The Morning Line

Fear of the much-ballyhooed Delta variant was nowhere in evidence recently at North Carolina's McCormick Field, home of a minor-league baseball team called the Asheville Tourists. The team, a high Single-A farm club operated by the Houston Astros, filled McCormick's 4000 seats to near-capacity, and there was nary a mask in sight. It was great baseball, which turns out to be the perfect antidote for non-stop Covid doomsday-porn emanating from Fauci's office and amplified to a deafening pitch by his ignorant, Great Reset-obsessed lackeys in the news media. As fans of the game might expect, it featured entertaining highs and lows just like the majors. A towering pop-up above second base attracted enough fielders to catch a swarm of fireflies; instead, they caught nothing when the ball dropped between them. But a runner on first base looked even worse when he failed to keep running past second base even though there were two outs.  The defense redeemed itself with a spectacular diving catch in the ninth inning by the Tourists' center fielder -- a risky effort, considering there were no men on base and his team had a four-run lead.  Afterward, a terrific fireworks display sponsored by chain-grocer Ingles, rocked the neighborhood. 'Delta' Thrives on Ignorance For the good of America, Fauci and his Goebbelsian PR crew should take in a few baseball games this summer. Otherwise, they'll continue to work overtime trying to convince us that 'Delta' is the most menacing development in all of history. But when was a virus variant ever more deadly than the original strain? If this were so, the variant, even if it tends to spread more easily, would quickly extinguish itself by killing off the host. Under the circumstances, how dangerous could it actually be, given that more than 99% of those who

[The following was written by a San Francisco friend from the hedge fund world, Shawn Brown. It buttresses the suspicion that while there seems to be plenty of credit money available for speculation, the collateral behind it is getting thinner and shakier by the week.  The Fed, with $8 trillion of Treasury paper and other top-shelf collateral on its balance sheet, has monopolized the supply, leaving lending banks to scramble for collateral of their own that hasn't already been hocked twentyfold. As a result, central bank interventions are becoming more frequent, more complex and bigger, to the point where even the experts are having trouble determining whether the banking system is headed for a crack-up far larger than the one that took down Archegos a few months ago.  RA] Why is the Reverse Repo Facility breaking records daily and the Federal Reserve returning hundreds of billions in foreign currency swaps weekly?  These two concerning but mostly overlooked items seem to coincide with Bill Hwang’s disaster at Archegos Hedge Fund. We still have very little clarity on exactly what happened with conflicting reports on the actual fallout. Whether the fund was naked short derivatives or concentrated long media companies, these positions resulted in tens of billions in losses to a number of Too Big To Fail banks. Whatever occurred, shock waves are still rumbling throughout the intertwined global financial system. Who Are Those Guys? The current explosion of usage from the Fed’s Reverse Repo facility began on March 26 -- the same day Archegos ceased operations -- with 12 Participating Counterparties exchanging $11.45 billion for Treasury securities. We aren’t allowed to know who they were because it might cause a run on the institutions, or so the story goes.  Fast forward to this past Friday morning and 61 Counterparties wanted to

Flush with stimulus, the states are in a spending mood that can be summed up in a single word:  TOGA!!!!!  Take Oklahoma. Their latest budget reflects an annual increase of nearly 18%, according to a report from the Associated Press. It includes bigger earmarks for education, corporate and personal tax cuts, credits for school choice and even for film producers.  In Florida, outlays will rise by about 11% to a record $101.5 billion.  The extra spending will provide "bonuses for teachers, police and firefighters, and new construction projects at schools and colleges."  Believing they will still have money to spare, Florida lawmakers have also expanded sales-tax breaks for school and hurricane supplies and created a tax-free week for purchasers of museum and concert tickets and recreational gear for camping, fishing and surfing.  In New York, a $212 billion budget is nearly 10% higher than last year's, most of it coming from Federal relief. The Cuomo government is planning to boost aid to schools by $1.4 billion, and spend another $1.3 billion to overhaul Penn Station, among other projects. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Federal aid amounts to fully 15% of what the states took in during fiscal year 2019, according to Moody's. Since they have until 2024 to spend the most recently disbursed Covid money, some states are waiting until later in the year to budget their windfalls. No question, increased spending by the states will have a bullish impact on the U.S. economy for the next several years. Even so, some are wondering what will happen when the money runs out. “I’m afraid that we are spending money and making commitments that we will not be able to sustain once that one-time federal money goes away,” said Sen. Bob Rankin, a Republican who sits on Colorado's joint budget committee.

If we'd known the pandemic would trigger the most reckless monetary blowout in history, could anyone have imagined that the U.S. dollar a year later would have fallen by just 14%? That doesn't even qualify as a bear market, just a middling correction of a powerful bull run begun in 2008, a year ahead of the historic rally in stocks.  The Dollar Index was trading around 70 at the time, about to embark on a nine-year climb to 104 early in 2017.  It subsequently swooned as low as 88 early in 2018 but hasn't traded any lower since; it's currently at 90.12. That's with the Fed showering trillions of dollars in helicopter money on America, a feat that achieved a dubious milestone recently when central bank purchases of Treasury debt exceeded purchases by foreigners. Biden for his part has been ramping up outlandish spending proposals, promoting the timeless Democratic canard that "the rich" will pay for it all. The proposals are likely to grow even more outlandish, since Biden fears that a Republican Congressional victory in 2022 could close the window of opportunity for a fiscal expansion dwarfing FDR's New Deal. Stimulus 'a Drop in the Bucket' So why do I continue to insist nonetheless that we are headed into a catastrophic deflation? The short answer is that even tens of trillions of stimulus dollars is just a drop in the bucket compared to a deflationary juggernaut poised to suck inflation into a black hole. When the bubble finally pops, here's a list of things that will deflate like a tire with a hole in it before the central bank has a chance to even attempt a resuscitation:  * A hyperleveraged derivatives market valued notionally at $2 quadrillion  * The public-pension systems of two-dozen states  * Residential and commercial real

Sucks? Yeah, sure. Maybe in the eyes of crypto fanatics and the quacks who re-invent monetary policy every month. In actuality, few things in the material world suck less than gold. Sorry to resort to headline flim-flammery to get your attention, but it was time to upgrade our enthusiastic endorsement of gold -- and silver! -- to an outright declaration of love. If you’re a bullion investor, this means we are confident you can buy the stuff now without fear or qualm. And if your safe deposit box is already filled to overflowing with ingots and precious-metal coins purchased when gold was $300 an ounce, it’s time to rent more space. You can even tell kin and friends that bullion is about to embark on a long, profitable ascent without having to worry about their getting burned. More likely is that they will thank you profusely a year from now, especially if the money they’ve plowed into metals was drawn from tech stocks and other appallingly overpriced shares being distributed to greater fools these days by Wall Street’s mountebanks. Bullion's Correction Is Over Regularly readers of Rick’s Picks will know that we quickened our bullion drumbeat earlier this month after Comex futures exceeded a small but technically significant price peak on the daily chart just above $1800. Nothing as promising as this had happened since December, and it suggested that the painful correction begun from around $2060 last August was close to an end. There were more bullish signs to follow. For one, minor ABCD rallies began to exceed their ‘D’ targets, even as corrections fell shy of them. Under the rules of our proprietary Hidden Pivot System, this was unmistakable evidence that the dominant trend had shifted from bearish to bullish. Perhaps even more noticeable was the absence over

Investors who feared muni-bond defaults when the pandemic first hit created unusual opportunity for those willing to buck the tide. One of the winners was Doug Behnfield, a Boulder-based financial adviser at Morgan Stanley whose ideas have been featured here many times over the years. Doug is not only one of the savviest investors I know, he is one of the savviest guys. Now, he is quite bullish on municipal bonds for reasons spelled out in a report that went out to clients in April.  He also thinks Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's confidence that the inflationary effects of stimulus and fiscal spending will be "transitory" is well founded and that this has already been discounted by stocks and bonds. Doug and his clients enjoyed an exceptional year in munis because he started buying them when others were dumping them. Prices subsequently recovered and then some, yielding excellent gains for anyone who'd faded the panic.  Doug is a canny contrarian who shares your editor's view that deflation poses a greater threat to the U.S. economy than inflation. More immediately, he expects pent-up demand to produce a subdued recovery rather than boom times. It will take years for growth to recover, he says, in part because consumers have learned beneficial lessons of frugality. A Limited Supply There are additional factors that have made Doug especially bullish on municipal bonds. For one, they are exempt from federal income tax. Substantial tax hikes planned by the Democrats will therefore make municipal bonds even more attractive.  Munis also are exempt from a tax that affects mainly the wealthy: the 3.8% levy on investment income under the Affordable Care Act.  Limited supply is another reason munis stand to do well over the next couple of years or longer, he says. Cities will not have to raise

With home prices pumped to record levels, we are hearing more and more about Uncle Sam's plan to avoid sticking it to taxpayers when the next crash hits. Although it's always wise to have a plan to deal with catastrophe, especially one that is inevitable, there are reasons to doubt that a mortgage market valued at $12 trillion could unravel without taking the economy and much else -- including, conceivably, our system of governance -- down with it. Consider that Fannie and Freddie, ground zero in the 2008 crash, still own roughly half of all U.S. mortgages -- as much as the three largest banks -- but lack reserves sufficient to cover more than a small fraction of bondholders' losses if it happens again. Of course, the next crash could conceivably be worse, since the financial system is much more leveraged than then. That's a concern the Feds may not have fully considered when they created "living wills" for financial institutions under the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill.  The law requires large banks to file workout plans that would seek to mitigate the risk of upending the financial system and the economy while accountants deal with the quagmire. Extending this rule to the GSEs reportedly is the last piece of legislation needed to complete the Dodd-Frank reforms. 'Affordable Homes' a Gimmick We should all be grateful that someone in Washington has thought this through. But how deeply? As former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson famously said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And what a devastating punch this one would be. My own forecast, which predates the 2007-08 real estate collapse by more than a decade, calls for a 70% plunge in home prices, with losses on vacation homes reaching as high as 90%. This may sound overly

We went out on a limb here last week with speculation that, just maybe, the bull market was topping. Alas, Friday ended with a short-covering orgy that bloodied bears, leaving the boldest of them festooned on the ropes. My hunch had been rooted in technical factors, including an ominous head-and-shoulders pattern that has been evolving since January in IWM, a vehicle that tracks the small-cap Russell 2000. Unfortunately for bears, rather than dropping into a steep dive like the textbook says it should have, the index tacked on five new bars to the right shoulder, turning its promising symmetry into asymmetrical dross -- a mocking, rubberized Mona Lisa smile. Similarly, the E-Mini S&Ps had seemed well poised for a long overdue plunge. They'd turned down sharply the week before after getting within an inch of a major 'Hidden Pivot' resistance that was capable in theory of stopping a buying stampede. By Friday's close, however, El Toro had gored the resistance and was snorting flames. In both instances, the geniuses who purport to be "managing" your and Other People's Money provided bullish spin and buoyancy. But when the rally threatened to turn ballistic on Thursday, bears scrambled to buy 'em back lest they get trampled this week by Wall Street's recurrent homage to Pamplona. Can you blame them for panicking? With the Fed monetizing full-tilt and Joe Biden hawking a version of the New Deal that makes FDR's look miserly, who would be so foolhardy as to bet against the asset bubble? Add corporate share buybacks to the raucous mix of monetary and fiscal stimulus and it becomes difficult to imagine how the bull market could possibly end. Apple's announced $50 billion buyback alone will help sustain the illusion of health in the U.S. pension system while eliciting more unearned huzzahs

First, let me titillate all of you die-hard permabears with a ray of hope:  A potentially important top may have formed last week in, respectively, the E-Mini S&Ps and in IWM, a proxy for the Russell 2000. The former stalled inches from a 'Hidden Pivot' resistance at 4222.82, while the latter turned down precisely on schedule after tracing out the right shoulder of a nasty-looking head-and-shoulders pattern. I must caution you against making too much of this, however, since the stock market since 2009 has blasted free of a dozen similarly daunting predicaments, even achieving enormous gains during an economically devastating pandemic. Still, one can always hope that the time for a long overdue and presumably healthful correction has finally arrived. Just one additional note of caution: If stocks bull-doze their way higher next week, the S&Ps should be presumed headed to at least 4536, a level that would equate to a 3000-point Dow rally. Now on to something with more impact on our day-to-day lives: auto-warranty scams. This plague interrupts tens of million of us each day with robotic phone calls offering worthless car-service agreements. All of us have received scores if not hundreds of these nuisance calls over the years, sometimes two or three of them in a single day. Supposedly, if you follow the voice prompts, you can purchase an extended auto-service policy for $3,000 that will turn out to be useless when it comes time to file a claim. Big Money Despite this, the scam is obviously making some crooks a lot of money, since the calls -- billions of them -- just keep coming and coming and coming. Mine come mostly from spoofed Colorado numbers (where I lived for 20 years) and hit in the late afternoon or early evening. Although I use a call-blocker