Where’s The Beef? (Money)

November 23, 2020 

* Dollar gets sold, along with Gold… 

* It’s a long one today, so fill your coffee cup! 

Good Day… And a Marvelous Monday to you! This will be a very shortened week for Pfennigs, as tomorrow I’ll be at the hospital for my quarterly scans at this 6:30 am… I know, you’re saying, “how lucky you are to be the first in the CT scanner!”  I have to say, that I wish I had never needed to be scanned!  But I have 100’s of times now in the past 13.5 years of dealing with this awful disease.. I’ve had bone scans, where they pump nuclear stuff into my blood stream… MRI’s of my head a couple of times (they didn’t find anything! HA!) And hundreds of other tests… If I could have done something in my younger life to prevent me from getting cancer, I would have certainly done that… But when you’re a young man, you think your Super Man, and nothing will destroy your body… Boy, do I know differently about that now! OK… enough of that! I have on my Smooth Jazz Christmas station that’s on Pandora, and The Ramsey Lewis Trio greets me this morning with their really jazzy version of: Here Comes Santa Claus…  (this version gets me moving in my chair for sure!)

Yes, it’s that time of year again… My most disliked month is nearly over, and one of my fave months will soon be here.. December…  Soon the houses will be lit up with colorful lights, and you’ll see freshly cut trees on the tops of automobiles.  And people will be much nicer to each other this time of year, which always brings a smile to my face, for sure!   So, let’s hurry up and get November out of the way!

I want to start today’s discussion about the markets I cover, by talking about Gold…  It came across my screen on Thursday last week that Gold has taken a plunge below $1.870 seven times since first crossing it on the way up to $2,000, back in August, and each time it has been taken below $1,870 by the price manipulators, it has rebounded, and moved higher… And that happened again last week… At one point on Thursday, Gold had been taken down to $1,852, but came back during the day on Thursday to close at $1,866, and on Friday, it moved the rest of the way past $1,870… 

Do you remember what it was like back before the plandemic, and Gold couldn’t get past $1,350?  And then one day it did, and there was no looking back?  History will repeat itself again folks…  I’m just saying..  Oh, and one more thing to think about… as I attempt to fair… December is historically a bad month for Gold, and people’s minds are taken away from the things that make Gold so “buyable”…  So, if we see weakness in Gold in December… It’s just its normal thang!”

So, on Friday, last week, the currencies came back against the dollar bugs, and saw some very range bound rallied across the board…  There was some news on the euro on Friday, that I feel compelled to tell you about…  And will in a minute, but first the rest of the recap from last Friday… The price of Oil rose, on the day to back above the $42 handle, and Treasuries rallied too…  Stocks lost ground again, and on a day when Pfizer announced that they would fine an emergency use authorization for their vaccine, which means it could be ready for dispersal next month… (Although Like I said last week, I doubt the mass injections won’t be done until spring)   Stocks sure have been acting strangely lately, I’m no stock jockey, but to me they appear to be out of gas…  I’m just saying…

In the overnight markets, the dollar has been sold at a greater pace, and the euro has climbed to 1.19 (we’ll see how long that lasts this time!). But news of another successful virus vaccine has got Gold & Silver on the run this morning, downward… Seems that the risk appetite is off, for now, and Gold has given back $3 to fall back below $1,870, which now makes that happening an 8th time…  

The price of Oil has shot higher on the vaccine news, and that has the Petrol Currencies looking better this morning, for sure! The Norwegian krone has moved back below 9.00, which is a good sight to see, and the Russian ruble is moving toward moving below 76…  

OK, The good folks at GATA sent me this link to an article on Bloomberg.com that talked about how euro was the most used currency in SWIFT, last month…  So, let’s get to the snippet of this article:

“The euro was the most used currency for global payments last month, the first time it has outpaced the dollar since February 2013.

Data from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, which handles cross-border payment messages for more than 11,000 financial institutions in 200 countries, showed the European Union’s single currency and the greenback were followed by the British pound and the Japanese yen. The Canadian dollar overtook China’s yuan for the fifth spot, SWIFT said.

Trade upheaval, a pandemic-induced recession, and political disharmony renewed pressure to reduce the share of international payments in dollars. The U.S. currency has weakened more than 11% from its March peak, based on a Bloomberg index that measures it against a basket of major peers, and many observers are predicting its valuation to drop further. “

Chuck again… As I wrote about a month or so ago, foreigners are buying smaller amounts of U.S. debt, in the form of Treasuries, with Russia and China leading the drops… And now the dollar is being used less in SWIFT?  As I said in the last 10 days, the problems for the dollar are piling up, and the Hedge Funds, Pension funds, trading desks, etc. all have their fingers on the trigger of shooting holes in the strong dollar trend… 

Oh, and one more thought that I read on Friday… The Fed now owns more Treasuries (their value) than all foreigners combined…  Now tell me how this doesn’t end in a trail of tears… 

In other news from late last week: OK… this has got to be something that will turn into a Hatfields and McCoys feud… Treasury Sec. Mnuchin asked the Cartel, I mean the Fed, to return the unused funds that they were given to fund their various alphabet soup programs….  And the cartel, I mean the Fed didn’t like it one iota! They basically said, “The Federal Reserve would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy.”   WOW!  A pushback from the Cartel! I’m impressed at their gumption! Basically, they could have said, “we’ll review the facts, and get back to you.” And then never get back to the Treasury Sec. because soon he’ll be back to looking for a new job…  And everyone will have forgotten about the request… I’m just saying…

In addition, to that news, there was also news that President Trump announced that drug prices are going to be coming down… Boy that’s music to my ears, folks… I take so many drugs, and the costs of them even with insurance is pretty daunting when you add them all up for a year… And chemo drugs? For-get-a-bout-it!  Those are insane folks… I’m just saying…

And still the stocks couldn’t buy a bid… Hmmm…    Oh well, not my cup-o-tea, so we’ll move on now…

So, I was doing some shopping on Amazon the other day, and it suddenly occurred to me what was going on…  As I see this whole plandemic, it is being used to wean us off of using folding currency… I’ve been walking around with the same folding currency in my pocked for months now… I don’t go anywhere to spend cash, and whatever I buy is online, and with my credit card…  And I’m sure that most people are in the same boat as me… After this is all over, the government will probably say, something like: “ now that we’ve all gotten used to not spending folding currency, let’s just get rid of it and go to our new digital currency”…     Talk about a revolt! Or, maybe not, given how easily the Gov’t got everyone in the country to go home, shut down businesses, move on out to the country, wear masks, and stay away from family, including our parents in homes… 

I shake my head in amazement every day that I think about how easily all that was done… And the “controllers of the universe” are quite happy about how easily that was all done too…

Ok, I’ll take my tin foil hat off now…. But remember, I used to be told to do that when I talked about metals price manipulation, and look at how that became “conspiracy fact!” …  I’m just saying…

Good friend, Dennis Miller, of www.milleronthemoney.com sent me a couple of quotes from the Burning Platform site, and one of them really hit home with me, and so I told him I was going to use it on Monday, and wonders of wonders, I remembered to do just that” Check this out…

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” – HENRY FORD

Man, if he was saying that all those years ago, imagine what he would think of our monetary and banking systems now?  It’s a real shame that most people in this country don’t know and lot of them don’t care to know about this stuff… To them, they know that payday is Friday…  And as long as the money shows up in their bank account, it matters not one iota to them how it got there, and how far it’s going to go, when it comes to spending it.

That’s why I wonder what’s happened to all those readers of this letter that I used to have…  The mail server would get bogged down at times, because of the number of email addresses the letter was getting sent to…  I know that some have passed on… ☹  But they haven’t all passed on!  I guess, they just didn’t want to know the truth about stuff any longer…

But rather than worry about those that have dropped the letter, I celebrate all those that have remained with me through the years…   in two years… 2022… it will be 30 years of writing the Pfennig… Can you believe that? I think that 30 years of doing something is long enough, don’t you? But who knows, maybe I’ll still feel like putting my thoughts on markets out there, and if all goes the way I said it was going to go, then I know for sure that I won’t want to talk about it any longer!

I had a special email late last week one that I’ll savor for a long time… My good friend, by nature of me sending him a fruit basket years ago, the Great Mogambo Guru, sent me a note with his, what he called, his last Mogambo letter…   So, it is with the highest esteem for him that I present this small snippet of his last Mogambo letter…  I say with a tear in my eye…

“And, now that you mention it, things are falling into ruination literally every “here, there and every-freaking-where,” which is not only unassailably true, but also classically poetic in an oddly lyrical way. 

Now you are sneering “Ozzy who? Poems? What is this idiot talking about?”

I’m talking about how the future is grim, and how to convince you to take action.  This time I am using a line from Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat.”  The line is “Upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat”, which is not only weirdly stilted, but here suffices as a springboard for me to turn it into something, as is my wont, truly immortal.

Thus, instead of my usual “We’re Freaking Doomed (WFD)!” and a breathless exhortation to buy gold and silver, I leave you with:

                        Mogambo At The Bat

Upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,

Because they had no gold and silver to save their fat asses, and they regretted that.

And speaking of asses, those pants you wear make your butt look fat.

There is a vital message in there.  Maybe two.  Trust me. You’re welcome.”

Chuck again…  Classic Mogambo….   But please Mr. Mogambo Guru, don’t stop writing these missives, if it’s only to me, I’ll be sure to share them with everyone!

I’m running long today, but… these are important things to think about, and this next section is very important folks…  I took this from www.wallstreetonparade.com  And I would suggest that if you want to know more about what I’m about to put down here, then go there to read it…  Take it away Pam and Russ Martens!

“On March 27, 2020 President Trump signed the CARES Act emergency stimulus plan into law. That law instructed the Treasury Secretary to make $454 billion available to the Federal Reserve for emergency lending facilities. The funds were to make $10 of Fed emergency funding available for each $1 from the taxpayer. The taxpayers’ money was to be used as loss-absorbing capital. The $454 billion would have supported up to $4.54 trillion in lending by the Fed.

But according to the Fed’s H.4.1 balance sheet statements that are released weekly on Thursday afternoon, the Fed has only used the following amounts of money from the Treasury: $10 billion for the Commercial Paper Funding Facility; $37.5 billion for the Corporate Credit Facilities to buy up corporate bonds and Exchange Traded Funds; $37.5 billion for the Main Street Lending Facilities for loans to small and mid-size businesses; $17.5 billion for the Municipal Liquidity Facility that buys up municipal bonds; $10 billion for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility; and $1.5 billion for the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility which bailed out toxic waste in money market mutual funds to keep them from breaking a buck. All of this adds up to just $114 billion out of the $454 billion that Congress allocated.

Wall Street On Parade has been repeatedly asking for an explanation as to what has happened to the balance of $340 billion that Congress intended to be used to help American families and businesses during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

Chuck again… Where’s the beef? Or where’s the money? Or, how in the hell did we get in this position in the first place? Oh, that’s right deficits didn’t matter…. 

The U.S. Data Cupboard this week is stacked on Wednesday, as they shove everything into one day’s data prints… Durable & Capital Goods Orders, Personal Income & Spending, and the usual Weekly Initial Jobless Claims, and everything else under the sun and moon!  This is all planned, folks… You see most of us will be either traveling (against CDC recommendations!), or getting things ready for our family Thanksgivings…  So, we won’t be paying attention to any financial news… And then that’s it for the week, as there will be no data prints on Friday…. 

To recap… The currencies and metals were OK, not great, but OK on Thursday & Friday last week, and overnight has brought the dollar selling to the currencies, and Gold selling in the metals… Seems that all the news this morning is about how risk appetite has gone away…  I don’t see how that works, for me, as there are still major problems going on around the world, but it is what it is…  

For What It’s Worth… I feel as though I’ve had about 3 FWIW things to talk about today, and don’t know how much one reader can absorb in a setting! But here’s something to whet your whistle… I took this from Ed Steer’s letter from Saturday, and it caught my attention only for the historical stuff in it that I will highlight below. It’s about taxation, and it can be found in its entirety here: https://internationalman.com/articles/the-greatest-swindle-in-american-history-and-how-they-will-try-it-again-soon/

Or, here’s your snippet: “International Man: Before 1913 there was no income tax, and the United States was a much freer country. Initially, the government sold the federal income tax to the American people as something only the rich would have to pay.

Jeff Thomas: Yes, exactly. It always begins this way. The average person is always happy to see the rich taken down a peg, so this makes the introduction of the concept of theft by the government more palatable. Once people have gotten used to the concept and accept it as being perfectly reasonable, then it’s time to begin to drop the bar as to who “the rich” are. Ultimately, the middle class are always the real target.

International Man: The top bracket in 1913 kicked in at $500,000 (equivalent to around $12 million today), and the tax rate for it was only 7%. The government taxed those making up to $20,000 (equivalent to around $475,000 today) at only 1% – that’s one percent.

Jeff Thomas: Any good politician understands that you begin with the thin end of the wedge, then expand upon that as soon as you feel you can get away with it. The speed at which the tax rises is commensurate with the level of tolerance of the people. And in different eras, the same nation may have a different mindset. The more domination a people have come to accept from their government, the faster the pillaging can be expanded.

As an example, the Stamp Tax that King George III placed upon the American colonies in the eighteenth century was very small indeed – less than two percent – but the colonists were very independent people, asking little from the king in the way of assistance, and instead, relying upon themselves for their well-being. Such self-reliant people tend to be very touchy as regards confiscations by governments, and even two percent was more than they would tolerate.

By comparison, if today, say, Texas were to eliminate all state taxation and allow only two percent in federal taxation, Washington would come down on them like a ton of bricks, saying they were attempting to become a “tax haven.” They’d be accused of money laundering and aiding terrorism and might well be cut out of the SWIFT system. The federal government would shut down the state government if necessary, but diminished tax would not be tolerated.”

Chuck again… Yes, taxes… I find them overbearing, and too costly for the average person… And then to think of what is done with my tax dollars, really gets me riled up to no end!  I used to say, when I didn’t make enough to even talk about in the way of wages, that I would gladly pay the taxes on a higher wage… But then when my wages did go higher, I was like, “I wish I hadn’t said that, because this is ridiculous!”

Market Prices 11/23/20: American Style: A$ .7331,  kiwi .6965, C$ .7663, euro 1.1901, sterling 1.3388, Swiss $1.1013, European Style: rand 15.3118, krone 8.9807, SEK 8.5837, forint 302.67,  zloty 3.7570,    koruna 22.0815, RUB 76.17, yen 103.72, sing 1.3405, HKD 7.7519, INR 73.96, China 6.5576, peso 19.99,  BRL 5.3786,  Dollar Index 92.02,  Oil $42.97,  10-year .85%, Silver $24.12, Platinum $944.00, Palladium $2,354.00, and Gold… $1.868.30

That’s it for today… I’ll make this really short, because I’ve gone on way too long today… I had a lot of time this weekend to read, and see what happens when that occurs? Congrats to my beloved Mizzou Tigers on their win at S. Carolina Saturday night. What’s with that awful rooster sound they play there? That was so annoying, I almost turned the game off!  I go to the wound center this afternoon, scans tomorrow, and then a break for a few days… I’m trying like hell to lose weight, I know, bad time of the year for that, but… my doctor is very upset and so I’ll do what I can… No salt, no sugar, no beer, what the heck! What’s the point of living? I’m just kidding…  I can’t get enough of the smooth jazz Christmas station on Pandora… And right now they are playing my fave song they play… The Charlie Brown theme song…  I hope you have a Marvelous Monday, and please Be Good To Yourself!

Chuck Butler