July 24, 2023 | A Price to Pay

Happy Monday Morning! CPI headline inflation came in lower than expected this past week. Markets were calling for 3% and we got 2.8%, a pleasant surprise and back to its lowest levels since March 2021. Perhaps the 475bps of rate hikes are finally starting to work their way through the system? We are back within […]

July 23, 2023 | British Banks Close Accounts for Political Views – Wait for CBDC Currency to Appear

We have a very serious problem. Banks, Media, and Tech Companies seem to be all pushing for the end of all our civil and human rights. The truth has come out now that the Coutts Bank closed down Nigel Farage’s accounts, and it had NOTHING to do with his finances that they told everyone. That […]

July 23, 2023 | Housing Hiccups

  While inflation is technically about general price levels, in practice we use it to describe living costs. That’s why the benchmarks measure consumer prices and personal consumption expenditures. These are where higher prices hurt because they apply to everyone. Other measures like the Producer Price Index have valuable information but are less immediately relevant to most people. But […]

July 23, 2023 | A Few Trillion Here, a Few Trillion There…

Last week’s commentary predicted that rates on the Ten-Year Note, currently around 3.8%, will hit a minimum 5.5% before inflation lurches into reverse and the U.S. begins a hellish descent into a full-blown debt deflation. The following, insightful response came from our friend Richard Charles at Alpine Capital: Well done, Rick, for highlighting the crux of markets […]

July 22, 2023 | Trading Desk Notes For July 22, 2023

A turning point in sizzling tech stocks? On Tuesday, MSFT announced plans to invoice corporations for employees using Microsoft AI. Within an hour; the share price rose >$20 to new All-Time Highs, adding ~$100 Billion (~4%) in market cap. By Friday’s close, those gains had evaporated, leaving the weekly chart with an ominous shooting star candlestick pattern. […]

July 22, 2023 | RAP Getting the Message? – Brainwashed

July 22, 2023 | Tech Talk for Saturday July 22nd 2023

The Bottom Line Focus next week is on news released from the FOMC meeting on Wednesday. Consensus calls for at least another 0.25% increase in the Fed Fund Rate to 5.50%. Second quarter results released by S&P 500 companies were mixed at best last week. Better than consensus results were released by most U.S. money […]

July 21, 2023 | Public Health and the Shrinking Trust Horizon

I’m on the road this week and can’t do much research. But there’s time to cut and paste some notable pieces of news. So, along the lines of January’s Gold And The Shrinking Trust Horizon, here’s a short piece from Matt Taibbi on the fallout from the lab-leak fiasco: Covid’s Origins and the Death of Trust Public has just published […]

July 21, 2023 | China Property Market Struggles with Debt Bubble

China began a new stage in its multi-year struggle with insolvency among property developers. One of the biggest, China Evergrande, reported losses of US$81 billion this week. Will massive debts of US$207 billion dollars in the property sector drag China down? The property sector started to contract in 2021, after a brief post-COVID surge.  Recent […]

July 21, 2023 | Fat Pitches and Market Cycles

Near-zero interest rates and trillions of asset buying by central banks (QE) enabled twelve years of increasingly deranged financial behaviour between 2011 and 2023. In the process, gambling became an international preoccupation, and investable assets were traded to uneconomically high valuations. A global standout, at the market peak in 2022, the S&P 500 index (shown […]

July 21, 2023 | The Death of Free Speech Is the Beginning

Tunisia is actually criminalizing free speech under the claim that it is spreading “fake news” to end free speech in the country. The problem is this is the trend in the aftermath of COVID. Anything disagreeing with the government narrative is increasingly moving toward criminalization. This was the very same trend that the LEFT took […]

July 20, 2023 | Recession Watch: Real Estate And Manufacturing Seize Up

Rising interest rates don’t hit everything all at once. Some sectors feel the pinch immediately while others keep chugging along, seemingly oblivious to tightening money. But eventually, the pain spreads far enough to hurt and/or scare everyone, which brings on the cycle-ending recession and bear market. That day is getting closer, as multiple sectors report […]

July 20, 2023 | The Elevator Pitch for Capital Preservation

The challenge is to explain complex systems in simple enough terms that people can comprehend. I attempt to do this every day in finance. But people can be hard to help. We have to want to learn and remember why capital preservation is our dominant goal. Financial enlightenment is made harder because most “experts” in […]

July 20, 2023 | Housing Market Faces Reckoning: Price of Used Houses now the Same as Price of New Houses

Sales of previously owned single-family houses fell by 3.4% in June from May, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales of 3.72 million houses, the lowest since January, according to the National Association of Realtors today. This is deep-dismal sales territory, even as supply rose to 3.1 months, and inventories to 960,000 houses, both the […]

July 20, 2023 | Harris – Reducing the Population is a Real Goal

The White House claims that Vice President Kamala Harris made a gaff by saying that the goal was to “reduce population” when she should have said pollution. Of course, the immediate claim is that anyone disagreeing with that statement is engaging in a conspiracy theory. As they say, actions speak louder than words. She actually […]

July 19, 2023 | Trudeau – A Modern-Day Caligula?

 Nathaniel Pawlowski delivered a powerful speech to the European Parliament, where he called Justin Trudeau a modern-day Caligula. Pawlowski’s father, Artur Pawlowski, has been arrested numerous times for simply speaking out against the tyrannical Canadian government. Artur Pawlowski was a vocal advocate for medical freedom and continued to speak up for the people despite threats from […]

July 19, 2023 | Should I Buy? Or Should I Rent?

                 I spend a lot of time thinking about the future – and where home prices will go from here. 2023:  Rental affordability has never been higher as compared to mortgage affordability. From my July 2023 Timing Letter: “Many believe that home ownership is always attractive as a way of avoiding paying rent, but […]

July 19, 2023 | Those Who Overlook History

Like today, soft-landing hopes were all the rage in the summer of 2007 too. The US Fed tightened its overnight rate from 1% in May 2004 to 5.25% by June 2006 and then paused there for 15 months. As the economy slowed and credit stress mounted, the Fed administered a first cut (50bps) in September 2007, and […]

July 18, 2023 | Tucker Carlson Kills Mike Pence’s Presidential Dreams

Some may have seen the viral clip of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Pence. This interview will be remembered as the nail in the coffin for Pence, who could not hide his Neocon agenda. “Every city in the United States have become much worse in the past three years. Drive around – there is not […]

July 18, 2023 | Real Estate Speculators Start to Blink

Nick Gerli, Reventure Consulting Founder and CEO, joins ‘Last Call’ to explain his recent viral tweet claiming AirBnB is seeing declining revenue in several major markets. Here is a direct video link. Also, see Nick’s update on developments in the commercial property sector. Commercial real estate values have already dropped 11% in the last year, with […]

July 17, 2023 | NATO – Escalates Nuclear War

What has come out of this NATO meeting is the West is escalating the war with Russia. They are expanding the “sharing” of nuclear weapons at the request of Poland, which has always been rejected previously. This means that any nation with F35 and F16 will have available to them nuclear weapons. This is why […]

July 17, 2023 | People We Should Know: Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio’s bio is not that different from the typical “hedge fund asshole”: Harvard, Bridgewater Associates, billionaire, best-selling author. And of course he predicted and profited from the last few couple of financial crises. But instead of coasting on past success, Dalio has shifted gears and become a public figure whose take on the global […]

July 17, 2023 | Trapped

  Happy Monday Morning! As expected, the Bank of Canada tightened the screws once again, jacking rates up another 25bps, and bringing the overnight rate to 5%, its highest level since 2001. “It’s working,” Macklem said in an exclusive interview with The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, several hours after raising borrowing costs for the 10th time […]

July 17, 2023 | Code Red

As a result of data released over the past week (mostly, the last 3 days), it seems clear to me that we may be facing a clear market emergency in COMEX silver futures. I am trying hard not to be alarmist, but what I see alarms the heck out of me – to the point […]