Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Nanny state political correctness fine of $150k threatens business of religious baker.

You never know what events will occur around the time of the great turning.  These events don't cause the turning; the turning is already happening.  But people like to associate landmark events with the pendulum swings because, of course, correlation always implies causality in the eyes of the herd (whether or not is is in fact true...).

Bad things happen to people at every political extreme.  Most times you just don't hear about them.  How many people really know just how corrupt and evil the local police forces of the USA have become?  Very few.  In their minds, whoever gets beaten or killed must have deserved it somehow.  And then it happens to their wife, their child, their brother, their friend or even a helpless stranger.  At some point they wake up and realize it has become a structural problem with the police state; it becomes their preferred mode of operation.

Today's bad thing is not physical violence but bureaucratic terrorism against a small business owner.  Basically, a baker with religious convictions decided not to serve a gay couple in their request for her company to bake them a wedding cake.  The gays complained to the nanny state and the nanny state has now slapped the baker with a massive, bankruptcy-threatening fine of $150k for their lack of state-defined political correctness.  I don't know about you but if someone can force you to work for them against your will then that is a form of slavery.  Small business owners must have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.  Of course the woman did mishandle this. She should have told them she would do the cake but that it would be $38,473.67.  Then she could have sub-contracted the cake out to someone else for $8k, made a $30k donation to her church on behalf of the gays, and then taken a weekend getaway for $473.67 in order to compensate her for being forced to do business with people whose ideals she is in opposition to.

How is her refusal of service any different than "no shoes, no shirt, no service"?  Why are gays a protected class whereas bums get what they deserve?  Is boycotting a business for religious reasons also against the law or will people be fined by the government for not spending money where the government says they must?  Where does the insanity end?  This is bureaucratic violence against a good, God-fearing citizen.  And yes, it is a traumatic, psychologically damaging, financially catastrophic state action.  While such actions don't impress me much, people do kill themselves or go on rampages over less. 

It will be interesting to see if and how the herd comes to the assistance of this woman and her business.  It would be one thing to fund raise the $150k fine but that would only encourage the con men to do more of the same and it will never end.  A better solution would be to assemble an army of lawyers and sue the living shit out of anything and anyone that moves from the organization that created this ruling.  Attack the individuals, not the organization.  Make it personal so that nobody gets to hide behind a government shield. 

If that doesn't work then you fall back to the militia option.  After all, that's what the US government would do.  What's good for the goose and all that rot...  The saying that "War is diplomacy by other means" has been around for a long time and it is true.  Might makes right, everything else is just talk.  Whether it is legal might or the might of physical force, these are the only things that ultimately matter to the herd.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Steen Jakobsen: "our current model is a Ponzi scheme"...

Here is the link to Mish's article where Steen Jakobsen is quoted, the whole thing is worth a read but I especially liked the bottom line by Steen and it closely matches what I have been writing to friends and family about since late 2007 and since 2010 when I started this blog:

"The developed economies are growing old in demographic terms, but we’re still not wise enough to realize that our current model is a Ponzi scheme rushing toward its inevitable Minsky moment. No serious policymaker or central banker is talking about the truth told by simple maths and hoping that things turn out well. Hope is not good policy and it belongs in church, not in the real economy."

--Steen Jakobsen, chief economist of Saxo bank

  • It IS a Ponzi scheme; a debt Ponzi to be precise.  Ponzis are a form of pyramid scheme.  They do not level off.  They grow, peak, and then collapse.  Always.
  • It WILL collapse and with such suddenness that most people will be caught completely off guard.
  • It WAS planned, just like 911.  Conspiracies have do and will always exist at every level.  Only a sleepy sheeple will deny that it is human nature to form cliques, clubs and yes, secret societies in order to further their goals.  Only an ignorant fool has not reviewed the farewell speech that Ike gave in which he called out the military industrial complex as the real enemy should we fail to monitor them carefully (and we have not monitored them AT ALL).
  • There WILL be panic as supply chains break and shelves go empty.  
  • There WILL be riots and violence and despair and many who have not seen fit to protect themselves will be in grave danger during those times.
  • The threat of global war has never been higher than it will be when all of the world banks fail.  Again, it is no accident and all you have to do is read the Georgia Guidestones to see this.  The con men want us to kill each other off leaving only 500 million people that they can control and use for slave labor.  I'm not saying they will achieve it.  I'm saying that this is their written plan and it is literally etched in stone.  Don't laugh it off too easily, very strange things are beginning to happen around the world.  Things like this.

GDXJ update

Metals and miners have been taking a big hit for many quarters now and are terribly oversold.  The common wisdom count is shown in black.  It says that the miners are headed down in 5 waves, will then a-b-c their way back up in a retracement, and then will head back down 5 more waves to finish their bear.  But I observe that if GDXJ has a C that is equal to the A wave so far then it will be trading at nearly zero.  Perhaps it will happen but if it does, know that it will be the buying opportunity of your lifetime.

At this time I want to propose an alternate count which is that this is not a 1-2-3-4-5 count down but rather an a-b-c as shown in blue letters.  In this model, the C wave is shown in red numbers.  This says that the recent triangle was not just 4 of 1 like everyone is saying but perhaps 4 of C.  A hint that this is the right count should come very soon.

If the common wisdom count is right, this 5th wave down should be about as long as black 1.  That is shown in red.  BUT if my alternate count is right, red 5 should end up being about the same length as red 1.  That would be significantly shorter than the 5th wave ass beating implied by the length of black 1.

IF this is the end of a-b-c then the blue wave should result.  And so here is the part every smart gambler should understand: The only two valid models I see show the miners having a huge rally once this 5 wave is done regardless of whether it is 5 of A or 5 of C.  You will know that wave 5 is over in either case if the chart breaks back up above the top rail of the triangle.


 
So here is what I will be looking for.  If wave 5 is only going to be about the same length as wave 1, it should bottom per the blue model.  Otherwise it should go down a bit more, then back up (perhaps further than shown in red to test the lower rail from below before collapsing back down into 3 of 5 then 4 of 5 and finally 5 of 5.


 If TVIX has moved up significantly by the time I get a terminal count in metals and miners I will certainly move a chunk to JNUG.  Once JNUG bottoms it will begin a massive rally in percentage terms.  Think of it this way: the move from blue b to blue C was almost 400% move for JNUG.  If blue e above is e of 4 then after 5 waves more down the chart will put in a medium term bottom and then rally to at least the level of the prior 4th.  That will be a much larger distance than blue b to blue c and so the percentage gains in JNUG will likely be > 400% during that rally.

Deflation about to show up in the oil patch. Can you DIG it?

DIG is the ticker for proshares 2x bullish oil and gas ETF.  It has rallied from $18 all the way up to $90 since the fed began trying to offset deflation in 2009.   These shares have peaked IMO.  I think this is the case based on the chart of DUG which is the inverse of DIG.  The DUG ETF is 2x short oil and gas.

Below is the DUG chart which shows that oil and gas have had a big payday since 2009 (remember DUG is inverse...).  Keep in mind that this has been taking place while gold and silver have been crashing.  So anyone who thinks gold is a commodity, please justify how oil and gas go up while gold goes down.  I have a long standing prediction that says before this collapse is over, gold begins to be remonetized by the market.  In other words, just like Apple and Google are laughing while the FBI whines about their new encryption, gold and silver will be remonetized despite government attempts to distract people from the historical money roles of these metals.  I think at some point, gold and silver will again be recognized as the only real money in the world.  Everything else, as JP Morgan (the man) said, "is not".

In any case, I scanned through the chart and found a triangle followed by a falling wedge and have applied a wave count to the series based on these landmarks.  I suspect that oil and gas will double top and thus DUG will double bottom (inverted owl) as shown below.   This should be good for a bundle before the deflationary crash is over.

If this assessment flies in the face of conventional thinking (i.e. that oil and gas should go up during war time) then that is fine because another of my long standing predictions is that during the end days of the debt Ponzi, things that used to work year in, year out, begin to not work anymore and in fact many will have the opposite effects than expected.  That is because people have mistakenly attributed news to many markets for decades except the news which matters which is the ebb and flow of the money supply.  Nobody has experienced a credit collapse like the one facing the world today and so who can possibly have experience with how things will react to it?

In any case, I have not followed the oil patch for years, don't consider myself any kind of expert on it, don't have any idea what current events are going on there (besides Israel striking natural gas recently and the obvious Russia-Europe heating gas connection) and my model could be all wet.  I'm simply going by some simple indicators as mentioned above.  It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Market update.

If you look at the latest model provided in my previous TVIX update from this past Friday, it is clear that I expected some rapid movement to the upside very soon.  The conventional wisdom is that the broader markets (and therefore TVIX albeit reversed) have entered into a stutter step where the blue wave is nested inside the black wave as circled below.  In other words 1-2-1-2-3-4-5-3-4-5.  Perhaps this will turn out to actually be the case but I have questions about that mess within the circle.  Sure, blue 3 gapped up as you would expect from a 3rd of 3rd but blue 1 was longer that blue 3 was and that does not sit well with me.   Maybe for a 3rd of 1 but not likely for a 3rd of a 3rd...


















Now don't get me wrong.  TVIX strength is growing fast.  I'm just obsessing over the short term because that is what keeps the smart gambler 1 step ahead.  By "TVIX strength" I mean that the DJIA closed down only 42 points today, $COMPX was only down ~6 points and S+P was only down ~5 points.  This is nothing to write home about.  But TVIX was up over 10% at the close and that is a big move relative to those paltry losses on the major indices.  So I do believe that, very shortly, TVIX will just skyrocket and will be at $7 or more within 30 days.  But how we get there can be via several different paths and so I want to float one potential model that is not being mentioned anywhere.  In short: The Owl.

I think that it is possible that the real count for the DJIA is shown below and the main reason for this view is my proprietary indicator that rising wedges are Cs or 3s.  Couple that with the 3 wave move down to the 16950 level and you can see what I mean.   That would make a very nice 4th.  Then the 5th could be coming still and it could be a short stroke failed 5th as shown below leading to a Declining Double Top (DDT).   This would form the right "ear" of The Owl and set the markets up for a very rapid sell off with abundant fear.


This is not my primary count yet but it could turn into that if we see strength in the broader markets tomorrow AM.  Conversely, if we gap down in the morning then this will likely have been a false alarm but The Owl would shake as many people as possible and send TVIX back down pretty nicely.  That should be what the market wants to do and so it has to be watched carefully.

Either way is OK by me.  If they want to stop me out and give me another shot at buying even more TVIX at lower prices then I'm good with that.  DJIA above 17150= stop out on TVIX.  If they instead want to gap down hard tomorrow and then keep going then I'm good with that as well since I am holding overnight. 

I am currently more worried about TVIX doubling without me in the next 30 days than I am about it going lower than $2.50 again.  I'm pretty sure the bottom is in but TVIX could pull back pretty hard before whipsawing back upward.  The big move in TVIX today relative to the tiny sell off in the broader markets smells like fear.  Fear is good for TVIX longs.  Long live the healthy dose of fear!

This can't be a stock market bubble....

Today's Market Watch opinion piece insists that this can't be a stock bubble by pointing to all of the wrong indicators.  It points to a bunch of useless facts as the reason for this opinion:
  • Unemployment rate is only 6.1%
  • 2nd quarter GDP up 4.2%
  • "Valuations are fair"
  • "Fed tightening isn't a bad thing"
  • Expect "rainy days" but then the sunshine will return
All of this incredible insight is coming from one Jeff Reeves.  Now I don't want to overstep here but Jeff does not look old enough to really have the experience needed to give advice to millions.  Jeff, is that a pimple on your chin?



 While taking cheap shots at babyface Jeff might be fun, the real things that people should be asking themselves are:

- Where is any mention of record margin debt? 
            Conveniently ignored.

-Where is any mention of extreme positive sentiment? 
             None mentioned.

Where is any mention of global meltdown in progress with Spain and Greece both at 25% unemployment or more?
             Yawn.  The world doesn't matter.  The US is decoupled...

Where is the talk about endless wars and rising protectionism?
             Oh that's right, war is good for the economy.

Where is the mention of the Fed's massive balance sheet that bought up assets which nobody else wanted in order to keep the banking system solvent?

Where is the mention of record numbers of people living off of government assistance?

Where is the mention of 17.5 trillion in US debt (which is growing exponentially)?  Jeff, of course you are going to see things get better when debt is used to fuel consumption today but it is not sustainable.  It is just pulling future demand forward.  When the future comes we will have to cut back massively to live within our means just like everyone else.  When that happens the stock market will collapse because nobody will have any real money to buy stocks and no credit will be available for that purpose either after all of the massive defaults that will occur.


Articles like Jeff's are just what Socionomics expects to see near major tops.  The herd cannot see the cliff because the actors are all watching each other looking for signs and signals.  As a result, the lemmings all scurry happily over the edge, all playing follow the false leaders.  Yes the market is a bubble and yes it will crash massively. 
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