How low can rates go?
Well, we've entered a Brave New World now where putting money into the ECB COSTS YOU 0.2% per year. That's right – if you give them $1,000,000,000 to hold for a year, they will give you back just $998M – and people will do it! Meanwhile, the refinancing rate at the ECB has been cut from 0.15% to 0.05% – so borrowing $1Bn for a year will only cost the Banksters $500,000 in interest while they use it to manipulate the equity and commodity markets.
As you can see from the top chart, this is making a complete joke out of the Euro, but that's what the ECB wants as member nations are Trillions upon Trillions of Euros in debt and the ECB's moves serve to force rates lower (so debt can be rolled over cheaply) and allow countries to pay back maturing debt in Euros that are worth less (worthless?) than what they were borrowed at – saving the big 5 over $1Tn in 2014 alone.
Will there ever be consequences to this type of behavior? Not, as I said on Tuesday, if everyone is doing it. However, if some people stop while others go on – it could be BIG TROUBLE for countries that need to borrow money using a combination of worthless currency and negative interest payments. What can possibly go wrong? Everything.
That's why, today, right now, we are once again shorting the Futures at 17,100 in /YM (Dow) and 2,005 on /ES (S&P) and 1,175 on /TF (Russell). Yesterday we shorted the Nasdaq (/NQ) at 4,100 – a trade idea I outlined in the morning post for our subscribers – and that trade made $700 per contract by noon. Not a bad day's work, right?
We already made our Egg McMuffin money this morning in our Live Member Chat Room (and you can join the fun here) as we caught a $200 bullish move on the S&P (/ES) Futures and $400 on the Russell (/TF) Futures early this morning. I made a call to get out ahead of the ECB announcement, as it was too risky and now we're sticking with our plan and going short – but with very tight stops over our lines, as it's likely to be a crazy day.
Trading volume is still very thin and very fake, with almost all of the up action coming on low-volume while the big money runs for the exits every time they trick a few retailers into holding the bag for them.
The MSM is cheerleading the markets for their Corporate Masters, uncritically reporting a 10.5% rise in Factory Orders yesterday morning even though, ex-Transport (Boeing) they were actually DOWN 0.8%. While that was not at all surprising to PSW Members (we were shorting the fools who rushed in), what is surprising is how many suckers are actually out there to be fooled by this BS.
So many suckers, in fact, that I can post trades like the ones above, which anyone can follow by simply reading our morning post – and they still make money. Usually (and we still usually do), you have to guard trades like that for fear of people taking advantage of your known position but, in this case, the market is being so blatantly manipulated and so many Trillions of Dollars are at stake for the manipulators – that our trading can't alter their plans, even when it costs them a lot of money. Still, if they're offering – we'll take it, right?
Speaking of trickling. With the bottom 99% feeling the pinch this summer, it looks like we're getting some pretty anemic consumer numbers recently (and we just saw unit labor costs DROP 0.1% – even less money for the poor workers) and that means oil is probably too expensive at $95 (/CL Futures) and we can short them below that line into the 11am inventory report. Anything but a 2Mb net draw is going to be a disappointment and we had a lovely collapse on Tuesday to below $93, which would be $2,000 per contract if it's repeated. Set a stop at $95.15 and your risk $150 to make much, much more – a good risk/reward ratio!
So far (8:30), the Futures are not cooperating and our watch levels are holding but it's just the usual pre-market spike in low-volume Futures trading – Europe is not even up 1% on DRASTIC Central Bank action and, if that's all we can get out of them, then we're WAY too toppy at 2,000.
