Commentary for the Week of March 8

When the euro staged a brief rally the other day, we professed to have been vexed. Why, we wondered, should there be any euro buyers at all at these levels – currently around $1.20 U.S. – when even the village idiot knows the currency is on its way down to 80 cents or lower? Of course, it’s not the little guys who have been goosing the euro into fleeting rallies the whole way down, but rather the central banks. And their perspective is quite different from that of Joe Sixpack;  for although Joe can once again fantasize about being treated like a high roller on the Champs Elysee, and of eliciting smiles rather than scowls from Parisian bellmen, cab drivers and waiters, the central banks of the U.S. and Asia see only a sovereign competitor stealing an unfair advantage over their own exporters. However, we somehow doubt that the folks at Daimler Benz and BMW will see it that way. They and other domestic manufacturers have struggled to hold the line on prices as the euro nearly doubled in value off an 83-cent low almost a decade ago. Now, with currency values being driven by factors wholly unrelated to trade in actual goods and services, the Germans undoubtedly sense that the U.S. dollar will fare no better than any other paper currency over the long run. And so it must be unsettling for them to watch helplessly as the greenback ascends for no good reason, if only temporarily, while the dream of a federated Europe sinks with the euro. Indictment-Proof Assuming they understand this, it seems obvious that the Germans and their eurozone neighbors will sooner or later come to recognize gold’s primacy as money. They quite obviously failed to do so yesterday, however, sitting idly by as the Dark

[Lately, Mother Earth has been angrier than we can ever recall. A friend of ours with a keen interest in the predictions of seers alerted us a few years ago to the prospect of a dramatic increase in seismic activity around now, so we were naturally eager to have him update the forecast. He has obliged with the grim predictions detailed below. Be warned that his outlook is not for the squeamish and that it suggests 2012 could be a year in which natural disasters impact hundreds of millions of lives around the planet. Incidentally, if you’d like to sample the eclectic range of Rick’s Picks commentary, we offer a free seven-day trial, including daily stock and futures recommendations.] Rick has asked me to outline the impact of potential future geological events on the U.S. economy. I am not a geologist or an economist, (although I do have an eclectic university education background) - my own personal studies for the last several decades have included amongst other things various prophecies about future events from multiple sources around the world. I write this anonymously, and am writing it at Rick's request. I am just putting it out there for your consideration - what you choose to do with this prophetic scenario, if anything, is up to you. Even the least observant amongst us is slowly becoming aware of a building 'drumbeat' of seismic events on our planet - that seem to be increasing in both frequency and magnitude and occurring in areas where we find significant populations. Recent large scale destructive events include the Indonesian tsunami; central China, Haiti, Chile and last week's western China earthquakes and also the recent eruption of an Icelandic volcano. Combined, these major seismic events have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions in damages.

[We wrote here recently that last week’s panic attack on Wall Street is unlikely to be the last.  The markets have since rallied strongly, but that won’t change the outlook, says a wise friend of ours who has been following the markets for thirty years. In the essay below, he explains why shouting “Fire!” on Wall Street is not quite the same as shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. RA] “Many years ago, while reading John Kenneth Galbraith in “The Speculative Episode,” it dawned on me that the world wasn’t necessarily becoming a safer place, particularly on Broad and Wall. If you think about military history, we’ve gone from flintlocks during the Revolutionary War with a range of 40 feet to the Spencer Repeating Carbine at Pickett’s Charge in the Civil War (every Confederate soldier died), to Hiroshima. On Wall Street, we went from the ticker tape running three hours late on 16 million shares in 1929 to program trading in 1987 when we didn’t have the Internet and you had to call your broker to know what was happening that day in the market. “Today, everyone has a quote in the corner of their screen at work or they watch CNBC at home. They are responsible for allocating their 401K online and many trade the rest of their nest eggs there too. The data processing capabilities out there can handle tens of billions of sell orders in a single day and on top of that, we have the CBOE and the E-Mini. Algorithmic Trading programs do umpteen trades a millisecond and make up 70% of the volume, one HAL versus another. Technology Produces No Buyers “The biggest problem, getting back to Galbraith, is that in the process of facilitating sellers, all the new technology does not produce any buyers. I

The Dow Industrials tacked on another big gain yesterday, blithely ignoring a global thumbs-down on Euroland’s latest, trillion dollar bailout package. The blue chip average finished up 149 points on the day, even as rumors circulated that Germany was about to ditch the euro and resurrect the D-mark. Whether or not this is true – and we doubt that it is – it’s clear that the Germans are becoming increasingly angry about having to play rich uncle to their n’er-do-well neighbors. Outside of Germany there appears to be a growing consensus that any further attempts to rescue, just for starters, Greece will simply be throwing (relatively) good money after bad.  This thought surfaced with unsurprising vehemence in the Rick’s Picks forum, where hard money rules, but it was surprising to see how quickly it caught on globally. For even as stocks rebounded with psychotic energy following last Thursday’s fleeting dive, the world’s major newspapers were questioning whether the  trillion-dollar credit line extended to the PIIGs would do any good. Pessimists were saying it would place a crushing debt burden on countries still able to pay their bills, and even the optimists were not claiming it would do much for Europe’s sclerotic economic growth. The U.S. stock market seemed inured to such doubts – to doubts about anything, really – in continuing its upward course. As the saying goes, “If you can keep a cool head while all those around you are  panicking, then perhaps you don’t understand the situation.” In fairness to the institutional speculators who have been teasing and manipulating U.S. stocks higher, they are not buying shares after having thought about the real world, but rather, because, at this moment in time, buying U.S. shares is what money managers are obliged to do with Other People’s Money. For

Because we called the latest Eurobailout a PR hoax in our most recent commentary, we’ll give equal time to a quite different point of view posted in the Rick’s Picks forum.  The author is “Cameroni,” a frequent contributor who says the European Union deserves praise for not shunning Greece and the PIIGs, especially since it will require considerable sacrifice on the part of the “haves.” Here’s Cam: “The European Union must be congratulated. They have acted responsibly by choosing union over self interest and Nationalism. Instead of shunning Greece, shutting her out and locking the door behind them they have instead made a tremendous sacrifice and have opted instead to take a share in Greece’s misfortunes despite the obvious risks. And they have put their collective neck on the line for the whole union by establishing what amounts to an insurance program for the rest of the sick patients in the group. The pain will be shared while expectations of future growth have been lowered. “At the same time they have sent a clear message to bond rating agencies. You can be replaced. Nobody needs a Rhodes Scholarship anymore to see the clear connection between the Bond raters and currency speculators. Nor do we need a microscope to see how destabilizing those influences can be nor how quickly the global financial system can be brought to the brink of economic calamity. The events of the last two weeks has made it clear to all just how disruptive those influences can be and what negative implications it has for both political stability and global markets. Their blunder will bring on change. No Child’s Game “This is not a child’s games anymore. Future financial reforms may well include putting limits on the speculation of currencies. We will see what transpires with the

At last, the European Union has decided to do a USA-style bailout – one with a quintessentially American, trillion dollar price tag and a shining vision of success.  “[The agreement] will ensure that any attempt to weaken the stability of the euro will fail,” said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.  Yeah, but for how long?  We wonder if Mr. Barroso noticed that the euro finished on a downswing yesterday (see chart below), even as the ink on this latest deal was drying. Still, we hate to rain on the EU’s parade, and even if the Mother of All Eurobailouts failed to inspire a show of confidence in the euro, it nonetheless did pump up the world’s stock exchanges with  trillions of dollars’ worth of dubious new valuations. European shares registered their biggest single-day gain in a year-and-a-half, and U.S. stocks were not far behind. This bailout is a far cry from the paltry $60 billion credit line provided to Greece just a couple of weeks ago. We’d noted at the time that trying to do these rescue packages on-the-cheap would only invite doubt and derision. Probably the last thing those humorless stiffs in Brussels want is derision, and so no one should have been surprised to see them throw caution to the wind by ponying up a proper sum for a pan-European rescue. Greece will now be less likely to get kicked, punched and insulted when it heads for the discount window, and Spain, Portugal Italy and Ireland won’t have to worry so much that all of the rescue money will gone by the time Greece is done with it. Soup to Nuts It’s hard to say how long the good feelings will last, though, since we know from America’s experience that even a trillion dollars doesn’t go very

The panic we’ve all been waiting for hit like a tsunami yesterday, sending the Dow Industrials into a thousand-point dive, 700 of it occurring in under ten minutes. We’d warned of this just a few days ago when we wrote that the market was “vulnerable to a sudden, even spectacular, selloff.”   Yesterday’s selling was indeed so ferocious that it might have gone on for another thousand points if not for Mr. Market’s addiction to round numbers.  With the Dow down almost exactly a thousand points, the broad averages turned from their lows like a cattle stampede encountering a wall of fire. We should consider it a warm-up for the real panic that surely lies ahead.  Thursday’s hysteria will be just a sound bite by the time it is replayed on the evening news, but when a truly destructive panic finally hits, it will run its course on Main Street as well as Wall Street. Safeway shelves will be stripped bare as quickly as stocks were stripped of value yesterday afternoon, and branch banks will run out of dollars before even a half-dozen customers have had a chance to deplete their accounts. In this scenario, it’s hard to imagine that things would return to hunky-dory the next day. Grocery stores would find it impossible to keep certain crucial items, such as toilet paper and batteries, in stock. The same goes for the banks, which hold but one crucial item in inventory. But what of the stock market?  Although the Dow had recouped 650 points of yesterday’s losses by day’s end, even the chirpiest news anchor would not deign to suggest that this warrants a sigh of relief.  Anyone who watched the stock market come unraveled on a monitor yesterday could only have been infected with a sense of foreboding. Under the

Silver quotes have come back down to earth with a thud, so perhaps it’s time to review our outlook, which was, and still is, quite bullish for both the intermediate and long-term. The Comex July contract has shed a hefty 10 percent of its value since Tuesday, settling at 17.51 yesterday after peaking just two days earlier at 18.89. Although this has caused some gnashing of teeth and sporadic expressions of anguish in the Rick’s Picks chat room, long-term bullion players who frequent the room seem to be taking the move in stride. We ourselves sounded an especially bullish note a week ago when we wrote that it would be a “piece of cake” for Comex silver futures to push above some daunting reservoirs of supply on the intraday charts.  The June contract duly obliged shortly thereafter, but as you can see in the May futures chart below, the rally left one key high at 18.91 recorded in January undisturbed. Although climactic buying missed exceeding that peak by just 2.5 cents, it was enough to make any selloff that followed a possible threat to the short-term picture. That threat was “actualized,” as they say, by this week’s steep selloff, but it remains to be seen how much more damage will be done. So far, it is minimal, and we therefore still expect the futures to hit a very bullish 21.53 by mid-June. That is our target for the July contract, and it was mentioned in last week’s commentary along with a secondary target at 20.21. At what point would our outlook turn intermediate-to-long-term bearish? That would take a print below 13.89 (!), since, according to the rules of our proprietary Hidden Pivot trading system, that’s what is required to turn the weekly chart bearish.  With respect to the daily chart,

Bruised and bloodied bears must have felt a rare sense of exhilaration yesterday as trading on the NYSE drew to a close. That, and a twinge of anxiety about whether U.S. stocks could actually fall for two days running. Some traders evidently decided not to bet on it, and so short-covering drove the best rally of the day in the final half-hour.  After all, who would have had the guts to take a short position overnight in a market that has been on a wilding spree for 14 months?  Some short-covering is bound to occur at the tail end of any day on which the Dow has fallen more than 200 points, as it did yesterday. But the fact there wasn’t more of it, and that the lows penetrated some key supports identified in yesterday’s commentary, suggests there is more selling to come.  Bear in mind that Tuesday is a dangerous time of the week for an all-day selloff to occur, since it leaves three days for the selling to mutate into panic. The ostensible reason for yesterday’s decline, which saw the Dow down nearly 300 points at its lows, was news of fresh trouble in euroland. But decide for yourself whether this is really news:  “Global markets tumbled as investors questioned the viability of plans to bail out Greece and fretted about knock-on effects in other nations.” That’s how the Wall Street Journal saw it, but the story is getting to be so “dog-bites-man” that its impact on the markets is probably overrated at this point. Make no mistake, an historical day of reckoning awaits euroland and its politically fraught currency when Greece’s fatal debt disease is suddenly discovered to infect all of Europe. But for the moment, we can only stifle a yawn when we read on one day about how