The Futures are just about flat this morning, and in a way, it is kinda surprising.

Here’s why:

One is the item that we went into some detail for in our discussion this weekend on the Peoplenomics.com site about the possibility that the U.S. economy is being “run” by artificial intelligence, already, at some level.  Why Bush Policy = Obama Policy.

This should not be surprising, since A.I. has been used in wargaming circles for years and the Mac game Balance of Power dating back to the 1980s should have been a major clue that if one developer (OK, a genius, I will give him that) could figure it out, so could that large hungry government near you.

The second thing is companies in the UK are scamming to get out of having to file quarter financial reports with regulators and investors.  This is perhaps the worst idea out of the UK since monarchy or King George – take Ure pick.  (More in our Coping section to follow).

But the real reason I am reeling from this asylum-like buzz, at least as portrayed on television, having never been in the deal-deal, is the assortment of headlines that lead me to believe the greater part of the U.S. population is not comprehending the reality of what’s going on.

Let me give you some examples:

Mexico’s Biggest Export?

It’s PEOPLE.

And if you’ll give me a minute to explain, there is much we can learn about U.S. relations with Mexico with a quick once-over a Denmark….yeah…Denmark.

Found by legal-beagle Jeffrey W.

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With the Fed meeting tomorrow, we are about as excited as mourners at a funeral.

That’s because the Fed really is in something of a no-win position.

As explained in yesterday’s column, the Fed is trying to navigate the same kind of seas that faced the 1928 Fed.  There were modest interest rates and pools of cash had piled up on the sidelines.  And bonds were hot, as well.  But the real place where the action centered was the stock market.

We seem to have overlooked the fact that since the market low in 2009, the Dow has screamed from a weekly close in March of 2009 of 6626.94 to almost three times that number before the current round of “second thoughts” popped up last summer.  Similar gains for the S&P, too.

From an Elliott Wave standpoint, that was where we start counting the current wave down from. The top on 4/15/2011 (on a weekly closing basis) was arguably the end of the Wave 1 up.  Then you run up to last summer.

I work all these numbers using something I call the Aggregate Index because you can’t trust only the S&P or Only the NASDAQ, or for that matter, only the Dow.  Not that they are not of high integrity as data points: they are. 

But what lacks integrity are the market players themselves.  Back in the days of the old University of Colorado Longwaves group, my consigliere (and others who pop up here from time-to-time) noticed the evolution of a phenomena called “hot money.”

This was wire-transferred all over the world and with computer speeds increasing, it became more and more evident that  the behavior of the markets became more like traffic on the freeway.  If there was an accident in Asia, things slowed down on that stretch of the financial highway.  Lookers, gawkers, and bottom-fishers duked it out there.

Halfway around the world, another batch of hot money might land in Europe.  So the markets there might be going up.  And in-between, the market could be going up, down, or sideways, here in the USA.

The ONLY SOLUTION THAT MADE SENSE to me, anyway (being of limited brainpower and all) was to build first a Global Index (which we present on the Peoplenomics side twice weekly) along with the U.S. Aggregate.  A lot of the money comes off the table for weekends, so that’s what matters in our studies.

Again, not that the S&P is bad, neither is the Dow, or for that matter the NASDAQ Composite.  But you see, it’s the fashion in investing that swells or fades.  That’s why in one period of time, say the week of July 23, 1999, the Dow was 10,910.96 while the NASDAQ was 2,864.48. 

If you divided the NASDAQ into the Dow at that weekly close, you’d see it took 3.809 times the NASDAQ to “buy the Dow.”

As always, the fashion in investing goes to extremes.  The the week of April 10, the following year, it took less than 2X the NASDAQ to buy the Dow.  1.96664 if you really want to know.

But you remember what happened next?  Somewhere between $5 and $8-trillion of market cap blew out of the NASDAQ  in The Tech Wreck also known as the Internet Bubble.

We’ve got a chart for Peoplenomics subscribers tomorrow, but if you’re wondering, tech is held today at about the same investing fashion {esteem} level that it was being held in winter of 2000 when the top was in and the big slide was beginning.

You can learn a lot by marking up your own charts.  You can ask logical questions, which we do, now and then.   There’s the ratio of one barrel of WTI (west Texas intermediate crude) to the Dow, for example.  With practice, charts will begin appearing in your head and trading decisions will become obvious. 

So back to the macro view of the run-up since 2009:  After 1 up topped, we did the required 2 down  from  Aggregate 8,816 the week of 8/15/2011,  Since then, our Aggregate screamed ahead to the high last summer to complete Wave 3 up.

Then along came wave 4 down, which to my eye looks like it may be done, but no market goes right to the top again.  We expect the familiar declines and pullbacks along the way.

Which gets us to today’s action.

The early futures were down (about –71 on the Dow) and that’s clearly the market trying a typical “sell the rumor” which should be followed by a “buy the news” by the weekend.

Amidst all this, Tech has been slowly gaining “respect” since 2003 in the aftermath of the Tech Wreck when it took about 6.7 “NASDAQs” to buy the Dow.  One thing you can take to the bank is that with all this hype about the IoT (internet of things) we should, over the course of Wave 5 up (if the Fed policy doesn’t pull the plug on that) witness a retest of the ratio extremes that we saw in 2000.

A student of investment would likely be well-advised to spend less time on the absolute notional values of stock indices, but rather, use them as comparison tools in order to infer what I think of as “standard accounting ratios” the same way one uses ratios – rather thank dollars – in objectified analysis of company financial health.

And that brother or sister, leads us into this morning’s real data.

Press Release Festival

No point me rewriting this…

The Producer Price Index for final demand fell 0.2 percent in February, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Final demand prices advanced 0.1 percent in January and declined 0.2 percent in December.

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Seems like there is always one news story, or another, that puts people in a foul mood or sets off a new “public debate.”

Now, I don’t like debate, because most things become clear if you can momentarily reflect on them and see how they fit in the real scheme of things.

I get a kick out of one of my liberal friends who is qick to jump in and often will introduce extraneous material into the dialog while my natural inclination is to keep things simple and to point.  It’s something I leaned as a journalist:  You can’t be a reporter until you can be a good “summarizer.”  And to be a good summarizer there is a simple technique that will help drain the emotions from any polarizing story and will get down to the gist of things in a rational way.

The way I go around this is to “flip the roles” on stories to see if they make sense if the parties that are making the claims and tossed in the blender and the “other side” is plugged in.

Here’s an example, just to get you started on the concept:

“Sarah Palin slams “punk-a**” protesters who disrupt Donald Trump’s events.”

Hmmm, let’s see here:  We have a conservative female, white, tossing barbs at protesters, who disrupted a white fellow running for President.

How could the story look if it were flipped around?

“Al Sharpton slams “punk-a$$” protesters who disrupt Hillary Clinton events.”  (Or disrupt what’s her name’s).

Of course, there has been no disruption of Clinton, but I think you get the point.

When I read either version of the story, it doesn’t do much for me one way or the other, but since I have a sense of how the other side would be scripted, should the shoe have been on the other foot, I get a sense of serenity about the story.  If a conservative white female can do one then, then a liberal black male taking the opposite side is neither surprising or unexpected.

As far as I know, Sharpton has said no such thing, but he’s definitely in the Clinton camp as it is reported…“Al Sharpton: Bernie Sanders ‘has not resonated’ with black voters.”

A flip-side story would be one where (Fill in the name conservative Christian leader says) Marco Rubio ‘has not resonated with white voters.”  Which would also be true, but that to me offer very little news value.  It’s more like the “packing” in an Amazon box.  Yet, it fills up the thing (and gives news media marketing departments something to sell, but it’s hardly the kind of thing that really changes the world.

The BIAS OF THE MEDIA becomes clear when we see a big story crossing the line Monday like “Putin Orders Start of Syria Withdrawal, Saying Goals Are Achieved.”

The “flip-side” of this story would be for the USA to see a headline like “Obama orders start of Syria support withdrawal, says Goals are Achieved.”

Except that we do not see a headline like that because (and this is complicated) the neocons never were and still are not conservatives (and sham on the Bush family for being so dim-witted about it) and the not only screwed up Iraq, but Afghanistan, and Syria, and with Hillary’s help, Libya.

Still, it would be nice if the West could be a little more conscious of how this “Wearing of the other man’s shoes” does help us see things.

If the U.S.,, for example, started to build islands in the middle of any of the world’s oceans, like, oh, offshore Mexico, for example, or off Honduras, what would the world make of it?

When analyzing things around here, I will often pause and think through not only what is the “headline value” of a story, along with “Does anyone really have skin in this, or is this just hype shuck and jive to sell advertising and drive lambs to advertising (slaughter)?

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(I will politely not ask if you are reading today’s column at the usual time since this weekend was National Gullibility Time.)

As I told Peoplenomics.com subscribers this weekend, Donald Trump should sue because if the shoe were on the other foot, I’m sure the U.S. Department of Just Us would be screaming violation of constitutionally protected free speech by the Chicago thugs.

And who is organizing the thuggery?  Well, here’s an idea.

That’s an easy thing to fix, though, or at least it should be if Trump’s right to free speech at his own freaking gathering is impeded by knuckle-draggers who try to bust up his rally.

In Ure’s book, free speech is just that: FREE. 

And part of FREE means not having to be there if you don’t happen to agree with the idea.  This is the same kind of Bolshevik tactics we’ve seen elsewhere on the radical Left in the past.  I know because I was one of the reporters who was regularly stampeded and gassed while covering the anti-war activists back then.

No, it was not a just war…but Trump is running for Warmonger in Chief, he’s running for President.

Now, if you want to inspect she-of-whom-we-don’t mention, THERE is your corporate war supporter.

To fill out the commentary, I should mention that over the course of 50-years of serious news-watching, it has been my observation that people’s politics get further Left, the more their incomes go down.  If incomes go too high, then things veer into the ditch on the Right, so there’s really no winning.

Still, we all know that the Right-Left dialectic has nothing to do with a real right and a real left.  It’s just the way the power players at the top keep everyone else in line.

So if you want to push more spending, you dial up the lefty groups in colleges.  If you want to dial it back a bit, you step on the right’s gas pedal.

Except in this case, the UIC promoters of terrorism and stealing Trump’s right to free speech (like at age 25 these kids know shit from Shinola, right?) can be identified.

And if they can be identified, they can be served.  As in with papers.

If it were me – and I might not even be elected county commissioner which I’m running for this fall – I would get a team of lawyers on the case.

My marching orders would be simple:

1.  Find the individuals who organized the Facebook pages and sue the living crap out of them for abrogation of Civil Rights.

2.  Sue the Federal government for the lack of response on the part of their Civil Rights group which while they seem to be able to take care of issues on behalf of the whole alphabet of genders these days, and every illegal sneaking in with a load of drugs, can’t step on the toes of the loving Left that put ‘em in office.

So there you have it.  I’ve read the Art of the Deal (so has Elaine) and this is what A REASONABLE BUSINESS RESPONSE WOULD BE.

When wronged, sue.  Sue Big and Sue Often.  And pay what it takes to win.

Of course, this would only upset the American apple cart more than it already is:  Sure as a reasonable district court judge rules one way, there would be an appeal until sooner, or later, the case would land in the hands of an Obama appointee and then it gets tossed.

But in the meantime, it would teach the kids some manners.  You can’t act irresponsibly in America and get away with it.

Or, at least, that used to be the case.

Guess we will find out in coming months whether it is still the case.

In the meantime, I’m all for raising the voting age to 25, or upon completion of military service with an honorable discharge.  Those are the people who have their feel (or boots) on the ground and have enough sense to make policy.

Spoiled kids on grants and mommy and daddy’s dime getting radicalized by the Olde Chitown Lefties? 

There’s a read Greg Hinz was able to write a fine summary in “Chicago is Still #1 for Public Corruption” last year.

All the liberals hate to be outed like this, but here we are and now we’ve all seen the evidence.

Trump should sue the promoters…pure and simply.  And with lots of significant zeroes.  Even if he were to lose, it would cause a sudden growing up of some folks for whom it is long past time.

You do remember the story from December?  A university in Scotland that had awarded Trump an honorary degree actually revoked it because, said the university, some of the things he was saying in his campaign were not in tune with what the university was peddling.

One of America’s all-time most successful businessmen (and author of the still best-selling Art of the Deal) is finding those hallowed halls of academic are still failing to teach critical thinking either to faculty, administration, or students.

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