Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Now tell me this chart does not look like our illustration number one, a ski jump.
How about housing’s first breakdown of strong support?
Failure to return to the support and through it is downright SCARY.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The reason for this is the quiet disaster. The major losses in retirement program investments is twofold:
1. The legal liability that the managers of pension funds absolutely have as compared to your average whacked hedgie.
2. The fact that for decades pension funds have been Wall Street’s circular file for junk.
Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System selling off $3B to cover benefits
By: Barry B. Burr August 24, 2010
(Crain’s) — Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, Springfield, plans to sell $3 billion in investments, or about 10% of its $33.1 billion in assets, in the current fiscal year to pay pension benefits, according to Dave Urbanek, public information officer.
The system is the fifth Illinois statewide defined benefit plan to sell off investments this fiscal year to pay benefits.
Illinois State Universities Retirement System, Champaign, expects to sell $1.2 billion in investments from its $12.2 billion defined benefit fund this fiscal year to raise liquidity to pay benefits to participants.
The Illinois State Board of Investment, Chicago, could sell $840 million investments from its $9.9 billion fund to pay benefits of the Illinois State Employees’ Retirement System, Illinois Judges’ Retirement System and Illinois General Assembly Retirement System. ISBI oversees the investments of the three systems.
The liquidity stress from the investment sales at the five plans could force each of them to restructure their strategic asset allocations, terminate investment managers and search for new managers.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Gold has ethics for one major reason: because there is no liabilities attached to gold as there are to all Fiat currencies in one degree or another.
The Ethics of Gold
Tuesday, 24 August 2010 at 11:14, By Ron Robins, Founder & Analyst – Investing for the Soul
The rising price of gold stands as the ethical barometer of the mismanagement of our fiscal, monetary, and currency systems. Gold is in the early stages of re-asserting its historic role of helping to bring order to monetary and currency chaos. Its price has risen more than fourfold over the past ten years as a result of investors anticipating the predictable financial and currency chaos we have today—and what is likely yet to come.
The central banks and government treasuries, particularly those of the US, Europe, and Japan, have been weakened and our trust in them eroded. For decades they assured us that only they and their paper currencies and fractional reserve banking systems can keep our economies growing forever. They are now failing for all to see. And before the ships of state sink and economies further submerge they bail out their banking friends.
The monetary and currency systems and organisations responsible for them are deteriorating because they essentially lack an ethical standard. That is not to say that most individuals in these organisations are unethical. It is that as organizations they implemented policies over the past several decades that knowingly—or they should have known—would eventually lead to great financial and economic hardship.
One such policy was the encouragement of debt creation way beyond income or economic growth. When this policy failed, it led to tens of millions of people losing their jobs globally, millions losing their homes, and retirees in developed countries losing their savings as interest rates were reduced to near zero. It is in this sense that these organizations were, and are, without an ethical standard.
To rise to the top among many of these banking and financial organizations, requires not only brilliance, but usually subservience to base instinctual values of status and greed.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
If the S&P wants to instantaneously disintegrate, there is a simple way – downgrade the USA.
I can see the Navy Seals storming their office.
S&P Says US Should Act to Protect AAA-Rating: Report
Published: Thursday, 26 Aug 2010 | 6:27 AM ET
The United States government needs to take steps to preserve its top AAA-rating, a Standard & Poor’s Ratings (S&P) official told Dow Jones newswire in an interview published on Thursday.
Financial Crisis
The measures taken in response to recommendations President Barack Obama’s commission on fiscal responsibility would be crucial in the view S&P takes on the U.S. credit rating, he said.
"It is very important for the credit standing of the United States that the Congress considers very carefully what the fiscal commission proposes," John Chambers, chairman of S&P’s sovereign rating committee, was quoted as saying.
"It is very important for Congress to take the required steps."
S&P maintains the United States’ top AAA rating with a stable outlook, meaning there is not a significant chance of a change in the near future.
