from King World News
On the heels of the S&P 500 and NASDAQ closing at all-time highs, here is a look at living in FantasyLand, plus look at what just hit the lowest level in 6 years.
Ouch!
August 25 (King World News) – Jeroen Blokland: Ouch! The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index dropped to 84.8 in August, the lowest level in six years! No V-shaped recovery here…
from Kerry Lutz's Financial Survival Network
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By all rights, Terrance K. Williams probably should have wound up in prison or dead. One of nine black children born to a crack addicted mother, Terrance went from one foster home to another. When he wasn’t in a foster home he was in a juvenile shelter. Somehow, it only made him stronger. An unshakable belief in God and in himself helped get him through it all. Now he’s a Trump Supporter and has visited the Whitehouse and can personally attest to the fact that President Trump is not a racist. It’s an incredible story of indomitable will and the drive make something of himself, which he most certainly has.
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from Kerry Lutz's Financial Survival Network
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Karen Kataline has had enough. She’s tired of the riots, tired of the loss of liberty and especially tired of wearing a mask that has no scientific backing behind it. She’s tired of the Dems and their anti-social rioting and she’s tired of them trying to turn the US into a third world Banana Republic. And we all should be.
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from Daily Market Wisdom with Nick Santiago
For more than 20 years, Master Trader Nick Santiago has been beating the markets. He’s made some incredible calls along the way and now he’s looking to spread the word. There’s no reason that the average trader should be coming up short. So now we’ve started a daily show to bring you up to date on the latest market developments. Nick will be sharing trades and concepts and discussing current trends. Today we discuss:
1. Last night after the closing bell, Salesforce.com reported block buster earnings. The stock is trading higher by 26% today. This is the stock that is being added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), so that is positive for the DJIA going forward. This move is also helping a lot of the other leading cloud stocks today. Back in the day it was the railroad average. Now there’s everything, tech, pharma, heavy capital goods and now cloud computing. They have a tendency to get rid of under performing stocks and put in higher performers. Nick believes they added Salesforce to offset the Apple split. It’s really a nod towards the Cloud.
2. Dow down a little S&P Nasdaq up a little. Oil up a little bit. Transports are flat. Nasdaq is up 28% and S&P is up 6 percent. Other indexes are down. S&P was underwater and in up. You need to make the most money on the turns. Easy money is over.
3. Upside reversal in gold and silver almost every down tic gets bought. When consumer confidence slides, gold goes higher. Nick is a long term bull for the metals.
For more info, go to InTheMoneyStocks.com.
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from Zero Hedge
Most of the feature stories published by the Columbia Journalism Review, a mostly-digital biannual “magazine” published and edited by the Columbia School of Journalism and its staff, is sanctimonious media naval-gazing filtered through a lens of cryptomarxist propaganda, written by a seemingly endless procession of washed-up magazine writers.
But every once in a while, just like the NYT, Washington Post and CNN, even CJR gets it (mostly) right. And fortunately for us, one of those days arrived earlier this month, when the website published this insightful piece outlining the influence of the Gates Foundation on the media that covers it.
Most readers probably didn’t realize how much money the Gates Foundation spends backing even for-profit media companies like the New York Times and the Financial Times, some of the most financially successful legacy media products, thanks to their dedicated readerships. For most media companies, which don’t have the financial wherewithal of the two named above, the financial links go even deeper. Schwab opens with his strongest example: NPR.
by James Rickards
Daily Reckoning
Gold as an asset class is confusing to most investors. Even sophisticated investors are accustomed to hearing gold ridiculed as a “shiny rock” and hearing serious gold analysts mocked as “gold bugs,” “gold nuts” or worse.
As a gold analyst, I grew used to this a long time ago. But, it’s still disconcerting when one realizes the extent to which gold is simply not taken seriously or is treated as a mere commodity no different than soybeans or wheat.
The reasons for this disparaging approach to gold are not difficult to discern. Economic elites and academic economists control the central banks. The central banks control what we now consider “money” (dollars, euros, yen and other major currencies).
Those who control the money supply can indirectly control economies and the destiny of nations simply by deciding when and how much to ease or tighten credit conditions, and when to favor (or disfavor) certain types of lending.
by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
The problem is the economy that’s left has no means of creating tens of millions of jobs to replace those lost as the 1959 economic model collapses.
Fundamentally, the economy of 2019 was not very different from the economy of 1959: people went shopping at retail stores, were educated at sprawling college campuses, went to work downtown, drove to the doctor’s office or hospital, caught a flight at the airport, and so on.
The daily routine of the vast majority of the workforce was no different from 1959. In 2019, the commutes were longer, white-collar workers stared at screens rather than typewriters, factory workers tended robots and so on, but the fundamentals of everyday life and the nature of work were pretty much the same.
Beneath the surface, the fundamental change in the economy was financialization, the commodification of everything into a financial asset or income stream that could then be leveraged, bundled and sold globally at an immense profit by Wall Street financiers.
by Damjan Tutarkov
LaCorte News
Racial slurs trended on Twitter on Monday night after notable black Americans spoke in support of President Trump on the first night of the Republican National Convention (RNC).
More than 6,000 “Uncle Tom” tweets were posted on the platform following speeches from Democratic Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones, former professional football player Herschel Walker, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (R).
“The Democratic Party does not want Black people to leave their mental plantation,” Jones said Monday night. “We’ve been forced to be there for decades and generations. But I have news for Joe Biden: We are free. We are free people with free minds.”
Sen. Scott recalled his family’s ascent to greatness.
Central banks are killing our currency to protect the already-rich
by Adam Taggart
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity
In our recent article It’s Time To Position For The Endgame, Chris Martenson explained how the US Federal Reserve and its sister central banks around the world have been engaged in the largest and most egregious wealth transfer in all of history — one that has been drastically exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic.
The official response, tremendous monetary stimulus by the central banks paired with massive fiscal stimulus from national legislatures, has been pitched as “saving the system”.
Yet, in reality, it has merely served to accelerate the transfer of capital from the public into the pockets of the already-rich.
Anyone with eyes can see how the central banks have abandoned all pretense of monetary fiduciary responsibility and have simply cranked their printing presses up to “maximum”:
by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics
ASIA:
Top US and Chinese trade officials have reaffirmed their commitment to a Phase 1 trade deal, which has seen China lagging on its obligations to buy American goods, giving a boost to financial markets on Tuesday. China’s commerce ministry confirmed that the two sides had a “constructive dialogue” and agreed to continue pushing forward the implementation of the Phase 1 trade deal. This is their first formal dialogue since early May – amid concern the deal could be on shaky ground because of worsening US-China ties.
TikTok, on Monday, sued US President Donald Trump’s administration over his executive order banning transactions in the United States with the popular short-form video-sharing app, calling it a pretext to fuel anti-China rhetoric as he seeks re-election. In a blog post, TikTok said it strongly disagreed with the White House’s position that the company was a national security threat, saying it had “taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s US user data.”
by Craig Hemke
Sprott Money
As the “delivery month” of September nears for COMEX silver, let’s take a look at where we stand and review again what it all means.
This is a topic we’ve covered often thus far in 2020. Here at Sprott Money alone, I’ve written multiple articles detailing the breakdown of confidence at COMEX in late March and the lasting impact that has followed. For the purposes of this post, please review these two links before continuing:
by Richard M. Ebeling
The American Institute for Economic Research
Political election years are viewed in democracies as momentous events in the country’s history. Through ballots rather than bullets are chosen those who will hold political office, and through them the implementation and enforcement of the laws of the land and a variety of government policies considered to be in the “common good” or the “general welfare.” In other words, it is a time when those running for political office promise to citizens and voters a seemingly unending stream of government “goodies” either for what appears to be “for free” or at someone else’s expense, with implied little or no negative effect on the well-being of the society as a whole.
The Democrats and the Republicans place their political wares before the people of the country at their respective national conventions as the kickoffs of the electoral campaign leading up to the presidential voting in November.
by Monica Showalter
American Thinker
As Republicans were preparing to hold their sizzling convention, Joe Biden was last seen quoting…Mao.
According to National Review:
Joe Biden used a quote from brutal Chinese dictator Mao Zedong to explain his pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate during the ticket’s first public interview Sunday.
When asked by ABC News’s Robin Roberts whether he felt “pressure to select a black woman,” Biden responded by saying he did not feel pressure, explaining that he did want his government to “look like the people, look like the country.”
“51 percent of the people in this country are women,” he said. “As that old expression goes, ‘women hold up half the sky.'”
This, as it turns out, is some poetic balderdash inconsistent with science that was a ’60s pop poster theme among the Bill Ayers set. The starry-eyed phrase was, in fact, written by Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, probably the 20th century’s most brutal dictator, responsible for the starvation deaths and mass imprisonment and killing of tens of millions. He was, you know, a poet. And his poetry there was to make the little ladies feel good — the ones he starved and forced to dress as worker ants heading off to work in the salt mines and night-soil farms, loudspeakers blaring propaganda as they toiled.
Trump even vetoed a bill that would stop him from military action in Iran without congressional approval.
by Scott Shackford
Reason.com
Tonight Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) spoke on behalf of President Donald Trump’s reelection. His remarks were heavily influenced by Paul’s own longstanding positions against excessive foreign military interventions, but only loosely tied to Trump’s actual record.
“I flew with him to Dover Air Force Base to honor two soldiers whose remains were coming home from Afghanistan,” Paul said. “I will never forget that evening. I can tell you the president not only felt the pain of these families but the president is committed to ending this war.
“President Trump is the first president in a generation to seek to end war rather than start one. He intends to end the war in Afghanistan. He is bringing our men and women home.”
by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Why is everyone suddenly trying to sell their home?
We’re going to look at San Francisco’s housing market in two ways: The Case-Shiller Home Price Index released today, which lags months behind but provides good price-movement data for houses and condos; and near-real-time indicators. First the near-real-time indicators:
“Active listings” in San Francisco skyrocketed by 137% year-over-year to 1,995 homes for sale in the week ended August 16, based on weekly data compiled by real-estate brokerage Redfin, from Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and Redfin’s own data. This is the biggest highest most stunning amount of inventory for sale since the very peak of Housing Bust 1 (chart via Redfin):
by Hubert Moolman
Silver Seek
We are at the end of the fiat debt-based monetary system. It is becoming clear that the system is in collapse due to the enormous debt load.
The thing (debt) that it needs to try and survive another while, is the very thing (debt) that is busy collapsing the system. It is virtually spiraling towards death, come what may.
In fact, this why the world is in such a mess currently. You cannot have smooth sailing when the waves are roaring.
There are some clear evidence of this stress in the charts of “fiat alternatives” like gold, silver and crypto currencies. At this stage of the collapse, these alternatives are singing the same tune (they are extremely bullish).
As we will get further along in this crisis, there will be a big separation among these alternatives, based mainly on the criteria of value (but that is for another time).
‘Managing drawdown risk is coming to the fore,’ says Jefferies’ Darby
by William Watts
Market Watch
“U.S. earnings expectations have certainly ‘V-shaped’ and this has been accompanied by an enormous reversal in risk appetite in almost a minuscule amount of financial time,” said Sean Darby, global head of strategies at Jefferies, in a Tuesday note. “Some of our indicators are beginning to move into the ‘euphoria’ stage, and we caution that managing drawdown risk is coming to the fore.”