book I show a solution for restoring transparency and ending rigged global financial markets."

Richard Field, Transparency Games: How Bankers Rig the World of Finance

 

Stocks were floundering most of the day, but tried to rally up through overhead resistance again off the Fed minutes which were released a bit early.

 

Alas, a rally was not meant to be.

 

Stocks feel a bit heavy here, and vulnerable to exogenous risk shocks of even a relatively mild kind.

 

Valuations of the big talk momentum nifty stocks are almost incredible. 

 

A few more of the career criminals, aka the Banks, were spanked lightly today for rigging yet another important global financial market. 

 

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pullback

Gold and silver have been steadily rising, but today gave a piece of that up and fell back to near support.   The 1200 and 16-17 ranges have their allure.

What a surprise.

 

The dollar rallied off the 'better than expected' home starts and permits number.  Recovery!

 

There was intraday commentary about The Recovery™  here.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Teen Spirit

The markets were thrilled this morning with Housing Starts and Building Permits numbers that were far above estimates, stoking hopes that the economy is recovering.

I would like to know the target market for these homes, and how many are spoken for. You'll forgive me for wondering if these are going into the speculative overhang along with the home flippers and their existing homes inventories.

Walmart missed on earnings and revenues, and in that there is a message, and a very strong one.

ETSY missed after the bell, and the stock was getting monkey hammered. So go the 'hot IPOs' of bubbledom, that come out at prices like 30, and less than a month later are under 20.

Have a pleasant evening.

Retail Store Closings and Bankruptcies - Most American Shoppers 'Broke'

"We have almost no GDP growth...We are so overdone...

More chains are going bankrupt than I've ever seen, and more stores are closing.

Half of America doesn't have any money. The financial condition of most Americans is a train wreck."

Howard Davidowitz

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."

John Kenneth Galbraith

Howard Davidowitz is one of my favorite analysts, and a maven of the retail sector.

And he tends to tell the facts, even to those who do not want to hear them.   But he is so good at what he does, so well known and respected, that they have to let him on.

Those who are profiting from the status quo do not want change, and being completely self-absorbed do not care if there is a recovery for the rest of America.

They do not care, as long as they can keep the music playing, and the economy dancing to their tune.  They've never had it better. 

And their enablers cannot address the problems.  They will not even acknowledge that their IS a problem, because of the credibility trap.

Cartoon source

Reich: Restore Balance, Break Up the Big Banks, Financial Transaction Tax

Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill are charter founders of the Wall St Wing of the Democratic Party. They removed one of the great counterbalances to the corporatists, and have organized political corruption into a cottage industry like Lansky and Luciano organized crime into a business.

The problem is that neither most Republicans nor many Democrats make any bones about serving Big Money first anymore. It is understood that this is how things are. Soft corruption and the revolving door is the fashion.

Mitch McConnell's new chief is a former lobbyist for Koch, for example. And the Republican presidential field is devoted to Big Money while confounding their constituents with emotional sideshows and manipulative pandering to their worst impulses and scapegoating.

Reich's ideas of reinstating Glass Steagall and a nominal Financial Transactions tax have potential. It was a mistake to repeal Glass-Steagall in the first place. I wonder who presided over that? Oh yes, Bill and Hill. And NAFTA. Everything had a price tag including the Lincoln bedroom and Presidential pardons. Very entrepreneurial.

The emphasis on the Transaction Tax should be very 'nominal' and without exemptions on professionals and institutions and 'market makers' so that the HFT crowd and raw speculation from the Banks' trading desks are the targets, and not the average investor.

I also think the Fed itself, in particular the NY Fed, should be banned from making trades in anything but the official and quasi-official bond markets. And all their public markets activity should be transparent with no more than a quarter lag.

The Congress and their staffers cannot be exempt from 'insider trading' and selling information for favors to the funds and trading desks. I mean, come on. Management of companies and the media get plenty of access to insider information as well, and they are not above the law because 'it is too hard' not to use it.

Given the regulatory capture we have today I am not optimistic about reform until there is another crisis. There are only a handful of genuine reformers, but many flavors of opportunists in sheep's clothing.

So Robert, how can you be so gung ho for reform, but so unqualifiedly endorsing the unreformed Hillary Clinton?

Why don't more Beltway and media progressives and liberals come out for Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders? Because they want reform, but cannot offer their supporters the biggest Washington payoff, which is money and power, which are the mother's milk of the politically corrupt.