by Andy Hoffman, Miles Franklin:

Full disclosure, I have pneumonia; and thus, am seeing my monitor through the haze of DayQuil; cough suppressant; and generally speaking, a lack of mental and physical balance. Thus, I’m not sure how this will turn out. Or, for that matter, how I’ll sound on the two podcasts I have scheduled for today – and tomorrow – if I attempt to record them. That said, one thing I know, is that unlike last year, when I also contracted pneumonia, is that I will not be going to the doctor. The reason being, that last time around, I spent a lot of money for nothing – so this time, I’ll simply use over-the-counter remedies, and “suck it up” until it passes over.

As for today’s topic, I’m keeping it simple – as while my goal is always to speak truth, sometimes I need to overemphasize it. As today, the financial world has morphed into a 24/7 manipulation-fest, both from a “trading” perspective, and how markets are “analyzed” and “reported.” In other words, fake earnings, fake prices, and even fake catalysts. All for the singular purpose of sustaining, for just a wee bit more, the unsustainable.

I mean, just how many more times do I need to speak of the “dead ringer” algorithm utilized on the “Dow Jones Propaganda Average” each day by the Fed/PPT to maintain “confidence” in a dying regime – per the below charts of the past five days’ “trading?” Quite obviously, amidst this crazy snapshot in history, it matters not what “news” is out, given the relentless market “support” provided to stocks.

For that matter, how much more ridiculous can it be to see Precious Metals higher every night in Asia – where the vast majority of physical demand resides; only to decline every time the fraudulent paper London and U.S. markets open?

Better yet, people pretend government-published economic data is “true”; and that financial markets are “freely-traded”; even when official sources admitted otherwise. It’s a tribute to human psychology that market participants actually ignore such reality – like inflation being “low” when the cost of living is surging; or the economy at “full employment” when the labor market hasn’t been this weak in generations. To wit, per David Stockman’s latest must read article…

“Had the BLS used last year’s seasonal adjustment factors, for instance, the gain for April would have been a more tepid 99,000 jobs, and March would have actually registered a 9,000-job loss. Likewise, had it used the 2015 seasonal adjustment factors, the April gain would have been 104,000, and there would have been a similar loss of 9,000 jobs in March.”

In other words, as I have espoused forever, “jobs” and “inflation” numbers are flat out lies. Heck, Stockman didn’t even mention the fact that of the 211,000 “jobs” supposedly created in April – which the government readily admits were mostly in part-time, minimum-wage-paying, unproductive service sectors – like government, retail, education, and healthcare; 255,000 were the fabricated out of thin air by the “birth-death model” – which incredibly, continues to assume hundreds of thousands of unreported jobs are created each year by small businesses, despite the reality that, since the 2008 Financial Crisis, more small businesses have died than been birthed.

And then there’s the painful reality of declining global trade, credit, GDP growth, and commodity prices – alongside surging debt, delinquencies, layoffs, and inventories; particularly in China, which quantitatively has been the largest contributor, via the unadulterated printing press, to global “growth” since said Crisis. I mean, what part of Chinese stocks, bonds, commodities, and the Yuan itself plunging – whilst Western markets like the Dow Jones Propaganda Average hit all-time highs (amidst multi-year low GDP and corporate earnings growth) doesn’t ring an alarm bell? Or the lowest market “volatility” in 30 years, despite the aforementioned, global economic weakness; and the most powerful political and geopolitical tensions in generations?

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