B4 the Bell, Fryday May 21, 2004

[traderfromhell]

Warning for The Bears:

 

BobBrinker completely went off on the bears today on his program.

 

And after 3 years of silence with respect to issuing market calls on his radio program, he issued a BUY SIGNAL TODAY for those who missed his March 2003 call and were still sitting in cash.

 

We are right at the 200-day.

 

Saudis have agreed to pump up production over the weekend, despite being unable to agree with other OPEC members.

 

Insurgents have been completely run out of two major cities in Iraq according to BBC, a major victory for U.S. troops.

 

I'm being very cautious about short positions.

 

Brinkman is a dangerous Matrix Operative, not to be faded.

I thought that was Bill Flanagan guest hosting his program today.

[Guest]

http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=587672004

 

US tactics 'heavy handed' says Straw memo

 

 

And, in a startling admission, it also declares that the "scandal" over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Coalition-run jails has damaged the "moral authority" of Britain and the US as they struggle to justify their decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein?s dictatorial regime.

 

"We should not underestimate the present difficulties," the document states, in a section headed ?Problems?. "Heavy-handed US military tactics in Fallujah and Najaf some weeks ago have fuelled both Sunni and Shi?ite opposition to the Coalition and lost us much public support inside Iraq."

 

The memo, reported in the Sunday Times, adds: "The scandal of the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib [prison] has sapped the moral authority of the Coalition, inside Iraq and internationally."

[Guest]

This is not a good sign for anyone..........Check SEC 10's.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/business...3inside.html?th

 

May 23, 2004

Insiders Are Selling Like It's 1999

[Guest]

North American military expenditures have risen to 350 billion dollars a year, some 36 % of world military expenses, and more than that of the sum of nine next highest nations on the list. Nonetheless, such sums are insufficient to subjugate and govern one country, Iraq, let alone to open new possible and probable fronts.

 

??Who is paying for the war? A class-based economic policy, according to economist Paul Krugman. A right-wing Keynesianism that converts a surplus into a deficit through an increase in military expenditures, tax reduction, protectionism, and the rescue of failing companies.

 

??Unilateralism damages the United States politically and economically. It hurts the standard of living since the country is too dependent on foreign energy and capital. The society's internal demands are too great to allow endless expenditures for military domination.

 

??The Democratic candidate, John Kerry, tackles these subjects belatedly and slowly only. The Massachusetts senator represents above all a major opportunity for North American diplomacy: to provide the United States with the credibility Bush's mistaken policies have lost it. Who will be able to believe Bush again the next time he cries: "Wolf!"

 

http://truthout.org/docs_04/052304H.shtml

[Guest]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE22Ak03.html

 

Berg beheading: No way, say medical experts

 

In a May 13 article, the Arabic newsgroup Aljazeera reported that a Dubai-based Reuters journalist first broke the story, "but while Fox News, CNN and the BBC" were able to secure the video from the "Arabic-only website" that hosted it, Aljazeera was unable to locate it. And also on May 13, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US Central Intelligence Agency had determined that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the individual who beheaded Berg.

 

On March 4, Brigadier-General David Rodriguez of the Joint Chiefs of staff revealed that the Pentagon didn't have "direct evidence of whether he's [al-Zarqawi] alive or dead", providing commentary on the nature of prior "evidence" linking al-Zarqawi to attacks and bombings. But that same day, AP reported that an Iraqi resistance group claimed al-Zarqawi had been killed the April prior in the US bombing of northern Iraq.

 

Speaking off the record, intelligence community sources have previously said they believe it "very likely" that al-Zarqawi is indeed long dead. Such a fact makes al-Zarqawi's alleged killing of Berg difficult to reconcile, and there has been broad speculation that blaming al-Zarqawi is an administration ploy.

 

While the circumstances surrounding both the video and Nick Berg's last days have been the source of substantive speculation, both Simpson and Nordby perceived it as highly probable that Berg had died some time prior to his decapitation. A factor in this was an apparent lack of the "massive" arterial bleeding such an act initiates.

[Guest]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE22Ak01.html

 

 

And now for the REAL war (including a multi-year US funded lobbying and disinfomation effort to invade IRAQ):

 

The U.S. State Department in concert with the CIA

Vs.

The Pentagon and the Neocons:

 

There is little doubt that Chalabi's apparent fall from grace confirms that the two-year battle for control of US policy in Iraq has reached a tipping point in favor of the realist faction in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has long considered Chalabi a self-dealing opportunist, a confidence trickster and a crook.

 

Their views now appear to be fully shared by Robert Blackwill, the National Security Council official who heads the Iraqi Stabilization Group that was created last October when it first became clear the US-led occupation was in deep trouble. Since then, Blackwill, who has been working closely with Brahimi for several months, has been trying with increasing success to reduce the Pentagon's influence in Iraq.

 

Conversely, the raids also signal the loss of credibility within the administration, at least so far as Iraq is concerned, of the neo-conservatives - including Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis Libby and former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle - who championed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) for much of the past decade.

 

Congress' watchdog, the General Accounting Office, is currently investigating reports that some of the $18 million provided by Washington to the INC between 1998 - when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act - and last year's invasion was used by the group and its US consultants to lobby the government for an invasion and to plant articles in the media. Both actions would violate US law.

[Guest]

Want a better understanding of why and how China came to be the largest trading partner with the US?

 

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FE21Ad01.html

 

The Bush family: Middle Kingdom rainmakers

By Zach Coleman

 

HONG KONG - George Herbert Walker Bush arrived in Beijing 30 years ago as the official United States representative to China with one goal above all else: expanding his buddy list.

 

Bush Sr and his brother Prescott both lowered their profile in the family business last year. Yet the Bushes' business suddenly hit the headlines again in November, when documents and testimony from the divorce trial of the president's brother Neil showed that he had signed a contract to receive US$400,000 a year from Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing, a Chinese company co-founded by a son of former president Jiang Zemin, in return for business information and advice. Fair enough, but Neil Bush has no background in technology. His brother's administration, however, is leaning on Beijing to reduce tax discrimination against imported semiconductors.

 

Prescott Bush only made his first visit to China after his brother Bush Sr had moved into the White House as vice president in 1981. He quickly became a regular, leaving behind his 33-year career in the insurance brokerage business in preference for Chinese deal making. A 30 percent stake in one early project, an $18 million golf club in Shanghai, gave Prescott the opportunity to strike up a friendship with then-mayor Jiang Zemin (who now heads the communist party's powerful standing committee of Central Military Commission).

 

Prescott capitalized explicitly on the family tie-in by forming the US-China Chamber of Commerce in 1993 after serving on its predecessor, the Hong Kong-US Business Council, during his brother's presidency.

[Guest]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE21Ak01.html

 

 

How the Middle East is really being remade

 

A few weeks prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the US Council of Foreign Relations held a dinner attended mostly by thirtysomething PhDs to discuss the intended consequences of the war. The participants were exuberant about the opportunity liberating Iraq presented to remake the Middle East. The "transformation of Iraqi society" would be a model and guide for the subsequent transformation of Arab society en masse, they enthused.

 

The diners eagerly convinced each other that Arab culture and society needed a sharp and devastating blow that would "shock and awe" them, so that the English-speaking West could get its attention. They also assumed that after its liberation, a supine Iraqi population, unshackled from its old political masters, would lie quietly while American academics worked their magic and miraculously presented them with a new society.

 

 

A note:

 

When you read this, make special note of the position in which the Saudis found themselves in the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

 

Somewhat inexplicably, the vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers were of Saudi decent.

 

Both Bin Laden and Bush were able to further their own agendas at the expense of the Saudis. Coincidence?

 

Are we actually witnessing the biggest chess game ever played, where human lives are merely the pawns? Are the seemingly random and unrelated events around the world actually all scripted and related?

 

As I was told directly by a person in a position to know everything there is to know:

 

"Nothing is as it appears...there is no Osama Bin Laden"

 

That was at the time, and remains, the spookiest thing I've ever heard.

 

If you can allow yourself to value human life at zero, and can picture the biggest game in the world being played by a monied few, buying-off who they can and killing, exhiling or imprisoning those they can't, it all adds up.

 

Why did Putin jail the biggest oil tycoon in Russia? Who benefitted? BIG OIL? Who is the personification of BIG OIL? Weren't the Senior Bin Laden and the Senior Bush both involved in the same company? Didn't each of their sons go to war against one another? Isn't that an incredible coincidence?

 

Without the world's equity markets, there would be no convenient method by which to transfer the wealth from the people to those at the top of the food chain (the very top).

[summoner]

My only worries about the bearish scenario....the 21 day ma of the PCR....and the large commercial long position in the Nasdog

 

Just maybe they keep this thing afloat until november....

 

Either way its lights out after the election at the latest......

 

Watch oil pull back these next 3 months....manipulation at its best

[wndysrf]

"a self-dealing opportunist, a confidence trickster and a crook...."

Sounds like a Wall Struck Shill and the rest of the Carnival Barkers.......

 

Chalabi could get a job on CNBS.

[Guest yobob1]

My only worries about the bearish scenario....the 21 day ma of the PCR....and the large commercial long position in the Nasdog

 

Just maybe they keep this thing afloat until november....

 

Either way its lights out after the election at the latest......

 

Watch oil pull back these next 3 months....manipulation at its best

From a purely non-TA basis - I don't think they can keep it rolling till November

 

1. The money has begun to dry up.

2. The almighty US consumer is beginning to show serious signs of distress.

3. The US jobs market is headed down again after a brief period of stability.

4. The fed nor the government cannot alter the ultimate path as they do not have the power to alter the mass psychology effect

 

The only thing that can prevent the above is an almost immediate decline in the 10 yr to 3.5% or less and the shorter terms by equivalent amounts. I think that's beyond their power at this point realistically.

 

Oil may decline but I'd bet not by much nor for very long. US gas prices will end up permanently a lot closer to $2 than to $1.50 even in the off season is my guess. Call it an engineered price increase. None the less the simple fact remains that from all outward appearances we are at peak oil or close enough for hand grenades.

 

The America bashing is a little disturbing to me. Everywhere I look is either much more economically socilaisitc or a dictatorship. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't..............

[DrStool]

I know some of you like to follow the COT reports. Sorry about beating a dead horse, but I must point out again, regarding the COT report, that the full name for a commercial as defined by the CFTC is "Commercial Hedger." A commercial hedger is one whose primary business deals in the underlying commodity, in this case Nasdaq stocks. That means investment companies, hedge funds, mutual funds, and most importantly, market makers. If a commercial is long the futures, then they are short the underlying, because it is the nature of their business. Otherwise they would not be in this category.

 

There is absolutely no way to know what the overall net position of commercial hedgers is. If they are net long the futures, then it is probably safe to assume they have a substantial net short position in the underlying, to say nothing of where they are with their option positions. These positions tend to relate to arbitraging various price inefficienies. When futures are below fair value, arbitragers buy futures and sell stocks. It has nothing to do with market direction. Rog often talks about gamma and the winding and unwinding of these positions. It has nothing to do with where the market is headed in the big picture. It's all about black box hedging.

 

I can see no consistent basis for correlating these positions with future market direction when overlaying the graph of the COT with market indexes. In fact, there have been occasions when commericials were heavily long the futures that the market fell sharply. Perhaps Goldman Sachs is the biggest commercial of all. If they are long futures, they are most certainly short the stock, and/or overweighted in puts. They buy what is underpriced relative to time value and the cost of money, and sell what isn't.

 

With the growing dominance of hedging and program trading in the market, this indicator and the put call ratio are not reliable indicators of anything other than arb values. They certainly do not measure sentiment. Conventional direct measures of sentiment have proven equally capricious.

[DrStool]

Long term outlook update

[Guest]

Winning the battle but losing the war.

 

The Sunday morning news shows are quoting the US Generals as unconfident that this war can be won...making implicit comparisons to VietNam. These Generals are determined not to become the fall guys for this failure, and when push comes to shove (right now), they will throw Rumsfeld and the NeoCon hijacked Pentagon over the side.

[brian4]

I agree Plunger-the News shows are projecting a pessimism that wasn't openly spoken about before, it is going to be interesting to see how Gen. Sanchez wiggles out of the box he now finds himself in. Direct testimony by a subordinate says he was present at the prison during interogations, I see no reason for that Officer to lie unless he has a death wish as far as his career is concerned. If he was there then others saw him as well, if they come forward then it's game over all the way to the top.