Tuesday, April 19, 2011

S&P Moves US Outlook To Negative, Gold Hits New Record

Standard & Poor’s on Monday downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, saying it believes there’s a risk U.S. policymakers may not reach agreement on how to address the country’s long-term fiscal pressures.

The S&P said the move signals there’s at least a one-in-three likelihood that it could lower its long-term rating on the United States within two years.

The U.S. dollar fell broadly on word of the revision. Gold prices, meanwhile, hit a new record above $1,496 an ounce.

Read Entire Article

Standard & Poors Cuts U.S. Outlook to Negative Because Both Parties Keep Throwing Money at Endless Wars, Endless Bailouts and a Ponzi Financial System

As I've been warning for years, America's irresponsible financial policy will lead to a credit downgrade.

Today, S&P cut its U.S. outlook to negative, warning of a 1 in 3 chance of a credit downgrade in the next couple of years.

As the Wall Street Journal notes:

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services Inc. cut its outlook on the U.S. to negative, increasing the likelihood of a potential downgrade from its triple-A rating, as the path from large budget deficits and rising government debt remains unclear.
"More than two years after the beginning of the recent crisis, U.S. policy makers have still not agreed on how to reverse recent fiscal deterioration or address longer-term fiscal pressures," S&P credit analyst Nikola G. Swann said. He said the rating agency puts the chance of a U.S. downgrade within two years at least one-in-three.
***
S&P said Monday it sees material risk that policymakers might not agree on how to address budgetary challenges by 2013, which would render the U.S. fiscal profile weaker than that of other triple-A-rated countries.
***
S&P said that if an agreement isn't reached and meaningful implementation is not begun by 2013, it would make the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of other triple-A-rated sovereigns.

While the Democratic and Republican leadership point fingers at the other side, and bicker about ideological pet peeves, this is not a question of left-versus-right.

The war between liberals and conservatives is a false divide-and-conquer dog-and-pony show created by the powers that be to keep the American people divided and distracted. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

The real problem is that both Democrats and Republicans want to fund endless wars, give endless bailouts to the too big to fail banks and corporations, and perpetuate the expensive Ponzi scheme of printing money out of thin air.

Imperial wars reduce our national security. Indeed, our top military and intelligence officials say that debt is the main threat to our national security, and have said that the Pentagon must cut spending. See this and this.

Moreover, endless bailouts harm the economy. Ponzi finance costs trillions of dollars (and leads to a decrease in loans to Main Street). And see this and this.

To the extent that both the Republican and Democratic parties slavishly follow these meta-policies - which supersede the stated "conservative" and "liberal" goals - they will ensure that we lose our AAA credit, and they will destroy our economy.

Saudi slashes oil output, says market oversupplied

(Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's oil minister said on Sunday the kingdom had slashed output by 800,000 barrels per day in March due to oversupply, sending the strongest signal yet that OPEC will not act to quell soaring prices.

Consumers have urged the exporters' group to pump more crude to put a cap on oil, which surged to more than $127 a barrel this month, its highest level in 2 1/2 years amid unrest in North Africa and the Middle East.

Oil Ministers from Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates echoed Saudi Arabia's Ali al-Naimi's concerns about oversupply and said rocketing crude prices were out of the hands of OPEC, which next meets in June.

"The market is overbalanced ... Our production in February was 9.125 million barrels per day (bpd), in March it was 8.292 million bpd. In April we don't know yet, probably a little higher than March. The reason I gave you these numbers is to show you that the market is oversupplied," Naimi told reporters.

Two Saudi-based industry sources told Reuters last week the kingdom had cut output due to poor demand, prompting selling by traders who saw it as a sign of a well-supplied market.

But crude rebounded later in the week on optimism about the state of the U.S. economy.

Naimi's words are the clearest indication yet that OPEC is unconvinced there is a need for more oil despite the civil war that has slashed Libyan output and expectations Japanese demand will rise as it scrambles to rebuild its earthquake-shattered electricity grid.

"These statements underscore the breadth of the security premium currently in (oil) prices. Overall supplies are sufficient," said John Kilduff of energy hedge fund Again Capital. "As we've seen in the past, however, a well-supplied market is not always a barrier to very high prices."

IEA: MARKET TIGHTENING

Naimi, who has previously spoken of $70 to $80 a barrel as a desirable range for crude, declined to comment on the price.

Oil prices fell early last week on concern that demand may be eroding under pressure from high prices, but rebounded on Friday following encouraging U.S. economic data.

Nobuo Tanaka, the head of the International Energy Agency, which represents oil importers' interests, stopped short of saying OPEC needed to boost output, but suggested the group be more flexible in its thinking about supply.

"The market is getting tighter and if it is tighter the price may go up, which may have a negative impact to economic growth," Tanaka told reporters.

OPEC last formally discussed output policy in December and is not scheduled to do so again until June. Members have ruled out holding an emergency meeting before then.

Unrest in North Africa and the Middle East has left Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations nervous of political instability and of a sharp fall in oil prices that could lead to a fiscal crunch while populations are restive.

Cut The War Machine Before Anything Else!

http://dailybail.com/home/cut-the-war-machine-before-anything-else.html

The Military Industrial Complex Loves You And Thanks You For Your Support (Eisenhower Farewell Speech 1961)

Video - Pentagon spending just keeps growing

Liesman: Money Markets Behaving Like 2008 Crisis

http://dailybail.com/home/liesman-money-markets-behaving-like-2008-crisis.html

Video - Steve Liesman on trouble in the money markets - April 18, 2011

Link is unrelated to the Liesman clip.

Saudis Slash Oil Output, Say Market Oversupplied

FRAUD: Federal Reserve Is Selling Put Options On Treasury Bonds To Drive...

Gerald Celente The Greatest Depression of 2012! Get Ready!

Watch this link ..... http://revolutionarypolitics.tv/video/viewVideo.php?video_id=14625

The charade is over, and the reality of global confrontation between the West and the world it presumes dominion over is beginning

Iran, Syria, and Belarus join China in condemning West for meddling.

China’s first aircraft carrier: the ultimate expression of projecting geopolitical power,
it represents China’s rise based on industry and multipolar international relations. It
also directly threatens the parasitic, financier, Ponzi-scheme, unipolar Western model
of global governance. The two cannot coexist. Confrontation is not inevitable – it is
already unfolding now as a global campaign of geopolitical destabilization by the West.
Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Bangkok, Thailand April 13, 2011 – Destabilizing China and attempting to overthrow a government of 1.3 billion people most certainly is a grievous act of war. Add to that operations unfolding across Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and South America and you have a recipe for World War III.

While initially passed off as spontaneous, wholly organic uprisings, the smirking corporate-financier oligarchs are now conceding that indeed they have meticulously planned, trained, funded, and supported uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt, from Tehran and Belarus to Burma and Beijing. With Western forces storming Libya and the Ivory Coast from above, they are signaling their will to bring their global campaign from proxy forces on the ground to armed intervention, with Iraq and Afghanistan proving their will to invade and occupy as the truest expression of imperial ambition.

International Reaction

While Clinton and Obama talk about the “one voice” the world speaks with, in reality they are referring to the US, UK, EU and their coalition of the coerced. When the UNSC r.1973 regarding using force against Libya was brought to vote, Russia, China, India, Brazil and even Germany abstained. And while the US did indeed vote “yes” they did so without consulting the nation’s legislative branch, circumventing their own national constitution to illegally ramrod the intervention through.

China, after being targeted by similar “revolutionary” activities as seen in the Middle East and Northern Africa has now accused the United States of “using the issue of human rights reports to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.” It should be noted that these “reports” come from entirely disingenuous corporate-funded organizations. It should also be noted that indeed the US has now admitted to funding activist groups and equipping them with technology to organize and carry out subversive activities within their respective countries.

The Washington Post in March 2011 reported that the US State Department, US Department of Defense, and Broadcasting Board of Governors, upon which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sits as a director, are funding tech firms providing dissidents with means to undermine their governments in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and even China. More recently an AFP report in April 2011 reported that the US State Department has also been providing training to thousands of dissents at locations around the world before sending them back to undermine the respective governments. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Iran, and China are all listed as nations targeted by the US State Department’s activities.

The reinvented PNAC think-tank “Foreign Policy Initiative” concurs that
China’s statement that a vast Western conspiracy is at work is merely
paranoia. US openly admits however to funding sedition in China.

So it comes as a surprise to see US foreign policy think-tanks like the “Neo-Conservative” PNAC redux Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) propose that China is “paranoid” for calling these openly admitted US funded destabilizations a “vast Western conspiracy.” FPI has also concluded that not only is China’s response to openly foreign-funded sedition unreasonable, but such a response demands further action to be taken by the United States. Such brazen hubris can only be expected from a group consisting of global elitists who have neither paid the cost of their agenda financially nor shouldered a rifle to defend it.

Many of the “activists” at the center of the US State Department’s concerted attack on China are being granted “pro-bono” legal aid form the globalist “Freedom Now” organization, funded and lined by Council on Foreign Relations members and corporate funded foundations.

From a March 2011 Land Destroyer report “Target China:”

The corporate-financier run Western media has been recently beating their chests over the imprisonment of Nobel Laureate and “human rights activist” Liu Xiaobo, a proponent of ending China’s strong central government and politically active military in favor of a weak, Western-style system run by corruptible, feckless, incompetent leadership that invites multinational corporations to entropically infest state institutions and seize control of the nation’s people and resources. Liu Xiaobo’s support goes beyond the media’s scornful chastisement of China’s government on his behalf, and includes “pro-bono” legal aid from the Council on Foreign Relations lined “Freedom Now” organization. Readers may remember “Freedom Now” from their extensive involvement in supporting the Syrian opposition leading the recent unrest against the Assad government.

Freedom Now is also providing legal services for Gao Zhisheng, a human rights lawyer also imprisoned in China. Gao had written an open letter to the US Congress detailing human rights violations in China, and his family currently resides in the United States. Council on Foreign Relations minion Jerome Cohen, Canadian MP Irwin Cotler, and former Canadian MP David Kilgour are personally leading the campaigns for both Liu Ziaobo and Gao Zhisheng. All three, are also involved in meddling around the globe in similarly hypocritical gambits revolving around “human rights activists” who just so happen to be fighting governments the West would like to see changed.

While it may seem noble to champion for human rights, it is a matter of fact that men like Cohen, Cotler, and Kilgour, and the entire Freedom Now organization along with the CFR that populates its membership and the foundations that fund it, are amongst the greatest enemies of human rights and human freedom on earth. The Council on Foreign Relations has tirelessly repeated its goal of establishing a one world government, with members working ceaselessly to achieve it and their publications over the decades perpetually reflecting this ambition. This is a world government that is of, by, and for the corporate-financier oligarchy’s interests, and their interests alone.

China’s Response

China has now openly charged the West with interfering in their internal affairs. In a recent Reuters report, “China crackdown driven by fears of a broad conspiracy,” it stated that “Chinese leaders believe domestic foes, their foreign backers and Western governments are scheming to undermine and ultimately topple the Communist Party. Recent speeches and articles from security officials echo with warnings of subversive plots backed by Western “anti-China” forces.”

Indeed, considering the evidence both openly admitted and being carried out through less visible channels like the Freedom Now organization, this is more than a paranoid conspiracy theory, it is a stated fact that indicates China is not only aware of what is happening inside their own country, but also who is really behind it.

The Reuters report continues by stating, “But what outsiders may see as a loose, disparate group of dissidents, bloggers, lawyers, and grassroots agitators, China’s security police treat as a subversive, Western-backed coalition with the potential to erupt into outright opposition.” The reality is that these groups are only seen as being a loose, disparate opposition because the Western media is portraying them as such, even in light of recent admissions from the State Department on the contrary.

China, according to the Reuters report, “view that “color revolutions” that swept Central Asia several years ago were Western-promoted rehearsals for a similar subversive assault on China.” All evidence clearly says that these were Western created, funded, and supported organizations operating in Serbia in 2000 as the Otpor movement, which later became CANVAS, training protesters from the Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, and more recently from Tunisia and Egypt. The scale on which organizations like CANVAS meddle across the globe is admitted in Foreign Policy’s “Revolution U” article where CANVAS claims to have worked with groups from over 50 other countries.

Iran & Syria

China then is not simply paranoid but grappling with a very real, concerted effort to destabilize its 1.3 billion population and collapse its government. Joining China in its condemnation of the West’s meddling is Iran which has recently stated that the unrest in Syria is also a Western plot. The evidence is overwhelming, with Syrian opposition amongst the many receiving aid to destabilize and topple their governments from the US, and opposition parties on the ground with leadership operating out of the US and London.

Iran itself was the subject of a 156 page Brookings Institute Report titled “Which Path to Persia?” detailing the use of covert military operations, foreign-backed color revolutions, sanctions, and outright military invasion to topple the Iranian government and institute regime change. Much of what was detailed in the report has already begun to unfold not only in Iran but in Libya as well.

Belarus

Belarus, also the target of US funded CANVAS trained mobs, foreign funded opposition, sanctions, and Congressional resolutions declaring the Belarusian government “illegitimate,” has also made statements that the unrest in their nation was the result of a Western plot. Quite clearly it is, and with the recent bombing of Minsk’s subway resulting in the death of 12, Belarus’ government has reiterated the fact that it is a target of Western destabilization with President Alexander Lukashenko specifically saying the bombing may have been “a gift from abroad.”

Joe Liberman betrays his mandate given by the American people and the US Constitution
to explain his resolution of incorporating Belarus into the “Euro-Atlantic world.” The US has
spent years trying to absorb the former Soviet territories into the “Washington Consensus.”

Implications

The charade is over, and the reality of global confrontation between the West and the world it presumes dominion over is beginning. What was once eluded to only within the halls of think-tanks and obscure commentary is now headline news. For the people of the world, it would be beneficial to recognize it is not servile, feckless politicians like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Liberman that are responsible for this confrontation. It is the multinational corporate-financier oligarchs that transcend borders and to a certain degree already dominate this planet.

Identifying them is the first step to stopping them. Full-spectrum boycotts and campaigns to eliminate and replace their presence within our local communities is what we can start doing today. Politicians afar can be compromised and coerced and cannot be looked to in order to solve our problems, we must look within ourselves and to our communities. We can either do this now, or face the consequences of being bled financially and quite literally as this confrontation intensifies.
Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at
Land Destroyer Report.

Morgan Stanley's $3B Japan Default, How Goldman Trades (Illegally) On Client Info, WaMu CEO Lied To Congress,JPMorgan Did Cost-Benefit On Madoff Ponzi

http://tinyurl.com/3g7mf3g

Video - Brian Moynihan, Bank Of America CEO, outlines Q1 results

Standard & Poor’s Puts ‘Negative’ Outlook on U.S. AAA Rating

Standard & Poor’s put a “negative” outlook on the AAA credit rating of the U.S., citing a “material risk” the nation’s leaders will fail to deal with rising budget deficits and debt.

“We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policy makers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013,” New York-based S&P said today in a report. “If an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation does not begin by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.”

Longer-term Treasuries fell, reversing earlier gains, after S&P lowered its outlook to negative from stable. The cost to protect against a default by the government and the nation’s banks jumped and stocks declined after the New York-based ratings firm’s action, which assigns a one-in-three chance that it will lower the U.S. rating in the next two years.

Under President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget, released in February, the total debt subject to the ceiling would be $20.8 trillion in 2016. The plan House Republicans approved April 15, written by Budget Committee ChairmanPaul Ryan, would need a debt ceiling of at least $19.5 trillion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Government.

The Treasury Department projected that the government may reach the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling limit as soon as mid-May and run out of options for avoiding default by early July.

‘Message to Washington’

“It’s truly a shot across the bow and a message to Washington, which has been clowning around on this and playing politics when they should toss ideology aside and focus on achievement,” said David Ader, head of government bond strategy at CRT Capital Group LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “The bond market is still trying to find out what to make of it. People don’t know what to do. If you sell Treasuries, what do you go in to? No one knows.”

Treasury Assistant Secretary Mary Miller said today that S&P’s outlook on the U.S. credit rating “underestimates” U.S. leadership.

Moody's Senior Credit Officer Steven Hess.

“We believe S&P’s negative outlook underestimates the ability of America’s leaders to come together to address the difficult fiscal challenges facing the nation,” Miller said in a statement.
The benchmark 10-year note yielded as much as 3.45 percent in New York before trading little changed at 3.43 percent. The dollar dropped 0.7 percent to 82.58 yen and pared its gain versus the euro. The S&P 500 Index fell 1.6 percent.

Credit-Default Swaps

The cost to protect against losses on Treasuries in the credit-default swaps market jumped to the highest in 11 weeks.

Credit-default swaps on U.S. Treasuries climbed 7 basis points to 48.5 basis points as of 10:25 a.m. in New York, according to data provider CMA. That’s the highest level since reaching 49.4 basis points on Feb. 1 and means it would cost the equivalent of 48,500 euros a year to protect 10 million euros of debt against default for five years.

Last week, Moody’s Investors Service said Obama’s plan to cut $4 trillion in cumulative deficits within 12 years may be a “positive” for the nation’s credit quality and mark a reversal in the budget debate.
The U.S. is the only large AAA rated country that saw its debt rise during the crisis that until recently had no plan that would reverse the trend, Steven Hess, senior credit officer at Moody’s, said last week.
The negative outlook by S&P means that the firm views a one-in-three chance it will cut a borrower’s rating within a two-year horizon, David Beers, S&P’s global head of sovereign and international public finance ratings, said in a Bloomberg TV interview.

Blankfein Reaps $19 Million As Bonuses Return To Goldman

http://dailybail.com/home/blankfein-reaps-19-million-as-bonuses-return-to-goldman.html

Get the details from Bloomberg

April 4 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein’s $19 million compensation for 2010, almost double the prior year, ended two years in which the firm’s top executives gave up cash bonuses. Blankfein’s pay included $5.4 million in cash, $12.6 million in restricted stock, a $600,000 salary and about $464,000 in other benefits, a proxy statement from the New York-based firm showed.

MOST RECENT STORIES

FRAUD: Has The Fed Become The Next AIG?

http://dailybail.com/home/fraud-has-the-fed-become-the-next-aig.html

Video - Fed is selling put options on Treasuries to drive down yields

Bank Of America Analyst Advocates The “Unthinkable” — An Intentional Default On US Debt

Source: Business Insider

We continue to be astounded by the emergence of the pro-default meme within financial circles.

Previously it was Chris Whalen and Dean Baker taking the stance that the US could default with minimal negative ramifications.

Now it’s someone at a major bank: BofA’s credit strategist Jeffrey Rosenberg, whose note from Friday is titled The Case For Default (via @dutch_book).

He explicitly rejects the doom camp, and thinks temporary default could be managed without significant market interruption.

We don’t find his argument to be all that convincing.

No one need create the catastrophic event otherwise feared from a temporary deferral of interest payments on Treasury debt arising out of a political conflict. Politicians on both sides of the debate could help to avoid that outcome by setting market expectations. With appropriate direction from Treasury or Congress, holders of Treasury debt could accrue their missed interest payments while continuing to accrue future interest payments. Though CDS contracts would likely trigger, with relatively limited erosion in bond prices there would be little disruption from the tiny amount of exchanges of cash flows. Treasury can continue to roll over maturing debt into new debt. Would US foreign creditors hold their collective breath under the expectation that the long term benefits of improving fiscal sustainability outweigh the temporary cash flow disruption? And from their
authoritarian perspective, would Chinese creditors to the US react stoically to a temporary disruption in their payments if they understand it as a necessary (and temporary) cost under the fractious US democratic system for securing the long term stable purchasing power of $1.1 trillion worth of US promise backed-debt? They might not. But they may face little other choice but to react with calm.

This raises so many questions. How are Congress and the Treasury supposed to give global markets “appropriate direction” about how this will work out? More importantly though, what is this supposed to accomplish? How does this temporary default get the US, with Washington DC so wildly divided, any closer to some long-term budget strategy? This is all incredibly confusing.

Then Rosenberg pivots. The US doesn’t actually face any debt risk. Just inflation risk.

Bank Of America Analyst Advocates The Unthinkable An Intentional Default On US Debt chart Much has been said of the market consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling and the related, though not necessarily linked issue of defaulting on the debt. However, the long term market response may be positive as well. The difference between long term and short term interest rates stands at historical highs. And while part of that reflects the cyclical conditions of easy monetary policy, another part reflects a risk premium reflecting the rising credit risk of holding US Treasury debt under current trends of budget deficits. Willingness and ability to pay timely interest and principal defines sovereign credit risk. As the US debt is denominated in its own currency, impairment of ability to pay implies
the Fed forgets how to run its printing press. Long term credit risk in holding US debt therefore reflects inflation risk – and the likelihood the government will eventually need to resort to higher levels of inflation to attempt to ease its debt burdens. Fortunately or not, such a solution will prove elusive as the average maturity of the debt – at less than 5 years – is too short for inflation to solve the
problem. Only by setting the fiscal policy on a sustainable path can this outcome be avoided. In place of financial market uncertainty, movement towards fiscal sustainability may ease some of the worry out of the long term interest rate market. That benefit might outweigh the near term costs of market uncertainty from a temporary delay in Treasury interest payments and a prioritization of payments required were the debt ceiling to be maintained as part of negotiating that sustainable fiscal policy path.

Again, we ask, how does this temporary default solve anything? How does it get us closer to the finish line of changing the course of the nation’s fiscal trajectory? It doesn’t.

Beyond that, Rosenberg seems basically alone in thinking the bond market is pricing in some significant debt-associated risk.

While he’s right that the spread between long and short-term debt is near historical spreads, this seems more due to the fact that the short end of the curve is abnormally low (thank you, QE), rather than anything happening at the long end.

Remember, 30-year yields remain really close to all-time lows.

Bank Of America Analyst Advocates The Unthinkable An Intentional Default On US Debt chart

Basically, longer-dated yields have moved with the market — up when stocks go up, and down when stocks go down, as they have for a long time.

The merits of the argument aside (and in this case, Rosenber’s argument is pretty weak), the real story here is the strength of the pro-default side of the debate, a stance that Treasury Secretary Geithner has called “Unthinkable.”

Bretton Woods II — The Final Enslavement of Mankind

“The rising powers must be present at the creation of this new system in order to ensure that they will be active supporters.” – George Soros

SARTRE, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Charges of a conspiracy theory are a convenient pretext to dismiss criticism when the global financial elites meet to shape the next evolution of centralized control of all economic activity. When Mayer Amschel Rothschild admitted, “Give me the power of the money and it will not matter anymore who is commanding”, he exposed the true nature of international finance. The new front man for the shadow masters of money is George Soros. His visibility is used to deflect attention away from the supra national circle of recluse manipulators, who set the agenda for globalism. The history of world politics is really the chronicle of money, debt and banking. Only by understanding this clash of titans, can one interpret the language of worldwide finance.

It is not often that you get to look into the window of the future before it takes place. The obsession with the political posturing of the torturous grinding process that produces a kosher sausage product causes acute indigestion. Banking is one such example and the INET, The Institute for New Economic Thinking, who sponsored the Bretton Woods II conference is the Neshama gourmet version of ground up animal flesh. Funneling the herd into the corral of a new world currency openly discussed, as the panacea for the coming collapse of international finance, is the height of totalitarian arrogance.

Soros, in The Alchemy of Finance wrote, “To put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes…. As I made my way in the world, reality came close enough to my fantasy to allow me to admit my secret, at least to myself.”

Some of the attendees and speakers at the INET conference included:

• Gordon Brown, former U.K. Prime Minister.
• Paul Volcker, former Fed Chairman and chairman of President Obama’s Economic Advisory Board.
• Economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of The Earth Institute.
• Joseph E. Stiglitz, former senior vice president and chief economist for the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner in Economics.
• INET Executive Director Rob Johnson, former managing director at Soros Fund Management.

Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, who sits on the board of INET is known for his ‘Shock Therapy’. Aaron Klein reports in WND. “Sachs is, a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is founder and co-president of the Soros-funded Millennium Promise Alliance. He has been a World Bank consultant who formerly directed Harvard’s Institute for International Development, which he turned into a major conduit advocating for World Bank and International Monetary Funds use for structural adjustment programs in the Third World and beyond”.

Mr. Klein then cites from the Investor’s Business Daily.
A Millennium goal called for a 'currency transfer tax,' a 'tax on the rental value of land and natural resources,' a 'royalty on worldwide fossil energy projection — oil, natural gas, coal,' 'fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on the carbon content of fuels.'
Does this sound like a global tax contrived to fund a centralized and top down authoritarian structure to replace nation states? The old Tobin Tax never dreamed of such grand designs. The psychosis of the Soros model is axiomatic, but the mainstream media avoids such characterization. Back in the mist of the market meltdown, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times warns about a previous precursor of the Soros’ venue, “like most sequels, Bretton Woods II is not going to be nearly as good as the original.

The first conference gave birth to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Its successor will be duller and less consequential.” If Mr. Rachman believes that creating the IMF and World Bank was good for the planet, he must have sat next to Soros at the London School of Economics.

Mr. Rachman cites his reservations for the success of a second Bretton Woods back in 2008.
The first reason for this is that the global financial crisis – bad as it is – is hardly the second world war. The war destroyed the established order and so the statesmen who drew up the postwar institutions had a blank piece of paper on which to doodle.
Second, there is not enough time. The original Bretton Woods conference benefited from two years of preparation, not two weeks.
Third – and rather important – the countries that are meeting in Washington this weekend disagree. The Europeans, who adore all forms of international governance, are pushing for new global regulators for the international financial system. The Americans and Chinese – more jealous of their national sovereignty – are more cautious.
Pat Buchanan reacts to the British Empire’s effort to enshrine Lord Keynes into the national constitution during this latest attempt to draft a unified draconic banking system.
(Gordon) Brown wants the IMF to become the 'global central bank,' the Fed of the world economy. No way, Brownie. Americans are not going to fund such a bank, nor cede it authority, nor abide by its dictates. We are not yet a Third World nation dependent on the IMF.
However, is Pat right on this one? With the Soros influence in this Obama administration is any American safe from the whims of the banksters? Is there the will in Congress to confront the executive abuses of this puppet president? When the ultimate crunch finally enfolds the TARP and “too big to fail”, bailouts will be small potatoes. The BRIC countries are already calling for the replacement of the counterfeit dollar as the reserved currency.

Going back further in time to 2004, John Brimelow in Market Watch, identifies the key issue with floating currency rate exchange.
What everyone has is a massive Chinese undervaluation problem. Any exchange rate discussion that fails to start with this fact is fatuous.
In 1993, China fixed its currency, the yuan, at $1 = Y8.28.
Since then, capital and technology have poured into China. It has built up foreign exchange reserves more than ten-fold, to almost $500 billion, an expansion almost unmatched in history.
Yet the decline of the dollar in the past two years has effectively dragged down the pegged yuan another 35 percent against the major currencies — exactly the reverse of what should have happened, given China’s exporting success.
Just think how much further the dollar has sunk while Chinese reserves have grown to unbelievable levels. No one is saying that a currency crisis is not real. The point is that international finance has the goal to become the credit-funding agent for the entire world.

Dan Gainor from the Media Research Center reveals the plan to put China in the catbird seat.
INET isn’t subtle about its aims for the conference. Johnson interviewed fellow INET board member Robert Skidelsky about 'The Need for a New Bretton Woods' in a recent video. The introductory slide to the video is subtitled: 'How currency issues and tension between the US and China are renewing calls for a global financial overhaul.' Skidelsky called for a new agreement and said in the video that the conflict between the United States and China was “at the center of any monetary deal that may be struck, that needs to be struck.

Watch the video The Need for a New Bretton Woods for the Skidelsky interview. Then view the Panel at INET’s Bretton Woods Conference for the real story behind the push for a single global central bank system.
This is the heart of much of our economic catastrophe. Sovereign governments are sacrificing themselves for private banking institutions. Trillions upon trillions of taxpayer dollars, world-wide, are being transferred to banks that have destroyed themselves many times over with their Enron-style Ponzi schemes and ‘creative accounting.’ The question is, how long will people stand for it? Soon it will be too late. So far, Iceland is the ONLY country whose people have made the right choice, while Ireland and Greece have made the devastatingly wrong choice — with Portugal ready to follow suit.
The significance of the Soros conference at Bretton Woods is that national governments are an endangered species if they do not eliminate the banking cartel that is the primary global dictatorship that faces mankind. The avarice Rothschild culture that underpins the debt created money system is the most dangerous terrorist that seeks to impose the ultimate Global Gulag on every county. The Totalitarian Collectivism we all face is upon us. Soros is an evil man, but the system that he is part of is bent on eliminating or subjugating any regime, like Iceland, that repudiates the rule of banksters.

These financers are admittedly the evil rulers of society. Any attempt to force a singular currency and a universal taxation levee is a fulfillment of the final enslavement of man-kind. Bretton Wood II is an outline for things to come. The debt created money cartel is ready to impose their captivity on sovereign governments. Soros is telegraphing their plan. We are engaged in the final battle for liberty and America is losing the war. The inevitable dollar default is the tool used to sentence you to death row. Now is the time to seek divine guidance and beg for national forgiveness.

Original article archived here

Euro vs. Invasion of the Zombie Banks

IS a euro held in an Irish bank in Dublin, or in a Portuguese bank in Lisbon, as sound and secure as a euro in a German bank in Berlin? That apparently simple question holds the key to understanding why the euro zone may splinter and bring a new financial crisis.

In Ireland, there has been a “silent bank run” on financial institutions for much of the last year. In February, for instance, Irish private sector deposits dropped at an annual rate of 9.8 percent. That’s largely because some depositors doubt the commitment of the Irish government to the euro. They fear that they will wake up one morning to frozen bank accounts, followed by the conversion of their euro deposits into a lesser-valued new Irish currency. Pre-emptively, the depositors send their money outside Ireland, where it still represents safe euros or perhaps sterling, accessible by bank transfers and A.T.M. cards.

This flight of capital reflects a centuries-old economic principle known as Gresham’s Law, sometimes expressed casually as “bad money drives out good money.” In this context, if two assets — euros inside and outside Ireland — are not equal in value in the eyes of the marketplace, sooner or later the legally fixed price parity will fall apart.

If enough depositors fear frozen accounts, the banks will be emptied out, and they also will require additional government bailouts, on top of the bailouts for the bad real estate loans. The banks come to resemble empty shells, conduits for public aid but shrinking and unprofitable as businesses — and, to a large extent, that is already the case in Ireland. Portugal is moving in this same direction, toward being a land inhabited by zombie banks.

It’s the zombie banks that doom the current European bailout plans. On any single day, or even for a year or two, an economy can survive with zombie banks, but over time functional domestic banks are needed to allocate credit.

As it stands, European Union emergency facilities are marking time by lending more money to the fiscally troubled nations in the currency union. But these loans do not reverse the logic of Gresham’s Law. For instance on its longer-term notes, Portugal is already paying yields in the range of 8 to 10 percent, and yet the Portuguese economy is shrinking. The Portuguese are digging deeper into debt, and confidence in the banking system and the fortitude of the Portuguese government is dwindling.

At this late point there’s probably no way to escape the mess by cutting government spending in the troubled countries. This year Ireland has a budget deficit of more than 30 percent of G.D.P., whereas in Portugal it is 8.6 percent. Even the best economic reforms can take many years to pay off with concrete results, and with zombie banks a turnaround is even harder and perhaps impossible. Most important, immense government spending cuts are often unpopular and so investors wonder whether an ailing country’s political system will see it through. The confidence problem remains.

A second option is a giant write-down of current debts, combined with national bailouts to the creditor banks. For instance, taking this approach, the Merkel government in Germany might acknowledge the status quo isn’t working and speedily recapitalize the German banking system, while letting Ireland, Portugal and others off the hook for some of the money. It’s easy to see why this policy isn’t popular in Germany, and indeed, for years German politicians promised to their voters that such an outcome would never happen.

Another dramatic way out is for Ireland, Portugal or some other country to break from the euro and create a new and lesser-valued domestic currency, while also defaulting on some debts. Any such breakaway country would incur the wrath of the European Union and also might have trouble borrowing on international capital markets. There will be no easy exit path from the euro. Still, taking this approach, a resolution of some kind would be in place, no subsequent devaluation of bank deposits would be expected and the new lower-valued currency would improve growth. Also, the troubled countries already cannot borrow at workable interest rates.

There would be an associated problem, however: if any one euro zone country were to start exiting the euro, there would be bank runs on the other fiscally ailing countries. The richer European Union nations know this, and so they are toiling to keep everyone on board. But that conciliatory approach creates a new set of problems because any nation with an exit strategy suddenly has enormous leverage. Ireland or Portugal need only imply that without more aid it will be forced to leave the euro zone and bring down the proverbial house of cards. In both countries, aid agreements already are seen as a “work in progress,” and it’s not clear that the subsequent renegotiations have any end in sight, because an ailing country can always ask for a better deal the following year.

ALL of the ways forward look ugly but, sooner or later, some variation of at least one of them is likely. Unfortunately, they all share the property of lowering European bank values, whipsawing currencies, hurting business confidence and possibly ending the European Union as an effective institution for collective decisions. That’s all because the euro, in retrospect, appears to have been a misguided attempt to equalize the values for some very unequal assets, namely the bank deposits of strong countries and those of weak countries.

To track the risk of a new financial crisis, focus on whether the troubled euro zone economies are seeing bank runs and capital flight. Then comes a fundamental question about human nature, namely: Why do we so often postpone admitting that short-run patches simply aren’t going to work?

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

A growing trend

Vegetable gardening is experiencing a Renaissance not seen since the 1940s

More Images »

Rebecca Cuttler rakes new soil in her community garden plot at Strathcona Park.

Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann, PNG, Vancouver Sun

A new generation of vegetable gardeners is transforming the urban environment and the way we are thinking about food.

They are planting on boulevards, digging garden plots in city parks, tearing the sod out of their back yards and even their front yards and filling their balconies with pots full of herbs and greens. It's the young, the urban, the cool. And the rest of us, too.

"I've been serious about gardening for about three years," said Rebecca Cuttler, a more-orless landless Strathcona resident. Cuttler, program manager of the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters at Simon Fraser University, lucked into a plot at the Cottonwood Community Garden near her home after joining a work party organized by the Cottonwood group last fall. She also has a garden at a home owned by her family in Kitsilano.

"We are going to get more ambitious with that [Kitsilano] space this year because it's an entire yard, so you can do a lot of stuff there," she said.

Cuttler, 28, has spent countless winter hours sketching her garden space and planning crops by the square foot using the methods she gleaned studying permaculture design at Amherst College in Massachusetts. She has joined forces with a group of seven friends and neighbours to form a Transition Town, essentially a group of people who work together to maximize their productivity and reduce their carbon footprint, using the principles of permaculture to create a sustainable urban ecosystem.

Sophisticated gardeners such as Cuttler and her group are the urban agriculture vanguard, dragging the rest of us along in their jet stream. Evidence suggests there are a lot of willing passengers on the vegetable gardening bandwagon and you don't need a PhD to get aboard.

The number of households that report having a vegetable garden is now 53 per cent in the United States, according to the 2010 Summer Gardening Trends Research Report, issued regularly by the Garden Writers Association Foundation. That's up from 38 per cent in 2009 and Canadians appear to be in lockstep with their southern neighbours.

Sales of seeds, garden equipment and gardening books have doubled since 2008, according to Jeanette McCall, owner of B.C.-based West Coast Seeds.

"Three years ago, seed sales really took off and took everyone aback," she said. Many seed companies struggled to meet the sudden demand.

Until then, the seed business had been steady but not spectacular for several decades.

Waves of immigrants from Europe brought gardening knowledge and tradition with them to Canada in the years before and after the war, but the gardening bug skipped a generation as many children of the immigrant families rejected those "old world" ways.

"The children [of those immigrant gardeners] didn't garden, but now their grandchildren do," McCall said. "We've noticed a real trend in our retail store -our staff have even commented on it -where we have a younger group of customers who are very knowledgeable about organic gardening and it's [their parents who] are new to gardening."

"People want to grow organically or sustainably and this is all information they did not grow up with. There is a missed generation," she said. "It's fun to see young people in the store giving advice to older people about how to grow vegetables."

BC Greenhouse Builders marketing director Angela Drake said interest in using backyard greenhouses to grow edibles has exploded.

"Five years ago, maybe one inquiry in five would be about growing vegetables; now it is four out of five," Drake said. "Always our first question is, 'What do you want to grow?' and it's been a complete reversal."

Tropical flowers are out as greenhouse residents, replaced by bell peppers and heirloom tomatoes.

The City of Vancouver has keenly encouraged the home gardening movement, easing laws to allow people to raise laying hens in their backyards and facilitating the creation of more than 2,000 community garden plots in the months leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

McCall says community gardens are the best place for beginners to learn about gardening; you don't even have to be a member.

"You can walk around and see what people are doing and how well their plants are growing and get an idea of how well different methods work very quickly," she said.

Locally based resources to help you get started or get better at gardening are proliferating online. Village Vancouver's Transition Town Initiative is a deep repository of both information and support for people growing in small spaces and urban environments. Find neighbourhood groups, FAQs and frequent gardening workshops to help get you started.

"People are going that greener route," said Geordie Flanagan, one of three 24-year-old entrepreneurs who have started a gardening resource website called MyGardenFootprint.com. "Everyone is realizing, 'Hey, I can grow things on my own.'"

Like Village Vancouver, MyGardenFootprint is an online community for people interested in local sustainable food and it is full of instructions and videos on planting, composting, harvesting and even cooking your produce. The heart of the site's business is a marketplace for local products and services -everything from local organic baby food to tractors.

"We think of it as a Facebook for food," said Flanagan.

Of course, you don't need a computer or a website to start gardening. A couple of pots of soil and a few dollars worth of seeds can get you started and, after that, there's a good chance you'll never stop.

rshore@vancouversun.com

WHERE TO FIND MORE INFORMATION

BOOKS

GROWING VEGETABLES WEST OF THE CASCADES STEVE SOLOMON, $27.50

First printed in 1979 and revised six times since, the bible of organic gardening in the Pacific Northwest is well-suited to gardeners in southwestern B.C. Detailed for beginners and sophisticated enough for even experts to learn from.

GROW VEGETABLES ALAN BUCKINGHAM, $23.95

A handy manual for growing in large, small or balcony gardens.

BACKYARD BOUNTY LINDA GILKESON, $24.95

Written specifically for the West Coast climate, this is a yearround guide to growing organic vegetables, composting, soil prep, winter cropping, seeding and even greenhouse growing.

ONLINE

villagevancouver.ca A community resource for building sustainable communities, growing food, sharing bounty and treading lightly on the Earth.

UBCBOTANICALGARDEN.ORG

The UBC Botanical Garden is a great place to go with questions. Loads of resources and forums where you can ask questions on outdoor and greenhouse gardening.

MYGARDENFOOTPRINT.COM

A resource for gardeners and a marketplace for local goods and services.

VANCOUVERSUN.COM/STEVEWHYSALL

The Sun's longtime gardening writer Steve Whysall has tips for growing challenging vegetables and a substantial video library.

Geithner hints at second term at Treasury

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hinted Sunday that he would be willing to stay on in his post should President Barack Obama win a second term in 2012.

After suffering harsh criticism for his handling of the economic crisis and calls for his resignation early in the administration's life, Geithner said he still enjoyed the job.

"I've got a lot on my plate still and we've got a lot of challenges ahead and I want to tell you, this is hard, but I believe in this work and I enjoy these challenges," he told ABC television.

"I'm going to keep at trying to fix what is broken here, make sure we're helping the economy grow and help deal with these long term challenges."

His comments, while stopping short of a outright pledge to stay, come in stark contrast to comments from other members of Obama's inner circle.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both said they would not be willing to stay on.

Geithner's tenure as Treasury Secretary got off to a rocky start, as the young Obama administration struggled to fix a massive financial crisis and end the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Geithner's term has arguably been as busy as that of any Treasury Secretary in living memory, with the possible exception of his predecessor Henry Paulson -- who wrestled to prevent the collapse of the financial system as Lehman Brothers and other banks failed.

Geithner has helped usher in a much maligned stimulus package worth hundreds of billions of dollars and helped pass sweeping reforms of Wall Street and health care while battling to keep the economy afloat.

He has been criticized for not doing enough to replace the nine million jobs lost during the recession and has been accused of being a poor communicator and of being enthrall to big banks.

But with the unemployment rate now under nine percent and fears of a double dip recession ebbing, Geithner critics have become less vocal in recent months.

© AFP -- Published at Activist Post with license

Rising food costs spur massive US theft of produce, meat

Dees Illustration

Ethan A. Huff
Natural News

Forget diamonds and cash. Rapid inflation and the tanking US economy have birthed a whole new wave of organized crime involving food. The New York Times (NYT) reports that a group of highly-sophisticated scam artists recently pulled off a massive food heist involving eight tractor-trailer loads full of produce and meat, all worth roughly $300,000.

The food theft was no ordinary theft, either. According to reports, the mystery thieves carefully planned the hijacking to coincide with high-priced tomatoes and other produce items that have seen heavy inflation in recent months. And instead of merely stealing the truckloads, the masterminds actually sent their own imposter trucks to pick up the loads, and pretended to deliver them to various intended destinations.

"I've never experienced people targeting produce loads before," said Shaun Leiker, an assistant manager at Allen Lund, a trucking broker from Florida who has seen numerous cargo thefts, to NYT. "It's a little different than selling TVs off the back of your truck."

Leiker's reasoning, of course, makes sense under normal economic conditions. But with massive unemployment, food shortages, and inflation, food has become a new high-value commodity that criminals appear to be increasingly targeting. And as food prices continue to rise, some authorities worry that food crimes will only escalate further.

Reports say the thieves actually created their own shipping company named E&A Transport Express, registered it with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, and directly booked the pickups through a brokerage so that everything would appear legitimate.

"This was definitely a smart organization," said Clifford Holland, owner of Old North State, a transportation brokerage that was hit by the theft, to the NYT. "It was like a snake in the grass and they struck."

Sources for this story include:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/b...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032109_food_costs_theft.html#ixzz1JsQK66Wr

1,700 Blockbuster stores hang in the balance

Former movie and video game rental giant Blockbuster struggled for years to compete in a changing marketplace. Last September that struggle finally caught up with the company: it declared bankruptcy.

Blockbuster’s recent acquisition by Dish Network, however, gave the crippled company a new lease on life — even as 1,700 stores potentially lay on the chopping block. A new request by the company is asking for one simple thing to help decide the fate of those stores: time.

Following talks of liquidating locations and selling inventories prior to the Dish deal, Blockbuster has now filed for an extension on when the company must decide just what it will do with 1,700+ stores reports Home Media Magazine. The Dallas, Texas-based company asked that courts shift the original deadline of April 20th to July 20th.

In its announcement of the $320 million acquisition, DISH Network touted those brick-and-mortar locations as complimentary to other home entertainment facets Blockbuster has its hand in, including the Blockbuster Express rental kiosk program the company previously discussed expanding.

Tom Cullen, DISH Network’s executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Programming said, “With its more than 1,700 store locations, a highly recognizable brand and multiple methods of delivery, Blockbuster will complement our existing video offerings while presenting cross-marketing and service extension opportunities for DISH Network.”

What this all means for the more than 1,700 stores involved is still unclear, though Blockbuster continues to shutter locations. According to a new Daily News report on store closings in New York, Blockbuster once boasted around 9,000 stores; now, that number hovers in the 2,000s.

Disregarding store closures and the growing pains that come from being under a new corporate umbrella, some believe Blockbuster may eventually go toe-to-toe with Netflix in the online streaming video space.

Considering that many credit Netflix as a major contributing factor for Blockbuster’s fall from grace, it would be an ironic battle for consumers.

A Good rant…from a Lemetropole Cafe Contributor…Andy Hoffman

OCCAM’S RAZOR AND THE PRECIOUS METAL MARKETS

Andy Hoffman

Occam’s Razor is a logical principal stating that “one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.” In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. By my life experience, this principle is correct roughly 99% of the time. Science, and humanity, are pretty consistent in their respective behaviors, and the same goes for financial markets.

Technical and fundamental analysis have been used successfully for centuries, and in my case over a 20-year career as an equity analyst. Stocks tend to rise with good news and fall with bad news, just like commodity stocks tend to outperform commodities in bull markets and underperform them in bear markets. These patterns have repeated themselves for centuries, and would continue in like manner were it not for one small wrinkle….ALL financial markets, particularly in the Nazi States of America, are now rigged.

Governments have always had an “invisible hand” in the markets, acting indirectly to influence stock prices via the setting of artificial interest rates via Central Banks or gold prices via the London Gold Pool, and at key points in history have been known to intervene directly. But the U.S. was largely a freely traded stock market until the 1987 crash, when President Reagan created the “President’s Working Group on Capital Markets” (i.e. the Plunge Protection Team) to directly intervene in financial markets at times of crisis.

The PPT, created simply as a buyer of last resort during emergencies, lie dormant during the 1990s, until that fateful day in September 2001 when the history of America changed, which I watched first hand from 10 blocks away, I might add. When the stock market finally re-opened a week later, the PPT clearly was in the market supporting the Dow, to such a level of blatancy that even a child could recognize it. Not uncoincidentally, that period also market the top of the bull markets in both the Dow and the dollar, the end of the bear market in gold, and the commencement of a long decade of market manipulation.

After 9/11, the PPT increasingly shifted from an “emergency buyer” to a regular buyer, gradually increasing its role in the markets to where we are today, a market managed 24/7 to make sure it NEVER has a meaningful decline. And that interference is now rampant in all markets, such as Treasury bonds, currencies, and, of course gold and silver. By now, we all know the paper gold and silver market is a fraudulent, fractional system in which “paper ounces” are created in multiples of hundreds or even thousands of actual existing metal, and we also know that concentrated, naked short positions are not only prevalent in the metals and PM stocks, but blessed (and promulgated) by regulatory authorities. If I hear one more person say that “JP Morgan is in trouble due to its silver short”, when in fact it is just a branch of the U.S. Government, who is the REAL PAPER SILVER SHORT!

In fact, the incidence of naked shorting of stocks (PM and otherwise) has blown up to epic proportions, to a point today where not only are such violations not enforced, but apparently no one even cares anymore. And now that High Frequency Trading has been perfected (to the point where criminal investment banks post trading profits EVERY DAY), massive algorithms have been created to make sure that certain sectors consistently trade the SAME WAYS ALL THE TIME.

In the case of paper gold, for instance, trading is so predictable that I can summarize it one paragraph. At 3:00 am EST, after trading flat or rising nearly every night, gold and silver suddenly drop sharply on 80% or so of all trading days. When the COMEX opens at 8:20 am EST, paper gold drops sharply roughly 80% of the time as well. Moreover, if you watch CNBC quotes in the hour leading up to the NYSE open, you’ll see that EVERY SINGLE DAY WTI Crude has a sharp dip at some point in this hour, at which point paper gold prices automatically drops at twice the rate of oil (doesn’t matter if Brent is rising, by the way, as the ALGOs are set versus WTI Crude). Of course, when oil rises during this period, gold never keeps up with it. Then, after the NYSE opens at 9:30 am, the price of gold has roughly 30 minutes to rise before the PM Fix at 10:00 am, at which point gold falls sharply on roughly 80% of all trading days. If it manages to rise after 10:00 am, it doesn’t matter much because roughly 90% of the day’s gains have been made already (particularly if gold has risen by the mandatory 1% cap limit), and in those rare cases you’ll see that gold is capped exactly two hours later at 12:00 pm EST roughly 95% of the time.

Applying Occam’s Razor, one would clearly conclude that such aberrational behavior, relative to hundreds of years of stock market history, could only be attributed to manipulation.

As for the shares, they meet massive resistance in the first 5-10 minutes of trading EVERY DAY, ensuring no early morning momentum that could generate a buying panic. The HUI tends to peak for the day in the first half hour of trading (as it did EVERY DAY this week), and then dribbles down all day long, with periodic crashes that are never matched by intense upward moves. In fact, now that the GOVERNMENT COMPUTERS have taken over, algorithms are built into the market ensuring that the HUI falls anytime the Dow is falling (by at least a 2x rate), any time oil is falling, any time copper is falling, any time the Euro is falling, etc., etc., etc..

I don’t just BELIEVE that GOVERNMENT COMPUTERS run the stock market now (I haven’t even discussed the predictability of the Dow), I KNOW IT. Do yourself a favor and watch a stock like SVM (the low cost silver producer on earth) trade for a few hours, and you’ll know what I mean. Just like trading in GLD and SLV, two of the most fraudulent securities ever created, you’ll see that the ask size is larger than the bid size roughly 90% of the time, and that it is never allowed to rise more than a cent at a time while it is constantly plummeting by 5-10 cents at a time on no volume, as in 100 times a day or so. These computers, spitting out naked shorts all day long in essentially all important PM stocks, have caused roughly 99% of PM investors (my estimate) to lose money in the sector, while roughly 1% (I like to believe I’m in that minority) deal with a lot of misery, not to mention a lot less stock market gains than are warranted.

Applying Occam’s Razor, one would also conclude that such aberrational behavior is not a coincidence.

Despite all the evidence (and admissions) of PM market manipulation, many “analysts” refuse to change the way they look at markets, even those squarely in the manipulation corner. They refuse to realize, for instance, that a weak short-term HUI or gold price CHART does not mean “the market” is expecting a gold price crash, and essentially has ZERO PREDICTIVE POWER. It simply means the Cartel is successfully creating that perception through endless naked shorting, particularly at strategic times such as the open or close of paper trading or around key events such as employment numbers, Fed meetings, or Presidential speeches. Heck, they even refuse to acknowledge that something is amiss when gold is continually pounded in the aftermath of crisis events such as the Japanese earthquake (can’t have it being a safe haven).

Applying Occam’s Razor, one would also conclude that such aberrational behavior is not a coincidence.

In nine years of being 100% invested in this sector, I have never seen anything as blatant as the HUI action this week. How ANYONE watching this sector, particularly a gold/silver “expert”, can give any other explanation of what we saw this week (and this year for that matter) other than government manipulation, is beyond me.

First, the statistics for this past week:

Gold
+1% (to an all-time high)

Silver
+5% (to a 31-year high)

Dow
UNCHANGED

Dollar
UNCHANGED

HUI
-4%

And now for calendar 2011:

Gold
+5% (to an all-time high)

Silver
+40% (to a 31-year high)

Dow
+7%

Dollar
-6%

HUI
+2%

XAU
-3% (!!!!)

and, oh yeah:

Oil
+22%

OSX (oil service index)
+16%

From my trained eye, the GOVERNMENT COMPUTER ALGORITHM ATTACK on gold mining stocks started in December 2010, shortly after silver breached $30/oz for the first time. After watching gold mining stocks (senior and junior) underperform bullion for several years, we saw a brief week or so of frenetic buying activity across the board, the type that PM investors have not seen in the past four years on absolutely massive trading volume. That excitement threatens everything TPTB are fighting against, as manic demand for PM investments would likely result in a rapid decline in paper investments, particularly Treasury bonds and, generally, anything dollar-denominated. It was then that the computer algorithm trading started to show up en masse, with successive major smashes to PM stocks in both November and December before the comical 14% HUI decline we all enjoyed starting in the FIRST HOUR OF TRADING of calendar 2011 for no apparent reason.

But even that paled in comparison to what we saw this week, starting with sharp paper gold and silver declines EVERY SINGLE DAY at exactly 3:00 am EST, and sharp HUI declines EVERY SINGLE DAY within minutes of the NYSE opening, despite the fact that outside market forces (such as SOARING silver prices, for instance) were extremely bullish for the sector. And let’s not forget the bogus Bolivian nationalization rumor (refuted one day later), which reminded me a lot of the “Bin Laden Captured” and “IMF to sell gold” rumors that were used to attack PMs countless times in the years following 9/11. Think it was a surprise that the rumor targeted Bolivia, where two of the largest silver mining stocks (PAAS and CDE, of which I own neither) are major players?

Applying Occam’s Razor, one would also conclude that such aberrational behavior is not a coincidence.

Before ending this RANT, I have one more topic to address, one that has drawn my ire for years now, but has finally motivated me to write (much as my Warren Buffet RANT last week). And that topic is the ridiculous notion that “hedge funds” are buying gold and silver (likely via GLD and SLV) and shorting mining shares. I hope I don’t ruffle any feather with this, but that has got to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, for many reasons. This silly hypothesis, which seems to gain traction in PM land every time the PM stocks are hit, is a perfect example of “analysts” refusing to address the most important issue in the market – MANIPULATION. Thus, they feel the need to make up silly theories to explain why the market did what it did – in other words, MARKET ACTION MAKES COMMENTARY!

Let’s think about this a bit. To start, who are these “hedge funds”, given that PM’s still represent only 1% of all global financial assets, and are they really powerful enough to take down the entire PM mining sector for weeks (or months) at a time? Really?

If so, I think I’d have heard by now of these amazing hedge funds that are making so much money at the expense of 99% of PM investors. If, for instance, Silver Wheaton is trading 17 million shares, or $750 million a day in the U.S. and Canada, in an environment of SOARING silver prices, am I really to believe that some “hedge funds” are selling that much stock EVERY DAY in a frenzy of shorting, not to mention two dozen other major PM stocks?

And in all my years of investing in commodity markets (I was an oilfield service analyst for nine years prior to my nine years in PMs), I have never heard of such a ludicrous concept of a trade as shorting commodity stocks against the commodity. Oilfield service stocks have outperformed the price of oil since the beginning of the oil bull market in 1995, and I’ll bet anything that copper and agricultural stocks have outperformed the underlying commodities, respectively, in their bull markets as well.

Moreover, not once in nine years of working in perhaps the largest Energy research department in the world (at Salomon Smith Barney) did I hear about clients shorting E&P or oilfield service stocks against the price of oil. And why, you might ask? Because it’s RIDICULOUS! The only instance I can think of where this is likely happening is among the criminal Canadian investment banks that, in the absence of ANY naked shorting enforcement at all, enjoy non-stop shorting of their clients with the goal of getting them to price stock offerings (with tons of warrants, of course) at prices so low that the companies rarely have a chance to ever recover from the dilution.

And one more thing to add, which goes out to the majority of people reading this RANT, whom are probably among the most educated and savvy in the world. Don’t let ANYONE tell you the “smart money” is doing something that is above your head! YOU are the smart money, not them! That is why you have invested in gold and silver, while 99% of the Western world has not. No, there are no “brilliant hedge fund managers” doing things you are not capable of, and frankly most of the ones that seem to be invincible turn out to be criminals, too, such as John Paulson with his shady deals with Goldman Sachs and bailouts from the Federal government.

WE are the smart money, and NOT ONE OF US would even DREAM of “shorting mining stocks against gold and silver”, particularly microcap junior miners with cash in the bank, valuations 70% below the 2007 levels, and, oh yeah, an environment of RAMPANT INFLATION and SOARING GOLD AND SILVER PRICES!

Believe me, if YOU haven’t thought of doing such things, there is no “smart money” that has.

And I’m sure William of Occam would agree.