911 Real or Not?
Who knows? What I do know is I do not believe whatever the government says because it is never free of self interest. The CIA had proposed creating terror attacks domestically and blaming it on Cuba to support and invasion. Even the claims used to start the Vietnam War have been shown to be a lie. So who do you believe? Never sure any more.
Germany wants Global Taxation Cooperation
The German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble wants to globalize tax collection with greater international cooperation to hunt down everyone and everything. He says government (ECB) has done everything right! This is the deflationary side. Yes, on the one hand they monetize and the other they reduce disposable income furthering recession. This is ALWAYS how empires die. They tax the people to death, they flee and in the case of Rome were forced to even abandon their real estate. Government is simply unsustainable anymore. However, they will no go quietly into the light.
Inflation v Deflation
I understand that some people have a hard time grasping how is it possible to deflate when on the one hand they appear to create money wholesale? We are in a period of STAGFLATION. This means that the REAL cost of living (including government taxation) is rising. This is squeezing out net disposable income. So we get the worst of both worlds. Additionally, the dollar is the reserve currency and the DEMAND for the dollar is rising as Europe and Japan have problems.
To get HYPERINFLATION that has never taken place in a core economy even looking at Rome, Spain, France, England and now America, the assumption is government will “print” to meet obligations.
The other side of that same coin is they choose AUSTERITY insofar as they seize assets to meet expenses and cut the promises they did make. This is what they are talking about behind closed door on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe wants to seize assets in the South and just take 15% of all wages as a pretended “savings” while in the USA Obama wants to go after IRA’s and change the laws to grab over $3 million now, while they are eyeing up $20 trillion in pension funds to offset $17 trillion in debt.
They are buying tanks and bullets. That is not following the path of HYPERINFLATION. There is no rule of law. They can do as they like and the courts will sanction whatever they do. What if they do not print, they just do not honor anything?
This is far worse, for this is how ALL empires have died.
Metals
Both gold and silver are flirting with key numbers for today’s close. In gold it is 1405 and in silver it is 23.21. Closings BELOW these numbers today leave these markets still vulnerable to a further drop for the next 2 weeks. Keep in mind that the intraday low was Tuesday in gold at 1321.5. So all we have is a 3 day reaction since then. We need to continue to rally for a brief pause or we may just go into meltdown mode.
Beware of Studies & Statistics
The interesting thing about studies, has been rarely are they unbiased. Errors are also highly common, which is one reason why we go for the raw data and standardize everything in house. Quite frankly, you just cannot rely on government, think tanks that have slants, or academics who rely upon grants.
Back in the 1980s, a staff member Isabel was crunching the data of the USA. Show came across what appeared to be a glaring error that was so stupid, we assumed we had to be wrong. She came to me to asked if I would review her work. It turned out that in GDP, government counts total government spending and then total personal income without backing out government employees. I called the head of the BEA (Bureau Economic Analysis). I asked for help. Where are you backing this out? Surely you have to be doing that somewhere. After a week, they never got back. I called him again. I was told “no comment.”
There are those who take the stock market and the Shiller P/E (S&P 500 divided by the 10 year average of inflation-adjusted earnings), and then proclaim that the market is overpriced because it is 60% above its 4-year low. The problem is that the “inflation” numbers used are produced by government and are nowhere close to reality. Garbage in = Garbage out.
Now there is a lot of fuss over the austerity study that a student happened to notice also had glaring mistakes by two of Harvard’s top economists. Their study, which has been cited widely, claimed that economic growth slows dramatically when a government’s debt exceeds 90% of a country’s annual economic output. This has contributed to the slash and burn policies in Europe and in the USA. as justification for slashing spending. They simply omitted entire countries. Germany has been citing this study as justification for burning down the barn in Europe to get a field mouse.
Welcome to the world of studies and statistics. You can make a 6 into a 9 by rotating it 180 degrees. They play with numbers to make it appear they are right like the silver/gold ratio citing it use to be 16:1 so silver is way under-priced. They omit it has also been 100:1 even during World War II. Remember the war nickels made of silver because nickel was more valuable because of its utility value during war? Everything fluctuates. There is no constant value. Beware of studies and always look closely.