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The institutional scumballs who control this stock have demonstrated yet again that they occupy the top rung of Wall Street's criminal hierarchy.  Like bank robber Willie Sutton, they have gone where the money is, manipulating the shares of the world's largest company.  Yesterday, they set a bull trap on the opening bar, allowing them to short stock as high as $683 before pulling the plug to send AAPL plummeting to $662 -- a 3% freefall.  This brazen shakedown was good for short-covering and creating fire-sale bargains. What is most impressive about it is that iPhone5's ridiculously overhyped introduction is slated for tomorrow.  Apple is expected to sell 266 million phones in 2013 -- each and every one of them egregiously overpriced and carrying airtight patent protection.  With the stock about to take out this morning's 662 low, our hat is off to the thieves who have turned Apple's daily ups and downs into a sleazy carnival game.  (And incidentally, our multi-sided option position hasn't been hurt one bit by the stock's histrionics.)

Lesson # 1: * U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000 * Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000 * New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000 * National debt: $14,271,000,000,000 * Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000 Let's now remove eight zeros and pretend it's a household budget: * Annual family income: $21,700 * Money the family spent: $38,200 * New debt on the credit card: $16,500 * Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710 * Total budget cuts: $385 Got It ? OK.  Now your second lesson: Lesson # 2: Here's another way to look at the Debt Ceiling: You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood -- and your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings. What do you think you should do ? Raise the ceilings, or pump out the crap? Your choice is coming Nov. 2012

Greg Hunter: Hello. I’m Greg Hunter. Thank you for joining us today on USAWatchdog.com. The guest -- a bit of a contrarian -- is Rick Ackerman. He hails from the website Rick’s Picks. He’s a professional trader. Rick Ackerman, thank you for joining us here on USAWatchdog.com. Rick Ackerman: Thanks for inviting me, Greg. Greg: Rick, you’re a bit of a contrarian, as I was saying. You think the dollar could get pretty strong right in here. Tell us about your trades and why you think that way. Rick: I like to think of myself as being on the respectable edge of the lunatic fringe. As far as the dollar is concerned, I’ve been pretty bullish for a while, with a Dollar Index target in the mid 90s. We’re down in the low 80s now, so my projection allows for quite a rally. But I’m not fundamentally bullish on the dollar -- it is ultimately garbage, since every dollar is backed by debt, not metal. For now, though, the world’s hot money is clamoring for the supposed safety of the dollar. It certainly seems safer than European paper at this point. So the dollar is enjoying its status as the trader’s currency of choice. Greg: It looks like it’s going to be some sort of, other people probably feel the same way. But where do you go if you have a meltdown? You’re saying they’re going to run into the dollar. Rick: Exactly. The thinking is that if the financial system is hit with a real crisis, the euro is going to collapse before the dollar does. Although I tend to agree with that, I think that the time differential between the two collapses could be very short. Once the euro goes down, all who sought safety in dollars are

There's finally enough chart data for Facebook to allow the canny Pivoteer to hazard a prediction about where it's headed.  Although I've already said in my commentary that the company would eventually wind up in the dumper, just another passing fad, from a technical standpoint its immediate destiny would appear to be no worse than 13.97 -- a 30% fall from current levels. I consider that target an absolute lock-up because of the way the downtrend crushed the midpoint pivot at 23.71. Some speculators, as stupid as they were greedy, paid as much as $45 for the stock when it began trading in mid-April. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch.

On Friday, Rick appeared on the Korelin Economics Report. In Rick's segment, the topic of discussion was the precious metals markets and where Rick believes they are headed. The audio for the interview may be heard here,while the transcript of the interview is reproduced below. Al Korelin: Hey, welcome in. You’re listening to a daily editorial on the Korelin Economics Report. I’m Al Korelin. I appreciate you joining me. I’ve got Rick Ackerman on the line with me. By the way, this audio is being produced exclusively for our friends at Kitco. It’s been a while since we’ve been there. It’s just about two or three days I guess that we’ve been remiss. But boy, it has been busy, busy, busy. I have a listener by the name of Bart who wrote a couple of e-mails yesterday regarding his pessimism about the precious metals markets right now. He doesn’t feel it’s a good place to be. My personal opinion is, long term, I think it is. That’s from a fundamental perspective. But Rick, I sent you one of the comments. You said, “Whoever this guy is, he knows what the hell he is talking about.” Can you comment on that please? Rick Ackerman: Well, partly because I agree with him, Al. I think that the weight of the evidence, technically speaking, is bearish. I look at these gold charts, and we’ve got August gold Comex closing up around $1567. But I can’t see it escaping a further dip down to just below $1500. $1497 is my minimum target. But at that point, the chart would look even worse. But the point that he makes is that you’ve got to wait and see, really. Certain things can happen. I’m always open-minded to being contradicted or to changing my mind, at least.

A stock market plummeting in despair Thursday, at least initially, seems to have taken the Supreme Court's dumbfounding approval of Obamacare the wrong way; for in fact, it all but guarantees that Obama, the most incompetent, Big Government-mongering President  since Roosevelt, will be turned out of office in November -- and by a wider margin than we might have predicted just a day ago.  From this point forward in the campaign, he will not be able to evade the charge that he has enacted the largest middle-class tax increase in U.S. history -- at a time when the economy remains intractably mired in what has come to be called, somewhat evasively with respect to its beginning and end, The Great Recession. The court's decision will also serve to remind angry voters that, even though Democrats and Republicans  are equally responsible for the financial mess the country is in, the two parties pick very different kinds of Supreme Court Justices. And if Obama should be allowed to put one more humorless, leftist ideologue like Kagan or Sotomayor on the court, we might as well all flee to Canada. A further benefit of the Supremes' upholding The Worst Bill Ever is that it will give Obama's weakling-of-an-opponent, Mitt Romney -- the news media's very deliberate choice, although not the people's -- something, finally, to talk about.

Rick appeared on The Keiser Report yesterday in a wide-ranging interview that covered inflation/deflation, the Euro crisis and student loans. The video and transcript of the interview are shown below. (If watching the video, Rick's segment begins at 13:00). Max Keiser: Welcome back to the Keiser Report. I’m Max Keiser. Time now to go to Rick Ackerman of Rick’s Picks newsletter. Rick, welcome to the Keiser Report. Rick Ackerman: Hey Max. How you doing? Max: Fantastic. Rick Ackerman, tell us, what happened to all the hyperinflationists? Rick: I think they’ve been pretty quiet lately, Max. We have nothing but a deflationary juggernaut unfolding in Europe. Austerity may have been voted thumbs down, but you don’t see any infusions of new credit making their way into the system. It seems like everything that’s happening in Europe right now has a deflationary outcome. Max: Right. The ravages of the credit peak of 2007 continue to wreak all kinds of damage around the world. No matter what the central banks try to do to stop it, the deflationary pressures continue to mount. What do you tell people when they say, “Well, look at the price of medical costs and look at the price of student loans, these are rising in price.” How does that factor into or square against this deflationary trend? Rick: Well, I call that lettuce bin inflation, Max. Compared to the larger deflationary picture - which is an asset deflation - the grocery store inflation is relatively tame. Even that’s going to hit a wall, because the money that you spend on groceries has to come from something else if the price of groceries goes up, because real incomes are stagnant. So it’s really sort of a closed loop. And if the price of one thing goes up, it means

Here's a story out on CNN and elsewhere this morning that dovetails perfectly with all that we might fear about Facebook: "Following a period of freak-out on the Internet on Monday, Facebook appears to have pulled a controversial feature that let the social network's users get a digital list of other Facebookers nearby. The 'Find Friends Nearby' feature was not accessible in a CNN test on Tuesday morning, and other media outlets, including CNET, reported that Facebook had pulled the service." For the full story, click here.

On Saturday, Rick again appeared on The Korelin Economics Report, where this week's topic of discussion was the gold market and where it's headed. The transcript of the interview is shown below. The audio may be heard here. (Rick is interviewed in segment #4) Al Korelin: Okay. Here to wrap up the first hour of the weekend edition of the Korelin Economics Report. Thank you for joining me, particularly our newest listeners and folks down in Portland, Oregon, listening on radio station KUIK. I’ve got Rick Ackerman on the line with me right now. Rick is one of the best technical analysts who I know. Rick and I, I think, are on the surface initially disagreeing, I should say, on one concept. That is, Rick feels that from a technical standpoint, we’re going to see the price of gold go down, specifically on the August contracts… August futures, I should say. We’re going to see it down at $1497. My personal feeling is hard for me to swallow that, only because I’ve never seen such a great time - from a fundamental standpoint - for gold to appreciate in value, for lack of a better term. Now, I want to get an explanation from Rick as to why he feels this way, because he has certainly been involved in this for as long as I have, and he’s a very bright guy. He doesn’t just shoot from the hip unless he’s got some fairly serious backup ammunition, for lack of a better term. Rick, why exactly do you feel that we’re going to see gold go down in price? Rick Ackerman: Well, mainly it’s from a technical standpoint. I look at charts with patterns that have ABCD configurations. I look for an AB - what I call an impulse leg -