May 24th, 2010 by Alex

Arch Crawford uses Astrology and Technical Analysis to forecast the stock market. And he has a track record of some good calls. So, his recent forecast is worth mentioning. Starting around August 1, 2010 there is going to be an extreme planetary alignment (Cardinal Climax) that he contends is indicative of a major bad event, and he forecasts a market crash between May 1, 2010 and November 1, 2010. Obviously, Astrology is not a science; it has little precision and is at best a system of identifying dubious relationships between cyclical celestial phenomenon and human behavior. Nonetheless, that isn’t to say that there isn’t something to it. All I know is that even if he is right, it won’t be the end of the world.

Here is a link to an interview with Crawford about the forecast and here is a YouTube video of a guy reading that interview. And here is another article and here is the radio broadcast upon which that article is based (it starts around the 79 minute mark).

Update June 20, 2010: Here is a short audio interview with Crawford.

Update July 3, 2010: Here is an interview with Arch Crawford on the Financial Sense News Hours. Arch comes in at the 40 minute mark and talks for a half an hour.

Update July 26, 2010: Click here for an Arch Crawford radio interview from July 17, 2010.

Update August 2, 2010: Here is an article titled Global Catastrophe Alert on International Business Times from July 31, 2010 about Crawford and the Cardinal Climax.

Update September 14, 2010: Here is a 22 minute radio interview with Arch.

Well, November 1, 2010 has passed and the prediction was right if the flash crash is considered the crash, but not right if something bigger was expected. If it wasn’t for quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve, the Dow would probably have slipped below 9000, but it didn’t.

May 23rd, 2010 by Alex

I’m all for Libertarian minded candidates like Rand Paul, and Peter Schiff. Those guys don’t deal properly with my primary political concern, which is monetary reform, but they at least offer underrepresented views. Plus, they are intellectuals in the sense that their political views are grounded in a fairly consistent formula of individual rights and economic freedom. Now, of course, the intellectual subtleties of their views are lost on most voters (and Tea Party participants) and simply provide tinder for political opponents eager to dismiss them as extreme kooks. And that is precisely what started to happen to Rand Paul last week.

As if the 1964 Civil Rights Act is a big issue in 2010, Rand Paul’s political opponents seized the opportunity to question his philosophical disagreement with one part of the Civil Rights Act. Rand Paul believes that it isn’t government’s role to say that a private business can’t discriminate based on race. Rand Paul doesn’t believe in discrimination based on race himself, but he respects the rights of business people to discriminate based on race and not get in trouble for it. And so, following that logic, he supports the rights of black, white, Hispanic, and every other color of business owner to discriminate based on race without legal ramifications.

I personally wouldn’t take that stance, because I think the good outweighs the potential harm to private property rights in that case. But I’m intelligent enough to see his logical stance. Really, Libertarianism is only optimal in a world of intelligent, logical people, because those are the only people that would respect and obey its tenants. In a world of people who think with their hearts (both with love and hate) not their heads, Libertarianism is hard to follow faithfully. The only place Libertarianism really works is in the fictional secret compound of intelligent, talented, logical, freedom loving people found in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.

And along the storyline of the novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand Paul gave his political opponents even more ammo last week when he said accidents happen and defended BP against Obama’s criticism. Defending BP isn’t a popular thing right now. It is obvious that individuals working for BP were cutting corners and the fact is that that wouldn’t fly in a true free-market.

In a true free-market, where private property is protected, that would mean you can’t pollute other people’s property. Therefore, a venture like drilling for oil in water would be very risky in a true free-market. In a true free-market, if the company really screwed up, the company would be done, because the potential cost of cleaning up such a mistake would be astronomical. So, the risk of ruining the company by messing up would be self-regulating. The venture would possibly be too dangerous to even risk, which means that it possibly wouldn’t even be economically viable in a true free-market, or even legal.

In that sense, environmentalist’s would be wise to seize an extreme Libertarian viewpoint of protection of private property. Because if you really support the right to private property, then other people can’t pollute it in any way that is uncontained to their property: water, air, ground, sound, odor, etc.

But it all comes down to what people value. If oil companies one day pulled an Atlas Shrugged and shut down the oil business, the world would grind to a stop. People can’t bitch about companies they rely upon, because their money does the real talking. But at the same time, what is the potential cost to private property through pollution by things like oil? People don’t want pollution in their back yards. And so people shouldn’t chant “Drill Baby Drill” unless they want drilling done in their own personal back yards.

The fact is that a true free-market economy would factor in the cost of maintaining the sanctity of people’s private property. The cost of cheap energy is pollution. And while I personally don’t really care about an abstract, debatable proposition like global warming, I do care about pollution. I don’t like these pollution tax schemes like cap and trade, but I do like the idea of respecting private property. The cost of pollution should be in the price of products. And the ideal way to do that is to have only products that don’t pollute in any discernible way. That would be the inevitable product of a true free-market that respects the sanctity of private property. We’d pay to be clean in such a system. And so, I don’t think a true Libertarian could really support something like offshore oil drilling as long as it poses a notable risk to the sanctity of private property.

May 14th, 2010 by Alex

May 13th, 2010 by Alex

Goldman Sachs had a perfect first quarter of proprietary trading (trading with their own bank created money for their own profit). That means that all 63 trading days in the U.S. markets in the first quarter were winners for Goldman. Needless to say, in a fair game, that is a nearly impossible feat. But Goldman wasn’t the only perfect trader in the first quarter, so was JP Morgan. And although not perfect, Morgan Stanley managed to make money 93% of the time. It all just goes to show that when you have the resources to determine the direction of a market, you can’t lose. It becomes just like a casino, it is rigged in favor of the house. So, that just goes to show that the idea that the market is some kind of oracle of the health and future of the economy is a delusion. All the markets is is a barometer of whether the big banks are mostly buying or selling on any given day. It is a joke.

And it isn’t only the markets that the big banks rig, it is also the government. Just look at the recent giant European Union bailout orchestrated by the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve. The only things that bailouts like that do is reward bad government behavior by delaying the day or reckoning and they assure no loses for the banks who finance bad government behavior. It is all a sick symbiotic relationship between governments and banks that turns them both into monsters. Plus, all that funny bailout money (debt) and risk manipulation messes up the real economy.

But no one in the mainstream ever comes out and says what the real problem is with all this stuff. The problem is that MONEY IN THE MODERN WORLD IS LITERALLY NOTHING BUT DEBT! The world doesn’t need bailouts, it doesn’t even need investigations into Goldman, it needs real debt-free money.

May 7th, 2010 by Alex

In light of the DOW’s 1000 point intraday plunge on May 6, 2010,  here is a little clip of Max Keiser explaining the Plunge Protection Team (The Working Group on Financial Markets formed out of the October 1987 stock market crash). The May 6, 2010 crash looked like the Plunge Protection Team pressed sell and sell again instead of buy and then a few minutes later noticed their mistake. Procter & Gamble and 3M fell below what is called the Liquidity Replenishment Point and triggered a kind of market circuit breaker. Interestingly, Procter & Gamble and 3M are two stocks that the Plunge Protection Team purportedly targets to buy to prop up the market since they are heavily weighted on the indexes. Anyway, the whole thing was very bizarre. The rapid recovery was just as bizarre as the plunge itself. It all just goes to show how prone the market is to manipulation, both on the up side and down side.