rigorousintuition.ca

http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-gol ... 6348G10020

Lost art of stained glass



The town of Chartres, France, boasts one of the finest and earliest example of gothic cathedrals. Its stained glass windows are the object of pilgrimage from the all over the world. The admiring pilgrims look at them in awe as they discover how their glow changes while the Sun journeys across the sky. Words cannot do justice to the deep burning blue, burgundy, purple among the many other colors. They must be seen to be believed.



Nor can they be duplicated, try as one may, with today's technology. There was something the medieval stained glass window makers have known that we don't. Their art is a lost art. For generations after generations its formula was handed down from fathers to sons. But the last member of the dynasty took the secret of blending these exquisite colors with him to the grave when he died. There was many an attempt to rediscover the lost secret - to no avail. No matter how much higher a level chemistry, physics, and other supporting sciences have reached today, the stained glass windows of Chartres are beyond comparison with the proudest achievements of modern science - and art.



Will the gold standard go the way of stained glass?



I want to sound the alarm. The art of the gold standard may go the way of the art of making stained glass windows in Chartres. Calling the gold standard an art is no exaggeration. It achieves as high a degree of harmony in the affairs of man as any other form of art, in addition to being a pillar of economic science. Now this art and science has become and endangered species. When my generation leaves the stage, the gold standard will be expunged from living memory. Young people will only know about the Golden Age of the gold standard what government-controlled schools will let them. Of course, governments like to pose as champions of preserving our intellectual heritage. That may be true, except when it comes to the gold standard which they treat as you would alchemy or astrology. Governments want to be thanked for delivering us from this 'barbarous relic'. They suggest that we should look at the gold standard with the same sense of shame as you would on vivisepulture or ius primae noctis. The gold standard sprang from superstition, they say. We don't want to be reminded of the fact that our ancestors fell under its spell. Their example could be contagious. We must cherish our 'progressive' paper money system that has freed us from the slavery of superstition.



Yet it is this way of looking at the gold standard that is backward, not the gold standard. It is the paper standard that is based on ignorance, not the gold standard. It is the regime of irredeemable currency that has enslaved savers and producers, not the gold standard. It was the sabotaging of the gold standard that caused the Great Depression, not the gold standard. There is no reason to be ashamed of our monetary heritage and to disown its greatest protagonists and practitioners: the schoolmen, Sir Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, among others. We should go out and pick up the pieces before they fall into oblivion.

Hammer of Los wrote:...

I concur with the Kid as usual.

Hi Kid!

Preserving your wealth can be fun

The first thing you'll need is a gun

Trust no one you meet

Each night soak your feet

Just in case it is prudent to run

I shall never own a gun.

However, I have been carving a number of wooden items recently.

A wand, a walking stick for a child, that has many uses including bow and slingshot, and a larger, heavier walking stick for me. The lattermost I have yet to begin, I have the branch but I am not sure it will be fit for purpose. I will find out when I begin carving.

They are carved in hazel, yew and oak.

If anyone ever sought to point a gun at me, I would have to either dodge or incapacitate the hand that wields the gun.

Hopefully, my kung fu would help in such a scenario.

I sure hope and pray it never comes to that, but who knows?




...

Hi Hammer,

you could always try one of these:







PS:

here's one for knives:



*

vanlose kid wrote:

Nordic wrote:

The bottom line is that governments, Kings and religious orders do not ‘produce’ anything nearly equal to their consumption no matter how you measure it, unless you have been drinking their Kool-Aid. These entities will consume from all sources using one or more of the following strategies; regulation, taxation and ultimately confiscation.

Great. Another one of those "libertarian" types, typical Zero Hedge stuff. I read the site anyway, because they're very good at figuring out what is going on, but terrible at seeing the actual causes of it.

I mean, they're still stuck in the "too much government is causing the collapse!" nonsense.

It's a bit tiresome at this point.

Yeah, let's "free" the markets even more, so the looting can speed up into red-line territory! Sure, that'll work.

really? false dichotomy much?

apropos of the post you commented on, what do you think the (always and ever necessary) government will do to these despicable "libertarians"?

...The inlet beside Wukan, in China's south, is tranquil. Herons and egrets fly over the nearby lagoon. The surrounding hills, some rising high above the village, are covered with lush trees and shrubs and the green-blue waters show barely a ripple. There is no wind.

For the fisherman of this village on the South China Sea three hours' drive east of Hong Kong, this should be a pleasant day for fishing.

But this is a fishing village where the fisherman cannot fish.

Wukan has captured the attention of the world, and of internet-savvy Chinese, as its residents have risen up against what they see as corruption among the local Communist Party officials who answer only to their party bosses.

China may be a country that spends more on maintaining internal security than on defence, according to finance ministry figures, but the residents of Wukan have nonetheless driven out the bureaucrats and the police and are now governing themselves...

http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwid ... le-to-fish

people who choose to govern themselves, freaks of nature, huh? completely impossible right?

*

No, those are two different things. Governing yourself is democracy. The type of "libertarianism" that the Zero Hedge guy, and his ilk, and people like Peter Schiff propose, is more of a free-for-all, lawlessness to the point of the bullies having even more power than they do now.

Their thinking is Magical Thinking, that a complete destruction of anything that remotely resembles a "regulation" will magically result in a Perfect Society.

They forget that the subject of their little obsession, the Economy, is a game. And like any game, it needs rules, referees, and enforcement of said rules, for the game to actually work!

Not sure where to put this, but since this thread is active, I thought here would be good-
So I'm on a PM board this evening and there is a guy from Iran telling us about a full out panic to buy gold there. They are worried that the currency is inflating and there is talk of collapse. People are selling land, and any assets at hand to buy gold. They are camping out in front of banks for days to buy what they can. He says there will be no uprisings like in Egypt though. The people there are very fearful of what they feel is about to happen. Here are some photos he posted-

There is a breaking news
CB of Iran Stop Selling Gold Coin it announced that buyer get coin after next 4months very bad signal to market
it seems they are hopeless of controlling the market

http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... 2Fshowitem %2F8707.aspx&act=url



http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... rsnews.com% 2Fnewstext.php%3Fnn%3D13900928000846&act=url

what is going on here???


Mr president(Ahmadinezhad) will lecture in TV on tomorrow night it would be very important

these day I'm learning the meaning of Chaos
I changed 94 percent of my properties to Gold coin
4 Percent $ and €
and 2 percent in Rial just for needs in the case of emergency

all Iranian became expert traders here even who can't read or write calculate you the interest rate, deposit rate inflation rate $/Rial rate they knoe what is the ounce how many grams is it !! and speeches like a person who has PHD of economy
all finding a way to protect themselves against future.

Board sage enters:

Easy to see why Iran is next.

In studying the role of Central Banks, I have discovered that there are distinct differences between a private/independent Central Bank and a state run Central Bank. It is clear that when a nation allows a Central Bank to be independent of the government, the debt of that nation quickly grows beyond control. It is a fact that all of the countries which are drowning in debt have an independent or privately operated Central Bank.

Iran has a State owned Central Bank- Negligible debt. 12 billion.

In 2008 Iran started selling oil in Euros. This is a direct threat to the U.S.

We saw what happened when Iraq decided to sell oil in Euros. And when Libya proposed a new gold backed dinar.

Central Bank Sells gold trough Branch of National Bank (Called Melli bank) but not all branches, we have gold store here but bank sells gold cheaper

I think it's not gold trade it's more like to save deposit against inflation and sanctions these days staying in queues with some rebels and thefts is very dangerous you may lose all your property instead of buying gold.

our TV doesn't say that in news but everyone learned it from Internet.
there are many reasons trigger this rush:
1) sanctions of CBI
2) selling gold by bank(which stopped today after 9 months) shows they need money!!
3) CPI near 50 % inflation near 20%
tonight after work time when I take a taxi to back home he said me to give him 3500 rial instead of 3000 I surprised (I remembered the Zimbabwe)
I told him I don't print the money Get your extra 500 Rials from CBI!! who print the money continuously
4) and the most important : losing confidence to economical policies of government especially our central bank chief DR. Mahmoud Bahmani
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Bahmani_

Market severely shaking
After stopping of gold selling by banks coin price skyrockets from 6080000 to 6250000 Rials
1 Gold coin= 6250000
1 us dollar =15600!!! It’s still unbelievable

The no queue in front of the banks as banks stop selling coins (or they may have run out coins) but the announcement emphasis on stop the selling programs to take back banks to the normal situation as they said banks can’t serve in normal way under huge queue of coin sellers.
While MR. President yesterday said it’s part of psychological warfare of foreigner and there is no crisis here!! I believe they became blind and can’t analysis the market correctly.
It’s very obvious people losing their fate in our paper currency.

I will update a more accurate and complete report of today tonight (8 hours later)

(he says it says: "let me buy gold coin!!")

Sage#2:

He is right... Iran, Sudan and North Korea are the few countries that are not run by the Global Rothschild bankers.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman is a good book to read on the topic.
It is a war against Islamic banking...Follow the money...

Largest Islamic banks
Shariah-compliant assets reached about $400 billion throughout the world in 2009, according to Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, and the potential market is $4 trillion.
Iran, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia have the biggest sharia-compliant assets.

In 2009 Iranian banks accounted for about 40 percent of total assets of the world's top 100 Islamic banks. Bank Melli Iran, with assets of $45.5 billion came first, followed by Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi Bank, Bank Mellat with $39.7 billion and Bank Saderat Iran with $39.3 billion. Iran holds the world's largest level of Islamic finance assets valued at $235.3bn which is more than double the next country in the ranking with $92bn. Six out of ten top Islamic banks in the world are Iranian. In November 2010, The Banker published its latest authoritative list of the Top 500 Islamic Finance Institutions with Iran topping the list. Seven out of ten top Islamic banks in the world are Iranian according to the list.

Any country that tries to set up a Gold standard is taken out.
That is the Banker's money, Not the common people's. Fractional Reserve Currency is the people's.... allows a leveraged theft of value.
The first step is to flood the country with Dollars and create price inflation in local currency with supply restrictions and sanctions.
China was smart in that they disseminated Gold to their people too.
Putting Gold in the people's hands works to reduce money inflation the same way as the west uses collectable coinage.
Think about that... How many of you know people that have a state or provincial quarter collection?
That not only takes 25 cents out of circulation but the fractional reserve x 9 to infinity. For the cost of 3 cents worth of Steel slug.
When times get tougher, can you imagine how that will supercharge price inflation as people use them into circulation?
Cash them in now and buy Gold and Silver ounces. That is the only way to bypass the game.

Iman...he is right, your country is under financial attack.
Beware of any currency... You are going to see a panic rush into USD and Euro.
Once there is no other alternative the plan is to crash those currencies to set up a one world money.
I hope you are working on your list...Gold, Silver and Physical items of value might get you through a little safer.

the problem is human behavior since gold obviously has no behavior. so then, let us legalize it as a gold coin for money.

full disclosure: as a lifeline to avert disaster. that part was an opinion

Nordic wrote:

The bottom line is that governments, Kings and religious orders do not ‘produce’ anything nearly equal to their consumption no matter how you measure it, unless you have been drinking their Kool-Aid. These entities will consume from all sources using one or more of the following strategies; regulation, taxation and ultimately confiscation.

Great. Another one of those "libertarian" types, typical Zero Hedge stuff. I read the site anyway, because they're very good at figuring out what is going on, but terrible at seeing the actual causes of it.

I mean, they're still stuck in the "too much government is causing the collapse!" nonsense.

It's a bit tiresome at this point.

Yeah, let's "free" the markets even more, so the looting can speed up into red-line territory! Sure, that'll work.

^Seconded. Obviously, nobody who values liberty likes rules and regulations, in the abstract. But apart from the joys of political hot-button pushing, it's really pretty fucking hard to see what could possibly justify an appeal to populist anti-regulatory sentiment in this particular context:

• • How Deregulation Fueled the Financial Crisis
    
    
    By Shah Gilani, Capital Waves Strategist, Money Morning
    
    No one person is responsible for the credit crisis, the failure of investment banks, the insolvency of commercial banks world-wide, the implosion of the world's stock markets, or for leading us to the precipice of another great depression.
    
    The truth is there were many.
    
    Fundamental and pragmatic banking regulations, which arose from the devastating financial collapses of the Great Depression, for decades strengthened U.S. banks and capital markets, making them the twin engines of American growth and the envy of the world.
    
    The systematic dismantling of those same regulations by greedy bankers began in earnest in 1980, peaked in 1999, and finally climaxed with an insane Securities and Exchange Commission ruling in April 2004, a final decision that paved the way for the implosion of everything regulation was designed to protect.
    
    Just how did we get here?
    
    Wall Street bankers, their exorbitantly well-paid lobbying army of former congressmen and former regulators, their greatly contributed-to sitting legislators and, most egregiously, the self-righteous and still mega-rich "former" Street executives have systematically eviscerated the muscle and bones from the regulatory bodies charged with protecting us from banks' self-destructive greed. An inordinately powerful group of executive insiders from the once-deeply respected House of Goldman Sachs (GS) have served as U.S. Treasury secretaries and in innumerable other administrative capacities.
    
    A Reflection on Reform
    
    The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, was the first major reform of the U.S. banking system since the Great Depression.
    
    While touted as a boon to consumers, the law was actually a gold mine for bankers. Among other requirements and banker "gifts" the 1980 Act's provisions:
    
    • * Lowered the mandatory reserve requirements banks keep in non-interest bearing accounts at U.S. Federal Reserve banks.
      
      * Established a five-member committee, the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee, to phase out federal interest rate ceilings on deposit accounts over a six-year period.
      
      * Increased Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) coverage from $40,000 to $100,000.
      
      * Allowed depository institutions, including savings and loans and other thrift institutions, access to the Federal Reserve Discount Window for credit advances.
      
      * And pre-empted state usury laws that limited the rates lenders could charge on residential mortgage loans.
    In 1980, in a virtual landslide, Ronald Reagan was elected and grabbed the conservative mantle. A year later, the shock troops of the heralded Reagan Revolution launched their attack and embarked on a massive, systematic de-regulatory campaign. President Reagan's first treasury secretary, former Merrill Lynch & Co. Chief Executive Officer Donald T. Regan, became chairman of the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee.
    
    In a burst of deregulatory bravado in 1982, Treasury Secretary Regan ushered through the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act. Key provisions of tthe Act ultimately coalesced with Treasury Secretary Regan's protection of the lucrative "brokered deposits" business, in which Merrill was a major player, and paved the way for the future collapse of the savings and loan industry.
    
    Some of the provisions in that 1982 Act would later be blamed for thousands of bank failures. The provisions permitted the following:
    
    • * Allowed savings and loans to make commercial, corporate, business or agricultural loans of up to 10% of their assets.
      
      * Authorized a capital assistance program – the "Net Worth Certificate Program" – for dangerously undercapitalized banks, under which the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. (FSLIC) and the FDIC would purchase capital instruments called "Net Worth Certificates" from savings institutions with net worth/asset ratios of less than 3.0%, and would theoretically later redeem the certificates as these shaky banks regained financial health.
      
      * And, most frighteningly, raised the allowable ceiling on direct investments by savings institutions in nonresidential real estate from 20% to 40% of assets.
    The history of S&L greed and fraud – which resulted from brokered deposits and deregulation – wasn't forgotten by legislators. But it was steamrolled by bankers pursuing an even greater unshackling of the regulations that constrained their ambitions.
    
    Shattered Glass
    
    The ultimate prize was to be the undoing of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Glass-Steagall, officially known as the Banking Act of 1933, mandated the separation of banks according to the types of business they conducted. Investment banks, whose securities related activities resulted in relatively large risks, were to be separate from commercial banks, whose depositors needed greater protection. The Act created deposit insurance and the government wasn't about to allow taxpayer-backed insurance of commercial bank deposits to be exposed to securities related risks. It was a prudent and sensible separation. Bankers tried for years to undermine and overturn Glass-Steagall, but it took time.
    
    In 1987, Alan Greenspan replaced Paul A. Volcker – the stalwart Federal Reserve Board chairman, national inflation-fighting hero and active proponent of Glass-Steagall (and now economic confidant of President-elect Obama).
    
    In its twilight days, the Reagan administration was determined to further fertilize the seeds of deregulation and Greenspan's Ayn Rand-inspired "objectivist," free-market philosophies would be the perfect embodiment of the deregulatory movement.
    
    Securitization Enters the Scene
    
    A year later – in 1988 – two very quiet revolutions sprouted that would ultimately hand bankers twin throttles to rain terror on us all.
    
    That year, the Basel Accord established international risk-based capital requirements for deposit-taking commercial banks. In a byproduct of the calculations of what constituted mortgage-related risk (by nature of the loans' long maturities and illiquidity) lenders should be expected to set aside substantial reserves; however, marketable securities that could theoretically be sold easily would not require significant reserves.
    
    To obviate the need for such reserves, and to free up the money for more-productive pursuits, banks made a wholesale shift from originating and holding mortgages to packaging them and holding mortgage assets in a now-securitized form. Not inconsequentially, this would lead to a disconnect between asset-quality considerations and asset-liquidity considerations.
    
    Meanwhile, over at the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the appointment of free-market disciple Wendy Gramm, wife of U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Tex., as chairperson, would result in her successful 1989 and 1993 exemption of swaps and derivatives from all regulation.
    
    These actions would not be inconsequential in the aforementioned reign of terror that was still to come.
    
    In 1993, with her agenda accomplished, Wendy Gramm resigned from her CFTC post to take a seat on the Enron Corp. board as a member of its audit committee. We all know what happened there. Enron's fraud and implosion became the poster child for deregulation run amok and ultimately helped spawn Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which has its own issues.
    
    The constant flow of money to lobbyists and into legislators' campaign coffers was paying off for the banking interests. The Fed, under Chairman Greenspan, was methodically deconstructing the foundation of Glass-Steagall. The final breaching of the wall occurred in 1998, when Citibank was bought by Travelers. The deal married Citibank, a commercial bank, with Travelers' Solomon, Smith Barney investment bank and the Travelers insurance business.
    
    There was only one problem: The deal was clearly illegal in light of Glass-Steagall and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. However, a legal loophole in the 1956 BHC Act gave the new Citicorp a five-year window to change the landscape, or the deal would have to be unwound. If aggressively flouting existing laws to pursue a personal agenda isn't a perfect example of bankers' hubris and greed, then maybe I've just got it all wrong.
    
    Phil Gramm – the fire breathing free-marketer, Texas senator, and chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs – rode to the rescue, propelled by a sea of more than $300 million in lobbying and campaign contributions. In 1999, in the ultimate proof that money is power, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, at once doing away with Glass-Steagall and the 1956 BHC Act, and crowning Citigroup Inc. (C) as the new "King of the Hill."
    
    From his position of power, Sen. Gramm consistently leveraged his Ph.D in economics and free-market ideology to espouse the virtues of subprime lending, where he famously once stated: "I look at subprime lending and I see the American Dream in action."
    
    If helping struggling borrowers pursue their homeownership dreams was such a noble cause, it might have been incumbent upon the senator to not block legislation advocating the curtailment of predatory lending practices. From 1989 through 2002, federal records show that Sen. Gramm was the top recipient of contributions from commercial banks and among the top five recipients of campaign contributions from Wall Street. [Click here to read "How Subprime Borrowing Fueled the Credit Crisis."]
    
    Since moving on from the Senate in 2002 to mega-universal Swiss banking giant UBS AG (UBS), where he serves as an investment banker and lobbyist, Gramm makes no apologies. "The markets have worked better than you might have thought," he has been quoted as saying. "There is this idea afloat that if you had more regulation you would have fewer mistakes. I don't see any evidence in our history or anybody else's to substantiate that."
    
    The "New" Math
    
    On April 28, 2004, in a fitting and perhaps flagrant final act of eviscerating prudent regulation, the SEC ruled that investment banks may essentially determine their own net capital. The insanity of that allowance is only surpassed by the fact that the SEC allowed the change because it was simultaneously demanding greater scrutiny of the books and records of what were the holding companies of investment banks and all their affiliates.
    
    The tragedy is that the SEC never used its new powers to examine the banks. The idea was that Consolidated Supervised Entities (CSEs) could use internal models to determine risk and compliance with net capital requirements. In reality, what the investment banks did was essentially re-cast hybrid capital instruments, subordinated debt, deferred tax returns and securities with no ready market into "healthy" capital assets against which they reduced reserve requirements for net capital calculations and increased their leverage to as much as 30:1. [Click here to read "How Wall Street Manufactures Financial Services Products," an insider's look at how greed on Wall Street results in unscrupulous investment instruments]
    
    When the meltdown came the leverage and concentration of bad assets quickly resulted in the shotgun marriage of insolvent Bear Stearns Cos. to JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holding (LEHMQ), the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America Corp. (BAC), and the rushed acceptance of applications by Goldman and Morgan Stanley (MS) to convert to Bank Holding Companies so they could feed at the taxpayer bailout trough and feast on the Fed's new Smörgåsbord of liquidity handouts. There are no more CSEs (the SEC announced an end to that program in September). The old investment bank model is dead.
    
    The motivation for bankers to undermine and inhibit prudent regulation is inherent in banker compensation incentives. The September 1993 Journal of Financial Research sums up the problem on compensation by concluding: "Firm characteristics that influence managerial compensation include leverage (as a measure of observable risk) market-to-book ratio of assets, size and shareholder return. Evidence suggests that Bank Holding Companies may be exploiting the deposit insurance mechanism because leverage is a significant factor in our results for incentive-based components of compensation. Our results strongly support the view that fundamental shifts in business activities of Bank Holding Companies have influenced their compensation strategies".
    
    No one would tempt an alcoholic by putting one in charge of a liquor store and neither would anyone put a fox in charge of a henhouse. So why are greedy bankers being allowed to rewrite banking regulations to enrich themselves while leveraging taxpayers, destroying trillions of dollars of hard-earned savings and sinking us into a potential depression?
    
    Until transparency sheds light on the backroom dealers and influence peddlers that aligned with Wall Street against Main Street, we will continue to be held hostage to the same greed and avarice that manifests itself in too many human beings who actually have the power to execute their personal agendas.

Link and caveat lector: I know absolutely nothing about that site or that author beyond that the above is a cogent, concise summary of late 20th-century financial deregulation and its impact on the American economy.

Also, fwiw: While his general thesis may very well be totally rebuttable on some grounds that I'm not aware of but would very much like to hear, the only extant rebuttals of it that I've seen have all, without exception, been from people who'd evidently been drinking Heritage Foundation of AEI Kool-Aid (ie -- they've all been based on a lot of crap originated by right-wing lobbyists think-tanks whose mega-corporate/financial-industry funders stand to benefit from having the finger pointed away from them and toward entities like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.)

Elihu wrote:the problem is human behavior since gold obviously has no behavior. so then, let us legalize it as a gold coin for money.

full disclosure: as a lifeline to avert disaster. that part was an opinion

The thing is, though:

Then we'd still have the problem of human behavior.
__________________

^Also an opinion, but at least one we share. I think.

This is how to deal with these so-called "libertarians:"


http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/21/c ... er-schiff/

C-SPAN wasn’t the only one to get cut off on Wednesday. As The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur and self-declared 1 percenter Peter Schiff hotly debated the role of money in politics, Cenk cut off Schiff’s microphone when he interrupted him and continued to talk.

“Are you saying the bankers are not guilty of this at all?” Cenk tried to ask after he was interrupted.

“We don’t have the benefits of capitalism any more because we don’t have capitalism,” Schiff responded. “We have a centrally planned socialist economy, and that is why the average American is getting poorer.”

“Alright, I’m done with that load of crap,” Cenk said, and asked for Schiff to be cut off.

“He wants to blame the government for the problems, but he knows it’s his banker friends who have given those donations, who buy their senators, who buy their staff members, so they can get more money,” Cenk added. “He doesn’t want you to pay attention to that, because that’s how they rob you. And he comes on here and goes, ‘Oh, no no, it’s socialism.’ Socialism, my ass!”

“The real problem is — and he’s talked about it in the past, but he didn’t talk about it there — corporatism, where the corporations come in and rob us blind.”

Gotta love Cenk.

Cenk kicks ass.

The western press has caught up to what I'd posted about on previous page-

Iranians Rush to Buy Gold, Dollars as Sanctions Tighten Grip
By Ladane Nasseri - Dec 22, 2011 8:44 AM CT

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-2 ... -grip.html

--

one more-

DECEMBER 23, 2011, 5:40 A.M. ET
Turkey Boosts Gold Reserves

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... %3Darticle

Indonesian police fire on gold mine protesters

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-26/i ... rs/3747932

Gold isn't pretty, nor is the linked video. But given the amount of firing, i like to think most of the police shooting must have been deliberately high. Is that bullish for gold futures?

my takeaway line would have to be: "If we stay on the present course, I think the outcome will look more like 472 AD than 1929. "

http://www.goldstandardinstitute.net/20 ... rmageddon/

and the runner up: "It is important to realize that gold is not “going up”. Paper is going down. There is no gain for the holder of gold; he has simply not lost wealth due to the debasement of paper."

...If enough gold bonds are issued soon enough, we may reverse the one-way flow of gold from the markets into private hiding, that is inexorably leading to inevitable permanent backwardation and the withdrawal of all gold from the system.

One of the key points in my backwardation paper is that the value of the dollar collapses to zero not as a consequence of the quantity of dollars rising to infinity, but because of the desire of some dollar holders to get gold. If they cannot trade paper for gold, then they will trade paper for commodities without regard to price and trade those commodities for gold. This will cause the price of the commodities in dollar terms to rise to levels that make the dollar useless in trade (and collapse the price of commodities in gold terms).

If we reverse the flow of gold out of the markets, we may be able to prevent this disaster from occurring. The dollar will then continue to lose value in a continuous (if accelerating) manner, as people migrate to gold.

This is the best outcome that could possibly be hoped for. If it occurs along with a reduction in spending so that spending does not exceed (tax) revenues, we will avert Armageddon and be on the path to a proper and real recovery. To be clear, times will be hard and the average standard of living will decline precipitously.

But this is infinitely preferable to total collapse.

It is now up to farsighted leaders, especially in government, to take the first concrete steps towards saving Western Civilization.

may that last line turn out to be something other than a post-mortem punch-line...

reposted to proper thread for relevance. apologies to the MIA halftime finger thread. eyeno made me do it!

eyeno wrote: i've given you all the all the clues that I can...take note of the dates. Prepare.

http://www.deflationeconomy.com/kondratiev-wave.html

eyeno on the job! more:
http://professorfekete.com/articles%5CA ... atievs.pdf
excerpts (sp)

Only in 6 of the 21 series could Kondratiev not confirm the presence of a long wave-cycle. Significantly, in the case of the price level and the rate of interest the evidence was strong. Kondratiev’s ultimate conclusion was that he obtained sufficient empirical basis to support the hypothesis of the existence of a long-wave economic cycle in the capitalist economies he studied, with an average duration of 54 years. He allowed a 25 percent deviation from this average. In particular, Kondratiev identified three historic waves:
i. First wave: rising phase from 1780-90 to 1810-17; falling phase from 1810-17 to 1844-51.
ii. Second wave: rising phase from 1844-51 to 1870-75; falling phase from 1870-75 to 1890-96.
iii. Third wave: rising phase from 1890-96 to 1914-20; falling phase started 1914-20.

Kondratieff was exiled to Siberia by Bolshevik officials who flatly rejected his conclusions. To the faithful there could only be one falling phase of the capitalist economy, followed by the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. And, following that, there was to be only
one rising phase, leading to eternal bliss under communism. Kondratiev died in the Gulag in 1930 at the age of 38. His work was later updated by other economists using his original methodology. They found that the falling phase of the third wave ended 1947-48, and that there is a
iv. Fourth wave: rising phase from 1947-48 to 1973-80; falling phase started 1973-80.

There may be more to hoarding than boorishness. It is well-known that informed producers regularly use sophisticated inventory-management techniques involving the speeding up or the slowing down of input and output at either end of their production line. The means of hoarding are just as ingenious as its objects are varied. The practice is certainly not confined to housewives buying more sugar to fill up their pantry, nor to small-time smugglers holding contraband merchandise in mountain-caves. They also include big multi-national firms using the most up-to-date techniques such as inventory-padding or the deliberate use of leads and lags in warehousing. In recent times cutbacks in production quotas of highly marketable goods such as crude oil have been utilized for the same purpose with dramatic effect. The Japanese are known to import far more lumber and coal from Canada than they need for current consumption. Having treated the excess with an impregnating solution, they sink the lumber and coal to the bottom of their mountain lakes. Nor is hoarding of fuel confined to energy-poor countries. The U.S. government is filling up disused salt mines with crude oil. They call it “strategic stockpile”, but in the vernacular it is called hoarding, even if the word has a pejorative or boorish connotation. The supertanker construction boom in the 1970's was not an exercise in efficient transportation. Its purpose was to build floating warehouses. The supertankers filled to the brim with crude set sail without the captain having the slightest idea of its final destination. If the highest bid for the crude in the tanker was not high enough, no problem. The supertanker just had to keep cruising a little longer. Futures and options trading opened up new avenues for the general public to participate in the hoarding game. These examples illustrate the phenomenal increase in the propensity to hoard in the period preceding 1980, which was manifested not only in rising prices but rising interest rates as well. Since 1980 the world has been experiencing a fall in the propensity to hoard, and even “dishoarding” previously hoarded goods. The process of reducing stockpiles at falling prices, which have been built up in expectation of higher prices, is a painful one.
It would be an impossible task to estimate, however tentatively, the size of existing stockpiles of goods held not for impending consumption but, rather, for some other reason, notably in protest against low interest rates, reckless government spending, and the banks’ plundering the savings of individuals. This
is where the statistician must plead ignorance. The only way to grasp the hoarding instincts and habits of people is through theoretical understanding. The divorce of hoarding from saving took place in response to the conspiracy of the banks, aided and abetted by the government, in order to defraud and dispossess the saving public. Over long periods of time the propensity to hoard has been gaining ground as an independent economic force at the expense of the propensity to save (i.e., save money) in response to deteriorating bank practices, in particular, the banks’ sheltering of illiquid government debt in their balance sheet, and the government’s protecting the banks against depositors withdrawing the gold coin. By now the U.S. has reached the point that the savings rate is negative. It is wrong to blame the American people for this unfortunate state of affairs. The blame should be assigned to American politicians and officials who have corrupted the monetary system to such an extent that people refuse to put their savings into instruments the banks have to offer. No one knows what the savings rate would be if the value of marketable goods hoarded by Americans could be calculated.

There is no defensible justification in jurisprudence for extending special privileges to banks, or for protecting them against the consequences of their own folly. A law setting up double standard of justice is bad by definition. The argument that bank failures cause too much economic and social pain is spurious. All should stand equal before the law. Compromising this principle lets the bad effects of bank policy accumulate and will ultimately cause far more harm and economic or social distress than the immediate punishment of the bank that has gone astray.
Later the banks got still more protection from the government in the form of compromised standards of inspection. When they overstate the value of their assets and understate that of their liabilities, bank examiners look the other way. “See no evil, speak no evil”. Banks can get away with fraudulent accounting practices that would trigger harsh punitive action if practiced by other firms. Bank examiners exonerate guilty banks upon the tacit approval, if not at the outright request of the government.
Economists are not famous for their curiosity about this peculiar tolerance for fraud that governments the world over have displayed for centuries. Yet the
explanation is rather simple: “If you scratch my back, then I shall scratch yours.” The banks have ample opportunity to return the favor of the government when they are expected to buy up treasury paper, which the market is no longer willing to take at the yields offered, and to deliver similar sweetheart deals. It would be naive in the extreme to assume that the savers meekly acquiesced in such acts of double-dealings and coercion. They could not prevent the government and the banks from sabotaging and ultimately destroying the gold standard. But they could do something about it. Instead of (or in addition to) hoarding gold, savers thereafter started hoarding other marketable commodities. The list of marketable goods is endless. There are the conventional ones such as salt, sugar, spices, spirits, tobacco, tea, and coffee. To this, one has to add the non-conventional ones, energy carriers such as crude oil, and narcotics such as heroin and cocaine. (Note that as long as governments tolerated the gold standard there was little problem with drug trafficking. The suggestion cannot be easily dismissed that the escalation in illegal drug trade in the twentieth century was in direct response to the destruction of the gold standard.)

After the destruction of the gold standard by the government hoarding did not cease. It only changed form. The benign tumor turned malignant. Not only did the withdrawal of gold coins from the monetary bloodstream through government coercion fail to stop deflation: it set off a huge suction pump in the bond market siphoning money off from every nook and cranny of the economy. In particular, it created a devastating liquidation and depression from which only a world war could pull the economy.
We can’t help but notice that gold is the philosopher’s stone. In its possession the propensity to hoard is directed into its proper channels. Without it the world economy becomes a plaything in the hands of bond and foreign exchange speculators. Competitive Devaluations
Since 1981 the world appears to be in the grips of a deflationary spiral, right on schedule as predicted by the Kondratiev cycle. This spiral hasn’t run its course yet. Some liquidation has taken place, but the worst seems still to come. The politicians and economists congratulate each other for ”having squeezed inflationary expectations out of the system”. Whatever they have squeezed, the inflationary and deflationary spirals are not caused by expectations, but by actual money-flows between the commodity and bond markets. The international monetary system is still the same rudderless ship it has been since 1971, and it is still exposed to the same monetary storms. The only difference is that the direction of the gale has changed.

What is to be done?
We need not conclude our review on such a pessimistic note. We are able to temper the deleterious effects of Kondratiev’s long-wave cycle, even though we are unable to eliminate it. If we cannot legislate the propensity to hoard out of existence, we may at least confine it to its proper channels and secure it with a
safety-valve. The role of gold in the world is to provide just such a safety-valve. God created gold in order to render the propensity to hoard harmless. Gold hoarding has no effect on essential consumption, its only effect is on jewelry consumption. Under a gold standard there is no bond, still less foreign exchange speculation. The only road to stabilization is to put speculation into its proper place, confining speculators to fields where they can do no harm, but they may do some good: to the market of agricultural commodities with supply controlled by nature, not by man. The greatest blunder that Keynes committed was that he failed to foresee the forces that his policies would unleash. In particular, he was oblivious to speculation unleashed in markets where supply is not controlled by nature but by man (read: governments and central banks), such as the bond and foreign exchange markets.
The significance of a gold standard is not to be seen in its ability to stabilize prices, which is neither possible nor desirable. It is, rather, seen in its ability to stabilize the rate of interest at the lowest level that is still compatible with the requirements of the saver. The stabilization of the rate of interest and foreign exchange will then impart as much stability to the price level as is consonant with a dynamic economy. By letting the saver withdraw the gold coin (read: bank reserves) when the rate of interest falls to a level he considers unacceptable, the irresistible speculative money-flow to-and-fro between the commodity and bond markets — the engine of inflationary and deflationary spirals — would be shut down at source. Benign bond/gold arbitrage would replace the malignant bond/commodity speculation. Since the former is self-limiting while the latter is self-aggravating, economic stability would be enhanced.
The alternative to a gold standard is too horrible to contemplate. Unemployment more devastating than that of the 1930's, an earthquake shaking the international monetary system to its foundations, the construction of protective tariff walls and, in the end, a world war in which governments hope to find an escape route from economic chaos.

4792AD?

http://professorfekete.com/articles%5CA ... Anchor.pdf

I am not going to analyze the Chatham report. Instead, I am going to discuss some of the results of research done at the New Austrian School of Economics (NASE) on gold in contemporary economy, as well as gold in the 20th century.

(1) Gold is the only ultimate extinguisher of debt. Having been exiled from the international monetary system in 1971, gold has not been able to play its God-ordained role as the ultimate extinguisher of debt. As a consequence, total debt in the world can only grow, never shrink. Bad debt can no longer be weeded out. Instead, it is being kicked upstairs to accumulate in the balance sheet of one government or another. Out of sight out of mind. But you can kick only so much garbage upstairs to the attic before it will start to come crashing down.
We need go no further in trying to understand what the ‘sovereign debt problem’ is all about, and why all of a sudden it has become a universal threat. It took that long for the level of bad debt in the balance sheet of the government of Greece to reach the tipping point. The same bad debt would have been extinguished long ago, had not the U.S. browbeaten the world to phase out gold from the monetary system. Greece is just the proverbial whipping boy. Bad debt keeps accumulating in the balance sheet of all governments without exception. The turn of other governments to become the whipping boy will not be long in coming.

(2) What gold price? The gold price is on schedule to cease to exist. When the gold futures markets go into permanent backwardation mode, the gold price at which to get gold will be as obsolete as the flint-stone with which to light a fire.
Permanent gold backwardation is a phenomenon bestowing risk free profits galore on speculators. They could sell their gold, and immediately buy it back at a lower price in unlimited quantities. The buy-back is in the form of paper gold. But lo and behold, speculators uncharacteristically refuse to nibble at risk free profits. They do because they are smart enough to sense that wrapped in the bait there lurks a hook. Paper gold that is worth gold today may tomorrow be worth only the paper on which the promise is written. This neat trick, which had routinely been performed on elephants by Houdini, was performed on gold by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On March 5, 1933, the $20 gold certificates issued by the U.S. Treasury could be exchanged for the double eagle gold coin without hassle. On March 6, pursuant to presidential proclamation, it was exchangeable only for an irredeemable $20 Federal Reserve note. Roosevelt had a better idea what to do with the double eagle gold coin than giving it to its rightful owner as promised. He was going to keep it and write up its value from $20 to $35. When the democratic president summoned the democratic senators to receive their congratulations on his clever ploy in the Oval Office, the great
blind senator from Oklahoma, Thomas P. Gore told him in his face: “Why, it is plain stealing, isn’t it, Mr. President?”
Permanent backwardation can also be described as the gold basis going negative never again to return to positive territory. The gold basis is just the difference between the price of the nearby gold futures contract and the price of cash gold. Positive basis is called contango, negative basis, backwardation. The two are not symmetric, however. While there is an upper limit to contango, there is no lower limit to backwardation. The reason is that the premium on the futures price cannot go higher than the carrying charge, i.e., the total cost of warehousing the good till future delivery. If it did, risk free arbitrage would bring it back into line instantaneously. By contrast, the futures price can go to any discount, however large, up to the full cash price.
When the world’s first future market for gold opened in Winnipeg, Canada, in the early 1970’s, gold basis was at its upper extreme: contango was as robust as it could be. The one outstanding feature of gold futures trading that received little attention is fact that the positive gold contango is constantly eroding and the gold basis is constantly shrinking, as it has for the past forty years. Paper gold has been withering on the vine. Right now the gold basis is at the brink of going negative. There is an acute and increasing shortage of deliverable gold against futures contracts in spite of high and rising gold prices. This can mean but one thing. Those institutions and individuals who control large quantities of monetary gold are ever more reluctant to relinquish their control. When the basis finally goes negative as it must, the game is up. All offers to sell gold are simultaneously withdrawn all over the world. Gold is no longer for sale at any price. If you want to get it, you have to have recourse to barter. You must give up silver, oil, wheat, and what have you, to get gold in exchange. Dollars are not welcome. This will be an historic event that is approaching with the inevitability of scientific law.
So what? researchers at Chatham House may shrug. Well, here is what. This event will toll the death knell for the market in U.S. Treasury bonds that, directly or indirectly are backing all currencies in existence. The carpet is yanked from underneath the international monetary system. The reason why foreigners are still buying U.S. Treasury bonds with a yield not big enough to compensate for currency debasement is that at maturity they fetch dollars that will still buy gold (however little). But the day when permanent backwardation dawns this last incentive will disappear. The credit of the United States will be gone in a puff of smoke.

(3) Roosevelt’s gold confiscation was the real cause of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. A careful analysis of Roosevelt’s 1933 gold policies reveals that banning gold coin circulation was a colossal mistake. It was the major cause of the Great Depression. Gold was knocked out as the only competition to government bonds. The most conservative savers were forced out of gold and into government bonds. Astute bond speculators saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a killing. They knew what the extra demand for government bonds was going to do to the bond price. They moved to pre-empt savers. They were determined to buy the bonds first on the cheap. By the time savers arrived, the price of bonds was sky high and rising. The rate of interest went into a falling mode. Speculators turned the bond market into a casino, bidding bond prices off the charts.
Tampering with gold coin circulation caused internal hemorrhage in the economy. Falling interest rates increased the burden of all debt contracted earlier. They gobbled up profits beyond the endurance of enterprise, both productive and financial. The unwarranted sudden shift of wealth from debtors to creditors devastated the economic landscape. Business was made prostrate, firms went bankrupt in droves, unemployment snowballed.
Falling interest rates were translated into falling prices. Easy money from the Fed backfired. It was intercepted by speculators who used it to buy even more bonds. The Fed had wanted them to buy commodities to stem the fall in prices. But the temptation to take the easy money to the casino of the bond market where gains were guaranteed and losses were on the house was irresistible. Instead of buying, speculators were selling commodities short, causing prices to fall. They knew that the policeman, gold, guarding prices against falling into a bottomless pit, has been fired. A vicious spiral was set in motion: falling prices chased interest rates lower, and falling interest rates chased prices lower still.
Here is how the process would have worked, had gold coins been available. Savers would have taken profits by selling the overpriced bonds. They would have stayed invested in gold coins waiting for the bond price to come back from outer space. When it did, they would have repurchased the bond at a profit, thus stabilizing the rate of interest at a level consonant with economic reality.
It is a canard due to wobbly logic to say that gold has a deflationary bias. It was not the gold standard but the fetters put on it including the confiscation of gold by Roosevelt in 1933 that was the true cause of the Great Depression. The threat of another Great Depression today can be averted only through rehabilitating the gold standard and through restoring honesty in dealings between government and citizens.
March 4, 2012.

Elihu wrote:http://professorfekete.com/articles%5CAEFWobblyAnchor.pdf

I am not going to analyze the Chatham report. Instead, I am going to discuss some of the results of research done at the New Austrian School of Economics (NASE) on gold in contemporary economy, as well as gold in the 20th century.

(1) Gold is the only ultimate extinguisher of debt. Having been exiled from the international monetary system in 1971, gold has not been able to play its God-ordained role as the ultimate extinguisher of debt.

Explain to me why anyone sane, or aspiring to sanity, would want to read a word past that? Unless, this is supposed to be a parody?

As it happens, when I talked to God earlier today, she assured me that both this guy and Pat Robertson are full of shit. Although she has never endorsed any currency system, she might consider it for such as are based either on labor, or on energy and other perishable material resources required in production. She also told me that other than her chats with me as her sole accredited agent, her only means of communicating with humans is through the material world as apprehended by empirical inquiry.

.

Q:

Explain to me why anyone sane, or aspiring to sanity, would want to read a word past that? Unless, this is supposed to be a parody?

A:

She also told me that other than her chats with me as her sole accredited agent, her only means of communicating with humans is through the material world as apprehended by empirical inquiry.

did she say to keep enquiring or can we stop now? is gold part of the material world or is it a human fantasy unlike a treasury bond?

ask her for me, what is the ultimate extinguisher of debt in our world today? is the ? relevant? i just gave out the man's words as he wrote them. perhaps because he felt strongly about his argument? does that ruin it for you? ie, no more empirical value? just read the article and grab yourself a graph: x axis time starting in 69, y axis global debt. i think this needs a scientific explanation. i'm still looking....