Gold World News Flash |
- 50 Predictions For 2013
- What Happened The Last Time Gold And Central Banks Were So Far Apart?
- The Fiscal Cliff Bill Will Raise Taxes on Those Making $100,000 a Year By $2,000 – YouTube
- FOR THE RECORD: GATA, Ted Truman And Gold … Another Stunning Revelation
- Economic Outlook for 2013 by Bob Pollin – YouTube
- Gold and Silver Updated
- MOTHER, SHOULD I TRUST THE GOVERNMENT?
- Does a Fiscal Cliff jump mean the end of the US dollar and the rise of the Chinese Yuan? [GoldSeek.com TV Interview]
- Free Trade: The Great Prosperity Machine – YouTube
- Trader’s 2013 Predictions
- Silver Update 12/31/12 Fiscal Clowns – YouTube
- 2013: The Year of Gold – YouTube
- In The News Today
- Big Hedge Fund Whacked - And Warm Feelings
- Multiple Justice Disorder
- What Do the Similarities & Differences Between the 1980 Top in Gold & the Current Situation Mean for Its Future?
- Giggling Glee
- A Glass Of Golden Bubbly
- Washington Agreement is another gold rig, former Fed and Treasury official admits
- My Top 6 Stock Picks for 2013 – According to Me, Myself and I
- You Know How This Ends Right? This Ends Through War
- 2012 Was a Hell of a Year for Investors! Here are 6 Lessons Learned for 2013
- The Fiscal Cliff Will Prove to Be a Dud – and More Optimistic Forecasts for 2013
- Jan.1st, 2013: Economic, Business & Financial Market News From BNN
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 11:40 PM PST from The Economic Collapse Blog:
|
| What Happened The Last Time Gold And Central Banks Were So Far Apart? Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:19 PM PST from Zero Hedge:
|
| The Fiscal Cliff Bill Will Raise Taxes on Those Making $100,000 a Year By $2,000 – YouTube Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:09 PM PST Check our website daily at... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.figanews.com for full Content ]]  |
| FOR THE RECORD: GATA, Ted Truman And Gold … Another Stunning Revelation Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:05 PM PST On May 10, 2000 a GATA delegation consisting of Reg Howe, Frank Veneroso, Chris Powell and Bill Murphy met with Denny Hastert, The Speaker of the House in the United States Congress; Spencer Bachus, the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy; and Dr. John Silvia, the Chief Economist of the Senate Banking Committee. We presented each of them our 100 page "Gold Derivative Banking Crisis" document and personally delivered it to the staff of every House and Senate Banking Committee member. It actually made the news on ABC television in Australia. From www.LeMetropoleCafe.com six days later: May 16, 2000 - Spot Gold $275.30 down 20 cents - Spot Silver $5.11 up 9 cents Midas Special Dinner plans are with former Justice/Treasury Department attorney and Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee member, Ethan Stroud, this evening, so this MIDAS will be a shorter than planned… GATA put out a press release this morning about the Roll Call open letter and our trip to Washington, noting that we met with Congressman Spencer Backus of Alabama. Congressman Backus is Chairman of the House Banking Sub Committee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy. This committee has oversight of the gold and silver markets and is the right place to go about our gold market concerns… Allow me to let you in on some of the inside scoop going on here. Over the past year, the name Ted Truman has popped up in our circles as a CIA snoop. That is also the word around certain politicos in Washington. Rumor mind you, but smoke all over the place on this one. He used to work for the Federal Reserve, but he had a falling out with Alan Greenspan. Al Gore picked him to go work at the Treasury which is where he is employed at the moment. After one of our meetings in Washington, we met with one of GATA's support contacts and told him the names of who we met with. Immediately, he told us to be careful with one of them because he has a direct line to Ted Truman. That sets the scene. Yesterday, I almost fell off my chair when GATA Treasurer/Secretary Chris Powell faxed me of a copy of a letter he just received from none other than Ted Truman! It was dated May 10, the day of our meetings in Washington. We did not get out of our meeting that day until A letter that was sent to Senator McConnell of Kentucky from Jeffrey Rush Jr., Inspector General of The Treasury. A letter to Dale Schnitzler and Congressman Sherrod Brown of Ohio from Marti Thomas, Acting Assistant Secretary of The Treasury. A letter to Congressman Charles T. Canady from Linda L. Robertson, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. A letter to Senator Christopher Dodd (with "concerning questions from Mr. Chris Powell." written in the letter) from Michelle A. Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Two letters to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers from Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. A letter to Senator Lieberman from Alan Greenspan in response to GATA's Roll Call questions. All this, but no letter from Secretary Summers to anyone, not even to Senator Lieberman. Secretary Summers had everyone else put their name down. But, NOT HIS. At the same time, there was plenty of correspondence to Chris Powell over these past many months by other Treasury officials in response to his request for answers to the questions that GATA posed in the Roll Call open letter. It is very odd then that this supposed CIA snoop (with the proper name of Edward M. Truman) with the Treasury writes to Chris Powell after obviously being immediately informed about we said at one of our presentations in Washington. The letter itself was a form one that most others received except for one difference. It started out, "Secretary Summers has asked me to respond on his behalf." I cannot help but think that Secretary Summers is the ringleader of the US gold trading operation, having taken over from former Treasury Secretary Rubin. The evidence is starting to mount. If that is the case, and Congress finds this out, it could open up a can of worms and who knows what else Congress will find? The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee and our supporters in the GATA delegation could be the Democrats worst nightmare, maybe Tony Blair's too. -END- As for Tony Blair, he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when the Bank of England announced a very controversial decision to sell 400 tonnes of gold at around $275 an ounce, which was close to the bottom of the market. Nearly a month ago Ned Naylor-Leyland, investment director of Cheviot Asset Management in London, interviewed by Max Keiser on yesterday's edition of "The Keiser Report" on the Russia Today television network, revealed that the British Broadcasting Corp.'s investigative journalism TV program, "Panorama," killed a report exposing silver market manipulation even after doing substantial interviews that provided evidence of manipulation by JP Morgan, etc. GATA knew all about the Panorama TV program due to GATA's Adrian Douglas being involved. Word was that it was a call from Tony Blair which killed the airing of the show. It begs the question to ask why and reveals just how big a deal the precious metal market manipulation story really is. The story won't die there. (And it didn't with this discovery)… From the Daily Mail: PUBLISHED: 12:51 EST, 16 September 2012 Tony Blair has taken a £4.2million loan secured against his family home from the US bank he advises, it emerged yesterday. The former Prime Minister received the seven-figure mortgage from JP Morgan, which pays him £2.5million a year for his advice… http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204154/Tony-Blair-takes-4-2m-lo... -END- A decade later, Mr. Truman surfaced again… ft.com October 12, 2010 2:01 pm America should open its vaults and sell gold By Edwin Truman Gold is back in the news. Its price is soaring in what some analysts say is a reflection of a weak economy and a lack of confidence in government policies. Naturally, investors are looking at a new sure thing in the expectation that prices will continue upward. My advice to the US government, however, is that this may be the best time – to sell. Doing so would help President Barack Obama and Congress reduce indebtedness, at little cost… http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2bbd4dbe-d5fe-11df-94dc-0 -END- Which has now led to this stunning revelation by R.M. and my colleague Chris Powell in this GATA missive… Washington Agreement is another gold rig, former Fed and Treasury official admits Submitted by cpowell on 09:01AM ET Tuesday, January 1, 2013. Section: Daily Dispatches 12:12p ET Tuesday, January 1, 2013 Coordination of European central bank gold sales under the Washington Agreement on Gold, an agreement made in 1999 and updated in 2004 and 2009, is "the modern counterpart" of the London Gold Pool of the 1960s, which controlled gold prices until it collapsed in March The former official, Edwin M. Truman, went on to describe an enduring system of daily communication among Western central banks in which they share "confidential information" that includes "the size, currency, and nature of their foreign exchange market operations." Thirteen years ago as assistant treasury secretary for international affairs, Truman denied in a letter to GATA that the Treasury Department was involved in manipulation of the gold market. But he did not volunteer any awareness of gold market manipulation from other Ironically, in his presentation to last month's investment conference, sponsored by the Bank for International Settlements and the World Bank and held in Washington – http://www.bis.org/events/pic2012.pdf Truman, now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, urged greater transparency for central banks and sovereign wealth funds and seemed to argue that they should not resist devaluation of the U.S. dollar. Truman cited the work of two colleagues at the Peterson institute who last week published a report blaming the U.S. trade deficit on currency manipulation by foreign central banks and advocating dollar devaluation: http://www.iie.com/publications/interstitial.cfm?ResearchID=2302 Of gold market rigging in the 1960s and today, Truman said: "Participants, a subset of the G-10 countries, cooperated in feeding gold into the London gold market to help keep the price close to $35 an ounce. The modern counterpart of the gold pool is the agreement among the central banks of some of these same countries to limit their market sales of gold. But that agreement, which currently runs through 2014, does not extend beyond a small group of countries." A detailed description of the London Gold Pool is posted at Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool The European Central Bank's most recent statement about the coordination of central bank gold sales is posted here: http://www.ecb.int/press/pr/date/2009/html/pr090807.en.html Of secret coordination of Western central bank currency market interventions, Truman noted "the establishment at the BIS in 1962 of the Gold and Foreign Exchange Committee of the G-10 central banks," adding, "At regular monthly meetings, participants exchanged views on conditions in gold and foreign exchange markets as well as their own operations. These discussions involved extensive sharing of confidential information. Later on these same central banks began regularly to participate in daily telephone calls in which they discussed, and exchanged information on, financial market developments including the size, currency, and nature of their foreign exchange market operations." But Truman's presentation to the BIS-World Bank conference seems to have been mainly a lament that the United States is losing control of the world financial system as huge dollar foreign exchange reserves are held opaquely by foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds and the U.S. government can't keep track of them and know where they may be used to strike next. He says more cooperation with international "public-sector investment policies" is needed and warns that "the alternative to increased cooperation on public-sector Of course given his biography -- http://www.piie.com/staff/author_bio.cfm?author_id=122 -- the greatest blow for transparency in the currency markets might be struck simply by strapping Truman himself onto a witness stand somewhere and putting him under oath. Wikipedia quotes New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman as having described Truman as "the George Smiley of international economics" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_M._Truman -- George Smiley being the British intelligence officer of the John LeCarre spy novels. Ever since Truman manifested himself during a GATA delegation's visit to U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other members of Congress in Washington in May 2000, GATA Chairman Bill Murphy has been describing Truman as a Central Intelligence Agency asset. Truman's presentation to the BIS-World Bank conference, acknowledging that gold market rigging continues through the Washington Agreement on Gold, is posted at GATA's Internet site here: http://www.gata.org/files/Truman-WorldBank-BIS-12-03-2012.pdf CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer * * * The evidence is mounting about The Gold Cartel price suppression scheme almost every week now, in every way imaginable, including the way gold and silver have been trading. What is it going to take to get the mainstream gold world press to deal with the truth so that the gold price suppression scheme can be exposed and stopped? Bill Murphy |
| Economic Outlook for 2013 by Bob Pollin – YouTube Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:02 PM PST Check our website daily at... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.figanews.com for full Content ]]  |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 08:00 PM PST by Gary Tanashian, Silver Seek:
A favorable bigger picture risk vs. reward situation was also highlighted for gold and silver in that post. Among the reasons for this:
|
| MOTHER, SHOULD I TRUST THE GOVERNMENT? Posted: 01 Jan 2013 07:13 PM PST Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb? Mother, should I run for president?
The lyrics to Mother had both a literal and figurative meaning for Roger Waters. He was literally describing his overprotective single mother (his father was killed in World War II) building walls to protect him from the outside world. The figurative meaning is Big Mother sending its boys off to war and using fear to control and manipulate the masses. At the time he wrote this song in 1979, the Soviet Union was thought to be at its peak of power and the Berlin Wall represented a boundary between good and evil. Nuclear war was still a looming fear. Waters has always had a dim view of totalitarian states and institutions (English schools). Having seen his Wall Tour performance this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with a diverse crowd of 40,000, ranging in age from senior citizens to teenagers, it seems this song has gained new meaning. He sang a duet with himself from 1980 projected on the Wall and when he sang the lyric, "Mother, should I trust the government?" the entire stadium responded in unison – NO!!! This revealed a truth that is not permitted to be discussed by the corporate mainstream media acting as a mouthpiece for the ruling class. A growing legion of citizens in this country does not trust the government. This is very perceptive on their part. In part one of this two part series – Hey You – I examined how an invisible government of wealthy, power hungry men have utilized the propaganda techniques of Edward Bernays and lured the American people into a narcissistic, techno-gadget, debt based servitude. Over the last one hundred years they have created a totalitarian state built upon egotism, material goods, and fulfilling our desires through Wall Street peddled debt and mass consumerism. It has been an incredibly effective form of control that has convinced the masses to love their servitude. The ruling oligarchs correctly chose the painless, amusement saturated, soft totalitarianism of Huxley's Brave New World over the fearful, pain inflicting, surveillance state, house of horrors detailed in Orwell's 1984. "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude." – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World The nefarious establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, launch of welfare programs in the 1930s, expansion of the entitlement state in the 1960s, creation of the credit card in 1970, mass media marketing propaganda, and the formation of an empire of debt laid the foundation for a society based on triviality, egotism, irrelevance and mass delusion. The conscious manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses by an invisible government of powerful men using media propaganda and easy to access consumer credit has reached its mathematical limit. The oligarchs built a society dependent upon exponential growth. This unsustainable prototype began to show signs of strain in the 1990s. The powerful interests have been growing ever more desperate and blatantly obvious in their looting and pillaging of the debt bloated carcass of a country. They used their control of the political system to repeal Glass-Steagall, allowing the Wall Street banking cabal to become Too Big to Control. The oligarch puppets at the Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve did the bidding of their masters by reducing interest rates and expanding the money supply to create two epic bubbles. The Dot.com bubble was created by Wall Street utilizing hype and misinformation to fleece millions into believing we had entered a new paradigm. The only people who got rich were the Wall Street hucksters, shysters and shills.
When the Dot.com bubble burst, Alan Greenspan came to the rescue, at the urging of Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, by creating the largest banker made bubble in the history of the world. The combination of excessively low mortgage rates, complete lack of regulatory oversight by the Federal Reserve, control fraud committed by the Wall Street banks, and buying frenzy stirred up by the corporate MSM and NAR, led to the biggest financial collapse since 1929. The white collared psychopathic criminals on Wall Street reaped billions in profits, paid themselves millions in bonuses, and cost taxpayers trillions when it all blew up in 2008. The ruling elite have added $6 trillion to our national debt and their central banker has added another $2 trillion to our ultimate tab, while providing free money to their Wall Street bank owners. They realize their efforts to restart the exponential growth engine have failed. They gutted our productive manufacturing based economic system by shipping the blue collar jobs overseas to Chinese slave labor facilities, replaced workers with machines, stimulated consumption with unlimited distribution of high interest debt, and allowed conglomerates to drive small business owners out of business with their cheap foreign sourced goods, all in the name of capitalism. The plan worked so well that real wages haven't risen in 40 years, inflation has destroyed the purchasing power of the middle class, 47.7 million people are dependent on food stamps to survive, and the masses can't even afford the cheap slave labor produced trinkets anymore. There is too little cash, too few jobs, too much debt, too many takers, too few makers, too many bankers, too much delusion, and too few resources to sustain the unsustainable. We have entered the end stages of a ravenous locust swarm. The fields have been stripped barren. When the men in smoke filled rooms realized their soft totalitarianism was losing its grip on the oblivious, submissive, egoistical, distracted masses, they began phase two of their effort to retain their wealth, power and control. They began to institute Orwellian measures to strike fear into the populace. Their illusion of control is dissipating and they are resorting to force in order to maintain hegemony. It began with the immediate passage of the Orwellian Patriot Act one month after 9/11. Did the corporate media question how a 363 page all-encompassing expansion of police state power was written in a few weeks after 9/11 and passed by October 26? They did not. The bill was pre-written and ready for instant implementation when the time was right. The Orwellian version of America was launched. "If the ideology had been a lie, then they are not heroes and gods on earth, but monsters and criminals, and their life has been self-serving and meaningless, without significance and honor. And that is the credibility trap. It is the impulse for the leaders to keep doubling down in the hope of a win, until exhaustion and collapse." – Jesse Obedience to Authority"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority." - Stanley Milgram – Obediance to Authority Just as Edward Bernays knew the unruly masses could be manipulated by propaganda and molded to believe whatever the small group of intellectually superior men wanted them to believe, conditioning using fear and authoritarian methods have also been perfected by the ruling class. Doctor Stanley Milgram unwittingly provided the oligarchs with confirmation the average citizen could be ordered to do anything by invoking expertise and authority over their subjects. Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolph Eichmann had begun. Eichmann's defense that he was simply following orders when he exterminated millions of Jews roused Milgram's interest. How could millions of Germans participate and condone such genocide? Milgram's testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs. Writer Kendra Cherry describes the experiment: The participants in the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 30 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including "slight shock," "moderate shock" and "danger: severe shock." The final two switches were labeled simply with an ominous "XXX." Each participant took the role of a "teacher" who would then deliver a shock to the "student" every time an incorrect answer was produced. While the participant believed that he was delivering real shocks to the student, the student was actually a confederate in the experiment who was simply pretending to be shocked. As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once the 300-volt level had been reached, the learner banged on the wall and demanded to be released. Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock. Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter issued a series of commands to prod the participant along:
The level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver was used as the measure of obedience. How far do you think that most participants were willing to go? When Milgram posed this question to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram's study delivered the maximum shocks. Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels. It is important to note that many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter. Yet they continued to follow orders all the way to the end. Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly sadistic act on the instruction of an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are a number of situational factors that can explain such high levels of obedience:
The American people have been participants in their very own Milgram experiment being conducted by their government since 9/11. Since the passage of the Patriot Act, the government continues to demand that its citizens increase the voltage in the name of security. Since 2001, the Orwellian measures have included:
Just as Milgram pondered how the German people could follow the orders of those in authority to slaughter millions, one must ponder how the American people have allowed those in power to strip us of our Constitutional freedoms and liberties in the name of safety and security. They have conditioned the masses to passively accept their fate by utilizing fear, authoritarian measures, thought control, and propaganda. Human beings never change. They have been driven by emotions throughout history – fear, greed, love and hate. There will always be psychopathic men who seek wealth, power, glory and control. It happened during the decline of the Roman Empire and it is happening today during the decline of the American Empire. "A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all." – Tacitus Big Brother is Watching You"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me." – George Orwell – 1984 What the average person can't seem to process through their government public school educated non-critical thinking brains is that there are actually a small group of bankers, politicians, corporate executives, media magnets, and shadowy billionaires who call the shots in this country. They constitute Bernays' invisible government, run the show, mold the minds, form the opinions, suggest the ideas, and create the reality for the masses because they believe they are intellectually superior. The left/right and Democrat/Republican discord is a planned diversion for the masses. The country has devolved into a corporate fascist warfare/welfare state. We are clearly moving in the direction of Orwell's state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought will be against the law. The longer this is allowed to progress the more likely any effort to resist like Winston Smith will be met with brutal measures. The parallels to Orwell dystopian nightmare state grow by the day. Those in control use technology to bombard Americans with psychological inducements designed to overwhelm the mind's capability for autonomous thought. In Orwell's 1984 the giant telescreen in every citizen's room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. In Obama's 2013 the 72 inch Chinese made HDTVs in every McMansion blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the zombie-like occupants buy trinkets and gadgets with a thin piece of plastic and makes the failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya appear to be triumphant successes. Our corporate/fascist party uses their control over the media message to indoctrinate and control the public mind through propaganda and repetitive messaging. In Orwell's world, the Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party. In our world children are indoctrinated in government run public schools that fill their brains with government manufactured history, social engineering claptrap and what they should think, rather than how to think. The Orwellian Department of Homeland Security (Thought Police) instructs them to report anyone they think is suspicious with their "See something, Say something" campaign. Children are "encouraged" to re-educate their parents about green energy and global warming. Corporations fund schools to advertise their products within the hallways of learning. The outputs of this corporate/fascist partnership are non-critical thinking, functionally illiterate, willfully ignorant Proles who obey the Party and consume products as instructed. In Orwell's 1984 the Party keeps the population in a general state of exhaustion by making them work long grueling hours at government run agencies. This was designed to keep them from thinking or having the energy to resist. About one in six workers work for the government in the United States, with a substantial portion of private jobs dependent upon government largesse. The true distinction in our society can be seen in the income levels over decades of our own Inner Party, Outer Party and Proles. The government educated masses were purposely not taught about the impact of Federal Reserve created inflation on their lives. Even using the government manipulated CPI, the real household incomes of the masses have barely risen in the last forty five years. Using a true measure of inflation, the real household incomes of the average family have fallen. In addition, prior to the 1980s those household incomes were predominantly provided with one parent working and the other raising the children. Today the vast majority of households require both parents to work in order to just tread water. Child rearing was delegated to the state and parents have been kept in a constant state of exhaustion, like hamsters in a cage on a spinning wheel. Household income was replaced by credit card debt, mortgage debt, auto debt, and student loan debt peddled by our very own Inner Party (Wall Street bankers). The Inner Party members have seen their incomes soar over the last four decades. This was not an accident. As those at the top accumulate an ever increasing percentage of the national wealth, while consolidating their power through ever more sophisticated use of technology for surveillance, warfare, and financial theft; urban decay and blight spreads across the land. Totalitarian regimes are ferociously effective at augmenting their own power and wretchedly incompetent at providing for their citizens. Just as the London in Orwell's dystopian world was a decrepit, rundown city in which buildings were crumbling, amenities such as elevators never worked, and basics such as electricity and plumbing were exceedingly undependable, the urban killing fields that are home to tens of millions in the United States are dangerous, disintegrating, hallowed out carcasses of once thriving metropolises. Hunger, poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and violence are the earmarks of society for the Proles. True unemployment exceeds 20%, with youth and minority unemployment exceeding 40%. There are 47.7 million Americans subsisting on food stamps (program administered by JP Morgan), accounting for 20% of all the households in the country. The incompetency and mismanagement by our totalitarian governing body is evident for all to see, as bridges collapse, water mains burst, gas lines explode, mass transit shuts down and structures deteriorate due to decades of neglect. The priorities of those in power are clearly visible as they spend trillions on weapons used to attack sovereign countries, distribute billions in "aid" to foreign dictators, provide trillions to the criminal banking cabal on Wall Street, and devote billions to technology designed to monitor and control their citizens. Our entire rotting, fetid, bloated, corrupt society has about reached its limits. It is only a matter of time until it implodes like the former Soviet Union. "Diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants." – Jim Kunstler We Have Always Been at War with EastasiaHush now baby, baby, don't you cry. She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing, |
| Free Trade: The Great Prosperity Machine – YouTube Posted: 01 Jan 2013 06:27 PM PST Check our website daily at... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.figanews.com for full Content ]]  |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 05:54 PM PST Check our website daily at... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.figanews.com for full Content ]]  |
| Silver Update 12/31/12 Fiscal Clowns – YouTube Posted: 01 Jan 2013 04:49 PM PST Check our website daily at... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.figanews.com for full Content ]]  |
| 2013: The Year of Gold – YouTube Posted: 01 Jan 2013 04:18 PM PST Check our website daily at... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.figanews.com for full Content ]]  |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 03:56 PM PST Your worth consists in what you are and not in what you have. –Thomas Edison
Jim Sinclair's Commentary Seems like that 6pm reported markdown on gold for New Years Eve might be as amateurish as the nightly NASDAQ after hours 100 share trades in gold shares. If it looks stupid, you can always Continue reading In The News Today |
| Big Hedge Fund Whacked - And Warm Feelings Posted: 01 Jan 2013 03:36 PM PST
One of the biggest leveraged hedge funds in the world got hit with a 2x4 during the 4th Q. This fund has a mixed bag of assets, but was heavily exposed to big FX positions.
The fund made a big “bet” recently when they went short EURYEN. This turned sour in a very big way; the EURYEN moved an incredible 14 big figures against them in just 60 trading days. Street players, who know of this currency spec, refer to it as a “Size” position. At the end of Q3, it came to a lumpy short $40B. There were rumors that the fund added to the short during the Q (not confirmed yet). But even if the book was kept static, the mark-to-market loss comes to $5+B. That’s serious money to anyone.
Note: The short EURYEN book is looking terrible for this fund. The new Japanese Prime Minister is forcing a devaluation of the currency. The Japanese Central Bank is doing its best to achieve that devaluation. It’s possible that the fund will have to cover the short. If so, it could turn that “paper” loss into a cash loss. I think the well-paid managers of the fund are kicking themselves in the ass over this speculation. They got creamed on this stinker, and this could be just the beginning of the losses.
Adding to the carnage was a monster sized bet short EURUSD. Last reported, this mega-position was $220B short! It’s possible that this number is now close to one-quarter trillion. It was a good Q for the EURUSD, and that means a bad Q for the fund. The 6+ big figure move up in the Euro versus the dollar translates into a paper loss of a staggering $11b!
All in, the losses from FX come to $16.5B. The fund has reserves of about $50b, so the quarterly swing is not a crisis, but it’s an eye-opener. 30+% of those reserves went out the window in one Q. Wow!
The fund in question has a strong capital base and loyal investors. But the management will have to explain to those investors how it managed to lose such a large percentage of its “cushion” in such a short period of time. Those investors will, no doubt, ask the very pertinent question: “Why is the fund making such big FX bets?”
Management is also going to have to address the issue of leverage – this fund is now running at 10 to 1. The high level of leverage, and the mega billions involved (much of which is tied up in derivatives), makes this fund a high risk/return player. Investors will have to ask themselves, “Do we still want to be on this roller coaster?”
So who is it that is running such a big FX book? And who are the investors that are on such a wild ride?
That would be the Swiss National Bank. The “investors” are the Swiss people.
I know, I know. Central Banks aren’t hedge funds, and they can’t take losses because they can always print more money. I respond to this by saying that the SNB is acting very much like a leveraged hedge fund. It's making currency “bets” with the people’s money. It's taking some very big risks. In an attempt to diversify one risk, they are just adding different risks, and that effort is backfiring.
Like the US Fed, the SNB sends its annual profits back to the people (Treasury in USA, Cantons in Switzerland). The book losses at the SNB will reduce the amount of the payouts to the Cantons, so the losses will be felt.
Switzerland is a small country with a GDP of about $600B. If the FX losses at the SNB were applied to the US economy, it would translate into a half-trillion dollar loss. That would be a very big deal indeed. The FX losses since September come to $2,000 for each and every Swiss citizen. The word “Shellacking” comes to mind.
I bring up this story to make a point. (Don't worry about the SNB) What happened at the SNB is because the SNB absorbed risk from the Swiss economy (the currency peg). As the SNB absorbs risk, it will, by definition, have to take losses from time to time.
The SNB has absorbed currency risk; other central banks have taken credit, liquidity and duration risk out of their respective markets. In the aggregate, the risk transfers have been massive. That’s why the global capital markets are so “calm”.
To me, the private sector looks “okay” for the time being. It’s the Public Sector that has the potential to produce a black swan over the next year or so. I conclude that the “confidence” factor is going to be an issue. The questions hanging in the air include, “Are all these governments really money-good?" "Are the key governments and their leaders able to maintain confidence in this fragile system?" "Are 'they' going to do the 'right' things?"
The world’s largest economy has just set itself up for a crisis in 60 days. China Inc. is sitting on a gazillion of dodgy loans. Japan Inc. is in hock up to its eyeballs (and is in the process of slow motion devaluation). The EU will, this year, be forced to make good on its promise of “Unlimited” printing. Where's the confidence in that pile?
This confidence “thing” is hard to anticipate. It comes and goes quickly. The year is starting out with a fairly high level of “warm feelings”. I’m not at all convinced that those feelings are justified. The list of things that could trip up the Public Sectors, and their deciders, is too long.
|
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 03:28 PM PST Chances are, you're a criminal. At least as defined by the state. You might not be one of the 83,000 people who are sent to prison in the United States every single year… and you might not have run afoul of one of the 4,500 (and counting) federal statutes…but that doesn't mean you're off the hook… There are still tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of additional laws, rules, regulations, writs, decrees, codes, charters, bylaws, edicts, mandates, ordinances, notices, requirements, rulings, precedents, injunctions, intrusions and assorted other meddling, do-gooder nanny statisms to catch you with your proverbial pants down. (Ed. Note: Being caught with your pants down, variously known as "indecent exposure," "public lewdness" and "public indecency," may also be a crime, depending on where you're reading this note.) In many ways, we are fast approaching what author T.H. White, in his book, The Once and Future King, described as the Totalitarian Principle: Everything not forbidden is compulsory. It is quite impossible to know, much less abide by, all the rules and regulations on the books. But if only that were the worst of it! Not only must we fall in line behind laws we don't — and cannot possibly — know, but the state issuing these cunning curtailments of our liberties also reserves the right to change and manipulate the rules of the game…often while the ball is still in the air. It might choose, for instance, to introduce a brand new law, one fitted out with special, retro-active powers. Or it might elect to reinterpret an existing law, a rereading, one invariably in its own favor. Alternatively, it might chose to simply ignore a law, again and almost always in service of its own benefit. Telling the truth might, depending on the circumstances, get you rewarded a hundred million bucks…or an indefinite detainment without daylight or trial. Reveal to the public that the state murders unarmed journalists and opens fire on children from Apache helicopters, for example, and a brutal hell awaits you. Aid and abet the same state in its quest to confiscate private funds, knowing roughly one-fifth of government expenditures go to aforementioned military activity, and you may count your reward in the millions. So went the cases we examined in our "Tale of Two Whistleblowers" column back in September of last year. Increasingly, this same legislatively schizophrenic state is choosing to reward incompetence and, when it is not busy punishing decency, ignore acts of wanton criminality. Eric Fry pointed out as much in his column, "The Corzine-Dimon Syndrome", first published in these pages back in May of 2012. "To reward incompetent finance company CEOs with billion-dollar bailouts," wrote Eric, "is to punish the employees and shareholders of the prudently operated finance companies that compete with the firms receiving bailouts. "To refrain from investigating and/or indicting Jon Corzine for 'disappearing' $1.6 billion of client funds is to punish both the 38,000 M.F. Global customers who are still missing the money they did not deserve to lose and the 1,000 employees who lost paychecks they did not deserve to lose." When it comes to state-run justice, Fellow Reckoner, there's no justice like "show" justice. Jon Corzine, Jamie Dimon and Bradleys Manning and Birkenfeld return in today's installment of our Daily Reckoning Best of 2012 Series to help make this point. Joel Bowman Multiple Justice Disorder appeared in the Daily Reckoning. Subscribe to The Daily Reckoning by visiting signup for an Agora Financial newsletter.        |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 01:40 PM PST *[B][B][B][B][B][B][B][B][B][B]“[B]Follow the munKNEE” [/B][/B]via[B][B][B][B][B][B][B] twitter [/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B]&[B][B][B][B][B][B][B] Facebook[/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][/B] The fact that nobody really knows with absolute certainty where gold will really go from today onward makes people try to make their own guesses about what can happen with the yellow metal. One of the methods to do that is to look back into past situations and try to estimate if what is happening now is somehow similar to those past events. The situation in the gold market today is different than the one in 1980 in a few important areas. Even if past patterns don’t give you any certainty, though, sometimes they can limit the uncertainty. Let us analyze that in more detail. Words: 1260; Charts: 2 So writes Przemyslaw Radomski, CFA ([url]www.sunshineprofits.com/[/url]) in edited excerpts from his original article* posted on Seeking Alpha entitled 1980 ... |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 01:16 PM PST December 20, 2012 Mogambo Guru Giggling glee born of easy, greasy greed Higher taxes for millionaires? First ask yourself "How did they become millionaires?" Then ask yourself "If I'm so smart, how come I'm not a millionaire, too?" Well, if this helps, I have noticed that one of the differences between us slovenly proletariat trash and millionaires is that they seem to have a lot of perfect teeth and nice haircuts. So, if you have nice teeth and hair, the data apparently shows that you've got it made, so relax! Haha! If you don't have these, however, you will need to do it the appropriately-named "hard way", which brings up one Big Important Difference (BID) between us busted-out lowlife dimwits and the millionaires: We spent our money on pure gluttonous consumption, and had a wonderful time for a surprising number of years by virtue of racking up suffocating amounts of debt, whereas millionaires got their millions from profitably (as in compounding the money borrowed from a bank) investing their money in productive, profitable businesses, like making money by making things, or by mining things, or making money merely handling whole oceans of money, or making money by running this towering, engulfing deluge of money created by the evil Federal Reserve through some Wall Street scam, con job, bamboozle or 401(k), or in any of the rest of the gigantic financial services industry which produces, as best I can remember instead of researching it to find out, about 40% of all the profits made in America. You no doubt noticed that I surprisingly did not use an exclamation point to emphasize such a huge, glaring fact that is destroying this country with some silly, low-IQ, pie-in-the-sky crap about how investing all your retirement money in the stock market is such a good idea when in fact -- in fact! -- it is a mathematically a guaranteed -- guaranteed! -- loser for the vast majority of trusting, gullible and embarrassingly ignorant people who are stupid enough to think that putting all their money, and their entire financial future, into the general stock market is a "good idea" despite a complete lack of successful historical examples, common sense and the mountains of evidence to the contrary, when, alas, it isn't, as the evidence had already proved, so it's weird anyone would do it. Anyway, I remember when I found out that investing long-term in stocks is a Big Time Loser (BTL) for the vast majority of people, and a Small Time Loser (STL) for almost everybody else. For me, it was the Five Stages of Shock. First, I was in denial, then, in the Second Stage, I was angry, then I was depressed, then I was angry again, then more angry, and then violently angry and scared out my Mogambo Freaking Mind (MFM), where I remain today. And it's especially bad when dividends from owning stocks are taxed so highly. We're the highest taxers of dividends in the world! Forbes magazine posted a blog by Austin Johnson on the new changes in taxes on dividends. The top corporate rate on the dividend is now 39.6%. The recipient of a dividend, if in the top tax bracket, is taxed at 39.6%, too, plus another 3.8% (the new Medicare tax), for a whopping combined tax rate of 65.8l%! And if you just stupidly add up the tax rates, it comes to an 83% tax! This 83% tax rate is both highly shocking and, unfortunately, a ridiculous and useless concept, except as evidence that I have no idea what I am talking about, as if anyone needed more evidence of that! Hahaha! Come on! But what else can people do, except buy stocks, with all the trillions and trillions of new dollars being first created by the evil Federal Reserve and then spent by the government? All these tons and tons of new dollars, busily working their economic way down winding, wending paths through an economy's worth of manufacturers, miners and farmers, workers, middlemen, retailers, owners and shareholders, and government itself, all of whom always have to wonder "What to do with all this money rolling in, and how can I get some more of it?" And what other market can absorb literally trillions and trillions of dollars per year? Ergo, the stock market has to go up because the government is not going to stop deficit-spending, and thus the Federal Reserve will not stop creating lots and lots of money, and there is nothing else to do with that much freaking money, except maybe buy bonds, which are, alas, Totally, Totally Toxic (TTT). Get a load of this: With the price of bonds so high, the imputed yield on the 10-year bond is at a tiny, micro, miniscule 1.5%, when even the government's own ludicrously-doctored figures show that inflation in prices is over 2%, and the money supply is expanding by over 10% a year! It's actually over 8% price inflation, as I gather from John Williams at shadowstats.com, who calculates inflation the old-fashioned way: It measures how much prices went up, more nearly matches the increase in the money supply. So join with me in asking what kind of morons are buying bonds, thus losing real buying power in inflation-adjusted dollars, when history shows the average yield is about 6%, which means that when the interest rate gets back to its long-term average (if it ever does! Ha!), then the expensive 10-year bond you bought today, yielding a laughably low 1.5%, will have lost 75% of its cost? Yikes! Big loss! And this does not even MENTION the reduced spending-power value of the remaining 25% of your dollars, thanks to inflation. All in all, bondholders will pretty much be wiped out! Yikes! Nice long-term investing there, dude! Hahahaha! At this point, you may be asking yourself "What kind of an insulting idiot is this Stupid Mogambo Person (SMP) disrespecting the insurance and retirement investment industries who have to buy bonds because they have no choice, and who are getting screwed along with everybody else, except for the executives, of course, who are all, I am sure, making out like bandits? I hate him!" Or perhaps you are even rubbing your chin, thoughtfully saying "I hate him, too, just like the guy in the paragraph above, but what he says makes sense! But I hate him nonetheless after listening to him blabbering and blubbering, rambling incoherently in that loud, stupid voice of his about how We're Freaking Doomed (WFD) because of the inflation in prices that will be caused by the inflation in the money supply because the evil Federal Reserve is forced to create more and more and more money and credit so that the federal government can continually deficit-spend us into a twisted, inflationary hell without the government having to embarrassingly try to auction off such astonishing, astounding, completely unbelievably massive loads of new government debt by actually competing in the credit markets, bidding against other sellers of new debt for a relatively limited pool of private funds, pushing interest rates To The Freaking Moon (TTFM), destroying America and the world. I mean, what kind of idiot IS this guy?" What kind of idiot am I, you ask? Well, I'll TELL you what kind of idiot I am! I am the kind of idiot that that is so stupid that he fails at everything, and the only things at which I did NOT fail are, firstly, to finally recognize and accept my own inherent stupidity, and secondly to wisely acknowledge the correctness of my naturally-suspicious paranoia and cynical hostility towards governments, self-interested salesmen and self-proclaimed "experts." Thus, I looked, instead, at history to find out what happened all the other times over the last 4,500 years when a government acted this stupidly (most of them, as it turns out), and to find the ultimate best investment that lasted through it all. As an aside, I could have saved a LOT of time, learned the same thing about economics, just by reading Hazlitt's nifty book "Economics in One Lesson," or by simply going to Mises.org and getting -- free! -- the glorious wisdom of the Austrian School of economics, thanks to the foresight and work of Lew Rockwell, whom I never actually met, but who must be a busy guy because if I call him up and say to the receptionist "Hey! Ask Lew Rockwell if he will lend me twenty bucks!", I find that he's never available, and they won't even take a message anymore. So he must be a busy guy! I can tell by the look on your face that you are not interested in hearing about another smart person who doesn't want to talk to me, either, and what you really, REALLY want to know is "What turns out to be, as the ultimate Idiot's Delight, the best investment during a period of government deficit-spending and money creation about which you have been shooting your mouth off until we are sick of hearing it?" Well, since you asked so nicely, I am happy to report that you, too, can succeed financially despite any personal shortcomings, such as being a rude moron who dares challenge me instead of cringing before my towering intellect, and/or having severe behavioral difficulties so that your kids hate you because you are a clueless, terrible parent, and your boss and all your co-workers hate you because you are incompetent at your job which makes their jobs harder, and you naturally hate them in return, stabbing them in the back at every turn, sparing no venom, daring to mix metaphors right in front of their stupid little, hateful faces. And you can financially prosper even if your spouse and your relatives and your neighbors all hate you, too, mostly because they are all a bunch of small-minded Earth-people whose serious lack of intellectual capacity cannot possibly allow them to comprehend the profound inherent safety and strong security, and thus an invaluable neighborhood asset, of having a Mogambo Big Beautiful Bunker (MBBB) in my backyard, bristling with enough firepower and miscellaneous armaments to kill them all a thousand times over if they give me a bunch of crap, which they, so far, don't. And so the important, profound answer to the question "How to have a successful, wealthy future despite being a complete moron and your own government is acting like one, too"? It is (drum roll, please!) to buy gold bullion and silver bullion! And I think to buy oil stocks, too, because oil has absolutely the most net energy per unit of volume, and it literally comes out of the ground almost ready to use as a fuel. Wow! Talk about intrinsic value that will surely rise with general inflation which is guaranteed by the Federal Reserve creating so much money and credit! How could oil NOT become more expensive? So, I mean, investment-wise, how could things get any more obvious? Not stocks. Not bonds. Not houses. Not cash. Not anything but gold, silver and oil. And speaking of "how" could something possibly be, ones wonders how could one NOT shout loud huzzahs, hoorahs, and heehaws to the highest of heavens, nor feel compelled to excitedly exclaim with a happy, giggling glee born of easy, greasy greed, "Whee! This investing stuff is easy!"?  |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 12:02 PM PST On the last trading day of 2012, a watershed event occurred. Key gold stocks staged superb breakouts, from their weekly chart power downtrend lines. Read More...  |
| Washington Agreement is another gold rig, former Fed and Treasury official admits Posted: 01 Jan 2013 11:31 AM PST Coordination of European central bank gold sales under the Washington Agreement on Gold, an agreement made in 1999 and updated in 2004 and 2009, is "the modern counterpart" of the London Gold Pool of the 1960s, which controlled gold prices until it collapsed in March 1968, a former Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department official told an international investment conference a month ago. |
| My Top 6 Stock Picks for 2013 – According to Me, Myself and I Posted: 01 Jan 2013 10:53 AM PST "Follow the munKNEE" via twitter & Facebook Like Warren Buffett, I don't believe that investors should diversify very So writes George Kesarios in edited excerpts from his original article (see here) as posted on Seeking Alpha under the title An Aggressive But Well-Balanced Conservative 2013 Portfolio.
Kesarios goes on to say, in part: I think of the themes for 2013 might be the return of the yen carry trade. While it is not yet official — that everyone is borrowing in yen and buying speculative assets like crazy — it will probably turn out that way the way the yen is trading. So if this turns out to be the case, then 2013 will probably be a good year for risk assets. With that in mind, some of the selected stocks cater to the idea that risk will be in style this year. At the same time, however, I have also picked stocks that are simply too cheap for investors to lose (much that is). Also keep in mind that I believe the fiscal cliff will not be a hurdle this year (please consider: The Fiscal Cliff Is Already Priced In). If I had any doubts on this, I would be much more conservative. Here are my top picks for 2013: 1. Research In Motion (RIMM) I think RIMM might turn out to be the big surprise of 2013. It is a classic turnaround situation play and I think that many people underestimate the penetration the company will have in the enterprise space. The company's strong balance sheet has surprised many people (me included) and as a result, the company is fully funded and will have no problem launching its new BB10 platform. Management has done all the right things, and all that can be expected from them, so the only thing that lies between success and failure is the market's acceptance of the new platform. We might even see this stock as high as $43 in 12 months from now (read all my RIMM buy logic here). (Risk factor 5 – possible 12 month maximum upside potential 250%) 2. Nokia (NOK) Nokia is also a special turnaround situation play. The…three types of Lumia phones, the high-end 920, middle price range 820 and the lower range 620…have had rave reviews and, so far, [have not been able to keep up with demand]…in many markets and countries where the phones are on sale. The new phones are based around the new Windows 8 operating system which I think will be the best Windows operating system yet (in fact, I just bought a new i7 system and I love it). Nokia is one of the world's best known brands and was once the biggest cell-phone maker in the world. It has a large following and I think the new Lumia phones will put it back on the world phone map. (Risk factor 5 – possible 12 month maximum upside potential 150%) 3. Microsoft (MSFT) Microsoft has got to be one of the cheapest technology stocks around. I never imagined that the stock would ever trade for 8.27 times forward earnings. Great balance sheet and just about the best brand name you can buy, at a price you never imagined. The new Windows 8 operating system that works with the same logic across all platforms (phone, PCs and tablets) is a great concept and I think it will be the new thing in computing…laying the groundwork for a new generation of touch computing systems. I think next year this time around, all new computers sold will be all-in-one touch PCs and the new Windows 8 operating system will be right in the middle of this revolution. (Risk factor 1 – possible 12 month maximum upside potential 75%) 4. Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) Alcatel-Lucent is another high-profile special turnaround situation play. With the financing the company recently received, the chances of there being a liquidity problem in the years ahead are nil. While the balance sheet still needs some improvement, I am comfortable from an investor's perspective the way things stand. The company stands to gain as global capital expenditures by telecommunication providers is expected to increase at the compounded rate of 1.5% over the next five years. The company is very well positioned to take advantage of this infrastructure spending in many ways. The company's new line of core routers it recently introduced is only a small part of the offerings the company has to take advantage of global telecommunication capex spending. (Risk factor 6 – possible 12 month maximum upside potential 125%) 5. Fonar Corp. (FONR) Fonar is a little unknown company that engages in the research, development, production, and marketing of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) medical scanning equipment for the detection and diagnosis of human diseases. Key statistics: Trailing P/E 4.79, Price/Sales 0.69, Profit Margin 14.5%, Operating Margin 18.6%, Return on Assets 13.3%, Return on Equity 68.5%, Diluted EPS – ttm – .90, Total cash $12.9 million, market cap $26.2 million. This is a micro cap stock and only for a few selected investors that invest in smaller cap stocks. The company has gone through very rough times and has made many mistakes, but I am impressed by the fact that the company has reported 11 straight quarters of profitability. Growth is at a standstill, but this is definitely a very undervalued company with a very solid balance sheet and very little debt. This stock is also a pure-play in the medical technology space. There are not that many MRI companies out there and there is certainly no one this small. (Risk factor 3 – possible 12 month maximum upside potential 125%) 6. Apple (AAPL) Those that have been following my Apple sell logic, know that I have recommended swing trading Apple and not holding onto it long term. I have repeatedly told you to sell it at the $700 mark (and below) and I have also said that it would be a good buy if it corrected somewhere close to $500. I have no beef with the stock (like many believe), but it's just too big to be able to double or triple and give extraordinary returns from here on. As such, in my book this is a dog stock but the good news is that the stock is at the $500 mark and I think it is a must buy at these levels as a swing trade opportunity with a time frame of several months in mind. After many articles on why you should sell Apple, I am finally telling you to buy it for once. (Risk factor 1 – possible 12 month maximum upside potential 50%) I wish everyone…a happy and healthy new year and may 2013 be a year that we will all become better people and better investors.
Related Articles: 1. Dr. Faber and I Concur: There Are Major Reasons to be Very Cautious in 2013 – Here's What To Do Dr. Marc Faber, the author and publisher of the "Gloom Boom And Doom" report is one of the most well-read economists out there. I am of the opinion that his suggestions and investment advice are more realistic than any other economist or analyst we hear and read regularly. The summary of Dr. Faber's latest monthly report suggests that he views 2013 as a year of capital preservation. In other words, Dr. Faber is not very bullish on risky asset classes for 2013. This article discusses Dr. Faber's views and the reasons to remain cautious in 2013. Words: 1494; Charts: 3; Tables: 1 2. Today's Investment Approach Must Change to Survive Tomorrow's Major Economic Changes – Here's How
3. The Fiscal Cliff Will Prove to Be a Dud – and More Optimistic Forecasts for 2013
4. The Most Important Questions (and Answers) Regarding What the Futures Hold for 2013
5. 2013 Forecasts: Do These 10 Analysts Know Something We Don't?
6. Goldman Sachs' Thoughts, Outlooks, Strategies & Picks for 2013
7. 2012 Was a Hell of a Year for Investors! Here are 6 Lessons Learned for 2013
8. Don't Blithely Accept the Views of Stock & Commodity Commentators – Here's Why
9. These 10 Articles Will Help You Better Protect & Strengthen Your Investment Portfolio – Take a Look
10. You, Too, Can Achieve a 100% Return on Your Investments – Here's How
|
| You Know How This Ends Right? This Ends Through War Posted: 01 Jan 2013 09:40 AM PST  In 2006, when Americans were flying high on ever-expanding credit and double digit real estate growth, hedge fund manager Kyle Bass came to the conclusion that something was very wrong. He and his investors determined that a massive real estate bubble was forming in sub-prime mortgages. But rather than just making a prediction, they put their money where their mouth was, and took a $4 billion gamble that the real estate market was about to detonate. At the time, many in the industry and within financial circles thought him crazy. History, however, proves he was right. When the real estate bubble did finally burst, stock markets plummeted and mortgage backed securities fell to pennies on the dollar. Bass and his hedge fund made billions in the process. Bass' foresight was 20/20, and now he has issued a warning so dire that it, like the real estate crisis and recession that followed, is unimaginable for most Americans. Read more.... This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| 2012 Was a Hell of a Year for Investors! Here are 6 Lessons Learned for 2013 Posted: 01 Jan 2013 03:59 AM PST "Follow the munKNEE" via twitter & Facebook If I should die or lose my WordPress password tomorrow, I'd be satisfied So writes Joshua M. Brown (www.thereformedbroker.com) in edited excerpts from his original article* entitled The Six Biggest Investing Lessons of 2012.
Brown goes on to say, in part: Other years there are other lessons taught, but this is the knowledge you should be walking away with after 2012: 1. Sometimes there's no one left to buy This is a very old lesson but a crucial one. When everyone's already in, where are the buyers going to come from? Over the summer, Apple became the Jesus Stock; no one would ever sell it but, unfortunately, anyone who could buy it and wanted to buy it had already done so. It had become the greatest Hedge Fund Hotel stock of all time, a massive weighting in all the large cap indexes and an institutional, as well as a retail, "darling", one of the most widely-held investments in the world. I was at the Ira Sohn conference when David Einhorn announced to a breathless audience of a few thousand asset managers that Apple was his next big pick. It was worth just over $500 billion and Einhorn explained how he had called both the NYSE and the Nasdaq and neither one of them had a restriction against it being worth a trillion. It [has been]…lights out ever since that moment. Apple has…lost more than $170 billion in market capitalization, a larger dollar amount than the total market caps of the 54 smallest companies in the S&P 500 combined. Without any Apple enthusiasts left to come in and buy, and absent a decent-sized short interest, there were no natural buyers and a whole host of tax-motivated sellers who'd ridden the stock for a decade, racking up 8000% returns. Oh well. 2. Sometimes there's no one left to sell Research in Motion's story this [past] fall was the antithesis of what we saw with Apple. The stock hit $6 a share, almost a complete and total wipeout of the company's value but then the market spoke in early September. It said, "Maybe this company is not long-term viable and cannot compete with Apple and Android – but it will not die now. No sir, not on this day." RIMM more than doubled to $14 within a few weeks, a monster return from the depths that happened concurrently with the Apple bludgeoning from $705 to $500. Take everything you thought you knew about platforms and handsets and technology and throw it out the window - this was about supply and demand, not who had the better product. Just as there was no one left to buy Apple below $10 a share there wasn't a soul left who would sell their Research In Motion. Sear the memory of this into your hippocampus. 3. Things change quickly Let's take a time machine back to the end of 2011 and [imagine that we had laid] out what we believed…[at that time would] be the top performing equity plays for 2012…
What sort of response do you think we'd have gotten to a forecast like that a year ago? Probably slapped across our fat faces with a Scotch salmon wrapped in newspaper. Laughed out of the building, dog, but things change. In 2012, the Dow Jones U.S. Home Construction Index was up an amazing 78%, the Financials were the best performing of the 10 S&P Sectors (up 26%) and Europe's main index, the Stoxx 600, is up a solid 15% for the year, over 20% from its June low. This spring I watched as Jeff Gundlach unveiled his now-legendary pairs trade – short Apple versus a 10X bet on natural gas – the crowd was incredulous, Apple was trading vertically higher after all and natural gas was well on its way to zero. Turns out that was the trade of the year. Know this – safe can be risky and risky can be safe in the blink of an eye – and mean reversion is always in the on-deck circle, playa. 4. Trends can and will persist past the point of sanity Let's consider that US 10-year Treasury bonds have been yielding around 1.7% for most of the year while the annual run rate of inflation is 2.2%, thus guaranteeing a destruction of purchasing power for the holders. This bond binge continuing despite a growing economy, low stock volatility and no major systemic disruption in the markets at the moment is quite a thing to behold. Investors spent the year continuously pulling money from stocks to flood the bond market like the animated broomsticks in Fantasia with their buckets sloshing about. It makes no sense, but betting against it has been a loser. How long can these trends go one while everyone agrees they shouldn't? Ask some of the geniuses who've been entangled in the Short-Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs) "widowmaker trade". The answer is almost forever, and you will capitulate just before the turn. Of course you will. 5. "Uncertainty" is a buy signal, not a sell signal When you hear the term "uncertainty" being bandied about from every corner of the universe, you may want to consider putting in some buy orders. Let's take Greece. How much uncertainty was there about the oft-lamented Mediterranean problem child nation? The maximum. There could not have been more. Each day, the discussion was about:
and while all these motherf…… were busy blabbing away about the "Fate of Greece"
Your passing, superficial knowledge of the risk factors of a given thing, gleaned from newspapers and television and repeated ad nauseum by a million wannabe pundits and newsletter writers, are priced in. Tell me something I don't know. Uncertainty is why Wilbur Ross gets to buy up the nation's entire complex of bankrupt coal and steel plants in the 1990′s while no one else would even think about it. It's why Dan Loeb can buy a billion dollars worth of Greek bonds in August and sell them for a $500 million profit four months later. Uncertainty is how kings are made. 6. Usually, the asteroid misses earth Markets usually climb a Wall of Worry they say. Let me tell you something – investors of other eras don't even know the meaning of the term Wall of Worry. The shit we've had to listen to and worry about this year – all at once – will be looked back on someday by a future generation and marveled at. [Things like:]
Some of the top veteran hedge fund managers threw the towel in this year, for no reason other than they had had enough, and possessed no explanation for what they were supposed to be saying or doing anymore. The emotions, the intellectual incongruity of the whole thing, it was just gut-wrenching and the fun – if ever it was fun – had been wrung out of it. Even Wall Street's full-of-shit Chief Strategist promotion machine struggled this year, a record amount of bearishness had crept into their forecasts and estimates – something we almost never see. If you traded and invested in 2012 and came out okay, then you are to be commended, [because it] was a tough one no matter what the index statistics say. Nerve-wracking doesn't even come close as a descriptor. [In fact,] we were Riverdancing on a frozen-over pond with steel-tipped boots and ice sharks swimming below the cracking surface just waiting for us to fall through – and those ice sharks had some kind of weird fish syphilis. I'm protectively shielding my crotch with one hand as I write this, wincing at the thought of an immediate boot-kick from any of the disasters we've managed to skate past but, once again, the asteroid missed earth in 2012 and, alas, the end of the world was not to be. We are alive and live to fight another year, much to the chagrin of basement-dwelling misanthropes and grumpy old men everywhere…. What did you learn this year? Tell us below! And have you bought my damn book yet? And are you following me on Twitter? *http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2012/12/28/the-six-biggest-investing-lessons-of-2012/
Related Articles: 1. Dr. Faber and I Concur: There Are Major Reasons to be Very Cautious in 2013 – Here's What To Do Dr. Marc Faber, the author and publisher of the "Gloom Boom And Doom" report is one of the most well-read economists out there. I am of the opinion that his suggestions and investment advice are more realistic than any other economist or analyst we hear and read regularly. The summary of Dr. Faber's latest monthly report suggests that he views 2013 as a year of capital preservation. In other words, Dr. Faber is not very bullish on risky asset classes for 2013. This article discusses Dr. Faber's views and the reasons to remain cautious in 2013. Words: 1494; Charts: 3; Tables: 1 2. Today's Investment Approach Must Change to Survive Tomorrow's Major Economic Changes – Here's How
3. Don't Blithely Accept the Views of Stock & Commodity Commentators – Here's Why
4. These 10 Articles Will Help You Better Protect & Strengthen Your Investment Portfolio – Take a Look
5. You, Too, Can Achieve a 100% Return on Your Investments – Here's How
|
| The Fiscal Cliff Will Prove to Be a Dud – and More Optimistic Forecasts for 2013 Posted: 31 Dec 2012 06:47 PM PST "Follow the munKNEE" via twitter & Facebook 'Tis the annual forecasting season. Every economist with a model is So writes Martin Lowy in edited excerpts from his recent post* on Seeking Alpha entitled Bullish On The Economy For 2013-2015.
Lowry goes on to say, in part: 1. Consumer Spending on the Rise The Fiscal Cliff, like the Millennial computer bug, will prove a dud. The U.S. economy runs on final demand, which primarily means consumer spending. Government spending also is part of demand, but it has to come either from taxes or from borrowing. Neither is as good as good consumer spending. Good consumer spending is spending based on increased income, not borrowing. On that front, recent news is encouraging. Below is a graph from…Bill McBride at Calculated Risk …[which] illustrates how consumer spending is getting healthier: McBride reported on December 21, 2012, that "Personal income increased $85.8 billion, or 0.6 percent … in November, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $41.3 billion, or 0.4 percent." 2. Household Formation is Picking Up [The above] means that the growth in consumer spending was healthy, being based on growth of personal income, and…[should] continue because household formation is picking up. Don't fight the Fed and don't fight the Demographics. Household formation is, in many ways, the key to the American economy because it results in spending on so many forms of goods and services. People starting a household need everything from homes to refrigerators to paint jobs to pots and pans. Over the last five years, household formation has been at historic lows compared with increases in population,…[according to] a recent Credit Suisse research note…[with] depressed household formation during the 2008-2012 period. That anomaly means that not only do we have the usual forces propelling household formation; we also have pent-up household formation that gradually, over the next few years, should make for robust demand for everything a household needs…. 3. Demand for New Homes Should Increase Household formation also, of course, will tend to drive the market for new homes and will tend to promote the emerging increases in house prices. These events will be part of a virtuous cycle in which increasing house prices will make it possible for aging boomers to sell their houses, move to warmer climes, and add to the household formation boom by engaging in their own redecorating and home improvement. Home building has traditionally led of the economy out of recessions. It has been held back in the last four years by the overhang of foreclosed properties and the lack of household formation…. 4. Industry Will Become More Competitive Internationally I would add to…[the above] economic tailwind the benefits of more abundant oil and gas. Over the next few years, the prices of these commodities are likely to stay in check. That will give American manufacturing businesses a leg up on foreign competition that should lead to increased sales and new jobs. 5. Growth in Jobs & Economic Activity Will Increase Tax Revenues This growth in jobs and economic activity will increase tax revenues as well, thereby bringing down the U.S. fiscal deficit and easing the concerns about the ability of the U.S. to fund its debt…. Where to Invest? [Personally,]…I like stocks of companies with sound balance sheets that make or sell the kinds of stuff that household formation causes people to buy…. For an investor with a lot of money on the sidelines and little time or inclination to do much research, I think probably this is not a bad time to buy a broad index fund, such as SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), as long as the investor understands that the market in general goes up and down, often in ways unrelated to fundamental values and that global events often derail expectations for periods of time. We have had almost four years of market recovery. We should not expect big upsides over the next few years because the market already has priced in much of the good economy that I and others are forecasting. Nevertheless, I believe that stocks will bring greater returns than other financial assets. A 3-year Process The process that I am describing is about a three-year process that should take us through 2015. I cannot quantify the progress that this process will create. As I said at the outset, I do not have a model. My forecast for 2013 is more optimistic than the forecasts of many of the economists that I respect the most, but it is in line with their expectations for 2014-2015. The only substantial difference is that I think the first half of 2013 will not be as weak as they forecast….
*http://seekingalpha.com/article/1082391-bullish-on-the-economy-for-2013-2015
Related Articles: 1. The Most Important Questions (and Answers) Regarding What the Futures Hold for 2013
2. 2013 Forecasts: Do These 10 Analysts Know Something We Don't?
3. Goldman Sachs' Thoughts, Outlooks, Strategies & Picks for 2013
5. Lack of Economic Growth Expected to Continue Until 1 of 2 Things Change – Here They Are
6. 2013 Will Not Be A "Happy New Year" For Most Americans
9. Fiscal Cliff: 1 Step Backward – Then 2 Steps Forward
|
| Jan.1st, 2013: Economic, Business & Financial Market News From BNN Posted: 31 Dec 2012 02:15 PM PST "Follow the munKNEE" via twitter & Facebook The best business news channel on television is now available here. Its called Business News This post is presented by www.FinancialArticleSummariesToday.com (A site for sore eyes and inquisitive minds) and www.munKNEE.com (Your Key to Making Money!). Please note that this paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright infringement. Below are links to 13 categories that might be of interest to you: 1. Real-time Stock Market Data (DJIA, S&P 500, S&P/TSX, Nasdaq, TSXV) 2. Best of BNN 3. International Business News 8. This Business Day Video Interviews 2 FREE Newsletters Available One sign up. Two great newsletters delivered directly to your inbox. 1. The BNN Morning Newsletter will keep you updated on all daily program highlights of the day's top stories, as well as executive and analyst interviews. 2. The BNN Market Call Top Picks Newsletter delivers top picks and market analysis from the day's Market Call and Market Call Tonight experts each night and provides you with a preview of interviews and topics coming up on BNN the next business day should you wish to view any of them live. To subscribe visit BNN.ca/subscribe. www.munKNEE.com Offers a FREE Newsletter Too! Not to be outdone by Bell Media, the giant media conglomerate that owns BNN, we offer our very own unique newsletter, Your Daily Intelligence Report, that belongs in everyone's inbox too. Our newsletter contains the "best of the best" financial/economic/investment articles that can be found on the internet and each of them is presented in an edited excerpts format to provide optimum brevity and outstanding clarity of content to ensure a fast and easy read. Stop wasting time searching the internet looking for articles worth reading. We do it for you and bring them to you each day in our newsletter. Sign up HERE to begin receiving yours starting tomorrow. Related Links: 1. Economy 3. Stock Market |
Are you ready for a wild 2013? It should be a very interesting year. When the calendar flips over each January, lots of people make lots of lists. They make lists of "resolutions", but most people never follow through on them. They make lists of "predictions", but most of those predictions always seem to end up failing. Well, I have decided to put out my own list of predictions for 2013. I openly admit that I won't get all of these predictions right, and that is okay. Hopefully I will at least be more accurate than most of the other armchair prognosticators out there. It is important to look ahead and try to get a handle on what is coming, because I believe that the rest of this decade is going to be extraordinarily chaotic for the U.S. economy. The false bubble of debt-fueled prosperity that we are enjoying right now is not going to last much longer. When it comes to an end, the "adjustment" is going to be extremely painful. Those that understand what is happening and have prepared for it will have the best chance of surviving what is about to hit us. I honestly don't know what everybody else is going to do. Many of the people that don't see the coming collapse approaching will be totally blindsided by it and will totally give in to despair when they realize what has happened. But there is no excuse for not seeing what is coming – the signs are everywhere
From 9/11 on, Gold and the world's central bank balance sheets were as correlated as over-consumption and a hangover (and linked just as causally we suggest). Then a funny thing happened in 2008 – gold slid as the central banks went extreme. Of course, as this divergence occurred, the world's stock markets imploded almost as if the central banks knew their status quo was about to go entirely pear-shaped. From 2008 until November of 2011 (when the world's central banks began their coordinated ease-fest) the correlation went limit up once again. Since then, Gold and CB largesse once again decoupled as liquidity is flushed around the world's markets to suspend reality just a little longer. While this divergence is not as extreme as in 2008, something is afoot.
Yesterday I made a post with the provocative title 
| 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 |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment