- the dollar gets ambushed overnight!
- Metals are getting sold to pay for other asset losses
Good Day… And a Tub Thumpin’ Thursday to one and all! Well, another day away from the hospital has given me some freedom to walk out on the balcony, walk down our outside hallway to the elevator, and all around the condo, and I do believe it’s helping me get stronger, and breathe a little better each day! Of course I still have a pharmacy of drugs I have to take each day to help! But que sera, sera! The Beatles greet me this morning with their great song: And I Love Her…
Well, the dollar didn’t gain anything yesterday, nor did it lose any ground either, even in the face of all the new tariffs the POTUS delivered in the rose garden at the White House… The BBDXY ended the day at the same level it began the day, 1,273… So, with that in mind the currencies didn’t budge much either…
Gold on the other hand gained $16 to close at $3,135… Back on the rally tracks again after two days of seeing short paper traders take it downward. Silver hasn’t been able to follow Gold higher these days… It was being stubborn, or, more likely it being short sold hand over fist… Silver . But not yesterday! Silver gained 30-cents to close at $33.95… So, maybe the short paper traders made their point, and took their bat and ball and went home, or…. The demand for Silver was just too strong yesterday… Probably the latter of the two!
The price of Oil lost 2-cents yesterday, nothing on the newswires about the reason for the loss, as I said yesterday, Oil is a commodity, and with the tariffs being announced, commodities should be rallying… But not so for the price of Oil yesterday… And the Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel was back at the yield controls yesterday, and brought the yield on the 10-year Treasury down to 4.07%…
In the overnight markets last night…. Well, hold onto your hats, because there’s been a real global selloff of all assets… Stocks are circling the bowl, the dollar has lost 10 index points in the BBDXY, Gold is being sold to pay for margin calls, and the list goes on… The only thing showing positive gains is the currencies… The euro is trading over 1.10, and the rest of the currencies, including the Euro Wanna Bes, are all on the rally tracks this morning. Gold has been sold to the tune $44 this morning, and has lost the $3,100 handle… The selling is crazy this morning folks, so like I said, hold onto your hats, because this wind of change is like a hurricane. When I first turned on my laptop this morning to do my usual reading before writing, I noticed the currencies all looking like they were on top of the world, and thought, “the dollar got ambushed last night”, but then with my interest piqued, I went to the metals and found out that this is a global selloff, because of the tariffs the POTUS announced yesterday. The whole world knows what’s coming next, and they don’t like it… But like I said above, Gold and Silver are getting caught up in the Global selloff, with the metals being sold to cover the losses of other assets, in my opinion, that’s what’s happening… Silver is down $1.041 this morning, have you ever seen such a global selloff like this?
The price of Oil has slipped downward too, and trades this morning with a $67 handle, and the 10-year Treasury’s yield has fallen to 4.07%… Everything but the currencies are getting sold this morning, and the currencies are receiving this kind of attention because the dollar is getting sold like funnel cakes at a State Fair!
I have an article that gets into the global tariffs that the POTUS announced yesterday, in the FWIW section today, so there’s that for you! This is going to get real ugly folks, so, I want you to crawl into your safe place, batten down the hatches, and wait for the good witch Glinda to give us the “all clear” signal to come back out and get on the Yellow Brick Road again… (Gold) Or, back up the truck and load of Gold & Silver on these cheaper price opportunities, it’s your decision not mine, so go ahead and make one… What’s it gonna be boy? (Meat Loaf)
OK, let’s talk about something that will cheer us up… I saw an article yesterday that listed the bestselling albums from the 70’s, my time of being a teenager, and buying most of these albums… And the number one album of the 70’s was… Drum roll please, Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd. I pretty much knew this was going to be the case, because at one time that album held the #1 selling record for years!
Wanna know what the number one song played in juke boxes (yes they still have those) is? Patsy Cline’s Crazy… Which was written by Willie Nelson…
Now, don’t you feel a bit better? Nothing like talking about music does that for me… I was a guitar player, as I’ve told you before, played all over this wonderful country, and thought the world revived around music… I get up in the morning, turn on Sirius XM and the day starts for me! Or, I get up and turn on my iPad… Either way, I start each day with music… What do you do?
In graph that longtime reader Bob sent me yesterday, the graph showed that the gain in The Current Account for the U.S. of A, was in contraction, by -.08%, while East Asia, led by China were all positive gains that started with Japan at +.01%, and China at +.03%, to as high as +.08%…. These were taken as of Rocktober 2024… A little stale in reporting but… Shows you that Asia is beating the U.S. in just about all categories that contribute to the Current Account… In other words, they don’t have the size of Debt that the U.S. does… I’m just saying..
And CNBC issued a report saying that the U.S. GDP will only be +.03% in the 2nd QTR… That’s close enough to be called a “rounding error”, which means that U.S. GDP could be flat…
Why would that be? Because U.S. consumers are tapping out… They’ve spent the stimmy checks that were issued to them, they’ve run up their credit cards balances, and not paying them off when the bill comes in the mail… Credit Card delinquencies are rising at an 11.35% rate, and that more than half of Americans are carrying credit card balances, despite sky-high APRs. More than 20% are those credit card rates, so who could pay them down, with inflation running around 13%? And most likely going higher…
The U.S. consumer debt has risen to more than $18 Trillion, and is attempting to catch the national debt, in my opinion… So, with all this debt in the U.S. you may see things the way I do, and that is we’ll see a default on debt in our lifetime, probably sooner than later… Too much debt is really the problem with the slow growth in the U.S….
I should probably move on to something else besides debt, for I’ve been carping about Gov’t debt for as long as I’ve been writing the Pfennig, it seems, and in the last couple of years the rise in consumer debt… The last year that I spoke at the Vancouver Investment Symposium hosted by my friends at Agora Publishing, I talked about how the total of U.S. Gov’t and Consumer debt was more than $50 Trillion… And today, it’s far more than that! So, let’s move on and let this fall where it will for today…
Wanna know why Gold had such a fabulous year in 2024 and have started 2025 even better? here’s Jan Nieuwenhuijs with his report on China’s Gold intake in 2024 and 2025 so far…. “The Peoples Bank of China continues to buy unprecedented amounts of gold as the global financial is deleveraging — that is, investors exchange credit assets for gold.
In 2024 the Chinese central bank covertly bought 570 Tonnes, encouraging gold’s ascent in global international reserves by 4%, the largest gain in four decades.”
He goes on to report that “This article is an analysis of formal and informal sources that indicate the PBoC is sitting on more than 5,000 Tonnes of monetary gold located in Beijing — more than twice what has been publicly admitted.”
Remember the old saying about “he who owns the Gold, makes the rules?” Well, 5,000 Tonnes is quite a bit, and if the U.S. really has over 8,000 Tonnes of Gold, then China still has some catching up to do, however, should the U.S. not have 8,000 Tonnes of Gold, then it will be China that make the rules, when all this debt falls like Humpty Dumpty, and not be able to be put back together again! OOPs, there I go with the debt talk about, when I said I should end it for today! My bad! BTW the good folks at GATA sent me that note about China’s Gold…
I forgot to give you the U.S. Data Cupboard incoming reports yesterday.. So this is a day late and a dollar short, but still worthy of knowing… The ADP Employment Report printed a plus 155,000 jobs in March, VS the lowly 84,000 jobs in Feb. And the Factory Orders for March fell from Feb’s unbelievable print of +1.8%, to a March print of +.06%, proving to me that in Feb. There were some one and one deals done an included with the report.
Today’s Data Cupboard has the Initial Weekly Jobless Claims for us to see today, and the experts think that they will add to the previous week’s 224,000… We’ll also see the Feb. Trade Deficit… which was a whopping $131 Trillion in Jan. We’ll also see 2 different Fed Heads out on the speaking circuit today…
To recap… The dollar didn’t budge yesterday in the face of all the new tariffs that were announced and all the calls for a global trade war impending… Gold got back on the rally tracks after seeing two days of short selling of the metal and Silver found away around the short sellers to gain 30-cents on the day. I have the FWIW article on the POTUS’s tariff announcements yesterday, so stay tuned, same bat time, same bat channel…
For What It’s Worth… Yesterday’s news wires and cable news stations were all over “Liberation Day” the day of the multitude of Tariff announcements… And it can be found here: Trump Tariffs: US to Impose 10% Global Duty, Higher Rates for Some Nations – Bloomberg
Or, here’s your snippet: “President Donald Trump imposed the steepest American tariffs in a century, stepping up his campaign to reshape the global economy and unnerving investors who see a trade war as a risk to US growth.
Trump announced Wednesday he will apply at least a 10% tariff on all exporters to the US, with even higher duties on some 60 nations to counter large trade imbalances with the US. That includes some of the country’s biggest trading partners, such as China — which now faces a tariff of well above 50% on many goods — as well as the European Union, Japan and Vietnam.
For years, hard-working American citizens were forced to sit on the sidelines as other nations got rich and powerful, much of it at our expense,” Trump said during an event in the White House Rose Garden to unveil the so-called reciprocal tariffs. “Now it’s our turn to prosper.”
The move marks a dramatic escalation in Trump’s trade war, one that’s likely to trigger immediate retaliation from other countries and upend calculations for businesses and consumers at home.
The president has embraced tariffs as a tool to assert US power, revive manufacturing at home and exact geopolitical concessions — counter to the decades-old consensus that lower trade barriers help to foster ties among nations and prevent conflicts. Economists say the near-term result of his measures will likely be higher US prices and slower growth — or perhaps even a recession.
In initial after-hours trading following Trump’s announcement, US stocks futures plunged more than 3% and oil slumped.
Less than three months after returning to the White House, Trump has already erected trade barriers that are bigger by some measures than those imposed in the notoriously protectionist 1930s. Bloomberg Economics calculates that the effective tax rate the US now charges on more than $3 trillion of imported goods may climb to around 23% — higher than any point in more than a century.”
Chuck again, and once again I will remind everyone to look up the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that have been accused of leading to the Great Depression… Could this happen again? Remember we, as a country, didn’t have near the debt then that we have now, and that should be a real problem going forward trading alongside a global Trade War..
Get a load of these currency values folks, I haven’t seen a rally like this in a very long time!
Market Prices 4/3/2025: American Style: A$ .6450, kiwi .5818, C$ .7085, euro 1.1075, sterling 1.3165, Swiss $1.1615, European Style: rand 18.8565, krone 10.3010, SEK 9.8882. forint 362.48, zloty, 3.7833, koruna 22.5636, RUB 83.88, yen 146.40, sing 1.33350, HKD 7.7780, INR 85.44, China 7.2930, peso 20..03, BRL 5.6152, BBDXY 1.063, Dollar Index 1.04.13, Oil $67.53, 10-year 4.07%, Silver $32.39, Platinum $ 963.00, Palladium $958.00, Copper $4.90, and Gold… $3,091.00
That’s it for today… And this week, my first week back has gone quickly… I have enjoyed my cinnamon rolls each day, but now they are gone… So, it’s back to scrambled eggs for breakfast… I normally didn’t eat breakfast but while I’m on all these drugs, some say eat with a meal, so that’s breakfast! I know that eggs are very expensive these days, and better for me than a cinnamon roll but.. The cinnamon roll tastes so much yummier! That was exciting watching my belove Cardinals win yesterday, with our catcher, Ivan Herrera hitting 3 homers in the game, all in Big Mac Land! He’s the first of a long line of great Cardinals’ Catchers to hit 3 home runs in a game, and that includes my two favorite catchers, Tim Mcarver, and Ted Simmons! I had mentioned to my spring training buddies, when they were here to attend games with me, that I preferred Ivan as our everyday catcher… And he’s proved me right!
John Lennon takes us to the finish line today, with, in my opinion, is his best solo work with the song: #9 Dream… A beautiful song indeed… I hope you have a Tub Thumpin’ Thursday today, and please Be Good To Yourself!
Chuck Butler