New high overnight, yet chop persists.
News:
No joke. The latest home trend according to Marketwatch.com is Souped Up Toilets.
Souped up toilets are big in Japan, where the economy has been mired in deflation since 1989. And Michael Lewis contended in a 2011 Vanity Fair article that Germany's not-so-secret obsession with shit was the reason why German banks bought so much shitty sub-prime debt just before the 2008 credit crisis. Perhaps another why Europe is stuck in deflation as well.
So if souped up toilets suddenly start trending in the USA, maybe a deflationary shitstorm is brewing here too.
Uh, sorry for the language.
Elsewhere, Zero Hedge culled a treasure trove of news blurbs this morning, mostly from Bloomberg.com, which saves me from having to look at its candy-colored site. (emphasis mine)
-- "A lot of the movement in oil recently has been dollar-driven,” Jonathan Barratt, the chief investment officer at Ayers Alliance Securities in Sydney. (Good point)
-- Monsanto Said to Seek Crop Chemicals Deals With BASF, Bayer: Monsanto approached its preferred partner BASF about buying its crop-science business. (Hopefully this means that Monsanto's plan to flood the world with GMO crops is failing fast)
-- Fed’s Lacker Confident Inflation Poised to Rebound to 2% Target: Inflation will rise back to U.S. central bank’s 2% target once energy prices stabilize, dollar stops advancing: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker. (Once the dollar stops advancing? Lacker sounds remarkably sure. Maybe the Fed really is up to something behind the scenes along with the ECB, BOE, BOJ, and others, which means I want to look for a way to take the other side once the plan fails)
-- The world’s biggest bond dealers are getting saddled with Treasuries they can’t seem to easily get rid of, likely the result of investors dumping the debt on the firms, adding to evidence of cracks in the $13.3 trillion market (Keeping an eye and ear on this. Not good)
-- Not since 1999 have China’s companies had so much trouble getting customers to actually pay for what they’ve bought. Accounts receivable at the nation’s public firms have swelled by 23% over the past two years to about $590 billion. It takes 83 days for typical Chinese firm to collect cash (Crazy)
FX:
A rather quiet day thus far. Welcome.
Treasuries:
Prices giving back some of the recent bounce.
Energy:
WTI crude printed a daily shooting star candlestick on Friday, yet price is bouncing. NG correcting the recent rally.
Metals:
Choppy, low volume pullback in gold. Silver back under recent highs. Platinum, palladium, and copper higher.
S&P Outlook:
Day two of a reprieve -- VIX has not been able to close below its 2 standard deviation band two days running.
Maybe the combination of Sunday's Vernal Equinox and Wednesday's full moon is keeping things afloat.
Two more tight Fibonacci confluence zones may be attracting price as well -- 2064.48-2065.25 and 2112.02-2116.48 (prior swing point). Additionally there is a separate 1:1 Fib extension target at 2061.23.
At this point, signs point to two scenarios:
-- either price subdivides higher and higher into a new all-time high, or
-- price "rolls over" to complete a more complex ABC correction down to 1750 before a mad rip to new all-time highs.
Here's what it looked like a while back:
Here's how it might look like now:
Maybe all those souped up toilets mean a flush is coming.
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