Almost sounds like a country (or blues) tune doesn’t it? But no, the first heading this morning has to be about how Dubai is seeking to postpone trading for a while on $5-billion plus worth of bonds, and on my first check of gold prices for the week, the price would seem to infer a 50-100 point downward opening of the Dow – just a dart thrown early. This after last week’s see-saw – manic rally and equally manic reversal Friday netted the market a 9-point loss for the week. Woo hoo! Party on the profits….or not.
The world markets are acting like Jell-O on the news: Hong Kong (no relation to Donkey) saw Sands China drop 13 percent but unrelated to Dubai where markets were down 7% early in the day’s slogging.
As I explained in more detail to Peoplenomics subscribers in this weekend’s reports, the outlook for the medium term (less than one year) could easily be a breakdown through February and then a rapid ascent into July-august and that’d be the time to load the boat with shorts – which I’d be willing to gamble on if the first part of the scenario works out. Gold in all this would pull back, perhaps to the $800 or below range, but since buying it back later would be a questionmark, likely the best bet would be to hang on and simply add to positions. Note this is not financial advice; just my own leanings and subject to more frequent change than the winds.
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Statistically, we are at another one of those busy periods, although today has only the Chicago purchasing number. As the week gets a move on, there’s construction spending and both auto sales will be reported tomorrow. Maybe a truck was sold, too.
Wednesday we get down to serious with the Challenger Job Cut forecast coming, the ADP employment numbers, Fed Beige Book (forget Dewey’s decimals – file under fiction, LOL) and, weekly unemployment and Productivity – another once-upon-a-time work of science fiction.
The biggy comes Friday when the unemployment rate comes out – a reasonable bet is that it will be shown holding around the 10% area on the official tally – which rolls off people who have run out of benefits, since they must not be serious about looking for jobs. Toss those folks in – as many stories in the MSM are starting to point out – and you get a real unemployment rate reminiscent of the Roosevelt Depression years.
For traders making micro-bets, this is should prove an exciting week. For us longer term traders (verging on investors) the real question is whether the ascending support presently around 10,000 on the Dow will be broken by Monday Morning Dubai Blues – and if it is, how far is down – besides the March lows at 6,627? I ought to get a guitar to pluck – I may not be Dylan, just right now and then. Aided by a rickety time machine, which is getting ready to dispense another report in a few weeks – I’ll let you know when.
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If you have noticed that both Cliff and I are being really low key about the predictive linguistics project there’s a reason for that…so much of what’s ahead over the next three years (1117 days) is grim beyond words – we ought to get to a point in either 2010 or 2011 that it won’t matter and systemic collapse takes over – making the holding of any assets other than basics (grub, gold, gun, garden) – could become pointless. The good news is that the rickety time machine is easily confused between bespoke words about the future which may (or may not) be related to action at a particular point. The filtration process there becomes unimaginably difficult, not to mention just plain outright depressing for Cliff.
Bigger Problems
If my notes on the market seem to be suffering detachment, it’s because of a few inconvenient truths about the global socioeconomic backdrop. Our own slapstick government hasn’t been able to figure out that the recently hacked Climate Research Center emails and papers infer a huge engagement in thought control and junk science in order to stampede (with the cooperation of the PTB) regular folks into believing that global warming is our greatest problem.
Once-upon-a-time, maybe. But not with the Space Weather folks showing another goose egg for sunspots which really ought to have been increasing to the daily 5-10 range by this point in Solar Cycle 24, but which I’ve taken the liberty of renaming the Obama Minimum.
The good news – and bad of macro climate change: “Last Ice Age took just SIX months to arrive” reports the Daily Mail. Although there’s slight comfort that the “Polar ice cap during last Ice Age may not have been as extensive as previously thought...” says an ANI report from India.
You know how my steel-trap mind works: I’ll be watching ice cream sales.
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Latest Climategate revelations (like we need more?): “Climate change data dumped“. If at first you don’t succeed, throw out the real data. Why, you’d think these old boys had been hanging around a marketing department, or something.
Fluing the People
OK, so you don’t scan the professional journal “Virology” – but if you did, the abstract out last week titled “From where did the 2009 ‘swine-origin’ influenza A virus (H1N1) emerge?” contains this nugget – as good science may have isolated the fingerprints of the PowersThatBe:
“The three parents of the virus may have been assembled in one place by natural means, such as by migrating birds, however the consistent link with pig viruses suggests that human activity was involved. We discuss a published suggestion that unsampled pig herds, the intercontinental live pig trade, together with porous quarantine barriers, generated the reassortant. We contrast that suggestion with the possibility that laboratory errors involving the sharing of virus isolates and cultured cells, or perhaps vaccine production, may have been involved.”
“Laboratory errors” where there’s an umpteen billion windfall from shoot-em-up-happy vaccine promoters? Gee…let me think….
Ure’s Public Health Axiom #106: You can flu some of the people some of the time, but you can’t flu all of the people all of the time. Why hadn’t anyone else figured this? I oughta get a Nobel Prize for this… I hear it’s gotten easier.
Emotional Release
Ever notice how when markets are on the verge of breaking down some emotional blow-off happens in the press? Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and this weekend, the killing of four police officers in the Lakewood area, south of Tacoma, Washington. Local TV in the Seattle area is reporting the suspected shooter has been wounded – and may be dead after holing up in a Leschi district Seattle home east of the CD.
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Still little insight – although some fine PR shuffle around the Escalade escapes of Tiger Woods this weekend.
Patriot Acting
With key provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire, there’s a whole obfuscation festival underway held by officials wanting to keep expanded powers while at the same time appearing to defend the remnants of the great Constitution – neat trick, and like I said, you can flu some of the people some of the time…
Let’s Get Smashed Department
The Large Hadron collider has set a new world record for energy levels with potentials beyond one trillion electron volts being reached. Beats the old record held by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (outside Chicago) Tevatron.
And the point is? Oh, sure, there’s a chance the elusive Higgs Boson can be found – if Nature doesn’t mind the so-called “God particle” from being unmasked. Barring that, or even with it, I haven’t seen much improvement in human behavior since the first atom smashing in the 1940′s…but maybe I missed something…yeah, that’s it… I missed something – that’s got to be it.
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Most of what passes for history seems to be encapsulated in the change from food to trinkets, trinkets to gold, gold to paper, paper to bytes.
Just as ‘money doesn’t care where it came from’, the Large Hadron seems destined to prove ‘electrons don’t care either’. Damn…that’s gotta be worth a few trillion to figure out, doesn’t it? I oughta get a Nobel Prize for this… I hear it’s gotten easier.
