No, she didn’t go as Elsa.

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

Not only did the pop star dress up as Olaf from Frozen during a concert in Tampa, Florida, on Saturday night...

Chensant / Via instagram.com

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First published here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kelleydunlap/taylor-swift-olaf-halloween-costume?utm_term=4ldqpia

From the Slope of Hope: With all the grousing and grumbling I do here, I thought I'd change my tone and write up a genuinely positive, optimistic post. This has to do with what I think will be a tectonic shift over the next twenty years: transportation.

As dull as that sounds, I think the changes that take place in how we get people (or cargo) from point "A" to point "B" are going to be more profound that Amazon, Facebook, and the iPhone put together. My insight, if you want to be generous enough to call it that, is spawned from a couple of (as is typical for me - - negative) observations I make on a periodic basis.

The first observation is one I make almost daily: in spite of the relative wealth of the San Francisco peninsula, there are buses all over the place. Some of them are the fabled "white buses" that tote highly-paid twenty-somethings from Google and Facebook back to their residences in San Francisco. But most of them are the large (and sometimes double-length) VTA buses that drive all over the Santa Clara valley, and there is one thing I notice about virtually every one of them: they're empty or near-empty. As they rumble by, I typically see two or three people sitting in a bus that holds 50 to 100 people.

The other observation I have is that the people driving these buses are really, really, really overpaid. Many of them make six figures. One fellow mentioned in this article was clearing almost $200,000. For driving a bus. This is about as close to "unskilled labor' as I can imagine. It's mindless, boring work. And very, very lucrative. (Thank you, civic employee unions!)

I find inefficiency to be offensive, and just about every aspect of bus systems is offensive to me. Just off the top of my head:

1. The empty seats are a screaming declaration of inefficiency. To have these huge, gas-guzzling, polluting monstrosities with a quantity of people that could fit into a VW Beetle is preposterous.
2. The bloated salaries (union-driven, surely) are also wildly out of step with the skill set required.
3. The passengers themselves have to somehow make their way to the closest bus stop they can find for departure, where in an ideal world I'm sure they'd prefer being driven directly from home, work, or wherever they happen to be.
4. The destinations are also approximate, because wherever the bus is taking people is surely not quite where they really want to go. As with boarding, the passenger has to figure out the least-bad place to get off the bus so they can make their way to their actual destination.
5. Even the bus stops themselves are wasteful, because, in the future I am envisioning, they simply wouldn't exist. That space could be used for something else - - or be simply empty. To say nothing of the huge parking lots where they store all the buses at night.

In short, it's a huge waste of space, energy, time, and money. I cringe every time I see one of these things rumble by with hardly anyone on board.

So what's going to get better? I think (or hope, at least) a far better world would be one in which small, self-driving cars were deployed all across the nation, and these would be at the beck and call or the same people that are presently riding buses.

First, let me give you a picture for your mind: here in Palo Alto, we see Google self-driving cars constantly. These have been retrofitted normal vehicles, but recently, the actual Google cars (not modified production cars, but honest-to-God all-Google cars) have been zipping around. They look like this:

Cute, isn't it?

So imagine a working-class person needs to get to their job somewhere. They request the car from their mobile phone, and in about five minutes, the vehicle above pulls up in front of their apartment building. They get in the (driverless) car and are taken to work in the most efficient way possible. There's no waiting and very little walking. For the passenger, it's a profoundly better experience.

Well, that sounds all lovely, but who is going to pay for this convenience? Well, hold on a second. Just think of the costs that are being expended right now on the inferior system in place. There are the aforementioned huge salaries, and with nearly 700,000 bus drivers in the United States alone, the human expense is enormous.

There are the buses, of course, and all the attendant costs, such as fuel, insurance, replacement parts, repair, and the replacement of worn-out buses. I daresay if you added up all the expenses related to toting individuals from place to place via the bus system and divided it by the number of passenger-miles, you'd get a higher figure than the one you'd get with the "one person/one car" idea I'm offering above.

Now this sort of thing doesn't happen overnight. It's going to take decades. But the technological leap forward of self-driving vehicles is, I believe, going to utterly alter the economic landscape for decades to come, not only with human transportation, but even more broadly with cargo. All the twenty-somethings today that are adding sillier and sillier features to all these social media web sites will be in far more useful occupations in the future as they weed out the grotesque inefficiencies present in worldwide transportation.

This sounds bone dry, I realize, but I think it's going to be a very big deal. Google is quite smart to be changing themselves to "Alphabet" and getting into new areas like this, because I think it's ultimately going to assure they are the largest company on the planet.

As for what those hundreds of thousands of unemployed bus drivers are going to do with their lives? Or the 3.5 million truck drivers? No clue. That's going to be just as big a challenge, but I seriously have no idea what the answer could be.

First published here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-31/empty-bus

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First published here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-31/happ-horrorween-2015

 

Source: searchglobalnews.wordpress.com

The Federal Reserve had a nasty surprise for the financial markets right before the Halloween weekend (the perfect timing to sweep something under the carpet and hoping the markets will have forgotten about it by Monday). At 8PM on Friday night (again, perfect timing, the Fed made sure all Bloomberg terminals were switched off and the average Wall Street trader was already spending his salary in a fancy Manhattan bar), a statement was issued, confirming the major banks in the USA would need an additional capital injection of $120B to secure the safety of the financial system and to get rid of the capital shortfall.

The governors of the Federal Reserve have confirmed and approved a draft version of the proposal, and it will now be made available for public comments. The remarkable part of the proposal is the fact the council of governors is proposing to fill the gap by raising additional debt, instead of issuing new shares to increase the equity level on the banks’ balance sheets.

Source: opengov.com

The six major banks will be hit by this new proposal, and it’s widely expected JP Morgan and Citigroup will have the hardest task to comply with the Fed’s requirements. So okay, if the $120B could be covered by new (probably subordinated) debt issues, the damage could be limited to the banks just paying a few billions in interest expenses per year. Nothing to lose your sleep over.

However, what’s really disturbing here is that these same banks, 6 years after the global financial crisis, are still facing shortcomings on the balance sheet front. Despite the government and the Federal Reserve claiming that the ‘crisis is over’ and the American economy is ‘healthy again’, apparently the banks would still have difficulties to deal with any decent-sized economic crisis.

But wait, that’s not all. On Friday, the European Central Bank also announced the results of a review of the situation of the Greek banks in the Euro-system. Apparently, there still is a huge hole in the Greek financial sector (surprise, surprise), and the Greek banks would need an additional capital injection of in excess of $15B , just to survive any adverse economic scenario in the country.

Source: politico.com

And this will very likely prove to be a much tougher challenge for these banks as the combined market capitalization of the four largest banks in Greece is less than $5B. Oops. Do you see the problem here?

It will be close to impossible to inject another $15B in those 4 Greek banks without a complete nationalization or at least absorption by a larger entity. And okay, yes, approximately $25B of Greece’s next rescue package is earmarked to be used to support the banks, but that’s only kicking the can further down the road.

Let it be clear. We are NOT out of the danger zone yet, and with a shortfall of $120B at the six largest banks in the USA and a $15B shortfall in Greece (roughly 3 times the market capitalization of the four largest Greek banks COMBINED), the situation actually looks pretty bad. There’s no way the Federal Reserve could maintain its position that ‘everything is going great in the USA’.

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First published here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-31/halloween-surprise-how-will-us-banks-plug-their-120b-capital-shortfall-trick-or-trea

You can only be one.

Polydor

First published here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kelleydunlap/which-member-of-girls-aloud-are-you?utm_term=4ldqpia

There has been a rapid movement over the past few weeks by commercial traders of gold futures to increase their net short position as a group.  That is a development which has importance for the future of gold prices.

The data for this week’s chart come from the weekly Commitment of Traders (COT) Report, published each week by the CFTC.  Within that report, the CFTC breaks down futures traders into 3 groups.  That agency provides a full page of wonky definitions of each category, but here are my abbreviated versions

Commercial Traders.  The big money, and thus presumably the smart money.  Think Goldman Sachs for stock index futures, or Archer Daniels Midland for wheat futures.

Non-Commercial Traders.  The big speculators, AKA hedge funds.  They usually have the opposite position from the commercials, with the exact difference between them consisting of the positions held by…

Non-Reportable Traders.  The small money, and nearly always the dumb money.  They are called non-reportable because the size of positions they hold is so small that the CFTC deems them not to merit reporting individually.

I report on the relevant developments in the COT Report data in every Friday’s Daily Edition.  Not every week has meaningful insights for every one of the futures contracts that I follow.  Generally speaking, these data are most valuable when they show an extreme reading, because extremes suggest that a move in the other direction is likely.  But figuring out what an extreme reading consists of can be a bit of a trick.

For gold, a big part of that trick is knowing that the commercial traders have been continuously net short since late 2001, and so the game consists of evaluating their current position relative to the range of recent values.  Part of the reason for that bias by the gold commercials to the short side is that a lot of the commercial traders are actually gold mining companies who use the futures markets to sell their future production at a price known when they enter the contract.  Since they are always producing, and since financing is sometimes tied to a requirement to fix the sales price, we get a seemingly bearish bias in the data.

Gold prices bottomed at the end of July 2015, when the commercial traders were at their smallest net short position in years.  As gold prices rebounded, the commercials gradually started upping their short positions.  That movement toward a larger net short position just recently gained a lot of urgency, as if they knew that a top was coming very soon and they needed to get positioned for it.  This is something we commented on in our Daily Edition as it was happening, and last week we noted that the level was high enough to get ready for a trend change.  That’s a cue to be extra attentive to indications of trend change, and we outlined such criteria for our Daily Edition readers.

That trend change was brought about by the FOMC’s Oct. 28 announcement, which hinted at a probable rate hike in December 2015.  How did the commercials know that was the way that the ball was going to bounce?  They do seem to have that talent a lot of the time, which I suppose is how they got to be the big money.

This chart is only current through last week’s COT Report data, because this coming Friday’s report is not out yet.  The reports are released each Friday at 3:30 Eastern time, and they reflect traders’ positions held as of the preceding Tuesday.  So even when we get the COT Report for this week, we will only know how the commercial traders were positioned before the FOMC meeting, and not how they may have responded to the news.  That we can update after getting next Friday’s COT Report.

If you are interested in following the insights I find in the COT data on gold, bonds, and occasionally copper, crude oil, gasoline, coal, silver, and currencies, you might be interested in our Daily Edition.

Tom McClellan | The McClellan Market Report | www.mcoscillator.com

First published here: http://goldsilverworlds.com/trading/cot-data-for-gold-at-topworthy-level/

In news sure to please anyone who was a teenager in the mid-2000s, Evanescence band members have announced they will be reuniting for a limited series of shows this November.

Eric Jamison / ASSOCIATED PRESS

In an interview with Rolling Stone, singer Amy Lee confirmed the band would be getting back together to play concerts in Nashville, Dallas, and L.A. before heading to Tokyo, Japan, for a headlining spot at Ozzfest on Nov. 21.

Felipe Dana / dapd

"We got offered to do Ozzfest Japan in the beginning of the year, so I was like 'Let's say yes to that,'" Lee told Rolling Stone. "I just added the three U.S. dates on to it so we could get a little practice before doing a big gig where everything is out of your control."

The band will be at Nashville's Marathon Music Works on Nov. 13, Dallas' South Side Ballroom on Nov. 15, and Los Angeles' Wiltern on Nov. 17, according to the group's official website.

The band has been on "hiatus" for three years, in which time Lee has pursued something of a solo-career, which has also included scoring films.

But she said she felt drawn back to the group, and was touched by fans' continued love for their angst-filled songs.

"It's such a wonderful gift to have this bag of songs that people know," she said. "It makes me very happy to sing 'Bring Me to Life.' I don't feel so disconnected that I can't sing 'My Immortal,' [though] that's just not completely who I am anymore.

"Yes, I have grown since then. I wouldn't write that song today, but it's become a beautiful part of my history and my fans," she said.

There are no apparent plans for any new music as yet, but Lee did hint at further appearances next year.

"It will be good to see the fans again," she said. "I'm going to be keeping my eye open to us for more opportunities. Like probably next year."

In the meantime, this should get you and your ~feelings~ through until then:

youtube.com

LINK: Do You Remember The Lyrics To “Bring Me To Life” By Evanescence

First published here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/there-is-just-too-much-that-time-cannot-erase?utm_term=4ldqpia

A proverbial picture [chart], being worth 1,000 words, we will let the charts speak for themselves, with observations/comments attached to each one.

From our perspective, the charts are saying, irrespective of what anyone is reading or following regarding gold and silver, there appears to be no change in trend for the near term.  The state of China’s economy; possible confrontation between China and the US now sending ships to irritate/challenge China’s control over it part of the ocean where she is building new bases; flagging response to the Fed’s ongoing failure of injecting more and more fiat in an already over bloated fiat economy, in fact, world-wide; Russia’s ongoing embarrassment of Washington with Russia’s pinpoint air force accuracy bombing ISIS terrorists, and commensurate challenge of taking control of the Mid East from the flailing Sunni Arab coalition, Western political disarray, etc, etc, etc.

Then there is the never-ending slew of new directly related information as to facts and fundamentals about gold and silver and the ever-missing market interpretations arising from all available information.

As we always maintain, charts are the cumulative distillation of all news and also the input from all buyers and sellers that can impact the market that would otherwise be impossible to assemble and then assimilate in order to make sense of it all.  The charts’ developing market activity accomplishes that.  It then becomes a function of how well the charts can be understood in the message[s] being conveyed for all to see.

The most obvious competition for Precious Metals [PMs], is fiat currency, and no country has been more manipulative in internationally suppressing the price of gold than the US Federal Reserve, aided and abetted by the corporate federal government.  It is a perfect cover for the international elite bankers/globalists pulling the strings behind government, while at the same time, having the masses believe it is the government actually in control.

It is impossible to keep issuing endless amounts of fiat without eventually destroying the economy, and this has been on an international scale via the IMF, BIS, and central banks. It is a testament to the insidious strength of the globalists to subvert and distort the world economy and still maintain control over those being ruled.

The US-issued fiat Federal Reserve Notes, widely accepted as “dollars,” has maintained its
relative strength, as noted by what appears to be a weak reaction, [see chart],given the degree of the rally from the 80 area.  What we know about weak reactions [pullbacks in a rally], is that they almost always lead to higher prices.

The premise behind that observation is simple.  If sellers have spent as much effort as they can to get price lower, and all they can accomplish is a mild correction, it is an indication that the market is in stronger hands preventing price from going lower.  Once the sellers have expended themselves, new buyers, recognizing that price has held well, will rush in and add to the demand to push price higher.

The sideways TR since the March ’15 high has the earmarks of a weak reaction, holding the 93 area on each attempt to breach that level and take price lower.  The failed August probe lower has held twice in retest attempts, the latest 3 weeks ago.  Some might interpret last week’s failed retest of 98 and lower close as negative.  While the range is smaller, indicating a lack of buyer ability to maintain the rally, but equally compelling is the fact that the sell off did not make much progress moving price lower.  TRs [Trading Ranges], can be difficult to trade because price if failing to go to newer highs or newer lows.  Best to let the TR play itself out and “go with” the confirmed directional breakout.

Twelve times a year, we get to present the monthly charts in order to keep a higher time frame perspective.  Higher time frames are much harder to turn and change trend, so it pays to always be aware of what a monthly chart is indicating.   A fact that all can agree on is that price is at recent lows when compared to the 2011 highs.  That indicates the trend is down.  It would be impossible to argue otherwise, whether one is an experienced chart reader or has no experience.

The comments on the chart further amplify the logic of understanding what the message of this particular chart is conveying.  There is no identifiable piece of evidence that indicates any sign for change, and no change can occur before one sees such sign[s].  That may sound simplistic, but it is also true.

Before we see a possible change on the monthly chart, a change on the next lower time frame weekly chart will show up first.  What we like to see in reading charts is a form of synergy where the respective lower time frames are in sync.  We see that on the weekly: the trend is down.  A similar channel shows a downward direction, and even within the channel, as is noted, price labors on rallies and has greater EDM [Ease of Downward Movement], indicating sellers are still in overall control.  From 1,200, it took price 5 weeks to reach the last swing low.  Since, the current reaction rally is in its 14th week and has yet to fully retrace to 1,200.

The current rally not only has failed to retrace all the loss from 1,200, over the last 14 weeks, the rally also failed to get much past a halfway retracement within the channel. Buyers need to demonstrate an ability to effect change, and any change on the weekly will first show up on the next lower time frame, the daily chart.  You may be able to sense how the charts “talk” to anyone wanting to observe their message.

Charts are organically evolving in the sense that they reflect the efforts of living buyers and sellers, and computerized input still results from live direction in their origin.  Charts change constantly, especially on the lower time frames.  Being able to “read” the developing “story” is the best edge one can have.

While still nearer the lows, we can see the potential for change developing on a small-scale, since the July swing low.  There is a small high followed by a higher low, and then another higher high, last week.  If the next reaction lower holds above the last swing low, forming another higher low, the short-term trend will change to at least sideways.

The next question is, does the daily confirm the weekly, which we noted already confirms he monthly, thus adding to the synergy of time frames?  When charts are complimentary over time frames, it makes taking positions within the obvious momentum potentially more profitable.

It is easier to see the high in August followed by a higher low and then the higher October swing high, which is now being corrected.  To the extent one can say gold has been trying to change trend to go higher, the angle of the rally is somewhat lax, bars are overlapping, gains harder to sustain themselves, yet price is marginally working higher.

All we can do is watch the character of this current reaction already underway and watch how much lower it goes, noting the size of the bar ranges and accompanying volume.  For now, there is little to be excited about in terms of a change in trend for gold, even silver.

The set up for silver is slightly different from gold.  The further price declines, the less is the net downward progress, but price is still going lower, so do not try to anticipate a change where none has yet occurred.  The inability of price to rally up and away from the support area remains problematic.

What can be said about monthly silver is that price, for October, has a higher high, higher low, and higher close.  That observation follows three months of a clustering of closes.  This could be subtle sigh of possible change, but it would still need to be confirmed by stronger overall performance to the upside.

What has to be respected the most in reading the weekly chart is the fact that the current rally from the August swing low has not been able to rally above and hold, a halfway retracement in the current TR.

NMW  [Needs More Work]

We saw the developing “story” in silver as being more positive in some time, up until last Wednesday’s failed breakout rally.  Like the fiat “dollar,” discussed in the first chart, the rally from the early October low was holding its gains from the past few weeks.  The reaction was weak, and weak reactions lead to higher prices, which is how we were viewing developing activity in silver.

The breakout rally on Wednesday did not hold.  It was not confirmed, a term we often employ in judging market activity.  It made sense to buy the breakout, which occurred on
strong volume, but nothing is guaranteed, and a small loss resulted, the cost of doing business.

So far, the correction has not extended lower when sellers had every opportunity to press the trapped new buyers but failed to do so.  Now, we simply have to watch how the market activity unfolds next week, for how it unfolds will be the message from the market as to what to expect moving forward.

If it is not clear, then there is nothing to do.  Go with the flow.

First published here: http://goldsilverworlds.com/price/month-end-technical-review-for-gold-and-silver/

WHEN the third Greek bail-out was outlined in principle on July 13th after an extraordinarily fraught summit of euro-zone leaders, between €10 billion ($11 billion) and €25 billion out of the total sum of up to €86 billion of help was set aside for bank recapitalisation. Greek banks had been undermined for over half a year as deposits drained out of them, on worries about a possible exit from the euro once Syriza, a radical left party, won the election held in January 2015, culminating in their closure for three weeks in late June and July. They had been further hurt by the harm done to the economy and thus to their loans arising from Syriza’s ill-judged attempt to outbluff its official creditors. Even so, the notion that they would need as much as €25 billion to offset the damage and put them on a sound footing appeared unduly pessimistic.

However, just how much they actually required would not be known until the European Central Bank (ECB), since late 2014 the supervisor of the four big Greek banks—Alpha, Eurobank, National Bank of Greece and Piraeus—that dominate the economy, conducted a probe into their books together with a stress test examining how they would be affected if the economy turned even sourer than expected in 2015-17. Today the ECB has published the results. They reveal that the extra capital that will be needed is considerably less than...Continue reading

First published here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/10/third-bail-out?fsrc=rss

Simple, observable facts lead the prudent saver and bank customer to be wary of the status of the European banking system.

European QE has failed and, according to the ECB's own data, has never, ever been successful. Look at this chart below. No matter how much the ECB has cranked up balance sheet purchases, lending to non-financial companies has never, ever materially benefitted.It gets worse, as explained in the video below. This Halloween, if you really want to look spooky, go dressed as a European bank depositor!

  

For more information on bailout avoidance strategies, visit http://veritaseum.com#mce_temp_url#.

First published here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-31/ecbs-own-data-shows-qe-program-utter-failure-largest-banks-dwindle-depositors-capita