The Morning Line

The headline on last week's commentary asked whether it might be morning in America, but the left's combative reaction to the drubbing they received on November 5 suggests we could be closer to high noon. We may know soon, since the forces of darkness are going full-tilt against Matt Gaetz, Trump's choice for Attorney General.  Wikipedia, while discreetly neglecting to mention Hitler, trotted out a laundry list of dubious citations implying that Gaetz, a Florida Congressman, is a right-wing crazy, sex pervert and a deadbeat. In their dreams, perhaps, for he is actually an avenging angel, intent on rooting out every rat and cockroach in the Justice Department and ending the U.S. Government's increasingly common practice of arresting and imprisoning people because of their conservative political views. It would look suspicious if Deep State were to take a potshot at Gaetz after failing twice to bring down Mr. Trump with bullets.  Whatever their plan, they'll have the pathetically diminished but as-yet-unhumbled voice of the New York P.O.S. Times to cheer them on. Here's the editorial page with a delusional take on the election that makes clear why the Gray Lady might not even be around in ten years:  “Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda.”  Humble Beginnings On Wall Street, Trumpmania experienced a mild setback last week. However, because investors are too revved up to have second thoughts about anything, the feeble decline over five consecutive days should be attributed to the pull of gravity. Stocks were due for

I've been confidently anticipating the Mother of All Tops since, like, around 1975, but this week I decided to go wholeheartedly with the flow. The result, technically speaking, is a robustly optimistic S&P target at 7644.50. This might not be what permabears want to hear, but it will leave bulls sufficient room to deal with their psychotic delusions once and for all before boom turns to bust. The rally would amount to 1600 points, or 27%, and come on top of an extraordinarily steep rally begun two years ago that has pushed valuations to near-record levels. Some would say the relentless uptrend has discounted whatever miracles Donald Trump could conceivably produce for the economy. Putting that question aside, his bullish impact already on the mood of America cannot be underestimated. For starters, Trump's plan to dismember Deep State sounds do-able, especially if Republicans retain control of the House. Click here to read all about how heads are actually going to roll. There is no precedent for taking on the embedded bureaucrats who have worked tirelessly for decades to wreck everything that is good about America. Sending these traitors to the gallows, so to speak, promises to be at the heart of Trump's domestic agenda. It will be interesting to see whether the ideologues who invent the news at the New York Times and the Washington Post eventually concede that Deep State even exists. They purport that it is a creature of right-wing paranoia, even though they have aggressively supported Deep State's reign of terror editorially for decades. Term-Limit 'Bonus' The President-elect's ten-point plan even includes full-on support for term limits. This issue should have become a bipartisan favorite, but for the fact that the left has been too busy hating Trump to get behind it. Now, it would seem, the

  [The author of this week's commentary is an old friend who worked his way up from exchange-floor clerk to commercial real estate mogul over the time I've known him. He has demonstrated remarkable timing, courage and patience as an investor, buying commercial real estate at the bottom of the 2007-08 crash and holding it until two years ago, when an even bigger crash that shows no sign of abating began. He also started accumulating a large position in physical silver as it fell from around $30 in early 2021 to $17 a year-and-a-half later. He recently cashed out his entire position at upwards of $33 an ounce, roughly doubling his stake. Now he is striking out in a radical new direction, deploying a large portion of his sizable gains in the most unpopular investment of the day, Treasury paper. Although no investor is infallible, my friend has never had a misstep with a series of all-in bets. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Comex Gold has fallen nearly $60 after coming within $1.60 of a 2803.40 target I started drum-rolling in September, when prices were $300 lower. Is the top in?  It's too early to tell, but even if higher prices are coming, anyone who has held bullion during its steep run-up since last October could not go far wrong by taking a partial profit at these levels. RA ]  Each time a massive wealth transfer occurs, it is caused not by an upward explosion in asset prices, but by crushing deflation such as we experienced in 2007-8.  It's about to happen again, and not with a puny, garden-variety bear-market or recession, but with the epic crash that we have all known was coming sooner or later. The list of possible catalysts boggles the imagination, to wit: a politically wrenching transition

You can always tell when portfolio managers are hard at play, immersed in an epic circle jerk that has become more tediously familiar with each passing week. And so it went on Friday, as money migrated for no discernible reason from certain, temporarily disfavored stocks to flavor-of-the-day hotties.  It seemed almost as though the chimpanzees who purport to manage everyone's money were on a conference call that morning, scripting a narrative simple enough for Jim Cramer to shill to the legions of widows and pensioners addicted to his show. The Dow was down more than 300 points at its lows, even as the lunatic-sector stocks -- you know them as the idiotically misnamed 'Magnificent Seven' -- winked at the thrashing their poor cousins were getting on less sexy exchanges.  The Naz was borne aloft as always by light volume and timid resistance. Bears evidently were too gutless to resist the uptrend, which in recent weeks has become increasingly confident of a Trump victory. 4% Above Sits Trouble Even so, there is a palpable feeling that the stock market has been nutso for so long that it's overdue for a sea change. That could mean irrational exuberance will peak on or around election day. But Mr Market could also surprise with a rally that turns even steeper than the one that has prop-washed the flesh from sane observers and skeptics. So which? The chart above makes a compelling case for something in-between. The 6102 S&P target lies 256 points, or 4.4%, above Friday's close. It would not be as large a gain in points as occurred in August or September. However, if the top were to coincide with the November 5 election, the entire gain would have occurred in just seven trading days. That looks like a good bet, but I

Wall Street has gone all-in for Trump, piling up such extravagant gains in the last few weeks that one might wonder what bold miracles investors expect of him. More likely, unfortunately, is that within a year or two of taking office, he will be overwhelmed by the collapse of a financial bubble that required only the hubris of America's promised return to greatness to set it in motion. Let's hope Mr. Trump gets a chance to clean house first, since Washington is a rat's nest of corruption and plots to bring down America. In the meantime, there is no arguing that the rampaging stock market has got it wrong in predicting that Harris, along with the malignant political philosophy and crackpot schemes she represents, will be overwhelmingly repudiated by voters on November 5. With a gusher of mail-in ballots already pouring in and millions of illegals ready to lend their signatures to the Democrats, it could take weeks or longer to adjudicate the results. Regardless, Trump is riding a wave so powerful that even if the Democrats double the cheating that won them the White House in 2020, they will still come up short. Liberals should listen to Harris's recent interview on Fox with Bret Baier to understand why she can't possibly win. She comes across as so empty and insipid that a conservative could almost wax nostalgic for Hillary's evil cunning and brass cojones. 'A Small Price to Pay' The biggest problem Trump will inherit lies in the Middle East, not Ukraine. He and Putin are neither friends nor enemies but seem to respect each other. This cannot be said of jihadis Trump must confront and what remains of their leadership. Israel has wiped out the terrorists' command structure, and we should expect them to try desperately to settle

[I can’t stomach news reports that take Kamala Harris’s candidacy seriously, especially articles suggesting with brazen implausibility that she is polling dead-even with Trump in some important swing states. Fortunately for those creeped out by all the tilted campaign coverage, my colleague James Howard Kunstler has compressed everything you need to know about the election into a bold, Menckenesque essay that will dazzle you with its insightfulness. He offers three scenarios, two of which could bring America to the brink of civil war. Fortunately, the third, a Trump landslide, seems the most likely and would give Americans a chance to snuff Deep State for good before it can recover from the blow.  With Jim’s kind permission, here is Kamala Unwinding, his latest Clusterfuck Nation essay on substack.  RA] *** “. . . we are facing a catastrophic collapse of governance. With democracy reduced to a tragedy or a farce (probably both things). . . .” — Ugo Bardi <<<<< >>>>> “As the US increasingly resembles ancient Rome, being president is more and more dangerous. Something around 35 emperors met violent deaths, most from people in and around their courts. In other words, members of the Roman Deep State. An ugly situation is brewing in and around Washington DC.” — Doug Casey ***** Don’t kid yourself: Kamala Harris does not want to be President of the United States. She doesn’t even want the ceremonial stuff, the incessant shuffling from one photo op to the next, the tedious Easter egg rolls, the prayer meetings, the turkey pardonings, the tiresome state banquets for men in strange headgear who are unfamiliar with using the fork and knife, and forbidden to sip chardonnay. . . . It’s obvious she has been played for a chump, that she was sandbagged into play-acting “the candidate” by an

If you can keep a cool head while everyone around you is panicking, perhaps you don't understand the situation. That's what they say, anyway. It is exactly what we saw last week when stocks barely shrugged even as the shooting war in the Middle East took another baby step toward nuclear conflagration. The oil markets certainly recognized the danger, spiking sharply after our titular president warned that Israeli warplanes might soon start targeting Iran's refineries. Energy quotes scored their biggest weekly gain in years while stocks, although relatively subdued, appeared to consolidate for yet another psychotic upthrust. What seemed to matter most on Wall Street was not the threat of cities going up in flames, but a few meaningless, cooked job stats implying that droplets of juice from America's financial bacchanal have begun to trickle into the parched gullets of gig workers, nurses and cocktail waitresses (if not yet retail clerks). Longshoremen could join them shortly with a 62% raise to $69 an hour, including the union's legendary no-shows.  It's a little late in the Kondratief cycle for them to become rentiers, but the prospect of owning a few shares of Nvidia seems realistic enough. Although keeping up with the Joneses has gotten easier because the Joneses' inflation-adjusted net worth has been stagnant for 50 years, chasing inflation has only grown harder. And that's measured against phony data that understate inflation by half.  Take heart, all you working stiffs: beating inflation is going to be a cakewalk when the next recession brings it down to, like, minus five percent. What About Microsoft? Speaking of recession, this IBM chart, even to the unschooled eye, suggests the Beamer may be about to reverse in a big way. Although I have never tracked the company's shares closely, there may be a few old-timers

Expect stocks to continue their heedless waft into outer space until the election. They would not likely do so if investors even remotely imagined Kamala Harris might win. James Kunstler provided the most succinct reason we've heard for why this is not going to happen:  "The people in this land are finally sick of a faceless blob ruling madly from the shadows," he wrote in the current edition of Clusterfuck Nation. "Mr. Trump has become a national father figure, a titanic offense to a party run by women with daddy issues and to their Marxist allies dogmatically bent on destroying the family (along with every other institution). As it happens, countries need fathers, both actual and symbolic. What a surprise!" So what about polls that show Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in some swing states? Even ostensibly conservative news outlets such as Fox and the Wall Street Journal have been reporting this as though the data were authentic. My guess is that the editors and news gatherers have all been overwhelmed by the nation's left-tilting news media into believing polls that have been massaged with poor sampling, misleading questions and purposeful misinterpretation. In reality, the believers are like the audience assembled on a barge to witness David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear.  Although some in the audience would swear this happened, it didn't; the barge had simply been repositioned while a curtain was raised to obscure a large swath of the horizon. 8%-10% More Believable Although the magician eventually revealed how he did the trick, the New York Times et al. will not be called upon to explain how they levitated Ms. Harris, since she is going to lose by 20 million votes. That's a realistic number if forecaster Martin Armstrong is right, as he often is about so

The stock market went bonkers following the Fed's first rate-cut since March 2020, but it's more than a little tempting to sell the news. A return to easing had been rumored for the last couple of years, but with a pitchfork mob threatening to descend on the Eccles Building, Fed Chairman Powell finally gave in to Wall Street. The mainstream media has given him cover with the lame story that lower rates will help spur employment. Historians are more likely to recall that the central bank's pivot toward lower rates came at a time when stocks were breaking out to new all-time highs, inflation was ravaging the middle class, and home prices were at record levels. Still, it's an election year, and what did we expect?  The Open Market Committee is simply revivifying the American Dream -- not with a scrawny chicken in every pot, but with renewed hopes of a leased Lexus in every garage. What will lower rates mean? For one, they could conceivably delay a crash in home prices and stocks for a while. It has been coming ever since the 2007-08 deflation failed to finish the job. At the time, one might have surmised that the nation's most popular and pernicious delusion -- growing rich simply by owning a home -- had suffered a fatal blow. Alas, whatever lessons the Great Financial Crash held for us were erased by a turbocharged recovery that has pushed home prices higher than ever. And stocks, too. Although Powell's steadfast hawkishness may have disappointed investors every month for the last three years, it did not impede the stock market's steep rise even slightly. Nor did it quell Congressional spending, which is currently adding $1 trillion of debt to the U.S. balance sheet every 100 days.  Historians will recall that statistic,