March 29, 2021
* Currencies & metals continue to be held to the chopping block…
* One shining light in the currencies is the Indian rupee…
Good Day… And a Marvelous Monday to you! Well… Chuck was away, and the currencies didn’t rally! See what I’ve been saying? That the world of markets is upside down… What’s good is bad and what’s bad is good… With most of the market activity dominated by the what’s bad is good… I had a great week of vacation with my daughter Dawn, her husband Jerry, and two of my 4 grandkids, Delaney Grace and Everett… Delaney Grace sang the national anthem at Roger Dean Stadium on Tuesday last week and did a bang up job! I’m supposed to be receiving a link to the audio / video of her performance to share with you, but to date, none has come my way… I’ll bug Dawn again to see if she’s gotten it yet, later today. The Stone Temple Pilots greet me this morning with their song: Interstate Love Song…
Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard this in the past week, but a lot of newsletter writers, analysts, etc. are saying that today, Monday, March 29th, is supposed to be a day of reckoning in the stock market… A major stock sell off is supposed to take place today… Now I have no idea if they will be correct in their calls for a sell off, but just in case, I sure hope you have your stop losses in place…
Did you receive your stimmy check payments? And we did with it exactly what the Government wants us to do with it… We spent it! I didn’t want to… But we needed to make some repairs at home, and with the extra money, we spent it! And in doing so, we doubled the GDP for that amount of money spent!
Ok… so the currencies didn’t rally while I was gone… Neither did Gold or Silver… The Dollar Index when I left you on the 17th, was 91.91, and this morning it is trading at 92.85, so up almost 100 bps… The price of Oil dropped from $64.19 on the 17th, to a price below $60 at one point last week, only to rally going into the weekend and get back above $60… But the more than $4 loss in Oil, really sent the Petrol Currencies reeling… The Russian ruble was on a nice run down to 72.81 and then the rug was pulled out from under it and it trades today with a 75 handle… The Canadian dollar/ loonie, had been trading above 80-cents for a month, but succumbed to the pressure of the drop in the price of Oil, and fell below 80-cents. It was the same for the Norwegian krone, which had seen its price perform nicely and trade down to 8.5225, is trading around 8.56 this morning..
The euro, has really been battered about with all this dollar strength… and this morning it is trading with a 1.17 figure… Crazy days for sure, and I for one am glad I wasn’t here writing every day about this because I would have been yelling at the walls and waking up the kids! So now, I get to start with a clean slate, and look forward to what I believe is going to be a rough year for the dollar…
Shoot Rudy, even the Chinese renminbi has lost ground in the past 10 days! There is one shining light in the currencies though… The Indian rupee remains steady Eddie with a 72 handle… I had mentioned the rupee’s gains before I left, and the currency has held onto them just fine…
Gold and Silver were up one day, down the next for the last 10 days… Gold finished the week on an up note, and closed at $1,734.30, which was higher than the last price on 3/17, which was $1,729.20… Silver wound up losing ground in the last 10 days, going from $25.96 on the 17th to $25.13 to close last Friday… Leaving me one question… What happened to the supposed short squeeze in Silver? Come one, Inquiring minds need to know! I read a short report last week, from an analysts who said that while Gold was suffering now, he still believed it would be trading at $3,000 by yearend… Of course, he could have been long Gold and wanting to get buyers keyed up about buying it and driving he price higher… But that would not be ethical….
In the overnight markets… There’s been more slippage in the metals, and the currencies … As I said above the Dollar Index is trading this morning at 92.85, and last night it was 92.81, so some minor slippage in the currencies. Gold is on one of those “down days” as it begins the week down $7.30 this morning, and Silver has lost 25-cents early today. Up one day down the next… Gold was up on Friday, so it must be down today… UGH!
Well, the ink wasn’t dry on the latest round of stimmy checks, when word came from the White House that they are considering a $3-5 Trillion dollar Infrastructure bill… That just riles me up to no end folks… For years I’ve said that the Gov’t needed to get out of the infrastructure business, and allow entrepreneurship to have at it… Sure they would all be toll roads, but… They would be sound and sturdy, and well maintained, unlike what we have now…
And there’s something else I want to talk about that I believe gets the Gomer Pyle treatment of Shame, Shame, Shame… The U.S. Gov’t has hundreds of thousands homeless people in this country, many of which are U.S. military veterans… People who have fought for our country… And do we spend $86 Million on hotel rooms for them? NOOOOOOOO… But we apparently do for the Illegal aliens, this headline taken from Business Insider: Biden is spending $86 million on hotel rooms for migrants as his administration struggles to handle the surge of families and kids trying to come to the US….
For Shame, Sgt. Carter, For shame…
The U.S. Data Cupboard last week showed some real chinks in the economy’s armor with Personal Income down 7.1%, Consumer Spending down -1.0%… Durable Goods Orders down -1.1% and Capital Goods down .8%… But what did these awful looking economic prints do to the dollar? Well, contrary to what you would believe would happen, the dollar rallied… Go figure!
The Data Cupboard today is bare, so no economic reports today… And basically most of the week will be void of real market moving data, until we get to Good Friday, this week, when the Jobs Jamboree for March will print… We’re traveling home on Friday… So, I won’t see this data until I change planes in Nashville…
To recap… It’s been a tough 10 days for the currencies, especially the Petrol Currencies, as the price of Oil fell out of bed in the last 10 days… Gold & Silver didn’t fare much better, although Gold did post a small gain in the last 10 days, after a week of up one day, down the next… Silver saw about 1/2- cent taken from its value during that same time… Chuck is not happy about the infrastructure bill nor is he happy about spending $86 Million to put migrants in hotel rooms, instead of helping the homeless people in this country…
For What It’s Worth… Well, remember when I told you (on a couple of occasions) that I truly believed that once the U.S. Gov’t came out with their form of a digital currency, that they would do two things… 1. Outlaw folding cash, and 2. Outlaw all other digital currencies? Including Bitcoin? Well… it was nice to see that a Big Time Trader, Ray Dalio, agrees with me… And this article talks about what Ray Dalio sees as the future for Bitcoin and other digital currencies, and it can be found here: Dalio sees ‘good probability’ bitcoin gets outlawed (yahoo.com)
Or, here’s your snippet: “Billionaire investor Ray Dalio, the founder of the $150 billion hedge fund Bridgewater Associates — the world’s largest — made a case that there’s a “good probability” bitcoin could be outlawed, similar to when the U.S. government made it illegal to privately own gold.
As Dalio points out in his upcoming book “The Changing World Order,” the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 made it illegal for individuals to own gold “because government leaders didn’t want gold to compete with money and credit as a storehold of wealth.” Something similar could happen with bitcoin, which has surged against a backdrop of high levels of debt, low interest rates, a lot of liquidity and stimulus, and investors seeking alternatives to bonds and currencies. At the time of this writing, bitcoin’s price was near $56,559.98, spiking after Elon Musk tweeted that you can use it to buy Teslas (TSLA).
“Every country treasures its monopoly on controlling the supply and demand. They don’t want other monies to be operating or competing, because things can get out of control. So I think that it would be very likely that you will have it under a certain set of circumstances outlawed the way gold was outlawed,” Dalio told Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer in an episode of “Influencers with Andy Serwer,” a weekly interview series with leaders in business, politics, and entertainment.
Dalio pointed out that India’s government is currently exploring outlawing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies altogether.
“[We] have to see what that means,” the investor added.
A government ban could likely cause demand to plummet. While emphasizing he’s not an expert, Dalio also cast doubt that bitcoin’s privacy could be protected.”
Chuck again… I want to thank the folks at GATA for sending me this link this past weekend… As soon as I saw it I knew it was what I wanted as my FWIW article on my first day back!
Market Prices 3/29/2021: American Style: A$ .7644, kiwi .6998, C$ .7945, euro 1.1770, sterling 1.3628, Swiss $1.06.38, European Style: rand 14.9911, krone 8.5675, SEK 8.5796, forint 308.26, zloty 3.9506, koruna 22.1618, RUB 75.80, yen 109.60, sing 1.3463, HKD 7.7726, INR 72.74, China 6.5405, peso 20.73, BRL 5.7542, Dollar Index 92.85, Oil $61.64, 10-year 1.65%, Silver $24.88, Platinum $1,184.00, Palladium $2,662.00, Copper $4.05, and Gold… $1,727.00
That’s it for today… Kind of tough to jump right into the markets after having spent the last week away from them… But I gave it my best college try… I did an interview with good friend Dennis Miller while I was on vacation, for his letter: Milleronthemoney.com. If you haven’t signed up for his letter yet, You might want to just so you can see what I had to say about digital currencies… Well, the last spring training game is today, for me that is… It’s going to be a hot one… like 7 inches from the mid day sun… But it’s the last one, and I’ll be there! My Cardinals had better learn to hit the ball more consistently or else this is going to be a very long season… The Cardinals will pitch well, and play excellent defense, but their hitting is sketchy at this point… Good news is there are 162 games this year, to get it right… I want to thank everyone that sent me a happy birthday greeting email… We celebrated my birthday a couple days late, on the deck with condo friends, and family.. I grilled steak on a stick for everyone, and a good time was had by all… Steely Dan takes us to the finish line today with their song: Reeling In The Years… I hope you have a Marvelous Monday, and that you will continue to Be Good To Yourself!
Chuck Butler