SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - FOMC Tomorrow and the End of QE III

The Street hit the stock market with tranquilizers and vitamins ahead of the end of QE III which will most likely come tomorrow with the Fed's afternoon FOMC announcement.

I expect the market to be supported, and perhaps find support as well.

This is a technically traded, highly dangerous market beneath the surface calm.

Have a pleasant evening.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Spooky Janet and the Zombies of the American MIddle Class

Unlike the fiends of folklore fright;

No coffin holds them safe for night.

Our Vampires live amongst our ranks;

And haunt us from their central banks.

A. S.

As a reminder tomorrow is a precious metal options expiration on the Comex.

Wednesday is an FOMC announcement.

Let's see if the hinted extension of QE transpires.   As if.

The Tories are trying to offset the subsidies for their wealthy by declaring their disabled 'fit to work' and slashing their benefits.  And here I thought they could sink no lower.  Oh, well done. 

This afternoon Dennis Gartman forecast that crude oil would literally drop to 'ten dollars' and would, over the next twenty or so years, go the way of whale oil as it is completely replaced by fusion energy (supplied by Lockheed for example).  He also urged the US government to start selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.   Looks like it might be time for Russia to throw in the towel, right?

I wonder what Dennis' book might look like?  Or whose it might be? 

A technology is only as good and effective as its implementation and 'roll out' into general availability.   And effectively eliminating the need for oil in about twenty years would be an ambitious infrastructure project for even the best organized of societies.

 

This from a country that cannot even repair its bridges now, or provide high quality rail transportation, or find the will to modernize its power grid, or a real estate title system that is not based on massive neglect and fraud, or a truly high speed internet system, or a capital allocation equity market with a level of integrity than would not be deemed criminal in a Las Vegas casino, or manage a single high level prosecution in one of the greatest financial frauds in history, or hold an election where people are not purposefully denied the right to vote by artificially complicated last minute ID rules and ridiculously long waiting lines.

 

Or manage a healthcare system that doesn't look as though it is price managed by Scrooge & Marley, or perhaps Sweeney Todd.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Twitter Spanked After Hours

Stocks were trading weakly most of the day, with a late day push for the green into the close.

After hours Twitter was down about 8% on a lackluster earnings report.

The US equity market is thinly traded and highly driven by technical (up) and any exogenous events which, if negative, could precipitate a violent sell off.

Let's see how they manage the formation of this current bubble, and how soon it will be before it meets El Cliffo. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Chris Hedges: The Myth of a Free Press

The bias in the US media towards corporate and special interests is apparent in some sources more easily and readily than in others, especially if one has access and bothers to look at a broad base of international news sources. 

The great change was institutionalized with the overturn of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan in 1985 and the revoking of media ownership restrictions from 1934 and 1975 under the Clinton administration's Telecommunications Act of 1996.

What has changed perhaps is the extreme marginalization of independent sources.  For the most part media outlets declare themselves for one group or another.  The bias of the financial media in policy issues has become so obvious and servile to its corporate interests that it is almost embarrassing.  What is even more surprising is the reach of this sort of continuous advocacy journalism into 'mainstream' channels such as Fox and MSNBC that actively re-interpret reality to suit a class of viewers. 

This balkanization of the issues attracts large classes of listeners into group think, and precludes any meaningful debate of the issues, even to the very framing of the questions and the issues, and ultimately their very perception of reality.

This is a brief excerpt.   Read the entire article for free here.

"The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy—even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism.

They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia. The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses.

The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power...

The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power.

The press writes and speaks—unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians—to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state.

It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions."

Chris Hedges, The Myth of a Free Press

Naomi Klein on Global Neoliberalism

Yellen's Trickle Down Dilemma

Why is the economy so sluggish?

Even if real wages are stagnant, and consumers are tapped, the Banks have been saved and stand ready to loan from an abundance of freshly created money (that they can obtain for almost nothing).

Why won't consumers make a leap of faith and borrow more, betting their last assets on an indifferent Congress and an elusive recovery?  

 

It's heads we win and tails you lose for the bailout Banks. 

 

And from a Banker's perspective it probably makes sense.

 

The Reason There Has Been No Sustainable Recovery

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”

John Maynard Keynes  

How can an economy based on printing money and financial repression for a broken financial system achieve self-sustaining organic growth?

Where is the growth in aggregate demand fueled by a growth in employment and an increase in median wages?

Is the great mass of the public thriving, or barely surviving?

Why do we insist on blaming and denigrating the victims of a massive and ongoing financial fraud that after six years is still largely intact?

 

There is only one thesis that needs to be nailed to this door...

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.