Loading ...good question, ignorance is bliss I guess it is harder to know what is happening than not because you can’t do anything about it but watch. And protect yourself with short etfs, they went parabolic, don’t like the candles they formed today though. We may have recoverys here and there but were still in a bear market with earning that wont beat last yrs. for most except some staples maybe, thats for sure.
Makes you want to stop paying your life insurance policy. Unless the gov nationalizes them too. It’s out of control. The whole world needs to just stop everything and take a 2 month holiday…paid for by the gov’s of the world of course.
btw, the worst week ever on record for the S&P down 18%.
Could have been worse, like Japan down 25% on the week because the yen crushes their economy. Jap CB should be forced to sell their yen, but they can’t push the rate any lower. This is a big problem I hope they discuss in G7.
from HS…a worldwide banking holiday over the weekend…don’t ask, I won’t tell.
Moggy
compilations of what kids say in class or in essays in school or, in your case, what tourists ask park wardens (because I think clever people with time on there hands enjoy dreaming up such questions for entertainment and to post them as ‘authentic’).
But assuming that there are some truly authentic questions in the examples you posted, it does not surprise me, given the perceptions behind some of these funny question, that there may be some problems for the general public to grasp what is happening with global manipulation of the US dollar index and it’s reciprocal twins (the price of gold and the price of silver). And a similar set of seemingly funny questions from the public could be compiled in respect to the global currency/precious metals markets.
Who are the sheep here and who are the border collies guiding the sheep, when it comes to the value put on the U.S. dollar index, and therefore the price of gold? And I wish you a pleasant Friday evening. Equiz.
Causing the yield curve to go bonkers again. Loved it in Feb 2007 bernanke said that we could be enter a period where the yield curve would stay “permanently flat”. or NOT!
Thanks for the chuckle !! Definitely needed after a week like this.
Stratford
Red Alert: The G-7 — Geopolitics, Politics and the Financial Crisis
The finance ministers of the G-7 countries are meeting in Washington. The first announcements on the meetings will come this weekend. It is not too extreme to say that the outcome of these meetings could redefine how the financial markets work, certainly for months and perhaps for a generation. The Americans are arguing that the regime of intervention and bailouts be allowed to continue. Others, like the British, are arguing for what in effect would be the nationalization of financial markets on a global scale. It is not clear what will be decided, but it is clear that this meeting matters.
The meetings will extend through the weekend to include members of the G-20 countries, which together account for about 90 percent of the global economy. This meeting was called because previous steps have not freed up lending between financial institutions, and the financial problem has increasingly become an economic one, affecting production and consumption in the global economy. The political leadership of these countries is under extreme pressure from the public to do something to solve — or at least alleviate — the problem.
Underlying this political pressure is a sense that the financial class, people who run global financial institutions, have failed to behave responsibly and effectively, and have therefore lost their legitimacy. The expectation, reasonable or not, is that the political system will now supplant these managers and impose at least a temporary solution. The finance ministers therefore have a political mandate, almost global in scope, to act decisively. The question is what they will do?
That question then divides further into two parts. The first is whether they will try to craft a single, global, integrated solution. The second is the degree to which they will take control of the financial system — and inter-financial institution lending in particular. (A primary reason for the credit crunch is that banks are currently afraid to lend — even to each other.) Thus far, attempts at solutions on the whole have been national rather than international. In addition, they have been built around incentivizing certain action and increasing the available money in the system.
So far, this hasn’t worked. The first problem is that financial institutions have not increased interbank lending significantly because they are concerned about the unknowns in the borrower’s balance sheet, and about the borrowers’ ability to repay the loans. With even large institutions failing, the fear is that other institutions will fail, but since the identity of the ones that will fail is unknown, lending on any terms — with or without government money — is imprudent. There is more lending to non-financial corporations than to financial ones because fewer unknowns are involved. Therefore, in the United States, infusions and promises of infusion of funds have not solved the basic problem: the uncertain solvency of the borrower.
The second problem is the international character of the crisis. An example from the Icelandic meltdown is relevant. The government of Iceland promised to repay Icelandic depositors in the island country’s failed banks. They did not extend the guarantee to non-Icelandic depositors. Partly they simply didn’t have the cash, but partly the view has been that taking care of one’s own takes priority. Countries do not want to bail out foreigners, and different governments do not want to assume the liabilities of other nations. The nature of political solutions is always that politicians respond to their own constituencies, not to people who can’t vote for them.
This weekend some basic decisions have to be made. The first is whether to give the bailouts time to work, to increase the packages or to accept that they have failed and move to the next step. The next step is for governments and central banks to take over decision making from financial institutions, and cause them to lend. This can be done in one of two ways. The first is to guarantee the loans made between financial institutions so that solvency is not an issue and risk is eliminated. The second is to directly take over the lending process, with the state dictating how much is lent to whom. In a real sense, the distinction between the two is not as significant as it appears. The market is abolished and wealth is distributed through mechanisms created by the state, with risk eliminated from the system, or more precisely, transferred from the lender to the taxing authority of the state.
The more complex issue is how to manage this on an international scale. For example, American banks lend to European banks. If the United States comes up with a plan which guarantees loans to U.S. banks but not European banks, and Europeans lend to Europe and not the United States, the integration of the global economy will very quickly shatter, leading to significant limitations on international trade, currency convertibility and so on. You will nationalize economies that can’t stand being purely national.
At the same time, there is no global mechanism for managing radical solutions. In taking over lending or guarantees, the administrative structure is everything. Managing the interbank-lending of the global economy is something for which there is no institution. And even with coordination, finance ministries and central banks would find it difficult to bear the burden — not to mention managing the system’s Herculean size and labyrinthine complexity. But if the G-7 in effect nationalize global financial systems and do it without international understandings and coordination, the consequences will be immediate and serious.
The G-7 is looking hard for a solution that will not require this level of intrusion, both because they don’t want to abolish markets even temporarily, and more important, because they have no idea how to manage this on a global scale. They very much want to have the problem solved with liquidity injections and bailouts. Their inclination is to give the current regime some more time. The problem is that the global equity markets are destroying value at extremely high rates and declines are approaching historic levels.
In other words, a crisis in the financial system is becoming an economic problem — and that means public pressure will surge, not decline. Therefore, it is plausible that they might choose to ask for what FDR did in 1933, a bank holiday, which in this case would be the suspension of trading on equity markets globally for several days while administrative solutions are reached. We have no information whatsoever that they are thinking of this, but in starting to grapple with a problem of this magnitude — and searching for solutions on this scale — it is totally understandable that they might like to buy some time.
It is not clear what they will decide. Fundamental issues to watch for are whether they move from manipulating markets through government intrusions that leave the markets fundamentally free, or do they abandon free markets at least temporarily.
Another such issue is whether they can find a way to do this globally or whether it will be done nationally. If they do go international and suspending markets, the question is how they will unwind this situation. It will be easier to start this than to end it and state-controlled markets are usually not very attractive in the long run. But then again, neither is where we are now.
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I was just wondering if you and Mr Polly were still having luck buying junk gold and silver or if people wern’t selling as much as before. TIA
Cheers
Dusty
After reading this I think you will agree that it is CHEAP…..
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Silver From the Mine to You
by Northwest Territorial Mint Staff
Silver has long been mined, refined, struck into coinage or formed into ornaments and items for thousands of years. As often as we buy and sell it, we rarely think about the amazing process that liberates silver from the earth and places it into our possession. For those who are curious — but not engineers — this summary is intended to highlight some of the science involved in the process.
Silver and lead are often found together, and, in fact, silver is usually a byproduct of mining for lead, or often copper or gold. To mine silver, it must first be pulled from the ground as ore — a metal-bearing rock material that is valuable enough to be mined. If the ore is sufficiently close to the surface, the mine may be an open pit style surface mine. If it is too deep, shafts down to the ore are dug and the ore is brought to the surface.
In order to obtain usable metal from the rock, many steps requiring massive equipment and immense power are required.
First, the rocks containing the desired metal are pulverized, crushed until small enough to fall through a sieve, then added to water, making a muddy slurry. A solution is added that enables the silver (and gold, often) to dissolve.
Once dissolved, the silver is separated with the help of carbon. When introduced to the slurry, the carbon attracts the silver, which binds to it; the rest of the slurry is directed away, leaving a tank full of precious-metal-coated carbon.
The metal is washed off of the carbon with water, then the carbon removed, leaving a muddle of silver and water. To finally get the silver from this mixture, electricity is run through the mixture, drawing the silver particles to stainless steel cathodes, where it adheres. After the water is removed, the silver sludge adhered to the cathodes is permitted to dry, leaving a silver powder.
After exposing the powder to enormously high temperature and a chemical agent that attracts impurities, the powder melts. When poured into molds, only the silver and gold pour off; everything else is left behind. What emerges from the molds is a bar of about 99% pure silver and gold weighing about 50 lbs.
These bars are sent to be further refined, separating the metals to a purity of 99.9% or higher. The refined metal is poured into large bars of approximately 1,000 ounces for delivery to industry.
Refined silver bars such as these make their way to mints (although not every mint works with bars; the US Mint, for example, buys its blanks from other vendors, and only strikes its coins).
At Northwest Territorial Mint, however, these bars are further melted into smaller billets (cylinders of silver). The warmed billets are fed into an extruding machine, which, through vast pressure, converts the billets into strips of silver of the correct thickness for 100-ounce bars all the way down to 1-ounce rounds.
To create the blanks for the die-struck bars or rounds, the extruded silver strips are fed into a blanking machine, which punches the correct shape out of the strip; the leftover is then melted again for the next production run. Blanks are then struck with dies at up to a thousand tons of pressure to create the silver product that investors buy at a rate of tens of thousands of ounces per day.
This process is remarkable and capital-intensive, yielding an ancient asset that is beautiful, enduring… and always valuable.
Dusty
also…I have never owned UNWPX…I will look at the holdings,,,Probably will buy some..
Thank You!…I am dollar cost averaging in…I dont need the Money..
over the long haul, probably will look back & say…”WHY DID I NOT BUY MORE”
about 5 pts…but for whatever reason things seem completely hopeless IMO.
I guess i feel that way because the silver stocks were sent off to the guillotine the past few days
PAAS - p/e of 10.5 now — consider it a complete option on silver
SLW p/e of 13; SIL 0.6; CDE 27; AEM 50 — SSRI and HL neg last quarter
when I saw they had smacked silver early this morning with gold still up 7 bucks - I got the feeling that gold would get pounded again. I hoped that it would have a different ending this time - but - the outcome was the same.
Glad that I was not able to watch the markets after 11am EST - my computer and tv might not have survived! 
