Search Results for: january 13

As we assemble, once again, to watch the sun rise over the cuckoo’s nest (it’s clear in Washington DC this morning), we can’t help but be somewhat bored with the lack of substance to the day’s headlines. Why, you’d think in a world full of terrorism, nuclear weapons, climate change, pandemics at every turn, not to mention Planet X, that something more than an unfortunately ‘routine’ bombing outside the Iranian embassy in Beirut killed 23, and there’s no winner yet in Mass Media’s current contest to see who can report the earliest date that the Obama administration knew their website wasn’t going to end happily. Both stories, however, are worthy of some elucidation while we wait for markets to do more than noise trade pending data later this week. We can start with the more pleasant of the two: Fox snooze is leading the “early warning” pack at the moment, revealing HHS warned about the website issues in March, but please!

The trading indicator, which Peoplenomics subscribers see twice weekly, has really ticked me off this year. I am *(as you probably figured) a dyed-in-the-wool bear who loves to make money on the short side of markets and who does extremely poorly when ‘gut trading” in a rising market. The Indicator, however, with a single weekly exception, has been resolutely bullish since last December and continues its long position, even now. Historically, Fall has been a great time for markets to pull major dives and yet, at least so far, we haven’t exactly gone off the high board. While there’s a chance of a decline come Wednesday, we can’t help but wonder if some of the “enduring optimism” (financial snort) hasn’t been due in part to the busting up on regular economic reports thanks to the government shutdown when 83% of government couldn’t even get the regular statistics turned out… I mention this because the Cost of Living report which has been previously issued around the 14th of the month won’t be out until Wednesday..

If you like Obamacare, you’re really going to love the details coming out about the Trans-Pacific Partnership plans which have been outed by Wikileaks. They’ve issued a press release: The TPP is the forerunner to the equally secret US-EU pact TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), for which President Obama initiated US-EU negotiations in January 2013. Together, the TPP and TTIP will cover more than 60 per cent of global GDP. Both pacts exclude China.

A number of readers have taken me to task for mentioning the reader strategy of not signing up for Obamacare and just paying the penalties later. That’s not me, but there are a lot of people who do want the option of considering that. The biggest problem with signing up when you think you might need care in the future is that it doesn’t work: If you’re in a traffic accident – one that makes local headlines, for example – you won’t be in any condition to sign up. Then there is some delay until paperwork finalizes and money is paid.

It’s been an article of economic faith that with any solid recovery, America ought to be seeing a major jump in home demand. Not only should the housing prices see a 2.3% (or whatever price inflation is), but it should also seem to pressure to the update from a) all that quantitative easing, and then b) by all the Federal Reserve M2 printing festival which has bumped up M2 by 6.4% over the past year. So, with this (unfortunately sobering) view, we flip over to this morning’s press release about the Case Shiller/S&P Housing Index which blew away just keeping up with inflation:

If this morning’s column turns out to be a bit shorter than usual – and missing a dandy feature like an incredible Wujo story which I had planned for this morning (damn!) it’s all because we had a power outage out here at the end of the string last night which took out the power supply in the main server. I can restore from backups, or just write this morning’s column, so I picked the latter. You’ll have to come back Thursday for the good stuff. Normally, when something like this happens, it’s no more than a half-hour worth of nuisance because that’s about how long it takes to tear open the box, toss in the power supply, and reboot.

Thank you Congress. By running back to the printing press you have jammed up the price of gold more than $35 bucks (some are excitedly saying $50), which is fine by us, but is this really the rational thing to be doing in here? With stock futures pointing to a slight pullback at the open this morning, down may 50-75 points after yesterday’s nosebleed-inducing rally, there I was by the phone when long-term reader Nick called. “So, George, let me see if I have this right: Congress needed to pass the debt ceiling so that we could keep paying our creditors, right?

The conventional wisdom on many investment-related websites is that the Fed decision yesterday touched off a major short-covering rally and from here things could go much higher. That they could continue upwards, I won’t dispute, but as to the implied “cause” there’s likely something else at play: The seldom mentioned role of currency valuations. Although it’s normally the kind of thing best explained on our Peoplenomics.com subscription service, there’s so much dumbed-down thinking on what causes rallies, that it deserves a little wider consideration.

You gotta love it when the market has just run into overhead resistance in the S&P 1,686 level and just can’t seem to get enough traction, and then looks like it will fall back. You see, because the S&P and the Dow have not been able to punch through the old highs set on August 5th and 2nd respectively, the doors of hell could open in the next couple of weeks because (repeat after me) Crashes don’t just appear out of thin air: they occur often times 55-days, or so, from a major high (which is coming up soon enough) and along the way there, you’d expect (under Elliott wave rules) to see Wave 1 down, then a wave 2 rally, and the decline and rally would then give you some key insight as to what will happen next. That’s because a “normal” decline might be expected to be 1.608 times the first wave down, and then a 5th wave down would be another 1.

Yes, the book Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects is likely worth your time to read, as is a visit to author Kevin Robert Ryan’s website over here. Getting traction… Also: Hat tip to reader Charles for the catch…and he thinks you might enjoy Project Censored’s “Exploring the Financial Core of the Transnational Capitalist Class” which gets more into those check-writing rulers behind the seats of power. All of which, he notes, could be a nice series of backgrounders before you move along to the front-edge newsnipulations (go ahead, use it, my gift) about to come at the helm changes at the Fed.

I’ve decided to moderate my outspoken criticism of the pending attack on Syria, since it is obviously baked-in-the-cake now, given that the US Senate breaks its own freaking rules in its headlong rush to war. The UN report not being in doesn’t seem to mean bupkis, and China this morning has sided with Russia over Syria which is significant since if China were to vote with its wallet (by not buying our “bond” offerings) we’d soon enough implode financially and the Rest of World (RoW) knows it. Oh-oh…al Qaeda-linked rebels attacking a Christian village? Tisk, tisk… Rebels executing folks? Oh my…This is moderation, Mr.