“Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that
evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their
share because of their own follies.” - Homer
When
asked, and oh so many times, how I thought that Greece would play out, I
have always offered the same answer. “They will continue to beg, they
will say anything, do anything, until the money stops and then they will
proclaim Greece for the Greeks and revolt.” The Greeks only assume the
mantle of serfdom to keep the pipeline of capital flowing. As an
outsider I would say that they have damaged their national psyche in the
process and caused undue pain for their citizens but it must seem
simpler, to the elite of Greece, to beg rather than go back to work. The
problem for Europe now is that the amount of money is so large and the
pain will be so great that they wince at the consequences of their
misbegotten strategy. Europe provided money, demanded
austerity, and kept the charade in play far longer than good sense would
dictate. This should have all been shut down years ago but the poorly
performed play limped along as the benefactors wanted neither the shame
of closing it down nor the financial loss that it will ultimately
entail. Now, however, I would assert; the tragedy is about to end and the farce about to begin.
From around 22 minutes, the second half of the show, Josh
talks with Jim Willie author of the newsletter on QE3 and the sweeping
effects that it will have on gold, silver, commodities, and the broader
market. Additionally, Josh and Jim discuss the Feds underlying motives
and the truly evil acts that are being perpetrated and what is the end
game for the Fed. Source
The Doc: In an attempt to flash-smash silver and prevent a weekly close above the critical $35 level, the cartel dumped an estimated 51 MILLION OUNCES of paper silver on the futures market in only 5 minutes on this morning’s non-farm payrolls release between 8:30 and 8:35 AM EST.
Net Dania’s spot silver chart, which is not a precise futures volume measure but approximates the volume, indicates nearly 10,500 contracts were dumped in a span of merely 5 minutes, and half of those were dumped in a span of 2 minutes between 8:30 and 8:32am EST.
Apparently
the t 1/2 of silver market intervention of a year and a half’s worth of
paper supply is now approximately 30 minutes as silver has retraced the
entire smash, and is trading back at $35/oz!
Silver is a runaway train waiting to happen as the pent-up physical demand is simply breath-taking!
By Gregor Macdonald: The Federal Reserve is probably not ready to take the aggressive plunge into Nominal GDP Targeting, but it likely will.
Such a policy, which received wider attention during Ben Bernanke's
Congressional questioning last year and was also highlighted this year
in a paper delivered at the Jackson Hole conference (Woodford, opens to PDF),
has not caught any visible traction with Washington policy makers
possibly because it’s seen as either too radical, or simply too new.
However, after four years of broad reflationary policy (and another
year to come) failing to meaningfully spur U.S. employment growth, the
Fed may be willing to try such measures by late next year, 2013.
Indeed, given the Fed’s recent announcement of open-ended
quantitative easing (QE), one can already anticipate the incremental
move towards Nominal Gross Domestic Product (NGDP) Targeting, which has
as its central belief that an aggressive and open-ended promise to
pursue growth at the expense of inflation is the booster required to
push a structurally broken economy back to normal trend. Moreover, in
contrast to Bernanke’s swift rejection last year of NGDP on a conceptual
basis, Bernanke discussed the idea in friendlier terms during his post-Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) news conference.
What’s 'exciting' about the emergence of NGDP Targeting into
mainstream economic thinking is that, once implemented, it will provide a
real-world test of reflationary policy’s final effort to combat the
forces that have led to the end of strong, economic growth. The
appearance of the Woodford paper (link above) further
highlights the reality that endless amounts of cheap capital will be
provided to restart economies, now that we are in energy transition,
with the world having lost its cheap oil. The battle between credit and
natural resources will be renewed.
By Wolf Richter: Cypriot President Christofias dug in his heels. On Greek TV. Not
behind closed doors with the Troika, the austerity gang from the
European Commission, the IMF, and the ECB that have performed such
miracles in Greece. But as Cyprus veers toward bankruptcy, his game of
playing the Russians against the Troika has fallen apart, banks are in
worse condition than imagined, and the bailout amounts jumped again. How
can a tiny country get in so much trouble in such a short time?
The real-estate and construction bubble, fed by corruption and
abetted by banks, burst two years ago. Home sales and prices have
collapsed. Some 130,000 homeowners (in a country of 840,000 souls) are
tangled up in a nationwide title-deed scandal [Another Eurozone Country Bites the Dust]. The Troika estimated that 50,000 homes would be dumped on the market—though only 4,876 homes were sold
during the first nine months of the year! Losses have gutted banks.
Unemployment has reached record levels. And the construction industry,
once a major employer, is being annihilated.
The index of building contracts,
after a two-year downhill slide, has reached the lowest point in its
history, and “activity is expected to continue dropping,” lamented the
Federation of Associations of Building Contractors (OSEOK). Contractors
are going out of business. Over the last four months, the morass has
deepened. And now there are only enough pending construction projects
for seven months, and after that, there are no projects.
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey will take
"Commissioner's Direct Action" against Lt. Jonathan Josey, the
Philadelphia police officer who hit a woman during a public event on
Sunday. That means that effective on Thursday, Lt. Josey will be suspended for 30 days with the intent to dismiss. Josey was caught on video striking Aida Guzman during a traffic stop on Sunday. Source
By Adrian Salbuchi: In today’s increasingly interdependent and interactive world,
every action has a myriad of causes, meanings, objectives and reactions;
many visible, many invisible. Some, openly admitted and declared;
others no one would dare confess.
When trying to come to grips with the many complex conflicts going on
in the world and the dizzying pace at which they transpire, it would be
a mistake to approach them in isolation. Only a “holistic” bird’s eye
view gives us the picture of where we are and, more importantly, whereto
we are being dragged.
21st century geopolitics cannot be understood applying a silo
mentality. Syria’s civil war, Egypt’s “Arab Spring,” the destruction of
Libya and Iraq, growing China, crippled Japan, the Eurozone crisis,
America’s “missile shield” in Poland, Iran’s nuclear program, the coming
Latin American “Spring…” Approached haphazardly, the picture we get is
one of utter chaos. Approached applying the right model of
interpretation, we begin to see how things interrelate, react and move
in obedience to extremely powerful and dynamic – albeit, mostly
invisible – forces silently driving today’s world.
Don’t (just) Read the Newspapers…
It’s good to be informed; it’s useless, however, if you cannot format
that information into proper intelligible models. Too much unprocessed
information will send your brain into overdrive. Thus, it’s good
judgment to step away from all the noisy headlines, breaking news,
terror alarms and show-biz news anchors. It’s like when you look at a
Claude Monet impressionist painting: if you stand too close, you only
see a maze of little coloured dots, but when you take a dozen steps back
then the beauty of the work unfolds before your eyes.
In today’s information overdrive, we must join the dots correctly in
spite of the global media’s insistence that we connect them all wrong.
By now, most of us have realised that ours is “a planet at war”; not at
war with some alien world (that would make things easier to
understand!). Rather, we are a civilisation waging civil war with itself
and against itself.
By Melissa Knowles: Gold is now being sold at one of
its highest rates in years. Wouldn't it be nice if you could figure out a
way to make your own gold? Two professors at Michigan State University
may have beaten you to it. They have discovered a way to use bacteria to
make 99.9% pure gold.
Kazem Kashefi, an assistant
professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, and Adam Brown, an
associate professor of electronic art and intermedia, created a compact
laboratory to conduct their experiment. Brown and Kashefi made the gold
by combining the bacterium, Cupriavidus metallidurans, and gold
chloride. Gold chloride has no real value and is a toxic chemical liquid
found in nature. Once it's added to the bacteria, the bacteria ingest
all of the liquid's toxins and waste. Then, over the course of a week,
the toxic substance becomes a solid 24-karat gold nugget. There's no
word yet on the actual value of the gold that's created in the lab. The
researchers believe the magic they created in their compact factory
happens in nature all the time without human interference.
Kashefi calls the process they
use to create the gold "microbial alchemy" and says that it is
"transforming gold from something that has no value into a solid,
precious metal that's valuable." The compact factory that the scientific
duo used to create the gold is more like an art installation, so much
so that they named it "The Great Work of the Metal Lover." The work received honorable mention at the cyber art convention, Prix Ars Electronica, and is on exhibit until October 7.
Unfortunately, do not expect
Brown and Kashefi's work to translate into golden nuggets for you. The
researchers have said their experiment is not cost-effective enough to
repeat on a large scale. Source
Gold hit an 11 month high today, supposedly bolstered by signs that the
ECB will keep borrowing costs low and the notion that the central bank
stands ready to buy bonds in the secondary market. As long as central
banks continue to print and maintain negative real interest rates,
should investors consider owning gold? A recent PIMCO report stated the
following:
"We believe investors should consider allocating gold
and other precious metals to a diversified investment portfolio...
Regarding inflation in particular, we feel that the Federal Reserve's
decision to begin a third round of quantitative easing makes gold even
more attractive."
By Alex Hern: Ed Miliband said the phrase "one nation" 46 times on Tuesday. We counted. - Angelo: One shameful bankocracy of war with mongering tentacles all around the globe. Apparently none of us want that but somehow it just keeps on happening... One nation of sheeple.