銀勁呀 !
2012年2月29日 星期三
Norcini - Silver Shorts Literally Panic, Gold Shorts Now Worried
kingworldnews.com
With silver breaking above the $37 level and gold trading $20 higher, today King World News interviewed legendary Jim Sinclair’s chartist Dan Norcini. Norcini told KWN what we are seeing today is a major breakout in the silver market and panic from the shorts: “Today we are seeing a strong move higher in silver and in gold, but particularly the silver market, which is up over 4%. Once silver took out $35.50 in a strong push, they ran a huge number of stops to the upside. There were a lot of shorts covering, Eric, there was literally a panic among the silver shorts.”
Dan Norcini continues:
“There were three previous attempts at this level that were held back by the shorts and when this upside resistance level was breached, the shorts had no choice but to run for cover. To compound their problem you had more fresh money pouring into silver, which simply added stress to the already panicked shorts.
We mentioned over the weekend in the KWN Weekly Metals Wrap that once silver cleared $35.50, there wasn’t a lot of overhead resistance in that market until roughly the $40 area....
“You have strong resistance in silver showing between the $40 to $41 level. That’s where silver is going to encounter some selling. If silver breaks above that resistance level, we should see a move to the $45 area.
It’s important to note that silver has now broken above its 50 week moving average and that average has capped this market going all the way back to October of last year. So, as I said this is a very significant breakout, Eric.
This last COT report showed hedge funds net long 28,000 contracts in silver. The highest level the hedge funds have held is net long 48,000 contracts. So these hedge funds have an awful lot of contracts they can add if they decide to start piling back into the silver market. You can certainly make the case that silver is not excessively crowded, even though we’ve had a pretty good run here.”
When asked about gold, Norcini responded, “We are on the verge of a major breakout in the gold market. We’ve moved back up into the resistance zones that stopped the advance last week. However, we have now broken through last week’s high.
If we close above $1,780 in the gold market, it appears gold will quickly move through the $1,800 level. Once gold clears $1,800 in a strong fashion, we will have seen a major breakout in gold.
Gold is poised for a test of major resistance at the $1,800 mark. Again, if gold does what silver just did at $35.50, then you have your major breakout. The last area of resistance after $1,800 on gold is the $1,850 level and then gold should move to test the all-time highs.”
Norcini also noted: “The US dollar hit fresh new lows dating back to early December of last year. There is a bit of support at 78 on the dollar, but if that fails you are going to see a very quick move to the 77 level and I mean right away to 77. Below 77 on the US dollar there is nothing to hold it up until 75, so traders should keep an eye on that.”
With silver breaking above the $37 level and gold trading $20 higher, today King World News interviewed legendary Jim Sinclair’s chartist Dan Norcini. Norcini told KWN what we are seeing today is a major breakout in the silver market and panic from the shorts: “Today we are seeing a strong move higher in silver and in gold, but particularly the silver market, which is up over 4%. Once silver took out $35.50 in a strong push, they ran a huge number of stops to the upside. There were a lot of shorts covering, Eric, there was literally a panic among the silver shorts.”
Dan Norcini continues:
“There were three previous attempts at this level that were held back by the shorts and when this upside resistance level was breached, the shorts had no choice but to run for cover. To compound their problem you had more fresh money pouring into silver, which simply added stress to the already panicked shorts.
We mentioned over the weekend in the KWN Weekly Metals Wrap that once silver cleared $35.50, there wasn’t a lot of overhead resistance in that market until roughly the $40 area....
“You have strong resistance in silver showing between the $40 to $41 level. That’s where silver is going to encounter some selling. If silver breaks above that resistance level, we should see a move to the $45 area.
It’s important to note that silver has now broken above its 50 week moving average and that average has capped this market going all the way back to October of last year. So, as I said this is a very significant breakout, Eric.
This last COT report showed hedge funds net long 28,000 contracts in silver. The highest level the hedge funds have held is net long 48,000 contracts. So these hedge funds have an awful lot of contracts they can add if they decide to start piling back into the silver market. You can certainly make the case that silver is not excessively crowded, even though we’ve had a pretty good run here.”
When asked about gold, Norcini responded, “We are on the verge of a major breakout in the gold market. We’ve moved back up into the resistance zones that stopped the advance last week. However, we have now broken through last week’s high.
If we close above $1,780 in the gold market, it appears gold will quickly move through the $1,800 level. Once gold clears $1,800 in a strong fashion, we will have seen a major breakout in gold.
Gold is poised for a test of major resistance at the $1,800 mark. Again, if gold does what silver just did at $35.50, then you have your major breakout. The last area of resistance after $1,800 on gold is the $1,850 level and then gold should move to test the all-time highs.”
Norcini also noted: “The US dollar hit fresh new lows dating back to early December of last year. There is a bit of support at 78 on the dollar, but if that fails you are going to see a very quick move to the 77 level and I mean right away to 77. Below 77 on the US dollar there is nothing to hold it up until 75, so traders should keep an eye on that.”
2012年2月27日 星期一
World Bank to China: Reform your economy or face collapse
佢地就想中國殘賣資產啦 !
隻狐狸關心雞仔的安危 !
finance.yahoo.com
The World Bank and a Chinese think tank have a stern warning in store for China's government: Transition to a freer commercial system, or else face an impending economic crisis.
The "China 2030" report, released by the World Bank on Monday, recommends China enact reforms promoting a freer economy. Those reforms include a major overhaul turning China's powerful state-owned companies into commercial enterprises.
The report is compiled by the World Bank and the Development Research Center, a research group that reports directly to China's State Council. It encourages China to also promote innovation, competition and entrepreneurship as a means of economic growth, rather than allowing growth to be primarily government engineered.
The world's second largest economy has been rising rapidly, averaging around 10% growth a year for the last three decades. Much of that momentum has come as China's rural population moves into the cities and as the government has funded massive infrastructure projects and retained a powerful influence over the country's biggest companies.
State-owned companies dominate China's banking, energy, telecom, health care and technology sectors. Overall, they account for about 40% of the country's gross domestic product, estimate Andrew Szamosszegi and Cole Kyle, who have researched the topic for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Their latest report to the commission puts it bluntly: The Chinese government has not "expressed an interest in becoming a bastion of free market capitalism."
Critics point out that China cannot keep up its rapid growth under this system forever. Emerging economies tend to start slowing when their economy reaches about $16,740 per capita, according to research by economists Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley, Donghyun Park of the Asian Development Bank and Kwanho Shin of Korea University.
They suspect China will hit that point around 2015. The report forecasts that economic growth in China will gradually slow, from an average of 8.6% in 2011-2015 to an average of 5% in 2026-2030. Without the reforms, the report said China would be on an even slower growth path.
The World Bank's report also suggested China should separate "ownership from management" of state-owned enterprises.
China has four major asset management companies that it originally created to oversee bad loans spun off from its four major banks. Currently, they're 100% owned by the Chinese government.
The report said the government should consider establishing state asset management companies that would represent the government as a shareholder, but would "independently and professionally" manage and trade assets in financial markets.
View this article on CNNMoney
隻狐狸關心雞仔的安危 !
finance.yahoo.com
The World Bank and a Chinese think tank have a stern warning in store for China's government: Transition to a freer commercial system, or else face an impending economic crisis.
The "China 2030" report, released by the World Bank on Monday, recommends China enact reforms promoting a freer economy. Those reforms include a major overhaul turning China's powerful state-owned companies into commercial enterprises.
The report is compiled by the World Bank and the Development Research Center, a research group that reports directly to China's State Council. It encourages China to also promote innovation, competition and entrepreneurship as a means of economic growth, rather than allowing growth to be primarily government engineered.
The world's second largest economy has been rising rapidly, averaging around 10% growth a year for the last three decades. Much of that momentum has come as China's rural population moves into the cities and as the government has funded massive infrastructure projects and retained a powerful influence over the country's biggest companies.
State-owned companies dominate China's banking, energy, telecom, health care and technology sectors. Overall, they account for about 40% of the country's gross domestic product, estimate Andrew Szamosszegi and Cole Kyle, who have researched the topic for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Their latest report to the commission puts it bluntly: The Chinese government has not "expressed an interest in becoming a bastion of free market capitalism."
Critics point out that China cannot keep up its rapid growth under this system forever. Emerging economies tend to start slowing when their economy reaches about $16,740 per capita, according to research by economists Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley, Donghyun Park of the Asian Development Bank and Kwanho Shin of Korea University.
They suspect China will hit that point around 2015. The report forecasts that economic growth in China will gradually slow, from an average of 8.6% in 2011-2015 to an average of 5% in 2026-2030. Without the reforms, the report said China would be on an even slower growth path.
The World Bank's report also suggested China should separate "ownership from management" of state-owned enterprises.
China has four major asset management companies that it originally created to oversee bad loans spun off from its four major banks. Currently, they're 100% owned by the Chinese government.
The report said the government should consider establishing state asset management companies that would represent the government as a shareholder, but would "independently and professionally" manage and trade assets in financial markets.
View this article on CNNMoney
Silver Unicorn 麒麟銀幣
1996 年 = 1/2 oz (5元), 分精造和普造
1997 年 = 1 oz (10元), 分精造和普造 和 1/2oz (5元)普造
呢隻銀幣舊年八月在東洋買的 650蚊, 第一眼以為是第一期生肖馬, 後來睇清楚是麒麟銀幣, 而因為在大洋網上見過, 所以知有呢個銀幣 ! 東洋老闆娘還提我, 是中國幣呀, 唔係馬 ! 因為諗住都幾靚, 所以買咗 ! 過幾個星期在國際錢幣見到有賣一排十枚, 而老闆娘問我買唔買, 不過一定要成排買, 所以我拒絕了; 如果當時佢可以散賣, 我可能會買多兩枚 !
之後上過二樓吉祥, 見到半盎司的麒麟銀幣叫價約500蚊, 所以只睇無買, 而在國際錢幣都見過半盎司的都是約500蚊 !
見到 LPM 說有過貨, 但賣去了美國, 都唔知佢想點 ?
以下是白銀隊的貼文, 好似我唔買個排麒麟銀幣是走寶 ?
www.facebook.com/groups/21947829503
96 Unicorn
Charlie Chang: We already sold these to the US for $60.
#
Henry Lau : 香港yahoo, 好旺角都要公價HK$450~460啦, 但只是2連原封! 該幣中西文化合一, 一面中國麒輪, 一面外國獨角獸, 近代好少有2面圖啦!
#
Henry Lau : 中國以前窮, 該幣以出口為主, 為吸引外國人買, 咪加隻外國獨角獸! 該幣雖說無限量, 但真係無限量? 以當時panda 量作基礎,斷估咪得拾万2拾万! 雖說面值$5, 但重量多於1/2oz 99.9% silver! 世人誤会(1)無限量, (2) only 1/2 oz! 以美感設計, 以平panda價值比, 性價比絕對低估!
#
Henry Lau : 該幣富歷史意義, 印證中國由弱变強!
#
Charlie Chang: we had 1oz unicorns before but we sold them to US very quickly.
#
徐偉倫: 梗係好賣啦 ..... 發行得果8000枚，你有我都想買 !!
剛才去大洋網睇, 原來 1997年 10元麒麟有兩種:
精造發行量 8000 枚, 而普造是無限量 !
1997年5元麒麟是普造無限量 !
1996年5元麒麟(幣上只有馬頭)都有兩種:
精造發行量 8000 枚, 而普造是無限量的 !
謝大洋資訊 !
2012年2月26日 星期日
巴郡上季純利跌逾 30%
蘋果日報
【本報綜合報道】巴郡公佈去年第四季業績，受到與衍生工具的投資組合回報減少拖累，純利大跌逾 30%。而「股神」畢菲特在致股東的信中重申，巴郡已物色到接替自己擔任巴郡行政總裁的人選，更已定了兩位後備人選。
巴郡上季純利按年下跌逾三成，至 30.5億美元或每股 1846美元，而截至去年 12月 31日，巴郡每股賬面值為 99860美元。
公司與股市有關的衍生工具投資組合，在 2010年第四季的利潤達 20億美元。馬里蘭大學教授 David Kass表示，「這些合約要在未來 10至 15年才會到期，而畢菲特亦不會太在意這些衍生工具的短期波動。」似對股神眼光充滿信心。巴郡股價在過去一年下跌 4%，而標普 500指數同期則上升 4.6%，顯示巴郡表現跑輸大市。股神本月初在財經雜誌《財富》的訪問中表示，基於現時低息以及通脹有上升風險的環境中，與債券及貨幣的投資是「最危險的資產類別」。
畢菲特鎖定接班人
對於美國經濟前景的預測，股神表示樓市仍然處於「蕭條期」，更指去年表示「樓市很有可能會在一年之內復蘇」的預測「錯得要命」，但他依然對前景感到樂觀，指該國樓市終會到復蘇的一天。巴郡仍在積極尋找收購對象，畢菲特明言「我的目標很明確，就是要四處覓食」。
另一個投資者最為關注的焦點，就是接替股神擔任巴郡舵手的人選。雖然畢菲特對候選人一事三緘其口，但事實上一直着手籌備，為自己最終要離開巴郡作好準備。
他去年聘請前對冲基金經理 Ted Weschler，與巴郡現時的投資總監 Todd Combs一起，管理公司的投資組合，二人均被視為股神接班人。
今次是巴郡有史以來，首次確認有接替股神的單一人選。然而，畢菲特在其 22頁致股東的信中，重申自己的健康狀態「極佳」，無意退位，並指儘管在信中已確認有接班人，但向投資者表示不要預料下任行政總裁「會在短期內出現」。
【本報綜合報道】巴郡公佈去年第四季業績，受到與衍生工具的投資組合回報減少拖累，純利大跌逾 30%。而「股神」畢菲特在致股東的信中重申，巴郡已物色到接替自己擔任巴郡行政總裁的人選，更已定了兩位後備人選。
巴郡上季純利按年下跌逾三成，至 30.5億美元或每股 1846美元，而截至去年 12月 31日，巴郡每股賬面值為 99860美元。
公司與股市有關的衍生工具投資組合，在 2010年第四季的利潤達 20億美元。馬里蘭大學教授 David Kass表示，「這些合約要在未來 10至 15年才會到期，而畢菲特亦不會太在意這些衍生工具的短期波動。」似對股神眼光充滿信心。巴郡股價在過去一年下跌 4%，而標普 500指數同期則上升 4.6%，顯示巴郡表現跑輸大市。股神本月初在財經雜誌《財富》的訪問中表示，基於現時低息以及通脹有上升風險的環境中，與債券及貨幣的投資是「最危險的資產類別」。
畢菲特鎖定接班人
對於美國經濟前景的預測，股神表示樓市仍然處於「蕭條期」，更指去年表示「樓市很有可能會在一年之內復蘇」的預測「錯得要命」，但他依然對前景感到樂觀，指該國樓市終會到復蘇的一天。巴郡仍在積極尋找收購對象，畢菲特明言「我的目標很明確，就是要四處覓食」。
另一個投資者最為關注的焦點，就是接替股神擔任巴郡舵手的人選。雖然畢菲特對候選人一事三緘其口，但事實上一直着手籌備，為自己最終要離開巴郡作好準備。
他去年聘請前對冲基金經理 Ted Weschler，與巴郡現時的投資總監 Todd Combs一起，管理公司的投資組合，二人均被視為股神接班人。
今次是巴郡有史以來，首次確認有接替股神的單一人選。然而，畢菲特在其 22頁致股東的信中，重申自己的健康狀態「極佳」，無意退位，並指儘管在信中已確認有接班人，但向投資者表示不要預料下任行政總裁「會在短期內出現」。
沉船40億寶藏 回歸西班牙
文匯報
一艘西班牙戰船於1804年戰事期間，被英國戰船擊沉於葡萄牙對開大西洋海岸。美國一家勘探公司於2007年在戰船殘骸發現多達17噸銀幣和金幣，引起多方爭議，美國法院最終判西班牙政府勝訴，兩架戰機昨日將金銀幣運回西班牙。
撈60萬金銀幣 史上最豐富
該戰船名為「Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes」，當年10月被擊沉，船上約200人葬身怒海。美國奧德賽海洋勘探公司在2007年5月把船上多達59.4萬個金幣及銀幣拖回國，估計價值高達5億美元(約38.8億港元)，是史上收穫最豐富的打撈行動。
奧德賽聲稱擁有寶藏，與西班牙政府對簿公堂，經5年訴訟後，最終美國地方法院於本月18日裁定西班牙有權管有該批寶藏。該批金銀幣在秘魯鑄造，雖然秘魯當時為西班牙殖民地，但秘魯政府仍於上周四入稟美國高院，緊急要求阻止金銀幣運回西班牙，但上周五被駁回，這批錢幣連同其他文物終物歸原主。
■綜合外電消息
一艘西班牙戰船於1804年戰事期間，被英國戰船擊沉於葡萄牙對開大西洋海岸。美國一家勘探公司於2007年在戰船殘骸發現多達17噸銀幣和金幣，引起多方爭議，美國法院最終判西班牙政府勝訴，兩架戰機昨日將金銀幣運回西班牙。
撈60萬金銀幣 史上最豐富
該戰船名為「Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes」，當年10月被擊沉，船上約200人葬身怒海。美國奧德賽海洋勘探公司在2007年5月把船上多達59.4萬個金幣及銀幣拖回國，估計價值高達5億美元(約38.8億港元)，是史上收穫最豐富的打撈行動。
奧德賽聲稱擁有寶藏，與西班牙政府對簿公堂，經5年訴訟後，最終美國地方法院於本月18日裁定西班牙有權管有該批寶藏。該批金銀幣在秘魯鑄造，雖然秘魯當時為西班牙殖民地，但秘魯政府仍於上周四入稟美國高院，緊急要求阻止金銀幣運回西班牙，但上周五被駁回，這批錢幣連同其他文物終物歸原主。
■綜合外電消息
Eric Sprott:The Crisis is Out of Control
還有得買二字頭價格的實銀就好買啦, 因為好快就會升上去四字頭啦 !
silverdoctors.blogspot.com
Eric: Well Doc, it’s great to be here, and I think you have a wonderful site and I would encourage your listeners and readers to pay a lot of attention to what you say, I think you’ve made a big addition to the silver world because there aren’t many people who talk to silver, and I very much welcome and enjoy reading your site every day.
Doc: Well thanks Eric. I’d like to start off by asking you just a little bit of background- at point did you first become interested in silver, and I guess what peaked your interest in it?
Eric: Sure. Well, I basically got involved in precious metals in a real serious way as a manic investment when the NASDAQ crash occurred. We had anticipated it and you know I had been writing columns on the market and I sort of foresaw that the market might break, and so we had to do some research on what are we going to do if we go into a secular bear market- we run a lot of money, and how are we going to survive this thing? And I always use that word survive. And there was some great work done by a guy named Frank Veneroso who did a gold book in 1998 that basically said you know the central banks and the gold mining companies are selling gold they shouldn’t be selling and it’s a negative factor on the supply of gold and ultimately, they’re going to have to change what they do. So from a supply/ demand point of view one realized that there would be a secular bull market in gold. And that’s kind of what took me there, because gold stocks were the only thing that did well in the depression and I figured they would do well as we headed into this secular bear market. In terms of silver, my first studies were in gold, but there were always silver companies coming through here. I got serious about silver I’m going to say maybe 30 months ago when I kind of figured out that the supply/ demand situation of silver was very much in favor of the price going higher, and that the price was being suppressed as I suspect the price of gold is being suppressed and that when we could finally win the battle against the paper short sellers that silver would by far outperform gold. That’s kind of what took me there.
Doc: It sound like you got in with pretty good timing- about the best possible if it was around 1998 that you first got into gold.
Eric: We’ve had a wonderful run with gold and you know the HUI gold index was down at 35 then and I think it’s probably 520 today or something like that. It’s been a wonderful, wonderful place to be for the last decade and even into this decade, but as I look forward I think silver will outperform gold- notwithstanding the fact that I’m a big bull on gold as well.
Doc: I know that personally, myself speaking, I’m a lot more bullish on silver today than even when I first entered the market in 2001 at somewhere around $4.70 or $4.75 an ounce. I know that you’ve often stated that this will be the decade for silver, so I imagine that you feel the same way about silver today vs. even a few years ago Eric?
Eric: Well I’m kind of a data guy, and I love the data points on silver. You know, you’ve spent a lot of time looking at what’s going on in the paper silver markets as have I- I mean it’s kind of ridiculous that we can on days trade a billion ounces of paper silver, when on a daily basis we probably only have a billion ounces available for investment, and probably not even that. I mean if I literally took the GFMS data I think they said last year there’s something like 178 million ounces were available for investment, so that’s not even half a million ounces per day, so the fact that we trade a billion ounces of paper makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I think the thing that most people don’t question is why would anybody sell a billion ounces of silver when they don’t have a hope in hell of producing it? So it sure begs the question who is in the market and why are they in the market? And you know, there’s been lawsuits over silver manipulation in 2008, and we all remember what happened back in April/ May when the price fell all of a sudden and you get these margin rate increases which just seemed so staged that- and you know of course the shorters were losing BIG TIME money. They probably lost $20 Billion at that point where the price was up to $50 so I think they were getting kind of desperate to find a way to reduce their short position which of course they’ve done until the last three weeks when I think they’ve increased their short position pretty markedly.
Doc: I couldn’t agree more with you on that. That last week of April I remember we documented that it appeared to more of a panic of the bullion banks and a short squeeze than any sort of general investors rushing into silver. The average person on the street was not involved in silver at all, so just the idea that silver was in a bubble last April when you consider what a bubble actually is- it’s almost humorous.
Eric: It’s an incredibly small market, the silver market. You know I’ve been involved in the gold market and spoken to most of the people who are big players in gold, and most of them, and I’m talking at the institutional level now, I mean I don’t think they’ve even considered silver! Which always shocks me that guys who can put billions into gold really haven’t looked at silver at all. And I think that the fundamentals are much more compelling for silver right now than they are for gold.
Doc: Ok Eric, well I wanted to ask you about Sprott’s big news here: your three new precious metals funds that Sprott Asset Management will be launching on Feb 28th, the Sprott Silver Equities Class, the Sprott Silver Bullion Class- which if I’m correct will be the first silver bullion fund to be offering within a mutual fund structure, as well as the Sprott Gold Bullion Class. Can you tell us a little more about these funds?
Eric: Well really, two of those funds already exist in Canada, but they’re mutual funds, and they don’t have a certain structure which lets you trade from one fund to the other, so in a sense, two of them are not new. We have a silver bullion fund up here which has been operating for over a year now, it typically gets in maybe half a million bucks a day, and its set up for Canadians, because we can’t sell mutual funds to non-Canadian customers. I’m just going to see…that fund has about $182 million dollars in it today. And it just keeps growing, and it’s a great vehicle for Canadians to participate in the bullion space, because it trades at net asset value, which I think is the deal of the century, because as I think you well know, our PSLV trades at a premium to its net asset value, but it has certain tax characteristics and ownership characteristics which probably make it a lot better than the SLV, in our view. So those two aren’t new, but the silver equities fund is something that we hope to launch here real soon, which will simply invest in silver equities, and will have the option of owning bullion, and we might even have some silver backed notes that we buy from miners. Anything connected with silver that falls within the purview of what comes through here. I just want to make something specifically available that people can focus in on the silver market.
Doc: That’s great news and I see only becoming more and more in demand as the bull market progresses here.
I’d like to ask you about your recent PSLV offering, and kind of take you back a little bit- I believe it was October of 2010 that your last big follow-on offering, I think it was 50 million additional units you offered: it’s been well documented the difficulties you faced sourcing that silver. About that same time I remember that you predicted silver would hit $50 within 6 months, and if I remember correctly, silver was trading at about $21 or $22 at the time, and no one else was predicting that silver would make this type of move. That proved to be one of the best calls of the bull market so far as we saw silver hit $49.73 in late April/ early May. I’m not going to ask for another prediction here, but I’m interested in if that prediction you made in 2010 was just based on overall market fundamentals, or did your PSLV offering weigh heavily on that prediction?
Eric: Not really. Like I didn’t think it would go to $50 because we were doing this issue, although I was very pleased with the size of that issue- it was a very successful offering. One of the interesting things about the IPO of the silver trust I think we raised $550 million. When we did our IPO of the gold trust we raised $440 million. Recently when we did our latest silver tranche we raised $350 million. When we did the latest gold tranche- so far, and it’s still in distribution by the way, so I can’t really speak much about it, but its raised I think $303 million before the exercise of a green shoe which I think has not been exercised yet. But the point I always like to make is that the people buying this are making up their own minds and they’re willing to put as much money into silver as into gold. Which means, they’re buying 50 times more physical volume of silver than they are gold. And when you go to the US Mint site, they sell the same number of dollars of silver as gold. Which means people are buying 50 times the volume of silver than gold. But when you look at what’s available to buy- you know we produce 80 million ounces of gold a year, and maybe 70 million of that is available for investment, and we produce 900 million ounces of silver, and theoretically let’s say 200 million ounces are available for investment, well that means you can only buy 3 times more silver than gold for investment purposes. But we see so many instances where the ratio is 50 to 1! And GoldMoney’s the same thing. Almost every time I talk to a metals dealer my favorite question- How much silver do you sell vs. gold? And every time, I get the same answer: We sell as many dollars of silver as gold. Well, that’s impossible. It’s just impossible that people can keep buying at that rate, and we not end up with some type of shortage. It’s those data points that make me so optimistic about silver.
Doc: The shorts can continue to throw on paper up to a point, but when the actual physical data indicates 1 to 1 flows into gold and silver, like you said, that just can’t continue forever.
Eric: And you know one other thing that’s happening recently that I’ve kind of noticed, Harvey Organ has a wonderful website that details the flows of metal in and out of the COMEX. I am absolutely stunned at the amount of silver that is asked for delivery every month now, and every day almost. Normally you see that when they’re expiring a lot of people settle for cash, but man, these people just keep piling in there and taking the silver! That is quite a dramatic change from where I would think it was just 6 months ago. Almost every day now you can find in an expiring month like this month the open interest goes UP! Which means that some guy’s going in there to get physical delivery. So it’s certainly taking hold here, and we’ve had a pretty good rally in the price of silver since year-end. It’s probably due for a little pause here- I don’t want to say a correction. But we are so close to breaking out of the big down-trend in silver that there could be a lot of fireworks with all the demand we’re seeing.
Doc: And I think that your fund probably could play into that a little bit. As most of our listeners are probably aware, your trust recently announced another what was it $250-$350 million follow-on offering in January?
Eric: Yeah, we raised $350 million. We raised $350 million…or $349 million, something like that. And by the way I should tell you that we didn’t have any trouble buying the silver. In the first issue, we had trouble buying the silver, and it took a long time to get delivery. I’m sort of disappointed that the delivery was as easy as it was, by the way. One of my aims in life is to do a silver issue and find out that I can’t buy the last bar. That hasn’t happened yet, but if people keep up their interest in silver like they are I have no doubt that that can happen.
One of the stunning developments in gold is that the Chinese seem to be buying a lot of gold these days and I sort of wonder who’s buying it, I suspect that it might be the People’s Bank of China. I may do a little work of trying to see what kind of silver is going over to China. There’s a huge appetite for precious metals in China and India. You keep reading these double digit trends of increase in demand whether it’s even industrial or investment- how can you have double digit increase in physical demand when the amount of silver that’s available every year only goes up 3-5%? It’s an impossibility.
Doc: Right. And that’s quite a lofty goal you have there of trying to have a day where you aren’t able to receive delivery of your last bar!
Eric: I think all of your readers are hoping for that too! We’re all on the same page that way.
Doc: I’m sure they are. You definitely answered that question- I was wanting to ask about your sourcing of the silver this time whether you had seen any delivery delays as with the previous offering.
Eric: I don’t think that we’ve had any. I don’t think that we have everything yet, but silver’s kind of bulky so it’s not that easy to move around, so you can sometimes expect it can take 3-4 weeks with the kind of size that we deliver but you know last time there was actually silver that was manufactured after the date that we had committed to buy it, so in my mind it wasn’t as though it was sitting around in some inventory somewhere and you can load up a truck and ship it. There was I think a bit of a shortfall at the time.
Doc: Well I believe you approved by the SEC for $1.5 billion, so you’ll have a few more chances.
Eric: Well the one thing that I would really like to do is get some institutions interested in silver. Lots of institutions, we can name the names- have bought billions of dollars worth of gold, and if we could get some institutions to see the reasons why silver should outperform gold and get them to take down part of the PSLV offering, that’s really what I’m hoping to do. It’s a bit of a struggle. It’s even a struggle, I’ve been down to see pension fund advisers and try to convince them that they should finally recommend precious metals for pension funds, and it’s a battle! We haven’t won them all over yet. But the minute we do, we all know that there’s only about 1% of the financial assets in the world invested in precious metals, and that obviously can go a lot higher. There’s been some studies put out that even low risk portfolios should have a 2-3% weighting in precious metals, so if the pension guys ever come through it could be quite exciting for all the metals.
Doc: I definitely agree. I want to go back and touch on one thing that was pretty interesting, and from what I’ve read you’ve had decent response to: prior to the most recent follow-on offering to the PSLV Eric, you sent a letter to silver mining companies requesting that they keep their savings in physical silver rather than paper assets such as say cash or treasuries. At the time in the back of my mind I wondered whether you were preparing to begin sourcing silver directly from these mines. That kind of speaks to me that the paper futures markets such as the COMEX is in danger of fading into irrelevance rather than facing an outright hard default. Are those some of the reasons you sent the letter, or what prompted the letter?
Eric: Sure. I think we have a bit of a voice in the silver market, and the reason for the letter was just the simple analysis that the paper traders were determining the price…and why should you physical silver producers let that happen? Most miners are not students of silver or gold unfortunately, they’re not. There’s the odd CEO who’s totally into understanding what the true value of precious metals is. But they seem to be few and far between, because most of them are interested in tons and grades and recoveries and things like that and they haven’t been students of their own product! And that was the primary thing- would you guys please think about what’s happening in your silver market! Plus the fact that it got bombed last year, and are you just going to sit back and lose $25 an ounce that you might otherwise be making, or are you ready to take a stand here? The other very easy argument for me, is when you have your money in a bank, you get no return. You essentially have no return. In fact I think it was expressed very well by the gentleman that runs UC Resources that you actually get a negative return at the end of the year because inflation’s higher than the return you’re getting on your money! I happen to be of the view that having money in the bank is a dangerous thing! And you know they keep bailing out the banks all the time such as the recent G6 announcement we’ll give unlimited loans to banks: well, they had to give unlimited loans to banks, because there were some banks that were on the brink! That tells you that it’s risky having money in a bank! So not only do you have to accept the risk, you get a negative return, why don’t you believe in your own product that also has been a currency and also will become a currency. That’s really why I went there. I thought that if we could just tip a few of these silver producers around to thinking about what’s going on in the market, and who’s determining the price, maybe we’ll let the physical markets determine the price instead of the paper markets determining the price.
Doc: That’s a whole world of difference- if you actually had the physical market determining the price the whole game would be over!
Eric: Right, right. And I should tell you as a follow-up to that, we’ve seen some good responses. I was sort of shocked that out of nowhere UC Resources said they bought a million dollars of the silver trust because I had not specifically spoken to them about it. But I can tell you that First Majestic did buy $10 million of our issue. Keith Neumeyer who runs First Majestic is a very pro silver guy- as you know he makes silver available on his website: First Majestic coins, and he was very helpful in that regard. And I would also point out that Endeavor Silver at the end of last quarter when they produced 1.2 million ounces only sold 400,000. And why did they not sell the other 800,000 ounces? Because they thought, and explained that this price is not appropriately priced at the end of the quarter down around $27, and kudos to them, here the price is now $33, they’ve made 30% more than they might have otherwise made, and I’m glad to see people taking a stand that the paper price shouldn’t determine where you’re selling things! We’re building a little momentum there, and I would hope that in time (and I have a lot of other things to do here other than going to see each mining company) but in due course I hope we’ll convince others to do the same thing.
Doc: I think you’re well on your way to achieving that goal.
If we can, let’s talk a little bit about the European debt crisis Eric. We’re definitely reaching a pivotal point here. Up to this point it’s been continual coin kicking, and I’ve kind of coined and added to Jim Sinclair’s phrase QE to Infinity…AND BEYOND, but it appears here for the first time that Germany’s getting wet feet, and they’re getting tired of bailing out Greece. Do you think it’s possible we’ll actually see a Greek default, or do you see The Fed stepping up to the plate at the last minute.
Eric: Well, I mean it’s a hopeless situation for Greece. I just can’t even imagine even thinking of writing a check for $130 Billion to Greece. I mean, how irresponsible is that? And I don’t know what specifically is going to happen in the Greek situation, but when you look at the whole crisis that’s unfolding here, our government, the Bank of Canada said we’re at a Minksy moment- and a Minsky moment is where you’re at a point where you have so much debt that has grown so large that your GDP can’t service it! And we have so many countries that have 100% debt to GDP, thank God we have a zero interest rate policy, otherwise everyone wouldn’t be able to pay their interest. There’s no way that we can continue to service these things. We’re going to end up with some unintended consequences (the LTRO that the Europeans have where they’ll lend as much money as any bank wants)- I think the greatest unintended consequence is if you put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese, or some non G6 nation and you’re looking in, and you think What the hell’s going on there? They just lent 750 Billion last month, and maybe it’s a trillion this month- obviously somebody’s taking on an obligation here that one would guess they won’t be able to repay. And I sense now (and I’m trying to do some work on this) that the Chinese have probably altered their investment posture, as with most of the non-European countries, why would you buy European debt? Why would you buy American debt? Why would you buy Japanese debt? Why would you buy English debt? All these central banks just keep printing money! If you took those 4 investment classes out of your portfolio, what is left? As I mentioned earlier, the gold exports out of Hong Kong into China have SKYROCKETED the last 4-5 months of the year- serious dollars here! We might be talking probably $12-$15 billion in 5 months! That’s not chicken feed! And I suspect that when you look around the landscape that there aren’t too many things left to invest in that I’m likely to get repaid, or repaid fairly! So I think that the crisis is essentially out of control. Most countries cannot support their debt. Obviously some can, but most can’t, and I don’t know how it all ends, but every day we come in and there’s some new rule in the economics rule book. Yesterday it was Japan with a hundred billion print, and 2 days before that it was England with a 50 billion pound print, and at the end of the month there will be another 500 billion to a trillion in the LTRO in Europe, and in my mind, it’s just totally out of control. It gives me much comfort to think that if you own gold and silver you’re probably in much safer hands these days.
Doc: 500 billion here, 750 billion there, a trillion there…pretty soon you’re talking real money!
I totally agree with you, I mean where else is there to turn? I’ve felt that way for probably 7 or 8 years just with my own personal holdings. You can see the writing on the wall, do you want to be in a money market account when each economy is printing a 30% shortfall of their deficit?
Eric: It’s incredible. We’re in a surreal kind of world. It’s amazing that everything’s held together here, and I’m always a little shocked when I see the market going up and even the markets today are going up, and I don’t know why they’re going up, but they just are, and we had that mysterious rally at the end of yesterday. It’s just mind-boggling that anyone could think things are going well because they aren’t going well! There was some great analysis done by Zerohedge on yesterday’s retail sales. On a real basis, counting real numbers, sales in January were ABYSMAL! But with the seasonal adjustment, all of a sudden they were up whatever the number was, I think it was 0.4%- I mean it was a joke! And the same thing of course with the employment data which is all garbage. We keep getting these data points saying everything is wonderful when it’s not wonderful. So all the more reason to fear that if there’s a continual economic slow-down that it’s going to continue to lean on the banking system and create more and more sovereign risk. All the more reason to own precious metals.
Doc: Right. I would say probably the only US government economic data that is even remotely accurate is tax withholdings- they don’t adjust that. And that’s in a severe down-trend, we have the Baltic Dry Index, that’s been collapsing, all the real economic indicators are not looking good.
Eric: No. Well, it’s not too hard..if you just stand back and say, well how much are wages going up? And what is the real employment growth, and what are costs going up by? Here we have oil back over a hundred, and I think we had a record high gasoline price in January in the US, and that’s obviously going to go higher, so how can anyone imagine that people’s disposable income is going up? It’s not going up, it’s going down! So how do you buy more when your disposable income’s going down? It just doesn’t work. And we can all have these wonderful thoughts that we’re going to have a recovery here, but unless people get paid more money, there’s no way they can buy more.
Doc: Right. I kind of wanted to follow this thought through to the end game in the currency debasement- everyone fears a German Weimar type hyper-inflationary event: one thing I’ve always contemplated and wracked through my mind and I just wondered what your thoughts would be- Say for the end game we do devolve into a hyper-inflationary collapse in the West, are any equities unless you own the actual paper certificates- the average Joe is going to be locked into those assets during massive inflation or hyper-inflation because it takes 3 days for the sale to clear, another couple days to get the funds from your account, physical gold and silver may be the Average Joe’s only source of liquidity in a crisis like that, he may have to just sit on his shares until it’s all over with.
Eric: Well I think it’s the safest route to go. I mean there’s no doubt that people can make a case for stocks going up, because in a hyper-inflationary environment, they’ll go up. But I think you can make a much stronger case that precious metals will go up the most, precious metals stocks will probably outperform precious metals, so I think that’s the place to be. I just think that it’s a very safe place to be. I think it’s a safe place to be in a deflationary environment, I think it’s a safe place to be in an inflationary or a hyper-inflationary environment. If you could imagine that a lot of those non G6 countries decide to invest in real things rather than paper, that’s how you’ll get your hyper-inflation. And I sort of look at copper and oil prices, and I think maybe we’re seeing the first signs of this- we don’t have a strong economy in the world, but some of the commodity sensitive products are going up. Maybe it’s just that people have changed their investment stance already.
Doc: We’ve definitely seen that with a lot of different physical commodities.
Well Eric, I know I could talk to you all day about silver, but out of respect for your time we’ll wrap up here. It was definitely a pleasure to speak with you and to hear your thoughts about silver and I hope we’re able to speak again soon Eric.
Eric: Sure, Doc. Well I tell ya, I really appreciate your site, I look at it every day. You add a different perspective to the silver market, and as a fellow silver bull I think that what you’re doing for the silver community is great so keep up the great work and I’m happy to talk any time.
Doc: Thanks Eric.
silverdoctors.blogspot.com
Eric: Well Doc, it’s great to be here, and I think you have a wonderful site and I would encourage your listeners and readers to pay a lot of attention to what you say, I think you’ve made a big addition to the silver world because there aren’t many people who talk to silver, and I very much welcome and enjoy reading your site every day.
Doc: Well thanks Eric. I’d like to start off by asking you just a little bit of background- at point did you first become interested in silver, and I guess what peaked your interest in it?
Eric: Sure. Well, I basically got involved in precious metals in a real serious way as a manic investment when the NASDAQ crash occurred. We had anticipated it and you know I had been writing columns on the market and I sort of foresaw that the market might break, and so we had to do some research on what are we going to do if we go into a secular bear market- we run a lot of money, and how are we going to survive this thing? And I always use that word survive. And there was some great work done by a guy named Frank Veneroso who did a gold book in 1998 that basically said you know the central banks and the gold mining companies are selling gold they shouldn’t be selling and it’s a negative factor on the supply of gold and ultimately, they’re going to have to change what they do. So from a supply/ demand point of view one realized that there would be a secular bull market in gold. And that’s kind of what took me there, because gold stocks were the only thing that did well in the depression and I figured they would do well as we headed into this secular bear market. In terms of silver, my first studies were in gold, but there were always silver companies coming through here. I got serious about silver I’m going to say maybe 30 months ago when I kind of figured out that the supply/ demand situation of silver was very much in favor of the price going higher, and that the price was being suppressed as I suspect the price of gold is being suppressed and that when we could finally win the battle against the paper short sellers that silver would by far outperform gold. That’s kind of what took me there.
Doc: It sound like you got in with pretty good timing- about the best possible if it was around 1998 that you first got into gold.
Eric: We’ve had a wonderful run with gold and you know the HUI gold index was down at 35 then and I think it’s probably 520 today or something like that. It’s been a wonderful, wonderful place to be for the last decade and even into this decade, but as I look forward I think silver will outperform gold- notwithstanding the fact that I’m a big bull on gold as well.
Doc: I know that personally, myself speaking, I’m a lot more bullish on silver today than even when I first entered the market in 2001 at somewhere around $4.70 or $4.75 an ounce. I know that you’ve often stated that this will be the decade for silver, so I imagine that you feel the same way about silver today vs. even a few years ago Eric?
Eric: Well I’m kind of a data guy, and I love the data points on silver. You know, you’ve spent a lot of time looking at what’s going on in the paper silver markets as have I- I mean it’s kind of ridiculous that we can on days trade a billion ounces of paper silver, when on a daily basis we probably only have a billion ounces available for investment, and probably not even that. I mean if I literally took the GFMS data I think they said last year there’s something like 178 million ounces were available for investment, so that’s not even half a million ounces per day, so the fact that we trade a billion ounces of paper makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I think the thing that most people don’t question is why would anybody sell a billion ounces of silver when they don’t have a hope in hell of producing it? So it sure begs the question who is in the market and why are they in the market? And you know, there’s been lawsuits over silver manipulation in 2008, and we all remember what happened back in April/ May when the price fell all of a sudden and you get these margin rate increases which just seemed so staged that- and you know of course the shorters were losing BIG TIME money. They probably lost $20 Billion at that point where the price was up to $50 so I think they were getting kind of desperate to find a way to reduce their short position which of course they’ve done until the last three weeks when I think they’ve increased their short position pretty markedly.
Doc: I couldn’t agree more with you on that. That last week of April I remember we documented that it appeared to more of a panic of the bullion banks and a short squeeze than any sort of general investors rushing into silver. The average person on the street was not involved in silver at all, so just the idea that silver was in a bubble last April when you consider what a bubble actually is- it’s almost humorous.
Eric: It’s an incredibly small market, the silver market. You know I’ve been involved in the gold market and spoken to most of the people who are big players in gold, and most of them, and I’m talking at the institutional level now, I mean I don’t think they’ve even considered silver! Which always shocks me that guys who can put billions into gold really haven’t looked at silver at all. And I think that the fundamentals are much more compelling for silver right now than they are for gold.
Doc: Ok Eric, well I wanted to ask you about Sprott’s big news here: your three new precious metals funds that Sprott Asset Management will be launching on Feb 28th, the Sprott Silver Equities Class, the Sprott Silver Bullion Class- which if I’m correct will be the first silver bullion fund to be offering within a mutual fund structure, as well as the Sprott Gold Bullion Class. Can you tell us a little more about these funds?
Eric: Well really, two of those funds already exist in Canada, but they’re mutual funds, and they don’t have a certain structure which lets you trade from one fund to the other, so in a sense, two of them are not new. We have a silver bullion fund up here which has been operating for over a year now, it typically gets in maybe half a million bucks a day, and its set up for Canadians, because we can’t sell mutual funds to non-Canadian customers. I’m just going to see…that fund has about $182 million dollars in it today. And it just keeps growing, and it’s a great vehicle for Canadians to participate in the bullion space, because it trades at net asset value, which I think is the deal of the century, because as I think you well know, our PSLV trades at a premium to its net asset value, but it has certain tax characteristics and ownership characteristics which probably make it a lot better than the SLV, in our view. So those two aren’t new, but the silver equities fund is something that we hope to launch here real soon, which will simply invest in silver equities, and will have the option of owning bullion, and we might even have some silver backed notes that we buy from miners. Anything connected with silver that falls within the purview of what comes through here. I just want to make something specifically available that people can focus in on the silver market.
Doc: That’s great news and I see only becoming more and more in demand as the bull market progresses here.
I’d like to ask you about your recent PSLV offering, and kind of take you back a little bit- I believe it was October of 2010 that your last big follow-on offering, I think it was 50 million additional units you offered: it’s been well documented the difficulties you faced sourcing that silver. About that same time I remember that you predicted silver would hit $50 within 6 months, and if I remember correctly, silver was trading at about $21 or $22 at the time, and no one else was predicting that silver would make this type of move. That proved to be one of the best calls of the bull market so far as we saw silver hit $49.73 in late April/ early May. I’m not going to ask for another prediction here, but I’m interested in if that prediction you made in 2010 was just based on overall market fundamentals, or did your PSLV offering weigh heavily on that prediction?
Eric: Not really. Like I didn’t think it would go to $50 because we were doing this issue, although I was very pleased with the size of that issue- it was a very successful offering. One of the interesting things about the IPO of the silver trust I think we raised $550 million. When we did our IPO of the gold trust we raised $440 million. Recently when we did our latest silver tranche we raised $350 million. When we did the latest gold tranche- so far, and it’s still in distribution by the way, so I can’t really speak much about it, but its raised I think $303 million before the exercise of a green shoe which I think has not been exercised yet. But the point I always like to make is that the people buying this are making up their own minds and they’re willing to put as much money into silver as into gold. Which means, they’re buying 50 times more physical volume of silver than they are gold. And when you go to the US Mint site, they sell the same number of dollars of silver as gold. Which means people are buying 50 times the volume of silver than gold. But when you look at what’s available to buy- you know we produce 80 million ounces of gold a year, and maybe 70 million of that is available for investment, and we produce 900 million ounces of silver, and theoretically let’s say 200 million ounces are available for investment, well that means you can only buy 3 times more silver than gold for investment purposes. But we see so many instances where the ratio is 50 to 1! And GoldMoney’s the same thing. Almost every time I talk to a metals dealer my favorite question- How much silver do you sell vs. gold? And every time, I get the same answer: We sell as many dollars of silver as gold. Well, that’s impossible. It’s just impossible that people can keep buying at that rate, and we not end up with some type of shortage. It’s those data points that make me so optimistic about silver.
Doc: The shorts can continue to throw on paper up to a point, but when the actual physical data indicates 1 to 1 flows into gold and silver, like you said, that just can’t continue forever.
Eric: And you know one other thing that’s happening recently that I’ve kind of noticed, Harvey Organ has a wonderful website that details the flows of metal in and out of the COMEX. I am absolutely stunned at the amount of silver that is asked for delivery every month now, and every day almost. Normally you see that when they’re expiring a lot of people settle for cash, but man, these people just keep piling in there and taking the silver! That is quite a dramatic change from where I would think it was just 6 months ago. Almost every day now you can find in an expiring month like this month the open interest goes UP! Which means that some guy’s going in there to get physical delivery. So it’s certainly taking hold here, and we’ve had a pretty good rally in the price of silver since year-end. It’s probably due for a little pause here- I don’t want to say a correction. But we are so close to breaking out of the big down-trend in silver that there could be a lot of fireworks with all the demand we’re seeing.
Doc: And I think that your fund probably could play into that a little bit. As most of our listeners are probably aware, your trust recently announced another what was it $250-$350 million follow-on offering in January?
Eric: Yeah, we raised $350 million. We raised $350 million…or $349 million, something like that. And by the way I should tell you that we didn’t have any trouble buying the silver. In the first issue, we had trouble buying the silver, and it took a long time to get delivery. I’m sort of disappointed that the delivery was as easy as it was, by the way. One of my aims in life is to do a silver issue and find out that I can’t buy the last bar. That hasn’t happened yet, but if people keep up their interest in silver like they are I have no doubt that that can happen.
One of the stunning developments in gold is that the Chinese seem to be buying a lot of gold these days and I sort of wonder who’s buying it, I suspect that it might be the People’s Bank of China. I may do a little work of trying to see what kind of silver is going over to China. There’s a huge appetite for precious metals in China and India. You keep reading these double digit trends of increase in demand whether it’s even industrial or investment- how can you have double digit increase in physical demand when the amount of silver that’s available every year only goes up 3-5%? It’s an impossibility.
Doc: Right. And that’s quite a lofty goal you have there of trying to have a day where you aren’t able to receive delivery of your last bar!
Eric: I think all of your readers are hoping for that too! We’re all on the same page that way.
Doc: I’m sure they are. You definitely answered that question- I was wanting to ask about your sourcing of the silver this time whether you had seen any delivery delays as with the previous offering.
Eric: I don’t think that we’ve had any. I don’t think that we have everything yet, but silver’s kind of bulky so it’s not that easy to move around, so you can sometimes expect it can take 3-4 weeks with the kind of size that we deliver but you know last time there was actually silver that was manufactured after the date that we had committed to buy it, so in my mind it wasn’t as though it was sitting around in some inventory somewhere and you can load up a truck and ship it. There was I think a bit of a shortfall at the time.
Doc: Well I believe you approved by the SEC for $1.5 billion, so you’ll have a few more chances.
Eric: Well the one thing that I would really like to do is get some institutions interested in silver. Lots of institutions, we can name the names- have bought billions of dollars worth of gold, and if we could get some institutions to see the reasons why silver should outperform gold and get them to take down part of the PSLV offering, that’s really what I’m hoping to do. It’s a bit of a struggle. It’s even a struggle, I’ve been down to see pension fund advisers and try to convince them that they should finally recommend precious metals for pension funds, and it’s a battle! We haven’t won them all over yet. But the minute we do, we all know that there’s only about 1% of the financial assets in the world invested in precious metals, and that obviously can go a lot higher. There’s been some studies put out that even low risk portfolios should have a 2-3% weighting in precious metals, so if the pension guys ever come through it could be quite exciting for all the metals.
Doc: I definitely agree. I want to go back and touch on one thing that was pretty interesting, and from what I’ve read you’ve had decent response to: prior to the most recent follow-on offering to the PSLV Eric, you sent a letter to silver mining companies requesting that they keep their savings in physical silver rather than paper assets such as say cash or treasuries. At the time in the back of my mind I wondered whether you were preparing to begin sourcing silver directly from these mines. That kind of speaks to me that the paper futures markets such as the COMEX is in danger of fading into irrelevance rather than facing an outright hard default. Are those some of the reasons you sent the letter, or what prompted the letter?
Eric: Sure. I think we have a bit of a voice in the silver market, and the reason for the letter was just the simple analysis that the paper traders were determining the price…and why should you physical silver producers let that happen? Most miners are not students of silver or gold unfortunately, they’re not. There’s the odd CEO who’s totally into understanding what the true value of precious metals is. But they seem to be few and far between, because most of them are interested in tons and grades and recoveries and things like that and they haven’t been students of their own product! And that was the primary thing- would you guys please think about what’s happening in your silver market! Plus the fact that it got bombed last year, and are you just going to sit back and lose $25 an ounce that you might otherwise be making, or are you ready to take a stand here? The other very easy argument for me, is when you have your money in a bank, you get no return. You essentially have no return. In fact I think it was expressed very well by the gentleman that runs UC Resources that you actually get a negative return at the end of the year because inflation’s higher than the return you’re getting on your money! I happen to be of the view that having money in the bank is a dangerous thing! And you know they keep bailing out the banks all the time such as the recent G6 announcement we’ll give unlimited loans to banks: well, they had to give unlimited loans to banks, because there were some banks that were on the brink! That tells you that it’s risky having money in a bank! So not only do you have to accept the risk, you get a negative return, why don’t you believe in your own product that also has been a currency and also will become a currency. That’s really why I went there. I thought that if we could just tip a few of these silver producers around to thinking about what’s going on in the market, and who’s determining the price, maybe we’ll let the physical markets determine the price instead of the paper markets determining the price.
Doc: That’s a whole world of difference- if you actually had the physical market determining the price the whole game would be over!
Eric: Right, right. And I should tell you as a follow-up to that, we’ve seen some good responses. I was sort of shocked that out of nowhere UC Resources said they bought a million dollars of the silver trust because I had not specifically spoken to them about it. But I can tell you that First Majestic did buy $10 million of our issue. Keith Neumeyer who runs First Majestic is a very pro silver guy- as you know he makes silver available on his website: First Majestic coins, and he was very helpful in that regard. And I would also point out that Endeavor Silver at the end of last quarter when they produced 1.2 million ounces only sold 400,000. And why did they not sell the other 800,000 ounces? Because they thought, and explained that this price is not appropriately priced at the end of the quarter down around $27, and kudos to them, here the price is now $33, they’ve made 30% more than they might have otherwise made, and I’m glad to see people taking a stand that the paper price shouldn’t determine where you’re selling things! We’re building a little momentum there, and I would hope that in time (and I have a lot of other things to do here other than going to see each mining company) but in due course I hope we’ll convince others to do the same thing.
Doc: I think you’re well on your way to achieving that goal.
If we can, let’s talk a little bit about the European debt crisis Eric. We’re definitely reaching a pivotal point here. Up to this point it’s been continual coin kicking, and I’ve kind of coined and added to Jim Sinclair’s phrase QE to Infinity…AND BEYOND, but it appears here for the first time that Germany’s getting wet feet, and they’re getting tired of bailing out Greece. Do you think it’s possible we’ll actually see a Greek default, or do you see The Fed stepping up to the plate at the last minute.
Eric: Well, I mean it’s a hopeless situation for Greece. I just can’t even imagine even thinking of writing a check for $130 Billion to Greece. I mean, how irresponsible is that? And I don’t know what specifically is going to happen in the Greek situation, but when you look at the whole crisis that’s unfolding here, our government, the Bank of Canada said we’re at a Minksy moment- and a Minsky moment is where you’re at a point where you have so much debt that has grown so large that your GDP can’t service it! And we have so many countries that have 100% debt to GDP, thank God we have a zero interest rate policy, otherwise everyone wouldn’t be able to pay their interest. There’s no way that we can continue to service these things. We’re going to end up with some unintended consequences (the LTRO that the Europeans have where they’ll lend as much money as any bank wants)- I think the greatest unintended consequence is if you put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese, or some non G6 nation and you’re looking in, and you think What the hell’s going on there? They just lent 750 Billion last month, and maybe it’s a trillion this month- obviously somebody’s taking on an obligation here that one would guess they won’t be able to repay. And I sense now (and I’m trying to do some work on this) that the Chinese have probably altered their investment posture, as with most of the non-European countries, why would you buy European debt? Why would you buy American debt? Why would you buy Japanese debt? Why would you buy English debt? All these central banks just keep printing money! If you took those 4 investment classes out of your portfolio, what is left? As I mentioned earlier, the gold exports out of Hong Kong into China have SKYROCKETED the last 4-5 months of the year- serious dollars here! We might be talking probably $12-$15 billion in 5 months! That’s not chicken feed! And I suspect that when you look around the landscape that there aren’t too many things left to invest in that I’m likely to get repaid, or repaid fairly! So I think that the crisis is essentially out of control. Most countries cannot support their debt. Obviously some can, but most can’t, and I don’t know how it all ends, but every day we come in and there’s some new rule in the economics rule book. Yesterday it was Japan with a hundred billion print, and 2 days before that it was England with a 50 billion pound print, and at the end of the month there will be another 500 billion to a trillion in the LTRO in Europe, and in my mind, it’s just totally out of control. It gives me much comfort to think that if you own gold and silver you’re probably in much safer hands these days.
Doc: 500 billion here, 750 billion there, a trillion there…pretty soon you’re talking real money!
I totally agree with you, I mean where else is there to turn? I’ve felt that way for probably 7 or 8 years just with my own personal holdings. You can see the writing on the wall, do you want to be in a money market account when each economy is printing a 30% shortfall of their deficit?
Eric: It’s incredible. We’re in a surreal kind of world. It’s amazing that everything’s held together here, and I’m always a little shocked when I see the market going up and even the markets today are going up, and I don’t know why they’re going up, but they just are, and we had that mysterious rally at the end of yesterday. It’s just mind-boggling that anyone could think things are going well because they aren’t going well! There was some great analysis done by Zerohedge on yesterday’s retail sales. On a real basis, counting real numbers, sales in January were ABYSMAL! But with the seasonal adjustment, all of a sudden they were up whatever the number was, I think it was 0.4%- I mean it was a joke! And the same thing of course with the employment data which is all garbage. We keep getting these data points saying everything is wonderful when it’s not wonderful. So all the more reason to fear that if there’s a continual economic slow-down that it’s going to continue to lean on the banking system and create more and more sovereign risk. All the more reason to own precious metals.
Doc: Right. I would say probably the only US government economic data that is even remotely accurate is tax withholdings- they don’t adjust that. And that’s in a severe down-trend, we have the Baltic Dry Index, that’s been collapsing, all the real economic indicators are not looking good.
Eric: No. Well, it’s not too hard..if you just stand back and say, well how much are wages going up? And what is the real employment growth, and what are costs going up by? Here we have oil back over a hundred, and I think we had a record high gasoline price in January in the US, and that’s obviously going to go higher, so how can anyone imagine that people’s disposable income is going up? It’s not going up, it’s going down! So how do you buy more when your disposable income’s going down? It just doesn’t work. And we can all have these wonderful thoughts that we’re going to have a recovery here, but unless people get paid more money, there’s no way they can buy more.
Doc: Right. I kind of wanted to follow this thought through to the end game in the currency debasement- everyone fears a German Weimar type hyper-inflationary event: one thing I’ve always contemplated and wracked through my mind and I just wondered what your thoughts would be- Say for the end game we do devolve into a hyper-inflationary collapse in the West, are any equities unless you own the actual paper certificates- the average Joe is going to be locked into those assets during massive inflation or hyper-inflation because it takes 3 days for the sale to clear, another couple days to get the funds from your account, physical gold and silver may be the Average Joe’s only source of liquidity in a crisis like that, he may have to just sit on his shares until it’s all over with.
Eric: Well I think it’s the safest route to go. I mean there’s no doubt that people can make a case for stocks going up, because in a hyper-inflationary environment, they’ll go up. But I think you can make a much stronger case that precious metals will go up the most, precious metals stocks will probably outperform precious metals, so I think that’s the place to be. I just think that it’s a very safe place to be. I think it’s a safe place to be in a deflationary environment, I think it’s a safe place to be in an inflationary or a hyper-inflationary environment. If you could imagine that a lot of those non G6 countries decide to invest in real things rather than paper, that’s how you’ll get your hyper-inflation. And I sort of look at copper and oil prices, and I think maybe we’re seeing the first signs of this- we don’t have a strong economy in the world, but some of the commodity sensitive products are going up. Maybe it’s just that people have changed their investment stance already.
Doc: We’ve definitely seen that with a lot of different physical commodities.
Well Eric, I know I could talk to you all day about silver, but out of respect for your time we’ll wrap up here. It was definitely a pleasure to speak with you and to hear your thoughts about silver and I hope we’re able to speak again soon Eric.
Eric: Sure, Doc. Well I tell ya, I really appreciate your site, I look at it every day. You add a different perspective to the silver market, and as a fellow silver bull I think that what you’re doing for the silver community is great so keep up the great work and I’m happy to talk any time.
Doc: Thanks Eric.
2012年2月25日 星期六
Perth Mint 新龍銀幣
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Ben Davies - Central Bank Buying Has Gold Shorts Trapped
kingworldnews.com
Today Ben Davies told King World News that a new buyer has come into the gold market. This buyer is very large and it has trapped some of the shorts in the gold market. Davies, who is CEO of Hinde Capital, also spoke with KWN about short-term price targets. Here is what Davies had to say: “Fantastic action indeed and I think it’s caught a lot of the participants in the market offside. When a market moves, as gold did, from structurally oversold and moves back quite quickly in the medium-term, particularly when a market is perceived to be in a bear phase, people are very keen to take to the short side of the market.”
Ben Davies continues:
“Last time we spoke I said the market would chop wood so to speak and that’s what has actually happened is just a chop sideways. We felt that the market was going to break out over the bank holiday on Monday. You often have turning points over these weekends and it is either a resumption or it’s a trend change. But because we had come from a structurally oversold element in the market, we felt there was going to be a resumption (to the upside).
There were a number of reasons, the sentiment was still very attractive and positioning was light....
“There are flows into physical that some participants are not seeing. But we are hearing about (it and it) made us wary that the shorts were getting into a trapped position.
With oil prices starting to resume to the upside, there were a lot of geopolitical pressures that could underpin the (gold) market and send it higher. Everyone is looking for a reason why gold needs to go higher. The fact remains not enough people own the physical.
A new player came into the market and that caught the market substantially offside. It started on Monday. The market was quiet but a lot of option activity was taking place in the market and then again on Tuesday in the physical (market).
A bigger player (and a new player) came into the market and it’s a central bank. The fact is people don’t get what’s happening and that tells me the market is going higher.”
Today Ben Davies told King World News that a new buyer has come into the gold market. This buyer is very large and it has trapped some of the shorts in the gold market. Davies, who is CEO of Hinde Capital, also spoke with KWN about short-term price targets. Here is what Davies had to say: “Fantastic action indeed and I think it’s caught a lot of the participants in the market offside. When a market moves, as gold did, from structurally oversold and moves back quite quickly in the medium-term, particularly when a market is perceived to be in a bear phase, people are very keen to take to the short side of the market.”
Ben Davies continues:
“Last time we spoke I said the market would chop wood so to speak and that’s what has actually happened is just a chop sideways. We felt that the market was going to break out over the bank holiday on Monday. You often have turning points over these weekends and it is either a resumption or it’s a trend change. But because we had come from a structurally oversold element in the market, we felt there was going to be a resumption (to the upside).
There were a number of reasons, the sentiment was still very attractive and positioning was light....
“There are flows into physical that some participants are not seeing. But we are hearing about (it and it) made us wary that the shorts were getting into a trapped position.
With oil prices starting to resume to the upside, there were a lot of geopolitical pressures that could underpin the (gold) market and send it higher. Everyone is looking for a reason why gold needs to go higher. The fact remains not enough people own the physical.
A new player came into the market and that caught the market substantially offside. It started on Monday. The market was quiet but a lot of option activity was taking place in the market and then again on Tuesday in the physical (market).
A bigger player (and a new player) came into the market and it’s a central bank. The fact is people don’t get what’s happening and that tells me the market is going higher.”
環球宇論：瘋狂年代 必買實金
金銀甲喜歡見到的報告 !
蘋果日報
越來越多迹象顯示，美元作為儲備貨幣的地位正面臨考驗。（ 1）過去一年，很多國家大手買金，光是第三季已達 148噸，是 40年來最多！（ 2）雖然中國沒有大肆沽售美債，但俄國明顯減持，印度亦減磅一成半，同期間，聯儲局資產負債表增加 5000億美元，減持趨勢會否一如戲院起火，一聲叫喊即令所有人擠向出口？（ 3）印度正與伊朗以金換油，若每年 120億美元之交易以金為單位，將標誌美元「油元」地位動搖，亦可能是黃金作為替代品的開始。中印、中俄、中日已起步以自己貨幣為貿易計價，亦長遠對美元流通量不利。
動盪年代應持商品
技術分析未必準，但金價的階梯式上升，卻有驚人的準確性： 1931至 1966年這 35年踏上階梯後金價一直平穩； 66年開始升浪至 2000年方完成另一周期，用了 34年；再早些 1860至 1931年剛好 71年，即兩個 35年循環。如此計算，下一周期會於 2016年前後見頂， 2035年完成。以 66至 80年之升幅計（ 18倍），下一波頂豈非 5000美元？
在動盪的年代，筆者覺得起碼應有一成資產為「真金白銀」，總比可貶值至零的紙幣安心。當年投奔怒海的越南華僑，是以甚麼換取自由的？因此，買實金應為審慎投資者的首務（紙黃金/ETF要靠兌現，切勿在此重要問題上偷懶）。
兩百多年來金銀價比例約為 15倍， 1872年後升至 43倍。如下一浪瘋癲如 80年應有機會由現在的 51倍縮至 30倍左右。若金價由 1700元升至 5000元（兩倍），銀價可能由 34元升至 167元（四倍）。
王震宇
Bricks& Mortar分析員
蘋果日報
越來越多迹象顯示，美元作為儲備貨幣的地位正面臨考驗。（ 1）過去一年，很多國家大手買金，光是第三季已達 148噸，是 40年來最多！（ 2）雖然中國沒有大肆沽售美債，但俄國明顯減持，印度亦減磅一成半，同期間，聯儲局資產負債表增加 5000億美元，減持趨勢會否一如戲院起火，一聲叫喊即令所有人擠向出口？（ 3）印度正與伊朗以金換油，若每年 120億美元之交易以金為單位，將標誌美元「油元」地位動搖，亦可能是黃金作為替代品的開始。中印、中俄、中日已起步以自己貨幣為貿易計價，亦長遠對美元流通量不利。
動盪年代應持商品
技術分析未必準，但金價的階梯式上升，卻有驚人的準確性： 1931至 1966年這 35年踏上階梯後金價一直平穩； 66年開始升浪至 2000年方完成另一周期，用了 34年；再早些 1860至 1931年剛好 71年，即兩個 35年循環。如此計算，下一周期會於 2016年前後見頂， 2035年完成。以 66至 80年之升幅計（ 18倍），下一波頂豈非 5000美元？
在動盪的年代，筆者覺得起碼應有一成資產為「真金白銀」，總比可貶值至零的紙幣安心。當年投奔怒海的越南華僑，是以甚麼換取自由的？因此，買實金應為審慎投資者的首務（紙黃金/ETF要靠兌現，切勿在此重要問題上偷懶）。
兩百多年來金銀價比例約為 15倍， 1872年後升至 43倍。如下一浪瘋癲如 80年應有機會由現在的 51倍縮至 30倍左右。若金價由 1700元升至 5000元（兩倍），銀價可能由 34元升至 167元（四倍）。
王震宇
Bricks& Mortar分析員
港交所高層閃電劈炮
好似唔太重要的新聞須多加留意 !
蘋果日報
【本報訊】香港交易所（ 388）又有高層職員離職。繼財務總監黃森暉上任不足兩年辭職，去年 6月底才出任港交所新設職位──行政管理總監的馬俊傑又呈辭， 3月中前生效。
馬俊傑辭行政管理總監
港交所昨發出簡短新聞稿表示，馬俊傑已經正式向公司呈辭，並將於 3月中之前離職，據悉馬俊傑會到外地發展。港交所沒有解釋馬俊傑的離職原因，也沒有表明如何或會否物色接替者。
行政管理總監一職是港交所去年新設的職位，負責監督主要項目的實施並管轄行政管理部，以及人力資源部，直接向港交所行政總裁李小加滙報，而馬俊傑去年於 6月底上任。
馬俊傑加盟港交所之前，為 Chi-X Japan的代表董事，主要負責推出買賣日本上市股票的另類交易系統，之前曾經在德意志及摩根士丹利任職。
市場原先還估計，本港近年興起討論黑池及另類交易平台，馬俊傑加盟港交所有助港交所發展及了解此類市場，豈料他上任不足一年便講「拜拜」，目前有關方面未有透露接班人選。
而去年底呈辭的財務總監黃森暉亦將會於下月 20日離職。
蘋果日報
【本報訊】香港交易所（ 388）又有高層職員離職。繼財務總監黃森暉上任不足兩年辭職，去年 6月底才出任港交所新設職位──行政管理總監的馬俊傑又呈辭， 3月中前生效。
馬俊傑辭行政管理總監
港交所昨發出簡短新聞稿表示，馬俊傑已經正式向公司呈辭，並將於 3月中之前離職，據悉馬俊傑會到外地發展。港交所沒有解釋馬俊傑的離職原因，也沒有表明如何或會否物色接替者。
行政管理總監一職是港交所去年新設的職位，負責監督主要項目的實施並管轄行政管理部，以及人力資源部，直接向港交所行政總裁李小加滙報，而馬俊傑去年於 6月底上任。
馬俊傑加盟港交所之前，為 Chi-X Japan的代表董事，主要負責推出買賣日本上市股票的另類交易系統，之前曾經在德意志及摩根士丹利任職。
市場原先還估計，本港近年興起討論黑池及另類交易平台，馬俊傑加盟港交所有助港交所發展及了解此類市場，豈料他上任不足一年便講「拜拜」，目前有關方面未有透露接班人選。
而去年底呈辭的財務總監黃森暉亦將會於下月 20日離職。
2012年2月24日 星期五
希臘慘情
silverdoctors.blogspot.com
My wife has several close friends living in and around Athens and a few other places in Greece. They recently told us that, Several of them who have jobs in various fields( civil servants, hotel staff, engineers, laborers, mechanics) have not been paid for several weeks to several months.
They are obliged to continue going to work every day, because if they quit or rebel against their employers, they will simply NOT be paid the monies they are owed. Their employers can't even tell them WHEN they will be paid.
Most of these people have banned together or are seeking help from family or friends. They are selling possessions to purchase food. There is alot of theft going on because alot of people don't know what else to do to feed themselves and their families. Apparently the feeling is that the Greek gov't doesn't want to hear or even give the impression that they care what the Greek people have to say about the bailouts or their future. They are genuinely scared of the mobs and the destruction that they believe is coming. I have met some of these people in the past and they are Just like you and me. Regular people just trying to survive the chaos.
We all need to remember. Greece is NOTHING compared to The USA....and by association, Canada and Mexico.
Now clear your head and ask yourself....When the contagion makes it to this side of the pond, and it WILL, What will I do if my livelihood disappears? Will I have the courage to stand up and fight the police and government? Will I defy the powers that be, even if it means indefinite incarceration or worse? Will I defend what's mine? Will I deny my friends and neighbors food, fuel and other necessities because they did not prepare as I did? Will I steal the same from my friends and neighbors to care for my family? Will I have what it takes mentally to endure from day to day while those around me falter. Will I have the compassion to help those who are in need,at my own expense?
I ask myself these questions often. It takes a certain kind of person to survive!
Get ready!!
Crazy Canuck
My wife has several close friends living in and around Athens and a few other places in Greece. They recently told us that, Several of them who have jobs in various fields( civil servants, hotel staff, engineers, laborers, mechanics) have not been paid for several weeks to several months.
They are obliged to continue going to work every day, because if they quit or rebel against their employers, they will simply NOT be paid the monies they are owed. Their employers can't even tell them WHEN they will be paid.
Most of these people have banned together or are seeking help from family or friends. They are selling possessions to purchase food. There is alot of theft going on because alot of people don't know what else to do to feed themselves and their families. Apparently the feeling is that the Greek gov't doesn't want to hear or even give the impression that they care what the Greek people have to say about the bailouts or their future. They are genuinely scared of the mobs and the destruction that they believe is coming. I have met some of these people in the past and they are Just like you and me. Regular people just trying to survive the chaos.
We all need to remember. Greece is NOTHING compared to The USA....and by association, Canada and Mexico.
Now clear your head and ask yourself....When the contagion makes it to this side of the pond, and it WILL, What will I do if my livelihood disappears? Will I have the courage to stand up and fight the police and government? Will I defy the powers that be, even if it means indefinite incarceration or worse? Will I defend what's mine? Will I deny my friends and neighbors food, fuel and other necessities because they did not prepare as I did? Will I steal the same from my friends and neighbors to care for my family? Will I have what it takes mentally to endure from day to day while those around me falter. Will I have the compassion to help those who are in need,at my own expense?
I ask myself these questions often. It takes a certain kind of person to survive!
Get ready!!
Crazy Canuck
2012年2月23日 星期四
Greece Agrees to Give Up All of its Gold to Obtain Latest Bailout
silverdoctors.blogspot.com
The devil is in the details. In this case, the details require Greece to give up all 111 tonnes of its gold in exchange for the latest bailout. Which means that should Greece ever decide to do what they should have done in May 2010 and default on the banksters, they will now be SOL as far as international trade is concerned.
As far as the banksters are concerned, Greece with its 111 tonnes of gold are merely a practice run for the main event: Portugal with 382.5 tonnes of gold, France with 2,435.4 tonnes of gold and Italy with 2,451.8 tonnes of gold.
But down there in the small print of the Greek deal lies the nasty side for Greece. There lies a heavy penalty clause; Greece's lenders will have the right to seize the gold reserves in the Bank of Greece under the terms of the new deal. Greece has 111 tonnes of gold. In other words Greece has given up on its "money in extremis", gold. If they default they will have nowhere else to go.
Its international assets will be seized and it will not be able to trade internationally at all.
Today we are watching both Iran and the Sudan use their gold to buy food for their country as they have nowhere else and nothing else to get it with. Under the terms of this new deal Greece has effectively forfeited that last resort. And if they wanted to pull a last card from the pack by insisting on a Greek jurisdiction for any final arbitration, they have forfeited that too, by agreeing that future bonds issued will be governed by English law and in Luxembourg courts, conditions more favorable to creditors.
The option of leaving the Eurozone and surviving independently has now gone. If they do default [and many think the shrinking economy will force them down that road] they will have to accept whatever terms they can scrape together from the E.U. in order to survive! Greece is now a colony of the E.U. not a member!
The devil is in the details. In this case, the details require Greece to give up all 111 tonnes of its gold in exchange for the latest bailout. Which means that should Greece ever decide to do what they should have done in May 2010 and default on the banksters, they will now be SOL as far as international trade is concerned.
As far as the banksters are concerned, Greece with its 111 tonnes of gold are merely a practice run for the main event: Portugal with 382.5 tonnes of gold, France with 2,435.4 tonnes of gold and Italy with 2,451.8 tonnes of gold.
But down there in the small print of the Greek deal lies the nasty side for Greece. There lies a heavy penalty clause; Greece's lenders will have the right to seize the gold reserves in the Bank of Greece under the terms of the new deal. Greece has 111 tonnes of gold. In other words Greece has given up on its "money in extremis", gold. If they default they will have nowhere else to go.
Its international assets will be seized and it will not be able to trade internationally at all.
Today we are watching both Iran and the Sudan use their gold to buy food for their country as they have nowhere else and nothing else to get it with. Under the terms of this new deal Greece has effectively forfeited that last resort. And if they wanted to pull a last card from the pack by insisting on a Greek jurisdiction for any final arbitration, they have forfeited that too, by agreeing that future bonds issued will be governed by English law and in Luxembourg courts, conditions more favorable to creditors.
The option of leaving the Eurozone and surviving independently has now gone. If they do default [and many think the shrinking economy will force them down that road] they will have to accept whatever terms they can scrape together from the E.U. in order to survive! Greece is now a colony of the E.U. not a member!
2012年2月22日 星期三
取消以後團購銀幣
本人再三考慮, 因為旺旺須全心顧及工作唔可以分心, 所以唔可以幫大家經佢公司再買銀幣, 決定唔再搞銀幣團購 !
銀幣團購其實須承擔好大的責任, 因為如果個箱銀幣(十幾萬貨)唔見咗, 都唔知邊個要負責 ?
好彩我地上次成功咗, 而給參於者留下美麗的回憶 !
其實如果唔係要買特別的收藏幣, 在香港可以去 www.lpm.hk 和 online.kitco.com.hk 都可以買到平銀幣的 !
而特別銀幣, 如你有多閒錢的, 可以自行去
www.gainesvillecoins.com (最少須買二千美元的貨) 或
www.apmex.com (最少須買一千五百美元的貨)買的 ! 當然由美國個邊運來香港須俾一定的運費, 而買愈多附有禮盒的金銀幣, 運費會愈貴 ! 呢兩間公司是美國金銀幣的 top 公司, 所以可以信的 !
所以只買幾個特別幣都可以去好旺角中心買, 雖然價格是貴些, 不過可以當面驗幣是好處 !
銀幣團購其實須承擔好大的責任, 因為如果個箱銀幣(十幾萬貨)唔見咗, 都唔知邊個要負責 ?
好彩我地上次成功咗, 而給參於者留下美麗的回憶 !
其實如果唔係要買特別的收藏幣, 在香港可以去 www.lpm.hk 和 online.kitco.com.hk 都可以買到平銀幣的 !
而特別銀幣, 如你有多閒錢的, 可以自行去
www.gainesvillecoins.com (最少須買二千美元的貨) 或
www.apmex.com (最少須買一千五百美元的貨)買的 ! 當然由美國個邊運來香港須俾一定的運費, 而買愈多附有禮盒的金銀幣, 運費會愈貴 ! 呢兩間公司是美國金銀幣的 top 公司, 所以可以信的 !
所以只買幾個特別幣都可以去好旺角中心買, 雖然價格是貴些, 不過可以當面驗幣是好處 !
2012年2月21日 星期二
利字當頭：為甚麼我不是金甲蟲？
本人都不讚成大家用全個身家買金銀, 但對於利生的思維, 唔知點講好 ?
好想問利生, 什麼是[讓人逃出生天的船] ?
黃金唔好, 物業唔好, 有乜好呢 ?
還有, 有乜証據, 儲金最終還是會被政府沒收 ? 你住歐美國家, 因為政府窮就驚啦, 但住中國又驚 ?
蘋果日報
各國央行亂來嗎？肯定是亂來！要是有甚麼地方出問題，央行只得一招嗎？當然！央行那一招是甚麼呢？放水！不過，這些理由，並不足以說服我加入金甲蟲的行列。
我在讀書會介紹過 Murray Rothbard的《 What has Government Done to our Money》。許多讀書會成員都問：「對抗通脹，磚頭好一點？還是黃金好一點？」
之前我也解釋過，磚頭像其他資產一樣，會隨時間流逝，折舊減值。理論上，唯一不會因為時間折舊減值的物質，叫做黃金。有閒錢，儲起百分之十的黃金，要是有甚麼亂局，那是應該的。
儲金不如做逃生船
不過，將大部份儲蓄變成黃金收起來，我們就變成了聖經故事裏「又惡又懶的僕人（馬太福音 25章 14至 30節）」。上天讓我們得到財富，不是要來掘一個洞收起來的，因為這樣做，最終祂會將收起的錢財，轉到那些會創富增值的人手上。
在兵荒馬亂的日子，假如你辛辛苦苦的儲起了一些金。但是我卻會做一條讓人逃出生天的船，你們手上的金，最終還是我的。這個道理，希望大家都明白。
奧地利學派認為金本位是最理想的貨幣制度，許多人就將這個講法理解成「央行亂來我們便儲金」。經濟活動，歸根結柢是價值的發現。發現價值的能力，才是最終生存的關鍵。累積財富，總不及創造財富的能力。儲金，不及建立人脈能力和心理質素。
金本位的世界，儲金是可以將金借出去賺利息；但是在紙鈔的世界，儲金最終還是會被政府沒收（如果你信政府有紙鈔陰謀的話）。
利世民
好想問利生, 什麼是[讓人逃出生天的船] ?
黃金唔好, 物業唔好, 有乜好呢 ?
還有, 有乜証據, 儲金最終還是會被政府沒收 ? 你住歐美國家, 因為政府窮就驚啦, 但住中國又驚 ?
蘋果日報
各國央行亂來嗎？肯定是亂來！要是有甚麼地方出問題，央行只得一招嗎？當然！央行那一招是甚麼呢？放水！不過，這些理由，並不足以說服我加入金甲蟲的行列。
我在讀書會介紹過 Murray Rothbard的《 What has Government Done to our Money》。許多讀書會成員都問：「對抗通脹，磚頭好一點？還是黃金好一點？」
之前我也解釋過，磚頭像其他資產一樣，會隨時間流逝，折舊減值。理論上，唯一不會因為時間折舊減值的物質，叫做黃金。有閒錢，儲起百分之十的黃金，要是有甚麼亂局，那是應該的。
儲金不如做逃生船
不過，將大部份儲蓄變成黃金收起來，我們就變成了聖經故事裏「又惡又懶的僕人（馬太福音 25章 14至 30節）」。上天讓我們得到財富，不是要來掘一個洞收起來的，因為這樣做，最終祂會將收起的錢財，轉到那些會創富增值的人手上。
在兵荒馬亂的日子，假如你辛辛苦苦的儲起了一些金。但是我卻會做一條讓人逃出生天的船，你們手上的金，最終還是我的。這個道理，希望大家都明白。
奧地利學派認為金本位是最理想的貨幣制度，許多人就將這個講法理解成「央行亂來我們便儲金」。經濟活動，歸根結柢是價值的發現。發現價值的能力，才是最終生存的關鍵。累積財富，總不及創造財富的能力。儲金，不及建立人脈能力和心理質素。
金本位的世界，儲金是可以將金借出去賺利息；但是在紙鈔的世界，儲金最終還是會被政府沒收（如果你信政府有紙鈔陰謀的話）。
利世民
網拍潮貨騙37萬 警擒13歲小老千
文匯報
香港文匯報訊（記者 鄧偉明、杜法祖）網上騙案日益嚴重，專責打擊網上詐騙活動的警方新界北總區重案組，昨凌 晨展開代號「登峰者」行動，拘捕15人包括一名年僅13歲的中二男生，他們涉嫌利用拍賣網站或網上討論區，藉低價或訛稱有限量版貨品，包括鑽飾及 iPhone 4S等，誘使受害人付款後，去如黃鶴。事件中共涉31宗個案(31名受害人)，涉款約37萬元。警方呼籲市民網購時需提高警覺，提防受騙。
香港文匯報訊（記者 鄧偉明、杜法祖）網上騙案日益嚴重，專責打擊網上詐騙活動的警方新界北總區重案組，昨凌 晨展開代號「登峰者」行動，拘捕15人包括一名年僅13歲的中二男生，他們涉嫌利用拍賣網站或網上討論區，藉低價或訛稱有限量版貨品，包括鑽飾及 iPhone 4S等，誘使受害人付款後，去如黃鶴。事件中共涉31宗個案(31名受害人)，涉款約37萬元。警方呼籲市民網購時需提高警覺，提防受騙。
警方發言人表示，去年網上商業騙案有888宗，按年升42.5%，涉損失2,175萬元，當中網上拍賣及購物佔75%，即666宗，涉款775萬元。
用家人賬戶 不涉集團操控
涉嫌網上詐騙被捕11男4女，年齡13歲至45歲，全部涉及「以欺騙手段取得財產」罪名，他們互不相識或為朋友關係，不涉及集團操控，部分人已獲准保釋候查。
新界北總區重案組第二隊總督察詹德明表示，被捕者中除一名年僅13歲的中二男生，還有一名16歲報稱無業的未成年少女。部分人除利用家中電腦上網犯案，亦會在公眾場所利用免費Wi-Fi網絡犯案，甚至利用家人的銀行賬戶交易，初步證實共涉20個至30個賬戶。
現金存入賬 貨物無影無蹤
兩個月前開始，警方接獲多名受害人報案，聲稱透過網上拍賣網站或討論區訂購心儀貨品，按指示將現金存入指定賬戶後，卻一直收不到訂購的貨物，包括鑽石、球 衣、郵票、錢幣、iPhone 4S及iPad 2等潮流電子產品等。警方隨即將案轉交專責打擊網上詐騙活動的新界北總區重案組深入調查，發現騙徒多以低價、限量版或紀念版等利誘受害人上當。
為購物犯案 中二生騙萬元
昨凌晨4時許，警方採取代號「登峰者」行動，搜查多處目標地點，先後拘捕15名男女，檢獲電腦、銀行卡、手機及匯款單等證物。其中在牛頭角彩盈鸷盈康樓一 單位，警方拘捕一名年僅13歲中二男生，有人涉嫌先在拍賣網站張貼圖片，聲稱有平價手提電話出售，成功騙得一名長者5,000元後食髓知味，再在拍賣網站 張貼價錢更貴的iPhone 4S及iPad 2等潮流電子產品圖片，再騙得5,000元。探員昨在其寓所檢獲一部男生剛購買的新款手提電腦及一件T恤，男生承認詐騙只為要購買心儀的消費品。
長者年輕人 齊陷網絡陷阱
詹德明總督察續稱，受害大部分為年輕人，亦有長者，由於網購活動日漸普及，帶來方便之餘也衍生不少網上罪行，他呼籲市民網購時需提高警覺，提防受騙，家長亦應時刻留意子女行為，包括銀行賬戶的情況等。
任何人觸犯「以欺騙手段取得財產」罪，最高刑罰為監禁10年；另外，借出銀行戶口供他人使用，亦有可能觸犯洗黑錢罪行，最高可罰款500萬元及監禁14年。
近期網上騙案
2012年1月20日 警方偵破2宗網上騙案拘捕6男女，其中一夥人在網上以高價收購為名，利誘網民，以空頭支票騙去19名網民80部智能手機，總值40多萬元；另一夥人則以低價出售智能手機騙網民，30買家共損失46萬元。2011年7月6日 19歲少女涉於網上討論區訛稱有包括台灣歌手羅志祥（小豬）演唱會的優惠價門票出售，估計10多人中招被騙，涉款6萬元。
2011年4月21日 30歲無業漢在網上討論區及拍賣網訛稱有歌星劉德華、鄭秀文及周杰倫等演唱會前排位門票出售，甚至有公屋單位出租，騙取65名男女近20萬元，判囚2年。
2011年4月1日 一名男子於拍賣網站訛稱有衣服及化妝品出售，要求買家繞過網站到指定電郵地址交易，當買家將款項存入銀行戶口後男子即杳如黃鶴，警方調查後將其拘捕。
2011年3月2日 行騙集團訛稱有包括熱炒的iPhone 4手機等潮物平售拍賣，吸引買家存款入銀行戶口後，以山寨貨冒充正貨、甚至以空盒行騙買家。警方拘捕12名男女，包括一名年僅14歲少女，估計事主共34人，涉款逾10萬元。
資料來源：香港文匯報資料中心
2012年2月20日 星期一
Lord James of Blackheath - 15 Trillion dollars and 750 thousand metric tonnes of gold
國際銀行又再玩緊魔術 ?
www.rumormillnews.com
Unofficial Transcript of the speech by Lord James of Blackheath, in the Lords Chamber of the House of Lords, London, on 16 February 2012
I'm going to start with my conclusions, but I'm not going to sit down when I've made them. Because I'm then going to give you the evidence to support them and hopefully present to you the reasons why I want support for an official inquiry into the mischief I want to unfold to you this afternoon.
My lords, I have been engaged in pursuit of this issue for nearly 2 years now, and I'm no further through to getting to the truth.
I think there are three possible conclusions that may come from it. I think there may have been a massive piece of money laundering committed by a major government which ought to know better and that it has effectively undermined the integrity of the British bank the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second alternative is that a major American department has an agency that has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which they are seeking to get at least 50 billion Euros as a payoff. And the third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud which has not been carried out but which has been prepared in order to provide a threat to one government or more if they don't pay them off. So there are three possibilities and this all needs a very urgent review.
My Lords, it starts in April and May of 2009, with the alleged transfer to the United Kingdom, to HSBC of a sum of 50 trillion dollars and seven days later, in comes another 50 trillion dollars to HSBC, and then 3 weeks later another 50 trillion. 5 trillion in each case. Sorry. A total of 15 trillion dollars is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland and we need to look at where this came from and what the history of this money is. And I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and from where it has come from for a long time.
It starts off apparently as the property of a man called Yohannes Riyadi. Which has some claims to be the richest man in the world. Well he would be if all the money that was owed to him was paid, but I have seen accounts of his showing he owns 36 trillion dollars in a bank. And it is a ridiculous sum of money. On the other hand the 36 trillion dollars would be consistent with the dynasty from which he comes and the fact that they had been effectively the emperors of Indo-China in times gone by. But a lot of that money has been taken away from him with his consent by the American treasury over the years for the specific purpose of helping to support the dollar.
He has sent to me a really quite remarkable document which is dated in February 2006 in which the American government, according to a meeting with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is neither a Federal Reserve, nor a Bank. It's a bit like celebrity big brother. It's got three names to describe it and none of them are true. And this document, which is quite astonishing, purports to have been a meeting. It is witnessed by Mr. Alan Greenspan, who signed for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, of which he was chairman, as well as the real Federal Reserve Bank in Washington. And it is signed by Mr. Timothy Geithner, as a witness on behalf of the International Monetary Fund who sent two witnesses, the other one being Mr. Yusuke Horiguchi and these gentlemen have signed as witnesses to the effect that this deal is a proper deal. There are a lot of other signatures on here as well. This is not a photocopy. This is an original version of the contract. Under which the American treasury has apparently got the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to offer to buy out the bonds which have been issued to Mr. Riyadi to replace the cash which has been taken from him over the previous ten years and they're giving him 500 million dollars, as a cash payment to buyout worthless bonds.
Now this is all in the agreement and it's very remarkable. I would have thought that establishing whether this is a correct piece of paper or not is just 2 phone calls away. One to Mr. Geithner and one to Mr. Greenspan. Both of whom still prosper and live, so they could easily confirm whether they signed this.
Mr. Riyadi has, by passing these bonds over, also put at the disposal of the U.S. Treasury the entire asset backing which he was alleged to have for the 15 trillion. I now have a letter here -- from the Bank of Indonesia, which says that the whole thing was a pack of lies. That he did not have the 750,000 tonnes of gold which was supposed to be backing it. He only had 700 tonnes. And this is really a piece of complete fabrication.
Finally, I have a letter here from Mr. Riyadi himself, who tells me he was put up to do this and that none of it was true and that he has been robbed of all his money and I'm quite prepared to recognize that one of the possibilities here is that Mr. Riyadi is himself putting this together as a forgery in order to try and win some recovery back.
But it gets more complicated than that. Because each of the 5 trillion payments that came in has been acknowledged and receipted by the executives at HSBC and again receipted by the executives at the Royal Bank of Scotland. And I have a set of the whole of those receipts for all of this money. Why would any bank want to sign 5 trillion dollars worth, 15 trillion total, of receipts if the money didn't exist.
The money was said to have come, first of all from the Riyadi account, to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York it was passed through JPMorgan Chase in New York for onward transit to London. The means of sending it was a SWIFT note, which ought to have been registered with the Bank of England if it was genuine. So when this happened and came about, I first of all took it to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde (sp?), and said, "what do we do with this"?
He said, give it to Lord Sassoon, he's with treasury. So we did and Lord Sassoon looked at it and said immediately, "This is rubbish -- it's far too much money, it would stick out like a sore thumb and you can't see it in the Royal Bank of Scotland accounts". Quite right. Secondly he said, "The gold backing is ridiculous, there has only ever been 1,507 tonnes of gold mined in the history of the world, so you can't have 750,000 tonnes" [Editors Note: The 1,507 tonnes is not correct, but the number is still FAR smaller than the 750,000 tonnes -- somewhere around 150,000 metric tonnes]. This is true and the third thing he said obviously was, "it's a scam", and I agree with him. It was a scam. The problem is we stopped looking at that point. We should have asked, what is the scam? Instead of, at that time, just nodding it off. And we have never really resolved this, because today, I have this piece of paper.
Which is my justification for bringing it into this meeting today, which is available on the internet and I'm astonished that it hasn't already been unearthed by the treasury and every alarm bell in the land should be ringing if it has. Because this is the general audit office of the Federal Reserve...the real Federal Reserve in Washington. And its audit review in the end of July of 2010 on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It has on it, some 20 banks listed, to which 16.115 trillion dollars are outstanding in loans. My Lords, that is the sore thumb that was being looked for by Lord Sassoon.
But more particularly there are two other very interesting things in this. The first is that Barclays Bank got 868 billion in loans, the Royal Bank of Scotland has got 541 billion, in which case, one has to ask, is that they could have earned in three weeks, enough to pay off their entire indebtedness to the taxpayers of Britain, why they have not done so and can we please ask them to put a check in the post for the whole 46 billion.
And the third thing that is wrong with it is that every bank on this list, without exception, is an MTN-registered bank. Which means they are registered to use the medium term notes to move funds between themselves with an agreed profit share formula. In which case these banks are investing this money and most extraordinary, not a penny of interest does the Federal Reserve Bank want paid on this vast amount of 16 trillion.
Anyone amongst yourselves who knows what the IMF rules for financials are will immediately smell a rat. Because the IMF has very strict rules for validating dodgy money. There are two ways of doing it. You either pass it through a major central bank, like the Bank of England, who have apparently refused to touch this. Or alternatively, you put it through to a bank which is an MTN trading bank. Which is then able to use the funds on the overnight European MTN trading market where they can earn between 1 and 2.5% profit per night. And the compound interest on that is huge. So there is a vast profit being made with this money somewhere if it is in fact genuine.
So my Lords, I believe that this is such an important issue now that I've put everything I've got on this subject into a 104 megabyte memory thumb. And I want the government to put this to some suitable investigative bureau and take everything I've got on the subject and find out what the truth is about what is going on here because there is something very seriously wrong. Either we have a huge amount of tax uncollected on profits made, or we've got a vast amount of money festering away in the European banking system which is not real money, in which case we need to take it back. My Lords, I ask for an investigation and please support my plea.
www.youtube.com
www.rumormillnews.com
Unofficial Transcript of the speech by Lord James of Blackheath, in the Lords Chamber of the House of Lords, London, on 16 February 2012
I'm going to start with my conclusions, but I'm not going to sit down when I've made them. Because I'm then going to give you the evidence to support them and hopefully present to you the reasons why I want support for an official inquiry into the mischief I want to unfold to you this afternoon.
My lords, I have been engaged in pursuit of this issue for nearly 2 years now, and I'm no further through to getting to the truth.
I think there are three possible conclusions that may come from it. I think there may have been a massive piece of money laundering committed by a major government which ought to know better and that it has effectively undermined the integrity of the British bank the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second alternative is that a major American department has an agency that has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which they are seeking to get at least 50 billion Euros as a payoff. And the third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud which has not been carried out but which has been prepared in order to provide a threat to one government or more if they don't pay them off. So there are three possibilities and this all needs a very urgent review.
My Lords, it starts in April and May of 2009, with the alleged transfer to the United Kingdom, to HSBC of a sum of 50 trillion dollars and seven days later, in comes another 50 trillion dollars to HSBC, and then 3 weeks later another 50 trillion. 5 trillion in each case. Sorry. A total of 15 trillion dollars is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland and we need to look at where this came from and what the history of this money is. And I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and from where it has come from for a long time.
It starts off apparently as the property of a man called Yohannes Riyadi. Which has some claims to be the richest man in the world. Well he would be if all the money that was owed to him was paid, but I have seen accounts of his showing he owns 36 trillion dollars in a bank. And it is a ridiculous sum of money. On the other hand the 36 trillion dollars would be consistent with the dynasty from which he comes and the fact that they had been effectively the emperors of Indo-China in times gone by. But a lot of that money has been taken away from him with his consent by the American treasury over the years for the specific purpose of helping to support the dollar.
He has sent to me a really quite remarkable document which is dated in February 2006 in which the American government, according to a meeting with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is neither a Federal Reserve, nor a Bank. It's a bit like celebrity big brother. It's got three names to describe it and none of them are true. And this document, which is quite astonishing, purports to have been a meeting. It is witnessed by Mr. Alan Greenspan, who signed for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, of which he was chairman, as well as the real Federal Reserve Bank in Washington. And it is signed by Mr. Timothy Geithner, as a witness on behalf of the International Monetary Fund who sent two witnesses, the other one being Mr. Yusuke Horiguchi and these gentlemen have signed as witnesses to the effect that this deal is a proper deal. There are a lot of other signatures on here as well. This is not a photocopy. This is an original version of the contract. Under which the American treasury has apparently got the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to offer to buy out the bonds which have been issued to Mr. Riyadi to replace the cash which has been taken from him over the previous ten years and they're giving him 500 million dollars, as a cash payment to buyout worthless bonds.
Now this is all in the agreement and it's very remarkable. I would have thought that establishing whether this is a correct piece of paper or not is just 2 phone calls away. One to Mr. Geithner and one to Mr. Greenspan. Both of whom still prosper and live, so they could easily confirm whether they signed this.
Mr. Riyadi has, by passing these bonds over, also put at the disposal of the U.S. Treasury the entire asset backing which he was alleged to have for the 15 trillion. I now have a letter here -- from the Bank of Indonesia, which says that the whole thing was a pack of lies. That he did not have the 750,000 tonnes of gold which was supposed to be backing it. He only had 700 tonnes. And this is really a piece of complete fabrication.
Finally, I have a letter here from Mr. Riyadi himself, who tells me he was put up to do this and that none of it was true and that he has been robbed of all his money and I'm quite prepared to recognize that one of the possibilities here is that Mr. Riyadi is himself putting this together as a forgery in order to try and win some recovery back.
But it gets more complicated than that. Because each of the 5 trillion payments that came in has been acknowledged and receipted by the executives at HSBC and again receipted by the executives at the Royal Bank of Scotland. And I have a set of the whole of those receipts for all of this money. Why would any bank want to sign 5 trillion dollars worth, 15 trillion total, of receipts if the money didn't exist.
The money was said to have come, first of all from the Riyadi account, to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York it was passed through JPMorgan Chase in New York for onward transit to London. The means of sending it was a SWIFT note, which ought to have been registered with the Bank of England if it was genuine. So when this happened and came about, I first of all took it to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde (sp?), and said, "what do we do with this"?
He said, give it to Lord Sassoon, he's with treasury. So we did and Lord Sassoon looked at it and said immediately, "This is rubbish -- it's far too much money, it would stick out like a sore thumb and you can't see it in the Royal Bank of Scotland accounts". Quite right. Secondly he said, "The gold backing is ridiculous, there has only ever been 1,507 tonnes of gold mined in the history of the world, so you can't have 750,000 tonnes" [Editors Note: The 1,507 tonnes is not correct, but the number is still FAR smaller than the 750,000 tonnes -- somewhere around 150,000 metric tonnes]. This is true and the third thing he said obviously was, "it's a scam", and I agree with him. It was a scam. The problem is we stopped looking at that point. We should have asked, what is the scam? Instead of, at that time, just nodding it off. And we have never really resolved this, because today, I have this piece of paper.
Which is my justification for bringing it into this meeting today, which is available on the internet and I'm astonished that it hasn't already been unearthed by the treasury and every alarm bell in the land should be ringing if it has. Because this is the general audit office of the Federal Reserve...the real Federal Reserve in Washington. And its audit review in the end of July of 2010 on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It has on it, some 20 banks listed, to which 16.115 trillion dollars are outstanding in loans. My Lords, that is the sore thumb that was being looked for by Lord Sassoon.
But more particularly there are two other very interesting things in this. The first is that Barclays Bank got 868 billion in loans, the Royal Bank of Scotland has got 541 billion, in which case, one has to ask, is that they could have earned in three weeks, enough to pay off their entire indebtedness to the taxpayers of Britain, why they have not done so and can we please ask them to put a check in the post for the whole 46 billion.
And the third thing that is wrong with it is that every bank on this list, without exception, is an MTN-registered bank. Which means they are registered to use the medium term notes to move funds between themselves with an agreed profit share formula. In which case these banks are investing this money and most extraordinary, not a penny of interest does the Federal Reserve Bank want paid on this vast amount of 16 trillion.
Anyone amongst yourselves who knows what the IMF rules for financials are will immediately smell a rat. Because the IMF has very strict rules for validating dodgy money. There are two ways of doing it. You either pass it through a major central bank, like the Bank of England, who have apparently refused to touch this. Or alternatively, you put it through to a bank which is an MTN trading bank. Which is then able to use the funds on the overnight European MTN trading market where they can earn between 1 and 2.5% profit per night. And the compound interest on that is huge. So there is a vast profit being made with this money somewhere if it is in fact genuine.
So my Lords, I believe that this is such an important issue now that I've put everything I've got on this subject into a 104 megabyte memory thumb. And I want the government to put this to some suitable investigative bureau and take everything I've got on the subject and find out what the truth is about what is going on here because there is something very seriously wrong. Either we have a huge amount of tax uncollected on profits made, or we've got a vast amount of money festering away in the European banking system which is not real money, in which case we need to take it back. My Lords, I ask for an investigation and please support my plea.
www.youtube.com
2012年2月19日 星期日
意充公 46.8萬億假美債券
蘋果日報
意大利反黑手黨檢察當局昨日（周五）充公了一批由香港運往瑞士、面值 6萬億美元（ 46.8萬億港元）的假美國債券，價值相等於美國國債的 33%。
這 批 1934年債券，於 2007年由香港運往瑞士蘇黎世，被發現暗藏在三個保險箱的暗格內，意大利警方早前調查該案時，在當地拘捕了八人。據悉，該批債券像真度極高。意大利警方 因兩張英國倫敦滙豐銀行逾 20.5萬英鎊（ 251萬港元）空頭支票，展開調查，才揭發這宗詐騙案，其間發現有人企圖透過銀行，向一個發展中國家兜售假債券。
美聯社
silverdoctors.blogspot.com
留意以下國民政府當年黃金換美債的故事, 而假美債有可能是真美債 !
malcolm said...
THEY NEEDED TO STAY SECURE FOR 60 YEARS
The wooden boxes were then glued shut. That way, the bonds were much less likely to get moldy -- after being stored in a chest and buried underground in a secure location for 60 years.After the 60 years, the Asian countries were told they could dig up the chests, cash out the bonds and get their money back if they wanted to.According to Fulford, Keenan and other sources, in 1938, the Kuomintang dynasty in China sent seven battleships' worth of gold-- a staggering amount -- to the United States to protect against it being stolen by the Japanese.This is a key aspect of the trillion-dollar lawsuit we have been discussing.In response, the United States issued massive amounts of 1934-series Federal Reserve bonds -- carefully sealed in boxes, which were then sealed in locked chests -- and handed them back to China as collateral.
THE 60 YEARS WERE UP IN 1998 -- AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE LOST THE CASE
In 1998, the 60 years were up. The Kuomintang had fled to Taiwan and were no longer the ruling party in China, but they still wanted their gold back. The Federal Reserve fought them in a secret international court at the Hague -- and lost.
The Federal Reserve was ordered to pay out the debt as of September 11, 2001. They did not. We all know what did happen that day.What very few people knew, until now, was that all the Kuomintang gold was being stored under Building 7 at the World Trade Centre. After the towers came down, the vaults were "mysteriously" found to be empty.The Kuomintang have been fighting ever since to get their gold back. The size and scope of such a "winner takes all" heist is truly extraordinary -- but something outrageous and unprecedented in any known laws of physics did happen that day.Susan Lindaeur is now the highest-level, most credible witness to have added significant strength to the story that"9/11 was an inside job."The lawsuit Neil Keenan has filed on the Dragon Family's behalf could potentially break the whole story open before the eyes of the world -- and again, this lawsuit has the backing of a 122-nation alliance.I have written this investigation to help end the deadly silence -- so justice can be served. Ultimately, this is everyone's war -- not just those seeking to reclaim their stolen property.
THE BOXES WERE COVERED WITH ENGRAVED COPPER
Before we go into more detail about the BIS and the open, provable aspects of the story, it's important to fill in a few more of the technical details about the bonds, the bond boxes and the bond chests.The 8.5x11-sized wooden bond boxes were faced and sealed with bronze-colored sheet metal -- for extra protection from the elements underground.The sheet metal on the boxes had elaborate, official engravings on every side. The engravings indicated that the bonds were issued by the Federal Reserve. They indicated which Federal Reserve bank, from which American city,had issued the bonds.
The range of serial numbers for the bonds were also engraved into the sheet metal -- as well as the staggering value of the financial instruments inside.
February 18, 2012 9:47 PM
malcolm said...
MORE ABOUT THE CHESTS
Many of the larger chests, particularly in the 1934 series, held a total of 13 of these boxes. They did very much look like the classic "treasure chest."Twelve of the bond boxes inside these chests were about two and a half inches wide, as we said -- and the thirteenth
was only half that width and was actually a "Book of Redemption", not containing bonds but rather instructions on how to redeem them.Each chest also contained a single, small cylindrical "Information Scroll" mounted in a clamp. All thirteen of the boxes fit neatly and snugly into the chest like a row of books.The chest was then also covered with engraved sheet metal. The engravings said the bonds were issued by a Federal Reserve bank from a given American city. The serial numbers of the bonds were listed, as well as the total value of everything in the box.Many of these 1934-series chests carried a written value of Three Trillion Dollars -- and a substantial number of them were produced. Each chest was padlocked shut for even further protection.
THE BONDS WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE USED IN THE "OPEN" ECONOMY
Even though the Kuomintang had the option to reclaim their gold after 60 years, the bonds were never meant to beused as cash. The money was still expected to be held on deposit and used as collateral for the existing "open"currencies of the world.If the bonds were freed up and actually cashed, they could ruin the United States economy -- which had nowherenear as much money in it as the Federal Reserve had printed in the bonds.The whole idea was to keep the bonds on deposit -- as well as the gold they were issued against.The bonds represented how much value a given country held in the BIS system. We will explore the inner workingsof this system in Section Five.Most importantly,
the bonds, boxes and chests all contained deliberate, glaring errors in spelling andgrammar.
That way, if anyone did actually try to use them, the authorities would say they were "Fake".It is not clear whether the Asians and other foreign nations were aware of these deliberate errors or not. Probably some of them were, and some of them were not.Meanwhile, anyone who actually tried to cash the bonds would be lucky to escape from their plan alive.
HOW DID I KNOW ALL THIS?
The reason why I know all this is rather convoluted, but compelling. In mid-December, once I knew what questions to ask, a top insider described to me what these bond boxes actually looked like. He had also toured some the vast facilities where the gold was held.
I then emailed Neil Keenan, the principal in this trillion-dollar lawsuit, with the information. Less than 15 minutes later, he sent me an avalanche of pictures that looked exactly the same
as what I had just described -- even though he had never met my insider.Bear in mind that I'd already been in contact with Keenan for nearly three weeks by this point. There was no possible way he could have moved fast enough to create fakes that matched what my insider had just described.I never thought I was going to do this, but since there are already two other online sources that have leaked very similar images, here are some of the pictures Neil Keenan sent me.
NEIL KEENAN / DRAGON FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS OF BONDS
This is the world debut of these photographs -- exactly as they were sent to me, a mere 15 minutes after I wrote Neiland told him what my insider said they should look like.I was absolutely shocked at how perfectly they fit the description. Many of these images are larger than they appear,so you can save them to your computer and zoom in on them with various programs.
February 18, 2012 9:47 PM
羅傑斯沽清美股 看好黃金人幣 杜指撲13000 近四年新高
hk.news.yahoo.com
(綜合報道)(星島日報報道)在歐債問題有望今周解決的利好因素刺激下，美股連升兩天，杜指逼近13000點關口，杜指及標普500指數齊創近4年新高；在過去7周，標普500指數和納指便有6周報升，美股前景漸佳。但「商品大王」羅傑斯就潑冷水，認為全球各國都印鈔救經濟，買黃金等資產才是保值之道，他看淡美股之餘，更預測人民幣未來十至二十年有望升值一至兩倍。
羅傑斯表示，目前在他的投資組合中沒有美股，但持有歐羅、美元、人民幣以及金銀等貴重金屬。他認為，全球央行大舉印鈔，令投資者在資產保值方面很傷腦筋；在這種情況下，他認為歷來保值之道都是買入黃金和白銀等實物資產，目前他持有的就是實物資產及部分貨幣。
料人幣十年倍升
全球央行透過量化寬鬆以大量泵水，他認為將令貨幣更大動盪，他的投資組合目前持有歐羅和美元，希望這些貨幣能相對堅挺；而貨幣動盪時投資者須持有商品。他表示，紙幣的價值令人愈益懷疑，或許到2020年前紙幣將走到盡頭。
羅傑斯表示看好人民幣，指人民幣未來10至20年有望再升一至兩倍。他又稱，雖然他很喜歡英國，他的投資組合沒持有英鎊；英鎊今年來已上升2%，惟過去6個月下跌4.4%。
杜指周五收市升45點，報12949點，距離2008年5月創下13000高位的重要心理關口，僅有一步之遙，杜邦和英特爾成為周五升幅最大藍籌股；標準普爾500指數收市升3點，報1361點，逼近08年6月以來新高的1363點。不過，納斯達克指數收市跌8點，以2951點結束上周。全周計，杜指、標普500指數分別上升1.16%和1.38%，納指升1.65%。
今年以來標普500指數已升逾8%，歐債危機解決有進展，加上近期美國製造業、樓市和就業數據表現理想，令大市獲有力支持。展望未來一周，由於第4季業績期基本結束，本周也沒有重大經濟數據公布，希臘援助貸款談判以及歐債形勢的發展，料將主導大市走勢。
此外，摩托羅拉移動（Motorola Mobility）與蘋果公司近月來圍繞智能手機技術的侵權官司，愈演愈烈。早前被摩托羅拉移動控告侵權的蘋果，上周五蘋果作出反擊，已向歐盟競爭局投訴，指摩托羅拉移動沒有以公平條款申請符合行業標準的智能手機相關技術專利，違反承諾。
美銀總裁削花紅35%
根據美國銀行向證監會提交的資料，美銀行政總裁莫伊尼漢在2011年獲取總值590萬美元（約4600萬港元）的有限制性紅股，較2010年獲得的紅股減少三成半。
(綜合報道)(星島日報報道)在歐債問題有望今周解決的利好因素刺激下，美股連升兩天，杜指逼近13000點關口，杜指及標普500指數齊創近4年新高；在過去7周，標普500指數和納指便有6周報升，美股前景漸佳。但「商品大王」羅傑斯就潑冷水，認為全球各國都印鈔救經濟，買黃金等資產才是保值之道，他看淡美股之餘，更預測人民幣未來十至二十年有望升值一至兩倍。
羅傑斯表示，目前在他的投資組合中沒有美股，但持有歐羅、美元、人民幣以及金銀等貴重金屬。他認為，全球央行大舉印鈔，令投資者在資產保值方面很傷腦筋；在這種情況下，他認為歷來保值之道都是買入黃金和白銀等實物資產，目前他持有的就是實物資產及部分貨幣。
料人幣十年倍升
全球央行透過量化寬鬆以大量泵水，他認為將令貨幣更大動盪，他的投資組合目前持有歐羅和美元，希望這些貨幣能相對堅挺；而貨幣動盪時投資者須持有商品。他表示，紙幣的價值令人愈益懷疑，或許到2020年前紙幣將走到盡頭。
羅傑斯表示看好人民幣，指人民幣未來10至20年有望再升一至兩倍。他又稱，雖然他很喜歡英國，他的投資組合沒持有英鎊；英鎊今年來已上升2%，惟過去6個月下跌4.4%。
杜指周五收市升45點，報12949點，距離2008年5月創下13000高位的重要心理關口，僅有一步之遙，杜邦和英特爾成為周五升幅最大藍籌股；標準普爾500指數收市升3點，報1361點，逼近08年6月以來新高的1363點。不過，納斯達克指數收市跌8點，以2951點結束上周。全周計，杜指、標普500指數分別上升1.16%和1.38%，納指升1.65%。
今年以來標普500指數已升逾8%，歐債危機解決有進展，加上近期美國製造業、樓市和就業數據表現理想，令大市獲有力支持。展望未來一周，由於第4季業績期基本結束，本周也沒有重大經濟數據公布，希臘援助貸款談判以及歐債形勢的發展，料將主導大市走勢。
此外，摩托羅拉移動（Motorola Mobility）與蘋果公司近月來圍繞智能手機技術的侵權官司，愈演愈烈。早前被摩托羅拉移動控告侵權的蘋果，上周五蘋果作出反擊，已向歐盟競爭局投訴，指摩托羅拉移動沒有以公平條款申請符合行業標準的智能手機相關技術專利，違反承諾。
美銀總裁削花紅35%
根據美國銀行向證監會提交的資料，美銀行政總裁莫伊尼漢在2011年獲取總值590萬美元（約4600萬港元）的有限制性紅股，較2010年獲得的紅股減少三成半。
法郎時代終結 56億變廢紙
本人早排都有少少法郎錢幣剩, 去法國旅行時用剩的, 但前年已送俾孫仔孫女當收藏 !
文匯報
又一個時代終結！法國民眾前日向有60年歷史的舊貨幣法郎說再 見，數以百計民眾在巴黎法國央行門外排隊，將法郎兌換成歐元。全球來不及兌換的約5.5億歐元(約56億港元)的法郎，昨日起正式成為廢紙，有關價值將被 央行視作盈餘入賬，為庫房帶來大筆媒體形容的「善忘稅收」(從忘記換錢的民眾獲得的收入)。
文匯報
又一個時代終結！法國民眾前日向有60年歷史的舊貨幣法郎說再 見，數以百計民眾在巴黎法國央行門外排隊，將法郎兌換成歐元。全球來不及兌換的約5.5億歐元(約56億港元)的法郎，昨日起正式成為廢紙，有關價值將被 央行視作盈餘入賬，為庫房帶來大筆媒體形容的「善忘稅收」(從忘記換錢的民眾獲得的收入)。
法國於2002年1月改用歐元，並於2005年停止兌換硬幣和舊紙幣，但央行一直繼續容許兌換較新的法郎鈔票，直至上周五最後期限。為了這天，法國人翻箱倒櫃，取出家裡最後一張法鈔，以6.55957法郎兌1歐元的匯率換成歐元。
《小王子》鈔吸引 太舊鈔不接收
雖然已經有10年時間，但不少法國人還是如今才發現尚有法郎留在家中。媒體連日來不斷提醒民眾換錢，造成一股法郎「集體回憶」，加上歐債危機令人們對歐元信心大減，很多人都懷念使用法郎的日子。
央行門外前日排著長長人龍，50歲歌劇歌手奧斯托拉薩也是一分子，他帶來2張200法郎和1張50法郎鈔票兌換，央行會在下月通知他何時領取歐元。有民眾帶來1980年代發行、印有著名畫家德拉克羅瓦肖像的100法郎，但因太舊不獲兌換，唯有把它鑲起當紀念品。
與歐元相比，法郎的設計相當有心思，最令人印象深刻的莫過於50法郎紙幣，上面印有法國作家聖埃克蘇佩里肖像，以及他的名著作品《小王子》主角站在星球上的插畫。
歐債下踩多腳 政府被狠批
換鈔不忘抗議，將參加4月大選的右翼政客杜邦艾尼昂，在央行前批評當法國人發現自己身陷「歐元陷阱」時，當局選擇停止使用法郎；他又以德國情況作對比，指德政府深明歐元前途堪虞，所以保留舊貨幣馬克。
意大利去年12月停止兌換舊幣里拉，法國則是第二個加入歐元區後停止兌換舊幣的國家。芬蘭將於月底停換舊幣，荷蘭限期則為2032年，但半數歐元國沒設限。深陷債務危機的希臘下月1日也停止兌換德拉克馬，前提是還能留在歐元區。
■路透社/綜合外電消息/《每日電訊報》
涉假債券3人明提堂
文匯報
香港文匯報訊（記者 杜法祖）涉在香港上水一單位藏有大量偽造債券、紙幣及印章的3名男子，昨被警方落案控以一項「藏有虛假文書」罪名，其中1名外籍男子另被加控一項「在香港非法入境後未得入境事務處處長授權而留在香港」罪名，3人明日(周一)在粉嶺裁判法院提堂。
香港文匯報訊（記者 杜法祖）涉在香港上水一單位藏有大量偽造債券、紙幣及印章的3名男子，昨被警方落案控以一項「藏有虛假文書」罪名，其中1名外籍男子另被加控一項「在香港非法入境後未得入境事務處處長授權而留在香港」罪名，3人明日(周一)在粉嶺裁判法院提堂。
3名被落案男子，當中包括2名分別姓葉(60歲)及姓張(48歲)的內地男子，另1名外籍男子則姓Albert(66歲)。
上周四(本月16日)晚上10時許，大埔警區重案組探員根據線報，突擊搜查上水皇府山一目標單位， 結果在單位內檢獲大批仿真度極底，涉及多國發行的偽造債券及虛假文件，當中更包括偽造紙幣及印章等，單位內3名男子當場被捕。另外警方又在單位內檢獲2部 電腦，由於涉及的偽造債券及虛假文件數量龐大，有傳僅債券面額總值已逾80億元，惟確實數量仍在點算中，警方商業罪案調查科訛騙組A隊已接手展開深入調 查。
2012年2月18日 星期六
納粹德軍偽鈔摧毀英鎊
一段有趣歷史 !
文匯報
英國軍情五處(MI5)公開的檔案顯示，納粹德軍於1940年開始，印製了當時面值達1.34億英鎊(約16.5億港元)的高仿真度英倫銀行偽鈔，相當於流通英鎊的10%，結果在1945年二戰結束之際，「德國成功摧毀英國貨幣在海外的信譽」。
當時納粹軍使集中營的猶太人印製偽鈔，並計劃在英國各地從天空散發，雖然未有實行，但偽鈔於1944年6月諾曼底戰役起大量流入英國，當中大部分來自美軍和波蘭軍的黑市買賣，有關買賣其後被搗破。
由於流傳太廣，遠至中東、南美、加拿大都有，歐洲的中立國都拒絕接收英倫銀行鈔票。英國無計可施，惟有回收5英鎊和以上的偽鈔，重印5英鎊，並停印及發行面值更大鈔票。
■英國《金融時報》/英國廣播公司
文匯報
英國軍情五處(MI5)公開的檔案顯示，納粹德軍於1940年開始，印製了當時面值達1.34億英鎊(約16.5億港元)的高仿真度英倫銀行偽鈔，相當於流通英鎊的10%，結果在1945年二戰結束之際，「德國成功摧毀英國貨幣在海外的信譽」。
當時納粹軍使集中營的猶太人印製偽鈔，並計劃在英國各地從天空散發，雖然未有實行，但偽鈔於1944年6月諾曼底戰役起大量流入英國，當中大部分來自美軍和波蘭軍的黑市買賣，有關買賣其後被搗破。
由於流傳太廣，遠至中東、南美、加拿大都有，歐洲的中立國都拒絕接收英倫銀行鈔票。英國無計可施，惟有回收5英鎊和以上的偽鈔，重印5英鎊，並停印及發行面值更大鈔票。
■英國《金融時報》/英國廣播公司
2012年2月17日 星期五
美特種部隊偷潛入120國
文匯報
美國與伊朗關係緊繃，有美國媒體報道，美軍已成立一支秘密特種部隊，派往75個國家和地區，主要負責潛入搜集情報、鎖定目標暗殺及施展心理攻擊等。據報部隊於去年底已潛入120國，並已開始在伊朗的行動，分析指這可能是美國對伊朗軍事行動的前奏。
美國「Wired」網站報道，該支美軍特種部隊於2009年中成立，當時伊朗拒絕美國總統奧巴馬提出的外交對話。美國特種作戰司令部證實該部隊正於伊朗行動，任務為指揮美國阿拉伯盟友的軍事部隊、搜集伊朗核計劃情報、確認將來發動軍事行動時或能幫忙的伊朗反對派組織等。
特種部隊潛入伊朗
報道指，部隊從伊拉克南部越境潛入伊朗，未有證據顯示部隊於伊朗參與暗殺等軍事行動。為盡量減少平民傷亡和破壞，部隊一般通過詢問平民、技術探測等辦法搜集具體情報，為日後進攻創造條件。
伊朗媒體前日報道，伊朗已停止向荷蘭、希臘、法國、葡萄牙、西班牙和意大利出口石油，消息公布後，刺激倫敦布蘭特期油前日升至每桶120美元，是去年8月以來最高。
伊願無條件恢復核談判
伊朗昨日就核談判事宜去信歐盟外交和安全政策高級代表阿什頓，據報伊朗信中稱已準備恢復核談判，「下一輪談判能否成功，取決於6國對伊倡議作出的建設性反應」。伊朗駐俄羅斯大使昨稱，恢復談判並無任何「預設條件」。美國國務院發言人紐蘭稱，美國正和盟友合作，評估覆函內容。
中國外交部發言人劉為民昨表示，中方讚賞伊朗覆函的舉動，呼籲盡早重啟6國與伊朗對話，推動伊朗核問題重啟對話與合作。對伊前日宣布核計劃重要成果，劉為民稱，伊朗作為《不擴散核武器條約》締約國，擁有和平利用核能的權利，同時也應履行相應國際義務。
以色列防長巴拉克昨表示，伊朗聲稱的核成果有誇大之嫌，但以方仍視之為威脅。日本防相田中直紀昨晚會見到訪的巴拉克，呼籲以方冷靜應對。
■路透社/綜合外電消息/Wired網站/英國《金融時報》
美國與伊朗關係緊繃，有美國媒體報道，美軍已成立一支秘密特種部隊，派往75個國家和地區，主要負責潛入搜集情報、鎖定目標暗殺及施展心理攻擊等。據報部隊於去年底已潛入120國，並已開始在伊朗的行動，分析指這可能是美國對伊朗軍事行動的前奏。
美國「Wired」網站報道，該支美軍特種部隊於2009年中成立，當時伊朗拒絕美國總統奧巴馬提出的外交對話。美國特種作戰司令部證實該部隊正於伊朗行動，任務為指揮美國阿拉伯盟友的軍事部隊、搜集伊朗核計劃情報、確認將來發動軍事行動時或能幫忙的伊朗反對派組織等。
特種部隊潛入伊朗
報道指，部隊從伊拉克南部越境潛入伊朗，未有證據顯示部隊於伊朗參與暗殺等軍事行動。為盡量減少平民傷亡和破壞，部隊一般通過詢問平民、技術探測等辦法搜集具體情報，為日後進攻創造條件。
伊朗媒體前日報道，伊朗已停止向荷蘭、希臘、法國、葡萄牙、西班牙和意大利出口石油，消息公布後，刺激倫敦布蘭特期油前日升至每桶120美元，是去年8月以來最高。
伊願無條件恢復核談判
伊朗昨日就核談判事宜去信歐盟外交和安全政策高級代表阿什頓，據報伊朗信中稱已準備恢復核談判，「下一輪談判能否成功，取決於6國對伊倡議作出的建設性反應」。伊朗駐俄羅斯大使昨稱，恢復談判並無任何「預設條件」。美國國務院發言人紐蘭稱，美國正和盟友合作，評估覆函內容。
中國外交部發言人劉為民昨表示，中方讚賞伊朗覆函的舉動，呼籲盡早重啟6國與伊朗對話，推動伊朗核問題重啟對話與合作。對伊前日宣布核計劃重要成果，劉為民稱，伊朗作為《不擴散核武器條約》締約國，擁有和平利用核能的權利，同時也應履行相應國際義務。
以色列防長巴拉克昨表示，伊朗聲稱的核成果有誇大之嫌，但以方仍視之為威脅。日本防相田中直紀昨晚會見到訪的巴拉克，呼籲以方冷靜應對。
■路透社/綜合外電消息/Wired網站/英國《金融時報》
2012年2月16日 星期四
Moody's warns may downgrade 17 global banks, securities firms
finance.yahoo.com
By Ian Chua and Soyoung Kim
(Reuters) - Moody's warned on Thursday it may cut the credit ratings of 17 global and 114 European financial institutions in another sign the impact of the euro zone government debt crisis is spreading throughout the global financial system.
It was reviewing the long-term ratings and standalone credit assessments of a range of banks, Moody's added. Markets were unaffected by the Moody's announcement.
"Capital markets firms are confronting evolving challenges, such as more fragile funding conditions, wider credit spreads, increased regulatory burdens and more difficult operating conditions," the ratings agency said in a statement.
It said among 17 banks and securities firms with global capital markets operations, it might cut the long-term credit rating of UBS, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley by as much as three notches following the review. It said the guidance was indicative.
Among the banks that might be downgraded by two notches are Barclays, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings, and Goldman Sachs.
Bank of America and Nomura were included in those that might be downgraded by one notch.
The U.S. rating agency said in a separate statement its action on 114 financial institutions from 16 European nations reflected the impact of the debt crisis and deteriorating creditworthiness of its governments.
It cited more fragile funding conditions, increased regulatory burdens and a tougher economic environment for its review of banks and securities firms with global reach.
Moody's salvo follows rounds of downgrades in European sovereign ratings as the euro zone's struggle to keep its weakest link Greece afloat has been driving up borrowing costs and straining finances of other nations.
Last Monday, Moody's cut the ratings of six European nations including Italy, Spain and Portugal and warned it could strip France, Britain and Austria of their top-level AAA grade.
Standard & Poor's cut France's and Austria's top ratings and downgraded seven other euro zone nations last month. It also cut the euro zone's bailout fund by one notch.
Moody's on Thursday also downgraded the insurance financial strength ratings (IFSR) by one or two notches of several insurance companies, which it said related to their investment and operating exposures to Spain and Italy.
These included Unipol Assicurazioni SpA, Mapfre Global Risks, Assicurazioni Generali SpA and Allianz SpA. It affirmed the IFSR of Allianz SE, AXA SA, Aviva Plc and their subsidiaries, but cut the outlook on the rating to negative from stable.
VICIOUS CIRCLE
Asian shares and the euro were weaker on Thursday on concerns about another delay in cementing a bailout for Greece. Traders said markets didn't not show any specific reaction to the Moody's announcement.
In its review of European financial institutions, Moody's said that once completed, the ratings would "fully reflect the currently foreseen adverse credit drivers."
European banks' bond holdings of struggling euro zone nations Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy have trapped Europe in a vicious circle.
The falling value of the debt puts pressure on banks, which in turn weighs on lending and economic activity, making it tougher to sustain the growth that governments badly need to shore up their finances.
The biggest single group among the 114 institutions under review were headquartered in Italy, followed by Spain, with more than 20 each. Nine were headquartered in Britain, 10 in France and seven in Germany.
Moody's said nine of the 17 banks with global reach are included in the list of 114 financial institutions in Europe.
European Union leaders have been trying to put a financial "firewall" around the nations most afflicted by the euro zone debt crisis.
But jittery market sentiment suffered a fresh setback on Wednesday when several EU sources told Reuters that the euro zone was considering a delay in parts of a second bailout plan for Greece.
Moody's said that for 99 European financial institutions, the standalone credit assessments have been placed on review for downgrade. For 109 institutions, the long-term debt and deposit ratings have been placed on review for downgrade.
For 66 institutions, the short-term ratings have been placed on review for downgrade.
By Ian Chua and Soyoung Kim
(Reuters) - Moody's warned on Thursday it may cut the credit ratings of 17 global and 114 European financial institutions in another sign the impact of the euro zone government debt crisis is spreading throughout the global financial system.
It was reviewing the long-term ratings and standalone credit assessments of a range of banks, Moody's added. Markets were unaffected by the Moody's announcement.
"Capital markets firms are confronting evolving challenges, such as more fragile funding conditions, wider credit spreads, increased regulatory burdens and more difficult operating conditions," the ratings agency said in a statement.
It said among 17 banks and securities firms with global capital markets operations, it might cut the long-term credit rating of UBS, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley by as much as three notches following the review. It said the guidance was indicative.
Among the banks that might be downgraded by two notches are Barclays, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC Holdings, and Goldman Sachs.
Bank of America and Nomura were included in those that might be downgraded by one notch.
The U.S. rating agency said in a separate statement its action on 114 financial institutions from 16 European nations reflected the impact of the debt crisis and deteriorating creditworthiness of its governments.
It cited more fragile funding conditions, increased regulatory burdens and a tougher economic environment for its review of banks and securities firms with global reach.
Moody's salvo follows rounds of downgrades in European sovereign ratings as the euro zone's struggle to keep its weakest link Greece afloat has been driving up borrowing costs and straining finances of other nations.
Last Monday, Moody's cut the ratings of six European nations including Italy, Spain and Portugal and warned it could strip France, Britain and Austria of their top-level AAA grade.
Standard & Poor's cut France's and Austria's top ratings and downgraded seven other euro zone nations last month. It also cut the euro zone's bailout fund by one notch.
Moody's on Thursday also downgraded the insurance financial strength ratings (IFSR) by one or two notches of several insurance companies, which it said related to their investment and operating exposures to Spain and Italy.
These included Unipol Assicurazioni SpA, Mapfre Global Risks, Assicurazioni Generali SpA and Allianz SpA. It affirmed the IFSR of Allianz SE, AXA SA, Aviva Plc and their subsidiaries, but cut the outlook on the rating to negative from stable.
VICIOUS CIRCLE
Asian shares and the euro were weaker on Thursday on concerns about another delay in cementing a bailout for Greece. Traders said markets didn't not show any specific reaction to the Moody's announcement.
In its review of European financial institutions, Moody's said that once completed, the ratings would "fully reflect the currently foreseen adverse credit drivers."
European banks' bond holdings of struggling euro zone nations Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy have trapped Europe in a vicious circle.
The falling value of the debt puts pressure on banks, which in turn weighs on lending and economic activity, making it tougher to sustain the growth that governments badly need to shore up their finances.
The biggest single group among the 114 institutions under review were headquartered in Italy, followed by Spain, with more than 20 each. Nine were headquartered in Britain, 10 in France and seven in Germany.
Moody's said nine of the 17 banks with global reach are included in the list of 114 financial institutions in Europe.
European Union leaders have been trying to put a financial "firewall" around the nations most afflicted by the euro zone debt crisis.
But jittery market sentiment suffered a fresh setback on Wednesday when several EU sources told Reuters that the euro zone was considering a delay in parts of a second bailout plan for Greece.
Moody's said that for 99 European financial institutions, the standalone credit assessments have been placed on review for downgrade. For 109 institutions, the long-term debt and deposit ratings have been placed on review for downgrade.
For 66 institutions, the short-term ratings have been placed on review for downgrade.
Rothschilds Want Iran’s Banks
americanfreepress.net
By Pete Papaherakles
Could gaining control of the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran (CBI) be one of the main reasons that Iran is being targeted by Western and Israeli powers? As tensions are building up for an unthinkable war with Iran, it is worth exploring Iran’s banking system compared to its U.S., British and Israeli counterparts.
Some researchers are pointing out that Iran is one of only three countries left in the world whose central bank is not under Rothschild control. Before 9-11 there were reportedly seven: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. By 2003, however, Afghanistan and Iraq were swallowed up by the Rothschild octopus, and by 2011 Sudan and Libya were also gone. In Libya, a Rothschild bank was established in Benghazi while the country was still at war.
Islam forbids the charging of interest, a major problem for the Rothschild banking system. Until a few hundred years ago, charging interest was also forbidden in the Christian world and was even punishable by death. It was considered exploitation and enslavement.
Since the Rothschilds took over the Bank of England around 1815, they have been expanding their banking control over all the countries of the world. Their method has been to get a country’s corrupt politicians to accept massive loans, which they can never repay, and thus go into debt to the Rothschild banking powers. If a leader refuses to accept the loan, he is oftentimes either ousted or assassinated. And if that fails, invasions can follow, and a Rothschild usury-based bank is established.
The Rothschilds exert powerful influence over the world’s major news agencies. By repetition, the masses are duped into believing horror stories about evil villains. The Rothschilds control the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the IMF, the World Bank and the Bank of International Settlements. Also they own most of the gold in the world as well as the London Gold Exchange, which sets the price of gold every day. It is said the family owns over half the wealth of the planet—estimated by Credit Suisse to be $231 trillion—and is controlled by Evelyn Rothschild, the current head of the family.
Objective researchers contend that Iran is not being demonized because they are a nuclear threat, just as the Taliban, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Qadaffi were not a threat.
What then is the real reason? Is it the trillions to be made in oil profits, or the trillions in war profits? Is it to bankrupt the U.S. economy, or is it to start World War III? Is it to destroy Israel’s enemies, or to destroy the Iranian central bank so that no one is left to defy Rothschild’s money racket?
It might be any one of those reasons or, worse—it might be all of them.
By Pete Papaherakles
Could gaining control of the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran (CBI) be one of the main reasons that Iran is being targeted by Western and Israeli powers? As tensions are building up for an unthinkable war with Iran, it is worth exploring Iran’s banking system compared to its U.S., British and Israeli counterparts.
Some researchers are pointing out that Iran is one of only three countries left in the world whose central bank is not under Rothschild control. Before 9-11 there were reportedly seven: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. By 2003, however, Afghanistan and Iraq were swallowed up by the Rothschild octopus, and by 2011 Sudan and Libya were also gone. In Libya, a Rothschild bank was established in Benghazi while the country was still at war.
Islam forbids the charging of interest, a major problem for the Rothschild banking system. Until a few hundred years ago, charging interest was also forbidden in the Christian world and was even punishable by death. It was considered exploitation and enslavement.
Since the Rothschilds took over the Bank of England around 1815, they have been expanding their banking control over all the countries of the world. Their method has been to get a country’s corrupt politicians to accept massive loans, which they can never repay, and thus go into debt to the Rothschild banking powers. If a leader refuses to accept the loan, he is oftentimes either ousted or assassinated. And if that fails, invasions can follow, and a Rothschild usury-based bank is established.
The Rothschilds exert powerful influence over the world’s major news agencies. By repetition, the masses are duped into believing horror stories about evil villains. The Rothschilds control the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the IMF, the World Bank and the Bank of International Settlements. Also they own most of the gold in the world as well as the London Gold Exchange, which sets the price of gold every day. It is said the family owns over half the wealth of the planet—estimated by Credit Suisse to be $231 trillion—and is controlled by Evelyn Rothschild, the current head of the family.
Objective researchers contend that Iran is not being demonized because they are a nuclear threat, just as the Taliban, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Qadaffi were not a threat.
What then is the real reason? Is it the trillions to be made in oil profits, or the trillions in war profits? Is it to bankrupt the U.S. economy, or is it to start World War III? Is it to destroy Israel’s enemies, or to destroy the Iranian central bank so that no one is left to defy Rothschild’s money racket?
It might be any one of those reasons or, worse—it might be all of them.
2012年2月15日 星期三
The Federal Reserve's Explicit Goal: Devalue The Dollar 33%
www.forbes.com
The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) has made it official: After its latest two day meeting, it announced its goal to devalue the dollar by 33% over the next 20 years. The debauch of the dollar will be even greater if the Fed exceeds its goal of a 2 percent per year increase in the price level.
An increase in the price level of 2% in any one year is barely noticeable. Under a gold standard, such an increase was uncommon, but not unknown. The difference is that when the dollar was as good as gold, the years of modest inflation would be followed, in time, by declining prices. As a consequence, over longer periods of time, the price level was unchanged. A dollar 20 years hence was still worth a dollar.
But, an increase of 2% a year over a period of 20 years will lead to a 50% increase in the price level. It will take 150 (2032) dollars to purchase the same basket of goods 100 (2012) dollars can buy today. What will be called the “dollar” in 2032 will be worth one-third less (100/150) than what we call a dollar today.
The Fed’s zero interest rate policy accentuates the negative consequences of this steady erosion in the dollar’s buying power by imposing a negative return on short-term bonds and bank deposits. In effect, the Fed has announced a course of action that will steal — there is no better word for it — nearly 10 percent of the value of American’s hard earned savings over the next 4 years.
Why target an annual 2 percent decline in the dollar’s value instead of price stability? Here is the Fed’s answer:
“The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent (as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, or PCE) is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve’s mandate for price stability and maximum employment. Over time, a higher inflation rate would reduce the public’s ability to make accurate longer-term economic and financial decisions. On the other hand, a lower inflation rate would be associated with an elevated probability of falling into deflation, which means prices and perhaps wages, on average, are falling–a phenomenon associated with very weak economic conditions. Having at least a small level of inflation makes it less likely that the economy will experience harmful deflation if economic conditions weaken. The FOMC implements monetary policy to help maintain an inflation rate of 2 percent over the medium term.”
In other words, a gradual destruction of the dollar’s value is the best the FOMC can do.
Here’s why:
First, the Fed believes that manipulation of interest rates and the value of the dollar can reduce unemployment rates.
The results of the past 40 years say the opposite.
The Fed’s finger prints in the form of monetary manipulation are all over the dozen financial crises and spikes in unemployment we have experienced since abandoning the gold standard in 1971. The financial crisis of 2008, caused in no small part by the Fed’s efforts to stimulate the economy by keeping interest rates too low for, as it turned out, way too long is but the latest example of the Fed failing to fulfill its mandate to achieve either price stability or full employment.
The Fed’s most recent experience with Quantitative Easing also belies the entire notion that monetary manipulation can spur the economy. Between November 2010 and June 2011, the Fed tried to spur economic growth by purchasing $600 billion in Treasury securities, flooding the banking system with reserves and keeping interest rates low. In response the economy, which had been growing at a 3.4% annual rate, slowed to a 1% annual rate in the first half of 2011. Once, the Fed stopped supplying all of that liquidity, economic growth in the second half of the year accelerated to a 2.3% annual rate.
Second, the Fed does not use real time indicators of the price level. Instead, it views inflation through the rear view mirror of the trailing increases in the PCE. And, even when it had evidence of rising inflation — as it did in the first quarter of last year — it chose to temporize, betting that the spike in inflation would prove temporary.
This spike in inflation did prove temporary, as Fed Chairman Bernanke predicted at the time, but not for the reasons — a slack economy — that he cited. Instead, the growing debt crisis in Europe led to a massive shift in deposits out of the euro and into the dollar — an event totally out of the Fed’s control. Yet, this increase in the demand for dollars was far more important than any action taken by the Fed because it increased the value of the dollar and produced a slowdown in the inflation rate.
What we are left with is a trial and error monetary system that depends on the best judgment of 19 men and women who meet every six weeks around a big table at the Federal Reserve in Washington. At the end of a day and a half of discussions, 11 of them vote on what to do next. The error the members of the FOMC fear most when they vote is deflation. So, they have built in a 2% margin of error.
Given the crudeness of the tools the FOMC uses to set monetary policy, allowing for such a margin of error is no doubt prudent. For example, when the economy slowed in the first half of last year, inflation picked up, accelerating to a 6.1% annual rate during the second quarter. And, when the economic growth accelerated in the second half, inflation slowed. These results are the precise opposite of what the Fed’s playbook says are supposed to happen.
The best the Fed can do — an average debauch in the dollar’s value of 2% a year while producing recurring financial crises and a more cyclical economy — is demonstrably inferior to the results produced by the classical gold standard. Here’s just one example. The largest gold discovery of modern times set off the 1849 California gold rush and increased the supply of gold in the world faster than the increase in the output of goods and services. The price level in the U.S. did increase by12.4 percent over the next 8 years. That translates into an average of just 1.5% a year. The gold standard at its worst was better than the best the Fed now promises to do with the paper dollar.
The Fed’s best is hardly good enough. The time has arrived for the American people to demand something far better — a dollar as good as gold.
The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) has made it official: After its latest two day meeting, it announced its goal to devalue the dollar by 33% over the next 20 years. The debauch of the dollar will be even greater if the Fed exceeds its goal of a 2 percent per year increase in the price level.
An increase in the price level of 2% in any one year is barely noticeable. Under a gold standard, such an increase was uncommon, but not unknown. The difference is that when the dollar was as good as gold, the years of modest inflation would be followed, in time, by declining prices. As a consequence, over longer periods of time, the price level was unchanged. A dollar 20 years hence was still worth a dollar.
But, an increase of 2% a year over a period of 20 years will lead to a 50% increase in the price level. It will take 150 (2032) dollars to purchase the same basket of goods 100 (2012) dollars can buy today. What will be called the “dollar” in 2032 will be worth one-third less (100/150) than what we call a dollar today.
The Fed’s zero interest rate policy accentuates the negative consequences of this steady erosion in the dollar’s buying power by imposing a negative return on short-term bonds and bank deposits. In effect, the Fed has announced a course of action that will steal — there is no better word for it — nearly 10 percent of the value of American’s hard earned savings over the next 4 years.
Why target an annual 2 percent decline in the dollar’s value instead of price stability? Here is the Fed’s answer:
“The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent (as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, or PCE) is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve’s mandate for price stability and maximum employment. Over time, a higher inflation rate would reduce the public’s ability to make accurate longer-term economic and financial decisions. On the other hand, a lower inflation rate would be associated with an elevated probability of falling into deflation, which means prices and perhaps wages, on average, are falling–a phenomenon associated with very weak economic conditions. Having at least a small level of inflation makes it less likely that the economy will experience harmful deflation if economic conditions weaken. The FOMC implements monetary policy to help maintain an inflation rate of 2 percent over the medium term.”
In other words, a gradual destruction of the dollar’s value is the best the FOMC can do.
Here’s why:
First, the Fed believes that manipulation of interest rates and the value of the dollar can reduce unemployment rates.
The results of the past 40 years say the opposite.
The Fed’s finger prints in the form of monetary manipulation are all over the dozen financial crises and spikes in unemployment we have experienced since abandoning the gold standard in 1971. The financial crisis of 2008, caused in no small part by the Fed’s efforts to stimulate the economy by keeping interest rates too low for, as it turned out, way too long is but the latest example of the Fed failing to fulfill its mandate to achieve either price stability or full employment.
The Fed’s most recent experience with Quantitative Easing also belies the entire notion that monetary manipulation can spur the economy. Between November 2010 and June 2011, the Fed tried to spur economic growth by purchasing $600 billion in Treasury securities, flooding the banking system with reserves and keeping interest rates low. In response the economy, which had been growing at a 3.4% annual rate, slowed to a 1% annual rate in the first half of 2011. Once, the Fed stopped supplying all of that liquidity, economic growth in the second half of the year accelerated to a 2.3% annual rate.
Second, the Fed does not use real time indicators of the price level. Instead, it views inflation through the rear view mirror of the trailing increases in the PCE. And, even when it had evidence of rising inflation — as it did in the first quarter of last year — it chose to temporize, betting that the spike in inflation would prove temporary.
This spike in inflation did prove temporary, as Fed Chairman Bernanke predicted at the time, but not for the reasons — a slack economy — that he cited. Instead, the growing debt crisis in Europe led to a massive shift in deposits out of the euro and into the dollar — an event totally out of the Fed’s control. Yet, this increase in the demand for dollars was far more important than any action taken by the Fed because it increased the value of the dollar and produced a slowdown in the inflation rate.
What we are left with is a trial and error monetary system that depends on the best judgment of 19 men and women who meet every six weeks around a big table at the Federal Reserve in Washington. At the end of a day and a half of discussions, 11 of them vote on what to do next. The error the members of the FOMC fear most when they vote is deflation. So, they have built in a 2% margin of error.
Given the crudeness of the tools the FOMC uses to set monetary policy, allowing for such a margin of error is no doubt prudent. For example, when the economy slowed in the first half of last year, inflation picked up, accelerating to a 6.1% annual rate during the second quarter. And, when the economic growth accelerated in the second half, inflation slowed. These results are the precise opposite of what the Fed’s playbook says are supposed to happen.
The best the Fed can do — an average debauch in the dollar’s value of 2% a year while producing recurring financial crises and a more cyclical economy — is demonstrably inferior to the results produced by the classical gold standard. Here’s just one example. The largest gold discovery of modern times set off the 1849 California gold rush and increased the supply of gold in the world faster than the increase in the output of goods and services. The price level in the U.S. did increase by12.4 percent over the next 8 years. That translates into an average of just 1.5% a year. The gold standard at its worst was better than the best the Fed now promises to do with the paper dollar.
The Fed’s best is hardly good enough. The time has arrived for the American people to demand something far better — a dollar as good as gold.
