"The truly hysterical part of this cycle is still approaching, and it may get quite a bit worse when it does. Paranoia is almost a given when the exceptional fail spectacularly. There may be blood, if history is any indication, and a great deal of propaganda and distorted information spread by the money masters, without doubt. Those who have gone before us have stood on similar ground, over and over again. And now it is our turn."
Jesse, Keep the Faith, 7 July 2017
"Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants - but debt is the money of slaves."
Norm Franz, Money and Wealth in the New Millenium
"It is one thing to be honestly correct or not correct about something; it's another thing for an academic discipline to have a systemic corruption problem. And that's what I will be talking about in part later, because the economics discipline in my view does have that problem."In Charles' defense he is only saying publicly what is being said privately amongst academic scientists and mathematicians about the inordinate effect of power and money on the integrity of economic opinions and research.
AFP
China's forex reserves hit record $2.87 trillion
January 10, 2011
BEIJING (AFP) – China said Tuesday its foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of 2010 as new loans topped an official target, highlighting Beijing's difficult task of stemming a flood of liquidity. The country's stockpile of foreign currencies, already the world's largest, expanded 18.7 percent from a year earlier to $2.847 trillion at the end of December, the central bank said in a statement.
New loans issued by state-owned banks in 2010 reached 7.95 trillion yuan ($1.2 trillion), exceeding the government's full-year target of 7.5 trillion yuan but less than the previous year's explosion of lending.
M2, the broadest measure of money washing around the world's second-largest economy, reached 72.58 trillion yuan at the end of last year, up 19.7 percent from a year earlier.
Analysts blame China's huge trade surplus -- $183.1 billion in 2010 -- and its massive stimulus measures since late 2008 to combat the financial crisis for the flood of credit that has been fuelling inflation and property prices.
Foreign exchange earned by Chinese exporters is changed for yuan with the central bank so it can control the value of the local unit -- a policy long criticised by China's trade partners for grossly undervaluing the currency.
The foreign exchange is added to China's growing coffers, while the yuan fuels the amount of money flowing into the economy.
Ever fearful of inflation's potential to spark social unrest, top leaders have been pulling on a variety of levers to rein in consumer prices and calm growing anxiety about soaring food costs and property values.
In December, the central bank hiked interest rates for the second time in less than three months. It has also ordered lenders to keep more money in reserve, effectively limiting the amount of funds they can lend.
District Court Judge Orders Federal Reserve to Hand Over Gold RecordsBoth Bernanke and Greenspan have testified that there have been no transactions in gold. Yet the Fed refuses to disclose documents that suggest circumstantially that there have been.
"If the U.S. gold reserves are just sitting somewhere, inert, unencumbered, and unused for surreptitious market intervention, what's the problem with full disclosure?"
How can the Fed be a trusted government regulator, given its position as a quasi-private banking cartel and an obsessive predilection for secrecy in its own dealings with what are clearly public assets?
Harvery Organ's commentary:
"And now for the big silver report.We witnessed a massive withdrawal of silver unprecedented in the history of the comex. First there was a smallish 6507 oz of silver deposited to two customers, one being 497 oz and the other 6010 oz). But just look at the huge withdrawals:
Four customers (not dealers) withdrew a total of 1,019,310 oz from the comex vaults. This is real silver leaving from 4 registered vaults. The individual withdrawals are: 579,081, 30,380, 399,994 and 9855 oz.
The dealer (our bankers) also were involved in the withdrawal of silver to the tune of 769,941 oz (there were 2 dealers involved removing 102,866 and 667,875 ozs). When you see this massive drain of silver, the fire is raging. The total silver withdrawal by both dealer and customer totalled an astronomical 1,789,251. The Brink's trucks must have been very busy yesterday.
The comex folk notified us that an amazing 85 notices were sent down for servicing for a total of 425,000 oz of silver. The total number of silver notices sent down so far total 323 or 1,615,000 oz. To obtain what is left to be served, I take the open interest for January at 153 and subtract 85 deliveries leaving a total of 68 notices or 340,000 oz left to be serviced.
Thus the total number of silver ounces standing in this non delivery month of January is as follows:
1,615,000 oz + 340,000 = 1,955,000 oz (Thursday total = 1,625,000). As promised to you, this number is rising and will continue to rise until the end of the month as our banker cartel scrambles to get any morsel of silver to satisfy the massive demand for this metal. Our bankers are stunned to see such a huge amount of silver options in a traditionally slow month.
I hope everyone caught the Eric Sprott story on Kingworld news that he is having trouble locating silver."
“This may be the best opportunity you’re going to get at least from a price sense to buy gold and silver in the next few days. I think when this correction however long it will last is over, it will probably mark the lows for the year which will then be the liftoff to the eleventh consecutive year of higher gold prices.” John Embry, interview with KWN
New Buyers Are Taking On the Silver Shorts - Turk
"Roosevelt appeared an unlikely candidate for a reform president. Born into a wealthy family, he enjoyed a youth beyond the reach of most Americans, touring Europe and the Middle East, studying with private tutors, and coming of age in a New York mansion. A Harvard man, he socialized with America's upper crust. In practice, however, TR looked after the interests of working class Americans against rapacious corporate trusts, defying -- and some would say betraying -- the very society from which he had sprung.
When TR entered the White House in 1901, he took control of a federal government that often aligned itself with big business. Roosevelt restrained his progressive leanings for a short time, wisely avoiding a shakeup on Wall Street, where jittery investors saw him at best as a loose cannon and at worst as a dangerous demagogue.
In early 1902, however, TR took the offensive against powerful corporate trusts. He convinced Congress to create a Bureau of Corporations to regulate big business, then shocked the nation by bringing an anti-trust suit against J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities Corporation. Morgan condemned the president, not just for what he had done, but for the ungentlemanly way in which he had done it -- publicly and without warning. A new paradigm had been established in Washington, and Roosevelt would go on to file suit against more than 40 major corporations during his presidency.
If Roosevelt's trust-busting surprised big business, it was certainly consistent with the major influences on his life. Theodore Roosevelt grew up worshipping a father who preached the moral duty of helping the poor, and he worked to be like his father in every way he could. As a young man, TR experienced life as a rancher in North Dakota's Badlands, where all the money in the world could not make a cow easier to rope or the summer sun less blazing, and years of honest work from sunup to sundown might still leave a person poor.
He learned to value working class people, and he never forgot them. From the time he took office in 1901 to the time he left it in 1909, the cowboy president did much to help working Americans. He passed laws to ensure the safety of food and drugs sold in the American marketplace. He placed millions of acres of land under federal protection, preserving America's natural resources. He regulated interstate commerce and helped laborers to get a fair shake at the negotiating table.
Plutocrats deplored Roosevelt. Yet TR adamantly defended the right of big business to exist. Trying to destroy the trusts, Roosevelt wrote in his Autobiography, "was a hopeless effort... those who went into it, although they regarded themselves as radical progressives, really represented a sincere form of rural Toryism." To TR, Progressivism meant a square deal for the American people and American business, a society where businesses profited by fair competition -- but not at the expense of the average American.
In fact, Roosevelt's relationship with labor was a tenuous one; he probably feared nothing more than he feared labor's potential for violence. "We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital than evil in the man of no capital," Roosevelt wrote. One of his greatest frustrations was the inability of capitalists to see that their greed might well foment a bloody American revolution. Labor regularly condemned him, insisting that his brand of reform did not go far enough.
After leaving the presidency, Roosevelt continued to push for domestic reform, most notably during his Progressive party campaign for the presidency in 1912. He ran on a "New Nationalism" platform, calling for women's suffrage, an end to child labor, pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance, and increased regulation of the trusts. While Theodore Roosevelt failed in this final presidential bid, others picked up his torch, and many of the ideas he championed would later come to fruition."
“For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill.” Richard Clopton
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: "Account Overdrawn."
Ayn Rand
"The more gross the fraud the more glibly will it go down, and the more greedily be swallowed, since folly will always find faith where impostors will find imprudence."
Charles Caleb Colton
"On a side bar. remember a couple of years ago, when I went on CNBC to talk to them about things that were happening in the markets in the afterhours that didn't make sense, and looked like an "outside force" was moving them? And they laughed at me, and told me to take my theory to Hollywood, and see if they would make a movie of it! And then a month or so later, a guy came out and proved my theory? Well. I have to believe that the rise of Gold and Silver, the rise of Treasury yields, and Oil, all being reversed on a dime, smells like PPT. it walks like PPT. and it talks like PPT." Chuck Butler, Everbank World Markets
"Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy." Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
The Adam Smith Institute Blog
European Nations Begin Seizing Private Pensions
By Jan Iwanik
January 2, 2011
People’s retirement savings are a convenient source of revenue for governments that don’t want to reduce spending or make privatizations. As most pension schemes in Europe are organised by the state, European ministers of finance have a facilitated access to the savings accumulated there, and it is only logical that they try to get a hold of this money for their own ends. In recent weeks I have noted five such attempts: Three situations concern private personal savings; two others refer to national funds.
The most striking example is Hungary, where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). In this extortionate way, the government wants to gain control over $14bn of individual retirement savings.
The Bulgarian government has come up with a similar idea. $300m of private early retirement savings was supposed to be transferred to the state pension scheme. The government gave way after trade unions protested and finally only about 20% of the original plans were implemented.
A slightly less drastic situation is developing in Poland. The government wants to transfer of 1/3 of future contributions from individual retirement accounts to the state-run social security system. Since this system does not back its liabilities with stocks or even bonds, the money taken away from the savers will go directly to the state treasury and savers will lose about $2.3bn a year. The Polish government is more generous than the Hungarian one, but only because it wants to seize just 1/3 of the future savings and also allows the citizens to keep the money accumulated so far.
The fourth example is Ireland. In 2001, the National Pension Reserve Fund was brought into existence for the purpose of supporting pensions of the Irish people in the years 2025-2050. The scheme was also supposed to provide for the pensions of some public sector employees (mainly university staff). However, in March 2009, the Irish government earmarked €4bn from this fund for rescuing banks. In November 2010, the remaining savings of €2.5bn was seized to support the bailout of the rest of the country.
The final example is France. In November, the French parliament decided to earmark €33bn from the national reserve pension fund FRR to reduce the short-term pension scheme deficit. In this way, the retirement savings intended for the years 2020-2040 will be used earlier, that is in the years 2011-2024, and the government will spend the saved up resources on other purposes.
It looks like although the governments are able to enforce general participation in pension schemes, they do not seem to be the best guardians of the money accumulated there.
