Technical Analysis

According to the index the construction of the world’s tallest buildings have always coincided with the great slumps and recessions that we have gone through in history.

Just a few days ago on July 27th President Barack Obama said that the next Fed head had to consider average Americans when setting monetary policy. If only that were true.

Goldman Sachs and the London Metal Exchange have had a case brought against them both in a court in the US regarding anti-competitive behavior in aluminum storage, with a monopolistic effect thrown in for good measure.

Now that Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia and he has been allowed to leave the airport, things are starting to hot up between the US and Russia. 

We are told that the Chinese do not have any money left, that the coffers are empty and that they will have to go the same way as the US and start printing presses rolling along so that the banks end up flush again and the economy rebounds.

There is one vitally important number that everyone needs to be watching right now, and it doesn't have anything to do with unemployment, inflation or housing.  If this number gets too high, it will collapse the entire U.S. financial system.

The conventional wisdom of the moment is that a weakening global economy will push the cost of commodities such as oil down as demand stagnates. This makes perfect sense in terms of physical supply and demand, but this ignores the consequences of financial demand and capital flows. The total financial wealth sloshing around the world is approximately $160 trillion. If some relatively modest percentage of this money enters the commodity sector (and more specifically, oil) as a low-risk opportunity, this flow would drive the price of oil higher on its own, regardless of end-user demand and deflationary forces. If we grasp that financial demand is equivalent to end-user demand, we understand why oil could climb to $125/barrel or even higher despite a physical surplus.

All in all, the Eurozone has made two steps forward and one step back.

Just when you believed that the last you were going to hear about Edward Snowden was that he was holed up in the airport in Moscow, living off borscht and blini (obviously topped with caviar) all washed down with the potato drink, the outside world will be gearing itself up to go to the foot of their stairs in exclamations of ‘well, blow me down!’.

Obama wants to give middle-class Americans a ‘grand bargain’. Roll up! Roll up! You won’t believe your eyes.

We as a nation had an unparalleled, historic opportunity to set things right in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. Alas, we blew it. Instead of tearing down what had failed spectacularly, we chose to do more of what failed spectacularly: cartel-crony capitalism, centralized wealth and power and an expansion of our financialized debtocracy.

Barry Ritholtz is convinced that once the current short-term bounce is over with, the recent cyclical bear market in gold will resume. The reality is of course that neither Mr. Ritholtz, nor anyone else actually knows the future. Therefore, he cannot know whether the bear market is or isn't over. However, judging from the remainder of his post, he actually seems to think that the secular bull market in gold is over. In our opinion there is no evidence for that, and we will explain below why we think that he and others in the  long term bear camp are wrong. Further below is the evidence marshaled by Mr. Ritholtz (actually, apart from the technical analysis he provides, it isn't really evidence at all – it reads like an unsupported opinion). Sure enough, gold has no yield, no conference calls, and no income statements (paraphrasing Jim Grant). That is actually the beauty of it. But that does not mean it 'has no fundamentals', nor does it means that it 'cannot be an investment'. We comment on his article (and its errors) further below.

Gold has gone down Friday to under $1, 200 an ounce and that means it’s reached its lowest point for the past three years. Worse than that: it’s been the worst quarterly performance for gold for 45 years!

The late 20th century was a jam-packed time for stock-market crashes that would change, shape and alter our lives in so many ways.

The Federal Reserve has had $1.2 million swiped from a flight somewhere between Switzerland, the land of secret banking, and New York City. Now, in the ranking of thefts that have taken place in history, this one seems like it is rather untimely! Has anybody seen Ben Bernanke lately?