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• Monday Holiday Note for October 8
• Election Gambling With Superior Odds
• How Gold Investment Hurts The Economy And Becomes A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Silver Suppression Explained: Part 2
• BrotherJohnF: Obamanomics 10.6.12
• The SCO, China, Iran, and gold
• Will Bank Of America Continue To Underperform In 2013?
• Gold Bars Worldwide
• “What if the Global Financial Crisis is Permanent?”
• New York Times Story Bizarrely Downplays Impact of Ocean Acidification
• Nephilim Giants
• IRS Reporting of Ag Bar Sales, BS or not?

Monday Holiday Note for October 8 Posted: 07 Oct 2012 11:18 AM PDT From our friends at Pennaluna comes this helpful notice regarding Monday, October 8, a sort-of holiday in the U.S. and Thanksgiving north of the 48th. "Dear PennTrader, Monday is Canada's Thanksgiving Day, so the Canadian markets will be closed. Monday is also Columbus Day in the US - one of our odd holidays when banks and federal offices are closed, mail isn't delivered, the bond market is closed...BUT... the US stock markets are open, as are many other businesses. So on Monday, we'll be open -- but for US trading only. The Canadian markets will reopen on Tuesday morning. Enjoy your holiday (if you have one). Thank you for using PennTrade." Happy Thanksgiving to all our Canadian friends.  We may cook a turkey with dressing to be in solidarity with ya'll, eh?   (Image courtesy of Canadian Club Houston)

Election Gambling With Superior Odds Posted: 07 Oct 2012 10:09 AM PDT By Modernist: Romney has an 80% chance of losing, according to Nate Silver of NYT. But the market isn't pricing this in. Journalists make money from reporting on a neck-and-neck race, so they are trying their best to make 80% look like 50%. This misinformation creates superior odds for those who bet against it. The following picks represent a diversified, actionable opportunity to generate significant returns on the election next month. If you disagree with Silver's projection, feel free to bet opposite. Short Coal As Jim Cramer points out, a Romney win would favor coal companies like American Electric Power (AEP), Southern Company (SO) and Union Pacific (UNP). These companies may have bonus alpha from shorting because Cramer specifically suggested them as picks for those who think Romney will win. Also in this space are Arch Coal (ACI), Alpha Natural Resources (ANR), Peabody Energy (BTU), Consol Energy (CNX), James River Coal Company Complete Story »

How Gold Investment Hurts The Economy And Becomes A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Posted: 07 Oct 2012 09:02 AM PDT BySeth Walters: One of the most hyped investments out there is gold, with silver, platinum, and sometimes palladium coming in behind as distant cousins. To be quite honest, I much prefer investing in things that I have to go learn about a little bit and that every website on the Internet is not flashing ads at me telling me to buy. Perhaps I am naive, but it makes me feel a little more that I am not simply following the herd and buying into a massive bubble. In this article, I will make the argument that commodity fetishism, or the desire to possess physical commodities as an investment, harms the real economy and slows real economic growth. As such, responsible investors should avoid the practice (aside from the fact that the precious metals are all trading at giant bubble valuations). For convenience's sake, you will see me refer to precious metals in Complete Story »

Silver Suppression Explained: Part 2 Posted: 07 Oct 2012 07:36 AM PDT The Silver Suppression Explained – Part 2 – Office Series 20 from brotherjohnf: ~TVR

BrotherJohnF: Obamanomics 10.6.12 Posted: 07 Oct 2012 07:34 AM PDT brotherjohnf: Silver Update 10/6/12 Obamanomics from brotherjohnf: ~TVR

The SCO, China, Iran, and gold Posted: 07 Oct 2012 07:00 AM PDT I make no apology for returning to the subject of China, its role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and gold. Gold is now a strategic metal for present and future SCO governments, which ...

Will Bank Of America Continue To Underperform In 2013? Posted: 07 Oct 2012 05:40 AM PDT ByPaulina: Introduction Bank of America (BAC) represents a question mark in the minds of many investors. Is it extremely risky to bet on financial institutions that have been marred by unethical practices in the past? As the banking industry of the U.S. continues to recover from the 2008-2009 financial meltdown, I will take a look at the current prospects of BAC - the U.S.'s top employer at the start of 2012. Company Profile It is estimated that the company's 2008 acquisition of Countrywide has now cost BAC more than $40 billion in losses on real estate, legal costs and settlements. The Merrill Lynch acquisition removed any doubt regarding the company's weakened condition stemming from the financial crisis, as the purchase was soon discovered to be a dud. BAC is currently on a cost-cutting drive to find a frugal, yet profitable, strategy for its business. Accordingly, BAC will cut 16,000 jobs, reducing Complete Story »

Gold Bars Worldwide Posted: 06 Oct 2012 11:00 PM PDT Gold Bars worldwide

“What if the Global Financial Crisis is Permanent?” Posted: 06 Oct 2012 10:51 PM PDT Yves here. I'm featuring a MacroBusiness post, "What If the GFC is Permanent?" despite its being a bit meandering, because it asks some Big Questions, and therefore will give readers something to chew over. The headline doesn't quite get at what the post is about. Its focus is a recent paper by Robert Gordon questioning whether growth is over. I've read the underlying paper; MacroBusiness's relies on a comment by Martin Wolf that discusses it. Key sections of its abstract: There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history… The analysis links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions (IR's), that is, IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present. It provides evidence that IR #2 was more important than the others and was largely responsible for 80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth between 1890 and 1972. Once the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth during 1972-96 was much slower than before. In contrast, IR #3 created only a short-lived growth revival between 1996 and 2004. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature. Even if innovation were to continue into the future at the rate of the two decades before 2007, the U.S. faces six headwinds that are in the process of dragging long-term growth to half or less of the 1.9 percent annual rate experienced between 1860 and 2007. These include demography, education, inequality, globalization, energy/environment, and the overhang of consumer and government debt. A provocative "exercise in subtraction" suggests that future growth in consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution could fall below 0.5 percent per year for an extended period of decades. I'm a bit dubious of tying the underlying problem of growth to getting out of the global financial crisis, although they certainly interact in nasty ways. If you look at our last big financial crisis, the Great Depression, it occurred in what Gordon would characterize as an underlying period of growth. Peter Temin has argued, and his analysis is persuasive, that the Depression came out of a breakdown of a paradigm that had performed well in terms of promoting trade and international stability, that of the gold standard. It was suspended in World War I and Temin contends that the efforts in the 1920s to restore it led directly to the Great Depression. A 31 year crisis (from 1914 till a new financial order was negotiated in Bretton Woods in 1944 and was implemented in 1945) is well nigh permanent from the perspective of those living through it. So even before you get to Gordon's reasons for doubting that past rates of growth can be restored, a global financial crisis can be a symptom of the end of a set of a financial arrangements, and the time it takes to accept that and implement new arrangements can be protracted. As we warned in ECONNED: All these factors play a role in the hesitance to impose tough reforms, but the most intractable and least recognized is the last, the difficulty of seeing that the failings of the current system are deeply rooted and not amenable to simple remedies. Any resolution of the major problems facing the financial system would take a good deal of time, care, and persistent effort, and would simultaneously be highly politicized. That makes it very likely that the financial services industry will derail or blunt reform efforts. That in turn means the current paradigm will be patched up and restored to service only to fail again. This pattern will replay until the breakdown is beyond repair. By Michael Feller, an investment strategist. Cross posted from MacroBusiness While Europe may be reaching a deal of sorts between Teutonic lender and Latin borrower, and while pre-election America may appear to be regaining momentum in the form of lending and employment data, economic turbulence has merely moved eastwards in its slow, global orbit. With the Asian Development Bank cutting regional growth forecasts from 6.9% to 6.1%, and Future Fund chief David Murray warning of an external finance shock in Australia, IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard seems right when he forecast on Wednesday that the world would not recover from the financial crisis until at least 2018. But what if Blanchard were wrong? What if his premise was incorrect? Certainly, there is a very real structural slowdown in China, a pause in the consumption rates of South Asia and Indonesia, and a continuing malaise in Japan, but what if we didn't look at this as a crisis, but as statis? What if our obsession with economic growth and measures of growth turned out to be an illusion. The Financial Times' Martin Wolf opened this can of worms on Tuesday, asking if unlimited growth was a thing of the past. Citing research on historic rates of productivity by economist Robert Gordon, Wolf questioned whether our current third industrial revolution – that of information, rather than steam and mechanisation in the 19th, or urbanisation and middle class expansion in the 20th century – was really all that profound. Who, for instance, would trade Facebook or an iPhone for indoor heating or a flushing toilet? What economic gains could broadband have over the original subsea telegraph? Could the benefits of green energy really compare to the discovery of alternating current or the invention of the turbine? These are questions others have asked as well, ranging from the longue durée historians of the Sorbonne, who are attempting to pinpoint capitalism's demise by 2100 (economic systems, like those of feudal Europe or the Roman Empire, apparently last 600 years), to UBS strategist Andy Lees, who last year provocatively claimed the world had hit its innovation peak in the 1840s. Furthermore, these questions are not new. William Morris, better known for his wallpaper designs, wrote of a cashless society in late Victorian England. In 1516, philosopher Thomas More described the isle of Utopia where gold and silver were cast aside for pursuits of real prosperity, the metals only used for the "humblest items of domestic equipment". And of course, there was John Stuart Mill, who in 1848 would advance the notion of the 'stationary state', where objectives of economic quality were to be pursued over objectives of economic quantity. This no-growth model would later have appeal for Kibbutzniks, survivalists, and environmentalists such the authors of the 1972 Club of Rome report – who reintroduced Mill's concept of the limits of growth to a new Malthusian audience. Even John Meynard Keynes, an admirer of Mill, would at times lament the obsession politicians would come to have with GDP, an instrument of measurement he helped devise for limited use during the Second World War. Yet Mill's legacy is perhaps most relevant today with global populations now stabilising, the risks of catastrophic climate change becoming ever more apparent, technology supplanting labour and productivity seen by many economists as the last great hope for growth. Indeed, outside of canonising modern liberalism or the idea of falsification in the scientific method, Mill's most important contribution to political economy was arguably his theory of development: that growth was a function of capital, labour and land (or natural resources). Mill felt that sustainable development was only possible if growth in labour was exceeded by growth in land and capital productivity, rather than debt. With middle class wages stagnating and the so-called 99% seeing few of the economic gains that we are supposed to have made since the economic deregulation of the 1980s, Mill's dictums speak a remarkable truth across the gulf of time. In a week where prominent fund manager Bill Gross likened America's credit-based economic model to a crystal meth addiction (like any 'hopium' or narcotic, debt borrows the benefits of tomorrow for the enjoyment of today) and when central banks, from Australia to Russia, are joining peers in Europe, Britain, the US and Japan in pushing down rates or pump-priming markets with liquidity, one can see another of Mill's classic warnings – the tyranny of the majority – coming true, with quick fixes and short-term solutions the order of the day. Yet no country is as perhaps as apt for Mill's analysis than China: a country that is in a self-imposed demographic decline, where utilitarianism and capital factor productivity have been warped into a fixed-asset bubble and where land is quite literally denuded of soil, drained of moisture and acidified by the detritus of industrialisation. In an oped for the New York Times last week, economist Richard Easterlin described China's belief it could purchase social stability through rapid economic growth as a "Faustian bargain"; a phrase also used recently by Bundesbank chief Jen Wideman's in criticising the European Central Bank's outright monetary transactions. In a survey of opinions on life satisfaction scored between 1990 and 2011, Easterlin and his colleagues found that the average Chinese is no more satisfied today than they were in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. Moreover, scores on satisfaction for urbanites actually declined for most of the period, as old social safety nets – China's so-called 'iron rice bowl' – were removed in the name of productivity, efficiency and, ultimately, economic liberalisation, and as the competitive urges of capitalism overtook the cooperation, forced as it was or not, of socialism. Yet unlike other post-Enlightenment political philosophies – both the capitalism of Adam Smith or the communism of Karl Marx – Mill saw growth as more than material. Borrowing from its classical antecedent – the Ancient Greeks spoke of humanity's goal aseudaimonia, or flourishing – modern society is built on the ideal of improvement, development, growth and expansion, but it needn't be so mono-dimensional. Indeed, Aristotle considered an essential pillar of eudaimonia, or one of the four cardinal virtues, to be moderation. The problem is that in many ways we may have already reached the limits of growth. Politicians like to talk about half-glass full and half-glass empty, yet ultimately we're still drinking from the same poisoned chalice. By relooking at John Stuart Mill there may be a more refreshing alternative.

New York Times Story Bizarrely Downplays Impact of Ocean Acidification Posted: 06 Oct 2012 09:03 PM PDT The Grey Lady tonight, in true "newspaper of record" fashion, has an article that manages to acknowledge some of the effects of ocean acidification, and its links to global warming, while sidestepping how grim the implications are. The article, titled "Scientists Adopt Tiny Island as a Warming Bellwether," does point out, via recounting how the number and health of various species on Tatoosh Island, Washington, have declined over time, and that the culprit is rising CO2 levels. But the story is written as if the intent is to anesthetize readers. Tellingly, it mentions "huge declines in Ph" first, and used the word "acidic" sparingly, a mere three times. 14 of its 24 paragraphs are travel narrative, with soothing images of crashing waves and rugged vistas. Some examples, starting with the opening paragraph: From a stretch of rocky shoreline on this tiny island, one can, on any given morning, watch otters floating on their backs, elephant seals hauling out of the water and a bald eagle flying past murres huddled along a cliff face. The startled birds perform a synchronized dive into the sea, their ovoid black-and-white bodies resembling miniature penguins…. While their parents are out counting barnacles or collecting water samples, the children, Anna, 9, and Ben, 12, lie in their bunks and read. Or they head out to try to catch a fish for dinner, hopping and skipping their way across slippery rocks and past several dark caves to a perch on the island's north end. What the researchers call "happy time" comes in the afternoon when the tides return and they gather — along with a rotating cadre of graduate students — outside the Winter Palace on an old dock laid out on the lawn to compare notes, gossip and have a snack. Everyone gets a brownie, courtesy of Dr. Pfister, but only one — and everyone keeps close watch. "Being a graduate adviser is like doing a second round of parenting," Dr. Paine said. And even when impact on marine life and the species that depend on them are mentioned, the story focuses on the impact on the island, rather than reverting to the typical journalistic device of using the anecdotes to leaven a serious, detailed discussion of the issues, which in this case would be the data and the science. But to the extent the article provides it, it's in minimalist, dumbed down form: Among the declines the researchers are noticing: historically hardy populations of gulls and murres are only half what they were 10 years ago, and only a few chicks hatched this spring. Mussel shells are notably thinner, and recently the mussels seem to be detaching from rocks more easily and with greater frequency. Goose barnacles are also suffering, and so are the hard, splotchy, wine-colored coralline algae, which appear like graffiti along rocky shorelines. While not entirely understood, the declines are not entirely mysterious. Biologists suspect that the shifts are related to huge declines in the water's pH, a shift attributed to the absorption of excess carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in ever-greater amounts by the burning of fossil fuels for energy. As the carbon dioxide is absorbed, it alters the oceanic water chemistry, turning it increasingly acidic. Barnacles, oysters and mussels find it more difficult to survive, which can cause chain reactions among the animals that eat those species, like birds and people. No where does the article clearly describe that acidification threatens all crustacea, as well as coral reefs. By mentioning the particular species ("barnacles, oysters and mussels") it makes it sound like the casualties will be comparatively few and ones can we live with (well, I suppose some people can't get by without moules et frites, but you get the picture). Contrast the overview from the Times with this section of a 2007 Angry Bear post by Stormy that we discussed at length here: One of the most startling effects is the acidification of the oceans. Since 1750, the oceans have become increasingly acidic. In the oceans, CO2 forms carbonic acid, a serious threat to the base of the food chain, especially on shellfish of all sizes. Carbonic acid dissolves calcium carbonate, an essential component of any life form with an exoskeleton. In short, all life forms with an exoskeleton are threatened: shell fish, an important part of the food chain for many fish; coral reefs, the habitat of many species of fish…. And, as readers of my last thread might remember, we are accelerating our creation of CO2 at an alarming rate. According to the Energy Bulletin, China alone is planning of 562 new coal plants by 2012. By 2012, the plants in three key countries – China, India, and the United States – are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons. According to one estimate, between 1750 and 1994, oceans absorbed 118 billion tons of CO2—and we were just starting serious CO2 production. As anyone with a fish tank knows, as the Ph falls, the water becomes more acidic. Fish life becomes more and more problematical. This absorption has made the world's oceans significantly more acidic since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Research published last year by Mark Jacobson, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, indicated that between 1751 and 2004 surface ocean pH dropped from approximately 8.25 to 8.14. James Orr of the Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory further estimated that ocean pH levels could fall another 0.3 – 0.4 units by 2100. In fact, by 2050, …there may be too little carbonate for [in the Pacific] organisms to form shells as soon as 2050. Since 1990 alone, Ph levels in the Pacific have dropped .0025. Such a drop may not seem significant until one understands Ph levels. Both of the articles cited above are well-worth reading in full. The first article is perhaps the most germane, touching, as it does, on the causes of the Permian extinction, the largest mass die-off in the earth's history. Yes, the oceans became acidic, far more so than ours will by 2100, I think, I hope. Yves here. In case you think Stormy was being unduly alarmist, consider this section of a post we published in March of this year: Consider the scope of the paper in Science, per a very good discussion in ars technica: A new paper in Science examines the geologic record for context relating to ocean acidification…The research group (twenty-one scientists from nearly as many different universities) reviewed the evidence from past known or suspected intervals of ocean acidification…They find that the current rate of ocean acidification puts us on a track that, if continued, would likely be unprecedented in last 300 million years. There is an important driver of this process that this overview mentions only in passing further on, and it's useful to have it in mind when you review the discussion of the historical record: ocean acidification depends primarily on the rate of atmospheric CO2 increases, not the absolute concentration. Look at how attenuated the rate of past CO2 changes was in the past versus the speed now: The first period the researchers looked at was the end of the last ice age, starting around 18,000 years ago. Over a period of about 6,000 years, atmospheric CO2 levels increased by 30 percent, a change of roughly 75 ppm. (For reference, atmospheric CO2 has gone up by about the same amount over the past 50 years.) Over that 6,000 year time period, surface ocean pH dropped by approximately 0.15 units. That comes out to about 0.002 units per century. Our current rate is over 0.1 units per century—two orders of magnitude greater, which lines up well with a model estimate we covered recently. The last deglaciation did not trigger a mass extinction, but it did cause changes in some species… During the Pliocene warm period, about 3 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 was about the same as today, but pH was only 0.06 to 0.11 units lower than preindustrial conditions. This is because the event played out over 320,000 years or so. We see species migration in the fossil record in response to the warming planet, but not ill effects on calcifiers… Next, the researchers turned their focus to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (or PETM), which occurred 56 million years ago. Global temperature increased about 6°C over 20,000 years due to an abrupt release of carbon to the atmosphere (though this was not as abrupt as current emissions). The PETM saw the largest extinction of deep-sea foraminifera of the last 75 million years, and was one of the four biggest coral reef disasters of the last 300 million years… The group also examined the several mass extinctions that defined the Mesozoic—the age of dinosaurs. The boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic included a large increase in atmospheric CO2 (adding as much as 1,300 to 2,400 ppm) over a relatively short period of time, perhaps just 20,000 years. The authors write, "A calcification crisis amongst hypercalcifying taxa is inferred for this period, with reefs and scleractinian corals experiencing a near-total collapse." Again, though, it's unclear how much of the catastrophe can be blamed on acidification rather than warming. Finally, we come the big one—The Great Dying. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction (about 252 million years ago) wiped out around 96 percent of marine species. Still, the rate of CO2 released to the atmosphere that drove the dangerous climate change was 10-100 times slower than current emissions… In the end, the researchers conclude that the PETM, Triassic-Jurassic boundary, and Permian-Triassic boundary are the closest analogs to the modern day, at least as far as acidification is concerned. Due to the poor ocean chemistry data for the latter two, the PETM is the best event for us to compare current conditions. It's still not perfect—the rate of CO2 increase was slower than today… The authors conclude, "[T]he current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 [million years] of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change." Translation: "We're probably fucked, but the data is so far outside of historical parameters, we can't say anything with a high degree of certainty." Back to the current post. It's not hard to find this sort of discussion on the grim effects of ocean acidification, yet the Times chooses to gloss over it as if the potential impact isn't known. Get a grip: scientists are looking at mass species die-offs as the closest comparable. By contrast, what we get from the Times is a narrowly accurate but substantively misleading bromide of the "no one knows for sure" sort. This is how the article concludes: He speaks of the calcareous sponges that live in the caves of Tatoosh and, like hard-shell species, use dissolved calcium carbonate, in this case to form their skeletons or spicules, thus making them vulnerable in more acidic waters. "Almost nothing is known about this species," Dr. Paine said. "No one in their right mind has the time to sample calcareous sponges, let alone recognize them," he added. "They're likely to disappear." While some species may be able to adapt to new oceanic conditions, many will not. "You can predict change," Dr. Paine said, "and most of the changes are going to be in a direction we don't want." So what is the coded message here? Yeah, we're gonna lose some species, but they are so obscure most scientists don't recognize them. The fact that acidification can and likely will make the ocean hostile to many forms of life, either directly or second hand, by diminishing their habitat or food supply, is acknowledged in "many will not adapt to new oceanic conditions," a remarkably bloodless formulation. There have probably been other examples of this sort of news treatment that I've missed, but this story comes off as a new form of propaganda. Rather than run a Big Lie, and say something isn't happening when it is, or try agnotology, in claiming the research around an issue is inconclusive when it isn't, this piece 'fesses up to the existence of a Big Problem and presents it as something not to be worried about, a threat to fungus and sponges and mollusks, not to Life As We Know It. Stormy's conclusion from March 2007 is still apt: I like my old metaphor—and will again trot it out: We are all subprime borrowers. Right now our credit seems good. Life seems good. We look around and behold the miracle of our civilization, on its capacity to grow and on the energy it has harnessed. But all things have their price; nothing is free…. Repayment may be sooner than we think.

Nephilim Giants Posted: 06 Oct 2012 05:07 PM PDT Need a break from Silver and Gold, follow this hole. The Truth About Nephilim Giants (Full Video) with Steve Quayle. from goodsamaritean4life: ~TVR

IRS Reporting of Ag Bar Sales, BS or not? Posted: 06 Oct 2012 04:30 PM PDT From another forum (consider the source): http://forums.silverseek.com/showthr...219#post233219 Quote: Going back to 2010, a large organization that many of the bullion dealers belong to, voluntarily took on the following reporting rules to the IRS. All "Silver Bar" sales totaling 1,000 ounces or more in a single year are reported to the IRS on a 1099-B form. They report the total number of ounces sold and the total value of the sales on that form. I have one from APMEX dated for 2010. They do not tell you about this, as it's a surprise on "your" part after year end, when you get a copy of the 1099-B in the mail. Sounds like bullsh!t to me, I thought the reporting minimum was $10K, regardless of form.

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