Oldtent Archives 2007 - 2008

I live in the middle of the Ozark mountains on 40 acres with a year around spring that we used for all our household duties for 20 years before we put in a deep well. We have 20 acres in pasture and 20 acres of Pine and Oak. I have a woodshed with 15 ricks of seasoned oak for this winters heating, will probably only use 8 ricks to get thru the whole season. I have a big fenced in garden to keep out the unwanted animals with raised beds for easy cultivation and harvest. Have fruit trees, grapes and raspberries that are out of this world when in season. Also have a big pond in my front yard stocked with Large Mouth Bass and catfish for fishing pleasure and another food source if need be. 
I wonder how many gold bugs can say they never borrowed money from a bank for a house or car. I’ve always done it backasswards. I built my first house by cutting the timber off the 40 and taking it to the local sawmill and paid 4 cents a board foot for the lumber. If I didn’t have the money to buy something it never got bought. Didn’t have alot of material things on the front end but never went hungry and always enjoyed the simple things in life. To have a house payment for 30 years would have killed me as its not in my nature to be tied down like that. Its just who I am.
As it turned out by not owing a bank anything for the first 16 years of living on the 40 and having a passion for the stock market I was able to turn some hard earned money into something that was more than I ever dreamed of. I was able to truly live my life the way I wanted without any pressures from the outside world, doing what I wanted after the Rambus trade in 2000. Retirement isn’t the right word to describe my lifestyle. Its doing what I want when I want. Money has only meant one thing to me and that is, freedom. So know fully, I’m protected and have spent the last 31 years getting ready for what maybe coming down the pike. I will be able to take care of my family and some close friends if the need arises. There is more to life than just having money and gold and material things, not that I don’t have all 3, but how to survive on ones own abilities when it comes right down to it. I know I can make it on my own. I know what it will take to put food on the table and stay warm on a cold winters night. Those things, like the stock market for me, are just a part of my everyday life. Freedom to do what I want when I want and to know I can survive have made this life an adventure for me that I would never been able to enjoy if I had become a slave to a bank.
I hope this answers your question fully as I know you’ve been dying to know if I have any physical. Yes I have physical and yes I will be able to survive if things turn out ugly. How about you fully, will you be able to survive if someone took your gold away from you? Do you have the necessary skills to put food on the table and stay warm on a colds winter night? Just curious.
I wish you the best fully and I really hope it doesn’t get as bad as some think it might. Stay warm and keep on laughing as that will help when the s$it hits the fan….Rambus

( No response re the below this a.m. Anyone up for it now? Good luck to us all—we’re going to need it)

Greetings,

   By way of background, I bought and still hold physical from the early 80’s. I have lurked and learned from at all the usual sites since 2000. Until this week, my investment portfolio held mining stocks and physical, 50/50.  I have never posted to any site.

   This week I have Surrendered and have gone to 100% physical. I did so after seeing that tptb will not be constrained in achieving their objectives.

   Question Please: As precious metals increase in fiat dollars, and if we head towards the necessity of a new regional and/or world currency with some gold component, how can we NOT expect tptb to nationalize the mining industry? As they most probably own most of the above ground gold, why wouldn’t they grab the “deep storage” too? Seems like a no brainer from their perspective.

   Thank you in advance for your thoughts.

FULL STOP

I’m sure hoping and praying things turn out for the best with your family.

All the best.—–aggie.

Send him to the Vronskonazi….I’m sure the little Dr. will be mucho impressed with the moooooooose calls. BTW…best wishes on the trial!

All the best my friend.——aggie.

..so now their currency is toast….is that Inflation or Deflation producing ?

stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=&p=D&st=2007-01-01&en=1979-01-01&id=p34113673095

Dennis Gartman yesterday:

“What bothers us about being long of gold is that GATA now crows about the fact that Gartman has joined the bullish brigade. We are not gold bugs, but we do acknowledge when the conditions warrant that gold does store value. There are times to be long of gold; there are times to be neutral of it, and there are times…. although rather few in recent years… when one is to be short of it. For now, the time is the former.”

Dennis Gartman today:

“As for gold, we hope we lose money on our positions for if we do it shall mean that the global capital markets are righting themselves and that the panic is running… or has run… its course. Certainly there is… and there was… selling of some very real consequence at the $910-$920 level yesterday and again earlier this morning in the Far East. Who the sellers were is open to debate, and we cannot count out the prospect that it was from the central banks, for if they are hoping to stem the global melt-down they can do much to add to their attacks if they are able to stem gold’s rise.

It is somewhat worrisome to us that gold has seemed to “fail” at a lower high once again, for it had gotten to $1020 early on Bear Stearn’s Monday; it got to $990 when Russian invaded Georgia and as crude oil was making its highs in late June, and it moved to $920 yesterday… each high lower than the previous high. Great, solidly built, sustainable bull markets do not fail in this manner, and so our defensive antennae are raised… as they should be.”

Geez Dennis, you think the central banks (part of The Gold Cartel) might actually be in there preventing the price of gold going from where it ought to during the biggest financial crisis since The Great Depression? Brilliant observation. We are not crowing about your being long gold, we are crowing about how you continued to get suckered in with you buy stop in points, and then The Gold Cartel buries your position hours later. What do they say about people doing the same things over and over and over?

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — Iceland Prime Minister Geir Haarde has some advice for his fellow citizens after the country’s banking system imploded: Go fishing.

”We are too small a country to sustain such a big banking system,” he said in an interview. ”We have fantastic resources and an abundance of green energy and we will now utilize that and the other resources we have, the ocean and human capital.”

Over the past decade, Iceland’s banks backed a buying binge that saw local investors take stakes in retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue, jeweler Mappin & Webb, and the parent of American Airlines, while the nation’s banks snapped up financial services firms abroad. That foreign adventure came to an end this week with the government seizure of Iceland’s top three banks, including Kaupthing Bank hf, the nation’s biggest lender.

Now residents are betting that the Atlantic island’s natural resources, primarily fish and geothermal energy, will help the country survive.

”We can live off the land as there are not so many of us, and we have heating, clean water and fish,” said Reykjavik resident Kristinn Johansson, 50, outside a branch of the now- nationalized Kaupthing. ”We will be fine. We can eat what we can fish.”

Haarde was Iceland’s finance minister from 1998 to 2005 and assumed his current position two years ago. He advocated the sale of state enterprises and bank investments abroad to diversify the economy.

Banks Encouraged

As Iceland’s global ambitions grew, the country’s top three lenders amassed assets valued last year at 12 times the country’s $19 billion gross domestic product. The island’s population of 320,000 puts it on a par with Cincinnati.

Iceland’s export of marine products made up about a third of total exports in August, according to Statistics Iceland in Reykjavik. Most trawlers hunt for cod and haddock.

Catch volumes have been in gradual decline since a peak in 2000, when Iceland’s haul nudged 2 million tons. The contribution from fisheries to GDP dropped to about 7 percent last year, from 12 percent a decade earlier.

Iceland has fought to protect its Atlantic fishing territory. The country’s navy clashed with the U.K. during the 1950s and 1970s as Britain sent frigates to guard trawlers it said were being harassed by Icelandic gunboats. The U.K. remains the largest customer for Iceland’s fish, accounting for more than $400 million of fish exports last year.

Tensions With Britain

Now relations with Britain are frayed again, this time over the fallout from the banking crisis.

Iceland’s government said this week that it wouldn’t cover losses for British customers after the collapse of Landsbanki Islands hf, whose U.K.-based Icesave unit had 300,000 account holders. Britain’s Conservative Party and local governments, called councils, may have had as much as 1 billion pounds ($1.73 billion) deposited with Icelandic banks.

”We used to stick to what we do up here and then we went abroad, into new economics for Iceland, and that went wrong,” said Vilhjalmur Bjarnason, the director of the Association of Small Shareholders in Iceland. He held stock in the Icelandic banks, including Kaupthing and Glitnir Bank hf.

The volcanic island sits on an oceanic ridge in the Atlantic that provides a continuous flow of magma, keeping the crust warm and providing natural energy. Iceland has more than 200 volcanoes and more than 600 hot springs.

Industry Expansion

The government is trying to lure power-intensive industries to harness the resource. Aluminum producer Alcoa Inc. is expanding its Fjardaal smelter, which will produce 300,000 tons of aluminum this year.

”Given the bank situation, which is like an earthquake, the state is likely to speed up the building of new aluminum smelters,” said Hjoerleifur Hringsson, director of sales and marketing at Icelandic real estate management company Stutulaut ehf, as he relaxed in the nude in a sauna at a Reykjavik geothermal spa.

Iceland has potential generating capacity from known high- temperature fields of about 25 terawatt hours a year, according to the Ministry of Energy, equivalent to about 20 nuclear power plants. In 2004, geothermal plants in Iceland generated 17 percent of the nation’s electricity, and that proportion may reach 20 percent by next year, the government said.

”Icelanders are considering all opportunities now on how to use our hydropower and energy resources, which could bring investments and jobs,” said Bragi Arnason, a professor of chemistry at the University of Iceland and a geothermal energy researcher.

Still, the country will need foreign investors to underwrite any expansion of non-service industries. European nations haven’t offered financial assistance, forcing Haarde’s government to turn to Russia for a loan of as much as 4 billion euros ($5.48 billion).

That bailout will be the first step in Iceland’s economic recovery, according to residents.

”We will rise again,” Arnason said.

and here we had just a year or two back a strong appreciating krona with a yeild of 14% and a very high cd demand. and now kaboom!!!!
the wonders of fiat at play. wj

Bix on Lehman’s latest…

Hi Bill
Tomorrow is the auction for Lehman Bro. bonds and the final settlement of Lehman Credit Default Swaps.

Nobody knows what kind of exposure there is or who is holding it but it is estimated the payout could be anywhere from $200B to $1 Trillion plus!

AIG and Lehman were two of the largest CDS players back in the days when it was like “printing money”. Now Lehman is a defaulted party to a huge chunk of derivatives and AIG is begging at the Fed window almost daily just to stay afloat. I expect AIG to go under any day and take the entire system down with them.

The Lehman Bankruptcy lit the fuse of the derivitive nuclear option for ending the banking cabal.

We could see Atlas Shrug tomorrow.
Bix

Iceland is toast….The banks are unable to finance about $61 billion of debt, 12 times the size of the economy…..Trading in the krona ground to a halt today after the central bank yesterday ditched an attempt to fix the exchange rate at 131 krona to the euro. Nordea Bank AB, the biggest Scandinavian lender, said the krona hadn’t been traded on the spot market today, while the last quoted price was 340 per euro, compared with 122 a month ago…Inflation will jump to at least 50 percent to 75 percent in the coming months.

The country will implode….

After all the wailing and gnashing of teeth and crashing commodities and

the financial vapour lockup of the last year, the $CCI is still up 100%

from as far back as I could scroll it and the paper markets are, well,

you know.

Auric

   Why gold and silver aren’t much, much higher in the overseas markets. WTH?

   Futures

     DOW  -238

     S&P -24.9

     NAZ -30

My wishes for your familys speedy recovery, Margaret said it all.  Were probably in for some bad times, and what it comes down to is family and their health and well being is the only thing that’s really important.