Friday, May 30, 2014

Economy does not confirm Stock Market.

Q1 GDP sank 1%.

The weakness was broad-based. Spending on business equipment fell at a 3.1 percent annualized rate, while spending on structures sank 7.5 percent. Corporate earnings dropped almost 10 percent, while exports slipped 6 percent. Housing investment shrank 5 percent.

So how did the stock market react to this obviously disappointing news for the "real" economy? It made new all-time highs, of course.

In addition to unproductive factors such as higher taxes and doubling of medical costs under ObamaCare, businesses seem to have embarked on a merger mania and stock buybacks. Even the business world of investors is turning insane. DDD, the leading producer of 3D printing equipment has increased its sales by a whopping 45% YOY. Its price promptly fell, because it is spending its revenues on research and development.

POTUS Obama has yet to respond, but based on past action, we can predict what he will say:

1. He just found out from reading the paper;
2. He is concerned;
3. He will call an economy summit;
4. He will ask the Treasury to redouble its effort at increasing spending. Problem solved.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Gold and silver miners: Larry issues a BUY.

The current drop in gold and silver prices he labels a "FAKEOUT."

Europe has an even bigger crisis on its hands than a British exit

British people will vote to leave the EU unless offered a new dispensation, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

A generic image shows a one euro coin above the flag for the United Kingdom, known colloquially as the Union Jack
 
Image 1 of 2
Brexit would change the chemistry of the union, leaving Germany in a hegemonic role it does not want, and leaving France in a very awkward 'menage a deux' Photo: Reuters
If Europe's policy elites could not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any meaningful sense.
British defenders of the status quo were knouted on Sunday. UKIP won 27.5pc of the vote, or 29pc after adjusting for the negligence - or worse - of the Electoral Commission in allowing a spoiler party with much the same name to sow confusion. Margaret Thatcher's Tory children are scarcely more friendly to the EU enterprise.
Britain's decision to stay out of monetary union at Maastricht sowed the seeds of separation, as pro-Europeans fully understood at the time, though almost nobody expected EMU officialdom to clinch the argument so emphatically by running the currency bloc into the ground with 1930s Gold Standard policies and youth unemployment levels above 50pc in Spain and Greece, and above 40pc in Italy.
European leaders must henceforth calculate that the British people will vote to leave the EU altogether unless offered an entirely new dispensation: tariff-free access to the single market along lines already enjoyed by Turkey or Tunisia; and deliverance from half the Acquis Communautaire, that 170,000-page edifice of directives and regulations that drains away sovereignty, and is never repealed.
Ideological hardliners would prefer to see Britain leave rather tolerating any reversal of the one-way Monnet Doctrine, and some talk of shutting British goods out of the European markets. They are fanatics. Others know that the EU's global credibility would be shattered if one of its largest states - and twin-leader in projecting military power - were to walk away in disgust, as Germany's Wolfgang Schauble has repeatedly warned.
French vote by department. The Front National (FN) is in grey
Brexit would change the chemistry of the union, leaving Germany in a hegemonic role it does not want, and leaving France in a very awkward "menage a deux". It would deprive the smaller free-market states of their policy champion and risk a chain reaction. A looser trading sphere might all too quickly emerge as a more alluring prospect along the Nordic-Protestant rim. Eurosceptics won the vote in Denmark, just as they did in Britain.
It is a fair bet that EU leaders would search for an amicable formula, letting Britain go its own way while remaining a semi-detached or merely titular member of the EU. Let us call it the Holy Roman Empire solution.
Yet Britain is the least of their problems. The much greater shock is the "Séisme" in France, as Le Figaro calls it, where Marine Le Pen's Front National swept 73 electoral departments, while President Francois Hollande's socialists were reduced to two.
Mr Hollande's address to the nation on Monday night was mournful. He had no answers beyond a few pro-forma utterings about "growth, jobs and investment", instantly undercut by his vow to press on doggedly with the same contractionary policies that led to disaster. His premier, Manuel Valls, even had to announce that the president would see out his five-year term, as if this were already in doubt.
It is widely claimed that the Front is eurosceptic only on the surface. Perhaps, but when I asked Mrs Le Pen what she would do on her first day in office if she ever reached the Elysee Palace, her reply was trenchant. She would instruct the French Treasury to draft plans for the immediate restoration of the franc, that great symbol of emancipation from the English occupation (franc des Anglais).
She vowed to confront Europe's leaders with a stark choice at their first meeting: either to work with France for a "sortie concertee" or coordinated EMU break-up, or resist and let "financial Armageddon" run its course. "The euro ceases to exist the moment that France leaves, and that is our incredible strength. What are they going to do, send in tanks?" she said.
She said there can be no compromise with monetary union, deeming it impossible to remain a self-governing nation within the structures of EMU, and impossible to carry out the reflation policies necessary to defeat the economic slump. "The euro blocks all economic decisions. France is not a country that can accept tutelage from Brussels. We have succumbed to a spirit of slavery," she said.
The EU authorities are now in a near hopeless situation. The logic of EMU is a further erosion of nation states. The "Two Pack", "Six Pack" and "Fiscal Compact" are all coming into force, and national regulators are losing control over their banking systems. The euro will inevitably lurch from crisis to crisis without some form of fiscal union and debt pooling. Yet voters have just let forth a primordial scream against any further transfers of power.
With the exception of Germany, the elections were a broad repudiation of EMU austerity. The two dominant parties of the post-Franco order in Spain saw their share of the vote drop to 49pc from 80pc last time, with the Podemos radicals coming from nowhere four months ago to win 8pc with a campaign to "stop Spain being a colony of Germany and the Troika".
The austerity coalition that has pushed the Netherlands into debt deflation crashed to 21pc. The ruling enforcers of EU-IMF Troika policies fell to 31pc in Greece and 28pc in Portugal.
Italy's new leader, Matteo Renzi, bucked the trend with a record vote of 41pc for the centre-Left, but his triumph is no less a threat to the EMU policy regime. After watching fellow Socialists in Europe destroy themselves trying to perform root-canal surgery on their economies without anaesthesia, he is going for growth whatever they may say in Brussels about EMU deficit rules. If anybody has the panache to lead a reflation revolt, it is this irrepressible Tuscan gambler.
Yet the elections have thrown up another wild card. Germany's Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has stormed onto the scene with 7.5pc of the vote. For the first time the anti-euro movement has an electoral platform to rail against bail-out policies or any deviation from orthodoxy by the European Central Bank. It is now even harder for Chancellor Angela Merkel to yield ground, whether on a debt redemption fund to chip away at legacy debts, or on the pace of fiscal retrenchment.
Strasbourg's Hemicycle is to become a chamber of militancy and protest where a Babel of voices shout down all action in languages the others don't even understand, like the Habsburg Empire's Cisleithanian parliament in its final years as the polity was falling apart.
Europe's leaders are counting on recovery to rescue them, relying on the rest of the world to generate the necessary demand, but creating none itself. This is courting fate at a time when China is choking its credit boom, most of the Brics are in trouble and the US Federal Reserve is tightening.
Italy, Holland and Portugal fell back into contraction in the first quarter, and France stalled again. The latest data show that the M3 money supply shrank again in April. It is the new normal of perpetual stagnation.
Europe's "Fiscal Compact" has set in motion a doomsday machine, requiring states to retrench for year after year by law until their debts are ground down to 60pc, and we are all dead. The best that can be hoped for is 1pc growth in southern Europe through the decade, too little to prevent a lost youth or to halt the rise in combined public and private debt ratios.
Claims that all is well are belied by strong hints that the ECB will venture into the unknown next week by cutting the discount rate below zero and launching asset purchases. Central banks do not embark on such policies unless something is badly wrong. The stimulus will not be enough, of course. The ECB's structure makes it incapable of acting with the overwhelming force of the Fed or the Bank of Japan, and it will therefore fail to break the recessionary psychology.
At some point the global cycle will roll over, leaving this crippled zone facing the prospect of another downturn before it has eked out any worthwhile recovery. It is a sobering thought. Unemployment may jump to yet higher plateaus. The European elections of 2019 may see the annihilation of the existing party system, if we get that far.
Let us not lose sight of what has occurred. The root cause of this social, political and economic disaster is EMU. As Nobel economist Paul Krugman said this week: "Depression-level slumps didn’t happen in Europe before the coming of the euro."
Monetary union first destabilised the South with massive capital flows. Now its contractionary bias blocks recovery.
Oxford Professor Kevin O'Rourke has called for an end to the misery in a remarkable cri de coeur for the International Monetary Fund. What shocks him is that EU officials seem to treat it as a matter of course that unemployment should be stuck at 1930s levels, or that Italian GDP should still be 9pc below peak after half a decade. "These are not minor details, blemishing an otherwise impeccable record, but evidence of a dismal policy failure," he said.
"If economic historians learned anything from the Great Depression, it is that adjustment based on austerity and internal devaluation is dangerous. Britain ran large primary surpluses throughout the 1920s, but its debt-to-GDP ratio rose substantially thanks to the deflationary, low-growth environment."
Prof O'Rourke said he has been waiting five years for Europe's leaders to forge the new instruments needed to make the failed experiment work, but it is by now obvious that Germany will not allow fiscal union or shared banking liabilities, and others will not accept a federal political Europe. It therefore pointless to protract the agony.
"The demise of the euro would be a major crisis, no doubt about it. We shouldn’t wish for it. But if a crisis is inevitable then it is best to get on with it, while centrists and Europhiles are still in charge. If the euro is eventually abandoned, my prediction is that historians 50 years from now will wonder how it ever came to be introduced in the first place," he said.

What is happening in the Ukraine and US economy?

If you listen to the American media (even Drudge), you would think that the Ukraine is calming down. The truth is something else:
 
 
There has been heavy fighting at the Donetsk airport, with the rebels suffering nearly 100 casualties. The Ukrainian govt used helicopter gunships and fighter planes. If you check the reference, it will also take you to some pictures. Note the rebel sporting an anti-tank weapon on his back. Fighting continues at and near the airport. Meanwhile, the rebels shot down a helicopter, killing 14 soldiers, including General Volodymyr Kulchytskiy. Govt troops are shelling Sloviansk with mortars.
 
President Putin is scheduled to meet with French Pres Hollande and there is talk of talks in the wing between Putin and Ukrainian President. The big question is how long the Russians will allow the Ukrainians bring military force against the separatists and what countermeasures they will take.
 
The US economy. AS predicted from analyzing the early report, the US economy shrank in Q1. How much? Maybe 0.5%, maybe 1%. Meanwhile, the regime and its press is touting the unemployment figures as proof that hiring is picking up. What do the numbers say? The numbers say that unemployment applications dropped by 18,000 to 300,000. That does not mean that hiring is picking up, it means that the number of people becoming unemployed is slowing.
 
Economists predict the growth of GDP to be between 3.5% and 4.% for the rest of the year. The reason? Increasing inventory and catching up for the lost shopping of Q1. There is one thing that weighs heavily on the economy: ObamaCare. The cost of insurance per avg family is set to rise from $7,500 to %15,000 per year.  

Monday, May 26, 2014

The economy: on the edge.

The government media reports that the economy is getting healthier. Really? Let's look at some numbers and trends.


How can the economy getting better while the middle class is getting crushed? Target, Home Depot, WalMart, Low's, PetSmart, Staples and Sears have all reported disappointing earnings. (Tiffany is doing fine though).


The Bureau of Labor Statistics (should that be known as BS Statistics?) reported Year Over Year inflation figures as 3.3% for energy, 6.4% for meat, fish and poultry and 9.9% for health care. In addition to the biggest jump in inflation in years, taxes have also gone up.


Inasmuch as the inflation figures may be consistently underreported, Q1 may have actually seen an economic contraction. That is, the reported figure of 1.4% growth in Q1 (0.1% growth + 1.3% inflation), may mean that the economy actually contracted in Q1. On top of this we have the tapering and it does not take a genius to figure out that we are heading for a recession, unless we are actually in a recession already.


Meanwhile, gold has been capped between 1,310 and 1,280 per oz. It no longer keeps inflation down.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Japan: an unworkabkle model.

The Bank of Japan had withdrawn from the Japanese Government Bond market for a day and a half. The number of bonds sold in that time? ZERO!! The bonds earn 0.6% when official inflation is at 1% and the govt is promising to raise that to 2%.
 
What if the Japanese govt raises interest rates? Well, if the rates increased by 2%, that would take up 80% of the tax take of Japan.  UNWORKABLE!

Ukraine: a sign of hope.

There are times when an ethnic population is attached to another country due to a peace treaty that is designed to punish a country. Such was the case with WWI, which ended with the Peace Treaty of Trianon. The Treaty took away 2/3 of the territory of Hungary (with a third of its population) and saddled Germany with crippling reparation payments. These were the seeds of WWII. The dissolution of the Soviet Union had left millions of Russians in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Ukraine, Georgia and Kazahstan. This threatens to become the seeds of WWIII.

There are some, such as the Romanians and the Nationalist Ukrainians, who believe that the case of the acquired minorities is to be handled with repression and forced absorption. In Europe, that is a recipe for war and unrest.

There are other, more peaceful ways of handling this. There is the Swiss model of cantonized solution. And then there is the solution proposed by Hungary. The Hungarians want their 200,000 Hungarians living in the Ukraine to have dual citizenship and autonomy. If the right candidate wins in the Presidential race in the Ukraine, this solution will be implemented. It can serve as the model for the Russians living in the Ukraine. The Russians are receptive to the idea. Of course, the West has to give up the idea of dividing Europe between Russia and NATO. NATO countries are not able to foot the bill anyway.

Russian gas deal: another Obama black eye.

Russia and China have announced a gas deal worth $400B. Except it will not be conducted in US Dollars. This is a major blow to the Dollar and to the Obama effort to isolate Russia. Not much of the details are known at this time, except that the deal will be paid in currency other than dollars.

The deal brings to mind the quotation attributed to Pres Putin:

"Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon….
the pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and
then struts around like it won the game."

~Vladimir Putin

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Has the bear market in gold ended?

According to Larry - YES.
Here is the latest graph on prices:
 
I do not see a breakout, only a wedge. The EU competition regulator just fined 3 banks for manipulating financial derivatives related to interest rates. This is a comedy, right?

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The FED's scheme did not work.

Says Shah Gilani. Here is what he says:

"The numbers are in. And they are ugly...
Based on preliminary first-quarter data, U.S. GDP (gross domestic product) growth is 0.1%.
That's not much.
But then again what do you expect for $3.4 trillion dollars of Federal Reserve spending to boost the economy?
So the question is, how is it possible that we've got nonexistent economic growth, or worse, negative growth and possibly another recession looming, when the Federal Reserve since September 2008 has spent $3.4 trillion to prime the economic pump?
This could push the whole economy past the brink...

The Ugly Truth on Fed Intervention

First of all, the preliminary GDP number, which is the total output of goods and services produced by labor and property minus imports, will be revised on May 29, 2014.
A majority of economists are already revising their estimates down into negative territory.
The consensus view expects the revised or "second" GDP number will actually show the economy contracted by 0.5% to 1% in the first quarter.
Not that the second quarter is expected to be bad just because of a slow first quarter. In fact, a majority of pundits, including the Federal Reserve itself, are saying because the first quarter was so bad the economy will bounce robustly in the second quarter.
But if they're wrong and the second quarter shows negative growth, that's really bad.
It's bad because two consecutive quarters in a row of negative GDP growth is the definition of a recession.
Why has the Fed intervention failed so miserably in spurring growth? It's an ugly truth but needs to be told.
Since the credit crisis, which spawned the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve has been trying to build a bridge to growth. The truth is they've spent trillions on their bridge efforts, but they can't deliver the destination.
Here's what's frightening: What seems like misguided Federal Reserve policies to stimulate economic growth by printing egregious amounts of money was never a misguided policy of trying to stimulate the economy. It was a massive liquidity and profit-making program designed to first save, then enrich, the nation's biggest banks.
Economic growth was the expected byproduct of the Fed's "trickle-down" banking bonanza.

Why It Didn't Work

The reason we're not seeing that trickle-down growth is because the banks aren't lending as they were expected to.
They aren't lending robustly into the economy because they've had to pay out billions of dollars in fines and legal costs.
That plus their former freewheeling speculative trading gambits with depositor money are being shut down thanks to Dodd-Frank and the Volcker rule, and they are facing their worst free-market enemy, a flattening yield curve.
It's common knowledge that all the nation's too-big-to-fail banks would have all failed if the Fed hadn't bailed them out. Any one of them collapsing, after what happened when Lehman Brothers imploded, would have brought down all of them like a professional bowler throwing a 50-pound ball down an alley with gutter guards.
It's impossible for there to be any economic activity if there are no banks. So, the Fed did what it had to do to save the big banks.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Canadian counterfeter apprehended.

Canadian Brian Ross had printed a few million dollars in denominations of 20 dollars.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/master-counterfeiter-prints-virtually-undetectable-fake-20s-23638314

The real criminals at the FED printed over 3 Trillion.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

The FED begins to lose control.

The FED printed enough money to bring its assets to 4T from 800B. Inflation was moderated by keeping gold prices suppressed and by the banks refraining from using their ability to increase lending money. This is now beginning to change, at least the banks reluctance to increase the money supply.
 
 
 
What we can expect to start happening is: 1. an increase in interest rates, 2. an increase in price inflation and 3. a drop in the price of bonds, especially Treasuries. The next thing we should see is an increase in the price of gold.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

EPA sabotaged the Pebble mine in Alaska

and made its decision before scientific review.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/30/exclusive-memos-show-epa-officials-tried-to-kill-m/

Economic slowdown and gold price changes.

1. Europe.

Despite the self congratulations in Greece and Spain over their successful sale of bonds, all is not well in Europe. The very fact that these countries have to finance their debts from new bonds tells us that they have serious economic problems. Spanish unemployment went past 26%  and Greece is not really recovering.

2. The US.

Lakshman Achuthan of ECRI tells us that the drop in US growth rates to 0.1% was not due to the harsh winter, as the leading economic indicators begin to drop in qIV of 2013. ECRI insists that we are still in a recession and the improvements now are noise in the economic indicators. Edelson forecast that deteriorating economic conditions will force the FED to resume QE on an even bigger scale.

3. Larry's emergency communication on gold.

Larry claims that the drop in silver below support was not shared by gold and that this non-conformation means a turn coming in gold prices. One of two things might happen: a drop in gold price will set off the last leg of the bear market in PMs, or 2. the gold price will start rallying without a further drop. Time should tell.