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Currencies & metals get sold in the overnight markets
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Credit Card delinquencies rise… Uh-oh!
Good Day… And a Tom Terrific Tuesday to you! Well, congrats to the Bills and the Bucs as they joined the other 4 winners of their playoff games yesterday and last night. Man, do I miss my RedZone tv station, as i find it difficult to watch a full NFL game, and prefer to watch highlights from live games instead… The day yesterday was warm, but overcast, and allowed me to sit outside and read a good part of the day, without worrying about the sun on my skin… I’ve just started a new book for me… The Memory Man series… It’s a good one so far! Good friend, Karen brought me a ton of books to read the other day, and so now I’m set, with reading material for some time to come! The Guess Who greets me this morning with their song: Undun…
Well, it was a holiday here in the U.S. yesterday, so there wasn’t much movement in the metals, Gold did gain $6 on the day to close at $2,055… Silver ended up losing 3-cents on the day, Mondy, and ended the day t $23.16… The BBDXY gained 1 index point on the day… The price of Oil bumped higher in its range to a $72 handle, and after I chastised the bond boys yesterday for not listening to the Fed Head Speakers last week, they adjusted the 10-year’s yield higher to 4.0%…
I was reading my weekly Classic Wisdom yesterday, and realized that I had become addicted to knowing more and more about the ancient Greeks, and others of the time… Yesterday they drew a comparison of Socrates and MLK… they had both given their lives to better enlighten people… You learn something new every day, folks… and when you don’t, it was a wasted day!
In the overnight markets last night… Well, all hell broke loose last night… The dollar bugs went on rampage, and Gold got sold down the river… The BBDXY gained 7 index points overnight, and Gold lost $17 in the early trading. This has been swift, and strong… I guess it was bound to happen given all the talk of no rate cuts early by the Fed Heads… But C’mon dollar bugs… are you kidding me? You really believe the dollar should be bought right now? Apparently so… UGH! Silver is down 15-cents to start the day today, barely holding on to the $23 handle…
The price of Oil has bumped higher in the range and trades with a $73 handle, and the 10-year’s yield inched higher and trades this morning with a 4.01% yield… I really don’t get why the dollar bugs are running all over the kitchen floor this morning, but they are, and so we’ll just batten down the hatches. The euro has dropped below 1.09, and the rest of the currencies, sans rubles, are looking pretty ugly this morning…
Well… the world planners are meeting in Davos, Switzerland… this isn’t as clandestine as the Bilderberg meetings, and I did get a kick out of their plan for the meeting… “To restore Trust”… Hmmm… that would mean that they did have our trust before, and somehow lost it… I wouldn’t trust these boys and girls with anything!
Did you hear that Credit Card delinquencies are rising? And that to me is sign that consumers have been using credit cards to make ends meet, and now they’re having problems with paying the large interest rate-based loans down… This could end up being what really causes the U.S. economy to fall flat on its face, folks… I’m just saying…
Last week I wrote about how Gold had outperformed stocks and bonds since the turn of the century… And then i Bill Bonner’s letter yesterday, he wrote this: “Our guess is that we’ve already seen “Peak America” in the late ’90s. That was the best time – ever – to sell US equities. The Dow was trading at over 40 ounces of gold. So, if you had $100,000 in stocks…and you traded them for gold, you would have gotten 357 ounces.
If you’d left your money in stocks, it would have grown from $100,000 to over $370,000 over the next 23 years. Not bad. But your gold coins would have gone from $280 per ounce in 1999 to over $2,000 an ounce today, turning your $100,000 into $714,000. ” – Bill Bonner from Bonner private research…
Well, the warnings have all been sounded regarding traveling through the Red Sea… Another U.S. ship was hit by a missile fired from those not wanting anything to go through the passageway. The US. had tried to send a message last week by firing on the terrorists, but now we learn that Congress hadn’t given the POTUS the Ok, to wage war… Uh-Oh…. All, I’m trying to point out here is that with oil tankers having to go the long way around, it’s going to jack up the cost to ship, and therefore the cost of the Oil…
Hmmm…. Well, the U.S. is racking up the debt again… This from MarketWatch.com “The U.S. federal budget deficit widened to $129 billion in December, up from $85 billion in the same month last year, the Treasury Department said Thursday.
For the first three months of the fiscal year, the deficit widened to $510 billion, up from $421 billion in the same period last year.
Interest on the federal debt was up $78 billion, to $288 billion, over the first three months of the fiscal year compared with the same period a year earlier. The Federal Reserve’s rapid increase in interest rates is leading to higher interest payments.”
See what I’ve been saying about the new issuance of Treasuries to finance the debt? Well, in case you forgot, I told you that the cost to service the debt, (interest rates on the bonds) would increase, and get so high that soon other items in the budget that requires funding would be forgotten about in the near future… What would you do if your WIC payment was deleted? Or your welfare payment was cut in half? Ok, I know I’m not talking to many of you who would be able to answer that question, but the idea here is to talk about what these people might do… And storm the castle comes to mind…
Well, the dollar gets another day to breathe easier without any economic data printing today… Tomorrow, will be a day of data for the U.S. and we should get a pretty good idea as to the direction of the economy…
To recap… The dollar got bought some yesterday, but really got bought overnight… Gold was up $6 yesterday, Oil was up a buck, and the 10-year’s yield was up to 4.0%… Chuck mentions Davos… and he talks about credit card delinquencies, and how that could very well be the straw that breaks the economy’s back… And interest cost on financing our debt is growing faster than a speeding bullet…
Here’s your snippet: “”Progress may have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”
I’ve always been fond of that quote. Back when Ogden Nash wrote it, it was quite clever. Today, the quote is a bit less entertaining, as we are living in a period when, more and more, world leaders seem to be headed in the wrong direction – away from progress. As the Great Unravelling plays out, people are coming to the conclusion that the directions taken by their leaders are, in Doug Casey’s well-chosen words, not only the wrong thing to do, but the exact opposite of the right thing to do.
The first category in which this seems to be true is economics. Most world leaders are quite committed to the idea that Keynesian economics will provide all the answers to solve any economic problem. However, the further each country goes down the Keynesian road, the clearer it becomes that Keynesian theory simply does not work. In fact, many countries that have followed it are on the brink of economic collapse, yet they are charging forward all the more determinedly with solutions that are based upon the very theories that caused the problems.
The second category is economic legislation. In most First World countries, particularly the US, legislators are making it ever-more difficult for businesspeople to function, as a result of the passage of ever-more complex and stricter regulations. The free market is, at this point, far from free, and there is a substantial flow of business away from First World countries as a result. Contrary to the claims of many politicians, most businesspeople are not following this exodus out of greed, but out of a need for survival.
The third category is social legislation. First World countries, at one time, took pride in referring to themselves as “the Free World,” in contrast to the communist and socialist Second World. Not so, today.”
Chuck again… The article goes on, and makes a lot of sense to me that is… And I’m sure for you too! I’m of the opinion that if lord Keynesian had decided to be a dentist, the world would be a better place… I’m just saying…
Market Prices 1/16/24: American Style: A$.6601, kiwi .6153, C$ .7414, euro 1.0889, sterling 1.2644, Swiss $1.1621, European Style: rand 18.9105, krone 10.4277, SEK 10.4094, forint 348.64, zloty 4.0298, koruna 22.6658, RUB 88.00, yen 146.70, sing 1.3409, HKD 7.8251, INR 83.07, China 7.1935, peso 17.03, BRL 4.8951, BBDXY 1,234.31, Dollar Index 103.17, Oil $73.05, 10-year 4.01%, Silver $23.01, Platinum $905.00, Palladium $958.00, Copper $3.74, and Gold… $2,038.15.
That’s it for today… Well, I think we’ve worked out a plan for the delivery of the Pfennig to your email box each day… I sure hope so, I don’t like having to send you to the website to read it every day! Nothing against the website, it’s just that if the letter isn’t in your email box, most likely, you’ll forget about it… UGH! And you never know when I’m going to lay some real important news on you! HA! That football game last night went pretty late for me, so I bagged it went to bed and found out who won this morning… I was pretty sure the Bucs would win, when I retired, and they did… I’m coming up on the anniversary of my stroke… I’m still in awe of the surgical procedure they performed on me at the Jupiter Med Center… The small indentation in the wall where my head hit when I fell out of my chair is still there to remind me of that day… The Moody Blues take us to the finish line today with their song: The Other Side Of Life…. I hope you have a Tom Terrific Tuesday today and will Be Good To Yourself!
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