Gerald Celente : the beginning of the first great war of the 21st century

Gerald Celente with Brian Sussman, KFSO 30 March 2011 Gerald Celente : you go to the airport you know how you will be harassed , you want a lousy day go to the TSA , they do want they want we are their servants , they are better than we are ....regarding the situation in the middle east and particularly Libya food price are at all time high corruption is everywhere and you got mass unemployment ,

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Gerald Celente : the beginning of the first great war of the 21st century

Gerald Celente with Brian Sussman, KFSO 30 March 2011 Gerald Celente : you go to the airport you know how you will be harassed , you want a lousy day go to the TSA , they do want they want we are their servants , they are better than we are ....regarding the situation in the middle east and particularly Libya food price are at all time high corruption is everywhere and you got mass unemployment ,

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Gerald Celente : the beginning of the first great war of the 21st century

Gerald Celente with Brian Sussman, KFSO 30 March 2011 Gerald Celente : you go to the airport you know how you will be harassed , you want a lousy day go to the TSA , they do want they want we are their servants , they are better than we are ....regarding the situation in the middle east and particularly Libya food price are at all time high corruption is everywhere and you got mass unemployment ,

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Gerald Celente : The First Great war of the 21st century has begun

Gerald Celente with Michael Harris, on CFRA March 24th 2011 :The difference between the democrats and the republicans is like the difference between the Bananos and the Gambinos says Trends master Gerald Celente , Obama actually out-bushed Bush , the hypocrisy continues from non closing Guantanamo bay to the now the war on Libya , it is same old same old...Gerald Celente believes that what we

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The Greatest Complacency of the 21st Century

Many of our readers know intuitively that their neighbors and friends have become complacent about the world around them, but they don’t know how to prove it.

Today, I’ll show you two ways to do just that.

The key is that rising equity prices usually lead to an increase in stock market optimism, while falling prices generate stock market pessimism.

That alone is no justification for bearish or bullish strategies — until it reaches an extreme.

So the questions are: How do you measure this optimism or pessimism? And how do you know when it’s at an extreme level?

Right now, I’d like to focus on two measures in particular …

Mutual Fund Cash Levels

The average cash allocation of mutual fund managers is one of the most important sentiment indicators available — and for good reason: Forty percent of all U.S. stocks are held by mutual funds. So their buying and selling can easily move the market.

What’s especially remarkable is that fund managers are as prone to the herding instinct as any other group, which leads to an interesting pattern in their investment behavior:

Mutual fund managers almost invariably hold relatively high cash levels near market bottoms, and relatively low cash levels in the vicinity of important market tops.

Go back to March 2000, for example, near the top of the tech stock bubble. Precisely when they should have been taking profits off the table, mutual fund managers loaded up with stocks and ran their average cash levels down to 3.7 percent. For them and their shareholders, it was a disaster. For astute investors, however, it was a blatant and very TIMELY sell signal!

But now look:

Mutual fund cash levels are even lower than they were in March of 2000!

In fact, according to the Investment Company Institute, mutual fund cash levels are currently at an extremely low 3.5 percent. They have been that low just twice before:

First, in the summer of 2007, at the climax of the 2003-2007 cyclical bull market. Second, in March/April 2010 right before the flash crash of May 6, which marked the beginning of a 17 percent market correction.

What’s most remarkable is that, as you can see in the chart below, cash levels have been very low for more than a year. This tells us that the only thing driving the market higher is the Fed, and we don’t doubt their ability to continue their money pumping. But the history of this indicator suggests that the next vicious bear market may be lurking around the corner.

Another indicator I closely follow is …

Investors Intelligence Advisor Sentiment

Investment newsletter editors play an important role in influencing and driving investor sentiment; and Investors Intelligence has developed a relatively reliable sentiment indicator to track them.

Here, too, a pattern is clear:

Compared to mutual fund editors, newsletter writers seem to be more flexible, adapting more rapidly to changing market conditions. So when they’re overly bullish as a group, it often has only short- to medium-term bearish implications.

But still, long stretches of extreme bullish sentiment as measured by this indicator has often marked major tops.

As you can see in the second panel on the chart below a high degree of bullishness has been persistent for nearly four months. And the trigger line for a bearish signal — more than 55 percent bulls — has been broken.

This is another clear warning sign that a larger correction is overdue. Moreover, despite the stock market correction of the past few weeks, bullish sentiment has prevailed. That’s very unusual, and I think it’s another confirmation of the bearish signal!

Indeed, we see little or no angst even in the wake of ominous news coming out of Japan, North Africa, and the Middle East!

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That’s complacency par excellence — historically a sign of an imminent stock market top.

If you are looking to profit from falling stock markets, I’d say that a decline in the Nasdaq 100 is the most probable. So you might consider ProShares Short QQQ ETF (PSQ) in the $33-$34 range. This inverse ETF is designed to rise 1 percent for every 1 percent drop in the NASDAQ-100 Index.

Best wishes,

Claus

Claus Vogt is the editor of the German edition of Safe Money. He is the co-author of the German bestseller, Das Greenspan Dossier, where he predicted, well ahead of time, the sequence of events that have unfolded since, including the U.S. housing bust, the U.S. recession, the demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as the financial system crisis. Claus is currently the editor of Million-Dollar Contrarian Portfolio and has just completed his book The Global Debt Trap.

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The 1st Great War of 21st Century Has Begun!

03/21/11 Kingston, New York – It is a bad science fiction movie written by mad political scientists.

Exactly eight years to the day that President George W. Bush took America and his “Coalition of the Willing” to war with Iraq, President Barack Obama has taken America and his “Broad Coalition” to war with Libya.

And just as the world was sold a “coalition of the willing” that was predominantly a fleeting alliance of the cajoled and the arm-twisted, the putatively “broad” Obama coalition consists primarily of America’s two cronies-in-war, the UK and France.

Only in a mad political science fiction movie could a President engaged in perpetuating two unjust, immoral, interminable and expensive wars begun by his predecessor, take his nation into yet another unjust, immoral, expensive and, in all likelihood, interminable war … and expect a happy ending!

Eight years of war in Iraq and 11 in Afghanistan has resolved nothing and served only to inflame anti-American sentiment around the world, drain the US treasury, kill and wound hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people and destroy the lives, limbs and souls of thousands of American troops.

Batting zero on the battle field, the mad political scientists have stepped up to the plate again. Despite nothing but failure, President Obama has decided, unilaterally, to squander still more American men and money in a war on Libya, promising that this time he won’t strike out.

In what could be a casting call for a mad sci-fi movie starring the Three Stooges, America’s newest Decider-in-Chief fights from the safety of the Oval Office while his equally battle-unscarred and chicken-hearted French and British counterparts, Nicolas “Sarko the American” Sarkozy and David (Eton/Oxford, what else?) Cameron lead the charge from the plush distance of the Palais de l’Élysée and 10 Downing Street.

What’s Next? Having accurately predicted, at their onsets, that the Afghan and Iraq wars would be failures, we now predict that war with Libya will not only be equally unsuccessful, but could have even graver global implications. Will Gaddafi fold without a fight? Or, faced by defeat and certain death, will he hit London, Paris, or New York with bio warfare, a dirty bomb or other tactic?

Absent a worst-case terror attack, even if the “broad coalition” overthrows and kills Qaddaifi, it will not amount to victory any more than executing Saddam Hussein and routing the Taliban has brought victory to Iraq and Afghanistan.

If it feels as though the world is spinning out of control, that’s because it is … and at breakneck speed! In just the past few months, revolution has engulfed the entire Middle East and North Africa. In just the past week a gigantic earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown has crippled Japan. And war, (under whatever guise; e.g., “humanitarian crisis” or “answering the call of a threatened people”) has been declared on Libya.

The trend to the “1st Great War of the 21st Century” is accelerating. Events are happening so quickly that it is nearly impossible for us to compile, absorb, analyze and distill the voluminous information in our Trend Alerts before they are eclipsed by the cascade of new events.

The opening salvos of the “1st Great War of the 21st Century” … the War that no one else to date is either recognizing or daring to talk about … represents a crucial episode in the “History of the Future” – a blow-by-blow build-up to war, rather than the mainstream media’s blah-by-blah coverage. Busy cheerleading the home team they are, even at this late stage, incapable of recognizing that the game ends with the 1st Great War of the 21st Century.

What will the War mean to you personally? What can YOU do to prepare yourself for what’s to come? What can be done to individually and collectively halt the march to war – or at least divert and mitigate the damage.

Regards,

Gerald Celente
for The Daily Reckoning

[Editor's Note: The above Trend Alert is available as part of a subscription to The Trends Journal, which is published by Gerald Celente. The Trends Journal distills the ongoing research of The Trends Research Institute into a concise, readily accessible form. Click here to learn more about and subscribe to The Trends Journal.]

Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.” Also a Close Combat practitioner and black belt trainer, Celente has made many media appearances including Oprah, CNN, The Today Show, Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, C-Span, and CNBC. He has been cited in the Economist, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Entrepreneur, USA Today, and many other publications.

 

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Inflation in the 21st Century

Inflation in the 21st Century
March 18, 2011

My monthly update Inside the Consumer Price Index identifies the components of the Consumer Price Index, documents their relative weights, and uses line charts to show the cumulative percentage change of each since 2000.

In this post I'm using a bar chart to illustrate the relative change over the same time frame. The table below documents the current weights assigned by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to the eight components of CPI. I've also included the weights of the two aggregate categories — Food (ex alcoholic beverages) and Energy — that are excluded from CPI to determine the Core CPI. (Note: CPI is sometimes referred to as "Headline CPI" to distinguish it from the Core variety.)

The bar chart below shows the relative change for each component and the two special aggregates. I've also added College Tuition & Fees, a subcomponent of Education and Communication, because of its significant impact on households with college expenses. Incidentally, the BLS assigns a mere 1.5% weight to this subcomponent of CPI. But for households planning for college expenses, the impact of inflation is dramatic.

The Inflation Controversy

The table and chart above help to explain why inflation is such a controversial topic. If your household mirrors the expense ratios of the CPI weightings, then the monthly CPI reports may seem reasonably accurate. However, households on tight budgets will be highly sensitive to the more volatile components of CPI — food and especially energy expenses. Also, for households with greater exposures to energy costs (especially gasoline), medical expenses, or college bills than the BLS weightings, the CPI data will definitely understate your experience.

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Gerald Celente : prepare for the first big war of the 21st century

Gerald Celente on Coast To Coast AM 8 3 2011 :Gerald Celente :"....this is not just about the middle east and north Africa this is one domino falling after another for real and we are looking at the whole economic system has been pumped up by those digital dollars not worth the paper they were not printed on " the market is a whole rigged job and big Ponzi scheme " we are looking at the first

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