Where have all the financial journalists gone?

•  All currency & metals gains of the last 10 days are wiped out on Monday.

• Chuck & Jim Croce combine for a new hit taking the music industry by storm! (well, maybe not). 

Goof Day… And a Tom Terrific Tuesday to you! And Welcome to January, and a New Year! Well, I apologize for no Pfennig yesterday, as yesterday was a travel day… Why didn’t I alarm you of this travel day? Well, you see I was scheduled to travel on Sunday… but the airline cancelled the flight for no apparent rhyme or reason, probably because they didn’t have enough people on the flight… But I digress, so the Sunday travel day became Monday travel day, without warning to you, or me for that matter! So, life goes on… My nasty cold lingers on… I give it two weeks, which would take it to Friday of this week… While I sit here coughing up a lung… UGH! I’ll get by, no worries.. Been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt… Pink Floyd greets me this morning with their song: Wish You Were Here.

Well, the Boys in the Band all returned to their desks yesterday from their extended vacations, where Gold was left to trade on its own merit… And trade higher in price is what it did… Gold has looked prior to yesterday, as if it had finally chucked the chains around its feet, and was heading for the hills… But talk about removing the punch bowl at the party… That’s what the Boys in the Band did on their first day back to work… Gold lost $28.40 in one day! And the reason behind this downward move was illustrated at the COMEX where, for the last 10 days we've seen volumes of trades that were more like normal, and without any price manipulators around, Gold found it's way higher in price each day.

But then yesterday, the Boys in the Band showed up at the COMEX with their arms full of short Gold/ Silver paper trades, and the volumes exploded higher... Their plan had worked perfectly.

I'll circle back to this discussion in a bit, but first, other than the selling of Gold & Silver yesterday, we saw a rally in the dollar... The dollar has appeared, prior to yesterday, to be on the chopping block... But that was not evident in yesterday's trading, as the dollar rallied back strongly throughout the day... The euro, which had reached the high numbers of the 1.13 handle, saw all those gains wiped out, and so it was with all the currencies showing losses of recent gains VS the dollar. 

So, not only did Southwest Airlines tick me off on Monday, so did the price manipulators of metals and the dollar... Why can't assets be left alone to trade on their own merit? Now we have to pick up the broken pieces of this puzzle and start all over again.

And that began in the overnight markets last night, where we saw more dollar selling, apparently the overnight traders didn't get the memo from Monday! The BBDXY has dropped 3+ points overnight to trade this morning at 1,173.40. Gold is up a buck and Silver is down 11-cents in the early trading.

The returns on the Markit version of the ISM (manufacturing index) for December wasn't the stuff that economic recoveries are made of... For those of you keeping score at home today, the Markit index number was 57.7, granted still above the line in the sand of 50, but to put in perspective... December 2020 the index was 57.8.... And this time its falling instead of gaining... Uh-Oh.

So, with this type of data print, remind me again why it was that the dollar rallied yesterday? Must be my imagination, running away with me... (Temptations). 

Rising inflation is on everyone's collective minds these days, and if it isn't, then you live under a rock, or you're on the 1%, that it won't matter... The other day, I heard an oldie but goodie from Jim Croce, and while singing along with the song, I had this thought come to me... Ready? Ok, here's goes.

Jim Croce sang these words, oh so many year ago… “you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, You don’t spit into the wind, You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Jim…  His point, in case you missed it, was there are things in the world that you just don’t question, or even think about doing, without recourse… So, Chuck made up his own little verse with the late Jim Croce in mind…. “You don’t cut interest rates to zero and then leave them there forever, You don’t bail out zombie corporations, You don’t deficit spend, and you don’t print new currency to the tune of $7.9 Trillion….. And you don't mess around with Inflation! 

And of course that recourse would be.. rising and out of control inflation…  Uh-Oh… Too late we, as a country have already traveled down all those paths above, so as my grandma used to say… “you made your bed, now lay in it”… Meaning, of course, that you’ve made a mess of things, now you have to deal with it… and dealing with it is what the U.S. citizenry does best… We put our heads down, go to work, and don’t talk back… But how much longer will that last? I don’t think today’s youngsters have the decorum to hold civil sit ins, like the ones in the 60’s.

So, Friday last week, we were supposed to be getting the skinny on who received loans and by how much back in Sept 2019... You may recall me making a big deal out of these repo loans and how we were left to our imaginations as to which Big Banks were in trouble. So much for all that transparency from the Fed/ Cabal/ Cartel we were supposed to be getting, eh?  

But something funny happened on the way to the Forum on Friday, and there was a gag order put on journalists (do they still consider themselves as such?).

The U.S. Data Cupboard slowly gets restocked this week, as we build to Friday's Crescendo of the Jobs Jamboree... We already talked about what the Data Cupboard had for us yesterday, and today we get the Gov't's version of the ISM (Manufacturing index)... Which never agrees with the Markit version prints... But you don't have to worry about that, because it's all a bunch of baloney, if you ask me! 

To recap... Well, all the good days from the last 10 trading days went to hell in a handbasket yesterday, when the boys in the band, and the dollar protectors came back to work and dropped the mic on the rallies... Showing up with HUGE stacks of short paper traders... The overnight markets, however, didn't seem to get the message, so we start today in a confused state of mind... No worries that's where they want us, folks... 

For What It's Worth... Well, I pre-billed this article above, so I won't go through all that again, and just get to the gist... This article about the missing names of who needed to get bailed out can be found here: There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders.

Here's your snippet: "There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders

Four days ago, the Federal Reserve released the names of the banks that had received $4.5 trillion in cumulative loans in the last quarter of 2019 under its emergency repo loan operations for a liquidity crisis that has yet to be credibly explained. Among the largest borrowers were JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, three of the Wall Street banks that were at the center of the subprime and derivatives crisis in 2008 that brought down the U.S. economy. That’s blockbuster news. But as of 7 a.m. this morning, not one major business media outlet has reported the details of the Fed’s big reveal.

On September 17, 2019, the Fed began making trillions of dollars a month in emergency repo loans to 24 trading houses on Wall Street. The Fed released on a daily basis the dollar amounts it was loaning, but withheld the names of the specific banks and how much they had borrowed. This made it impossible for the public to see which Wall Street firms were experiencing the most severe credit crisis.

It was the first time the Fed had intervened in the repo market since the 2008 financial crash – the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The COVID-19 crisis remained months away. The first reported case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was not reported by the CDC until January 20, 2020 and the World Health Organization did not declare a pandemic until March 11, 2020.

The dollar amounts of the Fed’s repo loans grew to staggering levels. On October 24, 2019, we reported the following:

“The New York Fed will now be lavishing up to $120 billion a day in cheap overnight loans to Wall Street securities trading firms, a daily increase of $45 billion from its previously announced $75 billion a day. In addition, it is increasing its 14-day term loans to Wall Street, a program which also came out of the blue in September, to $45 billion. Those term loans since September have been occurring twice a week, meaning another $90 billion a week will be offered, bringing the total weekly offering to an astounding $690 billion. It should be noted that if the same Wall Street firms are getting these loans continuously rolled over, they are effectively permanent loans. (That’s exactly what happened during the 2007-2010 Wall Street collapse: some teetering Wall Street casinos received, individually, $2 trillion in cumulative loans that were rolled over for two and one-half years – without the authorization or even awareness of Congress or the American people. One bank, Citigroup, received over $2.5 trillion in Fed loans, much of them at an interest rate below 1 percent, at a time when it was insolvent and couldn’t have obtained loans in the open market at even high double-digit interest rates.)”

Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, the Fed was legally required to release the names of the banks and the amounts they borrowed “on the last day of the eighth calendar quarter following the calendar quarter in which the covered transaction was conducted.” The New York Fed released the information for the third quarter of 2019 last Thursday, a day earlier than required. We reported on it the following day.

Those Fed revelations, that had been withheld from the American people for two years, should have made front page headlines in newspapers and on the digital front pages of every major business news outlet. Instead, there was a universal news blackout of the story at the largest business news outlets, including: Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, the business section of The New York Times, the Financial Times, Dow Jones’ MarketWatch, and Reuters."

Chuck again... Well, do you still have questions about how the Deep State controls the media? Well, certainly not after this revelation! It's not much to ask for the truth, is it? And then inform the American public what that truth is? Apparently, I'm living a lie, or at least living the past... 

Market prices 1/4/2022: American Style: A$ .7200, kiwi .6780, C$ .7841, euro 1.1283, sterling 1.3487, Swiss $1.0887, European Style: rand 15.9935, krone 8.8756, SEK 9.1080, forint 323.91, zloty 4.0544, koruna 22.9790, RUB 74.62, yen 116.12, sing 1.3570, HKD 7.7944, INR 74.55, China 6.3535, peso 20.55, BRL 5.5941, BBDXY 1,173.47, Dollar Index 96.34, Oil $76.68, 10-year 1.63%, Silver $22.87, Platinum $964.00, Palladium $1,950.00. Copper $4.37, and Gold... $1,803.70

That's it for today... And Big Happy Birthday to a long time friend, Debbie Wyland... Debbie was the programmer that worked with us at Mark Twain Bank, and we spent many long days working on programs for mortgage bonds... Those were the days my friend... Today would have been the 96th birthday of my dad... My dad passed at 70, his dad passed at 70, if you don't think I've got my eye focused on 4 years from now, you don't know me! I just watched the sun come up over the ocean, I'm reminded each year when I return here for the winter, how beautiful that scene is each day... Jr. Walker and the All-Stars take us to the finish line today with their hit song: What Does It Take... I love it when he says in the song: Let me blow it for ya, and then goes into a sax solo... Ok... I'd love to stay around for more this morning, but... the show must go one! I hope you have a Tom Terrific Tuesday today, and please, Be Good To Yourself, and remember, Be Positive, test negative!