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From Gold Core,

Gold is trading at $1,572.35/oz, €1,116.17/oz and £985.49/oz.

Gold for immediate delivery rose to new record nominal highs of 987.58 British pounds and 1575.18 U.S. dollars in London this morning. New record nominal highs were seen for gold in euros (1,123.50 euros per ounce), pounds and dollars yesterday.

Gold rose soon after FOMC minutes showed that the Federal Reserve is considering further quantitative easing or QE3 and after Moody’s downgraded Ireland’s debt to junk status. The very poor trade deficit numbers in the U.S. yesterday ($50.2 billion in May) and the UK this morning (£8.5 billion in May) is also supporting gold today.

Cross Currency Rates

The Moody’s downgrade of Ireland was expected but the timing was very bad given the increasing turmoil in Eurozone bond markets and deepening risk of contagion due to bond risk in Spain and Italy, the world’s third largest debtor after Japan and the U.S.

While Italian and Spanish bond yields have fallen today, the Irish 10 year yield rose to new euro era record highs at 13.74%.

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How many times have we heard, people in Finance and Politics are psychopaths? Well now it is official, high profile Jobs attract people with the same psychology as serial killers, according to the new study by Kouri. The trader has met quite a few of these persons during the years. LA Times reports,

Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.

Kouri, who’s a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.

These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.

But — and here’s the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion — these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)

Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.

Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.

“This allows them to do what they want, whenever they want,” he wrote. “Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders.”

Good grief! And we not only voted for these people, we’re paying their salaries and entrusting them to spend our national treasure in wise ways.

We don’t know Kouri that well. He may be trying to manipulate all of us with his glib provocative pronouncements. On the other hand …

He adds:

“While many political leaders will deny the assessment regarding their similarities with serial killers and other career criminals, it is part of a psychopathic profile that may be used in assessing the behaviors of many officials and lawmakers at all levels of government.“

While the Markets are trading somewhat “boring” this morning, it feels certainly the Markets have become rather Manic. We wrote about the Market Resonance  some days ago, and the manic moves seem to intensify by the day. We have not seen greed and fear play this aggressively in a long time. Below some thoughts from Bespoke;

Just one week after the S&P 500 finished off an historic stretch where all 24 industry groups finished higher on four out of five days, the index has now had two straight days where all 24 groups were down.  That makes it six days in the last ten where all 24 groups finished the day in the same direction (up or down).  Looking back over the last ten years, there have only been three other periods where this has occurred.  Those occurrences are highlighted below and came in August 2007, November 2008, and June 2010.  

As shown in the charts, the last two occurrences came near intermediate-term market lows, but the occurrence before that came in the midst of the S&P 500′s last ditch attempt to rally right before the long bear market began.  Apropos to the title of this post, these occurrences have preceded big moves (up or down) in the market, so a stable and sleepy Summer of trading is probably out of the question.

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