Post by
Democritus17 on Feb 05, 2008 2:15pm
I have been following and noticed weaker hands
have been washed out and these levels. Do we go lower? We could be we have been here a while and the number of shares traded here is significant and built quite a base at these levels.
I'm still holding and added a significant position in silver miners with my largest holding Sabina (SBB-V) which has a very largest concentration of silver in the Red Lake area.
Also from a Midas email I received today:
Economist: Expect Fed to lower Dow to 8,000
Critic claims agreements involving billions used to shift market
Posted: February 5, 2008
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com
Consumers should expect a deep recession, triggered by the "stealth methodology" of the Federal Reserve to "depress" the market even while lowering interest rates in an ostensible effort to stimulate economic growth, an economic analyst charges.
"The Federal Reserve is directly involved in manipulating the stock market," said Mike Bolser in a telephone interview with WND yesterday.
The New York Stock Exchange finished the day down 108 points, closing at 12,635, much as Bolser predicted, despite recent emergency Fed rate cuts of 1.25 percentage points aimed at stimulating the economy.
"Fed wants the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other financial indicators to descend in a managed way," Bolser said. "The Fed wants to drive the DJIA toward the 8,000 level, or below, in order to help create a deep recession which will have the effect of slowing consumption across the board and dampening the otherwise harmful effects of inflation.
"A falling DOW is only one element of the recession effects of the excessive Fed-created housing and credit creation, whose bubbles are now bursting," he added.
"Without this recession, we would be on quick trip to hyper-inflation," Bolser, the author of an internationally followed newsletter published in conjunction with his InterventionalAnalysis.com website, said, "and the Fed wants to prevent this."
(Story continues below)
In his twice-daily subscription newsletter, Bolser has devised a quantitative methodology for utilizing Federal Reserve repurchase agreements to predict upward and downward movements of the DJIA, measured on a 30-day moving average.
Yesterday, Bolser noted the Fed added $18 billion to repurchase agreements, edging the pool up to a total of $153.158 billion in unexpired temporary repurchase agreements.
Repurchase agreements involve a sophisticated use of government securities issued every day by the Fed, but little understood or followed, even by sophisticated investors.
A repurchase agreement, as defined by the Fed, is a government security offered by the federal government to a small list of specified primary government securities dealers, for a limited period of time, usually 28 days or less, with overnight return being the most common.
The government securities are "rented" by the primary dealers and they can be added to the primary dealer's portfolio or collateralized and then used in the open market to implement the Fed's open market policy.
At the end of the repurchase agreement, the Fed obligates itself to take back the government securities from the primary dealers, effectively canceling the contract.
Meanwhile, while holding the government securities let out by the Fed in the repo agreement, primary dealers are free to utilize the liquidity provided by the repurchase agreement to manipulate the economy in accordance with the Fed's true monetary policy, whether publicly declared or not.
Primary dealers use the funds provided by the government securities they hold under the repurchase agreements to buy dollar exchange futures contracts, stock market futures, or to buy commodities contracts, including gold mining shares. All of this is in accord with implementing Federal Reserve monetary policy to manipulate currency, commodity and stock markets up or down, depending on the goals the Fed wants to accomplish at any particular time, the economist alleges.
Over the past several months, however, the Fed has implemented a policy to issue smaller amounts of daily repurchase agreements, with the goal of reducing the total pool of repurchase agreements available to the Fed's short list of 20 banks that it qualifies to serve as primary government securities dealers participating in the Fed's Open Market Operations.
Only the 20 banks specified in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's list of primary government securities dealers are allowed to participate in Fed repurchase agreements.
"The primary government security dealer banks are like a private club," Bolser told WND. "You get to stay in the club as long as you take the repurchase agreements and enter the markets to implement Fed monetary policy the way the Fed wants it implemented. Violate the unspoken rules, and you risk being thrown out of the club."
Yesterday's $18 billion addition to the repurchase agreement pool caused the total amount of the outstanding repurchase agreement pool to remain below the Dow's 30-day moving average in a clear trend.
Bolser used this data to predict the Fed was manipulating the stock market lower, a controversial prediction when most economists see the Fed's emergency actions to reduce the target Fed Funds rate 1.25 percentage points lower over an eight-day period that ended with last Wednesday's meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.
"Ultimately, the government is in the business of inflating the dollar," Bolser said, "so the Fed is trying to engineer a recession, in order to cushion the pernicious effects of its own inflation."
"In my view, the government intentionally desires a deep recession not unlike that of the 1930s," he continued. "The Fed, however, dissembles, attempting to display the opposite impression with its rate cuts."
"Cutting rates will not boost the economy in an environment where the credit bubble has burst and banks are afraid to lend," he explained. "But decreasing the repurchase pool will push the economy down, especially when the primary banks execute monetary policy in accordance with the wishes of the Fed to short the market with future contracts that push the indices down."
Bolser argued the Fed's ability to manipulate the market by increasing or decreasing the pool of available repurchase agreements amounts to a "stealth methodology" where the Fed can now depress the market, while implementing a policy of lowering interest rates, which most economists would see as trying to stimulate economic growth and the stock market.
"You have to remember the primary goal of the Fed is to support the bond market, which the Fed has done for quarter century," Bolser stressed. "The Fed needs a strong bond market so the Treasury can sell the enormous amount of Treasury securities, especially to China, that we need to sell to finance what this year may be as large as a $400 billion dollar budget deficit calculated on a cash basis."
"As a result, the friend of the Fed is the bond speculator," he added.
Among the U.S. banks and securities firms currently on the list are Bank of America Securities, Cantor Fitzgerald, Countrywide Securities, Bear Stearns, Daiwa Securities America, Goldman Sachs, Greenwich Capital Markets, HSBC Securities (USA), J.P. Morgan Securities, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch Government Securities and Morgan Stanley.
Also on the list are France's BNP Paribas Securities, Great Britain's Barclays Capital, Switzerland's Credit Suisse Securities, Japan's Mizuho Securities and Germany's Dresden Kleinwort Wasserstein Securities.
"These dealers are the foot soldiers of the Fed, as it implements monetary policy," Bolser said.
Studying Bolser's "Repos/DOW" chart from Dec. 7 through yesterday, a broad correlation between the downward movement in the Fed repurchase agreements pool totals and the DJIA as seen by tracking the 30-day moving average is clear.
"With this strategy, the Fed hopes we won't experience the extreme 'stag-flation' we had in the late 1970s," he argues. "The Fed hopes to induce a recession to manage downward stock prices and commodity prices, including oil, gold, copper, and lumber, as well as the overall consumer demand for retail goods."
"Stag-flation" is an unusual economic situation in which economic stagnation is combined with inflation. Some economics believe that is happening now as the economy slows down while food and energy prices rise sharply.
*** METALS will skyrocket and prices at these levels won't last forever. I expaect a rotation from the main markets into precious metals very soon. It's real "hard assets" like nothing else. Fiat is doomed IMO. Growth and increasing QOQ and YOY will be in miners as demand and inflation takes metals higher and higher IMO. *** GL to all.