Sunday, June 14, 2020

Rolex Watches — a Store of Value / Personal_Finance / Investing

By: Kavinesh_A

Any avid watch enthusiast and collector can appreciate the amount of work that goes into designing a Rolex watch. Thanks to its impeccable design and high-quality, Rolex has become the most recognizable name in the industry, synonymous with classy, well-made watches. Thus, either new or vintage Rolex watches can be used as a unique store of value.

History shows that there were more than a few times when Rolex watches stole the show in world-class auctions and sales, with prices going up into the six-figure range.

Friday, June 12, 2020

US and UK Black Lives Matter Protests, Riots and Looting To Trigger 2nd Covid-19 Wave Peak? / Politics / Pandemic

By: Nadeem_Walayat

Briefly, the protesting and rioting of the past week that has shown little signs of social distancing coupled with relaxation of lockdown's is likely to trigger a second wave of sorts that a few weeks down the road could result in a rising death tolls for both the US and UK.

As things stand the Covid-19 deaths trend in the US continues to move the right direction with the 7 day average at 835 and the 14 day at distant 970, though the rate of decline has slowed over the past couple of weeks that implies that the US could be at risk of at least stalling at an average of about 800 deaths per day and worse risk an upwards trend towards a second peak over the coming weeks.

Friday, June 12, 2020

US Dollar Cycle Points To New All-time Highs For Gold / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Hubert_Moolman

The US Dollar index is not a true measure of value of the US dollar. It just tracks an “exchange rate” between the US dollar and a basket of significant fiat currencies.

For a true measure of value of the US dollar it is better to look to Gold and Silver. However, there is a relationship between significant Gold rallies and the US Dollar index.

Gold has a tendency to rally at a certain time in a US Dollar index long-term cycle. Previously, I have looked at significant Silver rallies, relative to the US Dollar long-term cycle. Here, I would like to look at Gold.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Will US Labor Market Recovery Sink Gold? / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Arkadiusz_Sieron

The recent job report is not reliable, but it shows recovery in the US labor market. The situation is still bad, but optimism could triumph for now, which is bad for gold.  

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Services released the newest edition of the Employment Situation Report. The publication shows that the US economy regained 2.5 million jobs in May, constituting the biggest nonfarm payroll surprise in history. Indeed, the economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a loss of 7.25 million jobs. The rebound is presented in the chart below.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Stock Market Shift Away from Safety Begins / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2020

By: Donald_W_Dony

Sector performance or strength can tell an enormous amount about how Mr. Market is feeling.

In Chart 1, from early December to late February, the four classic safe haven sectors (precious metals, bonds, U.S. dollar and utilities) were all outperforming the benchmark S&P 500.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Bullion Bank Retreat Puts Floor Under Gold and Silver Prices / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: MoneyMetals

Investors dumped paper gold and silver along with stocks, commodities, and most other asset classes in March. The price of silver dropped to $12.02/oz on March 18th and gold bottomed at $1,473/oz.

The bullion banks – notorious for their concentrated short positions – might have made a killing. But that isn’t what happened. Some of the most prominent players took massive losses instead.

Friday, June 12, 2020

Silver Investing Strategy / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Nadeem_Walayat

Firstly, my long standing approach to Silver has been one of buying (accumulating) when the Silver price is cheap to invest to capitalise on long-term Spikes, as the silver price tends to be quite erratic in behaviour, prone to a lot of false signals so Silver can be a difficult market to trade i.e. tends to run stops and sharp movements contrary to the likes of Gold, just as we experienced during Summer 2019, with the bulk of the silver moves taking place towards the end of precious metals bull runs as illustrated by my analysis of May 2018 investing for a $35+ Spike.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Gold Silver Ratio / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Nadeem_Walayat

I am afraid I have got some bad news for all the Silver bugs out there, for the gold / silver ratio chart makes it crystal clear that Silver is NOT a safe haven precious metal. Yes you may still call it a precious metal but it is NOT GOLD! That's for sure!

Thursday, June 11, 2020

When Profits and Politics Drive Science: The Hazards of Rushing a Coronavirus Vaccine at “Warp Speed” / Politics / Pandemic

By: Ellen_Brown

More than 100 companies are competing to be first in the race to get a COVID-19 vaccine to market. It’s a race against time, not because the death rate is climbing but because it is falling – to the point where there could soon be too few subjects to prove the effectiveness of the drug.

So says Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company that is a frontrunner in the race. Soriot said on May 24th,

“The vaccine has to work and that’s one question, and the other question is, even if it works, we have to be able to demonstrate it. We have to run as fast as possible before the disease disappears so we can demonstrate that the vaccine is effective.”

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Gold Sad Truth / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Michael_Pento

The sad truth is that few people really know very much about gold, especially when it comes to investing in the metal. They don’t understand what makes it so valuable and unique, and they know even less what moves its price. Since I don’t want to spend an hour on why it is so precious, I’ll just try and sum it up in a sentence: Gold is extremely rare, beautiful, portable, transferable, divisible without losing value, and virtually indestructible. Very few things on this earth can meet all those criteria, and that is why it is the most perfect form of money humankind has ever found.

Now more than ever, investors desperately need to know what really influences the dollar price of gold. This is the case given the unprecedented falsification of asset prices and debt monetization taking place today. Gold is not driven by the fear of a crash in the major market averages. Nor is it even primarily concerned about the inverse correlation to the U.S. dollar (USD). Indeed, the massive interest rate suppression scheme by the Fed since the Great Recession has been the main reason behind the outperformance of gold compared with the S&P 500. This is true even in the context of a rising USD.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Silver’s Apparent Recovery / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Kelsey_Williams

Some might say “Silver’s performance over the past several weeks has been nothing short of phenomenal.” Others talk and act as if all of their wildly crazy price predictions have already come true.

The chart (source) below is a one-year history of daily prices for SLV (Silver ETF)…

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Unnatural Distortions and the Precious Metals / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: The_Gold_Report

The most recent U.S. jobs report, which he believes is bound for revision, has Michael Ballanger musing on how economic policies are reflected—or distorted—in the precious metals markets.

I was sitting in my den looking out over the swamp—er—lake tonight when it appeared as though something was flailing around near the shoreline. So I threw on my deck shoes and went for a stroll down to the water to see what all the commotion was about. Now, you must understand that I have been around the Kawartha Lakes since my late teens, having fished for pickerel alongside the Buckhorn Dam in the summer of 1970. Back in the day, the pickerel were so plentiful that we would throw two or three of these two- to three-pound beauties into the live well and then play "catch and release" for the remainder of the day, because you were taught at a very young age that you only take what you need as food and you release anything else so they could grow and make more baby pickerel. At the root of the practice was one remarkably simple fact: Pickerel are the finest-eating freshwater fish in the world and you want to protect them.

So here I am, looking past the weeds and algae in the shallows of western Lake Scugog and what comes lumbering past is the most gawd-ugly creature that I have ever observed—an enormous Asian carp that had to be ten pounds. Before I could say "invasive species," two more appeared, equally as detestable and even larger than the leviathan that first surfaced, after which the fish began to perform a kind of floundering, splashing, mating ritual where they rotated their bodies over and around the female in a manner most foreign to anything I have observed in six decades of angling in the Ontario waterways.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Perceiving Coronavirus as a Disruptive Technology Accelerating Quantum AI Mega-trend / Companies / AI

By: Nadeem_Walayat

The 'scientists' say that viruses are not alive. We'll for something that's 'technically' not alive it sure does behave like it is! Perhaps just as scientists will deem AI to be 'not alive' all the way until they take all of the jobs.

So lets leave the academic world behind, for their moronic obsession's has gotten us into this mess, certainties of solutions adopted by the likes of the UK and US to achieve 'herd immunity' when commonsense would have served our nations far better that of isolating and quarantining all those even suspected of being infected! Such as every flight entering the UK from virus infested China during January and February.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

A 2020 guide to Business Opp Affiliate Marketing / Companies / SME

By: Submissions

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

What Huge US Jobs Number Means For Your Market Positions / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2020

By: Chris_Vermeulen

The Huge Non-Farm Payroll number released on Friday, June 5th, shocked the market.  A massive 2.5 million jobs were created in May 2020.  If you were paying attention to the data, you’ll also understand that 1.87 million new jobless claims just last week.  In fact, over the month of May 2020, a total of 12.58 million jobless claims were filed.  Taken into consideration, the new jobs created in May represent less than 20% of the total job losses over the same span of time.

Our researchers believe the jobs number is representative of a phased reopening of many US states and correlates directly with the extended opportunity for further re-engagement of the US economy over time.  The current social unrest taking place throughout the US will likely result in a new spike in COVID-19 cases as well as extended losses for certain businesses. 

The rioting seems to be taking place in more populated states right now – which suggests some real concerns for many of these states in regards to scheduled reopening phases and the potential for a spike in COVID-19 cases.

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

New Stocks Bull or Same Old One? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2020

By: Andre_Gratian

Current Position of the Market

 SPX: Long-term trend – Having rallied well past a .618 retracement of the decline into March 2020, it is time to consider the possibility that the retracement was only an interruption of the bull market which originated in 2009.

Intermediate trend – Up from March 23,2020.

Analysis of the short-term trend is done daily 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. 

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Inflation ‘A mirror image of the early 1980s’ / Economics / Inflation

By: Michael_J_Kosares

“To propose a return of inflation is to be inflammatory,” writes Lightman Investment Management’s Rob Burnett in an opinion piece for the Financial Times.  “Investors are committed to a deflationary thesis — and such is their fervor that many believe inflation cannot return in any circumstance. Yet if we look beyond today’s demand shock from the Covid-19 crisis, the forces driving the disinflation of the past 40 years appear to be in retreat. … [T]oday appears like a mirror image of the early 1980s. We have moved from inflation peak to deflation trough.”

Evidence is beginning to mount that the new paradigm Burnett describes – moving from disinflation to inflation – might not be too far off the mark. During the financial crisis that began in 2008, the Fed sterilized its money creation by routing money back to its coffers in the form of commercial bank excess reserves – a strategy that kept the inflation rate from running out of control. As you can see in the first chart, the current level of sterilization, at least in the short term, is greater than what occurred in the 2008-2014 period. At the same time, as you can see in the second chart, the rapid growth in the money supply this time around goes beyond anything that occurred during the prior crisis. Whether or not Burnett is correct and the growth in the money supply translates to price inflation down the road remains to be seen. (Please take note that the growth in the money supply began roughly a year ago – well before the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic.)

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Trump's Final Gamble: From Chinagate to Hybrid Wars / Politics / China US Conflict

By: Dan_Steinbock

The disastrous failure of the Trump administration to contain COVID-19 will result in catastrophic 2nd quarter data. As a result, Trump is risking his re-election on domestic unrest, fatal geopolitics and a global depression.

The cold reality is that the Trump administration learned about the virus already on January 3, when CDC Director Dr. Robert R. Redfield informed Secretary of Health Alex Azar that China had discovered a new coronavirus. Yet no mobilization was initiated until toward late March (see my report here):

Indeed, the Trump White House missed three opportunities to contain the virus outbreak; in January (between CDC alert and WHO’s international emergency), the 1st quarter (between the WHO emergency and the pandemic alert) and the 2nd quarter (since social distancing began 6-8 weeks late and inadequately).

Tuesday, June 09, 2020

Silver vs Gold Trend / Commodities / Gold & Silver 2020

By: Nadeem_Walayat

The silver price has managed to recover from the Corona crash of 2020 with the price back within it's trading range of $17 to $20. Though contrary to the Silver bugs perma expectations for the Silver price to track the Gold price higher, that's not what usually tends to happen as the below graph illustrates,, which if you have followed my previous Silver analysis articles than you would know this is the expected behaviour of Silver, Gold's volatile and unresponsive to events cheaper cousin.

Tuesday, June 09, 2020

Argentina, the World’s Biggest Deadbeat Economy / Economics / Argentina

By: Steve_H_Hanke

Borrow, spend, default; lather, rinse, repeat.

On May 22, Argentina failed to meet interest payments on its sovereign debt. With that, the country tipped into default on its $65 billion mountain of foreign debt. If that’s not enough, Argentina’s provinces are addicted to debt and are buried in it, too. The province of Buenos Aires is already in default, and Cordoba, La Rioja, Salta, Rio Negro, and Chubut have also indicated that they plan to restructure their debt as well.

This is not the first time that Argentina has stiffed its creditors. No, it’s the ninth time. And it’s not Argentina’s largest default, either. Indeed, Argentina set the world’s default record when it defaulted on $95 billion in external debt in 2001. The bottom line is clear: Argentina is hands down the world’s biggest deadbeat.