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How can US beancounters report twice the expected retail sales when all private data and state tax data shows that November had tepid if not soft retail sales – even with the easy y/y comparisons?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2009, AT 8:30 A.M. EST
ADVANCE MONTHLY SALES [...]
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A worse-than-expected ADP Employment Change for November (-169k vs. -150k exp) chilled traders’ appetite for stocks. But gold is a different animal, and it’s in a parabolic rise.
Bad news is really good news for gold because it means ‘more juice’.
Several weeks ago, we noted that gold was [...]
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While most of the known world was transfixed on the FOMC soiree and its communiqué, an equally if not more important Treasury soiree and communiqué went largely unnoticed.
November 4, 2009
tg347
Minutes of the Meeting of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee Of the Securities Industry and [...]
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A political bombshell exploded in the US last night. While the largest impact is on Democrats, there were clear warning shots fired at GOP nabobs.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent over $100 million to retain his office; but he only procured 51% of the votes. Polls gave [...]
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Last week, PBS “Frontline” produced a story that describes how Bob Rubin, Easy Al, Larry Summers and others prevented Brooksley Born of the CFTC from instituting controls on the OTC derivative market in the late nineties.
“I didn’t know Brooksley Born,” says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, [...]
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Traders again bought stocks on Wednesday’s open but an unexpectedly soft New Home Sales report chilled bullish proclivities. September New Home Sales declined 3.6% to 402k; 440k was expected. And once again, the previous month’s data was revised lower, from 429k down to 417k.
Though inventories are reported [...]
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Once again, just like in July, August & September, Benito juiced the system during expiry week.
The previous three weeks, the Fed balance sheet contracted modestly. But for the week ended on Wednesday, Benito poured $54.747B into the system via the monetization of $70.699B of MBS… Term [...]
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Citigroup and BAC jump on Friday afternoon; JPM and then the S&P 500 followed:
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Stocks tanked on Friday with the ugly employment report. But stocks rebounded, led by a big rally in major banks stocks. Yesterday Goldie touted the big bank [...]
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During European trading on Wednesday, the dollar fell to a new ’09 low. This produced a SPU rally into the NYSE open. US traders then poured into stocks on a ‘cash is trash’ rally. But that was it for the rally.
As we have asserted for months the [...]
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Let’s say that an aging baseball slugger who had abused performance-enhancing drugs for over a decade had a horrendous collapse in his hitting statistics. So the team put him on even stronger doses of steroids, HGH, testosterone, dianabol, insulin, protein shakes, creatine, glutamine and unknown powerful designer [...]
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The GDP report last Friday evinces the folly of US government economic statistics and Wall Street consensus analysis.
Most of the Street heralded the 1% decline in Q2 GDP because it was 0.5 better than consensus – even though the US government admitted in the release that its [...]
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There is mucho pontificating by research types and pundits that ‘all is still well because the S&P 500 held its 200-day moving average. These people are wrong and misguided.
Long-time readers know that we regularly assert that the slope of the moving average is of paramount importance and [...]
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We are stunned – no, we’re shocked, shocked over the following admission from an Assistant US Attorney about the theft of Goldman’s proprietary trading codes.
Bloomberg: At a court appearance July 4 in Manhattan, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti told a federal judge that Aleynikov’s alleged theft [...]
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Yesterday President Obama said a second stimulus package is not needed, for now. Do you think Ben Bernanke and the Fed will refute the president’s claim in its communiqué today? Not bloody likely!
Obama’s ‘not yet’ on a second stimulus package is intended to assuage China and Japan’s [...]
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For the past few weeks we have provided ample evidence, mostly via private industry data and oration, that ‘green shoots’ are just another Bernanke equivocation and Street yearning.
We also opined that requisite ‘insider’ banks have fleeced patsies for necessary capital, so market beware.
Another of our themes is [...]
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Our friend Brian alerted us to this USA/Today story: Benefit spending soars to new high
The recession is driving the safety net of government benefits to a historic high, as one of every six dollars of Americans’ income is now coming in the form of a federal [...]
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The markets are now screaming at the Fed to do something to arrest inflation concern. Fed governors must now internally debate hiking the fed funds rate…And if the economy and stock market have bottomed, a 50bp fed funds rate should be insignificant. But many people don’t really [...]
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Here is the S&P 500 Index on a weekly basis since May 1992. The slope of the yearly (52 week) and 70 week (favored by some researchers but more appropriate for commodities, which are more volatile than stocks) clearly defines bull and bear markets. Stocks can rally [...]
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Stocks rallied early and bonds sank on Tuesday on expectation that the release of GDP today would show a better than consensus number. The peculiarity of trade accounting mandates that GDP will be revised higher due to declining imports, which actually indicate economic ebbing.
Stocks tried to conform [...]
