Weekly Initial Jobless Claims Rise to 744,000!

April 8, 2021

* Currencies are back on the rally tracks this morning… 

* Gold & Silver recover nicely and head north! 

Good Day… And a Tub Thumpin’ Thursday to you! My beloved Cardinals got out their brooms yesterday as they swept the Marlins in a 3 game set… A HUGE home run by long time fan fave, Yadier Molina was the margin of victory… Today is the Home Opener… That is if the rain allows it to be! I saw rain yesterday for the first time in over a month! And it’s coming back today just for good measure. The rain has pushed back the schedule that our pool deck will be finished, but that’s no biggie, as we have the whole month of April left to get that done.  Our Blues  ended their losing streak at 7 games, with a 3-1 win last night… It’s finally time they won a game!        Radiohead greets me this morning with their song: Karma Police…

The old saying that I coined many years ago is that A Trend, is not a one-way street…  And that’s what we saw yesterday, as there had to be some profit taking and a bit of selling short, on the day, as the euro, the Big Dog, lost about 1/3rd -cent. The Dollar Index gained on the day from 92.22 in the morning to 92.44 at the end of the day.  Gold found a way to rally during the day, and had erased its $8 loss in the early trading, but then to close out the day, a flurry of short gold paper trades hit the market, and Gold ended up losing $6.00 on the day… Silver didn’t see a flurry of short Silver paper trades and it ended up only losing a nickel… Which was far better than in the early trading when Silver was down 26-cents… 

In The overnight markets… The dollar was back to getting sold overnight, as the euro, the Big Dog, climbed back to 1.1880, and the Dollar Index dropped back to 92.26…  Gold is back on the rally tracks this morning, with the shiny metal up $9.90 in the early trading, and Silver is kicking some tail up 25-cents this morning.  If these gains in the currencies and metals hold throughout the day, then it will confirm to me in my mind that yesterday’s trading was simply profit taking… 

Well… I had a dear reader ask me what was the problem with the vaccine passport?  I didn’t respond to him because… If you have to have your freedom of movement limited explained, then I’m at a loss to explain it any different than I did yesterday….   

Today is the day that my interview with Dennis Miller of milleronthemoney.com gets printed, and posted to his website…  I’m going to use some of that letter as my FWIW article today…  In the meantime, publishing guru, and best selling author, Bill Bonner, basically wrote a review of the letter without knowing it! He pointed out that China’s digital currency is a BIG DEAL….  He also had this to say in his letter rogueeconomics.com “The U.S. feds can control many elements in their fantasy world.

They can create “money” out of thin air. They can create make-work jobs. They can increase ersatz “demand” – by giving away more fake money. They can goose up stock prices… and suppress interest rates.

The thing they can’t do is control the value of their phony-baloney dollars.

And when it becomes more obvious that the morons have lost control of the dollar, the new digital yuan may look like a handy alternative.” – Bill Bonner

Chuck again…  OK… Well if you want evidence that the Cartel is implementing their Yield Curve Control (YCC), you don’t have to look any further than the movement in the 10-year Treasury’s yield, which has been moving downward for over a week now…  Going from 1.78% to 1.65% this morning…  Basically, in bond, when you buy a ton of bonds, the price will rise and the yield goes down, and vice versa when there is a ton of selling of bonds, the price would go down and the yield would go up…  In the Cartel’s YCC they would be the buyer… thus the drop in the yield in the last week…

In the Cartel’s meeting minutes yesterday, the Cartel’s members were split on their takes of how inflation is rising… I took this from MarketWatch.com “Several” Fed officials said that supply bottlenecks and strong demand would push up price inflation “more than anticipated,” the minutes said.

At the same time, “several” other Fed officials expressed belief that the factors that had contributed to low inflation over the past decade “could again exert more downward pressure on inflation than expected.”

Chuck again… And in the end the cartel believes that inflation for 2021 will reach 2.4%…  I’m going to call them out on that, and say malarkey! Balderdash! Hokum! And so on….  John Williams at Shadowstats.com says that real inflation is running just below 5%…   And it’s rising!  A week or so I titled a Pfennig with these words; If The Fed Really Wants Inflation, They Should Calculate It Correctly! Is that so correct! 

OK… China’s digital currency… I’ve told you previously that all countries are developing their own digital currency… It’s just that China was first… And they will be able to trade in the blockchain with their digital currency, which means…. Countries around the world will be holding digital yuan/ renminbi as reserves… And reducing the dollars they held as reserves…

The question in my mind is this… What is the U.S. going to do about this, for this does not bode well for the dollar’s future as a reserve currency…  And this is where we drop down into a deep rabbit hole folks…  Will this mean war with China? Will there be financial sanctions on China?  There are a myriad of things that could come about and none of them are good for relations between the U.S and China!

The U.S. Data Cupboard yesterday had the aforementioned Cartel Meeting Minutes… So with that out of the way, we can concentrate on the other two prints yesterday… with the first being, The Feb. Trade Deficit, which rose to $71.1 Billion from $67.8 Billion in Jan…  And the Consumer Credit for Feb (read debt) grew $2.7 Billion…   Let’s see, first off I know this isn’t how it works, but let’s just play with this and see what Chuck has in mind…   the difference in the Trade Deficit was $3.4 Billion, and the increase in Consumer debt was $2.7 Billion…  That’s very interesting to me how close those two are to matching…

Today’s Data Cupboard will have the usual Thursday fare of Weekly Initial Jobless Claims…  Now you may recall that 3 weeks ago, the number of Claims fell below 700,000 for the first time during the pandemic phase…  But then two weeks ago, they climbed back above 700,000 to 719,000… So, it will be interesting to see what’s going to print here today…   

Well I didn’t have to wait too long for the number to print, and since the letter is a little later this morning, the Weekly Initial Jobless Claims rose last week to 744,000… Ahem, the last two weeks of claims seem to be going in the wrong direction…  What do the spin doctors say about that? 

Before we head to the Big Finish today, I wanted to point out something that I’ve talked about for a few years, and that is to watch the Euro-wannabes for they will indicate if the dollar is really in a weak trend… So, who are the euro-wannabes?  The Hungarian forint, the Polish zloty, and Czech koruna…   Just the other day there was a blurb from the GATA folks that Hungary had increased their Gold reserves by a HUGE amount… And I don’t know if you follow these three, but the forint has dropped from the 308 handle to 301 in the past week… And the koruna, after months of trying has slipped below the 22 figure..  So, these three are in rally mode… 

I’m well aware of the fact that they have been in rally mode a couple of times in the past and their moves proved to be false dawns…  The dollar always seems to get rescued from a ride on the slippery slope by the Plunge Protection Team (PPT)…  But one of these days, Alice… to the moon! (for the currencies, not the dollar!) 

To recap… The currencies saw some profit taking yesterday, and their recent trend of rallies proved once again that a trend is not a ONE-WAY Street!  Gold worked diligently to rid itself of its early morning loss of $8, but a flurry of short Gold Paper trades flooded the market at the close and Gold ended down $6…. Silver erased all but 5-cents of its 26-cent loss in the early morning trading. Chuck talks about Inflation, the Chinese digital currency, as does Bill Bonner too!   Chuck points out that the Cartel’s YCC appears to be being implemented…

For What It’s Worth… Ok, as I said above, I have a snippet of the article where Dennis Miller interviewed me regarding digital currencies… So, that article can be found at Dennis’s website, or if you subscribe to his letter, it’ll be in your email box this morning, but it can be found here: www.milleronthemoney.com

Or, here’s your snippet: “ Dennis asks, Doesn’t “slowly lose value” mean negative interest rates – confiscation?

CHUCK: Thanks again Dennis to allow me to opine here…

To answer your question, yes it does mean negative interest rates. The thing that I keep talking about is the fact that the banks will then be able to charge you for logging into your account, and everything else, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because…. Well, the “money” is digits.

And, if you want to move your digits down the street to a different bank – that’s not going to help you, because banks will all be under the same fee schedules. Of course, price-fixing is illegal, wink, wink!”

Chuck again…  This is a powerful article folks, and one that I wish everyone would read, so they can begin to protect their accumulated wealth… if not for you, then your kids, or grandkids…

Market Prices 4/8/2021: American Style: A$ .7644,  kiwi .7050,  C$ .7946, euro 1.1880, sterling 1.3765, Swiss $1.0782, European Style: rand 14.5268, krone 8.4798, SEK 8.5876,  forint 301.80,  zloty 3.8313,  koruna 21.7887, RUB 77.28, yen 109.15, sing 1.3401, HKD 7.7779, INR 74.53, China 6.5392, peso 20.15, BRL 5.5980,  Dollar Index 92.26,  Oil $59.62,  10-year 1.65%, Silver $25.45, Platinum $1,237.00, Palladium $2,694.00, Copper $4.08, and Gold… $1,748.50

That’s it for today… Opening Day in St. Louis… it doesn’t get much better than that! I used to get invited to every opening day but, those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end… It’s funny how business relationships end when you leave… Out of sight, out of mind, and I thought they were my friends! UGH!  Oh, well, if it’s going to be a rainy day, I think sitting in my back yard and watching the game will do me just fine! I’ll still get the goosebumps when those beautiful Clydesdales come trotting into the stadium!  Tomorrow is Friday, and it will be a Big Day for me for a number of reasons, of which I’m not going to talk about now… OK.. this is BIG NEWS!  On April 21 (Frank Trotter’s Birthday) at 4:30 EDT I will join my publishers, Mary Anne and Pamela Aden, along with Omar Ayales on a virtual panel to discuss Gold & Silver…  This is being put on by the Money Show folks, and if you want to register to watch and listen to what we have to say, click here to register: https://online.moneyshow.com/2021/April/money-metals-and-mining-virtual-expo/registration/?scode=052516    I hope you all inundate the system and overload it with large numbers of people that have registered… In fact, I’ll be very disappointed if that doesn’t happen! 

On a sidebar… The woman who puts these things together at the Money Show, contacted me and wanted a bio and picture of me…  I said, “I don’t know if you were there or not, but… I used to speak at Money Show presentations 3 to 4 times per year.Surely you have that info and phot on file… And she said, “Oh, of course, I remember you now Chuck Butler, we’ll use what we have”… Whew, I did not want to write another bio!

Ok… The Climax Blues Bank takes us to the finish line today with their 80’s song: Couldn’t Get It Right… “kept on looking for a sign in the middle of the night, but I couldn’t get it right”….  I hope you have a Tub Thumpin’ Thursday, and please Be Good To Yourself!

Chuck Butler