Bill, I believe so, rather than having passive receptivism in a few channels, we have our own shovels and digging so to speak. Check out youtube.com, maybe you could do a weekly BCTV show, lol.

By the way, I knwo you like C, but can you please comment on the banks sometime, the bubbles moving from tech to housing and now... will have to impact this sector [along with slowdown ofcourse] IMO, What are your thoughts?

Bill or Mark or G034,
I'm a novice, but it seems to me that the gold stocks and the market are trading in tandem. Do you think one is leading the other or what?
Donna

Gee whiz, Bill, did you have to pick a sector where I'm short to make your point. <8)

donna-

Some correlation (weak) b/t SP500 and gold stocks but obviously the direct correlation is with gold and a sympathetic correlation with oil. Gold is inversely correlated with moves in the $USD.

Today, traders threw away beta (risk) in the afternoon BIG TIME and THAT has me worried. Tomorrow ECB announces rate change. 50bps coming? So you saw the energy complex get trashed and the miners erase nearly all their recoveries in the great beta toss.

I believe the same thing, though with me it's whenever I buy a stock it will inevitably go down. Blogging it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. :)

I called a buy on gold a few days ago. Case in point... probably should have bought today instead.

Works out well for my friends though....

Mark, explain that again please. you think todays trading signals another rate increase, thereby causing addional selling?

EU rate increase, that is.

Since Kohn's comments were out this morning I don't know what else could've spooked the herd so badly other than the ECB decision tomorrow at 7:45am. A 50bps raise would certainly cause commodities some more difficulties I think.

I'd love to hear some other theories.

Correction. Kohn speaks tomorrow. Guynn spoke at noon today. Since sell-off started about then, was that the impetus?

Fed Comments

The Fed's Guynn said today in a speech on the U.S. economy and the housing market in Duluth, Georgia, that recent inflation figures are ``bothersome'' and that the Fed must ``remain open to rethinking our policy.''

Guynn's sentiments echoed those from Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and other policy makers this week. Bernanke remarked on June 5 that inflation is accelerating and ``unwelcome.''

Thought I heard Art Cashin on CNBC say something about the market is worried about commodities - that there might be someone in trouble because of the big slide and they might have to liquidate which would cause cascade down.

Donna

Who knows really, so many possibilities. I do however, think that the market does not take the Fed seriously and the Fed has a track record, a proven track record, of overshooting on the rate hikes. Maybe they should get a new software, lol

I gotta be honest with you, and I dont want to take this lightly, but once I heard Guynn, I dumped half my purchases from this AM, sad, but hey, maybe we get it lower ;-)

Big slide? :) This doesn't even qualify as a correction yet, except for the Naz. In market parlance all this is is a little ol' CONSOLIDATION. Wait til it really gets going if people can't stomach this.

To restate what MarkM said for my own comprehension. Due to Ben's statement about inflation, people expect a rate increase. A higher riskfree rate combined with the increased volatility of the market makes the return no longer worth the risk of holding equities (And in this case gold as well).

A couple questions.
1) A what point is this anticipated rate hike "priced in". When the increase actually takes place, will the market still move. That is are there people actually waiting for it to happen?
2) If Ben is so worried about inflation, wouldn't that be a buy signal for gold? I guess what the money is saying, is that the value of the increase is enough to offset people's fear of inflation.
3) Bill's column about the gold sell-off stopping I imagine was in broad terms (i.e. stopping around here i.e. 580-620), where as MarkM, your comments about a much deeper slide are more near-sighted I take it (630--> 530). Or are you in disagreement here?

Some speculation about commodities:
From what I understand, most pension plans in the UK have inflation components to their valuations, so I imagine (just a guess) that most pension plan asset allocations already have some allocation to commodities. An automatic increase in pension benefit with inflation, however, is not the case in the US. As stands, I believe most have no allocation. Nonetheless, I think pensions are slowly making a move towards picking up diversification and inflation protection in the form of TIPs and commodities. I don't know if it's just a drop in the bucket, but I imagine the commodity world over the long run can expect an influx of investment from these pension plans, much like real estate in recent years. And in most cases I suspect these asset allocation decisions are made with little thought towards timing the market.

Everyone here is a link for fun:
http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/everybreath/

Parts of Asia look like it is getting irrational. It may be time to start nibbling....

1:39AM ET
^AORD All Ordinaries DOWN 105.000 (2.10%)
^BSESN BSE 30 DOWN 322.31 (3.30%)
^HSI Hang Seng DOWN 278.89 (1.76%)
^JKSE Jakarta Composite DOWN 44.757 (3.48%)
^KLSE KLSE Composite DOWN 5.61 (0.61%)
^KS11 Seoul Composite DOWN 31.22 (2.46%)
^N225 Nikkei 225 DOWN 571.36 (3.78%)
^NZ50 NZSE 50 DOWN 7.700 (0.21%)
^SSEC Shanghai Composite DOWN 23.481 (1.48%)
^STI Straits Times DOWN 39.52 (1.68%)
^TWII Taiwan Weighted DOWN 280.93 (4.25%)

rusticuf-

I don't know where gold is headed. No one does. But my target has been the 575-580 level with support also at about 609.

Risk NOT rewarded in this market.

Be safe everyone.

Gold probing lower (616) $USD doing Superman imitation. Oil off LARGE. This is not shaping up to be a good day for gold fans once again.

The whole thing looks scripted to me with Feds and other CBs. It's having the effect they want.

Hi Bill,

I would be surprised if some influential people were not aware of your blog. I found it funny that days after you posted your Richard Ney interview as a google cache link, the cache was removed from google by the time I arrived to read it (something that does not happen too often that I am aware of). Coincidence? I don't know and its not really important... it is easy to fall into the over-paranoid trap. As for your recent open question to your readers: "I had to stop and think: has our distrust and sarcasm gone too far? Have we gone from being merely doubtful to flat-out scornful for anything that is being reported today?"

I like to think of it in simple terms of human relations: If an individual lies to you and you discover it once, twice, three times... it does not take very long before a rational individual either a) does not listen to the liar anymore or at least b) take everything they say with a huge grain of salt.
The current US administration has been proved, even to the point of being forced to publicly apologise (which is rare) for orchestrating *entire wars* based on manufactured lies "evidence" and deceit.

Is it any surprise that the more rational less wide-eyed and trusting among us think the terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed some time ago? Personally I would question further: in the scale of lies, knowing what has come before from the same source, and then putting Musab al-Zarqawi death it in the context of the recent "scandal" of covering up the murder of unknown numbers of innocent women, children and men; It would not surprise me in the least if this Musab al-Zarqawi, never existed. I do not consider myself a paranoid person, I simply do not trust what I hear from that particular and its connected sources.

Lie to me once shame on you, twice, shame on me. So when I hear news like, the only real "news" I can hope to really trust is by immediately analysing to the context if possible (uncovered cold blooded murder, economic outlook,...), then look at the expected public reaction to their "news", and try to arrive at the real "why" and "what" based on that.

As I have mentioned in comments to this blog before it is basically the same process that needs to be applied to the market news and statistics. Its the same kind of game, only people's lives are at stake in the "game".

--
Keith