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Before I get into the economic news of the past couple of days, the big event today was the terrorist attacks in Belgium and I want to offer my condolences to the people of Belgium and also on behalf of my listeners from the U.S. and all over the world This will probably work to the benefit of Donald Trump, who didn't waste much time in capitalizing on the event We do have a couple of primaries today, Arizona and Utah In Arizona, Trump is well in the lead - it's a winner take all state and today's news will probably solidify Trump's lead there The wild card will be the Utah primary where Donald Trump is in last place. Mitt Romney didn't endorse Cruz, but said a vote for Cruz is a vote against Trump. If Cruz gets less than 50% of the votes, however, the delegates would be divided proportionately. Not much action in the market - Gold spiked up on the news of the Brussels attacks, and closed up just under $5 Silver was up earlier this morning, but there's a lot of support building in the silver market I had noticed that there were some traders shorting silver and buying gold When gold gets this expensive relative to silver, I wouldn't want to bet that that trend continues I would say, if you like gold, just buy gold, don's short silver, because you could turn a winning trade into a losing trade The big action in the currency markets was in the British Pound The Aussie and the Canadian dollar continue to rise against the U.S. dollar European currencies were a little bit weaker, but the main weakness was in the British pound One would think, wouldn't the euro be hurt more than the pound, by the terrorist attack? Traders believe that the attacks will increase the refugee problem, which is at the core of Great Britain's possible exit from the European Union, and the pound is falling on that speculation Most of the economic data that came out yesterday and today was weaker than expected They were expecting a bounce in the Chicago Fed National Activities Index and instead of a +.25, we got a -.29 They did increase the positive number from +.28 to +.41, so the February decline is actually more dramatic Bigger miss that came out was in Existing Home Sales; it was a 7.1% drop That's the biggest drop in 6 years, and the 3rd consecutive month of declines The problem they're pointing to is high prices Imagine what would happen if the Federal Reserve were to raise interest rates 2 more times If the Fed were to raise interest rates, what does that do to mortgage rates? They go up also When home sales are falling sharply because they're unaffordable even with record low mortgage rates, what happens to affordability when mortgage rates go up? How does the Fed increase interest rates when they are already not low enough to sustain the market, even at rock bottom? They're also pointing to lack of inventory as a culprit, but there are no buyers at these prices The only thing keeping these overpriced homes affordable is the artificially low interest rates, courtesy of the Fed, and the government, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA Another problem is the lack of viable jobs in this economy Also this morning we got the PMI Manufacturing Index - expected to improve on last month's 51, dangerously close to the borderline between expansion and contraction We did improve but only to 49.5, a full one point below expectations The one outlier of the week, was the Richmond Manufacturing Index - last month, February, was -4 and the consensus expectation was 0 for this month We ended up getting +22 - this was the biggest beat ever and the highest number going back to 2012 The number is so high it looks suspicious to me - it will be interesting to see what happens to the subsequent month, or if there is a revision All the other reports this week were weak, so one outlier does not give me reason to jump to any conclusions One of the interesting stories of the week was the government...
