Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Friday 16 January 2015


Market Commentary: Afternoon Trading Cut Morning Losses By Half, Oils Rebound 6% Providing A Temporary Market Relief

Written by 
Closing Market Commentary For 01-14-2015
The Fed's Beige Book report was positive enough to stop the averages slide and reverse the trend to an upward one. By 3:30 the uptrend stalled and started to move sideways, most likely because of concerned investors fears of a continuing oil slide.
By the closing bell the averages tried to rise back up to the morning session highs and simply could not penetrate that resistance which does not bode well for tomorrow being a turn-around day. Oils did rebound 6% giving additional leverage to the averages, but most analysts say this is temporary. Be careful, I can hear the bear off in the distance.


What We Read Today 14 January 2015

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary "reading list" which will include very brief summaries (and sometimes longer ones) of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for "reading list" items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.
Obama calls for end to 19 state laws that harm community broadband (Jon Brodkin, ars technica) President Obama has endorsed FCC (Federal Communications Commission) efforts to review with the objective of invalidating laws in 19 states that grant exclusive internet service provider rights to individual companies, protecting them from competition. See White House reportCommunity-Based Broadband Solutions: The Benefits of Competition and Choice for Community Development and Highspeed Internet Access (The Executive Office of the President, January 2015).





Market Commentary: Sideways Trading And DOW Still Off 1.3% As Averages Trend Down Along With Oil

Written by 
Midday Market Commentary For 01-14-2015
Morning trading once trending up is now trending down as oil starts to slip fractionally. SP500 slips below 2000 as DOW sinks further.
By noon the averages were looking weak and further downside is a distinct possibility as apparently Mr. Bull needs a nap.




Islamic Militants Crush Entire Town, No One Cares


Boko Haram just obliterated an entire town called Baga in Nigeria, and the world barely noticed. This is the same group of Islamic militants who kidnapped all those girls in the spring of 2014, causing everyone - including first lady Michelle Obama - to take pictures of themselves holding #bringbackourgirls signs.So where is FLOTUS' sign for these new attacks? They are too busy holding up their new trendy hash tag signs, and that is a sorry state of affairs.



Market Commentary: Markets Open Down Over One Percent, Currently Trending Upward Erasing Some Losses

Written by 
Opening Market Commentary For 01-14-2015
Premarkets dropped down into the -1% after import prices declined to December 2008 levels and retail prices also fell. Markets opened down with the DOW off 200 points but the volume remained in the low to moderate levels.
By 10 am there was a fractional trending up from the morning opening, but today's doldrums must be played out before making any decisions.


November 2014 Business Inventories and Sales Had a Bad Month

Written by Steven Hansen
Econintersect's analysis of final business sales data (retail plus wholesale plus manufacturing) shows unadjusted sales declined compared to the previous month. This series is moderately noisy, and the real metric is the 3 month rolling averages - and that metric continues to decelerate but still remains within the range seen in the last 18 months.

Read more >>



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Import and Export Price Deflation Continued in December 2014. What Is Next?

Written by Steven Hansen
Having lived my life in the world of inflation, and seeing the dramatic fall of the export and import price indices - just leaves me speechless. I am not a fan of disruption or rapid change as it leads to bad things in the short term. Literally everything deflated this month.
Read more >>



Retail Sales Slumped In December 2014 - Food and Drinking Did OK.

Written by Steven Hansen
Retail sales slumped according to US Census and well under expectations. Our analysis again slightly disagrees - but the unadjusted data in this series declined marginally (driven to a large part by backward revision). Overall the rolling averages are yielding a rather flat growth line showing there is too much noise in the monthly figures.

Read more >>



Floating-Rate Note - Who Are the Market Participants?

by Ezechiel Copic, Luis Gonzalez, Caitlin Gorback, Blake Gwinn, and Ernst Schaumburg - Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
On January 29, 2014, the U.S. Treasury held its first auction of a two-year floating-rate note (FRN), which pays a fixed spread over the floating thirteen-week bill rate rather than a fixed coupon. In this post, we investigate the aftermath of the January auction and highlight the important role played by dealers as intermediaries and by money market funds as ultimate investors. For more details on the FRN terms, please see our previous post, which offered an introduction to FRNs.



Patience is a Virtue

Age of Wisdom, Age of Foolishness (59)
Written by Adam Whitehead, KeySignals.com
A mixture of cognitive dissonance and wishful thinking, with a little help from global policy makers, rattled the markets pre-FOMC announcement last week. Post-FOMC the panic stopped, just as it should have been increasing.
Read more >>



An Open Letter To Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner

Written by Frank Li
Dear Governor Rauner,
Congratulations on becoming Governor of Illinois early this week!
In my 10/8/2014 Open Letter to Bruce Rauner, I offered advice on how you should explicitly advertise that you would serve as Governor of Illinois unpaid. Not only have you done as I suggested in your subsequent campaign advertisements, I believe that message helped you win the 2014 election.
If you appreciate my foresight, please allow me to further advise you on governing ...


Today's Oil Prices Spell Profit for These Energy Players

Money Morning Article of the Week
by Kent Moors, Money Morning
Finally, things are now getting back to normal after the holidays.
Of course, the oil price "Grinch" is still with us. He outstayed his welcome weeks ago, but with the shorts still driving today's oil prices lower, he's decided to extend his stay.
And as the first two trading sessions this week have shown, the instability in the energy sector remains as well.



The WSJ Is Outraged That Someone Would 'Loot a Company'

by William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives
George Akerlof and Paul Romer's famous 1993 article "Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit" introduced what criminologists call "accounting control fraud" to the economics literature. The people who control the firm (typically the CEOs) use its seeming legitimacy as a "weapon" to loot shareholders, creditors, and, if the resultant losses are large enough, the U.S. Treasury. Their article discussed several examples of such fraud epidemics, including the savings and loan debacle. Criminologists, the S&L regulators, and over 1,000 successful felony prosecutions of the S&L looters confirmed Akerlof & Romer's insights.



The US-Venezuela-Cuba Triangle

by Jennifer Lynn McCoy, The Conversation
The Obama administration announced the intention to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba the same week that Congress approved sanctions against Venezuela for human rights violations.



Sen. Grassley Wants Answers on Red Cross Finances

Special Report from ProPublica
by Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger, Propublica
Citing an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, Sen. Charles Grassley is asking the American Red Cross to explain more clearly how it uses public donations, specifying how much money goes to services and how much to overhead.



Middle Aged Males Most At Risk From Alcohol Poisoning

from Felix Richter, Statista.com
by Niall McCarthy
According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, six people die from alcohol poisoning in the United States every day.



Infographic of the Day: Mastering LinkedIn

Out of the over 259 million LinkedIn users how many of them do you think are using the social network to its full potential?




Obama and the Education Door Cracked Open

Education Trial Balloon: Let the Struggle Begin
by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, www.nofica.com
The Ten Steps to Prosperity first was posted on Oct 7, 2011 and more recently has been included in every post.



Investing.com Technical Summary 13 January 2014

Investing.com Technical Analysis (as of Tue, 06 January 2015 05:00pm EST)
by Investing.com Staff, Investing.com
Below, technical overviews and analysis for key stock indices, commodities and investing.com-logocurrency pairs, based on market activity at the close of the 06 January 2015 U.S. session. This information is a comprehensive summary derived from simple and exponential moving averages along with key technical indicators shown for specific time intervals.


What Drives Our Wine Choice - Taste, or the Price Tag?

by Eddie Oczkowski, The Conversation
Can a wine drinker judge the quality of a bottle by its price? The nature of this relationship has always been contested.



Social Seniors Flock to Facebook

by Felix Richter, Statista.com
Bad news for those who dreadfully remember the day when they first received a Facebook friend request from either of their parents: your grandparents may be next!