Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Real Education Reform Leaves the U.S. Government Behind / Politics / Educating Children

By: Dr_Ron_Paul

Among the items awaiting Congress when it returns from its August break is reconciling competing House and Senate bills reauthorizing No Child Left Behind. These bills passed early this spring. Each bill is being marketed as a huge step toward restoring state and local control over education. However, an examination of both bills shows that both provide local schools with only limited relief from a few federal mandates.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Dow Stocks Index Makes it Seven / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015

By: Andre_Gratian

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.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Stock Market Bubbles: What the Media Misunderstands / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015

By: ...

MoneyMorning.com D.R. Barton, Jr writes: Since the last bona fide financial bubble, the real estate and credit bubble of 2007 to 2009, it seems like every time anyone pays a few pennies too much for a stock, there is a flock of analysts ready to start crowing "bubble!" like so many birds on a wire.

I believe that any pundit who calls a sector or market a "bubble" when they really mean "fundamentally or technically overbought" should be banished from pontificating until the real bubble appears.

That's no hollow gripe: These talking heads can do serious damage with their flawed analyses. Regular investors who heed their bad advice can end up prematurely exiting what are in fact strong, lucrative positions, leaving billions in upside on the table.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Greenspan Warns Be Afraid of U.S. Bond Market Bubble / Interest-Rates / US Bonds

By: Bloomberg

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan spoke with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about the U.S. economy, bond market and Fed policy.

On how afraid we should be of bubbles, Greenspan said: "Very much so. I think we have a pending bond market bubble. If we merely substitute the structure of equity prices and we have the price of bonds and instead of expected equity return we do have expected interest rate return. That price earnings ratio is an extraordinarily unstable position."

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Game Theory and Retirement Choices / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement

By: Dan_Amerman

Game theory is a hot topic in many fields right now and for good reason - it can uncover better ways of making decisions, that are often otherwise missed. A particularly good example is the uncommon insights that game theory can deliver for us when it comes to making better retirement decisions.

For our decision-making "game", let's say there is a $1 million pool of money to be split between you and nine other people. If you wait until the end of ten years to cash out - you and everyone else are promised that you'll be equally entitled to $250,000 each.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Agricultural Commodities Peak Food / Commodities / Food Crisis

By: Ned_W_Schmidt

Last we visited on Agri-Foods the concept of Peak Food was introduced. That shift in the fundamentals of global food production was identified as adding support to Agri-Commodity prices. For despite the negative sentiment on commodities and "China is collapsing" group think, Agri- Commodity prices continue to show strong resilience, as shown in the chart below right. As prices of Agri-Commodities do not move in unison, the Agri-Food Price Index has been essentially unchanged for about three years. For example, recently hog prices have been weak while U.S. cash corn hit a new 52-week high.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

The War Between Physical Gold and Silver and Paper Hots Up / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015

By: Alasdair_Macleod

Gold and silver traded in a tight range this week on low futures volumes. Last Friday the gold price rallied from $1,080 to $1,101, last night it closed at $1,089. Silver also traded in a narrow range though both are slightly firmer in early European trade this morning.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Ignore the Commodity Message at Your Own Peril / Commodities / CRB Index

By: Michael_Pento

The Thompson Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index (CRB) is back down to the panic lows of early 2009. For those who think the CRB Index says nothing about global growth...invest accordingly at your own peril.

If you believe this commodity crunch is all about some temporary oil supply glut, think again. There are 19 commodities that make up the CRB Index: Aluminum, Cocoa, Coffee, Copper, Corn, Cotton, Crude Oil, Gold, Heating Oil, Lean Hogs, Live Cattle, Natural Gas, Nickel, Orange Juice, Silver, Soybeans, Sugar, Unleaded Gas and Wheat. The value of the weighted average of these commodities is screaming one thing loudly: the rate of global growth is plummeting just as it was at the height of the Great Recession.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Gold and Silver Halfway Home? / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015

By: Rambus_Chartology

First off I'm on a working one week family vacation down on the panhandle of Florida which is why I didn't get to post any late Friday Night Charts. It just so happened that this week was the best week to get the family together before school starts in a couple of weeks. I will still be watching the markets and posting each day but if nothing important is happening I may knock off a little early.

I also want to thank everyone who is posting at the forum. It really is a great place to share your idea's and ask question as we have some really talented folks there. As Sir Fullgoldcrown likes to say, "It's all for one and one for all." Whatever it takes to get an edge makes no difference to me as long as we get the edge.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Stock Market Crash, Bear Market Rally in Gold? / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2015

By: Brad_Gudgeon

I'm attaching three charts today: One chart of the daily SPY shows the parallel between Friday and March 3, 2015. The next one, shows where it could go as far as price and time is concerned, and the third shows the weekly chart of the SPX and what I believe may be the eventual conclusion of the correction into October of this year.

Astro-cycle-wise, we have not yet seen the 100 TD low, commonly called the 20 week low, last seen on March 11, 2015. As of Friday we are at TD 104. The 100 TD low usually comes within about a 10% variance giving it about 10 TD's on either side (the longest I've seen was at about 115/116 TD's ).

Monday, August 10, 2015

U.S. Dollar QE Death Sentence, Us Treasury Bond Black Hole / Interest-Rates / US Bonds

By: Jim_Willie_CB

Rather than stimulus, the USFed's Quantitative Easing is a death sentence for the USDollar. It might provide an ongoing backdoor bailout opportunity for Wall Street banks, and even a window for China to switch from long dated to short dated USTreasurys, but QE is death sentence. It guarantees that the USDollar will be removed from the global premises and placed in the dustbin of history. Foreign banking systems are largely devoted to USTBonds as the foundation for their entire reserves system. The African type of hyper monetary inflation blessed as good and fine stimulus is a sentinel signal by the US Federal Reserve itself, given to the Eastern producing nations who save in the $billions. They will start a caravan to exit the USDollar in their banking systems. They have great challenges in doing so, and must follow a prescribed path. That path is the Chinese RMB as an intermediary device, a transition tool. The goal is the return of the Gold Trade Standard, which will assure the return to the Gold Currency Standard and the Gold Banking Standard. The absent solution to the chronic global financial crisis has been the refusal to put Gold at the apex. Instead, the big banks have become zombies, the economies have become sclerotic, the financial structure have been control rooms, the bond platforms have been fracturing, while the USGovt has relied upon bond fraud, gold thefts, the printing press, and predatory wars to defend the King Dollar regime. It is due for the funeral pyre.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Bogus Economic Statistics - China About To Make History Again / Stock-Markets / Chinese Stock Market

By: John_Rubino

Any discussion of China has to open with the now-widely-understood fact that the numbers it reports are not to be trusted. Knowing this makes it easy to dismiss claims of high and consistently-on-target GDP growth, for instance, as a combination of government-directed borrowing and spending, and simple fabrication.

But how to handle negative numbers? When a serial fabricator admits that things are bad and getting worse, that would seem to imply that someone at or near the top has concluded that either the facts can no longer be obscured or that there’s an advantage in creating negative expectations.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Gold Technical Buy Signal / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015

By: Gary_Savage

For those traders who need to wait until the 'technicals' signal a buy. The signal has been given.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Stock Investors Shelter from These Storms in the Distance / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015

By: ...

MoneyMorning.com Michael E. Lewitt writes: In South Florida, we call the dog days of summer the "mean season", as vicious thunderstorms move over the Everglades every afternoon and attack the east coast with lightning strikes and blinding downpours. We keep our fingers crossed that the storms won't morph hurricanes that can sweep the ocean over the land and cause catastrophic destruction.

After a period of intense hurricane activity in the early 2000s, it's been ten years since we've been hit by any serious storms, and we are being told that strong El Nino conditions will likely protect us again this season. But we know that sooner or later our luck will run out, and we will be back in the eye of dangerous winds and storm surges. And, at least for a moment, we'll wish we lived somewhere other than in paradise.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Qatar Stock Exchange Index (QE) Bullish Wedge Setting Up / Stock-Markets / Emerging Markets

By: MarketsToday

A bullish wedge formation is setting up in the chart of the Qatar Exchange Index (QE). Taking into account the pattern to date, a breakout is confirmed on a move above 12,043.7. However, there could be a lower signal develop as the pattern may need a little while longer to progress. At this point an aggressive signal would be given on a move above Wednesday’s high at 11,836.8.

Sunday, August 09, 2015

The Unseen Consequences of Zero-Interest-Rate Policy / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates

By: MISES

Ronald-Peter Stöferle writes: In a dynamic economy, an action not only triggers just one effect, but always an entire series of different consequences. While the cause of the first effect is easily recognizable, the other effects often occur only later and no such recognition occurs. Frédéric Bastiat described this phenomenon in 1850 in his ground-breaking essay “What Is Seen and What is Not Seen”:

In the economic sphere, an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them …

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Japan Gets Ready for More Military Spending / Politics / New Cold War

By: MISES

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been pressing for more military spending in Japan, in what critics claim is a violation of Japan’s so-called pacifist constitution. Foreign Policy reports:

In January, the government of conservative Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe endorsed a defense budget of nearly 5 trillion yen, or $42 billion, continuing a three-year growth trend after nearly a decade of decline. The sum still represents a small portion of Japan’s GDP — it accounts for just one percent of it, according to the World Bank — but because offensive military action is prohibited by Japan’s constitution, even a modest increase is controversial.

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Trump’s Triumph: Billionaire Blowhard Exposes Fake Political System / ElectionOracle / US Presidential Election 2016

By: Mike_Whitney

FOX News GOP Presidential Debate Extravaganza featured the most riveting two minute political exchange ever heard on national television. During a brief colloquy between Republican frontrunner  Donald Trump and Fox moderator Brett Baier, the pugnacious casino magnate revealed the appalling truth about the American political system, that the big money guys like Trump own the whole crooked contraption lock, stock, and barrel, and that, the nation’s fake political leaders do whatever they’re told to do.  Without question, it was most illuminating commentary to ever cross the airwaves. Here’s the entire exchange direct from the transcript:

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Stock Market 4 Year Rest or P4 / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015

By: Tony_Caldaro

The market started the week at SPX 2104. It ticked up to SPX 2106 to start the week, then traded down to 2087 on Monday. A rally started Monday afternoon carrying the SPX to 2113 by Wednesday. Then the market pulled back to end the week at SPX 2078. For the week the SPX/DOW were -1.55%, the NDX/NAZ were -1.60%, and the DJ World was down 0.9%. On the economic front positive reports outpaced negative ones. On the uptick: personal income/spending, the PCE, construction spending, factory orders, ISM services, and consumer credit. On the downtick: ISM manufacturing, the ADP, monthly Payrolls, plus the trade deficit and weekly jobless claims rose. Next week will be highlighted by Industrial production, Retail sales and the PPI.

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Agricultural Commodities Prices Prepare To Launch Higher Again / Commodities / Agricultural Commodities

By: Austin_Galt

As outlined in previous analysis, the price of the agricultural commodities of corn, soybeans and wheat look to have already kicked off the bear rallies. From previous longer term analysis, we are expecting these bear rallies to be big ones.

Prices have come back down and now look ready to launch into the next stage of these rallies so let's revise the technicals of each commodity using the daily charts.