Tim Iacono The WSJ Economics blog reports on the latest increase in food stamp usage that recently reached 43 million across the U.S. and 20 percent or more in some areas as shown below. Note that the graphic is interactive over at the Wall Street Journal, so you can see how your state is doing. We’re below the national averaged here in Montana,...

Excerpt from John Murphy’s seminar, “Applying Technical Methods To Today’s Trading,” offered for on INO TV Free… “For those of you that trade the futures markets, there are a lot of other things outside the future markets that you should be following. But, I guess my bigger message is… for those of you that aren’t in the futures markets,...

Submitted by Chris Martenson H/T Zero Hedge Don’t Be Fooled: Inflation Has The Upper Hand Here at Martenson Central, we are endlessly keeping a close eye out for the emergence of deflation, defined here as the purchasing power of the dollar going up. Technically, inflation and deflation are terms that indicate a particular combination of money...

Calculated Risk The DOL reports on weekly unemployment insurance claims: In the week ending Dec. 4, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 421,000, a decrease of 17,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 438,000. The 4-week moving average was 427,500, a decrease of 4,000 from the previous week’s revised average...

From Goldessential Gold holdings in the thirteen continuously by Goldessential.com monitored gold-backed exchange-traded vehicles were seen dropping 3.14 tonnes on Wednesday, December 8th, weighed down by ongoing long liquidations, causing a drop in gold prices below the $1,400 an ounce mark. Four vehicles reported net outflows. The SPDR Gold Trust...

Over the past 2 weeks we have seen the market sentiment change three times from extreme bullish to bearish and back to bullish as of today. Normally we don’t see the herd (average Joe) switch trading directions this quickly. Over the past 10 years I found that the average time for the herd to reach an extreme bullish or bearish bias takes between...

The Market Ticker Why? Because his lying never is answered for. Never. And this man’s lies and the policies he has implemented that rely on these lies and their promulgation are largely responsible for the damage that has been done since 2007 and continues to be done to our economy – damage that cannot be excused or explained away, while...

HCPG Blog A lot of investors/swing traders talk about how utterly wrong it is to try to pick tops and bottoms.   Well, we do it all the time.  And well — we’ve picked short-term tops and bottoms correctly many times in real-time in the last year we’ve been on Twitter, and archived for our subscribers in the last 4 1/2 years...

Sean Hendelman, CEO of T3Live, was featured on a panel at the High Frequency Trading World Conference in New York yesterday. Sean runs high frequency trading strategies at T3 Capital Management, a separate but affiliated company with T3Live. The event itself was the largest of HFT events that I’ve attended so far seemingly pointing to the increasing...

Tyler Durden After taking out MasterCard.com earlier, the hacker organization Anonymous Operation, via its WikiLeaks supporting Operation Payback has just launched its attack on visa.com. And, lo and behold, Visa.com is now down. As of this posting, the operation has succeeded in under one minute: www.visa.com is down. For those who haven’t...

February gold futures closed down $25.60 an ounce at $1,383.40 today. Prices closed nearer the session low on heavy profit-taking pressure. There was also strong follow-through selling pressure in gold on Wednesday and a significantly bearish “key reversal” down was confirmed on the daily bar chart. This is one early clue that a near-term...

Scott redler of T3Live Bank of America Corp (BAC) has been one of the worst bank stocks of this year largely due to its heavy exposure to the foreclosure crisis. BAC is still only a dollar or so off the lows of the year, and I think we could see asmall pop in the near future out of the current bull flag type set-up. Banks are strong today and...

rom Simon Black’s The Sovereign Man Reporting From: Wellington, New Zealand Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is a marked man. My hat is off to him.  As far as I’m concerned, all he’s done is publish some information that shines a light under some big rocks and down some very deep crevices, and that is now making quite a lot...

Courtesy of Phil at Phil’s Stock World So many things are pissing me off today. I got my political outrage out of the way in my earlier post: “Thanks for the Gas Money, Mr. President,” so we don’t need to talk about that again. Ireland, as of 7:45, has not actually voted to accept the EU’s deal, which will pull $20,000...

Pragmatic Capitalism Consumer credit increased $3.4B in October to the best levels since July 2008.  The 1.75% year over year expansion is the second consecutive month of gains.  Revolving credit declined 8.4% for the 26th straight month while non-revolving credit increased 6.8%.  This was driven primarily by new auto loans and student loans.  Has...