May 10, 2022
* The U.S. Empire is in decline…
* Silver, yes, Silver is actually up this morning!
Good Day… And a Tom Terrific Tuesday to you! No baseball for me last night, so I had to find something else to do… So, I went to Amazon and bought 3 new books, one of them for my granddaughter, Evie… Speaking of Evie, that’s exactly what she’s doing these days, saying all Kinds of things, most of which I can understand, and some, well, she’s still jabbering a bit. She’s just so darn cute, and loves to try an steal my seat, when I get up…Three Dog Night greet me this morning with their big 70’s song: Mama told Me Not To Come
Well, if you came here this morning to see if the dollar had begun its burn out, like a failing star, then you came to the wrong place,as the dollar’s dominance continued yesterday, especially against the metals… Gold lost $29 on the day, and Silver lost 58- cents….Speaking od Silver… last Sayurday, in Ed Steer’s Saturday letter, he posted a graph, as he always does on Saturday, that shows the number of days of production it would take to equal the ounces of metals sold short… The number of days of Silver production that it would take to equal thr ounces of Silver that’s sold short is…. 162 days! Gold’s number is 88 days!
I find these numbers to be shameful for a nation that boasts about its free markets…. There should be a law the prohibits shorting more metal than they have in position available for sale…But as I’ve maintained all these years is that this whole idea of shorting the metals like this originated in the U.S. government to keep people from losing faith in the dollar… Henry Kissinger ans a senator that I can’t recall his name right now, discussed how they would need to defend the dollar after President Nixon, removed the Gold from backing the dollar…
Their initial fears were confirmed, as the dollar went into a 7 year down trend, that had traders scrambling for answers… and it took Volker’s’ 20% interest rates as the decade ended to entice foreign investors to but U.S. Investments to stop the decline of the dollar…
So, Gold closed at $1,855.10, while Silver closed at $21.86 yesterday. The price of Oil lost $5, and seeing that the Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel isn’t going to begin their Quantitative Tightening ( stopping their bond buying), bonds rallied and the yield on the 10_year dropped below 3%….. Oh! And the BBDXY closed yesterday at 1,253.05
In the overnight markets last night…. The dollar was steady Eddie, with little movement. A pause for the cause if you will… Gold ID up $8 early this morning, and Silver is up, yes I said up, 14-cents… The price of Oil staid in the $102 handle during the night and bonds didn’t move off their 2.96% rate… So, little movement in anything, as we start today…
I was reading Bill Bonner’s daily letter yesterday and he wrote something that I think everyone should read… So, here’s Bill: “But America is no longer getting richer… it’s going the other direction.
Disposable personal incomes are dropping – down 20% from March’21 to March ’22. Of course, the steep drop is the result of winding down the feds’ Covid gimmie/stimmie programs. But ignoring the ‘transfer payments,’ still shows falling incomes. While wage increases are running at about 5%, consumer prices are rising at nearly 9%.
GDP is falling at a 1.4% annual rate.
The trade deficit just hit a new record high – at $109 for the month of April.
Productivity is in retreat – down at a 7.5% annual rate… the worst since 1947.
Consumer prices are rising at the fastest pace in 40 years…
Rents in Miami are up 40% year-to-year… 22% in Orlando… 17% in Las Vegas…
…the stock market just had the worst first quarter since 1939…
…and investors are realizing that many of the most promising breakthroughs were just fads. NFT sales are down 92% from the peak. An NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2.9 million a year ago; now it’s on sale… top bid so far: $14,000.”
Chuck again… Remember when I had a cow about what the heck were NFT’s? Well, maybe that chicken will come home to roost.
Well what came to your mind last week when the stock market lost nearly 1,000 points, only to see it gain those lost points the next day? And the closed the week down nearly another 1,000 points, and so on? Given the fact that there are no free of manipulation markets anymore… I immediately thought of the PPT… The Plunge Protection Team, was created in 1987 after the October crash of the stock market… Their initial charge was to make the stock market operate smoothly… But in recent years they’ve added to their job, and a protection of sell offs became their charge de affairs….
And thinking of that, Russ and Pam Martens of: www.wallstreetonparade.com talked about this yesterday, let’s listen in: “Wall Street On Parade has been witnessing a new pattern in the stock market for several months now where the market plunges at the open and then shortly thereafter, on no major news, turns on a dime and spikes higher.
This suggests one of two things to us: 1) either the New York Fed is manipulating stock trading out of its second office close to the futures markets in Chicago; or 2) big money at Wall Street trading houses and/or hedge funds is doing it. Either way, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department have not nipped this activity in the bud. …
Chuck again, again… I would put my money on manipulation…
The U.S. Data Cupboard doesn’t have anything for us today, well make that for us to be interested in…All this talk today regarding manipulated markets, it’s not just the markets that get manipulated, think about last Friday’s Jobs report from the BLS, where they added 330,000 jobs to the surveys from employers. I can tell you that the reason the BLS gets away with these shenanigans is that nnot everyone knows how to look under the hood, and see their actual numbers…
To recap… dollar dominance continued yesterday and it especially showed up in the pricing of Gold & Silver qwhich both took on significant losses on Monday. Chuck goes through manipulation today in several things… Stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, and even data prints, get the manipulation treatment… there are no more free trading markets…
For What It’s Worth….Here’s an article that I feel is very important in the future of our economy, and it can be found here: https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/shocking-consumer-credit-numbers-everyone-maxing-out-their-credit-card-ahead-recession
Or, here’s your snippet:”While it is traditionally viewed as a B-grade indicator, the March consumer credit report from the Federal Reserve was an absolute shocked and confirmed what we have been saying for month: any excess savings accumulated by the US middle class are long gone, and in their place Americans have unleashed a credit-card fueled spending spree.
Here are the shocking numbers: in March, one month after the February print already came in more than double the $18 billion expected, consumer credit exploded to an absolutely blowout $52.435 billion, again more than double the expected $25 billion print, and the highest on record!
And while non-revolving credit (student and car loans) rose by a relatively pedestrian 21.1 billion (which was still the 6th highest on record)…
… the real stunner was revolving, or credit card debt, which more than doubled from the already elevated February print of $14.2 billion to a stunning $31.4 billion, the highest print on record… just in time for those credit card APR to starting moving higher, first slowly and then very fast.
While this unprecedented rush to buy everything on credit at a time when there were no notable Hallmark holidays should not come as much of a surprise, after all we have repeatedly shown that for the middle class any “excess savings” are now gone, long gone…
… the fact is that most economists – such as those at Goldman Sachs – had previously anticipated that continued spending of savings by consumers (who they fail to realize are now tapped out) is what will keep the US economy levitating in 2022. Unfortunately, as today’s consumer credit numbers clearly demonstrate, any savings that US middle class households may have stored away courtesy of stimmies, are long gone.”
Chuck again… this article tells the same story that Bill Bonner wrote about, and that is… the free money is all gone…
Market Prices 5/10/2022:American Style: A$ .6976, kiwi .6327, C$ .7708,euro 1.0566, sterling 1.2336, Swiss 1.0085, European Style: rand 16.0727, krone 9.6835, SEK 10.0367, forint 358.79, zloty 4.4226, koruna 23.6437, RUB 69.57, yen 130.03, sing 1.3885, HKD 7.8497, INR 77.01, China 6.7221, peso 20.28, BRL 5.1187, BBDXY 1,253.17, Dollar Index 103.60, Oil $102.24, 10-year 2.96%, Silver $21.94, Platinum $986.00, Palladium $2,068.00, Copper $4.20, and Gold $1,862.58
That’s it for today..A simply beautiful day here yesterday,as it didn’t get as hot as the weather app said it would… I sat outside for a few hours yesterday, soaking up some vitamin D… I find that the sun always makes me feel better…Speaking of feeling better, remember two weeks ago when I had an appt with my oncologist, but had to cancel it because of the head cold I had? Well, it got rescheduled for this Thursday… So, once again a short week for the Pfennig. I have my fair share of doctors… therefore I have my fare sure of doctor appointments! In 2020, I thought that going to see the doctor was like going out! The great Carlos Santana takes us to the finish line today with his rollicking version of the song: She’s Not There… I hope you have a Tom Terrific day today, and please Be Good To Yourself!
Chuck Butler