Gold World News Flash |
- Ironic Silver
- Weekend Viewing: Peter Schiff Schools Kid on the Gold Standard
- Haynes, Norcini review metals' week for King World News
- Holders of treasuries and paper gold may have their own tungsten to worry about
- Adlerconobot Takes On Conomists' Consensual Sexpectations
- Pento – Markets to Plunge This Summer & Eurozone Effect
- Spain is About to Enter a Full-Scale Collapse
- Dutch Government on Verge of Collapse After Anti-EU Lawmaker Torpedoed Seven Weeks of Austerity Talks ...
- Guest Post: The Truth About Excess Reserves
- Problems at Fukushima Reactor 4 are the Greatest Short-Term Threat to Humanity: TEPCO Doesn't Enough Money To Fix It
- Pento - Markets to Plunge This Summer & Eurozone Effect
- Krugman Rebutts (sic) Spitznagel, Says Bankers Are "The True Victims Of QE", Princeton-Grade Hilarity Ensues
- The Poop On Groupon
- Gold COT (CFTC - Commitment of Traders) for Period 4/11-4/17
- Silver COT (CFTC - Commitment of Traders) for Period 4/11-4/17
- Investors How to Speculate Your Way to Success
- In The News Today
- Gold and Silver Miners Put Real Money Where Their Mouth Is
- Untitled
- Investor Essential Knowledge for Maximizing Real Gains
- Many Signs Point to Gold Higher Prices
- Fiat Currency, Nixon, Gold and Crude Oil
- The JOBS Act: Washington Takes One Step Back Toward Capitalism
- Silver Price Seen Over $40/oz in 2012 – Store of Value Remains Undervalued
| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 03:45 PM PDT
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| Weekend Viewing: Peter Schiff Schools Kid on the Gold Standard Posted: 21 Apr 2012 03:32 PM PDT from TokenLibertarianGirl: FreedomWorks and the Reason Foundation hosted Peter Schiff's rebuttal to Ben Bernanke's lectures at George Washington University in late March. A handful of undergraduate students who sat through Bernanke's four lectures showed up at the event including the guy asking the question.
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| Haynes, Norcini review metals' week for King World News Posted: 21 Apr 2012 02:04 PM PDT 10p ET Saturday, April 21, 2012 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: The weekly precious metals market review at King World News finds Bill Haynes of CMI Gold and Silver saying that slow periods in these markets are usually followed by big moves, and futures market analyst Dan Norcini remarking on the undervaluation of gold mining shares and the need of gold mining companies to pay dividends to regain attractiveness to investors. The review is 20 minutes long and you can listen to it at King World News here: http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2012/4/21_K... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Prophecy Platinum (TSXV: NKL) and Ursa Major Minerals Company Press Release VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada -- Prophecy Platinum Corp. (TSX-V: NKL, OTC-QX: PNIKF, Frankfurt: P94P) and Ursa Major Minerals Inc. have signed a binding letter of agreement for a business combination through a proposed all-share transaction. In doing so Prophecy and Ursa have acted at arm's length and the transaction has been negotiated at arm's length. Prophecy will issue one common share in exchange for every 25 outstanding common shares of Ursa. Ursa options and warrants will be exchanged for options and warrants of Prophecy on an agreed schedule. Prophecy's offer represents a value of about $0.15 per each common share of Ursa based on Prophecy's share price of $3.70 as at March 1, representing a premium of 130 percent to Ursa's March 1 closing price of $0.065. Prophecy is to subscribe for $1 million common shares of Ursa by way of private placement financing at $0.06 per share, subject to regulatory approval. Upon placement completion, John Lee and Greg Hall, current Prophecy directors, will be appointed to Ursa's board. Prophecy thus will become a mid-tier resource company with a robust and diversified pipeline of platinum nickel projects, including: -- The fully permitted open-pit Shakespeare PGM-Ni-Cu mine close to Sudbury, Ontario, infrastructure with near-term production capabilities. -- The flagship Wellgreen (Yukon) PGM-Ni-Cu project with more than 10 million ounces of Pt-Pd-Au inferred resource. Drilling is under way and a preliminary economic assessment study is pending. -- Manitoba's Lynn Lake Ni-Cu project with more than 262 million pounds Ni and 138 million pounds Cu measured and indicated. For the complete announcement, please visit Prophecy Platinum's Internet site here: http://www.prophecyplat.com/news_2012_mar02_prophecy_platinum_ursa_major... Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Sona Discovers Potential High-Grade Gold Mineralization From a Company Press Release VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- With its latest surface diamond drilling program at its 100-percent-owned, formerly producing Blackdome gold mine in southern British Columbia, Sona Resources Corp. has discovered a potentially high-grade gold-mineralized area, with one hole intersecting 13.6 grams of gold in 1.5 meters of core drilling. "We intersected a promising new mineralized zone, and we feel optimistic about the assay results," says Sona's president and CEO, John P. Thompson. "We have undertaken an aggressive exploration program that has tested a number of target zones. Our discovery of this new gold-bearing structure is significant, and it represents a positive development for the company." Sona aims to bring its permitted Blackdome mill back into production over the next year and a half, at a rate of 200 tonnes per day, with feed from the formerly producing Blackdome mine and the nearby Elizabeth gold deposit property. A positive preliminary economic assessment by Micon International Ltd., based on a gold price of $950 per ounce over eight years, has estimated a cash cost of $208 per tonne milled, or $686 per gold ounce recovered. For the company's complete press release, please visit: http://www.sonaresources.com/_resources/news/SONA_NR18_2011-opt.pdf
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| Holders of treasuries and paper gold may have their own tungsten to worry about Posted: 21 Apr 2012 01:26 PM PDT Italian Police Seize $5 billion of U.S. Securities By Danilo Masoni http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/21/us-italy-police-seize-idUSBRE8... MILAN, Italy -- Italian financial police have seized U.S. securities with face values of about $1.5 billion and gold certificates worth more than 3 billion euros ($3.96 billion) as part of an investigation into a possible international financial scam. The police said on Saturday the "million-dollar" operation was a last step in the probe, which centered on the use of bearer Federal Reserve debt securities dating back to the 1930s as a guarantee for loans or other opaque cross-border transactions. Rome police seized the securities from a 70-year-old man, who held them in a briefcase along with documents about financial operations, the police said in a statement. Police said they were carrying out checks, helped by the U.S. central bank and the U.S. embassy in Rome, over the authenticity and origin of the securities, as well as over possible links between the man and criminal organizations. ADVERTISEMENT Golden Phoenix Discusses Royalty Mining Growth Strategy Golden Phoenix Minerals Inc. has discussed its royalty mining growth strategy on the Fox Business Network program "21st Century Business" with host Jackie Bales. Golden Phoenix's director of corporate communications, Robert Ian, told how the company narrows its focus to project generation and future royalty streams. He explained why Golden Phoenix believes it's better to own joint-venture interests in several producing mines instead of full exposure to just one project. "21st Century Business" has been airing for 15 years. Previous hosts have included Gen. Alexander Haig, Gen.l Norman Schwarzkopf, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Golden Phoenix appeared as paid programming on this broadcast. To view the program with Golden Phoenix, please visit Golden Phoenix's Internet site here: http://www.goldenphoenix.us/company-videos.html Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Be Part of a Chance to Discover Northaven Resources Corp. (TSX-V:NTV) is advancing five gold and silver projects in highly prospective and politically stable British Columbia, Canada. Check out the exploration program on our Allco gold/silver project : -- A large (13,000 hectare) property, covering more than 15 square kilometers of a regional mineralized trend just 3km from a recently announced 1.2-million-ounce gold and 15-million-ounce silver deposit. -- The property hosts historic high-grade silver workings and many mineral showings as well as former mines at the property's northern and southern boundaries. -- A deep-penetrating airborne geophysics survey has just been completed on the entire property and neighboring deposits and its results are eagerly awaited. To learn more about the Allco property or Northaven's other gold and silver projects, please visit: http://www.northavenresources.com Or call Northaven CEO Allen Leschert at 604-696-3600.
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| Adlerconobot Takes On Conomists' Consensual Sexpectations Posted: 21 Apr 2012 01:21 PM PDT Adlerconobot Takes On Conomists' Consensual SexpectationsCourtesy of Lee Adler of the Wall Street Examiner The Conobot's Take On Next Week's Wall Street Farce Job one for the US Treasury and its Primary Dealer enforcers is to keep yields low during weeks when the Treasury has a big load of notes and bonds to sell. Next week is one of those weeks, so the casino owners and managers will do what they can to gin up reasons for the Treasury market to stay strong. That usually means they'll try to shake cash out of the stock market tree. One of the biggest games in the Wall Street weekly farce of separating customers from their money is the game of Beat the Number. They play it with earnings and with conomic expectations. Several Wall Street media PR firms survey the Street conomists about their consensual sexpectations for the conomic data releases for the week ahead. To play along, I have invented the Adlerconobot to assist in the parallel game of Guess the Miss. A positive miss is called a "beat," while a negative miss is just a miss. Here's the schedule of major releases for the week ahead with the Adlerconobot's miss forecast. Feel free to play along. However, I must warn you, the real key to winning the game is not guessing whether it's a beat or a miss, or by how much. The real key is guessing how the market will react. If you guess right, you win. If you guess wrong. Sorry. Better luck next week.
Click to enlarge
Look for the conomic releases to be weaker than conomists' consensual sexpectations. If the numbers are really horrific that would be bullish, because really really weak is really really good. It means that Ben will print, and that means stocks will go up. But next week's numbers won't be horrific. They'll miss but they'll be so-so, not enough to scare anybody. That will leave traders confused. Sorry. Bearish for stocks. First out at 9:00 AM Tuesday will be the housing Case Chiller. The consensus on that is for a year to year decline of -3.4%. My guess is that it should be -2.1% based on the Case Chiller's ridiculous methodology. House prices are actually now up about 2.5% year to year. It will take another 4 months before the worthless, super lagged Case Chiller catches up with that fact. At 10 AM Tuesday we'll get the Con Board's Con Con index. Worthless. If the survey was taken during weeks when the Dow was down, it will disappoint. If the market was up during those weeks, the number will beat the consensual, which is for a 69.5 reading. That's down slightly from 70.2 last month. The market was weakening from new highs during the survey period, which ends on the 18th of the month. I don't know if the consensual guess is weak enough, and even if it misses, I'm not sure how the market would react. In any case, the Con Con reaction is usually a kneejerk that's quickly reversed. So unless you are an HFT bot, you can ignore this one. Also on Tuesday at 10 AM will be the Conmerce Department's new home sales data. The consensual on that is 320,000, seasonally fudge packed. Based on the Adlerconobot's double secret Al Gore rhythm, I suspect that that number will come in light, perhaps around 300,000, but truthfully, your guess is as good as mine, and certainly better than Wall Street conomists. Then on Wednesday, Durable Goods data is out at 8:30, with a consensual of -1.5%. The Adlerconobot says -2.5%. Then we get the FOMC announcement at 12:30, and Dr. Ben's Feelgood About Me Dog and Pony Circus at 2:15. Read my lips. "The conomy is recovering so no new printing, but we will stand by the pump stations just in case this mother of a bubble suddenly deflates again." The announcement and dog and pony should disappoint and stocks should sell off while Treasuries rally just in time for the last auction of the week, the 7 Year Note. The closing time for bids on the auctions isn't until 1 PM Thursday. My guess would be that weekly jobless claims at 8:30 AM and the NAR's pending home sales for March at 10 AM are also likely to disappoint. Jobless claims have started trending up a bit in the past 2 weeks. The consensus number is 373,000. The Adler conobot spits out 399,000, which would be worse than the market expects. That's also supported by a plunge in withholding taxes over the week covered by that data. On Friday, after the auctions are safely out of the way, we get first quarter GDP at 8:30 along with the GDP chain deflator and the Employment Cost Index (ECI), which is a very slow, lagging, quarterly indicator of labor cost inflation. The GDP consensus is 2.6%. I won't bother tackling the GDP. I don't track it. The ECI consensus is for a 0.5% increase. The BLS publishes monthly data on weekly wages and salaries. It was up .75% on average for the first quarter versus Q4 of 2011. If the ECI comes in lower than that it will be a sign that Dr. Bernankenstein and friends have no clue that labor costs are rising faster than their inflation target, or at least they are pretending that they have no clue. If the ECI does come closer to .75%, Treasuries will get pounded (and gold may finally get out of the starting blocks), but since the auctions are finished on Thursday, it won't matter. The Michigan Con final number for April comes out at 10 AM Friday. Like the Con Board Con Con earlier in the week, it's a meaningless, dog chasing tail indicator. They're looking for 75.7 on that one, which is a little lower than last month. Because stocks have been lower this month, that one is a tossup. The preliminary number was released earlier in the month, so this will be another non issue unless it's a huge miss, which is unlikely. As you play the game there are two things to keep in mind. Your guess is as good as mine, and better than theirs. And the consensual sextimate is always wrong. So why are the conomists paid so much? "Marketing and distribution baby!" screamed Dick Vitale. Marketing and distribution. For the rest of the story, you can read the weekly Treasury updates in the Professional Edition for 30 days risk free.
Get regular updates the machinations of the Fed, Treasury, Primary Dealers and foreign central banks in the US market, in the Fed Report in the Professional Edition, Money Liquidity, and Real Estate Package. Click this link to try WSE's Professional Edition risk free for 30 days! Copyright © 2012 The Wall Street Examiner. All Rights Reserved. The above may be reposted with attribution and a prominent link to the The Wall Street Examiner.
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| Pento – Markets to Plunge This Summer & Eurozone Effect Posted: 21 Apr 2012 12:53 PM PDT from KingWorldNews:
Michael Pento Continues @ KingWorldNews.com
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| Spain is About to Enter a Full-Scale Collapse Posted: 21 Apr 2012 12:46 PM PDT Spain is Greece… Only Bigger and Worse by Phoenix Capital Research, via ZeroHedge.com:
Spain is about to enter a full-scale Crisis. A few facts about Spain • Total Spanish banking loans are equal to 170% of Spanish GDP. • Troubled loans at Spanish Banks just hit an 18-year high. • Spanish Banks are drawing a record €316.3 billion from the ECB (up from €169.2 billion in February). Things have gotten so bad that Spanish citizens are pulling their money out of Spain en masse: €65 billion left the Spanish banking system in March 2011 alone.
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| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 12:03 PM PDT The Netherlands has been one of the staunchest proponents of forced austerity on Greece. However, now that Brussels has demanded the Netherlands hit its fiscal targets, Dutch politicians can't get the task done and the government is ... Read More...
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| Guest Post: The Truth About Excess Reserves Posted: 21 Apr 2012 10:47 AM PDT Submitted by Azizonomics The Truth About Excess Reserves Tyler enquires about excess reserves:
This is of course a live question. Excess reserves are at never-before-seen levels:
So, does the accumulation of excess reserves lead to inflation? Only so much as the frequentation of brothels leads to chlamydia and syphilis. Excess reserves are only non-inflationary so long as the banks — the people holding the reserves — play along with the Fed-Treasury game of monetising debt and trying to hide the inflation . The banks don't have to lend these reserves out, just as having sex with hookers doesn't have to lead to an infection. But eventually — so long as you do it enough — the condom will break. As soon as banks start to lend beyond the economy's inherent productivity (which lest we forget is around the same level as ten years ago) there will be inflation. So, will they? I think that would mean biting the hand that has fed them. The financial complex owes a great deal to the Fed for bailing them out in 2008, and throwing a pig's ear of slush money their way in 2009 and 2010 in the form of QE. Like any Fat Tony, Bernanke commands the allegiance of his minions. But even the most enduring mafia bosses sometimes get shot. There is no status quo that a black swan cannot shatter. But there are greater inflationary risks (which also, we must note, may set alight the inflationary potential of the excess reserves). A severe oil shock — caused by (say) Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, something that America, NATO and the UN seem totally set upon — is one. So too could be a global trade shock caused by a regional war — there are lots of danger zones (North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, etc, etc, ad infinitum). And how about the return of some of the trillions of dollars now floating around Asia?
So while the amassing of excessive reserves perhaps does not pose quite the same inflationary risk as collapsing reserve currency status, I think it is safe to say that while the 00s securitisation bubble was akin to juggling dynamite, this trend of amassing excess reserves (done, lest we forget, as a stability measure to protect primary dealers against another shadow banking collapse) is closer to going to sleep upon a bed of dynamite.
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| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 09:14 AM PDT from Alexander Higgins:
Now nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen who is one of the only people providing objective scientific analysis about the Fukushima nuclear fallout believes based on his analysis of the problems that TEPCO simply doesn't have enough money to deal with the issues there. He says this at about 25:00 minutes into a recent program on WBAI's Five O'Clock Shadow. Source: EneNews To put it simply, the nuclear fuel rods in reactor 4 are sitting inside of a pool of water that is preventing them from melting down completely and release massive amounts of radiation far beyond what already has been released. The structural integrity of the building has been damaged so greatly that it appears that the reactor 4 building is leaning and officials around the world, including US senators, are warning even a minor earthquake could make it collapse. Read More @ AlexanderHiggins.com
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Pento - Markets to Plunge This Summer & Eurozone Effect Posted: 21 Apr 2012 08:37 AM PDT  With investors concerned about the action in equity markets, as well as gold and silver, today Michael Pento, of Pento Portfolio Strategies, writes for King World News to warn that global stock markets will plunge this summer. Pento had this to say about the situation: "I would have thought that the decoupling myth between global economies would have been completely discredited after the events of this past credit crisis unfolded. Back in 2007 and early 2008, investors were very slowly coming to the realization that the U.S. centered real estate crisis was going to dramatically affect our domestic economy."
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 07:54 AM PDT At first we were going to comment on this "response" by the high priest of Keynesian shamanic tautology to Mark Spitznagel's latest WSJ opinion piece, but then we just started laughing, and kept on laughing, and kept on laughing... As a reminder, on Thursday Universa's Mark Spitznagel, best known recently for explaining in very vivid ways just how central planning has sown the seeds of its own destruction, wrote the following in the WSJ:
And here is how Krugman, who among other pearls of insight references ... Joe Wisenthal, responds. This is seriously Princeton-grade humor. We leave it up to readers to enjoy it for themselves unobstructed by our cynical interjections. Fom the NYT (highlights ours)
It... just... does.... not.... compute.... is this the type of thinking of needs to exhibit to get a Nobel? Does Krugman seriously still not understand that NIM as a business model for banks died about the time banks stopped making loans and relying exclusively on prop, pardon flow, trading and using infinite rehypothecation leverage to juice their returns into the stratosphere, using the offbalance accounting permitted by shadow banking (really read this Paul - you may finally understand how finance DOES work these days), while doing all their best to limit origination and mortgage lending exposure, thank you Bank of Countrywide Lynch (i.e. the opposite of the NIM business model)? Well at least Krugman is right about thing: there sure aren't many people living on fixed income anymore. Most of them have already died. And he is most certainly not referring to the $5 billion on average in capital that is weekly rotated out of stocks and into bonds. Whatever anyone does, do not point out our previous post that it was none other than the Fed warning that monetization and excess reserves could lead to hyperinflation. Or, that none other than JPMorgan pointed out a month ago that his beloved central planning has destroyed Okun's Law which makes all Krugman Op-Eds in the past 4 years about the same intellectual quality as one-ply Cottonelle. We may get a scene straight out of Scanners. And we don't want that - we just want more Krugman humor and more LSAP, aka Large Scale Asshat Publications. In fact, it is time for the Fed to stop printing money and just print Krugman Op-Eds. Following the laughter-induced genocide, unemployment will indeed finally drop for once naturally, instead of as a result of millions of people dropping out of the labor force on a monthly basis.
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| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 07:25 AM PDT From the Slope of Hope.... Only half a year ago, Groupon was the talk of the town. It was the biggest, hottest IPO on the horizon,and it was the darling of the social media industry. Imitators were everywhere, but there was one giant that was far ahead of everyone else: Groupon. Well, one glance at a stock chart will show you just how much the biggest, hottest IPO has been embraced since it went public. I offer you the following:
Now that it's lost two-thirds of its peak value (which occurred, cruelly, on the very day of its initial public offering), Groupon has pivoted from enviable leader to pitiable loser. And the stock price, from a chartist's perspective, doesn't have a firm shelf of support upon which it can rely for some much-needed stabilization. There is nothing but air between its current valuation and $0.00.
This must be particularly painful for original shareholders because of an important fact that 99% of the world has forgotten: none other than Facebook was ready for acquire Groupon for about $6 billion about a year and a half ago. Groupon told them to go jump in a lake. Before continuing, let's check out Groupon's current market capitalization, shall we? OK, so let's agree that the current market cap and the prior offer are roughly the same price (what's a billion dollars between friends? I mean, sheesh, that's just one Instagram!) So the reality of the situation is that the management of the company now faces the never-ending nightmare of being a public company (with all the attendent expenses, shareholder lawsuits, quarterly earnings reports, Sarbanes-Oxley, and all of that other happy hoo-ha) instead of cashing out for an amount that, based on Facebook's valuation growth over the past eighteen months, would certainly be far greater. In other words, would you rather be sitting on a ton of pre-IPO Facebook stock right now (whose liquidity is just a month away at this point) or a smaller amount of Groupon stock which comes with the millstone of being a publicly-held enterprise? Yeah, the first one. I thought so. It's interesting too, looking at the Google Trends for Groupon. The highlights tell the story nicely. Google is "close" to buying them. The deal doesn't happen, so Facebook fires up a competing feature. Then GRPN goes public. Surges. Slumps. And then gets "probed" by the SEC, which has got to be uncomfortable.
I've had a special interest in Groupon (as opposed to other "social" companies whose stock are falling to pieces, like, say, Pandora) for a long while. There are a few things about the company that have never quite sat right with me: (a) Accounting Questions - As a chartist, I usually don't care about fundamentals such as accounting. But the stories floating around about the not-quite-kosher accounting got my attention. There have actually been a number of "mini-scandals" going back over the past couple of years. But here's a simple analog to capture the failure of the "smell test" - - let's say I started a company that made change for people (e.g. you come in with a dollar, and I give you 99 cents in change and keep a penny for myself as a convenience fee). Let's say over the course of a year I made $100 million in change for people. What are my revenues? To my way of thinking, they are a million dollars. I'll have expenses, of course, and what's left over is profit. But my impression of the Groupon approach - - at least before they cleaned up their act - - is that the same business would proudly declare they had $100 million in revenue. After all, the cash passed through my hands, didn't it? But it takes a very distorted view of the world to believe that a business should be represented in this fashion. (b) Dumping stock before the IPO - historically, venture capitalists put money into a company to fund the company's growth. These days, it seems late-stage VCs have lost enough power that they have to shove stock directly into the pockets of early employees in order to get a deal done. Witness this finance round from the company's own S-1:
It just seems bad form, to me, to allocate the vast majority of an "investment" to the purpose of allowing founders and early VCs to take hundreds of millions of dollars off the table. I mean, sure, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, and if sell off a few million bucks of stock to buy a nice house, a nice car, and so forth - - bully for you. But to dump a meaningful portion of your stock even prior to an IPO doesn't exactly scream a lot of faith in your own enterprise. Although, it seems, they were smart to have done so. After all, if someone's going to hold the bag, why not let it be some schmuck retail investor? (d) The service itself - I just don't know how consistently popular these Groupons are going to be. You've all read the stories about small merchants giving the service a try once and vowing never to go back. But I'm speaking from the standpoint of a consumer who, I would guess, would be the very model of a Groupon customer. We've got a family. We spend ungodly amounts of cash on eating out, vacations, and all manner of consumer goods and services. We are probably in the 99th percentile in terms of technological savviness. But, in our lifetimes, we have bought two - - count 'em - - two - - Groupons. One of them was for a hair stylist. The other one is for The Counter (a local burger place). And the hamburger coupons are something I already resent, because they expire soon and it turns out they only work at a location which is a half hour drive from here, as opposed to the local establishment. So I'm kind of pissed that we even bought these coupons, the 50% discount notwithstanding. Some people think Groupon's burn-out as a public company is simply a harbinger of what's to come with the oh-so-widely anticipated IPO of Facebook next month. I don't. I think all these "social" companies are going to follow into two camps. There are going to be dogs like Pandora, Groupon, and Zynga - - companies that I am highly confident will all continue to wither away - - and there are going to be the winners who basically, like Google, have a monopoly on some certain aspect of the web. LinkedIn, for instance, and....Facebook. Bottom line for me is that Groupon's stock performance isn't a surprise to me at all. There will be hopeful "pops" in price along the way, but my opinion is that this thing is going to wither into sub-$5 territory within the year.
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| Gold COT (CFTC - Commitment of Traders) for Period 4/11-4/17 Posted: 21 Apr 2012 05:39 AM PDT Commercials sold 2,373 longs and picked up 2,669 shorts to end the week with 58.66% of all open interest and now stand as a group at 17,609,100 ounces net short, a increase of 504,200 ounces from the previous week. Read More...
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| Silver COT (CFTC - Commitment of Traders) for Period 4/11-4/17 Posted: 21 Apr 2012 05:37 AM PDT Commercials added 2,372 longs and 2,484 shorts to end the week with 47.57% of all open interest 132,485,000 ounces net short, a small increase of 555,000 ounces. Read More...
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| Investors How to Speculate Your Way to Success Posted: 21 Apr 2012 05:26 AM PDT So far, 2012 has been a banner year for the stock market, which recently closed the books on its best first quarter in 14 years. But Casey Research Chairman Doug Casey insists that time is running out on the ticking time bombs. Next week when Casey Research's spring summit gets underway, Casey will open the first general session addressing the question of whether the inevitable is now imminent. In another exclusive interview with The Gold Report, Casey tells us that he foresees extreme volatility "as the titanic forces of inflation and deflation fight with each other" and a forced shift to speculation to either protect or build wealth.
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| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 05:24 AM PDT Jim Sinclair's Commentary Locked and loaded. QE to infinity, which is debt monetization on steroids because you have no clue how terrible the wrath of the collapsed 2008-2009 OTC WMD derivatives still are. The collapse of 2013 – 2015 will be a horror to behold. The mortal sin of the FASB is that it Continue reading In The News Today
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| Gold and Silver Miners Put Real Money Where Their Mouth Is Posted: 21 Apr 2012 05:03 AM PDT In precious metals, it has been a trying time for miner investors. Despite gains in bullion prices, gold and silver miners have lagged behind. Since January 2011, the SPDR Gold Trust has gained 15.5 percent, while the iShares Silver Trust has increased 2.5 percent. However, miner ETFs such as the Market Vectors Gold Miners and the Global X Silver Miners have both fallen 23 percent in the same period. While it may appear to be all doom and gloom in the mining stocks, the companies themselves are signaling better days ahead.
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| Posted: 21 Apr 2012 04:56 AM PDT The following article has been posted at GoldMoney, here. The paradox of choice2012-APR-21
 When a consumer buys something, he must choose; and if he increases his purchase of one product, he must reduce his purchases of other products by the same amount. In other words he cannot buy both. This must be true for whole communities as well. How then can you have economic growth? It is of course impossible without monetary inflation. This is because any statistical average, in this context GDP, can only grow if people are not forced to choose between alternatives, a condition that can only occur if they are given extra money. Not even a draw-down on savings to spend on consumption creates extra spending, because it is merely reallocates spending on capital goods to consumption goods. This simple point has been ignored by all neo-classical economists. The result is that in their pursuit of so-called economic growth, they have committed themselves to monetary inflation. Their concept of growth is to make that extra money available to consumers, so that they are not limited to what they earn and forced to choose. It has also become the basis for economic modelling, which takes known demand for products and services and from it extrapolates growth for an average of all of them. The means by which GDP is adjusted for inflation is inadequate, because if it was adequate, this law of choice proves that real GDP statistic remain the same. Reported real growth in GDP is therefore no more than a statistical gap. Anyway, it is irrelevant: not only is it impossible to have wholly accurate statistics, but it is also impossible to predict the future consumer preferences that should be the basis of economic forecasting. So the gap cannot ever be closed, and it does not help that the neo-classical establishment yearns for results that confirm their misplaced concept of economic growth. Government has money on the result as well, with a variety of bonds and welfare benefits indexed to prices. There are therefore compelling reasons to under-report the effects of monetary inflation and so to ensure that real growth is always recorded. Understanding these dynamics is central to a proper understanding of our economic condition. It is not just a question of modern statistics measuring quantity and not quality as some critics assert. The whole basis of macro-econometric measurement is flawed and as long as we think in terms of GDP, CPI and other aggregated data we will continue to mismanage our affairs. Any reported GDP growth is statistical rather than real, a point that should be borne in mind every time the subject of economic growth crops up. The establishment has been deluding itself in this matter ever since the Second World War, when price indices and GDP began to be widely used. The answer to the conundrum we have posed is that growth in GDP cannot be a measure of economic activity, because of the paradox posed by choice. Instead an economy progresses, as entrepreneurs come up with products consumers will want tomorrow. Even though we pay lip-service to their role in society, none of their future input is reflected in the static economic models of the neo-classicists, which is why they resort to base subterfuge. Tags: economics, GDP, inflation, Keynesianism Author: Alasdair Macleod Alasdair Macleod 
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| Investor Essential Knowledge for Maximizing Real Gains Posted: 21 Apr 2012 12:56 AM PDT “Since its inception in 1913, The Federal Reserve Board has been responsible for almost 95% devaluation of the U.S. Dollar. All this has been achieved through its ability to continually inflate the money supply. And, between 1985 and 2005, the Federal Reserve Board has increased the money supply by five times. This extraordinary money creation is merely the catalyst for debt creation. In a fiat money system, money is debt…there is absolutely no way this money can ever be repaid except by continued inflation. But, now that the credit bubble is blown up, inflation is no longer an option; bankruptcy looms.”
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| Many Signs Point to Gold Higher Prices Posted: 20 Apr 2012 11:36 PM PDT The Reserve Bank of India on Tuesday surprised investors with a bigger-than-expected half-percentage-point cut to its key lending rate, sending it to 8%, saying the state of India's economy is "a matter of growing concern." Assuming a normal monsoon season, continuing improvement in industrial production and in the global outlook, the RBI said it expects growth for the current year at 7.3%. Inflation in India slowed less than expected in March. Indians, who love gold in any case, could turn to it as an inflation hedge. Meanwhile, the Indian Post office system is offering a 6% rebate on gold coins of various denominations for the forthcoming Akshaya Tritiya festival, which is one of the biggest gold buying festivals in the country.
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| Fiat Currency, Nixon, Gold and Crude Oil Posted: 20 Apr 2012 11:25 PM PDT In July 1944, delegates from 44 nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire - the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference - and agreed to "peg" their currencies to the U.S. dollar, the only currency strong enough to meet the rising demands for international currency transactions. Member nations were required to establish a parity of their national currencies in terms of the US dollar, the "peg", and to maintain exchange rates within plus or minus one percent of parity, the "band."
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| The JOBS Act: Washington Takes One Step Back Toward Capitalism Posted: 20 Apr 2012 10:56 PM PDT I know my editorial credibility and reader confidence will suddenly collapse when this goes to print but I have some good news out of Washington and Congress. Yes, I know what you are getting ready to do but don't hit the delete button just yet! The JOBS Act is actually good news for start-up and private company investors that will provide more liquidity, create an IPO boom and may be the beginning of a trend by Washington away from more regulatory and bureaucratic solutions holding down a nation and economy that simply can't compete with the rest of the world.
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| Silver Price Seen Over $40/oz in 2012 – Store of Value Remains Undervalued Posted: 20 Apr 2012 10:51 PM PDT Gold’s London AM fix this morning was USD 1,640.00, EUR 1,246.30, and GBP 1,018.25 per ounce. Yesterday's AM fix was USD 1,642.00, EUR 1,249.91 and GBP 1,022.73 per ounce.
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With investors concerned about the action in equity markets, as well as gold and silver, today Michael Pento, of Pento Portfolio Strategies, writes for King World News to warn that global stock markets will plunge this summer. Pento had this to say about the situation: "I would have thought that the decoupling myth between global economies would have been completely discredited after the events of this past credit crisis unfolded. Back in 2007 and early 2008, investors were very slowly coming to the realization that the U.S. centered real estate crisis was going to dramatically affect our domestic economy." 
On the Surface, Spain's debt woes have many things in common with those of Greece:
The problem at Fukushima nuclear reactor 4 which is being dubbed as | You are subscribed to email updates from Save Your ASSets First To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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