Thought Of The Day
A restaurant that has been used to launder money must be burnt down to keep the secret that it never had any significant number of clients. This was the case with Enron through the shredding of documents and bankruptcy.
Is it possible that the rollout of proprietary trading from major investment banks is the means of burying the mark up of OTC paper, compliments of FASB, that passed through those proprietary trading entities as enormous continuous daily trading profits?
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
What was Mr. Hitzfeld saying on December 16th 2001? My comments were set in cement in a Forbes interview that year.
He has the numbers right, just slightly low and late.
Gold’s Most-Accurate Forecaster Hitzfeld Raises 2011′s Estimate to $1,400
By Nicholas Larkin – Sep 6, 2010 11:02 AM ET
UniCredit SpA’s Jochen Hitzfeld, the most accurate gold forecaster tracked by Bloomberg in the last three quarters, raised his estimate for the metal’s average price next year by 12 percent to $1,400 an ounce.
Bullion will average $1,600 an ounce in 2012, Munich-based Hitzfeld said today in a report. He increased next year’s forecast from $1,250. Gold for immediate delivery traded at $1,249.75 at 3:45 p.m. in London, 1.2 percent below a record $1,265.30 reached on June 21.
The metal is headed for a 10th annual climb in a row this year, helped by concern about the effect of government economic- stimulus plans and speculation about increased demand in China, the world’s second-largest buyer after India. The Federal Reserve last month decided to restart Treasury purchases, its first attempt to bolster growth since March 2009 to keep the U.S. economy from relapsing into recession.
“The gold market reacted extremely positively to a monetization of government debt” in the past, Hitzfeld said. “In the interim, a growing number of Chinese investors are also discovering the gold market. The Chinese demand will now increasingly be felt on the global markets.”
China, the world’s biggest gold producer, last month unveiled plans to let more banks import and export bullion and give foreign companies greater access to trading.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Dearest Ayn Rand,
Please forgive me.
Alan G.
Alan Greenspan: Hedge Against the Federal Reserve and Buy Gold
Monday, September 6, 2010
The curious Alan Greenspan, who is now 84 years old, appears to have come full circle and returned to the ideas of his earlier years. In 1966, at the age of 40, he wrote a paper calling for the United States to return to a full gold standard and warned of the dangers of not doing so:
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.
He, of course, abandoned this view, at least publicly, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and became the money printing puppeteer that through the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the banking system. These actions ultimately resulted in the collapse of the housing market, a financial crisis and an economic crisis so severe that it must be compared to the Great Depression.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The plot thickens?
FBI escorts undersea evidence to NASA base in hunt for oil secrets
INVESTIGATORS looking into what went wrong in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are a step closer to answers.
A key piece of evidence is now secure aboard a boat after engineers took 29 hours to lift the 15.24m-long, 300-tonne blowout preventer from 1.6km beneath the sea, and the five-storey-high device looked largely intact yesterday, with black stains on the yellow metal.
FBI agents will escort the device back to a NASA facility in Louisiana for analysis.
Crews had delayed raising the device after icelike crystals called hydrates, which are combustible, formed on it. The device could not be safely lifted from the water until the hydrates melted.
Hydrates form when gases such as methane mix with water under high pressure and cold temperatures. The crystals caused BP problems in May, when hydrates formed on a 100-tonne, four-storey dome the company tried to place over the leak to contain it.
The April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon killed 11 workers and led to a massive 780 million litres of oil spewing from the undersea well.
