to herd or not to herd

Are you ashamed? I am.

2011-11-13T05:05:00.000-08:00

In spite of what MSM says about gold here's the real reason for its fall

2011-08-25T06:37:00.001-07:00

First what MSM says, Bloomberg then CNN.

Now the complete story...3 margin hikes over the last 2 weeks.

An observation

2011-08-06T11:24:00.001-07:00

"Most people lead lives of quiet desperation. The rest of us are vocal about it." --jomama

The Great Reset won't just transform government, it will transform the economy and culture.

2011-07-09T06:43:00.001-07:00

Although it will be marketed as a great tragedy by those losing power and profits, the end of Savior State moral hazard will not be a tragedy, it will simply be a return to reality. Those exposed to risk behave differently than those insulated from risk. That is neither "good" nor "bad," it is an observation any of us can make.

Read

Wired wrong.

2011-05-15T10:34:00.001-07:00

Yes, the entire planet.

Literally, as our motors consume energy instead of produce energy ...and metaphorically because we tolerate force-based institutions for solutions to human problems.

Welcome to The Planet of the Apes.

Think about it.

You didn't know, did you...

2011-01-16T08:34:00.001-08:00

Seventh Trip, or Netzach (the SNAFU Principle)
"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignore, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statistician, psychologist, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. the psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.

See the rest...

Surprise, surprise...

2010-10-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. "I have to tell you," said the spokesman, "that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don't have to do any of that. What is the secret?"

Read.

About those clowns...

2010-10-11T14:29:00.001-07:00

I'm sorry, but I don't see anyway out of this. With fraud absolutely everywhere in our banking system, like some advanced metastatic cancer, financial metabolism comes to a sickening stop. Nobody can buy or sell property. Nobody can trust any American financial institution. Money can't circulate. Nobody will be able to get any money. It won't be long before that translates into nobody getting any food. We may be a nation of clowns, but as Lon Chaney famously observed a while ago - when explaining his technique of horror movie-making - "...there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight...."

See it all...

The Final Curtain

2010-09-21T04:16:00.001-07:00

Politics

2010-09-02T07:28:00.001-07:00

"We must understand all of politics - no matter
in what nation it is practiced - as a system that
wars against the very nature of life. Politics
cannot be eliminated by force - for to do so
would only imply an even mightier amassing of
power than what is in place. Neither can it be
reformed, the effort to do so being as absurd as
trying to practice a peaceful form of warfare, or
a humane system of tyranny. It can only be
transcended, a process that can only begin by
each of us ending the divisions and fears that
our political masters have carefully conditioned
us to accept. When we discover peace and order
within ourselves, we shall then withdraw our
energies from the sanctified hostilities and
confusion that are destroying life." --Butler
Shaffer

Help, Oh Help...

2010-07-10T08:54:00.001-07:00

So once age and realism have eroded any expectation of adulthood or good sense, you realize that there is no hope. The limbic urges that power Washington are exactly those that you would find up some forgotten holler in West Virginia, at Jimbo’s Pool Hall and Rib Pit.

Damn, what a wordsmith!

Highly recommended

World Collapse Explained in 3 Minutes

2010-06-07T05:19:00.001-07:00

The Economic Propaganda Machine

2010-05-28T13:40:00.001-07:00

Greek Scramble For Physical Brings Gold Price To $1,700 Per Ounce

2010-05-27T06:27:00.001-07:00

Coinupdate.com reports that prices at which the Greek Central Bank is selling one ounce gold equivalents are as high as $1,700 (40% over spot), and prices on the black markets are even higher. The punchline, as Athens slowly returns to a forced gold standard: " A popular spot for street vendors to sell their coins is near the Athens Stock Exchange. There the traders wait for citizens to bring payments received from unloading their paper assets like stocks and bonds." That's good - downtown Manhattan close to the NYSE has some free space for gold vendors to set up shop as well, they just need to push some of the frontrunning/collocation boxes off to the side. And in other rhetorical ruminations, is it safe to say that the last days of the fiat experiment are among us now that people themselves are bypassing the government and enforcing their own gold standard?

Bet on it.

Highly recommended.

The 10 States Most Likely To Default

2010-05-22T09:52:00.001-07:00

See them here.

Farcism

2010-05-14T04:28:00.001-07:00

This manner of government is not driven by overt collectivism and the blatant, state-enforced social subjugation that characterizes communism. Nor is it well understood to be dominated by the pernicious nationalism, autocratic industrial centralization and megalomaniacal personality cults framed by fascism. Neither can it be sketched as the consenting construction of broad and broadly parasitic labor pools and growth retarding redistribution schemes that make up the key tenants of socialism. Quite differently, this manner of government is premised on the suspension of disbelief via sophistication, word play, disguise, deception, mistaken identity, the deliberate use of nonsense and absurdity to distract and will, no doubt, end in a melodramatic chase scene (treasury officials in absurd uniforms chasing stage left to stage right after foreign borrowers perhaps?)

In short, the United States has come to be governed by Farcism.

The success of Farcism depends on, and in some ways derives a measure of legitimacy from, the acquiescence (or abject ignorance of) a lazy citizenry. Truly, it is hard otherwise to explain phenomena like the perpetuation of the myth that President Reagan shrunk the government, or that President Clinton ever presided over a surplus in the United States when budget and historical debt outstanding figures are openly available permitting anyone at all to falsify these claims in seconds. In fact, under the Clinton administration it was the wholesale pillaging of the Social Security trust fund (accounted for in Intragovernmental Holdings instead of "public debt") that permitted the specious claim that somehow a material slice of the aggregate debt of the country had been paid off. In other words, the sort of accounting and insurance fraud that would send anyone in the private sector to jail and so familiar to forensic accountants and prosecutors it actually has a name: "Cookie Jarring." The last real surplus was in 1957, by the way.

Oooha and hot damn.

Highly recommended.

The Decline of the West

2010-05-10T12:26:00.001-07:00

The current sovereign debt crisis is another battle in a war for dominance between the global economic system and traditional nation-states, where the global financial system will be the victor. Once that occurs, the nation-states of the West will join those of the global south as hollow states.

Highly recommended.

S&P Downgrades Greece To Junk

2010-04-27T13:38:00.001-07:00

Coming soon to a country near you.

Overview:

* We have updated our assessment of the political, economic, and budgetary challenges that the Greek government faces in its efforts to place Greece's public debt burden onto a sustained downward trajectory.
* We are lowering our ratings on Greece to 'BB+/B' from 'BBB+/A-2' and assigning a negative outlook.
* The negative outlook reflects the possibility of a further downgrade if the Greek government's ability to implement its fiscal and structural reform program materially weakens in our view, undermined by domestic political opposition at home or by even weaker economic conditions than we currently assume.

Full obituary.

Housing Crash Update....

2010-04-25T14:17:00.001-07:00

"Two major banks are expecting major increases in foreclosures, by the end of 2010.

"According to the Irvine Housing blog, Bank of America, which currently forecloses on 7,500 homes every month will see that number rise to 45,000 by December 2010.....

“JPMorgan Chase is forecasting bigger foreclosure numbers in the coming months. According to a presentation at the end of February, JPMorgan expects the amount of real estate owned (REO) properties in its portfolio to reach between 33,000 to 45,000 in Q410. By comparison, in Q409, REO inventories were at 23,100." ("Big Banks Prepare for Major Rise in Foreclosures Ending 2010" Jon Prior, Housingwire.)

Now do you still believe the talking heads when they say 'the worst is over'?

Highly recommended.

CERN admits black hole ripped in space by Large Hadron Collider

2010-04-19T08:02:00.001-07:00

A spokesperson for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has confirmed the fears of many in the scientific world after revealing that the reason for the sudden closure of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most expensive physics experiment, was not due to "technical problems" as previously stated, but because its controversial particle collisions have sensationally rendered a "tiny black hole" in the fabric of space.

"I can confirm that, yes, the first stages of the experiment resulted in the appearance of a miniscule black hole," said the spokesperson to gathered reporters on Monday. "The black hole is being kept under quarantine and our scientists have been monitoring its progression," he explained.

Earthmonkey again on a very bad trip, easily fatal.

Lying sacks of shit now say they're gonna keep it 'under quarantine'.

Read.

There Will Be No Recovery

2010-04-11T08:15:00.001-07:00

You can both go hang, say voters

2010-03-30T07:04:00.001-07:00

50 per cent say choosing Brown is unthinkable... 51 per cent claim they have no enthusiasm for Tories... 38 per cent would like a hung parliament

Gitrdone.

The future of the planet looks to be in the hands of the English.

Read.

National income tanks

2010-03-22T14:39:00.001-07:00

Fundamentally it's all over

2010-03-18T10:46:00.001-07:00

" If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon." --Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

The proof that YOU are the problem...

2010-03-15T11:19:00.001-07:00

Therefore YOU can easily learn to solve the problem, for everyone, upon learning the problem's origin in your own (conveniently available) mind, which is the origin in their minds, by design of the human mind.

You have an excuse for being the problem, until you finish reading this section. The human brain is a trained device. It is trained with knowledge. It is not genetically coded with all the information you need for a human lifetime, in contrast to the brains of honey bees and ants which genetically know their lifetime reactions to stimuli upon birth, with no need for instruction by other bees and ants. If your brain does not learn the knowledge you need or want, your otherwise completely useful brain is useless for that knowledge and its utility.

You learn most of your knowledge from adults, from your mistakes, and from your other observations. You learn most effectively from your mind's carefully formed questions of the foregoing and everything. If you fail to ask and answer questions, this section and everything else you encounter is of little utility to you, and you will stay dumb.

If you make a mistake, it is because your brain had not prior learned the knowledge to avoid the mistake. That is the same for everyone, obviously including the writer of these words.

It is the same for criminals, both private sector and all government personnel. They simply have not yet learned how and why to not create inherently unsustainable, damaging contradictions, for which the ultimate cost is always inescapably paid, by design of the imperative balance in all things, for all things to exist. Inherently unsustainable, damaging contradictions are primarily caused by the use of force or deception, instead of reasoning. Force-based actions, such as those of military, police, prosecutors, court judges, politicians, their tax thugs, other government bureaucrats and private sector criminals are the primary cause of human problems.

...and electing new pols solves/changes nothing.

Highly recommended

It's Going To Implode: Buy Physical Gold - NOW

2010-03-12T06:08:00.000-08:00

The bond market is the backbone of the US Ponzi Finance system. When it goes – and the day is not far in my opinion - the whole enchilada will come crashing down. Any type of financial asset that has a counterparty – which is pretty much all the paper assets in the world – bonds, futures, any and all derivatives and yes, even the paper currency – will crash. What will they crash against? Yes, that’s right - Gold. All the world’s capital – trillions, perhaps quadrillions of it - will come rushing into the very tiny physical (NOT paper) Gold market. Remember, the world’s real physical capital – real assets such as land, oil-refineries, mines, infrastructure, etc. will not vanish, only it will be re-priced in terms of Gold and its ownership transferred to those who hold it. Since everything stays on this planet, it is a zero-sum game and the winner will be Gold. In other words, an ounce of physical Gold will command a lot more in real purchasing power than it does today. Just like a national currency is a claim on goods and assets within that country, Gold will be a claim on global goods and assets worldwide.

Paper Gold Will FAIL

Today what you think of the price of Gold is nothing but the price of paper Gold. "What is the difference between the two? We are still getting the metal at the price we see on the COMEX, are we not?", you may ask. Sure, but the key word is still. Even today you have to pay "premium" to the futures price to get physical ranging from about $50 for some coins to about $10 for bars. When it all blows, these “premiums” will skyrocket and the price of physical WILL decouple from the official paper price (this is what the guys at EverBank are scared s--tless about), as we already witnessed in 2008 – and this is the good scenario. Indeed, we may have a situation where there is no physical available at any paper price.[My emphasis]

This gent goes to the head of the class.

Must read.

Earthmonkey's Secret Revealed

2010-03-10T08:09:00.001-08:00

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

Highly recommended.

The Unemployment Plague

2010-03-08T06:13:00.001-08:00

The Myth of the Free Market - Money, Interest and Power!

2010-03-04T13:36:00.001-08:00

The Most Liberating Word

2010-02-17T08:47:00.000-08:00

All governments going bankrupt

2010-02-11T07:13:00.001-08:00

Mark Faber says eventually everyone will default on their sovereign debt. --CNBC, Thursday, February 11, 2010 5:17 AM

Why Sovereign Debt Pain Has Only Just Started

2010-02-09T13:42:00.001-08:00

"I think the UK will be downgraded in the future as our debts are being masked for the moment - the election - we created this global mess along with America and we have massive debt levels now. Greece, Portugal are just the start. You can't inject massive amounts of liquidity into economies without some kind of repercussions!"

While Jean-Paul in Los Angeles draw parallels with private sector funding:

"There is so much attention on the PIGS and other countries because the private sector has completely deserted and the public sector has been overburdened."

[PIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain]....I brought the precursor up here some time ago.

Full article.

The Second Wave of Mortgage Resets

2010-01-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

The results of this boggle the mind, if I'm reading it right.

Fractional Banking, Private Currencies and Humble Freedom

2010-01-19T09:50:00.001-08:00

The Big Oyster

2010-01-18T05:43:00.001-08:00

"A crisis (and this will be a very real one) always draws exhortations from the authorities to 'unite' and 'pull together' ?- which usually boils down to following orders and turning in those who don't. People will want, and will get, 'strong leadership.' This does not bode well for libertarians, classical liberals, and free thinkers, in general. . . I suggest you at least consider the possibility of transplanting yourself, or at least start by transplanting some assets. Don't look at it as a negative thing. The world is your oyster. Make the most of it." --Doug Casey

Escalating Complexity and the Collapse of Elite Authority

2010-01-12T10:17:00.001-08:00

One shakes one’s head in disbelief. Is there anything our “educated classes” can’t fuck up, any reality they won’t deny?

No.

Full essay.

The Crazy Ones

2010-01-11T06:48:00.001-08:00

Edit:

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or villify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." --Steve Jobs

They probably don't stand out in a crowd either.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!” --Jack Kerouac

Thanks to Tessa in the comment section.

The Planet of Clowns

2010-01-07T13:26:00.001-08:00

"I am almost "religiously" unimpressed with myself and the rest of humanity." --unknown

I'll buy that.

And I don't give a good god damn about Tiger Woods, Obama's vacations or Nigerian underwear styles.

...a tale told by an idiot...

I thank you, Willie, for pointing that out.

On history

2009-12-31T07:40:00.001-08:00

"Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis." --Schopenhauer

The Sheriff - The Most Powerful Person in the Country

2009-12-28T08:21:00.001-08:00

The Quiet Revolution...

What can you do? For once we are not just complaining. There is a plan. I do not argue that you should forget about Congress. Not at all; if you see an opportunity there, take it. Always remember that right now it is run by people like Barney the Bugger of Taxachusetts, who will be elected by moronth in hith dithtrict until he dieth of AIDS.

Most of the time, when you approach your congressman, you come to complain. In the new crusade, you will approach your sheriff and tell him that he is not only handsome, charming and overwhelmingly masculine, but also that he has powers he may not be aware of. You have come to tell him what they are and to back him up. My guess is, when you tell him that, he will not kick you out.

Tell him you expect him to return the courtesy when the Nazis come from the District of Criminals to get the guns. Tell him you are ready in a minute to serve under his direction in a posse. He will not move to Washington and be corrupted. He will stay there with you. Show him the ten orders the Oath Keepers will not obey. The Oath Keepers are retired and active duty military and police. Their web site is oath-keepers.blogspot.com. The first order they promise to disobey is an order to disarm you.

Put him together with Sheriff Mack. You will find him at sheriffmack.com. His telephone numbers are 928 792-4340 and 928 792-3888. Bring the sheriff to your town to speak. He will explain all this. Invite your own sheriff. At the meeting I attended, the local sheriff and chief of police were there and loved what they heard. No one dislikes hearing how important he is.

Details here.

Watch Sheriff Mack, The Last Straw:

A Memo To The Global Warming Cult

2009-12-16T14:03:00.001-08:00

Dear global warming fanatics,

Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Climagate are only making you look foolish. The con job you’ve been running for the last thirty years is busted forever...

You can stop trying to make Climagate go away by ignoring it, or lying about it. That won’t work, either. Huge stories can no longer be suppressed by a handful of like-minded network executives and editors. Those glittering eyes you see in the darkness, beyond the comforting glow of the New York Times editorial board, are the massed ranks of the Internet’s Army of Davids. They are a feral mixture of blogging curiosity and search-engine memory. If you think they’re closing in around you… well, it’s not just your imagination.

Ooooha.

The rest...

Aside: Note the number of search hits on 'Climagate' as opposed to 'Climategate'

Yet another myth

2009-12-10T13:55:00.001-08:00

"The Fed already buys and sells foreign exchange to prevent disorderly conditions in foreign exchange markets. The Fed has assumed a similar responsibility in the market for government securities. The Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thus stabilizing the market as a whole. The stock market is certainly not too big for the Fed to handle." Robert Heller, Federal Reserve governor, WSJ, Oct 27, 1989

Such hubris like the flea floating down the river
on his back with a hard-on, howling "Open the drawbridge".

Run on the U.S. Dollar ....Soon

2009-12-07T07:23:00.000-08:00

When governments go bankrupt, it's called a "default." Currency speculators figured out how to accurately predict when a country would default. Two well-known economists – Alan Greenspan and Pablo Guidotti – published the secret formula in a 1999 academic paper. The formula is called the Greenspan-Guidotti rule.

The rule states: To avoid a default, countries should maintain hard currency reserves equal to at least 100% of their short-term foreign debt maturities. The world's largest money-management firm, PIMCO, explains the rule this way: "The minimum benchmark of reserves equal to at least 100% of short-term external debt is known as the Greenspan-Guidotti rule. Greenspan-Guidotti is perhaps the single concept of reserve adequacy that has the most adherents and empirical support."

The principle behind the rule is simple. If you can't pay off all of your foreign debts in the next 12 months, you're a terrible credit risk. Speculators are going to target your bonds and your currency, making it impossible to refinance your debts. A default is assured.

So how does America rank on the Greenspan-Guidotti scale? It's a guaranteed default.

Here's more....

Tomorrow is here

2009-12-02T13:37:00.001-08:00

THE BANKERS CON GAME

The long-running and lucrative confidence game, however, is about to end. Its breakdown is now underway as constantly compounding consumer, business and government debt can no longer be carried and/or paid for by existing or future productivity, especially as economies are contracting, not expanding, and collective debt levels are skyrocketing to levels which can never be repaid.

We borrowed against tomorrow and tomorrow is here.

The collapse of economies such as the US, the UK, and Japan etc, will eventually render the bankers’ IOUs and government currencies worthless; and when this happens, the three hundred year stranglehold of bankers over human endeavor will be over...

Two powerful forces, paper money and gold, are now locked in mortal combat. The combatants, however, are proxies for far more fundamental forces. Paper money is a proxy for private banking and government power—and gold is a proxy for freedom.

See why.

Gore Flees in Panic from Chicago Book Signing

2009-11-30T13:13:00.001-08:00

November 25, 2009 (LPAC)—Not since Henry Kissinger fled a team of LaRouche organizers, in the back of a delivery truck in New York City's Central Park in the early 1980s, has an obese fascist moved so fast to escape an angry crowd, as Al Gore did today in Chicago. Appearing at a bookstore in the downtown Loop, Gore was confronted by a team of demonstrators from a grass roots group called "We Are Change," as he was signing his latest fascist screed on the global warming swindle. Gore bolted from the bookstore, raced down an alley, jumped into a waiting car, and tried to speed off, with protesters chasing after him and banging on the car. Midwest LYM organizers, who were also on the scene to confront the global warming swindler, provided an eyewitness account of Fat Albert's flight of fear.

Make no mistake about it. This little encounter is typical of the kinds of things going on all over the country, as the fascists who brought you the near-destruction of the United States and an onrushing global Dark Age, are no longer walking the streets, smug in the belief that they are literally getting away with murder. The mass strike dynamic is playing out in thousands of ways, every day, and the recent revelations about the "smoking gun" emails from the East Anglia University global warming propaganda center, have made Al Gore's life a little more miserable.

Read.

After Hyperinflation Disaster, Zimbabwe on Quasi Gold Standard

2009-11-29T06:02:00.001-08:00

The only kind of gold standard that will work: It's controlled by the consumer instead of any central authority.

Zimbabwe is now debt free, in fact it's probably the only country in the world to have no debts and is starting with a clean slate. This is because the Central Bank is no longer functioning, the local currency can no longer be produced at will and the politicians, led by the reviled Robert Mugabe are no longer able to cheat the citizens of Zimbabwe.

They are now using gold and U.S. dollars as their currency. Gold provides money that cannot be tampered with by the politicians, so it is trusted by people as a medium of exchange and a store of value. While U.S. dollars (for now) are being used along side gold as currency, there is a quasi-gold standard in full operation, markets are unhindered of government control and the shelves are now stocked with goods for sale.

Full report.

The Con of the Century exposed

2009-11-26T08:36:00.001-08:00

China has stealthily introduced a new financial system based on the renminbi which is well on its way to becoming fully convertible, according to a high-level Chinese source. In addition, China is purchasing 10,000 tons of gold to back up a new fund designed to develop and market heretofore forbidden and suppressed technologies. The fund will be based outside of China and will be controlled by prominent members of the Chinese overseas community. The gold purchase will take some time because of the logistics of transporting it and the Chinese wish to test it thoroughly. Both the Chinese government and MI6 now confirm reports that much of the gold sold by the Federal Reserve Board over the past decade is in fact gold plated tungsten.

Read.

The Paradigm Shift is coming...a Giant Slap Upside the Head

2009-11-23T06:42:00.001-08:00

Gold at $1171 this morning...

The tungsten deposits come in very high grade ore, located in shallow rectangular deposits dispersed widely across the world, segregated in unusual vault heap leach mineralizations. In October, the Hong Kong bankers discovered some gold bars shipped from the United States were actually tungsten with gold plating. This is the exact same Modus Operandi as the silver clad zinc dimes from 45 years ago. History repeats itself. The parallels to mortgage bond fraud with either subprime borrowers or multiple property titles used in bond securitization is easy to spot. A consistent theme runs through the American management of finance and dissemination of fraudulent assets on a global basis. Tungsten gold bars is a feat difficult to surpass. Credit must be given for not leaving any potential for fraud untapped. Refer to insider flash trading, naked shorting of bank stocks, commodity trading on behalf of the USGovt, and much more. No disrespect is intended for the trillion$ counterfeits of superstar grade. Refer defense appropriations, USTreasury Bond sales beyond issuance, and missing Fannie Mae funds. These are legacy crimes.

The initial discovery was something like four gold bars, which the Hong Kong bankers drilled invasively to test the contents. Reminds me of drilling the earth and measuring how many grams of gold per tonne. The HK bankers hoped to have 99% gold yield in their drill program for the resident bars. They found something like 1% instead and 99% tungsten. By the way, tungsten sells for less than $70 per ton, which makes its swaps for gold to be 60x more profitable than silver bar swaps. Another handy usage for the Gold/Silver ratio in calculations. The hunt was on. Now not a single assayer on the planet is available, as all are tied up. They have been commissioned to test the gold bars shipped from the United States of Fraudulent Banker America in their own bullion vaults. They use basic methods of four drill holes with direct assay of shavings, but also less invasive methods like electro-magnetic waves to examine the metal lattice structure. When highest level methods are needed, they turn to mass spectrometry. NOW ALMOST NO GOLD BARS WILL LEAVE THE LONDON OR NEW YORK METALS EXCHANGES WITHOUT SOME AUTHENTICATION, AS DISTRUST IS WIDESPREAD.

...and much more.

Global warming busted

2009-11-20T08:47:00.001-08:00

The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Read.

Gold Price Won’t Drop Below $1,000 an Ounce Again, Faber Says

2009-11-12T06:12:00.001-08:00

“We will not see less than the $1,000 level again,” Faber said at a conference today in London. “Central banks are all the same. They are printers. Gold is maybe cheaper today than in 2001, given the interest rates. You have to own physical gold.”

China will keep buying resources including gold, he said.

You'd be wise to believe him.

Full report.

It's Just Not Fair!

2009-11-09T13:57:00.001-08:00

"It's just not fair!" you can hear the bustling workers bitterly complaining as one huge newspaper after another takes a nosedive into today's mud of Agincourt: obsolesence and bankruptcy. The television networks and stations are right behind them. The paradigm has shifted. The worm has turned. Charles Fort would say it isn't time to newspaper any more. Before too much longer those giant presses will be so much junk.

Medieval aristocrats couldn't uninvent the Welsh longbow, the clothyard arrow, or the gray goose flock. A lot of people today would like to uninvent the Internet. But any individual can now communicate with any other individual all over the planet, and it's too late to stop. Mess with the 'Net as it is, it will simply morph into something else.

That's a very, very, very good thing.

And just not fair at all.

No it ain't.

Gitrdone.

Full essay.

Is Limited Government an Oxymoron?

2009-11-04T08:31:00.001-08:00

Self-jiving Nation

2009-11-03T13:55:00.001-08:00

Kunstler, right to the point...

The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe, in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call "the abyss." At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining "tomorrow," and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night.
...
For now, I still see the inflection point as coming by the holiday season, when the masters-of-the-universe on Wall Street will have to publicly post their Christmas bonuses (and as publicly held corporations, they will have to). It is also well within the realm of possibility that a Black Swan the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile will swoop through the stock markets to breath fire on the computer terminals and melt the glorious rally of 09 away. In the meantime, I wonder about that man in the White House, and those ever more comical meetings he attends every day. He must emerge from them spinning like a nine dollar gyroscope. Nobody wants to imagine what happens to him when the spinning stops.

Full essay.

Revolving Credit

2009-10-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

The implications of this turn green shoots into black roots.

Unarguably disastrous

2009-10-29T06:26:00.001-07:00

Utah...

Taxes on corporations, the franchise tax, were in free fall, plummeting 73 percent.

He said, "That's one that I think is probably the most scary. That means that businesses are way down, that means employment is going to be down."

Read.

These Captives of the Matrix destroy it

2009-10-27T15:00:00.001-07:00

How soon The Institution forgets the founder's stated goal.

2009-10-24T10:08:00.001-07:00

In Alfred Nobel's will, among the criteria for the Peace Prize was “abolition or reduction of standing armies”.

Read.

The uS Government is dying

2009-10-21T11:43:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the Untied States...

The US Government is dying. Its ultimate fate was sealed the moment the Federal Reserve Fiat money system was put into place. Like a recreational drug user enjoying that first chemical rush, those who created the federal Reserve luxuriated in the seemingly endless flow of money pouring forth from the Federal Reserve, money used to prolong and consolidate power, money spent without worry in the full knowledge that it was going to be someone else's problem to pay it all back.

But now the US Government is paying the price for that glorious free-spending time of so long ago. Like a recreational drug user now turned hopeless addict, the government has taxed profitable businesses into seeking friendlier homes in other lands, and has turned to looting trust funds and playing bookkeeping games trying to hold off the final collapse...

The U.S. Government is Dying: No longer able to conceal the financial losses, the US Government, like a desperate addict, is turning to crime as a source of funds, crime on a global scale, conquest, war for profit, call it what you will, an invasion and looting of a nation is different from an invasion and looting of a home only in scale.

Silly ass solution at the end of the article would best be ignored.

Full essay.

Consumer Credit Has Fallen Off a Cliff

2009-10-14T06:15:00.001-07:00

The NYT continues:

“For the first eight months of the year, the United States trade deficit with China is down by about 14 percent or $20 billion, compared with one year ago. The nation’s trade deficit with Japan has shrunk by almost 20 percent, and its deficits with Mexico, Canada and the European Union are down more than 40 percent.

“The huge shift stems mainly from the staggering collapse in trade. With credit markets frozen and Americans facing the highest unemployment in more than 30 years, the United States suddenly stopped shopping overseas at anywhere near the volumes that had become normal.”

Americans were the world’s champion consumers. Just lend them money; they’d spend it. But when they stop spending it brings a hush to the entire planet. The malls go quiet…trucks slow down…ships are idled…and finally factories are shut down. Clerks, drivers, stevedores and assembly line workers all go home. That is what a depression is all about.

The feds are trying to get consumers to spend again. They’ve given them tax rebates, incentives, loans, and bribes. They’ve run a federal deficit three times higher than the previous record. They promise $1 trillion deficits “as far as the eye can see.” And they put at risk a sum of money equal almost to the entire US GDP.

Highly recommended.

News You Can Use

2009-10-07T08:27:00.001-07:00

Systemic Failure Approaches

2009-10-06T14:15:00.001-07:00

In fact, my forecast is for systemic failure. Its primary elements will be a failed US banking system (as in seizure) and a USTreasury Bond default (as in coerced restructure). Again, martial law and declaration of economic emergency will be the final solution. Two years ago, my analysis regularly mentioned martial law and imposed order to handle the chaos from a disintegrated economy and insolvent dysfunctional banking system. Here we are in the present, when such forecasts do not sound so outrageous anymore. The Jackass has featured a string of seemingly outrageous forecasts that have come true. The US system is credit dependent, and credit will soon be cut off, in the next chapter of isolation. The Printing Pre$$ is a temporary solution, en route to a failed state. The US leaders and citizens do not learn from history. They defy history amidst delusions of omnipotent power. See the Weimar Republic, which has gone global! Even the World Bank led by yet another Goldman Sachs pupil warns the Untied States not to assume the USDollar will remain the unchallenged global reserve currency.

Gold hit an all-time high today of $1044.80.

Where will it go?

To the moon.

Full article.

Celine's Laws

2009-10-01T09:25:00.001-07:00

What it means to be radical (fundamental)...

FDIC Looking to Borrow Money From Banks to Save Banks

2009-09-23T08:17:00.001-07:00

Tired of the government bailing out banks? Get ready for this: officials may soon ask banks to bail out the government.

Inevitable.

Full article.

Withdrawing Consent

2009-09-18T09:54:00.001-07:00

If you lived all your life in a concentration camp and there was no chance of escape, would you fantasize about what you'd do if you ran it? Would you dream of uniting it with other concentration camps? Or would you think it would be better if the camp was broken up into smaller concentration camps?

Probably none of the above, unless you didn't even realize you lived in a concentration camp.

But what if you were the only one who realized you lived in a concentration camp, and everyone else was scheming and debating about the best "system" to put in place?

You would probably tell them that they are actually living in a concentration camp, and that their schemes and debates only serve to persuade the powerful that the camp has the people's underlying consent.

When personally powerless to stop encroachments on their freedom, the people can at least withdraw their consent. This weakens the powerful. The Eastern bloc fell because of it.

Ooooha.

Read.

A peak inside another Good Ol' Boy Club

2009-09-14T08:12:00.001-07:00

The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.

This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed's thrall, the economists missed it, too.

"The Fed has a lock on the economics world," says Joshua Rosner, a Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. "There is no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so wrong."

Full article.

A Mountain of Lies Exposed

2009-09-11T13:57:00.001-07:00

In the end, what is the most frustrating facet of these huge con games executed by the financial oligarchs is that the group of people that this article is most intended to help is often the group of people that will take most offense to this article and most steadfastly refuse to see the truth. Instead, they will only realize the truth when the economic future unfolds to the blueprint of those of us the media labels as “gloom and doomers” because we base our predictions on reality instead of fantasy and lies.

Full article.

No Recovery, Not Now… Not Ever

2009-09-09T04:08:00.001-07:00

The basic business model of government is to keep order, protect campaign contributors and lure supporters with the promise of other peoples’ money. The game plan of the typical citizen is even simpler: to be on the receiving end, not the paying end. Over time, more and more of them get into position. And the whole society becomes more costly, and more corrupt.

In the United States, entire industries now operate as wards of the state. They may have too little capital. Or, their operations may be too costly. Or, their products may be simply out-of-date and unattractive. Still, government keeps them going – even at the cost of at the expense of competitors. And the money doesn’t only go to business. Cities stay solvent only by the grace of federal government grants. Whole sections of the population depend on government – including 34 million who draw their rations directly from the federal food stamp program. The spectacle is breathtaking and alarming at the same time – like a Pakistani bus on a mountain road, freighted with passengers clinging to the roof. The old rust bucket could tip over at any time, but what politician would tell a voter to get off?

Read.

China and gold

2009-09-07T08:32:00.001-07:00

China’s reserves are more than – $2 trillion, the world’s largest.

“Gold is definitely an alternative, but when we buy, the price goes up. We have to do it carefully so as not to stimulate the markets,” he added.

Read.

Industrial production and unemployment

2009-08-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Dress rehearsal for the last contango

2009-08-25T13:59:00.001-07:00

It has never happened that gold was unobtainable at any price. It has never happened that all governments have defaulted on their debt obligations simultaneously.

Still, we have to explain the relevance of this to the credit crisis. It is no secret that the bonds, notes, bills, and other obligations of the U.S. government, or any other government, for that matter, are irredeemable. That is, they are redeemable in nothing but more of the same. For example, the bonds of the U.S. Treasury are redeemable in Federal Reserve credit, which is itself irredeemable and is "backed by" the self-same bonds of the U.S. Treasury. Why is it, then, that these Treasury obligations are in demand where one might think that redeemability is a sine-qua-non of issuing them? What makes people participate in this shell game? How can such a crude check-kiting scheme mesmerize the entire population?

Come to think of it, the sight of this Ponzi scheme would shudder the Founding Fathers of our great Republic.

Highly recommended.

The Grim Reaper Is Coming for The State

2009-08-24T09:40:00.001-07:00

A series of countries in Europe confront bankruptcy, including a number of states in Eastern Europe and Italy, Spain and Great Britain in the West. State debt is also growing at an alarming rate in Germany and France. At the start of the week, the Taxpayers Federation announced that the national debt in Germany would increase by €140 billion in 2009.

...
The constitutional “brake on debt” which was recently passed by the German parliament means that the first priority of any future government will be drastic budget cuts. The promises being made by all of the parties taking part in the national election campaign will be consigned to the waste bin as soon as the votes have been counted on September 27.

The rhetoric about the end of the economic crisis is also aimed at confusing workers and forestalling social protests, while behind the scenes unparalleled attacks are been prepared on living standards and social benefits.

...all foretold by Standard & Poor.

Full report.

The Real New Math

2009-08-21T08:32:00.001-07:00

"One man is a significant entity. A partnership halves that value. Three or more men, working together, diminish themselves to zero. Team effort is the stagnation of the race." --John D. MacDonald, On the Run.

If you find something evil that wobbles, push it.

2009-08-18T09:51:00.001-07:00

The gatekeepers can no longer control the flow of information. This has never happened in man's history. Gatekeepers still control the gates. But the walls have holes in them. These holes are widening.

The gatekeepers control accreditation. They no longer control content except where it is very expensive to do primary research, such as nuclear physics. In the social sciences and humanities, it's just about over.

When I think "Establishment," my mind goes back to Rocky III. Mr. T's character tells Apollo Creed, "you're going down."

If you find something worth posting, post it. Call this "post-it notes." It beats armed revolution every time.

Make a free online YouTube or Blip.tv course out of your favorite controversial topic. Imitate Salman Khan: www.KhanAcademy.org. (Note: Khan graduated from MIT and the Harvard Business School.) He did it with these low-cost or free tools.

In short, if you find something evil that wobbles, push it.

Full essay.

FDIC is Now Bankrupt

2009-08-16T12:22:00.001-07:00

Bank Failure Friday is in full swing. Tonight there were 5 more failures, numbers 73 through 77 on the year. In the biggest failure since WaMu, BB&T Takes Over Colonial.

Full report.

That which is seen only by a very few

2009-08-10T11:12:00.001-07:00

"All managed markets—whether managed by
government allocation as under Communism or by
government sponsored central bank credit as in
Capitalism—are doomed to failure." --Darryl Schoon

The free market will be all that's left.

Don't believe it?

Just crack a brew and watch then.

The Wave of the Future

2009-08-02T10:13:00.001-07:00

"We've mortgaged the legislative halls," said an exasperated state Rep. Steve Yarbrough, a Chandler (Arizona) Republican. "That just tells you how extraordinary the times are.

Read.

Plain truth

2009-07-29T11:55:00.001-07:00

Take a look.

The Record of the Federal Reserve

2009-07-25T08:37:00.001-07:00

The Federal Reserve System is fraudulent. Whatever its stated purpose, its effective purpose is to create a mechanism of deficit spending by politicians, through the insidious invisible taxation of monetary debasement (aka inflation). With printed money, the Government can buy services for its voters before the effects of inflation are felt. It is then the voters whose money buys less the following year, as the new money has raised prices, and they are none the wiser.

See why. (Short article)

Current Recession Is a Severe Credit Bust of Depression-Era Magnitude

2009-07-24T08:54:00.001-07:00

This time it is different, very different, as the author says...

There's a big difference between inventory-driven recessions and credit-driven recessions. An inventory recession is caused by a mismatch between supply and demand. It's the result of overcapacity and under-utilization which can only work itself out over time as inventories are pared back and demand builds. Credit-driven recessions are a different story altogether. They typically last twice as long as and can precipitate financial crises. The current recession is a severe credit bust of Depression-era magnitude.

The financial system has effectively melted down. The wholesale credit system (securitization) is frozen, the banking system is dysfunctional and insolvent, and consumer spending has tanked. The Fed's multi-trillion dollar lending facilities and monetary stimulus have kept the financial system from grinding to a halt, but the underlying problems still persist. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has chosen to avoid the hard decisions and keep the price of toxic assets artificially high with the help of a $12.8 trillion liquidity backstop. That's why stocks have rallied for the last 4 months while conditions in the real economy have steadily deteriorated. Bernanke is using all the tools at his disposal to keep the market from clearing and prevent the mountain of debt that has built up over decades from being purged from the system. Unfortunately, as Ludwig von Mises said, "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought on by credit expansion."

Full article.

What went wrong with economics

2009-07-22T11:20:00.001-07:00

Of all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself.

It's quite simple really.

Like the geocentric view of Earth for 2000 years,
the govcentric view of human action (the economy)
will be found grossly wanting. The cracks are
appearing when one of the world's premier economic's
rags hasn't found their Copernicus.

Here's your wake-up call, boys an' girls.

See the full article.

The Dying State

2009-07-20T11:59:00.001-07:00

No doubt Ireland has been the victim of a savagely tight monetary policy e_SEmD given its specific needs. But the deeper truth is that Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the US, and Japan are in varying states of fiscal ruin, and those tipping into demographic decline (unlike young Ireland) have an underlying cancer that is even more deadly. The West cannot support its gold-plated state structures from an aging workforce and depleted tax base. [My emphasis]

Read.

The Collective is now supreme. You'd better run until the dust settles.

2009-07-15T05:36:00.001-07:00

"The people who promote these governmental programs," I go on, "are destroying the world in which your children and grandchildren will live. Why do you giggle about this?"

The answer, I suspect, is to be found in our conditioned practice of identifying our sense of being with institutions. (I dealt with this topic in my first book, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.) Through schools, churches, the media, corporations, our parents, and various other influences in our development, we train ourselves to look for meaning in our lives not within ourselves, but in external organized systems that have a vested interest in having us elevate their purposes above our own. It is this practice that is the midwife to all forms of collectivism.

...and mass death.

Read.

The Big Myth of the last century exposed

2009-07-14T10:07:00.001-07:00

The Federal Reserve was established in 1913.

We were once told that boom-bust business cycles were a thing of the past because, thanks to the Fed, we now had scientific management of the money supply. If anyone believes that today, I’d like to meet him. Artificially low interest rates courtesy of the Fed do not yield us a utopia of sunshine and kittens. To the contrary, they artificially stimulate capital-goods production and long-term investment. They thereby deform the structure of production into a configuration that the public’s freely expressed pattern of saving and consumption will be unable to sustain. When this phony boom inevitably collapses, it is "capitalism" that takes the blame – when in fact the Fed, a non-market institution, is the culprit.

Whole essay.

The free market doesn't live on the back of the taxpayer, Warren. Capitalism does.

2009-07-10T08:35:00.001-07:00

Another statist thinks the state will save his ass...

Watch that fool go down.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Legendary investor Warren Buffett said in an interview aired on Thursday unemployment could hit 11 percent and a second stimulus package might be needed as the economy struggles to recover from recession.

Read.

Credit as money creation

2009-07-07T13:21:00.001-07:00

”Doug Noland has for years been pointing out that one of the drivers of the credit bubble has been the ever-broadening definition of money. As the global economy expanded without a hic-up, more and more instruments came to be used as a store of value or medium of exchange or even a standard against which to value other things—in other words, as money. Thus mortgage-backed bonds and even more exotic things came to be seen as nearly risk-free and infinitely liquid. In Noland's terms, credit gained "moneyness," which sent the effective global money supply through the roof. This in turn allowed the U.S. and its trading partners to keep adding jobs and appearing to grow, despite debt levels that were rising into the stratosphere. For a while there, borrowing actually made the world richer, because both the cash received and the debt created functioned as money.”

Read.

U.S. durable goods production - June 2009

2009-07-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

...and other extreme charts.

Shepherds of Illusion

2009-07-01T10:55:00.001-07:00

Sadly, history will continue to show that those in positions of great power, elected by various means as prudential stewards of peoples and their economies, continue to prove themselves nothing more than shepherd’s of illusion.

One of the spoils of war enjoyed by victors is the tendency toward rewriting history to better suit their prevailing views. In similar context, once ruling parties secure conquest, when backed up against the wall, the few in control of the many often go to extraordinary measures to quickly modify or rewrite the rule of law in order to preserve the monopoly of dominance over those under their rule.

Read.

Earthmonkey's conundrum

2009-06-29T11:44:00.001-07:00

A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. – Dresden James

We're now in The Great Re-run

2009-06-25T11:04:00.001-07:00

The spectacular crash of 1929 followed five years of reckless credit expansion by the Federal Reserve System under the Coolidge administration. In 1924, after a sharp decline in business, the Reserve banks suddenly created some $500 million in new credit, which led to a bank credit expansion of over $4 billion in less than one year. While the immediate effects of this new powerful expansion of the nation's money and credit were seemingly beneficial, initiating a new economic boom and effacing the 1924 decline, the ultimate outcome was most disastrous. It was the beginning of a monetary policy that led to the stock-market crash in 1929 and the following depression.

The whole megillah.

More on The Crash...

2009-06-24T11:36:00.001-07:00

The current mass delusion that will go down in history as the "green shoots fugue" can't possibly bring the credit freak show back because the credit -- i.e. money borrowed from the American future -- was swindled away. Something like $14 trillion worth of nominal dollars is being sucked into a cosmic vortex never to be seen again. It was last seen in the spectral forms of so many collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, so-called structured investment vehicles and other now-obvious frauds. That giant sucking sound we hear means the process is still underway, and the "money" disappearing into yawning oblivion will out-pace any effort orchestrated by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury to replace it with new "money" (or credit). Therefore there is no chance between heaven and hell that the pre-2008 suburban homesteading and shopping fiesta can ever come back. The American polity is tapped out in all sectors, personal, corporate, and public...

This will be the moment when the US renounces its debt -- or just proves unable to continue pretending to service it. This moment is liable to come sometime after the middle of this summer. It will be the moment when all the green shoots babytalk stops and the scope of onrushing hardship becomes self-evident. It will be the moment when all of America finds itself in something like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the federal government proves comically impotent and the cold reality hits that we're now all on our own.

See it all.

The Proverbial Box is no more

2009-06-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

Thinking outside of that box is no longer an
option.

It's a must.

There's nowhere else to do it.

Thus,
to conclude this historical perspective, we want
to emphasize that the stepping out of the century-
old reference system is graphically visible in
the form of a curve simply popping out of the
frame which allowed ongoing trends and values to
be represented for centuries. This popping out of
traditional referential frameworks is speeding
up, affecting increasing numbers of sectors and
countries, enhancing the loss of meaning of
indicators used daily or monthly by stock
markets, governments, or official sources of
statistics, and accelerating the widespread
awareness that "the usual indicators" can no
longer give any insight, or even represent the
current world developments. The world will thus
reach summer 2009 without any reliable references
available.

Of course, everyone is free to think that a few
points’ monthly variation of a particular
economic or financial indicator, itself largely
affected by the multiple interventions of public
authorities and banks, carries much more value on
the evolution of the current crisis than those
stepping out of century-old referential
frameworks. Everyone is also free to believe that
those who anticipated neither the crisis nor its
intensity are now in a position to know the
precise date when it will end.

Our team advises them to go see (or see again)
the movie Matrix (5) and to think about the
consequences of manipulating the sensors and
indicators of one’s perception of given
environment. Indeed, as we will examine in detail
in our special summer 2009 GEAB (N°36), the
coming months could be entitled « Crisis Reloaded
» (6).

Read.

The Next Boom

2009-06-17T12:37:00.001-07:00

There will be another economic boom one of these days, but it will arrive suddenly and from an unexpected place.

Yea, a boom in hammers and anvils.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Full load.

The American Empire is Bankrupt

2009-06-16T11:59:00.001-07:00

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Don make a hoot what they do. The entire planet's been living on
the perceived value of the dollar. All currencies are paper trash. Trust is gone.

Gold and silver along with other things of value will survive.

The kind of 'bullshit' thrown on 'green shoots' grows nothing.

If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

Full article.

Grocery Stores Begin To Accept Gold and Silver

2009-06-15T12:25:00.001-07:00

The reporter here probably had his account at youtube suspended for this video:

Germans Can Now Buy Gold Through Vending Machines

2009-06-12T09:41:00.001-07:00

A vending machine selling tiny gold bars was launched at the main railway station in Germany’s Frankfurt-am-Main. The ATM machine, the size of a phone-booth and shaped as a gold bar, was installed in the financial metropolis of the European Union, Itar-Tass news agency reports.

The new service appeared because of the aspiration of the Germans to rescue their savings during the crisis converting the funds on their bank accounts to gold bars.

Well, something like that...

Large profit margin at those prices.

Read.

Bond Market Blowout

2009-06-10T10:36:00.001-07:00

"Mancur Olson, the American economist, in his books (The Logic of Collective Action and The Rise and Decline of Nations), speculated that small distributional coalitions tend to form over time in developed nations and influence policies in their favor through intensive, well funded lobbying. The policies result in benefits for the coalitions and its members but large costs borne by the rest of population. Over time, the incentive structure means that more distributional coalitions accumulate burdening and ultimately paralysing the economic system causing inevitable and irretrievable economic decline.
...
“What we will have going forward is not Weimar Republic-type price hyperinflation, but a financial profit inflation in which zombie financial institutions turn nominally profitable in a collapsing economy. The danger is that this unearned nominal financial profit is mistaken as a sign of economic recovery, inducing the public to invest what remaining wealth they still hold, only to lose more of it at the next market meltdown, which will come when the profit bubble bursts. ("Liquidity drowns meaning of 'inflation", by Henry C. K. Liu Asia Times)

Nothing to see here. Move along, citizen.

Full article.

We can't afford no more stuff

2009-06-09T14:48:00.001-07:00

Classic...

Unlike Japan’s slump of the ’90s and ’00s, this depression is worldwide. Americans aren’t buying like they used to. So, foreigners aren’t selling. Everyone gets poorer as expected income and profits disappear…and turn into losses.

Meanwhile, in America, today’s jobs report shows that unemployment is still on the rise. People without jobs can’t buy stuff – neither the kind of stuff you get at the grocery store…nor the kind of stuff you get from real estate agents. Since they don’t buy stuff, manufacturers don’t make stuff. And since they don’t make stuff, they don’t need the stuff that stuff is made of, nor the employees who turn the raw stuff into the finished stuff.

Result: the stuffing gets knocked out of the economy.

Read.

Great Depressions Are So Methodical

2009-06-04T09:44:00.001-07:00

Our view on Keynesian safety nets has always been that in a bust they would be about as useless as a hardhat in a crowbar storm.

Read.

Job losses compared to previous recessions

2009-06-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

More charts here.

The Prez finally gets the word...

2009-05-30T10:49:00.001-07:00

In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, President Obama boldly told Americans: "We are out of money."

Full report.