101: Ik denk dat je gelijk hebt, ik zie heel veel goeds in Europa gebeuren. Ik zie FD Roosevelt en eerder presidenten als kwade genius van veel dat er gebeurt sinds Teddy Roosevelt, de eerste imperial president. Dat lijken we in Europa anders te willen doen.

Vandaag vrij druk, lig een dag achter.

'Fiscale noodtoestand' in Californië

Uit dat telegraaf-artikel:

Volgens het rapport zal de Nederlandse economie dit jaar met 4,5 procent krimpen en in 2010 zal de economische groei vlak zijn. Voor 2011 wordt gerekend op een groei van het Nederlandse bruto binnenlands product (bbp) met 0,9 procent en in 2012 met 2,2 procent.

Het uitdrukken van economische groei in eurootjes is eigenlijk ook waanzin; de relatie met de drukpers is te groot. Als Trichet maar genoeg bomen kapt kan de eurozone veel eerder een “economische groei” tegemoet zien.

Blijft wel een van de betere alternatieven om de groei te meten, maar het is geen indicator die immer zoutloos gegeten kan worden.

Some of his points..for example regarding central banks selling Gold over a period of time rather than all together..make sense. Most of the rest seem pure delusions to me.
He was talking as if the whole world was going to tank to zero and we are going to go into bunkers and hold Gold in our hands till our last breath.
Gold is valuable for the current crisis no doubt. It will probably go quite high in the current situation. But what he was describing was some sick annihilation of the whole system. What good will 10 ounces of gold be to someone if he cannot exchange any of it for food even for a day?
He is completely wrong about the mass psychology of people. People will accept 5-7 even 9% PA inflation very easily. If you give them interest rates high enough. THAT is why Gold never went vertical during the 1980's as interest rates were Higher than the rate of inflation.While everyone was proclaiming Gold standard would make a comeback Volcker broke Gold's back by simply giving people a real rate of return versus zero for Gold.

(dit is een discussie tussen 2 mensen; cursief is spreker 1, normale tekst staat voor numero 2)

You say, “People will accept 5-7 even 9% PA inflation very easily. If you give them interest rates high enough.”

If you GIVE THEM? Where does this yield come from? This is the problem with fiat. It is ALWAYS flirting with zero to negative REAL return. The beauty of Freegold, as described by Another and FOA is that it FINALLY conquers this negative return… for the long run!

Deze wil je tussendoor ook niet missen: terug naar de basics, papiergeld uit de vergelijking

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,633690,00.html

It seems clear that the banks would rather invest the cheap money they can borrow from central banks in safe investments, such as German government bonds offering 2.5 percent interest, than lend it to companies whose prospects, in the middle of a recession, are anything but rosy. And they are also lining their pockets with the fees they charge customers who are forced to go overdrawn as a result of the crisis.

Verder uit het artikel van 114

Banks still have unimaginable amounts of toxic securities on their balance sheets. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that potential global write-downs resulting from the financial crisis could be over $4 trillion (€2.85 trillion). Crisis-related write-downs to date amount to only about $1.5 trillion (€1.1 trillion).

Two years since the start of the financial crisis, many banks are still on the brink of disaster — with devastating consequences for the real economy. Hans-Werner Sinn, the president of the influential Munich-based Ifo Institute for Economic Research, sees the “under-capitalization of the banking system and the high levels of hidden losses that have not yet been disclosed” as the main obstacle to Germany's further economic development.

No matter how much additional liquidity ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet and his staff pump into the market, banks' capital ratios remain a limiting factor when it comes to issuing credit.

Jij bent toch van de Macro-economie? Waarom zijn al die banken hun buffers aan het vergroten? Buffers zijn er toch juist om klappen op te vangen? Het lijkt mij een stuk logischer om de buffers totaal te legen tijdens zo'n crisis. Doe je dat niet dan zijn het eerder balasttanks dan buffers.

Tot slot deze nog even:

Okay, here is how the theory goes….

Is China ALREADY out of the dollar?

China supposedly has $2T in foreign reserves, mostly dollar denominated.

So why would they make remarks that could trigger a run on the dollar?

Perhaps they have already bailed out of the dollar in a surreptitious way over the last 15 years!

Look at the “reliability” of statistics we receive from the media. The MSM quotes Chinese statistics as if they are verifiable FACTS. But are they?

Look at history. Through the 1800's and 1900's China was invaded many times, including by Britain and the US. China is famously contemptuous of foreign governments.

It is likely that Chinese statistics are designed to generate an EFFECT, and not to reveal the truth.

Recently it is believed that China has $1.3T dollars. How did they get these? By falling for a swindle?

In the 80's, China began liberalizing. But it's population had been raised on socialism. So to the ways of the West, they were, in a word, naive.

For years the Fed pumped out dollars by the boatload and Americans used them to buy up Chinese goods.

The Chinese business model became “work hard to produce real good and sell them to a counterfeiter”.

By the mid-90's, the Chinese were not so naive anymore and they realized they had been swindled.

So what would you do if you were the Chinese? You might face the fact that you cannot openly dishoard all your dollars without triggering a run on the dollar. So you would look for ways to do it on the sly.

You might set up a whole network of front companies to buy up non-dollar assets all over the world. Factories, office buildings, land, mining operations, etc… And you would pay for these assets with long term contracts denominated in dollars!

hose long term contracts would be paid for over time with the dollars YOU ALREADY HAD!

How would anyone spot this? You have one company buying a factory in one country and another company buying an office building in another. Would those two different sellers know anything about the other deal in a different country? Could they put it together and recognize the pattern of Chinese companies buying tangible assets in long term contracts denominated in US dollars?

Even if the entire $1.3T has been pledged, how would anyone know?

One suspicion Richard cites is that he has talked to many world travelers who report unexpectedly coming across Chinese signs in front of big buildings in out-of-the-way places. He wonders if translated these signs all read “End the Fed”.

Outsiders cannot look at the real Chinese accounting records, so there is no way to really know what is going on inside China.

So why are they making public comments about the dollar now? Couldn't a run on the dollar affect their holdings? No. What shows up on their “public” accounting as $1.3T is not really dollars. It is the ASSETS they have purchased all over the world!

As soon as they receive a new dollar they pass it off to someone else in the form of a long term contract to buy whatever that seller is selling. It is the SELLER who is left holding the dollar bag! Not the Chinese.

A normal accounting ledger looks like this: Assets - Liabilities = Net Worth.

Perhaps the Chinese ledger works like this: Assets = Liabilities + Net Worth.

The US dollars are surreptitiously in the LIABILITIES column, and non-dollar assets are in the Net Worth column.

The occasional public statements about the dollar are a shot across Washington's bow saying “get your financial house in order or else we will reveal that we bailed out of your currency a long time ago and you'll be as dead as Rome.”

@ 106: Eens.

Heb jij een link naar de lap tekst die de poste, print ik hem uit voor bedliteratuur.