Gold, Currencies, Treasuries All Getting Sold!

• Dollar bugs keep the pressure on the currencies
• Chuck celebrates Veterans Day! 

Good day… And a Marvelous Monday to you! A Veteran’s Day Monday to boot! The wound center doctor, last Friday, told me the wound was healing… I begged to differ with him and then he showed me the two pictures of the wound from 4 weeks ago to then… They also found an infection from the culture they took, and now I’m on an antibiotic to kill it… Fingers crossed! Well, our Blues sure are on a hot streak having won 7 games in a row! The just came home from a trip to the Canadian Northwest, and while suffering some major personnel losses, the wins kept piling up… OK, it’s Veteran’s Day, and when I was working in the bank, this was a holiday… So consider this a bonus Pfennig! HA! The Beau Brummels greet me this morning with their song: Just A Little…

Since this is Veteran’s Day, I have a Veteran’s Day Poem for you, and I’ll touch on a couple of things on my mind this morning, a FWIW section article, and tie it all up in a cute little bow… But not so much on the markets... There are priorities.... So, let’s get to it!

The currencies continue to give up ground to the dollar bugs… Even with the rotten to the core economic data that’s been printing… There’s something else going on here folks, the masses should be sprinting to Gold, and instead they’re sprinting to stocks… the currencies and Gold aren't the only assets under fire right now, as Treasuries are getting sold too... The yield on the 10-year Treasury has risen to 1.94%... Just so you don’t think I’m the only one crying wolf on our economy…. Publishing guru, and writer extraordinaire, Bill Bonner, had this to say the other day in his daily letter… “My doom meter is flashing 9… The last time it was here was 2008”…. Uh-oh spaghetti-o’s….

OK, longtime readers, remember when I used to talk about the jobs numbers and would say that (back then) that it didn’t matter what the numbers were, because we didn’t know what the makeup of the jobs created were, that if 100,000 jobs were created but all of them were minimum wage jobs, what good was that going to be for the economy?

As time has gone by the BLS now breaks down the category of jobs, but…. And this is a BIG BUT… They still don’t tell us what kind of wages these jobs in the categories are being paid… And now, Bloomberg reports that “there’s a low wage crisis in the U.S.”… Yes, with the jobless rate at or near an all-time low, 44% of those age 18 to 64 are low-wage workers, according to a new report. That’s 53 million people who aren’t reaping the benefits of a supposedly booming economy.”

So, now you see that the jobs numbers are basically worthless, unless they tell us the wage make ups… And… for the last 10 years, we’ve worked hard at widening the job creation at services companies, but not in the manufacturing sector, and look what all those night hotel keeper jobs have done… The Economy has been running around 2.1% for the last decade, Consumer Debt is at an all-time high, and there are still millions of people out there that can’t find a job that pays them what they need to be paid to put a roof over the heads of their children, and food on the table, and clothes on their backs, much less pay for their insurance, medicines, etc.

The U.S. Data Cupboard is closed today, and will not have anything meaningful to show us until Friday this week. Tomorrow we’ll see the stupid CPI (consumer inflation) of which I just don’t care about any longer, given my views on how the index is derived, and how inflation is really personal in this day and age. On Friday we’ll get bombarded with meaningful data, as Rocktober prints of Retail Sales, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization all print… More on those as we go through the week.

OK, here’s the Poem… I pulled this off www.aveteransday.com

Honor Our Veterans

we all love our freedom

yet we despise

the wars that have been fought

we say we love our Veterans,

but do we truly honor them?

is the concept of freedom

possible without the concept of war?

I honestly think not

contemplate that now and then

we all wish it could be so

but too naturally comes opposition

too many points of view

opposing ideals continuing to flow

one thing we must remember

our Veterans served our country

they did not start the wars

they answered the call of duty

so, if you love America

you must love our Veterans

for without them

we would have no freedom

God bless America!

And God bless our Veterans!

My dad was a veteran of WWII... I sometimes wish I had known him at that time, but then I realize how tough, rough, and strong of a man he was when I knew him, I think it's better that I didn't! But thank you dad...

Now… And after all that, here’s the FWIW article today…

Or, here’s your snippet: “Strategists at two giant Wall Street banks closed out their bets on gold as the traditional haven gets a hammering from investors shifting to risk-on mode.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s asset-allocation team including Marko Kolanovic, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou and John Normand said it unwound its gold hedge, moving to an underweight recommendation from an overweight one. Citigroup Inc. strategists including Jeremy Hale abandoned a long position in gold, in their asset-allocation note Thursday.

The rejigging comes amid the worst week for gold since May 2017, when riskier assets were propelled by the story of synchronous global growth and havens were in little demand. Bonds have also been losers, and the two teams made adjustments there as well: Citigroup opened a short bet against German bunds, and JPMorgan went more deeply underweight on its government-bond position.”

Chuck again… For goodness sakes, don’t be fooled into thinking that a bank that has had three different charges filed on them by the Gov’t. would be giving good advice… of all the things I read this weekend about JPMorgan, you would think I had some vendetta against them… I don’t… But these actions they keep taking to reduce the price of Gold have really got me riled up…

The currencies today 11/11/19 American Style: A$.6864, kiwi .6336, C$ .7562, euro 1.1023, sterling 1.2783, Swiss $1.0036, European Style: rand 14.8317, krone 9.1195, SEK 9.6856, forint 302.43, zloty 3.8653, koruna 23.0943, RUB 63.74, yen 109.30, sing 1.3585, HKD 7.8264, INR 71.02, China 6.9949, peso 19.13, BRL 4.1619, Dollar Index 98.18, Oil $56.64, 10-year 1.94%, Silver $16.88, Platinum $888.68, Palladium $1.726.08, and Gold... $1,464.13

That’s it for today… Well, I should be writing this from S. Florida, but I’m not, as my trip had to be cancelled. I say that because as we will be in the teens here tonight, temperature wise, it will remain pleasant and warm there… No I’m not bitter… But I do hold a grudge! I hope today was a holiday for you, dear reader… The weatherperson is calling for an inch of snow this afternoon... Ahhh, the , “just a dusting of snow” forecast… I’ll always remember February 1982… When the infamous forecast had to be changed to 2 feet of snow! OK, I’ve said enough today, this was supposed to be a quick and dirty one today, but… As usual I once get started, it’s difficult to stop me! Blind Faith takes us to the finish line today with their song: Can’t Find My Way Home… I hope you have a Marvelous Monday, and please Be Good To Yourself!