U.S. Debt Deal Reached, Republicans Got Nothing, Now 90 Days Until Next Crisis

By: PhilStockWorld

What idiocy!

As I told you yesterday, the damage is done. Extending the crisis past Christmas doesn't make it go away and the Dollar fell 1% today on the "great' news that we "fixed" the debt ceiling. So Congresses "fix" cost you 1% of EVERYTHING you EVER earning in your ENTIRE life. It's all worth 1% less now – happy?

If it took you 40 years to earn what you have, that's about 6 months of your life murdered by Government idiocy and, believe me, they are not done yet. As I warned yesterday, this may only be stage one of the decline of the American Empire – just like Rome, we have Senators constantly plotting against the Emperor while lining their own pockets and doing anything it takes to remain in power, rather than actually trying to do what's right for their country.

I was particularly disturbed this morning by a clip from the Daily Show which highlighted what's going on at the State Governemnt level with 26 GOP states refusing to cover millions of people who fall through the Medicare/Obamacare crack, which was meant to be covered by Federal Aid but GOP Governors, like Rick Perry, are refusing the aid – a political stand that is literally killing people!

In the interest of being "fair and blanced," here's a good Conservative cartoon from Investors.com, which, like almost all of the Financial Media, is a thinly-masked right-wing propaganda sheet. Still, this they can make good points in that, regardless of who you want to blame for Obama's inbility to magically completely reverse 8 years of Bush destruction in less than 4 years, there are still a TON of problems facing us that this debt fiasco only managed to distract us from:

Notice how they use the word "gravity" because it's a popular movie at the moment and, despite the fact that the cartoon has nothing to do with gravity, focus groups show it helps get your attention and focus groups are how we run the GOP, right? Speaking of how we run the GOP, congrats to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who agreed to sell out for a $2.918Bn earmark for a dam project in his state – a 300% increase from the original $775M alloted. Now THAT's how you compromise, right?

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) called the provision an "abuse" of McConnell's position. "One of the tricks around here, one of the abuses around here, is you get a big bill that needs to go forward and needs to pass, and the people try to load it up with things that are important to them," Sessions told reporters. "In the long run, that's not good for the public."

That's right, as you can see from the picture on the left, AMC's hit series "The Walking Dead" is back! Joe from CNBC is a big proponent of the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse and it's the perfect scenario to justify the "grab all you can because the World is going to Hell anyway" attitude that passes for political "thought" these days.

Speaking of Walking Dead, China is looking a little scary, especially after IBM earnings show a 22% sales drop in our reddest of states.

There are already China anomalies popping up in the results of some of the biggest U.S. tech names. At Cisco last quarter, sales in India and Mexico were up double digits, Russia and Brazil were flat, but China was down 6 percent. Apple's business in mainland China was up only 5 percent in the June quarter, a startlingly low number given that it had been up 8 percent and 67 percent in the previous two. Don't expect any signs of a China turnaround until July, when their next rounds of stimulus kick in. Meanwhile, we'll be looking for signs of China strain in Apple and Cisco's reports over the next couple of weeks.

Because of IBM, China, that cartoon and the fact that yesterday's rally was way overdone – we shorted a couple of indexes agressively in yesterday's Member Chat with:

• DIA Oct $152.50 puts at .55
• Oil Futures (/CL) shorts at $102.50
• Dow Futures (/YM) shorts at 15,200
• TZA Nov $22 calls at $1.07 

Those were to replace our very successful Wednesday short positions which, thankfully, we had cashed out. We'll see how our new set winds up today but our simple premise was – so what? All this deal has done is avoid a MASSIVE crisis that never needed to happen.

Now we have to focus on everything else that's wrong with the economy…

- Phil

www.philstockworld.com

Philip R. Davis is a founder of Phil's Stock World (www.philstockworld.com), a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders. Mr. Davis is a serial entrepreneur, having founded software company Accu-Title, a real estate title insurance software solution, and is also the President of the Delphi Consulting Corp., an M&A consulting firm that helps large and small companies obtain funding and close deals. He was also the founder of Accu-Search, a property data corporation that was sold to DataTrace in 2004 and Personality Plus, a precursor to eHarmony.com. Phil was a former editor of a UMass/Amherst humor magazine and it shows in his writing -- which is filled with colorful commentary along with very specific ideas on stock option purchases (Phil rarely holds actual stocks). Visit: Phil's Stock World (www.philstockworld.com)

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