Global economic situation for liveaboard cruising yachties

[Boston]

Existence living off the land is not really a viable option except maybe real short term in the early stages of the fall. I'm sure with the amount of people already out of work and exhausting their benefits that poaching is already increasing to put substance on the table. Their are just too many people for substance living off the land to work, the available resources would be depleted to nothing and what few remaining would be so weary a person couldn't harvest them.

I think your probably right about this considering that in the early 20th century they had to reintroduce game animals to most of the eastern US
its a simple matter of how fast the population reduction takes place
once food distribution begins to fail
we will probably eat out the countryside before we seriously experience a reduction in population

If a person had the means to purchase enough land and resources to provide for themselves and their needs (I don't) they would still need a significant amount of capitol to keep it. The capitol part would be taxes demanded by the state to support their agenda of spending, and legacy costs promised to state workers. The state has vast authority to raise taxes at their will and really could care less if anyone objects to it. In this state they tax your home, your automobiles, your farm tractors, each head of livestock also must be turned turned in for taxes, if you're getting the picture here.

taxes are the least of your worries
holding on to land will be the first thing to prove itself difficult
only communities banding together will survive the exodus from the cities
and most folks only have so many bullets at there disposal
and most dont have the slightest clue how to reload there own

If you should run into default with your taxes (in this state anyway) the Sheriff will quickly sell all your assets at public auction for taxes owed the state. So another person who may still retain some means (probably government worker) can then at auction purchase your whole life's work for pennies on the dollar for them-selfs. The taxes actually owed really doesn't have to be any significant amount at all, but being landowner and broke and penny-less any amount is significant and it goes to the sheriff for he demands every cent owed. (and they say bankers are heartless)

aint that the truth
round here if you own one dime for longer than three years
your home is for sale like it or not

This is depressing and I'm signing off and going for a weekend of boating. The weather isn't great but the end of boating is real near and old man winter is fixing to end it. Have a good weekend folks.

I agree but its necessary that we face reality
we the people if not the government that has so completely failed us all

enjoy your weekend on the water
best
B

[masrapido]

Existence living off the land is not really a viable option except maybe real short term in the early stages of the fall. I'm sure with the amount of people already out of work and exhausting their benefits that poaching is already increasing to put substance on the table. Their are just too many people for substance living off the land to work, the available resources would be depleted to nothing and what few remaining would be so weary a person couldn't harvest them.

You only need 1.2 hectar of land to be fully food self-sufficient. That includes meat production, so hunting would be the wrong option to go as it would deplete self-regenerating meat stock.

[masalai]

http://www.gata.org/node/7890 "Silver market analyst Ted Butler interviewed by King World News" - - http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingwor...ls_Market.html
http://www.gata.org/node/7885 "On CNBC Europe, Turk cites flight to gold in hand" - - http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1290375882&play=1
http://www.gata.org/node/7888 "Mexico's Hugo Salinas Price interviewed by King World News"
http://www.gata.org/node/7886 "Korelin Economics Report interviews GATA's Ed Steer"
http://www.gata.org/node/7887 "Adrian Douglas: The explosive dynamics of the gold and silver markets"

By Adrian Douglas - - Saturday, October 10, 2009 - - This week gold closed above $1,000 per ounce for the fourth consecutive week and made another all-time weekly high close. But the top-callers have come out in their droves declaring that gold is in a bubble that is about to burst and that because the recession has been declared as over there is no reason to hold such a safe-haven asset.

All that is nonsense and I will explain why. The dynamics unfolding in the gold and silver markets are nothing short of explosive. - - The dynamics are different for gold and silver so I will start by discussing gold. - - Gold is a unique substance. It is about the only thing on the planet that is bought and stored and never consumed. Almost all the gold ever mined still exists above ground. The purpose of gold is to act as a store of wealth. This singularity of gold makes it susceptible to a scam that was first perpetrated by goldsmiths in the 16th century. The goldsmiths realized that customers would buy gold and leave it for safekeeping in their vault. This meant that they could show the same gold bar to many customers and sell it many times over. This was the early form of fractional reserve banking, where banks retain only a fraction of the money on deposit, gambling that no more than 10 percent of the money will ever be called upon to be paid out.

This scam is at the center of modern gold market manipulation. Paper substitutes for gold are sold, instead of real gold, through derivatives, futures, pooled accounts, exchange-traded funds, gold certificates, etc. I estimate that each ounce of gold has been effectively sold 20 times over or more. To maintain this Ponzi scheme, some real gold is required, because some investors or jewelers demand to take possession of real gold. For the scam to be sustained there must always be plentiful physical gold for those who want it.

This physical supply has been met from mine supply and central bank leasing and selling. - - - The market is in effect a giant inverted pyramid with a huge paper gold market being supported above a small amount of physical gold at the tip of the inverted pyramid. The scam can continue until there are indications of a shortage of physical gold. If the 20 or so so claimants of each ounce of real gold demand their gold, there is the potential for a squeeze such as never been seen before.

To lend support to the idea that all the gold in the world has been sold several times over I cite the case of Morgan Stanley, which was sued in 2005 for selling imaginary precious metals to its customers. The firm had the audacity to charge storage fees for metal that didn't exist. Morgan Stanley settled the suit out of court but no criminal charges were ever filed against the firm. If Morgan Stanley was doing this, you can bet that it is the tip of the iceberg.

As further evidence just look at the monster over-the-counter derivatives market. Standing at approximately $1,000 trillion, it is multiples of the liquidated value of all the assets and currency in the world. Clearly derivatives must be selling some sort of claims to assets that cannot be fulfilled because there are not enough underlying assets.

The price discovery of gold has been achieved almost exclusively through the shuffling of paper gold promises between investors and bullion banks on the New York Commodities Exchange with very little real gold ever changing hands. But the situation is changing. Some big entities are now demanding physical gold. These entities are almost certainly countries, not individuals, such as China, Russia, India, Venezuela, Iran, and the Gulf states, to name but a few. This demand for real gold, instead of paper substitutes, is putting a strain on the gold market.

Paul Walker, CEO of the metal consultancy GFMS, recently said the price of gold was going up because of "large lumpy transactions in a market with a degree of illiquidity." Roughly translated, this means that there are large demands for physical metal that the market is struggling to meet. That is a cartel apologist's limp-wristed reference to the explosive dynamics I am defining.

The supply that feeds the bottom of the inverted pyramid to support the gold price suppression via a paper market is drying up. Mine supply has been declining for almost a decade and this year central banks became net buyers of gold for the first time in 20 years. The stress in the physical market is starting to show to those who are paying attention.

For example, the London PM fix of the gold price is coming in at historic highs day after day, the contango in the futures market has contracted dramatically, and the U.S. mint is routinely suspending production due to shortages of metal. But most importantly we are seeing astute investors display a growing preference for real bullion. A couple of months ago Greenlight Capital, the large hedge fund, switched $500 million of investment in the exchange-traded gold fund GLD to physical gold bullion. The supposed gold holding of GLD has not grown to a record high despite a record high gold price.

Apparently Germany has asked that its sovereign gold held by the New York Federal Reserve Bank be returned to Germany. Hong Kong has requested the same of the Bank of England, which stores Hong Kong's gold.

Robert Fisk, a respected journalist for Britain's Independent newspaper, reported this week that the Arab oil-producing states, Japan, Russia, and China have been holding secret talks to replace the dollar as the international reserve currency and as an accounting unit for the oil trade. The Independent reports that the basket of currencies they propose instead of the dollar would include gold.

If gold is going to regain its monetary role, you can understand why those in the know want real bullion. There are some significant signs that a run on the bank of the anti-gold cartel for physical gold is commencing.

Meanwhile most investors and analysts are focused only on the net short position of the commercial traders on the Comex, which has reached a record level and has in the past signaled the onset of a major correction. But such market observers are watching only a side show of the main event. The main event is all about a growing tightness in supplies of gold in the physical market.

I don't think the commercial net short position of 800 tonnes is that important. What is important is that the world's stockpile of 140,000 tonnes of gold may have been sold several times over. In all likelihood half of the supposed 30,000 tonnes of central bank stockpiles have been sold at least 20 times over. The gold short position could well be 300,000 tonnes (15,000 times 20) against a total world inventory of only 140,000 tonnes, much of which is not available to the market.

Could there be a more bullish scenario for gold?

If you think that such business practices could not be tolerated, I can hold up the example of the airlines, which regularly and knowingly oversell the seats on their flights, expecting that not all passengers will show up. Bullion bankers oversell their inventory of gold knowing that only 10 percent of customers will ever ask for it, just as the goldsmiths figured.

One cannot discuss the gold market in isolation, as it is linked to the U.S. dollar and Treasury debt. The major impetus behind the suppression of the gold market was to maintain a strong dollar despite massive overissuance of the currency. This has allowed the United States to live beyond its means because the rest of the world accepts the funny money as payment for goods and services. In a study he did when he was a professor of economics at Harvard titled "Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard," former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers showed that in a free market gold and real interest rates move inversely to each other. But since 1995 the United States has had low gold prices and low interest rates. In the absence of a gold standard this could have been achieved only by surreptitiously fixing the gold price through market manipulation. This was the essence of the "strong dollar policy" of Robert Rubin, the mechanism of which was never explained to the public.

The dynamics of the silver market are different. About 90 percent of silver production is used for industrial applications. Only 10 percent is purchased for investment. Clearly paper substitutes for silver cannot be used in industrial processes. The investment market is suppressed by paper silver substitutes as described above with respect to the gold market. It is this market, specifically the Comex futures exchange, that controls the price of silver.

The very low price of silver over the last 30 years has encouraged large holders of silver to dishoard it. After all, who wants to pay costly storage fees for something that is of low and declining value and bulky to store? This dishoarding has filled the gap between silver production and industrial demand, which runs at more than 200 million ounces annually.

Much of the investment demand has been met with paper substitutes and scams that are variations on the one that was perpetrated by Morgan Stanley. Because of the suppression of the price of silver it has been uneconomic to recycle most industrially used silver, with the exception of silver used in photography. This has meant that most industrially used silver finds its way into landfills. All the above-ground silver is now less than 1 billion ounces. Considering that the exchange-traded fund SLV alone claims to have more than 250 million ounces of silver, it is reasonable to estimate that investors have been sold something of the order of 5 billion ounces of silver. But how much is supported by real metal?

If the same ounce of silver has been sold 20 times over, as with my estimate in gold, then only 250 million ounces of investment silver bullion exist. This means that 4.75 billion oounces of silver could potentially be demanded in a market where only 1 billion ounces of stockpile exist and mining supply is already oversubscribed to the tune of 200 million ounces annually. One can probably add to this picture that investors who cannot easily find physical gold will come looking to buy physical silver. What is even more bullish is that the industrial users will not sit idly by watching a manic silver grab. They will join in the fray because they cannot remain in business unless they have silver inventory. They will try to stockpile silver at a time of acute shortage.

So the dynamics of the gold and silver markets are wildly bullish. This is no longer about whether the commercials will knock down the price by selling more contracts short. This is about a lot of market participants who have been content to hold precious metal paper substitutes but who now increasingly will want to own real bullion. This has been happening slowly but will gather pace. Because in the last 30 years most investors have trusted the brokers, dealers, and bullion banks to have the metals that have been sold, there has been no "run on the bank." This is changing. Many indications point to significant supply stress building.

Why are the entities that hold the largest short positions on the planet custodians of the bullion depositories for the largest ETFs? That's like putting a sex offender in charge of the day care center or Bernie Madoff in charge of your company pension fund.

The argument against holding physical bullion yourself has always been the risk it might get stolen while in your possession. But the risk of holding bullion substitutes is that it already has been stolen or never existed.

The precious metals market is now akin to a game of musical chairs with perhaps only one chair for every 20 players. It might be prudent to follow in the footsteps of Germany, Hong Kong, China, and Greenlight Capital and get your chair before the music stops.

If the physical markets for precious metals lock up due to shortages, then the short squeeze will be of epic proportions; it will be something to tell your grandchildren about. It will be a far better story for your grandchildren if you are on the right side of the trade.

-----

Adrian Douglas is a member of GATA's Board of Directors and editor of the Market Force Analysis letter (www.MarketForceAnalysis.com), which provides indications of market turning points -- times to enter, take some profits, or exit a market. Subscribers receive bi-weekly bulletins.

[masalai]

http://www.gata.org/node/7889 "John Dizard: Paranoid theories can't take the shine off gold" - - 4p CT Saturday, October 10, 2009 - - Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Score a small victory for our side this week: Financial Times columnist John Dizard took note of one of the many official documents recently disclosed about the gold price suppression scheme.

Yes, Dizard did so in a misleading, incomplete, and mocking way, but notice is notice, Step 2 in Gandhi's dictum: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win."

Dizard suggests that the culprit in goldbug paranoid conspiracy theory is constantly changing, "from JPMorgan, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Goldman Sachs (of course), to miner Barrick Gold or George Soros." We've never heard Soros cited, but the full range of documentation amassed over the years shows that the suppression scheme is superintended by the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve, using the Western European central banks, the New York bullion banks, and, at least until recently, Barrick Gold as their instruments. With the Fed now admittedly distributing trillions in secret on a patronage basis and refusing to identify the recipients, and with the Fed admittedly having made gold swap agreements with "foreign banks" and insisting that these agreements remain secret as well, why should anything suggested here seem so implausible?

More important, instead of prompting Dizard's mere pontification, why should complaints about the gold price suppression scheme not prompt Dizard to attempt journalism -- as, say, by calling the Fed about the purposes of those gold swap agreements and the purposes of the secrecy around them?

Dizard remarks that goldbugs have an obsessive and even religious devotion to gold. Maybe some do, just as some purported journalists have an obsessive and even religious devotion to placating the establishment. But for most goldbugs gold is only a means to an end, not an end itself; they are not idolaters but adherents of limited government and individual liberty, the ends to which gold's function as a free-trading currency are put, or would be put if gold ever was free-trading again.

And even as Dizard mocks the premise of gold price suppression he confirms it. He writes: "Gold could move the larger financial world directly if central banks tied the level and rate of currency issuance directly to their gold reserves or to the metal's price. Central banks, or a shadowy Doctor Evil, do not need to manipulate the price of gold if the price does not limit their freedom of action. What matters to governments is their ability to finance themselves through bond sales. This would be hampered if the bonds' value was being eroded by higher inflation, or by devaluation of the currency relative to other currencies. And that is what the gold price is beginning to tell us."

Yes, Mr. Dizard, part of the central bank interest in suppressing the gold price is exactly to conceal inflation and currency devaluation so as to restrain interest rates and maintain the value of their currencies and government bonds. That is just what those loopy goldbugs have been saying for years. It is what government officials themselves have acknowledged in so many documents Dizard has not yet gotten around to ridiculing. But a little more ridicule from Dizard may be good if it sparks the curiosity of actual journalists to look into the facts before opining too much.

Dizard's commentary is appended.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

The rest you can read from the link the guy, ("dizzy" or some such, must be on drugs or something), is a cretinous paranoid wanker trying to make light of his total incompetence and mental inadequacy...

"Maybe some do"? ...Without the "maybe"!

[hoytedow]

Originally Posted by masrapido

Well, you couldn't because the truth of the WWII is that it was won by Russians and Yugoslavs. "western" allies were just a sidekicks.

The Germans knew they lost on the Eastern Front when they saw the NEW American Made tanks coming over the hill. Without Usanian capitalism they would have had their asses handed to them by the Germans.
This is not to diminish the heroism of the Russians and Yugoslavs, who fought like demons to protect their homelands, as any patriots, even us American Gusanos would do.

[masalai]

http://theburningplatform.com/economy/rats-in-a-cage - - - only yourself to blame...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...section=justin - - - - - - - - - - No other option - just get out and let them sort themselves out....

He actually said this?

Originally Posted by masrapido

Well, you couldn't because the truth of the WWII is that it was won by Russians and Yugoslavs. "western" allies were just a sidekicks.


I guess I missed yet another important post of El Doradito...

[Boston]

hey I was just checking the weather up there for today Mark
ketchikan is a nice 50 deg while Im freazing my ass off at 22 down here

not to get in the middle of a perfectly good fight but I think it was GM that built the largest tank factory in the world in Russia during WW2
and thats just one of em
I think its still pounding out tanks today

not that I have much sympathy mind you for to many policies of the USA
but defeating the Nazi's is one I think we could all get behind
even the code talkers

[masalai]

http://www.gata.org/node/7892 "Maybe Dec. 21, 2012, is really the day the Fed gets audited"
http://www.gata.org/node/7891 "Adam Hamilton: Commitment of traders reports don't fully tell the tale"
...""" - - Adam Hamilton, publisher of the ZEAL Intelligence letter, argues in commentary published Friday that the commitment of traders reports for gold trading on the U.S. commodity exchanges do not determine price direction as much as the constant analysis of them suggests.
- - Record commercial short positions in gold, Hamilton writes, often have failed to precede declines in price. Hamilton also suspects that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which publishes the commitment of traders data, is not terribly accurate in defining commercial shorts.
- - Further, quite apart from Hamilton's commentary, one does not need to be wearing one's tinfoil hat to wonder if the big market players counted by the CFTC as commercial shorts on the U.S. exchanges might be hedging their positions there with unreported purchases elsewhere. Gold trading around the world is far from transparent.
- - After all, if, say, JPMorganChase, as agent for the Federal Reserve, had been instructed to start covering and to beat a retreat to a higher surreptitious ceiling for the gold price, the Fed and the company well might want to avoid creating a public record of it early enough that long traders could take advantage of it and take possession of cheap gold. And in this new era of infinite money and pervasive government secrecy, how much credence should be attached to the records and reports of U.S. government agencies anyway? From the detailed plan of currency and gold market manipulation written by the Federal Reserve in April 1961 and still posted on the Internet site of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (see http://www.gata.org/node/7096 ), we know that the U.S. government has at least contemplated the falsification of currency and gold market records for 50 years.
- - Hamilton's commentary is headlined "Gold Futures CoT 3" and you can find it at the ZEAL Intelligence Internet site here: """... http://www.zealllc.com/2009/goldcot3.htm

[masalai]

Corrupt behaviour by individuals may result in jail sentences and other penalties for individuals found guilty of fraud and associated charges but for government to behave in that fashion is despicable and usually escapes any punishment... A day for reckoning in the case of the latter point may not be far away...

[masrapido]

Originally Posted by hoytedow

The Germans knew they lost on the Eastern Front when they saw the NEW American Made tanks coming over the hill. Without Usanian capitalism they would have had their asses handed to them by the Germans.
This is not to diminish the heroism of the Russians and Yugoslavs, who fought like demons to protect their homelands, as any patriots, even us American Gusanos would do.

And I'm sure that usanian patriots would defend their homeland if it were invaded, but in WWII usa was not fighting off invaders in Normandy. Rather, it was simply helping Brits and French, with clearly made intent to send the bill for the costs of involvement.

The point is that the landing in Normandy is trumpeted out loud and relentlessly every year in the usa and Europe, as if it were the turning point in the war. The fact is it was not even the major event compared with what was going on on the russian front.

France was held in peace by 100 000 german soldiers. Greece had only about 20 000. Yugoslavs had about a million.

Some perspective to the fallacities of "western" (led by usanians) propaganda about the war must be held. The turning point in WWII were sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad. The winter and resistance from russians were the breaking point for the germans.

If we keep in mind that 2.5 million of germans returned from russia, and the number of those who died there is nearing a million, the "success" of the D-day is minuscule.

Compare also the number of killed germans in Yugoslavia with the killed number of germans in France, and you'll get the idea of efficiency of those "heroes".

One an keep trumpeting to their heart's content, but the facts are ruthless.

The D day was nothing more than a sloppy and ill conceived offensive that only had a happy ending because german army was already demoralised and in disarray due to enormous losses and failure in Russia and Yugoslavia.

Yet capitalist propaganda made the D day appear as the "battle of all battles" that won the war...And that nazist-style propaganda (keep repeating a lie until it becomes the truth) prevailed to this day when we have yet ANOTHER devastating crisis of a system that never could, a disaster in a country built on lies and, ironically and sarcastically, french fries, and a politically correct, but inept president of a country that is the root of all evil today in the world, who was even given a Nobel Peace Prize for NOTHING...

Pure panic among the stupid rightwingers. There's nothing left for capitalists but to hope everything will be okay...

Just as the D day, and many other stupid "tactical" decisions of usanian and british generals in WWII, and WWI mind you, the brute force strategy simply doesn't work. If it did, we wouldn't be witnessing all these economical meltdowns every 5 years in average.

Meltdowns of a system sold as "the best"...

Go gold...

[Boston]

hoyte
what NEW american made tanks ?
if our referring to the Sherman
it was the laughing stock of tanks for as long as it was used
nearly certain death for its crews in any tank battle against any tank the Germans had
on top they were hands down the least reliable tank mechanically of the war
did I mention paper thin armor and a propensity to burst into flames
or the genius who thought they could float and subsequently drowned every crew that tried to make an amphibious landing in one

I got WW2 down pretty well and old Masrapido has basically nailed D day for he debacle it was

and he didn't mention things like the gliders which mostly killed the guys that were in em
or the paratroopers who landed completely randomly
which actually helped spread confusion among the Germans as much as anything else did

the Russians built there own tanks using the GM plant that the USA gave them
Sherman's froze to easily and wouldnt go through the Russian mud
in that sense USA helped but it was Russian blood that did the majority of bleeding

we spent longer in Iraq than in WW2 and lost more guys in Vietnam

its a simple fact that while the USA played key role in arming the allied powers or at least some of em
the only truly decisive battle we engaged in was the battle of the bulge
and were loosing that one when the Germans ran out of fuel

the D day landings were a mess from the word go
hardly what could be called a well executed plan

Rapido is right about the numbers of casualties as well
a glance will tell you who did the majority of the fighting

[hoytedow]

The point about the NEW was that USA was pumping out war materiel at an increasing pace while Axis factories were being decimated. You are right, the Sherman was no match against the Tiger, but by then it was all the Axis could do to keep petrol in theirs, meaning Shermans could support infantry and keep advancing. Russian victory in the east was dependant upon American supply lines, so don't act like we did nothing. Men in my family were there, came back with hard won decorations that were not given out like lollipops. My uncle and his combat team put the first Bailey bridge across the Rheine River. This effort kept many Germans from being on the eastern front, which itself aided the Russians and Yugoslavs who otherwise would have had to face a lot more Germans.

[Boston]

ah
I misunderstood you
my bad