Darts at the Market, Pakistan’s Mushrooms

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Here’s how today ought to roll:  The market should pop up a hundred, or so, but today’s daily dart lands on some selling starting around 10:43 Eastern/9:43 Central time as the market gets ready to wind up Q1.  A drop of a bit today and maybe a further drop next week (to drive prices down for the Q2 buys) would make sense if we rally into May.  Not a prediction, just where our darts have been landing.

We do have a lot of faith in darts, as Paul Samuelson’s work seemed to show.  As amplified in Burton Malkiel’s classic book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (12th Edition). Malkiel, BTW, spent a very successful 28-years at the Vanguard Group.  I wish I had 1-10th of his brains…then again, maybe that’s a fair estimate.  But, I digress.

There is a bit of “hard economic news” just out from the Bureau of Economic Analysis which has been ever-so-slowly recovering from GovDown earlier this year.  In this morning’s chapter of “Belated Economic Data” we read two month’s worth of data…

“Personal Income and Outlays, January 2019
Personal income decreased $22.9 billion (-0.1 percent) in January according to estimates released today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Disposable personal income decreased $34.9 billion (-0.2 percent), and personal consumption expenditures increased $8.6 billion (0.1 percent).

Real DPI decreased 0.2 percent in January, and real PCE increased 0.1 percent. The PCE price index decreased 0.1 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 0.1 percent.

The decrease in January personal income primarily reflected decreases in personal dividend income, farm proprietors’ income, and personal interest income that were partially offset by increases in social security benefit payments (related to cost of living adjustments) and other government social benefits to persons, which includes the Child Tax Credit and the Affordable Care Act refundable tax credit.

In January, real PCE increased $15.6 billion which reflected a $20.8 billion increase in spending for services that was partially offset by a decrease of $7.7 billion in spending for goods (table 7). Within services, the largest contributor to the increase was spending for financial services and insurance. Within goods, new motor vehicles was the leading contributor to the decrease.

Personal outlays increased $6.3 billion in January (table 3). Personal saving was $1.19 trillion in January and the personal saving rate, personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income, was 7.5 percent.

Personal Income, February 2019
Personal income increased $42.0 billion (0.2 percent) in February. Disposable personal income (DPI) increased $31.3 billion (0.2 percent); Real DPI is unavailable for February.

The increase in personal income in February primarily reflected increases in wages and salaries, government social benefits to persons, and proprietors’ income that were partially offset by a decrease in personal interest income.”

As the US rushed to put some points on the board Thursday, we were much more interested in looking at the Fed Money Supply numbers which continue to reveal the mechanics of “lower for longer” as championed by Ben Bernanke.  The new Fed H.6 money stocks report for the 13-weeks ending March 18 showed the M1 print run at 3.6 percent annualized and that’s the kind of range that will generally cause a market decline.  But not always…

I might have mentioned this to you previously, but it bears repeating:  America was blessed with Bernanke at the helm of the Fed and in his academic afterlife (where the L4L strategy came from) because he’s in the same league with Murray Rothbard in taking in the whole of the 1930’s Depression impacts.

The “starter kit” to understand current economic currents would include just two books:  Murray Rothbard’s “America’s Great Depression” and Dr. Bernanke’s “Essays on the Great Depression.” Toss in Richard T. Ely’s later books and articles and you’d be smarter than me.  (I’m still competing with the door knob…)

Pakistan’s Mushrooms

Since we “spun up” our home intel platform (with a side of Nostracodeus web-scanning software on an old server) we’ve been getting our fill of “trigger event” analysis to read about the coming Indo-Pak SloGloWar.

On the Brewminate site, an article by By Dr. Alyssa Ayres
Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia
Council on Foreign Relations, is worth a read: India and Pakistan at the Brink.

To even mention the CFR will no doubt set off alarm bells because conspiracists think the CFR runs the world.  While we make no judgments of that sort, we believe the “steely-eyed” view of the future we hold should not be tainted by bias against any sources.  Experience offers guidance that source-bias (as opposed to dispassionate data study) is a huge source of error when predicting the future.

Since the “Division of India” happened August 15, 1947, and since we know the 72-year war/massive political change cycle runs a bit short (71.916 years), we have circled 30.66 days before that as the time to have fallout prepping complete.  Round it off to July 15 ought to be close enough, though I wouldn’t want to be in New Delhi after, oh, tomorrow, or so…

That’s because there is a lot of movement in the India-Pakistan arms race.  You should have noted that India recently claimed it had shot down one of it’s own low-orbit satellites.  This makes the case they can bring down the “national technical means” or other countries.

Since things are on a fast simmer with Pakistan now, and since spy satellites are like fleas on a dog, we notice that in response “Pakistan urges no militarization of space after India downs satellite.”

Remember, arms races have unpredictable outcomes.  Although it’s popular “bubble head” to say the U.S. beat the Soviet Union, that’s  because of militaria.  It was because when VHS video tapes showed middle class workers in America living at hugely better lifestyles than central planning was delivering, revolution quickly followed.

The “bubble head” part is such boastful capitalists forget that the US-Soviet arms race almost went to flashing mushrooms over the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.

A genuinely dispassionate read of the data raises the question was President Kennedy killed over alleged plans to end the Federal Reserve (that conspiracists love to write about) OR (and this is one no one writes about) was his Dallas end because the global power cabal at the time actually wanted a nuclear exchange to ramp down global population.

Remember, sometimes the facts don’t emerge contemporaneous with events and maybe that’s why the Club of Rome – Limits to Growth –  report on population went public in 1972?

It’s axiomatic in study of “future” that a “leadership cabal” is usually thinking 10-years ahead of events.  So, we can find a fair body of work evolving in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis where population projections began to really matter.

I remember in  1966 reading an article in the old (Wall Street Journal weekly paper) The National Observer about the “crisis of pop growth” – which narrows the “think ahead” down to less than 5-years.  Which is a pretty “normal” lead-time for (among others) military planners and tacticians.

The Observer article that so impressed me raised the newly-emergent question which I’ll paraphrase:  “If we feed the Third World, they will breed with reckless abandon and overpower the First World.  But, is it not the humanitarian thing to do?”

The post-Cuba crisis was also the birth of Zero Population Growth.  “In the late 1960s ZPG became a prominent political movement in the U.S. and parts of Europe, with strong links to environmentalism and feminism. Yale University was a stronghold of the ZPG activists who believed “that a constantly increasing population is responsible for many of our problems: pollution, violence, loss of values and of individual privacy.”

If I were a betting man, I’d say while there’s some historical support for the Kennedy-Fed conspiracy, there may be a stronger case for a Kennedy vs. Military conspiracy, which would also draw in the intelligence community.  Kennedy was killed just one year later  (Cuba crisis Oct 1962, Kennedy was killed in Nov of 1963).

For that brief instant from Starfish Prime until the Cuban Crisis resolution, the US was in a “window” where we owned and understood the preemptive use of EMP. The unthinkable became doable and Kennedy likely disagreed.

Conspiracists also miss the point that the Fed (at least so far as we know) doesn’t have a “wet work” division.  But the military?  OMG it’s what they do for crying out loud.

If you like the conspiracy side of history, you might imagine that an alternative “conspiracy” might be to imagine that the U.S. military knew – from the July 9, 1962 explosion of Starfish Prime – that the U.S. was in a very short-lived window of military advantage where nuclear war could be thought to “winnable.”

Specifically, Starfish Prime’s 1.4 megatons blew out street lights in Hawaii some 800 miles from the blast and knowing this, the U.S. military would have realized their advantage.  All that remained was an excuse.  The Cuban Missile Crisis arrived 90-days later.  Time was of the essence.

We will likely never know if such a hypothesis is valid.  Military leaders would never tell.  Any evidence is lost.  Yet, a read of the Warren Commission and subsequent books falls short of proving the “lone gunman theory.”  We expect there were several.

I mention all this detail, because we may be facing a similar “window” where India – with its newfound ability to pluck off LEO satellites – may sense a momentary “military lead” that could be prosecuted in a manner that could result in a “preemptive strike” on Pakistan this summer.

90-days (rounding) from Starfish Prime to the Cuban Missile Crisis and a likely (concurrent) showdown with the “military industrial complex” which owned the intelligence apparatchik of the US at the time.  Same folks that Eisenhower warned of.  Kennedy likely crossed them and their preemptive strike plans.

Using the Starfish Prime template, India going preemptive this summer is therefore not so far-fetched as headlines might suppose.

In the Shorts

Anti-Stall System Switched on Before Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX Crash: Report.

Lyft valued at $24.3 billion in first ride-hailing IPO.

U.S., China hold ‘constructive’ trade talks in Beijing.

And if the news drives you to drink, you’ll be thrilled to know there’s “Movement toward a poop test for liver cirrhosis.”

Oi..

Tell the chickens and pigs to hide, Ure’s on his way to breakfast…moron the ‘morrow…

21 thoughts on “Darts at the Market, Pakistan’s Mushrooms”

  2. George

    ” the Fed (at least so far as we know) doesn’t have a “wet work” division.”

    Yes, but the current version of Directorate 153 does!

    Because Starfish Prime’s 1.4 megatons blew out street lights in Hawaii all land based ICBM’s in the USA monitor for EMP 24 hours a day and will not launch during an EMP condition.

    I assume all major USA military units have their own monitoring ability.

    In the 1970’s all it took was a small console about the size of a two drawer filing cabinet and an outside antenna. I imagine the current version is the size of a pack of cigarettes.

    Does India or Pakistan have this ability? I would be surprised if they don’t!

  3. Dont ya know G, StarFish Prime was an attepmpt to blow hole in the lid of the matrix? So we can escape flat earth? We are just all pixels on God flat screen Tv. Lately God had been watching doom porn.

    Hahahhahahaahhahha!

    Okay thats enough out of me. See ya around. I got to be grabbing gears again. :)

  4. Americans feel our economy is strong under President Trump. As I previously mentioned, the $37 Trillion dollar AI, blockchain, & Internet of Things boom will be the leader in the coming stock market boom. No worry until URE INDEX 30,000. But you have to be in it to win it. Pick your poison & slowly buy in.

  5. “the coming Indo-Pak SloGloWar”

    Theres a probability of a war.. but I doubt seriously it will spiral out of control that way..

    Pakistan has so many coveted resources.. that turning it into a glass parking lot just isn’t something that anyone would want..
    Pakistan Hates the great devil America to..
    I can see the puppeteers having everyone’s child and grandchild ( except theirs of course) going in to get them some more turnips.. but.. I don’t think they would let nukes go off contaminating the country so much that all the turnips were unobtainable..

    the wild hair of possibility here is.. the terrorist factions.. do they have access to the nukes.. like NK Kim.. he is a wild hair as well and he has said right out.. go ahead destroy my peoples homes and land and I will drop one in your back yard I have nothing to loose by doing that.. so far I don’t think any of the puppeteers homes since medieval times has been on the battlefields or their families lives threatened by war in their neighborhoods.
    Considering the terrorist factions.. they don’t care about destroying their own treasures or heritage. that could possibly be the glow part of this.. see they get 74 virgins if they die..

    • “…see they get 74 virgins if they die..”
      Yeah, but they weren’t told the ‘virgins’ are goats or sheep!

      • OTFLMAO… I know right.. one of my many employers brought a worker in from Pakistan.. ( he thought my friend and I should both be put to death by the way LOL.. the reason.. we let women tell us what to do..We would tell him.. we are american men and in america the woman has as much say so..according to him woman walks eight paces behind the man) he came as a refugee govt.. paid part of his wages he to got choice hours and a higher wage to boot.. he to of course didn’t have to pay any taxes.. and he got rent etc etc etc.. really torks me off.. because our congress is ( grrr getting ready to go on a rant here about the recess kids again.. ) anyway.. the only reason he came here was so he could get enough american money to buy 12 wives.. (He told us his wives ideal ages.. 6-10 but he would take a 13 year old if he had to..) anyway.. where I was working is ran by women.. the administrator was a woman the DON a woman.. etc.. he made it 2 weeks .. maybe a little less.. came in and asked where did.numb nuts go.. seemed the Administrator because of complaints by the staff..( women) went to tell him he had to take the trash out.. LOL LOL LOL LOL… his response was…
        YOU FAT COW.. IF YOU WERE IN MY COUNTRY I WOULD HAVE YOU BEATEN AND STONED FOR THE WAY YOU TALKED TO ME.. LOL LOL needless to say.. he was no longer employed.. seemed he wasn’t our facilities ideal material.. I laughed of course and say.. come on tell me the truth here.. you all hid in the bushes to beat him when he left didn’t you.. LOL.. they said some other state was offering them more money to work there..
        People just don’t get it that they live the Old Testament or Quran.. same thing there was a store opened up.. Sudanese grocery store..I went in to buy some coffee ( they sell un roasted beans I love to roast my own from time to time) there was the land lord getting after the wife of the owner of the store about how they weren’t following his rules.. after he left I asked him out of curiosity just what he was thinking about when he did that.. he said they have to follow those rules like everyone else.. YES BUT… you talked to the woman.. she won’t even mention it to the husband she would be beat. if you want to get the changes done then walk up to the man and tell him.. He see you as an infidel to though. in his minds eye.. what you say means nothing and since infidels are enemy what you have is his if he is following the good book to the letter.. if she told him what you just told her to tell him will get her beat..woman and children Nope.. you never here of a terrorist bomber being an older man.. nope..its always women and children..

  6. Speaking of the Cuba Missile Crisis, note that Russia has now moved 100 troops into Venezuela and Trump is now rattling the sabers to get em out.

    • Unfortunately Jim .. Venezuela asked putin for Russia’s help.

      https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rferl.org/amp/29739552.html

      He only goes where he’s asked. My guess is he’s a smart guy. He realizes that the whole situation is probably a power grab for more turnips..for a very few people..
      It won’t make any difference to him what the bought and paid for want.From seeing what he’s done before and what his viewpoint is. My thought is He will look to see what he thinks is right for the administration and people that has asked him for help and stand by it. He has the backing of his country.
      It sure doesn’t take much to realize..our military might is supplied to us from outside our country. We are militarily active in what..157 countries now.
      We have a virtual army marching on our borders a Congress divided against the people. And our financial situation is bleak. Those that can afford to pay more race to the borders to hide it squirrel it away ..
      Seriously.. How much more can we borrow.. Print to much more and it won’t be worth anything and would probably be dropped as the currency to stand by.
      Our jobs and industry is in shambles..
      Just saying from my point of view .. Is their oil and natural resources worth glowing in the dark so someone wanting to have it all can sit back and roll in it.

      • Anonymous, who’s responsible is not my point.

        My point was that there is yet another flashpoint developing

  7. Oh for the love of Pete … “China Testing Long-Range Cruise Missile Fired From Concealed Ship Container” https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-28/china-testing-long-range-cruise-missile-fired-concealed-ship-container. “…China’s new long-range cruise missile which can be launched directly from a shipping container device, which is meant to conceal detection of the threat right up until the moment of launch. Alarmingly, it’s already being flight tested, according to analysts cited in the report, which further finds the technology “could turn Beijing’s large fleet of freighters into potential warships and commercial ports into future missile bases.””

    Look at the picture in the article. It’s the nightmare-come-to-life that Forstchen wrote about in his novel. Russia built it, China copied it for their cruise missiles and it’d be a major “face-palm” if we never did and stashed them somewhere overseas. Anyone taking bets on any ME countries doing the same?

    I think I’ll make another trip to Sam’s to stock up on toilet paper, salt, jerky … Need about three more metal trash cans for my electronics and a safe place for spare solar panel assemblies and I think my ammo’s getting a little long in the tooth as well… I’m pretty sure goats are EMP proof but when they start to glow in the dark … mmmmaybe not.

    • Take your time. Nothing will start here in the near future; what happens elsewhere isn’t going to migrate here soon, either. Diplomats don’t live in their own excrement. The one thing about John Bolton of which I approve (and STILL the reason I believe Trump brought him on-board), is he scares the crap out of diplomats.

      None of them are willingly going to pull his attention…

    • “”China Testing Long-Range Cruise Missile Fired From Concealed Ship Container” ”

      Bill… Russia has had their klub-k defense system for decades. America has an equivalent.. It just makes sense that since China is the manufacturers of most of this equipment that they would adopt it into their defense systems.

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ggRGvA5bwWc

      What I see as scary..we sold our ports of entry and we don’t check incoming containers. They could be in a yard near any of us..chasing ghosts..

      • The video’s one of those odd ones that have the same video sequence looped 2 or 3 times. Wonder who was in charge of putting that together?

        How ironic for it to say “Every state has the right to independence” when throughout history aggressive take over has been the norm. I’ve always wondered where that gene is in our DNA? The global chess game is running out of big moves to accommodate and acquire resources and the final moves will take place when one party thinks the other isn’t looking.

        Nicholson’s Jessup shouting “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”? rings down through all the ages of professional military people who know what’s coming. The daily news from our Southern border speaks volumes for that resource war while Russia and China have reached the point they can actively compete against our own World domination. Thinking it’s going to get better through negotiations is simply fooling ourselves. Enjoy life while you can here in ‘Merica.

  8. The privately owned FED does not have a “wet work divison” ?..now that is funny! Never noticed what happens to leaders and their countries when they defy the FED/Central Bank?? Bankers voluntarily jumping off buildings attempting suicide? Step out of line with the “club” and watch the honey trap/gay waylay ops begin..they luv Human Compromise.

    George to my ol tired eyes the monthly S&P “sequential” chart is looking FanF-ingTastic..new All Time Highs are on the way. Weekly “sequential” chart is just about/verging on Bullish – time to buy,buy,buy – just dont forget Stops and or a Hedge to downside. Who cant make money in the market when FED Put is Back!

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