Archive - Aug 9, 2015

It’s getting harder and harder for even the most vocal among Wall Street as they try to sing the “everything is awesome” song when the ground around them continues to be littered with an ever-increasing amount of sprawled out – motionless – canaries.

Beware of wigs dressed as sheeple...

Goldman has truly outdone itself with this one: in addition to purchasing the former Danish PM, and by implication, the current PM and his former fin-min protege, and assuring the DONG scandal quietly goes away, Goldman just hired the former head of NATO: from 2009 to 2014 Anders Fogh Rasmussen served as  the 12th Secretary General of NATO.

Poverty is better than wealth in one crucial way: The poor are still under the illusion that money can make them happy. But just as the common man is deceived by money (he thinks more of it will make him happier), so are policymakers. Their belief is a little more sophisticated. They know it is the economy, not money, that creates wealth. But they believe that adding money (and more demand) will make the economy function better… and make people wealthier. Never, since the beginning of time, has government ever added to wealth. It has no way to do so. And no intention of doing so. All it can do is to increase the power, wealth, or status of some people – at others’ expense.

For the last three weeks, gold has experienced something that has never happened before - hedge funds aggregate net position has been short for the first time in history. However, as Dana Lyons notes, this week saw another 'historic' shift in gold positioning as commercial hedgers shifted to the least hedged since 2001... so the 'fast' money is chasing momentum and the 'smart' money is lifting hedges into them.

It could never happen here, right? Again...

"In any event, waiting to normalize monetary policy may defer, but cannot avoid, a market collapse that is already baked in the cake."

"The greatest trick the central planners ever pulled was convincing the world omnipotence existed..." until now!

Washington hawks want regime change in Russia, no more and no less. Their hatred of Putin, who has the guts to have his own opinion of world affairs, and who stands firm for his country’s right to look after its security interests, makes him the ultimate evil. As for the huge crowd of presidential candidates, it looks like so far the only one who promises to fix the U.S. — Russia relations thus avoiding a looming disaster is Donald Trump. In his recent interview on CNN he said that he would be able to work well with the Russian president. No matter how the media and Republican Party establishment are trying to humiliate Trump, maybe he should be given a chance.

Fact... or Fiction...?

"The future is unknown and we are not dealing with markets that are free markets anymore...now we have government interventions everywhere. [But] in the last say twelve months, I have observed an increasing number of academics who are questioning monetary policies. That's why I think they will take the gold away and go back to some gold standard by revaluing the gold say from now $1000/oz to say $10,000 dollars. An individual should definitely own some physical gold. The bigger question is where should he store it? because... the failure of monetary policies will not be admitted by the professors that are at central banks, they will then go and blame someone else for it and then an easy target would be to blame it on people that own physical gold because - they can argue - well these are the ones that do take money out of circulation and then the velocity of money goes down - we have to take it away from them... That has happened in 1933 in the US."

Well, the San Francisco Bay Area startup-for-everything economy has now reached a new low..........

Manuel Ramos, 41, the former Fullerton police officer who was ultimately acquitted after being tried for the beating and killing of Kelly Thomas, has been arrested once more - this time for domestic violence.

A decline in the desire to own products conferring and announcing one’s high social status happens close to, or hand in hand with fairly severe economic downturns. People no longer want to stand out as rich when times are getting tough. This effect can be observed in numerous areas, even in the colors and shapes people choose when buying cars.