AAPL had OK earnings and it's up about 3% overnight so that's pumping 0.6% into the Nasdaq from that stock alone. The big news of the day is Euro-Zone PMI Reports coming in better than expected, pretty much across the board. Forget the fact that they are, overall, at 50.1 on a scale where 49.9 is contracting – 50.1 is NOT CONTRACTING!!!
Not contracting? That is FANTASTIC! Let's have a party. And a party is exactly what Europe is having, with the indexes up 1% or more across the board. Sure, unemployment is at a record high – but you can't make an economic omelet without breaking the hopes and dreams of a few million workers – can you?
Of course, what people tend to forget is that the Purchasing Managers Index is a survey of the expectations of Purchasing Managers for the NEXT 6 months. In other words, Draghi promises free money, people with high-paying jobs who are not unemployed believe him, and their expectations improve. This is what's raising the market 1% – isn't that silly?
Even sillier is that, in Europe, good news is good news but, in China, BAD news is good news too as their PMI FELL to 47.7 (clearly contracting) and investors in the US and Europe are hoping that means China will jump on the stimulus bandwagon and flood the World with even MORE FREE MONEY.
Asian investors, however, think bad news is still bad news and China’s stocks fell for the first time in three days, led by financial and commodity companies, as an unexpected decline in a preliminary manufacturing index boosted concern the economic slowdown is deepening.
Another "positive" being spun in the Western World is Japan's exports rising 7.4% from last year to 6.06Tn Yen. That's also exciting the EU and US markets ahead of the bell but boy oh boy are they schmucks! Surely I can't be the only person in the Western World capable of doing currency conversions, can I?
The reason the Nikkei futures (/NKD) are languishing at 14,850 while our Futures celebrate Japan's export numbers is because, last year 6,060Bn Yen converted at a rate of 78.5 Yen to the Dollar, so $77.2Bn and this year, 6.060Bn Yen converts at 100 Yen to the Dollar for $60.6Bn. That's a drop of $17Bn (28%), not an increase of 7.4%!
Why does no one in the MSM report this? Why would they treat a catastrophe like a victory? Are they trying to fool you – or are they fooling themselves? Perhaps you should ask your favorite media pundits WTF is going on over there? Usually, we ignore currency fluctuations because they are relatively minor and not worth the mental strain but THIS is a massive change in the value of the Yen, purposely engineered by the Prime Minister (Abe) and the Central Bank (BOJ) to devalue the currency and create exactly this sort of false recovery. Does that mean we all have to actually play along?? No thanks….
And, if they are lying to you about Japan, what other lies is the media telling you? I often put up the "Pyramid of Capitalism" to make a point and today I'll point out that the Church ("We Fool You") has been replaced in modern society by the Media (see Marshall McLuhan) and most of us spend a lot more time worshiping the idiot box than we ever did at the pulpit.
It's not even called "the idiot box" anymore. Not because it's any less idiotic but because the generation that grew up without them and thought that people staring at flashing images for hours on end were being turned into idiots have been replaced by their idiot children and their idiot children had children (my generation) and now my children think anyting that happened in "black and white days" was pure rubbish.
Those idiot boxes ended up making so much money that the companies that ran them have now taken over all of the media and almost all of our entertainment to the point where we now only have to say: Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, Clear Channel and News Corp to list the owners of 90% of the media in America.
Time Warner also runs the magazines and publishes books, Rupert's Fox is into book publishing and newspapers and also happens to own Dow Jones and Company – who publish Barron's, Smart Money, the Wall Street Journal and, of course, the Dow Jones Industrial Average. What kind of "news" do you think you're going to be getting from them?
IN PROGRESS
