Loading ...GoldBalloon @ 17:24 pm
I… Y… OK, I can’t spell. They sound the same. I actually googled it with my misspelled version and the first entry title matched what I (mis)spelled, so I figured I was good! Usually I’m pretty picky about my spelling. How embarassing. (blush).
PMtrader @ 11:59 am
If you have any feedback capabilities to Axiom House publishers, try to convince them that “Exclusive Shipping Deals” with UPS (or FedEx) are NOT in their best interests going forward. One of my major pet peeves in ordering stuff is finding outrageous shipping fees for premium services that I do not want or need… shipping fees that sometimes exceed the price of the merchandise (like your books).
The US Postal service does an adequate job of delivery for many or most things I may be interested in ordering. To NOT have the option of selecting USPS delivery upon checkout has many times led me to cancel an entire order and seek elsewhere. I very nearly did that with your books. So they were not a ‘deal’ to me.
Balloon
I believe that that guy is either Farmboy looking for a place to lay down or Equizetum trying to find his Gold Maple Leaf hiding spot…
Irish @ 18:20 pm
I was wondering if anyone else knew the story. That’s old man Boone in the picture. His ‘farm’ was just over the hill…
Ororeef @ 18:04
The link you posted at the bottom of that story about Made-off gets me to a site that says, “Message board name is either empty or non-existent.” Can you check and re-post a link, maybe a live link? Thanks. As we knew, it gets more and more interesting.
Also, please post the link to the story in your 18:18 post.
Balloon
Do you realize that you have actually taken pictures of the official Boonnes Farm Winery ..started in 28 by Maximus Boonius ..right on the Roman road the Applian Way…stems and grafts were taken to Havanna Il and planted on Goofy Ridge about 1723 by a drunken cook that tagged along with Lewis and Boone Clark
madoff
New SEC chief gave Bernard Madoff’s son a job
Rosie Lavan
div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited { color:#06c; }
Mary Schapiro, Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), previously appointed one of Bernard Madoff’s sons to a regulatory body that oversees American securities firms.
It has emerged that in 2001, Ms Schapiro, currently chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), employed Mark Madoff to serve on the board of the National Adjudicatory Council — the division that reviews disciplinary decisions made by Finra.
Last week, Mark Madoff, with his brother, Andrew, were understood to have approached the authorities after their father apparently confessed to orchestrating a $50 billion securities fraud.
Mr Madoff is under house arrest in his $7 million Manhattan apartment and will be electronically tagged after he failed to secure further signatories to guarantee his $10 million bail.
Related Links
Both sons have emphatically denied any involvement in what could be the biggest fraud perpetrated by an individual.
However, the link with Mark Madoff may prove controversial for Ms Schapiro and the President-elect, who has moved fast to replace Christopher Cox, the current head of the SEC. The watchdog has came under fire for failing to detect Mr Madoff’s activities.
Earlier this week, Mr Cox admitted the regulator had repeatedly failed to follow up on tip-offs about Mr Madoff’s business dealings.
At the time of Mark Madoff’s appointment, Ms Schapiro was serving as president of the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), according to the Wall Street Journal, which was consolidated with the New York Stock Exchange Member Regulation in 2007 to form Finra.
She has served as a commissioner of the SEC under three administrations since the 1980s: President Reagan appointed her in 1988, she returned for the first President Bush in 1989, and she was named acting chairman by President Clinton in 1993.
Ms Schapiro chaired the Commodities Future Trading Commission in the mid-1990s, during the downfall of Barings Bank, and first joined NASD in 1996 as president of regulation.
Mr Madoff was himself closely involved in NASD, the self-regulatory organisation for brokers and dealer firms, in the 1970s.
The NASD went on to found Nasdaq, the screen-based equity exchange, in 1971, and Mr Madoff became its chairman in 1990.
Mark Madoff began working at his father’s firm, Bernard L. Madoff Securities, in 1986. He was the third member of Mr Madoff’s family to join the business, following his uncle, Peter Madoff, and his cousin, Charles Wiener, son of Bernard’s sister, Sandra. Andrew Madoff, his younger brother, followed in 1988, and Roger and Shana, children of Peter Madoff, joined in the 1990s.
It emerged yesterday that Shana Madoff’s relationship with her husband, Eric Swanson, is at the centre of an SEC probe. Mr Swanson is a former SEC attorney.
In a profile of the Madoff family, published in 2000, Mark Madoff said: “What makes it fun for all of us is to walk into the office in the morning and see the rest of your family sitting there. That’s a good feeling to have. To Bernie and Peter, that’s what it’s all about.”
Gary North - Procrastination
Gary North’s REALITY CHECK
Gold’s price:
www.GaryNorth.com/snip/300.htm
The Federal debt:
www.GaryNorth.com/snip/544.htm
To subscribe to this letter:
www.snipurl.com/subscribenow
Issue 816 December 19, 2008
PROCRASTINATION AND CONFIRMATION
On November 5, 2007, I told my website subscribers to sell
all of their stocks, except possibly defense and energy stocks,
and short the S&P 500 with 20% of their funds.
I doubt that many subscribers did this. But by March, a lot
of them had. They wanted confirmation. The Dow in early
November 2007 was a little under 14,000; its peak had been two
weeks earlier. Everybody was bullish. Yes, there had been a
brief crisis in the credit markets in August, but the stock
market had shrugged it off. It had risen. Clearly, there was no
big problem. Clearly, the experts knew better.
So, most of my site’s subscribers procrastinated. They
waited for confirmation. They got it. Boy, did they get it!
What kept them from losing anywhere from 30% to 40% of their
401(k) portfolios was that they had received advance warning.
The collapse of the stock market did not come as a surprise. It
did not come as a “correction,” as it came for the naive,
trusting herd of investors who listened to their advisors and the
perma-bulls on Tout TV. It came as a confirmation. A lot of
them sold before the Dow fell below 10,000.
The experts saw none of this coming. They would have
dismissed as a fool anyone who predicted in October 2007 that in
one year: (1) Countrywide Financial would be busted and absorbed
by Bank of America, (2) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would busted
and taken over by the government, (3) Bear Stearns would be
busted and absorbed for pennies on the dollar by J. P. Morgan,
(4) Lehman Brothers would be literally bankrupt — gone, (5)
Merrill Lynch would be bought for $20 billion of declining Bank
of America stock, (6) Wachovia would be busted, (7) Washington
Mutual would be busted, and (8) Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs
out of the investment banking business because they needed access
to Federal bailout money for commercial banks. Above all, they
would not have predicted that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway
holding company would lose 50% of its market value, August to
October, 2008.
The experts were blind. They led the blind into the ditch,
where they remain. They keep telling their shell-shocked, “This
may be the bottom! Commit any remaining funds to the stock
market.” Not India’s. Not China’s. America’s.
KNOW WHEN TO FOLD ‘EM
Procrastination and confirmation: both of these are killers.
“He who hesitates is lost.”
But not always. That’s the problem. “If it ain’t broken,
don’t fix it.”
Is it really broken? What, specifically, is “it”? Is it
any of these?
The economy
The banking system
The dollar
The Federal budget
Medicare
Retirement
The American way of life
I did not bother to list Congress. Congress has been broken
for two centuries. There is a reason for this. Congress best
represents the dark side of the voters. It represents “gimme.”
Look at the list. It was possible back in 2000 to put any
or all of these on a list of “broken.” But we are still here,
aren’t we? We are still muddling through.
But . . . Americans are poorer than they were in 2000. The
stock market is down. The dollar is down. The banking system is
in a major crisis. Investment banking is gone. Medicare is
closer to insolvency, what with the prescription drug law to sink
it earlier than expected.
What categories on this list are clearly in better shape
today than in 2000? None.
Things take time to break down. But they do wear out unless
repaired. Maintenance costs money. There are few politically
visible indicators that maintenance is worth the money.
Maintenance is “same old, same old.” Problem: the alternative to
maintenance is R.I.P.
When a cog in the wheel breaks, it should be replaced. It
should not be jerry-rigged.
Bailouts are jerry-rigging on a massive scale. Bailouts are
irrational maintenance. Bailouts will eventually break the great
machine.
Do you think the bailouts so far have worked to fix the
great machine or undermine it? You need to decide.
RANDOM WALK THEORY GOES OVER A CLIFF
Random walk theory, beloved by Ph.D. economists who are
lousy investors, says that the stock market discounts news –
both good news and bad news. Today’s prices reflect the best
forecasts of the surviving investors. So, the next move up or
down of any index will be random.
Then why are we told — against all the evidence since March
2000 — that investors should buy and hold a no-load American
stock index mutual fund? If the next move of the stock market is
random, then why is the trend upward? Why should anyone believe,
as millions still believe, that the U.S. stock market produces a
7% return per annum, compounded forever? It has attained only
losses since March of 2000.
I told my “Remnant Review” subscribers to sell stocks in
February and March of 2000. How much confirmation does my
forecast require? More than it has received. Way more.
If the stock market’s next move is random, why is there a
pattern at all? Because of investors’ faith in an upward trend.
But what is the basis of this trend? More faith. It used to be
faith in the Federal government, 1933-1982. Then it was faith in
entrepreneurship, 1983-2007. Now it again is faith in the
Federal government. In other words, faith in stock market growth
must be maintained, come hell or high water, come government or
innovation, come rain or come shine.
What is the constant? What never fails? We know the
official answer: The Federal Reserve System. There must always
be faith in the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal
Reserve System. This faith is proclaimed in college textbooks,
assumed in Congressional hearings, cheered in Tout TV updates,
affirmed in Presidential reassurances. Only quacks and cranks
distrust the Federal Reserve System.
The quacks and cranks sold short in late 2007.
Ever since August of 2007, the international economy has
been visibly unraveling. This shaking of the foundations began
in the month that Dr. Kurt Richebacher died. He had been
predicting the Great Unraveling ever since 2001. Month after
month, year after year, he warned in his newsletter that the
world’s economy was heading for a crash as a result of
inflationary central bank policies and excessive corporate
leverage. He was John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness. He
saw it coming years before Keynesian economist Nouriel Roubini
did. Richebacher used Austrian School economic categories to
explain why the crisis was inevitable. He left the scene without
saying, “I told you so.” But he told us so.
Because the decision-makers who oversaw this disaster are
gone, with severance pay packages having set records that will go
into the history books, their replacements are now saddled with
the legacy of their predecessors’ incomparably poor economic
judgment. Their predecessors personally succeeded enormously
through enormous institutional failure. Now their institutional
heirs must pull weekly rabbits out of their hats to keep the show
from being closed. The supply of rabbits is running short.
Their price has skyrocketed: trillions and trillions. (Carl
Sagan, where are you now that we need you?)
The magnitude of the failure is seen in the magnitude of
Bernard Madoff’s private equity Ponzi scheme. The media have
picked up his suggested number: $50 billion. Whether it will
turn out to be this bad, I do not know. But it is being
trumpeted as the largest financial fraud in history. The best
and the brightest were taken to the cleaners by this man. They
trusted; they did not verify.
The stock market shrugged off this news. It rose on the day
after the story broke. Investment fund managers ignored a loss
more than three times larger than the proposed bailout of the Big
Three automakers in Detroit. The market had risen sharply in
expectation of the bailout, which failed in the Senate. The
market nevertheless rose the next day, despite the failure of the
bailout and the news of Madoff’s scam.
What does this tell us? The optimists say that the stock
market has turned up because . . . no one knows.
The stock market sometimes turns up because the economy is
about to turn up. But almost no forecasters are saying that the
economy is likely to turn up in the next two quarters, and not
much after that, if then. They got caught flat-footed denying
that there was a recession. They do not want to be caught flat-
footed again.
Then why had they explained the rise all week on the basis
of the expected Detroit bailout? Because, for stock market
optimists, bad news is always fully discounted, while good news
is a reason to buy now.
The market had no inkling on December 11 that Madoff had
scammed $50 billion out of his hedge fund investors, who must now
sell assets in order to meet redemptions. The market had not
discounted this event. But, the next day, investors shrugged off
its implications. The stock market rose after an early fall that
was over in minutes.
What does this tell us? This: the American stock market is
not responding to news these days. It is responding to emotion.
On Friday, the 12th of December, the emotion was optimism. No
one knew why.
There is a visible trend: down. It has been evident ever
since mid-March of 2000. This trend has reasserted itself ever
since October 2007, when the Dow reached 14,000. In terms of the
dollar’s purchasing power, the Dow in 2007 was still below where
it had been in 2000.
Are the experts slow learners? Not at all. They are non-
learners. They do not see the trend. They refuse to see the
trend. The trend is an affront to their confession of faith:
“The American stock market’s trend is upward, for the
Federal Reserve System guarantees this.”
To this has been added: “And the U.S. Treasury.” And this: “And
Congress, whenever it is scared of the collapse which is
imminent, but which no one could possibly have seen coming.”
This is the religion of professional advisors: “The next
move of the stock market is random, but you had better buy stocks
now. You don’t want to be left out.”
Yes, I do.
They say: “Don’t panic.” I agree. I did not recommend
panic in November of 2007. I just said get completely out and
sell short. No panic. Just a rational response to what Austrian
economic theory teaches about the effects of central bank
inflation, when followed by lower central bank inflation. “G + B
= SS.” Greenspan plus Bernanke equals sell short.
PROCRASTINATION KILLS
When you see the logic of a position and you agree with it,
you have taken the first step to wealth creation . . . if the
position is true.
When you see facts that seem to come close to the conditions
for a great reversal suggested by the theory, you have taken the
second step . . . if the theory is true and the facts are
accurate.
When you act in terms of the combination of theory and
facts, you have taken the third step.
I did not recommend putting 100% of your money in a short
sale in November 2007 — only 20%. I recommended shorting the
S&P 500, a broad market index. You would have cleaned up far
more if you had shorted GM or Ford with every dime. If you had
shorted the financials, you would have made out like a bandit,
though not as well as a CEO of a now-busted financial giant that
was too big to fail. But I recommend prudence: 100% out of the
stock market and 20% short the broadest index. For me, that was
prudence. For the experts, that was lunacy — irrational panic.
“Don’t sell. Don’t ever sell stocks, except to buy other
stocks.”
To wait for confirmation seems prudent. It isn’t. Your
theory of the market is either right or wrong. Your assessment
of the most significant facts is either right or wrong. But
confirmation in today’s market proves very little if anything.
If news of Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion scam moves the stock
market up, of what possible use is confirmation? What does such
a move confirm, other than blind faith by fund managers in the
Federal Reserve System?
Procrastination kills. Prudence is not committing all of
your assets to your theory and factual analysis. Imprudence is
waiting for confirmation before committing 20%.
CONCLUSION
What do you really believe about the future of the economy?
If you don’t know, put 80% of your money into an FDIC-insured
bank account, up to $250,000 per bank. Put the rest in gold
coins.
Wait for what? Not confirmation. If you don’t know what to
think, the trend will not confirm anything. You must wait until
you understand the trend. Then act.
I know. Action is painful. It means doing something new.
It means coming to grips with Jimmy Durante’s signature song:
“Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, but then
you had the feeling that you wanted to stay?”
Keep reading until you make up your mind. Then act.
Don’t procrastinate after you have made up your mind. Don’t
wait for confirmation, either.
Don’t procrastinate on taking a serious look at where this
economy is heading, and whether it is heading toward you like a
freight train. If your car is stalled on the tracks, keep
listening for a whistle.
I heard the whistle on November 5, 2007. It’s getting
louder.
Maybe you don’t hear it. Keep reading. Keep analyzing.
Keep listening.
If your car is stalled, call AAA (and I don’t mean corporate
bonds). Get off the tracks. An FDIC-insured bank account gets
you off the tracks.
dentist chair dreams
Also while with the dentist there were some good memories, as part of the conversation between the good doc & me was about Italy, which we both really enjoy. This prompted me to go through photos after getting home. Dug up some from Venice & the Dolomites in 2003. The last couple photos of Venice were snatched from the web recently, when Venice was flooded. Here’s a link to more photos of the flooding: http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Venice-suffers-severe-flooding/
And for my fellow winos in the crowd, here are some from the Piedmont area in 2005:
Madoff
Money To
Amount May Be Closer To $100 Billion
From Mark Graffis
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dentist chair nightmares
Spent a good chunk of yesterday morning and this morning with my dentist. He’s great, so he didn’t cause the nightmare. It was the nightmare I read about in Condé Nast ‘Portfolio’ magazine between sessions of work. The article is entitled ‘The End’, by Michael Lewis. He’s the author of a 1980s book some may have read, “Liar’s Poker”, about the lying thieving games played on Wall Street. His book ended the career of Solomon Brothers’ John Gutfreund. The article is well worth reading: http://www.portfolio.com/
If you see the magazine, you’ll recognize the cover photo, which has already been seen here in the Tent:
Balloon
Heck he had me going on apothocraty apthocritis oh hell ..the kitchen
Here we are on the verge of the greatest rise in Pm,s we have ever seen and you gatta get loaded up with pennicillin
one last virginia illinois post
http://www.beardstownnewspapers.com/
the local paper…the local combined with the beardstown paper …so it is no longer the virginia gazette
for those looking for a small town and your own private golf course to restore…she is all your..just waiting for the taking
if you want to try farming..it is the the best farm land in the world
Maya @ 1:22 am
Nice granite mortar & pestle, worth hauling around. Heck, it’ll feel light compared to the pot o’ gold.
You caused me to use the dictionary to check on your “Call me Sisyphus“. I thought you were complaining about a bad case of syphilis!