Submitted by Jeff Clarke via HardAssetAlliance.com,
It was predictable: gold takes a breather, and a flash mob of gold agnostics and atheists forms to point out the price is falling and that there’s little reason to get excited about it.
That’s the problem with investing bias; you don’t look for, or just ignore, evidence that shows another factor is in play.
Oil and the Canadian Dollar have traded tick-for-tick for the last 24 hours... until around 5amET, when the loonie was suddenly bid despite a plunge in crude. As US equities opened and crude extended its losses, CAD quickly plunged but it appears someone, or something, was ready to buy with both hands and feet...
Is The Bank Of Canada in the house? CAD positioning is back at its least short in 9 months so this does not feel like a short-squeeze.
The state of Georgia has built a significant film industry by giving Hollywood studios generous subsidies in the form of tax credits — a program that costs Georgia taxpayers $1 billion a year. But Georgia governor Nathan Deal earlier this year said he would not seek to repeal the tax credits, claiming that they were an overall economic winner for the state, because they made a lot more money for Georgia than they cost the taxpayer. Does anybody know if that is true?
It has been so long, we forgot what it's like for the "smart money" (hedge funds, private clients and institutional clients) to put money to work into the market instead of rushing to unload their exposure to corporations buying back their stock (in near record amounts).
"Energy needs lower prices to maintain financial stress to finish the rebalancing process; otherwise, an oil price rally will prove self-defeating as it did last spring,” Goldman’s Jeffrey Currie recently wrote, on the outlook for crude going forward.
The rally off the lows has largely stemmed from the market’s hopes for an output freeze from Russia, the Saudis, and everyone else who isn’t Iran. Producers will meet in Doha next month to try and hammer out an agreement, but as we’ve documented exhaustively, the whole effort is farcical at best.