Chris Kresser: Functional Health

Jon

Consumer Reports states that, person for person, health care in the US costs twice as much as it does in the rest of the developed world. And the kicker of their analysis: We don’t get much for our money. In a 2013 Commonwealth Fund study of 11 developed countries’ health care systems, the U. S. ranked fifth in quality and worst for infant mortality. America also did the worst job of preventing deaths from treatable conditions, such as strokes, diabetes, high blood pressure, and certain treatable cancers.
Today we welcome Chris Kresser to the program. Chris writes one of the most popular natural medicine blogs on the Web and has been named by Greatist.com as one of the 50 most influential voices in health and fitness.


This post was published at PeakProsperity on September 28, 2014,.

Carmen Segarra: Wall Street’s Spy Vs Spy

Jon

If you missed our coverage in 2012 of the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center where Wall Street sleuths from those serially charged firms like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan dunk donuts alongside New York’s finest in a $150 million spy center, keeping tabs on the comings and goings of their own Wall Street employees as well as innocent pedestrians, then you may not fully appreciate why Carmen Segarra has been celebrated all weekend for her temerity in taping her boss and colleagues at the New York Fed, as well as employees inside the cloistered bowels of Goldman Sachs.
While Wall Street was spying on everyone else in lower Manhattan in a high tech center funded by the taxpayer, Segarra strolled over to a Spy Store, plunked down a modest sum and walked out with a tiny tape recorder. She then proceeded to capture the essence of the quintessential captured regulators who didn’t see the 2008 crash coming and won’t see the next one coming either – because their job is not to see too much. (We called the Spy Store on Saturday to ask if they had experienced an upsurge in sales of the tiny recorder. We were informed that sales were brisk but not unusual.)
Segarra is a lawyer and former bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of Wall Street’s key regulators, who charged in a lawsuit filed in October 2013 that she was told to change her negative examination of Goldman Sachs by colleagues, who also obstructed and interfered with her investigation. According to her lawsuit, when she refused to alter her findings, she was terminated in retaliation and escorted from the Fed premises.

This post was published at Wall Street On Parade on September 28, 2014.

‘Painful period’ for sector could be over

Jon

When investors think of precious metals it is usually gold that springs to mind, whether it is direct exposure to the commodity or indirect exposure through mining stocks.
However, there are other precious metals that investors can be exposed to, which used to more commonly form part of a long-term investment portfolio.
Silver, palladium and platinum are perhaps the most well-known of the precious metals.
This year has been difficult for gold, so have investors abandoned other precious metals? How have the prices of palladium, platinum and silver fared in 2014?
It is fair to say that precious metal prices have been under pressure this year as the dollar strengthens.
The average monthly price of silver had gained some momentum this year to reach $20.92 (12.81) per ounce in July but that fell back to $19.80 per ounce in August, according to data from Kitco.com.
Meanwhile, platinum prices have climbed during the year to a monthly average of $1,447.85 in August, from a low of $1,410.50 per ounce in February, peaking at $1,492.65 in July.

This post was published at TruthinGold on September 29, 2014.

Pending Home Sales Drop In August (After Record Surge In New Home Sales)

Jon

Following last week’s explosion higher in new home sales (despite surging record high prices), it is somewhat intriguing that pending home sales would tumble over 4.1% YoY, and drop 1.0% MoM (missing expectations of a 0.5% drop) and the 2nd biggest drop in 2014.
The ‘stunning’ rationale for this miss, provided by NAR’s chief economist, is… “fewer bargain-priced homes’ (which is odd given record prices and record surge in new home sales), and a “rising rate environment” (except rates are collapsing), with hope for the future based on the “employment outlook for young adults improving and their incomes rising” (more lies) and a “shift to more traditional first-time buyers who need mortgages” (except mortage apps are at 20-year lows).

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 09/29/2014.

Gold vs Silver during Precious-Metals Bull Markets

Jon

Below is an excerpt from a commentary originally posted at http://www.speculative-investor.com on 25th September 2014.
It is widely believed that silver outperforms gold during bull markets for these metals, but that’s only partially true. It’s true that silver tends to achieve a greater percentage gain than gold from bull-market start to bull-market end. It’s also the case that silver tends to do better during the final year of a cyclical bull market and during the late stages of the intermediate-term rallies that happen within cyclical bull markets. However, the early stages of gold-silver bull markets tend to be characterised by relative strength in gold. This is a point we’ve made in the past, including in TSI commentaries earlier this year, but warrants revisiting due to the recent price action.
The point we are trying to make is established by the following long-term chart of the gold/silver ratio. The boxes labeled A, B and C on this chart indicate the first two years of the cyclical precious-metals bull markets of 1971-1974, 1976-1980 and 2001-2011, respectively. Clearly, gold handily outperformed silver during the first two years of each of the last three cyclical precious-metals bull markets that occurred within secular bull markets. Therefore, while silver’s recent weakness relative to gold certainly doesn’t guarantee that a new cyclical bull market began last December, it is not inconsistent with our view that a new bull market began at that time.

This post was published at GoldSeek on 29 September 2014.

Chinese Gold Demand Explosive

Jon

Whilst western media are still under the assumption Chinese gold demand is declining, based on data from the World Gold Council and net gold export from Hong Kong to China mainland, in reality demand is extremely strong. As I’vepreviously written, the lower the price of gold will go the more physical gold will be purchased by the Chinese people, and the price of gold has been dropping since mid August.
Wholesale demand, measured by withdrawals from the SGE vaults, accounted for an astonishing 50.3 tonnes in week 38 (September 15 -19), up 22.79 % w/w. Year to date SGE withdrawals stand at 1381 tonnes.
Because the SGE International Board started trading on September 18, I checked with the SGE if the total withdrawal numbers from week 38 include withdrawals from the International Board (IB) vaults in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ). Yes, it does they told me, though “withdrawals from the IB vaults are insignificant at this point”, they added. The total gold volume traded on the IB was 122 Kg in week 38. It’s impossible to know, but if all buyers opted for withdrawal, we would have to revise total weekly withdrawals in the mainland to 50.1 tonnes.

This post was published at Bullion Star on 27-09-2014.

William Cohan on with Dr. Janda

Jon

Our pal and loyal Turdite, Dr. Dave Janda, took up the cause on Sunday and invited journalist/author William Cohan onto his radio program. Yes, that William Cohan…the guy who has written the expose on silver manipulation that, so far, has not been published by any “mainstream” outlets.
If you don’t know what the fuss is all about, I suggest you start by reviewing this post from last week:
In short, it was brought to our attention that Mr. Cohan had been contacted by Andrew Maguire and his attorneys in the days following the sudden closure of the latest CFTC “silver manipulation investigation”. Mr. Cohan then wrote a detailed expose and summary of the evidence that the CFTC had chosen to ignore. However, when Cohan began to shop the article for publication, he could find no outlets within the mainstream media that were willing to take it.

This post was published at TF Metals Report By Turd Ferguson | Sunday, September 28, 2014.

New Global Crisis Imminent Due To ‘Poisonous Combination Of Record Debt And Slowing Growth”, CEPR Report Warns

Jon

“Deleveraging? What Deleveraging?”
No, that’s not the title of a Zero Hedge article from 2011, 2012, 2013 and so on (because we have written on the concept of global “deleveraging” simply because there has been none). It is, however, the title of the 16th Geneva Report on the world economy, released this morning by the Center for Economic Policy Research, which merely confirms, once again, everything we have said, namely that while the Fed’s liquidity injections have boosted the stock market, everyone else has been levering up as much as possible, with corporations once again in debt to record levels using easy debt proceeds to buyback their own stock (and push their equity-linked exec comp into the stratosphere), while consumers have loaded up on term debt, mostly in the form of student loans, to pay for their increasingly unaffordable lifestyle (and certainly not for tuition or textbooks), while defaulting, not deleveraging, on mortgages.
That’s what we call it. The Geneva Report has far harsher words. Here is an excerpt via the FT:
A ‘poisonous combination’ of record debt and slowing growth suggest the global economy could be heading for another crisis, a hard-hitting report will warn on Monday.
The 16th annual Geneva Report, commissioned by the International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies and written by a panel of senior economists including three former senior central bankers, predicts interest rates across the world will have to stay low for a ‘very, very long’ time to enable households, companies and governments to service their debts and avoid another crash.
The warning, before the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting in Washington next week, comes amid growing concern that a weakening global recovery is coinciding with the possibility that the US Federal Reserve will begin to raise interest rates within a year.
So here is lie #1, debunked: “One of the Geneva Report’s main contributions is to document the continued rise of debt at a time when most talk is about how the global economy is deleveraging, reducing the burden of debts.”
It got so bad in recent years, we thought everyone is so stupid they no longer grasp the concept of debt fungibility in an intimately interconnected, globalized world. Thankfully, the Geneva guys get it: “Although the burden of financial sector debt has fallen, particularly in the US, and household debts have stopped rising as a share of income in advanced economies, the report documents the continued rapid rise of public sector debt in rich countries and private debt in emerging markets, especially China.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 09/29/2014.

The Japanese Deflation Myth and the Yen’s Slump

Jon

The slide of the yen since late summer has brought it to a level some 40 percent lower against the euro and US dollar than just two years go. Yet still Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his central bank chief Haruhiko Kuroda warn that they have not won the battle against deflation. That caution is absurd – all the more so in view of the fact that there was no deflation in the first place.
Some cynics suggest that Abe’s and Haruhiko’s battle cry against this phoney phantom is simply a ruse to gain Washington’s acquiescence in a big devaluation. But whatever the truth about their real intent, Japan’s monetary chaos is deepening.
Japanese Prices Have Been Stable
The CPI in Japan at the peak of the last cycle in 2007 was virtually at the same level as at the trough of the post-bubble recession in 1992, and up a few percentage points from the 1989 cycle peak. Hence, Japan alone has enjoyed the sort of price stability as might be enjoyed in a gold-standard world. Prices have fallen during recessions or during periods of especially-rapid terms-of-trade improvement or productivity growth. They have risen during cyclical booms or at times of big increases in the price of oil.
If price-indices in Japan were adjusted fully to take account of quality improvements they would have been falling slightly throughout, but that would also have been the case under the gold standard and was fully consistent with economic prosperity.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on Monday, September 29, 2014.

The world’s wealthy are snapping up bullion

Jon

Gold may be lingering at nine-month lows but demand for the precious metal is growing among the super rich.
The world’s wealthy are buying record numbers of gold bars, similar to the ones held in reserve banks across the globe and featured in the 1969 British caper film, The Italian Job.
But don’t expect a convoy of Mini Coopers hauling their precious cargo through sewer drains. This is no heist.
According to BullionByPost, sales of the 12.5 kilogram bars – worth about $US537,000 each based on current gold prices – have soared 243 per cent this year.
‘More and more central banks are starting to print money now as well,’ he said.
‘All the reasons are there for people to diversify some of their portfolios into precious metals.’
Mr Thianpiriya said a waning Asian demand had weighed on the gold price and would continue to depress the metal until well into 2015.

This post was published at TruthinGold on September 29, 2014.

Europe, US Stocks Slide: 10 Year Bid Back Under 2.50%

Jon

10Y yields are back below 2.50% and the entire Treasury complex is flattening (erasing post-GDP losses) as fears over Catalan independence and Hong Kong protests spark safe-haven buying around the world. Gold is up, back over $1220 (pre-GDP levels) and Bunds are well bid yet the USD is fading modestly this morning driven by EUR and JPY strength. European periperhals bond risk is on the rise and stocks are mostly lower with Germany’s DAX back below its crucial 50DMA. US equity futures are all red – retracing the entire Friday mini-melt-up in the afternoon (and catching back down to credit reality).
US equity futures have erased the late Freiday meltup gains and are back at pre-GDP levels…

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 09/29/2014.

Despite 2nd Slowest Income Growth In 2014, Spending Rises Most Since March Driven By Subprime, Car Sales

Jon

Mission releverage accomplished. Personal Income rose 0.3% in August (very slightly below Bloomberg’s median estimate), the 2nd slowest growth of the year. Personal spending however jumped 0.5%, beating the 0.4% expectations, and its equal best growth since March. What was spending focused on? Why autosales, which accounted for about half of the spending. And what funded this spending? Why subprime car loans of course; it sure wasn’t the real disposable income per capita which was a paltry $37,684 in August.
This is how the income and spending looked like:

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 09/29/2014.

Russia’s Gokhran Buying Gold Bullion In 2014 and Will Buy Palladium In 2015

Jon

Gokhran, the Russian precious metals and gems repository, said it has been buying gold bullion in 2014 and will likely to start buying palladium bullion in 2015, Interfax news agency reported this morning, citing the head of Gokhran, Andrey Yurin.
GOKHRAN, Russian State Precious Metals and Gems Repository
Gokhran has been buying gold bullion on the Russian market this year and has no plans to sell palladium from stock in 2014 , Yurin said.
Gokhran’s palladium reserves are a state secret and analysts try to guess the level each year but they are widely believed to have been depleted according to Reuters.
Gokhran was influential on global platinum group metals (PGMs) markets in the 1990s and 2000s, when its palladium stocks, accumulated during the 1970s and 1980s, came to the market, depressing prices.
Gokhran is the State Precious Metals and Gems Repository which is a state institution under the Russian Ministry of Finance. It is responsible for the State Fund of Precious Metals and Precious Stones of the Russian Federation. It is responsible for the purchase, storage, sale and use of precious metals, precious stones, jewellery, rocks, and minerals by the State Fund.

This post was published at Gold Core on 29 September 2014.

Stock Market Crash Forecast…7 7 7

Jon

Today some witless Pollyannas will say the title of this article is inappropriate. Unfortunately, these hapless souls suffer from excessive greed, rampant euphoria and hyper-complacency. Furthermore, they are ignorant of stock market history…and its immutable cycles (where only magnitude and duration vary). They foolishly delude themselves that the US Fed has ‘banned’ bear markets and has discovered the ‘magic elixir’ to kill all potential bears…while they are still cubs or in hibernation.
But stock market sage Adam Hamilton knowledgeably observes:
‘Stock markets are forever cyclical. Stock prices don’t move in straight lines forever, they endlessly rise and fall. Great cyclical bulls that earn investors fortunes are followed by brutal cyclical bears that create the best opportunities to buy low again.
‘The serious risk historically is that market selloffs tend to be proportional to the rallies that led into them. The longer stock markets climb without a major selloff to rebalance sentiment, the more unbalanced trader psychology becomes to the greed side. This necessitates commensurately larger and/or sharper selloffs to bleed off the excess euphoria and bring sentiment back into line. That means we are in for a doozy of one today!’ (Source: Major Stock Selloff Looms 2 )

This post was published at Gold-Eagle on September 29, 2014.

Elephant in the Room Minsky Moment

Jon

The “elephant in the room” is debt. Try as they might, central bankers have not been able to spur credit, hiring, or much business expansion because of the elephant. Things are even worse in Europe.
Via email, this is a guest post from Steen Jakobsen, chief economist of Saxo bank.
Debt – The Elephant in the Room
‘Interest on debt grows without rain’ – Yiddish proverb
This proverb explains most of what goes on in policy circles these days. We are now watching Extend-and-Pretend, Episode VI: Promises for improvement amid ever growing debt levels.
Short put, we’re still working with the same dog-eared script we were introduced to all of five years ago, when markets had stabilized in the wake of the financial crisis: maintain sufficiently low interest rates to service the debt burden. Pretend to have credible plan, but never address the structural problem and simply buy more time. But while we were able to get away with this theme for an awfully long time, the dynamic is now changing as the risk of low inflation (and even deflation) is a brick wall for the extend-and-pretend meme. Yes, interest does grow without rain, and the cost of maintaining and servicing debt grows especially fast in a deflationary regime.
Mads Koefoed, Saxo Bank’s macro economist projects US growth at around 2.0% for all of 2014. That will be the sixth year with US growth near 2.0% – so despite lower unemployment, despite a record high S&P500, the economy has a hard time escaping that 2.0% level. Any talk of higher interest rates is hard to take seriously when US growth is going nowhere and world growth is considerable weaker than expected in January or as recently as July, for that matter. It seems everyone has forgotten that even the US is a part of the global economy.

This post was published at Global Economic Analysis on Sunday, September 28, 2014.

A Few Observations On The Gold Market

Jon

In my opinion, the gold market is too large to be manipulated to any serious extent. While there are many allegations of manipulation, no one has ever shown that there is manipulation that has made any lasting impact on the price of gold. By ‘shown’, I mean scientifically according to rigorous standards. One serious paper finds no such gold price manipulation. The same author looks at possible manipulation in the London gold spot price announcements. Even if this price is dirty to some extent or at some dates and gamed so as to place certain options in or out of the money, how dirty can it be for the ongoing prices of gold in view of the many players and their wealth? Not enough to worry about, probably close to normal spreads and volatility. In making a case for manipulation, it is not enough to point to episodes in which gold falls a few dollars and volume spikes. There are episodes where the opposite occurs. There are episodes where price moves quite a bit higher or lower after the alleged episode, or where it was moving quite a bit higher or lower before the episode. The result is that on a daily price chart, the episode doesn’t even stand out as anything out of the ordinary. Gold can easily fluctuate $15 to $20 an ounce in the ordinary course of trading within a few minutes. There are episodes in all markets where prices move when there is not evident news. This happens all the time. In fact, most price changes are unaccompanied by news. They occur as private information gets impounded into prices. Those who allege that gold’s price is rigged say that the price is too low, or that it has been driven down by concerted selling by bullion banks in league with central banks. Here, for example, is such a charge made on January 17 of this year: ‘The $650 decline in the price of gold since it hit $1900 in September 2011 is the result of a manipulative effort designed both to protect the dollar from Quantitative Easing and to free up enough gold to satisfy Asian demands for delivery of gold purchases.’

This post was published at Gold-Eagle on September 28, 2014.

Hong Kong Stocks Tumble Erase 2014 Gains, Volatility Soars As Protests Freeze City: Full Summary

Jon

The Hong Kong protests, which we covered over the weekend, and which took a dramatic turn for the worse overnight when thousands of students camped out and demand universal suffrage on the city streets and were in turn tear-gassed and arresteden masse by the local riot police demanding students disperse or else, and where the leader of the student protest, Joshua Wong – who had been previously arrested and was released on Sunday night – has openly called for the resignation of Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying in an interview with Hong Kong Cable TV, have done the unthinkable: they have impacted financial markets and the “wealth effect” transmission mechanism of the local billionaires.
Here as a summary of the latest market activity via Bloomberg:
Hang Seng Index declines 2.25% after falling as much as 2.5%, most since Feb. 4; erases YTD gains MSCI Hong Kong Index drops as much as 3.2%, most since Nov. 2011 HSI Volatility Index surges as much as 27%, most since Aug. 2011 HKD weakens as much as 0.09% against USD to HK$7.7648, most since Dec. 2011 Hong Kong 1-yr rate swap rises 3 bps, most since June 2013 Chinese Yuan falls 0.24%, most since March 20, to 6.1415 per dollar. Yuan 12-mo. forwards drop 0.25% to 6.2596 per dollar after falling by as much as 0.34%, most since March 12 Fitch says events in past 24 hrs won’t significantly affect ratings; says unlikely that protests will be on wide enough scale and last long enough to have material effect on H. K.’s economy and financial stability: Fitch’s Colquhoun

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 09/29/2014.

$60 Million for a Blow-Up Dog?

Jon

$60 Million for a Blow-Up Dog?
Shatura Power Station. Russia has the largest peak power capacity in the world
(Photo via moskva-stroyka.ru)
Talk about ringing a bell!
This ring-a-ding-ding comes from the New York Observer:
‘Sales of contemporary art at public auctions surpassed $2 billion for the first time last year, the Paris-based arts-data organization Artprice said.
The report tallied auction sales between July 2013 and July 2014, and it found that contemporary art sales grew 40% from the previous year. The number of big-ticket items that sold for over 10 million euro ($12.8 million) more than doubled in the period.
Those who follow the art market will remember the record-breaking Christie’s auction in November that saw buyers walk away with the most expensive publicly auctioned piece of art ever, Francis Bacon’s $142.4 million Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969). That auction also minted Jeff Koons’ $58.4 million Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994-2000) as the most expensive piece by a living artist ever sold at auction.’
That’s another bad thing about being rich – you have to live with this stuff. Even if you don’t own it, your new friends and neighbors will.
Unless you’re autistic – or a savant, like Warren Buffett – you’ll find it hard to avoid. Contemporary art and big, expensive houses are hugely popular among the wealthy elite. And most people are very susceptible to peer influence.
That is what creates investment opportunities, too. The lumpen investoriat – like the lumpen electorate – does not do much serious thinking. Instead, it reacts emotionally and primitively.
It takes up positions that are too expensive. And then, in a panic, it stampedes away from them… leaving them too cheap. That’s when the bells start ringing.

This post was published at Acting-Man on September 29, 2014.