by Chuck Butler
Daily Pfennig

Good Day… And a Tub Thumpin’ Thursday to you! I love these “every other Thursdays” because I get to do some Tub Thumpin’ too! I’m running late again today, what else is new? I try to be diligent about the time I get up, get ready, get to work, and start writing, but… There are always bumps in the road… This morning though, our Little Christine, is bringing in breakfast sandwiches, so I’ve got that going for me today! YAHOO! I’m greeted this morning with R.E.M.’s song: Losing My Religion… In the late 80’s, early 90’s, there wasn’t a hotter band going than R.E.M. I finally got to see them live in 1995…

Well, the broad-based, or wide based, is how I described it, selloff of the dollar ended yesterday afternoon, and the currencies and metals had to give some of their gains back…

Continue Reading at DailyPfennig.com…

from Zero Hedge

Two weeks ago, when looking at the recent surge in short-term funding rates in general, and Libor in particular, we said that this is the result of a scramble by various funds to change their asset ahead of an October 14 deadline for money market reform. Recall that “On October 14, 2a-7 money fund reforms will require some prime money market mutual funds (those that invest in non-government issued assets) to float their net asset value (NAV) or, under certain circumstances, to impose redemption gates and liquidity fees on redemptions. Rather than face these regulatory constraints, many investors have started pulling assets from prime funds, and a number of prime funds have converted to government-only funds (which are exempt from these regulations). Since late-2015 alone, prime fund assets have declined by nearly $450 billion, reducing the supply of dollars that funded private sector short-term liabilities.”

Continue Reading at ZeroHedge.com…

by Daily Bell Staff
The Daily Bell

Air Force Seeks New Land-Based and Air-Launched Nukes … Advancing what could become a near-total rebuild of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, the Air Force … solicited industry proposals to build a new fleet of land-based nuclear missiles as well as replacements for its air-launched nuclear cruise missile force. The two projects are part of a broader modernization of the nuclear arsenal expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over 30 years. – AP/ABC

At the same time as the Pentagon’s ability to audit its spending, HERE, is still in shambles, the US military-industrial complex seeks a cool trillion dollars to modernize virtually America’s entire nuclear force.

This ABC article, above, calls the upgrade one that could cost “hundreds of billions.” But other estimates put the estimates far higher than that. A lot can happen in 30 years, after all.

The Pentagon may be purposefully downplaying costs, in our view. It’s probably under pressure from the larger military-industrial complex to get the funds moving.

Continue Reading at TheDailyBell.com…

by Greg Guenthner
Daily Reckoning

The stock market is hitting for the cycle.

Instead of singles, doubles, and triples, investors are knocking a different sector out of the park almost every single trading day.

That’s bullish, by the way. What we’re seeing is a market of stocks emerging. Instead of every sector marching lockstep up and down in an endless chop, we’re seeing genuine breakouts pop up left and right.

We bid a fond farewell to the utilities safety trade just two weeks ago.

Continue Reading at DailyReckoning.com…

by Evil Speculator
Acting Man

A Rare Apparition

An old friend suddenly showed up out of the blue yesterday and I’m not talking about a contributor who had washed out and, after years of ‘working for the man’, decided to return for another whack at beating the market. Instead I am delighted to report that I am looking at a bona fide confirmed VIX sell signal which we haven’t seen for ages here.

[…] As a matter of fact it’s been so long that I actually had to and google my own blog in order to find it. Turns out the last time I reported a rare sighting such as this was on March 15th 2012 AD.

If I recall my history correctly that was right after Napoleon pushed the Romans out of Vienna at the battle of Dunkirk. Give or take a century – historical records are vague, as they have been corrected to satisfy political correctness and to protect the feelings of innocent snowflakes. After all we wouldn’t want the terrorists to win.

Continue Reading at Acting-Man.com…

by Andrew P. Napolitano
LewRockwell.com

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked last week if she has misled the American people on the issue of her failure to safeguard state secrets contained in her emails, she told my Fox News colleague, Chris Wallace, that the FBI had exonerated her. When pressed by Wallace, she argued that FBI Director James Comey said that her answers to the American people were truthful.

After Clinton recognized that even her strongest supporters doubted her statement, she attempted to walk it back. In doing so, she repeatedly lied again, but offered as an excuse a bizarre claim that she had “short-circuited” her answer.

Who knows what that means? She claimed that she and Wallace were talking over each other and her answer had been misunderstood and misconstrued. Yet, Clinton said that Comey exonerated her as being “truthful” to the public when in fact he stated that she had been truthful during her three-hour, closed-door, unrecorded interview with the FBI.

Continue Reading at LewRockwell.com…

from Bill Still

by Matt Turner
Business Insider

The stock market went haywire about a year ago.

The Dow crashed more than 1,000 points, the S&P 500 was down 120 points, and the Nasdaq was down 393 points shortly after the market open on August 24.

And for a time, the blame for the sudden and unexplained move was a group of funds called risk parity funds.

Risk parity funds build portfolios around risks: They target a certain exposure to volatility, rather than, say, equities or bonds. That means that when volatility spikes, they sell automatically and indiscriminately.

Continue Reading at BusinessInsider.com…

from BillWhittleChannel

Prediction is based on Wall Street’s targets for the Dow’s 30 components

by Victor Reklaitis
Market Watch

Get your “Dow 20K” hat ready now?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average will trade above 20,000 in a year, according to a bottom-up analysis of the blue-chip gauge’s stocks.

Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, has been tracking the company-level predictions submitted by Wall Street analysts for the Dow’s 30 components.

Lumping together their average price targets for these companies and then weighting them appropriately, he says the “consensus 1-year target price” for the Dow industrials just reached 20,003.93 late Tuesday.

Continue Reading at MarketWatch.com…

from Boom Bust

Paul Brodksy explains why central banks are losing control and how the system could be saved

by Valentin Schmid
The Epoch Times

If you don’t know about finance and you want to learn, where do you start? Start with the money, says Paul Brodsky of Macro Allocation Inc.

Paul started his career in finance in 1982 and worked as a bond trader, options trader, fund manager, before founding the research and consulting firm Macro Allocation. He said he had to unlearn many of the principles first taught to him and focus on what’s really driving stocks, bonds, and the economy.

As a result, he returned his investors’ money in a mortgage-backed securities fund right before the housing crash in 2007 because he saw it coming. Many of the investment legends like Marc Faber and Bill Gross follow him because of his unique understanding of money, credit, and central banks.

Continue Reading at TheEpochTimes.com…

from Talk Digital Network

by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics

Thomson Reuters Leak on over 2 million records of People & Firms they say are Questionable

Market Talk – August 10th, 2016

Continue Reading at ArmstrongEconomics.com…

from Ben Swann

by Frank Holmes
Daily Reckoning

Gold is one of the rarest elements in the world, making up roughly 0.003 parts per million of the earth’s crust. (For some perspective, one part per million, when converted into time, is equivalent to one minute in two years. Gold is even rarer than that.)

If we took all the gold ever mined — all 186,000 tons, from the bullion at Fort Knox to India’s bridal jewelry to King Tut’s burial mask — and melted it down to a 20.5 meter-sided cube, it would fit snugly within the confines of an Olympic-size swimming pool.

The yellow metal’s rarity, of course, is one of the main reasons why it’s so highly valued across the globe and, for most of recorded history, recognized and used as currency.

Continue Reading at DailyReckoning.com…

from Talk Digital Network

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org

According to various reports, the Russian government is reconsidering the neoliberal policy that has served Russia so badly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If Russia had adopted an intelligent economic policy, Russia’s economy would be far ahead of where it stands today. It would have avoided most of the capital flight to the West by relying on self-finance.

Washington, however, took advantage of a naive, gullible and demoralized Russian government which looked to Washington for guidance in the post-Soviet era. Russians thought that the rivalry between the two countries had ended with the Soviet collapse and trusted American advice to modernize the Russian economy with best-practice Western ideas. Instead, Washington abused this trust to saddle Russia with an economic policy designed to carve up Russian economic assets and transfer ownership into foreign hands.

Continue Reading at PaulCraigRoberts.org…

from Follow the Money

by Mike ‘Mish’ Shedlock
Mish Talk

Baroness Altmann Blasts Bank of England for Pushing Pension Schemes “Over the Edge”: BoE Admits the Risk

Convincing the Market Rate Hikes Coming is Damn Tough: Why?

Confusion Over Negative Interest Rates; What About Safekeeping Fees?

Russia Pulls Out of Ukraine Peace Talks Citing Crimea Attack; Videos of Detainee, Weapons Captured

ZEW Study Concludes Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole, BNP Paribas Have Capital Shortfalls Totaling €214 Billion

Continue Reading at MishTalk.com…

from RT America

from Zero Hedge

It appears that the world’s central-scammers have finally gone too far. In a shockingly Zero-Hedge-ian statement, Reuters is forced to admit that “spooked by the end of a 30-year bond bull run and bouts of money printing which have pushed stock values out of kilter with economic reality,” high-profile investors are turning their backs on financial assets and favoring real assets.

Of course, all it took was 7 years of unprecedented monetary policy experimentation to decouple the fantasy of equity markets from the harsh reality of the real economy…

Continue Reading at ZeroHedge.com…

from King World News

As we move through the second week of trading in the final month of summer, KWN thought it was important to share some very important wisdom from one of the legends in the business.

Russell On Warren Buffett

From the Godfather of newsletter writers, legendary Richard Russell: “Warren Buffet was asked how he came to be one of the richest men on earth. He answered that, 1) he was lucky enough to be born in America, 2) he had good genes, and has lived to his eighties, and 3) he understood the almost miraculous power of compounding through time.

Continue Reading at KingWorldNews.com…

from Paul Joseph Watson

by Tate Fegley
Mises.org

Both before and after September 11, 2001, the FBI has considered “eco-terrorism” one of its primary domestic terrorism concerns. The FBI defines “eco-terrorism” as “the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature.”

It comes in several forms, but one of its primary tactics is “ecotage” or “monkey-wrenching” where radical environmental groups sabotage the property of companies whose activities they deem to be bad for the environment (such as the capital goods used in the logging industry).

But, some groups have discovered a tactic in which they are able to not only avoid punishment by federal law enforcement, but also enlist the feds as willing partners in their effort to destroy private property or deprive people of it.

Continue Reading at Mises.org…

from Gregory Mannarino

by Raul I. Meijer
Market Oracle

We can, every single one of us, agree that we’re either in or just past a -financial- crisis. But that seems to be all we can agree on. Because some call it the GFC, others a recession, and still others a depression. And some insist on seeing it as ‘in the past’, and solved, while others see it as a continuing issue.

I personally have the idea that if you think central banks -and perhaps governments- have the ability and the tools to prevent or cure financial crises, you’re in the more optimistic camp. And if you don’t, you’re a pessimist. A third option might be to think that no matter what central bankers do, things will solve themselves, but I don’t see much of that being floated. Not anymore.

Continue Reading at MarketOracle.co.uk…

by Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg

I want to start this post off by taking a closer look at what Donald Trump actually said in his now infamous “2nd Amendment speech” yesterday. Here’s the part that generated all the controversy:

If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But — but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we’re tied. You see what’s going on.

First of all, I agree that this is an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing for a Presidential candidate to say. So while I don’t think he should’ve said it, I also don’t think it’s the biggest deal in the world. Moreover, mainstream media and pundits across the land are unanimously interpreting it as a call for the assassination of Hillary Clinton. I didn’t read it that way at all.

Continue Reading at LibertyBlitzkrieg.com…

by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street

Consumers at the “low end” are tapped out.

Restaurants are considered a leading indicator of the economy into a downturn. The theory is that restaurant revenues are slowing when consumers, whose spending accounts for about 70% of GDP, start having trouble with their wallets.

Some call the current situation a “restaurant recession.” Wendy’s, in its earnings call today, calls it a “recent slowdown.”

Others don’t see it that way quite yet. If you’re trying to walk into one of the amazing restaurants in San Francisco on a Saturday night, you might be disappointed when you find out that the “restaurant recession” has failed to reserve a table for you.

Continue Reading at WolfStreet.com…

by Jeff D. Opdyke
The Sovereign Investor

A Young Turk on Wall Street gets the chance to learn the ways of investing at the feet of his idol.

That is a key plot point in the movie Wall Street, one of my favorite flicks. But it doesn’t really tell you very much about anything. Does the Young Turk go on to great success? Does he flame out spectacularly? Does he learn his idol is a sham or the greatest investor of all time?

So many unanswered questions just knowing one data point.

Which brings me to the single points of light that flood the business media these days…

They say nothing about the true state of the U.S. economy.

Continue Reading at TheSovereignInvestor.com…