Monday, July 13, 2015
Syriza Breathtaking Political Capitulation; Tsipras Should Resign / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
Shockingly Stupid Sequence of Events
I am seldom stunned by political stupidity. In fact, I am surprised when I don't see it.
Yet, I have never witnessed a political reversal so shockingly stupid as we saw tonight from Greek Prime minister Alexis Tsipras.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
The Troika And The Five Families / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
Personally, like most of you, I always thought Germany, besides all its other talents, good or bad, was a nation of solid calculus and accounting. Gründlichkeit. And that they knew a thing or two about psychology. But I stand corrected.
The Germans just made their biggest mistake in a long time (how about some 75 years) over the weekend. Now, when all you have to bring to a conversation slash negotiation is bullying and strong arming and brute force, that should perhaps not be overly surprising. But it’s a behemoth failure all by itself regardless.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Silver Bullion Demand High – Price Falls and Premiums Surge / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015
- Silver imports into U.S. surge 33%
- Silver Eagle demand very robust
- Silver Eagles and Maples see 25% surge in premiums and shortages
- Silver price falls over 3.8% on same day as U.S. Mint runs out of silver eagles
- Total ETF Silver holdings remain robust – over 500 million ounces
- Increase in demand seems to becoming from large entities buying bars
- Silver is great value sub $20 per ounce
Monday, July 13, 2015
The Potemkin Bank of China / Economics / Central Banks
In the midst of an intense global economic slowdown that began in 2008, China's economy amazingly appeared to be unaffected. Defying the world-wide real estate collapse, China's GDP grew by an impressive 8.7% in 2009. Fueled initially by a $586 billion stimulus package, China would end up plowing and additional $20 trillion dollars into a fixed asset bubble that was designed to produce the government's desired GDP print.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Gold, Silver and the Two Horsemen of The Apocalypse / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015
If we can reassign meanings given to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the original, we can then say financial markets saw two of them this week. The first brought us the Greek Crisis which went from very bad to impossible to resolve, and the second was a collapsing stock market in China. Between them these two events triggered another flight into the US dollar, which would have been far worse without central bank intervention. With the dollar rising against the euro, commodity prices, particularly energy and oil, have fallen sharply, with US Crude down over 15% in the last month.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Gold Price Peculiar 6 Month Cycles / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015
In this report I'm going to show you some more of the same precious metals stocks we've been following as more are joining the impulse move to the downside adding confirmation. Unlike the US stocks markets that have been trading sideways since the December high of last year, the precious metals stocks are in a confirmed impulse move down and that's where the real money is made.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Could Markets React Positively to Grexit? 7 Reasons Why They Could / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2015
Politicians, investors and the general public are absolutely fed up with news about Greece. Over the last 2 weeks, the unthinkable possibility of Greece leaving the Euro started to materialize. And the stock market reacted quite well.
A Eurozone made up of 18 countries is quickly being seen as the new normal. And more than that, a desirable new normal.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Stock Market Critical Support Holding / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015
Current Position of the Market
SPX: Long-term trend - Bull Market
Intermediate trend - SPX may have started an intermediate correction
Analysis of the short-term trend is done on a daily basis with the help of hourly charts. It is an important adjunct to the analysis of daily and weekly charts which discusses the course of longer market trends.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Greece Today, America Tomorrow? / Politics / US Politics
The drama over Greece's financial crisis continues to dominate the headlines. As this column is being written, a deal may have been reached providing Greece with yet another bailout if the Greek government adopts new "austerity" measures. The deal will allow all sides to brag about how they came together to save the Greek economy and the European Monetary Union. However, this deal is merely a Band-Aid, not a permanent fix to Greece's problems. So another crisis is inevitable.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Silver Price Remains in Long-term Downtrend / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015
It's a strange situation - the long-term charts for silver continue to look awful, but there has been a quite dramatic improvement in its COTs, which now look positive, with readings that in the past have consistently lead to rallies. However, this doesn't mean that any rally that develops soon will succeed in breaking silver out of its long downtrend.
Silver's 8-year chart shows the as yet unrelenting downtrend from its 2011 highs involving a classic "staircase" decline. On this chart it looks set to drop again, but perhaps after another rally first towards the upper boundary of the downtrend channel.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
Gold Price Awaiting Outcome of Greece Crisis / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015
The situation is paradoxical - the charts of just about everything are positioned for a plunge - or a turnaround and limited recovery, which reflects the fact that markets are waiting on some sort of resolution of the standoff with Greece, either Greece walking away, a Grexit, or a fudge solution where Greece accepts defeat and is denied debt relief or it is obfuscated sufficiently for the markets to buy it and this may involve another "can kicking" exercise. While the charts for many commodities look scary, including gold and silver, their COTs now look bullish, which suggests that the fudge solution will be the outcome.
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Monday, July 13, 2015
China Crash, Greece Collapse, Harbingers of Stock Market Apocalypse Forecast 2015? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015
Whilst all eyes in the West were on Greece as its marxist Syriza government played game of thrones with the Greek peoples lives as they black mailed the Eurozone, the chinese stock market crashed, collapsing by over $2 trillion into a BEAR MARKET sending over 200 million chinese retail investors into a panic as they got a bitter taste of the dark side of capitalism, of what happens when investors believe the hype that stocks can only go up. We have all seen this play out many times before!
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Sunday, July 12, 2015
Greece’s Biggest Problem Is Its Anti-Capitalist Culture / Politics / Euro-Zone
Russell Lamberti writes: It’s considered politically incorrect to criticize culture these days, but whether using euros or drachmas, in or out of the European Union, Greece really has to, somehow, sort out its cultural dysfunction. I’m not talking about its customs, traditions, architecture or music, and I’m definitely not talking about its food. I’m talking about its cultural anti-capitalism. The negotiations, deals, counter-deals, referenda, protests and everything in between all mean very little if Greeks, by and large, don’t ditch their statist zeitgeist and rediscover Greek capitalistic exceptionalism.
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Sunday, July 12, 2015
One of the Most Important Lessons When Buying Stocks / InvestorEducation / Learning to Invest
You're not going to succeed in the stock market by just buying the world's best businesses...
For the past several years, my colleague Dan Ferris and I have urged Extreme Value readers to buy great businesses... Businesses that gush free cash flow, reward shareholders, have great balance sheets, earn consistent profit margins, and have high returns on equity.
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Sunday, July 12, 2015
Greece, EU and the Tower of Babel / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
Athanasios Laspopoulos writes: I remember when I was at school, many years ago, that a course was developed
for the Tower of Babel and a sketch showing a huge Tower building from thousands
of people. As I remember the Tower was building by many countries and different
peoples in order to reach heaven and God. This project because of the
multilingualism and misunderstanding was abandoned. This was the model on
which the EU was based on?? Because as I can see in pictures and the model
the EU is made of, are almost the same. And the funny thing is that in EU
there are multiple states, multiple languages and a relative disconnection
between the members just as it was happening at the Tower of Babel.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Tsipras Invites Schäuble To Fall Into His Own Sword / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
Too many voices the past few days are all pointing the same way, and I’ve always thought that is never good. A guessing-based consensus, jumping to conclusions and all that. Look, it’s fine if you don’t have all the answers, no matter how nervous it makes you.
What I’m referring to in this instance is the overwhelming conviction that Greece and Tsipras have conceded, given in to the Troika, flown a white flag, you get the drift. But guys, the battle ain’t over yet.
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Sunday, July 12, 2015
Grexit: Montenegro, Ecuador or Bulgaria? / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
Could Greece adopt the dollar?
In truth, Bulgaria, not the greenback, is the better currency model after Grexit.
What if the eurozone shows Greece the door? There are claims that the creation of a new currency regime in Greece would be fraught with problems. While the practical, technical problems would be relatively small, the political problems could be daunting.
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Sunday, July 12, 2015
Greece and China: Heralding a New Stocks Bear Market? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015
What started out as typically sluggish summer week quickly morphed into an extremely eventful one. In just the last five days we witnessed the intensification of the Greek debt roller coaster, the bursting of a mini-bubble in Chinese equities, a temporary shutdown of trading on the NYSE, and a brief but meaningful pullback in U.S. equities. And to think the summer is still young!
Investors are clearly disquieted over the impact the overseas crises might have on the U.S. stock market. But are they right to be concerned?
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Sunday, July 12, 2015
Corn, Soybeans, Wheat Agricultural Commodities Price Forecasts / Commodities / Agricultural Commodities
The prices of agricultural commodities of corn, soybeans and wheat have all exploded higher recently. This has been expected and was laid out in analysis back in February 2015. Now that the rallies have kicked off let’s revise the technicals of all three soft commodities.
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Sunday, July 12, 2015
"Guerrilla Warfare Against a Hegemonic Power": The Challenge and Promise of Greece / Politics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
Banks create money when they make loans. Greece could restore the liquidity desperately needed by its banks and its economy by nationalizing the banks and issuing digital loans backed by government guarantees to its ailing businesses. Greece could provide an inspiring model of sustainable prosperity for the world. But it is being strangled by a hegemonic power in a financial war that is being waged against us all.
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