What I’ve been waiting for: Confirmation the dollar is heading up!

Back on November 19 in my Money and Markets column, I listed nine reasons why I expected we were in the midst of a multi-year bull market in the dollar. Then on March 17, I repeated that forecast and said the dollar looks quite good relative to Europe and Japan.

This week that seems to be playing out as we’re getting some technical confirmation of another major leg up in the buck.

Today, I want to review the rationales as given in November, show you some current technical analysis on the buck, and share my long-term target for the euro.

My nine original reasons why the U.S. dollar may have bottomed (as they appeared back in November 2011):

1. Credit crunch forces change — U.S. savings are going up; debt sentiment has changed.
2. Flight from risk — Euro-zone crisis.
3. Growth in U.S. — Not as bad as expected; it’s all relative. Much better in U.S. than Europe, U.K., and Japan.
4. Carry trade history — The Fed hiked rates before the Bank of Japan and before the European Central Bank (ECB); and the ECB should be cutting rates soon. Read more.....
   

Economic Collapse: The End of the World As We Know It

As everyone is well aware, Europe is an absolute mess. The gravity of the global debt crisis is getting worse and for sure it’s the end of the world as we have known it.

EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht recently said, “The endgame has begun, and how it will finish I do not know.”

There is an implosion happening in Greece, and Spain is not far behind with Portugal and Ireland running neck and neck into the full embrace of depression and life-shattering bank runs.

Greece is a big deal and Spain is even bigger. Right now the European Central Bank (ECB) is starting to cut off funds from several Greek banks and there is a run going on at the same time.

Those banks are going down the toilet into a black hole and there will be a loud sucking sound as these banks pull hard on other banks. The Titanic is going down at the bow and just because you are at the stern (in the United States), not in Spain or Greece, it does not mean the cold waters of economic calamity are not going to come to the shores of your life. Read more......

US officials targeted in Iranian assassination plot

Several American diplomats, along with Israeli and Saudi Arabian officials, were reportedly on a hit list linked to an ongoing assassination campaign by Iranian intelligence.

The U.S. officials targeted in the alleged plot were stationed at the American embassy in Azerbaijan, according to reports in the Washington Post. The central Asian country shares its southern border with Iran.

Details of the plot, uncovered by U.S. and Azerbaijani intelligence, included a planned sniper attack on American embassy officials and their families.

Alleged Iranian conspirators also schemed to kill embassy members with a car bomb, according to the Post.

The ongoing investigation by American and foreign intelligence into the planned attacks have uncovered evidence tying the plot to Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah and other smaller factions working inside Iran. Read more........

Hackers Take Down Largest Survival Web Site; Threatening Email Sent Prior to Attack

SurvivalBlog.com, the most widely visited survival web site on the internet became the target of a Denial of Service (DoS) Attack which rendered the site inaccessible on the evening of May 26. According to an email published at The Orange Jeep Dad Blog, Lily Rawles, the wife of founder and author James Rawles, says the attack “appears to have been a “pinging” DOS attack.”

The Survival Blog main server, which is located in Sweden, is unavailable by using its www.SurvivalBlog.com URL (uniform resource locator) or direct IP address http://95.143.193.148/.

As of Sunday May 27 @ 21:30 efforts are underway to redirect the domain name servers to the US-based mirror web site at the following currently available IP address: http://64.92.111.122/

A threatening letter sent to the web site anonymously this week via email demanded that the site remove all hyperlinks to various other web sites that were interlinked from Survival Blog. It also threatened to openly publish James Rawles books on pirated web sites. The email, in what appears to be broken English, called for Rawles to immediately cease the interlinking within 5 days and threatened to attack unless Rawles complied with demands to publish a racist headline and post on his web site. Read more......

Education reform action needed now

November is nearing, and around the country candidates are courting voters. But, if they really want to connect with the men and women they hope to represent, they should start speaking up about a topic Americans care deeply about but which is being ignored.

A recent poll by the College Board showed more than two-thirds of voters call education an issue that is “extremely important” to them in the 2012 election. Only jobs and the economy are viewed with more urgency, and large majorities of voters see education and job creation as inextricably linked.

It’s not surprising voters care about this issue and want to hear more about it. What is surprising is that — across the country — candidates for federal office are barely taking note of that.

Let’s start at the top. One of President Obama’s most notable accomplishments has been creating a grant program — Race to the Top — that has helped spur innovation and improvements in states, particularly around developing great teachers and expanding public-school choices for families. During the campaign, both he and Mitt Romney have spoken to the importance of improving teacher quality. But considering how central the issue is to our nation’s future, it’s been a surprisingly peripheral discussion. Read more....

To fix student loans, respect education

The House Republican majority recently passed a budget that deeply slashes Pell Grants for nearly 10 million college students and allows student loan interest rates to double in July. While Democrats began working to prevent this interest rate increase, which would cost the average college student about $1,000 per year of school, one Republican member deemed it and rising college costs a “distraction” from our real problems.

What Republicans never seem to understand is that keeping college affordable for students and families is vital not just to the growth of our economy, but to the continued existence of the middle class. In this tough economy, people are turning to colleges and job training because they know that is the future for them, their families and the country.

According to the U.S. Census, the average college graduate makes almost $22,000 more a year than the average worker with a high-school degree. Over the course of a lifetime, that adds up to close to a million dollars in earnings. Meanwhile, about eight in 10 jobs in this economy are beyond the reach of workers who lack a post secondary credential like an industry certification, occupational credential or college degree. Read more.......

A glint of economic hope?

Calculated Risk — your one-stop shop for timely and comprehensive reporting on new economic data — points out something amusing and potentially important in the most recent survey of small business optimism conducted by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. In April “for the first time in years … ‘the single most important problem’” cited by small business owners was not “poor sales.” “Government red tape” edged out the longtime champion by the shadow of a hair. This is cause for celebration, because it means we’re getting back to normal.

In the best of times, small business owners complain about taxes and regulations, and that is starting to happen again.

As we scour the economic landscape for any data point, no matter how tiny, that will help us glean some sense of what the future holds, the fact that business owners might be seeing an uptick in consumer demand could be significant. This is especially true after the disappointing April jobs numbers released 10 days ago provoked a new round of mild panic about U.S. economic prospects. Read More.....

U.S. Army General: The Whole Northern Hemisphere is at Risk of Becoming Largely Uninhabitable

You may have entertained the idea of an improbable civilization ending events such as a ‘global killer’ asteroid, earth crust displacement or massive solar storms, but what if there existed a situation right now that was so serious that it literally threatened our very existence?

According to a host of scientists, nuclear experts and researchers, were are facing exactly such a scenario – and current efforts may not be able to stop it.

When the Fukushima nuclear plants sustained structural damage and a catastrophic failure of their spent fuel cooling systems in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, it left the government of Japan, Tokyo Power and nuclear regulatory agencies around the world powerless to contain the release of deadly radiation. A year on, the battle for control of Fukushima continues to no avail.

It’s estimated that tens of thousands of people in Japan and the whole of North America have been affected, with reports indicating that children in Japan and the U.S. are already being born with birth defects, as well as thousands who have already succumbed to radiation related illness. As we initially followed the breaking news during the first thirty days of the accident, we suggested the Fukushima disaster would be worse than Chernobyl. Not even we could have imagined how much worse it would be. Read more....