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Sunday, March 5, 2017

Gold World News Flash

Gold World News Flash


America's Miserable 21st Century

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 07:15 PM PST

Via Nicholas Eberstadt of CommentaryMagazine.com,

On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans, especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were familiar with, or understood anything about.

I

Whatever else it may or may not have accomplished, the 2016 election was a sort of shock therapy for Americans living within what Charles Murray famously termed “the bubble” (the protective barrier of prosperity and self-selected associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest from contact with the rest of their society). The very fact of Trump’s election served as a truth broadcast about a reality that could no longer be denied: Things out there in America are a whole lot different from what you thought. 

Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the “real America” outside the bubble. In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century.

It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.

The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it. (So much for the vaunted “information era” and “big-data revolution.”) Now that those signals are no longer possible to ignore, it is high time for experts and intellectuals to reacquaint themselves with the country in which they live and to begin the task of describing what has befallen the country in which we have lived since the dawn of the new century.

II

Consider the condition of the American economy. In some circles people still widely believe, as one recent New York Times business-section article cluelessly insisted before the inauguration, that “Mr. Trump will inherit an economy that is fundamentally solid.” But this is patent nonsense. By now it should be painfully obvious that the U.S. economy has been in the grip of deep dysfunction since the dawn of the new century. And in retrospect, it should also be apparent that America’s strange new economic maladies were almost perfectly designed to set the stage for a populist storm.

Ever since 2000, basic indicators have offered oddly inconsistent readings on America’s economic performance and prospects. It is curious and highly uncharacteristic to find such measures so very far out of alignment with one another. We are witnessing an ominous and growing divergence between three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth, output, and employment. Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose, America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less nowhere.

From the standpoint of wealth creation, the 21st century is off to a roaring start. By this yardstick, it looks as if Americans have never had it so good and as if the future is full of promise. Between early 2000 and late 2016, the estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions more than doubled, from $44 trillion to $90 trillion. (SEE FIGURE 1.)

Although that wealth is not evenly distributed, it is still a fantastic sum of money—an average of over a million dollars for every notional family of four. This upsurge of wealth took place despite the crash of 2008—indeed, private wealth holdings are over $20 trillion higher now than they were at their pre-crash apogee. The value of American real-estate assets is near or at all-time highs, and America’s businesses appear to be thriving. Even before the “Trump rally” of late 2016 and early 2017, U.S. equities markets were hitting new highs—and since stock prices are strongly shaped by expectations of future profits, investors evidently are counting on the continuation of the current happy days for U.S. asset holders for some time to come.

A rather less cheering picture, though, emerges if we look instead at real trends for the macro-economy. Here, performance since the start of the century might charitably be described as mediocre, and prospects today are no better than guarded.

The recovery from the crash of 2008—which unleashed the worst recession since the Great Depression—has been singularly slow and weak. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), it took nearly four years for America’s gross domestic product (GDP) to re-attain its late 2007 level. As of late 2016, total value added to the U.S. economy was just 12 percent higher than in 2007. (SEE FIGURE 2.) The situation is even more sobering if we consider per capita growth. It took America six and a half years—until mid-2014—to get back to its late 2007 per capita production levels. And in late 2016, per capita output was just 4 percent higher than in late 2007—nine years earlier. By this reckoning, the American economy looks to have suffered something close to a lost decade.

But there was clearly trouble brewing in America’s macro-economy well before the 2008 crash, too. Between late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5 percent per annum. That compares with the nation’s long-term postwar 1948–2000 per capita growth rate of almost 2.3 percent, which in turn can be compared to the “snap back” tempo of 1.1 percent per annum since per capita GDP bottomed out in 2009. Between 2000 and 2016, per capita growth in America has averaged less than 1 percent a year. To state it plainly: With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years 20002016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20 percent higher than it is today.

The reasons for America’s newly fitful and halting macroeconomic performance are still a puzzlement to economists and a subject of considerable contention and debate. Economists are generally in consensus, however, in one area: They have begun redefining the growth potential of the U.S. economy downwards. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), for example, suggests that the “potential growth” rate for the U.S. economy at full employment of factors of production has now dropped below 1.7 percent a year, implying a sustainable long-term annual per capita economic growth rate for America today of well under 1 percent.

Then there is the employment situation. If 21st-century America’s GDP trends have been disappointing, labor-force trends have been utterly dismal. Work rates have fallen off a cliff since the year 2000 and are at their lowest levels in decades. We can see this by looking at the estimates by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the civilian employment rate, the jobs-to-population ratio for adult civilian men and women. (SEE FIGURE 3.) Between early 2000 and late 2016, America’s overall work rate for Americans age 20 and older underwent a drastic decline. It plunged by almost 5 percentage points (from 64.6 to 59.7). Unless you are a labor economist, you may not appreciate just how severe a falloff in employment such numbers attest to. Postwar America never experienced anything comparable.

From peak to trough, the collapse in work rates for U.S. adults between 2008 and 2010 was roughly twice the amplitude of what had previously been the country’s worst postwar recession, back in the early 1980s. In that previous steep recession, it took America five years to re-attain the adult work rates recorded at the start of 1980. This time, the U.S. job market has as yet, in early 2017, scarcely begun to claw its way back up to the work rates of 2007—much less back to the work rates from early 2000.

As may be seen in Figure 3, U.S. adult work rates never recovered entirely from the recession of 2001—much less the crash of ’08. And the work rates being measured here include people who are engaged in any paid employment—any job, at any wage, for any number of hours of work at all.

On Wall Street and in some parts of Washington these days, one hears that America has gotten back to “near full employment.” For Americans outside the bubble, such talk must seem nonsensical. It is true that the oft-cited “civilian unemployment rate” looked pretty good by the end of the Obama era—in December 2016, it was down to 4.7 percent, about the same as it had been back in 1965, at a time of genuine full employment. The problem here is that the unemployment rate only tracks joblessness for those still in the labor force; it takes no account of workforce dropouts. Alas, the exodus out of the workforce has been the big labor-market story for America’s new century. (At this writing, for every unemployed American man between 25 and 55 years of age, there are another three who are neither working nor looking for work.) Thus the “unemployment rate” increasingly looks like an antique index devised for some earlier and increasingly distant war: the economic equivalent of a musket inventory or a cavalry count.

By the criterion of adult work rates, by contrast, employment conditions in America remain remarkably bleak. From late 2009 through early 2014, the country’s work rates more or less flatlined. So far as can be told, this is the only “recovery” in U.S. economic history in which that basic labor-market indicator almost completely failed to respond.

Since 2014, there has finally been a measure of improvement in the work rate—but it would be unwise to exaggerate the dimensions of that turnaround. As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation’s work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers. They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

For an apples-to-apples look at America’s 21st-century jobs problem, we can focus on the 25–54 population—known to labor economists for self-evident reasons as the “prime working age” group. For this key labor-force cohort, work rates in late 2016 were down almost 4 percentage points from their year-2000 highs. That is a jobs gap approaching 5 million for this group alone.

It is not only that work rates for prime-age males have fallen since the year 2000—they have, but the collapse of work for American men is a tale that goes back at least half a century. (I wrote a short book last year about this sad saga.2) What is perhaps more startling is the unexpected and largely unnoticed fall-off in work rates for prime-age women. In the U.S. and all other Western societies, postwar labor markets underwent an epochal transformation. After World War II, work rates for prime women surged, and continued to rise—until the year 2000. Since then, they too have declined. Current work rates for prime-age women are back to where they were a generation ago, in the late 1980s. The 21st-century U.S. economy has been brutal for male and female laborers alike—and the wreckage in the labor market has been sufficiently powerful to cancel, and even reverse, one of our society’s most distinctive postwar trends: the rise of paid work for women outside the household.

In our era of no more than indifferent economic growth, 21st–century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers. And trends for paid hours of work look even worse than the work rates themselves. Between 2000 and 2015, according to the BEA, total paid hours of work in America increased by just 4 percent (as against a 35 percent increase for 1985–2000, the 15-year period immediately preceding this one). Over the 2000–2015 period, however, the adult civilian population rose by almost 18 percent—meaning that paid hours of work per adult civilian have plummeted by a shocking 12 percent thus far in our new American century.

This is the terrible contradiction of economic life in what we might call America’s Second Gilded Age (2000—). It is a paradox that may help us understand a number of overarching features of our new century. These include the consistent findings that public trust in almost all U.S. institutions has sharply declined since 2000, even as growing majorities hold that America is “heading in the wrong direction.” It provides an immediate answer to why overwhelming majorities of respondents in public-opinion surveys continue to tell pollsters, year after year, that our ever-richer America is still stuck in the middle of a recession. The mounting economic woes of the “little people” may not have been generally recognized by those inside the bubble, or even by many bubble inhabitants who claimed to be economic specialists—but they proved to be potent fuel for the populist fire that raged through American politics in 2016.

III

So general economic conditions for many ordinary Americans—not least of these, Americans who did not fit within the academy’s designated victim classes—have been rather more insecure than those within the comfort of the bubble understood. But the anxiety, dissatisfaction, anger, and despair that range within our borders today are not wholly a reaction to the way our economy is misfiring. On the nonmaterial front, it is likewise clear that many things in our society are going wrong and yet seem beyond our powers to correct.

Some of these gnawing problems are by no means new: A number of them (such as family breakdown) can be traced back at least to the 1960s, while others are arguably as old as modernity itself (anomie and isolation in big anonymous communities, secularization and the decline of faith). But a number have roared down upon us by surprise since the turn of the century—and others have redoubled with fearsome new intensity since roughly the year 2000.

American health conditions seem to have taken a seriously wrong turn in the new century. It is not just that overall health progress has been shockingly slow, despite the trillions we devote to medical services each year. (Which “Cold War babies” among us would have predicted we’d live to see the day when life expectancy in East Germany was higher than in the United States, as is the case today?)

Alas, the problem is not just slowdowns in health progress—there also appears to have been positive retrogression for broad and heretofore seemingly untroubled segments of the national population. A short but electrifying 2015 paper by Anne Case and Nobel Economics Laureate Angus Deaton talked about a mortality trend that had gone almost unnoticed until then: rising death rates for middle-aged U.S. whites. By Case and Deaton’s reckoning, death rates rose somewhat slightly over the 1999–2013 period for all non-Hispanic white men and women 45–54 years of age—but they rose sharply for those with high-school degrees or less, and for this less-educated grouping most of the rise in death rates was accounted for by suicides, chronic liver cirrhosis, and poisonings (including drug overdoses).

Though some researchers, for highly technical reasons, suggested that the mortality spike might not have been quite as sharp as Case and Deaton reckoned, there is little doubt that the spike itself has taken place. Health has been deteriorating for a significant swath of white America in our new century, thanks in large part to drug and alcohol abuse. All this sounds a little too close for comfort to the story of modern Russia, with its devastating vodka- and drug-binging health setbacks. Yes: It can happen here, and it has. Welcome to our new America.

In December 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that for the first time in decades, life expectancy at birth in the United States had dropped very slightly (to 78.8 years in 2015, from 78.9 years in 2014). Though the decline was small, it was statistically meaningful—rising death rates were characteristic of males and females alike; of blacks and whites and Latinos together. (Only black women avoided mortality increases—their death levels were stagnant.) A jump in “unintentional injuries” accounted for much of the overall uptick.

It would be unwarranted to place too much portent in a single year’s mortality changes; slight annual drops in U.S. life expectancy have occasionally been registered in the past, too, followed by continued improvements. But given other developments we are witnessing in our new America, we must wonder whether the 2015 decline in life expectancy is just a blip, or the start of a new trend. We will find out soon enough. It cannot be encouraging, though, that the Human Mortality Database, an international consortium of demographers who vet national data to improve comparability between countries, has suggested that health progress in America essentially ceased in 2012—that the U.S. gained on average only about a single day of life expectancy at birth between 2012 and 2014, before the 2015 turndown.

The opioid epidemic of pain pills and heroin that has been ravaging and shortening lives from coast to coast is a new plague for our new century. The terrifying novelty of this particular drug epidemic, of course, is that it has gone (so to speak) “mainstream” this time, effecting breakout from disadvantaged minority communities to Main Street White America. By 2013, according to a 2015 report by the Drug Enforcement Administration, more Americans died from drug overdoses (largely but not wholly opioid abuse) than from either traffic fatalities or guns. The dimensions of the opioid epidemic in the real America are still not fully appreciated within the bubble, where drug use tends to be more carefully limited and recreational. In Dreamland, his harrowing and magisterial account of modern America’s opioid explosion, the journalist Sam Quinones notes in passing that “in one three-month period” just a few years ago, according to the Ohio Department of Health, “fully 11 percent of all Ohioans were prescribed opiates.” And of course many Am

The Robots Sent Into Fukushima Just Keep Dying

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 06:15 PM PST

Via Yvette Tan of Mashable.com,

The robots sent in to investigate the nuclear fallout at Fukushima just aren't good enough.

 

Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) head of decommissioning admitted on Thursday that more creativity was needed in developing its robots sent to the reactive zone.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant was massively damaged in 2011, when three of the six nuclear reactors suffered meltdown after being struck by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and associated tsunami waves.

More than 100,000 residents of the nearby Fukushima Prefecture had to be relocated, and the government has spent the last five years struggling with the aftermath. The incident is regarded as the world's largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

Part of the clean-up includes robots, sent in to probe the site, because radiation levels are too high for humans.

But earlier last month, a robot sent into Fukushima's No. 2 reactor was forced to abort its mission after it was blocked by deposits — believed to be a mixture of melted fuel and broken pieces of structure.

Two previous robots had also failed in its missions after one was stuck in a gap and another was abandoned after being unable to find fuel during six days of searching.

This is an example of one of the robots TEPCO had sent to probe the area in the past.

"We should think out of the box so we can examine the bottom of the core and how melted fuel debris spread out," TEPCO Head of Decommissioning Naohiro Masuda said.

Mr Masuda also added that he wants another robot sent in before deciding on methods to remove the reactor's debris.

Despite the failed probe missions, officials have added that they want to stick to their schedule of starting the site clean up in 2021. 

Decommissioning the site is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars and last around 40 years.

Fukushima's No. 2 reactor was found in February to have a radiation level of 530 sieverts.

Exposure to four sieverts is enough to be lethal, according to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences.

South Korea's low-cost carrier Jeju Air also announced on Tuesday that it would not use Fukushima Airport due to fears of radiation.

Some of its customers had reportedly posted online that they would not use the airline because they didn't want to "board airplanes that flew over Fukushima."

This House Was 3D-Printed In Under 24 Hours At A Cost Of Just $10,000

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 05:43 PM PST

While 3D-printing may have been faded away in recent years from the spotlight of core "disruptive" technologies, that may soon change again after a company managed to 3D-print an entire house in just 24 hours. Located in Russia, the following 400-square-foot home, or 37 square meters, was built in just a day, at a cost of slightly over $10,000.

As profiled in the Telegraph, the company Apis Cor, 3D-printing specialists based in Russia and San Francisco, built the house using a mobile printer on-site. According to the company, the walls of the building were printed and painted in just 24 hours.

What makes Apis' process unique is that while 3D-printing a home usually involves creating the parts off-site and constructing the building later, Apis Cor uses a mobile printer to print their apartments on-site. As profiled here, in 2015 the world's first 3D-printed apartment building was constructed in China, with the structures printed off-site.

However, the Apis process is unique in that it eliminates the need to transfer the printed blocks to the contstruction site.

"Printing of self-bearing walls, partitions and building envelope were done in less than a day: pure machine time of printing amounted to 24 hours," the company said.

The main components of the house, including the walls, partitions and building envelope are printed solely with a concrete mixture. Once the house has been completed, the printer is removed with a crane-manipulator and the roof is then added, followed by the interior fixtures and furnishings, as is a layer of paint to the exterior of the house.

The total construction cost of the house: $10,134.

The initial house consists of a hallway, bathroom, living room and kitchen and is located in one of Apis Cor's facilities in Russia. The company has claimed that the house can last up to 175 years.

 

Nikita Chen-yun-tai, the inventor of the mobile printer and founder of Apis Cor, explained his desire is "to automate everything".

"When I first thought about creating my machine the world has already knew about the construction 3D printing," he explained. "But all printers created before shared one thing in common – they were portal type. I am sure that such a design doesn't have a future due to its bulkiness. So I took care of this limitation and decided to upgrade a construction crane design."

He adds: "We want to help people around the world to improve their living conditions. That's why the construction process needs to become fast, efficient and high-quality as well. For this to happen we need to delegate all the hard work to smart machines."

Apis Cor has claimed to be the first company to have developed a 3D printer than can print whole buildings on-site.

For now the technology is in its infancy, however in a few years, the deflationary pressures unleashed by Apis-Cor and its competitors could results in a huge deflationary wave across the construction space, and would mean that a house that recently cost in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, could be built for a fraction of the cost, providing cheap, accessible housing to millions, perhaps in the process revolutionizing and upending the multi trillion-dollar mortgage business that is the bedrock of the US banking industry.

Ecuador's Presidential Front-Runner: "We Will Ask Assange To Leave Our Embassy"

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 03:55 PM PST

It appears President Correa's "intention to safeguard [Assange's] life and physical integrity until he reaches a safe place," is under threat as The Miami Herald reports that Guillermo Lasso, the front-runner in Ecuador’s presidential election, says he intends to evict Assange from that country’s London embassy if he wins the April 2 runoff against ruling party candidate Lenín Moreno.

“We will ask Mr. Assange, very politely, to leave our embassy, in absolute compliance with international conventions and protocols,” Lasso said in an email exchange with the Miami Herald.

Assange took refuge in Ecuador’s cramped London embassy in 2012 fighting extradition to Sweden where he is wanted on sexual misconduct allegations. Assange and his legal team fear that the Swedish charges are a ploy to have him extradited to the United States.

Lasso also noted that Assange had volunteered to leave the embassy if Chelsea Manning, who is serving a 35-year-sentence for giving WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of secret and confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, were to be pardoned. On his way out of office, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, and she will be released May 17. But Assange argued that a commutation wasn’t a pardon and hunkered down at the embassy.

The ruling party’s Moreno has said he would continue Correa’s policy of letting Assange stay at the embassy.

As a reminder, in October 2016, Ecuador cut Assange's internet access due to his publication of a "wealth of documents impacting the U.S. election." Despite what seems to be the Ecuadorian government caving to political pressure from the Obama administration, the statement takes special caution to reassure everyone that the decision was in response to "sovereign decisions alone" and that Ecuador "does not yield to pressure from other states"....sure, though we do wonder how many drafts John Kerry's staffers went through at the State Department before finally approving these comments for dissemination.

Here are some key excerpts from the Ecuadorian statement:

"In recent weeks, WikiLeaks has published a wealth of documents, impacting on the U.S. election campaign.  This decision was taken exclusively by that organization."

 

“The Government of Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate."

 

“Accordingly, Ecuador has exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom.  This temporary restriction does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out it journalistic activities."

 

"Ecuador, in accordance with its tradition of defending human rights and protecting victims for political persecution, reaffirms the asylum granted to Julian Assange and reiterates its intention to safeguard his life and physical integrity until he reaches a safe place."

 

"Ecuador's foreign policy responds to sovereign decisions alone and does not yield to pressure from other states."

Probably just a coincidence? Is the deep state still pulling the strings? One wonders just what Wikileaks may have up its sleeve next... especially as the Obama links to Trump White House leaks and Trump Tower surveillance grow stronger.

Finally, while it may be nothing, we note that Ecuador transferred half its gold to Goldman Sachs in exchange for "liquidity" in June 2014 - that 'swap' is due to expire in June 2017...

Ecuador agreed to transfer more than half its gold reserves to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for three years as the government seeks to bolster liquidity.

 

The central bank said it will send 466,000 ounces of gold to Goldman Sachs, worth about $580 million at current prices, and get the same amount back three years from now. In return, Ecuador will get “instruments of high security and liquidity” and expects to earn a profit of $16 million to $20 million over the term of the accord.

 

“Gold that was not generating any returns in vaults, causing storage costs, now becomes a productive asset that will generate profits,” the central bank said in the statement. “These interventions in the gold market represent the beginning of a new and permanent strategy of active participation by the bank, through purchases, sales and financial operations, that will contribute to the creation of new financial investment opportunities.”

Probably nothing, nevertheless it's clear Assange - rightfully so - is getting increasingly frustrated with his status (and faces more enemies). Remember, Assange's uncharacteristically emotional remarks last year with Hannity:

"I have been detained illegally, without charge for six years, without sunlight, lots of spies everywhere. It's tough... but that's the mission I set myself on. I understand the kind of game that's being played - big powerful actors will try and take revenge...it's a different thing for my family - I have young children, under 10 years old, they didn't sign up for that... and I think that is fundamentally unjust... my family is innocent, they didn't sign up for that fight."

There is however, perhaps a modest silver lining, as Lasso latter said “we vow to take all the steps necessary so that another embassy will take him in and protect his rights.”

However, as the Miami Herald notes, even if another government were willing to provide Assange shelter, it’s unclear how he would be transferred. In the five years since he’s been holed up in the embassy, the Rafael Correa administration hasn’t been able to figure out how to move him to Ecuador, amid heavy police scrutiny in London.

Will Banks' Excess Reserves Fuel a New Monetary Crisis?

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 01:49 PM PST

Don't look now but inflation and a new gold rush might be in our future Introduction: Professional investors are selling stocks and buying gold. Small investors are buying stocks and neglecting gold. While the bulk of attention has gone to the stock market thus far this year, gold is up 7.2% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 6.2%. What is going on? In this month's issue we explore what the professional investors might know that small investors are missing? "Banks in the United States have the potential to increase liquidity suddenly and significantly – from $12 trillion to $36 trillion in currency and easily accessed deposits—and could thereby cause sudden inflation. This is possible because the nation’s fractional banking system allows banks to convert excess reserves held at the Federal Reserve into bank loans at about a 10-to-1 ratio. Banks might engage in such conversion if they believe other banks are about to do so, in a manner similar to a bank run that generates a self-fulfilling prophecy. . . What potentially matters about high excess reserves is that they provide a means by which decisions made by banks – not those made by the monetary authority, the Federal Reserve System – could increase inflation-inducing liquidity dramatically and quickly." – Christopher Phelan, economist, Minneapolis Federal Reserve

Jordan Maxwell on The #Illuminati Plan To Destroy #Trump

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 12:30 PM PST

 Secret society expert Jordan Maxwell breaks down the hidden realm of the Illuminati and how the elite use language and other systems of control to keep humanity asleep as they tighten the noose around their neck. The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://financearmageddon.blogspot.com http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Mike Kosares: Will banks' excess reserves fuel a monetary crisis?

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 10:57 AM PST

2p ET Saturday, March 4, 2017

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

In USAGold's March newsletter, proprietor Michael Kosares reviews indications that the banking system's "excess reserves" parked at the Federal Reserve are finding their way back into the economy through lending, pushing up prices and inflation, with positive implications for gold. Kosares' commentary is headlined "Will Banks' Excess Reserves Fuel a New Monetary Crisis?" and it's posted at USAGold here:

http://www.usagold.com/publications/NewsViewsMarch2017.html

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org



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(Golden Predator will be exhibiting at Booth 2650
at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference in Toronto from March 5-8.)

Golden Predator Begins Drill Program at 3 Aces Project
and Is Named to TSX Venture Exchange's Top 50 List


Company Announcement
Thursday, February 23, 2017

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada -- Golden Predator Mining Corp. (TSX.V: GPY; OTCQX: NTGSF) is pleased to announce it has commenced a 20,000-meter drill program at its fully owned 3 Aces project in southeastern Yukon. The drilling program will initially focus on targets in the Spades Zone, where 2016 results included a new vein discovery at depth plus 7.5 meters of 33 grams-per-tonne gold at the Ace of Spades.

Management is also pleased to announce that Golden Predator has been named a TSX Venture Top 50 company, placing fifth of 957 mining companies. ...

... For the remainder of the announcement:

http://www.goldenpredator.com/_resources/news/nr_2017_02_23.pdf



Join GATA here:

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Wednesday-Friday, April 5-7, 2017
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
http://asia.minesandmoney.com/

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Help keep GATA going:

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60 Investing Terms You Need to Know

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 09:15 AM PST

This post 60 Investing Terms You Need to Know appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

Whether you are a beginning investor or are just getting into finance, understanding market lingo can leave you better positioned for the future.

Reading editorials ranging from ZeroHedge, Wall Street Journal or even Barron's can become daunting with jargon. Investing terms can morph into their own coded language.

Not to fear, the world of investments is an ever-changing environment and knowing investing terms will put you at a great advantage. Below is a introductory list of 60 investing terms you need to know to gain a financial edge:

Active Trading Terminology:

Buy – A recommendation or action to purchase specific shares from a given company.

Sell – A reference to closing out a position on shares that were purchased. Typically calls to "sell" come from hitting a specific objective or to reduce losses occurred.

Bid – The price offer made to purchase a given stock that relates to what you're willing to spend and how many shares purchased from that buy.

Ask – Inversely from a bid, this is the quote price a buyer is looking to get per share (almost always higher than a bid).

Quote – The latest data on a stock's price that a buyer and seller actively agreed upon during transaction.

Returns – What is gained or lost through an investment over a specific time frame. These are typically views in returns on investment, equity and assets.

Execution – This is the action of buying or selling an order for a specific share of stocks.


Reviewing Market Conditions:

Bear Market – A market where conditions have investors generally expect stock prices to decline. In this environment, selling increases and short selling is frequent.

Bull Market – A financial market environment where prices are rising or anticipated to rise. While typically referencing the stock market it can also be applied to bonds, commodities (gold) or currency.

Volatility – The statistical rate at which a stock increases or decreases. Typically refers to uncertainty or risk in changes of a stock.

Liquidity – The ability for investors to get in and out of a stock or given security. This measures how easy an individual or company can buy or sell at given prices in a market.

Credit Risk – The threat that a borrower may not meet obligations of a loan and a lender could experience loss on the principal or interest of a specific loan.

Fundamentals – Data (quantitative and qualitative) that signals to the financial value of a company, stock or currency. This references how stable or risky a business or asset is.


Investing Terms on Pricing:

Yield – The amount of income from a return on an investment. This typically comes through dividends of a particular stock.

Rally – A continued rise in the price of the market that can also be focused on particular stocks and bonds. This movement varies depending on the market environment and duration.

Margin – The difference between the selling price of an investment and its cost of production. It can also be a reference to the revenue intake of a company and the overall expenses of business.

Dividend – A portion of a company's earnings that is paid to shareholders (those who own stocks).

Capitalization – The book value (sum of stock, long-term debt and retained earnings) of a company that can influence a company's value in a market.

Going Long – An expectation that a stock, commodity or currency will rise in value. Often an effort to purchase low and sell high.

Market Order – Instruction to execute, in rapid availability, a transaction at current market price. They operate with a bid price and an asking price.

Limit Order – An order to buy or sell at a designated price or at above the sale price. This method is more commonly used.

Good Till Cancelled (GTC) Order – An order placed to buy or sell a sThree Sectors Trending in the Trump Rallytock at a defined price will remain until it is either removed or executed by an investor.

Day Order – A given order that is only good for the hours the market is open on day placed.

Averaging Down – The process of purchasing more of a stock as the price goes downward.

Bid-Ask Spread – The amount in which the ask price is greater than the bid for a stock (asset). This is a reflection of supply and demand in a given market.

Day High and Low – An index of market trends comparing daily highs and lows in a given market.


Financial Environment:

Broker – An individual or firm that acts on behalf of an investor for an agreed fee or commission.

Hedge Funds – Investment firms that use "pooled funds" in order to employ diverse strategies in order to drive greater returns in a market.

Exchange – The location housing various investments that are traded in a market. These often cover securities, commodities and other financial transactions.

Sector – A selection of stocks that are within the same or connected business/industry.

Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) – A security that can be tracked on an index that holds assets (shares in stock, bonds, currency, gold) and is on a given stock exchange.

Initial Public Offering (IPO) – The first price offering of a private company's stock that is publicly traded in a market.

Authorized Shares – The maximum amount of shares that a company can legally trade.

Secondary Offering – An issuance of a new stock that has already made an IPO. Usually if a company's stock is rising, this is a method to sell more and raise greater capital.

Public Float – The regular shares that a company has issued that are available to be traded publicly.

Foreign Exchange – FOREX (FX) – The market in which currencies are traded.


Intra-Day Investing

Stock Symbol – Commonly a 1-3 characters from the alphabet representing a publicly traded company in a given stock exchange.

Portfolio – The series of investments an investor has (stocks, bonds, funds).

Day Trading – A practice in which an investor buys and sells stocks within a given trading day. The methodology for day trading varies by market and individual.

American Depository Receipts (ADR) – Certificates (receipts) for foreign stocks that trade in the U.S exchange markets.

Volume – The number of shares or select contracts that are traded in a market over a given time.

Close – The ending of a specific trading session in financial markets. (When you hear the bell ring).


Trading Areas:

Interest Rates – Amount charged by a lender to a borrow for the use of an asset.

Commodities – A basic good in commerce that is often used as a method to supplement goods or services. Commodities often are items like gold, oil, natural gas, grains, etc.

Futures – A financial contract that requires a buyer to purchase or sell an asset (often a physical commodity) at a given date and price in the future.

Bonds – A debt investment where money is loaned (often to a corporation or government) for a specific amount of time with an agreed upon fixed interest rate. Often used to raise money.

Securities – Represents a financial method of ownership of shares in stocks, bonds or rights of ownership (options).

Derivatives – A security that has a price that is dependent or valued from one or more assets. Considered a bet on a bet that can fluctuate depending on the underlying asset.

Blue Chip Stocks – Stocks from large, concretely established, financially stable companies that are considered to be able to provide reliable dividends.


Investing Market Sectors:

Credit Agency – A company that assembles mass aggregates of data about businesses, governments and various individuals debts to score creditworthiness. [Ratings agencies Standard & Poor’s (S&P) and Fitch Ratings use the AAA to identify bonds with the highest credit quality, while Moody’s uses AAA is the top credit rating.]

New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) – A stock exchange in New York, NY considered one of the world's largest list of securities.

Nasdaq – An American tech stock marketplace that is also used for buying and selling securities. Commonly featured are the world's leading technology and biotechnology companies.

Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) – A price average of thirty significant stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange  and the NASDAQ. Often referenced as "the Dow."

S&P 500 – The Standard & Poor's 500 index is a marketplace of 500 stocks that reflects large-cap American equities.

Russell 2000 – An index that measures 2,000 small-cap companies in the United States which consists of 3,000 of the biggest American stocks.


Central Banking:

Monetary Policy – Actions of a central bank and other regulatory departments that determine money supply and interest rates.

Federal Reserve – The central bank of the U.S that influences monetary policy and credit conditions.

Treasury Department – A U.S government department that is directly responsible for printing money, collecting tax, managing government accounts, overseeing government debt and promoting economic growth domestically.

Quantitative Easing – A irregular monetary policy where a central bank buys government securities in a given market with the intent on lowering interest rates and driving up money supplies.

Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP) – A nuanced central bank policy where target interest rates, typically applied during deflationary periods, are negatively charged on an account held at a bank in order for depositors to keep their money in holding.


Other Sources:

Agora Financial continues to offer top notch independent economic commentary on the world and how things work. As one of the leading publishers that houses economists like Jim Rickards, David Stockman and Nomi Prins to name a few. Agora Financial offers honest, unconventional and unbiased analysis.

If you are looking to expand your personal index of investing terms, Investopedia offers a unique source for investing terms and resources with a vast financial dictionary.

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Craig Wilson, @craig_wilson7
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The post 60 Investing Terms You Need to Know appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

Mining entrepreneur, Clinton confidant Giustra concedes gold price suppression

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 07:58 AM PST

11:11a ET Saturday, March 4, 2017

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

The price of gold has been heavily suppressed by the U.S. government, Wall Street financial houses, and the banking system, according to billionaire Canadian mining and movie entrepreneur Frank Giustra, a confidant and philanthropy associate of former President Bill Clinton.

Giustra's remarks were made in late January at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference during an interview with Marin Katusa of Katusa Research and were publicized today by GATA Board of Directors member Ed Steer's Gold & Silver Daily newsletter (http://www.edsteergoldandsilver.com).

... Dispatch continues below ...



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Video of the interview, posted by Katusa Research, shows Giustra identifying gold as the asset with the most potential for appreciation and describing the financial and political turmoil in the world. Then Katusa asks Giustra why the gold price hasn't reached $5,000 per ounce.

Giustra replies: "I'm not into conspiracy theories but I think gold is managed, and I think the West -- specifically the United States -- goes out of its way to downplay the value of gold from a historical perspective, and I think that they've done a very good job -- Wall Street, the banking system, the government. Every government wants to own gold. They don't want their citizens to own gold because that undermines the confidence in the real economy, and in a situation where you have such fragility in the system, the worst thing that any government would want to see is a spike in the price of gold."

To which GATA may reply ruefully: Better late than never. For nine years ago a mutual friend introduced GATA to Giustra in the belief that he could be immensely helpful to the cause of liberating the monetary metals markets. Your secretary/treasurer sent him a summary of GATA's documentation of the purposes and mechanisms of the gold price suppression scheme, a summary whose most recent edition is posted here:

http://www.gata.org/node/14839

Weeks passed and eventually Giustra was prodded into resentfully acknowledging receipt of the summary while adding that he had not yet had time to review it -- and that was the end of it.

Of course GATA does not expect people of great wealth to pursue the public interest or a social good when this involves challenging governmental and financial power far greater than their own. That kind of philanthropy could put their wealth, businesses, reputations, and even their lives at risk. But such people always could help indirectly and through intermediaries or groups. (Imagine what might be done by the World Gold Council, an organization of gold mining companies, if it ever wanted to function as a world gold council and not just as a facilitator of the fractional-reserve gold banking system.)

Now that Giustra admits knowledge of the Western gold price suppression scheme, will he do anything about it except passively wait for it to disintegrate, vindicate the value of his investments, and liberate not just the monetary metals markets but the world's markets generally? Is putting himself at risk in pursuit of justice that cosmic still out of the question?

Belated as it would be, GATA still could use and would be grateful for his help, which can be arranged here:

http://www.gata.org/node/16

Giustra's interview with Katusa is posted at the Vimeo video site here --

https://vimeo.com/202302922

-- and his remarks about gold price suppression begin at the 1:30 mark.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Actin Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org

* * *

Join GATA here:

Mining Investment Asia
Tuesday-Friday, March 28-31, 2017
Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
http://bit.ly/1DBH5lb

Mines and Money Asia
Wednesday-Friday, April 5-7, 2017
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
http://asia.minesandmoney.com/

* * *

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:

http://www.gata.org

To contribute to GATA, please visit:

http://www.gata.org/node/16

Bitcoin Is Now As Good As Gold, Actually It’s Better

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 07:33 AM PST

It wasn’t too long after I discovered bitcoin in 2011, trading at $3, that I became one of its biggest promoters. I have even said on several different occasions, that if bitcoin reaches its ultimate potential it will be worth more than $1 million in today’s US dollar terms. Of course, if it did, we wouldn’t be talking about the price of bitcoin in dollars because dollars likely wouldn’t exist anymore.

More Downside Potential in the Gold Stocks

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 07:23 AM PST

While we expected the gold stocks to correct and test GDX $22 and GDXJ $35, we did not expect it to happen so quickly. It literally took only three days! Gold stocks rebounded on Friday and managed to close the week above those key levels. While gold stocks could bounce or consolidate for a few days, we would advise patience as lower levels could be tested as spring begins.

The Deep State’s Gold Scam And The Demonization Of Russia

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 07:06 AM PST

As the Fiscal Year 2018 budget, and particularly its war component are floated, it has become clear that without continued, massive military spending, paid for with mass-produced electrons masquerading as money, U. S. GDP would collapse, taking the country’s financial and monetary systems with it. The nation, whose real economy has been hollowed out, for profit, by the Deep State plunderers, has become significantly reliant upon deliberately contrived wars and military tensions for its economic survival. With systemic monetary risk now at an unprecedented level, intensified by a new, partisan, “politics of defeat,” scorched earth agenda being implemented by those displeased with the results of the 2016 election, there has never been a more dangerous time for people to denominate their wealth in unbacked, baseless, debt-drugged dollars.

'Paper vs. physical dilemma' can power gold, Tice tells CNBC

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 06:38 AM PST

9:40a ET Saturday, March 4, 2017

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Fund manager David Tice, interviewed Friday on CNBC's "Closing Bell" program, argued that gold can rise despite rising interest rates, in part because of the "paper vs. physical dilemma." The interview is 3 minutes long and can be viewed at CNBC here:

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/03/gold-and-silver-are-a-gift-right-now-stra...

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org



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The company mined more than 8,000 ore tonnes by February 24 and is on target to achieve 10,000 tonnes by month end, which is 40 percent above February budget. The increased ore production is in part due to significant lower-grade ore being identified outside the planned ore envelope, which was identified by our ongoing grade-control program, highlighting the importance and success of this program. ...

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Join GATA here:

Mining Investment Asia
Tuesday-Friday, March 28-31, 2017
Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
http://bit.ly/1DBH5lb

Mines and Money Asia
Wednesday-Friday, April 5-7, 2017
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
http://asia.minesandmoney.com/

* * *

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:

http://www.gata.org

To contribute to GATA, please visit:

http://www.gata.org/node/16

Breaking News And Best Of The Web

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 01:37 AM PST

US stocks finish the week just below record levels. Gold and silver down from multi-week highs. Bitcoin now higher than gold. Fed expected to raise rates at next meeting. Trump budget to increase defense, cut EPA, State. Trump’s secretary of state forced to recuse himself from Russia investigation.   Best Of The Web Fake risk, […]

The post Breaking News And Best Of The Web appeared first on DollarCollapse.com.

Alarming Data on Gold Prompts Special Report from Jack Chan

Posted: 04 Mar 2017 12:00 AM PST

Technical analyst Jack Chan finds the latest Commitment of Traders (COT) data alarming and explains what the COT charts predict for the gold and silver markets.

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