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GK


Very interesting that you mention dumping gold on the market to strength the dollar.

I have been VERY closely watching the planned IMF gold dump that happens in April 2008.

If the Fed surprises EVERYONE and raises interest rates, the USD will rise from the dead, crash gold and real estate down to historical means, and begin the healing.

I think the April gold dump with just be a small test of the currency markets' reaction to fee into econometric peasant-revolution models the NSA is working on and give the accurate and smug USD bears a little show of who is boss.

If you are right that they will await until the end of the year to unleash the cleaning depression where commodities plunge and war is required to get things going again, it will not just be a mini-depression like 1974 I believe.

Consumer debt of around $12 trillion on houses and $2.6 trillion of personal debt rounds to around $15T and if average interest payments are $1Trillion per year and interest costs triple as they would have to, that means interest payments from consumers would rise to $3 trillion surpassing every the amount of cash ($2T?) the IRS loots each year from us peasants.

That might be revolution time, but now the government has unrivaled surveillance systems for absolutely everything we touch from text messages, paper mail, cell phones, email, Facebook, MySpace, outdoor camera, 100% of internet traffic, financial transaction monitoring and military agreements with Canada to use those big guns to keep everything in order.

Hard to fire up the guillotines when the most powerful military in the world roams Main street and the offenders are flaps up on the Gulfstream V for the islands.

If you had to edit the 1907 China photo, just Photoshop some iPods into their hands as they trade them for a handful of wheat.

OC

GK,

I think it's too late - it's like trying to catch a falling guillotine 1 second before it cuts off the head.

The Fed and Wall Street set off the perfect storm and it is in a self sustaining loop:

Dollar-Gold: A Perfect Storm by Jim Willie CB

http://www.321gold.com/editorials/willie/willie030708.html

'HAS ANYTHING BEEN FIXED? HAVE ALL DESPERATE MEASURES BEEN INVOKED? The answer to the first question is NO WAY! and to the second question NOT EVEN CLOSE! So the declines will continue, as US economic, banking, and political leaders squirm in reaction to utter futility in their policies to date, and continued futility in their upcoming policies. Their errors are many, in prescribing solutions which are more of the same inflationary wallpaper, which demonstrate no conceivable depth of understanding for the corner they have painted the United States into. '

Elaine Meinel Supkis

JAPAN wants to fix the dollar upwards. Very, very badly! Ditto, China, believe it or not. Both can continue to destroy our industrial base this way!

Also the oil pumpers: strong dollars=eventual world domination for them. So these forces might force the dollar upwards if Bernanke raises rates to 5% again.

Elaine Meinel Supkis

My forecast: if McCain loses and Hillary loses, Bernanke will suddenly raise rates and give Obama a depression. Then the establishment guys will have another Reagan moment. See? Four years of high interest rates and hell for the workers and they will vote for more imperial insanity. This is what they are thinking in their dark souls.

Carli

It will take more than high interest rates to prop up the dollar, even if the Fed paid out 20% which it never will, your earn that on a 60% devalued dollar (by year end maybe 100%), where is the sense in that?

Arrest the criminals, hostage their families and send their children to fight the Iraqi insurgency until they repatriate all the stash from the pirate coves.

Since they act like pirates they should be treated as such.

GK

JPM: PULL IT!

When I read that JPMorgan, the heart of the beast, says that there is a $325 Billion 'margin-call for banks...

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN0832645120080308

... it reminds me of the crash of 1929 where the main goal of the Central Bank powers that be was to cripple any banks that were not part of its system.

So I read a lot about the derivatives explosion and the shadow-banking system, and maybe they just want to pull the rug out from under the whole mess, and only those that have access to its TAF honey-debt-money will survive.

DREAMS FOR THE FUTURE: HAHAHA!
It is tempting to project our dream for a desired outcome onto this simple financial scam. Jim Kunstler, bless his heart, despises the commercial salad-shooter big box world invading the countryside and rightly so, but it is so easy to dream that this tactical financial collapse will bring about strategic social change and utopia of organic gardens sprouting everywhere.

This is just a standard consolidation of power, with a new transfer of power from the US to China as JPM opens offices in China to sell their communist government debt.

DRIFTING TO THE FUTURE: HU'S YOUR DADDY
The powerful will still be powerful, the US will lose its empire like the British did, but the English and US countryside will still be there an people will still go for coffee and drive around, just a little less hope for the future, which makes for great music and art when people have more free time due to no work.

TRADE WEAPONS FOR TRADE: MONEY NOT DEATH!
Tonight at bedtime my son wanted to discuss the 10 books on military hardware he checked out of the library and I patiently answered his questions about force fields, laser beams, terminator robots, smart bombs, dumb bombs, but at the end I told him every weapon has a weakness, and the best way to keep safe is not weapons but building good things that you fairly trade with other people in other countries that build good things to trade fairly with you.

Jim Smith

Going forward, our outcomes appear to be one or a combination of:
l. Depression
2. Hyper-Inflation
3. Nuclear and widespread war
4. Stumbling forward with makeshift and patchwork solutions while hoping to avoid these extremes

What a time for some form of philosophy, religion, what have you that would be credible and provoke widespread optimism and spiritual uplift! Anyone?
Amidst all of the searching and speculation I can only think of my mother seventy years ago saying "thought thought he did, but he only thought he did". So seemest our leaders.

CK

Two books have popped up in recent days that merit attention.
1) Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization.
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-kurlansky9mar09,0,6763134.story
just a bit of back story about the USA's main support for its belief in its own exceptionalism.
2) The Man who pushed America to War.
http://www.muckraked.com/wordpress/2008/03/07/turning-the-page-the-man-who-pushed-america-to-war/#more-565 A bio of Chalabi.
And an interesting sidebar blurb on Xinhua net about GHWB taking a meeting with Hu the same day Carlyle corp is faced with massive margin calls.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/07/content_7740780.htm
Ostensibly to talk about the coming Olympics.

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Remember, Bush repeatedly insulted Hu in public. Hu is a very proud man with a mind like a trap. Unlike Putin who betrays his every emotion in his face and can be read like a book, Hu's face is as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. I can see into his future for the simple reason, I intersected with the Chinese leadership just as they began to figure out the key to power was in capitalism and becoming the world's bankers.

There is no glorious future for the US in these plans. Our penchant for chopping nations into squabbling parts will be exercised upon us. Our justifications for destroying Yugoslavia, Korea, Vietnam, Cyprus, etc, all those divided lands is in our own future. We will do it to ourselves, you know. They will simply aid and abet us in this future project. They know we are a very divided nation.

Blunt Force Trauma

Oops, slight error noticed.

"The photo at the top of this story is from the terrible famine of 1907, the year the Federal Reserve was born."

The Banker's Panic (of 1907), which saw the stock market fall 50% the year before, and while the U.S. was in a recession, saw runs on banks which caused many close down. There were two stock market crashes that year as well in March and October.

In May 1908 everyone was happy again. Congress came up with the Aldrich-Vreeland Act by the end of that month. That spawned the Nat'l Monetary Commission which looked into the events of the previous year and drew up legislation to regulate the banks. This in turn had Congress dream up the Federal Reserve Act and it's 'system' by 1913. It was set off to sail on December 23rd, 1913.

'The Fed' was created due to fractional reserve lending by institutions that did not not have enough liquidity to cover their (customers) ASSets. Especially when they all came knocking for their money at the same time.

What has changed since 1907? Not much apparently. The banks are now broke (again). Especially Citi, which won't come clean about it. When and if they do, there will be runs. Massive ones.

Today there is constant need for an influx of money from varying points on the planet to fuel the banks. And from 'The Fed' itself. The Fed is doing nothing to prevent this and can't stop it now. The credit hot-potato just keeps revolving and being passed from one to another while the media keesp quiet about it so as not to excite the masses.

It's a completely failed system and doomed to crash as the credit Hindenberg will surely see itself go up in a ball of flame
with people taking to the streets in near anarchy.

It's amusing to read one of the key responsibilities of 'The Fed';

"to strike a balance between private interests of banks and the centralized responsibility of government"

The latter is simply laughable, while the former sees 'private interest' coming solely from Dubai.

Elaine, you are right that we are all in for quite a show in the coming months.

I hope the 'Decider-In-Thief' doesn't pull out the HSPD-51 card to quell all this when financial collapse and ruin happens.

Commercial and corporate credit fiasco coming soon......

CK

And here is a bit of the old reality based universe intruding into The American Media Fantasy Universe.
http://chinamatters.blogspot.com/2008/03/china-jumps-off-iran-sanctions-merry-go.html
Oh NOES the latest round of sanctions are SSDD. No change from what went before.
The author of chinamatters blog is pretty damn accurate so far. Called the North Korea situation, the Macau Banking fiasco, the Pakistani elections, and has been all over the China Iran relationship.
He committed the most evil of all thoughts to pixel when he pointed out that the world is moving away from a US centered view of reality. One can be a bankrupt, shit happens and bankruptcy can occur for numerous reasons, one can be a bully. The world appears to have little consideration for a nation that is simultaneously both.
I admired the honesty of the one comment:
"Looking at the four conflicts [First Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq War], the bigger the discrepancy between US and opposing forces, the easier it is to provoke an American desire to attack...Saddam Hussein voluntarily destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, thereby allowing America to attack without worry. In the opposite example, North Korea..."
How politely the Chinese can call out cowardice.

John East

DK, You say, "I have been VERY closely watching the planned IMF gold dump that happens in April 2008."

So have I, and I also saw this as a political move against gold rather than just a means of funding the ever growing bloated IMF bureucracy.

However, I saw an interview on Bloomberg this morning of an IMF representative (sorry, I didn't catch his name). This guy went out of his way to emphasise that the April IMF 200 tonne gold sale has still not been approved by all members, and that if approved it would not be over and above current planned central bank gold sales. I presume he was refering to the central bank's mutually agreed gold sale limit of I believe 500 tons already announced some time ago. So, according to this spokesman, if the IMF 200 tonne sale goes ahead, the central banks will only be able to sell 300 tonnes.

What's got me puzzled here is not the specific details, but the gold positive nature of this statement. It's as puzzling as Greenspan the other week urging the Middle East states to drop their dollar pegs.

The IMF supporting gold, Greenspan talking down the dollar?

What's going on?

rockpaperscizzors

How desperate is Citi-bank-group-cards? In December they gave me a $10.00 credit just to use my card. I refused. In January, they increased it to a $20.00 credit to use that god damn card, I should've but was to lazy to dig up wherever I buried it. They took away the credit but made it look like I had used it; funny money disappears with funny accounting. This week I rec'd a plea to pleeeeeeeease open a 'platinum' money market account and deposit $25,000.00 plus open another $1000.00 citibank account. What do I get for my generous donation into a unsecure, nonfdic account? I would receive two $400.00 roundrip tickets. I say round these pirates up back onto their rat infested, plague diseased, hole-ridden pirate ship and chart a course back to Dubai and face the music with their new Arab investors they've swindled.

CK

@RockPaperScissors
A very conservative move is to transfer any checking or savings or cd accounts you have at Citi to some other bank, quickly.
Then pay off all your credit card debt with citi and CLOSE the account.
Paying off the debt and leaving the account open makes Citi look stronger than it is.
Closing the account reduces Citi's strength and their financial strength.
If you close your credit card accounts over the phone you can enjoy the most outrageous and humourous begging and pleading from the account agent.
And yes I am feeling particularly good as the letters are now coming in informing us that various credit card accounts are paid off and closed. The last thing remaining is for the banks in question to send us a check for the overages we paid in the final payoffs.
Citi should be headed for the hopper of history but I fear that like Chrysler years ago, it will be deemed to big to be allowed to fail and we will "bail the bastards out" again.

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Correct, CK. I got rid of all my debts including on my property back when it was easier. Freedom!

The picture at the top was from a NYT article published in the spring of 1907. People were frantic, starving in nations being ripped apart by history. Both Russia and China were decimated from 1900 to 1960. Horrible.


I have had many banks send me 'free checks!' which I could 'cash now!' But they have stopped this month. Hmmmm....nothing from any credit card companies, either! Have they written me off because I haven't taken any bait in the last 10 years?

About Greenspan talking down the dollar: he is a traitor. He is also probably senile and can't cover his tracks anymore. Arrest him.

And the gold sales: HAHAHA. Wow. Gold buyers won't weep over this, it just means they can get more gold and then continue to bid it up. Like I keep saying, getting a 3% loan which is 3% below the rate of inflation and using it to buy the IMF gold and then selling the gold when it shoots up to $2,000 will be a great profit game for anyone who loves to play very risky games. But not me.

Gary W

Interesting comments about the Chinese. I expect them to 'win', whatever the competition, because they have a perspective of decades, if not millenia, and they seem to think of China as a unit where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; while the (particularly Anglophone) West can't see past the next quarterly report or, at best, the next election, and even then, purely self-interest.

Kung Hee Fat Choy! (that's the only Chinese I know :-)

OC

Gary,

Kung Hee= Congratulations!!

Fat Choy = Your'getting rich!!

This term is usually used as greeting during the Chinese New Year and to some one who hit the lottery jackpot!!

OC

Gary,

I forgot to mention the phrase 'Kung Hee Fat Choy' is in Cantonese dialect (Hong Kong) and not Mandarin (Mainland China)!!

Kah

Take a gander over at www.whatdoesitmean.com

They say Bush went to ask China for $2 trillion to bail out the failing dollar and they said no.... and I don't blame them.

Also they talk about Canada and UK to come police us for food riots.....
actually was an interesting website.

OC

Bush Snr. didn't make an offer the Chinese could refuse: Taiwan and Korea and out of Japan for good.

Unfortunately, Taiwan belongs to the walking dead:

Read this article from Singapore:

http://www.todayonline.com/articles/242061.asp

Taiwan presidential rivals trade barbs in last debate

The KMT candidate, Mr. Ma is talking of Hong Kong type of arrangement with China if he win the presidential election. His party already controls the Parliament. China had already replied to his offer after his party won the Parliament election a few months ago: We'll talk AFTER you win the presidential election!!

Elaine Meinel Supkis

China is definitely going to do an Anschluss with Taiwan. They are waiting for the US to weaken further. If the weak dollar kills our trade deficit with Taiwan, Taiwan has to get help from someone and that someone is China.


End of story. And yes, the US is now hyper-spending at the top. And we need to get the support of other nations who have sovereign wealth to do this. And they will increasingly say 'no' unless we give concessions. We are already trying unsuccessfully to be mercenaries. Talk about ridiculous.

GK

It is all fun and games on the Wall Street casino until 1 billion people riot for their rice.

http://www.gulfnews.com/business/Business_Feature/10196163.html

"Vienna/Hong Kong: Rice prices have surged to a 20-year high in the latest sign of global food inflation, creating policy headaches in Asia where more than 2.5 billion people depend on cheap and abundant supplies of the grain.

Thai rice prices, a global benchmark, surged last week above the level of $500 a tonne for the first time since at least 1989, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, prompting importing countries to seek assurances on supplies.

Robert Zeigler, Director at the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, said policymakers should be concerned. "If history is any indicator, we should be worried because rice shortages have in the past led to civil unrest," he said. "

cash for gold

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