by Mike ‘Mish’ Shedlock
Mish Talk
Please consider Vatican Uses Donations for the Poor to Plug Its Budget Deficit.
Every year, Catholics around the world donate tens of millions of dollars to the pope. Bishops exhort the faithful to support the weak and suffering through the pope’s main charitable appeal, called Peter’s Pence.
What the church doesn’t advertise is that most of that collection, worth more than €50 million ($55 million) annually, goes toward plugging the hole in the Vatican’s own administrative budget, while as little as 10% is spent on charitable works, according to people familiar with the funds.
Gold’s post breakout reaction back from its early September peak has evolved into a steady downtrend as we can see on its 6-month chart below. The approach of the rising 200-day moving average below suggests that this reactive downtrend will have run its course before much longer leading to a second upleg. However, gold’s COTs have shown no improvement as this downtrend has unfolded, which is a sign that the downtrend has further to run. The now orderly downtrend has one distinct advantage which is that bulls simply have to wait either for a breakout from it or the development of a basing pattern. One indication that the downtrend is a correction and not the start of something more sinister is the positive divergence of the Accumulation line compared to the price.
Democrats are expecting wide-scale defections among their rank and file when Articles of Impeachment against President Donald Trump come to the floor for a vote next week, the Washington Post reports.
What does it mean when the Fed and other central banks jointly bemoan the effects of their own policies? Worried about not being able to keep all the plates spinning?
On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump said far-left climate alarmist Greta Thunberg should to work on her “anger management problem” and “chill.”
Financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter says big delivery demands are flashing a warning sign that something is very wrong in the gold market. Holter explains, “What’s happened so far this year, there have been roughly 5,900 tons of gold sent to London under ‘exchange for physical.’ The world only produces 2,700 tons a year. There is only one official hoard in the world that is more than that, and that is 8,300 tons in the U.S. Treasury. It has not been audited since 1956. What I am telling you is over 200% of annual production has been sent to London for delivery, and it is an impossibility to deliver. The metal doesn’t exist. Once it gets to London, it is totally shrouded. We see nothing in terms of proof or verification that delivery is being made. It’s being sent to London to die.”
Despite today’s pullback in the gold market in early trading, gold continues to paint a very bullish picture, plus the big picture for the Fed in 2020.
Like disgraced former FBI director James Comey before him exonerating Hillary Clinton for her crimes, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz presents us with a documented list of crimes, fraud, and deception in the FISA warrant application process by the FBI but then says never mind — these are bureaucratic mistakes made without bias and without intent. There still was sufficient predicate, says he, for starting an investigation and surveillance of Team Trump, even as Horowitz admits that the first FISA warrant, the one authorizing surveilling Carter Page, was riddled with errors and omissions of key exculpatory evidence. It was the first of four frauds committed on the FISA court, a felony.
While every painful second of every individual’s testimony during the impeachment hearings was relayed and narrative-managed by the mainstream media (and still failed to increase public awareness, let alone support for the Democrats’ plan), interested viewers were hard-pressed to find Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee (on his findings regarding alleged surveillance abuse during the 2016 election) anywhere on the mainstream.
The first sentence has to be short.
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case challenging the way local government across the U.S. deal with home developers.
To the extent that some analysts reject the Fed/Wall St/Perma-Bull narrative that the Fed’s repo operation is needed to address “temporary” liquidity issues or was caused by the newer regulatory constraints, the only explanation offered up is that the financial system’s “plumbing” is malfunctioning. But there has to be an underlying cause…
Mainstream thinking considers the central bank a key factor in the determination of interest rates. By setting short-term interest rates, the central bank, it is argued, can influence the entire interest rate structure by creating expectations about the future course of its interest rate policy.