The bottom line is these stock markets are very dangerous. A monster bull has been topping over the past year-and-quarter, leading to extreme technicals, sentiment, and valuations. Traders’ euphoria and complacency have been running at bull-slaying levels, while valuations remain way up near perilous bubble territory. All this is happening as corporate profits flatline after surging dramatically on the corporate tax cuts.
Like after every past waterfall decline, the stock markets are due to roll over and retest their deep late-December lows. Odds are they will fail, confirming a major new bear market. And the Fed doesn’t have much dovish ammunition left to retard the heavy selling. Gold investment demand will surge as stocks finally face their reckoning after this artificially-amplified bull. That will push gold and its miners’ stocks far higher. Full Story
Notwithstanding today’s absurdly phony and propagandistic employment report, it’s becoming more apparent by the week that the Fed and the U.S. Government are once again preparing to print more money. I don’t know when the Fed will revert to more QE but I would argue that the intense effort by the banks to use the Comex as a conduit to control the price of gold is a probable signal – just like in 2008 from March to October. Several FOMC officials have already hinted at the possibility of employing “radical” policy measures to keep the system from falling apart. Full Story
U.S. intervention in a nation of 30 million people, with an army of scores of thousands of troops, would enable Maduro to cast himself in the role of martyr of Yankee imperialism.
Finally, time is on our side, not Maduro’s.
The Venezuelan economy, one of the richest in the hemisphere owing to the world’s largest oil resources, is now in shambles. Some 3 million people, 1 in every 10 Venezuelans, have fled the disaster that Maduro and his mentor Hugo Chavez created.
The currency is sinking to Weimar levels. Oil exports are falling. Shortages of food and medicine are spreading. Power blackouts have been reported. It is difficult to foresee any turnaround the Maduro regime can execute to revive the economy or prevent the continued exodus of its people. Most of the nations of Latin America are with us and against Maduro. Full Story
The news that Bart Chilton, the former commissioner of the CFTC, suddenly passed away was truly sad but also shocking, so much so that some were given to fabricating conspiracy-type explanations. Chilton certainly had a larger than life persona and many came to appreciate his colorful pronouncements, enthusiasm and willingness to respond to just about everyone who contacted him – qualities quite rare in a regulator. I learned this first-hand very early on when I started communicating with Chilton shortly after he became commissioner in 2007, as I recounted not even a month ago in reaction to his last known interview, with Chris Marcus from Arcadia Economics.. Full Story
The Donald was at it again in Wisconsin this weekend, reiterating his patented boast that the US economy is booming like never before.
We’re now the No. 1 economy anywhere in the world and it’s not even close,” he said on Saturday night at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“At the end of six years, you’re going to be left with the strongest country you’ve ever had,” he said.
We beg to differ, profoundly. The debt- and bubble-freighted US economy is actually running out of gas after a long, artificial cycle of tepid expansion; and so far the Donald’s Trade Wars and fiscal borrowing binge have only piled more debilitating baggage on America’s deeply impaired economy. Full Story
Assuming it’s real, it means that the metals have become less liquid. This could be due to a decline in trading volumes at the institutional level, to correspond with moribund volumes at retail. Or it could be due to consequences of Basel III regulations, which make it more expensive for banks to hold gold. Full Story
The semiconductor stocks continued melting up last week until Intel threw some cold water on the Dutch tulip bulb price-chasing party. TXN reported Tuesday after the close. Revenues declined 5% from the year-earlier quarter. The management stated that “demand continued to slow across most markets. TXN then said Q2 revenues would drop 10% from Q2 2018. It said earnings would be down 13%. Management also explained that historically down-cycles last 4-5 quarters. With the Company 2 quarters into a down-cycle, it would seem that the “green shoots” sighted by some companies in Q1 are nowhere in sight. TXN insiders have been very heavy sellers of the stock. Full Story
By: Richard (Rick) Mills, Ahead of the herd - 1 May, 2019
In March Italy broke ranks with its EU partners in joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative, known also as One Belt, One Road or the New Silk Road.
Students of history know the original “Silk Road” refers to the ancient network of trading routes between China and Europe, which served as both a conduit for the movement of goods, and an exchange of ideas, for centuries.
The “New Silk Road” is the term for an ambitious trade corridor first proposed by the Chinese regime under its current president, Xi Jinping, in 2013. The grand design also known, confusingly, as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is a “belt” of overland corridors and a “road” of shipping lanes. Full Story
Population adjusted official national debt has exploded in the past 100+ years.
Population adjusted GDP has not kept pace with debt—a bad sign.
Worse, population adjusted GDP has fallen from 8.9%/year in the 1970s to 3.4%/year in the past decade.
Gold prices will rise as fiat currencies devalue, and as the world acknowledges $250 trillion in global debt is unpayable. The “printing game” can last longer, but the consequences will be ugly.
Have you protected your savings and retirement with something real – silver and gold – instead of trusting devaluing fiat currency units manufactured in the trillions by corrupt central banks? Full Story
Have you ever heard the phrase, “What a gold mine!”?
That common, age-old expression was actually a positive reference to having something very valuable. Notably, a gold mine that paid its owners very well by producing gold.
Yet in the last two decades (the span of my career), gold miners have been anything but responsible dividend payers to their owners – the shareholders... Full Story
By: Keith Weiner, Monetary Metals - 29 April, 2019
The similarities, of both the magnitude and timing, are hard to miss. What does it mean? Well, for starters, if you’re paying attention to some myth or whispered rumor of a Big Gold Event to come, don’t pay it much heed. Regardless of last year’s outcome, the trend of the fundamental price this year is not looking like it should if the price is about to go bananas.
Is this just a picture of the old words “sell in May and go away”? Perhaps, but it should be noted that the prior year we had a rise in the fundamentals from December through September. A similar drop up to Dec 2015, and then rise through mid-April 2016 occurred, though there was a second peak in August. The year before that, there was a more modest rise in fundamental from late Dec to January, of about $90. Full Story
Investors who are striving to optimize their portfolios should consider taking cues from the world’s central banks, writes the Financial Express. “Informed money,” such as these banks, is the cash invested by those who have a better understanding of the market, or with access to information channels that a regular investor does not. Furthermore, Bloomberg writes that official sector gold purchases could reach 700 tons this year, “assuming the China trend continues apace and Russia at least matches its 2018 volumes.” India’s central bank is likely to join its counterparts, as the Reserve Bank of Index (RBI) may purchase 1.5 million ounces in 2019, according to Howie Lee, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. Full Story
Central bankers and politicians love inflation, but they need “bag holders” to have faith in the value of the fiat currency IOUs they hold. The trick is to avoid suddenly destroying the ephemeral confidence in currencies by printing too much too fast.
Central bankers may also need to limit the options inflation wary citizens have for escaping.
They are both shifty and innovative when it comes to making sure the ill effects of perpetually devaluing currency are primarily borne by the citizenry. Full Story
To end it all simply (or just to end myself after hearing that), the underlying domestic data look perfectly primed for a downturn.
Finally, inflation also fell back sharply from 1.9% annually to an annualized 1.4%, which is certainly an economic change more typical of a looming recession than a hotly expanding economy. In the very least, the dive in inflation looks like it is time for the Fed to cut interest rates again just to drive inflation back to the Fed’s 2% target. Oh, hold it. The Fed only starts doing that when the economy is going into recession! Full Story
While the former member of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Bart Chilton, disappointed some monetary metals investors, he was a hero to GATA for several reasons.
First, he forced the commission to take public testimony from GATA Chairman Bill Murphy and GATA Director Adrian Douglas at the commission's much-publicized hearing on the monetary metals markets in March 2010. This brought national attention to our issue.
Second, he repeatedly gave credence in public to complaints of manipulation of the gold and silver markets.
Third, he conscientiously answered mail from ordinary investors and others... Full Story
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