For Matterhorn Asset Management, Lars Schall spoke with Ronan Manly, who is an investment professional and research analyst with an interest in the monetary gold market. He is currently working as a consultant precious metals analyst for BullionStar Singapore. Ronan’s studies include financial and economics related undergraduate and Masters degrees at University College Dublin and London Business School. His career has spanned roles in portfolio management, stockbroking, and technology, working for companies including Dimensional Fund Advisors and Morgan Stanley.
Could the earthquake that just struck the New Madrid fault seismic zone near the town of La Center, Kentucky be a “foreshock” for a much bigger quake yet to come? Very early on Sunday morning, a magnitude 3.5 earthquake hit western Kentucky, and it was felt in parts of three other states as well. In fact, it is being reported that the quake could be felt all the way over in Miller, Missouri, which is 267 miles away. The New Madrid fault seismic zone is six times larger than the more famous San Andreas fault zone in California, and it covers portions of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. Scientists tell us that the New Madrid fault is about 30 years overdue for a major event, and because of the nature of the Earth’s crust in that part of the country, a major earthquake would do significant damage all the way to the east coast.
[…] Just a fine time we’re having in the great divide of wealth and power, masked and sustained by the lack of real reform and the credibility trap.
Speaking of ‘stupid media’ blithely passing along the spin from the Wall Street paper pushers, what assets outperformed stocks in the first four months of 2016?
Central Banks are trapped and the scenario I’ve been waiting years to see play out is now materializing.
The speculator and investor in me is excited because the volatility that’s approaching will provide some incredible opportunities to make a lot of money.
The human in me cringes because the volatility that we will experience globally will have real-world consequences for many, many people. Consequences that will include defaults, bankruptcies, recessions, and if history is any guide…. war.
It was a busy week on the global stage so lets get right to it.
Heavy propaganda accompanies the strategic battle in Aleppo between the Syrian Army and its allies (Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and other militia) and the Saudi-Turkey-NATO backed terrorist groups (Jabhat al Nusra, Jaysh al Islam, Ahrar as Sham and ISIS).
Fighting escalated in late April when the armed groups sent hundreds of mortars into Syria’s second city, and the Syrian Army responded with its long awaited offensive.
Western media now claim that Aleppo’s citizens are under threat from the Syrian Army, while Syrian sources show civilians, reeling from constant mortar attacks, demanding that the Army roots out all terrorist groups.
“I’m OK. I just called the cops and they are on the way. Just please come over now! I’m scared!”
A while back, a close friend lost her stepfather to cancer. During the last stages of his life, her mother cared for him with the help of hospice in their home. And that’s when she received this frantic phone call from her panicky mother.
Since he was suffering from tremendous pain due to bone cancer, the hospice supplied them with lots of pain medication.
This type of miraculous narrative of how a child abuser suddenly became a good man once getting into office would be bad enough if the media was reporting in good faith and didn’t have any information on his nefarious activities in office.
Calling him a “serial child molester” and his actions “unconscionable,” Judge Thomas Durkin sentenced Dennis Hastert to 15 months in prison, two years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine for his abuse of four male wrestlers under his tutelage at Yorkville High School in Illinois over 30 years ago.
[…] The sentence is remarkable in many ways. As Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2007, Hastert was second in line to the presidency after the Vice President, making him one of the highest ranking office holders in the history of the United States ever to be put in prison. Not only that, but the 15 month prison far exceeds the federal guidelines of probation to six months for the banking violations of which he has been convicted. And Judge Durkin’s statements during sentencing leave no room for ambiguity about Hastert, his actions, or his legacy. He will forever be remembered as a convicted sex offender, a rapist and a child molester.
But it is not enough. Not nearly enough.
To people like Sibel Edmonds, the FBI whistleblower who has been trying to get the media to investigate the story of Hastert’s child sex abuse since he actually was the Speaker of the House, it may be a form of vindication, but it’s a hollow one to be sure.
Editor’s Note: The U.S. is close to recession territory.
In today’s Weekend Edition, Agora founder Bill Bonner explains that the Fed created an economic bubble with phony credit…and the bubble is about to burst.
As I write this edition of the Daily Pfennig® newsletter, I am flying from San Diego to Chicago. The four-hour trip spends most of its time over The Great Plains and The Rockies where straight lines stretch out for miles unbroken in the emptier sections. Today, of particular notice, was a highway. The straight lines divert in places around lakes or mountains or to avoid property lines back when the highways were built.
I am not a financial markets chartist and I don’t rely on charts to forecast future values of assets, particularly in the short term. But, more in a Newtonian sense, I do observe that, much like those highways, many asset classes move in long trends until acted on by an outside influence. Currency prices in particular are influenced by macro-economic and corporate fulfillment transactions that do not change course quickly.
Is the strongest and most powerful nation on the planet headed for an apocalypse which will bring it to its knees? We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable, and apocalyptic themes have become very common in books, movies, television shows and video games. It is almost as if there is an unconscious understanding on a societal level that something very big and very bad is coming, even if the vast majority of the population cannot specifically identify what that is going to be. Last week, the Global Challenges Foundation released a new report entitled “Global Catastrophic Risks 2016” in which they discussed various apocalyptic events that they believe could wipe out more than 10 percent of the population of our planet, and they warned that these types of events “are more likely than we intuitively think”…
I took a trip to Boise last week to hang out with my father during his first week of chemo. I didn’t really need to go but my father-in-law died shortly after his first round of chemo when the chemo shrunk a tumor they were not aware of growing on his intestine. This led to fecal matter flooding his abdomen causing peritonitis. They chemo had also killed his white blood cells so he had no ability to fight the infection which killed him ten days later.
Despite the circumstances we had a great time together. Throughout the entire trip I had the opportunity to notice a number of things that amazed me.
On the drive down I travel through central Idaho north to south.
Some time ago I commented on a pattern that was quite disturbing, when you looked at it analytically — what articles got the most views, and thus “clicks.”
Put bluntly, it was never the articles on my catching Bernanke pulling system liquidity into the maw of the collapse in 2008, while he maintained to Congress he had done the opposite. Nor was it such articles like my recent piece on Harbor Mobile, which for anyone with a small business outlined a very simple way to take a $75 monthly cell bill and cut it in half for what amounts to the same service, which winds up saving you over $400 a year — every year.
Nor is it articles detailing how a state decided to literally kidnap and medically experiment on a person slightly under the age of 18 — against her express wishes. Oh, and the experiments failed too.
Gold jumped 2.2% on Friday to $1,294.90 an ounce. It’s up nearly 5% for the week and hit the highest price since January 2015.
Silver rose 1.7% on Friday to $17.80 an ounce. During the day, it kissed the highest price since January 2015. It has jumped 15% in April.
The yen, which the Bank of Japan successfully crushed for a while, has re-soared, from ¥126 to the dollar in June last year to ¥112 by last Wednesday morning in Tokyo. At that point, the BOJ announced that it would keep its scorched-earth campaign of negative interest rates and money printing unchanged, rather than adding to it.
Sorry stock pickers, but the herd-like trading pattern that dominated financial markets in the aftermath of the financial crisis appears to be back in force.
In a note earlier this week, HSBC’s multi-asset quant research team said the so-called risk-off-risk-on theme is, once again, the “single most important driver of asset markets.”
The theme describes a situation in which asset classes become increasingly correlated with each other and respond largely to broad shifts in investor appetite for risk. Ultimately, asset classes lose much of their individual character and, instead, split into two camps: they are either “risk-on”, namely risky assets, or “risk-off”, meaning havens. As the names imply, risk-on assets rally when investors are upbeat and fall when the mood turns sour. Risk-off assets do the opposite.
Currently skepticism toward the ongoing rally in the precious metals sector is rampant. A lot of it based on shamelessly presented analysis of the COT data. But the COT data analysts have been wrong since March on their doom and gloom outlook based on the attributes of the long/short data in the weekly COT report.
Let me preface this with the proviso that the veracity of the COT data is predicated on the reliability of reports generated by the likes of JP Morgan, HSBC and Scotia. If these banks are providing bona fide, non-fraudulent Comex data reports, it would be the only area of their entire business for which they are not publishing corrupted financial information.
A legend in the financial world just issued a dire warning.
Below is a dire warning from a recent piece by financial legend and six time Graham and Dodd award winner Rob Arnott, whose firm helps to oversee $170 billion globally:
“Big Brother cannot take care of us. Only we can do that. Big Brother is us; the government is us. If we think a bureaucrat can take care of us better than we can take care of ourselves, or cares more about us than we care about ourselves, we’re deluded.
Jason presents innovative new thinking on real estate investing with The Hartman Risk Evaluator™ which can virtually eliminate or at least dramatically reduce downside risk based on the LTI (Land-to-Improvement) Ratio™. Don’t miss this episode as it could cost you a bundle! You won’t hear this unique content from any other financial and real estate guru as it is truly unique – enjoy!
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