Inverted Yield Curve March 2023

Stock Market Outlook – March 24, 2023

Today Chris Ciovacco of Ciovacco Capital Management looks at the market situation in light of the bank failures. First up is the Inverted Yield Curve. We can see that it originally inverted in July of last year, when short-term interest rates moved higher than long-term rates. From there it moved steadily lower before rebounding earlier this month. So although it is still inverted it is not anywhere near as bad as it was just a few weeks ago.

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Dollar Dominance

More Cracks in U.S. Dollar Dominance

Back in 1933, Roosevelt forced Americans to sell their gold to the government for $20.67 an ounce and then promptly raised the price to $35/oz. Thus he presided over a 69.33% gain in the value of gold which was equivalent to a 69% tax on the ownership of gold. Then at the tail end of WWII, Roosevelt pulled off the Bretton Woods agreement that made the U.S. the dominant world currency. When that began to fail Nixon cut a deal with Saudi Arabia instituting the “Petrodollar” which once again put the dollar at the top of the heap. But now some cracks are once again emerging.

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Red and Blue States

Do “Red States” Ride the “Blue State” Gravy Train?

When Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called (again) for “national divorce” this week, a common retort among her detractors on Twitter was to claim that so-called red states are heavily dependent on so-called blue states to pay for pretty much everything. Reporter Molly Knight claimed, for example, that “Red states get their money for roads and cops and schools from blue states. You cut off that gravy train and you e [sic] got a third world country.”

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NYSE Daily 1-23-2023

Has the Stock Market Turned Positive?

It has been a long time since there has been any positive news for the stock market. In our January 12th, 2023, NYSE ROC report, we changed from a “Sell Signal” to a “Hold Signal” because of some positive indications in the market. Although the ROC has not yet switched to a “Buy”, we noticed a few positive indicators that could indicate either a bottom has been set or that we are in for a short-term rally. Some may call this “green shoots” in the market.

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Countries splitting

Are Countries Getting Smaller?

In the following article Ryan McMaken talks about “States,” but he uses the term in the classical sense meaning “country,” not in the way we in the United States tend to think of the term. He tells us that the number of states has almost tripled since 1945. This is due to countries splitting into smaller units. A classic example is the Soviet Union breaking up into its smaller components. Other examples are the breakup of Yugoslavia, North and South Korea, and North and South Vietnam. There is even occasional talk of Quebec splitting from the rest of Canada due to language and cultural differences. So there is definitely a trend in place toward smaller countries. Today Ryan is looking at the political consequences of smaller, more localized units of government.

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dollar-hegemony

Is the U.S. Dollar Hegemony Ending?

The U.S. has been the currency of foreign exchange ever since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. It did experience a crisis of confidence in the 1970s, but the Nixon / Kissinger deal with Saudi Arabia to create the PetroDollar whereby all oil sales had to be completed in U.S. Dollars (in exchange for military support) recemented the dollar’s prominence for another half-century. But now things are changing. In today’s article, Patrick Barron looks at the current state of Dollar hegemony.

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M3 Components

Latest Recession Alarm

There’s a new Recession Alarm! Money Supply Growth can have a significant influence on the state of the economy. When the FED is pumping, and the money supply is growing, Woo Hoo, it’s happy days, but when the flow dries up, the economy goes into a tailspin. As we have repeatedly implied, via the FED’s massive Quantitative Easing, the money supply has grown exponentially over the last decade.

But today, let’s look at the M3 money supply itself. The M3 money supply is a broad measure of money, including M2 plus much more. It is an indirectly derived measure of the supply of money which includes currency in circulation, checking and savings deposits, certificates of deposit, term deposits, call/term borrowings from ‘non-depository’ corporations by the banking system, and ‘Other’ deposits with the central bank.

Latest Recession Alarm Read More »

Sq FT per person

Housing Is Getting Less Affordable

The average square footage in new single-family houses has been declining since 2015. House sizes tend to fall just during recessionary periods. It happened from 2008 to 2009, from 2001 to 2002, and from 1990 to 1991. But even with strong economic-growth numbers well into 2019, it looks like demand for houses of historically large size may have finally peaked even before the 2020 recession and our current economic malaise. (Square footage in new multifamily construction has also increased.)

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NYSE Composite Chart

Half-Way to the Stock Market’s Worst Case Scenario

On the NYSE weekly chart. we can see that this year so far, the index has fallen from the peak at the long-term resistance line down to the mid-line (as we said it would). So as the headline suggests, we are now halfway to the worst-case scenario, i.e., all the way down to the long-term support line. Whether it gets that bad or not remains to be seen.

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