Baltic Dry

While the sell-side has been vociferous about the fact that earnings are troughing, that consensus growth expectations are not miraculous, that equities are discounting that awesome reality; it appears Goldman Sachs' 'Swirlogram" - which we initially discussed here - is pointing to what we have been seeing for months - a slowdown in their global leading indicator dead-ahead.

We now live in an entirely fabricated fiscal environment.  Every aspect of it is filtered, muddled, molded, and manipulated before our eyes ever get to study the stats.  The metaphor may be overused, but our economic system has become an absolute “matrix”.  All that we see and hear has been homogenized and all truth has been sterilized away.  There is nothing to investigate anymore.  It is like awaking in the middle of a vast and hallucinatory live action theater production, complete with performers, props, and sound effects, all designed to confuse us and do us harm.  In the end, trying to make sense of the illusion is a waste of time.  All we can do is look for the exits…

• Introduction – Gold’s Gains In All Fiat Currencies in 2012

• Much of Gold’s Gains in 2012 On 11% Price Gain in January 2012

• Japanese Yen Shows How Gold Protects From FX Devaluations

• Food Inflation Risk As Wheat and Soybeans Surge in Price

• Currency Wars and Competitive Currency Devaluations

• Gold Remains Historically and Academically Proven Safe Haven

• Conclusion – Gold in 2013

Presenting Dave Collum's now ubiquitous and all-encompassing annual review of markets and much, much more. From Baptists, Bankers, and Bootleggers to Capitalism, Corporate Debt, Government Corruption, and the Constitution, Dave provides a one-stop-shop summary of everything relevant this year (and how it will affect next year and beyond).

The markets, as most people reading this should now well know, no longer reflect in any way the true economic health of our country.  If one was to measure the financial “recovery” of this nation by the strength of global stocks alone, he would probably come to the conclusion that the collapse of 2008 was a mere hiccup in the overall success of the worldwide economic system.  However, electronically traded equities with little more to back their value than scraps of receipt paper and numbers on a screen have no bearing on what is going to happen to you, and to me, over the course of the coming year.  The stock market is a sideshow, a popcorn movie, a façade.  The real drama is going on behind the scenes and revealed in fundamentals that mainstream analysts no longer discuss...

Why the lack of follow through? Because, according to preliminary desk talk, just as we predicted yesterday now that the Fed has reengaged the QEasing machine, the ECB will too have to intervene and ease on its own once again to push the EURUSD lower (as otherwise the internal devaluation for most European countries will be simply unbearable). Which means one thing: the time to drag the Spanish insolvency out of cryogenic sleep is coming, and if Rajoy still refuses to request a bailout, he will get some much needed assistance from Frankfurt to make up his mind, allowing the ECB to inject hundreds of billions into the market and in doing so to keep up with the Fed or else risk dropping too far behind in the global race to debase (with a footnote that in Europe, a drop in the currency always raises redenomination risk now and going forward).

It has been a while since we looked at the Baltic Dry Index, which when normalizing for the excess glut in dry container ship supply (such as right now - 5 years after all the excess supply in the industry - has long been normalized), continues to be one of the best concurrent indicators of global shipping and trade. We look at it today, moments ago it just posted an epic 8.2% plunge, crashing from 900 to 826, or the biggest drop since 2008! Of course, conisdering the collapse in global trade confirmed in past days by both Chinese and US data, this should not come as a surprise, although we are certain it will merely bring out the BDIY apologists who tell us that supply and demand here (like in every other Fed-supported market) are completely uncorrelated.