Yesterday was a very peculiar day that just didn't add up. With speculators waiting breathlessly for word of QE3, bulls and bears did...nothing when there were no new measures announced to "stimulate growth." Perhaps because this has been such a memorably asphyxiating, screw-the-pooch kind of summer, the trade-desk whack-offs and algo-maniacs were just too tired to react to the non-news. But it's hard to imagine that, come Thursday, the usual bunch of Wall Street clowns will find something bullish in Wednesday's news. A delayed-reaction plunge, perhaps? We shall see. [Rick's Picks' Hidden Pivot Webinar is going on right now. Click here if you don't want to miss the next in September.]
Thursday, August 2, 2012
CZ12 – December Corn (Last:801^0)
– Posted in: Current Touts Free Rick's PicksA chat-roomer with some farming experience thinks there's news yet to come about the corn harvest that will push prices even higher. In any event, we should use the 860^2 target of the pattern shown as a minimum upside objective for the near term. Although buyers had little trouble pushing this vehicle through its 802^7 sibling midpoint resistance, yesterday's relapse back down through it suggests bulls may be tiring. You can learn how to do this stuff yourself — and more easily than you might imagine. Click here for a free trial subscription.
Rebirth of Local Newspapers Crucial to U.S. Future
– Posted in: Commentary for the Week of March 8 FreeHow did Stockton, California get mired so deeply in muck, stuck with paying an estimated $417 million over the next 30 years to provide free lifetime healthcare to its pampered workers? The short answer is that voters were too busy to care about such things. Indeed, if they’d attended city council meetings or kept up with the minutes from those meetings, they’d have realized a decade ago that the city was on a path to financial disaster. Instead, irresponsible and too lazy to be bothered, they paid little attention to how their tax dollars were allocated by a city government that turns out to have been either grossly incompetent, recklessly negligent or a combination of both. Now Stockton and its workers are in a full-tilt battle over whether the latter will ultimately receive all of the absurdly generous retirement benefits they were promised. It needn’t have ended so badly for Stockton, which, with a population of 292,000 ranks as California’s thirteenth largest city. All it would have taken to avert the downward spiral that's coming is the diligent attention of one or two civic-minded gadflies and a local newspaper that cared. In bygone days, the alliance between them has proven highly effective in rooting out fiscal excesses and raising the awareness level and constructive ire of taxpayers. These days, unfortunately, the local gadfly has all but disappeared from civic life. After all, who has time to attend city council meetings any more, or to ride herd on local decision-makers? Like most of us, erstwhile gadflies are too busy trying to make ends meet to have the time or energy for haggling with local pols over line-items in the budget. As for the newspapers, they are fighting for their lives, too strapped for cash to cover local government diligently -- but
