The Sprott Physical Gold Trust continues to add bullion, and is now almost on a par with the Central Gold Trust, which is several years old.
“One day, we will have to stand before the God of history. And we will talk in terms of things we've done. And its seems to me that I can hear the God of history saying, 'That was not enough. For I was hungry, and you fed me not. I was naked, and you clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and you provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.'" Martin Luther King
The Sprott Physical Gold Trust continues to add bullion, and is now almost on a par with the Central Gold Trust, which is several years old.
Still reaching for that high note. Looks like 1200 may just be out of reach, and a big inhale is coming soon, maybe short of resistance at 1190.
The Fed still seems to be following the policy of blowing an asset bubble, and then using monetary policy to clean up afterwards. I had hoped they would have learned their lesson after the housing bubble, but that is apparently not the case.
The Fed is doing the same thing over and over, and each time they run through a cycle of bubble and collapse, more wealth is transferred from the real economy to a few oligarchs, and the result of the collapse is more debilitating on real production and jobs.
I don't think the Fed can stop, because they are fearful of the results. And their owners like the status quo. Obviously I cannot know how far the bubble can go this time, and it may just be an 'echo bubble' since the real economy seems incapable of responding to it. The next leg down will shake things up.
I am thinking they will do a 'wash and rinse' with short term reversals in stocks and bonds to churn up the specs and generate some fees and some food for the trading desks. But it will probably not break key support unless 'something happens.'
The Wall Street demimonde in the financial media is drooling all over themselves for Dow 11,000 which is an essentially meaningless number, but important as a lure to bring mom and pop back in for another shearing. Wall Street is the very definition of 'useless eaters,' but what they consume is the vitality of the nation.
Addendum at 3 PM EDT
The NDX is failing to surmount resistance.
I just put some shorts back on the US stock indices to balance my metals longs.
That title is a bit of a rhetorical question, because I think the stock market bubble has already arrived, and the Fed is pumping the bellows. But let us not allow that detail to impede the progress of our discussion. Let's assume that only the next leg up in this monetary experiment will be breaching the limits of the bubblesphere.
Mark Thoma has 'reblogged' a review of Dean Baker's book False Profits from Brad DeLong Site at his own, The Economist's View.
Brad, the blogging professor from Berkley, takes issue with Dean Baker's book, concluding:
"But let me start by saying how I disagree with the book. I think that its story of the linkages between our current crisis and Federal Reserve policy is significantly overstated. Its argument about how excessively-low interest rates caused the housing bubble is exaggerated. I think that its belief that the Federal Reserve could have taken much more action to curb the housing bubble while is underway is also exaggerated..."Well, at least he is consistent. In censuring my criticisms of Mr. Greenspan's monetary policy back in 2004 which I made as comments on his blog, Mr. DeLong said that Greenspan "never made a policy decision with which I disagreed." Although I was incredulous, I took him at his word.
kevincure: 04.03.10 at 6:21 PM
"I was at the Fed in 2006. Everybody at the Fed was aware that there was a housing bubble. The fact that rents and house prices had diverged was known to all of the policymakers I interacted with.
The question was not, is there a bubble, but rather, can monetary policy improve welfare by popping that bubble. The general opinion was no. First, monetary policy is an economy-wide hammer, and housing in only one sector. Second, housing bubbles were prevalent worldwide, and in fact were stronger in many other countries than the US, so it was difficult to imagine that non-extreme changes in policy would affect the bubble. Third, “use policy to clean up the mess after the bubble pops” was, I think, absolutely the right policy in 1987 and 2000, so a model of housing bubbles would have needed to explain what was different this time – even now, lost wealth from housing price declines are not, as far as I know, greater than the wealth decline of the dot-com bubble. That is, the housing bubble in and of itself required no different monetary policy, even with perfect hindsight.
The difference was in the financial markets, where for a variety of reasons (high leverage ratios, principal-agent problems, etc.), the decline in house prices led to what was functionally a bank run. The Fed was not the primary regulator of investment banks in the US, and is one of at least five regulators of local banks (OCC, FDIC, OTS, and state regulators among the others). This isn’t to excuse the Fed – they should have had an office looking at systemic risk! – but merely to point out that very few people saw systemic risk as a major problem in 2006, primarily because of a belief that shareholders and managers were capable of taking better care of their own firms and jobs. This was wrong, but the common criticisms of Baker and Shiller and others about Fed policy and housing bubbles completely abstract away from the real cause of the crisis, which was financial.
In any case, a housing bubble – by itself – would have been straightforward to deal with ex post with policy. That was not the problem."