Showing posts with label Debt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Debt. Show all posts
Monday, August 17, 2015
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Special Op Zero Dark Thirty 2.0: German Gold Gone Missing ... Sorry, Safely Stored At MF Global Deposit Box.
Normally we could be hardly surprised by anything these days, but in this particular case with German Gold Gone Missing we are seriously worried about the human race. Could They be just So Arrogant or we as a whole species really scientifically proven to be classified just as a "Bunch of Morons"? Or maybe GMO has finally made it even into the Elite circles: They do not even bother to spin it out properly any more? Bloomberg editors were having fun yesterday:
Then Rudy Havenstein joined the party:
I keep my .45 for home defense in a bank safe deposit box so I can quickly access it "in an emergency."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-23/german-gold-stays-in-new-york-in-rebuff-to-euro-doubters.html …
The Bundesbank, commenting today on the obvious and confirmed safety of storing German gold in New York and Paris.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAmPIq29ro …
"Nearly half of Germany’s gold reserves are held in a vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York"
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/global/german-central-bank-to-repatriate-gold-reserves.html …
.@RudyHavenstein @kirillklip .Rudy, it must be The Missing Half of #German #Gold safely stored at NY #FED! #EndGoldManipulation TNR #Gold
If push came to shove, the US would pull an ABN Ambro/Rabobank/MF Global in 2 seconds with any German gold they may still have outright.
Who Wants Their Gold Back?
Now we can safely conclude that German saga is over and Gold will be going much higher: Chinese Virus "Missing Collateral" has finally reached BOE and FED Empty Vaults.
Kirill Klip.:
FED Has Found ... Sorry, Created Inflation To Save Us All - Gold Celebrates ... Quietly So Far.
"Gold and Silver are acting today like if the Chinese virus "Missing Collateral" has finally reached the London BOE vaults!
Bullish For Metals?! Missing Collateral in China, Follow The Trail of Loans, Copper and Fraud.
In my personal opinion, we are witnessing the same game of the rehypothecation as it is happening with FED, BIS, Investment Banks and Gold. This, actually missing metal as collateral, will be the very bullish set up for the commodities markets. After initial selling due to the margin calls and unwinding of Paper Positions in the market, Mr Market will realise that all these metal accounted for the supply and demand picture is NOT there. Industrial demand will stay in place, but Supply which was supposed to be hoarded in the warehouses is missing: the collateral was used a few times for the different transactions. You can study this subject more with explanation in plane English in the very good podcast I have published yesterday: Read more."
Swiss thinks that they know the good medicine against GMO induced coma, please note how often have you heard about it in any media? Little help? Donate your tweets and share it, please:
The Swiss Gold Initiative: Stop Selling Gold, Store All Gold In Switzerland And Back Swiss Franc With 20% Gold.
This Swiss Gold Initiative could become the truly turning point for the world's financial system, people are tired of the manipulation with their money confiscating the savings and wealth."
You can find more of our research on German Gold Gone missing and rebuttal from the Head of German Gold Repatriation Initiative:
There Is No German Gold Left At The New York FED GLD, MUX, TNR.v, GDX
"Die Welt has reported today the bombshell announcement for the Gold market. We have discussed before that only 37 t of Gold out of 674 t was delivered to Germany in 2013 and that the Gold bars were Melted. So not a single original German gold bar was returned to Germany so far!
ZeroHedge reports today that surprisingly only 5 t of gold has been delivered from the NY FED - the rest came from Paris. Now it is not the conspiracy theory any more that there is no German Gold left at the NY FED.
Now all the manipulations in the Gold market and constant smashing down the price in 2013 are coming into another perspective. Germany is very serious about the investigation of the manipulations in the Gold market - it was already reported thatprecious metals manipulation is worse than LIBOR scandal. This investigation has already claimed the first victim: Deutsche Bank to withdraw from Gold fix amid probe.
With the highest on record leverage at COMEX of 112 owners for every single ounce of Gold and record low COMEX registered Gold at 11 t we have the set up for the major blow out phase in the Gold market. Who in their mind will continue to hold Gold at LBMA any more? According to Eric Sprott, we can expect a failure to deliver Gold and lawsuits with deliveries last February from COMEX of 40 t and China buying at least 100 t of Gold every month on average now.
Once Gold will breach $1270 level Andrew Maguire's discussion about the massive short squeeze will become the reality and even if his predictions about $200 Up-days will not materialise, the move by Gold to the upside from the most oversold condition in history will be nothing less than spectacular."
With the highest on record leverage at COMEX of 112 owners for every single ounce of Gold and record low COMEX registered Gold at 11 t we have the set up for the major blow out phase in the Gold market. Who in their mind will continue to hold Gold at LBMA any more? According to Eric Sprott, we can expect a failure to deliver Gold and lawsuits with deliveries last February from COMEX of 40 t and China buying at least 100 t of Gold every month on average now.
Once Gold will breach $1270 level Andrew Maguire's discussion about the massive short squeeze will become the reality and even if his predictions about $200 Up-days will not materialise, the move by Gold to the upside from the most oversold condition in history will be nothing less than spectacular."
Glenn Beck: Where Is German Gold? GLD, TNR.v, MUX, GDX
"Glenn Beck is digging up the mystery of German Gold repatriation. With the reports that even small amount of the delivered Gold so far was melted beforehand we can be sure that there is no more original German Gold left. As we have discussed before, the Gold smashing down has started with Venezuela's request for Gold to be returned back and last year Gold's bloodbath was assured with Germany seeking for its Gold to be returned as well."Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: If the Currency Collapses & You Try to Flee Into Gold, There Won't Be Any GLD, TNR.v, MUX, GDX
"Dr Paul Craigs Roberts talks about all markets being manipulated and presents the big picture of the Gold market and ongoing QE by the FED. Gold price action became the threat to the FED's policies and Gold was smashed down to preserve the status quo and save US Dollar. Markets can not be manipulated forever and now we have the situation when bullion goes to the East and to China particularly with the very dear geopolitical consequences. There is no recovery in U.S. economy and there is no Jobs creation - we would like to mention that this interview was recorded before yesterday disaster with Jobs numbers of only 74k being created and collapse in labour participation numbers."
ZeroHedge:
Germany Has Recovered A Paltry 5 Tons Of Gold From The NY Fed After One Year
ZeroHedge:
Head Of German Gold Repatriation Initiative Responds To Bloomberg Story About Repatriation Halt
Just hours after we noted Bloomberg's story of Germany's decision to halt its repatriation of gold from the NY Fed, the gentleman at the center of the story, who Bloomberg quoted as saying his 'Repatriate Our Gold' campaign was "on hold" - Peter Boehringer - has come out swinging... The Bloomberg story is "a 'non-news' article with a wrong headline, strange interviewees, old news, and with a clearly apologetic ideological approach." and that's just the start...
Just to set the record straight re this article in which my name is mentioned and in which I am quoted out of context:
a) BusinessWeek/Bloomberg uncritically cites statements of politicians and BuBa-bankers who have or give no proof whatsoever re the untouched whereabouts of the german Gold.
b) Re our campaign "Repatriate our Gold": "On hold" does of course NOT mean that we are in any way satisfied with the current status of BuBa´s ongoing repatriation (far too slow and too little - only 5 tons came from NY in 2013! Not exactly a proof for the untouched existence of 1500 tons in a NY vault unaudited since 1950...). Our public campaign will therefore have to continue.
c) Almost no info in the article can be considered in any way "news". Simply because there has not been any material news in this context since early 2013.
d) Especially the headline is plainly false, because there has not been any change in BuBa´s (too slow) repatriation plans: at least 300+ tonnes will come from NY by end 2020. It is not much - but contrary to the headline, BuBa has NOT stopped the ongoing partial repatriation - enforced solely by public pressure!
e) The political party "Alternative for Germany" has never been part of our campaign - they can therefore not have been "rebuffed" as the article suggests.
f) The political party "FDP" has (with the exception of one (1) MP ) never demanded a repatriation - yet another false info in the article.
g) Some politicians cited in the article can not in any way claim to be "in charge" of the german gold hoard (abroad or not). This holds true for both Mr Barthle and for Mr Hardt: BuBa alone is in charge - and officially, BuBa is independent from political influence...
Summary: a "non-news" article with a wrong headline, strange interviewees, old news, and with a clearly apologetic ideological approach: the main purpose seems to be NOT to give space to the myriad of unanswered and extremely relevant questions BuBa and the Fed have been refusing to answer for decades.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Professor Laurence Kotlikoff: The Inform Act - The True Size Of The American Debt
Professor Laurence Kotlikoff discusses The Inform Act and the true size of the American Debt. "The country is in the worst shape than Detroit, it is basically bankrupt." China knows it and buys record amount of Gold this year.
Eric Sprott 2014 Sends Gold North of $2,000 and Silver Over $50 GLD, MUX, TNR.v, GDX
"Gold has started new year with the bang and is solidly up from the retest of the low in 2013. Bearishness in the sector is another reason for the big turn around and equity markets are taking a breather now as well. Great Rotation from Bubbles into the Real Assets could be just in the beginning. The action next week will be very important for Gold and Silver markets and Gold mining shares."The Intergenerational Financial Obligations Reform Act
"Dear Fellow Economists and Other Fellow Citizens,
Please join the 15 Nobel Laureates in Economics, prominent former government officials, and others listed here in endorsing the INFORM ACT.
The INFORM ACT requires the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the General Accountability Office (GAO), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to do fiscal gap accounting and generational accounting on an annual basis and, upon request by Congress, to use these accounting methods to evaluate major proposed changes in fiscal legislation.
The INFORM ACT is a bi-partisan initiative. The bill was introduced Senators Kaine (Democrat from Virginia) and Senator Thune (Republican from South Dakota) and is being co-sponsored by Senator Coons (Democrat from Delaware) and Senator Portman (Republican from Ohio). The Bill will shortly be introduced on a bi-partisan basis in the House of Representatives."
Thursday, January 02, 2014
Albert Cheng: Gold Markets Move East | McAlvany Commentary GLD, MUX, TNR.v, GDX, SLV
Albert Cheng the head of World Gold Council in China discusses the Gold market in China and how Gold has became the foundation for wealth preservation and saving.
KWN: “The Most Remarkable News In The Gold & Silver Markets”
"King World News has published very interesting long term charts for Gold, Silver and Gold Mining Shares."
Bloomberg: London Gold Vaults Are Virtually Empty
"Bloomberg quite suddenly provides some really interesting information about the state of the gold market and ongoing manipulations around it these days. Could the reports about JPMorgan being Net Long Gold now be correct in the end?"
Friday, November 29, 2013
After Reaching Parity With Gold Bitcoin’s Success Is Putting It Under Growing Strain GLD, MUX, TNR.v, GDX
We are searching answers whether Bitcoin is Gold 2.0 or just Dotcom Bubble 2.0 all over again. You know our take already, now Economist weights in with its opinion. And do not forget, please, if you were not the one left holding the bag after the Dotcom Crash, we are all benefiting from Internet revolution now. Just Do Not hold the bag this time.
Idea of Goldcoin crypro-currency based on Gold held in Vaults in Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland and clearing House in London can be Very elegant solution to the US Dollar hangover after QE abuse.
Danish bitcoin exchange Bips latest to suffer cyber-breach
Bitcoin Has Reached Parity With Suppressed Gold And Crashed GLD, MUX, TNR.v, GDX
"We are witnessing the watershed events in the financial markets these days. Bitcoin has reached the parity with Gold today crossing $1242 before crashing to $1000, now it is back to $1178. We will repeat: congratulations to everybody who bought it cheaper and is able to sell now. Bitcoin exorbitant rise show the future for the real alternative to FIAT currencies. Its spectacular fall will drive attention to the real value: Gold and Silver. With new revelations from Kissinger about the Gold Suppression, rise of Bitcoin demonstrates the unleashed potential for Gold and Silver free of manipulation.
All crypto-currencies are on fire these days with Litecoin crossing $50 and we can see here the danger to this very remarkable idea. Will Bitcoin sustain its rise to $2000 and fall to $50? It is not currency at the moment, but asset Bubble chased by the crowd attracted by "unbelievable returns on investment." System is taking notice and will make all possible moves to discredit Bitcoin. Bitcoin's success will the major problem to overcome here. Now it looks like classic OTC market Pump and Dump: few insiders are controlling the flow, price is pushed up in deals between insiders and crowd is attracted at more and more higher prices with rising volume and distribution by insiders.
Expect the "active management of Bitcoin" now: rumours about the NSA cracking the encryption, hackers stealing BTCs and compromised Exchanges. The price going to the sky will trigger insiders selling itself and then it will the question how Bitcoin can withstand it.
In the modern age of Currency Wars and announced Financial War stage with China threatening the US Dollar Reserve Currency of choice status, we will ask very important question: Who is really behind Bitcoin? Even if it is not introduced by countries like China and Russia now - they are taking notice. People are getting out of dollars and other FIAT currencies and even Gold and Silver prices are affected by the BTC rise. The only thing BTC lacks in order to become the real Money is stability and "accepted system guarantees". Now lets imaging that somebody will introduce crypto-currency, but backed by Gold and going into the mainstream. This will be the real game changer and who knows maybe somebody is testing the grounds already.
Next year China is going to announce its official Gold reserves and these number will be very interesting with ongoing record amount Gold accumulation this year and record high leverage in the Western Fractional Reserve System with 69 owners per one ounce of Gold at COMEX."
Economist:
Bitcoin under pressure
Virtual currency: It is mathematically elegant, increasingly popular and highly controversial. Bitcoin’s success is putting it under growing strain
ALL currencies involve some measure of consensual hallucination, but Bitcoin, a virtual monetary system, involves more than most. It is a peer-to-peer currency with no central bank, based on digital tokens with no intrinsic value. Rather than relying on confidence in a central authority, it depends instead on a distributed system of trust, based on a transaction ledger which is cryptographically verified and jointly maintained by the currency’s users.
Transactions can occur directly between the system’s participants at almost zero cost, without the need for a trusted third party or any other intermediary, and are irreversible once committed to a permanent and fully public record. Bitcoin’s mathematically elegant design ensures that the money supply can increase only at a fixed rate that slows over time and then stops altogether. Anonymity, while not assured, is possible with the right precautions and tools. No wonder Bitcoin is so appealing to geeks, libertarians, drug dealers, speculators and gold bugs.
Bitcoin began in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, with a paper published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The technical design outlined in the paper was implemented in open-source software the following year. It came to widespread prominence in 2012 and has been in the headlines ever since.
Investors are backing Bitcoin-related startups, the German finance ministry has recognised it as a “unit of account” and senior officials told an American Senate committee on November 18th that virtual currencies had legitimate uses. But there have also been many cases of Bitcoin theft. Exchanges that convert Bitcoin to other currencies have collapsed or closed. Silk Road, an online forum where illicit goods and services are traded for Bitcoin, was shut down by America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation in October but has since reopened. The Bitcoin price has fluctuated wildly, hitting $230 in April 2013, falling below $70 in July, and then exceeding $600 in November, prompting talk of a bubble.
The system is now straining at the seams. Its computational underpinnings have collectively reached 100 times the performance of the world’s top 500 supercomputers combined: more than 50,000 petaflops. Bitcoin’s success has revealed three weaknesses in particular. It is not as secure and anonymous as it seems; the “mining” system that both increases the Bitcoin supply and ensures the integrity of the currency has led to an unsustainable computational arms-race; and the distributed-ledger system is becoming unwieldy. Will Bitcoin’s self-correcting mechanisms, and the enlightened self-interest of its users, be able to address these weaknesses and keep Bitcoin on the rails?
Bitcoin uses a technique called public-key cryptography, which relies on creating an interlocking pair of encryption keys: a public key that can be freely distributed, and a private one that must be kept secret at all costs. The public key is treated as an address to which value may be sent, akin to an account number. Each transaction involves the paying party signing over a portion or all of the value in one of these addresses by using his private key to perform an operation, called “signing”, on the contents of the transfer, which includes the recipient’s address. Anyone can use the sender’s public key to verify that the sender’s private key signed the transaction. All transactions are appended to a public ledger, called the block chain.
Public keys are ostensibly anonymous, because they are created randomly by software under the control of each user, without central co-ordination. But it turns out that the flow of money from specific addresses can be tracked quite easily. In a paper presented in October, academics from the University of California, San Diego, and George Mason University engaged in a series of ordinary transactions to collect commonly used addresses for Bitcoin wallet services, gambling sites, currency exchanges and other parties.
Follow the money
The researchers exploited a current weakness in most Bitcoin personal and server software, which generates single-use addresses to store change from transactions. This allowed them to follow the movement of Bitcoins across hundreds of transactions from large sums accumulated at single addresses, including ones suspected of being controlled by Silk Road and stolen funds from exchanges. One of the authors, Sarah Meiklejohn, says that the same technique could easily be used to provide the basis of warrants to serve against exchanges or other parties. Law-enforcement agencies would regard this as a good thing, but to advocates of a completely secure and anonymous online currency, it represents a worrying flaw. Ms Meiklejohn says most current implementations of the Bitcoin protocol fall short of the level of anonymity that is theoretically possible, and that her group’s efforts represent just the tip of the iceberg of what could be deduced from analysis of the public block chain.
The Bitcoin system offers a reward to volunteer users, known as “miners”, who bundle up new transactions into blocks and add them on to the end of the chain. The reward is currently 25 Bitcoins (about $15,000 at this writing). Miners pull active transactions waiting to be recorded from the peer-to-peer network and perform the complex calculations to create the new block, building on the cryptographic foundation of the previous block. Comparison of the results produced by different miners provides independent verification. About every 10 minutes, one lucky miner who has generated the next block is granted the 25-Bitcoin reward, and the new block is appended to the chain. The process then starts again.
Mine craft
The Bitcoin system is designed to cope with the fact that improvements in computer hardware make it cheaper and faster to perform the mathematical operations, known as hashes, involved in mining. Every 2,016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks, the system calculates how long it would take for blocks to be created at precisely 10-minute intervals, and resets a difficulty factor in the calculation accordingly. As equipment gets faster, in short, mining gets harder. But faster equipment is constantly coming online, reducing the potential rewards for other miners unless they, too, buy more kit. Miners have formed groups that pool processing power and parcel out the ensuing rewards. Once done with ordinary computers, mining shifted to graphics-processing units, which can perform some calculations more efficiently. Miners then moved on to flexible chips that can be configured for particular tasks, called field-programmable gate arrays. In the past year, bespoke chips called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) have appeared on the scene.
Your correspondent visited a miner who operates a rack of mining hardware in his modest apartment. He had purchased his ASIC-based hardware a few months earlier, and it had arrived weeks late, causing him to miss out on a bonanza, because after arrival, the kit generated Bitcoins so quickly that it paid for itself within three days. But the edge that ASICs provide is quickly eroding. Between July, when the gear arrived, and mid-November, the computational capacity of the Bitcoin network increased 25-fold, from 200 trillion to 5 quadrillion hashes per second. This was due in part to the arrival in September of a newer generation of more efficient ASICs. Hashing capacity has increased so rapidly in 2013 that the practice of hijacking thousands of PCs and using them for mining is no longer worth the effort. The average time between blocks has fallen to between five and eight minutes.
The general consensus, says Mike Hearn, one of the volunteers who maintain the Bitcoin software, is that with this new generation of ASICs, mining will have approached a point where only those with access to free or cheap electricity will continue operations, and even they will produce a relatively marginal return on investment, rather than the huge multiples (when exchanged into traditional currency) possible even earlier this year. Mining has become increasingly commercial and professional, he says. Server farms with endless racks of ASIC cards have already sprung up. But as part of Bitcoin’s design, the reward for mining a block halves every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years. Sometime in 2017, at the current rate, it will drop to 12.5 Bitcoins. If the returns from mining decline, who will verify the integrity of the block chain?
To head off this problem, a market-based mechanism is in the works which will raise the current voluntary fees paid by users (around five cents per transaction) in return for verification. “Nodes in the peer-to-peer network will try to estimate the minimum fee needed to get the transaction confirmed,” says Mr Hearn.
Bitcoin’s growing popularity is having other ripple effects. Every participant in the system must keep a copy of the block chain, which now exceeds 11 gigabytes in size and continues to grow steadily. This alone deters casual use. Bitcoin’s designer proposed a method of pruning the chain to include only unspent amounts, but it has not been implemented.
As the rate of transactions increases, squeezing all financial activity into the preset size limit for each block has started to become problematic. The protocol may need to be tweaked to allow more transactions per block, among other changes. A further problem relates to the volunteer machines, or nodes, that allow Bitcoin to function. These nodes relay transactions and transmit updates to the block chain. But, says Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins University, the ecosystem provides no compensation for maintaining these nodes—only for mining. The rising cost of operating nodes could jeopardise Bitcoin’s ability to scale.
“The volunteer programmers who work on Bitcoin’s software have no special authority in the system.”
The original paper that sparked the creation of Bitcoin has since been supplemented by layers of agreed-upon protocol, updated regularly by the system’s participants. The protocol, like the currency, is a fiction they accept as real, because rejection by a large proportion of users—be they banks, exchanges, speculators or miners—could cause the whole system to collapse. Mr Hearn notes that he and other programmers who work on Bitcoin’s software have no special authority in the system. Instead, proposals are floated, implemented in software, and must then be taken up by 80% of nodes before becoming permanent—at which point blocks from other nodes are rejected. “The rules of the system are not set in stone,” he says. The adoption of improvements is up to the community. Bitcoin is thus both flexible and fragile.
So far, it has kept going. But can it withstand the pressure as it becomes more popular? “It’s got this kind of watch-like feel to it,” says Mr Hearn. It keeps on ticking, but “a mechanical watch is fragile and can be smashed.” Perhaps Bitcoin, like the internet, will smoothly evolve from a quirky experiment to a trusted utility. But it could also go the way of Napster, the trailblazing music-sharing system that pioneered a new category, but was superseded by superior implementations that overcame its technical and commercial flaws."
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