US economic growth accelerated last month, according to the November update of the Chicago Fed National Activity Index. But while the broad trend is looking stronger these days, housing remains wobbly. Existing home sales fell a hefty 6.1% in November – the biggest monthly decline in over four years. The slide follows last week’s news of November’s sluggish growth in housing…
Cerus Corporation (NASDAQ: CERS) announced its Phase 2 clinical trial of red blood cells treated with the INTERCEPT Blood System met its primary endpoint, with preliminary analysis demonstrating that greater than 75 percent of treated red blood cells continued to circulate 24 hours following transfusion. The investigators plan to submit data from the study for presentation…
Photo Credit: Rob Pym This is another Aleph Blog series of indeterminate length. I won’t bleed as much as my friend James Altucher, but I will reveal the worst investments of my life. There have been a lot of them. Good investments have more than paid for the losses, but the losses were significant in two ways:…
A version of this post appeared in the San Antonio Express News. I’m fired up by the new US policy I’m totally fired up that the Obama administration relaxed travel, trade, and diplomatic restrictions on Cuba last week. Removing the US embargo will not raise up Cuban people’s lives as much as we hope without the…
The US dollar is narrowly mixed. The euro is pinned in a quarter cent range above $1.2220. The dollar is higher against the yen for the fifth consecutive session. It may be the first session since December 8 that the dollar spend the entire session above JPY120. The Australian dollar and sterling are the weakest of…
Gold, the ultimate inflation hedge, isn’t much use to investors these days. Oil is in a bear-market freefall that began in June, spearheading the longest commodity slump in at least a generation. The collapse means that instead of the surge in consumer prices that gold buyers have been expecting for much of the past decade, the…
Click on picture to enlarge As the year is coming to an end and the Dow is near all-time high levels, I wanted to take a peak at two different long-term perspectives. One of them Fibonacci Extension levels and the other a long-term Mega phone pattern. If one applies Fibonacci to the lowest “monthly closing…
“Predictions Are Difficult…Especially When They Are About The Future” – Niels Bohr We can’t predict the future – if it were possible fortune tellers would all win the lottery. They don’t, we can’t and we aren’t going to try to. However, we can analyze what has happened in the past, weed through the noise of the…
The mainstream economics narrative is so far down the monetary rabbit hole that the blinding clarity of the chart below has no chance whatsoever of seeing the light of day. That’s because it dramatizes the real truth regarding all the Fed gibberish about “accommodation” and “stimulus”. Namely, that what lies beneath its “extraordinary measures”, such as ZIRP, QE, wealth effects and the rest of…
In addition to all of our wars in the Middle East and the war that has erupted on the streets of America, we are now engaged in a cyber war with North Korea and an economic war with Russia. Without a doubt, the United States has the capability to do a tremendous amount of damage to…
