Rocktober 11, 2021
* Currencies are stuck in the mud…
* Bond and Oil are pointing to higher inflation ahead…
Good Day… And a Marvelous Monday to you! Well, I’m back home in my little river town today. Getting here was a nightmare, but as I told my beautiful bride yesterday: “I thought we were lucky to get home when we did”… Apparently, Southwest had cancellations and delays out the ying=yang on Friday, so… we were lucky to get home, albeit hours later than originally booked! Yesterday, we celebrated my little Evie’s 2nd birthday, which is actually today… She’s already won my heart, and wrapped me around her little finger! So, Happy Birthday Evie! My beloved Missouri Tigers got back on the winning side on Saturday, but… They still didn’t play the brand of defense that I always remember them having… Little Feat greet me this morning with their song: Fat Man In the Bathtub… “Cause there’s a fat man, in the bathtub, with the blues.”
So… I take it from the Pfennig Replies that for the most part, you all enjoyed the piece that I sent to you on Friday from the Great Mogambo Guru! The Great Mogambo replied to me that he was very happy and surprised that I sent out a special Pfennig with his words.. Always humble… I just hope he continues to send me thoughts that I can pass along to you dear reader!
Well… when I wrote to you on Friday morning, I told you that the Job Jamboree for September, reflected the BLS’s number of jobs created at 194,000, when it was forecast to be 500,000 jobs created… I told you that Gold was rallying and up $25 on the data news… Well, one would have thought that Gold would have kept adding onto to its early morning gains on Friday, but that was not to be.. .The price manipulators entered the market after the Jobs number printed and saw to it that Gold & Silver didn’t add to its early morning gains…
For the record, Gold ended the day up just $1.70 to close at $1,758.10, and Silver gained 8-cents to close at $22.76… It’s just a shame what the “boys in the band” did to the metals on Friday…
I know, I told you months ago that I was finished with talking about how the price manipulators continually took down the price of Gold & Silver. But Come on! This takedown on Friday was so brazen and in your face that I have to talk about it! What’s it going to take to get these guys to stop? Because they’re being a real pain in the rear! I’m so tired of these brazen takedowns….
So… in other things to talk about… The currencies attempted to mount a rally on Friday, but they fell short of their aspirations… The euro is stuck in the mud below 1.16, and the good things we’ve seen from the Petrol Currencies in recent trading sessions, was looking like it could be petering out… UGH! I know it doesn’t ease the pain but if you look at the dollar in the past 5 years, it has lost ground… The BBDXY 5 years ago was trading around 1,237.00… And today it’s around 1,163.00… So, not a HUGE movement downward, but overall the dollar is weaker than it was 5 years ago… And I’m sure that this is the kind of weakness the Gov’t has told the Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel that they want to see. As I’ve explained in past years many times… The Gov’t can’t allow the dollar to fall off a cliff all at once, for it would really scare dollar holders into selling more, and causing a real exit from the currency… I’ve explained this to be like the frog in the the pot of boiling water… if you put the frog in a pot of boiling water he’ll jump out immediately, but… if you put the frog in the a pot and slowly turn up the heat, you’ll have better luck…
I know that doesn’t give to much credence to the “what have you done for me lately crowd”… But, we have to change the way we look at things… The Chinese have 100 year plans… And we go through gyrations on a quarterly basis… I’m just saying…
In the overnight markets last night… The dollar was bought but not by the bushelful. The BBDXY has risen to 1,164.38, from the close on Friday of 1,163.38… So, not a major move upward, but… an upward move nonetheless…
The Big Mover in the past 24 trading hours is the price of Oil… This morning the price of Oil is trading with an $81 handle… The Russian ruble has noticed, and is on the rally tracks this morning. In fact, most of the Petrol Currencies, which looked like on Friday that they were petering out, have taken a flyer on the rise in the price of Oil, and are booking gains this morning…
And coming in second for the Biggest Mover, we have bonds… The yield on the 10-year Treasury has climbed to 1.61%, just 20 days ago, the 10-year’s yield was 1.33%… Let me remind you that bond pricing has the price of the bond going down as the yield rises, and vice versa… So, there are apparently a lot of selling of bonds going on here folks… Time for the Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel to get back to their yield control business… before this begins to get out of hand…
It sure does appear to me that both Bonds and Oil are pointing to higher inflation ahead…
I had a dear reader send me a note on Friday, telling me that the Great Mogambo Guru doesn’t understand Bitcoin… I want to say here and now, that I don’t understand Bitcoin either! There’s nothing there, but people that think it’s going to the moon! I understand that it’s made a lot of people very rich.. . But I’m telling now so you can listen to me later… The Gov’t’s of all countries are not going to sit by and allow this to continue… They will regulate it to no end, like China has done, and in the U.S. ‘s case, I still believe that once the U.S. introduces their own digital currency, they will outlaw all these entries and not allow any competition to their own entry in the digital currency market… So… I would strongly recommend that you take your profits while they are still they are still available… But then, that’s just me…
So… our fearless leaders (NOT!) have decided to kick the debt can down the road a bit farther… They’ll take this up again in December… You know, when most congress people take off to return home for the holidays… But don’t let that get in the way of a debt discussion! HA! As if these folks really understand what they are doing to future generations… Well, maybe they do.. and they don’t care because they won’t be around when to see the burdens of their grandkids that were given to them …
The folks in Washington D.C. continue to make a Big Show of these deficit/ debt discussions, but in the end they all know that the Debt Ceiling will be raised, and we will continue to go down the road that leads to ruins… One of these days… They will HAVE to have discussions regarding debt, and default, that are REAL, and not just a BIG Show… But until that time we’ll continue to get these drama queen shows, just to throw everyone off the scent of their ability to rein in these deficits…
The U.S. Data Cupboard this week is lacking at best… We’ll have to wait until Friday to see real economic data, when September Retail Sales will print… Until then we will see the stupid CPI (consumer inflation) and the usual Thursday fare of Initial Jobless Claims, and there are other prints of the 2nd and 3rd tier levels to print this week…
To recap… The Jobs Jamboree was very disappointing on Friday, and Gold took off for higher ground to the tune of a $25 gain out of the starters’ gate… But then the “boys in the band” decided that they couldn’t have Gold rising quickly like that, and took the metals down with a very brazen takedown… Chuck was very upset with that outcome, and wishes a thousand lashes for the price manipulators! The Currencies tried to move higher VS the dollar on Friday, but couldn’t really get enough movement and then petered out… In the overnight markets the dollar is getting bought, but not by leaps and bounds, so it’s a nervous market. The price of Oil is up to a $81 handle this morning…
For What It’s Worth… Well, in Ed Steer’s Saturday letter, he highlighted an article that talked about the $3.5 Trillion spendalooza that’s being discussed by elected representatives ( I’m trying to be nice, here but I doubt it’s working!) And so I thought that this would be a great FWIW article, and so here’s David Stockman on what’s in the $3.5 Trillion spendalooza, and it can be found here: David Stockman on Why the Biden/Dem $3.5 Trillion Spending Plan Is Worse Than You Think (internationalman.com)
Or, here’s your snippet: “So let’s cut the to the chase. The once worthy notion of 10-year budget projections has been turned into an absolute scam by the bipartisan duopoly on Capitol Hill through a gimmick called early expiration. That is, Dems tend to cause spending programs to look cheaper in the 10-year projections by having them expire in, say, year #5, while the GOP did the same thing in spades with early expiration of the 2017 tax cuts.
Of course, when these expiration dates come, they get routinely extended at the 11th hour because by then it is purportedly “unthinkable” to hit beneficiaries with a cold turkey cut or taxpayers with an unwelcome increase. Accordingly, the numbers game as between Biden’s $3.5 trillion versus Senator Manchin’s $1.5 trillion and a possible compromise somewhere between $1.9 trillion and $2.2 trillion is just Washington’s version of legislative Kabuki Theater.
What really matters, of course, is the creation of massive new universal entitlements (i.e., not work and means-tested) for children, maternity leave, childcare, free college and expanded Medicare, Medicaid and ObamaCare—plus a whole slew of climate change based crony capitalist nonsense––not the gimmick-ridden book-keeping by which the legislative language is officially scored.
For instance, making the $3,600/$3,000 refundable child tax credit permanently available to essentially 90% of the population will cost $110 billion per year or $1.1 trillion over the 10-year budget horizon. But if they write it to expire in September 2024 on the eve of the next presidential election, two things are certain.
First, the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) will be forced to score it as costing $330 billion, not $1.1 trillion, on a true 10-year basis. And, secondly, that expiration will never happen in a month of Sundays. Both parties will pledge to “protect American families” at all hazards during their summer conventions and then make a noisy show of extending these child tax credits before they adjourn to campaign for the 2024 elections.
The truth is, there is almost nothing in the plan that won’t become permanent due to deeply embedded constituencies once they “plant a flag” on new entitlements and climate change pork barrels, as one of the more honest Congressional Dems explained a few days ago”
Chuck Again.. there’s a reason why I call this spending bill the “spendalooza” folks… You really need to read into this and find out all the pork that’s being put into this bill… I will make your head spin, and cause you to really think about voting out these bums that thought of this bill… I’m just saying….
Market Prices 10/11/2021: American Style: A$ .7344, kiwi .6940, C$ .8021, euro 1.1572, sterling 1.3632, Swiss $1.0793, European Style: rand 14.9694, krone 8.5419, SEK 8.8396, forint 311.45, zloty 3.9649, koruna 21.9455, RUB 71.78, yen 112.90, sing 1.3535, HKD 7.7818, INR 75.35, China 6.4423, peso 20.73, BRL 5.5057, BBDXY 1,164.38, Dollar Index 94.17, Oil $81.94, 10-year 1.61%, Silver $22.63, Platinum $1,028.00, Palladium $2,243.00, Copper $4.23, and Gold… $1,756.40
That’s it for today… Well, this will be a short week for me, as I have my scheduled scans coming this Thursday morning… So, no Pfennig on Thursday… Well, in the old days, today would be a holiday, as it is Columbus Day… But here I am writing instead of sleeping… Columbus Day is still celebrated in parts of the country, even though we now know that he didn’t really discover America… He was the first European to sight the Bahamas archipelago and then the island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On his subsequent voyages he went farther south, to Central and South America. But it’s a good story, and one that many kids my age were told over and over again… The Beach Boys take us to the finish line today with their song: Wouldn’t It Be Nice… I guess we could apply that title of the song to many things, eh? I hope you have a Marvelous Monday, and please Be Good To Yourself!
Chuck Butler