Search Results for: january 13

It’s the little things that remind me of how we got to be a confused, bewildered, and mostly paralyzed by cognitive dissonance in this country. Come to think of it, without a southern border we may not even be a country any more. Maybe that’s like computer software with a memory leak…without borders were just…leak , leak, leak ourselves to death… A major dissonance arrived in Wednesday’s mail. There it was: A nice direct-mail piece suggesting that I subscribe to Alaska Magazine.

But only if you’re willing to look with fresh eyes. Last week I was busy pointing out to you how there were (mysteriously) 73,000 fewer people employed in the USA in the latest Labor Department jobs report, but somehow 288,000 new jobs had been created. In the process, 806-thousand just raptured out of the stats and so forth. By now, I’m sure you’re sick of me telling you there’s something rotten in Denmark, and being half of Danish background…hold it. Let’s not go there.

Well, it depends on which chart you want to look at, I suppose, as the Case Shiller/S&P/Dow Jones monthly housing report is out. Based on a consistent 20-city sample, I take this one as the “gold standard” of real estate price reports: New York, April 29, 2014 – Data through February 2014, released today by S&P Dow Jones Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the annual rates of gain slowed for the 10-City and 20-City Composites.

I had occasion to head up to Tyler, Texas Monday to meet up with visiting Howard Hill and lead him back to what we jokingly call Deliverance Country here in the outback. And while I was there I loaded up the car with supplies because we don’t like to shop and it’s 15-miles just to find a gas station around here… What struck me was how busy the town was. There were wall-to-wall people everywhere I looked. Parking lots of shopping areas were full, or darned near. The Barnes and Noble was busy, Northern Tool had a steady flow of people going through.

The market is going to rally this morning – and it might even make it back up to 1,840 on the S&P.  But we play the long game around here, and so we begin this morning with a very somber outlook for markets, except as our Peoplenomics subscribers have known for weeks, it won’t be somber around here because anyone with half a brain can make as much (or more) money when markets are going down, compared to when they are going up.  It’s just that that the American public has been hoodwinked into thinking that taking the short side is somehow bad.  Truth is:  Your money doesn’t give a shit.

The market will fall today. It is NOT the end of the world. That comes this summer. Peoplenomics subscribers, though, have to be deliriously happy with our Trading Model which has, for about the past three weeks been setting up on a “replay of summer 2011” and which I trade quite publicly. It’s one thing to have a trading model that keeps you in the Big Trends, but it’s another to bet against it and the market as I have been.

Tomorrow will be an interesting one – it’s when the new unemployment report (for March) will be released. It’s almost predictable that the report will show either a stable, or slightly improving jobs picture. But what may not be clear is how many jobs are real (not taxpayer supported) and what portion are thanks to increased government spending. But we do have a couple of clues to help guide us, in this regard, which are out this morning. The Balance of Trade report and the Challenger Job cuts.

Peoplenomics readers will remember our December 18, 2013 edition where I called into question whether social media would be around any longer than CB radio, Pet Rocks, or Hoola Hoops. Of course, all three are still around today. It’s just that they are no longer manias like they were, each, once upon a time. My concern about “social” was simple: I wondered whether it was much of a business model because it’s time-circular.

I have been telling you for a long time that deflation was the big bogeyman in America’s future, which is why there is such a hype to drag us into some kind of major conflict right now. War is good for the economy and – if enough damage can be done – there’s economic stimulus, a basis for raising taxes, and government asserting even more control of individual humans who deviate from “offishul” group-think. Now, part of the evidence of deflation has been that while prices have been going up as a roughly 2% rate in the consumer price index, I’ve been telling you that the Fed is increasing the money supply by dramatically higher levels. But even old pessimistic Ures truly was not ready for the shocking pumping of the M1 money supply in last night’s M1 number in the weekly update to the H.6 money stocks report:

The reason we start off with the Retail Sales figures press release this morning is this old business school axiom that “Nothing happens until someone buys something…” It’s also why you should strike to be in sales as a career, because this is where the money is, in almost any industry you care to name. If you want to get rich, sales is, near, as I can figure, the shortest ladder to the top. We can talk more about this some other time, but with the sales figures this morning, it seems on point. Some of the highest returns in learning you can find are to be had from studying the fine art of selling. And no, it’s not hard, but people, in general have a fear of rejection and there is a good bit of that in sales.

(Amarillo, TX) If you remember yesterday’s column (that’s two of us then) I had mentioned that we were planning to stop at Sewell Lexus in Ft. Worth to have them figure out why the (damn) Check Engine Light (CEL) came on the day before our trip. This is a marvelous opportunity, if you’re a shade-tree mechanic, to brush up on your troubleshooting skills. The symptoms? Check engine light: