SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - History Repeats - Grapes of Wrath

Export-Import prices this morning came in weakly, showing little upward pressure on monetary inflation.  

 

Retail sales however came in badly and that gave the markets the shakes.

 

The Atlanta Fed's model of forward GDP is showing 2Q at about 0.7 percent.   Hardly the kind of number favoring a policy of tightening.

 

And so the dollar slumped and stocks initially soared along with gold and silver, because although the Fed would still like to throw a token rate increase our way, the fundamentals of the economy are starting to not only deny the recovery story, but are starting to signal a recession.

 

In addition to the consternation about where to invest, the leadership elite of the West needs to start considering why their policy of the last twenty years or so has been such an abysmal failure.

 

I think they know why, in the odd moments when they actually care about such things since the public good is such a low priority in their busy day.

 

They just do not wish to acknowledge it, because they are culpable, and not in a convenient position to do anything about it, because it would interfere with the flows of private plunder that are now some of the most significant economic trend in the economy.

 

I doubt anything will change unless we see a major economic dislocation that causes a large number of people in their desperation to march on Washington and demand the political class finally decide to do the right things for the people.  

 

The last time that happened was the Bonus Army, and the military burned them out, and chased them with horses, tanks, and machineguns.  

 

The final change came when the people, in a major revulsion against the status quo, voted in a genuine reformer who had actions and experience, more than just well spoken words.  He could not be bought because he was already wealthy, and yet understood the notion of suffering and compassion because of a long time personal disability.  

 

American history:  to most Americans it's a mystery.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

Why There Has Been No Recovery In One Simple Chart - A Harvest of Corruption

"The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy."

Will Rogers, Nov 26, 1932

“Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud."

Charles H. Ferguson

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair

"In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods.  They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits.  They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

"What we have are asset PRICES being whipped up as median real wages deflate."

Anthony Sanders, Whip It! Real Median Wages Down 3.4% Since Q1 2010

"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent.   This pattern of government action shows up in all areas of government policy."

Dean Baker

If the people have no money, they may buy no goods, even essentials, without falling ever more deeply into debt.

That is not so difficult to understand.  Unless your paycheck demands that you not only cannot understand it,  but not even see it, or talk publicly about it. 

And so we have this sad spectacle of Our Great Reformer desperately trying to ram two trade deals through the Congress, without a real examination and debate, in the waning days of his office. 

And we see the continuing attempts by the Congress itself to thwart and undo financial reform under cover of rhetoric and canards, so that they too might get paid by the moneyed interests.

The harlots of finance and economics will say, 'You laymen simply do not understand the mysteries of our science.  Wages always lag in a recovery.'

Seven years is some lag.   Unfortunately economics these days has less in common with a natural science than it has with marketing.   And at its worst, it has become a carney sideshow.

But we might feel better about all this uncertainty if the corruption and distortion that have become embedded in our laws and economic theories, that preceded this and led to a long term secular stagnation in median incomes, had been changed in any meaningful way since the financial crisis. 

And they have not.    But yet we marvel that our condition seems intractable, unsolvable.

This is the root of our problem.  It is old as Babylon, and evil as sin.  If we sow greed to the worst of our desires, we will reap a harvest of corruption.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Coiling Like a Snake - Whip It Good

When a problem comes along

You must whip it

When something's goin' wrong

You must whip it

Devo - Whip It

The metals continue coiling as gold is held around the 1200 level and silver between 16 and 17.

The 'delivery action' is in silver this month, and the relative scarcity of deliverable warehouse metal at this price is in gold.

I wonder how long the Fed and their cronies can hold the metals down, while they desperately whip the flagging economy into recovery.

 

The urban cowboys are the Wall St Bankers, and the red hatted weirdos are the Fed.

 

Whip it good.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - 99 Luftballons

Another intraday 'stick save' for the ever levitating US equity markets.

And the hits just keep on coming. Until they don't.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Deliverable Gold in the Comex Falls To Record Low

This is an inactive month for gold on the Comex, and the delivery reports, such as deliveries are at The Bucket Shop which is merely an exchange of claim checks, reflect this.

So I was a little surprised to see that in the latest warehouses report the 'registered' or deliverable gold, at these price levels, has fallen to record low levels of 372,235 ounces, or about 11.6 tonnes.

To put that into a more global perspective, the Shanghai exchange alone is actually physically delivering, or withdrawing in excess of 30 tonnes per week.

This is not so much an issue now since this is an 'inactive month' at The Bucket Shop, meaning that the exchange of claim checks takes a back seat to the purer exercise of wagering to an internal set of rules, scheming and bluffing amongst the big swinging dicks of Manhattan, in the manner Liar's Poker, and the long tradition of scheissers and assorted flim-flam men.

 

Can you not see this in our culture?  We admire and hold up the most skillful liars as role models.  See how he can deftly answer any question in whichever way he wills,  without batting an eye or touching a fact?   What a great leader for our time.

 

But as our self-absorbed nincompoops in business and government so often forget, the rest of the world is active, and very open for business.   And they are not necessarily signing on to the one world government of the multinational corporations just yet.

 

To be clear, I am not saying that the Comex is on the verge of default, or anything as dramatic as that, although there are plenty who will make that claim, and on just about every occasion on which they have a podium to be heard.

 

Rather, I am making the point that our models of price discovery and capital allocation are broken, and badly, in quite a few markets beyond the precious metals.   It is like we are running our economy on demo mode, some video game in which wiseguys play to cheat the unsuspecting and the productive. 

 

And this is having and will continue to have increasingly disruptive consequences in the real domestic and the world economy.  And at some point the world may say 'enough.'  And then change may come.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - United States of Amnesia

“We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Gore Vidal

Stocks backed off their exuberant rally high from last Friday after that 'goldilocks' job number.

The 'global bond rout' has investors nervous, and well they might be. 

We are led by narcissists and sociopaths, in a most unwholesome partnership between the public and private sector. 

 

And the most feral, counterproductive response of self-proclaimed 'reformers' is to eliminate government, to nullify it, so that in their very deluded and romantic imaginations the monied interests can refrain from acting as lawbreakers, since at their core these most selfish and cunning of predators and sociopaths are really yearning to be, think, and act like angels.

 

And what will we do, having deregulated our markets, freed them from restraint, and eliminated the laws so that none may be lawbreakers.  What will we do when the very heart of darkness has a freer reign to blow the winds of plunder and power over the lands, with nothing to provide us a foothold or an anchor, the laws which are the pillars of justice having been all overturned? 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - And Quiet Flows the Con

"When swept out of its normal channel, life scatters into innumerable streams. It is difficult to foresee which it will take in its treacherous and winding course.

Where to-day it flows in shallows, like a rivulet over sandbanks, so shallow that the shoals are visible, to-morrow it will flow richly and fully."

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don

 

The predator class got their 'goldilocks' jobs report today, with many part time and marginal jobs for average people with little to no wage growth.

 

There were a couple of interesting developments in gold and silver at the Bucket shop.

 

Thanks to a very large withdrawal of 137,041 ounces of gold from the Brink's warehouse, the amount of registered (deliverable) gold in the Comex warehouses dropped to about 407,402 ounces of gold bullion. 

 

That is a low for registered gold we have not seen in some time.  Where that gold might end up is not something we can yet know.  It may just be an inter-warehouse transfer.  Or it might be headed East.  Perhaps we will know next week when the next report comes out. 

 

It does not matter much for May since it is an inactive month for gold, but it was notable nonetheless.

 

The other interesting thing is the silver chart below showing the technicals with the moving averages.  Silver is coiled like a tight spring in what looks like an ascending triangle.   

 

The US macroeconomic news calendar next week is a bit light, with emphasis probably coming from Retail Sales and ex-im prices on Wednesday and the PPI on Thursday. 

 

Otherwise it will be corporate earnings and geopoliticals again, with the situation with Greece slowly ripening on the vine.

 

I found the Tory victory in Britain to be quite interesting.  I wonder if Cameron will be emboldened to go even further with his party's destructive economic prescriptions.

I now have a whole unit of silver which I quietly acquired over the course of the week.

 

Have a pleasant weekend.