Monday, January 17, 2011

European Silver Shortage Spreads To UK



On Friday we disclosed that major PM distributor, retailer and trading house BullionVault.com had run out of physical silver inventories in Germany (and possibly elsewhere) and was advising clients to seek the precious metal elsewhere. Today, we find that the UK joins Germany in what is now becoming the second round of the global silver shortage (the first one occuring in May 2010 when it was unclear just how the ECB would deal with insolvent PIIGS). Below is the warning by British BullionByPost notifying clients that the company currently has no silver bars in stock. Inventories are expected to be restocked later in February. In the meantime, as before, we urge customs agents to do a quick check of the cargo hold of all private jets (and time shares) registered to any banker making over $25 million. After all, surely the Tunisian president didn't come up with the idea to flee with 25% of Tunisia's gold entirely on his own.

Niall Ferguson On Whether The Financial Crisis Will Lead To America's Decline And A Glimpse Of The "Post-Pax Americana" Dark Ages



Two weeks after we presented Niall Ferguson's video lecture - "Empires On The Verge Of Chaos" to tremendous reader response and almost 30,000 views, we follow up with another must watch video presentation, this time highlighting the intellectual rigor of Ferguson, David Gergen and Mort Zuckerman. The topic once again is the Financial Crisis, and specifically how, why and whether it will lead to America's decline. Of particular note is Ferguson's spot on characterization of the primary deficiency in the so-called brains of economists, namely that they see patterns, equilibria and stable systems where there are absolutely none: i.e., in the complex (as in Lorenzian) world of economics: "Complex systems look like they are in equilibrium, but they are not: they are constantly adapting, highly decentralized, interdependent systems and this process of adaptation can continue for quite a long time. And you think to yourself when you look at it, that's in a wonderful equilibrium. That's how we think about the economy. That is how economists teach economics. They talk about it in terms of equilibrium. The bad news is that in fact we inhabit a complex system that has virtually nothing to do with the neoclassical model that you are taught in Econ 101. And that's why the economists failed to predict the financial crisis... For me American power if you generalize beyond the realm of finance through the geopolitical system is a perfect example of a highly complex system which looks like it is in equilibrium but like all the great empires of the past is quite close to the edge of chaos. And our nightmare scenario should be that something happens to us like happened to the Soviet Union... It suddenly just falls apart. And I think the trigger, the catalyst if you want to switch to chaos theory the butterfly in the tropical rainforest that flaps its wings and posits the distant thunderstorm is going to be the credibility of fiscal policy. That just seems to me like the obvious place where things can turn nasty, and they turn nasty with amazing speed."

Fed President Charles Plosser Says Fed Is Helpless To Reverse Sharp Decline in House Prices

 

posted by TraderHMS at Jim Rogers Blog - 7 hours ago
“It should be criminal. Prices are going up except in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is here and it is going to get worse.” - in LewRockwell ProShares UltraShort 20+ Year Trea (ETF) (NYSE:TBT) , iShare...



Posted: Jan 17 2011     By: Greg Hunter      Post Edited: January 17, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Filed under: USAWatchdog.com

Courtesy of Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

Dear CIGAs,
For months now, the Federal Reserve has been worried about inflation being too low.  So low, that the Fed claims it is unhealthy to the U.S. economy.  When it announced its second wave of money printing (QE2) in early November 2010, the Fed said, “Longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable, but measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters. . . . To promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate, the Committee decided today to expand its holdings of securities.” (Click here to read the Complete Fed News release from November 2010.) That means the Fed started printing $75 billion a month, out of thin air, to finance more than half of the U.S. budget.  QE2 is scheduled to end in June, but many predict it will be immediately followed by some sort of QE3.
The mainstream media is spinning the latest consumer price numbers as good news, but inflation 2011 is here.  The Associated Press called inflation “tepid.” The story went onto say, “The Labor Department said Friday that consumer prices rose 0.5 percent last month, the largest increase since June 2009. Roughly 80 percent of the increase was due to higher gas prices. . . . Without food and energy costs, consumer prices only increased by 0.1 percent for the second straight month. This “core” inflation rate has gained 0.8 percent in the past year, evidence that prices are not rising too quickly.” (Click here to read the entire AP story.) It would be nice to live in a world where you don’t need food or energy, but that simply is not the case.
On the other hand, the Fed plan to stoke the fires of inflation is working nicely according to the latest report from economist John Williams at Shadowstats.com.  Williams strips away all the accounting gimmicks that make inflation look tamer than reality.  The Shadowstats.com report last Friday said, “There are numskulls in the financial media — toadies to the Federal Reserve — who would like to think that energy and food inflation do not count.  Simply put, the monthly December inflation releases for the CPI-U (annualized 6.2% inflation), CPI-W (annualized 7.8% inflation) and PPI (14.0% annualized inflation) were disasters . . .” The credit or the blame for the big spike in inflation is the direct fault of the Fed.  “The sharp increases in December energy and food prices were not due to normal price volatility in those areas, instead, they were created directly by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke’s ongoing push to debase the U.S. dollar — to destroy the purchasing value of the U.S. currency,” said Williams. (Click here to go to Shadowstats.com)
More…

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ECB Monetization Of Toxic Sovereign Sludge Surges 20-Fold In Past Week

 

Albert Edwards: "I Have Been Wrong – I’ve Been Too Bullish"

 

Simon Black On "Hands Down, The Cheapest Place In The World To Buy Gold Coins" And Some Arbitrage Opportunities

 

 

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