Wary of Monday

Our friends the time monks at www.halfpasthuman.com told their subscribers that they are sort of expecting a big news event tomorrow which will impact markets Monday and Tuesday of this coming week, and to put it politely, we almost see the outline of a "perfect financial storm" shaping up for early in the week.

Not only has the Midwest just been slammed with a major winter storm that is blamed for at least 10-deaths so far, but we now expect the seriousness of winter to slam into upstate New York on Sunday.  The New York City area looks to be spared any direct impact, but the weather doesn't have to close streets and businesses to make a mess of things; it need only tone down the holiday spirit of spending.

Other factors may weigh on the market in the coming week as well.  It's the time of year when seasonal tax-selling takes place.  Investors want to lock in profits (or losses) to derive the best possible tax position by year end.  As Humberto Cruz writes in the (LA) Daily News: "All this maneuvering is part of a year-end tax planning ritual that regularly keeps hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in our pockets."

Not that it ends there.  Another factor which is weighing on the market is the dropping value of the dollar, which from an economist's perspective, represents something of an international, or "hot money" paradox.  The two titanic forces are play here are the cooling prospects for the US economy, which in a US-centric world would drive the stock market's down versus the view that equities in American companies represent ownership of a marketing niche, such that it becomes relatively cheaper for foreigners (think Asian) to buy US assets.

When you read reports like "Gold his 16-week high on weak dollar, silver firms" you have to remember that gold can go up valued in US currency at the same time it is going down valued in some other currency.  Such is the difficulty of predicting market moves, although by reckoning long term puts are extremely cheap and I am seriously tempted to wade in to some long term positions.  Some gamblers never learn?  For now, I've managed to resist.

One reason is "Bart's" work over at Nowand Futures.com which offers a recreation of the Fed's gone-since-March-06 M-3, the broadest measure of the money supply,  By his figuring the annual rate of change of M3 is running just about 10%, underscoring out long held belief that since 9/11 which coincided with the first leg down of the Second Depression, but misdirected public attention from that fact, the central banksters have been flooding the markets with liquidity on the theory that deflation can be exactly and precisely counteracted by driving offsetting inflation into the system. 

Thus, when M-3 disappeared in March for no legitimate reason, the Fed, in my view, tipped its hand that for sure, that was the game.  And, it has worked out for a while which is a good thing, but it all ends badly before the end of 2007 due to the dollars now obviously developing big leg down.  We'll explore some of the implications of this for our Peoplenomics subscribers this week in our Annual Forecast issue, but you should see the game clear enough to draw your own conclusions.  The worry about money is that everyone sobers up at the same time and realizes the jig is up.

And Our Next Civil War is?

The rebellion/revolution meme/theme which came up linguistically around the first of September continues to percolate along.  The latest: Egyptian president Mubarek fears that Lebanon could turn into another sectarian battlefield - a nice way of saying civil war.

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We may be reading too much into it, but OPEC is sending mixed messages about what's ahead for oil prices.

Ford in Fourth

Automaker Ford may have avoided some of the problems of GM, but despite their best efforts in the board room, the sales figures out this week put them at #4. GM seems to have pulled off a big turnaround, and it has surprised a few that Kirk Kerkorian's stock sale has been such a non-event.

Wii Be Happening

Selling out at some Tokyo retailers on Day One.

2200 Year Old Calculator

The discovery of an amazingly complex calculator has scientists scratching their heads. Better than anything for the next thousand years.  Best quote in the story: "What was not quite so apparent before was quite how beautifully designed this was," he said. "That beauty of design in this mechanical thing forces you to say 'Well gosh, if they can do that, what else could they do?'"

We have to wonder whether it's even older.  And yes, this lends a lot of credibility to Graham Hancock and the alternative archeologists who keep telling us history is not what's being taught in schools.  But as to what else they could build back then?  Repeat after me: Pyramids....and the list goes on...

Peoplenomics: Dollar Canary?

Friday December 1, 2006

A Curiously Timed Warning

I don't like coincidences, and so when news items and things I hear from friends start to pile up, I start paying a lot of attention to that pile of data.  That's the case this morning I read that the government is warning private financial services to be ready for a cyber attack, possibly starting as early as today. The reason the timing has me scratching my head a bit is that Steve Quayle has recently been talking about rumored meetings of bank tellers and such and reports about credit unions having systems down for reasons that weren't clear.  It's a subject Steve and I talked about over the past two weeks or so.  And then this warning comes out.  It's all a bit too coincidental for my tastes.

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The alert from the feds brings to mind an important box that the financial industry has put Americans in.  On the one hand, the only "money" that claims to be legal tender for all debts private and public is Fed-issued paper money.  Yet, if a person is caught in possession of more than $10,000 in cash, there's a law enforcement (which is really paradigm enforcement) presumption that such a cash-laden person must be some flavor of nogoodnick; drug dealer, terrorist sympathizer, or other un-American, anti-social sort. 

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I'm sure the deep thinkers have thought this through, but what would be the impact if Americans took such a warning seriously?  A prudent person might respond by stashing a few extra dollars around the house in whatever passes for a cookie jar these days.  But, let's face it: There's so little actual cash money in circulation today, because of the emergence of digidollars and webbucks, that if the public really got concerned about a cyber attack on financial institutions, and wanted to hedge by keeping a few thousand around the house, banks would quickly run out of actual cash.  We've chronicled before how at most banks, a withdrawal of more than $2,000 of your own money from a bank can result in supervisory interest in your plans and telling a bank official "I'm going shopping and I don't want to use checks" doesn't play well.  There's a presumption of guilt.

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This quite naturally gets me to re-reading the short Wikipedia entry covering the history of bank runs. But, as I read economic history as a professional worrywart, a comforting thought comes to mind: Most people don't take the time to think through the actual meaning of news headlines.  They just catch a story here and there and pass it off with a "Well, ain't that interesting..." and then it's on to another cup of coffee.

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It would appear that the more technologically savvy a person is, the more they develop first confidence, then reliance on computer-based financial systems.  When I first started trading stocks back in the early 1970's I had a choice between having certificates delivered or "held in street name."  Now days, virtually all securities are held in electronic trust.  While my confidence may be relatively high in that system, I choose not to own stocks at the moment.  About the only thing I'd have in event of an electronic catastrophe (think about the fed's warning here) is maybe a PDF or a piece of paper arriving in the mail that says I bought this or that security.

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In the event of a worst case failure, what would pass as proof of a deposit or proof of the purchase of a security?  How in the world could you prove that you still had custody or ownership at the time whatever system went down?  I may be the only person on the planet that backs up my Big Bank checking account statements as PDF files every couple of days, and that's one reason I haven't "gone paperless."  - I worry about things like things are vicious as cyber attacks and as benign as power failures,  and have taken every step I can think of to avoid exposure to risks I don't control.

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And just when I catch myself saying "George, you ought to get back into the market and do some trading...build up a little extra cash..."  I see a story that shakes my confidence.  No, not the fed's cyber attack warning.  Im talking about the failure Thursday of the floor trading computer system at the NYSE tyhat forced traders to revert back to manual operations for about 3-hours.

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Based on my expectations for next week, I find myself in a regulatory conundrum.  How much cash can (or should) a person have on hand, and how much should be in banks?  The conservative side of me says "Remember the 1930's!" But having too much cash is a crime, too, dammit.  Besides, I love the convenience of online banking. But - I still keep paper statements.

It's a difficult question made doubly important because how you answer it could be intuited by federal officials (or local police) as evidence of intent to do something un-American. Yeah.  Like think through the implications of some of today's headlines.

Sky Harbor X-Rays

Plans have been unveiled for full body scans of passengers at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport.

Say: Here's the UrbanSurvival/Independence Journal money-making idea of the day:  Instead of paying TSA staff to monitor the full body x-rays, why not sell "seat time" to oncologists and dentists in the Phoenix area?  Yah think?

Mexico's Midnight President

OK, we were expecting a showdown in Mexico's Congress today when the presidential swearing in (and at) of Felipe Calderon was scheduled.  But, Vincente Fox handed over the power just after midnight at a surprise swearing in.  So much for ringside seats in Mexico City, huh?

Weather Uglies

Not pretty...

• 200 dead in the Philippines from Typhoon Durian.

• Midwest snarled from the first major snowstorm of the season

• 19° here at the ranch this morning.

Megalomania Charged

A curious accusation of "megalomania" on the part of the BBC from the heir/son of Rupert Murdoch is reported.  Oh?

HP Shareholder Suit

HP shareholders are going after execs and the board for unloading nearly $40-million in shares before public disclosure.

Thursday Nov. 30 2006

Seasonal Grinchification

I don't suppose I have to tell you that I'm not a big fan of Christmas.  Nothing personal, mind you.  Sure, I enjoy the big family meals, the decorating the tree as a kid - and the joy of discovering Dad and two uncles "testing the new electric train" to make sure it worked when I was a kid.  But that was in the 1950's - a now mythical period when a family of four could live well on a single income, when a commute was often done via public transportation, and when a dollar would still buy 35% of what it would in 1913 when the modern robber-barons who hijacked America's money supply took over.  (It's down to 4.9% of 1913 purchasing power now.)

1957 was different than today in other important ways, too.  Local schools have relatively more control and less reliance of "guidelines from "above."  People didn't structure their personal lives around finances so much, and divorces weren't nearly as common.  50-years of so-called progress may have bought us iPods and dual screen CPU's, but most folks can't type any faster than when the IBM Selectric came out in 1961. True, there have been enhancements that allow us to read extremely fast using machine assisted reading systems (MARS) such as the Vortex Reader our web bot colleagues at www.halfpasthuman.com invented, but such systems are not for everyone.  And folks don't seem to communicate much more efficiently, either.

It's as though most humans, like it or not, are stuck with an I/O problem.  We don't type faster, read too much faster, think any faster, or speak more efficiently.  Yet, the technical development of the West has continued to spew forth new reasons to make and spend money.  Things taken for granted today, such as microwave ovens, HDTV's, and heated car seats, passed for miracles in 1957.  And the promise that nuclear power plants would make electricity "so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering" has been shown to be a little off the mark, as well.

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Watching "The Cinderella Man"  the other night, I was really struck by the kind of work folks were doing in the Depression.  Working the docks with little automation puts in stark contrast the way humans have been innovating themselves our of physical work in order to take on more intellectual pursuits.  The factories that I remember as a kid in Seattle, like the American Can Company plant down at the north end of the waterfront are long gone. Automated, exported, right-sized and changed.

You can almost see a progression in the specialization of labor in there somewhere:  From the revolutionary times when a man who had a newspaper did it all (like some of us who write on the internet now try), or a shop owner like a blacksmith did everything himself, we have evolved first to two and more people working as teams, to automation of tasks to automation of almost entire companies.

Especially when you get into the realm of financial services, or insurance, we have to ask if humans (other than those in customer service who field phone calls) will really be necessary in a few years.  At what point, one might reasonably ask, do we get to automation saturation and start removing humans from the mix entirely.

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This moment of mood-setting is not, I hope without point.  I share it as a perspective, so that when you open the NY Daily News today and read that 38,000 are taking job buyouts at ford, and with GM this means the US has lost 72,000 automotive jobs, that it will mean something.  Not just in the "Oh, another data point" sense, but at the human level.  We might be asking reasonable questions like "We're lurching toward the Business Singularity, but what will we do when we get there?"

It's not like Ford and GM are alone: A lot of other companies are reducing staff, too, as holiday job cuts gain momentum.

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Down on Wall Street, such sobering observations and tough core value questions are seldom asked - at least during trading hours - when the whole point of the game is to make money.  Still, some thoughtful reports are questioning what's ahead.  Take Business Week's report summarized this way:

"The Economy: Not Looking Like Christmas: The GDP, even revised up, is still down. Inventories have grown. And data like truck-freight stats are nothing you'd want under the tree"

No doubt there is a demographic element to it.  Most of us who are Baby Boomers either have two of everything, or don't want it.  So what's left to buy?  And, the Baby Boom Echo (kids of us Boomers) are not in diapers anymore.  Most or out gifting this year will be handled by writing checks, shoving them in envelopes, and sending them off to the kids.

My eldest daughter, age 29, had a birthday recently, and when I asked her what she wanted, she replied: "I'll get back to you after the birthday, in case there's anything I really wanted that I didn't get from someone else."  You know where that's going: The check is in the mail.

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And not to put too much of a Grinchly slant on things, I was surprised today to see that my daily tabulation of news stories featuring the word "shortage" in the Google news search engine hit a new all-time high (since I started logging returns March 15, 2006) of 15,000.

This is not to claim that "falling off the edge of the earth" is imminent, but consumer confidence did take a small drop in the latest report.  And despite the comments effectively saying "stay the course" by Fed boss Ben Bernanke this week, the foreign exchange position of the US continues to suffer falling dollar syndrome.  As we put bytes to drives, the price of gold as measured by dollars, is back approaching $640 and one US dollar can be had for 0.7573 Euro.

Meanwhile, MarketWatch reports "Fed's big worry gets revised away..."

The Iraq Balancing Act

Here's the problem in a nutshell:  Even if the US wanted to get out of Iraq, how would we go about it?  All six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are reportedly lined up against an Iraq pullout, especially with any kind of specific timetable. Meantime, the bipartisan panel reviewing the situation has recommended a gradual withdrawal of combat brigades. The difficulty we have now is that any rapid withdrawal would just about assure the civil war in Iraq would go country-wide and perhaps turn into a regional war as a vacuum might look interesting to other countries in the region with ambitions.

A $2-million Ooops

A Muslim lawyer in Oregon is getting $2-million and an apology for the government wrongly naming him as a 2004 Madrid train bombing suspect.

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Speaking of courts and terror, I keep forgetting to mention that a federal judge recently ruled George Bush doesn't have the authority to designate groups as "terrorist."

33,000 Warned

British Airways is warming passengers who might have been on the same plane as that Russian ex-spy who was recently killed with polonium 210.  Meantime, turns out that polonium is easy enough to get on the internet.  About $70.

Not Running

Bill First says he's not running for the White House in '08.  Fine with us.  Can we draft Ron Paul?

Electric Cars Coming

At the LA Auto Show, some talk about GM's electric car plans. Me?  I am a lot more excited about Bluetec - the term for new generation ultra clean diesels...

Wednesday Nov. 29 2006

Reader Note: This week's Mogambo Guru is posted at our mirror site, http://www.independencejournal.com/mogu/

GDP Growth: Falling

Newest figures out from the Bureau of Economic Analysis today shows the annual rate of growth of GDP dropped 4-10th's of a percent between Q2 and Q3 this year:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter of 2006, according to preliminary estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP increased 2.6 percent.

 

The GDP estimates released today are based on more complete source data than were available for the advance estimates issued last month. In the advance estimates, the increase in real GDP was 1.6 percent (see "Revisions" on page 3).

 

The increase in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, equipment and software, nonresidential structures, and state and local government spending that were partly offset by a negative contribution from residential fixed investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

 

The deceleration in real GDP growth in the third quarter primarily reflected an acceleration in imports, a larger decrease in residential fixed investment, and decelerations in private inventory investment, in PCE for services, and in state and local government spending that were partly offset by upturns in equipment and software, in PCE for durable goods, and in federal government spending.

 

Final sales of computers contributed 0.09 percentage point to the third-quarter growth in real GDP after contributing 0.04 percentage point to the second-quarter growth. Motor vehicle output contributed 0.76 percentage point to the third-quarter growth in real GDP after subtracting 0.31 percentage point from the second-quarter growth.

Personal Saving continues to decline, too.  Down 1.3% annualized, essentially no change from the previous quarter's annual rate down 1.4%.

Dollars in Context

Sadly, it's beginning to look like the web bot project's forecast of the start of the major decline in the dollar starting November 24th is revealing itself to be really accurate.  The developments are starting to pile up faster than the snow in Seattle.  So, to keep things simple, let's just run through the headline version of what's developing:

• Over all others, the Telegraph's headline this morning in the UK is "US setbacks see dollar plunge to near 15-year low."

• While the whole world is voting with its wallet, we notice that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson  is still supporting a "strong dollar" policy.  The mystery to us is what the Secretary might offer in the way of an asset or capability to back up that policy.  You see, at some level, a strong dollar must be backed up by more than paper, paper, and more paper.  The crooked game of bundling nonperforming loans and declaring them to be asset-backed securities is not exactly a basis upon which strong trade can be sustained.

• Since about 1997, I've offered an alternative view of contemporary economic history that says unlike the 1920's and 1930's, where tariffs were the primary tool in international books jiggering, in the present developing replay which seems likely to go into history books at the Second Depression, the international shenanigans are played with currency exchange rates.  An article Monday (also in the Telegraph) offers that the aircraft sales of "Airbus could trigger 'nuclear option' of currency controls."

• While conventional headline writers are attributing the recent strength of oil prices as a reaction to colder weather here in the US,  True enough, at least as far as the analysis goes, but I also think there's some component of weaker US dollars at play here.  The problem for a trader is trying to judge how much.

• One measure might be gold, which has shown recent strength, along with silver.  Flat this morning, I expect this will only be a short-term cooling period, with more upside to follow if Paulson & Pals can't make some new converts to paper backed by more paper, backed by bundled paper.  The major US export at the moment is debt instruments and derivatives.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development figures the world economy which is growing by about 3.2% this year will chill down to 2.5% next, based on an expected soft-patch here in the US.

But what they're calling a "soft patch" could be more like quicksand if the report from the Florida Association of Realtors out Tuesday is a harbinger of more bad news to come in housing.  Prices were flat and sales volume (number of units sold) was down 22%.  So much for house flipping as a new easy way to get rich, huh?

Still, if prices were relatively flat, that tends to support my view that the big bad troll of deflation isn't going to steal us all away to the poor house just yet.  In fact, as the dollar declines in purchasing power, there may be some external pressure on US assets to counter deflation.  We'll be watching the Dow Jones Industrials for hints on this, because as the dollar falls, the relative price of a US company falls when valued in an external currency.  

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Oh Look!  Hedge fund Citadel is planning to sell $2-billion worth of debt next week.

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All of depreciating dollar talk and the export of paper financial instruments as the #1 US export, has revealed to me why the CONgress tried to get rid of the US Penny last summer.

If the penny is required, then copper and zinc become the metals backing the US currency!  Hahahaha... As the purchasing power is sucked out of the dollar, Pennies will be become worth a nickel for their metal content...then a dime...then a dollar...then $10...then $20...  tears are coming to my eyes from thinking about the absurdity of this "new economics" crap.  Elaine and I are geniuses for buying producing farm land and metals...we know you can't eat a tossed paper vinaigrette.   Not that we win overnight, but better early than late.  Some pepper on that paper?

Paid to Merge?

The New York Times has a great headline that demands a little daylight.  Reporting on the proposed merger of regulators who work for the NYSE and the NASD, the Times headline reads: "Let’s Vote on Securities Rules. Oh, and Here’s $35,000." That little detail is missing from most other versions of the story.  Not a confidence inspiring event. 

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With notional values of derivatives now over 6-times world GDP, I find myself asking is there any limit to the madness of financial markets?  The answer is "No, not as long as there's no limit on the number of layers paper that can be shoved between a producing asset and the n'th paper holder.  Hell, who needs an underlying asset in this kind of craps game, anyhway?

Mexico's Revolution

We continue to watch what seems like a slow-motion and under-reported revolucion underway in Mexico.  The latest development is a fist fighting that broke out in their version of congress yesterday.  Heck, inaugurations are boring compared to heavyweight championships.

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By the way, the Mercury News headlines this as: "Leftist politicians try to take control of Mexican Congress".  You might want to refer to our discussion of labels left and right on Monday, which prompted one reader to suggest:

"George,

The visual imagery suggested by the left/right rhetoric of politics is misleading. It allows us to think that we are all distributed around a great big field, some clumping up at one end or the other, with the possibility of meeting and mingling in the center. But real politics is vertical. It's who's on top that counts. The rulers of the universe don't think of themselves as "on the right." They just own and run the world and intend to keep it that way - and have been systematically removing the lower rungs on the ladder. Left and right may have some utility in helping to choose dinner companions."

Tuesday Nov. 28 2006

Pan Pacific Quake Warning Relaxed

Last week, both www.urbansurvival.com and www.halfpasthuman.com did something extraordinary - we issued a warning about an imminent "9.5 earthquake" which looked, with our time-scanning technology, like it would be accompanied by some undersea volcanic action.  Today, we are able to relax the advisory and point to the high immediacy value events which triggered the alert.

Dollar: Catch Falling Knives?

If It Walks Like a Duck...

What's a Leftist?

Numbers Day

We expect the Consumer Confidence numbers later this morning - so that and a few other items will drive the market when the action gets rolling at the Wall St. casino.

 

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Monday Nov. 27 2006

Monday After

This major investment sport to be played out this week is to try and second-guess market reaction to Black Friday and today, which is Cyber Monday.  One forecast is that 61-million people will conduct shopping over the internet this year - a huge percentage gain from last year's estimated 52-million.
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For our amusement, though, the thing to watch is how the US dollar does this week.  The web bot forecast that the dollar decline would begin in earnest on the 24th have proven accurate, at least so far.  This morning, we note that the London market seems down a bit in reaction, and the price of gold and oil, denominated in US currency, seem headed up.

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The fall in the US dollar may be a good thing, at least for a while.  When the US dollar falls, the price of imported goods goes up; interpreted as inflation by most.  And inflation is good because of what?  It helps to keep up appearances that housing is not collapsing.  Not that the housing bubble has gone away, but it's clearly being portrayed as a regional event.

 

For example in parts of Nevada, we read that housing prices are down 13 percent.  And sure, housing prices might drop another two years in California, says one economist.  But there are patches of appreciation.  Eastern Washington, for example, seems to be undergoing "discovery" at the moment.

 

Here in East Texas, we've noticed a relentless increase in land prices this year, too.  With UPS and FedEx covering the country as well as they do, living in the city, or living in a rural area becomes more of a conscious choice than victim of circumstance.  Knowledge is transportable, and once you've got a fat pipe {to the internet} why should your boss have to pay office rent for you, if you can work from home?

 

Booing the Pope

Thousands demonstrating in Turkey today in advance of the Pope's visit. Faithful Muslims are still upset with his reference to Muslims as "evil and inhumane" - a quote from a 14th century Byzantine emperor.

 

NATO: Energy Police?

There's a big NATO summit starting tomorrow in Latvia.  One of the big (if not the biggest in terms of long-range impact) will be the discussion about whether NATO should become more aggressive in maintaining security of energy supplies.

 

Troop Cuts

Lots of headlines around this morning about troop cuts in Iraq.  The UK expects to cut thousands by the end of 2007.  Wasting no time, Italy will complete its troop withdrawal by the end of this week.

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The situation in Washington is a lot harder to figure.  The Detroit Free Press headlines "Democrats hold fire on pullout" Republican Chuck Hagel, meantime, says the US should begin a phased withdrawal.  The US has now been fighting in Iraq longer than we fought in WW II, notes an AP report over at Forbes.

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But Iraq is not the only mess in the Middle East judging by comments by Jordan's King Abdullah II.  He figures Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq all to be powder kegs of civil wars.

 

Quake Warning Update: Wednesday?

We expect an update, perhaps Wednesday afternoon, from the "time monks" at www.halfpasthuman.com who last week issued an extraordinary pan Pacific earthquake warning.  There's a chance that the quake expected in the present period is actually coming a year from now.  The reason is a little complicated, but goes something like this.  If you remember the web bot forecast that preceded the Banda Aceh quake, we had the initial forecast in mid August of 2004.  The quake itself didn't happen till just after Christmas that year. The important thing is that it was a four month lead time on a mega quake. 

 

One of our theories is that the bigger and event is, the more lead time is involved.  Thus, if 250 to 300-thousand dead cast a foreshadow linguistically of 4-months, what does a one-year foreshadowing mean, if in fact we've caught the leading edge of a quake that could be a once every few thousand years in size?  The simple answer is: It's not good. 

 

Then there's the matter of the charts/time maps which the subscribers to the web bot runs get.  We would expect to see a huge "release" change in emotional values accompany such an event - and we don't see anything this month that would qualify as large enough.  We continue in an emotional stress increase period, with only small releases (relatively speaking, when compared with a Pacific mega quake) through the Ides of March 2007.  Serious flare up in the Middle East in December, sure, but not the kind of "end of global trade" kind of event that a pan Pacific quake with massive aftershocks and plate movement would entail.

 

What's under study now is whether the pan Pacific event could give a full year warning - and then there's the question of why the high immediacy values in the linguistics?  Bigger brains than mine are working on this - and as I've said before, there's no instruction manual for making event predictions by using subtle language shifts on the internet and capturing what seems like global awareness changes.  But more likely on Wednesday afternoon.

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Although scoffed at by the time monks, I also remember that in the August 2004 quake prediction, we experienced some mixing of  multiple quakes.  Part of the August '04 quake prediction was fulfilled by the California (Redwood City) quake during the Peterson trial, and we chided ourselves at the time; "What about the 300-thousand dead and land driven back to a previous age, and electric water rising descriptors?"  So it seems, when looking through time using linguistics, a small quake reaction close in (temporally) can obscure/mix with a bigger event further along (temporally), as the Redwood City/Banda Aceh.  A small quake close in, say a 6-7 with some media coverage/global awareness, seems reasonable to me.  Cliff has made it clear though, that the earlier case involved short term values and long term values, not high immediacy values.  Different stuff. 

 

Fortunately, we've got the luxury of having two data pipes open at the moment - one feeding the 907 subscriber feed (which focuses on the the 9th lunar month of 2007) and a separate private run.

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Meantime, the project has been forecasting "encounter with scarcity" for better than a year, and as I have mentioned before, it seems like the longer the lead time, the more dire events turn out to be when they arrive.

 

Back in March, I started looking the daily returns from Google's news search engine, trying to see what a simple word frequency might capture in advance of major "encounters with scarcity" arriving.  I'd expect the use of the term shortage to head skyward as a result of something like the predicted pan Pacific event.  Interestingly, here's what it looks like:

 

 

You might also recall that under the headline "Ammo and MRE's" our March 23 report earlier this year, I started mentioning that ammunition seemed to be heading for shortages with common rounds going up in price and some, like 7.62X39 still hard to find, even today.  A couple of readers have reported in the past few weeks that even some types of reloading supplies (primers) have started to become less available.

 

American Father of Prius Dies

We note the passing this weekend of David Hermance, credited with getting the Toyota Prius to market. Of an aerobatic plane accident.

 

Audit Odds

IRS has been increasing audits on folks who have incomes of more than $1-million.  Please, let me have that problem some day...

 

Reality Check

My 91-year old/young mother, who falls down every once in a while found herself in the hospital over the long weekend, recovering from a fall.  While "snapping out of it" the doctors asked her a series of questions to determine her mental acuity.

"Mrs. Ure, what year is it?"

"2006"

"Do you know what day it is?"

"Wednesday."

"Good.  Do you remember your son's name?"

"George"

"Do you know who the president of the US is?

"Oh, I don't like him very much..."

Passed.  Go home.

 

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News from Elliott Wave International

The Web UrbanSurvival Only

On to Our Chart!

Instead of our customary chart, this week you get a free peak at one of our other charts from www.peoplenomics.com - this is our "Global Markets Equally Weighted" chart:

 

 

Write when you get rich,

 

George Ure, The People's Economist