The Most Important Chart for Friday

The Stock Sage has posted a chart of $CRB, which is worth reviewing.

Go here to see the chart and his analysis.

Manipulated to perfection?

TOKYO (Reuters) – Asian shares and the Australian dollar jumped on Friday after China’s second-quarter gross domestic product data landed in line with forecasts.

But market relief could be short-lived as Moody’s downgrade of Italy’s credit rating to near-junk status just ahead of a bond auction threatens to reinforce fears over Europe’s debt crisis.

Read the rest here.

A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that the bulk of equity returns for more than a decade are due to actions by the US central bank.

Read the scandalous article and see the chart here.

Expect the legalization/decriminalization drumbeat to grow steadily louder throughout the media as it is widely known that Obama will pursue legalization of marijuana in his second term.

A new organization, Count the Costs, has decided it’s time for an assessment. To this end, they have compiled a comprehensive report detailing the death and destruction the war on drugs has directly caused around the world over the past 50 years.

Unfortunately, as Count the Costs points out, the saddest effect of the war on drugs is that “the centrality of criminalizing users means that in reality a war on drugs is to a significant degree, a war on drug users – a war on people.”

Read the article here.

This guy’s first paragraph was Flyesque and worthy of promotion in the hallowed halls of iBC news…

News that that a swarm of termites deep inside the British banking system have been fiddling the interbank interest rates (LIBOR) for years in order to systematically vacuum a few billion pence off the exchange floors for themselves is the latest blow to the credibility of the global money system – and probably a fine overture to a looming climactic implosion of the gigantic, creaking, smoldering, reeking, duck-taped edifice of broken promises, booby-trapped hedge obligations, counterparty follies, central bank euchres, sovereign flim-flams, and countless chicanes too various, dark, and deep to smoke out. Next, we’ll probably hear that Lloyd Blankfein over at Goldman Sachs has been tinkering with the rotation of the earth in order to gain a few micro-milliseconds of advantage in his firm’s high frequency trading rackets. After all, back in 2008 Lloyd himself claimed to be “doing God’s work.”

James Howard Kunstler

Given the wipe-out of years of savings, are there ways to make retirement nest eggs safer? What might replace the 401(k) as the dominant savings vehicle?

7 experts way in on what might replace the 401(k).

Read the article here.

Via Market Folly, read Soros’  best investment advice and analysis of it here.

The average Joe knows nothing of Libor. The average Joe knows a lot about gold. Manipulating the price of gold would certainly awake the masses.

As with everything in economics, there is a correctional market mechanism for this scenario – the flight to commodities, particularly precious metals like gold. Gold holds its value when paper money loses value, because it is beyond the gift of the government to simply will gold into being and give it to friends in high places or voters in low ones.

If gold has been manipulated downwards and if that process continues, then all recourse to a store of value (other than land and property) has been taken from the individual.

Read the article here.

You really must look at this Economist graph, created by the citizens of each country voting on this question. Note carefully the countries that vote for politicians to reduce income inequality.

Submit your vote and see the graph here.

(Reuters) – A divided Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday adopted a rule designed to bolster the agency’s surveillance of the equities markets by establishing a central database that stores information on every trade order, execution and cancellation.

Read the article here.

More than 1,000 counties in 26 states are being named natural-disaster areas, the biggest such declaration ever by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as drought grips the Midwest.

Read the article here

Read the article with analysis and explanation of the chart here.

(Reuters) – The Federal Reserve Bank of New York will release on Friday documents showing it took “prompt action” four years ago to highlight problems with the benchmark interest rate known as Libor and to press for reform, an official at the regional U.S. central bank said on Wednesday.

Read the article here.

Via Bloomberg:

U.S. stocks declined for a fourth day, giving the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index its longest losing streak since May, amid concern about corporate profits….The S&P 500 decreased 0.8 percent to 1,341.47 at 4 p.m. New York time, dropping 2.4 percent in four days.

Read the article here.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.

Read the article here.

“We’re really right at that edge, if economic data continue to come in below expectations and if our view is that we don’t expect to make progress on our mandate, then I would think we need more accommodation,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams said on the sidelines of a conference in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

Read the article here.

How much farther left can America go?

From the progressivity of our tax code, to the percentage of GDP devoted to government, to the extent of the regulatory burden on business, most of Europe’s got nothing on us.

Indeed, America looks more like Spain than the America of our grandparents.

Read the article here.

Mebane Faber, via World Beta, is out with an end of June updated list of global ten-year PE ratios for many countries.

See the list here.

Sex, drugs, and meeting the President while still drunk. What more could an Olympian ask for?

The female Olympian says her experience at the White House in 2010 was similar.

“It scared the crap out of me,” she says. “I woke up with this guy — I drank so much, I had no recollection of what happened. And I’m going to meet the president, and I’m still drunk. Vice President Biden — I think he was smelling my breath. He was so close, I could’ve licked his nose without moving. I know I reeked of liquor. I was mortified, but they were all smiling.”

All morning, she says, the entire US Olympic team was struggling. “We were texting each other about how much agony we were in,” she says. “It was hilarious.”

Being drunk at the White House, Lodwick says, has been a tradition as long as he’s been competing — and, as with every other event, it’s something that the athletes gear up for.

Don’t believe the hype by the alarmists who want to tax the the very air you exhale.

There have been 372,989 correctly recorded daily high temperature records in the US since 1895.  84% of them were set when CO2 was below 350ppm.

To read the article and see some outstanding charts and graphs, go here.