Faber News Flow

While 'hope' had rebounded, headline consumer confidence data from The Conference Board was expected to slide back lower in July, and it did with a notable disappointment. Headline consumer confidence fell from 98.3 to 92.6 (well below the 95.0 expectations) Present situation confidence rose to 94.2 vs. 86.7 last month. Consumer confidence expectations fell to 91.5 vs. 106.1 last month. Not a "V"... Source: Bloomberg Buying expectations fell for Autos and Appliances but rose modestly for Homes as  only 31% of Americans surveyed see business getting better within six months. If only record high stocks sparked confidence in the future.

In his morning critique of goldbugs' resurgent optimism about the future of gold, which has exploded alongside the price of precious metals, which in turn have been tracking the real 10Y rate tick for tick... ... Rabobank's Michael Every argued from the familiar position of one who views the modern monetary system as immutable, and bounded by the confines of the dollar as a reserve currency and financial assets as a bedrock of modern household wealth, of which as Paul Tudor Jones recently calculated there is over $300 trillion worth, compared to just $10 trillion in total gold value. Indeed, according to Every, the surge in gold is meaningless because "if you buy gold, technically that is going to make you money. And yet that money is still going to be priced in US DOLLARS – and that gives the whole game away." Like fans of the England football team, gold fans can dream of the distant past when gold was the centre of the global monetary system; but they

The laughably hopeless hope is that by propping up the corpses, the populace will discern some faint flicker of life in the decaying carcasses and return to their free-spending ways. Call it  cultural synchronicity , but it increasingly feels like we're living in the 1979 Talking Heads song  Life During Wartime , which was anchored by the lyric  "This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco, This Ain't No Foolin' Around."  Indeed. It also feels like  Life During Wartime  because the propaganda is so blatant and intense:   we're winning the war  on Covid-19, and our wars on everything else, too, of course, as  war  is the favored metaphor and favored policy at the  end of the Empire . The ceaseless propaganda is that "a vaccine is right around the corner."  The inconvenient reality is that  Corporate Insiders Pocket $1 Billion in Rush for Coronavirus Vaccine :  Well-timed stock bets have generated big profits for senior executives and board member