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.
Technofeudalism is a term I have been using for many years now to try and accurately describe the status of our society and the trends to make it more so. Basically, merely medieval feudalism, with an aristocratic class that controls all the wealth and political power, just with today's technology, including their co-opted governmental surveillance/command/control apparatus, which is focused intently on expanding technofeudalism.
Masters..and serfs Now with more bling, but it's the same style and design.
This goes beyond mere economics into raw power, and freedom, and who has it, who did have it, who is losing it, and who has lost it already.
The article here goes into depth, with a lot of references, showing how this technofeudal nightmare is completely destroying, bankrupting and making almost irrelevant and powerless, what was not too many years ago the world's largest and most successful middle class creation.
This middle class is now on the endangered species list, and it wasn't by accident, it has been by purposeful design and intent, and there is no salvation on the horizon from either of the entrenched political mobs, no matter what they claim or which constituency they pander to with their political soap opera fictions, both are corrupt at the top, comprised of willing members of this top technofeudal class, and 100% a significant part of why this has been happening.
A pretty good article on the exploration of generational seasons as relate to social change, economics, and geopolitics.
Now I'll be the first to admit that the boomer generation has created a *lot* of problems. No contest there. I'll also point out that the preceding two generations to that got close but no cigar in reforming the realities that lead to a lot of these problems. They fought the good fight..everywhere but at home where it was really needed. The boomers awakened the real drive and spirit to freedom and equality, to deny some hereditary aristocratic birthright to power. We had a schism, a major break in the two boomer camps. It wasn't and hasn't been all a single mindset "boomer" force.
And this is why *this* particular boomer has always recommended to have a personal sovereignty and socially gracious outlook and existence to life, and to strive to be less of a burden to surrounding society, and to be more of a net positive asset by getting independent in life's necessities, of water, food, shelter and security and to engage in honest transactions, and not to manipulate events so that they shaft my global neighbors or the present or future generations in our society.
LBJ said he wanted a "great society". Well, that's nice, but it starts with yourself and a personal mindset and by your actions. It can't be dictated by some government law, it can't be bought, it can't be sold either, and it certainly can't be traded, mortgaged, hedged or leveraged.
An interesting little bit of analogous fiction by an executive at Berkshire Hathaway, Basicland.
A fairly good (long with annotations) article with timelines and dates and names and policies, etc., about how the global economic system, which is now the main political system, that we have today has come about. The global economic and political coup in one article
A pretty famous and successful economist/financial advisor has finally caught up to the realities of tangibles and tangible insurance, and "evacuation in advance" to the safer countryside.. Faber and economic and physical risk mitigation
The study, The Forgotten History of Domestic Debt, PDF
Here is an article about the growing problem of young, college degreed Chinese kids who can't get jobs now. There's millions of them, and more coming. And even with their ramped up manufacturing and government, they can't absorb them all, just not enough white collar work for them. The article beats around the bush and never hits on the thought I have been saying, that they are going to be exporting these excess folks all over the planet, but you can see that the pressure is there, and building, to *do something* with them before they become more annoyed. the last thing big governments want is to have huge numbers of their youngest adults being out of work, full of desperation. Should be obvious why this is. The ruling elite there will do whatever it takes to avoid internal regime change, and if they can't absorb them, that leaves export them. One way or the other.
--I think solar fusion power (adding in the noun there to sex it up a little) would stand a better chance in the market if they just embedded a little chunk of waste nuke fuel on the panel someplace, with wires sticking out of it connected to nothing, so they could say it was "nuclear power".
Anyway, one of dozens of spiffy solar power breakthroughs I have heard about over the past decade. All of them are still unobtanium. Higher prices than ten years ago, perhaps 1% better quality is what is on the retail market now. Ain't that special. Starting to look like a bit of a pattern there...
This is what I have been saying for some time now, to watch for the economic tipping point when China will no longer really require the markets in the already developed nations so much, which will also correspond with the *rapid* decline of the now gutted and dysfunctional bankrupt nations who are existing on credit, and not "making stuff". I mean, here it is, in your face, we are at that tipping point now. I've been watching this for a week now and it appears this is the point.
As China finishes building up its manufacturing base, across the whole spectrum of industries, it ceases to have a need for maintaining markets where they acquired such tech from. That was just an absolutely necessary but temporary first step, if you can accept the word temporary on an historical time scale of a generation and now some change. It's taken them thirty years, but they are "there" now.
They have been exporting for cheap, so they can turn around, reuse those foreign currency units, and buy more tech, and more and more and more. That's what they buy, factories, machine tools, designs, all the good stuff, or just snag it, whatever it takes, and bring it back to China where it gets cloned and mass deployed.
Once the reach this plateau of having "enough", this artificial need to maintain the markets they currently are using now starts to go away, and they only need to start developing their internal market more, and switch to those external markets *that supply them with natural resources*.
Those two markets will be large enough for them to easily achieve and maintain global topdog position, and anything else is pure gravy.
Just swapping goods for printed up paper was their short range mass buildup plan, because they needed that tech from the western developed nations first, and to get it, they had to use those nations currency units. See how that worked? Well, they got it..that part is done "enough" now, (also proven by them being able to accumulate so much foreign capital they have to scramble to find places to stick it now, that's more than enough proof right there) so they can be a little bit more forceful on the global scene. This is the beginning of their real mass expansion stage now.
This article goes into what is happening there, and how they are slowing down their exports a little, and also stopping buying so many financials, as they raise internal wages, so that their internal market can start taking over from export, or better stated, serve as the catalyst for economic force multipliers internally.
This is what the US had way way back when we built everything, and sold it to ourselves. It worked so well we could also export everything and we became the largest creditor nation, the richest nation ever. It worked for us then, until we just handed to China for cheap the bulk of the manufacturing (with Europe just a little bit behind us there, Germany will be the last holdout), so it will work triple plus good for China now, they are just so much larger, larger than the EU and the USA combined.
And their "where they get natural resources from" market they can export to now is all of Africa, South America, and a few more interesting places, like Canada and Australia and take your pick middle eastern oil exporters, and here and there and elsewhere, Russia for example. That's a HUGE market, once you add all that up, they no longer absolutely "need" the USA or Europe. Not saying they will immediately just dump the USA and europe as a market, of course they won't, but now that they no longer need it so much, they will be using some more hardball economic tactics because they can't be hurt very much now by ANY retaliatory move. It is past that point now, so they don't have to care. They can now leverage their mass manufacturing wealth creation position politically.
Economic MAD is no longer in force. That concept is just slap over. This has *profound* implications.
They will keep taking as much R and D as they can of course..but they don't need those two markets much anymore either. They'll just keep taking, because they have been allowed to, so why would they stop?
It's a smooth move, real dang smooth, and the most logical one they could have taken, and the only thing surprising to me is it has taken a shorter time period than what I originally thought, and I felt there would have been a series of huge populist protests inside the US before now as the economy got worse and worse, with such political concerns causing shifts in policy. Nope, didn't happen, won't happen now, and even such things as the tea party movement are already compromised. I'll have to address that some time later, too complex, but the bottom line there is just every avenue of protest or actual high level policy change is severely compromised now, ineffective, and will remain so, and will not happen. The last ditch gambit there is breakup of the Union, which now becomes a higher probability.
The next important thing to watch for is a really large mass emigration of people from China all over, moreso than now, much larger. When they hit that expansion phase the global scene will get dicey, as in security concerns dicey, it can go either way, all the way to resource wars, or it might get diffused somehow, but I think the next stage will be over resource control, with a lessening of emphasis on financial products.
I thought, after my first large analysis, that this expansion phase and resource war potential timeline would occur around 2014, but I will bump that up a couple of years now.
You need resources plus energy input along with the labor, which is another form of energy input, to create value added manufactured wealth.
Not sure on other industries, I follow the food scene more, but I can tell you right now the way the system is set up, we are a single, as in one, solitary, geopolitical "whoops!" away from mass famine on a global scale. It wouldn't happen immediately overnight, but it would cascade out of control and could probably lead to a slew of "regime changes" and so on around the world, "social unrest", and have a lot of blowback to other industries then on to the service and management and government "industries". And I am not exaggerating in the slightest.
This is why, despite working on a farm and having "income" as it is commonly known and understood, I also produce my own wealth, I grow "extra" and have sunk a lot of of my cash and time investment potential into creating my own mini wealth production effort, which includes onsite diversified food production plus my own energy production in the form of solar PV and firewood, that is not entirely tied to availability of cheap energy inputs, and have accumulated the tools and skills to maintain this outside of the system being intact.
And I'll tell you why. The larger ag scene is 100% dependent on cheap, ever flowing diesel and natgas associated fertilizers and chemicals and so on, as is the packaging, transportation and distribution aspects of the whole "farm to table" stack. There does not exist the quantities of "natural" fertilizer or alternative liquid fuels for there to be any even medium scale emergency replacement. Just doesn't exist, can't be done. the only place it exists is right now in the poorest nations who still rely on animal power for farming, etc. They won't change much, but they can't produce any beyond their own subsistence levels either.
Now, because we have let speculators and the higher level wealth skimmers dominate "the market" and governmental policy, and tied the banking "industry" into ag so heavily, plus caused a focus on patented seeds and IP so much, all of that, they make more money by having higher demand in times of lower production. It isn't regulated like it would be if food and energy were treated as national security issues, I mean beyond what they claim to do with "terrorism", it would need to be more than that even to have true food insurance.
They don't care. No short term profits in it. There's massive short term profits in NOT caring,, so that's what they do.
When they light up Iran, which will come eventually, that's it, crude goes to hundreds a barrel or more overnight from speculators, the supply drops drastically on a global scale, then these costs go down the "food chain" and..well..all the food production stack goes completely bankrupt, busted. It ceases. Food commodities themselves, immediately after most energy sources, will get bid up to extreme levels in "the market", instantly putting a few billion people here and there out of the "buy and eat some food" level. Not a few thousand, a few billion, then spreading out from there, and fast. Even guys who have hedged their own production with derivatives will be forced to honor what they thought would happen, so they will lose a lot there, most of them anyway.
Just even mild/moderate price and availability run ups have shown how fast this occurs, just the slight loss of refined useable petroleum products after Hurricane Katrina shows this, and how other energy sources get tied to the cost and availability of global crude sources, because what industries can, switch to other forms of energy. But a lot can't. Food is one of them, in spades.
We have no immediate substitute for crude (diesel and bunker fuel) that can be deployed in the quantities needed to maintain the entire ag stack. We don't even have backup emergency trains/locomotives that could run on coal anymore either. Any break in that stack-no ag, bye.. But, the banks still want their money for their loans, and on up the chain to goldman sachs type sliced and diced paper financial products, those big traders still want and will get their money. The government, federal/state and especially local, still will want their tax monies, but it won't be there, because wealth production will cease.
Truckers will abandon their rigs and walk away, farmers will tell the bank to come and pickup their tractors, etc. It'll collapse. Guys will just walk away, disgusted and heart broken, but our past track record in this nation is wall street and the government *don't care* because they make more short term profit and get a LOT more political power out of emergencies.
It's dang iffy right now and barely profitable as it is with current production costs versus income. I mean, barely, and most farmers are in hock up past their eyebrows, and can barely maintain energy costs as it is. Most are entirely dependent on yearly loans, loans set with the expectation that cheap energy will always be there, and priced accordingly. Local governments are set up to extract x-property taxes, and that's it, and most of them are already hurting as it is all over the nation being in debt and having to issue bonds or placing additional future debt loads on an unpredictable economy.
You quadruple energy prices in a short time frame, plus throw global warming taxes into the stew, which a big war around the middle east and loss of straits of hormuz shipping would cause, along with the political agenda of instituting the green police and more governmental bureaucracies and handing wall street another trillion a year in cap and scam carbon credits to gamble with..well, shoot... party's over, fast.
And it will ripple out from there, into many other true wealth production non ag but still critical areas of the economy, now down to ten percent of the whole economy, and there is NO will or plan or option to eliminate middleman speculator profits in this scenario, it will not happen, they will be allowed to take advantage of the situation. And even if they did freeze that in place, it still doesn't address availability issues.
And we have no credible sources for such a severe loss of energy sources or the increase in prices for what is still available. We have a barely out of the starting gate biofuels industry which *could* be economically and resource self-supporting, then turn a real profit in both dollars and wealth production, and be able to slide away from dependence on petroleum products in general, soon if they threw a fraction of the resources at it as they spend on war profits, but they don't, and the population has been faked out that it isn't possible anyway, so they are killing it off when it is just getting to the point of being a viable option. They have everyone brainwashed into believing the baby steps transition effort we have today with biofuels is the full complete endgame. Short attention span theater there.
As I have pointed out before, this nation (and most nations really) no longer maintains a full season or beyond of backup basic foodstuffs, enough to deal with such a catastrophe, enough to try and keep everything running even on a reduced emergency scale. They stopped commodity buying for seasonal price supports and warehousing some years ago, switched to offsets and paying FRNs to not grow, switched to food stamp credit cards instead of handing out boxes of real food, etc., and finally sold off the last of our national pantry backup. It's all gone, poofed away. There exists no "backup food" to carry the nation over through any medium disruption time scale, and this is a rich nation, it is worse for many other nations globally.
Maybe 1% of the US population understands this and has made their own contingency plans, or maybe even less. Even most professional farmers aren't planning for this, they are just as dependent on the food supply chain down to the supermarket as everyone else is. I know on this farm I am the *only* guy who stockpiles food in any decent quantities and runs a big garden now, the rest of the guys just do the normal "get their check, go to the supermarket before they run out" scene. A couple of the guys before had their own little gardens, but they quit or got fired.
We have very few people left alive in the US who have an historical awareness of true food shortages, etc, andjust about everyone is relying on paper insurance policies, server entry wall street "investments", and "government" to "save them" in this sort of situation. And that's if they have even thought about it, and most people have not, or dismissed it as "too improbable, so it just can't happen, this "they" guy, some great OZ figure "they", wouldn't allow that"
Man, that is epic fail in advance. Believing in the tooth fairy as official high stakes policy and general across the board mindset.
This isn't a plan to try and pour six gallons of real stuff from a five gallon bucket, like the economy is now, which is bad enough obviously, it is trying to pour six gallons from a zero gallon bucket. Just ain't gonna happen. And that scenario has just a dandy chance of occurring given our abundant global supply of the "natural resource" of quite insane megalomaniacs "in charge" all over in government and big business. Emergencies today don't bring out the statesmen, that's long gone from national scenes all over, "statesmen" don't exist, they turn what nutso doofuses we have now masquerading as leaders into clones of kim ill dung, that level of "leadership".
I think it will be man made fast extinction event once it starts. Take a few years to run its course, and it would be rather nasty as this was going on, and I expect a lot of weapons used eventually to sort out who might own what, which will lead to a lot of people not really owning much more than rubble and hunger.
There will be an investigation in Europe now over "flugate", what they are calling the golden triangle of the UN's WHO, big pharma companies, and some academics who profit from what big pharma makes.
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst
