John Williams is your typical Keynesian inflationist. He will be aggressive in his advocacy to print money. He will also be very influential at the Fed.
He will be slow to raise interest rates and “normalize” the balance sheet. Read the full statement here.
Update to Will the Low Hold?
Bitcoin is approaching the low made in February.
Looking at the chart, this seems to be the panic level. Lots of speculators will flood the market with sell orders if this support gives away.
Manufacturing jobs are decreasing.
I say good riddance.
Politicians and economist say, “We need to bring back manufacturing jobs”.
I ask:
Who is “we”?
Why?
Here is what they never show you.
Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Productivity is up. This is a good. Robotics and outsourcing has decreased the necessity of men in manufacturing jobs. These people can now do other task in the economy. The USA is second only to China when it comes to manufacturing output in dollar terms. The third, fourth and fifth slot are far behind.
These same people would have been warning about the agricultural jobs disappearing in the 20th century. However, productivity in agricultural is up. US farmers feed the world. Less people are needed to toil in the fields. These people can serve their fellow man in other ways. Instead of picking corn they can become engineers, doctors, barbers etc.
Here is Joan Norberg to set the record straight.
The next time some one tells you about manufacturing jobs, and how the USA does not make anything any more. Tell them what a remarkable success US manufacturing has become. More productivity, less workers. This is called high efficiency.
Platinum at $950 is cheap right now. I have detailed the bullish case for platinum over the last few months. See here, here and here. You buy investments cheap. You sell them when they get expensive. Over at capitalist exploits they have made the case for owning platinum. Read the article here. He points out the South Africa problem that I have detailed at this website. He also has other observations I have not detailed at this website.
Update on the gold market.
Gold looks set to break out from its multi-headed bottom.
It must break 1380 forcefully in order for me to take this trade. Once it breaks out, there is not much resistance until $1580.
Another reason why I think it is going to break out is because on the daily chart it broke out of a bull flag. 
In my experience, these smaller daily patterns are used to launch the bigger weekly patterns.
Some good info here when dealing with the IRS.
Our position in the Yen finally began to move.
The Nikkei broke down.
Click here to read this. From the abstract:
Nonbanks originated about half of all mortgages in 2016, and 75% of mortgages insured by the FHA or VA. Both shares are much higher than those observed at any point in the 2000s. We describe in this paper how nonbank mortgage companies are vulnerable to liquidity pressures in both their loan origination and servicing activities, and we document that this sector in aggregate appears to have minimal resources to bring to bear in a stress scenario. We show how these exact same liquidity issues unfolded during the financial crisis, leading to the failure of many nonbank companies, requests for government assistance, and harm to consumers. The extremely high share of nonbank lenders in FHA and VA lending suggests that nonbank failures could be quite costly to the government, but this issue has received very little attention in the housing-reform debate.
From the conclusion:
…we ask “What happens next?” What happens if interest rates rise and nonbank revenue drops? What happens if commercial banks or other financial institutions lose their taste for extending credit to nonbanks? What happens if delinquency rates rise and servicers have to advance payments to investors —advances that, in the case of Ginnie Mae pools, the servicer cannot finance, and on which they might take a sizable capital loss?
My answer: Nothing good.
The trade war headlines definitely sells papers.
I stand by my original claim. There will be no trade war. Trump placed tariffs on about $50 billion dollars worth of Chinese imports.
The Chinese government responded with $3 billion dollars.
Trump’s tariffs are small compared to the overall imports on China goods.
Chinese officials are on record stating that no one wins in a trade war. This is reflected in their $3 billion dollar response. They only responded to save face politically.
