No Happy Meals For McDonald's Shareholders; Gold, Silver Rise

The signs of collapse are everywhere. You just have to know where to look.

Detroit declared itself a bankrupt city on Friday and on Monday, McDonald's (MCD) - home of the Happy Meal - reported earnings before the opening bell that were short of estimates. When the world's largest purveyor of cheap, unsubstantial, processed, nutrient-deprived food (though Yum Brands is a close second) can't meet the already-lowered bar of wall Street estimates, you know that something bad this way comes.

McDonald's is all about everything that is wrong with our society. Their main profit center is the dollar menu - cheap, boiled or broiled sandwiches or chunks of deep-fried processed chicken with gobs of unsaturated fats included at no extra charge - an affordable alternative to actual, pesticide-free nutrition, that gets goobed-up by the least of our society in massive numbers daily. The problem - in a very heuristic, superfluous, nebulous kind of way - is that numbers of the wretched poor can't even afford to eat this crap any more, so burdened are they by taxes, lack of meaningful and good-paying employment and general economic malaise. It's a much more serious problem than just not making the numbers. The American poor are being slowly, methodologically, starved into submission and death.

America was once the land of milk and honey and other worldly gifts, but, no more. Now, the country is devoid of morals, an aimless gob of humanity looking for a way off the debt treadmill. And Wall Street isn't giving them an escape route.

Bottom lime is that McDonald's food is junk food and their stock is a junk stock, like so many others, profitable upon the backs of cheap labor and unconscionable practices.

The market is dead. Gold - in backwardation since January - shot through $1300 like an unguided missile, dragging silver along for a gain of better than a dollar on the day. Land, precious metals, fuels, tools, skills. That's survival. The rest will vanish.

You thought last week's market was dull. Wait for Thursday. It will be like being struck with the wrong side of an axe. These aren't gains. They are mirages.

Dow 15,545.55, +1.81 (0.01%)
NASDAQ 3,600.39, +12.77 (0.36%)
S&P 500 1,695.53, +3.44 (0.20%)
NYSE Composite 9,650.61, +32.10 (0.33%)
NASDAQ Volume 1,459,571,875
NYSE Volume 3,047,999,000
Combined NYSE & NASDAQ Advance - Decline: 3911-2541
Combined NYSE & NASDAQ New highs - New lows: 607-74
WTI crude oil: 106.91, -1.14
Gold: 1,336.00, +43.10
Silver: 20.51, +1.049