by Rick Ackerman
RickAckerman.com
The current E-Mini S&P tout highlights the risk of betting aggressively with stocks at these airless heights.
Look at the chart that accompanies the tout and you may conclude as I have that a spectacular move in either direction is possible.
It’s not a 50-50 bet, however, since, as we all know, the futures could swing wildly in one direction, and then the other, before embarking on a major trend leg.
by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
Barack Obama’s “friend” in Turkey is a deeply corrupt radical Islamist dictator that has just staged a coup to consolidate his grip on power. As I have reported previously, 1,845 “journalists, writers and critics” have been arrested for “insulting” President Erdogan over just the past two years, and a couple of years ago he had a monstrous 1,100 room presidential palace built for himself that is 30 times larger than the White House. With each passing day, more evidence emerges which seems to indicate that the recent “coup” was a staged event meant to enable Erdogan and his allies to eliminate their enemies and solidify their stranglehold over the nation. At this point the number of victims of “Erdogan’s purge” has hit 50,000, but the final number will not be known for quite some time.
by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
For them, asset bubbles just aren’t helpful. On the contrary.
Gallup’s weekly survey has been trying to determine to what extent American consumers would get hit by the Brexit vote and the financial volatility that came with it: the two-day dive, the central-bank agitations, the massive dip-buying, the big rally since. Throughout, the survey found that Brexit bypassed Americans. But something else hit them, and economic confidence has been falling despite the market highs. Gloomy comes to mind.
by JL Yastine
The Sovereign Investor
I always liked the famous scene in the movie Jaws where the film’s hero, police Chief Brody, finally gets a close-up look at the size of his killer shark nemesis.
“We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” he says, incredulous at the size of the monster fish.
These days, we have a monetary nemesis called negative rates. It’s already a reality in Japan and the European Union.
But large banks, incredulous at being forced to store their digital cash at the European Central Bank (ECB) — and paying for the privilege — have a strategy to deal with this ongoing financial horror show, summed up as…
“We’re gonna need a bigger vault.”
by Steve St. Angelo
SRSRocco Report
Something BIG happened in the gold market this year and very few investors understand the significance. While precious metal analysts debate whether the huge gold rally since the beginning of the year is sustainable, I am beginning to wonder if certain indicators are no longer reliable.
I’ll get into that in a moment, but wanted to share a few things as it pertains to my views on the precious metals.
A few weeks ago I was able to get away on a short vacation with my family. We stayed at a nice Bread & Breakfast and at night I enjoyed listening to several different guests talking about their jobs and past-times. In my experience, I have found out that the majority of people would rather talk about themselves rather than listen to others. This doesn’t bother me at all as I get to learn more things with my mouth shut than I do with it open.
by Brian Maher
Daily Reckoning
God doesn’t play dice with the universe, Einstein famously opined. But does He play dice with the stock market?
It’s Monday, Oct. 19, 1987 — “Black Monday.” The stock market plunged a nightmare 22.6%, its largest one-day drop in history.
And by all that’s holy, it never should have happened. No, not just in the sense that regulators were snoozing at their desks or some gasket blew from poor maintenance. It literally… never should have happened.
It was almost statistically impossible.
by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics
Some say the Nikkei is close to ending its bull run after seeing some impressive gains recently. However, after the long weekend we have seen yet another 1%+ gain, but that has yet to halt dealers still trying to call the top. A better performance than its peers as Shanghai and Hang Seng returned loses of -0.3% and -0.6% respectively. In late trading, the Nikkei has returned some of the cash gains whilst China 300 and HSI remain little changed.
Ahead of much data releases we heard that Moody’s downgraded their UK’s GDP growth target for 2016, and then, mid-morning, we saw the UK CPI release 0.5% marginally better than the 0.4% expected. However, despite a brief rally in GBP, it was only short-lived and we were back with the sellers very soon after.
by Mac Slavo
SHTF Plan
The United States isn’t the only place where you’ll find citizens concerned with a rapidly deteriorating geo-political landscape and the real possibility of another World War.
According to a report from Newsweek titled In Europe and Russia There’s Talk Of War, plenty of Russians feel the same way:
Recently, I grabbed a taxi in Moscow. When the driver asked me where I was from, I told him the United States. “I went there once,” he said, “to Chicago. I really liked it.”
“But tell me something,” he added. “When are we going to war?”
The question, put so starkly, so honestly, shocked me. “Well, I hope never,” I replied. “No one wants war.”
from King World News
With continued uncertainty in global markets, David Stockman weighed in on the coming global collapse and one short seller warned, “I have no idea how long they can keep pretending.”
By Bill Fleckenstein President Of Fleckenstein Capital
July 19 (King World News) – Overnight equity markets were slightly lower, with bonds markets slightly higher in uneventful trading. As for our equity market, Netflix provided some fireworks, as it lost badly at the game of beat-the-number and the stock price was hammered for 14%. IBM, however, managed to win at Wall Street’s favorite game by making enough acquisitions to make the estimates.
[…] Funny but most people these days are also suckers for bad news too, especially news that spells doom and gloom and grim warnings about the imminent decline of the world as we know it. There are web sites that seem to specialize in it.
Maybe its not that the news had to be good, or bad, but extremely good or extremely bad. Maybe that says something about how overwhelmed we are becoming by ‘news’ so that only the real shocks can get our attention.
Most of life is just doing your daily chores, finding grace in simple things, and waiting. What one is waiting for says quite a bit about who they are.
Gold and silver were drifting largely sideways today in what can best be described as the ‘Summer trade.’
Silver comex records its highest ever open interest and yet silver remains 29 dollars below its all time high!/Gold rises and remains robust despite high USA dollar/silver falls slightly/China Vice Chairman tells his troops to prepare for war/Turkey’s Erdogan fires all University deans/fires 21,000 private school teachers/Explosion in Ankara/Turkish stock market plummets/also Turkish lira falters badly
by Harvey Organ
Harvey Organ’s Blog
Gold:1331.50 UP $3.10
Silver 19.98 DOWN 7 cents
In the access market 5:15 pm
Gold: 1331.50
Silver: 19.92
from Dollar Collapse
Brexit looked like the end of the world — until people figured out that central banks would have to ease in response. Then markets turned positively jubilant with US stocks, for example, hitting record highs. The result: A world of mounting debts, weekly terrorist attacks and even military coup attempts alongside financial assets priced for perfection. Wonder which side is right?
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from Financial Survival Network
Peter Schiff and I have been speaking for 5 years now. We’re seeing state sponsored civil unrest. 2016 is the beginning of the process that Peter has been warning of. People have been distracted by the bubble that the Fed blew. Bernanke was the hero. However, the reality is that everything that was done actually made the problems much worse and now we’re heading for a much worse disaster for which there are no bail-outs. There is no riding out this disaster.
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from Financial Survival Network
Dan Johnson of the Tax Revolution Institute has a novel idea, audit the IRS. The first thing is to know the enemy. They’re surveying people to understand what the IRS is doing. They want find out how the agency is overstepping it’s bounds. How is it exceeding its statutory limitations, is it actually doing it at all? Once this information is known then it will be published and hopefully solutions will be proposed. As we all know ignorance of law is no defense, but people of average intelligence should be able to understand these laws without possessing an advanced degree.
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by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Breaking up the dangerous banks on Wall Street that are gambling with their taxpayer-backstopped insured deposits by restoring the Glass-Steagall Act is now a part of the newly adopted platforms of both the Democrat and Republican parties. Under a restored Glass-Steagall Act, banks holding insured deposits would not be allowed to affiliate with Wall Street investment banks and brokerage firms that regularly underwrite risky securities and engage in trillions of dollars of derivative gambles. It would effectively put an end to the idea that these complex banks are too-big-to-fail because the life savings of small savers holding insured deposits in the bank would be at risk.
Bernie Sanders’ supporters pushed the Democratic Party to include the provision in its platform. Today’s media spin is that Trump & Company added it in hopes of picking up some Sanders’ supporters who have vowed not to vote for Hillary Clinton.
What has been lost in the frenzy of political posturing is that there already exists a bi-partisan bill in the Senate to restore the Glass-Steagall Act. It’s called the “21st Century Glass-Steagall Act of 2015” and is co-sponsored by progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator John McCain among others.
Why does the Fed focus on backward-looking indicators such as employment?
by Danielle Marceau
Market Watch
The Federal Reserve has demonstrated, yet again, its inability to forecast the economy.
In May and early June, Fed officials suggested that rates could be raised in June or July. Contrary to this sentiment, in mid-June, the Fed was, to quote Chairwoman Janet Yellen, “Quite uncertain about where rates are heading.”
In mid-June, following the discouraging jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for May and the mad panic surrounding the weak numbers, the Fed pushed back the interest-rate increase from its anticipated June or July date to an unspecified time after July and August. A few days later, following the Fed’s two-day policy meeting, officials declared that they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
The bottom line: The Fed needs to learn how to forecast.
by Mike ‘Mish’ Shedlock
Mish Talk
WikiLeaks claims to have over 300,000 emails from Erdogan’s AKP party.
AKP stands for “Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi” (Justice and Development Party).
Erdoghan claims the AK Party’s agenda is limited to “conservative democracy”. The irony is obvious.
by Daily Bell Staff
The Daily Bell
Hillary Clinton said Monday that Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, was the most dangerous presidential candidate in the history of the United States. – CNN
Clinton, in an interview with CBS News’ Charlie Rose, believes Donald Trump has “no self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits of the kind of power that any president should impose upon himself.”
All of this could be applied to Clinton. She is by far the more dangerous of the two candidates.
If Clinton gets into office, she will start or expand wars and through large economic programs will ensure the US’s quasi-depression deepens and that the economy never truly recovers at all (even though it may seem to.)
from Zero Hedge
There was some good news for citizens of Venezuela yesterday, when the government – having mostly given up on trying to provide its citizens’ with even the most basic food needs – announced it has opened its border with Colombia for the second time this month to allow people to buy food and medicine unavailable at home in their country’s collapsing economy. Colombia’s government said 44,000 people crossed on Saturday to buy food, medicine and cleaning products and said it expected that number to almost double on Sunday.
Bus terminals were packed and hotels filled to capacity in the border town of San Antonio, with many traveling hundreds of miles to shop.
The result of the scramble to obtain much needed staples is shown in the photos below.
