Is Tiny Tim going to cry? Gonna get a spanking when he gets home to Broad and Wall tonight?
Poor Paul looks like he’s STILL not sure the Prez’ll give the word.
Alfred Hitchcock presents …
… a fine elderly unemployed couple, about to be bounced out of their home, try to work things out.
… the trauma of losing your job.
Since Pearl Harbor Day, everybody — everybody — in the money world has setting up for a dollar rally in early 2010, to correct the Buck’s big fall in 2009. The rally — or at least a snap of the dollar’s downtrend — began in December.
But recent US economic news has been mixed, with housing optimism again failing. And yesterday’s unexpected drop in the monthly Jobs report — when the whisper numbers, reported by Todd H at Minyanville, were as sunny as 100,000 jobs created, not the 85,000 lost in fact reported — has people scratching.
And has a lot of fat set-ups suddenly looking pale. If the dollar were to turn down here with any authority, it would touch off a panic sell. And gold would soar.
Here’s the past year for the DXY index, which measures the Dollar against the Euro, Yen, Pound, Swiss Franc, Swedish Kroner and … Aussie dollar, if memory serves.
You can see the year’s tumble, the upturn in December, and the flatline since, as people puzzled and waited for yesterday’s US job number — which sent the dollar down.
Also this past week, bad employment news in Europe and an unusual public disagreement in Tokyo enriched the currency picture.
The new Japanese Finance Minister on his first day loudly renounced his predecessor’s Strong Yen bias — but the next day the Prime Minister rebuked the new Finance guy.
Nevertheless, people seem to think the Japanese bank may begin to publicly intervene — buying dollars — to weaken the Yen, trying to recover the balance that was broken this past year as the Dollar tumbled. (A relatively weak Yen helps Toyota and Sony sell stuff to the corpulent American consumer.)
So. New employment weakness in Europe will promote a weaker Euro.
Tokyo wants a weaker Yen.
But the (mixed) weakness in USA economic numbers across the past month will also blunt the momentum that had been building at the Fed to raise its bank rates sooner than later, blunting the Dollar’s heavily anticipated rise.
So. The three big currencies seem ready to race each other to the bottom.
Makes it very difficult to guess or bet on the currency pairs (ie, to trade dollar versus euro, euro vs yen, dollar vs yen, etc).
But if all the central bankers are intent on keeping their currencies weak, it seems gold — despite the recent trend in thinking re the Dollar rebound — will benefit again this year.
So I got back into some gold yesterday in my retirement account (having sold out early December, on the report of the November employment numbers).
And may prove a bit early getting back into gold now, if indeed the Dollar bid of December holds a while longer. As always we shall see. The dollar was down yesterday, on the bad US employment news.
I also got into a Japan fund this week, inspired by the new Finance Minister. The chart here is inviting — for Japanese stocks have suffered of late, not like American, worse than Chinese. Thus obvious room for upside if the Strong Yen is truly dead. And Japan would serve as something of a hedge on my new gold bet if the dollar were to rock a bit skyward against the yen.
Am still 40% cash in the retirement account. Would like to get back in technology if the stock markets provide an opening (ie, go down) sometime. They’ve been up, generally speaking, since March last year — perhaps (another story this week) with direct help from Tsy and Fed, who may have been buying S&P Mini Futures on the sly (again).
(They began doing so in March 2003 to support the Iraq war. Fiendish. A great sickness. Free market capitalism? Don’t be silly.)
This story about AIG and 2008, although in essence not important, could be used by the White House to begin the business of easing Tiny Tim into the dumpster.
If the White House were so minded. No evidence yet that it is. Reactions worth watching.
Yesterday’s spectacular debut of the world’s tallest building — twice as tall (!) as the Trade Center towers were — in Dubai, whose related sovereign debt is number six on a recent list of Most Likely To Fails after its corporate sister pleaded poverty in December …
Leaves me speechless.
Floyd Norris managed to say something. Hear him, sigh.
And check out the business prospects for this white mammoth. Those prospects are nil, but Murdoch’s man closes with assurance that the “image of yesterday’s fireworks display” will surely mean alot to Dubai in years to come.
Meanwhile, farther east, into the creditor hemisphere, a single tuna sells for $177,000. In Japan. Our second biggest banker.
Back at the ranch, a prominent finance CEO today accused the Fed and Tsy of steadily buying stock futures during 2009 to ignite and prop the miraculous rally of March-November.
The money-management world is full of serious people who are certain this began in March 2003 — in an effort to support the (world?) war also set in motion that month by Bush-Cheney. “The Market That Will Not Go Down” then ran up despite news and experience in highly abnormal fashion until the weight of the credit crisis finally crushed it in October 2007.
Meanwhile, more mundanely, the media are full of forecasts for the year. Here is a quick summary of twelve prominent money minders, all foretelling doom as Obama cements his administration’s feet in the status quo ante on the finance front.
In same vein, the Times editors today forecasted doom for US real estate this year in light of Team Obama’s Do Nothing agenda.
Finance. Pakghanistan. Health Care. No Change We Need in any of these, and very little change at all.
Who would have thought, fourteen months ago?
“He went down with the ship.”
My own thoughts about the year ahead in the markets are almost entirely neutral, having been neutralized by the odd three years now past. The future is a mist and the postwar’s First World is as fragile as it has ever been. No reason for long-term confidence of any sort. Investments are all trades.
The stock market just had a fabulous, perhaps basically fraudulent, run, so one must be cautious. And yet if the combined forces, public and covert, of the Fed and Tsy and their international investors continue to juice the markets perhaps there’s some profit yet to be had in being long stocks.
My retirement account went all cash in early December, selling its gold fund FGLDX near peak (on the report of the November employment numbers, which juiced the dollar, breaking gold’s uptrend). Had already sold its China and Tech in May and summer (too early). And its energy by September. So the autumn was about 40% gold and 60% cash, until cashing out entirely in December.
Yesterday I stepped back in with some China. About 14% of the account. Rest is still cash.
Why China. Simply because it’s in a fundamentally sound position, bad news is less likely to appear here, or cash in reaction to flee from here, and the chart is somewhat more inviting than the others.
In my mother’s account of free cash I bought some CTL, the fourth-largest telecom in the US last time I looked, something of a takeover possibility, with a very healthy dividend and rather nice chart. I should have bought it before Christmas — had been watching — but was without an internet connection when the opportunity arose. I’m unhappy buying it here — 36.75 — but will be even less happy if it breaks out over $37, which bad news elsewhere is likely to make it do. The buy was a small lot, about a third of what one hopes to buy if things work out.
In short: I’m trying to get my head back in the morass.
Gold jumped the past two days as the dollar (which broke its downtrend late in the year) sank a bit — but then gold sold off this afternoon and its bulls seem flummoxed again, after 36 hours of unrestrained crowing.
The big news here is Friday’s December employment numbers, which will clarify the dollar (and thus gold) picture. I will be looking for the right time to get back into gold. Perhaps already missed the best time, but there’s plenty of upside left if the bull thesis has merit. Gold’s LONG-TERM prospects seem secure, up up and up as the postwar First World continues its descent into the maelstrom for wont of political will to regulate capital and large corporations.
But it’s not clear yet that the dollar’s late-year rebound is done. I tend to think not, and thus have done nothing. If Friday’s numbers are unexpectedly not bad, the dollar should resume its rise and the time to restock gold will have been pushed further into the future. If the numbers are unexpectedly poor, the dollar may roll over and gold go off again to the races.
Finally, if the dollar continues to rise, it will pressure american stocks down in general, although other factors may be countervailing.
Otherwise, there are certainly some inviting tech stories. But for now the macro picture outweighs in my mind any stock-picking enthusiasms, all of which will get funnelled into short-term trades or the trash.
This has been a poorly written report from a mind mostly elsewhere.
I had half my rather pathetic IRA account in a a gold fund FGLDX all fall, until two weeks ago, when I cashed out half. Then cashed out the other half last Friday on the employment number.
Theory being that the dollar seems near or at its midterm bottom, because the economic numbers (despite many disconnects to economic reality) are likely to bring Tightening talk into the Fedspeak.
Juicing the dollar. Hurting gold.
The world is the other consideration of the moment. Two weeks ago Dubai asked forbearance. Now Greece is waving a flag. Snowballing here seems likely to also help the dollar, short and mid term.
Team Obama are already on the tightening wagon, already talking down Job Creation and talking up the need to rein in the deficit. Quite the good boy.
So. At the moment — all cash in my retirement account. The juicing dollar also exerts downward pressure on stocks, which of course had a very good year. People generally look for Santa Claus here, this time of year, but if Greece goes belly up on its sov debt …
Wait and see with cash for the moment. Even if we have a year-end flourish, January seems forbidding. Maybe it’s just me.
Perhaps the best tickets I ever scored on the fly outside the gate were at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, an amphitheater, for Rickie Lee Jones in 1991, near the end of the summer’s FLYING COWBOYS tour.
Third row. Most memorable was an exquisitely theatrical “Something Cool.” June Christy’s signature tune. The sad song of Blanche DuBois.
Days later, a similar score in San Diego. And then, the tour closer, in Santa Barbara — where I danced in the grass before the stage with the Celestial herself during “Ghetto of My Mind.”
Earlier on, closer to home, I once got into Madison Square Garden for Springsteen without a ticket of any sort, by paying a brazen snappy fellow, reminiscent of Michael Parks in Then Came Bronson, whom I — and four others — simply followed past an elderly black ticket-taker, a distinguished looking gent with grizzled lambchops, who granted entry to each Vandal with a sober nod, summing, I imagine, his piece of the action.
Dem was the daze.
But dose days are gone.
This past Sunday, this veteran of Gotham — and a visiting friend, under his aegis — walking south for John Hammond and The Blind Boys of Alabama at City Winery in the Village, were taken for fools and parted from their money by a pair of slicky boys hocking bogus Van Morrison tickets on 33rd and Seventh.
Marx warned us about technology. Advances in home printing have brought us to the pass where none but a box-office expert may now distinguish false ducats and the real thing.
But surely, you wonder, would even the most credulous of chowderheads not have balked at the $300 face?
Well … That’s what the high-ends were going for at the Box. Van is cashing in his chips with this Astral Weeks extravaganza. And this wasn’t the Garden’s basketball arena, but the former Felt Forum, a sideshow theater with about seventeen hundred seats.
Even so, you may wonder if something less than a perfect putz might have at least nosed a whiff of suspicion when the sellers agreed to $80 per.
Well … The thought was that showtime was ten minutes off and the boys were happy, at that point, to dump at any price, eighty bucks being better than zero by multiples indeterminate.
Imagine my humiliation …
An insult all the more peccant and piquant when perceived piling on my unemployed back.
With a friend on my arm.
Under my aegis.
Her first time in New York for anything more than business affairs.
Oh it burns. It burns. The city’s red face, and my red ass.
The fish rots from the head. Bear Stearns and Lehman. AIG and Goldman Sachs. Bernie Madoff and …
And now one can’t trust the local scalpers.
I imagine, indeed, they no longer exist — the honest brokers, I mean. For the falsifiers have burst the bonds of trust and surely none but a ditzy dunderheaded diptstick would dare, henceforth, to buy tickets off the street.
Dem daze indeed are done.
Whither hence, my friends?
Theyre selling postcards of the hanging
Theyre painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
Theyve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad theyre restless
They need somewhere to go
As lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row …
A map of jobs lost and gained.
A political pattern?
And here’s a map of foreclosure rates.
The two maps don’t synch as much as one might think. The wave of unemployment foreclosures, if coming, is not yet reflected in the one.
Watching:
– the news since June re big banks buying Treasuries with their governmental loans and new capital — instead of lending into the economy, and
– now (this week and next) the quarterly results of the big financials,
it became clear that Bill Seidman’s Zombie diagnosis of the winter was correct.
And today (!) we find Alan Greenspan reiterating the prognosis.
1. WEEK THAT WAS
As surmised last Sunday, it was a bad week for the greenback and good for gold and other precious commodities.
Gold rocketed to a new high circa $1,060 and settled on Friday about $1,045.
The dollar dived then bounced a bit. Still roughly $1.47 to the euro.
Many commentators sense the Europeans won’t let the euro climb much more any time soon.
If so, we may be approaching the end of the dollar’s slide for this cycle, and that would likely temper gold’s ardor and, to a degree, that of the stock markets.
Ie, the dollar turning up against other major currencies would almost surely hurt gold a bit, and would pressure the stock of corporations that sell alot of stuff overseas, and to a degree US stocks in general (as dollar-denominated assets) as a mere matter of exchange.
But where precisely the turn shall be … What do you think?
Thats the DXY index for the past 18 months or so, measuring the dollar against six other currencies.
Does it look like it’s done going down? That 72 level still seems to beckon. But perhaps not now …
( The DXY is weighted this way: Euro 57.6%, Yen 13.6, Brit Pound 11.9, Canadian Loonie 9.1, Swedish Krona 4.2 and Swiss Franc 3.6. )
2. LIKE I CARE
Maybe us Net Debtors shouldn’t care — indeed, should applaud the dollar’s drowse.
Then again, here’s an excellent piece from Bloomberg on the quiz:
“The Washington theory is that dollar weakness will benefit the U.S. by inflating our way out of debt and causing more exports,” Encima’s Malpass said in a Sept. 25 note to clients. “The problem with this theory is that it assumes capital stays put while the dollar devalues.”
There’s the rub.
When capital begins to flee … You have Argentina, 2001: Not only do Asian bankers stop investing, but eventually the domestic rich move their money to Switzerland (or Uruguay), leaving the domestic banks to get run on and close.
Those not footloose enough to flee get f#%*$d. Lose (access to) their money. Default on their mortgages — and then the banks (perhaps yet shuttered) take the real estate.
The editor of a Buenos Aires daily walked me through this in 2006, in painful detail. Citibank, he said, owned a good deal of Buenos Aires at that point, having foreclosed en masse on the middle class during the bank closures of 2001-02.
It can certainly happen here. The FDIC was about broke a few weeks ago. And after dishing out hundreds of billions to the big banks last year, nobody in D.C. seemed able to come up with the $10 billion the FDIC held out its hat for. Geithner should never have been hired.
If it were to happen here, our plastic Rugged Individualist society would … Well.
Indeed, something’s happening here (same article says) already in the New American Century:
The dollar’s 15 percent decline against the euro and 11 percent depreciation versus the yen since early March are increasing concern among world leaders. At the same time, Americans are getting poorer.
Per capita net wealth tumbled to $172,749 in August from a peak of $212,599 in September 2007, government figures show.
A United Nations Human Development Report released Oct. 5 showed America’s quality of life dropped to No. 13 in a 2007 global ranking from No. 5 in 2000.
The last refers to the UN Human Development agency’s global 2009 report, which contains its annual Human Development Index:
1. Norway 0.971 No change
2. Australia 0.970 No change
3. Iceland 0.969 No change
4. Canada 0.966 No change
5. Ireland 0.965 No change
6. Netherlands 0.964 Up 1
7. Sweden 0.963 Down 1
8. France 0.961 Up 33
9. Switzerland 0.960 No change
tie Japan 0.960 No change
tie Luxembourg 0.960 Down 3
12. Finland 0.959 Up 1
13. United States 0.956 Down 1
14. Austria 0.955
15. Spain 0.955
16. Denmark 0.955
17. Belgium 0.953
18. Italy 0.951
19. Liechtenstein 0.951
20. New Zealand 0.950
21. United Kingdom 0.947
22. Germany 0.947
23. Singapore 0.944
24. Hong Kong 0.944
25. Greece 0.942
26. South Korea 0.937
27. Israel 0.935
28. Andorra 0.934
29. Slovenia 0.929
30. Brunei 0.920
31. Kuwait 0.916
32. Cyprus 0.914
33. Qatar 0.910
34. Portugal 0.909
35. United Arab Emirates 0.903
36. Czech Republic 0.903
37. Barbados 0.903
38. Malta 0.902
