“The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

EARLY LOOK: Trojan Protection - chart2

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On Friday President Obama introduced Elizabeth Warren as the new head of the US Consumer Protection Agency. Sounds serious. We hope that she’ll be working vigilantly to protect us from more policy making ideas coming out of Larry Summers and Timmy Geithner.

EARLY LOOK: Trojan Protection - chart1

Hope, of course, is not an investment process. So the best we can do for your protection this morning is recommend you take your financial security into your own hands – in the face of government sponsored volatility, sell high - buy low.

If you thought last week was a big week for Government (Congress was back in session), this week is going to be a barn burner:  

1.   Monday - kicks things off with an “exclusive CNBC” town-hall meeting with none other than the President of the United States as 12PM EST today (I couldn’t make that up if I tried).

2.   Tuesday - Heli-Ben is going to save us all from the road that is US monetary policy perdition at the FOMC meeting that will be brought to you by Trojan’s NEW “Fire & Ice Quantitative Easing”, twice the turn on!

3.   Wednesday – both the Senate Banking Committee and weekend at Barney’s House Financial Service committee will be back in action.

Some people take the alleged Trojan horse protection Ben Bernanke provides us very seriously – if you think about it in terms of the world’s poor who are watching food prices rip higher again this morning, it’s very serious indeed.

EARLY LOOK: Trojan Protection - chart4

Bernanke’s “Warped Twenty Ten Tour” (Trojan) has been a battle. He started the year talking about US GDP growth accelerating into the back half of the year on the order of 3.5-4%. Now that US GDP growth is barely 2%, you can fully expect him to downgrade his growth estimates tomorrow. In modern day risk management speak, we call this chasing your own tail.

Protecting their own tail is what people in Washington do. This isn’t new, and you don’t need CNBC to provide the sponsor’s messaging to understand this either. Today is just another day in the Fiat Republic. Prices are a lot higher than where they were only a month ago, so now is not the time to be buying those inflated prices.

On a sequential basis versus August, inflation in September has re-reared its ugly head. Expect Ben Bernanke to mention none of this tomorrow. If he didn’t see inflation in 2008, he’s certainly not going to see it now. These things are very hard to see from a helicopter.

Interestingly, but not ironically, Bernanke’s counterpart at the Reserve Bank of Australia, Glenn Stevens, pre-empted Heli-Ben’s political pandering by saying the following in Victoria this morning: “If downside possibilities do not materialize, the task ahead is likely to be one of managing a fairly robust upswing. Part of that task will, clearly, fall to monetary policy.”

Now if you are part of the perma-Deflationista camp, you probably don’t like these trivial things like prices going up being mentioned as inflation. Heck, how should we expect one of the next alleged great leaders of the Fiat Republic like Republican Senate candidate, Christine O’Donnell, ever see anything but deflation in US home prices since she stopped paying her mortgage in 2007?

EARLY LOOK: Trojan Protection - chart5

Never mind 15 year highs in cotton prices this morning or all-time highs in the nominal price of gold – the deflation story-telling is entrenched – and Elizabeth Warren is going to protect all consumers from those evil-doer gold commercials anyway.

Last week saw further deflation in the US Dollar Index’s price. The US Dollar continued to look like the credibility of the government that backs it, losing another -1.6% of its debauched value week-over-week and closing down for the 13th week out of the last sixteen.

In response to the Dollar DOWN trade that Ben Bernanke has been hired to perpetuate, most asset prices inflated week-over-week, including short-term US Treasury bonds. As we look at 2-year yields dropping to generational lows this morning of 0.47%, Americans with hard earned savings accounts in this country must be wondering whether Elizabeth is going to protect us from Japanese style fixed income rates too…

As Emerson dares me to have the spine to sell my 6% asset allocation to Gold (GLD) this morning, I think I might just do it. That’s right - I have my own protection strategy against Government.

My immediate term support and resistance levels for the SP500 are now 1113 and 1137, respectively. On Friday, I sold 3% of our 15% position in the Chinese Yuan (CYB), taking our asset allocation to Cash up from 46% to 49%. Unlike prior bear market rallies, we have plenty more to sell into this one.

Best of luck out there today,

KM

Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer

This note was originally published at 8am this morning, September 20, 2010. INVESTOR and RISK MANAGER SUBSCRIBERS have access to the EARLY LOOK (published by 8am every trading day) and PORTFOLIO IDEAS in real-time.