Bubble Trouble in the U.S. Heartland?

The “smart money” has been buying up farmland hand over fist for the past few years and you can see how they helped drive up land prices in the U.S. heartland. Some think this is the place to be if the shit really hits the fan. Not gold, but productive assets that you can eat. Nevertheless, with ag commodities starting to rollover, farmland prices have probably seen their best days.

The Ugly Chart Contest

Here’s a couple ugly charts we’re monitoring: China’s Shanghai Composite stock index and Commodity Research Bureau Index (CRB). Do you think there’s causality here? Remember the “China is buying/hoarding every commodity” story

Running through Italian default scenarios

The most important debate of our lifetimes is now ongoing. The question: Should the ECB “write the check’ for the euro area national governments? In thinking about the answer to this all-important question, I prefer to shift the focus by changing the verb “should” to “will”.

Answering this slightly different question is much more important than answering the first question for you as an investor, a business person and as a worker. If the ECB writes the check, the economic and market outcomes are vastly different than if they do not. Your personal outlook as an investor, business person or worker will change dramatically based upon this one policy choice. The right question to ask then is: Will the ECB “write the check’ for the euro area national governments

Chinese coal now costs over $150 per ton again – huge gap to Australian prices

The Ministry of Finance is pumping money like mad into the weakened Chinese financial sector, over 1 trillion yuan, in order to shore it up from the souring of loans from all of the malinvestment over the past few years. If the Chinese succeeded in engineering a soft landing, Andy Lees believes the record premium for Chinese coal would disappear as Australian coal prices started to play catch-up

Gold and the Three McBears

Now the market must contend with three macro bears: 1) how much and how Asia slows; 2) the Eurozone debt crisis; and 3) the slowing U.S. economy and employment/political problem. Continued volatility and 1101, 1101, 1101 on the S&P500!

Finally, we warned last week gold could take a big swan dive and $1,700 was where the “river meets the waterfall.” The chart below shows the yellow metal hasn’t been below its 200-day moving average in more than 2 1/2 years. The power of the rally has been stunning. We now think gold is set to test its 200-day moving average at $1,527, which is the level we will take a shot at getting long again

The Biggest Bubble of All Time

What is surprising is that over the past decade, the price rises you find for 33 commodities are just about beyond the realm of possibility—2, 3, and 4 standard deviations away from trend. It is a boom without any precedent. Quite simply, nothing even close has ever happened before, in any market, including hi tech bubbles and real estate bubbles

Week in Review: Hurricane ‘I-Lean’ Lifts Markets

Reports that hedge funds, with almost no tolerance for short-term pain, have opened the biggest net short positions since early 2008 has driven a relatively low volume short covering rally. We even heard predictions of a 400 point drop in the Nasdaq if Mr. Ben didn’t announce QE3. We guess they were positioned for it and had a front row seat at Friday’s performance of the Nutcracker

Is Resource Nationalism on the Rise?

According to an Ernst and Young (E&Y) report Business Risks Facing Mining and Metals 2011-2012, resource nationalism is the biggest risk companies currently face

Global Trend Indicators

Two charts showing the latest trends in markets around the world

Deal, Now What?

Almost everything that happened last week is irrelevant given what looks like a U.S. debt deal. What we’re watching is how the relief rally holds and whether the Friday’s poor GDP data was a game changer. Looking under the surface of the price action last week, it appears the market is starting to fret over the coming fiscal contraction into a soft economy. Note, the Russell was hammered the hardest, bonds rallied, and most commodities were lower

China Gets Picky

It turns out that China is not willing to pay whatever it has to for energy and metal resources. Several resource deals have faltered in recent months, indicating an increasingly choosy Chinese perspective on energy and metal acquisitions. Add to that the growing concern that the global economy is once again stumbling and that commodity prices may be near a top, and you have a Chinese deal-making market that has gone from 60 to zero in no time

After careful consideration, I remain bearish

The S&P has gone from 2 standard deviations below the 20-day moving average on the 16th June to 2 standard deviations above it now, something it did prior to the 87 crash when it rallied 6.4% in the week prior to the crash. It has been doing this more and more frequently recently although not of the scale of swing we have just seen. Our economists have already said that a single payroll figure is not sufficient to cause QE3 to which I agree. Commodity prices are telling us that further Asian stimulus is not going to happen unless offset by demand destruction elsewhere in the world. The risks are clearly mounting up