You really have to hand it to the banksters. As was painstakingly detailed in the book Creature from Jekyll Island, the banking elite devised a brilliant plan in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island in which to take over control of the United States, steal the wealth from the taxpayers and the resources from the country.

It was at this meeting that the Federal Reserve was conceived by the banking cartel, as they devised a plan to protect its member banks from competition and convince Congress and the American public that this cartel was an agency of the United States government.

The creation of the Federal Reserve will undoubtedly go down as one of the biggest tragedies in American history. After all, the government handed over the right to print the nation’s currency AND charge interest to a private, for-profit corporation with foreign stockholders. The Federal Reserve was given the right to simply print massive sums of money out of thin air and then charge the American taxpayer interest on that money.

In essence what they did was place the American people into indentured servitude by forcing the people to pay usury on worthless fiat currency (paper money created out of nothing), not to fund the government, but to enrich the bankers and fund wars in which America should never be involved. It has led to the massive unsustainable debt situation and the dollar losing 96% of its purchasing power since 1913. Stop and reflect on that last statistic for a moment. If you held $100 since 1913, it would only be able to buy you $4 worth of goods and services today! Or put another way, it would take $20 in today’s money to match what just $1 would have bought you in 1913. The rest of the value has been absorbed by the banking cartel and government. How on earth we still allow this institution to exist and operate in privacy is beyond comprehension.

Furthermore, It is absolutely unconstitutional, as Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly states that only Congress shall have the power to issue money. This view was confirmed in Lewis v. United States, 680 F.2d 1239 (1982), in which the Supreme Court ruled:

The Federal Reserve Banks are “independent, privately owned and locally controlled corporations”, and there is not sufficient “federal government control over ‘detailed physical performance’ and ‘day to day operation’” of the Federal Reserve Bank for it to be considered a federal agency.

As the United States debt-to-GDP ratio approaches 100%, the interest owed on the debt has become one of the largest annual budget items. The total U.S. debt according to http://www.usdebtclock.org/ has reached $56 Trillion or $180,000 for every U.S. citizen. This figure does not even include unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare, off-balance-sheet liabilities such as Fannie and Freddie and other liabilities that put the true total debt well over $100 Trillion. But let’s just use the $56 Trillion number for now.

The Federal Reserve conveniently stopped printing the total money supply statistic (M3) back in 2006. But since that date, a number of statisticians have extrapolated the number and come up with estimates that are widely believed to be in the ballpark. Using these numbers, the total amount of U.S. money outstanding is approximately $14 Trillion. If you divide 14 Trillion by the U.S. population of 310 million people, there is approximately $45,000 for every US person.

So, if the debt per citizen is $180,000 ($56 Trillion / 310 million people) and there is only $45,000 per citizen in existence, how can the debt ever be paid off? Even if we use the more conservative estimate of debt which is total public and private debt, we get $29.5 Trillion, which is more than DOUBLE the amount of dollars in existence.

The answer is that the debt CAN NOT be paid off. In fact, this is specifically how the banksters designed the system, so that everyone would eventually be in debt and servitude to them. Think about just how maniacal that is for a moment. But it gets worse…

You see, the government has already pledged all of America’s gold, which is surely no longer at Fort Knox as they haven’t allowed an audit in over 50 years. Even if the gold is still there, it now only represents a fraction of the annual deficit, let alone the total debt. Furthermore, the government will eventually have to pledge what is left of America’s public land, buildings and natural resources, privatizing everything from the Grand Canyon to Manhattan to Yosemite National Park.

On the individual level, since there will never be enough money for everyone to pay back their home mortgages, this means the banks will end up foreclosing on a huge portion of the real estate and housing that hard-working Americans own, a process which has already begun. So not only will the banking elite end up with all of the money, they will also end up with all of the land and resources of the once great United States of America. Sound alarmist? Consider this visionary quote from one of our nation’s greatest leaders:

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered…I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies… The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” -Thomas Jefferson

It is absolutely ridiculous that we have become so apathetic and brainwashed to be allowing this to happen right under our noses. This charade is going to end badly, either by default or hyperinflation and most likely with a high level of social unrest. Either way, the banksters have created a fiat money system that is absolutely destructive to this country, our freedoms and our way of life. If you are outraged, there are fortunately some things that you can do.

1. Move your money out of the big banks and into local community banks or non-profit credit unions. Because of fractional reserve banking, every dollar that you remove deprives the banks of $9 or more used for risky derivatives gambling where its heads they win, tails you lose.
2. Support a full audit of the Federal Reserve, sign the petition and write or call your local congressman. Voter action has already led to a partial one-time audit that recently passed the Senate, which is a good first step. But we need periodic full audits of exactly what the Fed is doing with taxpayer funds. The more the awareness is raised about the Fed, the better chance we will have of eliminating this institution one day and returning the right to print money to the Congress, INTEREST FREE!
3. Get out of debt and live within your means. We’ve had it good for a very long time and have been able to live beyond our means due to the dollar’s status as world reserve currency and easy credit. Those days are coming to an end, so you should do everything within your means to get our of debt while interest rates are still low. They will need to shoot dramatically higher one day, and you don’t want to have an adjustable rate loan of any type when they do. Establish your freedom from the banks and deprive them of their revenue (interest on your debt).
4. Invest in precious metals. The government’s most likely response to the debt issue and slowing economy is going to be to print money on a scale the world has never seen before. This will undoubtedly lead to hyperinflation, destruction of the U.S. dollar and skyrocketing prices for gold and silver, real money. In addition, the banks and their government bed buddies hate gold because it is out of their control. They can’t print gold or silver out of thin air and it is a threat to their fiat currency system and their very power structure. You should consider owning physical gold and silver and if you are enjoying the leveraged gains provided by mining stocks, make sure to occasionally convert those paper profits into more physical metal stored outside of the banking system.
5. Lastly, continue to learn and share this information with as many people as possible. We can take our country back and end debt enslavement, but we have to move beyond the two-party system and stop bickering over marginal issues. Both parties are completely corrupt and in the pockets of the banksters and megacorporations. None of this will change until we eliminate the Fed and eliminate money from our political system. The mainstream media is not going to tell everyone this, because they are owned and funded by the banksters and elites. The information must spread via the Internet at a grassroots level.

Jason Hamlin
Gold Stock Bull

by Tyler Durden

Gold’s Blood Relatives
Stewart Thomson
email: s2p3t4@sympatico.ca
Nov 10, 2009

1. “The banks are going to close! Street violence is coming!”

2. Remember those headlines going into Dow 6500? I do. I bought the Dow into those headlines. Of course, I kept up my insurance actions, removing money regularly from the financial system on a weekly basis. Nobody knew what would happen. Would the Dow make a bottom or go into an abyss with the thundering explosion of a thousand trillion dollars of OTC derivatives blowing to smithereens? The decision was made to use fraud accounting to bury it all and attempt to print money to technically re-price assets, while actually devaluing them. That is a key concept to understand going forward as this crisis accelerates. Raising the price of an item and raising the value of it are not necessarily the same thing at all times.

3. We are at a new Dow 6500 crossroads. An even bigger crossroads. This time, it is for the US Dollar. As the world’s largest market, major action there brings the greatest debate and the most powerful players. While the global fear level is nowhere near as big as it was at Dow 6500, the dollars on the line are vastly larger.

4. Will the mighty US dollar stage a rally? Or will it melt down, possibly triggering a global paper currency crisis? Look at the indicators like MACD rolling over. This looks like the chart of an item that is preparing to crash, not rally.

5. The analysts calling for a huge dollar rally and a stock market collapse are generally quite demoralized. The fundster technicians incorrectly identified the rising technical pattern in the Dow as an actual wedge, as opposed to the wedging action, that is all it was. I highlighted this repeatedly in my videos. Few listened. I kept seeing the same wedge drawn over and over. A costly error for those who bet large money on calling the Dow top with this “wedge”. I would venture that the banksters’ kids have a joke about the fundsters with a Dow “wedgie”. My bank trader friend told me his prime broker contacts told him a literal sea of fundsters were short the Dow on huge leverage at the recent Dow lows, sure they had the top. He pulled his own short positions. Dow top call number 10 zillion bites the dust.

6. The dollar could rally here. Jim Rogers says he’s bought the dollar. My question to those selling commodities here to buy the dollar is alongside Jim “Mighty Man” Rogers is: Do you really think Jim Rogers is net long the dollar? Do you think he’s bought more dollars than the commodities he holds as a core position? The man opened up his bag of peanuts and he’s chomping on a few US dollar peanuts. That is all that he is doing. Period. Many in the gold and fund community are already trying to eat the bag, shells and all, in a gorging on the dollar. Many of these players missed the move in gold from 905 or shorted it, and they are compounding one blown trade with another even worse set of tactics, to desperately “make back” their losses.

7. Play the dollar as an insurance trade or a simple counter trend play. Note the key word here is: Play. Not “sell all my gold at the market, it’s going down!”

8. The possibility of a strong US dollar rally is very high, yes, but the odds of a dollar collapse followed by a global paper currency crisis, are even higher.

9. Remember when gold moved towards the $1000 marker, towards the neckline of the massive head and shoulders continuation pattern on the gold weekly chart? I said, “There is a 51% chance we go higher. I am long with an ultimate target of $6000 and no amount of possible gold weakness will cause me to take any action on the sell side with my gold positions”.

10. When I look at the gold monthly chart, I see a stronger technical situation now than ever! Regardless of any minor trend rally (minor trends last 1-3 weeks in time), my view is the odds of a US dollar collapse are 55%. The odds of a major rally are 45%.

11. This is a time where put options on gold could be a good idea for those who are terrified of a dollar rally. You have solid profits in gold and related items, but the “will gold rise or tank” game being played out there is too much for you mentally. You could “insure” a portion of your gold portfolio for a small cost. If gold goes higher, your further gains should far outweigh the loss on the put options.

12. I personally will not be buying any put options. In fact, I’d rather buy call options here than put options if I was forced to choose one or the other. I will be buying more gold if it declines. All the way to zero in a pyramid formation. The buys growing larger as it declines.

13. There is no “gold top” and I don’t care about gold 1100.

It’s a round number marker and I sold into it with bits of my trading position. End of story. Here’s the chart. While the daily chart calls for booking modest profits, the monthly chart is on massive buy signals. Look at the TRIX configuration. That is an enormous buy signal. Gold’s major technical indicators are triggering buy signals, not sells.

While head and shoulders continuation pattern price targets are generally unreliable, this is one of the greatest examples of this pattern of all time. Targets of 1200-1400 are not unreasonable, just for the move from the head and shoulders. This pattern to me looks like price could soar far beyond that target. What happens now is not so important as insuring that you are in the gold rocket when it parks at moon $1400, on the way to mars $3000.

14. If a substantial decline of size were to commence in gold, well, I would suggest we are nowhere near that point yet. But if it did occur, you have to buy, not sell. We have the banksters, the fundsters, and now the Gold Topsters. My message to the topsters is this: Stop picking your gold nose. Or you will arrive at gold moon 1400 with bits of gold, if any.

15. My suggestion to those looking for real world tactics to manage your emotions and money on the gold rocket right now if you are feeling overwhelmed by both bull and bear pulls, is to focus on what I term “Gold’s Blood Relatives”.

16. I spoke about corn at length over the week-end. I don’t view corn as better than oil or wheat, but I like to talk about one thing at a time so investors understand it, rather than just blabbing, ‘oh yeah, corn is the big one, go go go!” But you tell me, what makes more sense, a madman play to load up on dollars when there is a 55% chance of a global paper currency crisis, or to buy items like corn, one of the world’s lowest risk investments, with a near-infinitely smaller chance of going off the board than the dollar? To repeat, I don’t favour corn over any other gold-related item. Notice the Bloomberg headline that came out yesterday, right after my write ups. That Bloomberg story shows a stunning picture of what is going on in the Chinese corn market.

17. About 55% of all farms in China are about 3 acres in size. Or less. The six dollar a bushel marker is the corn market line in the sand. If Chinese farmers get less than $6 a bushel, the revenues needed to survive on a farm that is less than 3 acres in size just don’t exist at less than 6 dollars a bushel. Chinese farming is not about profit margins. It’s about revenues. The Gman is subsidizing the farmers, because the farmers are pouring out of the farms and into the cities.

18. Jim Rogers himself has stated while he doesn’t think it will happen, he is clear that the risk is very real: water shortages could lay an unimaginable beating on the industrial revolution in China. No water equals: Starvation. The world bank notes the following about China:

With 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of global water resources, China meets with a severe challenge.

.  More than half of China’s 660 cities suffer from water shortages, affecting 160 million people.
.  The per capita water volume in China is one fourth of the world average.
.  90% of cities’ groundwater and 75% of rivers and lakes are polluted.
.  As a result of widespread water pollution, 700 million people drink contaminated water every day.

19. Some cyclical forecasters believe an actual “dust bowl” type of event could occur in the 2011-2012 period. My suggestion is: If you are feeling like you can’t go on in the gold market at this point in time, rather than trying to be king of the dollar bugs, simply shave off a FEW gold profits, and grab a nice piece of corn on the price weakness cob. Take a bite out of that, not US dollars, to kill your thoughts of gold suicide.

20. If gold goes to $3000, where will the dollar be? Focus on Gold’s blood family, not gold’s enemies. I would suggest you also consider the “cost of farming floor” with agricultural items like corn. It’s not impenetrable by any means, but there is a price point below which the farmer throws in the towel. The odds of price going below there and staying there are small, never mind the odds of it going to a real price of zero. The deflationists haven’t factored starvation into their pipedream. There is much more Deflation of value coming to the world’s economy, but there will be Inflation of Price. Earth to price deflationists on Mars: There can’t be any deflation of price because we’ll all starve to death. The global farming industry will collapse and we’ll all die. The gold relatives advice applies to gold price chasers as well. Some have the thought, “I’m missing out, I just gotta buy, gold will be at 1200 and I’ll have too little!” If gold soars higher, do you think items like oil, food, and other hardcore commodities are going to tank? Not likely. But you can buy them without the adrenaline gusher that is present in the gold market right now. “I don’t buy anything that just went to an all-time high” -Jim Rogers. Maybe you are smarter than he is. I doubt it. There are many items, like food and energy that are trading at low prices.

21. My most important point today is this: Many gold stocks haven’t joined bullion yet. Those that have risen have done so modestly in most cases. Do not dump them to chase the bullion rocket. That borders on insanity. Gold stocks should be bought aggressively into any and all weakness. If you think you are missing out on bullion now, magnify that by 100, and you’ll have the picture of how twisted your emotions will be when the gold stocks join the party and you sold out to chase a $100 move in bullion.

22. The Dow is beginning to hyperinflate, as major institutional players sense a US dollar meltdown is very near at hand. Rising bullion prices coupled with a soaring Dow put you, the gold stock owner, in what I term “The Ultimate Driver’s Seat”. There is no better place to be invested right here, right now. My suggestion is you scan the gold stocks horizon and buy what you can that is weak. Don’t walk to those stocks. Run. Notice I said “hurry”. Not: “back up the truck”. You don’t need much fuel in a toy rocket to shoot it 500 feet in the air. That is the gold stocks market. But do not waste time. Time is of the essence. The gold juniors rocket is on the launchpad in a situation in time comparable to when gold bullion was at $960 as it moved towards the triangle breakout.

23. The pros are moving onto the gold stocks rocket and preparing for liftoff, while the gold topsters are jumping out of the rocket onto the US dollar cement below. The banksters are transporting their broken bodies to the US dollar oven and preparing for final roasting. Do I have a few longside US dollar peanuts in my bag like Jim Rogers does? Sure I do. I’ve bought the dollar into this weakness. With the peanut capital it deserves. So far, while I’ve banged about 10 or 15 USD pucks into the net on strength out of the hole from the recent low, overall it tastes like bits of USD shell mixed with USD peanuts. Those who sell gold stock in major size here and buy the dollar in size, are going to find they have a mouth full, not of shells, but of poison. It will be a mouthful far worse than the poisoning they got shorting the Dow into 6500. Gold’s blood relatives versus USD paper bills in the oven. Not such a tough choice. Is it?

Nov 10, 2009
Stewart Thomson
Graceland Updates
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Risks, Disclaimers, Legal
Stewart Thomson is no longer an investment advisor. The information provided by Stewart and Graceland Updates is for general information purposes only. Before taking any action on any investment, it is imperative that you consult with multiple properly licensed, experienced and qualifed investment advisors and get numerous opinions before taking any action. Your minimum risk on any investment in the world is 100% loss of all your money. You may be taking or preparing to take leveraged positions in investments and not know it, exposing yourself to unlimited risks. This is highly concerning if you are an invetor in any derivatives products. There is an approx $700 trillion OTC Derivatives Iceberg with a tiny portion written off officially.

The bottom line:

Are You Prepared?

Howard S. Katz
Nov 9, 2009

(Click on image to enlarge)

On November 4, gold pulled back to $1025, and that was the turn. It gained 75 points over the next 6 days, including a 30 day whopper when India bought 200 tonnes of gold from the IMF. On Friday, $1100 was breached (interday on the Comex, Dec. future).

Is it too late to become a gold bug? Are you one of those who did not listen to the one-handed economist? Worse, did you fly to “safety” in the U.S. dollar? Are you thinking, “Is it too late to buy?” The answer is in the chart above.

This is the gold bull market going back to its beginning in 1999. Even a novice can see one thing: it is going up. I am not a big fan of uptrend lines, although I have drawn the uptrend above. But you don’t even have to look at the uptrend line. All you have to notice is that each time gold goes up, it breaks to a new high, and each time gold goes down, it holds at a higher low. This is a concept that Charles Dow formalized in the Dow Theory a hundred years ago, and it is as valid today as it was then.

It is not difficult, but in this way of doing things is a very important idea. One must always keep in mind the big picture. The big money is made in the big move. The vast majority of traders are up too close to the market. They cannot see the forest for the trees. So they lose sight of the big picture. And it is the big picture which is going to bring you the big profit.

These are the technicals arguing for a big rise in gold. What are the fundamentals? The important fundamental is an event which happened on March 9, 1933. F.D.R. rammed a bill through the obedient Democratic Congress giving the privilege to counterfeit money to the commercial banks.

I know that you have been taught that F.D.R. and the Democrats were against the bankers. That is a lie, pure and simple. Through the 1920s F.D.R. had been a Wall Streeter working at 120 Broadway, the manager of a vulture fund (so called because it would swoop down on dying companies like a vulture and gobble them up.). His very first act allowed his Wall Street buddies to steal from the working people of America and use this privilege to get rich. A traitor to his class he was definitely not. The bill was rammed through Congress in one day, with no hearings, and the House of Representatives did not even have copies to read before they were required to vote. It was a travesty of the democratic process. Ever since that day, the Democrats have pretended to be the party of the working man while they robbed the working man to give to the bankers. Now how does this affect you?

With this in their pocket, the big Wall Street banks went to work. They found a group of “economists” who would advance the theory that letting the bankers print money makes the country rich. It is true that these “economists” were regarded as crackpots by the real economists of the day. No matter, the bankers’ money talked. They bribed a number of the top schools in the country to hire these crackpot economists. Crackpotism was defined as a new theory of economics. A good example is John Kenneth Galbraith, whose chair of economics at Harvard is named after a former head of the Manhattan Bank (today merged into J.P. Morgan). You probably know these crackpots by the name Keynesian. Perhaps you sent your son off to Harvard to earn a degree in crackpot economics.

I went to Harvard, but I was smarter than you or your son. I spotted the professors there as crackpots by my sophomore year. I skipped the Harvard economics courses and learned real economics by self study. This is why my record of economic prediction over the past half century is brilliant, and the record of the crackpot economists with the long titles is a joke.

But here we are in the 21st century, and you have to make a decision. Buy gold, as we gold bugs are telling you. Or buy stocks, bonds or T-bills, as the establishment is telling you. Well, here is the situation. Through the course of the 20th century the bankers were more and more successful. With the Kennedy tax cut of 1963, Nixon’s abandonment of gold in 1971 and Reaganomics in the 1980s, the issues of paper money got bigger and bigger. America had became the richest country in the world while she was on the gold standard (1788-1933). Now America is getting poorer and slipping backward toward the level of the other nations. The U.S. dollar is in full scale collapse, and there is speculation about the day that it will no longer be used as the world currency. (This happened to the British pound in 1947-48 and coincided with the collapse of the British Empire and with the fall of Britain as a world economic power.)

At the present time, both political parties follow the banker line of more paper money. Last year, the Fed created a trillion dollars out of nothing. To avoid alarming people, the Fed lied about this, reclassifying a portion of the money supply as time deposits (although the owners of these deposits were told that they were demand deposits).

The bottom line of all this is that the bankers are hungry for the Fed to create more paper money. (They are always hungry for the Fed to create more paper money.) So they have their crackpot economists writing articles in every “respectable” newspaper and magazine and locking down all the financial advisory positions in both parties. Obama is projecting trillion dollar deficits for the next 3 years. The Government does not intend to borrow these trillions of dollars from the American people. (thus putting the burden on our children). It intends to counterfeit the money (putting the burden on the people of today). (In America, paper money is illegal under the Constitution. That doesn’t seem to stop anybody, but it certainly does make their actions illegal.)

Since the crackpot theory that printing money is the road to plenty is not true, this will cause the collapse of the U.S. dollar. The vast majority of the American people will wind up poor, and the bankers will get rich. Think, we now have a Government which believes that destroying cars (Cash for Clunkers) will “stimulate the economy.” F.D.R. had a similar theory in the 1930s. Plow under crops, and kill pigs. This was considered to be the way to get us out of the “depression.”

The way to protect yourself is to get out of dollars. This means no savings accounts, T-bills, commercial paper or longer term notes and bonds. GET YOUR ASSETS INTO REAL GOODS. As the dollar goes down, the price of real goods in dollars has to go up. And anyone who tells you different is an ignoramus, a crackpot or a fraud.

Leaving aside collectables, which can be tricky, you have 3 choices: stocks, real estate and commodities. Over the (very) long term, all three of these will go up (in dollar terms) as the dollar goes down. But one of my important discoveries is the commodity pendulum. This says that commodities and stocks take turns. Commodities move down and up in waves which used to take a decade and now take two (examples 1971-80 and 2001-?). As their rise feeds through into consumer prices, the Fed is forced to tighten, and this causes a collapse in both bonds and stocks. That is what you are going to see over the next several years. The Obama price explosion is already beginning in commodities and will later feed through to consumer prices. Then the Fed will tighten, and all the establishment types who are in the stock market will feel a great deal of pain. Have you heard the advice, “Stocks go up for the long pull. They always have?” I was told this when I started trading stocks in the 1960s. From 1966 to 1982, the real value of the DJI declined by 70% in real terms. From 1970 to 1980, gold multiplied by 25 times in nominal terms and 12 times in real terms. How stupid do you have to be to get taken by the same lie twice? (When the young Jim Dines first became a gold bug in 1963, he was fired by his establishment broker. They later went bankrupt, but they never apologized.)

# # #

Howard S. Katz
email: howardkatz@hotmail.com
website: www.thegoldspeculator.com

I publish an economic newsletter, the One-handed Economist ($300/year). I have been calling the gold and other markets since 1965. To subscribe, visit my web site at www.thegoldspeculator.com. If you don’t like computers, you can subscribe directly by sending $300 to The One-handed Economist, 614 Nashua St. #122, Milford, N.H. 03055. Or you can get a free sample of my writing by visiting my blog at www.thegoldspeculator.blogspot.com (no charge). This week’s blog is about the Middle East. Thank you for your interest.

Howard S. Katz holds a BA in mathematics from Harvard University. He became interested in Austrian economics and started a successful investment newsletter, The Speculator which focused on gold and gold stocks. He is a lifelong advocate of gold and gold stock investing. Later, he published The Gunslinger for investors interested in gold and gold stocks. In addition, Mr. Katz authored three books on gold, the gold standard and money in politics: “The Paper Aristocracy“, “The Warmongers” and the soon to be published “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”. He was involved in the Objectivist movement in New York in the 1960s and was an early member of New York’s Free Libertarian Party. Mr. Katz is a contributing author to The Ludwig von Mises Institute where his writings appear along with those of contemporaries Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Murry Rothbard and Robert Murphy, among others. He has been interviewed on numerous radio programs. He is currently Chief Investment Officer, editor and publisher of the gold and gold stock investment newsletter, The One-handed Economist.

by Fayyaz Alimohamed

I began writing the Acamar Journal in 2004, warning that debt levels in the US were at record levels and unsustainable. Much of what has happened was predicted in previous issues of the Journal.

I warned of a financial crisis and a coming recession in November 2006, well before the financial crisis first began in July 2007. In June 2008, I highlighted an RBS report which warned that a stock market crash would occur by September, which it duly did. You can view these issues at www.acamaronline.com.

Now that the crisis has happened, what next?

Since this recession has been compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s, let’s see what happened to the stock markets then. The Dow Jones peaked in Sept 1929 and then fell 48% by November.

It then rose 50% in a bear market rally off that November bottom. The rally lasted till April 1930.

The rally generated expectations that the worst was over. President Herbert Hoover told a group that had come to ask for a stimulative public works program in June 1930, “Gentlemen you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over.”

He was wrong. By June 1932, the Dow Jones had lost 89% of its value from the 1929 peak and the Depression lasted until 1939 when World War II began.

I cite this example to show how the current rally is generating similar expectations. There is talk of “green shoots” suggesting that the economy will resume growth in the last quarter of 2009 or early 2010. The banks have passed the stress tests conducted by the government, though I think the results are not credible.

The US has now committed to over $ 13 trillion in bailout packages, consumer stimulus, AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae guarantees, TARP and other programs. These are funds that the US Government will have to borrow to try to solve the crisis.

Here’s my problem with this. The crisis was caused by excessive debt and leverage. The solution cannot be far more debt. That’s like giving a drug addict more drugs to cure him. It won’t work, and it will make the eventual problem worse.

The current US deficit is estimated at $ 1.75 trillion, which is almost four times larger than the record $ 485 billion from last year.

My question is: who will fund this?

China has spent the last 20 years accumulating massive foreign exchange reserves due to its massive trade surpluses. But it has only accumulated $ 1.9 trillion over three decades.

Even with oil around $ 60, there are not enough Petro-Dollars available to write this kind of a cheque.

And here’s the real shocker:

The head of the Federal Reserve Bank Of Dallas, Robert Fisher, gave a speech in May 2008 (Storms on the Horizon) in which he said that the US government’s unfunded liabilities are now $ 99.2 trillion (for future Social Security and Medicare obligations). This is in addition to the Federal debt of over $ 11 trillion.

With 111.6 million households in 2006, each household’s share of this future debt is $ 888,750. For each family!

Total credit market debt (combined government, corporate and personal debt) is now an all-time record of over 350% of GDP, as of Q4 2008. This does not account for growing federal and state government debt this year nor does it take the unfunded liabilities into account.

The reality is that the US is essentially insolvent.

This brings us to Bernie Madoff. The former chairman of Nasdaq ran a $ 50 billion Ponzi scheme. For years he pretended to earn impressive returns for his investors; the reality was he didn’t invest anything, he just took money from new investors to pay old investors and lived very well off the difference.

The US government is running a similar investment plan through its issue of new US Treasuries.

The US will never, ever repay its debt. It can’t, the numbers are too large. Each year, it rolls over the principal and interest by issuing new bonds, with the debt growing ever larger.

The Fed announced last month that it will begin to “monetise” US debt, which means it will buy US Treasuries and Agency debt, ostensibly to keep interest rates down.

Here’s one of the major reasons why:

The Chinese have virtually stopped buying US Debt, have warned the US to ensure that it protects the value of the approximately $ 800 billion it already holds in US debt and have proposed that the US dollar be replaced as the world’s reserve currency.

This monetisation strategy, formally known as Quantitative Easing, has engendered sharp criticism from China’s People’s Central Bank. In a quarterly report, it says “A policy mistake made by some major central bank may bring inflation risks to the whole world. As more and more economies are adopting unconventional monetary policies, such as quantitative easing (QE), major currencies’ devaluation risks may rise.” It warns of its concerns of a bond crisis due to this policy approach.

Japan is a major holder of US bonds. And Japan’s opposition party has announced that if it comes to power it will not buy US bonds if they are denominated in US$, only in Yen!

My concern is that the Fed’s actions seems to indicate the last stages of a Ponzi scheme going bad, when there are no longer enough new buyers and the desperate con man has to improvise to keep the scheme going.

And another bubble appears to be OTC derivatives. These unregulated contracts were recently valued at $ 684 trillion, which is an unfathomably high number compared to global assets. Derivatives are what Warren Buffett once called “weapons of mass destruction” but he indulged in derivative contracts anyway, leading to Berkshire Hathaway’s recent 96% profit drop.

And if this US Treasury or derivatives markets blow up, then the global economy will be decimated as these are the mother of all bubbles.

Fayyaz Alimohamed

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Fayyaz Alimohamed has been the Chief Financial Officer of an insurance company in Vancouver and the Director of Investments for a large investment and operating group in Dubai.

Silver Dollar Coin Values

by Howard Katz

You have probably been taught that the responsible way to handle your economic affairs was to work hard, be thrifty and invest safely. This is what the old timers did, and it worked for them. When they reached 65, they were able to retire

However, the old timers lived in a country on the gold standard. They went to work at age 16, saved 15% of their income each year and put it in the local savings bank at 5% interest per year.  Let us do a little 8th grade math.

Assume an average wage of 30 oz. of gold per year. Saving 15% of that means saving 4½ oz. per year.  At the end of a 49-year working lifetime, you have saved 220½ oz. of gold.

Now listen closely because what happens next is so astonishing that it was called a miracle: the miracle of compound interest. When you lend money at interest, in the first year you get the agreed upon rate. If you lend $100 at 5%, you get $5.00.  It is in the second year, that the miracle starts. In the second year, you don’t merely get another $5.00.  In the second year, you are not lending $100; rather you are lending $105, and at 5% this produces an interest of $5.25.; so at the end of the 2nd year you have $110.25.  This is interesting.  Not only is your capital growing; it is growing at an increasing rate.

Now to calculate what 5% interest does to your capital over a 49-year working life span is a long, difficult problem in 8th grade math. But I was a bad boy one day and had to stay after school, and so I calculated what 5% interest does to capital over a 49-year period. The answer, to cut to the point, is that it multiplies it by 4.25.  So, the man who saves 220½ oz. of gold will, after 49 years at interest at 5%, have 220.5 x 4.25 = 937 oz. of gold.  That is, you saved 220½, but you have 937. This so impressed the people of the 19th century that they called it the miracle of compound interest.

So here you are at age 65 with 937 ounces of gold in the savings bank.  You can stop working, continue to draw interest on your capital, and you will receive 5% x 937 oz. = just shy of 48 oz. of gold per year.  In other words, you can stop working and receive 50% greater salary than you did when you worked.

This was a wonderful system.  It no longer exists, but it is very important if you want to know what to do with your wealth today and how to survive in the modern economic climate.  To read the full article, click here…

Silver Dollar Coin Values