What Did You Spend That $600 On?

September 20, 2021

* Currencies & metals get sold down the river last week

* What are the Cartel Heads doing with stocks? 

Good day… And a Marvelous Monday to you! My beloved Cardinals are on a roll to say the least! They have won 8 games in a row, and are looking like a completely different team than the one they made us all suffer through for 140 games… They travel now to Milwaukee, where the Brewers have already qualified for the playoffs… Cardinals gotta keep on winning! Well, it was a real Chamber of Commerce weekend, weather wise that we just went through here in the Midwest… If the weather stayed like that too long, it would cost us a fortune to live here! The Beatles greet me this morning with their song: The Long And Winding Road… 

That’s what I feel like we, as a country, are on these day… The Long and Winding Road to financial ruins… But then that’s just me, and a handful of other guys that write and keep pointing out the direction that we’re taking… Sure things “seem” to be going along smoothly, but they also say that when they’re in the eye of a hurricane… And the dollar bulls? They are taking the bait, hook, line and sinker these days, buying dollars by the bushelful…  What was their excuse for buying dollars last Friday? Oh, that’s right, August Retail Sales “surprised” with a positive print of .7%, when Retail Sales were expected to be negative -.7%…  Oh, so they were surprised by the back to school bump that Retail Sales gets every year at the end of summer?

So… on Thursday & Friday, the currencies got sold down the river, and the metals went along for the ride… A joy ride it wasn’t, as the current was very swift, and rocky… The BBDXY rose from Thursday morning’s 1,146.09, to close on Friday at 1,152.47… That’s a HUGE jump in the dollar index folks, and shows what I’m talking about when I said the currencies got sold down the river… The euro got pushed down to 1.1725, and the rest of the currencies followed the Big Dog down the river…

On Thursday last week, it was yet another engineered takedown of Gold by the price manipulators… There really was nothing, absolutely nothing, say it again, that would have garnered a selloff like we saw on Thursday… The price manipulators were so brazen with their selling, and it just gets my goat! Gold was sold down by $40.40 to close on Thursday at $1,753.70, and then on Friday, Gold was only allowed to rally by one thin dime! That put the close on Friday at 1,753.80. Silver got sold both days, with Thursday’s selling by 95-cents! And then on Friday it was sold down again by 51-cents, to close the week at $22.36…

Taper, Schmaper… There is not going to be any tapering by year end folks… And as soon as traders get it in their thick skulls that it’s not going to happen in the time frame that the Cartel has drawn out, they will stop with this pestering dollar buying!  I’m reminded of what my former colleague and good friend Ty Keough used to tell clients when the dollar was rallying… He would say, “Well, when the dollar is down, is when you should be buying more currency”…  Cheaper levels of currencies and metals are the call there, and here today…

The last two trading days of last week were very ugly folks.. .stocks got sold for the 3rd week! Bonds got sold, as yields on the 10-year rose to 1.36%, Oil lost nearly $2 of its price, and the currencies and metals were down in the dumps… So, where was money going if all these things were getting sold? Shoot Rudy, even Bitcoin got sold late last week! These funds from all this selling had to be going somewhere, right?  Just to cash? Not when you only earn about.1% on cash… But maybe, just until the smoke clears and the all clear horn has been sounded…

That doesn’t appear to be today, as the calls for a major stock sell off are being sounded once again by the same folks that have cried wolf 3 previous times… As I said before if they keep saying it, eventually it will come true, and then they’ll be on record as saying that they called the stock selloff… Because, I know that eventually it will come true, as stocks have been in an overbought position for longer than you think… But I’m no stock jockey, and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, nor do I play one on TV… I’m just pointing out facts…

In the overnight markets last night… There was more dollar buying but not to the tune of late last week’s barrage… The BBDXY is 1,153.63 this morning, so up from Friday’s close of 1,152.47… Gold and Silver are flat this morning, with Gold up $2.80 and Silver down 1-cent…  Hold on to your hats folks, this week will be a doozy!

The price of Oil has fallen out of bed, and trades with a $70 handle this morning, having been as high as $73 early last week!  Bonds are getting bought this morning, and Bloomberg forecasts that the 10-year’s Treasury yield will be 1.69% by year end…  Hmmm…. Interesting, very interesting… 

Well, well, well, what have we here? Could this be the final straw of Fed Credibility? I’m talking about the news articles this past weekend regarding the Fed Heads buying stocks ahead of monitary policy decisions were made public… This is HUGE folks, because it’s not only a few Fed Heads, but it includes the Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell, and Robert Kaplan Dallas Fed President, who sits on the Federal Open Market Committee…  A few years ago, Martha Steward when to jail for “insider trading” But I doubt seriously that these guys will ever see the inside of a cell, because…. The Elite, take care of the Elite… They don’t throw people under busses… And they don’t go to jail… 

But this makes me sick to my stomach folks… And if everyone knew what these guys were doing they would be calling for their heads… But this will get swept under a rug, and if you asked a random person on the street what they thought about this, they wouldn’t have the faintest idea…  And that’s a sad state of affairs, folks… I’m just saying…

Just in case you think I’m spreading non factual news here… You can find the info here: Fed Chief Powell owned same type of assets bank bought during Covid (cnbc.com)

And here’s another: Dallas Fed President Traded S&P 500 Futures. Dallas Fed Will Not Say If He Shorted the Market During Pandemic Crisis in 2020. (wallstreetonparade.com)

OK… what else is on my mind this morning?  Free speech… That’s what! Or the lack of free speech would be a better lead in to what I’m going to say here…  If you don’t like the sound of this next diatribe then skip ahead, you won’t hurt my feelings…

But I’ve remained pretty quiet about all this cancelling of people’s free speech by the Social Media Platforms, and YouTube, etc.  If whatever the person has to say that doesn’t jibe with the new “woke” mentality of the platform, they cancel the submission, and in some cases close the account of the person… Shoot Rudy, they cancelled the account of the President of the United States!  All, I’m saying here is that this is not the free country that I grew up in… I knew in my heart of hearts that all that PC Policing that was being done a few years ago, was going to lead to this…  The pendulum has swung folks, and it has swung too far to the other side, could we please just come back to the middle?

Moving on to other thing… My good friend Rick S. sent me this and I thought it did a great job of bringing the debt in this country to the forefront and allowing people to think about it differently and not allow all the zeroes to boggle the mind…  here we go!

Lesson # 1:

* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000

* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000

* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000

* National debt: $19,271,000,000,000

* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700

* Money the family spent: $38,200

* New debt on credit cards: $16,500

* Outstanding balance on credit cards: $192,710

* Total budget cuts so far: $385

Chuck again… See what I mean?  What would happen if you or me tried to get along with $192,710 in credit card debt? Someone with an ounce of brains would finally decide that we had been given too much credit, and would begin to call the debt payments to be made…

The U.S. Data Cupboard last week had the aforementioned Retail Sales… But another data print that we saw on Thursday was the Weekly Initial Jobless Claims, and unlike previous weeks, the number of ,Claims didn’t go down, they went up! And I’m going out on a limb here to say that I think given the COVID virus variants that are present today, that we could very well see these Claims continue to go upward each week. Certainly not like in the spring in 2020, but move higher each week and take the euphoria out of the folks that continue to say the economy has recovered…  Well, that’s not true and we know it’s not true, otherwise we wouldn’t have 10.9 Million job openings and 8.4 Million people unemployed…

This week’s Data Cupboard has a FOMC Meeting on Wednesday… Some pundits think that this will be the meeting that the Cartel heads begin to pull back the reins on stimulus…  I don’t think that to be the case, but then I could be wrong… But it just seems to me that the Cartel knows the real facts about the economy and unemployment, and while they may want to begin to remove stimulus, their collective hands are tied… 

To recap… it was a very ugly end of the week last week, as Thursday and Friday brought about major dollar buying and currencies and metals getting sold down the river. Chuck is besides himself this morning at the brazen way the price manipulators implemented yet another engineered takedown of Gold & Silver… What are the Fed Heads up to these days? Chuck talks about their stock trading ahead of monetary policy decisions… He also touches on the lack of Free Speech, and… gives us a breakdown of expenses that take out all the zeroes so that it’s more easicly understoon…

For What It’s Worth…  Well, folks, this is something that screams FWIW if anything does! This is an article about a new proposal that the President proposed that would require banks to report any transactions of $600 or more… Wait! What? And it can be found here: Biden proposal mandates banks to track and report all transactions over $600    :   Opinion: – (informationclearinghouse.info)

Or, here’s your snippet: “ Opposition is mounting to a Biden administration plan to require financial institutions to report customers’ account flow data to the Internal Revenue Service, with banks, credit unions and some consumer advocates warning it would be a massive invasion of consumer privacy.

The Treasury Department outlined a proposal in its recent budget request for a regime requiring banks and other financial institutions to report inflows and outflows in consumer accounts with more than $600. The goal is to crack down on tax evasion by high earners and narrow the so-called tax gap between what Americans pay and what they owe.

Financial institutions sounded the alarm over the new plan — meant to help the administration pay for the American Rescue Plan and infrastructure overhaul — before it was formally unveiled on May 20, noting the potential regulatory burden. But criticism has intensified from a broader array of stakeholders over concerns that consumers’ private information could be compromised.

“It’s not a targeted program,” said Ed Mierzwinski, senior director of the federal consumer program at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, who warned lower-income Americans could be targeted by the reporting regime. “They are collecting information about everybody and I don’t know why it is necessary to collect information about everybody.”

The top 1% of taxpayers fail to report as much as 20% of their income, and the projected tax gap could reach roughly $7.5 trillion, according to estimates. The IRS cannot always identify more obscure income sources in parnerships, LLCs and S-corporations. The administration has also called for more resources at the IRS to conduct tax audits, which plummeted between 2010 and 2018.

The proposed financial reporting regime is seen as helping the government gain insight on wealthy earners. But financial trade associations and others warn that will be a costly undertaking for the industry to implement it, and it could expose private account data. Many say that would be a significant expansion of what banks report to the government about their customers, on top of the suspicious activity reports they submit to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.”

Chuck again… This is just the beginning folks…  IF they get this passed, then the next thing will be to have banks report on your spending in any amount. Of course in my mind that will mean when we are on a digital currency basis…  I shake my head at the direction this country is going folks… I feel so badly for my kids and grandkids…

Market Prices 9/20/2021: American Style: A$ .7234,  kiwi .7020, C$ .7788, euro 1.1707, sterling 1.3684, Swiss $1.0742 ,Eu0ropean Style: rand 14.7775, krone 8.7484, SEK 8.7279,  forint 301.89,  zloty 3.9283,  koruna 21.7006, RUB 72.84, yen 109.54, sing 1.3522, HKD 7.7864, INR 73.58, China 6.4652, peso 20.13,  BRL 5.2872,  BBDXY 1,153.63, Dollar Index 93.36,  Oil $70.55, 10-year 1.33%, Silver $22.45, Platinum $926.00, Palladium $2,046.00, Copper $4.20, and Gold… $1,757.60

That’s it for today… Back to normal today..  But on Thursday this week, I’ll not be writing as I’ll need to report to the hospital bright and early Thursday morning…  Just normal stuff folks, no need to be concerned, as my breathing is much, much better, my strength is almost all back, and I’ve put the double dose of Covid and pneumonia behind me… I know, some of you are saying, well, it’s about time! Well, give me a break here, I’m 66 years old, have had cancer for 14 years, along with taking daily chemo for many of those 14 years, and I’m over weight…  I tend to think that I’ve done quite well in my recovery! Grandkids, Braden and Evie came to stay with us Saturday night… Braden is 10 now, and pretty much does his thing, but Evie has to be entertained all the time, and she wears me out! But she’s so darn cute, that I don’t care! I got her to sit still for about 10 minutes and watch the baseball game with me on Saturday night. That was quite the accomplishment on my part I thought!  The Ides of March take us to the finish line today with their great 70’s song: Vehicle…  I hope you have a Marvelous Monday, and please Be Good To Yourself!

Chuck Butler