The GoldenSunrise
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Today’s Golden Sunrise
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Hours of research consolidated for you
Preparations being made for the President’s visit to Wall Street to tell them, repeat tell them, about what is good for the investment community. Rolling out the Red Carpet for his arrival.
Speaking of red, Asia was last night across the board, Europe is as I begin this, and futures say the US markets will be.
Most Asian markets are down from the close of the last trading day in March with only South Korea, Taiwan and Australia every so fractionally positive and the rest negative. Surprised? I was and I track this every day..Easy to get caught up in the near-term and look a little deeper, wide and broader. This is THE growth area of the world and the growthiest of the growers, China, see yesterday’s FXI chart, is the most negative.
The three main markets in Europe; the DAX, the CAC, and FTSE are all down slightly and the German and French markets are the only major markets that are in the red for the year.
Leading market in the world-Russia. Of course, you knew that.
US markets are all in the plus column for the month and the year. Of companies reporting so far this quarter, 83% have exceeded analysts expectation…including Apple which has done so for the 29th consecutive quarter…the probability of this event occurring 29 times in a row is rather small but that is the beauty of probabilities-it can happen that way and not be an issue.
Noted author and long-time commentator/fund manager David Dremen has published a number of articles on the horrible estimating record of Wall Street forecasters and has documented a rather deplorable track record for this coterie of cognoscenti.
The President will speak around 2pm, so if he begins “You people” or anything that can be construed that way look for..ahm..let me put it this way-I wouldn’t be going long Goldman Sachs at 1:59PM.
Divinely inspired Lloyd Blankfein has taken up the cudgel of self-righteousness and moral indignation and has taken to attacking the SEC on their actions in calls to clients defending the actions of Goldman Sachs in the CDO arena.
Each of two aforementioned leaders considers themselves to be God’s chosen worker and performing His Will for the better of mankind. Interestingly both involve poverty and wealth at the same time.
The President wants to take Lloyd’s money and give it to the people who voted him into office and, he hopes, will do so again. Lloyd wants to keep the money and keep the system of retirement accounts (401ks, IRAs) and pension funds in place so he can dip into them at the end of each bonus period. His ilk sees nothing wrong with collection hundreds of billions of bonuses for “performance” for clients who have earned nothing since 1998.
I suspect the President will win this if he can ram it through before November, a skill which he has mastered. And if it turns out that way, any money coming from Lloyd will be money that came from the people who put it up to begin with. When pension managers cleverly diversified into non-correlated “assets” like hedge funds, they provided the liquidity that let the fundsters run the price of oil to $147 a barrel, paid for by the people who put up the cash so their own prices could skyrocket. That worked out well.
And yet, no one will buy a coin made of precious metal that is what it is and can’t be tampered with. When President Nixon shut the gold window for conversion of paper dollars in 1971, there were not nearly as money dollars in existence and you could buy an ounce of gold for $35. Today there are many, many, many (to the power of 100x, more maybe) and not that much more gold in existence. Yet, the thought is the gold is risky and speculative and to be avoided, when, in reality, the exact opposite is true.
Gold, that you have in your possession, can be trusted. You are deciding that the people mentioned in this article can be entrusted with your financial future. The only good thing that came of Nixon’s overturn of Bretton Woods was that, two years later, for American citizens, the US dollar again become convertible but only if you take action.
Whatever you decide works for me.
JohnR
Goldensurveyor.com
Golden Sunrise is the Golden Surveyor’sbroad-based market and world view.
Written daily 4am-7am by markets information specialist GS John!
