As luck would have it, this daily look at the market through nontraditional, long-wave economics oriented eyes, does not have a particular bet. In other words, I haven’t put down any boundaries around the writing style to make in conformant with the venerable A.P. Stylebook, although I keep one at the ready lest someone question my journalistic integrity. In fact, as a writing style to be emulated I find “Playboy After Hours” as good as any, since a little levity goes a long ways toward lightening the load, whether you’re meeting some ‘friends of fermentation’ across the street from the NYSE after work for a post mortem, or looking through stacks of long-tail bond analysis trying to squeeze an extra dime’s worth of interest out at the 30-year mark.
Since humor is no stranger here, I’m pleased to report that this morning we have what you’d call a “target rich environment”. If you know what MOUT is (and all .mil types know that’s ‘Mobile Operations on Urban Terrain’), I keep a local Eat Texas variant alive best I can. It’s called SHOUT; Somewhat Humorous Observations in Unbelievable Times.
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With this in mind, we can scope out our first objective: Goldman Sachs, reported Alice Schroeder (Bloomberg) is “Arming Goldman with Pistols Against Public“. Invariably, this set headline writers to work in a double entendre frenzy: “Top firms said to be loading up on firearms in case of uprising” and “Gun Toting Goldman Execs Prepare for the Revolution.”
My personal favorite would be something like “Goldman Execs to Hit Bonus Target” or “Goldman: Bonus Bull’s-eye….” or something like that.
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But the truth of the matter is (and you’re not going to like this) that the flurry of language connected with this story, especially how it is linking terms like Goldman to “guns” and “revolution” and “uprising” and “against the public” yada, yada, yada is [wait for it] pretty much exactly what predictive linguistics held for this period.
As I’ve told you timer and time again, the rickety time machine up at www.halfpasthuman.com is incapable of distinguishing between a “real” event or a flaring up of linguistically ‘hot’ headlines such as those that are filling much of the descriptor sets that go with conflict with/between bankers and the general public.
The next HPH report should be out Sunday (www.halfpasthuman.com, $10 bucks downloaded) but Cliff’s taking a very low-key approach to its release. We’re both pretty much sick of the project since while movies popularizing how cool having a real time machine would be are totally off-base. Our experience over the past 9-years is that even when the project yields ‘well above statistical chance’ outputs, the detractors/denials/skeptics keep throwing rocks and so forth, resulting in something akin to rising bile in the throat. Everything from damnation to death threats to vicious ad hominem attacks has come from it so far along with charges from some that we’re profiteers and worse.
How we can be profiteers at $10 bucks a report and with wholesale ripoff artists modifying and posting the reports on the net in violation of copyright laws is never explained; just that we’re somehow bad guys for not sharing the output of thousands upon thousands of hours of work for free. I know there’s a business model in free somewhere, but the critics never explain this which pisses me off no end. Cliff’s attitude is a little closer to “Screw ‘em. I’ll do this report but after that…” The work, and it’s remarkable ‘hits’ either stands on its own, or not, and we’re just interested in the work, not the debate. This ain’t global warming data that can be neatly corralled and purged.
I still get several several emails a week urging “George admit it! You guy’s October 25th call was dead wrong!”
Was it? We did get the presidential swine flu declaration spot/smack-dab on, the Ukraine flu panic, after all. And by some news accounts, we are only in the second of what should (if linguistics are right) be a total of nine global waves of ‘ill winds’ associated with this linguistic set which the Ukraine and related European (mostly Eastern) countries have gone bonkers discussing. not to be defensive hear, but most of the critics don’t read the overseas press widely and tend to be US-centric in their views.
From a broader perspective, the language stew that was visible 6-months back was exactly crystal clear, but I’m sure one of these days the project critics will send along the definitive books on predictive language shifts so that we may better find the errors in our ways. I jest of course; there are no books on what we’re doing because guess what? This is what life on the bleeding edge of computing is about. Not one of the critics we’ve heard from offered a clearer perspective on what the language of this period would be back in mid August. Easy to criticize when there’s no comparable work to offer up in comparison.
Several people have asked “How come Cliff” (and to a lesser extent George) hasn’t been on the radio much lately? To which I answer with a simple question in kind: “Ever hear the term ‘pearls before swine’?” Certain makes clear at a deep personal level how tempting is it for the PTB to treat the whole planet as little more than grazing Ovis Aries. Ever read “Operation Mind Control“?
Sorry if I’ve lost a bit of my humor. I’ll get it back just as soon as I offer card-carrying Glockman execs a chance to step onto the pistol range here at the ranch to work on that fist-sized grouping at 10-meters. Two caveats though: Around the ranch BOA doesn’t mean Bank of America: It means Bring (your) Own Ammunition. And, if all you know about ‘indexing’ is summarized in letters like ^DJIA or ^DJT, or ^IXIC, don’t bother.
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OK, let’s shelve Glockman and move on to Globalists, who are having a dandy week, having essentially taken over Europe, much tot he chagrin of a few English patriots such as Daniel Hannan who noted Tuesday “At midnight last night, the United Kingdom ceased to be a sovereign state.“
Turns out that after all the jeering, laughter, and derision heaped upon people who’ve been writing of the corporate/globalist take-over of the world, that the alarmists were right. But this isn’t the first time the alarmists have been right, as you well know. The John Birch Society was warning of the socialist take-over of America back when I was a kid and sonavabitch if they weren’t substantially right in their warnings. Of course the same JBS which was right about creeping socialism is now writing about the globalist power grabs to come in places like Copenhagen (see: “UNEP Power Grab Planned for Copenhagen“), but pay that no mind, Ovis. Frogs being slowly parboiled don’t complain, and I don’t expect you to, either.
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Serious though the first couple of headlines were this morning, the third brings a smile to my face…in fact, I’ll just go laughing all the way to the bank as my gold coin came to being worth within a whisker of $1,218 this morning. (See updated price at top of page)
My wife Elaine asked me just yesterday “Don’t you think we should sell that thing?”
“No,” I explained patiently. “That gold has a long ways to run before it even comes close to being sellable.”
I then took her through the “When is fully valued likely to happen?” exercise.
It begins with looking at the price of gold in the early days of 1980. January 21, 1980, Kitco’s gold price data shows a spike to $850 an ounce.
Now we need to correct for ‘official inflation’ by putting $850 and 1980 into the Minneapolis Fed inflation calculator. That says that to be priced to the beginning of 2009 – in other words correct just for offishul monetary inflation /watering down of money’s buying power, gold would have to be where to equal the 1980 spike? $2,199.27.
But like the late-great Billy said: “But Wait! There’s More!” That doesn’t take into account inflation for this year. I think 4.5% is a realistic number (or should be by January when the last of the exceptionally low data rolls out). That means minimally to equal the 1980 price spike, Gold ought to be $2,298.23 before I even begin to get remotely interested in selling.
That, unfortunately, is not where our tale ends. Nossir; we need to go to John Williams’ most excellent site Shadow Government Statistics and put in the inflation calculation which is based on a different – and dare I suggest less politically agendized? – methodology.
The answer he comes up with (through October of this year only) is a gold price of $2,368.39.
And even that is not really where gold is going, since if people today were to hold as much on a per capita basis just based on population change, the price could be arguably higher. You see in 1980, global population was, and this is UN numbers here, 4.43 billion and in 2000 that was up to 6.07 billion. So not counting the last 10 years of growth, population was up 37%.
Kah-ching! Kah-ching! Williams’ calculator’s $2,368.39 times population growth would put gold in the $3,244.69 area.
Oh sure, there’s been some mining (and some mining of tungsten, too, LOL) so not even counting the last 10-years for global production and such, I still keep coming back to the $3,000 level and that’s before we get the explosive high cost of money in 2010.
“THE WHAT???”
Oh, sure, you were paying attention, weren’t you, to the reports that
Of course, you may be one of those people who discounts conspiracy theories on the origins of AIDs, too. But in case you haven’t had your head outside the MSM patrolled borders of US thought, perhaps reading an article in an Africa media outlet “Don’t discount conspiracy theories on origin of Aids” might be an eye opener.
If an outfit like Baxter can be found out about ‘accidentally’ shipping live flu virus about earlier this year (see: “Baxter: Product contained live bird flu virus”, Toronto Sun, Feb 27, 2009) then who’s to say this couldn’t have happened with other biowar materials much earlier on in a covert plan to depopulate the planet down toward the 500-million Club of Rome agenda?
By the way – if this is any comfort – the update to ‘Limits to Growth”, the CoR report on population from 1972, updated in 2004 predicted at that time (2004) that there was only a global gold reserve for 9-more years. See the Wikipedia entry on the methodology called “Exponential reserve index” for more…Petroleum runs out in 20 years (basis 2004) so we only have something like 14-years to run on that clock, which is why governments are getting so globalistic and cap & trade-ish, restrictions on travel, reduced caloric, disarmed populations, yada, yada, in their behaviors. You knew all this, of course.
So the question is not whether global population has to be reduced; the real issue is whether you will be one of the survivors of the cull which will no doubt be coming along either because of 2012, climate shift, alien wars, or global pandemic disease. Care for a little something each from behind curtains 1 though 4 to keep things interesting?
Going Down?
US stock futures have started to dip after the ADP jobs report figured 169,000 jobs were lost int he US last month. One of three things could happen here: The overnight pop in gold could evaporate, the stocks could rally later in the session, or the relationship between stocks and gold could break down. I’m figuring the latter.
Climategate, Redux
Since we’re talking about the conspiratorial side of life this morning, I suppose we should notice how the climate stamped is going, eh Ovis?
In our last exciting episode, the “Climate scientist at center of e-mail controversy to step down” and republicorp Senator James “Inhofe asks Boxer to investigate possible ‘Scientific Conspiracy’ in ‘Climategate‘”
Yep…and I expect a full open accounting of this all on my deck not later than March 31, 2025.
Urge To Surge
Change? You weren’t seriously expecting change from president O who just committed another 30,000 American forces to Smackghanistan, do you.
Only change: War Party A to War Party B…but this is a Checkbook Republic form of government where people in Washington don’t get there by raising money solely within their home districts, for crying out loud.
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More proof? Sure, take New Jersey, please: “Corzine’s total tally for his 3 campaigns: $131M“
Best government money can buy.
Life in the Web
Yahoo has it’s top searches of 2009 warming up.
Sailing On
Those 5 British sailors who supposedly strayed into Iranian waters have been released. Wonder if both sides got a quick refresher course on how to put keep out zones into their GPS nav systems?