Friday, September 03, 2021
Don’t Investing Tomahawk Yourself Just to Own a Home / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Jared_Dillian
A house is a terrible investment. But for a lot of people, it’s the best investment.
Let's unpack that…
Unless you buy a new house, you will probably spend up to 1% of the value of the house on maintenance every year.
Stuff breaks. Pipes burst, roofs leak, and occasionally the whole thing burns down. I live by the ocean, so the maintenance is relentless—constant leaks, not to mention the hurricanes. Plus, you have to pay to insure it, you have to pay the property taxes, and you have to pay for all the other stuff. And that's on top of the mortgage.
Friday, September 03, 2021
Bitcoin BTC Elliott Wave, Price Patterns and Trend Analysis Forecasts / Currencies / Bitcoin
By: Nadeem_Walayat
This is my latest video based on my extensive full spectrum analysis of the crypto markets, of what I expect to happen over the next 6 months in terms of a Bitcoin price trend forecast, and the strategy I am deploying to capitalise on as well as 5 potential black swans that could collapse the crypto markets where Stable Coins such as USDT are what could be imminent catalysts for.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, September 03, 2021
Prepare Now for Brutal Economic Austerity -- Here's Why / Economics / Economic Austerity
By: EWI
Here's what's holding together a "global house of cards"
When financial times get tough, you hear the phrases "tightening our belts," "cutting back" or "making do with less."
Those are common phrases to describe the word "austerity."
If spending and borrowing had been done with moderation when times were good, then the tough times would not be as tough -- or austere.
Read full article... Read full article...
Friday, September 03, 2021
Will Crude Oil Prices Skyrocket in the Aftermath of Hurricane Ida? / Commodities / Crude Oil
By: EWI
"Supply and demand" does not always determine the price trend of crude oil
As you probably know, Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana on August 29, the exact date that Hurricane Katrina made a Louisiana landfall sixteen years earlier.
On August 30, the Wall Street Journal said:
Oil Industry Surveys Damage After Hurricane Ida Slams Louisiana
The storm disrupted fuel supplies, and the speed of the recovery will depend on how long it takes for refineries to come online amid flooding and power outages
Did oil prices skyrocket due to the disruption in oil production? Well, Bloomberg reported (August 30) that prices initially fell 1.6% [as Ida made landfall] before they "edged" higher.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, September 02, 2021
China’s theme park economy thriving, despite pandemic times / Economics / China Economy
By: Dan_Steinbock
Against odds, theme parks are expanding in China, thanks to rising disposable income, investor confidence, and long-term opportunities.On September 1, Universal Beijing Resort, the largest of its kind in the world, will start its trial run. It is the most recent international chain in China’s thriving theme park industry.
Over 2008 to 2017, total theme park attendance increased at 13 percent annually. Today there are more than 200 theme parks in the Chinese mainland and their numbers continue to increase.
In an era of misguided global divisions, the impressive rise of theme parks in China shows the brighter promise of foreign investment and Sino-American cooperation.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, September 02, 2021
Fed Statements Drive New Rally Momentum In The Stock Markets / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2021
By: Chris_Vermeulen
Last week, the US Federal Reserve reiterated statements in support of continued easy money policies and support for a recovering US economy. Additionally, Jerome Powell made a statement suggesting tightening too early could be much more damaging than waiting until sufficient headwinds are behind us. I interpret this as stating the current inflationary concerns are less important than the current global market expectations. We can likely weather moderate inflationary concerns if the economy continues to strengthen – whereas tightening right now may not reduce inflationary concerns and may prompt a broad market slowdown within the US and globally.
Be sure to sign up for our free market trend analysis and signals now so you don’t miss our next special report!
In short, traders and investors perceived these comments as “Here we go – off to the races again” and the US markets rallied sharply on Friday and in early trading on Monday, August 30, 2021.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, September 02, 2021
When Will It Be Time to Sell Precious Metals? / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2021
By: MoneyMetals
Clients often ask when they should sell precious metals. We usually suggest one basic rule around the timing. After that, the decision to sell will depend upon whether your reasons for holding gold and silver have changed.
The basic rule is to avoid selling based on impulse. Humans are emotional creatures and studies show most of us make poor choices when it comes to timing. If you are making a snap decision to sell (or buy) based upon a surge of either fear or greed, odds are you will regret it.
The trick to avoiding an emotional decision about when to sell is to understand why you bought precious metals in the first place and stick to your guns.
Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, September 02, 2021
Bittersweet Truth for Gold Stocks: What You Need to Know / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2021
By: P_Radomski_CFA
When the Fed entices grown up kids with sweet words, they hit the candy store and stock up on gold, silver, and stocks. A sugar hangover follows.
Beware of the candyman!
With Fed Chairman Jerome Powell performing his usual dovish dance on Aug. 27, gold, silver, and mining stocks were like kids in a candy store. However, with the short-term sugar highs often leaving investors with nasty stomach aches, the sweet-and-sour nature of the precious metals’ performances may lead to pre-Halloween hangovers.
HUI Index: Harbinger of Things to Come
To explain, while the HUI Index invalidated the breakdown below its previous lows, the bullish reversal may seem quite sanguine. However, an identical development occurred in 2013 right before the index continued its sharp decline. Moreover, I warned previously that the HUI Index could record a corrective upswing of 4% to 8% (that’s what happened after the breakdown in 2013) and that it would not change the medium-term implications. And after the index rallied by more than 6% last week, the bounce is nothing to write home about.
Thursday, September 02, 2021
Facing down our investment fears, Courage comes from a strategy you can genuinely believe in / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2021
By: Michael_J_Kosares
“Gold shone with the placid certainty of received tradition. Honored through the ages, the standard of wealth, the original money, the safe haven. The value of gold was axiomatic. This view depends on a concept of gold as unchanging and unchanged—nature’s hard asset.” – Matthew Hart, Vanity Fair magazine
Facing down our investment fears
Courage comes from a strategy you can genuinely believe in
“As markets shake off their summer slumbers,” writes London-based analyst Bill Blain, “what should we be worrying about? Lots..! From real vs transitory inflation arguments, the long-term economic consequences of Covid, the future for Central Banking unable to unravel its Gordian knot of monetary experimentation, and the prospects for rising political instability in the US and Europe.”
Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
The Great Deflation of 2022 / Economics / Deflation
By: Michael_Pento
It is not very surprising to me that nearly every talking head on Wall Street is convinced inflation has now become a permanent feature in the U.S. economy. This is because most mainstream economists have no clue what is the progenitor of inflation. They have been inculcated to believe inflation is the result of a wage-price spiral caused by a low rate of unemployment.
In truth, inflation is all about the destruction of confidence in a fiat currency’s purchasing power. And there is no better way to do that than for the government to massively increase the supply of money and place it directly into the hands of its citizenry. That is exactly what occurred in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. government handed out the equivalent of $50,000 to every American family in various forms of loans, grants, stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment, tax rebates, and debt forbearance measures. In other words, helicopter money and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) were deployed—and in a big way. The result was the largest increase of inflation in 40 years.
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Inflation Properly Defined / Economics / Inflation
By: Antonius_Aquinas
The use or rather misuse of language has always been an effective tool of politicians to enact their agendas. George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” brilliantly showed, in his day, how language was being manipulated for all sorts of totalitarian measures:
Read full article... Read full article...Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.*
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Gold GDX Stocks, A Proxy for the Precious Metals Complex / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2021
By: Rambus_Chartology
I’ve been suggesting for some time now that the PM complex is trading at a critical inflection point where they can have a big move in either direction. It may sound like a copout but that is what an inflection point is. Many times at a critical inflection point, in the case of the PM stock indexes, support can hold beautifully or there can be a false breakout of the the S&R line which can be called a bear trap if the price action trades back above that important trendline.
Tonight I’m going to use the GDX as a proxy for the rest of the PM stock indexes which is showing us a great example of the current critical inflection point. The most basic concept in Chartology is how an important trendline can reverse its role to what had been resistance to support once broken to the upside and vise versa. The psychology behind an important trendline, using the top rail of the 2016 flat top expanding triangle on this weekly chart for the GDX below, is that when the top rail of the flat top expanding triangle was broken to the upside everyone that bought below the top rail is above water. As long as there isn’t a big breach of the top rail most will feel comfortable and not sell.
Every trendline you put on a chart is a support and resistance line, above is bullish and below is bearish. This is why we are always looking for a backtest when we see a breakout of a chart pattern. It doesn’t happen all the time but it does happen enough to always be on guard.
Lets focus on the top rail of the 2016 flat top expanding triangle that starts at the 2016 high and runs horizontally to the right side of the chart. Not many caught the double top that formed just below the 2016 trendline which led to the March 2020 crash low. As you can see there were 3 important touches from below. After the 2020 crash low was put in you can see the vertical rally that ensued but this time the top rail gave way. After several more weeks of moving higher the GDX completed its first backtest which could have been the backtest which would lead to the next important move higher but that wasn’t the case.
Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
The Delta Variant Scam / Politics / Coronavirus 2021
By: James_Quinn
“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.” ― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.” ― Benjamin Disraeli
It’s amazing how you can lie with statistics when you don’t provide context and/or leave key information out of your false narrative. As of July 4, the entire covid fear narrative was dying out, with cases crashing to new lows and the Big Pharma vaccine profit machine sputtering. That is when those controlling the media narrative began running the stories about the Indian variant and the imminent tragedy. As cases soared over 350,000 per day, the MSM was predicting bodies piling up in the streets.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, August 30, 2021
Stock Market Taper Shock That Never Was / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2021
By: Monica_Kingsley
Yes, more paring the risk-on bets came yesterday, indiscriminately taking down stocks (tech and value alike), oil and copper. The overall shape of the consolidation in real assets (commodities and precious metals) remains bullish though – it‘s mainly in the S&P 500 that the hanging man candle is giving me a pause – temporarily lower stock prices would be favored by the VIX too.
Regardless of that:
(…) Margin debt is contracting, M2 not exactly at the prior rates of growth, but celebrations in the paper and real asset markets largely go on. Gold and silver are understandably lagging in the drummed up taper expectations, but I‘m not looking for any kind of dramatic statement from the Fed. The two steps forward, one step backwards melodrama is likely to continue into the September FOMC, and even that may very well leave the markets guessing. The Fed is in no position to tighten, the economic recovery is likely to continue, and the central bank won‘t kill it – which means continuous noises, and data dependecy as they like to call it.
What we have seen thus far, and are likely to see next, are stealth real attempts to test the markets‘ tolerance to the continuing monetary largesse to the extent permitted by actual fiscal realities (nice qualifier to say „don‘t expect too much“), verbal interventions projecting the (sooner than anticipated, and most importantly, actually viable in the marketplace) taper (and later tightening) images while seeing the dollar hovering in a position of relative strength (useful tool to take on cost inflation). Make no mistake, Powell is keen to cement his legacy, and that doesn‘t involve succumbing to the hawkish (ehm, considered as hawkish in our loose monetary era) calls during a slowdown in the real economy growth.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, August 30, 2021
Fed Chairman Doubles Down on Loose Money as Inflation Rages / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: MoneyMetals
Precious metals markets are rallying on some early Friday remarks from Jerome Powell. The Federal Reserve chairman is speaking at the Jackson Hole virtual gathering of central bankers Friday and Saturday, and he started off by emphasizing the view that high inflation readings will come down soon.
There is still a question of whether anything has changed since the last Fed policy meeting. There, Fed officials had suggested they may soon begin tapering their asset purchases.
Something that could give the Fed’s money masters an excuse to back down on tapering is the recent global surge in COVID cases linked to the Delta variant.
Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, August 30, 2021
Stock Market Drawing Ever Closer to Final Target? / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2021
By: Andre_Gratian
Current Position of the Market
SPX Long-term trend: There is some evidence that we are still in the bull market which started in 2009 and which could continue into 2021 until major cycles take over, and it ends. A move up to ~4500 is possible before the current bull market makes a final top and SPX corrects into its next major cycle low due in 2023.
SPX Intermediate trend: SPX correction underway.
Analysis of the short-term trend is done daily with the help of hourly charts. They are important adjuncts to the analysis of daily and weekly charts which determine longer market trends.
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Stock market risk not yet realized / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2021
By: Gary_Tanashian
Stock market is at high risk, but…
The ‘but’ is the old saying “markets can remain [seemingly] irrational longer than you can remain solvent” if you fight a trend that is intact at any given point. Since March, 2020 that trend has been up.
Structurally Over-bullish
Below is a chart showing the 10 week exponential moving average of the Equity Put/Call ratio (CPCE) that we review periodically in NFTRH for a view of the structural over-bullish situation in stocks. I write structural because it has extended much longer than extremes in the CPCE have done at previous ‘bull killer’ danger points, after which risk was realized in the form of moderate to severe corrections.
The trend began logically enough at a ‘bear killer’ reading in the midst of max pandemic fear. We noted at the time that market participants were not just bearish, not just risk averse, but absolutely terrified. So the recipe is this: take 1 lump of terrified investors, add a heaping helping of the Fed’s money printing and voila, enjoy the taste of a slingshot rally that is very filling despite its inflationary odor.
Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Play the Odds: Avoid Gambling in Rigged Markets / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2021
By: MoneyMetals
Is America becoming a nation of gamblers?
The lure of potential cash windfalls is driving rampant speculation in financial markets and record traffic to casinos.
The commercial gaming industry generated a record $13.6 billion in revenues during the second quarter, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Casinos in Las Vegas, Massachusetts, Louisiana, and elsewhere now expect 2021 to be their best year ever.
On the flip side, since all games on a casino floor are rigged in favor of the house, it’s a good bet that gamblers are losing record amounts of money.
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Jackson Hole Ahead! What Should We Expect? / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
By: Arkadiusz_Sieron
Gold prices fluctuate around $1,800, waiting for signals from the Fed at Jackson Hole. Which way will we go after the conference?Finally! The price of gold returned above $1,800 this week, as the chart below shows. It’s a nice change after the slide in early August. Although gold has rebounded somewhat, bulls shouldn’t open the champagne yet. A small beer would be enough for now, as the yellow metal already retreated from $1,800 on Wednesday (the fact that gold was unable to stay above this level is rather disappointing).
Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, August 29, 2021
CENTRALIZATION, BLOCKCHAIN and DECENTRALIZATION / Politics / BlockChain
By: Raymond_Matison
Brief history of centralization
One important but mostly uncomplimentary history of man is recorded through his activities in war. Thousands of years ago large marauding bands of tribesmen descended on small communities or villages pillaging or killing its inhabitants. As centuries of time passed, small communities coalesced to become larger villages, some of which eventually expanded and grew to become city states or petty kingdoms.
In 480 B.C. Xerxes invaded Greek city states, but after taking Athens had to retreat. As William McNeil, author of his magnificent book “The Rise of the West” states: “free men organized into city-states need fear no military danger from without”. This early centralization of men and weapons protected cities from conquest at that time. The concept of certain centralization and its benefits became acknowledged and gained momentum over future centuries. In the seventeenth century, after the 30 year war, new legal principles for states and sovereignty were established in 1648. Under the new Westphalian system, states would exist with agreed-upon borders as each state’s sovereignty was recognized by others. This became another historical benchmark for increasing centralization.
Over the next several centuries, the so called industrial revolution with its centralization of production and factories provided heretofore unforeseen job and income opportunities for the general populace, further rapidly accelerating growth of cities and population movement from rural to urban areas. Increased production and worker incomes spurred sales providing useful products to the masses, and profits creating a dramatic centralization of wealth and power for these owners of productive facilities.
Read full article... Read full article...