The saga of MF Global has faded from the headlines a bit, what with the end of the world approaching in 13 months or so, and societal and economic collapse prior to that.  But one big question I have is why have I not heard any talk about either the US DOJ or some States [...]

Lots of talk lately about whether we are replaying 2008 in the real economy and in a host of markets.  The unfolding chart of the Real is starting to look very similar to 2008.  Will commodities collapse again and the dollar rally hard?  Hard to believe that things will replay but we are staring at [...]

It is passing strange that a week or so after the Obama administration declared it would be taking a tough line on speculation and shortly after the Fed was roundly abused for a lackluster performance in its 1st press conference and for not taking any responsibility for the run-up in commodities due to its outrageously [...]

Cramer was just on CNBC ranting about how the markets had failed. Erin Burnett the idiot was just lapping it all up. The massive unwind in energy has him all excited. $10 down in a day in crude is a very very big move. His takeaway? The Government should control [...]

What I missed in watching this farce was any sense that the Fed is going to fail in achieving the fulfillment of its mandate by virtue of the very policies it is pursuing. It reminds me of the oft-heard proverb that one often meets ones destiny on the road one takes to avoid it, [...]

Today I paid $4.15 to put some gas in the tank of my car. Ben Bernanke refuses to accept that the Fed has anything to do with commodity inflation and refuses to view it as anything other than “transitory” according to remarks on April 5th.  Before putting the lie to such nonsense, it will [...]

What do Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman have in common, aside from the fact that they are both madmen?  They are both professors of economics at Princeton University.  Now I have a cousin who got his PhD in Physics from Princeton.  I hit Princeton on my college tour years ago.  It is a lovely place [...]

While our Dear Leader, our erstwhile American Nero, left for India and Asia spending $200 Million per day on entertaining his Media Mogul friend and mouthpiece, CNBC owner and GE Chairman Jeff Immelt, in order to escape the unpleasantly painful aftermath of his face slapping in the mid-term elections, his putatively independent economic minion, [...]

Unless you live under a rock, you must be aware that the Federal Reserve is now widely expected to engage in a strategy of expanded Quantitative Easing to fend off incipient deflation, or if you believe the Fed’s latest statement, even to get low inflation to be more in line with what the Monetary Policy [...]

When the US Employment Situation Report came out Friday, the 41k private payroll print shocked the bulls. An interesting divergence appeared. Normally a weak payroll print in relation to expectations would cause the currency in question, the US Dollar in this case, to weaken substantially. But in fact the opposite took place. [...]

From the pre-harvest low near $5.25 in September 2006 to the monster blow-off high of $16.63 in July 2008, Beans more than tripled in price.   Then in a mere 5 months as the world was crashing in 2008, they lost more than half their value to a low of about $7.75, a drop of nearly [...]

There is no number to convey what I have perceived in the last couple of months but the signal nevertheless seems too strong to ignore.  I take my daughter to Tae Kwon Do near downtown Chicago two or three days a week from further north on the Interstate.  I do this after school so it [...]

In December the Fed announced that it would target Fed Funds at 0 to 1/4% and it also announced that it would be in the market for agency debt and treasuries, effectively monetizing the debt of the United States.  The dollar, which had been strengthening in the flight to quality as risk positions were eliminated [...]

I am not sure that stock prices ever bear much relation to the worldline that will ultimately play out over time, but the recent rally, now aged 55 days and counting, really highlights the fantasy world that typifies equity values (as so much else, but more on that later).  Recall that market indices made their [...]

It is alarming to hear gleeful democrats say that the mistaken policies of the last 30 years are now to be jettisoned.  What policies exactly?  In a nutshell it is the reduction of state participation in the economy.  As the chart below demonstrates, it is hard to view the policies that started with Reagan as [...]

UPDATE:  28 October 2008,  3PM Central.  Well That was wrong.  Stocks broke out the TOP of the wedge rather than breaking out the bottom and falling through the table.  Never fight the Fed.  The Fed is expected to set rates at or below 1% tomorrow afternoon.  Of course this in itself is nearly unprecedented; for [...]

Fridays trade had all the earmarks of a bottom. At the beginning of the day I felt strongly that the bottom would be seen that day. However the trade on Friday felt engineered. It had all the technical aspects one would look for; heavy volume, started strongly down, wild volatility, spike [...]

Two weeks ago (Sept. 26) the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a high of 11,168.10.  As of Tonight (Thurs. Oct 9) it closed at its low of 8579.19, down 23% in nine trading sessions.  That is a crash. The S&P 500 Dropped from a high of 1215.77 on the 26th to a low of 909.19 [...]

This weekend we drove all over Will, Grundy, Livingston and Kankakee counties in Illinois scoping out places to find Mazon Creek fossils (yes, we drove over the Mazon Creek or River several times but did not go into the town of Mazon). While we did not find many good fossil sites until [...]

Last July, the SEC retired the Uptick Rule. The rule was promulgated in the aftermath of the Great Crash of 1929 and requires that a short position in a stock may not be established unless the stock has most recently ticked up in price. People in general do not understand what shorting is (I [...]