Canada Pauses Reporting Trade Data, Blames US Shutdown

Statistics Canada said today the release of their monthly trade statistics will be delayed indefinitely due to the current shutdown of the U.S. government.

Statistics Canada:

“Trade statistics without Canada’s exports to the United States have limited use as a current economic indicator, as these exports represent approximately 75% of Canada’s total exports.”

The U.S. shutdown “has a direct impact on Statistics Canada’s ability to compile, produce and publish Canadian international merchandise trade data, as Statistics Canada will not receive data on Canada’s exports to the United States for the duration of the shutdown”

Publication of December 2018 trade data won’t occur as scheduled on Feb. 5, 2019.

The agency says it will delay the release of trade statistics “until the USCB resumes normal operations and a new joint release date is negotiated with the USCB as per the data exchange agreement”

The question is – why should a US shutdown affect Statistics Canada’s ability to track its own imports and exports? Is there some ‘negotiated’ agreement between the trade partners to ensure that the data is manipulated just right (so as to avoid the glaring errors that are so evident between China and Hong Kong for instance).

Historically they can’t quite agree…

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Michael Cohen Hired IT Firm To Rig CNBC, Drudge Polls; Paint Him As “Sex Symbol”

Before the 2016 US presidential campaign, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen agreed to pay small IT firm to rig online polls in his boss’s favor, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

And instead of the $50,000 he was promised, Cohen gave the man, John Gauger, a blue Walmart bag with between $12,000 and $13,000 in cash and a boxing glove that Cohen said had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter. 

Cohen has disputed the account – but not the relationship with Gauger’s firm, RedFinch – saying “All monies paid to Mr. Gauger were by check.” 

In January 2014, Mr. Cohen asked Mr. Gauger to help Mr. Trump score well in a CNBC online poll to identify the country’s top business leaders by writing a computer script to repeatedly vote for him. Mr. Gauger was unable to get Mr. Trump into the top 100 candidates. In February 2015, as Mr. Trump prepared to enter the presidential race, Mr. Cohen asked him to do the same for a Drudge Report poll of potential Republican candidates, Mr. Gauger said. Mr. Trump ranked fifth, with about 24,000 votes, or 5% of the total.

After making the cash payment at Trump Tower, Mr. Cohen kept saying he would pay the balance of the $50,000 but never did, Mr. Gauger said. Mr. Cohen also promised to get RedFinch work for Mr. Trump’s campaign. He set up two phone calls for Mr. Gauger with campaign officials, who didn’t hire him, he said. –WSJ

In addition to owning RedFinch, Gauger is chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia, where evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. – an ardent Trump supporter, is president. Cohen met Gauger in 2012 when Falwell invited Trump to give a speech. Gauger helped Cohen set up an Instagram account and gave him his cellphone number. 

Cohen would then ask Gauger for help over the next several years which would boost positive internet search results for Cohen and friends, according to Gauger. While Cohen didn’t pay for much of that work, he often promised to connect RedFinch with Trump hotel and golf-course executives, though Gauger says that never happened. 

Hilariously, in May 2016 Cohen also asked Gauger to craeate a Twitter account – @WomenForCohen, which was run by a female friend of Gauger and described Cohen as a “sex symbol,” praising his looks and character, while promoting his appearances and statements boosting Trump’s candidacy. 

And while Gauger says he never received the rest of the $50,000 he was owed, Cohen still requested – and received – a $50,000 reimbursement from Donald Trump and his company for the work done by RedFinch, according to the Journal, citing a government document and a person familiar with the matter. The reimbursement – based on a handwritten note by Cohen, was paid largely out of Trump’s personal account. 

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said that Cohen’s full reimbursement for the $50,000 while paying RedFinch less shows the former Trump lawyer to be a thief. “If one thing has been established, it’s that Michael Cohen is completely untrustworthy,” said Cohen. 

Cohen shot back, saying that he did was “at the direction of and for the sold Benefit of” Donald Trump, and that he regrets his “blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it.” 

Federal prosecutors noted the reimbursement when they charged Cohen in August with eight felonies – including arranging hush-money payments to a porn star and a Playboy model who say Trump had affairs with them. 

Prosecutors wrote in a charging document that when Mr. Cohen asked Trump Organization executives for a $130,000 reimbursement for a hush payment he made to Stephanie Clifford, the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels, he also scrawled a handwritten note asking for $50,000 he said he spent on “tech services” to aid Mr. Trump’s campaign. Prosecutors didn’t name the company providing those services, but people familiar with the matter say it was RedFinch.

…

Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations, tax evasion, lying to Congress and other charges. He was sentenced last month to three years in prison. None of the charges were connected to his interactions with Mr. Gauger and RedFinch. –WSJ

Gauger’s attorney, Charles E. James Jr. of firm Williams Mullen, said that Gauger was interviewed by federal prosecutors about his relationship with Cohen over six years, fom their first meeting in 2012 until last April, when Cohen’s home, office and hotel room were raided by the FBI. 

Gauger said that while Cohen promised him profitable work for the Trump campaign, his activities for Trump were relegated to the unsuccessful rigging of polls. 

Reimbursements to Cohen, totaling $420,000, was paid mostly from Trump’s personal account – which included $180,000 to pay Stormy Daniels and RedFinch, as well as a $60,000 bonus and another $180,000 to cover taxes he would owe since the money would be considered income, according to prosecutors. 

Cohen did give Gauger some other paying work – hiring RedFinch to create positive web content about the CEO of CareOne Management, a New Jersey assisted-living company that gave Cohen a consulting contract. 

Mr. Cohen sent RedFinch checks totaling $50,000 for that work, Mr. Gauger said. Mr. Cohen collected $200,000 from CareOne but didn’t pay taxes on it, according to the charging document filed by federal prosecutors, who didn’t identify the assisted-living company by name. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to evading taxes on that income. CareOne didn’t respond to a request for comment.  

Mr. Cohen asked Mr. Gauger to create the @WomenForCohen account, still active in 2019, to elevate his profile. The account’s profile says it is run by “Women who love and support Michael Cohen. Strong, pit bull, sex symbol, no nonsense, business oriented and ready to make a difference!” –WSJ

Gauger says he and Cohen last spoke in April 2018 following the raid by federal agents. 

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Bloomberg System Goes Down Ahead Of US Open

For the second time in a few months, the Bloomberg Terminal system appears to be down and is causing panic across Wall Street ahead of the US market open…

 

Traders are not happy…

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Beto O’Rourke Suggests America Should Ditch The Constitution

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson,

Potential presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke has stunningly suggested that the United States should ditch its own Constitution.

During an interview with the Washington Post, the Texas Congressman openly mulled whether the rapidly changing nature of the world meant that the founding document of the country was out of date.

Throughout the two-hour interview — which was often interrupted by bystanders urging him to run for president — O’Rourke boomeranged between a bright-eyed hope that the United States will soon dramatically change its approach to a whole host of issues and a dismal suspicion that the country is now incapable of implementing sweeping change.

When asked which it is, O’Rourke paused.

“I’m hesitant to answer it because I really feel like it deserves its due, and I don’t want to give you a — actually, just selfishly, I don’t want a sound bite of it reported, but, yeah, I think that’s the question of the moment: Does this still work?” O’Rourke said. “Can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships…and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?”

The bizarre quote is sure to come up again should O’Rourke decide to run for president, a scenario that looks more likely in the aftermath of his Senate challenge, which O’Rourke almost certainly knew he would lose but embarked upon anyway to increase his name recognition.

Some analysts think that Beto is more likely to seek a spot on the 2020 ticket as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, but with views like this, many conservatives will want him nowhere near the White House.

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Are You More Likely to Be Killed by Opioids Than a Car Crash?

A report from the National Safety Council (NSC) has prompted a bunch of news stories highlighting the finding that an American’s lifetime risk of dying from an accidental opioid overdose is now greater than his lifetime risk of dying in a car crash. “Odds of Dying From Accidental Opioid Overdose in the U.S. Surpass Those of Dying in Car Accident,” says the CNN headline, while The New York Times reports that “the opioid crisis in the United States has become so grim that Americans are now likelier to die of an overdose than in a vehicle crash.” The NSC itself claims “your odds of dying from an accidental opioid overdose are greater than [your odds of] dying in a motor vehicle crash.”

All of this is highly misleading for a couple of reasons. First, the danger of dying from opioids, unlike the danger of dying in a car crash, can be readily avoided by most people. Second, the NSC’s calculation lumps together different kinds of drug use that pose very different levels of risk, ranging from substantial to negligible.

As Josh Bloom notes at the American Council on Science and Health’s blog, journalists “feel the need to compare opioid overdose deaths to those from automobile accidents, as if the two have anything to do with each other.” Bloom wonders what sort of conclusion we are supposed to draw from this ranking: that arranging more fatal car crashes would alleviate the “opioid crisis”? He also notes that treating “opioid overdoses” as a single cause of death conflates heroin and illicit fentanyl, which are involved in the vast majority of such cases, with prescription pain medication, which accounts for a small share that looks even smaller once you take drug mixtures into account.

The records compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that heroin or illicit fentanyl was involved in 75 percent of the 47,600 opioid-related deaths that the CDC counted in 2017. Just 30 percent of opioid-related deaths involved prescription analgesics such as hydrocodone and oxycodone, and about two-fifths of those cases also involved heroin or fentanyl.

Adding more substances to the analysis shows that most records listing a prescription pain reliever also list other drugs: For example, 68 percent of deaths involving prescription opioids in 2017 also involved heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, or alcohol. In other words, less than 10 percent of opioid-related deaths involved pain medication by itself, and the actual percentage may be considerably lower, since coroners and medical examiners do not always note additional drugs. In New York City, which has one of the country’s most thorough systems for reporting drug-related deaths, 97 percent of them involve mixtures.

Keep these facts in mind when you read that your lifetime risk of dying from an opioid overdose is one in 96, according to the latest NSC calculation, compared to a one-in-103 risk of dying in a car crash. That does not really mean you are more likely to die from an opiod overdose, of course, since you can make sure that will not happen by never taking an opioid. But even if you are brave enough to use pain medication that a doctor prescribes for you, the chance that it will kill you is very small: on the order 0.022 percent a year, according to a 2015 study of opioid-related deaths in North Carolina.

To approximate the risk calculated by the NSC, you’d have to continue taking the same drug every year for half a century or so. But even that is misleading, because these deaths are not random. They are especially likely to occur in people who take larger doses than instructed and who mix opioids with other drugs. If you don’t do either of those things, your risk will be even lower.

The illicit opioids are much more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable. Furthermore, they are becoming even more dangerous, largely thanks to the proliferation of fentanyl and fentanyl analogs as heroin adulterants and substitutes, which is encouraged by the economics of prohibition. In 2017 that category of opioids was involved in 60 percent of opioid-related deaths, up from 14 percent in 2010.

A rough calculation (one that does not take into account the underrepresentation of heroin users in the government’s surveys) indicates there were 17.5 drug-related deaths per 1,000 heroin users in 2017, compared to 1.3 drug-related deaths per 1,000 “misusers” of prescription opioids. That’s a big difference, even if the official count of heroin users is off by a factor of two or three. Judging from the North Carolina study, the corresponding rate for people who take opioids prescribed for them is something like 0.0022 per 1,000. The NSC’s one-in-96 lifetime risk is an average that conflates different situations involving dramatically different odds.

By contrast, while your chance of dying in a car crash depends on factors such as miles traveled, traffic conditions, and seat belt use, anyone who drives or rides is exposed to some risk, and the average gives you an idea of how big the danger is. It is perfectly rational to worry more about dying in a car crash than about dying from opioids, especially if you use them only as directed to treat pain. When the NSC warns us about “the danger inside of a bottle of pills” in the context of a calculation based mainly on illicit opioids, it is engaged in fearmongering rather than public education.

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Blain: “The UK Seems Hell-Bent On Self Immolation”

Commenting on the latest Brexit development, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid puts it best: “Watching the House of Commons over the last 48 hours has been a good appetiser for the final series of Game of Thrones out this April. Well we haven’t had dragons…….. yet!”

UBS’ Paul Donovan was just as laconic, commenting overnight that “the UK government survived a vote of confidence 52% to 48%. Everyone is saying things that they probably do not mean. The main opposition party leadership has not decided whether or not to back a second referendum. If anyone is still paying attention, it is probably best to stay cynical and avoid attempting to trade unforecastable events.”

And since by now it is indeed safe to say that many humans, and certainly most algos, aren’t paying attention, we present the the following rant from Bill Blain who, with regrets, has dedicated his latest “Blain’s Morning Porridge” note to lay out his thoughts on what happened this week, and what he expects will happen next.

* * *

Blain’s Morning Porridge  – 17th January  2019

“They say the Camel is a horse designed by a committee…”

Let me start with a heartfelt apology to all international investors holding UK stock, Gilts, property or sterling. We are terribly sorry

for all the confusion, noise and bluster. Brexit is a wonderful illustration of democracy in action – the worst possible form of government except for any of the alternatives. BUT! There is actually little to worry about… its process. Its just got a bit.. well.. a bit more difficult than we expected.. You are probably a little concerned about your Investments in UK Plc, (note Plc rather than Inc). You are wondering the UK, which you always assumed to be the ultimately politically stable safe-haven investment – is so divided. You may be wondering why the Mother of all Parliaments having what looks to be an emotional breakdown, and wondering why the UK seems hell-bent on self immolation.

Relax. Periodically we Brits fall out.. Wars of the Roses, Wars of Scottish, Irish and Welsh Independence, English Civil Wars, Jacobite Rebellions, Rules of Rugby vs Football, LBW Rule, Miner’s Strikes etc, but we always eventually solve it over a nice cup of tea

It wasn’t meant to be like this. It just got, well, messy. We were going to be very British about this. Shaking our heads regretfully and telling Europe: “Its not you, its us.” We assumed we’d agree the details like gentlefolk, shake hands, walk out the door and remain friends forever… and continue with our fondness for French cheese, German Cars, Spanish Holidays and whatever it is the Italians are meant to do.. while being free to enjoy Kangaroo Steaks, American Burgers and South American wines.  

Not quite happening that way, but still very resolvable… ish.

The current mess is just a minor variation on our very British way of doing things. We will fudge it sooner or later. We always do. After all, that’s our defining national characteristic – muddling through till we find a solution. And, we have the advantage of being British – as Lewis Carrol said we are more than able to “believe six impossible things before breakfast..” We will “keep buggering on” Winston-style as long as it takes..  So keep buying Gilts, UK stocks, and hey, London property is looking well affordable these days (if you are a Russian oligarch..)

Be not concerned that on Tuesday you watched in shocked bewilderment as 2/3rds of our legislators screamed down our Prime Minister’s proposals to exit the Europe Union, and on Wednesday the same MP’s affirmed their confidence in her government.
Confused? Then you are in good company. These things have a way of correcting themselves. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn called his confidence vote too early and has united the Conservatives. Yay. Even the SNP sounded vaguely conciliatory. The Liberal chap was, is, and will remain irrelevant.

I won’t try to hide that the next few weeks are going to be difficult. Theresa May still has the near-impossible task of cobbling together a deal from the conflicting and mutually exclusive factions across parliament – not just her own fatally divided party.

As it stands, UK politics looks to be gridlocked. There is no clear majority for any of the multiple Brexit choices. At either end of the spectrum are the noisy No-Deal Brexiteers and the Looney Peoples Vote Second Referendum. In the middle we have soft-medium-hard agreed Brexit choices. (There is the added complication that once we agree what we want, we still have to get Europe to agree they want it to…, but lets ignore that for now..)
 
I’m fairly positive on the likely outcomes.

  • It’s clear a Hard No-Deal Brexit is effectively off the table. Why? Because it’s abundantly clear the bulk of parliament will oppose it and remove it as the default option for the March 29th exit date.  Whatever Jacob Rees-Mogg (the minister for the 17th Century) thinks, they are increasingly politically irrelevant – the numbers are against them.
  • The same is probably true for the second referendum Peoples Vote – although politicians know it would be short-term politically popular, it would be long-term divisive, and how long before calls for a third plebiscite come in?

Like empty vessels, No Deal Brexiteers and Remoaners will make an awful lot of noise. Cromwell would have known how to deal with them….

What are the chances of a compromise? May knows she can probably muster 210 non Hard Brexit Tory MPs (let’s agree there are 120 Tory Hard Brexiteers and Ardent Remainers). That means she has to attract at least 115 MPs from other parties. Whether she can find that number (over half the parliamentary Labour Party) is open to question. Enough Labour MPs despise Corbyn to make it happen – but will they risk deselection? Perhaps Corbyn can still be brought on side – although it would probably mean the Conservative party splitting. (What’s not to like about that?)

May has to craft an acceptable Parsons Egg of soft-to-medium Brexit from the middle ground. It’s not binary – she needs a convention type approach (which her non-listening personality will struggle to handle) – to achieve a workable compromise. It will be a soft-medium Brexit that will all can agree on – which will inevitably lead to something like a Norway style customs union and single market membership.

But, that’s just my view.. So much that can go wrong and I’m probably as misguided as anyone else.. But, the bottom line is a No-Deal won’t happen – and that’s why UK markets were a screaming buy!

I must try to focus back on markets tomorrow, this political tosh is just too difficult.

 

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Trump Paving the Road to Overtime Pay With Good Intentions: New at Reason

Back in 2016, the Obama administration passed an overtime-pay regulation that would have required employers to pay overtime for salaried employees who earn less than $47,476 per year. But its implementation was blocked by a federal judge in November 2016 in response to a lawsuit filed by states and businesses. That regulation is back in the news, however, after the Trump administration has spent months re-examining the issue and seems close to a final decision. Let’s hope the administration makes the right call, writes Veronique de Rugy. After all, raising the cost of employing workers is never a recipe for increasing employment.

View this article.

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Giuliani Can’t Say No One Colluded, Only That Trump Didn’t

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night that he doesn’t deny the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russians in the 2016 US election – only that President Trump himself did not. 

“There is not a single bit of evidence the President of the United States committed the only crime you can commit here, conspiring with the Russians to hack the DNC,” said Giuliani. 

Giuliani also claimed that Trump has never denied that there was no collusion by his campaign – just that he didn’t personally collude. 

“[Trump] didn’t say ‘nobody,’ he said he didn’t,” said Giuliani. “How would you know nobody in your campaign…” before Cuomo interjected.

Giuliani has, in fact, denied there was any collusion by the Trump campaign on numerous occasions, including telling Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last May that the Trump campaign didn’t use information obtained from Russia thus proving there was no collusion. “If there was collusion with the Russians, they would have used it,” he said at the time. That same month, he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that “Russian collusion is total fake news.” –MarketWatch

Giuliani then attempted to walk back his statements later in Wednesday’s interview, saying if “the collusion happened, it happened a long time ago. . . . It’s not provable because it never happened. … I’m telling you there’s no chance it happened.”

In July, the Trump attorney questioned in a CNN interview whether collusion is criminal at all. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” he said. 

Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort of lying about sharing polling data with an alleged Rusian spy while the 2016 election was in full swing. 

Asked by Cuomo whether that was considered collusion, Giuliani said that “polling data is given to everybody,” while trying to downplay the situation – adding that Trump didn’t know about it until it was covered in the news. 

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Red Dead Redemption 2 Has First Amendment Right to Use Pinkertons As Villains

RDR2In American history, the Pinkertons are a not-so-fondly remembered private security agency that did the government’s dirty work throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s: breaking up labor unions and arresting gang members (often via brutal means). At present, the Pinkerton Detective Agency still exists, and it would like the creators of the Old West-inspired video game Red Dead Redemption—in which the hired thugs appear, true to form, as notable villains—to pay up.

Take-Two Interactive, Red Dead Redemption 2‘s publisher, received a cease and desist letter from Pinkerton last month. “Although we are flattered by your clear affection for Pinkerton and the Pinkerton Marks, their prominent use in the game appears to be made with the intent to trade on the goodwill associated with the Pinkerton Marks,” wrote the company. The letter demanded a lump sum payment, or royalties.

Take-Two has refused to pay the ransom. This week, the company responded by filing a lawsuit against Pinkerton. The suit asks a judge to confirm Red Dead‘s First Amendment right to reference actual history, according to The Verge.

“Defendants ignore well-established First Amendment principles that protect expressive works, like Red Dead 2, from exactly the types of claims that Defendants have lodged against Plaintiffs,” Take-Two argues in its lawsuit.

The suit prompted Pinkerton to change its tune. In a statement, the agency claimed the game had misrepresented Pinkertons as bad guys:

One cannot rewrite history to create profit in the present at the expense of real-life people who represent a brand today. In the game, Pinkertons are seen shooting horses, shooting guns and firebombs into buildings where women and children are present, and as violent villains in the community. History tells a different story. Allan Pinkerton was a visionary businessman who created the country’s first detective agency in 1850. The logo he created features an eye, leading to the term “Private Eye,” which is a part of American lexicon today. After working as President Lincoln’s security detail and thwarting the first attempt on Lincoln’s life, the agency became the inspiration behind the creation of the Secret Service.

Pinkerton President Jack Zahran lamented that his employees must now explain to their video game-playing children “why Red Dead Redemption 2 encourages people to murder Pinkertons.”

If the agency were to succeed in this scheme of exacting payment from Take-Two, it would be an awful affront to free speech protections. Thankfully, this is one legal gunfight the Pinkertons should almost certainly lose.

“Pinkerton has nothing resembling a case,” Ken White, an attorney and contributing editor to Reason, told me via email. “Their claim is so preposterous that Take-Two’s very aggressive strategy—sue them for a declaration—is warranted and will likely be successful.”

Timothy Geigner of Techdirt reached the same conclusion, writing, “it’s quite difficult to imagine works of art having to license history in the way Pinkerton has suggested Take 2 should.”

After all, there is plenty of publicly available information on the Pinkertons’ activities in the 18th and 19th century, and they have made appearances in other media, including television shows like Deadwood and Sherlock Holmes stories.

“The notion that Pinkerton can somehow prevent entertainment use of its historical behavior is offensive and ridiculous,” said White. “Also, the Pinkertons were armed thugs for decades.”

If the matter goes to court, a judge should reach the same conclusion.

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Euro-Gold Ratio Is A Canary In The Monetary Coalmine

Authored by Tom Luongo,

For weeks I’ve been telling my subscribers that something changed in the gold market. Since Donald Trump’s election there was a pretty clear pair trade between the U.S. dollar and gold.

And that trade was most manifested in the price of gold in euros.

During last summer gold experienced its worse (in terms of time) downtrend of the seven-year bear market.

But since bottoming in October it has rallied, albeit weakly. It is still mired in that bear market, gamely trying to push through the $1300 barrier. The important zone is the $1365-75 post-Brexit vote area.

And with Brexit very much up in the air at this point, despite the best efforts to project otherwise by The Davos Crowd and their political/media quislings, gold’s relative weakness is a real worry for long-suffering gold bulls.

While the currently monthly chart is a mildly-bullish uptrend, and has been since December 2015, it is a counter-trend withing a broader bear market that has not finished.

But, we know all this. Nothing about gold has been interesting for months. Newmont Minng (NYSE:NEM) and Goldcorp (NYSE:GG) announced a huge merger the other day, funds are scrubbing gold from both their names and their portfolios, investors have lost all interest.

That is because the real story is not what’s happening in the U.S., and consequently the dollar, it is Europe.

And this is reflected in the euro.

As I said at the beginning, the election of Donald Trump created a very strong pair trade between the euro and gold. Since the October bottom, however, that trade is breaking down.

Look at the strength of the move by gold in euros since the October low. This is now challenging the 2018 high — a triple top breakdown — and hinting at a push towards €1200.

This is a far more bullish move than we saw in dollars. And it says that the breakdown in gold last summer may very well be the false move to get everyone on the wrong side of the trade.

New bull or bear markets happen only when a significant majority of actors are betting with the current trend which has played out. Once everyone is a bull there are no more buyers and vice versa.

It also screams that investors are now looking at gold as a safe-haven play again and it is not purely trading as a currency pair. There is a new dynamic at play that hasn’t been there, frankly, since the run up to Brexit.

Moreover, it has been plainly obvious watching the day-to-day trading of both gold and the euro that there is a concerted effort to manage this price level.

Gold isn’t breaking out in Japanese Yen or Swiss Francs, at this point only the euro and the British pound.

So despite the Project Fear mongers, gold is making the right noises about where things are heading. Gold’s primary role is as a check on the public’s confidence of political institutions.

A secular bull market only happens when Gold is rising against every government currency. Given the importance of the EU to the global trade and financial status quo a breakdown there politically has the potential to turn a localized bull market into a secular one.

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