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Is this a merger play? Last I heard this was a shell. Small OS and float tho,. News coming? Entire float traded in the past 2 sessions. It hit my radar. Just wondering.
............al
Long read, but a good lesson in history:
.......al
THE ROAD TO ARMAGEDDON by Alf Mendes
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=17858
Author’s Foreword: The current global situation seethes with such
expectation of oncoming turmoil that it is essential to examine it
more closely, by focussing on America, whose governments have, for
decades now, made no bones about the fact that they have been - and
are still - calling-the-tune in order to gain political/financial
control on a global scale (One has only to read their Project for the
New American Century [PNAC] to confirm this). Hence the following
events in brief, precised, more-or-less chronological form, and the
fact that many of them are excerpts from previous articles written by
this author, and others, is irrelevant inasmuch as they are of
pertinence to the current global scenario - and need to be repeated.
1917: The Bolshevik revolution. NB: Germany, Britain, France, USA and
Japan entered Russian territory in order to help the ‘White Army’ in
its attempt to restore the Emperor. Forerunner of what would
subsequently become known as the Cold War.
A group of imfluential , atheistic Ashkenazim Jews had formed the
Zionist Organisation in 1896 with the intention of creating the State
of Israel in Palestine. They reached an agreement with Britain at the
Balfour Declaration in 1917.
Nov.1919: George Herbert Walker forms W.A.Harriman & Co. bank - with
Walker as president & chief executive, & Averell Harriman as chairman
(He was to become US Ambassador to the USSR [‘43 - ‘46]; US Secretary
of Commerce [‘46 - ‘48]; & Governor of NY State [‘55 - ‘59]).
1920: Harriman & Walker of W.A.Harriman & C0. gain control of the
German Hamburg-Amerika Line after negotiations with the latter’s chief
executive, William Cuno, & Max Warburg of the shipping line’s bankers,
M.M. Warburg. NB: Warburg’s two brothers went to New York, becoming
partners in the Kuhn Loeb & Co. The older brother, Paul, drew up a
plan to centralise the American banks, as a result of which, President
Wilson signed an Act establishing the Federal Reserve Bank in December
1913. It was now self-evident that there was a close relationship
between Corporate America and Jews! (see below)
.Prior to ‘24: W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to
1924 & at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German
industrialist who was financing Hitler (and was later to become a
member of the Nazi Party)- and they agreed to set up a bank for
Thyssen in New York.
1924: W.A.Harriman & Co invested $400,000 in setting up Union Banking
Corp. (UBC) in New York to act in partnership with the Thyssen-owned
Bank voor Handel en Scheepvart (Bank for Trade and Shipping, BHS) in
Holland....
1926: Prescott S. Bush Snr.(son-in-law of George H Walker) appointed
Vice-President of W. A. Harriman & Co.
1930: The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) the world's oldest
international financial institution, is set up - ostensibly to cope
with the German financial post-WW1 recession, but, in fact, was formed
in order to counter communist Soviet Union, with not-a-little-help
from one of its co-founders, Montagu Norman (Governor of the Bank of
England) - and Corporate America. Suffice it to say that the first
President of the BIS was Gates W. McGarrah (ex-Chase National Bank &
Federal Reserve Bank).....The ‘Cold War' had begun, and its most
blatant expression was the birth of fascism in the aftermath of the
Bolshevik revolution - a birth both induced and nurtured by
corporations such as I.G.Farben, SKF, Ford, ITT, Du Pont, W.A.Harriman
& Co.- et al
Jan. 1933: Hitler assumes power in Germany - with not-a-little-help
from Corporate America and the BIS.
Mar. 7th 1933: Prescott S. Bush Snr. notified Max Warburg (above) that
he (Warburg) was to be the American Ship & Commerce Line official
representative on the board of the Hamburg- Amerika Line. Warburg had
been a long-time advisor to Hitler’s Economic Minister, Hjalmar
Schacht , co-founder of the BIS, & a close friend of Montagu Norman.
May. 20. ‘33: As reported in the New York Times: on Hitler achieving
power, an agreement to coordinate all trade between Germany & America
was reached in Berlin after negotiations between Hitler’s Economics
Minister, Hjalmar Schacht (above) & John Foster Dulles.The Dulles
brothers’ corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, had acted for many
Nazi enterprises during & after this period, including I. G. Farben,
developer of the nerve gas, Tabun. (J. F. Dulles became Secretary of
State [‘53 - ‘59]; A. W. Dulles became CIA Deputy Director for Plans
[‘51]; Deputy Director of Central Intelligence [‘51 - ‘53]; & Director
of CIA [‘53 -’61]).
September 1938: Munich Agreement signed by Hitler, Chamberlain,
Daladier & Mussolini. By concluding a pact with Hitler, Britain and
France - in effect - gave him the green light to advance eastwards
towards the USSR (ref. "Mein Kampf") - for which they paid a heavy
price!
1939: WW 2 is declared by Britain and France against Nazi Germany. NB:
with FDR as President, American public opinion is against joining the
Allies (Britain & France).
August ‘41: UN is conceived at the mid-Atlantic meeting (the Atlantic
Charter) between FDR and Churchill.
Dec. 7 ‘41: Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour - thus ensuring that the US
would now be at war against the German alliance.
in May 1942: Contrary to FDR's assurance to the USSR in May 1942 that
a ‘second front’ would be opened later that year, this, in fact, did
not occur until June 1944 - when it became clear that the Soviets were
advancing inexorably westwards. Keeping in mind (as noted above) that
America was against joining the Allies at the start of WW 2, and
keeping in mind the foregoing events covered in this article - America
would now be in position to ensure that the advance of their real
enemy, the USSR, would soon be halted.
1944: Arabian American Oil Co. (ARAMCO [ex CASOC]) formed by Exxon,
Texaco, Socal & Mobil , was Saudi’s main source of wealth. As evidence
of America’s subornation of Saudi Arabia, the following joint secret
deals were made - subsequently - without the knowledge of the US
Congress at the time: (1) re-the IranGate scandal - the Saudis gave
the American-controlled Contras $8 million in exchange for 400
American Stinger missiles; (2) the Saudis financed the unsuccessful
CIA assasination of the Hizbollah leader, Sheikh Fadlallah - then gave
the money to the Sheikh! ; (3) The Saudis jointly assisted in
financing covert arms supplies to the Afghan Mujahadeen in the latters
struggle against the Soviet Union in ‘79/’80.
July ‘44: The Bretton Woods Conference, which led to the formation of
the World Bank and the IMF.
Here, it is of pertinence to note that, at Bretton Woods, Resolution
5, calling for the dissolution of that most prestigious, and notorious
banking organisation, the Bank fo International Security (BIS), was
subsequently ignored and proven ineffective.The US corporate
establishment had seen to that! NB: In its published “People of an
International Organisation”, the BIS states clearly that its
“predominant tasks are summed up most succintly in part of Article 3
of its original Statute. They are to promote the co-operation of
central banks and to provide additional facilities for international
financial operations” - and they meant it! Their subsequent
conferences/summits, G7, G10, G12...etc.would confirm this.
Feb. ‘45: At the Yalta Conference the US & Britain persuaded the USSR
to join them in the continuing war against Japan. Stalin promised to
do so 3 months after the end of the war in Europe. On August 6th,
America atom-bombed Japan (without informing its ‘allies’), and, as
promised, on August 8th the USSR invaded Korea, which for the past 40
years had been occupied by Japan - defeating the Japanese....
May ‘45: The end of WW 2, which had decimated the economies &
infrastructure of most of the worlds’ nations (particularly that of
the USSR) - but greatly enriched the economy of the USA. Result? The
USSR would now no longer be an ‘ally’ - and all American Lend-Lease
Aid would be terminated on May 8th ‘45 without prior consultation with
any of its (USA’s) allies.
June 1945: The US-financed San Francisco Conference of 50 nations
resulted in the signing of the UN Charter ‘to promote international
security & cooperation’, and incorporating both the World Bank and the
IMF. NB: The USA (1) donated the land site for the UN Secretariat in
New York City; (2) loaned the money to build the UN HQ buildings; (3)
guaranteed the independence of the UN’s American staff who,
understandably, accounted for two-thirds of the UN staff (a promise
that would soon be reneged upon); & (4) supplied 40% of the UN’s
running costs. Suffice it to add that future presidents of the World
Bank would be appointed by America! Henceforth, all steps taken by the
UN would be flaunting the banner of ‘The International Community’ -
somewhat duplicitously. NB: America had refused to join the precursor
to the UN - the League of Nations (formed, in Switzerland, in the
immediate aftermath of WW 1).
Sept 2nd ‘45: The communist leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, declared
independence from its French colonizers - which resulted in subsequent
warfare between the two, the French relying heavily on American
financial & military aid.
Sept. 6th ‘45: The liberated Koreans (see above), consisting mainly of
anti-Japanese resistance groups of a left-wing bent, held an assembly
and formed the ‘People’s Republic Government of Korea’..... Two days
later, US troops entered Korea, ignoring this newly-formed government
- and proposed the setting up of a ‘line of demarcation’ at the 38th
parallel. This led to the Korean War of ‘50 - to ‘53. Korea was now a
split-in-two nation, with America in control of South Korea. The UN
General Assembly set up the ‘UN Temporary Commission on Korea’ to
expedite its (Korea’s) unified independence. The USSR vetoed UN entry
into North Korea - so the UN decided to hold the election in South
Korea (only) thereby making a mockery of their declared aim towards
unification! On July 27th ‘53 the Korean Armistice was signed.
1947: With the threat of the powerful communist Soviet Union and the
Cold War looming, America recognized the need for a centralized
intelligence system to replace its two forerunners - the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS); and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) -
and thus forms the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) via the National
Security Act. The CIA would subsequently play a very crucial role on
the global scene.
June 48: Tito is expelled from the Cominform. The West's reaction to
this was best spelt out by Pavlowitch in his book “Yugoslavia”: “The
American and West European governments were faced with a dilemma.
Should they help a now weak and isolated, but otherwise successful,
instance of communism, while ’containing’ communism generally?”. On
the one hand.. “if Yugoslavia were left to collapse, only the Soviet
Union would benefit. But if Tito's regime were helped to survive
economically, his rift with Moscow could be widened to the point where
no reconciliation were possible any longer, and his independent
position could then entice other East European regimes to follow his
example. Thus, at the same time as the states of Western Europe and
North America were grouping together to constitute the North Atlantic
Alliance, it was decided, as a calculated risk for a long -term
advantage, to assist Yugoslavia without asking its government to alter
its domestic policies in any way”.
1948: Jews defeat Arabs in British protectorate of Palestine,
resulting in the formation of the State of Israel by the secular group
of Jews known as Zionists (established by Herzl & Weizmann in Basel in
1887). From America’s viewpoint, a subservient Israel would now act as
a convenient foil vis-a-vis MidEast Arab countries with vast oil
reserves (many of which would soon be American-owned). NB: Thereby
satisfying American Jews who were a strong, influential lobbying force
in the US.
1948: The Marshall Plan was passed by the US Congress in order to
ensure that the US would benefit from the reconstruction of war-
damaged Europe - with not-a-little-help from the US Congressionally-
authorised European Cooperation Act (ECA) of 1948, implemented by its
subsidiary, the European Payments Union (EPU) of 1950 - both under the
aegis of the Marshall Plan. The BIS would handle much of the wheeling-
and-dealing involved in this.
1948: The Brussels Treaty was also the first step in the process
leading to the signature of the American-controlled North Atlantic
Treaty in 1949 (NATO). This ‘reconstruction’ understandably called for
an intigrated Europe, in which NATO would play a crucial role (as
confirmed in their ‘Handbook of 1999’: “The Brussels Treaty of
1948...was also the first step in the process leading to the signature
of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 & the creation of the North
Atlantic Alliance”). The Brussels Treaty would subsequently evolve
into the Common Market/EEC/EU. This close relationship between NATO
and the EU led to the fact that - in the future - any country wanting
to join the EU would be vetted by NATO.
1949: As noted by Pavlowitch above: America relaxed export controls to
Yugoslavia, and instigated a series of loans and grants to same (this
totalled some $2- to $2.5 billion in the decade up to ‘59). Yugoslavia
was now embarked on a debt-ridden course which would eventually lead
to the dissolution of its Federation - helped in no small measure by
Tito's setting up in 1984 of a New Constitution which, in effect,
split the Republic of Serbia into three parts by giving its provinces
of Kosovo and Vojvodina a higher degree of autonomy than they had
previously held. American aid had ensured that Yugoslavia would become
a country heavily in debt, and with an economy in turmoil.
1952: Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh plans to nationalise
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. so Britain asks the US to join them in a
plan to have him removed from his presidency. Result: Mossadegh is
overthrown by a joint CIA/SIS operation in ‘53.
April 1954: The French were defeated by Ho Chi Minh (see above) at
Dienbienphu - as a result of which a Geneva Convention was called, and
an armistice agreed upon on July 21st whereby Vietnam would be divided
between North & South at the 17th parallel - elections being held to
reunify the two after 2 years -And in June 16 ‘54: America, via its
Secretary of State, John Dulles (see above) installs Ngo Dinh Diem (a
Catholic, who had been in America from ‘50 to ‘53) as President of
South Vietnam - a country with a Buddhist majority!... The Geneva
Convention had now become a hindrance and would have to be bypassed.
This called for an up-dating of America’s political/military strategy,
which would now be known as ‘The Counter Insurgency Strategy’. Simply
put: this meant that America would now embark on the dangerous tactic
of interfering, militarily if necessary, in the affairs of a foreign
country. The ensuing Vietnam War between US-controlled Vietnam and
North Vietnam resulted in many deaths on both sides - helped in no
small degree by the CIA’s Phoenix Operation and much bombing by the
Americans using Napalm incendiary bombs. The Americans were finally
defeated by North Vietnam in 1975. Vietnam was now a united country
once again.
1958 to 1963: Iraq was under the populist, reformist government of
General Qasim, and its increasing involvement in oil development
there, and the fast-rising influence of the Communist Party, therefore
drew the attention of America. Result? In February 1963 Qasim was
overthrown - and assassinated - by a Ba’athist Party coup, with the
direct connivance of the CIA. The Ba’athist Saddam Hussein, who had
fled the country to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to
assassinate Qasim, returned and became Head of the Al-Jihaz al-Khas
(more popularly known as Jihaz Haneen), the clandestine Ba’athist
Intelligence organisation - and, as such, he was soon after involved
in the killing of some five thousand communists. Saddam’s rise to
power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!
1961: Founded as the Association of Data Processing Services
Organisation (ADAPSO), it subsequently evolved into the Information
Technology Association of America (ITAA), a lobbying firm in
California which specializes in getting special treatment for
technology companies. It was to play a crucial role in the electronic
voting system subsequently. (see below).
September 4, 1961: The Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) was passed by
Congress, as a result of which: the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) was established in November 1961. This was
essentially a funding organisation whose main aim was on countering
the spread of communism - and it would thenceforth play a crucial
role. (see below)
August 1964: The assasination of Kennedy in 1963 resulted in the US
corporate establishment setting up the News Election Service (NES), a
consortium of the three major television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS,
plus the Associated Press wire service, CNN, the New York Times, the
Washington Post and other news-gathering organizations, their job
being to compile computer-voting results at election time and feed
them to the major media. Electronic voterigging - in the form of the
Electronic Voting System (EVS) - would now be the order-of-the-day,
superceding ‘the buying of votes’. (As later exposed publicly by the
two Collier brothers in their book “Votescam:The Stealing of America”.
June 9th 1969: The Pemtagon asked for a sum of $10 million from the
Congressional House Subcommittee on Appropriations to develop a new
contagious micro-organsm capable of destroying the human immune
system. It would therefore be necessary, first, to create such a
virus! Such a 'virus' was discovered some ten years later in America
which became known as 'acquired immune deficiency syndrome' (AIDS). In
April 1974, Kissinger drew up a secret plan for population control
called the ‘National Security Plan of Action 200’ (NSSM 200), which
claimed that population growth in the less-developed countries was
“..creating political or even national security problems for the US”.
On October 2nd 1979, Robert McNamara (President of the World Bank)
addressed a group of international bankers thus: “We can begin with
the most critical problem of all, population growth”..concluding that
“..either the current birth rates must come down more quickly, or the
death rates must go up...There are, of course, many ways in which the
death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, we can accomplish it
very quickly and decisively”(as indeed they had done in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in1945).
Early 1970’s saw the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of exchange
convertibility, thus exposing the irrelevance of the IMF and World
Bank as agents for European reconstruction, the main reason being
that, under the Bretton Woods agreement they were therefore hindered
by being accountable statutorily-appointed agents of the UN, and were
therefore - ostensibly - accountable to a much wider constituency than
the BIS, and therefore politically less manageable by the corporate
establishment
From 1973 to ‘93: The BIS Secretariat of the Committee of Governors
also served the Board of Governors of the European Monetary Co-
operation Fund (EMCF), and acted as EMCF agent. As such, they
therefore provided the institutional framework for monetary co-
operation in the European Community until January ‘94, when they were
replaced by the European Monetary Institute (EMI) under the headship
of Baron Alexandre Lamfalussy - ex-General Manager of the BIS! The EMI
was to become
The European Central Bank.
1978: The World Computing Services Industry is founded.. It was later
to become the World Information Technology & Services Alliance (WITSA)
which would have a real impact on the global IT environment.
(see below)
July 1979: As revealed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and unknown to the
American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly
authorized $500 million to create an international terrorist movement
that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and ‘de-
stabilise’ the Soviet Union... The CIA called this Operation Cyclone
and in the following years poured $4 billion into setting up Islamic
training schools in Pakistan. ..Young zealots were sent to the CIA's
spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda were
taught ‘sabotage skills’ - terrorism.
December ‘79: well-aware of Ops. Cyclone, in December ‘79, the USSR
invaded Afghanistan, and after a long and devastating war with
guerrilla opposition forces (the mujahideen) the last of the Soviet
troops left Afghanistan in February1989, their economy and rubles in
tatters.
1980: With Saddam Hussein now in power, Iraq invades Iran - and (a)
the US supplies Iraq with strategic information gleaned from its
satellites during the Iran\Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. (b) Less well
publicized was the substantial American aid brokered by such as: the US
\Iraq Business Forum, set up in May 1985 with many top US corporations
as members; the Kissinger Associates consulting firm, boasting such
alumni as Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Lord Carrington;
and the Bechtel Group, boasting such alumni as George Shultz and
Caspar Weinberger. (Bechtel, it should be noted, won the contract to
build the Iraqi PC-2 Complex near Al-Musaiyib for the production of
gas precursors and ethyline oxide)
The UN’s response was to have Resolution 479 passed - which neither
condemned Iraq nor demanded their withdrawal from Iran! Understandable
when it is recalled that the UN had been suborned by the US since its
formation. The build-up of the Iraqi military machine would not, of
course, have been possible without considerable assistance from more
technically advanced countries such as Germany, France, Britain, the
USSR, America
June 1982: The secret arming of Iraq had been ordered by President
Reagan in June 1982 as part of a National Security Decision Directive.
Under it, CIA Director William Casey and his then-deputy, Robert
Gates, "authorized, approved and assisted" delivery of cluster bombs
to Iraq through Cardoen.
1983: The US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
had been set up by Congress“to try to do openly what the CIA used to
do secretly”. It, in turn, controls the Center for International
Private Enterprise (CIPE) which, in turn, funds the group of
economists known as the G17, three of whose leading members are also
staff members of both the IMF and World Bank. NED has been active in
Yugoslavia since 1988.
1987: The notorious Guantanamo Bay detention camp/prison, operated by
a Joint Task Force of the US, was set up.
1987: The Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) was set up in
Alexandria, Virginia with the specific aim of promoting America's anti-
left strategy on the international military scene. (see below)
1988: As evidence of vote-rigging: as is well-known, the New Hampshire
primary is a crucial forerunner for any presidential candidate, and in
the election of ‘88, GHW Bush won unexpectedly aginst his fellow-
Republican Robert Dole. It transpired that the Governor of New
Hampshire, John Sununu, was a computer engineer, and the computer
voting machine being used was a ‘Shouptronic’ Direct Recording
Electronic (DRE) voting machine, supplied by Ransom Shoup, who “had
been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia”! On becoming
president, Bush appointed Sununu Chief of Staff in his administration.
1989: The economist-cum-G17 coordinator, Vaselin Vukotic was appointed
Minister of Privatisation under the federal Yugoslav premier, Ante
Markovic (a Croat). Vukotic implemented the World Bank-sponsored
‘bankruptcy program’ in Yugoslavia between ‘89 and ‘90, which led to
the devastation of the Yugoslav economy, and set the stage for the
breakup of the republic. Result?: 50% of Yugoslav industry was broken
up, and over 1100 industrial firms wiped out between January 1989 and
September 1990!
late 1989: the Director of the Kuwaiti State Security Department,
Brigadier al-Fahd, had had a secret week-long meeting in Langley,
Virginia, with the US Director of the CIA, William Webster. In his own
words: “We agreed with the American side that it was important to take
advantage of the deteriorating situation in Iraq in order to put
pressure on that country’s government to delineate our common border.
The CIA gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that
broad co-operation should be initiated between us, on condition that
such activities are co-ordinated at a high level”.
August 2nd 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait and takes control of the country,
installing a puppet government.
...On November 29, with US & coalition forces massing in Saudi Arabia
and Iraq showing no signs of retreat, the UN Security Council passed a
resolution to allow member states to "use all necessary means" to
force Iraq from Kuwait if Iraq remained in the country after January
15, 1991. On January 17, 1991, coalition forces began a massive air
attack on Iraqi targets. After five and a half weeks of intense
bombing, Iraq’s forces were severely damaged. On February 24 the
coalition launched its long-anticipated land offensive, attacking
southwestern Iraq, then turned east toward the Iraqi port of Al
Basrah, thereby surroundeing Kuwait, encircling the Iraqi forces there
and in southern Iraq, and allowed coalition forces (mainly Arab) to
move up the coast and take Kuwait city. On February 28, with the
collapse of Iraqi resistance and the recapture of Kuwait—thereby
fulfilling the coalition’s stated goals—the coalition declared a cease-
fire. UN sanctions against Iraq were now enforced. The UN continued to
maintain most of the economic embargo on Iraq after the war, and
several coalition countries enforced other sanctions, such as the no-
fly zones. The following September, Clinton authorises bombing of
Iraq.
May 1991: George H.W. Bush nominated Robert Gates to be Director of
Central Intelligence (DCI). Gates had played his part in effectively
manipulating the circumstances surrounding the Iraq\Kuwait
confrontation - thus ensuring the inevitability of the invasion that
followed in August 1990. (Gates had served as a director of the well-
known vote-rigging company, Votehere!)
1991: The collapse of the USSR was probably the most significant post-
WW 2 event. America’s role in destabilising the USSR (as noted above)
therefore calls for closer scrutiny, and from the vantage point of
hindsight, the fact that in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR
the American oil companies (with others) quickly bought their way into
the vast reserves of Russian oil and gas is surely proof enough that
this was one of the crucial aims of America’s strategy. This
‘destabilisation’ was implemented, primarily, by money-laundering. Two
Americans, Leo Wanta and the notorious Marc (Reich) Rich, were the
main players in this, and, - in Wanta’s own words: while working under
Bill Casey’s Special Operations Branch, Black Ops. “he had dealt with
both the fusion bomb and the destabilisation of the ruble” - in
conjunction with Kok Howie Kwong of the Chinese Secret Service! Casey
was then Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). As for Rich
- he had fled to Switzerland in ‘83 to evade prosecution in a US
Federal Court, and had been operating on Soviet territory since 1983.
By 1993, his yearly turnover on ex-Soviet territory was $3 billion.
Here it should be noted that George Kennan, who had been Head of
Planning when NATO had been formed, revealed, at a BBC Reith Lecture,
that NATO had not been set up solely to resist Soviet expansion - its
true role had been to act as a counter-revolutionary, counter-
reformist arm of the Corporate West. In plain English: NATO had been
formed to deal with the internal political problems of Western
society. Furthermore, as noted by Eric Hobsbawn, the reforms known as
Glasnost, introduced by Gorbachev in the late ‘80’s, led to the
economic collapse within the Soviet Union.
Dec. 1 1991 : The people of the Ukraine, the so-called breadbasket of
the Soviet Union, voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence from
the USSR - sunsequently endorsed by the Ukraine parliament on Dec.
5th. (here it is of pertinence to note that Hitler’s invasion of the
USSR in June 1941 was aided in no small measure by fascist Ukrainian
paramilitaries - this author can vouch for that).
December 1991: Germany recognises Croatian & Slovenian independence -
which ensured that the conflict would spread to neighbouring Bosnia-
Herzogovnia with its potentially explosive mixture of three ethno-
religious groups. NB: 2 Germans held important posts in NATO at that
time! That well-known ‘Balkan Problem’ would now, once again, rear its
ugly head.
1992: As Stephen Dorril reported “The CIA launched Operation Maseraagh
(‘laundry’) which flooded Iraq with forged dinars to undermine the
economy” - adding that “At the beginning of 1992, CIA Director Robert
Gates travelled round the Middle East states to drum up support for
renewed covert action”.
From June 1992: NATO's involvement in the Balkan crisis was a gradual
process - from its avowed readiness to support peace-keeping under the
authority of the Conference on Security & Cooperation in Europe
(subsequently re-named the Organisation for Security & Cooperation in
Europe [OCSE]). In October ‘92, it had inaugurated a plan to create an
Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) of some 250,000
troops to be deployed whenever NATO deemed it necessary to intervene
in order to ‘keep the peace’ - but, as originally foreseen, the ARRC
would not be ready until 1995.
1992 to 1993: Belgrade-born cyclist, Milan Panic, who had defected to
America in 1955 (where he had subsequently adopted American
citizenship and founded a large, successful chemical corporation),
returned to the country of his birth and served as its Prime Minister
from 1992 to 1993...Panic“took his new job very seriously and employed
a weighty team of Serb and American advisers”.
1993: The HagueTribunal (International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia [ICTY]) - call-it-what-you-will was not legitimately
set up by the UN Security Council via its Resolutions 808 and 827 -
with not-a-little arm-twisting by then US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, who, when asked whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi
children (during the sanctions against Iraq ,1992-1998) was 'a price
worth paying for removing Saddam', curtly replied 'we think it was
worth it' !! The political character of the Tribunal was stressed by
Antonio Cassese when he told Boutros-boutros Ghali (UN General-
Secretary) that "Our tribunal will not be simply ‘window dressing" but
a decisive step in the construction of a new world order." In
violation of Article 32 of its Charter, in 1994/95, the United States
provided $700,000 in cash and $2,300,000 worth of equipment; George
Soros’ Open Society Foundation contributed $150,000; the Rockefeller
Foundation, contributed $50,000; - et al.... (NB: Soros also funds the
main KLA newspaper in Pristina, the Tribunal.) In its own words: "The
tribunal does not need to shackle itself with restrictive rules which
have developed out of the ancient trial-by-jury system." In plain
english - this is a kangaroo court! (best described by Christopher
Black, who helped to create the International Committee to Defend
Slobodan Milosˇevic´ (ICDSM), and is a vice-chair of that committee).
(see below)
1994: Leonid Kuchma replaced Kravchuk as Ukrainian president in the
1994 election, and during his candidature, Kuchma had visited Soros in
the US. In 1994, the American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee (AUAC), was
formed, under Zbigniew Brzezinski with such prestigiously notorious
members as Henry Kissinger, General Gavin (ex-head of NATO), Frank
Carlucci, George Soros et al... Kuchma would later send 1650 Ukrainian
troops as allies to the Americans after the latter’s invasion of Iraq
in 2003.
Moreover, the Soros foundation would supply $363,100 to support the
independent television stations’ coverage of this election - all of it
used within 3 months!.
1994: In 1994, a contract - titled Democracy Transition Assistance
Program (DTAP) - was agreed between the Croat defence minister and the
US Deputy Secretary of Defense, John Deutch (who subsequently became
Director of CIA from '95 until he was forced to resign the following
year because he had improperly stored classified information on his
personal computer disc!). As a result, the MPRI had signed a contract
with the Croatian Ministry of Defence under which the former would act
as military advisors to the Croat army at the Petar Zrinski military
school in Zagreb - the MPRI officer in charge being retired General
Richard Griffiths who had once been assistant to the US Commander in
Europe for Intelligence, in Frankfurt. MPRI’s Chief of Operations was
Lieut. General Harry Soyster, ex-Head of the US Defense Intelligence
Agency. While head of the DIA, Soyster had dealt out a number of
contracts to the notorious German arms dealer, Ernst Werner Glatt, for
the procurement of Soviet weapons which were then shipped to the USA
from whence they would be sent to America's proxy troops in Latin
America, Asia and Africa. In Soyster’s own words: "Glatt was the
favorite arms merchant of the CIA, which chose him to move arms to the
contras in Nicaragua and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan".He had also
supplied weapons to Croatia, and had bought a country estate in
Virginia, which he named the 'Black Eagle', a symbol of Nazi Germany!
August 1995: the training of the Croat army came to fruition and their
attack on the Serbs of Western Krajina was so well and effectively
planned that, within a matter of days, 150,000 Serbs had fled the
region where, four centuries before, they had been settled to act as a
buffer between Catholic and Muslim. The CIA had sent pilotless
reconnaissance flights over Krajina from a base on the island of Brac
(in the Adriatic) to assist in the attack. The Americans had now
adopted a blatantly anti-Serb stance which embraced both Cetnik
Serbian leadership in Bosnia (Karadic was a self-avowed royalist
Cetnik) and the rump Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under
Milosevic - conveniently disregarding the schism between these two
groups, a schism born in WW 2 and now re-activated in this crisis. It
was now self-evident that, in the eyes of the Americans, the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) - still tainted with ‘communism’ - was
now the ultimate target.
September 1995: with the ARRC now ready, NATO announced its readiness
to deploy a large force to implement a Bosnian peace settlement.
December 1995: as a result of a conference convened in London to
discuss the implementation of the coming Dayton accord, a Peace
Implementation Council - with no UN representatives onboard - was set
up in Brussels. The resulting Implementation Force (IFOR), a force of
60,000 American, British and French troops - under the command of the
ARRC - was then deployed throughout Bosnia into three zones of
operation.
14th of December 1995: The Dayton peace talks took place in the
intimidating atmosphere of the Wright-Patterson Air Force base near
Dayton, Ohio. The embargo against Yugoslavia was lifted in November -
and the peace accord signed in Paris.
1996: The Trade & Development Agency (TDA - now known as the USTDA)
was given the task of overseeing the South Balkan Development
Initiative (SBDI) of 1996 - as a result of which, TDA gave the
Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation (AMBO) the exclusive
right to run the Corridor 8 pipeline, a 900 kilometre trans-Balkan
pipeline from Burgas - via Skopje in Macedonia - to the Albanian port
of Vlore on the Adriatic Sea. In the words of the Director of TDA, J.
Joseph Grandmaison, this project was “..a significant step forward for
this policy and for US business interests in the Caspian region”. The
feasibility study for this pipeline project was contracted out - by
the TDA - to the prestigious oil/construction company Brown & Root
(the CEO of whose parent company, Halliburton, had been Dick Cheney -
now Vice-President under Bush jnr.) Now - in 2009 -the project is
still not completed!
December 1996: IFOR was augmented by the Stabilisation Force (SFOR) of
30.000 troops. The cease-fire could now be ensured by this display of
military might.
1997: saw the formation of the Central Asia Gas Pipeline consortium
(Centgas) with the intention of running a 790-mile-long pipeline from
the gas fields of Turkmenistan through neighbouring Afghanistan to
Multan, in Pakistan (at a cost of $1.9 billion) - with a possible
future extension to New Delhi, in India (cost: $600 million). all
under the control of the California oil company, UNOCAL, but, due to
the ever-worsening instability in Afghanistan, UNOCAL aborted the
project in December 1998. it is reasonable to assume that these
considerations would have been in the forefront of the minds of the US
government officials, and would thus have played a crucial role in
determining America’s response to Afghanistan in the aftermath of the
WTC bombing
1997: The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a very
influential lobby group set up to promote American global leadership.
January 26th 1998: eighteen members of the PNAC, including such as:
John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, , Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, and Robert Zoellich (to name the more
recognisable ones) sent a letter to the then President, Clinton,
advising him that he “should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam
Hussein’s regime from power”, adding that “American policy cannot
continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the
UN Security Council”. (shades of what was to come later!). On cue, in
December of that same year, Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox,
whereby the American air force heavily bombed Iraq - but did not
occupy it, much to the chagrin of the PNAC. NB: In its 90-page long
article published in 2000, the PNAC repeatedly stressed the need for
“American global leadership..by maintaining the pre-eminence of US
military forces”, and proudly stating that “The United States is the
world’s only superpower”, et al.... ( as proof of their influential
status politically : August 1st 2005, Bush appoints Bolton as US
Ambassador to the UN - replacing him by the Afghan/American Ambassador
to Iraq, Khalilzad, in February 2007; and in 2007, Bush appoints
Robert Zoellich to replace Paul Wolfowitz as Governor of the World
Bank - two cases of one PNAC member replacing another!)
1998: ITAA does not confine its activities to America only - it is
active on the international scene. As evidence of this was an ITAA-
sponsored conference held in Fairfax, Virginia in 1998, at which there
were 1686 attendees (of whom, 429 were not American) - including such
'noted speakers' as Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.
End of 1998: After months of internal strife in Kosovo, NATO prevailed
upon the Yugoslavs to allow its (NATO’s) affiliate, the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the situation
in situ. Result: the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) entered Kosovo
under the leadership of a US diplomat, William Walker, who, as US
Ambassador to El Salvador, had administered support for that State's
reign of terror - with its politically motivated killings!
18th of March 1999: the representatives of the FRY, Serbia , and seven
of the Kosovan ethnic minorities submitted - for discussion - an
Agreement for Self-Government in Kosovo & Metohija (a document
conforming to democratic principles), - only to have it rejected out-
of-hand by the (American) Contact Group and the KLA. On the 23rd March
‘99, peace talks convened by the Americans at Rambouillet, just west
of Paris, - without Yugoslavia - reached an ‘agreement’ - Appendix B
of which stated “Status of Multi-National Military Implementation
Force (Cool NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles,
vessels, aircraft, and equipment free and unrestricted passage and
unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and
territorial waters”. (Agreement - or Ultimatum?!). NATO launched its
bombing campaign the following day, at the end of which, the UN
Security Council approved Resolution 1244, which gave the UN Mission
the responsibility to administer Kosovo. .In the aftermath of NATO's
bombing of Kosovo in 1999, the KLA (once rightly considered by the
Western Powers as 'terrorist') was transformed into the Kosovo
Protection Corps (KPC) and the MPRI was awarded the contract to 'train
& equip' same. Intriguingly, the commander of this newly-formed KPC
was one Brigadier General Agim Ceku, an Albanian Kosovan who had been
serving in the Croatian army when he had masterminded the successful
HV (Croatian army) offensive at Medak in September '93; and had also
played an important role in the Croat's routing of the Serbs in
Western Krajina (covered above).
2000: John Bolton (see above) had served as assistant attorney general
under Reagan , and assistant secretary of state under George H.W.
Bush. During Bush Jnr’s Presidential election quagmire in Florida, his
campaign strategist James Baker dispatched Bolton to Palm Beach to
halt the recount, which he did, thus ensuring Bush’s electoral
victory. In 2001, Bolton was appointed Undersecretary of State under
Colin Powell. As stated by Jesse Helms:"John Bolton is the kind of man
with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon”
April 1st 2001: Milosevic is arrested (with not-a-little-help from
Ahthony Monckton, chief MI6 officer in Serbia) - and is sent to face
trial by the Hague Tribunal - and dies of heartfailure there in March
‘06, the case against him not proven.
September 11 2001: 4 US planes are highjacked, 2 0f which crash into
the NY World Trade Center twin towers, thereby destroying them,
another crashing into the Pentagon, and a fourth re-captured by
passengers and crew, thus aborting its attack (presumably on
Washington). The Bush administration blame al Queda, and the following
month bomb Afghanistan and NATO invades the country. At this point, it
is of pertinence to add the following: In his ‘Talk’ in September
2006, the Canadian Dr. Peter Dale Scott exposed - comprehensively -
that the FBI, CIA & US Special Forces had foreknowledge of the 9/11
attacks! Of particular interest was the fact that Abu Mohamed al
Amriki (better known as Ali Mohammed), had had strong connections to
al Queda, and from 1994 until his arrest in 1998, had lived as an
American citizen in California - and had been used by the three US
agencies noted above. Dr. Scott goes on to give detailed accounts of
Mohammed’s key role in training al Queda trainees in sabotage skills
in America itself - as well as abroad - ending his ‘talk’ by saying:
“It’s time to confront the reality that these agencies themselves, and
their own sponsorship and protection of terrorist activities, have
aggravated the greatest threats to our national security.” (It must
not be forgotten that in the Afghan/USSR war, America had played a
role in creating al Queda, as noted above).
13 - 19th September: Menbers of the Bin Laden family - with important
Saudis - are flown out of the US, under supervision of the FBI.
22 December 2001: Bush Jnr. appointed Hamid Karzi - who had previously
been a paid consultant for the oil company UNOCAL (and Deputy Foreign
Minister of the Taliban) - Prime Minister of Aghanistan.
31 Dec. ‘01: Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzad (PNAC) as Special
Residental Envoy to Afghanistan - under Karzi.
1st January 2002: Khalilzad (also a former employee of UNOCAL - & a
member of the PNAC) - is appointed special emvoy to Afghanistan.
14 February 2002: Quote from Israeli Newspaper, Ma’ariv: “If one looks
at the map of the big American bases created in the Afghan war, one is
struck by the fac that they are completely identical to the route of
the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean”.(see Central Asia Gas
Pipeline [CENTGAS] above).
March 2002: To quote Robert Parsons: “The US loudly & proudly boasted
this month of its new bomb currently being used against al-Qaida hold-
outs in Afghanistan; it sucks the air from underground installations,
suffocating those within. The US has also admitted that it had used
depleted uranium weaponry over the last decade against bunkers inIraq,
Kosovo, and now Afghanistan.”
August 2002: the Dutch-sponsored Netherlands Institute for War
Documentation (NIOD) report revealed that the supply of arms/weapons
(most of which came from Iran and Turkey) to the infighting factions
in the war in Yugoslavia were all done with the connivance of NATO.
More shockingly, it revealed that Turkish, Malaysian, Bangladeshi and
Maltese troops serving in UNPROFOR (UN protective force) had been
selling ammunition on a large scale to the Bosnian army (ABiH)!
October 2002: Bush Jnr’s administration passed the Help America Vote
Act (HAVA) which authorised the funding of $4 billion for states to
use the Direct Recording Election system (DRE) equipment which would
have to meet certain standards (set by the Act ) by the year 2006, at
which point, they (the states) will be under obligation to have
purchased said new equipment. As of December 2003, 36 states agreed to
these obligations. [1] Note that in DRE, votes are stored
electronically, and, as such, therefore under proprietary ownership of
the equipment companies: the voter is therefore denied access! (NB:
Bush Jnr. had set up NorthCom in 2002 to counter any ‘terrorist’
attacks on American homeland territory - thus ircumventing the Posse
Comitatus Act (PCA) which had been passed in 1878 in order to prohibit
any “future President or Congress from directing by military order of
federal legislation the re-imposition of the US Army”
October 2002: Unknown to Congress, a very secretive group , The Office
of Special Plans (OSP), under the leadership of its architect, Paul
Wolfowitz (PNAC), was created by Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq.
February 2003: The Pentagon established the Iraqi Reconstruction and
Development Council (IRDC), made up of Iraqis who would be part of a
temporary government after the ousting of the Ba'ath regime..its
leading members were transported to Baghdad in late April 2003 - their
official task being to rebuild the structures of a government that
would then be handed over to the new Iraqi authority. The team is
headed by Imad Dhia, the top Iraqi adviser to ex-general Jay Garner
13 July 2003: the Governing Council of Iraq was inaugurated, its
members having been appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Under its civilian administrator, Paul Bremer (who had been Ronald
Reagan’s adviser on counter- terrorism) would oversee the Pentagon's
man in Baghdad, the retired general Jay Garne, who is.a personal
friend of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
2004: The election of Victor Yuschenko as President of Ukraine was
helped in no small measure by the AUAC (see above) - and Soros. This
was an election, known as the Orange Revolution, entitled PORA (its
Time!), organised by the same Serbian-trained group (overseen by
America) which had set up the previous similarly-manipulated elections
in Serbia (OTPOR), in October 2000 - and Georgia (K-MART), in 2004.
The fact that all three elections were immediately denounced as
‘rigged’; but most importantly that they had all three been
manipulated by America - with not a little help from the Soros
foundation - gave substance to the allegation that the Orange
Revolution was imported from the United States via Serbia and Georgia.
2005: Bolton was named as America's Ambassador to the United
Nations.NB: in a 1994 speech he had said, "There's no such thing as
the United Nations....There is only the international community, which
can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United
States" On December 4, 2006, Bolton resigned as U.S. Ambassador to the
UN. Hardly surprising!
2007: ITAA currently acts as the Secretariat for the World Information
Technology & Services Alliance (WITSA), which was then a consortium of
69 IT associations around the world (from Algeria to Zimbabwe - or 90%
of the world's IT market!).The clonal relationship between these two
organisations is confirmed by the fact that (a) Harris N. Miller is
President of both; and (b) ITAA Director, Robert B. Laurence, is
Chairman Emeritus of WITSA. Little wonder that the vote-rigging EVS’s
are today used worldwide!
2007: The great financial crisis began when a loss of confidence by
investors in the value of securitized mortgages in the United States
resulted in a liquidity crisis that prompted a substantial injection
of capital into financial markets by the United States Federal
Reserve, Bank of England and the European Central Bank - and deepened
increasingly throughout 2008 and 2009, leading to the G 20. (see
below)
Feb. 2008: US officially recognised Kosovo as an independent state.
September ‘08: after 3 years service in Iraq, the army’s1st Brigade
Combat Team (BCT) was sent back to America to serve under Northern
Command (NorthCom), where, for the next year, it would train/act “as
an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies
and disasters, including terrorist attacks”(As noted above, this would
bypass the PCA). Intriguingly, “Army Times” reported that “another, as
yet unnnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that mission will
be a permanent one”, and Col. Louis Vogler, chief of NorthCom’s future
operations, notes “Right now, the response force requirement will be
an enduring mission.” - adding that “Now, the plan is to assign a
force every year”.
This will not worry Obama unduly, inasmuch as he is keen on following
Bush Jnr’s mid-east strategy, resulting in the construction of the
Central Asia Gas pipeline through Afghanistan. That is the goal (see
above).
5th November ‘08; Obama wins election as president, and his subsequent
administration includes the following two of pertinence to this
article: Hillary Clinton (US Secretary of State); Robert Gates (US
Secretary of Defense). Remember, Hillary had been a partner of the
Rose Law Firm in1979 which was to play a role in helping G.W. Bush out
of the financial hole he had dug for himself as Director/Consultant of
the small oil drilling company, Harken Energy - to say nothing of the
fact that her husband had played a key role in the break-up of
Yugoslavia. And as for Gates - just refer to the foregoing in this
atricle.
14/15 November 2008: The current global financial depression has now
entered a crucially important phase, resulting in America - that
quintessential capitalist State - holding a G-20 summit in Washington
to discuss this matter. The first draft of thisWashington Action Plan
had been drawn up previously by the ECB, IMF, and the Bank for
International Settlements (BIS) - NB: under the supervision of the
BIS,
The participants were (a) leaders of the G-20 nations; (b) Chairman of
the World Bank, Robert Zoellick (see above); (c) President Dominique
Strauss-Kahn of the International Monetary Fund; (d) Secretary of the
UN; and (e) Chairman of the Financial Stability Forum, Mario Graghi.
The Americans strongly recommended that it be adopted at two
subsequent summits that would be held in Britain
4 Mar 2009: US president has written to Moscow to stress that the
contentious US missile defence system in Europe is focused on Iran.
(believe that - you believe anything!)
14/15 March ‘09: The first G-20 is held in Horsham, Sussex - and, as
with all cases of documents written in legalese, the Action Plan is a
document written in convenient double-speak, as exemplified by the
fact that Germany and France, in particular, were in favour of
reforming the international financial system - whereas Robert Zoellick
of the World Bank (see above), and Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury
Secretary (who, in 2007, had served as Director on the board of the
BIS!), were strongly in favour of stimulating the global economy by
the injection of more money.
April 2nd. ‘09: The final G-2 summit is held in London, and Germany &
France, having been ‘persuaded’ to follow the American way, an
‘agreement’ is reached.(t is worthy of note that the foregoing ignores
the fact that it is Capitalism which is responsible for this current
financial debacle. What are capitalists if they are not profiteers
swamped in greed?)
18 May 2009: Binyamin Netanyahu, met President Obama today for talks
expected to shape the direction of one of the toughest political
challenges either leader will face in the coming years - with the
Israeli prime minister trying to shift the primary focus away from the
Palestinians toward confronting Iran over its nuclear programme while
mapping out a long term strategy to build Palestinian self government.
But Obama's principal challenge is to get Netanyahu to put “an end to
Israel's well practised tactics of prevarication and obstruction over
the creation of an independent Palestine while continuing to gobble up
land that would be part of that state.” (to quote the Guardian of 18th
May ‘09). Obama has a problem indeed.
20 May 2009: Iran test fires surface-to-surface missile capable of
reaching Israel or US bases in the Middle East
**************************
Two important conclusions from the foregoing:
(a) Over the past century, there is little, if any difference between
the Republican and Democratic parties (not unlike the situation in
Britain, where, since Thatcher, there has been little difference
between Conservative and New Labour).
(b) The reason for this being that US administrations have (and are
still) under the control of its Corporate Establishment with its
fascist strategy of achieving global control.
PS: And if you readers disagree
My only answer would be
- Just wait and see
_________________
Hi Brendan- Excellent post on your thoughts. I'm sure there are many that have pretty much the same feelings. Each one of us has to make decisions daily from the time we decide to exit the bed in the morning until we decide to re enter the same piece of furniture at night. I can only speak for myself. I too am not happy with the share price short term and anyone that is saying different most likely ( no offense intended towards anyone ) has a delusion problem. I've been in this and buying since Oct 06. I was even in for the forward split way back when. When I first found this company I knew this would be a long term play, not a quick swing trade. I liked the concept and thought it would eventually catch the mainstream eyes. It did but has yet to generate the accompanying returns. Will it ever? I like to think so or else I would have been long gone and not even looking back. Been there done that many times with others. The 2 things that almost always cause a company to fail are undercapitalization or mismanagement. Very rarely do a true entrepreneur and savvy businessman come in the same package. Henry Ford comes to mind as an exception, as I'm sure there are a few others out there. Did Clint, the entrepreneur, surround himself with people with the necessary skills to make this work? Good question and I wish I had an answer. I would love to be a mouse in the corner of their office ( hope they don't have a cat, LOL ) to hear the day to day talk about the business. I understand they are hard at work seeking the LOC. It makes me wonder whether or not they fired that guy in LV that was supposed to be doing this for them. Seems he hasn't come through, all bluster and no delivery. So we wait and each day have to make the decision- to sell, hold, or buy more. For each bit of good about the prospects of this company, I'm sure someone can come up with some bad. You've read it all before right here, I'm sure. I recently bought some more shares in the 1¢ area, not to average down as I don't think averaging down is a good idea for any stock. Peter Lynch once said something to the effect of - never buy stock in a company that if the price went down by half that you wouldn't be willing to buy more. The pre split high of .008¢ equates to a current share price of 16¢. I think we'll see that again and more, JMHO of course. Gonna take some time and some good numbers on the Qs. Buy, sell, or hold, it's always a personal decision. Best of luck to you.
..............al
It takes some real searching but I found a congressman that seems to be on the side of the people and not the fraudulent bankers. Interview is about 20 minutes long. Go to the link and click on the icon right under the word congressman.
http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2009/7/31_Congressman_Cliff_Stearns.html
......al
Hello all, just in on a break from some light farm work. In time to see theft. Someone sold almost 3/4 million shares of ETNL in the span of a few minutes. The seller probably put in a sell at "market". The MMs saw this come up on level 3 before it hit level 2 and immediately dropped the bid to pick up those shares cheap. After the sale the bid raised right back up again. Peoples, use limit orders for penny stocks. NEVER use a market order. Buying or selling stock in this comapny or any other is a personal decision, but try not to get ripped off. This was MM games at their worst. They will do it to you every chance they get.
..........al
I think more and more are becoming aware each day. Still, I don't think it's too late to take back what is ours, our government, peacefully thru the ballot. The alternative is almost unthinkable.
......al
We all knew this but it was denied by the banksters. This should outrage anyone paying taxes.
......al
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bonuses paid to executives at nine banks that received U.S. government bailout money in 2008 were greater than net income at some of the banks, the office of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Thursday.
Cuomo, in a report on months of investigation into compensation paid by the banks, said employee pay "has become unmoored from the banks' financial performance."
Representatives of the banks either declined comment on the report or could not comment immediately.
"There is no clear rhyme or reason to the way banks compensate and reward their employees," said the report by Cuomo, New York's top legal officer, who began his probe last October amid taxpayer complaints about Wall Street pay.
Even in one of Wall Street's worst years on record, at least 4,793 bankers and traders received more than $1 million in bonus payments, according to the report.
Cuomo argued that, if firms followed "a more principled" bonus system, they would be less susceptible to poaching of their employees by other firms offering more pay.
"This rationalization of the compensation and bonus system must be accomplished now," said the report, which was sent to Edolphus Towns, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman.
Since nine banks received a total of $125 billion last October in taxpayer money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help them survive the financial crisis, Cuomo has pressed them for details on billions of dollars paid to executives amid huge losses.
SUBSTANTIALLY GREATER
The report said bonuses for Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co were "substantially greater" than the banks' net income.
Goldman earned $2.3 billion, paid out $4.8 billion in bonuses and received $10 billion in TARP funding, the report said.
Morgan Stanley earned $1.7 billion, paid $4.475 billion in bonuses and received $10 billion in TARP funding, while JP Morgan Chase earned $5.6 billion, paid $8.69 billion in bonuses and received $25 billion in TARP funding.
The latter bank paid out 1,626 bonuses of $1 million or more, the most of all the banks studied in the report, while Goldman, which had the highest average compensation per employee, paid out 953 bonuses of $1 million or more.
Cuomo said his office studied historical financial filings and found that at many banks compensation increased in the 2003-2006 bull market years, but stayed at those levels as the mortgage crisis and recession hit.
"Thus, when the banks did well, their employees were paid well. When the banks did poorly, their employees were paid well. And when the banks did very poorly, they were bailed out by taxpayers and their employees were still paid well.
"Bonuses and overall compensation did not vary significantly as profits diminished."
While Citigroup Inc and Merrill Lynch, bought by Bank of America Corp, lost more than $27 billion each, Citigroup paid $5.33 billion in bonuses and Merrill paid $3.6 billion, the report said. The two banks received a combined $55 billion of TARP money.
A spokesman for Bank of America said bonuses were paid to 200,000 bank employees and 30,000 Merrill legacy employees.
"The repeated explanation from bank executives that bonuses are tied to performance in a manner designed to promote (national economic) growth does not appear to be accurate," Cuomo said.
Much of Cuomo's investigation and publicity had been focused on Merrill Lynch, but Thursday's report covered all nine banks that received initial TARP money. The office has also investigated bonuses paid by giant insurer American International Group Inc, but it was not included here.
Wells Fargo & Co paid bonuses of $977,500, while losing $42.93 billion according to the report.
It said State Street Corp's State Street Bank and Bank of New York Mellon Corp "paid bonuses that were more in line with their net income, which is certainly what one would expect in a difficult year like 2008."
State Street earned $1.8 billion, paid bonuses totaling about $470 million and received $2 billion in TARP funding. Bank of New York Mellon earned $1.4 billion, paid out $945,000 and received $3 billion from TARP.
I know you didn't just become aware of this. What is needed is for millions of Americans to become aware of it and demand the changes necessary to put our great country back on the right track. JMHO
...............al
When will our elected representatives listen to us? Go Ron Paul!
75% Favor Auditing The Fed
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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So much for the ongoing secrecy of the nation’s independent central banking system. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Americans favor auditing the Federal Reserve and making the results available to the public.
Just nine percent (9%) of adults think that’s a bad idea and oppose it. Fifteen percent (15%) aren’t sure.
Over half the members of the House now support a bill giving the Government Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative agency, the authorization to audit the books of the Federal Reserve Board.
Support for the bill has grown now that the Obama administration is proposing to give the Fed greater economic regulatory powers. The Fed which sets U.S. monetary policy was created as an independent agency to keep it free of politically-motivated interference.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in a town forum filmed on Sunday which is airing this week on PBS stations said he is strongly opposed to the audit legislation. “I don’t think the American people want Congress running monetary policy,” he said. Howard Rich addressed this issue in a recent commentary and concluded it was important to locate the “trillions of dollars” the Fed has spent over the last year-and-a-half.
The new survey finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans in every demographic category – including age, gender, political affiliation, race and income – disagree with Bernanke and favor auditing the Fed to make its secretive deliberations public.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter.
Fifty-two percent (52%) of Americans support Bernanke’s efforts to speak out more publicly than his predecessors as Fed chairman, but his favorables have gone down over the past month. A plurality (41%) think the previous Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, did a better job, too.
While the president hopes to expand the Fed chairman’s regulatory controls, 46% of Americans say he already has too much power over the economy.
Fifty-one percent (51%) oppose expanding the Fed’s regulatory powers.
Despite Bernanke’s pledge that the Fed will keep interest rates and inflation down, 54% of Americans think interest rates will be higher a year from now, up 20 points from April.
Perhaps helping to drive the support for regularly auditing the Fed is the growing unpopularity of Obama’s economic initiatives to date. While the Fed is an independent agency, just 20% of Americans believe the Fed chairman is truly independent of the Obama administration. Sixty percent (60%) say his decision-making is influence by the president.
The smoking gun, what we all knew but was vehemently denied:
By Grant McCool
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bonuses paid to executives at nine banks that received U.S. government bailout money in 2008 were greater than net income at some of the banks, the office of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Thursday.
Cuomo, in a report on months of investigation into compensation paid by the banks, said employee pay "has become unmoored from the banks' financial performance."
Representatives of the banks either declined comment on the report or could not comment immediately.
"There is no clear rhyme or reason to the way banks compensate and reward their employees," said the report by Cuomo, New York's top legal officer, who began his probe last October amid taxpayer complaints about Wall Street pay.
Even in one of Wall Street's worst years on record, at least 4,793 bankers and traders received more than $1 million in bonus payments, according to the report.
Cuomo argued that, if firms followed "a more principled" bonus system, they would be less susceptible to poaching of their employees by other firms offering more pay.
"This rationalization of the compensation and bonus system must be accomplished now," said the report, which was sent to Edolphus Towns, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman.
Since nine banks received a total of $125 billion last October in taxpayer money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help them survive the financial crisis, Cuomo has pressed them for details on billions of dollars paid to executives amid huge losses.
SUBSTANTIALLY GREATER
The report said bonuses for Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co were "substantially greater" than the banks' net income.
Goldman earned $2.3 billion, paid out $4.8 billion in bonuses and received $10 billion in TARP funding, the report said.
Morgan Stanley earned $1.7 billion, paid $4.475 billion in bonuses and received $10 billion in TARP funding, while JP Morgan Chase earned $5.6 billion, paid $8.69 billion in bonuses and received $25 billion in TARP funding.
The latter bank paid out 1,626 bonuses of $1 million or more, the most of all the banks studied in the report, while Goldman, which had the highest average compensation per employee, paid out 953 bonuses of $1 million or more.
Cuomo said his office studied historical financial filings and found that at many banks compensation increased in the 2003-2006 bull market years, but stayed at those levels as the mortgage crisis and recession hit.
"Thus, when the banks did well, their employees were paid well. When the banks did poorly, their employees were paid well. And when the banks did very poorly, they were bailed out by taxpayers and their employees were still paid well.
"Bonuses and overall compensation did not vary significantly as profits diminished."
While Citigroup Inc and Merrill Lynch, bought by Bank of America Corp, lost more than $27 billion each, Citigroup paid $5.33 billion in bonuses and Merrill paid $3.6 billion, the report said. The two banks received a combined $55 billion of TARP money.
A spokesman for Bank of America said bonuses were paid to 200,000 bank employees and 30,000 Merrill legacy employees.
"The repeated explanation from bank executives that bonuses are tied to performance in a manner designed to promote (national economic) growth does not appear to be accurate," Cuomo said.
Much of Cuomo's investigation and publicity had been focused on Merrill Lynch, but Thursday's report covered all nine banks that received initial TARP money. The office has also investigated bonuses paid by giant insurer American International Group Inc, but it was not included here.
Wells Fargo & Co paid bonuses of $977,500, while losing $42.93 billion according to the report.
It said State Street Corp's State Street Bank and Bank of New York Mellon Corp "paid bonuses that were more in line with their net income, which is certainly what one would expect in a difficult year like 2008."
State Street earned $1.8 billion, paid bonuses totaling about $470 million and received $2 billion in TARP funding. Bank of New York Mellon earned $1.4 billion, paid out $945,000 and received $3 billion from TARP.
All Associated Press newsWASHINGTON (AP) - Federal regulators on Monday made permanent an emergency rule put in at the height of last fall's market turmoil that aims to reduce abusive short-selling.
The big unanswered question is- Does this now apply to all stocks or just the ones listed in last fall's emergency rule?
........al
A view of America from Russia:
>
>
> This will rattle your brain... Actually, the entire article should be bold
> type, capitalized and underlined, for that matter. Hard to believe that
> this article was in a Russian State Newspaper. Share it with your friends;
> perhaps it will open some eyes!
>
> The irony of this article appearing in the English edition of Pravda
> (Russian State Newspaper) defies description.
>
> American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper
>
> It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American
> descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back
> drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
>
> True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past
> century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was
> conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians
> would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much
> money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
>
> Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American
> populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their
> elites and betters.
>
> First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and
> substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics.
> Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that
> directly affects their lives.
>
> They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a
> BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around
> and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the
> foolish.
>
> Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of
> thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part
> little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top
> protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and
> flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another..
> Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the
> "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for
> earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized
> in
> America .
>
> The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed
> in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money
> printing has been a record setting, not just in America 's short history
> but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is
> no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic
> and at worst Zimbabwe.
>
> These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came
> the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system,
> by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, losses and
> swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs
> look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the
> Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we
> congratulate
> them?
>
> These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees
> picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now
> gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after
> another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American
> congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper
> to their masters.
>
> Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step
> down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the
> land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the
> self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private
> companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his
> minions.
>
> So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this
> up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected,
> chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will
> even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the
> chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world,
> too.
>
> Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK 's
> Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster.
> Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror
> show,we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise"
> Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.
>
> Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper... but a
> "freeman" whimper.
>
> So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically
> controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that
> would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum
> salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay
> raises and bonuses?
>
> Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of
> course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as
> that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon
> life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist
> enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects
> companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical
> extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a
> tax break or incentive. (While I don't agree with everything in this
> paragraph I do agree that Franks is not good for America and it has nothing
> to do with his sexual persuasion. Please don't let this paragraph divert you from
> the importance of this article in total.)
>
> The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look
> thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and
> fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while
> there is still value left. The proud American will go down into his slavery
> with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he
> really is. The world will only snicker.
>
> Stanislav Mishin? 1999-2009. "PRAVDA. Ru". When reproducing our materials
> in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA. Ru should be made. The opinions
> and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point of view of
> PRAVDA. Ru's editors.
I found this on another board:
Bilderberg 2009 Intel Already Proving Accurate
Veteran Bilderberg researchers Jim Tucker and Daniel Estulin hit the mark once again as insider info becomes reality
James Corbett
The Corbett Report
24 June, 2009
http://www.corbettreport.com/articles/20090624_bilderberg_predictions.htm
Observers of the annual elitist confab known as Bilderberg have long known that plans discussed at the conference quickly become reality. In 2002, Bilderberg researcher Jim Tucker correctly predicted that the Iraq war would start in March 2003 (not late 2002, as many were predicting at the time). In 2006, Daniel Estulin correctly forecast the popping of the housing bubble and subsequent economic crash, a possibility that most talking heads in the corporate media were laughing at at the time. In 2008, Tucker forecast a dramatic drop in oil prices while most analysts were fretting about the possibility of $200 a barrel oil. Tucker and Estulin have proven so stunningly accurate in their predictions not because they have a crystal ball, but because they have sources inside the Bilderberg Group and other organizations where financial oligarchs and their political puppets make decisions about our geopolitical future.
2009 is not even half over, but it seems the forecasts made by both Estulin and Tucker based on their 2009 Bilderberg sources are already proving to be accurate. In a phone interview conducted as this year's conference was getting underway in Greece, Daniel Estulin warned The Corbett Report that the powers that be were preparing to run up the stock market one final time in order to draw the masses back into investing before crashing the market. Now, a worrying new report suggests that this is precisely the case as corporate executives start ditching their stocks at a rate not seen in years. Watch an excerpt from the interview in the video player below:
Daniel Estulin on Bilderberg 2009
The Bloomberg report suggests that the market—currently enjoying one of the greatest rallies in decades as stocks continue to rise from last year's post-crash nadir—is about to have the rug pulled out from under it, a fact that corporate executives in the know are taking to heart as they scramble to get rid of their worthless stocks before the general public realize what's going on. Add to this the stunning news that U.S. Embassies around the globe have been instructed to prepare for a bank holiday in September and growing opposition to the Obama Administration's stunning proposal to give the private Federal Reserve sweeping new dictatorial powers over the entire U.S. economy and there is little doubt that an economic collapse the likes of which Estulin discussed is becoming more likely by the day.
Should an economic collapse occur as predicted, social and political changes of world historical importance will be the inevitable result. Jim Tucker, who also recently joined The Corbett Report for a telephone interview, has predicted that the ongoing world financial crisis will be manipulated by Bilderberg to further their long-held goal of crafting a North American Union along the lines of the European Union. Indeed, we have already seen call for the centralization of financial regulatory power from Bilderbergers like German chancellor Angela Merkel, who argue that national sovereignty over financial regulation is what caused the crisis in the first place. More chillingly, Estulin believes the worldwide economic depression which we are currently entering could ultimately result in the deaths of over 4 billion people, or roughly 2/3 of the planet's population. This is certainly one way to achieve elitist goals of vast population reduction, an item high on the agenda of another secretive meeting of billionaires (chaired by Bilderberger David Rockefeller) just weeks before this year's Bilderberg conference.
Jim Tucker also stressed that manipulation of the swine flu hysteria was high on this year's agenda, and that this crisis too would be used to consolidate power in international bodies such as the WHO. Preparations for ceding more and more power to unaccountable international bureaucrats in the event of a flu pandemic have been carefully crafted for years, and now the butchering of national sovereignty is to begin in earnest. Watch a portion of the Jim Tucker interview in the player below:
Jim Tucker on Bilderberg 2009
Again, recent events have made Tucker's Bilderberg intelligence that much more credible. Since Bilderberg, the WHO has declared the first pandemic of the 21st century, opening the door to the very WHO power grab that Tucker warned about. The first real test of those powers may be as early as this fall, when a much-hyped seasonal resurgence of the surprisingly weak H1N1 flu may be used as an excuse to implement mass vaccinations. Preparations for just such a plan have been made in country after country including Canada, the U.S. and France.
The prospect of the WHO using their own campaign of swine flu hysteria to justify mass vaccinations in countries around the globe is triply frightening. Firstly, the vaccinations could be made mandatory, thus breaking fundamental tenants of freedom from forced medication which is the very pillar of a free society. Secondly, the swine flu vaccine is being developed by the very company that earlier this year sent out doses of live bird flu to be mixed in with their flu vaccines, an "accident" so incredibly unlikely that doctors in the Czech Republic accused the company of actually attempting to provoke a pandemic. Thirdly, the idea of a mass vaccination campaign is worrying because, as one of the co-developers of Tamiflu recently surmised, the recent swine flu strain itself was likely created during the vaccine production process.
The Adens on gold !
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
"Gold has yet to take off in true bull market fashion, but its chart suggests that it’s coming," says Mary Anne and Pamela Aden.
In their top-notch The Aden Forecast, the resource experts discuss the outlook for gold as well as some of their favorite mining stocks for investors to consider.
"Considering that the Summer months tend to be slow months, we could still see some short-term weakness.
"More important, however, is the bigger picture as gold is poised to rise during the second half of the year." Here, they discuss their outlook and some favorite ming stocks.
"On the upside, gold is strong above $920 and shows renewed strength above $950. It would be very strong above $985 and a full on bullish C rise and new phase of the bull market would happen above $1004, the record high.
"On the downside, if gold weakens during these Summer months, it would happen below $920. It could then go to possibly $882, or to the April low near $868. However, gold’s 'C rise' is still underway as long as gold stays above $868.
"Considering silver’s weakness, it may be leading gold short-term. The point is, don’t be disappointed if we see sluggish to down metals for a while longer. Once the 'C rise' starts to heat up, you’ll want to be well positioned in the precious metals.
"Gold is getting closer to starting the next phase of a stronger bull market, and silver and gold shares will follow. If
"you haven’t yet completed your gold purchases, these Summer months are providing one of the last good buying times. That is what the big picture is telling us.
"Meanwhile, among our recommended long-term gold mining positions, we suggest Iamgold (NYSE: IAG); Eldorado Gold (ASE: EGO); GoldCorp (NYSE: GG) and Agnico Eagle (NYSE: AEM)."
There's Nothing Left to Recover
What Economy?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.”
The “New Economy” was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real estate bubble, and by “free market” financial deregulation, which unleashed financial gangsters to new heights of debt leverage and fraudulent financial products.
The real economy was traded away for a make-believe economy. When the make-believe economy collapsed, Americans’ wealth in their real estate, pensions, and savings collapsed dramatically while their jobs disappeared.
The debt economy caused Americans to leverage their assets. They refinanced their homes and spent the equity. They maxed out numerous credit cards. They worked as many jobs as they could find. Debt expansion and multiple family incomes kept the economy going.
And now suddenly Americans can’t borrow in order to spend. They are over their heads in debt. Jobs are disappearing. America’s consumer economy, approximately 70% of GDP, is dead. Those Americans who still have jobs are saving against the prospect of job loss. Millions are homeless. Some have moved in with family and friends; others are living in tent cities.
Meanwhile the US government’s budget deficit has jumped from $455 billion in 2008 to $2,000 billion this year, with another $2,000 billion on the books for 2010. And President Obama has intensified America’s expensive war of aggression in Afghanistan and initiated a new war in Pakistan.
There is no way for these deficits to be financed except by printing money or by further collapse in stock markets that would drive people out of equity into bonds.
The US government’s budget is 50% in the red. That means half of every dollar the federal government spends must be borrowed or printed. Because of the worldwide debacle caused by Wall Street’s financial gangsterism, the world needs its own money and hasn’t $2 trillion annually to lend to Washington.
As dollars are printed, the growing supply adds to the pressure on the dollar’s role as reserve currency. Already America’s largest creditor, China, is admonishing Washington to protect China’s investment in US debt and lobbying for a new reserve currency to replace the dollar before it collapses. According to various reports, China is spending down its holdings of US dollars by acquiring gold and stocks of raw materials and energy.
The price of one ounce gold coins is $1,000 despite efforts of the US government to hold down the gold price. How high will this price jump when the rest of the world decides that the bankruptcy of “the world’s only superpower” is at hand?
And what will happen to America’s ability to import not only oil, but also the manufactured goods on which it is import-dependent?
When the over-supplied US dollar loses the reserve currency role, the US will no longer be able to pay for its massive imports of real goods and services with pieces of paper. Overnight, shortages will appear and Americans will be poorer.
Nothing in Presidents Bush and Obama’s economic policy addresses the real issues. Instead, Goldman Sachs was bailed out, more than once. As Eliot Spitzer said, the banks made a “bloody fortune” with US aid.
It was not the millions of now homeless homeowners who were bailed out. It was not the scant remains of American manufacturing--General Motors and Chrysler--that were bailed out. It was the Wall Street Banks.
According to Bloomberg.com, Goldman Sachs’ current record earnings from their free or low cost capital supplied by broke American taxpayers has led the firm to decide to boost compensation and benefits by 33 percent. On an annual basis, this comes to compensation of $773,000 per employee.
This should tell even the most dimwitted patriot who “their” government represents.
The worst of the economic crisis has not yet hit. I don’t mean the rest of the real estate crisis that is waiting in the wings. Home prices will fall further when the foreclosed properties currently held off the market are dumped. Store and office closings are adversely impacting the ability of owners of shopping malls and office buildings to make their mortgage payments. Commercial real estate loans were also securitized and turned into derivatives.
The real crisis awaits us. It is the crisis of high unemployment, of stagnant and declining real wages confronted with rising prices from the printing of money to pay the government’s bills and from the dollar’s loss of exchange value. Suddenly, Wal-Mart prices will look like Nieman Marcus prices.
Retirees dependent on state pension systems, which cannot print money, might not be paid, or might be paid with IOUs. They will not even have depreciating money with which to try to pay their bills. Desperate tax authorities will squeeze the remaining life out of the middle class.
Nothing in Obama’s economic policy is directed at saving the US dollar as reserve currency or the livelihoods of the American people. Obama’s policy, like Bush’s before him, is keyed to the enrichment of Goldman Sachs and the armament industries.
Matt Taibbi describes Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentless jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Look at the Goldman Sachs representatives in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. This bankster firm controls the economic policy of the United States.
Little wonder that Goldman Sachs has record earnings while the rest of us grow poorer by the day.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
I'm surprised that my nickname for the new president- Obushma - hasn't caught on. Nothing has changed. Nothing much will change except the taxpayers' wallets will become lighter. Wall street led by Goldman Sachs has bought and paid for the entire lawmaking bodies of our country. Creating more paper to sell is not the way towards prosperity. Need a job? Apply at the security companies hired to guard the bankers' personal safety. I hear the numbers have increased substantially. If they are doing nothing wrong, what have they to fear? Frontier justice perhaps? Will we ever come to that? Lots of questions but can't even fathom an answer to any of them.
.........al
fivestar- that's ok by me. Personally I don't want the daytraders in on this play. They do not help a company, rather just play with the stock price. I checked some of the boards and ETNL is still under the radar. I hope it stays there. Most daytrader penny plays are not worthwhile investments and once the momo dies the stock languishes due to lack of interest. IMHO ofcourse, I do believe this company is worth far more than a daytrader's play. Parabolic spikes almost always return to saner levels. I would hope the rising fundamentals, as they occur, will do far more justice to the shares than being swept up on hype.
It's 40° here in northern PA this morning. Going to market today. So I'll catch up later on.
.............al
The air is abuzz with the uplisting news. A long time coming indeed. So what's our next target? I will be looking at the 10Qs.While the uplist is great for a little respect, which even us hardcore shareholders have to admit has been on the wane, now we need to see some good numbers from rising sales. Could we get a spike on the uplist tomorrow? Certainly it could happen, or it could not. Euphoric expectations can be killed quite quickly in the penny stock world. I would hope that now that this will be open to more investors, the volumes will rise and a slow and steady pps increase. No one knows for sure anyway. Great news would be some new licenses, and yes more great news would be a reduction in share structure- I'm with you Lurker. Oh and btw, I was buying at under a penny, just didn't advertise it. Best of luck to all here
............al
Ron Paul on FED independence:
Fed Independence or Fed Secrecy?
Last week I was very pleased that hearings were held on the independence of the Federal Reserve system. My bill HR 1207, known as the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, was discussed at length, as well as the general question of whether or not the Federal Reserve should continue to operate independently.
The public is demanding transparency in government like never before. A majority of the House has cosponsored HR 1207. Yet, Senator Jim DeMint’s heroic efforts to attach it to another piece of legislation elicited intense opposition by the Senate leadership.
The hearings on Capitol Hill provided us with a great deal of information about the types of arguments that will be levied against meaningful transparency and how the secretive central bankers will defend the status quo that is so beneficial to them.
Claims are made that auditing the Fed would compromise its independence. However, by independence, they really mean secrecy. The Fed clearly cherishes its vast power to create and spend trillions of dollars, diluting the value of every other dollar in circulation, making deals with other central banks, and bailing out cronies, all to the detriment of the taxpayer, and to the enrichment of themselves. I am happy to challenge this type of “independence”.
They claim the Fed is endowed with special intellectual abilities with which to control the market and that central bankers magically know what the market needs. We should just trust them. This is patently ridiculous. The market is a complex and intricate thing. No one knows what the market needs other than the market itself. It sends signals, such as prices, that should be reacted to and respected, not thwarted and controlled. Bankers are not all-knowing and cannot ignore the rules of supply and demand. They might act as if they are, but their manipulation of the market just ends up throwing it wildly off balance, which gives us the boom and bust cycles.
They claim the Fed must remain apolitical. No organization is apolitical that relies on the President to appoint the Chairman. In fact, it is subject to the worst sort of politics – power to create trillions of dollars and affect the value of every dollar in the country without the accountability of direct elections or meaningful oversight! The Fed typically enacts monetary policy that is favorable to particular administrations close to elections, to the detriment of long term considerations. They do this partly because of the political appointee process for the Chairmanship.
The only accountability the Federal Reserve has is ultimately to Congress, which granted its charter and can revoke it at any time. It is Congress’s constitutional duty to protect the value of the money, and they have abdicated this responsibility for far too long. This was the issue that got me involved in politics 35 years ago. It is very encouraging to finally see the issue getting some needed exposure and traction. It is regrettable that it took a crisis of this magnitude to get a serious debate on this issue.
Posted by Ron Paul (07-13-2009, 01:20 PM) filed under Monetary Policy
Ron Paul on Ending the Federal Reserve
****************************
July 9, 2009
The Fed Must Be Stopped
Written by: Ron Paul
Our country currently finds itself in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and, as during all economic crises, people search for the answer as to why this has happened. Not only have large financial firms been affected, but also mainstays of American industry such as GM and Chrysler, all the way down to the Mom & Pop stores on Main Street. The easy way out is to blame the traditional scapegoats: foreign governments, fraudulent businessmen, and greedy speculators. But the real villain is far more sinister; the organization entrusted with maintaining a stable dollar and touted as the guarantor of economic stability – the Federal Reserve.
In the United States, monetary policy has been the domain of the Federal Reserve since its inception in 1913. Since that time we have had a number of cyclical recessions, each one following a boom caused by the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy. The problem with the Federal Reserve is that it interferes with market pricing functions. Interest rates are a price just like any other and arise because of the fact that people prefer to consume in the present rather than in the future. The extent to which people defer present consumption is reflected in interest rates, which in a free market are determined by the spontaneous interactions and decisions of millions of people.
Fed intervention to set prices throws markets and interest rates out of equilibrium. When the Federal Reserve pushes interest rates below what the market rate would be, everyone wants to borrow money for long-term projects. Shortages of loanable funds would occur, except that the Federal Reserve has the ability to create bank balances out of thin air. The Fed can create a bank ledger on paper, or on a computer, establish a balance of millions or billions of dollars, and then spend these dollars out into the economy.
Loans become cheap, and the result of these lower interest rates is an economic boom which eventually manifests itself as a bubble. Beginning in 2001, the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates to as low as one percent, which after adjusting for inflation meant that the real interest rate was negative, so businesses were actually making money by taking out loans. This was the fuel for the housing bubble and the reason there are 19 million empty houses today.
From this article I would gather that the comex is anticipating not having enough gold to meet delivery demands.
Commodity exchanges can dump gold debts on ETFs
Submitted by cpowell on 10:11AM ET Saturday, July 11, 2009. Section: Daily Dispatches
1p ET Saturday, July 11, 2009
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
GATA board member Adrian Douglas discloses in the report below, titled "The Alchemists," that the New York and Tokyo commodity exchanges have been permitting their gold futures contracts to be settled not in real metal but in shares of gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This essentially allows the gold shorts (and the exchanges themselves, which guarantee futures contracts) to transfer their obligations to third parties that may not have the metal they claim to have and that, in any case, are operated by the investment banks running major short positions in gold.
Thus it is likely that the paper claims to the world's supply of gold are greater than even GATA has suspected -- that the gold supply is even more oversubscribed and that "paper gold" is being created at an ever more frantic rate to suppress gold's price.
The ability to offload futures contract gold obligations to the ETFs could become the principal mechanism of the gold price suppression scheme. GATA asks its supporters to call Douglas' report to the attention of financial journalists, market regulators, and elected officials everywhere.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
The Alchemists
By Adrian Douglas
Saturday, July 11, 2009
In the Middle Ages alchemists toiled in vain to transmute lead into gold. One wonders why they used such an expensive starting material, such as lead, when modern alchemists in the gold world have succeeded in transmuting paper into gold. This article reveals the anatomy of a scam that has been perpetrated on investors and goes a long way to explain and tie together developments in the precious metals markets in recent years.
As many readers may know, I have recently been reporting on how delivery notices at the COMEX cannot be reconciled with movements of metals from and into the warehouse. Clearly these are not going to match on a daily basis, just as orders into a factory will not match shipments out on any given day, as there is a time lag. But when averaged over a month, the "flow" of metal inventory should be comparable to the delivery notices issued. This is just basic accounting. But I have observed that reconciliation is almost impossible with the COMEX data. The only explanation I could think of is that settlement of contracts must be bypassing the warehouse. But how could this be possible, as I thought all contracts had to be delivered via a COMEX registered warehouse?
The COMEX states:
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Delivery:
Gold delivered against the futures contract must bear a serial number and identifying stamp of a refiner approved and listed by the Exchange. Delivery must be made from a depository licensed by the Exchange."
This seems unequivocal until you find this exception:
Exchange of Futures for Physicals (EFP)
The buyer or seller may exchange a futures position for a physical position of equal quantity. EFPs may be used to either initiate or liquidate a futures position.
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The COMEX trading rulebook clarifies further:
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104.36 Exchange of Futures for, or in Connection with, Product (Physical)
(A) An exchange of futures for, or in connection with, product (EFP) consists of two discrete, but related, transactions; a cash transaction and a futures transaction. At the time such transaction is effected, the buyer and seller of the futures must be the seller and the buyer of a quantity of the physical product covered by this Section. The quantity of physical product must be approximately equivalent to the quantity covered by the futures contract.
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So what this means is that contracts can essentially be settled without going through the COMEX warehouse. Futures contracts and a physical commodity equivalent can be exchanged outside of the exchange and an EFP form can be filed to the clearing department at the COMEX. What's more, the physical commodity doesn't have to meet the specification of the COMEX Gold Contract of being a 100 troy ounce bar or three 1Kg bars of .995 fineness.
So what can be delivered as the physical gold commodity?
This is where it gets very interesting. On February 18, 2005, the NYMEX, parent of the COMEX, issued this announcement:
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http://www.cftc.gov/files/submissions/rules/selfcertifications/2005/rul0...
Exchange Rule 104.36, which governs exchange of futures for physicals ('EFP') transactions on the COMEX Division, refers to a 'physical commodity' as one of the required components of an EFP transaction but also indicates that the physical commodity need only be substantially the economic equivalent of the futures contract being exchanged.
The purpose of this Notice is to confirm that the Exchange would accept gold-backed exchange-traded funds ('ETF') shares as the physical commodity component for an EFP transaction involving COMEX gold futures contracts, provided that all elements of a bona fide EFP pursuant to Exchange Rule 104.36 are satisfied.
Thus, acceptable gold-backed and exchange-traded ETF funds include, but are not limited to, the iSharesCOMEX Gold Trust (ticker: IAU), which began trading on the American Stock Exchange on January 28, 2005.
The trust is an exchange-traded fund that provides a means of obtaining a level of participation in the gold market through the securities market. The trust shares are intended to constitute a means of making an investment similar to an investment in gold. Each trust share represents a fractional undivided beneficial interest in the trust's net assets which consist primarily of gold held by a custodian on behalf of the trust. The shares of that trust are expected to reflect the price of gold less the trust's expenses and liabilities.
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So the gold ETF with the symbol IAU started trading on January 28, 2005, and three short weeks later the shares of IAU became equivalent to real physical gold in the eyes of the COMEX for delivery against futures contracts in an EFP transaction! I
If that doesn't blow your socks off, I don't know what will.
Also note that the ETF mentioned is a COMEX product! How convenient!
Where are the regulators? This ETF is not equivalent to gold. Note the description: "Each trust share represents a fractional undivided beneficial interest in the trust's net assets which consist primarily of gold."
All that is being guaranteed is that each share is a fraction of the ETF assets. The net assets could be 1 oz of gold while the face value of the total shares sold could be 100 million ounces!
The notice does not restrict which gold ETFs are eligible, so clearly the infamous GLD is also eligible to be considered as good as physical gold in an EFP transaction.
Right from the inception of the gold ETFs GLD and SLV, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee has deduced from studies of the ETF prospectuses that these funds very likely do not hold gold and silver to fully back the issued shares because the prospectuses don't categorically require it. (See footnotes 1 and 2.) In fact, the ETFs may have no gold or silver at all.
What seemed bizarre to GATA at the time was that the two mega-short anti-gold investment banks, JPMorgan and HSBC, would be involved in the launch and operation of precious metal investments that, on the face of it, would create huge investor demand for the very metals in which the banks hold massive and clearly manipulative concentrated short positions.
Now all becomes clear. The system is the ultimate alchemy. If ETF shares are NOT backed by gold but are accepted by the COMEX as equivalent to physical gold ... presto! You have turned paper into gold -- and paper is a lot cheaper than lead.
A futures market is supposed to provide price discovery for a commodity. In the gold market this notion has been hijacked because settlement can be made with a derivative instrument, such as an unbacked or partially backed ETF share. If that derivative instrument is not backed by gold on a 1:1 basis the scheme allows an artificial apparent increase in the supply of gold and so distorting price discovery toward lower prices.
Such a scam would be in grave danger of becoming exposed if anyone knew the true inventory condition of the vaults of the ETFs. That problem is easily solved by having HSBC be the custodian of GLD and JPMorgan be the custodian of SLV.
I have not found anywhere that COMEX accepts ETFs as an equivalent to physical silver for an EFP transaction, which probably explains why silver warehouse movements are much larger than those of gold, and perhaps may indicate that physical silver is the cartel's Achilles heel.
We have all wondered how GLD could have amassed a stunning 1,100 tons of gold in less than five years without the gold price exploding. This represents buying 10 percent of all global gold output each year. What's more, in the last nine months the ETF holdings almost doubled, adding approximately 500 tonnes or 23 percent of annual global production. And this when the signatories to the second Washington Agreement on Gold have reduced their gold sales to a trickle, from 500 tonnes per year. If the GLD shares are unbacked or only partially backed by gold, the alleged 1,100-tonnes gold holding would be easy to achieve with just the use of a printing press for the share certificates.
In looking at COMEX reports the EFP transactions are reported under "Other Volume." This category is huge compared to delivery notices. For example, on July 8, 2009, the gold price fell by $20. Looking at the relevant COMEX report --
http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy-metals/files/cmxopint070809.pdf
-- on Page 4 "Other Volume" is 9,540 contracts or 954,000 ounces, while the much more visible delivery notices were only 17 contracts or 1,700 ounces! Judging from many reports the "Other Volume" category is orders of magnitude larger than the delivery notices.
What I don't know is how many of these trades are settled with the COMEX-approved gold equivalent ETFs or even if any are. I have sent an email to the COMEX to ask them. I won't hold my breath for a reply. My guess is that a lot of EFPs are settled this way, which would account in part for the meteoric issue of GLD shares. But the COMEX should be transparent; it should be required to publish exactly what is being traded as "Other Volume." In fact if the COMEX wants to be above suspicion it should insist in its rules that EFPs must be settled with gold that meets exactly the COMEX gold contract specification. The EFP then would facilitate delivery instead of facilitating a change in delivery obligations.
Why was it necessary to introduce a mechanism to exchange ETF shares in lieu of physical gold? Where there is smoke there is fire.
What I don't know is how many of these trades are settled with the COMEX-approved gold equivalent ETFs. I have sent an email to the COMEX to ask them. I won't hold my breath for a reply. My guess is that a lot of EFPs are settled this way, which would account in part for the meteoric issue of GLD shares.
Adding credence to this supposition is that GLD has gained wide acceptance with mutual funds, pension funds, and university endowment funds. Many sophisticated investors believe ETFs to be equivalent to investing in bullion. This makes this fiat paper bullion scam easy to perpetrate.
It would appear that the COMEX gold warehouse is merely a window dressing displaying an almost static 2.5 million ounces of dealer-owned gold inventory. But it would appear the vast majority of settlement occurs out of the average investor's view AND, therefore, out of the view of the regulators.
This means that the COMEX is not what it seems. Delivery for an EFP only needs to be "substantially the economic equivalent" of the deliverable commodity! A default could occur at any time if this sorcery of swapping paper for paper suffered a serious setback.
The members of the Gold Cartel must be very proud of themselves for succeeding where the ancient alchemists failed. In fact, they are so proud they decided they didn't need to limit the scam to the COMEX. They have implemented it on the Tokyo Commodity Exchange too.
On October 29, 2008, the TOCOM made the following announcement:
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Based on the Memorandum of Understanding signed in January this year, The Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM) and Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) have launched 'Inter-market Cooperation Workshop' in efforts to improve convenience for participants of both markets, and studied to reinforce cooperation between the commodity market and the stock market.
In light of the study at the workshop, TOCOM has added a 'physically backed commodity ETF' as a possible physical for EFP (Exchange of Futures for Physicals) transactions at the exchange, which allows seller and the buyer, who holds agreement for physical transactions, to conclude the contracts in the commodity futures market without continuous trading of physicals.
Therefore, the SPDR Gold Shares, physically backed commodity ETF listed on the TSE, which has a correlation with the gold spot price, can now be used as a physical for EFP transaction on TOCOM's gold market.
Thanks to this new arrangement, it is expected that the link between TSE's SPDR Gold Shares market and the TOCOM gold market will be strengthened and that the price reliability, as well as the liquidity of both markets, will be enhanced.
For inquiries about this news release, please contact:
Planning Department, The Tokyo Commodity Exchange
http://www.tocom.or.jp/news/2008/20081105-1.html
- - - -
Notice the comment that the "liquidity of both markets will be enhanced." There can be little doubt about that! They can print as many ETF shares as they want and they can then settle as many EFPs as they want ... and guess what happens to the price of gold with such an apparent increase in liquidity. Yes, it will be suppressed. As they said in the release, "the price reliability will be enhanced."
Now that reminds me of Alan Greenspan, who said, "Central Banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise." But why get the central banks to lease the real stuff when an ETF can print up an IOU that the unsuspecting investor will accept to be as good as gold?
Does this mean that the alchemists of the Gold Cartel have discovered the Elixir of Life for their gold suppression scheme so that it will go on forever?
No, absolutely not. Faith in anything paper is going out of fashion. California is shortly going to discover that people don't like IOUs. Central banks outside of the G7 countries are buying gold, and I am sure they know about this alchemy. I doubt that the Chinese will accept GLD shares for settlement of futures contracts.
If you want an investment in bullion, then make sure you have an investment in bullion. In my opinion what I have presented here, and what other analysts have written, indicate that GLD and SLV are not investments in bullion. They are mere IOUs in bullion. Take physical delivery of gold and silver from the COMEX. They have only 2.5 million ounces of the real stuff in the gold inventory. That is a paltry $2.3 billion at today's price.
The Gold Cartel is desperate to suppress gold and keep the dream of a "strong dollar" alive along with maintaining low interest rates by using a mechanism described by Professors Summers and Barsky in their research paper "Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard." The London Gold Pool used real gold to try to suppress the gold market, and it failed. The paper IOU is going to be even less successful. Imagine what will happen to the gold price when the holders of the paper IOUs go looking for physical gold instead. The Gold Cartel has built a dam on the river of physical gold demand, thinking that it is clever enough to defy the laws of supply and demand. Wait until the dam bursts to experience gold fever such has never been seen before.
Buy real gold and silver before the dam bursts!
* * *
References
[1] "The Paper Game" by James Turk
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/turk/2007/0305.html
[2] "Unanswered Questions about the Silver ETF" by James Turk
http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=125607
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CFTC: Corrupt Foxes Tending Chickens
-- Posted Tuesday, 7 July 2009
By James West
All the hyperbole in the mainstream media announcing imminent changes by the CFTC (Commodities and Futures Trading Commission) amounts only to so much spin and P.R. There aren’t too many thinking adults involved even peripherally in the global poker game known as the Futures market who still believe the house always wins by dint of natural statistical preference.
The game is rigged.
Tracing a pattern of predictions by the financial mafia powerhouse Goldman Sachs that just happen to coincide with the evolution of short and long positions in oil reveal a pattern where Goldman profits by touting oil bullishly while building a short position, then warns of price weakness when its ready to unwind the position into the panic of their own creation. The cycle is sickening to watch, though not without some grudging admiration for the sheer force and coordination of such a well-oiled criminal enterprise.
The CFTC has been the eunuch of the American Imperial Guard (AIG) since the last Chairperson with any shred of integrity was summarily squeezed out of her role in 1999 by incumbent banksters Lawrence H. Summers, Robert Rubin and retired don Alan Greenspan. At that time, she locked horns with the presidential bagmen over exactly the kind of deregulation that made possible the massively under-capitalized Credit Default Swaps, and similarly threadbare bets on future prices of commodities. The direct result of her exile is the incomprehensibly massive “nominal” values of derivatives contracts that now exist in various futures markets, and the unregulated exempt “custom contracts” that remain unreported, unaudited, and for the most part, not subject to clearinghouse rules.
This ‘dark market’ as it has come to be known, is the abode of the “Weapons of Financial Destruction” famously coined by Warren Buffett.
At the time of Born’s forced walking of the plank, Gensler was one of the junior financial capos who lobbied in favor of this brand of de-regulation. The fact that this team of elite hitmen have now emerged intact in Obama’s regime smacks of some kind of back room deal-making that points to a compromise in exchange for cooperation.
I’ll bet that the CFTC is now going to bring actions against some sacrificial corporate lambs who neglected to donate to the democratic election fund, who, upon having their wrists very publicly and resoundingly slapped, will be held up to the glaring media light as proof positive that the problems in the derivatives markets are now over and confidence is duly warranted in the global financial system.
Today’s announcement from Lieutenant Gensler stipulating limits on speculative positions and other regulatory fortifications is heartwarming spin but in actuality more closely connotes closing the barn door after the horses have been ridden off into the sunset carrying all the loot.
In the press release Gensler, writing in the first person, declares, “The Commission will be seeking views on applying position limits consistently across all markets and participants, including index traders and managers of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs); whether such limits would enhance market integrity and efficiency; whether the CFTC needs additional authority to fully accomplish these goals; and, how the Commission should determine appropriate levels for each market.”
The apparent holistic application of such regulation is in opposition to the inclinations of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who, in a letter dated May 13 states that, “in order to contain systemic risks, all standardized OTC derivatives should be required to be cleared through regulated central counterparties (“CCP”). CCPs in turn will be required to impose robust margin requirements and other necessary risk controls. Centralized clearing for customized OTC derivatives will not be mandated, as long as ‘customization’ of OTC derivatives is not used solely to avoid clearing through a CCP. To that end, if an OTC derivative is accepted for clearing by any CCP, a presumption for its standardized nature is created and it should be required to be cleared through CCPs as a matter of course.”
The loopholes glaring out of this most disingenuous doublespeak are better defined as Special Interest Vehicles. (SIVs) In other words, all that has to happen to avoid the clearinghouse rules is to fabricate custom contracts as opposed to standardized ones, and have ready for inspection a certificate proclaiming that their customized character is a requirement of the transaction not for avoiding clearinghouse rules.
Cute.
Also, how much would you like to bet that these “CCP’s” will most likely be incestuously bound to either Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan, and will then subsequently be deemed organizations that are too big to fail.
The Commodity Exchange Act states that the CFTC shall impose limits on trading and positions as necessary to eliminate, diminish or prevent the undue burdens on interstate commerce that may result from excessive speculation.
Here again, the opportunity for loophole exploitation is transparent in the vagueness of the language. What’s to prevent such excessive speculation from being distributed to several organizations under the cover of “custom contracts” to build yet another rendition of the “dark market positions” currently menacing the derivatives markets?
Interestingly, or perhaps predictably, we have moved from Geithner’s letter of May 13th stipulating good intentions to Gensler’s statement of today stipulating hearings with good intentions, and our assumption then is that this will result in legislation that embodies the spirit of such intentions.
Is it conceivable that by the time any bill makes it into the congressional process, the new loopholes will be professionally sighted and targeted by the same forces that, by virtue of their insider status with the largest criminal organization in the world, we will have forgotten about this financial crisis amidst the artificial exuberance induced by yet another over leveraged bubble?
My money’s on the foxes.
James West
www.MidasLetter.com
Just a small blurb, probably not a paid for nor from the hired PR people. The word is out there. Happy 4th everyone.
.......al
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/scavenger/detail?entry_id=42915&tsp=1
Raiders' new airplane: Xcellence
Gotta hand it to the Raiders for spreading its brand globally. Their site features original content in Tagalog, Japanese, Chinese, German and Spanish. They've played in cities around world. Now, the team has picked up a new sponsor, Malaysian discount carrier AirAsia, inking a deal that includes a Raiders-branded jet.
Dubbed Xcellence, the Airbus A340 is a site to behold. The nose and tail don an eye patch and the Raiders shield. Three Raiders and a trio of Raiderettes are painted on the silver and black fuselage. And just in case you can't figure out the team, "Raiders" screams in ginormous white letters. AirAsia doesn't fly in the U.S. but AirAsia officials suggest the new deal may help it crack this market. For now, the only American action Xcellence will be seeing is in Oakland, where it lands on Sept. 14 for the Raiders' Monday Night Football opener against the Chargers.
As for the deal itself, the AirAsia-Raiders partnership isn't unique. JetBlue recently showed off its Major League Soccer-branded Airbus A320. Elizabeth Arden released a Daytona 500 cologne. And Eternal Image makes a line of MLB caskets and urns. But given the choice between flying like a Real Salt Lake-er, smelling like a race or resting in peace like an SF Giant, we prefer soaring like a Raider any day.
hello hot sauce and a pleasant day to you too. Doing some rewiring and taking a lunch break. Not posting too much but am still around. Somewhat disappointed about the short term price action now, but still believe in the longer term prospects. I am somewhat surprised at no uplisting as of yet. Been in this since Oct 06 and determined right then this was a longer term play. To complicate my record keeping even more I added more at a penny not long ago. So I sit back patiently tuning in at least once a day to enjoy the back and forth banter.
........al
a little lime wouldn't hurt either. just be very careful of damaging the root system.
.............al
beigledog- as long as those lilacs are under the shade of a tree they will always bend and stretch to find the sun. Have the same thing myself under some pine trees. Remove the one not producing as it may have a virus that could spread to the other. One thought- oak trees like pines have acidic residue(leaves, etc) and lilacs like their ph on the higher (alkaline) side of the scale. Don't try digging out the roots. Much easier to nip anything that might spring up in the next couple of years.
..........al
Hello all. I am one of the lucky few that got out at 2. Had em for almost a year at 1. I became suspicious last year when they raised the AS. Why raise it if they are not going to issue more shares? I looked to get out asap and was fortunate enough to get a bid at 2 and dump my shares. I was still considering buying again but once again they have raised the AS. Why? I have watched this almost daily and the share volumes should have taken this to 5 easily. I suspected company dilution and the recent increase in the AS has confirmed my crude analysis. I have serious doubts if this will ever go anywhere. But for the sake of all here, I hope it does. I wish you all well and the best of luck.
.........al
just FYI, re- ONFI
Hototc.com - Watch List for Friday 6-26-2009
Hototc.com has been compensated by a third party Waters Edge Advisors Inc. thirty thousand dollars for a one week AFTC advertising services contract. Hototc.com has been compensated by a third party Oceanic Consulting ten thousand dollars for a one time news alert on ONFI. The third party, may have shares and may liquidate it, which may negatively affect the stock price.
If China is just "talking" about buying gold with dollars, you know that it has already begun behind the scenes.
.......al
Thursday June 25, 04:40 AM
UPDATE 1-China should buy gold to hedge dlr fall-researcher
By Zhou Xin and Alan Wheatley BEIJING, June 25 (Reuters) - China should buy more gold because the dollar is poised for a fall and the metal is needed to support the greater international role envisaged for the yuan, a senior researcher with ADVERTISEMENT
the ruling Communist Party said on Thursday.
Li Lianzhong, who heads the economic department of the Party's policy research office, said China should use more of its $1.95 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to buy energy and natural resource assets.
Speaking at a foreign exchange and gold forum, Li also said that buying land in the United States was a better option for China than buying U.S. Treasury securities.
'Should we buy gold or U.S. Treasuries?' Li asked. 'The U.S. is printing dollars on a massive scale, and in view of that trend, according to the laws of economics, there is no doubt that the dollar will fall. So gold should be a better choice.'
There is no suggestion that Li, even though he is a senior researcher, was enunciating an agreed party line.
However, a debate is swirling in China about how the country can reduce its exposure to the dollar and to U.S. assets in case America's ultra-loose fiscal and monetary policy rekindles inflation and erodes the value of the dollar and U.S. Treasuries.
To that end, China has said it will buy up to $50 billion worth of bonds denominated in Special Drawing Rights, the International Monetary Fund's unit of account, to be issued by the IMF.
Chinese companies, at Beijing's bidding, are also snapping up energy and commodity supplies around the globe to fuel its fast-growing growing economy.
Sinopec, China's largest oil refiner, agreed on Wednesday to buy Swiss oil explorer Addax Petroleum Corp for $7.24 billion in China's biggest overseas acquisition.
China disclosed on April 24 that it had increased its holdings of gold to 1,054 tonnes from 600 tonnes since 2003.
However, China's foreign exchange reserves have grown so fast over the same period that gold's share of the stockpile, the largest in the world, has shrunk.
Li cited the high share of gold in the foreign exchange reserves of the United States, Italy, Germany and France, to argue that China's gold holdings, which account for about 1.6 percent of its reserves, are too small.
REFORMING THE SDR
China does not disclose the composition of its currency reserves, but bankers assume around 70 percent of it is held in dollar assets.
China is the largest single holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $763.5 billion at the end of April, according to U.S. Treasury data..
Analysts say this data set understates the true number as it does not capture paper bought through dealers in London or elsewhere.
Li said a second reason for buying more gold would be in anticipation of the yuan one day becoming a reserve currency.
The yuan is not convertible on the capital account, meaning it cannot be freely traded for other currencies for financial transactions that are not related to trade.
This rules out the yuan's use as an international reserve currency, for central banks would not be able to convert it quickly if necessary.
But, in a very preliminary step towards that goal, China is paving the way for greater use of the yuan beyond its borders.
The People's Bank of China has arranged currency swap deals with six countries since December totalling 650 billion yuan ($95 billion) so that trade and investment with China can be conducted in yuan, not dollars.
And China will soon allow selected firms in the southern province of Guangdong that trade with Hong Kong to settle their transactions in yuan, or renminbi.
'If the yuan should go international or become a reserve currency, China needs more gold to back that,' Li said.
When the yuan does become an international currency, which Li acknowledged was a long way off, he said the composition of the SDR should be reformed to include the Chinese currency.
Ideally, in the long term, the SDR would be made up of the dollar, euro, sterling and yen and yuan, each with a weighting of 20 percent, Li said.
The SDR is currently made up of the dollar (with a weighting of 44 percent), the euro (34 percent), the yen (11 percent) and sterling (11 percent)
The four currencies in the SDR, which must be convertible, are those issued by Fund members with the largest share of global trade. The weights assigned by the IMF are based on the value of exports and the amount of reserves denominated in those currencies.
The composition of the basket is reviewed every five years. the next review is due in 2010.
(Reporting by Zhou Xin and Alan Wheatley; Editing by Ken Wills)
Chuck Butler on silver manipulation
Straight Talk On Manipulation
By: Theodore Butler
-- Posted 23 June, 2009 | Share this article | Discuss This Article - Comments: 1 Source: SilverSeek.com
This article comes as a result of recent conversations with my friend and mentor Izzy Friedman. Our discussions on silver go back decades, to the mid-1980’s. Some may marvel at how two grown men can debate such an apparent narrow issue on almost a daily basis for 25 years. What could we possibly find new to talk about? The truth is that not only do we find new things, the debate oftentimes becomes quite heated. Why this intense continued interest in this metal?
Silver is an interesting topic in itself. Like all world commodities, it’s impossible to study and keep current on all the issues impacting silver without being aware of what is going on in the world. It forces you to be knowledgeable on a host of current events, including economics. It forces you to study history and contemplate the future. It helps make you well rounded. Such thought processes are more satisfying than keeping up on the latest celebrity gossip.
Most important is the financial angle to silver. This is the primary interest of those that read my articles. Silver is an asset that can make people a lot of money, perhaps even provide financial salvation to many. It requires that you buy it in the right form for the long term. Without the chance to score big financially, most people would not be that interested in silver. This big pending silver gain is tied to the hip with my main motivation for the past 25 years - ending the manipulation in silver. Fortunately, we are approaching the flip-side of this manipulation. That’s when the silver price stops behaving as it has for 25 years. This will be the glorious time for the price of silver.
I know that many readers have trouble fully grasping the manipulation issue. Admittedly, it is complex. I know that some believe that such a long-term manipulation is not possible. The CFTC has denied the silver manipulation for so long, that they have no graceful way to change their position, no matter how compelling the evidence. This manipulation is the most important market issue possible. That is evident by the attention that the regulators exhibit when dealing with it. However, it’s never about simple and direct answers, in a timely manner. It’s always a stall and never a fair and open debate. But the evidence of wrongdoing, in the form of a continued super concentration on the short side, has grown so compelling that another whitewash is likely to be as well received as the Iranian election. That’s why the silver manipulation appears to be on its last legs.
Once this manipulation ends we will be able to measure the full extent of the damage. The long-term price suppression is the prime component behind the depletion of silver over the past quarter century. The dangerous predicament that a few short sellers have placed our country and the world in is related to the minimal remaining inventories. We have no buffer to smooth out the coming shortage, except at extremely high prices. The artificial low prices caused by the short sellers are responsible for the depleted inventories. There is no water for the fire trucks to put out the fire caused by a silver shortage. The short sellers have seen to that.
Investors in silver, of course, won’t consider the wildly escalating prices as damage, nor should they. There will be great fortunes to be made in silver, but that still doesn’t excuse the dangerous predicament a few greedy short sellers and lax regulators have created. More people are becoming aware of the real story in silver and are doing what comes natural, namely, getting their share while there is still time. There are certainly no big government stocks of silver remaining in the world. We won’t wake up to any announcement that the IMF or any other official source will be selling silver, like was just announced in gold. How can they, when they don’t own any silver?
In addition to the crime of market manipulation and the pain to producers and their employees that these short sellers have caused, they are guilty of treason. That’s a very strong word, but I think it applies not only to the short sellers, but also to their protectors. That’s because they are placing our country in jeopardy in the manufacture of defense items. The US is dependent on imports for 70% of our silver consumption just like petroleum. We all know the danger in crude oil. That’s why we maintain a strategic petroleum reserve. We have no strategic silver stockpile, just empty vaults, thanks to the big short sellers. The coming world-wide silver shortage places us in jeopardy, not just for defense, but for all types of the manufactured goods produced here and the jobs that go with them. How a US regulator, the CFTC, can stall while this condition festers is beyond me.
Because of the manipulation, silver is a better long-term buy than at any time in the past 25 years. I see us reaching a more extreme shortage scenario with price peaks that are, quite frankly, so astonishing I don’t care to pinpoint them here. On the one hand we should be outraged about the continued illegality of the ongoing price scam, while on the other hand elated over the extreme price escalation that will undoubtedly occur because of it. There will be nothing moderate about the outcome.
One last thing. As I write this, it appears that the “normal” resolution of the lopsided market structure in COMEX gold and silver is unfolding. In other words, the big shorts are ripping the rug out from under the tech fund leveraged longs. When this rug-pulling is completed, it is my strong conviction that this will be, once again, an absolutely perfect time to buy silver and put it away. And if the CFTC ever gets around to enforcing the law, it will be the last time such an opportunity exists.
David Morgan on silver-
David Morgan: We Could See Silver Outperform Gold 2:1
By: The Gold Report and David Morgan, Silver-Investor.com
-- Posted 23 June, 2009 | Share this article | Discuss This Article - Comments: 0 Source: SilverSeek.com
David Morgan, whose interest in silver dates to the tender age of 11, returns to The Gold Report today to discuss the latest buzz about his favorite subject. One of the world's leading authorities on silver as a commodity, an investment, a safe haven and an increasingly important manufacturing metal, he expects this year's stronger-than-anticipated late spring climb to lose momentum before the end of the month. Longer term, though, the founder of the respected monthly, The Morgan Report, sees silver appreciating at a faster pace than gold. And while he also likes the idea of monetizing silver—rather than gold, because silver is far more liquid—that's one wish he does not expect to see granted.
The Gold Report: Last month saw the biggest single gain in silver since the 1980s. Why did this happen when it did? And what should we expect in the months to come?
David Morgan: I don't know if anyone can really answer why it happened in May. This sounds trite, but it's true: Any market, commodity or stock, is based on buying or selling pressure. A lot of buying pressure in silver from all angles—the exchange traded funds, the mining equities, and the physical market itself—combined to really push the market higher.
Normally you see good seasonality in precious metals, with peaks sometime in the first quarter every year. We've seen the May peak a couple of times before, the big peak in 2008 also came in May. Here we are again actually in early June and we're still near a peak. I do believe, unfortunately, that we will see the top of this on an intermediate-term basis.
TGR: And what will happen then?
DM: Loss of momentum. I've been following this market for more than 30 years and I'm good at making calls. It has a very historic parabolic pattern, silver especially. Basically, like anything, it loses momentum. If you throw a baseball up into the air, it reaches its apex. As it's getting to its peak, it's starting to run out of energy. It's the same in the stock market. You starting to run out of energy and that energy is new buyers. So I think we're getting to that point. Also, it's very obvious if you look at the charts. As far as everything I know so far, it appears as if we're going to hit a peak fairly soon.
There could always be surprises, especially on the silver side. Silver is such a small market that anything can happen. It wouldn't take much buying to continue to accelerate silver to the upside. As an example, when Warren Buffett bought silver, the silver market went from under $5 to $8 very, very rapidly. Everybody wondered what was going on. It was only after the fact, once Buffett announced that he'd bought 129.7 million ounces of silver, that we learned the reason for that rapid rise.
So, certainly, some large buyer could be waiting in the wings to come into the silver market. That kind of new buying could take silver to $20 or $25, who knows? It depends on how much buying is available; how much is done would determine where the price rests. Barring an event of that nature, I think we're near a top—temporarily.
Longer term, I believe we're going to see silver again outpace gold as it has done this year. And I don't see the top of this market coming until probably 2011 to 2012, and perhaps longer than that.
TGR: When you say 'this market,' are you referring to precious metals as a kind of hedge against inflation? Or do you mean silver specifically?
DM: The precious metals move together, generally. When they peaked in January of 1980, they basically peaked nearly the same day. Whether that'll happen the next time around, I don't know, but I think they'll peak probably within the same month or so.
There are arguments on both sides. People such as Jim Sinclair state that gold is going to make a huge rally and it's really not going to pull back but will stay at a very high level. Certainly that could be the case if gold were remonetized (at a high price) at some point.
I don't think silver will ever be remonetized, though I would like to see that happen. My friend in Mexico, Hugo Salinas Price, proposed putting silver into circulation alongside the Mexican peso. It was an extremely favorable idea to not only the governors of all the states of Mexico, but additionally to almost all the legislature and something like 90% of the people. However, the banking establishment has a lot of clout in Mexico, and right now the proposal has been shot down.
TGR: Assuming that precious metals investors should use different strategies for silver versus gold, could you highlight the difference?
DM: There's a widely held perception that gold is much, much different than silver. Gold-centric people have the philosophy that gold is the only monetary asset available and it's the only safe-haven asset. But the actual objective truth is that silver has about an 85% correlation with the price of gold. It doesn't move exactly as gold moves, but it does most of the time. So regardless of what guru or what gold expert you listen to, you have to stay grounded and realize that silver and gold pretty much march to the same drummer.
Of course, silver is a smaller market, so its moves are greater percentage-wise than gold's. It's like a NASDAQ stock versus a Dow stock. I think that's a good analogy. Gold is like the Dow stock; more of a sure thing. It trudges along as long as you're in a bull market and you're pretty safe buying it. Silver is more like a NASDAQ stock. It has bigger moves up and down, but chances for extreme gains are much greater than with the Dow stock.
In my opinion, metals portfolios should have both gold and silver. The advantage of silver is actually liquidity. Although more gold than silver is available in investment form, silver has a much lower price, which makes it far more liquid. Gold is not nearly as liquid. It's pretty hard to buy groceries or gasoline with a gold coin in circulation when it has a value of $1,000.
TGR: In January the ratio of silver to gold was on the wider end than usual, so many people who follow silver were expecting a good run up to return to a more traditional ratio. What is that ratio and where are we today?
DM: This ratio question is very controversial. I've probably become more of an adherent to the ratio than many others. If we go back in history and look at the background, and for 4,500 years we charted this out and every century measured one foot long, the chart for 4,500 years would be about 45 feet. And for every foot of that chart, you'd have a gold/silver ratio below 16:1 except for the last 19 inches of that chart. So, let that sink in for a moment please!
If you can picture that in your mind, the chart measures 45 feet from left to right and the ratio is 16:1 or less for every foot except for the last 19 inches, you're visualizing monetary history. (This information courtesy of Franklin Sanders of The Money Changer.)
For many, many hundreds of years, the ratio was 12:1, which is what I call the natural ratio. The natural ratio is how it came out of the ground relative to gold for all of those centuries. No one had a mandate for a 'correct' ratio. The marketplace determined the ratio based on what came out of the ground. Today the ratio favors silver from the aspect now that the natural ratio is now 8:1, which means that in the earth's surface, there's roughly eight ounces of silver available for every ounce of gold that's available.
Silver usually disperses itself nearer the surface and a lot of that easy-to-get-to silver has already been mined out of the earth's surface. During one of the periods that the metals were "officially" monetized, Sir Isaac Newton established the ratio of silver to gold at 15.5:1. That's what I call the monetary or the classic ratio, which held up until about 1873. The Crime of 1873 (the Coinage Act of 1873) basically demonetized silver. At that time, the ratio started to take off and it's been as high as 100:1 a couple of times in recent history.
Because silver is becoming scarcer and its uses continue to increase and investment awareness grows, I believe that the ratio will favor silver over the longer term. When I said that the silver market bottomed in September of 2003, I was very accurate with that call. The ratio was roughly 80:1 then. Today it stands at about 60:1. It's been as low as about 50:1 during this bull market. At the top of the market, we may see the classic ratio reestablished.
The classic or monetary ratio, as I call it, was reestablished very briefly in 1980, when silver peaked. The ratio got to around the16:1 level at that time. I think we could reasonably see 30:1, which would mean that silver would outperform gold 2:1 from here on out. However, to be consistent I have stated that in a buying panic we might even see a 10:1 ratio. I want to keep my creditability, before we get that type of ratio we need to see 50:1, then 40:1 and so on; in other words, let us watch the market before we make too wild a forecast.
TGR: How does paying attention to the ratio benefit the investor?
DM: There are lots of ways to look at the ratio. It's just numbers. Everything I've said to this point is pretty much history, so does it mean anything? I think it does. Whether you put a lot of faith in the ratio is an individual choice. What does a ratio do to your advantage?
From my perspective, it's a huge advantage. These metals trade within a wide channel, and I do physical trading between gold and silver. When silver is dear, we sell it; when it isn't, we buy it back. So you can actually trade this ratio back and forth and make money by just driving down to your coin dealer or mailing your metal in to your favorite coin dealer.
In summary, there are advantages to this ratio if you pay attention and know what you're doing. I like it. And I like the wide swings because, as I said, you can take advantage of them. You can end up with a much bigger position in the metals just by swapping silver and gold back and forth.
TGR: How do you know when silver becomes more dear or less dear if it trades in a much wider band?
DM: There are several ways and, of course, it's an art—not a science. One is by using technical analysis. A second one is looking at sentiment. Not very many articles were favorable to silver a couple of months ago; now tons of articles are talking about silver. I'm reading articles by people I've never heard of, and that's fine. I always encourage new people to come into the market. I'm a big free-market guy. In fact, I've said many times and will state it again—the "free-est" market of all is the free market of ideas. Everybody who wants to should have a voice on whatever subject they want.
TGR: You've been kind enough to write a series of articles on basic silver investing, which we're going to feature in The Gold Report in our Guide to Silver Investing every week. Would you like to share any thoughts about this series for our readers to whet their appetites?
DM: I would. We're on the verge of the next big move up in the metals. Whether that happens this summer or next spring, I don't know, but I know it's going to take place. A lot of people will be entering this market for the first time.
As you know, gold gets a lot of free publicity. It's become almost mainstream. You hear it on Wall Street, you hear it on CNN, CNBC, some of the financial channels. But silver is hardly ever mentioned. So I thought it was a good public service to write kind of the primer on the silver market, on how you establish an investment position in silver, why it's an important part of a precious metals portfolio.
I was happy to do it, I'm glad you asked me to—I think it's going to be beneficial to some people out there who are at least curious enough to investigate the silver investment realm.
TGR: With all of the publicity focused on gold, the metal itself, a lot of the gold mining companies, particularly the seniors, also have enjoyed a lot of media attention and have seen a really great run up in stock prices. What's been happening with the silver producers?
DM: Silver mining companies have gone up equal to the gold mining companies, better in most cases. You don't see a lot of that in the news, but I study as much as I can on both sides—gold and silver—but I devote more time to silver. There's been quite a bit of coverage lately—not in the mainstream but on the Internet—regarding silver and silver stocks. A lot of these stocks have done quite well, as you would expect. Silver's had its best month (May 2009) in 22 years, so, obviously, somebody's going to notice that. A lot of latecomers, so to speak, are jumping on the silver bandwagon right now.
If silver does its usual, which is to disappoint right at the top, you probably won't hear from some of these people again for a while. The markets get overbought on the way up and they get oversold on the way down. But generally speaking, you've got to look at the major trend and the major trend is still up for both of these metals.
Because of that fact, if you align yourself with a major trend, you're going to come out quite well in the long run. The problem with today's investors is that most of them are failed speculators. They want everything to go their way for a week or a month or two and then trade out. Certainly, you can make more money trading than you can in any other way, but it's extremely difficult. That's why I advocate keeping a core position on about 75% and trade with 25%. That way, if anybody mis-times the market and you know you're in a major bull market, you're still going to come out way, way, way ahead.
TGR: In that core position of 75%, do you have a certain percentage in seniors versus juniors?
DM: I do, but not really in percentages. Very much of the big money goes into the major companies that have huge potential. A lot of times I actually write options against my position, as I'm doing now. I think that we are at an intermediate top. These stocks have gone up substantially. I can rent my stock for about a 17% yield for maybe an eight-month write. And if the market comes back, as I expect it will, somebody has rented my stock from me and the premium comes out of that. I keep the option premium, and I also keep my stock.
I use that option premium as my fun money. I take that money and put it into some of my favorite juniors. But I advocate small money for smaller companies that are highly speculative. You really want to bet money you can afford to lose. In other words, if you put a lot of money in a junior and it's going to ruin your life if it fails, you're doing the wrong thing.
If you want big money, serious money goes into serious companies. Fun money goes into fun companies. That's the way I approach it.
TGR: What do you expect for the final phase or leg of the precious metals market?
DM: I think what we just saw into early June is a pretty good precursor to it, meaning that these metals keep going up in price; they can't go any higher and yet they do continue to move up. In the final leg some of your gurus like me might be saying they've peaked and they continue to go up. At that point, people start getting greedy and think it can continue forever. This is known as a blow-off top but sooner or later the bubble does burst.
It's just like what happens in all markets. It happened in the housing market, it happened during the technology boom. People were buying stocks there that were cheap at the top because they were cheap and these companies had absolutely no merit whatsoever. You'll see the same thing happen in the gold and silver sector, especially with the mining stocks in my view. The problem this time is selling gold or silver (the actual metal) might not be wise this time and I will address my readers at the time on strategies I have already developed to keep them profitable and safe at the same time.
TGR: When silver is frothy and there's some summer slump, many times you'll see a pullback in exploration. Some companies seem to be relying a lot on exploration. Could they weather a longer-term slump in the silver price?
DM: You have to ask yourself two simple but fundamental questions: 1) How much money do they have in the treasury?; and 2) What is their burn rate? You really have to look at that and find out whether your favorite exploration company can weather another year or so of downtrend. I doubt it's going to take that long, but it may be two years. In any case, at the end of that time, you still want to have a fair amount of cash to proceed onward, because without cash you can't continue a drill program. So you have to ask the right questions.
There are, undoubtedly, some very good exploration companies out there that are out of cash and basically unable to raise any more. The really, really good ones will be cherry-picked by companies that maybe don't have as good a project but do have the cash to buy them up and thus make a better combined company for their shareholders. If I were on the board on any mining company, that would be my recommendation—use cash wisely to strengthen shareholder value.
You have to be very careful, I think. The heyday of easy money in the mining sector is over. You can't just blindly buy any company that has gold or silver in its name and expect to make 500% anymore. You have to be much more careful about where you place your money from here on out.
I do need to give a caveat, though.
TGR: What's that?
DM: When the public rushes into the market, you will see any company that has gold or silver in its name start to move. But it's a very, very short period of time before it peaks—similar to what happened to the technology boom. At the end, the public was buying some really ridiculous companies because they were technology stocks, but not for any other reason.
Looks like we are not alone-
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/20/745038/--Goldman-Sachs-to-make-record-bonus-payout-
" Goldman Sachs to make record bonus payout "
by Dburn
Digg this! Share this on Twitter - " Goldman Sachs to make record bonus payout "Tweet this submit to reddit Share This
Sat Jun 20, 2009 at 07:39:04 PM PDT
This of course was from The Guardian. As we struggle with record unemployment, a corrupt congress and a deepening suspicion that Goldman Sachs has far more influence on the govt than most corporations do in the aggregate we are now treated with news that the top 1% and 10% are going to add a huge pile this year.
How much do they plan to pay out. Well , as I remember a Monte Python flick a while back "a Lot".
Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firms 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.
* Dburn's diary :: ::
*
How can this possibly be? At the start of the year, the imminent collapse of the banking system was the toast talk of the town. Within 6 months Goldman, while still owing TARP funds is paying out 600 Million in bonuses from Q1 on the BS profits they made that included a omission of the billion dollar loss they suffered in Dec that apparently fell into a different year or structure. I forget which excuse. Then the heavy political pressure put the FASB board, who were told to get rid of mark to market accounting and allow banks and bank holding companies to value their assets using some sort of convoluted future cash flow model which is another way of saying "lie motherfuckers". They happily did what they were told.
A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.
So now in the second quarter as competition is reduced and nothing is done about regulating the derivatives market, the company makes record profits from it's trading desk. I just want to know who is paying off their derivative bets. I'm "betting" we are.
Does a feeling of nausea hit when you read this. A kind of sickness that is reflected in the Death Clock I wrote this week.
Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses if, as predicted, it completed its most profitable year ever. Figures next month detailing the firms second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.
As we struggle to make our Health Insurance payments to companies who have absolutely no intention of changing so our payments our for a 3 cent card that says "We will fuck you any chance we get". We know now they will start rolling out the heavy armor this summer as Goldman bets, that are not really bets, because they are inside the govt, on who the winners will be. They still have our TARP money even as they raise 5 Billion from the equity markets.
I believe Buffet had an option to purchase more Goldman Stock
at $115.00. As it hovers in the $140 mark, why wouldn't he?
When we are stilling seeing 10,000 foreclosures a day and three more banks fail this week-end, we find out that the 350,000 figure we heard on jobs lost last month,was not because of people hiring. It was an 220,000 "adjustment " to the total as a result of a new in the life death model or some such shit that has a spooky resemblance to the FASB adjustment from mark to markets.
No this govt isn't for sale. That happened a long time ago. It has been purchased. I hate this sinking feeling that the outcome of the so Health Care reform is preordained. An old bloody band-aid here. A rusty needle stitch there, a pat on the bottom and a exhortation to "go out and get another job" because prices are doubling to make up for the record lobbying dollars and the 2.2 billion they have spent in the last decade buying off the Govt.
Do you wonder if the various owners have conflicts over who should get what? You got Defense, Health care , Fiance and Food all jockeying for position as these less than average people in congress who don't understand anything about any of it, with few exceptions, make decisions on who gets 4 trillion dollars a year.
The economy is not improving by any stretch of the imagination, yet Goldman announces record profits even though they hold one of the highest amount of home mortgages than any bank/investment bank out there. So this 10,000 foreclosures a day doesn't effect them. As their CEO confidently said about the AIG CDSs, "we're fully hedged". Yes you are. Your hedge is your hand around our balls and it's time it was cut the fuck off.
If you look at my last diary, you'll see how they managed to get their hands around where they are and cause us to take money we didn't have to bail their asses out. No matter where you are in your belief of the Democrats, faith is starting to crumble at the overwhelming evidence that keeps making it's way into the public discourse that our system is so screwed that the concept of political parties is really "quaint".
We have seen what happens when greed goes unchecked along with the desire for more and more power. I saw it on Google a few weeks ago when a childhood friend, a life long Democrat who worked in the house, changed his worn out $161,000 job for a lobbing job that pays somewhere in
the neighborhood of 400,000+ . Why not, we are paying his 75% pension plus all his health care benefits. His client list? A whose who of all the above.
I'm get more and more convinced that we will have to just watch this go out to it's logical end. I've seen the suggestions of campaign finance reform and a bunch of other fixes that coincidentally all require congressional support. We have threatened primaries. We have dialed till our finger dropped off. We spend a inordinate amount of time obsessing that political heroes can't possibly be involved. Yet as one person said to me "silence is complicity".
Perhaps Obama came into this thinking rather naively that if he could find enough honest people from both sides to get a coalition together, inroads could be made. Naive yes. Corrupt and uncaring as he has been made out to be , no. Sorry I'm not in that crowd.
But I think we are getting close to the time when Obama needs to have a talk with the country again. He might even consider resigning to show how serious it is. I can hear the gasps and the arguments, if the diary is even read. But I'm of firm belief that no amount of protest, no amount of pleading and begging is going to get us back to a point where govt isn't an extension of large corporations. The merger is complete.
We need to hear that from someone inside and then we need to see action from inside from politicians who are part of the silent and complicit majority or minority. The alternative is to just watch as this slow motion train wreck keeps piling up the dead.
Update: Sorry for any nastiness on my part. Too much anger I guess. Going to bed. Shake it off. Thanks for reading my little diary.
Tags: Goldman Sachs, TARP, Healthcare, sigh (all tags) :: Previous Tag
dan- thanks for the correction. I had thought the IMF approval by congress was included in the Afgan/Iraq military spending bill. Apparently I misread.
........al
As we all know the IMF gold sales have been approved and signed into law. The question is what might this do to the gold market? IMHO, it may have a slight negative effect short term, maybe just a slight dip, just based on the news and the actual start of the selling. I don't think any of it will even hit the market. Putting together all the news about China's dollar worries and their inclination to diversify, it's quite probable all that gold will end up in the vaults of the Chinese central bank. What a better way to rid the balance sheet of some dollars and not cause a major stir in the metals market. Long term, I can see no way that IMF gold sales will do any harm to the gold market. European central bank sales in the past several years have dumped far more gold into the market than anything the IMF has to sell and look what happenned to the price of gold. I would appreciate any opinions pro or con. Thanks and happy Father's day to all the proud papas out there.
............al
Brendan- Let me give this a try in answer. First I read the K in it's entirety. Not a good read not only IMO but I don't think anyone was too happy with it. Yes, if they slip in another reverse split I think all investor confidence will be lost, the pps will tank lower than it's ever been as most sell off their shares. Will it happen? I don't think so, but that's only my opinion. Who can know what goes on in the main office behind closed doors.
What does the future possibly hold? First I'll say I'm still holding over 3 million shares and haven't sold a one even after reading the K. I still see some kind of future here that would be made brighter with the addition of more licenses. I still have the longer term view. Some people do pre arrange their own funerals, most do not. The excitement for these products doesn't come from today's 80+ year olds, rather from the next generation coming up. Would grandpa who grew up listening to radio rather than TV want to be buried in a photon torpedo? I seriously doubt it. The concept is still sound and coming but the time hasn't hit with full force yet.
$1 share price? I'd love to see it. But I think the share structure needs to be seriously addressed before that happens. See Lurker's posts to get a better handle on that issue. I have seen stranger things happen on buying frenzies in the past but a maket cap of over 1/2 billion $ could not be sustained without large increases in sales numbers. I'm positive on the company but still also a realist.
As for the near future, right now I'll be happy to see the uplist and the 1st quarter Q. I hope it will look better than the K, but if not I'm holding on for now anyway. My ETNL value is red like everyone elses. I'll be scrutinizing each 10Q thoroughly. I'm looking forward to new product releases also. They have distibutorships and the industry is starting to embrace the concept. In an industry known for being ultra conservative, it's has got to mean there has been public interest in the current product lines. Hope this helped a little.
And good morning everyone.
...........al
Hi Heppie- I am in agreement with you all the way. I don't think anyone was happy with that 10K. Personally I wasn't expecting any real groundbreaking good news from it. I do admit it was worse than I expected and can't see why anyone would be "happy" with it other than it was filed and accepted by the SEC. Yes they have some problems to deal with. On top of the problems now comes very unhappy shareholders to deal with. But, when you go public and take public monies you had better learn to deal with shareholders. It's part of the deal.
The 2 things that are almost always the cause of business failures are undercapitalization and mismanagement. I'd like to make this a post to reassure everyone that everything will be OK, the company is doing just fine and it's all good. I can't do that. No one can say for sure. Welcome to pennystock world.
In my opinion, I think they will get over this big bump in the road. It will take time. I'm still looking at the big picture of a changing funeral industry and this company on the leading edge of it. For now I'm willing to wait it out. Each individual investor has to chose for him or her self what they will do. Everyone's circumstances are different. What might change my mind? - Another reverse split. It would be the death of any kind of investor confidence left.
Right now I'm waiting for the 10Q. Haven't sold any shares on the releae of the K and won't as long as the Q's are improving with each quarter and no reverse splits.
Disappointed but not down and out yet-
............al
The crack that may break to dam:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Business/Mint+moves+halt+possible+gold/1690805/story.html
OTTAWA — To halt a possible “run” on the gold it safeguards for private businesses, the Royal Canadian Mint is reassuring customers their deposits are fully accounted for and in secure vaults as the investigation continues into as much as $20 million in lost precious metals.
Since the scandal broke last week, some precious metals market advisers have been trying to instigate “some kind of a run” on the custodial accounts of the Ottawa mint and other mints around the world, said Jon Nadler, senior metals market analyst with with Montreal-based Kitco, one of the world’s leading precious metals bullion dealers.
“I cannot name names, but I’ve seen a number of forums and blogs and newsletter alerts from people who claim to be market analysts and saying, ‘You should take delivery of everything that’s in storage, no matter who you keep it with because of things like this,’” Nadler said in an interview Friday, calling the tactic “pathetic.”
The federal government this week ordered the mint to call for an RCMP criminal probe, after a four-month external audit was unable to reconcile the unaccounted-for gold and other precious metals at the mint’s Sussex Drive headquarters. Mint insiders tell the Citizen the missing metals could be worth as much as $20 million. The RCMP continues to review the request for an investigation. The audit findings are expected to be made public next week.
In the cut-throat world of international bullion refining and minting, any loss of confidence in the mint’s reputation as a world-class operation could threaten future business.
For Kitco, which stores some of its gold and precious metals at the mint as well as some of its clients’ metals, the unaccounted-for gold mystery is “clearly not an issue,” said Nadler.
Letters, he said, were sent to the company and other custodial customers June 4, a day after the Citizen broke the story, in which mint chief operating officer Beverley Lepine assured them, “all individual customer holdings and metal deposits entrusted with the Royal Canadian Mint are secure and have been fully accounted for.”
Whatever the outcome of the audit and anticipated police probe, people knowledgeable with mint operations say it’s unlikely the gold was stolen, and certainly not all at once.
Referring to the blockbuster 2003 gold-heist movie The Italian Job, Nadler said, “people tunnelling under vaults and making off with mass quantities of gold and walking out the front door, this just doesn’t happen.”
In a Friday blog posting on the website of the International Business Times, Nadler wrote: “Some over-zealous alarmists need to get a grip and learn how vaults, insurance policies, and such operate in the real world. Until then, we can only call them saboteurs. Anyone who listens to them is sadly misinformed.”
In the later interview, he said, “I can appreciate this atmosphere of post-Madoff mania, but at the same time, when you have a government entity that you’re dealing with and they have a hundred years of track record under their belt, your worry level is certainly misplaced. We’re quite comfortable sleeping at night and so are our clients.”
Meanwhile, mint chairman James Love says one possible, but unconfirmed, explanation for the mystery is a programming problem with a new computer system used to track the mint’s precious metal reserves.
In a media interview this week that attracted scant coverage, Love said, “it’s still possible that it is some sort of a programming error in that system. Obviously frauds and security breaches happen, so we haven’t ruled anything out. But we simply don’t believe that that’s the sort of thing that happened.”
Further, the issue may be traced to a decision not to re-refine an estimated 90 tonnes of slag for residual gold not captured during the initial refining process. Because of the huge demand for gold last year, there was no time, explained Love.
“An estimate was made at the year end as to what the value of the gold in this slag would be, and it was thought that this could explain a significant portion of this reconciliation difference. The amount of gold that was determined to be in that slag was significantly higher than the estimate that was originally used,” he said in the report.
“That went a significant distance in reconciling the rolling inventory to the physical count, but certainly not far enough from our point of view.”
It’s not clear what happened to the slag.
The initial discrepancy at issue was less than 0.5 per cent of the gold that had flowed through the facility last year, Love said.
Nadler said though he is not privy to the external audit findings, “I’m reasonably sure that it’s an accounting issue and literally a reconciliation issue, where a shipment was either short or diverted or what have you. Even if it’s proven to be actual malfeasance, I’m sure that the coverages that they have in place are ample to make (up) any particular shortfall.”
4God- anyone that thinks this stuff is not going to happen should read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Great articles.
...........al
Northwestern Mutual Makes First Gold Buy in 152 Years
By Andrew Frye
June 1 (Bloomberg) -- Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., the third-largest U.S. life insurer by 2008 sales, has bought gold for the first time the company’s 152-year history to hedge against further asset declines.
“Gold just seems to make sense; it’s a store of value,” Chief Executive Officer Edward Zore said in an interview following his comments at a conference hosted by Standard & Poor’s in Brooklyn. “In the Depression, gold did very, very well.”
Northwestern Mutual has accumulated about $400 million in gold, and Zore said the price could double or even rise fivefold if the economy continues to weaken. Gold gained 10 percent last month, the most since November. The commodity has more than tripled since 2000, rising for eight straight years. Gold futures for August delivery slipped $4.80 to $975.50 at 4:03 p.m. in New York.
“The downside risk is limited, but the upside is large,” Zore said. “We have stocks in our portfolio that lost 95 percent.” Gold “is not going down to $90.”
Policyholder-owned Northwestern Mutual, based in Milwaukee, ranks third by 2008 life insurance premiums according to data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The data excludes annuities.
To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Frye in New York at afrye@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: June 1, 2009 16:34 EDT
Hi Heppie- planning to be there in Boston this fall. I am certainly looking forward to meeting everyone there at that time.
.......al