by Rich Winkel, Thought Crime Radio:
The number of homeless students in the US is the highest in more than a decade according to a new study.
Most of the 1.5m homeless children stayed with other families or friends after losing their homes.
But 7% lived in abandoned buildings or cars, the report by the National Centre for Homeless Education showed.
Homelessness is often caused by job insecurity, unaffordable housing, domestic violence and recently the opioid crisis.
by Alasdair Macleod, GoldMoney:
Gold and silver moved sideways over the week with little change. In morning trade in Europe gold traded at $1576, up $5 from last Friday’s close, and silver at $17.70, unchanged on the week. In gold futures, turnover was light until yesterday, in a week of growing uncertainty over the coronavirus, now renamed COVID-19.
Yesterday, there was a jump in Comex gold options trading on the back of a firming market, when gold looked technically placed for a bullish move. Volume expanded to 104,354 options, compared with 37,000 typically. On examination, the activity was in October calls, striking at $1650, $1750 and $1775, with open interest rising by 16,102 contracts. Furthermore, there was an 8,000 contract March 2021 $1850 call taken out.
by Theodore Butler, Silver Seek:
It has now been more than eleven years that I have been writing about the leading role that the US’ largest bank, JPMorgan, plays in the pricing of silver and gold. My suspicions that JPMorgan was the big silver and gold manipulator started shortly after the release of the August 2008 Bank Participation report, which indicated an unnaturally large increase in the short positions of one or two US banks in COMEX silver and gold futures contracts. That’s when I started speculating that JPMorgan was the big COMEX short seller. On Nov 10, 2008, I stopped speculating and directly pointed to JPM, as a result of correspondence between a US congressman and the CFTC.
by Rob Kirby, Gold Seek:
What has happened to our capital markets? The reactions to the onset of a global pandemic in our capital markets are, for the most part, fundamentally counter- intuitive and, in my opinion, will not continue.
Incapacitating the second largest and fastest growing economy in the world is no reason to “buy stocks” into record territory or conduct fire sales of precious metals. If you drop a ball and it falls “up” I suggest you not jump to the conclusion that the laws of gravity have been repealed. Instead, you might want to take heed of the old adage, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”.
American equity markets have celebrated treasonous, undermining, political assault and subterfuge:
by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:
“It is a mind-numbing exercise for investors who see the cognitive dissonance”: CIO at Guggenheim Partners.
This market has been an astounding experience for people who’ve traded through the prior stock market bubbles and the last three crashes, who’ve seen a national and several regional housing bubbles form and implode, who’ve seen the subprime-auto-loan Asset Backed Securities bubble blow up in the mid-1990s and again during the Financial Crisis, and now it’s starting to head the same direction again. But no one can remember ever having seen markets like these that have formed the Everything Bubble.
by Harvey Organ, Harvey Organ Blog:
GOLD UP $6.85 TO $1583.45//SILVER IS UP 10 CENTS TO $17.76/ANOTHER QUEUE JUMP FOR GOLD TODAY: 300 OZ//CORONAVIRUS UPDATE!//BILL BLAIR HAS HAD ENOUGH: CALLS ON AN OUTIDE PROSECUTOR TO LOOK AT ALL “POLITICIAL MOTIVATED CASES” INCLUDING THE MICHAEL FLYNN CASE AND ROGER STONE//MORE SWAMP STORIES FOR YOU TONIGHT.
by Alasdair Macleod, GoldMoney:
This article posits that the spread of the coronavirus coincides with the downturn in the global credit cycle, with potentially catastrophic results. At the time of writing, analysts are still trying to get to grips with the virus’s economic impact and they commonly express the hope that after a month or two everything will return to normal. This seems too optimistic.
The credit crisis was already likely to be severe, given the combination of the end of a prolonged expansionary phase of the credit cycle and trade protectionism. These were the conditions that led to the Wall Street crash of 1929-32. Given similar credit cycle and trade dynamics today, the question to be resolved is how an overvaluation of bonds and equities coupled with escalating monetary inflation will play out.
by Mish Shedlock, The Maven:
by Peter Schiff, Schiff Gold:
Every once in a while, the truth slips out of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s mouth.
Powell was on Capitol Hill this week addressing Congress. He continued to talk up the economy, but in a moment of honesty, tacitly admitted that the central bank is already engaged in extraordinary monetary policy, and confessed the Fed may not have the firepower to fight the next recession. During testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, the Fed chair conceded that the current low level of interest rates “means that it would be important for fiscal policy to support the economy if it weakens.”
by Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds:
When the stampede tumbles off the cliff, buyers vanish and markets go bidless.
The shock wave unleashed in China on January 23 is about to hit the U.S. economy and shatter everything that is fragile and fantasy, starting with the U.S. stock market. The shock wave is still reverberating through the vulnerable Chinese economy, toppling all that is fragile: auto sales, sales of empty flats in Ghost Cities, shadow banking loans that cannot be paid, workers’ wages that won’t be paid, businesses that won’t re-open, supply chains dependent on marginal enterprises and most saliently, the faith of the people in their hubris-soaked, self-serving leadership.
by Egon Von Greyerz, Gold Switzerland:
There are no safe assets. In 2002 we recommended our investors to hold up to 50% of their financial assets in physical gold. Today in 2020, I consider that up to 100% is the right figure since there are no safe assets except for physical precious metals.
We are now at the end of the only truly global asset bubble in history, fuelled by a debt explosion of epic proportions. Never before have all major economies peaked together, powered by quadrillions of credit creation, money printing and derivatives.
by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:
My “Credit-Card Spread Index” blows out. Heck if I knew what that means, but it doesn’t mean anything good.
The average yield of investment-grade bonds (as per ICE BofAML US Corporate Yield index) dropped to a record low of 2.62% this week. This comes after the Fed cut its policy rates three times last year, from already low levels, to even lower levels, and after it bailed out the repo-market with over $400 billion over a period of just three months. Bond yields across the board have fallen, and it made borrowing for companies extremely cheap:
