An interesting article and series of email exchanges with a metals markets insider and his attempt to whistleblow about how the markets are manipulated by big traders.

Governments run the printing presses and bailed out the banks, now who is going to bail the governments out?

It's dead..no it's aliveeeeee! And it's coming for your branez! No..it's...reaching for your wallet! And..wait..look! Zombies are supposed to just shuffle slow towards you with their hands out! These zombies do that, but they also got guns!

Chrysler will be offering an EV version of their Fiat 500 small car next year. The gas version is on track for the end of this year to be sold in the US. Both will be made in Mexico. They also announced a drop in plans for a hybrid pickup.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2219887120100322

Boy howdy I can relate to this scenario, floods turning fields into lakes.

They don't know yet if it will be as bad as last year, but it might, and a lot of those guys are hurting financially because of lower yield and stock losses last year. You just can't have too many back to back bad years, because most modern big farms run on a yearly credit, they borrow huge sums, then hope for the best and make enough to pay the bills deal. The only thing that saved my @$$ets this winter is we had enough hay stockpiled in the barn to let us ride through not being able to hay last fall because it was just too dang sloppy muddy wet, and it's been wet all winter, it's soaking wet now, and we got two days of rain coming starting this weekend. And what they say in the article is true, this effects beyond row crops, about spring calving and the ground being too wet and cold, sometimes the little guys don't make it. A wildcard there, ya never know.

A large and (barely) bipartisan letter has been sent to the Treasury secretary demanding some action on China keeping the Yuan/Renminbi so low. They say this is seriously impeding trade, and I agree.

  Technically of course, China can do what it wants as well, so who cares? Let's rock *now* while we still can, no need to wait any longer.

    It is WAY past time for a little tariff action at the borders to address this issue, along with some regulation action on wealthy manufacturing real jobs getting shipped off for short term profits, and no, to me "protectionism" isn't a bad word, I WANT the government to "protect" our economy as a whole, that's part of their dang job.

    We have "protectionism" now, it just protects the profits of the top .5% of the population, and they are near hysterical to keep that little factoid hidden. This just sucks. Anything to save what manufacturing we have left. This went beyond an emergency situation a long time ago. And to make it worse, China taking all those surplus dollars from this lopsided trade imbalance and going around the planet locking in long term resource and farmland contracts, A to Z.

This is an economic "clear and present danger" and should be treated as such.

Sad to say not many Rs signed this thing, but I did notice the Rs from the hardest hit loss of manufacturing jobs places signed it. Shows they can at least read their own polls...and I can about guarantee that Rs who don't support this measure will be targeted for removal by the tea party folks in the upcoming elections. This is a simmering grass roots war against the neocons.

The "old ways" of doing things the last thirty years are broken, we need new emergency measures or we are seriously borked economically. It might be too late anyway, but we do need to at least *try* to salvage something.

And then, we need to get even more people annoyed with using debt based FRNs as our official currency. We need a lot of currency reform, all around.

This is another reason why "open source" food is a good idea

Got a question on growing your own food? Ask me!

Here's a potential candidate which has been looming for a few years now. The fungus that ate your sandwich

six lanes wide, etc Canyonero!

Notice none of these big three or big sixteen now or whatever offer a real practical contractors/farmers/ranchers truck, which would be a diesel electric hybrid, so you would have a *large, practical sized, able to run a full crew or your entire house or shop, etc* portable generator all the time with you. They just don't freekin get it, trucks are useful yes, but just to get you and your stuff where the work needs to be done, and frequently it would be real handy to have large quantities of electricity there to use, and frequently in the real world there ain't no handy plug, so now you got to fill up half the back of the cargo bed with an additional generator, when you are ALREADY toting around a big engine and fuel tank. Knuckleheads.

Anyway, there's a business model for someone. Those suits in deetroit and tokyo just *don't get it* on what a pickup work truck is, they are fixated on dang sportscars and luxury sedans and keep trying to turn their trucks into one.

    Nope, got to work on heated GPS cupholders, etc. Whoopedy zing a big engine, you can go out today and buy a mid sized work truck with a big engine, on truck lots all over. And what's weird is they are sometimes loads cheaper than getting the alleged "pickup" sized truck. Just a tiny scosh bigger, still easy as snot to drive around anyplace, as in for instance we have an f450 flatbed dump here I used to drive around a lot, easy after a few miles familiarity with it, no different from a full sized old van or big pickup, for big bucks savings and double the practical workload. No heated gps enabled cupholders though.

As opposed to "investing" in stuff like this:

Two governments, two choices on where to dump close to a trillion bucks. I keep looking, and I have yet to see any obvious economic benefit for the nation as a whole to "investing" in the wall street casino banking "industry"..Or in dumping even more money into "going to war" against goat herders, while China is using similar cash to just go around the world and buy up all the juicy bits of real tangible stuff, raw materials, farmland, energy sources, minerals, whatever.

  Just security wise, we could have enriched every dude in ashcanistan, helped them build farms and roads and hospitals, etc, for a *fraction* of what we spend on bombing them with the highest tech imaginable, and they would have strung up their 1% mad jihadi nutjob fundies willingly themselves. No war needed.

    Nope, can't do that, got to create more and more jihadis with "collateral damage". Kill someone unrighteously, now their whole family is against you forever. Lather rinse repeat, that's our big advanced war strategy. I mean, right off the bat, who wouldn't want to fight against alien invaders in their homeland??

    Really annoying, too, I don't like their lack of freedoms in China and blatant one party rule and a lot of other things, but I have to admire their long range planning and obvious intelligence and the ability to grok wealth creation and making friends around the planet over the complete ludicrous foreign policy and economic stupidity that exists in the USA now with our so called "leaders". Dang, just dang it. I mean it's *embarrassing*. And the height of the discourse is the grassroots with the two political gangs pointing fingers at each other claiming everything is the other side's fault.

Well, they are both correct actually. It *is* their fault.

I've been calling this economic meltdown a crime, or rather a series of large overlapping crimes, that have not yet ended and are still ongoing, for a couple of years now. Not an accident, a deliberate crime, with real guys involved, who need to be arrested and charged, and several large "private" financial institutions need to be broken up, be made gone, dissolved, just like they would do with any other large gang operation. And because they *aren't*, and they are still "in charge" and running things, we will be seeing another round of big heists coming, as they loot what's left and charge you with the tab. They are going to *tax* you for the privilege of getting robbed. Official extortion. That's what's coming. that's what's been going on. they are lying when they say they can't be auditied, or that there will be financial collapse if they aren't bailed out. Liars. They are protecting a long running massive criminal organization.

Here's a take on it from someone who should know, William Black, from about a year ago. transcript or video

Notice this is from almost a year ago..nothing has changed. No one has been charged with any crime. And they most likely won't, because the crooks stay in control right through administration after administration after administration, right through alleged "change" in which "party" is running things.

  This is and has been an ongoing coup, there is no other word for it that fits, and I can't even begin to guess what other major crimes the same guys might be involved with. Well, I can guess..but I'll leave it for now just with these economic crimes.

From the interview;

Don't mess with 'em! ;)

One analyst has looked at some clues and is suspicious that the actual amount of physical bullion (PDF)-gold and silver-that is really there, supplies that could be delivered, is much lower than what paper contracts would indicate-by a huge margin.

heh, how's your stack going?

A startup in Vancouver thinks they just might have a design for making fusion power practical.

Presented as-is. I just thought it was interesting, but I really don't have any idea about their proposed science. Maybe it is just a stock scam, I just don't know.

"selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars."

This ain't getting sold down the river, it is having the river diverted away from you. It's really *that bad*.

What gets me is, so many people willingly and fervently trust these guys, think this scene is just great. Man..just, man... and every payday they fork over more of their wealth to these guys, rather than investing in themselves. They keep buying these lies, "investing" in congames.

All these little internet phishing scams and so on..chump change, but it gets the press. Nice diversionary tactic to keep the serfs amused. One day they'll wake up, notice their river is gone, then have their respective political cult water diversion "leaders" tell them that it was all those serf's over there fault. And they'll believe it, and get all mad and loud etc, demand revenge on other innocent serf victims.

Gonna get uglier and uglier now.

This appears to be the first official confirmation of the fake Tungsten filled bars being found, at a gold smelter in Germany, since that story broke late last year about the Chinese getting burned by some bars they got and getting pretty upset over it. There was all sorts of denial at the time. Allegedly this big gold smelter received the bar from some bank. This is all we have so far on this. The sound track is in German with subtitles. I don't speak German so can't vouch for the accuracy, but you can see the one they got suspicious of and cut in half.

If this story gets more legs..well, there's just all sorts of interesting implications here. Not enough detail yet for any analysis, just thought I'd throw what sort of update is available out to ya'all about it. The big question is, is this a real low scale minor league counterfeiting, or are there tons of these sorts of bars sitting out there now in big vaults that might be dodgy, as was indicated when the story broke? And the origins, the provenance of the bars.