I didn't have time to watch the first US presidential debate in real time but I got a chance to do so just now and wanted to make the common sense comments that so few online are making. The ridiculous emotionalism surrounding the presidential elections simply blinds people to the basic facts. As I see them they are:
- Donald Trump is likely the worst presidential orator in history, even besting Bush 2 in this regard. It is painful to hear him stumble through his thoughts aloud. He talks in circles and uses circular arguments. His big convincing blow (his Trump card if you will) in any debate is "just ask (someone you don't know and could never ask anything of), he'll tell you". Trump is an opportunist and a con man who hides behind corrupt laws in order to tilt the scales in his favor. Trump's art of making a deal is the good old fashioned win lose-deal of the elite. People mean nothing to him. His repetition and yelling and other dictatorial behaviors annoy the living crap out of me. The only positive thing you can say about him is that he is a crappy liar. He is very poor at disguising his many faults. This is one of his few positives but it is an important one.
- Hillary Trump is a snake and has mastered the fine elitist arts of deceit and sophistry. Her arguments in the debate were far better presented than anything Trump said but any person above 100 IQ can see that its all half truths, lies and omissions. Hillary is living, breathing definition of the word duplicitous. Whereas Trump's voice gives me a headache, Clinton's smarmy voice makes me feel nauseous. Whereas Trump will attack the people with his brand of a frontal assault, Hillary Clinton will steal into your children's rooms at night and smother them quietly in their beds. Figuratively speaking of course; Hillary is too weak to strangle anyone herself. But if you cross her then one of her paid thugs will be calling on you soon. Clinton actually thinks she owns people. She is as much a dictator wannabe as Trump is but she sells it softer. Clinton cannot be trusted in any form or fashion. Whereas Trump is a slick con man businessman, Clinton has never worked an honest day in her life. She is a parasite of the worst kind and of the highest order.
Overall, I cannot recall a time when the two most likely options for president were both this bad. Neither of them are conservative. So it comes down to who will do the least amount of damage. It is a tough call to choose between them because the damage inflicted by either of them will be similar in magnitude but different in focus. But for me Trump is the lesser of two evils simply because it will be easier to see him coming whereas Hillary will gut us by degree, quietly and without debate. The socialism that Obama has pushed forward would go into high gear under queen Hillary. I believe that the odds of being pushed too far are higher under her dictatorship than under Trump's.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
First DeutscheBank and now Commerzbank...
The German banking system is likely ready to collapse. It started with Deutsche Bank which is now apparently in need of a government bail out and now we are hearing about "stress" at Commerzbank.
But wait a minute. I thought everything was fixed. I thought that central banks got together and threw in the kitchen sink and huffed and puffed and by the will of their sweaty bureaucratic ball sacks FIXED all of the problems. So what happened? Why are these German banks rolling over? I thought Germany was the powerhouse of the EU!!??? WHAT THE F--- IS GOING ON?
That is what people should be thinking to themselves. WTF is going on and where do we go from here? Well, I haven't changed my story one bit since I began this blog back in early 2010. Not one little bit. I know what's going on and why. This understanding has allowed me to author many very prescient predictions over the years. Many of them have come true including EU breakup. Others are now about to blossom. For example, when Germany and France were calling pretty much everyone else in the EU "PIIGS", explained how it was REALLY the net exporters who were the pigs:
The whole thing is a debt Ponzi and the EU is just part of it. ALL countries which primarily use fake money, AKA fiat currency, are in the same boat. All will receive the same reward eventually, that of a global collapse the likes of which has never been seen before.
The US is now the central bank of the world. The US fed cannot raise rates because if they do the dollar will become too strong and US exports will suffer. This is exacerbated by the fact that people in the EU are losing confidence in the issuing authority of the Euro. Why do you think the UK bailed out of the EU? Simply because they are less marginal than the other EU players. The people of the UK simply lost faith in the faith based system. The full effects of Brexit have not been felt yet but they are coming. The UK has gotten out early and they never gave up the GBP in the first place so they were never really full members. These things taken together mean that the UK will fare better than the rest of the EU.
At some point all the people in all countries will realize that fake paper money is at the heart of nearly every problem on the planet and they will revolt against it. We will know this is happening because US treasury rates will spike WITHOUT PERMISSION from the fed. The fed might again play the role of fast follower in this game, raising the fed funds rate as they see the market raising the rate of the 10 year treasury but the fed will not lead the effort else the fed will be blamed for collapsing the global economy AND THEY KNOW IT. They also know that if too many people end up homeless and starving with nothing left to lose then someone is going to get dragged into the streets and killed in a very unpleasant way. I'm quite serious about this because there is so much precedent in history: when Mark and Patsy eventually wake up to the fact that they were conned, the con man better beat a hasty retreat or face street justice.
When interest rates begin to rise they will not be rising because demand for loans is increasing which is the usual reason for rising rates. It will be different this time; they will rise because holders of US debt will become concerned about repayment. When interest rates next begin to rise, and they will begin to rise at some point, it will be because the players in the system will lose confidence in the issuing authority. The fed will have lost control of the bond market. So look for a rise in interest rates to know when the time grows close.
Additionally, people hoard something when they think it has value and they want to have some security. But if what they are hoarding is a paper asset and they lose confidence in the issuing authority, they dump the paper in exchange for hard assets as fast as they can. The chart below is essentially a chart of how paper assets are being hoarded, probably by retirees. That 5th wave is long in the tooth. This aggressive slope cannot continue for very much longer or the Velocity of Money will approach zero. What cannot continue will not in fact continue. When that 5th wave bottoms and then turns up it will likely announce the arrival of massive if not hyperinflation in the US and in all other countries of the world. What once was hoarded will be tossed into the street. Fake paper money will at some point return to its intrinsic value of zero.
It will not be easy and it will not be fun. Whenever there is fear and anger in the herd there is loss of life and probably great wars will attend it. Nobody knows the day and the hour with certainty but banks are the energy source of a debt Ponzi and if banks go down, the entire system will not be far behind.
I continue to watch velocity of M2 as a primary indicator that the US is finally near economic collapse.
But wait a minute. I thought everything was fixed. I thought that central banks got together and threw in the kitchen sink and huffed and puffed and by the will of their sweaty bureaucratic ball sacks FIXED all of the problems. So what happened? Why are these German banks rolling over? I thought Germany was the powerhouse of the EU!!??? WHAT THE F--- IS GOING ON?
That is what people should be thinking to themselves. WTF is going on and where do we go from here? Well, I haven't changed my story one bit since I began this blog back in early 2010. Not one little bit. I know what's going on and why. This understanding has allowed me to author many very prescient predictions over the years. Many of them have come true including EU breakup. Others are now about to blossom. For example, when Germany and France were calling pretty much everyone else in the EU "PIIGS", explained how it was REALLY the net exporters who were the pigs:
- THEY started the EU in order to create fake credit worthy customers for them to sell to. Without the Euro, Germany and France manufacturers would have pulled back their horns. But once the Euro was in place, all the small countries with long histories of inflating away their trade debt suddenly became AAA credit members with the ability to borrow to the moon. And with all this new debt based purchasing ability, Germany and France had new and spendy customers. Thus the REAL pigs of the EU, namely Germany and France, were themselves allowed to borrow to the moon in order to meet this fake, debt driven demand. They built factories and created productive capacity that far outstripped the REAL purchasing power of their customers and they did it all on debt.
The whole thing is a debt Ponzi and the EU is just part of it. ALL countries which primarily use fake money, AKA fiat currency, are in the same boat. All will receive the same reward eventually, that of a global collapse the likes of which has never been seen before.
The US is now the central bank of the world. The US fed cannot raise rates because if they do the dollar will become too strong and US exports will suffer. This is exacerbated by the fact that people in the EU are losing confidence in the issuing authority of the Euro. Why do you think the UK bailed out of the EU? Simply because they are less marginal than the other EU players. The people of the UK simply lost faith in the faith based system. The full effects of Brexit have not been felt yet but they are coming. The UK has gotten out early and they never gave up the GBP in the first place so they were never really full members. These things taken together mean that the UK will fare better than the rest of the EU.
At some point all the people in all countries will realize that fake paper money is at the heart of nearly every problem on the planet and they will revolt against it. We will know this is happening because US treasury rates will spike WITHOUT PERMISSION from the fed. The fed might again play the role of fast follower in this game, raising the fed funds rate as they see the market raising the rate of the 10 year treasury but the fed will not lead the effort else the fed will be blamed for collapsing the global economy AND THEY KNOW IT. They also know that if too many people end up homeless and starving with nothing left to lose then someone is going to get dragged into the streets and killed in a very unpleasant way. I'm quite serious about this because there is so much precedent in history: when Mark and Patsy eventually wake up to the fact that they were conned, the con man better beat a hasty retreat or face street justice.
When interest rates begin to rise they will not be rising because demand for loans is increasing which is the usual reason for rising rates. It will be different this time; they will rise because holders of US debt will become concerned about repayment. When interest rates next begin to rise, and they will begin to rise at some point, it will be because the players in the system will lose confidence in the issuing authority. The fed will have lost control of the bond market. So look for a rise in interest rates to know when the time grows close.
Additionally, people hoard something when they think it has value and they want to have some security. But if what they are hoarding is a paper asset and they lose confidence in the issuing authority, they dump the paper in exchange for hard assets as fast as they can. The chart below is essentially a chart of how paper assets are being hoarded, probably by retirees. That 5th wave is long in the tooth. This aggressive slope cannot continue for very much longer or the Velocity of Money will approach zero. What cannot continue will not in fact continue. When that 5th wave bottoms and then turns up it will likely announce the arrival of massive if not hyperinflation in the US and in all other countries of the world. What once was hoarded will be tossed into the street. Fake paper money will at some point return to its intrinsic value of zero.
It will not be easy and it will not be fun. Whenever there is fear and anger in the herd there is loss of life and probably great wars will attend it. Nobody knows the day and the hour with certainty but banks are the energy source of a debt Ponzi and if banks go down, the entire system will not be far behind.
I continue to watch velocity of M2 as a primary indicator that the US is finally near economic collapse.
Forbes article heralds the bottom for solar stocks. [FSLR]
I'm on record as having put in a call for a likely bottom for Sunpower in this post. My alternate model allows for one more small wave down but the primary model says the bottom is already in. Now that I've made that call based on chart data alone I am going back and looking at recent articles on the sector.
This Aug 12 2016 article by a Forbes contributor states, "...what’s left of the solar universe is showing severe signs of stress, and given the tricky accounting and the prevalence of China-based companies among the panelmakers, that stress may very well be understated. So, if you...don’t want to lose money, don’t invest in what’s left of the solar stock universe.".
OK well there you have it. Another high powered pundit spouting off from his main stream media podium predicting endless pain for the entire solar panel industry. He has declared the entire sector uninvestable simply because he makes the all too human mistake of thinking that true value will at some point become free and also in believing that current trends will continue unabated in perpetuity. After all, it has been such a crappy past few years for solar, let's all just throw in the towel, right?
Well yes, that is exactly what people who do not know about Elliott waves do all the time. It is the norm rather than the outlier case. We as a species do that because we travel in herds. Well, most of us do. I make it my business not to. That is why I was laughing at the moron who called gold a pet rock right near the bottom and I declared at the time that he was going to be sorry he posted that because such a wildly emotional belief by the herd is the hallmark of tops and bottoms.
I know people are forgetful and in fact the market counts on it. That's because the history of a stock oftentimes predicts its future. Yeah, I know it sounds like a cute catch phrase but then if there is no actionable truth to it, how the the Hell did I nail the bottom on DRD in this post so well? Here is the model chart from that Nov 22, 2015 post:
In fact I wrote, "Because of the foolish notion that gold is a pet rock, they hated DRD at $1.10 and they aren't showing much love at $1.56 (today's price) either. I want to be on record as saying that they are going to love it at $8 (minimum price target) within 24 months.".
So let me recap what I did there folks just in case you haven't grasped the enormity of it. And I don't do this to brag! After all, I did not invent Elliott waves. I simply became an expert at using the tool given to us by Ralph N. Elliott back in the early 1930s. But if you think about how remote the odds must have seemed to everyone reading my post back then and then you compare to what actually happened, you have to conclude that this "Captain" fellow is on to something real and something big. After all, the stock had just bottomed at $1.10. It looked to everyone EXCEPT ME that it was just going to evaporate. Nobody in their right mind except an Elliottician would conclude that this pissant stock would become an 8 bagger off the bottom. But as you can see from the chart below, that is exactly what happened. It peaked at $9 and change. As it was peaking I was warning my paid blog to step away because the 2nd wave would cut deeply given the rapid move up.
Furthermore, if you review the DRD post link carefully you will see that at the time of that red arrow in the chart above, I offered the short term outlook shown in the chart below. The primary (red) model expected a move back down to $1.20 before launch. Blue is the alternate model given that all things in this universe are based on odds and not absolutes. As you can see from above, the red model was followed almost exactly as the shares fell from $1.84 down to $1.34 before reversing up wildly.
I don't care what high powered Wall St. outfit says that solar is dead. That is like saying clean energy is dead. I bet that the doofus who wrote that article doesn't even have any solar. But I do! As reported in these pages several times, I have 15.3 kW on my roof, all working perfectly for a couple years now with zero noise and zero maintenance. Here is the view from Google Earth:
Below is my dashboard. Today was a nicely sunny day and I generated 75.1 kWh with a peak production of 12 kW. Note: while the system is rated at 15.3kW you will never get more than 85-90% of the rated DC output of the panels on the AC side which is what is being measured here. That's because inverters are not 100% efficient, angle to the sun is not ideal, etc. Also, the panels degrade ~10% in the first year but then hold their output for 25 years. So, abarring accidents, 12-13 peak kW is about what this "15.3 kW" system will output for the rest of my life.
The bottom line is that I know the true benefits of grid tie solar and if you plan to stay in your home for a long time it is well worth the investment (providing you are not gullible when dealing with the installer of course. Otherwise it can be very costly).
So did the solar industry get ahead of itself? Well sure it did. Of course it did. Government got involved and distorted the short term economics of it. This is why there is so much volatility AND NO OTHER REASON. Everything in the economy that the government touches be it solar or health care will see ripples as a rock entering an otherwise serene pond. The rock does nothing but cause waves and disrupt everything around it. But the government arm gets tired of throwing rocks and the pond settles out eventually. Solar is about to settle out simply because government assholes have given up trying to be do gooders (for which service using our money they can extract a fat living for doing nothing beneficial). But the Elliott wave count was not and is not fooled by this.
If you want to get daily insights about market moves before the market even knows it is going to going in that direction, click the subscribe button at the top of this page and join the team.
This Aug 12 2016 article by a Forbes contributor states, "...what’s left of the solar universe is showing severe signs of stress, and given the tricky accounting and the prevalence of China-based companies among the panelmakers, that stress may very well be understated. So, if you...don’t want to lose money, don’t invest in what’s left of the solar stock universe.".
OK well there you have it. Another high powered pundit spouting off from his main stream media podium predicting endless pain for the entire solar panel industry. He has declared the entire sector uninvestable simply because he makes the all too human mistake of thinking that true value will at some point become free and also in believing that current trends will continue unabated in perpetuity. After all, it has been such a crappy past few years for solar, let's all just throw in the towel, right?
Well yes, that is exactly what people who do not know about Elliott waves do all the time. It is the norm rather than the outlier case. We as a species do that because we travel in herds. Well, most of us do. I make it my business not to. That is why I was laughing at the moron who called gold a pet rock right near the bottom and I declared at the time that he was going to be sorry he posted that because such a wildly emotional belief by the herd is the hallmark of tops and bottoms.I know people are forgetful and in fact the market counts on it. That's because the history of a stock oftentimes predicts its future. Yeah, I know it sounds like a cute catch phrase but then if there is no actionable truth to it, how the the Hell did I nail the bottom on DRD in this post so well? Here is the model chart from that Nov 22, 2015 post:
In fact I wrote, "Because of the foolish notion that gold is a pet rock, they hated DRD at $1.10 and they aren't showing much love at $1.56 (today's price) either. I want to be on record as saying that they are going to love it at $8 (minimum price target) within 24 months.".
So let me recap what I did there folks just in case you haven't grasped the enormity of it. And I don't do this to brag! After all, I did not invent Elliott waves. I simply became an expert at using the tool given to us by Ralph N. Elliott back in the early 1930s. But if you think about how remote the odds must have seemed to everyone reading my post back then and then you compare to what actually happened, you have to conclude that this "Captain" fellow is on to something real and something big. After all, the stock had just bottomed at $1.10. It looked to everyone EXCEPT ME that it was just going to evaporate. Nobody in their right mind except an Elliottician would conclude that this pissant stock would become an 8 bagger off the bottom. But as you can see from the chart below, that is exactly what happened. It peaked at $9 and change. As it was peaking I was warning my paid blog to step away because the 2nd wave would cut deeply given the rapid move up.
Furthermore, if you review the DRD post link carefully you will see that at the time of that red arrow in the chart above, I offered the short term outlook shown in the chart below. The primary (red) model expected a move back down to $1.20 before launch. Blue is the alternate model given that all things in this universe are based on odds and not absolutes. As you can see from above, the red model was followed almost exactly as the shares fell from $1.84 down to $1.34 before reversing up wildly.
I don't care what high powered Wall St. outfit says that solar is dead. That is like saying clean energy is dead. I bet that the doofus who wrote that article doesn't even have any solar. But I do! As reported in these pages several times, I have 15.3 kW on my roof, all working perfectly for a couple years now with zero noise and zero maintenance. Here is the view from Google Earth:
Below is my dashboard. Today was a nicely sunny day and I generated 75.1 kWh with a peak production of 12 kW. Note: while the system is rated at 15.3kW you will never get more than 85-90% of the rated DC output of the panels on the AC side which is what is being measured here. That's because inverters are not 100% efficient, angle to the sun is not ideal, etc. Also, the panels degrade ~10% in the first year but then hold their output for 25 years. So, abarring accidents, 12-13 peak kW is about what this "15.3 kW" system will output for the rest of my life.
The bottom line is that I know the true benefits of grid tie solar and if you plan to stay in your home for a long time it is well worth the investment (providing you are not gullible when dealing with the installer of course. Otherwise it can be very costly).
So did the solar industry get ahead of itself? Well sure it did. Of course it did. Government got involved and distorted the short term economics of it. This is why there is so much volatility AND NO OTHER REASON. Everything in the economy that the government touches be it solar or health care will see ripples as a rock entering an otherwise serene pond. The rock does nothing but cause waves and disrupt everything around it. But the government arm gets tired of throwing rocks and the pond settles out eventually. Solar is about to settle out simply because government assholes have given up trying to be do gooders (for which service using our money they can extract a fat living for doing nothing beneficial). But the Elliott wave count was not and is not fooled by this.
If you want to get daily insights about market moves before the market even knows it is going to going in that direction, click the subscribe button at the top of this page and join the team.
