Louis Scatigna, Author of The Financial Physician
Author of The Financial Physician
This week’s “The Financial Physician” radio show is now available for your listening pleasure. Please forward this link to your friends and family.
Thanks to all my listeners for making “The Financial Physician” radio show the #1 downloaded podcast out of 240 investment related podcasts on Podomatic.
“The Financial Physician” radio show has now moved back to Sunday at 11:00 AM ET on WOBM AM 1160.
The show is back home where we spent 12 years bringing you no-nonsense financial advice on your Sunday morning.
The podcast link will be up on Monday mornings.
The next six months will be interesting to say the least.-Lou
These are the signs of an economic collapse
NY POST
What does the beginning of an economic collapse look like?
Do you see grocery stores closing? Do you see other retailers, like clothing stores and department stores, going out of business?
Are there shuttered storefronts along your Main Street shopping district, where you bought a tool from the hardware store or dropped off your dry cleaning or bought fruits and vegetables?
Are you making as much money annually as you did 10 years ago?
Do you see homes in neighborhoods becoming run down as the residents either were foreclosed upon, or the owner lost his or her job so he or she can’t afford to cut the grass or paint the house?
Did that same house where the Joneses once lived now become a rental property, where new people come to live every few months?
Do you know one or two people who are looking for work? Maybe professionals, who you thought were safe in their jobs? Friday’s anemic jobs numbers tell that tale.
Did your high school buddy take a job at the local convenience store because he could not find work in sales?
Is the pothole on your street getting larger instead of getting repaired? Is there more than one street light out in your town?
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the stock market is any indication of the health of an economy.
Is the town pool closed this summer much more than usual?
Have you seen a situation — any situation — and said, “Jeez, it wouldn’t take much money to fix that” — but it hasn’t been fixed?
You may have witnessed many of these situations, but you tell yourself it can’t be an economic collapse because the stock market is at an all-time high.
Does that mean all is well? No, this is what a 21st century economic collapse looks like in the beginning.
The divide between the haves and the have-nots is growing exponentially. If the 99 percent can’t contribute to the economy because of the dire financial situations they find themselves in, then you see gross domestic product growth reports of 1 percent, such as we have seen lately.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the stock market is any indication of the health of an economy.
It’s a rigged market to placate the masses — most of whom do not have much skin in the game — and convince them that all is well, when in fact the opposite is true.
Greenspan has nothing good to say about the economy or markets.-Lou
“This is the worst period, I recall since I’ve been in public service. There’s nothing like it, including the crisis — remember October 19th, 1987, when the Dow went down by a record amount 23 percent? That I thought was the bottom of all potential problems. This has a corrosive effect that will not go away.”
The next 6-7 months are going to to wild in so many ways.-Lou
From: ZeroHedge
The Dreaded Death Cross Formation Just Hit Stocks
Smart investors have noted that the S&P 500 just staged a very dangerous looking move.
That move was when S&P 500’s 50-week moving average broke below its 100-week moving average. You can see this in the green circle below.
This move is called a “Death Cross” and for good reason. The last time it happened was in 2008, right before the entire market CRASHED.
The time before that was right before the Tech Bubble burst, crashing stocks.
In short, going back over 16 years, this Death Cross formation has only hit TWICE before. Both times were when major bubbles burst and stocks Crashed.
Yea, the gold market is not rigged.-Lou
Gold Plunges After “Someone” Suddenly Decides To Dump Over $2.3 Billion Notional In 10 Minutes
A modest blip higher in the USD…
And commodities suddenly accelerated to the downside, led by precious metals.
While Copper and Crude are giving up gains, gold and silver and being monkey-hammered on heavy volume..
Over 18,000 contracts – or over $2.3 billion notional of gold has been dumped in the last 10 minutes…
As I have been warning you.-Lou
Wealth Confiscation for the Digital Age: the New “Cash Tax”
“Negative interest rates” have become a phenomenon with economists and the media. But I’m writing to tell you something about negative interest rates you haven’t heard. You certainly won’t hear about it in the mainstream press.
What’s coming at you is a historic event. It’s something our grandchildren will hear stories about, much like the Great Depression or the Cold War. It could send the price of gold much higher in the coming years.
If you know what’s coming, it could mean the difference between having lots of free cash in retirement and barely getting by. And please remember this warning: Social Security will help even less than you think.
To understand the gravity of this moment, let’s cover one of the most bizarre ideas in the world…
In a normal world, your bank pays you interest on your savings. It takes your money, pools it with other people’s money, and loans it out. The bank makes money by paying out less in interest on your deposit than it earns in interest from borrowers. For example, it might pay out 3% to depositors while earning 6% from borrowers. This is how it has worked for decades.
Negative interest rates turn your “normal” bank account upside down. They could only exist in a crazy world where idiot politicians are in control. Unfortunately, that’s just what we’re dealing with right now.
Politicians all over the world are ordering banks to charge depositors (you) a fee for storing cash. It’s a perversion of saving. It’s a perversion of capitalism. It’s a perversion of planning for the future.
And it’s going to result in disaster.
Politicians think that by making it unattractive for you to keep money in the bank, you’ll save less money. Instead, you’ll spend more money on things like smartphones and cars. You’ll invest in things like stocks and real estate. This would “stimulate” the economy.
This thinking is very, very wrong. No matter what the government does, it can’t force you to spend money. It can’t force you to make investments if you don’t see good opportunities. Forcing people to pay banks to hold their money is a tax.
The government and the mainstream press won’t dare call it a tax. But that’s exactly what it is. A negative interest rate policy is a tax. Any time you hear a politician, central banker, or news anchor say “negative interest rates,” just think “TAX.” Think “TAX ON MY CASH.”
Negative interest rates are going to result in financial disaster that will wipe out many people. But you don’t have to be one of them. I’ll explain how you can sidestep this disaster—and even make a lot of money as a result of it—in a moment.
But let’s quickly cover one more thing about negative interest rates…
If the government makes it unattractive for you to keep cash in the bank, you can pull cash out of the bank. You can simply store it in a safe or under the mattress. Politicians know this. That’s why they’ve created another dangerous policy that works hand-in-glove with negative interest rates.
You see, if you pull your money out of the banking system and stuff it under the mattress, you aren’t doing what the government wants you to do. You’re not spending money or investing in stocks. This is a major reason why governments are banning large cash transactions and large denomination bills. They are fighting a War on Cash.
In just the past few years…
And just a little while ago, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called for a ban on the $100 bill! Historians aren’t surprised by Summers’ idea. Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned $500 and $1,000 bills in the 1930s. You can bet that our politicians will do the same thing in a financial emergency.
The financial world has gone mad.-Lou
The Sub-Zero Club: Getting Used to the Upside-Down World Economy
Japanese families seem to have a sudden affinity for home safes. According to the Tokyo-based manufacturer Eiko, shipments have doubled since last fall. And in Germany, insurer Munich Re has stashed some 10 million euros ($11.4 million) worth of its own cash into vaults.
Why the squirreling? One possible reason is the creeping imposition of negative interest rates across the world, which could make it more rewarding to bypass banks—and a safe or vault is, well, more secure than a mattress.
Welcome to the upside-down world of modern monetary policy. In this new reality, borrowers get paid and savers penalized. Almost 500 million people in a quarter of the global economy now live in countries where interest rates measure less than zero. That would’ve been an almost unthinkable phenomenon before the 2008 financial crisis, and one major economies didn’t seriously consider until two years ago, when the European Central Bank first partook in the experiment. Now the ECB and the Bank of Japan are diving deeper into the sub-zero world as they seek more ways to spark inflation.
ECB President Mario Draghi currently charges 0.4 percent on the euros deposited by banks in his coffers overnight. BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, whose country knows more than most about the perils of soft inflation, knocked his benchmark down to an unprecedented -0.1 percent in January. Their counterparts in Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark have already been running negative campaigns for a while now. The U.S. Federal Reserve has, so far, remained on the sidelines.
The overall aim, of course, is to spur banks to look elsewhere when lending their cash, preferably to spenders such as companies and consumers, who should also benefit from low borrowing costs in markets. There’s also the hope—especially in Scandinavia and Switzerland—that currencies will fall as investors seek higher returns elsewhere, lifting exports and import costs.
The policy isn’t without risks. Bank profits could be squeezed, money markets may freeze, and consumers could end up with bulging mattresses to avoid paying to keep money in a bank account. The whole effort could wind up leaving inflation even weaker—hence the tiptoe approach to cutting rates.
“I’m skeptical about the efficacy of negative interest rates,” says Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics at University of California at Berkeley. “They increase the cost of doing business for the banks, which find it hard to pass on those costs to borrowers, given the weakness of the economy and hence of loan demand. Weaker bank balance sheets are not ideal from the standpoint of jump-starting growth, to put an understated gloss on the point.”
Marke