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After two (and soon three) "generational" market crashes, Joe Sixpack may have lost interest in the stock market (or at least in single names, the transfer of bagholder rights from institutions to retail investors via ETFs is doing just fine), but when it comes to chasing torrid, upward price momentum, US retail investors are doing their best frenzied Chinese housewife impression now that they have discovered the next big bubble thing, and it's called bitcoin.

After plunging 20% in the last few days from its $5000 highs - following China's ICO ban, Bitcoin has bounced back to $440 today amid global turmoil...

As SHTFplan.com reported earlier, Rick Rule, the billionaire Chief Executive Officer of Sprott Global Resources, noted in his recent interview with Crush The Street:

Appending to an earlier announcement by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, according to whom the House would not add Harvey disaster funds to the debt ceiling bill, Dow Jones reports that Republican lawmakers are set to vote on the Harvey aid bill on Wednesday, and instead of raising the debt ceiling, they will suspend it, likely kicking the can until some time in December when the whole farce would have to repeat itself again, although the exact length of the extension remains under discussion.

In a day when gold is surging to the highest level since the Trump election, what better way to hedge what happens next than to issue two separate price targets. We bring this up, because that's precisely what Goldman Sachs did today.

First, in a note discussing the relative merits of gold as a "currency as a last resort", and which eyed the suitability of the yellow metal as a hedge to an escalating North Korean crisis (discussed earlier), Goldman's chief currency strategist, Jeffrey Currie issue the following trade recommendation:

Authored by Robert McKeown via The Mises Institute,

As Hurricane Harvey, now tropical storm Harvey, makes its way across the southern US, estimates have already come in as to the cost of the storm. According to AccuWeather, Harvey is expected to cost upwards of $190 billion in damages, one percent of the national GDP. This makes Harvey the costliest storm ever to hit the United States, more than Katrina ($100 billion) and Sandy ($60 billion) combined.

Here Come The Clowns