Author Archives: Lila

Roman Polanski Arrested by Swiss at US Request..

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Roman Polansky, acclaimed film director, has been living abroad for years to avoid arrest for charges stemming from ‘date rape’ of an underage girl. Now he’s been arrested by the Swiss, says an AP report this morning.

Polanksi’s horrible actions can’t be excused by his considerable talent. But, from a libertarian stance, I am not sure why the state needs to pursue him further, when the victim seems to have settled and wants the whole business over.

I say this, despite having very strong feelings about crimes of this nature, which – when the victims are not minors – are often dismissed as “consensual” – instead of what they really are – acquaintance or date rape. When you target a naive young man or woman, ply them with alcohol and slip drugs into their food, in order to make them compliant, you are raping them, as surely as if you’d knocked them over the head. [I know the victim’s surname has been given every where, but on principle, I think it should not be – so I am referring to her by initial. I also removed the link to her testimony to the grand jury which I’d placed here before. I hope other writers will do the same.].

But Polanski has paid his dues and made amends to the victim to her satisfaction. Why is the state baying for blood? Ambitious judge?

Here is what the victim, now married with three children, has said about the repeated publicizing of the case.

“My views as a victim, my feelings as a victim, or my desires as a victim were never considered or even inquired into by the district attorney prior to the filing,” she said. “It is clear to me that because the district attorney’s office has been accused of wrongdoing, it has recited the lurid details of the case to distract attention from the wrongful conduct of the district attorney’s office as well as the judge who was then assigned to the case.”

— The Huffington Post.

There is really no “public” good being served by rehashing this business when Polanski is in his 70’s and has never offended again, when there’s been evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, and most importantly, when the victim is satisfied that justice has been done. All the rest is vanity, careerism, and titillation.

Next to the number of children whom governments and corporations routinely abuse when they starve, bomb, destroy, and impoverish whole countries, the damage Polanski did was relatively limited.

It seems as if the Swiss have become pretty compliant with demands from the US government.

What does this say about the new monetary regulatory regime, now headquartered in Switzerland?Could the government just be looking for a high-profile victim to lend legitimacy to its own intrusiveness.

“In 1977, he [Polansky] was accused of raping the teenager while photographing her during a modeling session. The girl said Polanski plied her with champagne and part of a Quaalude pill at Jack Nicholson’s house while the actor was away. She said that, despite her protests, he performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her.

Polanski was allowed to plead guilty to one of six charges, unlawful sexual intercourse, and was sent to prison for 42 days of evaluation.

Lawyers agreed that would be his full sentence, but the judge tried to renege on the plea bargain. Aware the judge would sentence him to more prison time and require his voluntary deportation, Polanski fled to France.

The victim, Samantha G, who long ago identified herself publicly, has joined in Polanski’s bid for dismissal, saying she wants the case to be over. She sued Polanski and reached an undisclosed settlement.”

The Fed’s Market Manipulation Scheme…

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The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank has a document on file, marked confidential, taken from the papers of William McChesney Martin Jr. (Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve from 1951-1970, the longest tenure). The collection is housed at the Missouri Historical Society. The paper was discovered by researcher Elaine Supkis and is cited by James Turk at the Gold Anti-trust Action Committee’s website.

Note the following:

“There can be little question that the interconvertibility of gold and the dollar at a fixed price will have to remain the keystone of the international currency structure. At the same time, foreign exchange dealings by the United States monetary authorities, when judiciously applied, can serve to reduce capital flows, to dampen speculation, to minimize potential reserve effects, and hence, to minimize the impact on the United States gold stock.
The basic purpose of such operations would be to maintain confidence in the dollar* Foreign exchange operations would, of course, not be a substitute for other appropriate and basic actions to maintain the integrity of the dollar* but would serve as a highly useful and flexible addition to other monetary and fiscal policy measures..”

People Leaving Florida and California..

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When bad times came in earlier days, Americans were likely to up and leave town for greener pastures.
This time, they’re hunkering down. It’s the new depression mentality.

Those that are moving seem to be moving out of the two states that had the biggest booms in housing – Florida and California.The reason is clear. With the housing market in crisis, the economies of the two sunshine states have been hit proportionately hard.

CNN Money reports:

“The Florida economy is based on growth and home construction,” said Lang. With building projects dying on the vine, unemployment soared to 7.6% for the state in 2008. It’s now up to 10.7%.

The same job problems plague many California cities, especially Central Valley towns like Stockton, Fresno and Merced. Construction-related job losses helped send state unemployment to 8.7% by December 2008 from 5.9% a year earlier. Today, some cities report breathtakingly high unemployment rates: 30.2% in El Centro; 17.6% in Merced; and 17.2% in Yuba City.

So, if people aren’t heading for the good life in California and Florida, where are they going?
D.C., Alaska and Wyoming. (Seriously……

…To be fair, however, small populations in these places convert modest in-migration increases into large percentage gains. They’re each among the smallest states (or district) in the Union. That’s just the opposite of California and Florida where each percentage point represents hundreds of thousands of people….In terms of net migration — those moving in minus those leaving — Texas was the star performer in 2008, with the population growing by 140,000.”

My Comment:

I thought of Texas – way back in 2003. Houston or San Antonio, I thought. I liked the fact that Houston had a large Asian community and was reckoned one of the best places to begin a new business and one of the best places for immigrants. Property was also reasonably priced and the place had a healthy libertarian community. It’s reputed to be a safe, family-friendly city – and greener than you’d think. And there are all those jobs in the energy business.

But there are negatives. Both places are a long way off from anywhere else. In many ways, you’d be going to a new country. To get to any other city in Texas, let alone anywhere else, is a long haul. Houston’s roads are congested. The housing is largely modern – no old architecture. The weather is extremely hot and humid, and there’s hurricane season. I told a friend of mine he’d find me on a ranch, chewing baccy, spitting, and eying down rattlesnakes. I’d fit right in, I said. I probably would have. But I would have lost something in fitting in. In Uruguay, subtly, I feel I gain by fitting in.

And the prison system – not that I was planning on ending up in it – has serious problems. I am not sure it would have been the ideal place for a political blogger.

I still wonder about Texas and if I made a mistake coming here. My reasoning was that if I was going to uproot that much, I might as well go abroad, where I’d also have the advantage of being out of the country. But I admit to being conflicted about it all…still.

What made up my mind for me ultimately was the privacy issue. You can move to Texas, but you can’t move out of the way of the snoop state. And you can’t get away from litigators and stalkers…from enemies with their malevolence and the government with its benevolence….

Robert Prechter on Closing Doors..

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The July 2009 Elliot Wave Theorist by Robert Prechter has some ominous warnings.

Prechter warns that as the depression deepens, more and more avenues of escape are going to be shut off. He lists three that have become difficult:

1. You used to be able to invest in tax-free foreign annuities. Now you have to pay tax on them.
2. You could deposit your money at any Swiss bank. Now, harassment by US authorities has led many of those banks to shut the door on American depositors.
3. You could emigrate to New Zealand easily. Now, independent operators without a government license who try to help immigrants face trouble.

Dollar Dilemma…

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At Lew Rockwell, David Calderwood writes:

“If one believes that the failure of the Federal Debt system is imminent, then one should be preparing for TEOTWAWKI (Lila: The End of The World As We Know It). In this event, prudent preparation includes quitting the job, selling the house, moving the family to a temperate rural area and converting all assets to guns, food, ammo, farmland, livestock, barter goods, and books on how to live an 18th century lifestyle.

The trouble is that preparing for TEOTWAWKI renders one in a very poor position should things not be quite so catastrophic. People are incredibly resourceful and the history of communism shows us that even unsustainable systems don’t necessarily collapse all at once.

If the federal government system survives for a period of time after the Federal Reserve banking cartel crashes (or more likely, is seized by an Act of Congress), instead of an immediate dollar collapse, surviving dollars would soar in value. Ironically, the closer any dollar credit exists to the U.S. Treasury, the longer it may survive. The idea in this case would be to hold the last surviving dollar credits, stepping off that boat to the dry land of hard assets when all vulnerable credits have disappeared and asset values have declined about as far as they’re going to. Then will be the time to flee dollars in fear of the appearance of ever-larger denominations of currency, the hallmark of currency hyperinflation.”

My Comment:

I’m playing both sides. I’ve left for a temperate clime, started scouting out my rural retreat, am on my way to learning how to skin squirrels, drive a buggy, and forage for roots (in a manner of speaking)….AND I cling to my dollars.

I’ve been a dollar contrarian…all through the ups and downs of the last three years. (It’s been a sickening ride) Why? Because someone who knows a lot about the world told me this a few years ago: “Don’t bet against the United States of America.”

[Note: That’s not a vote for the dollar, which I think has terrible fundamentals. It’s a contrarian approach to moving out of the dollar. And as always, if things change fast, I’ll change my mind with them. I’d modify that: don’t bet too confidently against the United States.

Golden Goose Down – IMF Gold Swaps

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GATA (The Gold Anti Trust Action Committee, the leading gold activist group that charges gold market manipulation) has just forced an admission from the Federal Reserve that it engaged in gold swaps.
In that context, I wanted to repost this old article of mine from three years ago, where I highlighted a news item that the media in the US had not bothered to cover:

Golden Goose Down: Was the IMF Involved in Gold Price Manipulation (Dissident Voice, June 8, 2006)

“The latest evidence is an IMF report that shows how IMF rules wink — if they do not actually blow kisses — at central banks which double count gold reserves they have actually lent out for sale in the open market.

Apparently, being a central bank means never having to say you’re short.

Aha, says GATA, which has charged all along that the IMF along with the US Federal Reserve and other government banks have done a financial two-step that has kept down gold prices until recently. The shady rules suggest that when they lent gold out for cash, the banks actually got to double their reserves by counting the leased gold as an asset too. Which means they got to lend, or sell, more gold than showed up on their books. That was pretty sweet both for the lenders — the central banks, who got a small return for their gold — and for the borrowers, the bullion banks that got to sell and reinvest the proceeds for a higher return in what’s called a carry trade.

Of course, it’s dollar holders who’ve done the real carry trade — carrying water for the lucky sods at both ends of the deal by clutching the ever diminishing paper that allows the lucrative game to go on at their expense. Sort of as if you or I or the rest of the peons who supply the tax funds for this financial musical chairs were to blow our money at Las Vegas and then write our losses down as collateral when we asked for a loan at the local credit union. Sounds good, huh?

Or as the IMF report admits delicately, IMF rules have encouraged overstating reserve assets because both the funds received from the gold swap and the gold are included in reserve assets.”

SFO Magazine Picks Mobs as Top Ten Trading Books of 2009

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Stocks, Futures, and Options Magazine will be out with an article in December on its top ten trading books for 2009 – the list includes Mobs.

This really tickles me, because at heart, I’m a trader, albeit an amateur. Nothing like watching the charts – the heart-beat of the great capital markets. There’s a real romance to it. Had I been born some place else, I think I’d have run away from school and gone to work in one of the exchanges.

I also just saw that Mobs was on the list of top ten best-selling finance books on Amazon for 2008. That’s great news, but a bit of a surprise, because there were so many books published on the economy that year, I thought it would get edged out. Hopefully, the book will sell well this year too, because it really does have a lot of good information for anyone who trades/invests.

I’d advise you to especially read Chapter 16, which is a mini-manual that’s as insightful a look as you’ll find anywhere about what it takes to make good decisions on trades (It’s my co-author’s work, so you know that’s an honest opinion, unbiased by my problems with the book’s promotion, about which I’ve written at length before).

My contributions – such as they are – to “trading psychology” are Chapters 10 and 11 of Mobs, where I deal with “herd mentality” and how it affects and eludes quantification in economics. It’s more of the macro view. I think parts of that can be found on the web in articles I wrote for Endervidualism..

The rest of Mobs is more historical and less immediately relevant to trading per se. although the history of the housing and credit bubble will help give you the background you need to understand what’s going on now.

Roderick Long: Six Talking Points for Libertarians

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Roderick Long at Austro-Athenian blog has a list of principles he thinks libertarians should emphasize in public interaction to define themselves as a clear-cut alternative to either conservatives or liberals:

1. Big business and big government are (for the most part) natural allies.

2. Although conservative politicians pretend to hate big government, and liberal politicians pretend to hate big business, most mainstream policies – both liberal and conservative – involve (slightly different versions of) massive intervention on behalf of the big-business/big-government elite at the expense of ordinary people.

3. Liberal politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of intervention on behalf of the weak; conservative politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of non-intervention and free markets – but in both cases the rhetoric is belied by the reality.

4. A genuine policy of intervention on behalf of the weak, if liberals actually tried it, wouldn’t work either, since the nature of government power would automatically warp it toward the interests of the elite.

5. A genuine policy of non-intervention and free markets, if conservatives actually tried it, would work, since free competition would empower ordinary people at the expense of the elite.

6. Since conservative policies, despite their associated free-market rhetoric, are mostly the diametrical opposite of free-market policies, the failures of conservative policies do not constitute an objection to (but rather, if anything, a vindication of) free-market policies.

Gold Action Vindicates Caution

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All the bugs who were rah-rahing and telling people to buy gold over $1000, instead of cautioning them to take profits and watch out must be feeling subdued. Despite the thrust upward to yearly highs, the gold action this year never struck me as spectacular at all. Considering everything that’s gone on, it’s been rather staid.

The most common explanation for that from the gold bug community is manipulation.  GATA has recently got confirmation of Federal Reserve gold swap arrangements that would certainly fall under the category of market intervention.

A second reason is that we still haven’t come out of the deflationary movement of the economy. We had the first wave of contraction last year, followed by an artificial bounce provoked by stimulus money and a lot of happy talk from the pundits. Now the second contraction has begun. Gold might do well in a deflation relative to other commodities, but so far it’s tended to sink when the market sells off, and that’s precisely what happened yesterday. No surprise there for me at all.

But it seems to have been a surprise to some traders out there. Rick Ackerman at Rick’s Picks expresses his puzzlement over the rush to dollars – it’s a rush to the Titanic, he argues.

Well – that’s why fundamental analysis is something you need to put on the back-burner when trading. I don’t care how bad fundamentals are. Nothing moves in a straight line down or up. Besides that, Ackerman, like many American commentators, assumes that his view of the dollar is the world’s view. That simply isn’t so. The dollar has terrible problems, but at least for now, there aren’t that many currencies that are free of problems – some of them worse than the dollar’s. And since the dollar is the currency used in a majority of transactions, moving out of them (which would be the case if you felt the economy was contracting) would entail buying dollars. It’s simple logic.

Finally – never pile onto a trade that has too many people on one side. That’s logic too.

Gold rose, but only wishful thinking would call it as powerful an upthrust as the gold experts have claimed it was. If you watch gold prices regularly, you’ll know it’s nothing for gold to move $40-50 in a day. It’s volatile. That’s its nature.

Add to its inherent volatility, the other things going on – the G20 meeting, much talk about altering the SDR’s backing, Bernanke’s comments about the recession ending, international tensions over Iran, the fact that September is usually a strong month for gold, Chinese comments about walking away from derivative contracts, China’s instructions to its population to buy gold — put all of that together and it’s not surprising that gold should have moved up by about $70.

If you bought earlier, you should have taken profits and you should be watching to see how things play out. I didn’t buy earlier, so I’m just watching.

I still firmly believe we are due for a correction – and a relatively big one. I’ll buy then (with reluctance – since I think it’s a terrible industry in many ways).  But what if we don’t correct, and gold shoots up?

Well, what if? Then I’ll be out. So what? if it goes up, it’s likely to go to $1200 or so. That’s a 20% upside. It could also go down to $800. Equal downside.

That’s not a good ratio of reward to risk. There are any number of stocks which will give you that kind of movement if you like gambling. But if you’re investing – and not gambling – then you should act like an investor and ask if you really want to buy at prices that high at the end of a long upthrust.

It doesn’t make investing sense.  So wait and buy on dips.

That said, I’m prepared to eat my words…

PS: Seems like Ackerman is in the deflationist camp (along with Shedlock, Prechter and others) – as opposed to the hyperinflationists like Schiff. [Correction: I accidentally had this in reverse, with Shedlock as inflationist. I’ve posted on why both Schiff and Shedlock are correct – and why that sort of face-off is misguided. Deflation in some areas and over a certain time frame can certainly take place with inflation over other areas. But if you consider inflation to be only the kind that shows up in CPI and on the grocery shelves then obviously, we haven’t see the kind of hyperinflation that gold bugs are waiting for. One thing I fail to see from a lot of people is an awareness that what’s anticipated from the Fed might already be priced into the dollar.]

Rick Ackerman’s Response:

RE: gold and the titanic?
From: Rick Ackerman
Sent: Fri 9/25/09 10:00 PM

Hey, Lila!

I’m using a $1074 target for Comex December Gold and have told my subscribers, many of whom are hard-money guys, that I can’t promise them any higher than that, at least not based on the evidence of GCZ’s daily and weekly charts. My gut feeling is that this is not the rally cycle that will take gold into the Promised Land, assuming it gets there at all. I’m still a hard-core deflationist who believes hyperinflation must ultimately play out, but not in time to save 80 million underwater U.S. homeowners from going through the ringer.

No matter what happens, the Baby Boomers’ retirement plans have already been deflated away to nothing. And concerning the dollar, I’ve moved beyond the idea that the currency is fundamentally worthless, accepting the reality that it trades, simply, as a share in USA, Inc.

With kind regards,

Rick

That’s a pretty good take on things from one of the more astute traders around.

Matthew 24:33

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Matthew 24:33

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and cares of this life; and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.

But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but my Father only.”

My Comment:

And that pretty much takes care of anyone who says that specific historical events can be foretold from the Bible…

[Correction: “specific historical events” – means, in this context, the “last days” of the apocalyptic passages in the Gospel.]

Even the scripture that they claim as infallible in its literal sense contradicts them..