2x+ good...

mmckinl,

Imagine getting into a line that was 30 people long, only inquiring as to what the store had to offer after a place in line had been secured, and then 20 minutes later getting the chance to buy canned turnips.

That's what communism was like.

How's that compare with your American experience so far?

CR,

Why are we fighting the last war?

people stand in line for concert tickets and wiis, thats worse than a soup line

Arbitrage_Macht_Frei,

Power without accountability will always corrupt, whether you are a bankster or a government official.

blinder is a keynesian shill already trying to postion himself for when this program fails as it will. partison politics at ists best. Pathetic

Blinder had better worry about 31-32 first !

Nice to see you back, C !

Yeah, one would think that today's debt monkey is not just "orders of magnitude" worse today, but an entirely different animal. Debt is not heroin here, it's oxygen.

i've read the rumors that the metals ETFs may not have, or not be able to procure, all the metal they are supposed to have to match the insane quantity of share purchases. it seems likely they don't, especially when you find the usual pm manipulators guarding the vaults. the size of these ETFs makes them dominant players in the market. you gotta wonder with the millions of ounces being added all the time to GLD and SLV why the spot price is not reacting more strongly. seems that the pm not being bought is a very possible answer. now the flip side, when the market continues it's dive and people need cash for bills, they will sell these etfs right away. i suspect that mass redemptions in GLD and SLV shares will have an asymmetric effect on the spot price compared to the same price movement on the upside.

blocks of shares, once created, are not destroyed in the same proportion on a downward price movement as when bought (and created) on the way up.

If PM ETFs are just a scam sponge to sop up all the investment demand for pm. this diversion not only suppresses the pm price now but could be used to absolutely crush it short term through the undermining of faith in the ETF itself, causing a run on the etf, and subsequent massive gold sales/shorts. seems to me if there was a sharp loss in confidence in the ETFs they (the shares, not the metal) would be clearly be sold. this selling would have to be matched by actual selling of PM. if the ETFs are run as advertised.

ultimately, though, an unraveling of a ponzi etf would cause a scramble for physical PM..

The ETFs are not gold, they are stock certificates. It is the supply and demand of these certificates that determines the share value, not the underlying. They only track the underlying according to how well the managers of the funds have set up the ETFs.

mmckinl,

You need to study up a bit. I recommend "Re-inventing Collapse" by Dmitri Orlov.

Anak,

but fiscal conservatives seem to ignore our current reality.

// Debt is not heroin here, it's oxygen.//

Man, if they don't close a bank on Friday, everybody here gets cranky.

everybody cranky - it's a really slow news day too - we dont have much to discuss so we wind up arguing theory which always has a bad end...

Arbitrage_Macht_Frei,

440 million and 150 million.. amateurs!!

there does appear to be an inordinate level of verbal masturbation today.

the big boys are the only ones who can redeem ETF shares for the underlying commodity. so should i assume that everyone else (essentially everyone) cannot and their trades are just matched by brokers like stocks. so, except for the special exception of redemptions by say JPM and HSBC, shares do not come out of the float when sold.

what incentive do the big boys have to redeem shares for metal in a declining price environment. Seems to me they would rather have the cash if the metal price is expected to go down. I don't have any faith in the big boys just keeping the ETF float normalized out of the goodness of their hearts. besides, they can take delivery from comex.

it is hard to reconcile close tracking of the PM spot price with an ever increasing float. this implies that the share price tracking the underlying is a matter of faith, a psychological phenomena. eventually, the share price must depart, and fall, from the spot price because of the constant increase in supply of the shares.

if the etf departed from the spot by a large amount to the downside it could be seen as throwing off a forecast. the false impression that the etf is predicting the PM market would quickly become self reinforcing due to the over supplied shares getting sold off.

it is also easy to see that most people would mistake an issue of oversupply of shares for a price forecast inherent in the difference between the share and spot. this is where things would self perpetuate. people believe the religion that the free market finds the right price with the help of invisible hands, even though they could easily understand that it is supply and demand that determine market price.

along these lines, backwardation could be caused by a loss of confidence in the futures markets expressed as lower prices for futures instruments. this loss of confidence and reduced demand for futures contracts could trick bugs by falsely signaling something they have been waiting years to see.

one thing is for certain. the price is manipulated downward, which means it is on sale.

i believe that the primary purpose of most ETFs, particularly the ultras and PM shares, is to divert real buying or selling demand from the underlying commodity or sector.

history will call them a scam.

Ya next generation is going to be saying "Trillions - pfffft"

Anak - thanks, trust the fragrant harbour is treating you well.

Last thread, Outsider asked what happens when SovBKCorp or other entity which appears royally skrood and well in line for the grim embrace of FDIC, but which is owned by a foreign entity, finally reaches the point of irredeemable insolvency.

Ta da! SWAPLINES!

Yes, this means that the Fed is printing / generating bytes for furriners too.

C

Adolf thought that imaginary divisions were going to save the day as the Reich was crumbling, and now we think imaginary division will work for us...

One quadrillion = 10 ^15

The Avogadro number = 6.022 141 79(30) × 10^23

Planck's constant = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m2 kg / s

so maybe the government somewhere down the line nationalizes the pm ETFs to "protect investors,"" forcing them to wait to settle in hyperinflating cash and through force majeure confiscates the (real or contrived) mountain of metal. 

FDR made it illegal to own gold in 1933.

nixon ended gold convertibility to dollars.

check out this video of him blaming it on currency traders.

video of Nixon

dryfly,

My point.. for a long time. We have the internet now.. so events might occur faster.

// When that lie was exposed hell breaking out wasn't far behind.//

mmckinl,

What will we pay police in? beyond a year or two, we will require a real economy of some sort.

//What we likely see is a police state not a dissolution of state//

broward,

I have been saying that for some time.. inflation screws over the rich more than the poor.

broward apparently people arent out of money yet... My wife says the high end places are still full of people - Whole Foods, etc... Are you brave enough to ask the people in Starbucks how many are not making their mortgage payments or credit card payments?

Numbers of stars in the milky way.. 200 to 400 Billion

Actually, thus far Obama has been a carbon copy of FDR- his reforms have been very moderate- though the far right call him a socialist, well they called FDR that as well.

The analogy by Blinder is certainly possible.

What will we pay police in? beyond a year or two, we will require a real economy of some sort.
//What we likely see is a police state not a dissolution of state//

~~~~~

We will have a real economy ... just smaller than it is now ...

Debt will have to be destroyed or inflated away ... and even now debt is being destroyed ...

The question is how far we go down this "Trickle Down" road ....

When Obama was campaigning I was encouraged that he said he would go over the federal budget and eliminate wasteful and fraudulent programs... So far no dice though... I didnt think the congress would be able to say no to him if he wanted to eliminate something useless...

If you were China and wanted to set in motion the financial future for the next 100 years, you'd be in no rush to make changes, especially as the only competitor on the world's stage was imploding before your very eyes.

Remember when we defiantly told China they couldn't buy Chevron Oil?

Do you think we'd sell it to them today?

sm_landlord (profile) wrote on Sat, 5/16/2009 - 3:40 pm
Addressing the budget deficit can be done in one of two ways: increase revenue or cut spending.
I don't think it's possible to increase government revenue significantly at this point, because the economy is weak and we're too far up the Laffer curve already. And cutting spending is beyond unlikely - in fact, spending looks like it's going to rise. And when was the last time our government actually cut spending overall?
So I consider it unlikely that the budget deficit will be addressed, other than rhetorically.

Everything I see the Feds trying to do have already been tried in California with the obvious results. The only tool left is the printing press. Think they'll not print just because they know it isn't a good idea? We saw how that worked with TARP voting.

In the 70's when we had big inflation the winners were people who held real assets such as real estate - losers were on fixed income... I still think you need to hold all asset classes because no one is very accurate at picking the winners and losers... you can change your allocation but over the long haul a more or less equal allocation among classes probably works as well as anything...

"i believe that the primary purpose of most ETFs, particularly the ultras and PM shares, is to divert real buying or selling demand from the underlying commodity or sector."

What purpose would that serve? If the ETFs stop tracking the underlying holdings, they would have to be abandoned, since no one could know what they actually were tracking.

Your criticism of ETFs would be better applied to the futures contracts. Some of those appear to be actually rigged in the sense that they are disconnected from the underlying commodity - Silver, for example, as discussed earlier this year.

"The only tool left is the printing press"

Is the Dawg piling into treasuries?

I watched the SARS outbreak closely. I'm half convinced that the Internet did more to contain it than anything else. Likewise, I think the swine flu might be contained the same way. I'm not sure that the latency of stock markets has been affected much but as I walked along today, I wondered if there's some sort of effect, call it global consciousness for lack of a creative term, in that the emotional and current-event context of large numbers of people are more synchronized than in the past.

I'm still trying to figure out the "green shoot" effect. I believe it's MSM-driven but I have no evidence of a gov't conspiracy. It appears that the "green shoots' meme appeared much earlier, even before Obama took office but laid at a low level for awhile. It doesn't have the signature of an over-driven meme but... perhaps the perpetrators are much more skilled at impedance-balancing the push than I've seen before.

At some point, the Fed will have to withdraw liquidity, and the Congress will have to address govt deficits.

And at some point, we are all dead. With influential people like Alan Blinder, along with Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, and practically every economist out there, advancing the theory that recessions can be avoided or significantly mitigated by more govt spending, the only question is how much more than it should will govt spending and the money supply grow.

Does anyone here honestly believe that the amount of cheap easy money, or of govt spending, will be shrunk before inflation has been allowed to transfer significant amounts of real wealth?

Like any other natural mechanism, our system will eventually self-correct, or at last reach a new equilibrium. But people like Alan Blinder will ensure that a major inflation lies between us and the next equilibrium.

Nobody really "owned" anything in the Soviet Union, as opposed to here where most everything & everybody is owned.

In the USSR the state owned most peoples homes, property, etc. The party apparatchiks ran the state.

In the USA most homes are TECHNICALLY owned by individuals... but are so levered that in fact the bank owns them - or at least owns liens to them. Foreclosures reinforce that reality daily. It appears our party is the 'banker party' and their apparatchiks run the state.

Now again who owns what where? And how is our average hero of labor going to tell the difference?

"Lots of things are "owned" in America, but precious few of them free and clear."

~~~~~

30% of the houses, supposedly there are trillions on the sidelines, I myself am cash or

less than 1yr treas ...

Do you think we'd sell it to them today?

At a 50% discount and give them all the voting rights they wanted... if they waffled we throw in Chrysler & GM as a bonus - almost like a TV infomercial... And there is MORE!!!

patientrenter

We are no where near inflation ...

They are printing Zombie money for Zombie banks ...

All this money is is a place holder with zeroes ...

until it gets into the real economy ....

Trickle Down doesn't work ... unless you are a bankster ...

What complexities of 1936 did the average person encounter in an average day?

Radio, Cars, Refrigerator, Airplanes, Trains, Telephones & Telegraph, etc.

How's that compare with the average person's complexities today?

small landlord,

i am only speculating on the integrity of ETFs.

i might do some deeper research on the subject or just watch for a confirmatory disconnect between the shares and spot.

honestly, i'm truly tired of finance. the scams and deceit are infuriating. can't wait for it to collapse. it is lonely, soul crushing, gut wrenching work.

can't even tell people you are a trader. they either hate you instantly or think you have a gambling problem.

heard about a tofu factory for sale...

"How's that compare with the average person's complexities today?"

AMF, argh, I'm actually trying to do some work for once, and now you're going to get me started.

How the city hurts your brain - The Boston Globe

It's a long story but over the past few years, I've concluded that most people are operating close to the maximum sustainable bandwidth in terms of brainpower. One of the effects of the credit cycle is that as people produce more in the same space of time, they're forced to consume faster in their remaining time. Think about how frantic the 1990s were.

That's bandwidth overload.

Now imagine that people have bandwidth quality-of-service.
What might people jettison to make room for incoming bandwidth?

I suspect that the ability to "rationalize markets and value" might take a hit, which would feed into a Optimistically Deluded Meme. Yes?

This chick is driving me crazy. She's talking terrorists, torture, Marxism, ,spacial art, novels, she's an 35-year-old big-blue-eyed, bohemian type and now she's TALKING TOO LOUD to distract me, I think it's on purpose. Begone! Begone, witch! I'm busy!

Do you think we'd sell it to them today?

At a 50% discount and give them all the voting rights they wanted... if they waffled we throw in Chrysler & GM as a bonus - almost like a TV infomercial... And there is MORE!!!

dryfly pegs the mordacity meter!

Nah, when the siamese twins start fighting over their shared liver, true sailing is dead. Can't say it wouldn't happen someday, but I think they're forced to bide their time, which is something they've managed wisely to do so far...

just curious if anyone has any thoughts on what will be the likely consequences of a strike by israel vs. iran. particularly with respect toimplications on oil. not trying to start any political strife here! no, if it happens (rightly or wrongly) what are the ramifications?

lucifer, loved your comment on global warming & vanity in the last thread....

"heard about a tofu factory for sale... "

LOL

" I'll be in Montreal in a few weeks."

An interesting thing I tested many years ago is Kitco's metal investment pool. You send them cash and theoretically they hold an equivalent amount of metal on hand. Since Kitco is located in Canada, taxation on profits is your responsibility.

Just saying.

just curious if anyone has any thoughts on what will be the likely consequences of a strike by israel vs. iran.

particularly with respect toimplications on oil.

~~~~

oil skyrockets as does the dollar ...

recreating another oct-nov-dec cascade in economic activity ...

Dawg wrote:
US paper for Canadian 1/10ths, halfs and full Maple Leafs. Deal.

Gold Maple Leafs are very nice coins, 24K. However, I like the alloyed coins better, the Krugerrand and American Eagle because they are harder and meant to be handled. You still get same amount of gold, just 22K with copper in the case of the Krug, and copper + silver in the Eagle. I like to handle the stuff and 24K is rather soft and prone to dent. All just personal preference.

mmckinl,

that's pretty much what i was thinking....

thanks for your thoughts.

1936 ?

I say we have 1931-1932 ahead of us ...

but I guess Blinder couldn't say that ...

too much truth to handle ...

This "general equilibrium" determines the relative prices of goods and services and labor of all kinds, and the output of each kind of good or service and thus the RGDP.

NAIRU
The rate of unemployment at which inflation neither speeds up nor slows down.

When RDGP is more than the NAIRGDP, inflation tends to speed up;

The dilemma is: if the monetary policy does not accommodate shifts in FC ( Friedman Curve) there will be unemployment and human misery, perhaps on a large scale. On the other hand, accommodating monetary policy merely puts off the unemployment and misery, since the inflationary expectations will prove to be self-fulfilling prophesies and the inflationary spiral will just continue with no foreseeable end, if it is accommodated.

Also see: Friedman denied that there is a permanent trade-off between inflation and unemployment, as suggested by the so-called Phillips curve. He argued that there is a ‘natural rate of employment’, determined by structural and institutional forces in the labour market, such as trade unions, unemployment compensation, and the costs of moving house, which governments are powerless to alter solely by monetary and fiscal policies.

broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sat, 5/16/2009 - 4:16 pm reply Ignore user

An interesting thing I tested many years ago is Kitco's metal investment pool. You send them cash and theoretically they hold an equivalent amount of metal on hand. Since Kitco is located in Canada, taxation on profits is your responsibility.
Just saying.

Why, now that you mention it... I do seem to remember something about that. Jus' sayin'.

Comrade Coinz also has a good point. Leafs are for transacting in envelopes not for spending. Too delicate.

you can scratch maples with your fingernail.

small weights are available in maples though, not so much in other brands.

apmex.com

Wondering if the withdrawal of liquidity is some kind of basic politico-economic meme. Remember how increasing its VAT and introducing a consumption tax in 1997 affected Japan.

burnside,

Endowments should be mechanisms to store surplus cash for future wants, thus they rely on long-term planning versus short -term casino plays. I think a lot of universities were like the majority of most entities and people that got out of control and focused on micro-managing short term casino chips. Everyone collectively lost focus, as if everyone had lotto fever. The interesting thing about a recession or depression is related to this stuff I was toying with related to marginal costs, i.e, higher input costs reduce the incentives for expansion, thus we as a society are going to fall backwards and re-boot, as we re-engineer all labor costs, housing costs, transportation and GDP. Society is on the edge of massive social and economic changes, so getting back to endowments, one can only hope that schools will still allow the lower classes to have opportunities to be educated, versus allowing the upper classes to re-invent The Next American Order (NAO). As such, the endowments will be less valuable and there will be fewer opportunities for all and the nature of risk will be re-thought by everyone.

ETFs sound like another derivative to me.
What's the big deal with gold anyway? It's fairly rare, can be pounded really thin, it's heavy, it doesn't corrode and it conducts electricity really well. And it reflects light well in certain glass applications
It's too soft and heavy to really be used structurally. Basically it's non-toxic lead.

I read this post and initially thought: "so, we've been down this road before and everything ended up just fine." Then, I remembered the rest of the story. The economy collapsed back into depression in 1938. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. In 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harder. 70 million dead souls , nazi genocide, concentration camps, and two nuclear detonations later and the world was forever changed.

It's hard to decouple the end of the depression from World War 2. True, the relationship may be one of correlation instead of causation. However, it would pretty damned well hard to know how things would have turned out had that little conflict not taken place.

Thanks EHP. The link on Aleksandr Yakovlev was actually a lot more intersting than cargo stats ! You are a man of catholic interests.

catholic (lower case): wide, broad, varied, diverse.

"Like a diabetic junkie camping out at a fast food takeout counter, President Obama, after increasing government debt and borrowing close to fourfold, says the debt and borrowing that are on his tab are not sustainable. And then pledges to bail out insurance companies, for no reason that anyone can seem to fathom, and to prop up the municipal bonds markets, after ensuring the death of those very markets himself with the announcement of the issuance of mind-boggling amounts of federal bonds.

Everything that still functions to a degree in the US now runs on government hand-outs, bail-outs and guarantees. Everything. That's it. And I’m not kidding here. Take out government support for banks, home purchases, car loans and all the rest, and you would be looking at a barren lunar economic landscape. And things are getting visibly worse every single day. GM and Chrysler may or may not come out of bankruptcy proceedings, their present predicaments are sure to cost millions of jobs this year alone. Those losses will be added up on top of the millions more in non-car-related firings, and there will come a point, and soon, when something breaks in the chain that cannot be mended easily, if it can at all.

America has been consuming a lot more than it has been producing for years now. What makes today stand out from what has been before is that what we are now witnessing is that the consequences of overconsumption are starting to further deplete production, and with a vengeance. The government is losing its grip at lightning speed, even though you would of course never know from their public utterances. Don't underestimate the possibility that they have reached the same conclusion that people like Stoneleigh and I did quite a while ago, that there is no way back, no recovery anywhere is sight. If that were so, and you would be in their shoes, what would you do?

I can tell you what their choice is: keep up the semblance of normality as long as possible, while behind the curtains frantic efforts are taking place to save and safeguard as much as possible for themselves and their own people. And no, you are not among their own people, you are not Obama's people. To know whose people you are, look around you in your homes, your towns and your families. "

~ The Automatic Earth

anak,

yep, probably just another crazy idea.

Otis, my brother actually grows soybeans and don't think I haven't given this some thought, at least as a "plan 9". I'd just have to trust my better half, Mrs. Krakatau, as I do anyway....lol

"withdraw liquidity"

that means sell crap.

....the house is burning and everyone is discussing the color of the drapes. Do some here just not see the flames? Do they think they will be extinguished by a timely rain? How important is discussion of breakfast tomorrow while the kitchen is ready to explode in conflagration? I just don't get it.

Name the greatest natural disaster in US history.

It was the drought of 1934.

That and the Great Mississippi River Flood of '28(?)... it and the dust bowl did more to transform America both good & bad than any two events since the Civil War itself. My BIL (a New Orleans native & amateur historian) once told me the Great Flood FINISHED what the war started... it really wasn't 'over & behind us' until then.

Black Star Ranch

Counting your chickens while the hen house burns down ?

Great Mississippi River Flood, April 1927. Was all of that.

Rising Tide by John Barry is a great read if interested.

The etf is appealing for shorter term trading, the physical metal is more appealing for a buy and hold forever...

Besides, "withdrawing liquidity"?

The Fed will have purchased $1.5tn of MBS by year's end, probably long before then even. That is one position you can't liquidate. Ditto for the debt outstanding with an FDIC guarantee slapped on it for 3 years. Ditto for the saturated Treasury market that will face further weakening of demand as exporters not only have less float to reinvest, but have to withdraw and spend at home.

It's just posturing for the eyes and ears of the public. Taking sharp action from a political standpoint. It's no different than some political bobble-head taking the stage to demand AIG repay its loans within the next year. It has nothing to do with anything other than forcing your opponent to declare a position that you can potentially attack them for later.

former GAO Comptroller General David Walker said sometime last year:

“If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and some people would be talking about whether the company’s management directors needed a major shake-up”.

“The federal government’s total liabilities,” Walker explained, “translates into a de facto mortgage of about $455,000 for every American household and there’s no house to back that mortgage. In other words, our government has made a whole lot of promises that, in the long run, it cannot possibly keep without huge tax increases.”

Now with the $12 Trillion bail out of Wall St ‘too big too fail banks’ it’s probably $650,000 for every American household

anak, was thinking their packaging equipment and existing distribution probably worth more than the asking price.

they sell to whole foods.

What game should we play?

Electronic Liquidity Drawdown or Unfunded Liabilities,

how about global-thermo soverign bank war?

What happened in 1936? My dad was born in 1927 and he seems to be really worried, but won't say why...

TODAY is "the new norm". Nothing will be as it was. We borrowed 1/3 - 1/2 of what we consumed. Assume everything will be reduced by that amount from here on out. Pretty simple, really. If you start from there, things won't "seem" quite as bad in another year, or two, or five, or ten...........

Califorina hedge fund manager arrested

"A Beverly Hills hedge fund manager was arrested Friday on a charge he bilked investors out of $44.3 million, including $5 million he lost playing poker, the U.S. attorney's office said."

Yahoo! 404 - Page Not Found

amf,

i think you just gave me a new nightmare to work into the repertoire (re- ETFs)....

Tedium on my iPhone. I always saw Laffer as 2-d but EHP is prob right that a large # of simult eequations give an optimum revenue. A beautiful day, greenery ,lake, blue sky, student bosoms in halter tops, I like the flakiness of Seattle.

GF on a date, if I were ambitious I'd do the same.
Come on NSA guy, toss me a grant already!

....."our government has made a whole lot of promises that, in the long run, it cannot possibly keep without huge tax increases.”

.....President Obama has "just realized this" in his latest from the New Mexican Town Hall meeting. His current level of spending cannot be continued. His next step will be a coordinated effort to garner public support to increase taxes - but only from the "undertaxed high income wealthy".

seems like CVS expends more effort counting tubes of personal lubricant than GLD does counting gold bars.

--
Only comment on the topic: Too many "crooks" spoil the btoth. More interesting and OT...

BOOK Watch -- Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust

For Those Who Have Any Interest In knowing HOW MUCH America Contributed to The Holocaust can read Edwin Black’s Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust. I just watched Mr. Black’s presentation at Park East Synagogue in NYC. Mr. Black’s is a Jew whose young parents were thrown out of a train to Auschwich and survived.

Based on Mr. Black’s presentation of the facts of late 1910s and 1920s America there would never have been the Holocaust but for the importation of the American ideas on Race & Blood, including eugenics, to Germany and the help provided to the Nazis by powerful Americans. Needless to point out that Nazis learned the use of propaganda from the Americans (this is based on my knowledge from other source). According to Mr. Black, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, a German American, and Thomas Watson of IBM were the most responsible. FDR got lot of support and money from Watson on behalf of IBM, Mr. Black asserts. Amazingly, The Holocaust Museum in New York does not allow any permanent exhibit implicating American corporations, according to Mr. Black. I am not surprised at all.

Regrettably, it is highly likely that the Gross Fuehrer (Great Leader) would be the American Hitler once the Greater Depression in America is an accepted reality and dopes get to vote for a demagogue “to fix” the problem. We know that people don’t learn from history. Least of it Americans, in general, and American Jews in particular. Why bother with inconvenient truths. Oh, I see, Americans are better, or smarter!, than the Germans of 80 years ago. Pride & Prejudice,

Jas

PS: Licifer, we are fighting the last war because we are BBAD. I said the we would as soon as Bernanke was appointed as the Chairman.

penalty for reading too fast: I read Jas's last "Gross Fuehrer (Great Leader)" as a reference to Rush L.

what the heck is a "statistical sample count"

You take an inventory list; you randomly select which bars you will physically count; and then, you count this sample of your total inventory.

They do this sample count mid-year. They do a full count at fiscal year-end. (Full count = 'dis bar with serial number on the custodian's inventory matches 'dat bar sitting on the pallet in front of the auditor.)

NW

seems like CVS expends more effort counting tubes of personal lubricant than GLD does counting gold bars.

I would believe that if they kept all their lubricant in a precious metals vault run by a custodian company independent of CVS.

CC: the Morgan Stanley mess is why you should have previous metals custodied away from the broker who sold you the gold. It is an extra set of eyes keeping an eye on things.

NW

C,

Well, that would also be me. I will look into that. Thanks,

Few seem to discuss our incredible aggregate debt to GDP. It is higher now than in 1933. How do we resolve what clearly appears to be Ponzi finance?

168 ignores 19
35 to 129

-odds are good for this question.

Why is Barclays shopping the Merril/Lehman SPDR bonds?

-this comment was actually posted twice.

Great Mississippi River Flood, April 1927. Was all of that.

Rising Tide by John Barry is a great read if interested.

Ya - I have the book but haven't read it. My sister & BIL gave it to me - the one from New Orleans.

There will be books written about this period too.

Allen C

Here's the chart ...

Has Deleveraging Even Begun? (Not For the Fainthearted) « naked capitalism

"Based on Mr. Black’s presentation of the facts of late 1910s and 1920s America "

This is a sad post. It is a scurrilous misreading of history...Societies dedicated to Teutonic myths and Aryan racial purity were already influential in Vienna in the early 1900s. Freud and Adler, Wittgenstein and even Mahler, were subjected to anti-Semitism. Mahler was even criticized for conducting Mozart, the latter believed to be a free-mason, a group also among the despised. Besides the Jews and Masons, the Slavs and Bosnian Muslims were also among the reviled, despite membership in the Empire.
Vienna was the intellectual center of the German world at the turn of the 20th century, Berlin steps to the forefront of a broken Germany after WW1, and the idea of a pure Teutonic race betrayed by lesser races, already widely dispersed in the German-speaking world, was a salve to a defeated, impoverished nation.

mmckinl,

Check out the Morgan Stanley chart. It breaks out the debt by type. I recall Zero Hedge posted the chart. Sorry for the lack of link.

Vonbek777 - you want to turn the climate change thingie on it's head look at it this way:

Current meme is that increased human population & development cause climate change... okay.

How about climate change is primary cause of human development and increased population?

I live in the center of North America's bread basket - some 20,000 years ago there was something like a mile of ice above where I live now... or at least nearby [I am on the edge of what they call the 'driftless region' where ice went around in the last ice age].

Anyway once the ice went & the earth warmed the 'first agricultural revolution' was possible and with it excess food supply, division of labor, invention & eventually SUVs.

And since the planet was warming dramatically enough to melt a mile of ice and push it thousands of miles north and eventually make it go 'away' - all before SUVs - maybe there are more drivers to climate than just automobiles.

And I'm not even saying there isn't a possibility recent human released CO2 isn't adding to the sum of effects - just saying there is a lot going on and it has gone on for a long time.

BTW - I first came to this conclusion about 1979 while taking a class on ecology [not environmental studies but animal & plant population dynamics] and ancient history [where we discussed the ice melt in Scandinavia & Central Asia as drivers of their population explosions & the problems that caused for Mediterranean & Asian civilizations].

I've dropped that 'concept' on few folks and always receive the 'there goes dryfly again' look. Kinda fun really. Try it some day.

Feldstein on the economy

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Sure there is. Social Credit. Take a chunk of the economy, divide evenly. Its not perfect but it deals with the immediate needs without complex programs.

Playing by the same trade rules your partner does will settle any other troubles

abprosper,
I saw one of those families by choice tonight in Costco. It was a Saturday night, but they were dressed in their Sunday best eating in the food court. Seven children looked like the range was 17-6 months. Very well behaved, and looked very happy to boot. Mom and Dad were very tiny people. Both under 5'4, but eldest son was a big 6'3 at least. I am pretty sure if the financial world imploded tomorrow.....they would survive just fine despite the extra mouths. I only have two children, and I can't get mine to behave that well.

You are absolutely correct that it is climate change but even more important the stability following climate change that allowed human populations to expand world wide. We are currently living (last 200 years) in the most stable climate in the last 200,000 years and a climate that happens to be ideally suited to human populations. It is an aberration based on the climate record and regression to the mean suggests that at some point forces beyond human control will return the climate to normal i.e wildly fluctuating and less hospitable to human beings.

However, to argue from that point that we should not be concerned about human caused changes misses the whole point. Climatologists like economist are unable to conceive of punctuated equilibriums. I for one don't believe the the IPCC view of this slowly warming planet. Once you put a chaos system into motion it goes wild until it finds a new equilibrium point. Therefore, we should be taking every step possible to perpetuate the current island of stability for as long as possible by avoiding any actions that could upset the current stability.

Essentially your argument is that because killer bees come out of a hive on their own doesn't no harm is caused by sticking a stick into the hive or that since we are all going to die anyway why bother with any safety precautions.