Sunday, July 22, 2018
China is Now Officially at War With the US and Japan / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2018
By: Graham_Summers
It is not a war of guns and soldiers, but a war of finance.
The Trump White House is aggressively going after China on trade. Every other month we are seeing a new round of tariffs announced on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese exports.
China is retaliating by devaluing the Yuan against the US Dollar at a pace not seen since early 2016. In real terms, the 10% in tariffs the Trump administration will implement on Chinese goods has ALREADY been negated by China’s 14% Yuan devaluation.
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Sunday, July 22, 2018
You Buy the Fear in Gold / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2018
By: Gary_Tanashian
This article does not speak to gold’s proper fundamentals, which are not yet very healthy (although some positive signs are finally gathering). For the proper counter-cyclical atmosphere to engage gold bulls would need have risk ‘on’ markets and assets crack. Yet, gold’s (and silver’s) price may well bottom before readily obvious fundamental improvement is apparent to a majority (as was the case in Q1 2016).
Far too much analysis is put out there linking gold with inflation. It is true that gold often acts as an effective inflation hedge, but it all too often fails in that capacity.
Far too much analysis is put out there linking gold with war, terror, pestilence and other conditions of human suffering. The surest way to spot a gold promoter, if he is not pumping inflation, is his pitch for gold as a disaster hedge. Yes okay, and I have a little Unibomber shack in Montana to sell you too.
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Saturday, July 21, 2018
Trumponomics Stock Market 2018 - The Manchurian President (1/2) / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Trumponomics in a nutshell can be summed up as a mish mash of policies built on tweets that has surprisingly so far delivered relative stock market strength for the broad US markets this year that has the Dow currently trading at 25,064 marginally up from at the start of the year opening level of 24,720 whilst standing up 7.5% a from its early April low of 23,300. So as the Dow chart illustrates the stock market has refused to FALL this year despite the chaos of the unfolding trade war that has been the focus of the mainstream press for 2018.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
The Death of Japan's Real Estate Dream / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Harry_Dent
It’s no secret that Millennials are not buying homes as early or to the degree that Boomers did.They saw the first major real estate crash since the Great Depression. So, rentals are up and home buying is down.
But this is being called “the Dream on Hold.”
Our view is based purely on demographics, and it is more extreme than that: By 2024 the home ownership dream as a means to wealth will be DEAD!
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Saturday, July 21, 2018
Looking at the Amazon Tax / Companies / Amazon
By: Rodney_Johnson
Recently the Supreme Court overruled previous decisions that said states couldn’t require companies without a physical location in their state to collect sales tax.Now, online retailers must collect sales tax based on the consumer’s location, no matter where the retailer resides.
Before I get to what this means to Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and others, it’s worth recalling that just because states could not force out of state retailers to collect the tax, it was always due.
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Saturday, July 21, 2018
SMIGGLE Amazing Mega Shopping Haul, Pencil Cases, Smigglets and Giant Back Packs! / Personal_Finance / Shopping
By: Anika_Walayat
Were back from our latest smiggle shopping trip with loads more New Smiggle stuff, including pencil cases, rubbers, SMIGLETS and an amazing giant SMIGGLE back pack, about twice the volume of my old SMIGGLE back pack. So here is my review of all of these new SMIGGLE goodies in my greatest SMIGGLE shopping haul so far. I hope you enjoy the video and find it useful.
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Saturday, July 21, 2018
Cayton Bay Beach Caravan Park Holiday - What's it Like? / Personal_Finance / Holidays
By: Anika_Walayat
Thinking of booking a caravan park holiday for summer 2018? Then look no further than our series of videos of what it's like to holiday at a UK caravan park. This is at the Hoseasons Caravan Park at Cayton Bay, North East England, not 10 miles from Scarborough.
In our fifth video in this series we show what it's like to take a walk down to Cayton Bay Beach, which is quite a walk down a steep slope as the video illustrates.
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Friday, July 20, 2018
Gold Stocks Investment Wanes / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
By: Zeal_LLC
Gold’s summer doldrums are dragging on this year, with this asset slumping longer and lower than usual. Several converging factors are responsible. The stronger dollar has convinced gold-futures speculators to sell aggressively, and gold’s downside momentum has fed on itself. Investment demand has waned on the resulting weaker gold prices and euphoric near-record-high stock markets, but that should reverse soon.
Summers are usually gold’s weakest time of the year seasonally. So investors and speculators need to be mentally prepared for lackluster or bearish trading action this time of year. Market summers run Junes, Julies, and Augusts. And their first halves are simply devoid of the recurring outsized spikes in gold investment demand seen during much of the rest of the year. Thus gold prices tend to drift neglected.
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Friday, July 20, 2018
Diversifying Your Stock Investing Strategies is Smart Investing / InvestorEducation / Learning to Invest
By: Boris_Dzhingarov
When you look to invest, you will find that there are a wide range of options to choose from and also a few types of investments you can make. The range of Investments vary from real estate, to stock Investing, bonds, commodities, new companies, and even Bitcoin. Each of these has its own set of parameters and investment guidelines. An investor can also approach investing from a standpoint of risk/ reward. Typically speaking any investment that has a higher reward scenario will be more risky than one that offers less reward.
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Friday, July 20, 2018
Custom Global Stock Market Indexes May Be Sounding Alarms / Stock-Markets / Global Stock Markets
By: Chris_Vermeulen
Over the past 4+ months, we’ve been working away trying to keep our readers aware of the risks and concerns that were originating out of some foreign markets and how that might relate to the US markets. We remember a point in time back in June or July 2017 when we, suddenly, started receiving emails and calls from moderately large Indian, Indonesian and other foreign development companies asking to schedule time for an “introduction call”. It is not unusual for us to receive cold calls from development firms looking for new projects, but at one point we were getting 2 to 3 calls a week.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
S&P 500 Just 2% Below Record High, But There's More Stock Market Uncertainty / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
By: Paul_Rejczak
Stocks were basically unchanged on Wednesday, as investors took short-term profits off the table following the recent rally. Is this a topping pattern before downward reversal, or just a quick flat correction before another leg up? Will quarterly earnings releases drive the market higher?
The U.S. stock market indexes were mixed between 0.0% and 0.3% on Wednesday, as investors' sentiment remained pretty bullish following the recent rally. The S&P 500 index reached the highest since the early February, as it slightly extended its short-term uptrend yesterday. It currently trades just 2.0% below the January's 26th record high of 2,872.87. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.3% and the technology Nasdaq Composite was unchanged on Wednesday.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Stock Market Technical Picture / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
By: Christopher_Quigley
No two recessions are ever the same.
One of the best indicators of a possible recession on the horizon is the inversion of the American Treasury interest rate yield curves. Inversion means the yield on short term rates are abnormally higher than long term rates. With Jerome Powell, the FED chairman, publically committed to another two .25% interest rate hikes this year, it is highly probable that by year end the 2/10 year yield curve will have inverted. (Currently the spread between the 2 year and 10 year yield is only .26%). In the recessions of 2000 and 2008 the American economy experienced severe recessions within 22 months and 24 months, respectively, upon yield curve inversion.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Gold Market Signal vs. Noise / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2018
By: Jordan_Roy_Byrne
In his book Nobody Knows Anything, my friend Bob Moriarty wrote about the difference between signal and noise. Unfortunately, much of the information in the gold space or what passes for such is really noise. Conspiracy theories around manipulation, price suppression and China are all too popular while important factors like real interest rates, investment demand and gold’s relationship to equities are neglected. At present the Gold market has experienced a critical breakdown yet in some circles a new theory and explanation is gaining traction.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Don’t Get Too Bullish on Gold / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2018
By: Troy_Bombardia
Gold has been getting crushed recently, and now sits near several support levels.
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Thursday, July 19, 2018
Bitcoin Price Rallies to Upper Channel – What Next? / Currencies / Bitcoin
By: Chris_Vermeulen
Even we were concerned with Bitcoin briefly traded below $6k in late June. Yet, the recent upside price move was incredibly quick and the price of Bitcoin ran right up to our upper price channel. We believe this will become a new price peak over the next few days/weeks where the price of Bitcoin should continue to drop from these levels near $7500. We know there are many Bitcoin investors that want to hear us state that it should continue to push higher, but there are other factors at play here that may limit this movement.
The price channels that are currently constraining the price of Bitcoin originate back in February and March of 2018. The low and high price rotation within these months start the points of interest for our research team. From these points, we have continued to identify key price levels that appear to contain breakouts.
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Thursday, July 19, 2018
Trump Manchurian President Embarrasses Putin By Farcically Blowing his Russian Agent Cover / Politics / US Politics
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Trump effectively blew what little cover he had left of being Czar Putin's Manchurian President, as he lavished praise on the Russian Dictator whilst deriding his own law enforcement and Intelligence agencies and their evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, as Trump chose to side with Putin by following the Czar's script rather than the growing volume of evidence of Russian interference in the election that just days earlier had prompted the US to indict 12 Russian intelligence agents for hacking of DNC servers. That were a likely response to Trump's own statements made during the campaign for the Russians to to hack and leak Hillary's emails as he continued with the theme at the Press conference in Helsinki.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
The Fonzie–Ponzi Theory of Government Debt: An Update / Interest-Rates / Global Debt Crisis 2018
By: F_F_Wiley
This post is excerpted from my book Economics for Independent Thinkers, although with some updating. It seems relevant after the CBO’s latest long-term budget outlook, which in its optimistic “baseline scenario” called for America’s net federal debt to double over the next 30 years, rising from 76% of GDP in 2017 to 152% in 2048.
Before reaching this chapter or even picking up this book, I imagine many of you were already loosely divided into the two major camps of the public debt debate. The first camp is already concerned and doesn’t need my research to form an opinion. These people stress the math involved in borrowing—the idea that you get do extra stuff today, but you have to somehow pay for it in the future. Meanwhile, those in the other camp ask, “So what?” They might argue that America will make good on its debt because “it always does.” Or they’ll point confidently to America’s unique advantages as a military superpower, paragon of political stability, and steward of the world’s predominant reserve currency. Confronted with the lessons of history, they’ll say, “This time is different.”
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Thursday, July 19, 2018
Economic Combustion Powering SPX to Test All-Time High? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
By: Mike_Paulenoff
A big-picture perspective of the S&P 500 (SPX) shows that the most recent up-leg off of the June 28 low at 2691.99 has climbed to a new high at 2816.25, or +4.6%. In so doing, the SPX has hurdled its prior two significant rally peaks at June 13 (2791.47) and at March 13 (2801.90), positioning the index for upside continuation to my next optimal target zone of 2845-2860.
Should such a scenario unfold, the SPX, in effect, will be climbing towards a test of its all-time high at 2872.87 from January 26 of this year. Only a break below 2789 will trigger initial signals that the June-July up-leg needs a breather.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Will the Fed’s Interest Rate Tightening Trigger Another Financial Crisis? / Stock-Markets / Financial Crisis 2018
By: Arkadiusz_Sieron
The recent currency and debt crises in Argentina and Turkey raise questions about the condition of the global economy in general and the emerging countries in particular. Are they merely isolated events without broader implications or are they canary in the emerging market mine?
This question is timely and worryingly justified in the context of the ongoing Fed’s tightening cycle and the ECB’s shy steps toward normalization of its monetary policy. Historically speaking, the Fed’s tightening used to end with some sort of market crisis, including U.S. recession and turbulences in the emerging markets which rely heavily on dollar-denominated debt (as a reminder, the dollar lending outside the U.S. stands at about $11 trillion today). As one can see in the chart below, practically all recessions in America occurred after the Fed’s tightening cycle.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Stock Market Investor “Buy the Dip” Mentality is Still Strong, Which is Bullish for Stocks / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2018
By: Troy_Bombardia
The stock market’s “buy the dip” mentality is very strong right now.
The S&P 500’s pullbacks are becoming smaller and smaller, while the S&P 500 has started to break out.
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