Gold & the Dow Rally Together? OMG


Armstrong Economics Blog/Dow Jones Re-Posted Apr 14, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

COMMENT: Well, the goldbugs are wrong again. This claim that the stock market must crash and only gold will rise is as you say sophistry. It looks like gold and the Dow are rallying together. I can see how they are just promoting a cult-like agenda.

Thanks for being objective

MH

REPLY: We became the biggest institutional adviser because there was never an agenda. Everything goes up, and everything comes down. There is an old saying among actual traders – NEVER marry the trade. I buy gold personally. I just bought a hoard of $20 gold pieces all uncirculated and all dated 1924. I do not regard it as a trade, just a stash for the long-term. It will go up and go down. Do not pretend that something only goes in one direction.

Here is a chart from Socrates on the Quarterly Level of the Dow/Gold Ratio. Anyone who only forecasts a single direction is NOT an analyst – they are a promoter like a used car salesman. No matter what we look at, there is a time to buy and a time to sell. EVERY market functions that was.

Here is an advertisement from April 9th, 1930 pitching Bank Stocks. Brokers were telling people to buy all the way down, average in, but it took 26 years for the Dow to reach the 1929 high again. Anyone selling any product will ALWAYS tell you to BUY. That is their business. It is up to you to come to terms with how ALL markets really move. Hence, there is always a TIME TO BUY just as there is a TIME TO SELL.

Yellen Admits Truth Behind the Inflation Reduction Act


Armstrong Economics Blog/Corruption Re-Posted Apr 11, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

The Inflation Reduction Act has only increased inflation. Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen came out and admitted the truth – the act’s entire premise is to push the climate change agenda forward. “The Inflation Reduction Act is, at its core, about turning the climate crisis into an economic opportunity,” Yellen admitted.

It provided the government with an opportunity to eliminate our energy independence. We did not have an energy crisis before Joe Biden took office. He killed the Keystone deal on his very first day in office and has been promoting the larger WEF Build Back Better plan at the expense of the nation. Biden implemented policies that worsened inflation and then convinced mindless politicians, who never read the large bills put forward, to vote for a $369 billion act under the premise of fixing a problem he created.

Now Joe Manchin, who brokered the deal with Biden, claims he was duped into believing the act was actually designed to reduce inflation. In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Manchin criticized the need to raise the debt ceiling as a “needless emergency.” Manchin wrote:

“America is fast approaching another needless emergency—the raising of the national debt ceiling. This impending crisis isn’t an accident but a result of the inaction of various actors who refuse to confront fiscal reality, sit down, negotiate and make hard decisions for the sake of our nation’s future. While all parties have a responsibility to negotiate in good faith, recent actions make clear to me that the Biden administration is determined to pursue an ideological agenda rather than confront the clear and present danger that debts and deficits pose to our nation.”

He goes on to state that the national debt is nearly $31.5 trillion, “or close to $95,000 for every man, woman, and child, and represents 120% of our gross domestic product.” He proposes negotiating the debt ceiling and is pleading with “Mr. Biden to instruct his administration to implement the Inflation Reduction Act as written and stop redefining its credits and other subsidies.”

The Senator from West Virginia stated that Americans will pay the price for generations if Biden fails to act, but Yellen has now admitted that the goal of the IRA has been achieved. As Trump said, if you put the worst five presidents in American history together, they’ve done less damage to the nation than Biden in under three years.

US National Debt – A Different Perspective


Armstrong Economics Blog/Uncategorized Re-Posted Mar 24, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

In 2010, Barron’s wrote a piece on me effectively laughing at my forecast that the share market would rally to new highs. What seems to inevitably unfold is this notion that whatever the event might be in motion, the mere thought of a reversal in trend appears impossible. When the press disagrees with Socrates, I know it will be the press who is wrong. And because they end up being wrong, of course, they cannot print a retraction so they will just pretend you do not exist rather than admit – Sorry, we were wrong. The Dow made that new high above 2007 by February 2013. That was 64 months from the October 2007 high.

I have been in the game for many years. With each event, it appears to be like Groundhog Day. They pop their heads out and declare they do not see their shadow, so the entire world will disintegrate and that is always based upon opinion. It is never backed by real analysis. Just the standard human trait of assuming whatever trend is in motion, will remain in motion.

Being an institutional adviser, I have never had that luxury. We have had to deal with some of the biggest portfolios in the world. They want accurate forecasting, and it has to be long-term – not day trading. They are not interested in the typical headlines of doom and gloom that the press love to print with every financial event simply to get readership. That is all they care about. It has been the financial version of the fake news.

When we step back and look at this favorite fundamental that people beat to death to predict the end of the world, the national debt, and the collapse of the dollar. Little did they know that the increase in National Debt during the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis was supposed to bring down the sky and end the existence of the dollar. We can see the sharp rise in debt simply made a double top with the Financial Crisis of 1985.

It was that previous 1985 Financial Crisis that set in motion the Plaza Accord which brought together the central banks creating what was then the G5 – now G20. Of course, like every government intervention, the side effect was the 1987 Crash and their attempt to reverse their directive at the Plaza Accord became the Louve Accord. When the traders saw that failed, the collapse in confidence led to the 1987 Crash.

It has always been a CONFIDENCE game as I pointed out with the 1933 Banking Holiday previously. In this case, the failure of the Louvre Accord which came out and said the dollar had fallen enough, once new lows in the dollar unfolded and the central banks could not stop the decline, led to financial panic by 1987 which manifested in the 1987 Crash.

This chart shows the quarterly change in the National Debt since 1966, Here you can see the 1985 and 2008 Financial Crises were on par. Neither one ended the dollar no less the world economy. So when I warned the share market would rally and make new highs and Barron’s laughed in 2010, I said the same thing after the 1987 Crash and people laughed.

In fact, on the very day of the low, I said this was it and that we would rally back to new highs by 1989. That was perfect and the market responded to the Economic Confidence Model (ECM) which has been published back in 1979. This was more than simply forecasting the 1987 Crash and the very day of the low. It clearly established that the ECM had revealed that there was a secret cycle behind the appearance of chaos even in economics.

Larry Edelson was actually a competitor at the time. But Larry respected that the forecast from the model was far beyond what people would ever expect. If we are ever going to advance as a society, we have to stop the bullshit and understand HOW markets trade and WHY. Larry did that. He understood that the model was something larger than just personal opinion.

Even those claiming to be using the K-Wave cannot make real forecasts. The basis of Kondratieff’s argument came from his empirical study of the economic performance of the USA, England, France, and Germany between 1790 and 1920. Kondratieff took the wholesale price levels, interest rates, and production and consumption of coal, pig iron, and lead for each economy. He then sought to smooth the data using an averaging mathematical approach of nine years to eliminate the trend as well as shorter waves. Kondratieff thus arrived at his long-wave theory suggesting that the economic process was a process of continuous waves of boom and bust.

Kondratieff’s work was compelling and contributed greatly to the Austrian School of Economics that first began to develop the concept of a Business Cycle. The general central principle of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is concerned with a period of sustained low-interest rates and excessive credit creation resulting in a volatile and unstable imbalance between saving and investment. Within this context, the theory supposes that the Business Cycle unfolds whereby low rates of interest tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking sector and thus then result in the expansion of the money supply that causes an unsustainable credit ­source boom which leads to a diminished opportunity for investment by competition.

Benner

Here is a chart of the business cycle that was created by a farmer named Samuel Benner. Benner based his work on Sunspots, which actually incorporated solar maximum and minimum that today’s Climate Change zealots refuse to consider. Nevertheless, someone manipulated Brenner’s work and created a chart to try to influence society handing it in with a wild story to the Wall Street Journal published this cycle on February 2nd, 1932, when the market bottomed in July 1932. Still, nobody knew who had investigated this phenomenon in 1932.

WSJ1933

When I was doing my own research reading all the newspapers to understand how events unfolded, I came across this chart. I found it interesting that during the Great Depression people were reaching out and some began to embrace cyclical ideas. The problem with both Kondratiff and Brenner was that the period they used to develop their cycles was the 19th century because the real Industrial Revolution was unfolding and in the 1850s, 70% of the civil workforce were all in agriculture. Consequently, if you constructed a model based entirely upon one sector, it would work only as long as that sector was the top dog.

Being a historian buff, it quickly hit me that NOTHING remains constant and that the economy will ALWAYS evolve, mature, and then crash and burn. Where agriculture was 70% of the workforce in 18590, it fell to 40% by 1900, and then down to 3% by 1980.

Just look at energy. The earliest lamps, dating to the Upper Paleolithic, were stones with depressions in which animal fats were burned as a source of light. In cultures closer to the sea, they began to use shells as lamps which they would burn at first animal fat. Clay lamps began to appear during the Bronze Age around the 16th century BC and the invention quickly spread throughout the Roman Empire. Initially, they took the form of a saucer with a floating wick.

We even find Roman oil lamps as luxury items crafted out of bronze. There are collectors of terracotta oil lamps for there is a vast variety of motifs. There is everything from dolphins, and various entities, to erotic oil lamps, which may have been used in brothels. The point is, if you constructed a model on oil, you would have surely accomplished similar results to Kondratief and Brenner.

Then of course, just as the energy moved from animal fats to vegetable oils, by the 19th century it returned to whale oil which was extracted from the blubber. Emerging industrial societies used whale oil in oil lamps and to make soap. However, during the 20th century, whale oil was even made into margarine.

Then the discovery of petroleum and the use of whale oils declined considerably from their peak in the 19th century into the 20th century. Ironically, it was fossil fuels that probably saved whales from extinction. Hence, now we are entering a period where they deliberately want to end fossil fuels and move to solar and wind power. Obviously, just a cursory review of energy reveals the problem of basing a model on the current energy source or major economic industry. Things change with time.

This Just In – Western Nation Central Banks Organize to Provide Daily Liquidity of Dollars in The Event of Contagion Bank Collapse


Posted originally on the CTH on March 19, 2023 | Sundance 

This is rather remarkable and tells us something about the current status of the “western” financial system.  The last sentence in today’s announcement from the FED is particularly laughable.   Check this out [Source]:

That last sentence is nonsense.   When was the last time the ‘central banks’ worried about the supply of credit to households and businesses?  Total and complete nonsense. What they are worried about is the need to have readily available dollars, faster, to backstop banks that are supposed to be holding deposits.

Nothing quite inspires ‘global banking confidence’ like the need to swap dollars rapidly, from country to country on a daily basis, because the amount of currency in bank, within any western nation, at any given time, might disappear.

Yesterday’s monologue from Neil Oliver, and the recent personal banking story that structures his comments, is standing as eerily prescient right now.  SEE BELOW:

.

“This just in.  Everything is fine… the liquidity of the Western banking system has never been stronger”… “Look over there folks, Trump indictment, nothing to see here folks… move along now”…

C-Level Executives Sold Shares Weeks Before SVB Failed


Armstrong Economics Blog/Corruption Re-Posted Mar 13, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

A bank failure of this proportion has not been seen since 2008 when Washington Mutual failed. The majority of deposits in Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) are uninsured, meaning the FDIC’s $250,000 protection does not apply. Uninsured depositors will be provided receivership certificates and should receive an advanced dividend this week. The FDIC must sell off the remaining assets of SVC to determine how much it can provide to those uninsured depositors. The FDIC is encouraging borrowers to continue paying their existing loans. The bank was said to host $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in deposits as of December 2022. Washington Mutual held around $307 billion in assets when it went down.

Tons of people and businesses will be completely screwed over. Who could have seen it coming? Silicon Valley Bank CEO, CFO, and CMO sold off millions in stock over the past two weeks. President and CEO Greg Becker sold 12,451 shares on February 27 for $3.6 million at $287.42 per share. Later that day, he purchased options for the same amount of shares at $105.18 a piece. He did the same thing in December 2021, as this is not an uncommon albeit unethical practice. Banks commonly trade against their own clients. Becker sold about $3.57 million worth of SVB stock over the past two weeks and is now making TV appearances saying he did not see this coming.

There were signs of trouble, but the talking heads said otherwise. Forbes even listed SVB Financial Group as #20 on its list of America’s Best Banks in an article published on February 14, 2023. Talking/screaming head Jim Cramer came out last month to say that SVB Financial would become one of the top performers on the S&P. This is why you cannot listen to information based on biased opinions. I hesitate to call this negligence technical analysis.

Companies are now at a complete loss, many cannot make payroll, and this situation will only worsen once the uninsured depositors realize their IOUs are worthless.

Beyond Hubris – Joe Biden Says He Takes No Blame for Inflation


Posted originally on the CTH on February 3, 2023 | Sundance

Not only does the buck not stop with Biden, the installed occupant of the White House refuses to admit the buck even started with him. It did!

During remarks to the press today, even Brian Deese looked stunned as Joe Biden incredulously claimed he didn’t cause the rampant inflation that is crushing middle class Americans. Oh, he started it alright…. He not only started it, but he also created it.

The combination of the January 2021 immediate move to block any domestic energy development, in combination with the April 2021 unneeded explosion of deficit spending triggered both a supply side and demand side inflationary impact; with the former continuing to put massive upward pressure on prices still. WATCH:

The lies from the lying, liar who lies, just flow so easily from his mouth.

A pox on all their houses.