Friday, June 30, 2017
Blinded by the Money Illusion - chronology of panics, manias, crashes and collapses / Currencies / Financial Crash
By: Michael_J_Kosares
"Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far but I do think we're much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don't believe it will be." – Fed chair Janet Yellen
With those words, Janet Yellen put investors around the world on notice, though probably not in the way she intended. In the past, such smug assurances have been enough to send contrarian villagers heading for the safety of the near-by woods. The informed student of financial history knows that panics, manias, crashes and collapses are as common to investment markets as thunderstorms are to placid summer afternoons. To think that suddenly we have banished their recurrence for "our lifetimes" smacks of the kind of misguided hubris that contributed directly to the 2008 meltdown and subsequent untold financial hardship. Just about the time most everyone came to the conclusion nothing could go wrong, everything went wrong. . . and in a hurry.
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Friday, June 30, 2017
Soft Fake BrExit as Theresa May Destroys Britain's Strong EU Negotiating Stance / Politics / BrExit
By: Nadeem_Walayat
So everyone got the 2017 UK general election outcome WRONG. Which included my UK house prices based analysis that was the most accurate predictor of the 2015 general election, however this time based on April house price data implied a Conservative win on 342 seats. So despite being the most accurate of all of the forecasts out there, nevertheless did get the election outcome wrong i.e. unlike for Trump there was no betting markets profits bonanza for this election.
Friday, June 30, 2017
Three Main Lies About Stock Market Volatility / Stock-Markets / Volatility
By: Adam_ODell
Volatility gets a bad rap.The media typically portrays it as the financial world’s evil villain personified, saying things like…
“Volatility reared its ugly head on Monday.”
Or…
“Volatility is striking fear into the heart of the masses.”
You can almost picture the CGI monster Hollywood would create – the “Volatility Viper” – with its ten snake heads and blood-dripping fangs, snapping at Wall Street suits as they run for their lives.
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Friday, June 30, 2017
Canada Real Estate Bubble / Housing-Market / Canada
By: Harry_Dent
I’ve been seeing a lot in the news lately about Canadian and Australian real estate prices. Here’s just a sampling:New Brunswick real estate offers a lesson on peak housing prices
Condo flipping on the rise as Vancouver market heats up
Face it Canada – you’re a real estate addict and no one wants a cure
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Friday, June 30, 2017
Yellen’s Delusional Statement Guarantees Stock Market Crash Around the Corner / Stock-Markets / Stock Market Crash
By: Harry_Dent
Janet Yellen Said What!?She just had to do it!
Human behavior and its accompanying delusion is just so predictable! Earlier this week, she straight up said that “she does not believe there will be another financial crisis in her (our) lifetime…”
WHAT?!
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Friday, June 30, 2017
Sheffield Hanover Tower Cladding Nightmare as Costs Spiral Out of Control / Local / Sheffield
By: N_Walayat
The Broomhall Hanover flats tower are Sheffield's first tower blocks to fail urgent fire safety tests in the wake of the Grenfell Tower Fire disaster that prompted the city council to in a panic announce the removal of all of the substandard cladding from Hanover Tower, work on which began earlier this week, starting with two sides of the tower blocks cordoned off.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
The Fed Has Officially “Rung the Bell” For the Stock Market Top / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2017
By: Graham_Summers
The Fed just “rang the bell” on the market top.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s right hand man, John Williams made the following statement yesterday:
“The stock market seems to be running pretty much on fumes,” San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President John Williams said in an interview carried on Sydney’s ABC News affiliate and available on the internet on Tuesday. “It’s something that clearly is a risk to the U.S. economy, some correction there — it’s something we have to be prepared for to respond to if it does happen.”
Thursday, June 29, 2017
5 Maps That Explain The Modern Middle East / Politics / Middle East
By: John_Mauldin
BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN AND KAMRAN BOKHARI : Nation-states are the defining feature of the modern political era. They give people a collective identity and a pride of place… even when their borders are artificially drawn, as they were in the Middle East.
However, transnational issues like religion and ethnicity often get in the way of the notion of nationalism. Those can’t be contained by a country’s borders.
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Thursday, June 29, 2017
USD Intermediate Cycle Update / Currencies / US Dollar
By: SurfCity
USD Cycle Status/Outlook: Short term is a bit cloudy but my preferred count is day 10. Longer term, it is clear that the USD is still seeking out its Yearly Cycle Low (YCL). If my last ICL is correct, we are now nearing the 5 month timeframe is a normal 5-6 mont ICL timing band.
Once the YCL is found, my expectations are that future rallies will be still be corrective in nature against the longer term cycle trend which should now be down. Out of the next ICL, the next IC High should be a lower high.
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Thursday, June 29, 2017
India Is Likely to Become the First Digital, Cashless Society / Currencies / War on Cash
By: John_Mauldin
BY STEPHEN MCBRIDE : The top news out of India over the past 12 months has been President Modi’s move to ban 85% of the currency in circulation. However, something much more far-reaching has happened.
It’s called India Stack.
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Thursday, June 29, 2017
The Fed Is Pursuing An After-Me-The-Deluge Monetary Policy / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
By: John_Mauldin
I think there is a mixture of political bias and legacy-building that is driving Federal Reserve policy. The simple fact is that the Fed should have been normalizing interest rates starting in 2013.
Fifty basis points a year, and we would be at 2% now. That is not exactly a torrid rate-hike path. It cannot be seen as putting your foot on the brakes. It’s simply moving to normalize a situation that everybody realizes is abnormal.
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Thursday, June 29, 2017
Is A Big Move In Oil Prices Due? / Commodities / Crude Oil
By: OilPrice_Com
In options trading, a straddle is literally a sit-on-the-fence strategy. By purchasing a put and a call at the same strike (price of underlying commodity) for the same time period, an investor isn’t making a conventional directional bet; rather the investor is looking for a big move either up or down. The rub is that the big move must be greater than the sum of the two option premia or the bet goes south. But that is in the nature of the trade.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Stocks Rebounded Off Tuesday's Low, New Uptrend? / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2017
By: Paul_Rejczak
Our intraday outlook is bearish, and our short-term outlook is bearish. Our medium-term outlook remains neutral, following S&P 500 index breakout above last year's all-time high:
Intraday outlook (next 24 hours): bearish
Short-term outlook (next 1-2 weeks): bearish
Medium-term outlook (next 1-3 months): neutral
Long-term outlook (next year): neutral
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Stock Market Correction May Complete Today / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2017
By: Anthony_Cherniawski
SPX futures are mildly positive this morning. In addition, the quarter end and the Cycles Model are positive for at least another day. That suggests Wave [c] may complete near the Cycle Top today in an expanded flat correction, dominated by a very long Wave [b].
The Summer quarter end is usually positive. As mentioned earlier, early short entries are usually subject to draw-downs. The VIX and Hi-Lo have not made sell signals, yet. Thus, only partial positions have been recommended. That will change very soon.
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Thursday, June 29, 2017
GBPUSD rebounded from 1.2589 / Currencies / British Pound
By: Franco_Shao
Being supported by the 20-weekly moving average on its weekly chart, the GBPUSD pair rebounded from 1.2589, suggesting that lengthier consolidation for the long term downtrend from the July 2014 high of 1.7190 is needed.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
US Minimum Wage / Economics / Wages
By: Submissions
John Dunham writes: What a difference a day makes. Just this month, a group of researchers at the University of Washington (UW) released a working paper outlining how a $13 per hour minimum wage for restaurant workers in Seattle has led to exactly the opposite effects that proponents predicted.
According to the team at UW, which was funded by the City of Seattle, a 37 percent increase in Seattle’s mandatory minimum wage for restaurant employees resulted in a decrease of working hours for these employees of about 9 percent, and an overall loss in income of $125 per month. This is significant because the minimum wage increase, which was promoted as a way to help lower-wage workers, actually cost those same workers about $1,500 per year on average.
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Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Mainstream Media Feeding Frenzy in the Echo Chamber / Politics / Mainstream Media
By: Raul_I_Meijer
The best comment on the June 13 Jeff Sessions Senate testimony, and I’m sorry I forgot who made it, was that it looked like an episode of Seinfeld. A show about nothing. Still, an awful lot of voices tried to make it look like it was something life- and game-changing. It was not. Not anymore than Comey’s testimony was, at least not in the sense that those eager to have these testimonies take place would have liked it to be.
Comey shone more of an awkward light on himself rather than on Donald Trump, by admitting that he had leaked info on a private conversation with the president he served at the time. Not quite nothing, but very little to satisfy the anti-Trump crowd. It’s just that there’s so many in that crowd, and most in denial, that you wouldn’t know it unless you paid attention.
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Wednesday, June 28, 2017
The Fed Has Undermined the US Economy’s Ability to Grow / Economics / US Economy
By: John_Mauldin
BY STEPHEN MCBRIDE : The Fed’s hope was that quantitative easing would stimulate economic growth. But a former senior economist for the Fed believes it has done the exact opposite.
Speaking at the Mauldin Economics Strategic Investment Conference, Dr. Lacy Hunt, the executive vice president of Hosington Investment Management and former senior economist for the Dallas Fed, said that quantitative easing has created “significant unintended consequences.”
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Wednesday, June 28, 2017
“Secular Stagnation” Is Nonsense… Here’s the Real Reason Behind the US Downturn / Economics / Stagflation
By: John_Mauldin
My good friend Charles Gave recently wrote an instructive article titled “Tale of Two Countries.”
In the UK and France, structural growth rates have diverged since 1981. The rate has fallen by two-thirds in France, while in the UK it has risen.
Why?
Well, to begin with, in the UK, Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979. She reduced the role of the bureaucracy in managing economic activity and dialed back government spending as a percentage of GDP.
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Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Sheffield Broomhall Hanover Flats Tower Block Cladding Could Take Months to Remove! / Local / Sheffield
By: N_Walayat
The Broomhall Hanover flats twin towers were Sheffield's first tower blocks to fail urgent fire safety tests in the wake of the Grenfell Tower Fire disaster that prompted the city council to in a panic announce the removal of all cladding from Hanover Tower work on which began early morning yesterday, with two sides of the tower blocks cordoned off. Meanwhile the council reassured residents that they were 'safe', despite the panic move on behalf of the council.