Egon von Greyerz says Swiss 20% gold backing referendum in the works. Of course, there's a news blackout in the U.S. on this interesting development. The Swiss ranks 4th in bullion holdings with 2,590 tonnes. Is this the death knell for Bretton Woods II, the IMF, and USD reserve fiat status as other central banks use gold to stabilize exchange in this ultra-high-stakes G20 poker game? Think Chinese renminbi.
von Greyerz:
“We have what is called a gold initiative. So there is a Swiss politician who has started the initiative to have to have the currency backed with 20% gold.
I just talked to the politician who started this move and he said it’s going very well and he firmly believes they will get the 100,000 signatures that will lead to the referendum. It’s a very interesting initiative and it’s too early to say how successful it will be, but it’s certainly on its way.”
So, Frau Merkel and der Vaterland have negotiated austerity based on the Weimar hyperinflationary experience while The Bernank and the ECB pursue monetization based on Ben's profound understanding of the U.S. Great Depression. The big 5 U.S. banks will eventually fail as Sinclair explains and discussed here today based on CDS and a nuanced Greek/Portugese definition of 'default.' That's unintended consequences on steroids.
So the trigger is unemployed youth riots as austerity puts the crush on their futures. Beware the SPRING meltdown in Europe and the French election.
Portugal joins Greece in the utterly insolvent camp with a 16.75% increase today in the spread between the 10-yr Deutsch Bund above 15%. Time for some more of The Bernank's swaps with the ECB or does this jet hit the ground?
No wonder the USD is still in party mode. Watch for that quick reversal when the technocrats announce another fix to last a few more hours, days, or weeks and the DOW takes off on the USD drop.
"Growth and profitability in the financial system can substitute for the impaired growth and profitability of the system of actual production ... an outright antagonism between the financial system of fictitious values and its monetary base ... then forms the rock on which accumulation ultimately founders. In social terms, this will take the form of a contest between creditors and debtors over who is to suffer more devaluation." - Benjamin Kunkel
The Bernank code speak this week says inflation will rise to that 4.0% mortgage 'deal' and theoretically make it free money if you get the equivalent in a salary raise, but when home values continue to devalue and the collateral goes underwater, doesn't that refi essentially lock that sucker into the equivalent of a 30-YEAR LEASE with a nominal residual value on that depreciating asset (minus the land, of course)? Don't forget to factor in the property taxes and maintenance ... it's a half o lifetime lock unless you pay out-of-pocket for that shortfall. Promoting debt vehicles with 25% let alone little to no equity in the afterglow of a housing bubble is on par with the shenanigans of the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637.
A local residential broker is bragging in her advertisements that she is about to pass $1 billion in sales within this community of only 137,000 households. Of course, her 6% to 7% commisssion is fixed by the National Association of Realtors' multiple-listing-service monopoly to garner her and a few assistants a minimum $65 million (3.5%) skim off the debt machine over the past decade. Now is that productive?
"Facebook is the joke of this century or I'm missing something."
I guess that means AOL is soooo last century. Remember "You've got mail" and now its you've got everyone in your face? It's not social networking; it's just a mania of social time wasting. This too shall pass.
Your report today is the instant cure for STOCKHOLM SYNDROME. I understand the ESF now. Much appreciated. Will you run as Ron Paul's VP?! How about settle for Treasury Secretary?
I think I read that UXG and MAI will morph into MUX on the exchanges this Friday. Gold is going to get volatile here but when it breaks to the upside decisively above 1710, I want to be holding MUX.
I just took profits on my PM miners and plan to buy back in after gold OpEx smackdown IF it comes tomorrow. That 1700 handle is a big resistance that Armstrong says will break either way around the end of the month based on a technical model with an all too often scary track record for accuracy.
Mark my words, Comex gold will get a smackdown before or at 10:00 a.m. EST at the London fix tomorrow because of this big jump a day ahead of options expiration for the PMs.
Casey Research refocuses 'peak oil' drumbeat on the real culprit:
"So here's an interesting thought experiment. Everybody says the US goes to war to protect its oil supplies, but doesn't it really go to war to ensure the continuation of the petrodollar system?"
For example:
"The Iraq war provides a good example. Until November 2000, no OPEC country had dared to violate the US dollar-pricing rule, and while the US dollar remained the strongest currency in the world there was also little reason to challenge the system. But in late 2000, France and a few other EU members convinced Saddam Hussein to defy the petrodollar process and sell Iraq's oil for food in euros, not dollars. In the time between then and the March 2003 American invasion of Iraq, several other nations hinted at their interest in non-US dollar oil trading, including Russia, Iran, Indonesia, and even Venezuela. In April 2002, Iranian OPEC representative Javad Yarjani was invited to Spain by the EU to deliver a detailed analysis of how OPEC might at some point sell its oil to the EU for euros, not dollars."
Other examples are given with an outstanding overview of Iran's global trade relationships overriding any European and U.S. embargo. Interesting as all get out.
Just more proof the petrodollar is toast and the Fed will win the Currency War and beat the Yen and the Euro to the bottom. Once that is accomplished, the U.S. will become a competitive manufacturing powerhouse again.
The advent of the blogosphere in the past few decades is putting some serious sunshine on the commodities markets but they have historically been a HAVEN for manipulation. Spies around the resource warehouses/mines, contango, backwardation, OPEC, embargos, trade deficits, subsidies, mono-crops ... petrodollars ... Hussein swinging from a rope.
Honest weights and measures are just enforcement of fair exchange amongst the minions in the trade. But even there, you find the debasement of coinage in both weight and silver/gold content dates back to the creation of it at the dawn of civilization.
Chin up. Knowledge usurps Manipulation every time.
I can't find it but someone was talking about setting up a trade instrument to do this trade of selling the London a.m. fix and buying the p.m. fix. No doubt it's a long term winner. I wonder how long it would take the CFTC or the SEC to charge the guy for having public toilet sex and fold the fund?
Edit: The 4 year chart from Mar 2006 through Mar 2010 shows the smack down comes at the two fixes but more prominently at the London PM fix. So the trade could be fine tuned to not hold one half hour before and one half hour after the two fixes of the day or 5:00 to 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 to 11.00 a.m EST. Now, how to hold into the off hours for the London morning fix? Easy enough to dump the big manipulation down on the p.m. fix here in the U.S. but that knock down hasn't been too prominent lately and those commissions add up and paper gold EFTs are scary instruments.
Linked from CaseyResearch, this Sharelynx chart shows the decades long manipulation of the gold price in the futures market. Scroll to the bottom of the page. What a damning chart!
I did some regular business with Tom Borders, founder of Border's Books, years ago. I recall him as a southern gentleman looking to leverage a runaway local success. The original Border's store was created in my town of Ann Arbor next to the U/Michigan campus and was successful because the two Border's brothers could hire PhD candidates to manage their book 'sections' and so the sales people on the floor were ridiculously knowledgable, to say the least! During their IPO, Kmart gave the brothers an offer they could not refuse and the business went corporate merged/expanded and collapsed.
Ann Arbor is still rife with small booksellers as well as a little known warehouse with a dumpster full of used up scanners out back. In that warehouse are Google's minions scanning away millions of U/Mich's massive library for the past several years. The Google founder, who matriculated at U/Mich, made a deal with the regents and will take the copyright issue to the U.S. Supreme Court soon enough in an attempt to create that most comprehensive of virtual libraries. That coming Supreme Court concession will mark the decline of the public library. Carnegie will roll in his grave. It's '1984' and 'Fahrenheit 451' unfolding in front of our eyes: Big brother setting up a digitized readership which ultimately will be heavily censored with a mouse click by some peevish bureaucrat while the fire department morphs into a book burning operation.
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." ~Heinrich Heine, Almansor, 1823
The Border's and Barnes & Noble corporate bookstores are a stone dead model stocking their shelves with mostly trendy selfishly helpless advise at huge premiums to Amazon's prices. Border's had the Harry Potter series on the shelf for a price that was 100% over any slightly used first editions on eBay just two years ago.
How many of the next generation would appreciate opening my first edition (with a fine dust jacket) of Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' as it was originally published as a bestseller to the public in 1939? Digital books will also kill the book publishing business as witnessed in the past decade with the havoc in the music business and successful authors will become trendy short-story tellers with an Oprah-style endorsement like a one-hit-wonder in the top 3 of American Idol with Simon's nod.
I will study your links more thoroughly when time permits. The main premise I take from Bill Gross is that he sees a velocity problem with the zero-interest set by the Fed. Indications of this are (1) Gross' PIMCO, the largest bond portfolio on the planet, bailing entirely on U.S. public debt instruments; (2) Your link to M2 velocity dropping like a stone; (3) Commercial banks unwilling to lend to Main St (I base this on my daily business dealings with regional banks and business owners).
This dying velocity of money screams deflation but where the hell is it when I go to the pump or grocery store? Maybe the velocity is being lost in the housing mortgage toxic debt taken off the banks' balance sheets and virtually all small business owners (70%+ of GDP) losing their lines of credit with 100% funding from savings. Gross also asks why hold these debt instruments below inflation rates with the added risk of bank failure? So velocity may be headed overseas or under the matress too. Every year in the U.K., treasure hunters discover ancient gold/silver coin hoards buried in a field by a nobleman during times of political turmoil. There may be no protection of wealth in the end.
We do know banks have managed to recapitalize by transferring bad private debt into public debt. Assuming Spain cannot mandate austerity politically without revolution triggered by its vast unemployed male youth (other troubled european nations not so much with autocrats in place), the big haircut will come there and trigger some form of banking crisis similar to those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When the big sovereign debts roll in March, be ready. It will be game on for WE THE PEOPLE and how we deal with Washington and the NY Banking Cabal (HB&B) when and if Spain 'default' on the banks. They may not call it 'default' to avoid the derivative cascade of claims. Once Spain quits, severe inflation or even hyperinflation and eventual deflation will be in order and the Bernank will be a footnote along with Greenspan in a new heavily revised edition of the Economic Clown School 101 textbook for the Ivy League.
I'm with kaimu on public debt being paramount. Bill Gross, in all his wisdom, is simply saying that the Kensyian bastardization to allow bureaucrats to co-op the politicians into extreme debt creation is not going to allow a CONTROLLED INFLATION. Dropping velocity of money appears to be BG's proof of concept since it should be the opposite for the zero interest policy.
Egon von Greyerz says Swiss 20% gold backing referendum in the works. Of course, there's a news blackout in the U.S. on this interesting development. The Swiss ranks 4th in bullion holdings with 2,590 tonnes. Is this the death knell for Bretton Woods II, the IMF, and USD reserve fiat status as other central banks use gold to stabilize exchange in this ultra-high-stakes G20 poker game? Think Chinese renminbi.
von Greyerz:
“We have what is called a gold initiative. So there is a Swiss politician who has started the initiative to have to have the currency backed with 20% gold.
I just talked to the politician who started this move and he said it’s going very well and he firmly believes they will get the 100,000 signatures that will lead to the referendum. It’s a very interesting initiative and it’s too early to say how successful it will be, but it’s certainly on its way.”
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2012/2/1_Greyerz_-_Alf_Field_Calls_for_$158_Silver_%26_Swiss_Look_to_Gold.html
Scary chart from Zero Hedge via Casey Research:
http://www.caseyresearch.com/gsd/home
So, Frau Merkel and der Vaterland have negotiated austerity based on the Weimar hyperinflationary experience while The Bernank and the ECB pursue monetization based on Ben's profound understanding of the U.S. Great Depression. The big 5 U.S. banks will eventually fail as Sinclair explains and discussed here today based on CDS and a nuanced Greek/Portugese definition of 'default.' That's unintended consequences on steroids.
So the trigger is unemployed youth riots as austerity puts the crush on their futures. Beware the SPRING meltdown in Europe and the French election.
Portugal joins Greece in the utterly insolvent camp with a 16.75% increase today in the spread between the 10-yr Deutsch Bund above 15%. Time for some more of The Bernank's swaps with the ECB or does this jet hit the ground?
No wonder the USD is still in party mode. Watch for that quick reversal when the technocrats announce another fix to last a few more hours, days, or weeks and the DOW takes off on the USD drop.
Hard to trade daily manipulation.
Thanks pulse! Pink slim today; soylent green tomorrow. Jamie rocks.
loannetter -
"Growth and profitability in the financial system can substitute for the impaired growth and profitability of the system of actual production ... an outright antagonism between the financial system of fictitious values and its monetary base ... then forms the rock on which accumulation ultimately founders. In social terms, this will take the form of a contest between creditors and debtors over who is to suffer more devaluation." - Benjamin Kunkel
The Bernank code speak this week says inflation will rise to that 4.0% mortgage 'deal' and theoretically make it free money if you get the equivalent in a salary raise, but when home values continue to devalue and the collateral goes underwater, doesn't that refi essentially lock that sucker into the equivalent of a 30-YEAR LEASE with a nominal residual value on that depreciating asset (minus the land, of course)? Don't forget to factor in the property taxes and maintenance ... it's a half o lifetime lock unless you pay out-of-pocket for that shortfall. Promoting debt vehicles with 25% let alone little to no equity in the afterglow of a housing bubble is on par with the shenanigans of the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637.
A local residential broker is bragging in her advertisements that she is about to pass $1 billion in sales within this community of only 137,000 households. Of course, her 6% to 7% commisssion is fixed by the National Association of Realtors' multiple-listing-service monopoly to garner her and a few assistants a minimum $65 million (3.5%) skim off the debt machine over the past decade. Now is that productive?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yer4L1Uhayc
Cheers.
bigwad1 -
"Facebook is the joke of this century or I'm missing something."
I guess that means AOL is soooo last century. Remember "You've got mail" and now its you've got everyone in your face? It's not social networking; it's just a mania of social time wasting. This too shall pass.
kaimu -
Your report today is the instant cure for STOCKHOLM SYNDROME. I understand the ESF now. Much appreciated. Will you run as Ron Paul's VP?! How about settle for Treasury Secretary?
Best.
dbarryclan -
I think I read that UXG and MAI will morph into MUX on the exchanges this Friday. Gold is going to get volatile here but when it breaks to the upside decisively above 1710, I want to be holding MUX.
dberryclan -
I just took profits on my PM miners and plan to buy back in after gold OpEx smackdown IF it comes tomorrow. That 1700 handle is a big resistance that Armstrong says will break either way around the end of the month based on a technical model with an all too often scary track record for accuracy.
http://www.martinarmstrong.org/files/Gold%20Near%2...
Could get wilder than a gun fight at an NRA convention.
NYUGrad -
Mark my words, Comex gold will get a smackdown before or at 10:00 a.m. EST at the London fix tomorrow because of this big jump a day ahead of options expiration for the PMs.
Cheers.
In T minus 14 seconds, the vehicle will depart the atmosphere ... over. Houstson, we copy.
http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html
OpEx tomorrow could cause a spark when Capt. Lovell flips the cryotank mixer switch tho.
Casey Research refocuses 'peak oil' drumbeat on the real culprit:
"So here's an interesting thought experiment. Everybody says the US goes to war to protect its oil supplies, but doesn't it really go to war to ensure the continuation of the petrodollar system?"
For example:
"The Iraq war provides a good example. Until November 2000, no OPEC country had dared to violate the US dollar-pricing rule, and while the US dollar remained the strongest currency in the world there was also little reason to challenge the system. But in late 2000, France and a few other EU members convinced Saddam Hussein to defy the petrodollar process and sell Iraq's oil for food in euros, not dollars. In the time between then and the March 2003 American invasion of Iraq, several other nations hinted at their interest in non-US dollar oil trading, including Russia, Iran, Indonesia, and even Venezuela. In April 2002, Iranian OPEC representative Javad Yarjani was invited to Spain by the EU to deliver a detailed analysis of how OPEC might at some point sell its oil to the EU for euros, not dollars."
Other examples are given with an outstanding overview of Iran's global trade relationships overriding any European and U.S. embargo. Interesting as all get out.
Just more proof the petrodollar is toast and the Fed will win the Currency War and beat the Yen and the Euro to the bottom. Once that is accomplished, the U.S. will become a competitive manufacturing powerhouse again.
http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/demise-petrodollar
Cheers.
pulse -
The advent of the blogosphere in the past few decades is putting some serious sunshine on the commodities markets but they have historically been a HAVEN for manipulation. Spies around the resource warehouses/mines, contango, backwardation, OPEC, embargos, trade deficits, subsidies, mono-crops ... petrodollars ... Hussein swinging from a rope.
Honest weights and measures are just enforcement of fair exchange amongst the minions in the trade. But even there, you find the debasement of coinage in both weight and silver/gold content dates back to the creation of it at the dawn of civilization.
Chin up. Knowledge usurps Manipulation every time.
Thanks dave. All credit goes to sharelynx charts. Looks like a trend change in 2011 for the 'manipulation' based on your calculations.
dave -
Trading a trend based on manipulation is like trying to profit from the mob.
Cheers.
dave -
I'll save you some time. Scroll down to the three charts at the bottom.
http://www.caseyresearch.com/gsd/edition/more-trad...
I can't find it but someone was talking about setting up a trade instrument to do this trade of selling the London a.m. fix and buying the p.m. fix. No doubt it's a long term winner. I wonder how long it would take the CFTC or the SEC to charge the guy for having public toilet sex and fold the fund?
Edit: The 4 year chart from Mar 2006 through Mar 2010 shows the smack down comes at the two fixes but more prominently at the London PM fix. So the trade could be fine tuned to not hold one half hour before and one half hour after the two fixes of the day or 5:00 to 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 to 11.00 a.m EST. Now, how to hold into the off hours for the London morning fix? Easy enough to dump the big manipulation down on the p.m. fix here in the U.S. but that knock down hasn't been too prominent lately and those commissions add up and paper gold EFTs are scary instruments.
Linked from CaseyResearch, this Sharelynx chart shows the decades long manipulation of the gold price in the futures market. Scroll to the bottom of the page. What a damning chart!
http://www.caseyresearch.com/gsd/home
Bill & Athan -
Streams super fast in HD. Nice.
Ron -
I did some regular business with Tom Borders, founder of Border's Books, years ago. I recall him as a southern gentleman looking to leverage a runaway local success. The original Border's store was created in my town of Ann Arbor next to the U/Michigan campus and was successful because the two Border's brothers could hire PhD candidates to manage their book 'sections' and so the sales people on the floor were ridiculously knowledgable, to say the least! During their IPO, Kmart gave the brothers an offer they could not refuse and the business went corporate merged/expanded and collapsed.
Ann Arbor is still rife with small booksellers as well as a little known warehouse with a dumpster full of used up scanners out back. In that warehouse are Google's minions scanning away millions of U/Mich's massive library for the past several years. The Google founder, who matriculated at U/Mich, made a deal with the regents and will take the copyright issue to the U.S. Supreme Court soon enough in an attempt to create that most comprehensive of virtual libraries. That coming Supreme Court concession will mark the decline of the public library. Carnegie will roll in his grave. It's '1984' and 'Fahrenheit 451' unfolding in front of our eyes: Big brother setting up a digitized readership which ultimately will be heavily censored with a mouse click by some peevish bureaucrat while the fire department morphs into a book burning operation.
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." ~Heinrich Heine, Almansor, 1823
The Border's and Barnes & Noble corporate bookstores are a stone dead model stocking their shelves with mostly trendy selfishly helpless advise at huge premiums to Amazon's prices. Border's had the Harry Potter series on the shelf for a price that was 100% over any slightly used first editions on eBay just two years ago.
How many of the next generation would appreciate opening my first edition (with a fine dust jacket) of Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' as it was originally published as a bestseller to the public in 1939? Digital books will also kill the book publishing business as witnessed in the past decade with the havoc in the music business and successful authors will become trendy short-story tellers with an Oprah-style endorsement like a one-hit-wonder in the top 3 of American Idol with Simon's nod.
I leave you with another quote from Herr Heine:
"The German Censors —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— idiots —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— ——"
Cheers.
Les -
I will study your links more thoroughly when time permits. The main premise I take from Bill Gross is that he sees a velocity problem with the zero-interest set by the Fed. Indications of this are (1) Gross' PIMCO, the largest bond portfolio on the planet, bailing entirely on U.S. public debt instruments; (2) Your link to M2 velocity dropping like a stone; (3) Commercial banks unwilling to lend to Main St (I base this on my daily business dealings with regional banks and business owners).
This dying velocity of money screams deflation but where the hell is it when I go to the pump or grocery store? Maybe the velocity is being lost in the housing mortgage toxic debt taken off the banks' balance sheets and virtually all small business owners (70%+ of GDP) losing their lines of credit with 100% funding from savings. Gross also asks why hold these debt instruments below inflation rates with the added risk of bank failure? So velocity may be headed overseas or under the matress too. Every year in the U.K., treasure hunters discover ancient gold/silver coin hoards buried in a field by a nobleman during times of political turmoil. There may be no protection of wealth in the end.
We do know banks have managed to recapitalize by transferring bad private debt into public debt. Assuming Spain cannot mandate austerity politically without revolution triggered by its vast unemployed male youth (other troubled european nations not so much with autocrats in place), the big haircut will come there and trigger some form of banking crisis similar to those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When the big sovereign debts roll in March, be ready. It will be game on for WE THE PEOPLE and how we deal with Washington and the NY Banking Cabal (HB&B) when and if Spain 'default' on the banks. They may not call it 'default' to avoid the derivative cascade of claims. Once Spain quits, severe inflation or even hyperinflation and eventual deflation will be in order and the Bernank will be a footnote along with Greenspan in a new heavily revised edition of the Economic Clown School 101 textbook for the Ivy League.
I'm with kaimu on public debt being paramount. Bill Gross, in all his wisdom, is simply saying that the Kensyian bastardization to allow bureaucrats to co-op the politicians into extreme debt creation is not going to allow a CONTROLLED INFLATION. Dropping velocity of money appears to be BG's proof of concept since it should be the opposite for the zero interest policy.
Thanks for your thoughts.