Guest Post Submitted By Bob Rinear, Robert Foster, et al from Invest Yourself
(Editor's Note: This is a serious rant. Buckle up.)
This letter is going to be offensive to many many people. That's fine, I'll simply chose to use my first amendment rights, even though I understand it will bother a lot of folk. As you proceed through the letter, you're going to ask yourself a question, and it might go somehow along this line "Isn't IY about the economy and the markets? What's this rant got to do with that?" The answer of course will be "everything". So let's get to it. Oh and by the way, if you can't deal with what I'm about to go off on, please exercise your rights to hit the "unsubscribe" button while you are still free enough to do so.
InvestYourself isn't going to solve the worlds problems. The giant gears of global society are turning and will not be repealed by a small newsletter writer. All we can hope for is that "some" amount of people ponder what we say for long enough that they actually "do" something for themselves. I'm not stupid enough to think I have all the answers, I don't. But I'm smart enough to know that when a ship is sinking, I want to be real close to the life raft. America the Titanic is sinking. The Captains are telling the passengers that everything is fine, she's a sturdy ship, and we'll be back on course in no time. Meanwhile the water is rising.
The increasing, detailed, intrusive regulation of life, the national desire for control, control, control. Everything is the business of some form of government. Want to paint your shutters? The condo association won't let you. Let dogs in your bar? Never. Decide who to sell your house to? Racial matter. Own a dog? Shot card, pooper-scooper, leash, gotta be spayed, etc. Have a bar for men only, women only, whites or blacks only? Here come the federal marshals. Want to open a lounge that lets people smoke while having a drink? Can't do it. Want to drink a sugar packed soda just for the rush? They want to tax it, "obesity" tax. What isn't controlled by government is controlled by the crypto-vindictive mob rule of political correctness. This wasn't always in the American character.
Add the continuing presence of police in the schools, the arrest in handcuffs of children of seven, the expulsions for drawing a picture of a soldier with a gun. A woman gets arrested for watching her neighbors kids at the bus stop because she isn't licensed to run a daycare. Something very twisted is going on. America stood for the land of the free, home of the brave. Now we are the land of the controlled, home of the scared. The nanny state has brainwashed the population into believing that Government knows best, Government will keep you safe, just give up your silly ideas of freedom and come under the great wing of Uncle Sam, he'll protect you, keep you from harm. Yet who is "the Government?" Isn't it nothing but a collection of men and women? It is. Oh and what a grand troop they are. We have tax evaders. We have adulterers. We have people taking bribes. We have people using their office for their own financial gains no matter how "illegal". Most of them have never run as much as a lemonade stand, and have not the slightest clue about how a business works. Yet there they sit, making rules for the masses, rules that we have to abide by or "go to jail". Why are criminals allowed to make rules, that make us criminals if we don't abide by them? Why do people who've never run a business, get to make laws concerning business?
Just 65 years ago, Fine American soldiers returned from Europe. They had defeated Hitlers Germany. Then over the next 20 years, they outproduced, and outmanufactured, anything the world had ever seen. America was the single largest manufacturer, The largest exporter, the richest nation on earth, the worlds largest creditor to the world, and guess what? They did it all without 90% of the "Rules, laws and political correctness we have in place now. Kids weren't handcuffed for drawing a gun, in fact they went home and went shooting with their fathers after school. Women weren't arrested for watching the neighbors kids at the bus stop, in fact, it was quite common for each "mom" to take her daily rotation in watching over the kids that week. The nice lady down the street wasn't shut down and fined for cooking some turkey dinners for the poor people on Thanksgiving, she was praised in the paper.
So, now that we've evolved into the Nanny State, where people have given up virtually all their true freedoms in return for a false sense of security, how are we doing? Well the nation is bankrupt by any conceivable measure. We are the worlds single biggest debtor nation that's ever existed. Our manufacturing base has been completely dismantled. We import more than we export, and by most accounts our population is broke. Now the question is, is that because of, or in spite of all our social engineering, laws, rules, restrictions, and political correctness? Well call me nuts, but I believe to the last fibre of my being that it's because of all the absurdity, AND that it didn't just "happen". Whomever you wish to call "they", they knew that the way to throttle America, to knock her down and get her in line was to erode what made her great in the first place. Take away the individual spirit of independence, make the strong seem like outcasts, to be mocked and ridiculed. Dumb down the population to the point where individual thought is evil, and going along with what Nanny Government says is the only answer.
Well here we are. America is the Titanic, yet the passengers simply don't get it. Because they've relied on Government for so much, they are relying on Government to plug the hole and get us back on course. Unfortunately this is impossible. See, the real Titanic simply made a fatal mistake and slammed into an iceberg. It was an Accident. America the Titanic has been sunk on purpose. There can be no "getting back on course" because those in charge, the real puppet masters that control our Nation knew exactly what they were doing. All that's left now is to continue to tell the people that "things are fine, we'll be fixed up in a jiffy" while the puppet masters loot every last person of their personal wealth before she settles on the bottom. This is the stage we are at now. The final push to get your every last cent is on and will accelerate as they scramble to take your last penny, before America the Titanic slides below the waves for good. Sound dramatic? Rolling your eyes yet? Go ahead. Laugh, mock, chuckle, snicker. It's okay, I can take it. Do you know why? Because I'm laughing, snickering and chuckling at your absolute stupidity and gullibility.
Most of the politically correct, well educated, soccer mom class of people are without a doubt the most shallow, thoughtless robots I've ever met. An original thought would scare them to death, they wouldn't know what to do with it. Much too busy worrying if their latest tapas party was perfectly executed to do any real investigating, they rely on the media for their thoughts. And of course the media tells them exactly what they should know. How to fix a killer meal in under five minutes. How to dress for that big company party. How to reduce their carbon footprint. Why guns are bad, and Government is good. Why suggesting that there might actually be scientific differences between people is absolute racism, and just to mention that someone is indeed black is the purest form of evil and deeprooted racism. Well guess what Mr or Mrs. well educated politically correct robot...the jokes on you. You aren't cool and hip and suave, you're an idiot. You're the exact Barbie Doll robot they created you to be. They don't have to fight for their pet agenda's, you'll do it for them. An army of brainless sheep that will do the dirty work for the miscreants that sit back and laugh, while reaping their rewards. While you pretend you're "in the know", the truth is your a slave to the machine they created. I almost admire the beauty of what they've pulled off.
If you watch CNBC for any length of time, you have no choice but to come away with the feeling that not only has the recession been averted, but America the whole, is soon to be the glorious gal she was just 50 years ago. The parade of Wall Street Analysts, fund managers, and politicians they trot in each day almost all to a Tee, have the same prepackaged Propaganda. The recession is over. The going will be slow, but it's working. We're well on our way to "normal". Guess what? The politically correct, Barbie Doll robot, brainless sheep are buying it. Well of course they are, they're incapable of rational thought. Trying to figure out if the CNBC cheerleaders are right or wrong would take minutes away from deciding if the new coach bag would go better with the current outfit or another designer. They can't waste their precious time on trying to discover the truth, besides they have a 7 pm meeting at the school to try and get a carbon footprint awareness program going.
How can this be, when the reality is that we are not recovering, but falling further into a mass depression? Once again I have to remind you of whom owns CNBC, and what their agenda might be. Of course the owner is GE, and they have their hands in all the major "agendas". If you build windmills, don't you think that forcing a "green" movement is in your best interest? OF course it is. If you take your advertising from Wall Street, don't you think it would be best if you promoted Wall Street? Of course they do. But it's even deeper than that, it reaches back to the theme of this letter. "Media" and social engineering has created an enormous class of deluded self important robots that think they actually have a clue. Consider this from the people at Project PC:
As guardians of power, today's dominant media system is in crisis because it's bottom-line driven, unresponsive to public needs, and concerned only about the interests of wealth and power. As a result, fiction substitutes for fact. News is carefully filtered, dissent marginalized and denigrated, and supporting the powerful substitutes for full and accurate reporting. The fallout has imperial wars called liberating ones. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good. Washington has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and patriotism means supporting militarism, violence as a way of life, global dominance, lawlessness, torture, and an Orwellian society in which "war is peace, freedom is slavery, (and) ignorance is strength."
And there in a nutshell is the bottom line. If you "take in" news from someone spewing it, it will always be tainted with the spewers slant towards it. Unless you are willing and able to sleuth out the "facts" for yourself, you are at the mercy of the advertising agents, the Corporations, Uncle Sam and Wall Street, and none of them are above distorting the facts to fit their agendas. The sad part is that most people are so shallow, so mesmerized by the spin meisters, they accept it as fact and go along with the program.
I have made quite a few predictions over the years that have come true. Some of them sounded so completely outlandish at the time that howls of laughter could be heard for miles. Yet come true they did, and those people who laughed and scorned are now psychologically damaged. They cannot understand how some "conspiracy nut" got it right, while the Nanny Media either got it wrong or ignored it completely. So in the Spirit of America the Titanic, let me continue with some very unpleasant contradictions.
This week CNBC brought in a lot of the Bulls. We had Art Hogan, Ned Riley, Ken Heebner,and a host of other notable cheerleaders. That is of course in addition to their home grown cheerleaders like Bob Pissone, and Steve Liesman. 99% of the talk centered around the recovery, and how things are going along well. How we'll be gaining all manner of GDP and how stocks are "cheap". It didn't seem to matter what particular bad headline might have hit, someone had the positive spin on it. The epitome of disgusting self prostitution came right after the jobs report on Friday when one of their "guests" suggested that having another 263K people lose their jobs in September wasn't bad, in fact it's a plus. I'm not making this up folks. According to this market whore, it will lower the dollar, and lower interest rates even more, thereby helping the housing market. So, taken exponentially, everyone should lose their jobs, and the economy would be better off? Have I been eating acid mushrooms again??
While the shameless at CNBC appeal to the brain dead, politically correct morons among us, some of the remaining few thinking people of the nation are asking interesting questions. What kind of recovery is this, where credit still contracts, housing still falls, defaults soar, sales plunge, revenues drop, banks still fail, FDIC goes broke,and jobs are still lost? The fake kind. The fairy tale kind. The CNBC kind. The Obama kind. The Politically correct, Dennis Kneale type robot kind. Read this:
- Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The number of U.S. lenders that can't collect on at least 20 percent of their loans hit an 18-year high, signaling that more bank failures and losses could slow an economic recovery
- If we're recovering, wouldn't these numbers be going down? Consumer loan delinquencies struck record highs in Q2, ABA says, citing the "cumulative effect of the longest recession since the Depression." Bank card delinquencies were up 26 bps to a record 5.01% and home equity loan delinquencies rose 49 bps to 4.01%, while secured credit lines rose a modest 3 bps to 1.92%
Record high delinquencies? In a recovery?
- 10:27 AM Foreclosures jumped 16% in Q2 to 2.9% of all serviced mortgages, delinquencies hit 8.5% of all mortgages, while home retention actions such as loan mods were up by 21.7%, according to a report today from the OTS.
Now let me get this straight. Obama is giving out your tax money, some 8K dollars worth for people to buy houses. Fannie, Freddie, the FHA and the USDA are back to giving out subprime loans. They have spent trillions on bail outs and stimulus, and still foreclosures rise? Not to mention the pick a pay mortgages and Alt -A loans that will reset from now until next July.
Now how about the jobs picture. I'm not too awful bright, but it would seem to me that people with no jobs would have a hard time spending if their home is falling in value, they can't do a cash out refi, their credit card limits have been cut, and they're running out of unemployment benefits. Yet despite 550,000 people signing up for first time initial jobless claims on Thursday and seeing Uncle Sam tell us that 263K more people lost jobs in September, still CNBC and most of their hosts, along with Obama and his administration continue to tell us the recovery is "in" and it's all blue sky from here.
What about the fact that the "hours worked" fell to the lowest number EVER recorded? What about the fact that capacity utilization is at the lowest levels ever recorded? What about the fact that employers "could" take their part time crews and turn them on full time, and we'd really have no reason to hire another real full time employee for approximately 3 years? What about the fact that the BLS has added some 604,000 jobs to the employment reports this year, that really aren't there?
These people make me sick. I will NOT allow myself to think they are so stupid that they really believe the Bullshit they are telling people. So, if they don't really believe it, but they are cheerleading anyway, then the only logical choice I can make is that they are whores for their masters, telling people any and every thing their puppet leaders tell them to say. Do they have no shame? No conscience? As their brainless robot audience makes financial decisions based on their lop sided view of the economy, doesn't it matter that they will be crushed? Evidently not. Like a common prostitute, the dollar they are paid outweighs the conscience of doing right.
So what is the bottom line? What's "my" prediction? Well you won't like it, but that won't change it. We are going to see spectacular changes folks. The economy will limp along on life support as they toss trillions of made out of thin air dollars at it. But it won't work. Eventually it all fails and we get the true depression we should have had already and worked out of. They can't stop the stimulus or the economy grinds to a halt instantly. We are destined to a world of dollar devaluing, Corporate bail outs, less and less jobs, more foreclosures, more falling home values. I said much earlier that the mutants behind the grand scheme are sucking you dry for every penny they have, and they are. Your taxes are rising. Not a day goes by where a toll road fee isn't increased, or your cable bill doesn't go up or your medical bills don't go higher. Your Country is already broke, yet what we are witness to is the privatizing of profits and the socializing of losses, so the rich can remain gloriously rich, while you go down in flames.
Sound dire, and dramatic? Well it is. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no "way out". The wheels are in motion and nothing's going to stop it, all we can do is plan for it. So, what do you do? Of course I'll harp on gold and silver, I always do. But there's one thing that I want to bring to your attention, especially the folks that feel they are so well protected because they don't owe much on their house. I know Jim Cramer said housing is recovering. He also said buy the market in November of 07 just before it peeled off 7000 points. I'm here to say that MILLIONS of foreclosures are still coming at us, and as unemployment continues to rise, housing will continue to fall. Don't think that because you dont have much of a mortgage left that you can count on a specific amount of equity being in your home in 4, 5 or 6 years that you're going to sell and live off of. It's my guess you'll have another 30% less at least. Figure for that.
We know they're going to devalue the dollar, it's already in progress. At some point the dollar will no longer be the worlds reserve currency. What they replace it with is still up in the air, but you can bet your exchange rate is going to be pretty lousy when you're forced to make the move. If you cannot rely on your job, your house or your money to see you through the depression we'll be mired in for several more years, is there any alternative than gold? Not really, none that I can come up with. Yes you'll want to be a nimble stock investor, riding the up moves and going short on the drops. But once you collect your cash, I'd suspect it would be wise to exchange them for some amount of gold coins.
My object wasn't to scare you, or offend you. Like any other "nutcase" with a website, I could have this all wrong and be found to be the biggest dummy that ever lived. Maybe. That's a decision you'll have to make for yourself. But this is what I believe to be coming, and for the past 15 years my beliefs have rewarded me with quite a bit of success, therefore I'll trust my gut. Had I listened to the pundits over the past ten years, I'd be homeless living in a shelter. I'll take my track record over theirs every time.
Now onto the market itself:
Oh what a twisted web we weave... Last Wednesday the market hit an intra day high of about 9937. Since then we've fallen back a bit, hitting an intra day low of 9378. A quick push of the calculator button shows me that we've lost about 560 points in 8 trading days. The question is, is this the big smackdown? Another pressing question is, if so how low will it go? Or how about this one, if it's not, when do we race higher? All grand questions that I wish I had grand answers for.
There is a major argument that you can wage for all the scenarios. For instance the chart slaves are warning us every day that the NDX, or the technology heavyweights, are forming a pattern that historically has seen a massive smackdown following it. So, you have that in the "we're heading much lower camp". Then we have another influence. See, as hard as it is to imagine, quite a few traders didn't catch much of this whole March - Sept move and are rabid to get in. All they wanted was a pull back so they could get cheaper entries. Some of them are on the move already.
Yet there's another dog in this fight, the big dog. "Consumer confidence will rise with the gradual rise of the equity markets" is a quote from non other than Ben Bernanke himself months ago. How did he know the equity markets would rise? simple. He's allowed the banks to take TARP money, and stimulus money and ramp the markets higher. So, we have the 800 lb gorilla lurking every day. A gorilla with limitless funds, to buy futures, and stocks, at any time. Knowing that housing is in the toilet, knowing jobs are nowhere and going nowhere fast, they are manipulating the last "thing" they can manipulate that keeps the masses from bearing down on them with pitchforks.
We've all been looking for a big pulldown, because markets don't just "go up" forever. Once we got up and over my first DOW target of 9600, we entered a surreal time, where reality and fantasy have been disconnected. We know that if the stimulus was removed the economy stops immediately. So, we know the stimulus will be there for as far as the eye can see. But we also know that the Chinese don't like us much any more, and most of the major economies are looking for a way "out" of dollar denominated assets, not in. Added together it creates quite a confusing time to try and be a market pundit.
So, all we can do is take our best educated guess. My guess goes as follows: We've already lost 560 points. Some of that is post window dressing selling. We have people desperate to make money, especially if they were stupid enough to be in the market during the 2008 crash and missed this run up. We have the FED willing and ready to push more money into the Goldmans, and JPM's of the investing world. That would seem to add up to another run higher coming. But when?
I'd say they have a big more work to do at the flat line first. The beginning of the week will be lumpy, bumpy, murky and cloudy. We should open green and then erase that and go red, and then go green as they all jockey for position. Tuesday into Wednesday might be just as funky. But, by Wed night, into Thursday if they want the market to run up, that's when I'd suspect the firepower would start. Could the chart slaves be right and we finally plunge? Sure we could. But that would be against the Fed, and the money people trying to recover from last years beat down. See a sell off would make real sense, and that's probably why it won't happen.
I think that by Wed. night we'll have a better clue as to where they want to push us, either up or down. In the beginning of the week, I suspect the market will just chop slice and dice it's way to a lot of nowhere. We are currently "out" of the market in our trading accounts, just waiting for confirmation of going long or short. So far, that's not been completely decided. Stay tuned!
PS.. If you'd like to see the exact stocks/options/metals and 401K moves we will be looking at for this week, please consider becoming a member of the "insiders club" located here: Click Here
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