Sunday, July 02, 2006

the gold standard,

Alan Greenspan
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Gold price just broke $500

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Gold versus Stocks

The usually terrific Floyd Norris puts forth an interesting but somewhat flawed thesis in Friday's NYT about Gold; it has some odd logical reasoning in it -- that's unusual for Norris, who is typically excellent:

"GOLD is in a bull market, approaching $500 an ounce for the first time since 1987, and there is talk that the move shows renewed fears about inflation. Gold bugs say it may be that people are starting to lose faith in central banks to preserve the value of paper currencies, while others see evidence of growing demand for gold jewelry as Asia grows richer.

But perhaps it shows something else entirely. For the last three years, since the world settled down from the technology stock boom and bust, gold has traded suspiciously like just another American stock. If the stock market goes up, so does gold. And ditto if the stock market goes down." (emphasis added)

I find this description to be incorrect. As the graphic from his column (below) reveals, Gold has been in a robust up trend since even before the reflation process began in 2002 -- mark the beginning of the Gold move to 2001. The argument can be rationally made that the Gold market correctly anticipated the long term impact from high deficits.

Indeed, the very same factors that led to global markets to begin rallying since the pre-war period (March 2003) are many of the same elements which have led to Gold's rally: They are both products of the massive government stimulus which took place following the crash and recession:

interest rates were dropped to half century lows;
deficit spending soared;
Personal income taxes were cut;
corporate dividend taxes were slashed;
Capital gains taxes were cut;
CapEx spending recieved a special accelerated depreciation (ADCS);
Spending for the prosecution of two wars;
Money supply increased dramatically;
Hence, why I called this the kitchen sink economy.

But the key takewaway is not that Gold and Stocks are suddenly in sync -- the same underlying factors have been impacting each of them.

Depending upon which time period you use, Gold has very much outperformed stocks. Equities have gone sideways, and have been rangebound. Recent Market returns really depend on the measuring period you employ. If you take your measure of the markets as just before the War began, that creates a period of strong performance. Measure the market over other periods -- 1 , 2 or 4 years -- and there's not a whole lot of returns to write home about.

Here's Norris' take:


"Since the end of September 2002, as the stock market was hitting bottom, the S. & P. 500 is up 56 percent. But over the same period, the nearby gold future has risen 52 percent. Gold and stocks have not marched in lock step over that period, but neither have they moved very far apart.

The interesting question is why that should be, and whether it will continue. A possible explanation is that this is an era with an excess of capital available for investment. That explains low interest rates and rising prices for many investments, from stocks to gold. Since the end of September 2002, the major stock market indexes in the United States, Britain, Japan and Hong Kong, measured in dollars, are up 56 percent to 67 percent, none of them very far from the change in gold. The real proof of a bull market in gold will come when, or if, it resumes an ascent that is impressive not only when measured in paper currency, but also when measured against alternative investments.

Note that in the chart provided, Gold has gone through distinct periods relative to the SPX: Under-performing (1996-99), Over-performing (1999-2002)and Equal-performing (2003 - ).

My main problem for Floyd's thesis is the end game for reflation: It has already morphed into inflation. This bodes well for Gold, but poorly for stocks.

>


Source:
To See How Gold Is Doing, Check the Rest of the Market
Off the Charts
FLOYD NORRIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/26/business/26charts.html

Monday, November 21, 2005

The confusion about gold

Most people don't get it when it comes to gold and why it may be an investment. Here are a couple of ideas for everyone to discuss.
1. Gold is the global economic thermometer. When the price of gold is rising it is a sign that something in the system is not healthy. What that could be most will never know, but here are the suspects: worldwide inflationary pressure, potential derivatives meltdown, deflationary pressure in the US.
2. Gold is a global currency unsanctioned by any government. Gold historically has been counter-cyclical to the dollar and that is a sign of it trading as a commodity. Currently we are seeing the price of gold decouple from this inverse relationship. I am not saying it is completely decoupled, only time and hindsight will tell if that is the case, but gold is showing signs of trading independently as a currency.
3. There is no good alternative in currencies. Europe has serious social unrest and too many social programs that governments are on the hook for. The US has it's twin deficits plus the off the books deficits - medicare and social security. There is not another currency that has the potential to be the worlds' reserve currency. Basically, nothing is that attractive so people move to gold.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

I Want The Earth Plus 5%

I Want The Earth Plus 5%

How The Federal Reserve Board System Works

The Story of Fabian
The History Of Money And Power Told As A Fairy Tale

by Larry Hannigan

Fabian was excited as he once more rehearsed his speech for the crowd certain to turn up tomorrow. He had always wanted prestige and power and now his dreams were going to come true. He was a craftsman working with silver and gold, making jewelry and ornaments, but he became dissatisfied with working for a living. He needed excitement, a challenge, and now his plan was ready to begin.

For generations the people used the barter system. A man supported his own family by providing all their needs or else he specialised in a particular trade. Whatever surpluses he might have from his own production, he exchanged or swapped for the surplus of others.

Market day was always noise and dusty, yet people looked forward to the shouting and waving, and especially the companionship. It used to be a happy place, but now there were too many people, too much arguing. There was no time for chatting - a better system was needed.

Generally, the people had been happy, and enjoyed the fruits of their work.

In each community a simple Government had been formed to make sure that each person's freedoms and rights were protected and that no man was forced to do anything against his will by any other man, or any group of men.

This was the Government's one and only purpose and each Governor was voluntarily supported by the local community who elected him.

However, market day was the one problem they could not solve. Was a knife worth one or two baskets of corn? Was a cow worth more than a wagon and so on. No one could think of a better system.

Fabian had advertised, "I have the solution to our bartering problems, and I invite everyone to a public meeting tomorrow."

The next day there was a great assembly in the town square and Fabian explained all about the new system which he called "money". It sounded good. "How are we to start?" the people asked.

"The gold which I fashion into ornaments and jewelry is an excellent metal. It does not tarnish or rust, and will last a long time. I will make some gold into coins and we shall call each coin a dollar."

He explained how values would work, and that "money" would be really a medium for exchange - a much better system than bartering.

One of the Governors questioned, "Some people can dig gold and make coins for themselves", he said.

"This would be most unfair", Fabian was ready with the answer. "Only those coins approved by the Government can be used, and these will have special marking stamped on them." This seemed reasonable and it was proposed that each man be given an equal number. "But I deserve the most," said the candle-maker. "Everyone uses my candles." "No", said the farmer, "without food there is no life, surely we should get the most." And so the bickering continued.

Fabian let them argue for a while and finally he said, "Since none of you can agree, I suggest you obtain the number you require from me. There will be no limit, except for your ability to repay. The more you obtain, the more you must repay in one year's time. "And what will you receive?" the people asked.

"Since I am providing a service, that is, the money supply, I am entitled to payment for my work. Let us say that for every 100 pieces you obtain, you repay me 105 for every year that you owe the debt. The 5 will be my charge, and I shall call this charge interest."

There seemed to be no other way, and besides, 5% seemed little enough charge. "Come back next Friday and we will begin."

Fabian wasted no time. He made coins day and night, and at the end of the week he was ready. The people were queued up at his shop, and after the coins were inspected and approved by the Governors the system commenced. Some borrowed only a few and they went off to try the new system.

They found money to be marvelous, and they soon valued everything in gold coins or dollars. The value they placed on everything was called a "price", and the price mainly depended on the amount of work required to produce it. If it took a lot of work the price was high, but if it was produced with little effort it was quite inexpensive.

In one town lived Alan, who was the only watchmaker. His prices were high because the customers were willing to pay just to own one of his watches.

Then another man began making watches and offered them at a lower price in order to get sales. Alan was forced to lower his prices, and in no time at all prices came down, so that both men were striving to give the best quality at the lowest price. This was genuine free competition.

It was the same with builders, transport operators, accountants, farmers, in fact, in every endeavour. The customers always chose what they felt was the best deal - they had freedom of choice. There was no artificial protection such as licences or tariffs to prevent other people from going into business. The standard of living rose, and before long the people wondered how they had ever done without money.

At the end of the year, Fabian left his shop and visited all the people who owed him money. Some had more than they borrowed, but this meant that others had less, since there were only a certain number of coins issued in the first place. Those who had more than they borrowed paid back each 100 plus the extra 5, but still had to borrow again to carry on.

The others discovered for the first time that they had a debt. Before he would lend them more money, Fabian took a mortgage over some of their assets, and everyone went away once more to try and get those extra 5 coins which always seemed so hard to find.

No one realised that as a whole, the country could never get out of debt until all the coins were repaid, but even then, there were those extra 5 on each 100 which had never been lent out at all. No one but Fabian could see that it was impossible to pay the interest - the extra money had never been issued, therefore someone had to miss out.

It was true that Fabian spent some coins, but he couldn't possibly spend anything like 5% of the total economy on himself. There were thousands of people and Fabian was only one. Besides, he was still a goldsmith making a comfortable living.

At the back of his shop Fabian had a strong-room and people found it convenient to leave some of their coins with him for safekeeping. He charged a small fee depending on the amount of money, and the time it was left with him. He would give the owner receipts for the deposit.

When a person went shopping, he did not normally carry a lot of gold coins. He would give the shopkeeper one of the receipts to the value of the goods he wanted to buy.

Shopkeepers recognised the receipt as being genuine and accepted it with the idea of taking it to Fabian and collecting the appropriate amount in coins. The receipts passed from hand to hand instead of the gold itself being transferred. The people had great faith in the receipts - they accepted them as being as good as coins.

Before long, Fabian noticed that it was quite unusual for anyone to actually call for their gold coins.

He thought to himself, "Here I am in possession of all this gold and I am still a hard working craftsman. It doesn't make sense. Why there are dozens of people who would be glad to pay me interest for the use of this gold which is lying here and rarely called for.

It is true, the gold is not mine - but it is in my possession, which is all that matters. I hardly need to make any coins at all, I can use some of the coins stored in the vault."

At first he was very cautious, only loaning a few at a time, and then only on tremendous security. But gradually he became bolder, and larger amounts were loaned.

One day, a large loan was requested. Fabian suggested, "Instead of carrying all these coins we can make a deposit in your name, and then I shall give you several receipts to the value of the coins." The borrower agreed, and off he went with a bunch of receipts. He had obtained a loan, yet the gold remained in the strong-room. After the client left, Fabian smiled. He could have his cake and eat it too. He could "lend" gold and still keep it in his possession.

Friends, strangers and even enemies needed funds to carry out their businesses - and so long as they could produce security, they could borrow as much as they needed. By simply writing out receipts Fabian was able to "lend" money to several times the value of gold in his strong-room, and he was not even the owner of it. Everything was safe so long as the real owners didn't call for their gold and the confidence of the people was maintained.

He kept a book showing the debits and credits for each person. The lending business was proving to be very lucrative indeed.

His social standing in the community was increasing almost as fast as his wealth. He was becoming a man of importance, he commanded respect. In matters of finance, his very word was like a sacred pronouncement.

Goldsmiths from other towns became curious about his activities and one day they called to see him. He told them what he was doing, but was very careful to emphasize the need for secrecy.

If their plan was exposed, the scheme would fail, so they agreed to form their own secret alliance.

Each returned to his own town and began to operate as Fabian had taught.

People now accepted the receipts as being as good as gold itself, and many receipts were deposited for safe keeping in the same way as coins. When a merchant wished to pay another for goods, he simply wrote a short note instructing Fabian to transfer money from his account to that of the second merchant. It took Fabian only a few minutes to adjust the figures.

This new system became very popular, and the instruction notes were called "checks".

Late one night, the goldsmiths had another secret meeting and Fabian revealed a new plan. The next day they called a meeting with all the Governors, and Fabian began. "The receipts we issue have become very popular. No doubt, most of you Governors are using them and you find them very convenient." They nodded in agreement and wondered what the problem was. "Well", he continued, "some receipts are being copied by counterfeiters. This practice must be stopped."

The Governors became alarmed. "What can we do?" they asked. Fabian replied, "My suggestion is this - first of all, let it be the Government's job to print new notes on a special paper with very intricate designs, and then each note to be signed by the chief Governor. We goldsmiths will be happy to pay the printing costs, as it will save us a lot of time writing out receipts". The Governors reasoned, "Well, it is our job to protect the people against counterfeiters and the advice certainly seems like a good idea." So they agreed to print the notes.

"Secondly," Fabian said, "some people have gone prospecting and are making their own gold coins. I suggest that you pass a law so that any person who finds gold nuggets must hand them in. Of course, they will be reimbursed with notes and coins."

The idea sounded good and without too much thought about it, they printed a large number of crisp new notes. Each note had a value printed on it - $1, $2, $5, $10 etc. The small printing costs were paid by the goldsmiths.

The notes were much easier to carry and they soon became accepted by the people. Despite their popularity however, these new notes and coins were used for only 10% of transactions. The records showed that the check system accounted for 90% of all business.

The next part of his plan commenced. Until now, people were paying Fabian to guard their money. In order to attract more money into the vault Fabian offered to pay depositors 3% interest on their money.

Most people believed that he was re-lending their money out to borrowers at 5%, and his profit was the 2% difference. Besides, the people didn't question him as getting 3% was far better than paying to have the money guarded.

The volume of savings grew and with the additional money in the vaults, Fabian was able to lend $200, $300, $400 sometimes up to $900 for every $100 in notes and coins that he held in deposit. He had to be careful not to exceed this nine to one ratio, because one person in ten did require the notes and coins for use.

If there was not enough money available when required, people would become suspicious, especially as their deposit books showed how much they had deposited. Nevertheless, on the $900 in book figures that Fabian loaned out by writing checks himself, he was able to demand up to $45 in interest, i.e. 5% on $900. When the loan plus interest was repaid, i.e. $945, the $900 was cancelled out in the debit column and Fabian kept the $45 interest. He was therefore quite happy to pay $3 interest on the original $100 deposited which had never left the vaults at all. This meant that for every $100 he held in deposits, it was possible to make 42% profit, most people believing he was only making 2%. The other goldsmiths were doing the same thing. They created money out of nothing at the stroke of a pen, and then charged interest on top of it.

True, they didn't coin money, the Government actually printed the notes and coins and gave it to the goldsmiths to distribute. Fabian's only expense was the small printing fee. Still, they were creating credit money out of nothing and charging interest on top of it. Most people believed that the money supply was a Government operation. They also believed that Fabian was lending them the money that someone else had deposited, but it was very strange that no one's deposits ever decreased when a loan was advanced. If everyone had tried to withdraw their deposits at once, the fraud would have been exposed.

When a loan was requested in notes or coins, it presented no problem. Fabian merely explained to the Government that the increase in population and production required more notes, and these he obtained for the small printing fee.

One day a thoughtful man went to see Fabian. "This interest charge is wrong", he said. "For every $100 you issue, you are asking $105 in return. The extra $5 can never be paid since it doesn't exist.

Farmers produce food, industry manufacturers goods, and so on, but only you produce money. Suppose there are only two businessmen in the whole country and we employ everyone else. We borrow $100 each, we pay $90 out in wages and expenses and allow $10 profit (our wage). That means the total purchasing power is $90 + $10 twice, i.e. $200. Yet to pay you we must sell all our produce for $210. If one of us succeeds and sells all his produce for $105, the other man can only hope to get $95. Also, part of his goods cannot be sold, as there is no money left to buy them.

He will still owe you $10 and can only repay this by borrowing more. The system is impossible."

The man continued, "Surely you should issue 105, i.e. 100 to me and 5 to you to spend. This way there would be 105 in circulation, and the debt can be repaid."

Fabian listened quietly and finally said, "Financial economics is a deep subject, my boy, it takes years of study. Let me worry about these matters, and you look after yours. You must become more efficient, increase your production, cut down on your expenses and become a better businessman. I am always willing to help in these matters."

The man went away still unconvinced. There was something wrong with Fabian's operations and he felt that his questions had been avoided.

Yet, most people respected Fabian's word - "He is the expert, the others must be wrong. Look how the country has developed, how our production has increased - we must be better off."

To cover the interest on the money they had borrowed, merchants were forced to raise their prices. Wage earners complained that wages were too low. Employers refused to pay higher wages, claiming that they would be ruined. Farmers could not get a fair price for their produce. Housewives complained that food was getting too dear.

And finally some people went on strike, a thing previously unheard of. Others had become poverty stricken and their friends and relatives could not afford to help them. Most had forgotten the real wealth all around - the fertile soils, the great forests, the minerals and cattle. They could think only of the money which always seemed so scarce. But they never questioned the system. They believed the Government was running it.

A few had pooled their excess money and formed "lending" or "finance" companies. They could get 6% or more this way, which was better than the 3% Fabian paid, but they could only lend out money they owned - they did not have this strange power of being able to create money out of nothing by merely writing figures in books.

These finance companies worried Fabian and his friends somewhat, so they quickly set up a few companies of their own. Mostly, they bought the others out before they got going. In no time, all the finance companies were owned by them, or under their control.

The economic situation got worse. The wage earners were convinced that the bosses were making too much profit. The bosses said that their workers were too lazy and weren't doing an honest day's work, and everyone was blaming everyone else. The Governors could not come up with an answer and besides, the immediate problem seemed to be to help the poverty stricken.

They started up welfare schemes and made laws forcing people to contribute to them. This made many people angry - they believed in the old-fashioned idea of helping one's neighbour by voluntary effort.

"These laws are nothing more than legalised robbery. To take something off a person against his will, regardless of the purpose for which it is to be used, is no different from stealing."

But each man felt helpless and was afraid of the jail sentence which was threatened for failing to pay. These welfare schemes gave some relief, but before long the problem was back and more money was needed to cope. The cost of these schemes rose higher and higher and the size of the Government grew.

Most of the Governors were sincere men trying to do their best. They didn't like asking for more money from their people and finally, they had no choice but to borrow money from Fabian and his friends. They had no idea how they were going to repay. Parents could no longer afford to pay teachers for their children. They couldn't pay doctors. And transport operators were going out of business.

One by one the government was forced to take these operations over. Teachers, doctors and many others became public servants.

Few obtained satisfaction in their work. They were given a reasonable wage, but they lost their identity. They became small cogs in a giant machine.

There was no room for personal initiative, little recognition for effort, their income was fixed and advancement came only when a superior retired or died.

In desperation, the governors decided to seek Fabian's advice. They considered him very wise and he seemed to know how to solve money matters. He listened to them explain all their problems, and finally he answered, "Many people cannot solve their own problems - they need someone to do it for them. Surely you agree that most people have the right to be happy and to be provided with the essentials of life. One of our great sayings is "all men are equal" - is it not?"

Well, the only way to balance things up is to take the excess wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. Introduce a system of taxation. The more a man has, the more he must pay. Collect taxes from each person according to his ability, and give to each according to his need. Schools and hospitals should be free for those who cannot afford them "

He gave them a long talk on high sounding ideals and finished up with, "Oh, by the way, don't forget you owe me money. You've been borrowing now for quite some time. The least I can do to help, is for you to just to pay me the interest. We'll leave the capital debt owing, just pay me the interest."

They went away, and without giving Fabian's philosophies any real thought, they introduced the graduated income tax - the more you earn, the higher your tax rate. No one liked this, but they either paid the taxes or went to jail.

Merchants were forced once again to raise their prices. Wage earners demanded higher wages forcing many employers out of business, or to replace men with machinery. This caused additional unemployment and forced the Government to introduce further welfare and handout schemes.

Tariffs and other protection devices were introduced to keep some industries going just to provide employment. A few people wondered if the purpose of the production was to produce goods or merely to provide employment.

As things got worse, they tried wage control, price control, and all sorts of controls. The Government tried to get more money through sales tax, payroll tax and all sorts of taxes. Someone noted that from the wheat farmer right through to the housewife, there were over 50 taxes on a loaf of bread.

"Experts" arose and some were elected to Government, but after each yearly meeting they came back with almost nothing achieved, except for the news that taxes were to be "restructured", but overall the total tax always increased.

Fabian began to demand his interest payments, and a larger and larger portion of the tax money was being needed to pay him.

Then came party politics - the people started arguing about which group of Governors could best solve the problems. They argued about personalities, idealism, party labels, everything except the real problem. The councils were getting into trouble.

In one town the interest on the debt exceeded the amount of rates which were collected in a year. Throughout the land the unpaid interest kept increasing - interest was charged on unpaid interest.

Gradually much of the real wealth of the country came to be owned or controlled by Fabian and his friends and with it came greater control over people. However, the control was not yet complete. They knew that the situation would not be secure until every person was controlled.

Most people opposing the systems could be silenced by financial pressure, or suffer public ridicule. To do this Fabian and his friends purchased most of the newspapers, T.V. and radio stations and he carefully selected people to operate them. Many of these people had a sincere desire to improve the world, but they never realised how they were being used. Their solutions always dealt with the effects of the problem, never the cause.

There were several different newspapers - one for the right wing, one for the left wing, one for the workers, one for the bosses, and so on. It didn't matter much which one you believed in, so long as you didn't think about the real problem.

Fabian's plan was almost at its completion - the whole country was in debt to him. Through education and the media, he had control of people's minds. They were able to think and believe only what he wanted them to.

After a man has far more money than he can possibly spend for pleasure, what is left to excite him? For those with a ruling class mentality, the answer is power - raw power over other human beings. The idealists were used in the media and in Government, but the real controllers that Fabian sought were those of the ruling class mentality.

Most of the goldsmiths had become this way. They knew the feeling of great wealth, but it no longer satisfied them. They needed challenge and excitement, and power over the masses was the ultimate game.

They believed they were superior to all others. "It is our right and duty to rule. The masses don't know what is good for them. They need to be rallied and organised. To rule is our birthright."

Throughout the land Fabian and his friends owned many lending offices. True, they were privately and separately owned. In theory they were in competition with each other, but in reality they were working very closely together. After persuading some of the Governors, they set up an institution which they called the Money Reserve Centre. They didn't even use their own money to do this - they created credit against part of the money out of the people's deposits.

This Institution gave the outward appearance of regulating the money supply and being a Government operation, but strangely enough, no Governor or public servant was ever allowed to be on the Board of Directors.

The Government no longer borrowed directly from Fabian, but began to use a system of I.O.U.'s to the Money Reserve Centre. The security offered was the estimated revenue from next year's taxes. This was in line with Fabian's plan - removing suspicion from himself to an apparent Government operation. Yet, behind the scenes, he was still in control.

Indirectly, Fabian had such control over the Government that they were forced to do his bidding. He boasted, "Let me control the nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." It didn't matter much which group of Governors were elected. Fabian was in control of the money, the life blood of the nation.

The Government obtained the money, but interest was always charged on every loan. More and more was going out in welfare and handout schemes, and it was not long before the Government found it difficult to even repay the interest, let alone the capital.

And yet there were people who still asked the question, "Money is a man-made system. Surely it can be adjusted to serve, not to rule?" But these people became fewer and their voices were lost in the mad scrabble for the non-existent interest.

The adminstrations changed, the party labels changed, but the major policies continued. Regardless of which Government was in "power", Fabian's ultimate goal was brought closer each year. The people's policies meant nothing. They were being taxed to the limit, they could pay no more. Now the time was ripe for Fabian's final move.

10% of the money supply was still in the form of notes and coins. This had to be abolished in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. While the people used cash, they were free to buy and sell as they chose - they still had some control over their own lives.

But it was not always safe to carry notes and coins. Checks were not accepted outside one's local community, and therefore a more convenient system was looked forward to. Once again Fabian had the answer. His organisation issued everyone with a little plastic card showing the person's name, photograph and an identification number.

When this card was presented anywhere, the storekeeper phoned the central computer to check the credit rating. If it was clear, the person could buy what he wanted up to a certain amount.

At first people were allowed to spend a small amount on credit, and if this was repaid within a month, no interest was charged. This was fine for the wage earner, but what businessman could even begin? He had to set up machinery, manufacture the goods, pay wages etc. and sell all his goods and repay the money. If he exceeded one month, he was charged a 1.5% for every month the debt was owed. This amounted to over 18% per year.

Businessmen had no option but to add the 18% onto the selling price. Yet this extra money or credit (the 18%) had not been loaned out to anyone. Throughout the country, businessmen were given the impossible task of repaying $118 for every $100 they borrowed - but the extra $18 had never been created at all.

Yet Fabian and his friends increased their standing in society. They were regarded as pillars of respectability. Their pronouncements on finance and economics were accepted with almost religious conviction.

Under the burden of ever increasing taxes, many small businesses collapsed. Special licenses were needed for various operations, so that the remaining ones found it very difficult to operate. Fabian owned and controlled all of the big companies which had hundreds of subsidiaries. These appeared to be in competition with each other, yet he controlled them all. Eventually all competitors were forced out of business. Plumbers, electricians and most other small industries suffered the same fate - they were swallowed up by Fabian's giant companies which all had Government protection.

Fabian wanted the plastic cards to eliminate notes and coins. His plan was that when all notes were withdrawn, only businesses using the computer card system would be able to operate.

He planned that eventually some people would misplace their cards and be unable to buy or sell anything until a proof of identify was made. He wanted a law to be passed which would give him ultimate control - a law forcing everyone to have their identification number tattooed onto their hand. The number would be visible only under a special light, linked to a computer. Every computer would be linked to a giant central computer so that Fabian could know everything about everyone.

By the way, the correct terminology used in the financial world for this system is "fractional reserve banking".

The story you have read is of course, fiction.

But if you found it to be disturbingly close to the truth and would like to know who Fabian is in real life, a good starting point is a study on the activities of the English goldsmiths in the 16th and 17th centuries.

For example, The Bank of England began in 1694. King William of Orange was in financial difficulties as a result of a war with France. The Goldsmiths "lent him" 1.2 million pounds (a staggering amount in those days) with certain conditions:

The interest rate was to be 8%. It must be remembered that Magna Carta stated that the charging or collecting of interest carried the death penalty. The King was to grant the goldsmiths a charter for the bank which gave them the right to issue credit.

Prior to this, their operations of issuing receipts for more money than they held in deposits was totally illegal. The charter made it legal.

In 1694 William Patterson obtained the Charter for the Bank of England. Quotations:

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition - "Banks create credit. It is a mistake to suppose that bank credit is created to any extent by the payment of money into the banks. A loan made by a bank is a clear addition to the amount of money in the community."

Lord Acton, Lord Chief Justice of England, 1875 - "The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the People v. The Banks."

Mr Reginald McKenna, when Chairman of the Midland Bank in London - "I am afraid that ordinary citizens will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.

Mr Phillip A. Benson, President of the American Bankers' Association, June 8 1939 - "There is no more direct way to capture control of a nation than through its credit (money) system."

USA Banker's Magazine, August 25 1924 - "Capital must protect itself in every possible manner by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through a process of law, the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the influence of the strong arm of government, applied by a central power of wealth under control of leading financiers.

This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world.

By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."

Sir Denison Miller - During an interview in 1921, when he was asked if he, through the Commonwealth Bank, had financed Australia during the First World War for $700 million, he replied; "Such was the case, and I could have financed the country for a further like sum had the war continued." Asked if that amount was available for productive purposes in this time of peace, he answered "Yes".

From "Hand Over Our Loot, No. 2, by Len Clampett:

"There are four things that must be available for paid work to take place:

The work to be done. The materials to do the work. The labor to do the work. The money to pay for the work to be done.

If any of those four things are missing, no paid work can take place. It is a naturally self-regulating system. If there is work to be done, and the material is available and the labour willing, all we have to do is create the money. Quite simple."

"Ask yourself why it was that depressions happened. All that went missing from the community was the money to buy goods and services. The labour was still available. The work to be done was still there. The materials had not disappeared, and the goods were readily available in the shops, or could be produced but for the want of money.

Extract from a letter written by Rothschild Bros of London to a New York firm of bankers on 25 June 1863:

"The few who can understand the System (Cheque Money and Credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class. While on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical (hostile, hurtful) to their interests.

The following quotation was reprinted in the Idaho Leader, USA, 26 August 1924, and has been read into Hansard twice: by John Evans MP, in 1926, and by M.D. Cowan M.P., in the Session of 1930-1931.

In 1891 a confidential circular was sent to American bankers and their agents, containing the following statements:

"We authorise our loan agents in the western States to loan our funds on real estate, to fall due on September 1st 1894, and at no time thereafter.

On September 1, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration.

On September 1st we will demand our money - we will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession.

We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the great Mississippi as well, at our own price.

We may as well own three-fourths of the farms of the west and the money of the country.

Then the farmers will become tenants, as in England."

From "Hand Over Our Loot, No. 2"

In the United States, the issuing of money is controlled by the Federal Reserve Board. This is not a government department but a board of private bankers. Most of us would believe that the Federal Reserve is a federal arm of the national government. ... This is not true! ... In 1913 President Woodrow Wilson signed the document that created the Federal Reserve, and committed the American people to debt slavery until such time as they awake from their slumber and overthrow this vicious tyranny."...

"The understanding of this issue of money into the community can be best illustrated by equating money in the economy with tickets in a railway system. The tickets are printed by a printer who is paid for his work. The printer never claims the ownership of the tickets. And we can never imagine a railway company refusing to give passengers seats on a train because it is out of tickets. By this same token, a government should never refuse people the access to normal commerce and trade by claiming it is out of money."

Suppose the government borrows $10 million. It only costs the bankers a few hundred dollars to actually produce the funds, and a little more to do the book-keeping. Do you think it is fair that our citizens should struggle to keep their homes and families together, while the bankers grow fat on these profits?

Credit created by a Government-owned bank is better than credit created by private banks, because there is no need to recover the money from people by way of taxes, and there is no interest attached to inflate the cost. The public work completed with the credit by the Government bank is the asset that replaces the money created when the work is finished.

None of our problems will disappear until we correct the creation, supply and circulation of money. Once the money problem is solved, everything else will fall into place.

Source: http://www.fourwinds10.com/news/05-government/A-banking-irs/2003/05A-08-18-03-i-want-the-earth-plus-five-percent.html

The Next Great Debate - Following the $$ trail

Disclaimer I am not affiliated with this site in anyway shape or form
I just think everyone should read this story.

If you haven't read the story about $$ and how it works this is
the story about Fabian the money lender.

I Want The Earth Plus 5%
http://www.federal-reserve.net/iwanttheearthplus5percent.htm

Where is the top of the $$ prymid and who sits upon its throne.

Maybe it begins in Babylon, Greece, Atilah the Hun, Rome,
The Money Changers in the Temple, Rothchilds in the 1700?
Britain was at the top of the game!!! No matter what empire falls
someone still owns the next one.

"Give me control of the money, and i care not who makes the laws."

But now who is at the top? Where does the $$ trail Lead?
I borrow from the banks, who lended to the banks?
A parent company? Who Started the Parent company?
All the Gold must be somewhere who has it?

I probably went to deep but, just wondering if anyone
else has ever wondered this??

Again I have nothing to do with these sights nor do I
know anyone who does. This is my knowalage quest!!!

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

History Repeat?? GOLD and private owners.

This question was posted in a forum recently. Leave your comments.

History Repeat?? GOLD and private owners.

We all know we are facing economic problems.
Does the Pre$ of the U$ have the power to declare owning gold illegal again?

When other countries want to cash out of USA
and the mighty dollar colapses/worthless(ie. Germany 1923)
What would be a possible course of action for the Pre$?


" we need to pool our resources and bind together,
if we are to survive this horrific economi disaster.."


I can just imagine him saying something like that
right before he makes owning gold illegal again.

Unless there is some law preventing this I really don't know.
Could the US declare owning gold reserves ilegal again?

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Gold and Robet K

Mannn I found an article that Robert wrote Im going to guess in 2002.

http://reiclub.com/articles/bad-news-good-news

He must be really raking in the dough off the gold market! LOOK!

http://quotes.ino.com/chart/?s=FOREX_XAUUSDO&v=dmax

I think (and this will probably make me look stupid) but I think hes getting a %33 roi. maybe my math is flawed...invests at 300 goes up to 400 so $100 increase is %33 of $300 but over a 2 year span thats %17 a year. I kinda think Id want something more rapid than that more like 30-40%/yr...but maybe with gold it just doesnt work like that..bottom line..im not too educated on futures markets as to what would be considered a good return and what would be considered marginal...any knowledge from others as to what that would be would be helpful.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Gold seeks role as currency of e-commerce

By Steve Hays, Reuters
July 10, 2001

LONDON (Reuters) -- World markets need a digital currency that is independent of national economies, and gold is already showing it fits that bill, a dot.com firm based on the Caribbean island of Nevis says.
``In the past there wasn't enough gold to finance wars, but there's more than enough around now to finance commercial transactions,'' Douglas Jackson, president and chief executive of e-gold Ltd, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Jackson said the firm turned gold into an online currency and started up its e-gold system in November 1996, since when 3.2 million transactions had been conducted via the network.

Jackson said each unit of e-gold as a digital currency was backed by an equivalent weight in gold metal held in secure third-party vaults. That meant there was no credit risk or contingent liability in using e-gold for any transactions.

A Canadian, for example, can pay a German the correct weight of gold for goods or services as easily as if the price had been quoted in a national currency.

Internet penetration

Most deals had been done by small businesses in the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia that could not afford to wait weeks to receive funds from credit card transactions or were not in the credit card system.

``We've also seen interest from areas where there are weak currencies and good internet penetration, particularly Malaysia and New Zealand,'' he added.

Banks could mobilise reserves

Jackson is in London to discuss using e-gold for bullion banks to settle business among themselves.

He said a digital currency also offered central banks a way to mobilize their gold reserves.

``The central banks, and the IMF, are sitting there with thousands of tons of gold as a major part of their assets, but they can't be used for capital transactions.''

Official gold holdings stood at about 30,000 tons worldwide at the end of 2000, out of total global above-ground stocks of 142,600 tons, according to industry analysts Gold Fields Mineral Services.

The United States was ranked first with 8,137 tons, followed by Germany with 3,469 and France with 3,025.

``During its recent economic distress Turkey needed to defend itself with open-market operations, but it was sitting on 100 tons of gold reserves that it couldn't easily draw into that effort,'' Jackson said.

He added that the absence of credit risk exposure in using digital gold, rather than a traditional hard currency, could also change the way financial markets did business -- for example, in allowing the immediate settlement of securities trades and the clearing of multiple dissimilar financial assets.

``In theory a grandmother in Bangladesh with a few grams of gold could get access to the global financial system for the first time,'' Jackson said.

Gold was fixed at $267.45 a troy ounce in London on Tuesday afternoon, and there are 32,151 troy ounces in one ton.

Read the original article at ZDNet

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

In Gold We Trust

Thirty miles south of Florida's Cape Canaveral lies the town of Melbourne, home to the Action Gun pistol range, where, on a balmy Thursday afternoon, James Ray stands calmly firing round after Glock 9-mm round at a photocopied image of Adolf Hitler. Ray supplied the target himself. He purchased it on the Web site of one of his favorite nonprofit organizations (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership), and its ideological content is not what you'd call subtle: Against the background of a standard ring target, the Führer stands in full Sieg heil mode, his arm up high and his sternum right in the bull's-eye, above a caption that reads ALL IN FAVOR OF GUN CONTROL RAISE YOUR RIGHT HAND. By the time Ray has had enough of the Glock, the target is nicely perforated. Then he picks up his .44 Magnum hand cannon and blows Adolf pretty much to bits.

Yes, Jim Ray is a gun freak. But as it happens, the purpose of today's visit to the pistol range is not to huff powder fumes or celebrate the Second Amendment. He's here to show that there's a type of money you can believe in without also having to believe in the authority of the state. He's here to offer a glimpse of a world in which wealth resides ultimately not in flimsy pieces of government-issue paper but in rock-solid slabs of $279-an-ounce metal. He's here, in short, to demonstrate the vanguard of monetary technology: a 5,000-year-old form of cash called gold.

Or in this case, e-gold, the world's first 100 percent precious metal-backed Internet currency, with which Ray pays for his outings at the gun range and a lot more besides. The private currency was launched five years ago and is now operated by two separate but tightly linked companies: e-gold Ltd., incorporated in the Caribbean island state of Nevis as a holding company for the system's assets, and Gold & Silver Reserve, headquartered in Melbourne, which takes care of everything else. Both are closely held and managed by e-gold chair Douglas Jackson. In addition, Jackson has forged a partnership with Islamic entrepreneurs to launch e-dinar, which is foreign owned.

Jim Ray works for G&SR as "lead evangelist." He draws his monthly salary in e-gold; each gram sitting in his Web-based account gives him title to a gram of real gold held in vaults in London and the United Arab Emirates. Sometimes he trades his e-gold for e-silver, e-platinum, or e-palladium - the other, far less popular, metal-backed currencies offered in the e-gold system. More often, he trades it for US dollars through G&SR's OmniPay exchange service or one of the couple dozen independent exchange providers who make their living selling e-gold for dollars, marks, yen, and other national currencies at the standard 4 to 6 percent markup over the spot price of gold. But otherwise, he spends the stuff like cash, giving it straight to whoever will take it.


And people do. Ray's .44, his Hitler target, the bullets in his Glock - all were paid for with instant, online transfers to the sellers' e-gold accounts. And when he settles up today at the Action Gun cash register, he'll have this afternoon's $18 shooting fee charged to his tab, which he'll pay in e-gold when he gets back to his desktop. He'll point, he'll click, he'll type in some account numbers and a password and, in the blink of a clock cycle, approximately 2 of the 1.7 million grams of solid gold in the system's reserves - a gleaming hoard of 141 brick-sized ingots - will change owners.




"It's the only foreign currency without a nationality," says e-gold's Jackson. On an average day, his company's clients make 8,600 transactions, trading roughly $1.6 million worth of e-gold for goods, services, and cash worldwide. Those numbers are more than double what they were 18 months ago, and so are most other statistics. As of November, there were 287,965 accounts in the system, up from 134,150 at the beginning of 2001, and the amount of emetal in those accounts, worth more than $16 million, was close to twice what it had been the previous November. In a sector littered with the corpses of failed online currencies and other exotic emoney systems - Beenz, Flooz, DigiCash, CyberCash, CyberCent - e-gold is quietly thriving.

Ray calls it "the little payment system that could" - the operative word, of course, being little. The company's financials ($5.47 million in revenue; 114,000 funded accounts) are Popsicle-stand caliber compared with the figures posted by emoney media darling PayPal, with its $80 million to $100 million in revenue and its 10 million customers. But with fewer than two dozen employees and a marketing budget close to zero, Jackson's corporate structure runs lean and, as of the summer of 2000, profitable. The company finally got its first competitors in 2001 - GoldMoney, E-Bullion, 3PGold, OSGold - attracted to the gold-backed digital currency space by low barriers to entry and the smell of black ink.

The product's appeal? "Fundamentals," says Ray. For online consumers, especially those making international purchases, e-gold offers an ease of use and a degree of anonymity that credit cards can't match. And for some merchants, of course, the only selling point e-gold needs is that there are people who want to spend it. After a German customer inquired about e-gold, Vince Lee, president of TealPoint Software, added the payment option. "It's not a big part of our business," admits Lee, whose company is probably the largest of the couple hundred mostly mom-and-pop operations that take e-gold online. "But in this climate, you can't really afford to turn any customers away."

Ray argues, though, that the advantages for merchants go further. A transaction fee of 1 percent, capped at 50 cents per spend, comes in well under the 2 to 5 percent fees charged by credit card companies. And as for that bane of online businesses, the credit card chargeback, e-gold is a silver bullet. Unlike almost any other form of online payment, e-gold clears instantly and finally, with no chance for the spender to cancel after the fact. Or as Ray puts it, "When you get paid, you stay paid."

Still, Ray knows better than to pretend that these are the only reasons most e-gold users have bought into the system. Or even, perhaps, the main ones. For most consumers, the ability to reverse online credit card charges is decidedly a feature rather than a bug. And if you're going to pay a nickel for every dollar you turn into e-gold - as the going rate of exchange requires - you're probably not doing it because you want to help some online merchant save the same nickel in transaction fees. More likely, you're doing it at least in part for the one thing e-gold offers that no other digital payment system before it ever has. You're doing it for the gold.

Which is to say, you're doing it for any of the complex cultural, psychological, and above all political reasons that make gold, in Ray's words, "the most emotional spot on the periodic table - never mind plutonium."

As a onetime Libertarian candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, Ray is well aware, for instance, that a large percentage of e-gold's early adopters come from the ranks of the laissez-faire radicals for whom gold has long been an icon of economic freedom from government. Others are goldbug investors, desperately bullish on the metal despite years of declining prices. Still others come to e-gold via e-dinar, looking to honor Islamic financial commandments and subvert the Western economic system.

Finding bits of 141 bars of gold circulating on the Net is a little like a coelacanth, a financial fossil come to life. Don't be fooled. E-gold is hotter than plutonium.

But all the same, Ray insists gold's philosophical baggage doesn't stand in the way of its being a technically superior currency. It frustrates and baffles him, for example, that the only advocacy groups currently taking e-gold donations on their Web sites are outfits like his cherished Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership or the cyber libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I would love," he says, "to go up to some offensive antifreedom group like Handgun Control Inc. and say, 'Look, you morons: You're taking plastic. They're taking a percentage out. Take e-gold and sell it for a profit. It's better money! Even if you're not a libertarian, it's better money.'"

Ray sighs, as if summoning the patience to wait for civilization to catch up with him. "Gold," he says, "has always been better money."




There are those who would beg to differ - among them, the most influential economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, who 78 years ago declared the gold standard a "barbarous relic," unfit for the complex monetary demands of modern economies. In Keynes' now widely held view, the problem with pegging currencies to fixed amounts of gold was that it limited government's ability to adjust the money supply, which among other things made economic crashes much more brutal than they had to be. The onset of the Depression drove the point home, and central banks spent the next 40 years gradually weaning themselves off gold. Finally, in 1971, President Richard Nixon pulled the plug on the world's last metallic national currency: the gold-backed dollar. Ever since, the major currencies have all floated anchorless, backed only by "the full faith and credit" of their issuing governments.

Encountering 141 solid bars' worth of gold-backed currency circulating on the Internet, therefore, is a little like hauling a wriggling, gasping coelacanth up from the bottom of the sea: It's a financial fossil come to life, calmly going about its existence despite decades of expert consensus that it couldn't be anything but dead.

Don't be fooled, though. The convergence of gold and the Net - of the oldest of low tech and the newest of the high - isn't nearly the freak encounter it appears. When Douglas Jackson first conceived of e-gold in 1995, he had barely heard of the Internet. Likewise, when longtime gold-market analyst James Turk founded GoldMoney last February - Jackson's most serious competition - he was making good on a concept he'd started thinking about in 1979, back when he still doubted that the technological infrastructure to support it would exist in his lifetime. But both men knew as soon as they encountered the Net that their currency belonged there - and not least because classic gold money and the core mechanisms of the Internet are in fact strikingly analogous technologies.

The international gold standard was one of the technical wonders of the highly globalized late-Victorian era - a sophisticated, elegant mechanism for transmitting value from one end of the civilized world to the other. National monies existed, of course, but in effect were just local network protocols running on top of the internetwork layer that connected them all. Or as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell has put it, "Currencies were just names for particular weights of gold." The dollar, for instance, was fixed by statute at 23.22 grains (about one-twentieth of an ounce), the pound sterling at 113.0016 grains, and so on. Local payments were made in local units, but all cross-border deals ultimately were settled through international bank-to-bank shipments of the universal currency - bullion.

Today, in a world just now returning to Gilded Age levels of economic interdependence after a century of hot and cold global warfare, the closest thing we have to a universal money is the US dollar. But as with most proprietary standards, many argue, the dollar introduces costly inefficiencies into the system - from the distorting influence of US monetary policies on non-US markets to the simple fact that final clearance of dollar payments still takes place only during East Coast banking hours.

Clearly, says Turk, if the Internet is going to become the engine of global commerce it's cracked up to be, it needs a currency it can call its own - a currency as nonproprietary and international as the Internet itself. "And gold seems to be the logical candidate," he says, "because after all, that's gold's traditional role. It's international money."

But if gold does good things for the Internet, says Jackson, the Internet does even better things for gold. E-gold isn't your great-grandfather's gold standard. It's new and improved, Jackson argues, fortified by the rigor of free-market discipline and the openness of digital networks. And if you think that's no big deal, well, Jackson - a 45-year-old former oncologist and entirely self-taught economist - would like you to know that his invention represents "an epochal change in human destiny" and "probably the greatest benefit to humanity that's ever been thought of."

How so? Invulnerable to government manipulation and subject to the kinds of market forces only a worldwide, 24/7, open-ended network can bring to bear, e-gold promises not simply better money but the best: a money supply kept so straight and narrow that it has room for neither bubbles nor crashes. And "this," as Jackson is fond of claiming, "fixes something that's been screwed up since before the pharaohs." After millennia in which the boom and bust of the business cycle has washed ceaselessly over human affairs - playing havoc with the lives of rich and poor and even now blackening capitalism's good name - e-gold has arrived to still the waters. E-gold is here to bring capitalism to a kind of perfection.

Not that it's a foregone conclusion. Some of Jackson's closest business colleagues, after all, like to think e-gold might actually bring capitalism to its knees.





It's a hot high noon in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Faint, muggy breezes are blowing in off the Persian Gulf; and in the shopping malls, Mercedes dealerships, and air-conditioned Starbucks of this deliriously prosperous city-state, loudspeakers are discreetly broadcasting the muezzins' call to prayer.

The call can also be heard, if you listen hard enough, inside a 12-foot-square, steel-and-concrete-walled storage vault located in Dubai International Airport's heavily guarded cargo-holding facilities. But if you're inside the vault, your mind is probably on other things. Like, for instance, the $7.5 million worth of precious metal piled up around you: five flat bars of chrome-bright palladium; two large plastic jars full of powdery platinum sponge; 160 fat, tarnished loaves of silver; and - on a single shelf, laid out one next to the other like babies in a maternity ward - 58 slender, radiant bricks of 99.9 percent pure gold, about 400 troy ounces each and altogether worth more than $6.5 million.

These assets represent nearly half of the e-gold system's physical reserves, and there are, arguably, sound business reasons for storing them in this part of the world. Dubai, sometimes called the Switzerland of the Middle East, offers the financial sophistication of a major commercial hub, the low overhead of a mostly immigrant labor pool, and the high security of a politely authoritarian mini-monarchy.

But the truth is, the gold is here because Allah commanded it. Or at any rate, because the passionate believers behind e-dinar - the network's Muslim-friendly frontend - believe He did. When Douglas Jackson and the e-dinar principals began the negotiations that culminated in e-dinar's September 2000 launch, Jackson was told up front that a proper Islamic currency requires a proper Islamic country as its base. Obligingly, he moved some of the company's existing assets from ScotiaBank in Canada to Dubai's Transguard repository (the rest remains with J. P. Morgan Chase in London) and even rewrote his governance contract to give e-dinar a limited veto over bullion transfers out of the vault. In return, e-dinar agreed, in effect, to help market the e-gold system to the world's 1.1 billion Muslims.

The pitch? Late one night in the lobby of one of Dubai's five-star hotels, a 46-year-old Muslim named Abdalhasib Castiñeira lays it out, sipping chamomile tea as he outlines a brief theology of money and calmly prophesies the downfall of the worldwide capitalist imperium.

A gaunt, neatly bearded Spaniard, Castiñeira is marketing director of the Islamic Mint, a private institution dedicated to reviving as international currency the coinage described in the Koran - the gold dinar and silver dirham. He has placed on the table before him two small gold coins inscribed with Arabic scripture. The Islamic Mint makes them and they represent, says Castiñeira, the Islamic virtues of fair trade and honest value. Give someone a piece of gold, the argument goes, and you give him a real asset whose worth has endured throughout millennia. "Whereas this," he says, pulling a crisp US hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet, "is just a promise." Put your faith in it, and you submit to a system ultimately controlled by governments and corporations, a system that when it collapses - "all empires fall sooner or later," he says - will take the dollar down with it.

"But if you hold this," he says, picking up one of the gold coins and weighing it thoughtfully in his palm, "you are free."

The coin in Castiñeira's hand contains 4.25 grams of gold, just as the dinar did in the time of the Prophet. Likewise, and by no coincidence, the e-dinar's primary unit of account is also 4.25 grams of gold. Officially, the Islamic Mint and e-dinar are separate organizations, but they're actually the off- and online divisions of a single project, joined by ideological and personal ties.

E-dinar's British COO, Yahya Cattanach, and his family share a communal condo with Castiñeira in the comfortable Jumeirah district of Dubai. The company's Spanish president, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, is also the president of the Islamic Mint. And finally, uniting all three men - as well as e-dinar's Swiss CEO, Malaysian CFO, and German CTO - is one crucial biographical datum: All are high-placed members of the Murabitun movement, a modern, Western offshoot of Sufi Islam and possibly the only religious sect in history whose defining article of faith is a financial theory.




There aren't too many Murabitun in the world; they number probably in the thousands. But they are avid proselytizers, supported in part by Dubai's royal Maktoum family, and they've established significant communities in Germany, England, South Africa, Indonesia, and Spain (though none is quite so impressive, perhaps, as the Murabitun outpost in Chiapas, Mexico, a community of 600 local Indians converted in the midst of the Zapatista uprising). Scattered though they are, community leaders see one another often, convening regularly in the small Scottish town of Achnagairn, home to the movement's founder and patriarch, the 71-year-old Sheikh Abdalqadir As-Sufi.

For most of his life, the sheikh went by the proper Scots name Ian Dallas. In the 1960s, he worked as an actor and promoter, making the scene in London and Paris and hanging with Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles, and other hippie icons. Increasingly disillusioned with the counterculture, Dallas wound up in Morocco, where he met the Sufi spiritual leader Sheikh Muhammad ibn al-Habib and became a Muslim. Sheikh Muhammad had a vision: The modern revival of Islam, he believed, would come from, as he put it, "the people who pee standing" - from Westerners. Ian Dallas, now Abdalqadir, was anointed to take the lead. "Go to your land and see what will happen," Sheikh Muhammad told him, and he went.

Back in London, Sheikh Abdalqadir slowly gathered acolytes from among the drifting spiritual seekers of the day. Murabitun legend has it that pop star Cat Stevens (later Yusuf Islam) got his first exposure to Islam from Sheikh Abdalqadir, when both of them used to hang out at T. Rex singer Marc Bolan's house. Others became hardcore followers, donning djellabas and turbans and helping the sheikh shape Murabitun belief into a curiously worldly mysticism - a radical Islam tinged with elements of classic European anarchism, moderate feminism, refined anti-Semitism, and dense Heideggerian phenomenology.

It wasn't until the mid-1980s, however, that the members of the Murabitun truly began to set themselves apart from the run of post-hippie spiritual movements. Sheikh Abdalqadir came to believe that if there was anything a group of Western Muslims was best positioned to contribute to the world, it was an Islamic cleansing of the global financial system. And so he set his closest followers - in particular Umar Vadillo - the task of studying classic Islamic texts on money, with a view to drawing out their modern implications. The result, published in 1991, was the "Fatwa Concerning the Islamic Prohibition of Using Paper-Money as a Medium of Exchange."

"You want to be radical? You don't need to blow up the bank, just burn your bank account. For that you need an alternative. What is the alternative? E-dinar."

In the wake of fatwas sentencing Salman Rushdie to death and launching Osama bin Laden's terrorist jihad, Vadillo's sounds almost comically wonky. But make no mistake: This is an extreme document. The Bible condemns the financial practice of usury, certainly, and Islam does so even more firmly, prohibiting as haram, or unlawful, not only excessive but any interest charges on debt - a stricture that generally requires orthodox Muslims to leap through awkward theological hoops just to keep their money in a bank. But what Vadillo objects to, and in no uncertain terms, is modern money itself. "After examining all the aspects of paper money," he writes, "in the Light of the Qur'an and the Sunna, we declare that the use of paper money in any form of exchange is usury and therefore haram."

Naturally, you can't comply with the fatwa merely by paying with plastic instead of paper. Paper money is a usurious cheat, Vadillo argues, largely because it has become "nothing but a pure symbol with no reality attached except the imposition of law." And since that same unreality undergirds the entire monetary system, the only honest way to escape its taint is to strive for the entire system's destruction. The fatwa, in short, is a call to financial jihad, and the struggle, Vadillo predicts, will be an unconventional one. Muslim information warriors will hack into banking networks and "transfer money at random." They will create dummy companies and "absorb debt that will never be paid back." They will "raid" the diamond and gold markets, which, according to Sheikh Abdalqadir's way of thinking, represent the hoarded wealth of the world's great usurers, the Jews.

But these are tactics for a war that has yet to come, and may not ever. For now, and before all else, there's one thing Muslims everywhere need to do to hasten the end of the paper-currency regime and with it the demise of capitalism, the liberation of Islam, and the restoration (insh'allah) of the caliphate: They must work together to create a righteous alternative. They must bring back gold and silver as a standard medium of exchange.




What was Douglas Jackson thinking when he hooked up with these guys? If he could have looked into the future, would he have guessed that, at the start of 2002, the world's attention would be riveted on pan-Islamic radicalism and its links to, among other things, obscure international money networks? And if so, would he still have steered his own obscure international money network into so close a partnership with the Murabitun?

Probably. So far, Jackson's only second thoughts about the e-dinar deal have been to wonder just how much appeal the Murabitun's financial extremism really holds for the average Muslim. "The jury's still out," he says somewhat ruefully, noting that in a year of operations the funds held in e-dinar accounts have barely added up to a single bar of gold. For this and similarly mundane reasons, Jackson was already looking to loosen e-dinar's connection to the e-gold system months before the World Trade Center collapsed, and he insists the political mood since then hasn't added any urgency to the task.

And why should it? In the weeks since September 11, investigators have painted a pretty clear picture of the kind of networks they think al Qaeda & Co. are moving their money around in, and it doesn't include anything as Net-savvy as online payment systems.

And even if it did turn out that al Qaeda funds have passed through e-dinar, one thing's for sure: The Murabitun wouldn't be thrilled to hear it. For years they have publicly proclaimed their contempt for terrorists of every stripe, and in the wake of the September attacks, their stance has only hardened. Shortly after 9-11, Sheikh Abdalqadir issued a declaration excoriating Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The attacks themselves he condemned as horrific and, more to the point, futile. "Bombing a building which houses a magical wealth system, which has no physical reality but remains simply electronic impulses in the digital archives of computers, far from attacking or weakening the system, strengthens it," wrote the sheikh. "A true study of the Qur'an and the Sunna shows us that capitalism will not be abolished on the battlefield but in the marketplace where it is practiced."

"Look, we are against terrorism more than Bush is," Vadillo explains via email. "You want to be radical? You don't need to blow up the bank, just burn your bank account. And for that you are going to need an alternative. What is the alternative? E-dinar."

That's not to say Jackson shouldn't be worried about tainted money coursing through the e-gold system - or that he isn't. But what troubles him most are the Ponzi schemes: Hundreds of online pyramid scams have made e-gold (because of its convenience and because it offers bilked users no way to cancel charges) their payment system of choice.

It gives some sense of how much these operations have contributed to e-gold's bottom line to know that, to this day, the single largest holding in the e-gold system - $1.1 million in gold, 8 percent of total reserves - sits unclaimed in an account belonging to an alleged Ponzi that shut down a year ago. As for more recent activity, Eric Gaither of Gaithman's, one of the leading independent gold-currency exchanges, guesses that "at least 50 to 60 percent of e-gold" transactions are headed into or out of what he and others sometimes euphemistically call HYIPs (high-yield investment programs) or simply games. Other reputable exchange providers put the figure between 30 and 90 percent. "Frankly," says Steve Foerster, former CTO of G&SR and currently COO of Dominica-based gold currency 3PGold, "without online games right now there would be no gold economy."

For his part, Jackson vigorously denies HYIPs account for anything approaching a substantial portion of e-gold traffic. "These are piddly-ass little things," he says. "When you actually run one of these things down, they're pathetic." Still, he concedes, they're a PR liability, and he and his staff have been working hard to squeeze them out of the system. They've instituted "know your customer" rules to identify suspected swindlers, and they've cooperated amicably with law enforcement. When SEC staffers came to G&SR's offices last May to review the accounts of one of the biggest e-gold schemes ever - the self-styled "Christian-based humanitarian organization," E-Biz Ventures, shut down after allegedly inflicting losses of $8.5 million on investors - they were welcomed with coffee, bagels, and a conference room of their own. J. Chris Condren, the attorney charged with recovering E-Biz investors' money, has only good things to say about e-gold. "They've answered every question we've asked them, they've responded to every subpoena, every request for information."


Still, Jackson sometimes seems almost baffled that anyone could care who uses e-gold and why. It's all the same for him, for instance, that most users haven't a clue about the profound macroeconomic consequences he sees in e-gold. "They could be doing this for the dumbest reasons, we don't care," he says. "All we need is a growing circulation." For Jackson, the only thing that really seems to matter is what happens when the circulation gets big enough for e-gold to matter. Will he be proved right or not? Will e-gold bring about an epochal change in human destiny or won't it? And if it does, will anybody still care that once upon a time e-gold was a currency beloved of gun freaks, Sufi anarchists, and Ponzi schemers?

"You're going to have to make a personal judgment," says Jackson. "Am I some sort of dipshit visionary, you know, that's got some idea, but what I'm really doing is just sort of facilitating all kinds of sleazy stuff? Or in fact is this vision one that is achievable?"




So which is it? Take your time. And if you really want to get a handle on the question, try the following experiment. Go out and find a 400-troy-ounce gold bar, like the ones stored in the e-gold vault in Dubai, and pick it up. You'll learn something interesting about gold: It's heavy.

Maybe you think you knew this already. Maybe you know gold has a specific gravity of 19.3, and that this means it's 19.3 times heavier than water. Maybe you also know gold is heavier than any element known to humans prior to the 18th-century discovery of platinum, and almost twice as heavy as lead. But until you've held 400 ounces of it in your hand, you've probably never grasped just what sort of heavy this stuff really is. Relative to its modest size, the 27.5 pounds in a standard gold bar is so much weight it's nearly impossible to accept that gravity alone accounts for the force you feel as you lift it. You're tempted to attribute some additional, almost metaphysical, power to the metal - as if the gold brick in your hand weren't just undeniably real but a gleaming avatar of reality itself.

And whether or not Douglas Jackson actually thinks of gold that way, he sure tends to act like he does. Beneath the scaffolding of what he calls his "unassailable economic logic" lies the true foundation of his vision: the self-assurance of a man convinced he's discovered something as genuine as it gets in a world ruled by fiction and cheats.

This is why, despite Jackson's efforts to position his system as a serious financial player - a rival to the major currencies of the world - little e-dinar remains Jackson's closest corporate partner. Maybe Jackson wants to fix capitalism and maybe the Murabitun want to finish it, but both, at bottom, pursue a truth that isn't so much economic as it is spiritual. Both see in gold a purity that transcends the machinations of the merely mortal.

Which at least answers part of Jackson's question: Is he some sort of dipshit visionary? Well, no more or less, really, than Sheikh Abdalqadir As-Sufi, the Scottish redeemer of the Muslim world. As for whether Jackson's vision is in fact achievable - let's just say the odds of e-gold effecting an epochal change in human destiny are probably not much better than e-dinar's odds of bringing back the caliphate.

But both may be better than you think. Last June, Mahathir Mohammed, the irascible, authoritarian prime minister of financially beleaguered, mostly Muslim Malaysia, called for the formation of an "Islamic trading bloc." Like the Euro Zone, the bloc would have its own currency, yet with a twist: The "Islamic dinar," as Mahathir proposes calling it, would be backed not by anybody's faith and credit but by gold. As it happens, Mahathir seems to have gotten the idea for the gold dinar from none other than Jackson's associates among the Murabitun. If the proposal flies then there is a more than negligible chance that e-gold could become the base-money system for an economic community stretching from Indonesia to Morocco.

"I want to jump on that," Jackson says of the opportunity. Already Vadillo and the sheikh have met with Mahathir to make the pitch, and Jackson hopes to fly to Malaysia soon to drive it home.

Of course, convincing a major world leader to put the monetary fate of a billion people in the hands of a retired oncologist from Melbourne, Florida, is not going to be easy work. But Jackson doesn't seem to mind the challenge. "That's going to be an especially fun project over the next few months," he says. "I'm gonna have a lot of frequent-flier miles."

Read the original article at WIRED

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Would a Global Crisis Make E-Gold Glitter?

That's the idea behind this awkward online currency. But fans use it for digital transactions -- even in these stable times

The U.S. economy could hardly be stronger. The world's financial markets are as stable as they've ever been. But the founders of Web site e-gold.com hold the paranoid view that the full faith and credit of the U.S. government may not always sustain the worth of the almighty dollar. E-gold's creators, a Baltimore lawyer and a Florida doctor, have quietly established an ambitious alternative world currency backed by gold.

E-gold is one of the more radical experiments in Internet finance. It's a legal and mostly aboveboard private currency that can be used for conducting financial transactions online. While it has a growing number of enthusiastic fans, it's a complex system that is hardly ideal for the majority of U.S. consumers. E-gold also operates outside the radar screen of federal regulators and the world's financial establishment. While that offers some advantages, it also opens the door for potential abuse.

MARKET RISK. What is e-gold? At one level, it's a simple service. A customer opens an online e-gold account and funds it with a check or cash. E-gold sells the customer gold, silver, platinum, or palladium -- whatever the customer chooses -- at a price determined by e-gold, which is roughly the going spot price for each precious metal. Via e-mail, the customer can then use the metals-based currency -- e-gold -- to send it to someone, pay a bill, or buy something. It works easily if the recipient has an e-gold account. If not, e-gold will cut the recipient a check and send it through the mail for a 90-cent fee.

E-gold is an awkward currency. Customers risk losing money if the value of the metal in their account falls in the open market, or they can gain money if the metal in their account rises in value. Customers incur capital gains or losses by constantly buying and selling the metal underlying their account -- usually gold. But the company that operates e-gold, Gold & Silver Reserve Inc., is not required to file anything about these transactions to federal authorities. So it's up to consumers to voluntarily report the results of their trades. It's an open door for tax evasion.

In addition, Richard W. Rahn, a prominent Washington economist who has written a book advocating the use of digital money, says the currency's existence outside the banking system means "of course, it could be used as a vehicle for money laundering." Barry W. Downer, the Baltimore lawyer who co-founded e-gold, says e-gold is not aimed at helping would-be thieves. The site encourages its customers to file capital-gains reports with the IRS and provides customers with detailed data to do so, he says. He also claims e-gold is not a safe way to launder money because his firm keeps meticulous transaction records that federal regulators could easily obtain through court order. And as with any U.S. business, it has to report all customer transactions involving $10,000 or more in cash.

Why e-gold? Downer says it's rooted in an economic philosophy that worries about the stability of dollar-denominated currencies around the globe. The theory is that a major financial crisis will sharply devalue the dollar, and a gold-based currency will be safer in the long run. As stated on e-gold's Web site: "e-gold cannot be rendered worthless by a financial crisis, whereas paper money can."

The folks who run the site emphasize that e-gold entails "no financial risk" because the currency is backed by gold. But clearly, market risks exist. Gold, silver, palladium, and platinum fluctuate daily in world markets. And in recent years, gold has been a lousy investment.

SMALL-BIZ CONVENIENCE. E-gold has spent nothing on advertising, but its account base is already larger than some Internet-only banks that lay out millions of dollars on marketing. In the first three months of 2000, customers bought $4.5 million in precious metals.

That its customer base is growing rapidly is no surprise. The digital currency has advantages over existing payment systems. For one, it avoids the problems of credit-card fraud. Precious metal, at whatever value, backs every transaction. E-gold can also be used by small businesses abroad that don't qualify to accept credit cards or don't want to pay credit-card company fees of about 3% per charge.

E-gold's antigovernment message, along with the apparent privacy of e-gold, have created some rabid enthusiasts. Many customers are members of libertarian and antigovernment groups, lawyers specializing in privacy and offshore trusts, or small-business owners who don't like to pay credit-card fees. One such fan, an Australian who sells CD and DVD players on eBay, conducts business with customers in Britain, South Africa, and the U.S. using e-gold. He says in an e-mail message: "It works seamlessly, it's very private, and the government here in Oz doesn't know about it." He adds, "I love the privacy factor."

The operations behind e-gold are exceptionally complex. It's built on a web of companies with operations around the globe. I may have some details wrong -- Downey explained that the corporate structure is constantly changing. But it goes something like this:

Gold & Silver Reserve's headquarters is in Melbourne, Fla., with about 10 employees. G&SR acts as a "market maker," buying and selling precious metals in the open market. (The price G&SR pays to buy metals is not disclosed to customers.) A separate Delaware corporation, Omnipay, serves as an "exchange provider" and directly handles, or will soon directly handle, customer transactions. Another company, E-Gold Ltd., is a trust based in the British West Indies island of Nevis, a noted tax haven, and holds actual ownership of G&SR's gold and other metals. Two Bermuda-based lawyers at the firm of Mello, Hollis, Jones & Martin, serve as trustees for E-Gold Ltd. The gold is physically held by independent companies in Canada and Switzerland.

All this, Downey says, is designed to protect customers in case the parent company in the U.S. goes bankrupt or gets sued. What happens if the trustees refuse to turn over the gold? Downey says the company is writing an arbitration clause into a new customer agreement.

NEXT GENERATION. Sounds complicated, and it is. E-gold may appeal to those who share the company's philosophy about the value of gold as currency. It may also be useful to a small business that can't get accepted to take credit cards -- some 40% of e-gold's customers are based outside the U.S., including some small African merchants.

Those aiming for completely private financial transactions may want to wait for the next iteration of e-gold. An Anguilla-based service called DigiGold will use both e-gold and sophisticated encryption technology to allow totally anonymous financial transactions anywhere in the world.

Most U.S. consumers can find easier alternatives. One example is PayPal, recently acquired by x.com. Simply fund your account with a credit card or a bank account, and you're off. An even simpler service, e-cash, is already available through Deutche Bank in Europe and may soon be available through major U.S. banks.

If you've used e-gold or another Web-based payment service, send me an e-mail and let me know what you think.

You can find the original article at Business Week Online

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Buying more gold

"They're buying more euros and more gold. Gold is going to play a much bigger role. Only 2% of Chinese reserves are in gold. There is a saying that gold is the only asset you can have that isn't someone else's liability."

Interview with Ray Dalio, Chief Investment Officer, Bridgewater Associates
Link: http://online.barrons.com/article/SB111844418862156882.html

Saturday, July 30, 2005

200 years of gold bullion prices

Annual closing prices since 1792

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Robert Kiyosaki has turned bearish on the boom he helped create

Rich House, Poor House

Financial guru Robert Kiyosaki has turned bearish on the boom he helped create


You read the real estate-to-riches books and finally took the plunge. You pulled the equity out of your home and bought another and then another. Despite your income of $45,000 a year, now you're leveraged to the tune of $1.7 million and loving every minute. Because when the properties appreciate you'll have made the nest egg of your dreams.

Then you log on to your investment guru's Web site and discover this stunning news: Your real estate dreams are soon to be dust in the wind.

If you want to be smart, buy gold coins.

You can find the complete article here.

Monday, July 25, 2005

Fantastic Article....

A great article I found recently



21st Century Gold Rush
(How High Can Gold And Silver Stocks Go?)

Back in the late 1970's, the lineups to buy gold were reminiscent of people waiting to buy Stanley Cup Hockey tickets at the Montreal Forum. They stood in their jeans, ski jackets, bulky sweaters, construction boots and business suits and coats. They ranged in age from their early teens to their late 90's; Waiting for hours on end, to buy Gold. The analysts and economists cited a litany of reasons to explain the new gold rush. Gold prices, a barometer of political and economic fears as well as finally hit a record $850 an ounce on January 3, 1980. But in reality, the only important factor was simply that prices were skyrocketing. Anybody who was in was making money, not as much as they claimed but making money nevertheless and everyone else was afraid of being left behind. Gold was selling for $250 when 1979 began. Later, amazed at the sudden surge above $700, gold devotees began to think $1,000 + some even thought $5000 or even $10,000 was possible. The rocketing prices even startled the experts and frighten the analysts who had forecast a precious metals boom. Newspaper reports and articles on gold and silver in late 1979 and early 1980 were all front page stuff. Articles such; "Industrial users worried about prices," "Silver soares even faster than gold", "Canadian traders say silver's popular", "Gold stocks look even better," "Ottawa won't announce timing of gold sale," were everywhere. Although we are probably years away from any newspaper articles of this sort, I expect that by the end of this decade there will be similar news stories around the world.

I have focused on gold and silver stocks to see were they might be going in the next 3-5 years, by going back in time to the 1970's and to see what happened back then when gold first hit $500 then $600 then $700 and finally $850. I started my research by going to the library to look at newspapers from the 1970's, and WOW did I find some amazing things!! The Library that I went to had the Financial Post newspapers on microfilm all the way back to 1972, the very beginning of the last gold and silver Bull market. There were very few articles when gold moved from $31 in1972 to $200 by 1976, and hardly anybody noticed when Gold dropped back down to $100 in late 1976. The plethora of stories didn't even begin to get published until late 1978-79 and they didn't hit the front page until December 1979 into January of 1980 the final blow off top. The stock tables that I found was absolutely amazing.. In 1975 most gold and silver stocks were trading at under $2 and a lot were penny stocks under $0.50. Even with gold up 600% from the 1971 low of $32 to the 1975 top of $200 most gold and silver shares did little to make anyone wake up and take notice. I worked for Dominic & Dominic at the time and the President was one of the Biggest Gold Bulls who became famous for going to Japan to sell them Gold. I held a few seminars in an attempt to push Gold stocks as well as Bullion getting an order was like pulling teeth. It was not until gold retraced the first big sell-off back above $200 did the gold and silver stocks start there historic bull market that would end at un-imaginable prices.

Some examples were: Lion Mines - 1975 price $0.07 / 1980 price $380 YES that's right it's not a misprint you could of bought 10,000 shares of lion mines in 1975 for around $700 dollars and if you held on for the whole 5 years January 1980 you could have netted a total profit of around $3,799,300. Not bad hey!!!!! A few others were Bankeno - 1975 price $1.25 / 1980 price $430. Wharf Resources - 1975 price $0.40 / 1980 price $560. Steep Rock - 1975 price $.93 / 1980 price $440 Mineral Resources - 1975 price $.60 / 1980 price $415 . Azure Resources - 1975 price $0.05 / 1980 price $109.

No question about it, that was one of the biggest financial opportunities in history. I don't know of any other time in history, not even the dot.com bubble where in only a 5 year time span you could have turned so little money into so much wealth. "You only need to make one good investment decisions in your whole life to be super successful". I believe we are now at that same juncture as we were in 1976-78, but only this time the fundamentals are even better for gold and silver than they were back then. The similarities between the 1970s and today are uncanny. See if you can find a copy of James Dines prophetic classic "The Invisible Crash" known then as the "Gold Bugs Bible". The book is basically a documentary case study of the stock and gold markets of the 1960's to mid 1970's. The things that Mr. Dines wrote about back then could have easily been written last week or talked about on MSNBC yesterday. Here are a few quotesA full-fledged panic away from paper money could start at any moment". Or how about this nice quote. "When people see gold and silver standing alone amidst the economic ruins, they will realize that we gloom and doomers were actually right". "Hopefully, eternal optimists will pay more heed to warnings the next time around". or "Too much paper has been printed in the past, and will have to be wiped out no matter what." "People say gold is useless. Not true. It is demonstrating its function right now for all to see. Gold is the ballast for the monetary printing press and gold will relentlessly punish all offenders" The list of timeless quotes goes on and on but I will leave you with one last quote that is very relevant to today's problems in the U.S dollar and the so called economic rebound. "It beginning to dawn on some people that to defend the dollar and avert a dollar crisis, U.S interest rates will have to go up; or money will be transferred from the U.S to England, Europe, Australia Japan or Canada to take advantage of higher interest rates and stronger currency, . However, if interest rates go up sharply it will choke off our recovering economy. What a dilemma!" The similarities between now and then are simply uncanny. All of these quotes tell the real story of why gold (and silver) were so important throughout history and that history always repeats it's self. These quotes are the real fundamental cornerstone of why gold is in a bull market today and why the current rally in the general equity markets is only a bear market rally based on 45 year low interest rates, (that can't last), several tax cuts and the FED flooding the world with fiat dollars!!.

Now that the Fed is being forced to raises interest rates, to save the dollar among other reasons; the stock markets, bond markets, housing markets and credit markets and finally the oil market will, shortly implode once their respective breaking point are reached. For your own information I recommend you read "The Dollar Crisis" By Richard Duncan. If you want to know why gold and silver will explode in value you must have the information in this book. Here is one example "Balance of payments deficits of an unprecedented magnitude have resulted in credit induced economic over heating on a global scale. The foundations for sustainable economic growth will not be restored until this flaw is corrected and the U.S. trade deficit ceases to flood the world with U.S. dollar liquidity. The only way to stop the coming decline in the U.S. dollar is for the FED to raise interest rates. But if they raise rates they will cause a simultaneous crash in multiple markets (stock, bond, housing, credit). Only gold and silver and the companies that take it out of the earth will prosper in this environment, no matter what the FED does. Greenspan has painted himself into a corner that I believe he will not be able to get out of. Investing in gold and silver shares and the physical metal now and holding them for the next 3-5 years could be the only major financial decision you may ever have to make in your entire life. No need to trade in and out. Just buy a basket of gold and silver stocks now or on any temporary sell-offs and wait until you see headlines in the newspapers similar to the one that I opened this essay with. Or scale into any precious metals mutual fund. Remember, when that front page story which ran in January 1980, most gold and silver stocks were trading over $50 per share and lots were trading over $100 -$200 some even as high as $500 per share when only a few years earlier you could have bought the same stocks quietly for under $1. As of now I don't know of even one gold or silver stock that is anywhere close to trading at over $100 per share.

I know it's hard for most people to think that gold and silver will surpass their old January 1980 highs of $850 for gold and $56+ for silver, but that is what a 20+ year generational bear market will do to a whole new age of investors who have grown up with falling real assets (gold, silver and commodities) and rising paper assets (stocks and bonds). When the tide of human emotion swings and paper assets really start to fall hard the lust and fervor for real assets will be unbelievable. The Dot.com bubble will look like small potatoes compared to some of the up coming gains in the first gold and silver bull market of the 21st century.

But unlike the Dot.com bubble that was based on easy financing, unrealistic dreams of profits aggressive accounting and pure greed, the coming explosion in gold and silver stocks will be all about supply and demand and a object FEAR to protect one's savings from paper destruction combined with GREED to get in on a sure thing. When the entire world wants a piece of the gold and silver bull market there will only be a relatively very limited supply of shares, so they will have to be bid them up to unthinkable levels.

TOTAL EQUITY OF ALL GOLD STOCKS combined is less that the total equity of IBM. It is estimated that their are over $2 Trillion in hedge Funds alone (not counting Leverage). Can you imagine what happens if suddenly they wake up and begin a rush to Gold.. The gold and silver stock sector is very small compared to the bond and stock markets and it won't take much buying to push these stocks into the stratosphere. I am sure that most of you have friends that can't name even one Gold stock; But I'm also sure that in 3-5 years they will be touting you about the latest hot gold new issue out of Vancouver, even though they don't know where Vancouver is.. That will be the first major sign that the top is near.

I firmly believe that the opportunity in gold and silver and the companies that mine them may be presenting a once in a lifetime opportunity, where even a modest investment today could change your financial destiny.

NEAR-TERM OUTLOOK

Plain and simple; Gold Shares usually lead Gold Bullion both up and down. Check out their respective Charts. Gold Shares look to me like they have already bottomed and have begun the first leg of the next stage of the ongoing Bull Market. While Bullion is still in its consolidation phase, it's nearing completion of what in my opinion, using Elliott Wave analysis, is a declining a,b,c,d,e, wave (4) triangle. My best guess is that the low (if it has not already been made) will be in the $410 to $420 area, You can wait for a confirmed low in Bullion if it will make you feel more comfortable, as long as you are prepared to pay 20% to 50% more for your favorite gold stocks, once Gold Bullion breaks out to new recovery highs. It takes guts to stand alone against the crowd, but that's what you have to do if you want to buy low. Who among you can really expect to do better than to get in within 5%- 7% of the beginning of the next major move? However since we are still very early into the biggest GOLD BULL MARKET to come in history and if sleeping better is more important to you, than wait for Bullion's conformation of its resumed bull market and then buy. BUT do not let buying the stocks at new breakout highs stop you. Just treat them like Investors Business Daily has been treating new breakout highs for the last ten years.

THE TRIGGER

We can never know until after the fact what triggered the recession/depression. Is it possible that the idiot Schumer goaded China into cutting off its nose to spite its face, and begin the process of the collapse of both the US $ and the worlds economy?

Aubie Baltin CFA, CTA, CFP, Phd. (retired)
Palm Beach Gardens, FL
aubiebat@yahoo.com
561-840-9767

22 July 2005



You can fin the original article here.