While a further move down is possible, investment fund manager, Marc Faber says over the long term gold should move higher
Hard
Assets Investor: At Inside Commodities last December in New York City,
you presented a line chart that compared gold prices to U.S. federal
debt and showed the parallel trajectory lines of both. With debt
increasing every day, your charts say gold will keep increasing, right?Marc Faber: People say the price of gold is in a bubble stage and it is up substantially from the lows in 1999, which was, at the time, around $252 per ounce. But at the same time, we had an explosion of debt, not just government debt, but private sector debt, and an explosion of unfunded liabilities such as in the pension fund industry, and not just with Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.
So now, 12 years after the gold’s low, we are essentially in a situation where maybe the price of gold should be much higher because the economic and financial conditions are worse than they were 12 years ago. I go to lots of conferences and I usually ask the audience, “How many of you own gold?” Normally, hardly anyone owns it. I’ve been to conferences with thousands of people attending, and nobody owned any physical gold.
Read More @ MineWeb.com
Ron Paul: "Central Bankers Are Intellectually Bankrupt"
Likely glowing from his glorious victory (h/t Trish Regan)
over Krugman in Bloomberg's recent Paul vs Paul debate, Rep. Ron Paul
destroys the central-planning arrogance of Bernanke and his ilk in an
Op-Ed released by the FT today.Control of the world’s economy has been placed in the hands of a banking cartel, which holds great danger for all of us. True prosperity requires sound money, increased productivity, and increased savings and investment. The world is awash in US dollars, and a currency crisis involving the world’s reserve currency would be an unprecedented catastrophe. No amount of monetary expansion can solve our current financial problems, but it can make those problems much worse.
Why You Shouldn't Trust Tomorrow's BLS Number
While
much has been written on the revisions, adjustments, and
just-plain-guesses that make up the BLS' non-farm-payroll data, the
frustration levels are building in the Bay Area as Charles Biderman
provides the most in-depth discussion of why we need a better press
corps. The simple truth, as Charles notes, is that even the BLS doesn't believe its own hype (in its footnotes)
and while mainstream media and talking heads will quote the
unemployment rate or NFP change as if it was transcribed by the hand of
God, it is in fact an extremely ill-formed, very narrow survey with such huge statistical noise as to be entirely useless. However, while every human should watch this brief clip before buying that 100-lot ES milliseconds after the release tomorrow, we suspect, as usual, it will be algos-gone-wild no matter how many sigma we beat or miss.Don't Get Caught Chasing Your Tail
Testing previous resistance as support after the breakout is nothing more
than ebb and flow within a market. Those trading short-term technical
patterns better be expert traders, because nothing has reversed the
long-term breakout and secular up trend. Double tops, heads and shoulders
formations, etc, only limited guidance as when to reenter. This game is
all about control and control...
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content, and more! ]]
Mining Shares Continue being Pummeled
No matter which way you measure it, the mining shares are systematically
being destroyed as the HUI just made a new 52 week low in today's session.
What else can be said about these shares that has not already been said -
their performance against the price of gold bullion has been atrocious
while they have seriously underperformed the broader market since September
of last year.
Management needs to get out in front of this and where possible, cash
profits should be returned in a much larger percentage to the shareholders
in the form of a stronger and higher dividend. They have to ... more »
Invisible Hand Abusing Silver Investors
A short-term peak in the composite lease spread on 4/3 suggested that the
invisible hand had started leaning on silver again. The price of silver was
$31.98. As of 4/24 composite lease spreads and price of silver continue to
decline. As I wrote Monday, "Negative lease spreads tend to reverse into
weakness unless the trend becomes uncontrollable." The invisible hand
remains in complete...
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content, and more! ]]
ETFs and Derivatives Will Be the Next Trigger Event for a Major Financial Crisis
"Volatility On Demand": Catching A 54 Second Grand Rehearsal For A Market Crash In The Act
"Either someone likes buying high and selling low, or they have figured out how to significantly increase the volatility in a stock." On May 2, 2012 beginning right at market close (16:00 Eastern) and continuing for about 54 seconds, an HFT algo ran that significantly increased volatility and impacted at least 34 stocks. We think this was either a test of an algorithm someone is getting ready to deploy during market hours, or that this algo already runs during market hours, but is much harder to detect amidst the huge volume of market data noise.
Facebook Details IPO Details, Issues Amended S-1
Facebook has just released a revised S-1 filing (link) which list additional information on the IPO. Among the details:- The IPO would value the company at as much as $74.8 billion, based on a total of 2.138 billion Class A and B shares outstanding after the offering, assuming a $35 share price. Wasn't this supposed to be $100 billion?
- Total shares offered wil be 337,415,352 at a proposed price range of $28-$35 (mid point of the range is $31.50)
- Primary shares (proceeds going to company) will be 180 million
- Selling stockholders shares will be 157.4 million: these proceeds will not go to the company
- Facebook estimates: "We estimate that our net proceeds from the sale of the Class A common stock that we are offering will be approximately $5.6 billion, assuming an initial public offering price of $31.50 per share, which is the midpoint of the price range on the cover page of this prospectus"
Rutledge Reads The Tea-Leaves: "We Are Investing On The Crust Of A Melted Marshmallow"
While
much of the panel's discussion is the somewhat typical growth,
recovery, global diversification mantra of a homogenized investment
community, The Milken Institute's 'Reading The Tea-Leaves' panel was dominated by some deeper thoughts from John Rutledge of Safanad SA.
John sees the world not as a series of equilibria like any and every
mainstream economist but the exact opposite with earthquakes and
tsunamis capable of occurring at any time. In three-and-a-half minutes,
Rutledge analogizes investing today as "living on the crust of a molten
marshmallow" and notes that 'investing' to him now is "trying
to figure out situations in which some stupid policy has created a big
wedge between returns on different assets that causes people to
redeploy capital" and that is what moves prices. Claiming that the two most destructive inventions of the twentieth century were Modern Macroeconomics and Modern Portfolio Theory
(which have caused more loss of wealth than anything else he knows),
the optimistic father-of-six goes on to discuss the three storm systems
that must be navigated in the world currently: 1) Europe; 2) China's
growth; 3) the extraordinary growth of Central Bank balance sheets. He
concludes with some insights into why not to own bonds and what bonds
say about scarcity of future cash-flows, and sees the greatest risk today is that "investors are mentally unprepared for the world we invest in"Osama's Grand Plan To Destroy America: President Biden
In
celebration of the one-year anniversary of the Corzining of Osama, a
stash of letters uncovered during the raid that killed the Al Qaeda
mastermind uncover a truly terrifying 'grand plan'. As the NY Daily News reports, Bin
Laden planned to target more airplanes at Petraeus and President Obama
with the cunning plan that a successful assassination would propel an
"utterly unprepared" Vice President Biden into the Oval Office - and send the US spiraling into chaos."
In the aftermath of Solyndra and the realization that Biden's key
economic advisor was Jon Corzine this actually sounds like a brilliant
plan. The full list of 17 Bin Laden letters can be found here
with English translations and the Combating Terrorism Center's report
is embedded below. Luckily for all of us, it appears the weakened Al
Qaeda had no means to pull off such high profile attacks and Osama even
reflected on his frustration with the inability of spinoff terror
groups to inflict real damage on the West. Oorah!Guest Post: Future Economy, Future Stability, Future Careers
"I would very much like to learn your thoughts on what careers may be viable for our children. With the future likely to change our lives so dramatically, where do you see opportunities for some form of career growth and some form of stability?"Answer:
- Let go of old models of financial security. Do not assume a government job means 30 years of security and a fat pension thereafter. That's the past, not the future.
- Assume monopolies and cartels imposed by the State will be disrupted and implode. The key example here is the sickcare system imposed by the State. For decades people have seen sickcare expand year after year, and so it seems sensible to assume that joining healthcare a.k.a. sickcare was a path to security.
- The best career strategy going forward is to assemble multiple skillsets. What we know is that current models will be disrupted, but we cannot know the future. Thus we cannot know which skillsets will be demand. That may change constantly; "security" will flow not from clinging to failing institutions for 30 years but by being flexible and adaptive.
Rents are soaring, and that’s bad news for inflation — and for Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s plans to keep it low.FORTUNE – Most of us don’t want to pay higher prices, but there’s a growing debate over whether we should allow inflation to edge a little higher to help the U.S. economy grow.
Earlier this week, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Engle joined fellow prize winner Paul Krugman in building the case for rapidly rising prices. They say it could help reduce joblessness, with Krugman suggesting that the Federal Reserve tolerate inflation of up to 4% to boost the economy. That’s about double what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been targeting. Anything higher than that, Bernanke has said, would be “very reckless” and could potentially derail the economic recovery.
He might be right, but economists urging higher prices also have a point worth considering.
Read More @ Money.CNN.com
[Ed. Note: CRIMINAL BANKS RUN THE SHOW]
By Bradley Keoun, Joshua Zumbrun and Cheyenne Hopkins, Bloomberg :
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon
led Wall Street bosses in a closed-door meeting to personally lobby the
Federal Reserve about softening proposed reforms that might crimp their
profits.
The contingent, which included Bank of America Corp. (BAC)’s
Brian T. Moynihan, 52, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s Lloyd C. Blankfein, 57, pressed the Fed on rules they said would overstate trading risks and harm financial markets, the central
bank said yesterday in a statement. They also discussed what they see as flaws in Fed stress tests designed to gauge the strength of the nation’s largest lenders…
…JPMorgan has said the company’s chief investment office, with a $360 billion portfolio, is responsible for managing some of the firm’s risks. The unit has made bets so large that the bank probably can’t unwind them without losing money or roiling financial markets…
Read More @ Bloomberg.com
By Bradley Keoun, Joshua Zumbrun and Cheyenne Hopkins, Bloomberg :
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon
led Wall Street bosses in a closed-door meeting to personally lobby the
Federal Reserve about softening proposed reforms that might crimp their
profits. The contingent, which included Bank of America Corp. (BAC)’s
Brian T. Moynihan, 52, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s Lloyd C. Blankfein, 57, pressed the Fed on rules they said would overstate trading risks and harm financial markets, the central
bank said yesterday in a statement. They also discussed what they see as flaws in Fed stress tests designed to gauge the strength of the nation’s largest lenders…
…JPMorgan has said the company’s chief investment office, with a $360 billion portfolio, is responsible for managing some of the firm’s risks. The unit has made bets so large that the bank probably can’t unwind them without losing money or roiling financial markets…
Read More @ Bloomberg.com
Over
the last 10 years, there have been only five 40-day periods quieter
than the one we have just had but is it a bearish or bullish signal?
by Ben Traynor, MineWeb.com
HOW OFTEN are gold prices as range bound as this?
The London gold fix on Wednesday afternoon marked the fortieth trading day in a row that gold fixed between $1600 and $1700.
The last PM Fix outside this range was on March 5 ($1705 an ounce). Spot gold prices did manage to poke their head above the $1700 mark later that same week, but since then gold has gone pretty much nowhere. Is it common to see such a protracted period of sideways trading?
Read More @ MineWeb.com
by Ben Traynor, MineWeb.com
HOW OFTEN are gold prices as range bound as this?
The London gold fix on Wednesday afternoon marked the fortieth trading day in a row that gold fixed between $1600 and $1700.
The last PM Fix outside this range was on March 5 ($1705 an ounce). Spot gold prices did manage to poke their head above the $1700 mark later that same week, but since then gold has gone pretty much nowhere. Is it common to see such a protracted period of sideways trading?
Read More @ MineWeb.com
by Bix Weir, Road to Roota:
Those of us who have witnessed the manipulation of the silver market
for many years have developed a 6th sense about what is on our horizon.
This 6th sense combines all the information available and sorts it
according to the expected planned manipulation maneuvers of the market
riggers. For example, last years rigging of the silver market was a
delicate dance orchestrated by JP Morgan. Both the early build-up from
$25 to $50 in the first four months to the subsequent slams perpetrated
throughout the year. It was all scripted well in advance and then
implemented with military precision after the appointment of the JPM
“Swat Team” member Bill Daley as Obama’s Chief of Staff. I outlined it
all in this article that was posted in June 2011: JP Morgan: “Operation Silver Slam”
Was it fair? Of course not. Was it “par for the course”? Yes…100%. Once you understand that the price of silver is controlled ON EVERY TRADE by computer programs you can easily see past the smokescreens that are put up. I take that back…there’s not even a smokescreen up anymore with all the blatant market rigging!
Read More @ RoadToRoota.com
Those of us who have witnessed the manipulation of the silver market
for many years have developed a 6th sense about what is on our horizon.
This 6th sense combines all the information available and sorts it
according to the expected planned manipulation maneuvers of the market
riggers. For example, last years rigging of the silver market was a
delicate dance orchestrated by JP Morgan. Both the early build-up from
$25 to $50 in the first four months to the subsequent slams perpetrated
throughout the year. It was all scripted well in advance and then
implemented with military precision after the appointment of the JPM
“Swat Team” member Bill Daley as Obama’s Chief of Staff. I outlined it
all in this article that was posted in June 2011: JP Morgan: “Operation Silver Slam”Was it fair? Of course not. Was it “par for the course”? Yes…100%. Once you understand that the price of silver is controlled ON EVERY TRADE by computer programs you can easily see past the smokescreens that are put up. I take that back…there’s not even a smokescreen up anymore with all the blatant market rigging!
Read More @ RoadToRoota.com
from Bullion Street:
HANOI:
As Vietnam’s Gold Decree less than a month away, banks in the nation
began the race to mobilize gold before being banned from doing so.
Many local commercial banks have switched from mobilizing gold to safeguarding gold for customers as the ban on gold depositing and lending started to take effect on Tuesday.
Reports said most banks were offering the popular rate of 3 percent per year, but the earnings at some banks were pushed up over 4 percent.
Read More @ BullionStreet.com
HANOI:
As Vietnam’s Gold Decree less than a month away, banks in the nation
began the race to mobilize gold before being banned from doing so.Many local commercial banks have switched from mobilizing gold to safeguarding gold for customers as the ban on gold depositing and lending started to take effect on Tuesday.
Reports said most banks were offering the popular rate of 3 percent per year, but the earnings at some banks were pushed up over 4 percent.
Read More @ BullionStreet.com
By Amity Shlaes, Bloomberg :
Nut cases. That’s what they are. And if you take an interest in them, you are a nut case, too.
That’s the consensus among credentialed economists who describe advocates of a return to the monetary regime known as the gold standard. In fact, the economic pack will marginalize you as a weirdo faster than you can say “Jacques Rueff,” if you even raise the topic of monetary policy in relation to gold.
An example of such marginalizing appears in a recent issue
of the Atlantic magazine. Author Adam Ozimek lists four rules upon which economists overwhelmingly agree. Right away, that
puts readers on guard; they don’t want to be the only one to disagree with eminences.
Read More @ Bloomberg.com
Nut cases. That’s what they are. And if you take an interest in them, you are a nut case, too.
That’s the consensus among credentialed economists who describe advocates of a return to the monetary regime known as the gold standard. In fact, the economic pack will marginalize you as a weirdo faster than you can say “Jacques Rueff,” if you even raise the topic of monetary policy in relation to gold.
An example of such marginalizing appears in a recent issue
of the Atlantic magazine. Author Adam Ozimek lists four rules upon which economists overwhelmingly agree. Right away, that
puts readers on guard; they don’t want to be the only one to disagree with eminences.
Read More @ Bloomberg.com
from The American Dream:
Does
it ever seem to you like people are becoming stupider than ever? There
have always been people out there that have been a few cards short of a
full deck, but these days it seems like more people than ever are a few
fries short of a Happy Meal. Certainly our education system plays a
major role in this. Our children are being systematically “dumbed-down”
by our public schools and millions of them are graduating from high
school as dumb as a rock.
And the endless hours of mindless entertainment that most of us are
addicted to certainly is not helping matters either. Will we eventually
become a society where only a small minority possess critical thinking
skills? In our world today, logic and reason seem to be in very short
supply and the sheeple seem to have taken over. As I wrote about recently,
in this day and age it is more imperative than ever that we all learn
to think for ourselves. Unfortunately, most people do not seem to be
doing that. Most people seem content to let their televisions do their
thinking for them. Way too many people have a blank look in their eyes
as if they aren’t even fully there. But when people are not thinking
clearly, they tend to act very foolishly. From the very top of our
society to the very bottom, people are doing some really stupid things.
Read More @ EndOfTheAmericanDream.com
Does
it ever seem to you like people are becoming stupider than ever? There
have always been people out there that have been a few cards short of a
full deck, but these days it seems like more people than ever are a few
fries short of a Happy Meal. Certainly our education system plays a
major role in this. Our children are being systematically “dumbed-down”
by our public schools and millions of them are graduating from high
school as dumb as a rock.
And the endless hours of mindless entertainment that most of us are
addicted to certainly is not helping matters either. Will we eventually
become a society where only a small minority possess critical thinking
skills? In our world today, logic and reason seem to be in very short
supply and the sheeple seem to have taken over. As I wrote about recently,
in this day and age it is more imperative than ever that we all learn
to think for ourselves. Unfortunately, most people do not seem to be
doing that. Most people seem content to let their televisions do their
thinking for them. Way too many people have a blank look in their eyes
as if they aren’t even fully there. But when people are not thinking
clearly, they tend to act very foolishly. From the very top of our
society to the very bottom, people are doing some really stupid things.Read More @ EndOfTheAmericanDream.com
by Greg Hunter, USAWatchdog:
Last
Friday (April 23, 2012), the government reported the gross domestic
product (GDP) number for the first quarter, and it was 2.2%. That was
.8% lower than the 4th quarter’s 3% growth rate. It was a
big disappointment because most economists were expecting growth numbers
closer to the 3% range. The New York Times reported the economy thwarting numbers with a political bent that said, “The
economic recovery slowed more than expected early this year, raising
fears of a spring slowdown for the third year in a row and giving
Republicans a fresh opportunity to criticize President Obama’s policies.
. . . “When you look at the report in the totality, I think it shows
that the private sector is continuing to heal from the financial
crisis,” said Alan Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of
Economic Advisers. . . . Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from
Texas and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, called the
numbers “beyond disappointing.”
Read More @ USAWatchdog.com
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Last
Friday (April 23, 2012), the government reported the gross domestic
product (GDP) number for the first quarter, and it was 2.2%. That was
.8% lower than the 4th quarter’s 3% growth rate. It was a
big disappointment because most economists were expecting growth numbers
closer to the 3% range. The New York Times reported the economy thwarting numbers with a political bent that said, “The
economic recovery slowed more than expected early this year, raising
fears of a spring slowdown for the third year in a row and giving
Republicans a fresh opportunity to criticize President Obama’s policies.
. . . “When you look at the report in the totality, I think it shows
that the private sector is continuing to heal from the financial
crisis,” said Alan Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of
Economic Advisers. . . . Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from
Texas and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, called the
numbers “beyond disappointing.” Read More @ USAWatchdog.com
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