Gold Sinks Further, Dollar Surges..

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We will need to see a few more days of supporting action, but as of now, it looks like gold might be beginning the long-awaited correction.

How deep that will go is anyone´s guess, though the recent central bank buying is supposed to lay a floor for it above $1000. Now, normally I wouldn´t bet the house on that, but I´ve come to see that pronouncements from insider analysts (at GS) are no longer just market analysis to be weighed. They are announcements about the course of action the banking cartel is going to be supporting.

The trigger for this? I think it´s that upbeat jobs number, which is probably taking some speculative money out of gold …especially as gold is technically very overbought and institutional buyers want to lock in profits before the year end.

Dubai is more important than most commentators think, even Marc Faber. They say the numbers involved are  too small.

But, as I blogged earlier, they´re  not seeing the contagion possible.

Here´s what they´re discounting:

1 We don´t know what the numbers from Dubai really are.  We can´t be absolutely sure. They keep changing them.  $125 billion (the highest figure I´v heard) may not be enormous in a global context, but we don´t know how its tied up with investments and where. A firesale of Dubai Worlds real estate could have unsettling effects all over the world.

2. Dubai has an impact on the property market, not just in Dubai, but in London and New York where Dubai Worlds has holdings, and also in India, where real estate and employment could take a hit.

3. Banks have leveraged exposure through derivatives, beyond what they are admitting in public.

4. These are banks that are already broke, for all purposes.

5. When the banks involved are not themselves broke, they are backed by governments that are broke, or near-broke.

6. The government with likely the most exposure is Britain. Britain is on the verge of sovereign default.

7. This happens just as the second down-leg in real estate is unfolding, and along with it the just-as- leveraged commercial real estate market (see the recent zero hedge post on an ongoing  CRE failure in Chicago), where there´s little pressure for the Feds to step in.

8. This happens after a 10-month run up in the stock market in what is essentially a bear rally, according to many experts.

9. This happens when the government has escalated an unpopular war in Afghanistan, calling for more troop commitments and more money

10. This happens after massive further government commitments in health care and other social spending.

Would the dollar move up just on the back of an employment number that was widely acknowledged to be misleading? I don´t know.

Do I know if gold will sink below $1000? No.

But CB (central banks of India etc.) buying is said to have set the floor. Me, I  think that was a bit of help given by the RBI (CB of India, Sri Lanka, etc.) to the IMF, seat of power of the globalists. Even the IMF admitted it got lucky.

Will that bit of market manipulation to the upside be enough to stave off the deflationary effect of develeraging asset derivatives?

I don´t know, but I suspect it won´t.

I’m anticipating  a rush into the dollar like we had in 2008…maybe not as strongly…
maybe gold will sop up some of the rush this time. I think that´s what the CB´s are hoping will happen.

But again, one can´t be sure, for the simple reason no one knows how much more bad debt there is and where it is.

Libertarian Living: Expat Belonging

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My first year as an expat. Come New Year and I will have done the necessary time outside the country.

I must say it´s a relief. At the best of times I never quite fit into America, although I think I fit in better there than I would ever have fit into India…but I´ll never know, since I left India as a student.

Honestly, I think I wouldn´t really fit into any country, except as an observer of sorts. A kind of partial citizen. That´s me. I spend a lot of my time alone, because people tire me out. Yet I like them around me anonymously…. preferably talking a language I don´t understand.

Loren Eisely, the anthropologist, once wrote somewhere in some essay of his that he liked spending time by himself in dark theaters (or was it bars?). I´m like that.

I like a seat in the corner of a crowded restaurant or lobby where I can watch people. The current of voices, as long as it doesn´t impinge too much on my thoughts, soothes me. A  dark hum of water whirring around me. A kind of return to the womb.

Airport lounges…small coffee shops, one-star hotels with wooden cupboards that tilt precariously when you open them late at night…unfamiliar streets that open up suddenly as you turn a corner ..a grey sea… I feel at home around  them.  Anonymity seems to make my own self clearer to me. In a group of friends, on the other hand, I lose a sense of who I am.

People yearn to belong somewhere. I spend my time elaborating ways of not belonging. And when I begin to feel at home, it´s always a warning sign that soon, very soon, I will want to leave.

Brown Calls Climate-Skeptics Flat-Earthers; IPCC Calls Hackers Sophisticated

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Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:

“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”

—  Telegraph, December 6

Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.

No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.

The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.

“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”

In short, act first, think later.

Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..

At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.

Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me —  whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12,  were sent on October 12  to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then,  realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted  via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.

“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”

The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.

But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers  blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.

So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.

The hackers have the last word on this:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.

Climate-Gate: Media Ignored Scientific Back-Trackers

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This story back in September ought to have made a lot of headlines, but didn´t. Perhaps it will now:

“When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it’s usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN’s World Climate Conference — an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change — Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.”

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.”

My Comment

Now why would Latif come out with this suddenly? Maybe he had a peek at some of that data the CRU scientists were trying to hide and decided to dissociate himself in advance from a scandal threatening to blow up…

Goldman Bankers Talk To God But Keep Powder Dry

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Ah, the masters of the universe….always so quick to protect their own hides…

This, from Bloomberg (Dec. 4):

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.”

Meanwhile, CEO Lloyd Blankfein´s on talking terms with God, and assures us he´s only going about his father´s business….

No profiles in courage here.

Just to bring in a little perspective: These are multimillionaires, who work and live in the best part of town, who have immense political clout, who are probably tall males, if the profile typical of a high-flying Wall Streeter is anything to go by.

I used to teach at a school in the inner city for a few years, trudging home sometimes well past ten at night, often with music equipment in hand. I started carrying mace only at the end. I never had my wallet picked or a purse snatched. Once, a couple of panhandlers acted aggressively toward me. I returned the favor and they backed off. Another time, at 2 AM, near a bus-station, a teen girl “broke bad” with a razor blade. Two young men came over and warned me to get away so I wouldn´t be hurt. Twice, walking through a ghetto, I´ve had young teenagers carry my bags and give me directions, without my asking.

The only time I was robbed was in an affluent neighborhood, where someone picked my pocket. Later there were the brokers, the lawyers, and the rest to add to my bitter experience and teach me the semi-criminal nature of the upper echelons of our society.  This upper level is not “smart,” as Bethany McLean seems to suggest in her strange piece on Goldman Sachs in Vanity Fair . Call it by its proper name. It is corrupt. Deeply so.

And its corruption is commonplace.

The monstrous size of the crimes committed reflects not the size of the men who commited them but the monstrosity of the ideology of which they are, in some sense, the greatest victims….

Climate Chief Jones Steps Down

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The Winnipeg Free Press notes that chief climate book-cooker Phil Jones has announced he´s stepping down. It then comes out swinging in defense of the true scientific spirit, let the carbon footprints fall where they may:

“Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.

But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre’s information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he’d destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post….

… a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.

The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other’s work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don’t like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!

Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.”

My Comment:

I hope this will make the lay public much more skeptical of the much touted academic process called “peer review.” Peer review, in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous “scientists,” turns out to be nothing much more than a PR gimmick to enhance the authority of certain points of view.

Of course, anyone who´s spent any time at all in academia already knows this.  Graduate students quickly find out that dissertations are written not because of any intrinsic scholarly merit in the project, but because professor x can get grant y, which will let student z graduate and perhaps get a foot into the tenure system at university abc, where professor x´s old buddy j needs someone else to support his agenda. And so on. The process, because it involves grubbing for money more than following the inherent worthiness of a project, naturally promotes the most political and street-smart operatives rather than the most scientifically gifted or creative researchers.

When academic work is driven by government funding, the end product is not science but propaganda for government programs. What a shock.

Walter Williams On Mandatory Health Insurance

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Walter Williams, via Lew Rockwell:

“You are a 22-year-old healthy person. Instead of spending $3,000 or $4,000 a year for health insurance, you’d prefer investing that money in equipment to start a landscaping business. Which is the best use of that $3,000 or $4,000 a year — purchasing health insurance or starting up a landscaping business — and who should decide that question: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Bush, a czar appointed by Obama or a committee of Washington bureaucrats? How can they possibly know what’s the best use of your earnings, particularly in light of the fact that they have no idea of who you are?

Neither you nor the U.S. Congress has the complete knowledge to know exactly what’s best for you. The difference is that when individuals make their own trade-offs, say between purchasing health insurance or investing in a business, they make wiser decisions because it is they who personally bear the costs and benefits of those decisions. You say, “Hold it, Williams, we’ve got you now! What if that person gets really sick and doesn’t have health insurance. Society suffers the burden of taking care of him.” To the extent that is a problem, it is not a problem of liberty; it’s a problem of congressionally mandated socialism. Let’s look at it.

It is not society that bears the burden; it is some flesh and blood American worker who finds his earnings taken by Congress to finance the health needs of another person.”

War On Terror Monitoring Likely to Spread to Latin America

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UpsideDownWorld.org

“Eric Farnsworth, Vice President of the Council of Americas, said he believes that Iran may be looking for uranium, possibly in Venezuela. But Time Magazine reported in an Oct. 8 article that “experts say it’s hardly certain Venezuela even has much, if any, uranium to provide Iran or anyone else.” Farnsworth also claimed Iran’s improved diplomatic relations with countries in Latin America is a boon for its intelligence capabilities.

Dina Siegel Vann, another “expert” who testified at the hearing, cited a U.S. State Department Terrorism report published in April that stated the Tri Border Area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil is a hub for Hezbollah and Hamas sympathizers-something that has been widely disputed.  Vann, Director of the Latino and Latin American Institute at the American Jewish Committee noted that the report also cited Bolivia as a possible site for terrorist activity.

“Concerted and decisive action is needed to closely monitor the activity of Iran and the groups it subsidizes, to correctly assess their potential for mischief, and to establish mechanisms to prevent potentially dangerous scenarios,” said Vann.

Coincidentally, these attempts to designate parts of Latin America as potential threats and conduits of terror attacks are in countries that have democratically elected left and center-left governments. And all of this comes as Washington’s controversial military base deal with Colombia awaits approval.”

My Comment

We´ve been blogging for some time now that Latin America seems to be going the way of Asia as a site of resource- warfare cum terrorism-monitoring.  This article signals another step in that direction.

Now, according to the electronic police state rankings of  Cryptohippie for 2008 (I blogged this several months ago), Brazil is still a “green” state – that is, one in which monitoring is lagging.  But articles like this suggest that it will be heading in the direction of the more advanced yellow, orange, and red states (in order of increasing surveillence).

Feds Suspected Rajaratnam Ten Years Ago

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Forbes has a report on an Intel engineer, Roomi Khan who cooperated with the Fed´s to avoid charges in a wire fraud case back in 2001- 2002. Apparently Rajaratnam was making money from inside information even then.

“According to a June 2002 sentencing memorandum for Khan, the earlier case arose after Intel suspected Rajaratnam was getting tips from an Intel insider because he was predicting Intel’s revenue “with extreme accuracy.”

Intel set up a hidden video camera that on March 6, 1998, recorded Khan, employed as a product marketing engineer at the company, faxing an important report concerning Intel’s three main Pentium processors to Rajaratnam.

The memo said Khan on March 24 then faxed handwritten pages that contained pricing information and sales data for Intel chips. “By multiplying those numbers, one can determine Intel’s total revenue for the quarter,” it said.”