Tag: news

Authored by MN Gordon via The Economic Prism blog,

The New Year’s nearly here.  The slate’s been wiped clean.  New hopes, new dreams, and new fantasies, are all within reach.  Today’s the day to make a double fisted grab for them.

 

Without question, 2018 will be the year that everything happens exactly as it should.  Some things you’ll be able to control.  Other things will be well beyond your control.

Certainly, your ability to stop your neighbor’s cat from relieving itself in your side yard is limited, barring extreme measures.  What we mean is each day shall unfold before you – both good and bad – in symbiotic disharmony.  You can count on it.

But what are the specifics and particulars for the year ahead?  What about stocks, the 10-Year Treasury note, gold, bitcoin, and everything else?  Are we fated for World War III?  Will this be the year Hillary Clinton finally croaks?

Today we endeavor to answer these questions – and more – with hesitation and humility.  Obviously, predicting the future is more art than science.  But so is Fed monetary policy, or a charted wave pattern that extends resistance and support lines out into the future.

Predictive Methodology and Disclaimer

“Past performance is no guarantee of future results,” counsels your broker.  Thus, we eschew common forecasting techniques for a conjectural approach.  We look to connect seemingly unrelated big picture nodes with the illogical grace of an Irish joke.

To be clear, our methodology is as unscientific as your street corner palm reader’s.  First, we engage all matters of fact, fiction, fakery, and fraud.  Then, through induction, deduction, biased interpolation, and metaphysical reduction, we arrive at precise, unequivocal answers.

But before we get to it, a brief disclaimer’s in order.  This proviso from King Solomon should suffice:

“A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?” – Ecclesiastes 10:14

Hence, today’s windbag contemplations are foolish in nature.  Perhaps, they’re even being offered by a complete fool.  You can decide and let us know.

With that out of the way, we sharpen our pencils and face our limitations.  What follows, for fun and for free, are several simple suppositions and suspicions for the year ahead.

The only thing we ask of you in exchange for these utterances is to consider printing this out and thumbtacking it to your office corkboard.  That way you can cross each prediction off as it comes to pass.

Several Simple Suppositions and Suspicions for 2018

Stocks

To begin, the animal spirits and bullish market optimism of President Trump’s first year in office will extend well into the New Year.  The GOP tax reform bill should deliver a great short-term boon to businesses and corporate earnings.  This will provide a further boost to the stock market via corporate share buybacks – bringing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to just a hair above 28,152.

Nevertheless, the Federal Reserve’s efforts to reduce its balance sheet and raise the price of credit will ultimately exhaust the 9 year bull market.  Sometime around late-summer the stock market will crack.  An abrupt 10 percent correction will occur.

Algorithmic traders will buy-the-dip as they’re pre-programmed to do.  Stocks will quickly bounce upward and approach their all-time high like they have following every other market blip since 2009.  However, this time a new all-time high will not be attained.  Shrewd investors will sell the bounce and exit to the safety of cash.

By October, pre-programmed buying will morph to pre-programmed selling, and an abrupt collapse will be triggered.  Valuations will once again matter.  A multi-year bear market will commence that’ll eventually end in the early part of the next decade, following a 60 percent decline of the S&P 500.

But that’s nothing.  Treasury investors are in for a much greater level of capital destruction.

Treasuries

As we close out the year, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note has quietly inched up above 2.4 percent.  From a historical perspective, this is extraordinarily low.  But in early-July 2016, the 10-Year Treasury note bottomed out at just 1.34 percent.  In other words, the yield has increased nearly 80 percent over the last 18 months.  What to make of it?

The last time the interest rate cycle bottomed out was during the early-1940s.  The low inflection point for the 10-Year Treasury note at that time was a yield somewhere around 2 percent.  After that, interest rates generally rose for the next 40 years.

The high inflection point for the rising part of the interest rate cycle was in 1981.  At the peak, the 10-Year Treasury note yielded over 15 percent.  Bond prices – which move inverse to yields – had been going down for so long that Dr. Franz Pick declared them to be “guaranteed certificates of confiscation.”

Pick, who was in his 80s, was looking backward.  Not forward.  Perhaps if he’d looked forward – and peered over the yield summit – he’d have seen the forthcoming 35 year soft, slow slide in interest rates before his eyes.  Of course, these broad trend reversals are only recognizable in hindsight.

So, what about now?  Could it be that credit markets are reversing, and returning to a long term rising interest rate trend?

Quite frankly, we don’t know.  We’ve been anticipating the conclusion of the great Treasury bond bubble for at least 8 years.  But, over this time, we’ve been consistently fooled by a variety of head fakes.  Instead of going up over the last 8 years like we thought, yields have gone down – and then they’ve gone down some more.

The best rationale we can surmise is that the fiat based paper money system, and extreme central bank intervention, has served to push rates down well beyond what is honestly conceivable.  Nonetheless, we’re confident that markets – and a determined Federal Reserve – will eventually succeed in reversing the long-term interest rate tide.

Moreover, we’re highly confident that 2018 will be the year that yields commence their long-term rise in earnest.  After 8 years of being wrong, it’s about time we’re right.  The price of credit will steadily become more and more expensive over the next several decades.  This one thing will change everything.

Gold

If you haven’t noticed, gold has had a terrible run since peaking out at $1,895 per ounce in 2011.  Gold fell to around $1,200 at the start of 2015.  Then it slid to $1,060 per ounce by the close of 2015.  That’s a loss of about 44 percent in dollar terms.  At the close of 2017, gold is priced at about $1,290 per ounce.

The trends that pushed gold up 645 percent from 2001 to 2011 are still in place.  The federal debt – now over $20.6 trillion – continues to rise unabated.  The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency continues to become increasingly suspect.

The broad realization that the recovery’s a sham and that Fed monetary policy has inflated asset prices to a speculative mania will eventually prick the stock market bubble.  The chickens of reckless money printing, unabated debt growth, and ultimate inflation, will come home to roost.  Gold will inevitably resume its uptrend as the safe haven of last resort.

As of late-2017, despite the awful beating over the last several years, gold’s price has stabilized and is setting up for a considerable rebound.  What’s more, gold mining stocks are incredibly cheap.  Quite frankly, this could be the mother of all speculations.

Bitcoin

The rise of bitcoin in 2017 has been nothing short of spectacular.  How high the price of bitcoin goes is partially dependent upon the rate at which the world loses faith in the dollar and all paper currencies.  Nonetheless, bitcoin’s recent gains have all the characteristics of a herd driven speculative mania.

Cyber-security guru John McAfee has promised to eat his most private parts – on live TV, no less – if bitcoin doesn’t hit $1 million by 2020.  Now, why would McAfee make such a promise?  Is he hungry?  Is he mad?  Or does he have complete conviction?

At the same time, Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, has said bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will drop to $0.  Who’s right?  Who’s wrong?

As far as we can tell, both are wrong.  Bitcoin’s not going to $1 million and it’s not going to $0.  How’s that for a prediction?

What is certain is that the underlying blockchain distributed ledger technology isn’t going away.  In fact, this technology is a game changer.  In 2018, the greater population will wake up to the fact that bitcoin and other competing cryptocurrencies offer a vast improvement to the archaic and fee driven services of banks, brokers, and other financial intermediaries.

New applications of the blockchain technology will mushroom in the New Year.  Forthcoming innovations in supply chain management, health care, peer to peer transactions, voting, big data, records management, cyber-security, and much, much more, will all be blockchain based.

Geopolitical Madness

Like 2017, the coming year will be one of great distress.  As the global economy – including the U.S. economy – approaches recession in late-2018, world leaders will seek to deflect blame from their own blunders.  They’ll stumble outward in search of a greater cause to channel the frustrations of their populace towards.

Global factions are on a collision course for war.  We wish this weren’t so.  The ongoing territorial dispute between China, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea will intensify in 2018.  Ancient territorial disagreements between Japan and China over the Senkaku-Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea will deepen.

These age-old disputes will complicate the attainment of a consensus approach to addressing the North Korean nuclear threat.  This, along with the strengthening oil trade nexus of Russia, Iran, and China, and the imminent roll out of the petro-yuan, will further marginalize the United States’ influence on geopolitical matters and undermine the petro-dollar.

Proxy wars will intensify in the Middle East – specifically, Syria and Yemen.  Military buildups will escalate along with the insane rhetoric of national leaders.  New sagas will be invented to focus public support for war.  A major conflict between rival superpowers – perhaps, Iran and Saudi Arabia – will breakout by year’s end.

Hillary Clinton Finally Croaks

The New Year, no doubt, will be the year Hillary Clinton finally croaks – if not literally, then figuratively.  Indeed, her political career is beyond resurrection.  But there’s an awful lot further for her to fall.

Hillary’s been caught with her hand in the cookie jar one too many times.  While her cohorts in the FBI did a glorious job running interference over her private server transgressions, they’ll be unable to fully cover her tracks on Uranium One related contraventions.  Furthermore, President Trump has turned up the heat with his recent executive order, which targets Clinton-linked individuals and lobbyists.

Hillary may be above the law; she may never go to jail.  But she’ll be the equivalent of O.J. Simpson.  Disrepute, distrust, and downright disgust will float around her like the repugnant odor emanating from a construction yard latrine.  Not even Bill will go near her.

Closing

In closing, 2018 will be a year both like and unlike any other.  We hope you make the most of it – however you choose to do so.

Here’s to a healthy and prosperous New Year!

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This afternoon, the State Department has just released the infamous batch of work-related emails from the account of top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were discovered by the FBI on a laptop belonging to Abedin’s estranged husband, and convicted pedophile, Anthony Weiner near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign.

As you may recall, the discovery of these emails on Weiner’s computer is what prompted Comey to re-open the Hillary Clinton email investigation roughly 1 week prior to the election, a decision which the Hillary camp insists is the reason why they lost the White House.

Of course, while the Hillary campaign attempted to dismiss the emails as just another ‘nothing burger’, the Daily Mail reports that an initial review of the 2,800 documents dumped by the State Department reveal at least 5 emails classified at the ‘confidential level,’ the third most sensitive level the U.S. government uses.

The classified emails date from 2010-2012, and concern discussions with Middle East leaders, including those from the United Arab Emirates, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas – which was declared a terrorist organization by the European Court of Justice in July. Large portions of the 2,800 page release were redacted prior to release by the State Department. 

According to the Daily Mail, three of the emails were sent either to or from an address called “BBB Backup,” which one email identifies as a backup of a Blackberry Bold 9700 – presumably belonging to Abedin. 

As a civilian, Weiner – though once a congressman, was unlikely to have possessed the proper clearance to view or store the classified documents on his laptop. 

A sample of the documents can be seen below…first, a “Call Sheet” prepared for Hillary’s discussion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

And another update regarding “Hamas-PLO Talks”:

In a statement issued Friday, Judicial watch called the release a “major victory,” adding “After years of hard work in federal court, Judicial Watch has forced the State Department to finally allow Americans to see these public documents. It will be in keeping with our past experience that Abedin’s emails on Weiner’s laptop will include classified and other sensitive materials. That these government docs were on Anthony Weiner’s laptop dramatically illustrates the need for the Justice Department to finally do a serious investigation of Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s obvious violations of law.”

Fitton also commented that it’s ‘outrageous’ that Clinton and Abedin ‘walked out of the State Department with classified documents and the Obama FBI and DOJ didn’t do a thing about it.’

Thanks to @JudicialWatch, State Department now posting government docs from Clinton/Abedin found on Anthony Weiner laptop. Weiner campaign received classified info through Abedin/Clinton emails. Docs being posted here: https://t.co/dHCRPEk3gn

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) December 29, 2017

Not surprisingly, Abedin was spotted heading into the Hillary Clinton offices in midtown Manhattan earlier today just a few hours before the release of the 2,800 emails.  Seems you’re never too old to be called into the Principal’s office…

Of course, we’re sure this will all be promptly dismissed by Hillary as just another effort to “criminalize behavior that is normal”…because what government employee hasn’t shared classified materials with their convicted pedophile husbands?  Just another boring day in Washington D.C. really…

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After Chinese vessels were “caught red handed” – in the words of President Trump – by US spy satellites, illegally selling oil to North Korea, and following this morning’s news that a Hong Kong ship was seized after transferring oil to North Korea, Reuters  is reporting ‘two senior Western European security sources’ confirm Russian tankers have supplied fuel to North Korea on at least three occasions in recent months by transferring cargoes at sea.

As Reuters reports, the transfers in October and November indicate that smuggling from Russia to North Korea has evolved to loading cargoes at sea since Reuters reported in September that North Korean ships were sailing directly from Russia to their homeland.

“The vessels are smuggling Russian fuel from Russian Far Eastern ports to North Korea,” said the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Reuters was unable to independently verify that the vessels had transferred fuel to North Korean vessels, whether the Russian state knew about the sales or how many Russian vessels were involved in the transfers. It was also unclear how much fuel may have been smuggled.

Ship satellite positioning data consulted by Reuters and available on Reuters Eikon shows unusual movements by some of the Russian vessels named by the security sources including switching off the transponders which give a precise location.

The security sources said the Russian-flagged tanker Vityaz was one vessel that had transferred fuel to North Korean vessels.

 

The Vityaz oil products tanker

The Vityaz left the port of Slavyanka near Vladivostok in Russia on Oct. 15 with 1,600 tonnes of oil, according to Russian port control documents.

The owner of the Russian vessel denied any contact with North Korean vessels but also said it was unaware that the vessel was fuelling fishing boats.

Yaroslav Guk, deputy director of the tanker’s owner, Vladivostok-based Alisa Ltd, said the vessel had no contacts with North Korean vessels.

“Absolutely no, this is very dangerous,” Guk told Reuters by telephone. “It would be complete madness.”

Two other Russian flagged tankers made similar journeys between the middle of October and November, leaving from the ports of Slavyanka and Nakhodka into open seas where they switched off their transponders, shipping data showed.

The sales of oil or oil products from Russia, the world’s second biggest oil exporter and a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, breach U.N. sanctions, the security sources said.

“Russian vessels have made ship-to-ship transfers of petrochemicals to North Korean vessels on several occasions this year in breach of sanctions,” the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

A second source, who independently confirmed the existence of the Russian ship-to-ship fuel trade with North Korea, said there was no evidence of Russian state involvement in the latest transfers.

“There is no evidence that this is backed by the Russian state but these Russian vessels are giving a lifeline to the North Koreans,” the second European security source said.

The two security sources cited naval intelligence and satellite imagery of the vessels operating out of Russian Far Eastern ports on the Pacific but declined to disclose further details to Reuters, saying it was classified.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry and the Russian Customs Service both declined to comment when asked.

*  *  *

Finally, if these alleged interactions are true, then it highlights the degenerating position of the supposed US hegemon in the eyes of the world. Just today, we saw reports that China’s launching of its petro-yuan oil futures contract is days away.

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Ugly end…

*  *  *

But on the year, the dollar tanked (worst since 2003), stocks and bonds (the long-end) soared higher, commodities rebounded dramatically, cryptocurrencies exploded, and gold had its best year since 2010 as VIX saw its lowest average in history…

and all that driven by the biggest increase in central bank balance sheets since 2011… anyone else feel like this… (our estimate is we are at around the 30 second mark currently)

 

2017…

Now that was a year for stocks…

• The Dow is up 25% over 2017, putting it on track for its second straight annual increase, as well as its best year since 2013.
• The S&P is up 20% year-to-date. Like the Dow, it is set for its second straight annual increase and its best year since 2013.
• The Nasdaq is up 29% in 2017, its best year since 2013. 2017 is set to be the Nasdaq’s sixth straight annual gain. According to the WSJ Market Data Group, this is the longest streak for the Nasdaq since a six-year streak lasting from 1975 to 1980.
• The Russell has gained 13.6% in 2017. The index is set for its second straight annual gain.

 

Additionally, The Nasdaq also has posted a record number of all-time high closes this year.

Vols across every asset class collapsed to multi-year (if not record) lows…

 

Treasuries were extremely mixed on the year with 2Y Yields soaring 67bps and the long-bond yields collapsing 34bps…

 

The collapse in the yield curve (2s30s) is the biggest flattening since 2007…

 

This is the flattest yield curve since Oct 2007…

 

The Dollar was a bloodbath this year – the biggest loss for the greenback since 2003…

 

 

All the major commodities ended higher on the year with copper’s recent crazy rampage leading the way..

 

 

While all the headlines have proclaimed Bitcoin the big winner, its 1400% return in 2017 is dwarfed by the explosion in Ripple…

 

 

In December…

• The Dow is up 2% in December. This will mark its ninth straight monthly rise, its longest such streak since 1959.
• The S&P is up 1% thus far this month. This will also be the S&P’s ninth positive month in a row, representing its best streak since 1983.  On a total-return basis, however, the S&P is set for its 14th straight monthly gain, which will lengthen a record… and is the first “perfect year” of 12 straight months in one calendar year gains.
• The Nasdaq is up 0.5% in December, which will represent its sixth straight monthly increase. The tech-heavy index has risen in 13 of the past 14 months.
• The Russell is down 0.5% in December. breaking its longest winning streak since Feb

Ugly close to the month…

 

 

30Y Yields were also lower in December overall as the rest of the curve was higher (10Y Unch)…

 

The dollar dropped for the second straight month led by Aussie, Yuan, and Euro strength…

 

 

As the dollar weakened following The Fed rate hike so commodities all started ramping higher in December…

 

 

On the week…

Santa failed to deliver this year (so far) with stocks ending a huuge year with whimper… tumbling into year-end with all major indices red on the week

 

 

Nasdaq was smashed lower for the 5th day in a row…

 

 

Bonds were very aggressively bid, and the yield curve flattened dramatically…

 

 

Bond yields and the dollar tracked each other all week…

 

 

The dollar fell for the 3rd straight week – the biggest weekly drop in almost 4 months…

 

 

And cryptos surged with only Litecoin lower, despite the Korean headlines, as Ripple roared…

 

 

Gold surged to $1310, near 3 month highs, this week but silver and crude led the way…

 

 

*  *  *

Finally, if there is one chart that sums up 2017, it is this…

 

 

*  *  *

Happy New Year to all… and remember, on Tuesday… It’s…

 

 

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Huma Abedin’s first cousin, Omar Amanat, 44 and an associate were convicted of Fraud on Tuesday for deceiving shareholders in their tech company by falsely inflating revenues. They face a 10 years in prison at his scheduled April 25th sentencing. 

Huma Abedin and cousin Omar Amanat

Notably, the jury was “not permitted to hear a recorded telephone conversation in which Amanat tells a government cooperator that his first cousin is Huma Abedin, a former aide to last year’s Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton,” according to the Associated Press. Amanat and his partners deceived shareholders of “Kit Digital” between 2010 and 2012, falsely inflating revenues to hide losses. During the trial Amanat introduced fabricated emails as evidence. 

Ironically, court documents also reveal Amanat tried to destroy evidence before the trial – asking his brother over email to “delete all of my emails from the yahoo site,” over concern that they might be subpoenaed at some point. 

“The evidence of their criminal schemes was so overwhelming that Amanat actually tried to fool the jury by introducing fake emails into the record as exculpatory ‘evidence’ in this trial,” said Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H Kim, adding “Unfortunately for Tuzman and Amanat, the jury saw through their tangled web of lies, convicting them on all counts.”

Amanat was ordered immediately jailed by US District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe after U.S. Attorney Andrea Griswold argued he was a flight risk, due to the “substantial” sentence likely to be handed down. 

Another first cousin of Huma Abedin Irfan Amanat, was charged on December 5 in Manhattan Federal Court in the KIT Digital case. He was busted by The SEC in a separate case for tricking the Nasdaq exchange into giving him $50,000 with a computer program he wrote.

And as Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller reports, in 2013 Omar Amanet partnered with businessman Vladislav Doronin, known as The Russian Donald Trump, to buy a luxury resort for $358 million. 

An in-depth 2014 profile in Fortune magazine says Doronin is “referred to in the British press as the ‘Russian Donald Trump.’” Dorinin was born in what was then Leningrad before moving to Geneva to work for Marc Rich, a financier who fled the U.S. after being indicted for fraud and trading with Iran, and was pardoned by former President Bill Clinton on Clinton’s last day in office.

“Clinton’s motive for pardoning Rich on his last day in office was questioned,” USA Today reports, “because Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, was a wealthy Democratic donor who made a $450,000 donation to Clinton’s presidential library foundation and more than $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.” The pardon was investigated by the FBI in 2001.

After Doronin and Amanat parted ways, Doronin began calling Amanat a “serial swindler,” who forged signatures on million dollar contracts. As the Daily Caller also reports, Amanat was permanently barred by FINRA in 2008 “from associating with any FINRA member firm in any capacity” for repeatedly failing to disclose legal judgments and an SEC investigation. 

In 2002, he sold a company called Tradescape for $100 million to E*Trade, which charged that Amanat hid that before it was sold, the company had “no money! Zero. Zilch. Nada… We can’t pay any of our bills,” as one employee wrote in a contemporaneous email, according to the Forbes piece.

At one point after having declared bankruptcy, a creditor attempted to seize Amanat’s house, when Abedin’s cousin allegedly backdated a document claiming he had sold the property to his brother for $10 the prior year. The scheme didn’t work and the house was sold. 

As a side-note, there also lies an interesting connection; Doronin, one-time business partner of Huma Abedin’s cousin, Omar Amanat, worked for financier Marc Rich (deceased). And who else worked for Rich? None other than Dan Gertler – one of the 13 “corrupt” or “serious human rights abusers” listed in President Trump’s new Executive Order. 

Dan Gertler

As we reported earlier this week, Gertler – an Israeli billionaire mining magnate, was revealed by the Paradise Papers to be chief negotiator between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and his primary business partner – mining company Glencore, founded by none other than Marc Rich – the former employer of Omar Amanat’s money man – Vladislav Doronin. 

And there you have it – a particularly bad December for a few colorful characters – most, if not all of whom are only a few degrees of separation from the longtime core of the DNC.

What a small world.

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From the “Yellen Call” to “globalization” and from “disruption” to “dumping“, 2017 had it all and Goldman Sachs’ annual ‘themes’-driven crossword is just the ticket as the final few minutes of the trading year tick away…

Via Goldman Sachs,

 

Across Clues:

 

Down Clues:

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

The Answer (don’t cheat!) – click image for legible version

 

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Americans who are lucky enough to own their own little slice of the ‘American Dream’ are about $2 trillion wealthier this year courtesy of Janet Yellen’s efforts to recreate all the same asset bubbles that Alan Greenspan first blew in the early 2000’s.  After surging 6.5% in 2017, the highest pace in 4 years according to Zillow data, the total market value of homes in the United States reached a staggering all-time high of $31.8 trillion at the end of 2017…or roughly 1.5x the total GDP of the United States.

If you add the value of all the homes in the United States together, you get a sum that’s a lot to get your mind around: $31.8 trillion.

How big is that? It’s more than 1.5 times the Gross Domestic Product of the United States and approaching three times that of China.

Altogether, homes in the Los Angeles metro area are worth $2.7 trillion, more than the United Kingdom’s GDP. That’s before this luxury home on steroids hits the market.

In the New York City metro, total home values equal $2.6 trillion, more than the French economy — and enough money to buy 8,494 Boeing 787-10 Dreamliners.

And here is a look at the “Housing Bubble 2.0” on a state-by-state basis:

Ironically, among the 35 largest U.S. housing markets, the one to experience the greatest total home value growth happened to be Columbus, Ohio, which gained 15.1% to $152.3 billion.

Meanwhile, the millions of Americans who have been forced into renting following their short sales or foreclosures in the wake of the last housing bubble, threw a record $485.6 billion dollars down the drain in 2017 on rent, an increase of $4.9 billion from 2016. Not surprisingly, folks in New York and Los Angeles spent the most on rent in 2017 while San Francisco rents soared to such high levels that renters collectively paid $616 million more in rent than Chicago renters did, despite there being 467,000 fewer renters in San Francisco than in Chicago.

Of course, as we pointed out at the end of November, while staggering, the pricing gains on housing only look to just now be heating up…

As the latest housing data shows an uptick in sales, Case-Shiller’s 20-City Composite index surged 6.19% YoY in September – the fastest rate of gain since July 2014.

As Bloomberg notes, the residential real-estate market is benefiting from steady demand backed by a strong job market and low mortgage rates. The ongoing scarcity of available houses on the market, especially previously-owned dwellings, is likely to keep driving up prices.

Eight cities have surpassed their peaks from before the financial crisis, according to the report.

All 20 cities in the index showed year-over-year gains, led by a 12.9 percent increase in Seattle and a 9 percent advance in Las Vegas (slowest gains in Washington area at 3.1 percent, Chicago at 3.9 percent)

Luckily, American’s are too ‘smart’ to get crushed by another housing crash this cycle…no, this time around they’re not taking any chances and are instead taking all their equity out of their  homes to buy Bitcoin…which is a genius plan if we understand it correctly.

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After tumbling in early December, gold has exploded higher since The Fed hiked rates on 12/13, hitting $1310 today – the highest since Oct 16th.

 

And as Gold has soared so the dollar index has collapsed…

Interestingly in the last month, Gold and Bitcoin have seen a wild ride – converging again today…

 

As Reuters reports, the dollar’s drop to three-month lows versus a basket of currencies on Friday lifted gold to its highest since mid October.

Putting the year’s relative performance in context…

 

This is the dollar’s worst year since 2003… despite 3 Fed rate hikes, repatriation expectations, and exuberant economic hopes.

“In the last couple of weeks, trade has been relatively thin, yields have been under pressure and the dollar as well, so gold has profited from that,” ABN Amro analyst Georgette Boele said. “If you look over the year, dollar weakness has been the main theme.”

The impact of three U.S. interest rate hikes this year was offset by the dollar’s weakness, Boele said. “The dollar is the most important driver, and then real yields. The Fed is increasing rates, but the dollar’s not profiting.”

This is gold’s best year since 2010… despite no volatility, no inflation, and a total lack of comprehension of any geopolitical risk in equity markets.

Gold, which is also on course for its best month since August, has also benefited of late from technically driven momentum, analysts said.

ScotiaMocatta’s technical team said in a note that chart signals for the metal look positive after it broke above its 100-day moving average this week at $1,295 an ounce. “Momentum indicators are bullish.”

 

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