Friday videos: Cannibal Corpse, but with a twist

As you can probably figger, I've just come across this Andy Rehfeldt guy and think his videos are fucking hilarious:

Whoops, gold and silver suck again

Haven't been watching it for a while, so I was surprised this morning to see that gold has really dropped conclusively below $1300.

Two quick charts:

Silver weekly looks like death. If it doesn't turn around in the next week then this multi-year pennant resolves on the downside with pain. Eric Sprott will probably blow his brains out.

Gold looks slightly less horrible on the weeklies.

New Deal Demoncrat on retail sales and industrial production

New Deal Demoncrat - industrial production and real retail sales.

Everything looks fine, but with the trade actions recently taken I'm going to say the more important place to look for the next few months will be inventories and industrial capital investment.

Though, then again, oligarchic late capitalism actually has a fuck of a lot of wiggle room in pricing, and I remain agnostic as to whether 25% tariffs across the board are really going to show up in prices anywhere.

Working til you're 100? Yeah, about that....

BBC - what if we all have to work til we're 100? Yeah, about that:

There’s a sizeable gap between the amount that most people are saving towards their retirement, and the amount that they’re likely to need. It’s growing every day. According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum (WEF), people living in some of the world’s largest economies – the US, UK, Japan, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, China and India – collectively face an eye-watering $428 trillion savings hole by 2050.

So the World Economic Forum, besides being the organizers of the Dav(r)os event, must also be a group of fucking morons.

The reason I say this is that the supposed $428T shortfall is close to the total wealth of the planet. All publicly-traded world equities total $100T, private business is maybe another $100T, there's maybe $100T in bonds, gold is a pittance, and world real estate is about $250T - all figures plus-or-minus a huge margin of error.

Savings has to be invested in something that pays a return. So, if all the rich countries' old people suddenly had an extra $428T to cover their lifetime savings shortfall, that $428T would have to be invested in debt, equity, and real estate: things that pay a return.

But there would be no extra investment in production, because that extra $428T in savings would not cause any change to consumption demand.

So, that $428T would be invested in existing businesses, equities, and bonds, which would mean a UST10Y yield of maybe 1.5% and a US market forward P/E of over 30.

Neither of which can happen sustainably.

In any case, since it's Davros suggesting this number, it probably assumes that all old people in rich countries want to spend $100,000 a year on fucking caviar and fine wines, instead of complaining about how you can't any longer buy buttwipe for under $4 a pack.

Friday videos: Rammstein, but with a twist

I prefer this version of Du Hasst:

Friday videos: Metallica, but with a twist

I prefer this version of Enter Sandman:

As an aside

By the way, the No Fucking Sense Whatsoever award goes to WSBK in Boston, who this weekend decided to shit all over a comedy movie (Spinal Tap) with a bunch of commercials about kids dying of cancer.

Heh heh heh, FART

Reuters - Trump orders drafting of the FART act. When you elect stupid, you get newsworthy events such as this:

U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the drafting of legislation that would mean abandoning key disciplines agreed at the World Trade Organization, Axios news website reported late on Sunday, to a skeptical response from trade experts.

Wait for it....

Axios reported on Friday that Trump wanted to leave the WTO, a story dismissed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as “wrong” and “an exaggeration”.

Wait for it...

The website followed up on Sunday by publishing what it said was a draft bill, the “United States Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act”, immediately drawing ridicule for legislation that would be known by its acronym, the FART Act.

THERE you go.

Friday videos: Bill Drummond being a nutter

No music this week... instead, Tony Wilson interviews Bill Drummond and his silly moustache on the release on the KLF's "The Manual":



And Bill proves that Alan McGee wasn't even remotely the biggest nutter from Glasgow in the 90s.

Paul Hickey from Bespoke and his opinion on the market

CNBC - interview with Paul Hickey. Bespoke is the smartest market analysis organization out there, and I'm always tempted to renew my subscription so that I can get their opinions day-to-day. Here, Paul Hickey says that their analytics suggest a lot of the past few days' moves are just end of quarter rotation.

I disagree based on my view of the charts in the previous post, but hearing that Bespoke is on the other side always makes me doubt myself.

THE CHARTS YOU NEED TO SEE TO STAY ALIVE

My old "rule of threes" had me out of the market this week. Good thing:

The third peak happened in mid-June, and my totally silly-sounding "rule of threes" said that after the third peak, you're not going to get a third simple breakdown to the lower Bollinger, but rather a longer fall. Because the market never does the same thing three times.

So now, SPY wants to break its SMA(50).

QQQ:

QQQ had previously sailed up to a new all-time high. Now, however, it's negated the positivity of that move. At best we get a long protracted retest of the all-time breakout. The hold of the SMA(50) makes me feel positive right now.

$VIX:

$VIX was popping for the past few days, but that could simply have been due to end-of-month fund repositioning. And in any case, today's $VIX doesn't make the same noises as last year's $VIX because of the destruction of the XIV ETF. So you have to look at the index charts to see whether the $VIX move really means something.

And emerging markets look positively terrible right now. The acceleration of the decline after the fail at the weekly SMA(50), to below -2 SD, makes a further 20-30% drop look suspiciously likely right now.

You could interpret all this as just the markets accepting the reality of a new American mercantilist trade policy.

What's scarier is if you instead interpret all this as the final rolling-over of US equities before a crash, recession, and eventual cyclical (at least) bear market.

The stupidity of Canadian marijuana legalization

CBC - Canadian government is looking to price legal marijuana at... wait, what?

$10 a gram?

I thought the whole point of legalizing pot was to put the illegal drug dealers out of business.

But, as it turns out, the Canadian government wants to price legal marijuana at a price above the illegal street price.

Meanwhile:

Macleans - Ontario's pot strategy includes shutting existing dispensaries. They have hundreds of existing businesses who could sell legal pot in the province, but instead they're trying to drive them all underground.

This, along with the stupid rule that nobody can grow more than four plants, means that

1) the illegal drug trade will continue to make huge profits, and

2) people growing pot on their own will continue to be targets of violent home invasions.

It's hard to figure out what the idiot government is actually intending to do here.

Evangelicals get funnier all the time

This story says everything you need to know about American evangelical Christians:

Reuters - evangelicals back pimp for Nevada legislature. No, seriously, he runs brothels in Nevada, and the evangelical Christians love him and want to help elect him.