I am working extra hard to stay ahead of the spin in my attempts to separate the facts from the fiction that now permeate the news cycles.

We’ve recently talked about the all-in effort to convince us that Peak Oil has been debunked, which is an effort that is principally concentrated in the US and UK press. I’ll have more on that in future reports.

Recently there have been a bevy of articles in a variety of news outlets trumpeting the recent new home sales numbers from home builders as indicative that the long-awaited housing bottom has finally arrived. My view is that it is too soon to make that call.

Here’s a recent example:

Executive Summary

• Expect the Fed's ability to move the market to weaken from here
• The three key investment-actionable indicators
• The most likely direction the dollar will head next
• Why capital preservation is now of paramount priority

Part I: What Data Can We Trust?

There are several hard things about this particular crisis, especially for the aware. One is the waiting for the other shoe to drop, as we all know it must. The vast imbalances that led to the 2008 crisis are mainly still intact, and in many cases are larger than they were before.

Another difficult thing is constantly reading all the horribly wrong and misleading information out there that is designed to shape opinion almost universally in the direction towards more profligacy and consumption. Statistics are constantly bent, and other bits of information running counter to the idea that a new round of robust consumer expansion is nearly upon us are conveniently buried or overlooked.