Monday, May 20, 2013

KYGT - Idaho Springs, CO - Clear Creek Radio - With Mark Kline Rick owns Ricks Picks at rickackerman.com. A well-healed trader and writer for publications such as Barons, The Antiquarian Bookman, Fleet Street Letter, Utne Reader and The Sunday San Francisco Examiner, Rick has been around a lot of years and is regarded as a renegade. Heavily sought after on the Free Press Youtube sites, Rick contributes his experiences and projections to my quest for knowledge on the true state of America and, indeed, the world. Click to hear the audio interview.

Gold's despairing price action Sunday night has put into play a target that exceeds an earlier, worst-case estimate of a possible bear-market low.  Even under the best scenario, bulls are unlikely to find good traction above 1352.90.  For a graphic look, check out the chart accompanying today's tout for June Gold

As the new week begins, Comex Gold is taking its wonted Sunday night pounding, down as much as $28 at the so-far lows.  That put the futures within $15 of a test of mid-April's sodden lows -- a test that we'd said here earlier was all but assured.  I'd identified bear-market targets at 1352.90, or possibly even 1218.60 if any lower, but it's time to mention another at 1190.40 that comes from a lesser pattern shown in the chart (see inset).  Bulls could take encouragement, however, from a rebound today that exceeds 1367.30, since that would create a bullish impulse leg on the hourly chart. It would be the first, faint bullish sign generated in nearly two weeks. _______ UPDATE (12:11 p.m. EDT): Looks like the lunatic fringe is pushing gold for a change.  The manic rally of the last hour is insignificant on the daily chart but bullishly impulsive on the hourly. To see what it's made of, we'll need to monitor the follow-through (C-D) leg that begins with A= 1349.30 at 10:00 a.m.   From a camouflage standpoint, an excellent buying opportunity was signaled at 1363.80 (11:57 a.m.). Check out the 3-minute chart if you want to see why.

[Breaking news:  I knew we would be richly entertained by Obamagate, but who could have imagined the slapstick would start so soon? In fact, we now know that the IRS and certain unnamed "White House aides" sat on the scandal for several weeks while they mulled ways to spin it.  In the meantime -- and this is where the Liar-in-Chief has really kicked off the show -- Obama maintains that he only found out about the IRS witch-hunt against Conservative groups when he read about it in the papers.  And this just in: The IRS-official-in-charge says she will plead the Fifth rather than testify before Congress. Is this spectacle going to be fun, or what! RA] With new revelations of scandal surfacing almost daily, there are apt comparisons to Watergate, of course. But say this for Richard Nixon: at his worst, the man’s political ambitions never went much beyond stealing an election and settling an old score with the press. The political career of Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been animated by an overweening vision that seeks nothing less than the further enlargement of Big Government so that even the most ardent disciples of the New Deal might someday stand in awe of His achievement. But would they? FDR at least had a Keynesian excuse for ramping up fiscal stimulus and expanding Washington’s reach, since the U.S. had been wallowing in depression for more than a decade.  We’ll concede that Obama was dealt a bad hand, economically speaking, but his response has made FDR look like a piker. For in fact, the gargantuan deficits he has piled up to push housing and share prices higher have put the U.S. on an inexorable path toward bankruptcy. Moreover, the suspicion grows that this has been his intention all along, since