Anyone who has been watching the evolution turning devolution of the EU has been able to see this coming for years – ever since the prescient Jim Sinclair ( www.jsmineset.com ) observed that in truth the EU was nothing more than a collection of bankrupt countries several years back.
While some countries (Germany, for example, still the world’s #2 trade exporter behind China now and hanging onto their country’s gold reserves) maintain some degree of prosperity (granted Germany seems to be stalling now, also), others like the UK – led by Gordo the Gold seller Brown, who’s pulling tearful interviews of late – are simply paying the price for incompetent leadership whose only vision is the word “free lunch”), word this morning that Germany is nixing the “Greece Deal” are hardly any surprise.
Merkel is now up to three gold stars, in my book: Kept on exporting, kept their gold (no tungsten questions yet, please), and now she’s proving she didn’t flunk basic economics about printing up paper and touting it as “money”.
Long term, there’s no question that the globalist cabal will see the EU collapse under its own substantial bureaucratic complexity, but that won’t stop EU lackeys from trying to promote global taxes on banking and what-have-you in order to set themselves above all other common folks.
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Elitism is a disease and this one is PIIGS flu (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Greece) and if it’s confined to the Eurozone until the July-September period and then goes ‘global financial pandemic’ don’t look surprised.
Although it’s been a fun little adventure to watch, as the EU runs aground on the rocks of financial despair, while the US dollar may benefit – a strong dollar will push down Dow stocks and gold to perhaps the $800 range – the bad news is that most investors won’t be able to anticipate and see far enough ahead to book profits along the way.
Too bad…but I guess that’s what makes average investors average and why we keep electing free-lunchers everywhere.
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Although this site does not offer financial advice – and only chronicles the arrival of common sense as the masses wake up to financial charlatans and scammers of the 30% variety, I don’t see any reason why short term we see a real dive today in stocks and then another Miracle Monday (except this one will come Tuesday due to the President’s Day holiday) as another Greece Rescue Plan gets cobbled up in ‘emergency talks’ this weekend and into Monday just in time to save option expiration next week from paying of hugely on put options for this cycle.
Depending on how low the markets get today, I may be tempted to wade back in to some very short term (couple of days worth) of options just at the money on lows today…
A number of people think I’m nuts when I do things like that but the way I figure it, that’s when there’s no time premium to speak of in option pricing and a news event like another ‘European Miracle Plan” could land a few more dollars in my miniscule trading account.
WTFIF: What the (blank) It’s Friday. I haven’t had a losing trade so far this year, so why not put on a really ballsy trade using House money?
Retail Fiction, Redux
If you read the report on retail sales this morning, it might seem like we’re in some kind of economic recovery. But pay attention to the little bit of the Census news release that I’ve highlighted for you…
“The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for January, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $355.8 billion, an increase of 0.5 percent (±0.5%)* from the previous month and 4.7 percent (±0.5%) above January 2009. Total sales for the November 2009 through January 2010 period were up 4.3 percent (±0.3%) from the same period a year ago. The November to December 2009 percent change was revised from -0.3 percent (±0.5%)* to -0.1 percent (±0.2%)*. Retail trade sales were up 0.5 percent (±0.5%)* from December 2009 and 5.3 percent (±0.5%) above last year. Gasoline stations sales were up 29.0 percent (±1.5%) from January 2009 and nonstore retailers sales were up 12.4 percent (±1.7%) from last year.”
So when you see this fancy graph, like this in the release:
Draw a line across somewhere between 3% and 6% (I use 6.5% which I’ll get to in a minute) because that’s the pernicious impact of monetary inflation which is apparently not backed out of the feel-good report which is “not [adjusted for] for price changes‘ on the face of it…
Pop open the latest Federal Reserve money stock report (H.6) and you see that M-1 money stocks are up 6.5% in the past year ($1.6765 trillion vs. $1.5738 trillion Jan ’10 vs. ’09) but for God’s sake, don’t put that into the press release because that would mean that unit sales for the past year are flat or worse negative…
Surely, good times are just ahead, brothers & sisters, Hallelujah. Where’s my crack pipe?
Hip, Deep
Under non-el Nino years, or when I’m just thinking about Life, I like to think of UrbanSurvival as “hip, deep, and humorous”.
While today’s report may not be exactly ‘hip, deep” or humorous, it is at least 3″ deeper than yesterday’s report.
See the Thursday OMG It’s Snowing! picture here for comparison with this morning’s piles of whiteness.
Pay particular attention to the pine tree behind the snowlar system which has put on another layer. To help scale things, that my 10-panel snowlar array is 28-feet 7-inches long…the little bits of dirt and grass evident in the first pic are gone from today’s.
Right: Looking out my office window around sunrise….
For now, it’s over and into the record books per the National Weather Service:
“Some light flurries are still falling east of Interstate 45 and Highway 75… but otherwise the record snowfall event has ended across North Texas. Surface temperatures this morning range from the upper 20s to near freezing. However… most area roads remain covered in a mixture of snow and slush with some icy areas now being reported. Bridges and overpasses are usually the first to ice over when temperatures fall below freezing. Even though all the roads are not covered in ice… the snow and slush is creating slick and hazardous travel. This especially applies to secondary roads that are less traveled. The biggest travel impacts are expected north of a line from Cisco to Hillsboro to Palestine where most of the snow fell.”
Up the road from us, the official weather station at Tyler Texas had 5″ while the Dallas Morning News reports 11 inches in other parts of the state.
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Linguistically, the East Coast mess this week and this one are Storm #2 of three for this winter…so should be one more along in a week or four. Gotta tell Cliff he should rename the Terra/Weather section of the predictive linguistics “The Olde Codger’s Almanac…” Don’t mind me while I burn IPCC climate reports to keep warm today….
Budgets Freeze, Too
Some people in NJ are upset with the governor freezing the state budget.
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Think a state budget freeze is something, how about this little science snip about how “Scientists freeze water with heat”.
Gun Grab?
A lot of concern among responsible firearms users who have been flooding our news tip mailbox with reports about how the Obama administration is reversing an earlier decision and promoting a treaty which would regulate arms trade. The fear is that (as in all gun legislation I’m aware of) what happens is the (pick as many as you want here) a) criminals b) terrorists, c)tin-horn dictators, d) state-supported ‘freedom movements won’t stop trading in arms but centralist power-grabbing governments will disarm people who would otherwise be able to draw lines in the sand, dirt, (or snow) to hold government to its proper Constitutional role.
Say, does actually believing that ‘powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved for the States” make one a terrorist nowadays? Just checking…
Speaking of that 10th Amendment…
A report on the Tenth Amendment Center’s web site notes that 14 states have now told the feds that in keeping with their reserved rights, medical marijuana is OK. And more are likely…
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Not looking for change locally since jailing people is a big industry here, however. So big in fact that a year ago certain prison operators imported low cost workers from African nations & Mexico on visas despite the high unemployment rates in the USA. And what’s worse, no one seems to care. But let’s keep this a low-blood-pressure day, shall we?
The Fallen
I’ve seen a lot of different crime stories around, but the one about “Russia nabs meteorite smuggling ring” assures me that the world is running out of things to monetize. Universes throws rocks at us and we sell ‘em as souvenirs…go figure.
They’re not souvenirs. They’re hints. Universe would probably also throw tomatoes, but they aren’t plentiful in space…
