Adam Taggart: “Trouble ahead for the housing market” … Fed Chair Powell hints at “a little trouble with the yield curve” … Crypto market adds $20 billion in 30 minutes as bitcoin spikes above $7400 … Gold and silver at multi-month lows. Waiting for that second-half rally! Best Of The Web Trouble ahead […]
Top Ten Videos — July 17
Chris Martenson on our “Potemkin Village financial markets” … Jimmy Kimmel: Seriously, how ignorant are we? Americans unable to name a single country on a map … Max Keiser: Is Trump just pretending to be crazy? … Lynette Zang: “A pattern shift has occurred” … […]
Michael Pento: How The Trade War Will Hurt The US — And The World
Excerpted from Michael Pento’s Pento Portfolio Strategies China appears to have more to lose from a trade war with the US simply because the math behind surpluses and deficits renders the Bubble Blowers in Beijing at a big disadvantage. When you get right down to the nuclear option in a trade war, Trump could impose […]
US Housing Bubble Enters Stage Two: Suddenly-Motivated Sellers
Housing bubbles proceed in fairly predictable stages. Stage One is long and (initially) slow, fueled by excess central bank money creation or foreign demand or some other source of liquidity that encourages large numbers of people to buy houses. At first, sellers remember the peak prices from the previous bubble and aren’t willing to sell […]
Student Debt Bubble Expands As Parents Do More Of The Borrowing
Not so long ago, student debt was mostly the responsibility of students. That is, you paid for college with loans and then paid off those loans with the proceeds of the good job you got with an advanced education. These days it’s a little different. The cost of higher education is soaring, the jobs available […]
We Give Up! Part 3: China Stops Deleveraging, Tells Cities To Ramp Up Spending
China’s growth over the past decade has been not just impressive, but historically unprecedented. No single country has ever added this many factories, roads, airports and entire new cities in so short at time. But the transformation has come at a cost, in the form of a debt bubble that’s starting to look unstable. Beginning […]
Rising Wages = Shrinking Corporate Profit Margins … And Falling Stock Prices?
Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a couple of charts that illustrate a relationship that’s not getting much media attention these days: The fact that tightening labor markets are forcing companies to raise wages, in the process squeezing their own profit margins. Historically this margin compression has been either a cause of or contributor to cyclical […]
Inflation Is Back, Part 9: Two Sentences Say It All
Okay, one more look at wage inflation, followed by a short diatribe on the unfairness of life. As the labor markets get tighter, power is finally shifting from companies to workers. For some reason Iowa is leading the way (the promised two sentences are in bold): Say Hello to Full Employment — Want to know […]
Inflation Is Back, Part 8: Labor Shortage Reaches “Critical” Point
Economist Peter Bookvar recently analyzed the the anecdotal evidence of capacity constraints piling up in recent industry surveys, including the following: “Business is strong in all regions. Materials are tight. Trucking continues to be a major challenge.” (Chemical Products) “Strong economic growth continues to put pressure/strain on capacity, lead time, availability and pricing across a […]
Things Are Lining Up Nicely For Gold And Silver
Beginning in early Spring, gold and silver faced two serious headwinds: Seasonality – that is, the annual decline in bullion demand from China and India once wedding season ends – and the internal structure of the futures markets, where the big players in gold had lined up in ways that historically point towards weak prices […]
US Political Center Is Being Devoured From Both Right And Left
President Trump will soon nominate his second Supreme Court justice. The first, Neil Gorsuch, has so perfectly replaced the late Antonin Scalia that it’s safe to assume retiring justice Anthony Kennedy’s successor will be in the same mold – which is to say formidable and unapologetically conservative. The result will be a solid conservative majority […]
Emerging Market Crisis Spreads To The Core, Central Banks Face Catch-22
One of the things giving “data-driven” central banks wiggle room on their pledge to tighten monetary policy is the fact that there are several definitions of inflation. In the US the thing most people think of as inflation is the consumer price index, or CPI, which is now running comfortably above the Fed’s target. But […]
Is China Part Of The “Emerging Market Crisis”?
Being huge, consequential and technologically advanced, China isn’t normally lumped into the “emerging” category with Brazil and Argentina. To most observers they’ve already left the kids table and are now seated with the developed-world adults. But that might be premature. A big part of China’s economic ascendance was purchased with borrowed money – including a […]
If Bitcoin’s Rise Was Bad For Gold, Will Its Fall Be Good?
After an artificial pause in 2017, US government debt has resumed its inexorable climb… …the dollar has fallen by around 5%… … and inflation – even the massaged-beyond-recognition Consumer Price Index (CPI) – has shifted to a higher gear, driven by rising oil. All of which should be great for gold, right? Well, not so […]
Will Disney’s Epic Buyout of Fox Mark The End Of The Everything Bubble?
As bubbles expand and hot money starts burning holes in corporate pockets, merger and acquisition deal terms begin to leave reality behind. Often one deal of such breathtaking size, scope and hubris is struck that — in retrospect – it heralds the end of the era. The junk bond bubble of the 1980s, for instance, […]
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