Welcome back to Worriers Gulch. It’s a patch of land situated between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, inhabited by a few reasonable people and millions of savages and imbeciles.
This is the gap widens between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Still, it remains interesting to see unfold.
My personal expectation is that the market will pull back, sharply and briefly, before Christmas *(or New Years) and then we will get the manic buying of stocks toward our dueling market peak windows in 2017.
The two main drivers are, of course, the potential for the election to be changed at the Electoral College on December 19th. As I explained to Peoplenomics subscribers this weekend, one of Texas’ Electors, Ken Clark who’s a Galveston County Commissioner in District 4 (*South side of Houston) said when he was an Elector in 2004 (Gore/Bush) the email surge didn’t begin until December – asking him to abstain or change his vote.
This time, the pressure is several orders of magnitude higher with more than 500 emails coming in before Thanksgiving.
So that will give you an idea of how much the Green Party and the Clinton supporters detest America.
What do I mean detest? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Based on the results reported in the Washington Post, Jill Stein received only 31,006 votes. Trump had 1.4 MILLION and Clinton had 1.381 MILLION.
Stein doesn’t have a chance…so we assume some other motive…
What’s going on? Well, seems to me Jill Stein has probably cut a deal with Clinton who is now acting like a cry-baby and will participate with other Stein – no chance of winning – recounts in other states as well.
Does the world disingenuous mean anything to you? As the DailyBeast reported ahead of the election “The holier-than-thou Green Party candidate rails against Big Carbon, big banks, Big Pharma—while she holds substantial investments in them…”
HRC, on the other hand, has been lurking like a viper ready to strike the first time Trump said something really stupid, as he’s prone to doing.
This weekend, the left-leaning press called him out for saying Hillary would have lost by even more if “millions of illegal votes” had not gone to Hillary.
Now, SHE is on the attack against Trump.
Should be obvious why it looks like a Stein/Clinton “deal” has been struck. Stein has no chance of winning, and Clinton is banking on bullshit and bluster to intimidate a few Electors into either abstaining or changing their vote.
In fact, there is no such thing as an Abstain at the College. Abstain essentially means a vote for Clinton.
Meantime, our favorite socialist, Bernie Sanders is again demonstrating why the democrats should have given the nod to him, by acting with class and finesse on this recount thing. Were it not for the crooked machinations of the hijacked democratic party apparatchik, he would have had a very good chance of winning. Nice, and/or honest, folks finish last, however.
So the market has this to worry about.
Meantime, we are two weeks out from the next Fed meeting and in that, a rate hike of a quarter is considered nearly a “sure thing.” So the market has a hell of a problem that only (so far) our Peoplenomics piece is talking about.
That is simply this: When interest rates turn, and with companies going virutal and retailing reduced to clicks, what about shopping malls, long a favorite of insurance companies, pension funds, and so forth as being stable, long-term investments?
Think crisis in commercial real estate. Think through the present-era mechanics.
Normally, when inflation lights off again after a recession, mall owners have a bit of pricing power when comes time to renegotiate leases. But now? Not so much — because Amazon and Wal-Mart are doing Battle Royale online.
And that gets us to “Cyber Monday” (which this morning is).
Problem is that with so many “Early Bird” deals, most of the big pop in online expected today may be toast.
By the way, if you are looking for great deals on Amazon, don’t forget to double-check that the priced low to high price sort is enabled. They sometimes flip it back to “Relevance” if you change a search term and that tends to hide the super-deals.
So there’s that…all in all, shopping-crazed Americans will have to be treated for “credit card burn” by the time the week is over.
Food Prices
Click on the futures over here.
Scroll to bottom. Look at distro of curves.
See where foodstuffs are? Except coffee which bewilders me.
Looks to me a lot like food price-driven inflation in the wings.
Tomorrow is the Big Data Day
GDP comes out tomorrow, along with corporate profits and such. Then we get the Case-Shiller S&P Housing report, too. So could see some volatility as the week moves along.
Friday sees the Employment situation, too…to lots of data could move the market around.
And out of the gate this morning U.S. Stock Futures Pull Back After Record-Setting Week.
Dow was down 50’ish, which ain’t much – yet.
Say: If the market rallied on Trump, would a Hillary Challenge tank things?
What Really Matters
I won’t spoil it for you, but the headline “California weighs ban on sex between lawyers, clients” got us to wondering.
Do they mean like on billing, or something else?
While Our Infrastructure Rots
China approves $36 billion rail project. But what do they know with a 5-thousand year old culture?
Football’s Freefall
Is neatly explained in this one: Kaepernick angers Miami fans.
Yessir, I’m so old I remember when football was a team sport. Nowadays? Not so much.
And may the bird of paradise fly up your nose
Whether the Fed recognizes it or not, interest rates have raised about .5% on the 10 year without their imprimatur. Celebrate the return of the Bond Vigilantes!
I maintain that the future of shopping malls is to warehouse first the Boomers as they set sail for the great unknown and then the autistic kids being born today whose parents will be in nursing homes or dead long before their child who needs long-term care. Where is the national out cry when 1 in 68 boys are being born with autism? In the real world, this would be a catastrophe, requiring full mobilization of the medical world to figure out what is going on, but I think THEY know what’s going on already.
Treatments and partial cures exist for various ASDs. Most of the problem is legal, in that the most effective cures are currently Schedule I. Paywalling all the scientific journals lets only the very rich companies and some universities get access to mass quantities of research, and federal regulations on science and who may practice/investigate makes the entire field political, rather than scientific. The state of the art is such that if someone discovers something that works, they will keep it to themselves rather than sharing it and risking that it will be outlawed or regulated.
Weird choice of words, George. Why is accuracy detestable to you? Trump says he has proof of voter fraud that denied him an important mandate. So now all candidates want voting accuracy. Mike
Until “proof ” is made public, it is an allegation.
Who said that the election was rigged, rigged, rigged? Trump. Who said that he may not accept the results of the election? Trump. Who said as recently as yesterday that there was widespread fraud? Trump.
Why anyone would be opposed to ensuring that the system is working correctly is incomprehensible to me.
And who said she thought it was ‘horrifying’ to not accept the result of the vote and then did, in fact, concede? Hillary. Who is now funding the lawyer spearheading the recount for her campaign? Soros. And who encouraged illegals to vote, well, illegally? Obama. And who works at every turn to strike down voter ID laws? Liberals.
The truth is they don’t want the system to work correctly.
You know the goal of voter ID laws isn’t to make sure that the right person is voting. The goal is to get less democratic voters to vote.
That’s why laws were struck down in TX, ND, NC and WI. I have no issue with IDing people. The issue I have is when getting the ID is made purposefully hard and also costs money.
“A district court had found not only that the law discriminated, but that it was intentionally designed to do so. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saw some flaws in that conclusion and instructed the lower court to reconsider that element of the case and rule again — preferably after Election Day.”
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/02/488392765/as-november-approaches-courts-deal-series-of-blows-to-voter-id-laws
The electoral college was designed by people who thought that everyone except white landowners were little more than livestock. And today it has the effect that the opinions of people in scarcely populated backwoods count for way more than anyone else’s. Either we are all equal under the law or we are NOT.
You need more study on the Electoral College. We do not want a pure democracy, which is defined as 5 wolves and a pig voting on what to have for lunch. Democracy is mob rule. The United States has the worst form of government in the world. Except for everyone else.
That’s funny, I don’t remember Clinton advocating for a return to the rule by fang and claw. The electoral college can’t possibly do anything about the reality of predation, but fear of (fill-in the-blank) is always a useful tool for the elites. I simply value equality and reject the argument that after 240 years democracy still needs training wheels. That is, if people are willing to do the hard work of thinking for themselves.
What do I mean detest? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Based on the results reported in the Washington Post, Jill Stein received only 31,006 votes. Trump had 1.4 MILLION and Clinton had 1.381 MILLION.
George, wish I could find this info, everything you read is Hilliary won the pop.
2016 versus 2008: About 10 million more voters were motivated in 2008 versus 2016 (crashes versus crassness!…according to chart below)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/clintons-popular-vote-lead-will-grow-and-grow/507455/
Just as well, Trump will get blamed (and booted) for 2017 crash, just as Hoover got blamed and booted in 1932.
I see Fidel Castro has died…again. I remember him dying like 4 or 5 years ago. I wonder if he’ll be resurrected again.
Food Prices…
One of my many hats through the years was working retail and in grocery.. I did that for years and years.. bringing up food prices reminded me of a conversation over the thanksgiving weekend.
the conversation was with a retailer that brought up that they had a huge decrease in sales before thanksgiving and during the thanksgiving spending spree and couldn’t figure out why there was such a drastic cut in overall spending. because of it they had to raise costs and cut staffing on the floor for stocking and check stands to maintain the same income for the company.