Monday, December 21, 2015

Beware of Central Bank Success / Interest-Rates / Central Banks

By: Michael_Pento

The most important question investors will soon have to face is: "what's going to happen once central banks finally meet their inflation targets?"

For example, let's assume after years of monetizing government debt, bidding up equity prices, and forcing debt on the public by keeping borrowing costs at or below zero; that the ECB is finally able to achieve its inflation target rate of 2%. This would only occur once money supply growth becomes both robust and sustainable. It is silly to believe ECB President Mario Draghi can bring inflation to just 2% and nail it at that level. Inflation will continue to rise past 2% until the ECB raises interest rates by reducing its pace of bond buying. So, we will have the environment where inflation is rising north of 2% and the central bank will be forced to start cutting back its purchases of debt and preparing the market for eventual outright sales.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Stock Market Positive Expectations Following Last Week's Sell-off, But Will It Last? / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015

By: Paul_Rejczak

Briefly: In our opinion, no speculative positions are justified.

Our intraday outlook is now neutral, and our short-term outlook is neutral:

Intraday outlook (next 24 hours): neutral
Short-term outlook (next 1-2 weeks): neutral
Medium-term outlook (next 1-3 months): bearish
Long-term outlook (next year): bullish

Monday, December 21, 2015

UK Savings Interst Rates Recap of 2015 / Personal_Finance / Savings Accounts

By: MoneyFacts

This year we have seen new brands enter the savings market and Government proposals to encourage people to save, either towards their first home, or to secure a higher return of interest during retirement.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Yellen has Lift Off, But Rates Won’t Go To The Moon / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates

By: Sam_Kirtley

At the FOMC meeting last week the Fed raised interest rates for the first time since 2006. This was a historic moment marks the first rate hike after the Fed engaged in massive quantitative easing programs to combat the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession. However, we are not economists or economic historians. We run a trading service and are therefore concerned with where the markets will go next. This means that our key point of analysis is around where rates will go next, rather than what they did last week.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Ron Paul - Do We Need the Fed? / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank

By: Dr_Ron_Paul

Stocks rose Wednesday following the Federal Reserve's announcement of the first interest rate increase since 2006. However, stocks fell just two days later. One reason the positive reaction to the Fed's announcement did not last long is that the Fed seems to lack confidence in the economy and is unsure what policies it should adopt in the future.

Monday, December 21, 2015

U.S. Silver Production Plunges by 20% / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015

By: Jason_Hamlin

To view The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) released their September silver production numbers this week and the results were incredible. Only 82.6 metric tons (mt) of silver were produced domestically in September versus 103 tons during September of last year. This represents a massive decline of 20% and is part of a greater trend of declining silver supply.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Euro Rally Likely to Reverse / Currencies / Euro

By: Richard_Cox

As we move into the end of this year, we have seen some surprising moves in the currency markets that have likely taken many traders by surprise.  Perhaps the best example here is the shorter-term rally in the EUR/USD, which has quickly risen to near important psychological levels at 1.10.  This commonly traded pair has spent most of its recent activity roughly 5 big-figures below this area, so the it is difficult to argue against the fact that these moves have been substantial. 

Monday, December 21, 2015

Stock Market's Wild Swings May Continue into the New Year / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015

By: Brad_Gudgeon

I just need to start off saying that due to the Holidays, this update will not include charts. Happy Holidays to everyone!

Two weeks ago, I had been expecting a stock market low around the New Moon at the Sagittarius/Capricorn cusp due December 14th when the Sun squares Jupiter near the Bradley turn of December 11. I also was expecting a rally into mid week and then possible further weakness into week's end, which we got. We are now falling into the moon at the Aries/Taurus cusp, which often times is a market low when the stock market falls through the moon at the Sagittarius- Capricorn cusp. We are also at a Bradley turn when Mercury squares Uranus (which turns stationary direct Christmas Day on the full moon).

Monday, December 21, 2015

Silver Price Stuck in a Grim Downtrend / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015

By: Clive_Maund

Silver has been somewhat weaker than gold in the recent past and dropped to clear new lows last Monday, as we can see on its 6-month chart below, but this should not come as a surprise as its recent COT structure has been nowhere near as positive as gold's, and at the end of a bearmarket or beginning of a bullmarket, gold outperforms silver.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Gold Price Suspected Bullish Falling Wedge Pattern / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015

By: Clive_Maund

Gold's technical picture is actually little changed from the last update posted on the 6th, apart from its having made marginal new lows late last week. What has changed is that we have since seen the Fed raise interest rates for the first time in many years, and the Junk Bond market has started to seriously fall apart.

With respect to the rise in interest rates there are two points to be made. The first is that, contrary to the general belief that gold is less attractive in an environment of rising rates because it doesn't pay interest, it actually does well, because some of the money that floods out of the stockmarket flows into gold. Second, the Fed's diminutive rate rise was a hollow face-saving measure, intended to salvage some credibility after it had been "crying wolf" for so long. It is too little and far too late.

Monday, December 21, 2015

The Recession And Bear Market Of 2016, In Two Charts / Economics / Recession 2016

By: John_Rubino

Good friend Michael Pollaro just sent a couple of charts that show the US economy heading for a brick wall. The first illustrates what happens when business sales (the green line) turn negative. In the previous two boom/bust cycles, when sales started falling the economy either tipped into recession shortly thereafter or (it was discovered in retrospect) was already well into a contraction.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Why Gold Price is going down, in Two Words: IT's NOT ! / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2015

By: Denali_Guide

          So as ephemeral as anything is to “prove” by math, we can observe and draw the following conclusion, that REAL METAL GOLD is priced far differently than PAPER CONTRACTS settled in Dollars.  Having not “proved” this but empirical observations to illustrate and support this enduring phenomena, we conclude that: “Currencies fluctuate, at different rates against MANDATORY DELIVERIES of METAL GOLD vs. PAYMENT in any given currency.”

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Stock Market Failed Rally / Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2015

By: Andre_Gratian

Current Position of the Market

SPX: Long-term trend – Still Bull Market?

SPX: Intermediate trend – The index appears to have made a secondary top at the 2104 level and to have started another decline of intermediate duration.

Analysis of the short-term trend is done on a daily basis with the help of hourly charts. It is an important adjunct to the analysis of daily and weekly charts which discuss longer market trends.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

U.S. Interest Rates Yield Curve Flattening Further, Why it Matters / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates

By: Dan_Norcini

I am becoming increasingly concerned over the flattening yield curve. This curve enables us to get a first hand view of sentiment towards economic growth among bond investors and other large players in the interest rate markets, some of whom are among the most sophisticated observers of the financial scene anywhere.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Fed Might Have Nailed End of Cyclical Stocks Bull Market, Beginning of Next US Recession / Stock-Markets / Stocks Bear Market

By: Jas_Jain

On April 5, 2015 I suggested that One of the Longest Cyclical Bull Market In US Stocks May be Coming to an End with an update on August 16, 2015. Now, it seems that Janet Yellen has nailed the end of the cyclical bull market with her telegraphing the specific date for change in policy and then acting on it. Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fisher's statement, few months ago, that the Fed is data dependent and not date dependent (emphasis in his voice) was part of Fed propaganda to cover up the real reasons behind the change in policy. If the cyclical bull market were coming to an end, as Yellen has concluded, and the bear market is to begin in early 2016 the recession would follow. As one can see in Fig. 1, S&P 500 is where it was approximately 16 months ago and the market has been struggling.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

John Kerry’s Moscow Lovefest / Politics / GeoPolitics

By: Mike_Whitney

If John Kerry doesn’t win an Oscar for his performance in Moscow on Tuesday, then there’s something very wrong with the system.

From the time he touched down at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, to the time he left some 26 hours later, the Secretary of State was as cordial and conciliatory as anytime in recent memory.  There was no hectoring, no lecturing, no threats of additional sanctions and no finger-wagging condescension, just pleasant give-and-take on the main issues followed by friendly chit-chat, multiple handshakes, and plenty of smiley photo ops.   To say his hosts were surprised by Kerry’s behavior is a probably an understatement.  After nearly three years of nonstop belligerence and confrontation, the last thing Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin expected was an ingratiating Kerry oozing brotherly love and carrying on like an old buddy from college.

Sunday, December 20, 2015

The Natural Gas Trading Play / Commodities / Natural Gas

By: EconMatters

Bearish Sentiment

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Cheap Christmas Lights Review (B&M Stores), What to Expect - Video / ConsumerWatch / Reviews

By: Anika_Walayat

This is a review of cheap outdoor Christmas lights such as by B&M Stores (Diamond Berry and similar), these lights are made exclusively for B&M Stores comprising 80 multi-coloured LED bulbs, of what use you can expect over 2 Christmas.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Today’s Mainstream Media Often Pandering to Bias and Ignorance / Politics / Mainstream Media

By: Walter_Brasch

The Texas board of education didn’t find anything wrong with a world geography textbook that said slaves from Africa were workers, but that immigrants from northern Europe were indentured servants.

This is the same school board that five years ago demanded that textbooks emphasize that slavery was only a side issue to the cause of the civil war, and that Republican achievements be emphasized in political science and civics textbooks.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Operation Northwoods, CIA Terrorism False Flags and Media Propaganda / Politics / Conspiracy Theory

By: James_Quinn

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

“In many nations, rational people end up believing crazy things, including (false) conspiracy theories. Those crazy thoughts can lead to violence, including terrorism. Many terrorist acts have been fueled by false conspiracy theories, and there is a good argument that some such acts would not have occurred in the absence of such theories. The key point—and, in a way, the most puzzling and disturbing one—is that the crazy thoughts are often held by people who are not crazy at all.”

Cass Sunstein- White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs