Silver Has Reached a Chart Chomping Golden Cross Moment

Higher prices to come ?

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“LONDON (Reuters) – Dwindling new orders and faster layoffs marked a worsening decline for euro zone companies last month, according to business surveys that dent hopes the economy will return to growth before 2013.

Wednesday’s purchasing managers indexes (PMIs) suggested it was almost inevitable the euro zone returned to recession in the third quarter.

A good gauge of economic growth, Markit’s Eurozone Composite PMI fell to 46.1 in September from 46.3 in August.”

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“BlackRock Inc. (BLK)’s Laurence D. Fink, who has been trying to persuade retail investors to get out of cash, said the U.S. is about a year away from having a more robust economy.

“When you talk about macro issues in the U.S., our banking system is far better than most banking systems and our housing crisis is 90 percent behind us,” Fink, chairman and chief executive officer of the world’s largest asset manager, said in an Oct. 1 interview from his New York office.

Fink has been urging investors for more than a year to buy equities as the U.S. economyexpanded and the stock market rallied. BlackRock today started the third phase of a five-year branding campaign, with a series of advertisements telling savers to get out of cash and low-yielding bonds and suggesting they put money in high-quality stocks, exchange-traded funds and products that generate higher income.”

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“Australian sales of newly built homes slumped to the lowest level on record in August, a private report showed, underscoring the central bank’s decision to resume lowering interest rates.

Sales decreased 5.3 percent to 5,383 from July, when they dropped 5.6 percent, the Canberra-based Housing Industry Association said, citing a survey of the nation’s largest builders. Detached house sales fell 5.8 percent, while apartments slipped 2.5 percent, it showed.

“New home sales for August are the latest in a string of soft new housing updates for this financial year,” Harley Dale, HIA chief economist, said in a statement. “A fresh round of interest rate cuts will help rebalance this situation, although financial institutions obviously need to play their role in cementing this outcome.”

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“The volume of home sales in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, fell 21 percent in September from the same month last year, realtor data shows.

The number of homes sold in the Greater Toronto Area fell to 5,879 from 7,422, the data show, while the average price rose more than 8.5 percent to C$503,662 ($510,335), the Toronto Real Estate Board said in an e-mailed statement.

“While sales have been lower due to stricter mortgage lending guidelines, we continue to see substantial competition between buyers,” said board President Ann Hannah in the statement. “The months of inventory trend remains low from a historic perspective, which explains the strong price increases we are experiencing.”

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Commodities in general sold off overnight as the dollar gained strength on expansion in the Chinese service sector.

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On the Greenback

Germany, Europe’s largest economy, had a return to spending helping out the overall retail sales data in the euro zone. Retail sales climbed a whopping 0.01%.

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World Markets

Currencies

Commodities

USD Libor

Euribor

Yields for Italy, Spain, France,  and Germany …

He is going to be proven a liar and a scoundrel. Can you say “one term President?”

It’s over.

UPDATE: ‘We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs. We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods’…

UPDATE II: Watch Video

Citing a “resurgent Taco Bell” as being a threat and “nosebleed valuation” for CMG.

The stock is getting hammered on that news.

“Hedge fund manager Doug Kass disagrees with the notion that the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing (QE) will spark a rally for Treasurys.

“I maintain the view that shorting the U.S. fixed-income market is still the trade of the decade,” he writes on Real Money Pro.

The 10-year Treasury yield stood at 1.62 percent Monday, down from 1.77 percent Sept. 13, the day before the Fed announced QE3.”

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“The United States is in danger of falling into another recession, while monetary-stimulus measures are artificially pumping up stock prices well above where they should be and doing nothing for the fundamental economy, said billionaire real-estate magnate Sam Zell.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is currently trading around 13,515 thanks mainly to Fed intervention, but strip out monetary support and the index would likely fall more than 4,000 points if corporate and economic fundamentals truly reflected share prices, said Zell.

“I think the environment is tough, confidence is low,” Zell told CNBC.”

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Are central banks setting investors up for a big fall ? Global PMIs suggest a serious slowdown, but due to central bank activity the markets are not signaling such an event. Buyer beware.

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“(Reuters) – Ranjana Bhandari and her husband knew the natural gas beneath their ranch-style home in Arlington, Texas, could be worth a lot – especially when they got offer after offer from Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Chesapeake wanted to drill there, and the offers could have netted the couple thousands of dollars in a bonus and royalties. But Bhandari says they ultimately declined the deals because they oppose fracking in residential areas. Fracking, slang for hydraulic fracturing, is a controversial method used to extract gas and oil.”

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“A compounding lack of confidence in the future has kept American companies from investing in their businesses and is leading the country back into recession, real estate mogul Sam Zell told CNBC.”

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We could see many states and foreign pension plans sue large banks for losses and accountability in the MBS market.

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Jefferies global head of equity strategy Sean Darby warns in his latest note to clients that a key change in the underlying fundamentals of the stock market rally is going unnoticed amid all of the talk about QE3 and the U.S. elections.

Darby writes that “corporate earnings are now forecast to drop in 3Q after consecutive quarterly gains since the 2008 financial crisis.”

From the note:

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Worried about the future ? Worried about the stock markets ? Here’s a look at some companies that should thrive no matter what.

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In play ,

On the Wires