I’m voting for Brown if I can figure out how to do it from Tennessee! 

Any of you in Mass. know what is happening in the poles with Scott Brown? I heard Obama trying to talk up Coaxley. What is the general view from the Mass. people?

Hurray for Rothchild. He must be one heck of a smart fellow with 200+ trillion. You’ll have to work a lot harder, Mfkzt, if you want to control the world.

By Jesse Riseborough

Jan. 18 (Bloomberg) — Lihir Gold Ltd., the second-largest gold mining company on the Australian Stock Exchange, said Chief Executive Officer Arthur Hood resigned.

Chief Financial Officer Phil Baker will act as CEO while the company makes a “global search” for a replacement, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea-based Lihir said today in a statement. Hood, who was CEO for four years after joining from Placer Dome Inc., had time on his contract to run, the company said.

Since Hood took over in 2005, Lihir’s shares more than doubled and profit climbed 11-fold as gold surged to a record. Hood was forced to cut the value of the Ballarat gold mine in Australia by as much as $350 million last year after it failed to meet output targets. He led the A$350 million ($323 million) takeover of the company that owned the mine in 2006.

“The new CEO will be looking to try and grow the business into West Africa and diversify away from Papua New Guinea,” Lyndon Fagan, an analyst at RBS Equities Australia Ltd., said today by phone from Sydney.

Lihir rose 0.6 percent to A$3.31 at 10:25 a.m. in Sydney. The company has a market value of A$7.8 billion.

“Lihir is now one of the world’s leading gold producers and is consistently performing very well, with excellent growth options,” Hood said. “It is therefore the right time for me to step aside to enable an orderly transition to a new CEO.”

Hood’s termination package includes A$3.6 million ($3.3 million) in cash, including A$1.3 million in lieu of share rights he would have been entitled to this year had his contract run its full term, and the right to 3.5 million shares, Lihir said in the statement.

Company spokesman Joe Dowling couldn’t immediately be reached for further comment.

Mine Sale

Lihir said in July it’s seeking to sell its Ballarat mine where it has cut production and 200 workers last April.

In 2008 Lihir agreed to buy rival producer Equigold NL for A$1 billion to expand output to Africa. Hood also led the $860 million expansion of the plant at its Lihir Island mine in Papua New Guinea with construction work currently progressing. The expansion will add production of 240,000 ounces a year, the company has said.

Output from the company’s mines in Papua New Guinea, Australia and Ivory Coast in 2009 was a record 1.12 million ounces, Lihir said today. The company had forecast full-year output of between 1 million and 1.2 million ounces. It will announce quarterly production figures on Jan. 22, it said.

1. create a problem out of thin air.

2. blow it wildly out of proportion.

3. come up with a solution.

4. finance the solution from the middle class.

anything seem familiar???

rno

I should note that this is ignoring the money both are raking in as the chief shareholders of our wonderful “federal” reserve.

Now I see said the blind man!   Thanks, I thought they were both trillion and it did not make sense to me.   I would be happy to have either! 

$281 trillion (Rothschild)  vs  $241 billion  (Rockefeller)

Others can check out the math.

The implications are startling if even close to correct.

It is now all about control.  

Rothschild(s) could cover the entire national debt.

And a comment on the absurd “magic” of compound interest.  

I hope that you enjoy your new interests, and your older ones.

Cheers, TQ

Assuming that your Rothschild’s number is correct.

How is it possible that the Rockefellers, started 83 years later, earned 1% less interest each year and started with 5 billion 100 million less - yet, end up with only 40 trillion less today.

Math major I am not - but it does not seem possible to me on first glance.  Just curious!  Thanks in advance.

    If there is doubt as to the true wealth of these powers behind the scenes, some simple computations relative to some known facts make it clear. 

    Rothschild’s worth in 1830 was then estimated to be $6 billion.   (He already controlled most of western European banking.)   I once ran a small computation.   At 7% interest for the intervening years, this is the number as of the end of 2009:

          $281,949,872,369,522  ( yes, $281 Trillion)

    Rockefeller’s worth, estimated in 1913, was $900,000,000.   At 6% interest, as of the end of 2009, the number is:

                $241,883,147, 247     ($241 Billion)

     As to who is running the world, any questions?      

Posted: Jan 17 2010     By: Dan Norcini      Post Edited: January 17, 2010 at 5:54 pm

Dear Friends,

As many of the readers of this site are aware, once a week the CFTC publishes a Commitment of Traders report which details the internal positioning of the various players that comprise the futures markets through Tuesday of the week which the report is issued.

Not that long ago, the CFTC, in response to numerous industry requests, issued a Disaggregated report which further breaks down the categories that we in the trade have come to know as the Commercials, the Large Speculators (predominantly Funds) and the Unreportables or the General Public.

The new report breaks out the Commercials as the Producer/Merchant/Processor/User category but instead of lumping in the Swap Dealers into that category or the Large Speculator Category as they did in the past, it provides a separate category for that group in addition to the category now classified as “Managed Money”. I have found this new report very useful as it gives us a much better picture of who is doing what in these futures markets.

The commodity markets of today are being driven primarily by two categories, Managed Money and Swap Dealers. Managed Money is pretty self explanatory – those are primarily hedge funds or fund like entities who serve clients that want speculative or investment exposure to commodities. Swap Dealers are a bit murkier. This group can be legitimately serving the needs of clients who want to offload risk in a risk management program but whose needs to do so are not best met by the standardized commodity futures contracts offered at the US futures exchanges. An example might be an airline which needs to offset the risk of rising jet fuel prices. There is no such contract offered at the Nymex. In times past such a company might have chosen to use the heating oil contract as a type of hedge instrument because its movements are generally related to the price of jet fuel but as you can surmise, there are vast differences between the two products. To fill this need the Swap Dealer has arisen which can offer a contract specifically covering Jet Fuel but which then needs to offset that risk themselves and so will come into the heating oil markets and employ those contracts as a hedge for their own risk exposure.

If things were that simple, it would make deciphering this new report a bit easier. The problem arises because these swap dealers also have clients that they represent who are speculators or because the swap dealer themselves might be speculating for their own interests. In other words, we can now see the positions of these swap dealers but we do not really know for whom they are acting. Transparency can only go so far.

In the last few years a new group of players have also come into the commodity futures markets known locally as the index funds. These are not the same as the hedge funds primarily because they are known as “long only” funds, in contrast to managed money which will go both long or short. What they do is to serve a group of clients who want exposure to commodities as an investment sector but who only want to buy commodities against an expectation of a falling US Dollar and a wave of inflation that results from excessive monetary easing. These funds will apportion their investment monies according to the weightings of the commodity basket selected by those who create and manage the benchmark commodity indices that they use to govern their futures holdings. The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI), the DOW JONES/AIG Commodity Index and the Reuters Jefferies Commodity Index are among these various indices.

In a nutshell, what these index funds do is buy commodity futures across the board and then roll those positions from month to month as the front month futures contract expires. They are generally in the market on the long side as it is evident that those who want to allocate money to the commodity sector are doing so because they expect prices to rise over the long term. They do carry some short positions but generally those are small as could be expected. After all, if your clients want to own commodities because they think the price is going to rise, why would they be investing with a firm that is going to be short that sector? That is realm of the hedge funds who are in and out and both long and short depending on what they black boxes command these mindless dolts to do.

For CFTC classification purposes, a rather sizeable portion of this index fund community seems to be captured in the numbers that comprise the Swap Dealers category. I do not claim to be able to completely understand this but I do know from my analysis of these reports, especially by comparing the Supplemental COT report and this new Disaggregated Report, that the Swap Dealers category catches a large number of these index funds.

Regardless, if you look at the chart of the gold futures market, you will notice that since I started detailing this info beginning back in June 2006, these swap dealers have not once been net longs but have maintained a net short position even after all their short covering which was fairly extensive beginning when the credit crisis erupted in full force in the summer of 2008. This is quite odd when one does some further investigation into the commodity markets as a whole because there are very few exceptions, outside of the precious metals, where one can find the swap dealers on the short side of the market , particularly during periods of rising commodity prices.

Think about this – clients want to own commodities to protect against the decline of the US Dollar. They give money to firms that buy a basket of commodities for them. Gold is included in this basket as is crude oil, corn, wheat, soybeans, coffee, cotton, sugar, cattle, copper, etc. We could expect therefore when we do an analysis of a rising market to see both the Managed Money category and the Swap Dealer category to be on the net long side of the market against the Producer/User category. That is indeed the case with the large majority of the commodity markets. But it is NOT the case with the gold market. This is quite strange because any index fund that invests money for its clients is going to be long gold. It has to be in order to matching the weighting given to gold by the particular commodity index that is its benchmark.

For instance, if the weighting for gold in a commodity index is 5%, then for every $1 million of client money received, an index fund manager must buy $50,000 worth of gold contracts. Do the math and you can see that these giant index funds and their money flows into the commodity markets have pushed prices to levels commensurate with the kind of investment money that has piled into this sector. I did not detail it in this article with a chart, but copper for example has the Swap Dealers as NET LONGS by a SIX to ONE margin. Look at its price chart and you can see that it has gone vertical.

Corn is another example of where the Swap Dealers are overwhelming net long, alongside of the Managed Money category.

Yet when we come to gold not once in the last 3 ½ years has this category been net long, not once. I am at a loss to explain this quite frankly. Yes, there are Swap Dealers who are outright longs in the gold market, but they are dwarfed by those in that category that are shorts. Perhaps these gold Swap Dealers have long side exposure to gold elsewhere and are using the Comex gold market as a hedge against that position, something which would fit with their function of providing private contracts to clients to gain exposure to the gold market, but where do the index funds come in here? Are they being lumped in with the managed money section for the purposes of the gold report and if so, why, in contrast to what we see in nearly every other commodity market? Are some of these Swap Dealers also the same entities as are being labeled Producer/Merchant/Processor/User? If so, why?

I think it also useful to note here, even in silver, that other precious metals market in which shenanigans are occurring, the Swap Dealers are currently Net Shorts but not nearly to the extent that we see in gold. There in silver, Swap Dealers’ longs comprise 10.4% of the total open interest to their 5.4% of the total open interest on the long side in gold. Their shorts comprise 11.6% of the total open interest in silver compared to a whopping 19.5% of the total open interest in gold. Obviously a net difference of 1.2% in silver biased to the short side is dramatically different than a 14.1% difference biased to the short side in gold.

What all of this means is unclear to me at this point but I do think it is something worth noting. It further serves to underscore the murkiness that infests the Comex gold market and why even more transparency is required if investors are ever going to be able to have a level playing field when it comes to the US gold futures market. The CFTC needs to look even further into this market.

Recent discussion about potentially limiting position size in the precious metals market is useful but is not all that needs to be done. The problem with granting exemptions to position limits for hedgers is that it is quite possible that a Swap Dealer could be granted exemptions by claiming legitimate hedging needs to offload long side risk exposure, but who is then to say that the same outfit could not also be purely speculating for its own ends at the same time? Since this category by its nature is not easily defined, exactly how the CFTC can determine that the system is not being gamed with a speculative interest being granted position limits based on an incomplete or inaccurate description of the entirety of its activities is a challenge that must be addressed. Otherwise a shrewd operator can gain an unfair advantage over the rest of the speculative community that has to curb the ultimate number of positions that it can take on in a commodity market. Hedgers have no limits –speculators do, and therein lies the problem – should a speculator masquerade as a hedger and have access to a huge sum of money, who or what is to prevent them from sitting on a market? Just a thought….

Click chart to enlarge in PDF format

i’ll just double up with twice the carribe hemp! wj

You will use up your whole supply of Lamp posts on this bunch of lieing crooks!

wj

popular mechanics and 9/11’s bldg #7? inquiring minds and all that!
wj

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece

euro down duller up….boooooohoooooo. wj

that doesn’t stop the thieves….i think i must now ramp-up production of more lamp-posts and add to my warehouse storage area…… just in case? wj

They are “your” roads!  Where did the money come from to build them?  The States are behaving as autonomous corporations, ignoring all moral and ethical responsibilities.

The same is starting to happen in Oz.  We had the first toll roads in Qld about 20 yrs ago, funded and owned privately.  That was bad enough - after all, if a road or bridge is needed, then why, as y2kdon says, isn’t it funded out of the fuel tax and the annual registration fee, which raise far in excess of what is spent on the roads anyway(in Oz)?  But now, the suggestion is that other roads are sold off and become toll roads, to finance the State’s $85bn debt (pop’n 4.3m).  Along with State forests, ports, railways etc. etc.; I think the State govt. is all too well aware of wht is happening with California.

Baloney.

Dollar inflation seems a theme of yours. Is the US FED the only one leveraging its balance sheet? Value is relative to what perception is at any given time, not to mention location. It is highly circumstantial. That is why governments spend so much effort on obfuscating truth as it is a never ending quest for capital at the right price (interest rate/currency price).

Case in point, investing in Brazil was different in 2008 relative to 2009. Brazil wants the Real to remain cheap and likes capital investment but doesn’t want investment to the extent it strengthens its currency. The strength of the Real forced the government to change foreign direct investment rules.

As Martin Armstrong points out, albeit indirectly, what is coming is increased volatility because sovereign risk is everywhere. Money will be moving fast and furiously trying to find value.

Most of the developed world is insolvent, that is not up for debate. however, it is the debt phenomenon and the ability of the US government to inflate its way out, at the expense of the rest of the world that is, as stated previously, hopelessly naive.

That is why Armstrong believes the ultimate outcome will be settlement in a world currency. That helps corporate business if it reduces volatility, but what is left in the individual sovereign states? A whole lot of debt.

You need to pick your spots or just buy gold as a hedge against the volatility and sovereign risk.

The crux of what Martin is saying is that no nation will be made the fool. If not expect war.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that we already pay a road tax.  Over 50% of the price of gasoline is tax to pay upkeep on the roads.

Yes, it could be implemented easily.. At the annual License renewal time.

Lets see, Mr Smith, your mileage is now 39,674. Last year it was 29,674.

10K miles @ $00.10/mile. $1,000 Please, and $110 for this year’s License.

Shhhhhh…….don’t tell GS or anyone.

I need time to digest and understand what you posted and suspect that I will never have the understanding to enter into the Goldtent debates about deflation and inflation in our future. But I do always appreciate your insights and views on the subject. I too have other interests that will take priority over daily Goldtent browsing, including further reading of recent texts on world geopolitical events plus further reading on some of the themes and events that you just capsulized in your 14:24. Best wishes. Equiz.

Good to see you posting. I found reading Armstrong’s latest, found at JSmineset, to be a helpful summary. Also like the GEAB2020 site; Sinclair has a link to that also. One thought that congeals from reading both is that paper assets, due to increasing volatility for reasons known and unknown, become more risky than hard assets such as gold.

Recently I read an article [I think it was by Fekete] that suggested that the two year depression of 1930-1932 became longer because Roosevelt made gold ownership illegal. This induced money to move to bonds, which in turn brought down interest rates. This led to a destruction of capital and an unnatural disincentive to invest in productive capacity. What he may not have mentioned is that the bond crisis in Europe at the time led to a flight of capital to America. This led to gold moving to America, strengthened the US dollar and pushed rates down further. It allowed the massive government spending programs to begin the next round of socialism in America.

Armstrong makes clear that even gold could not prevent currency debasement during the past two thousand years. So the US dollar’s ties with gold did not prevent or limit US government spending then or later.

This point is important because it leads us to ask what if any of the early causes of US dollar strength continue to exist. Armstrong makes a point part way through that volatility in currencies was predicted by his model many years ago. His continued emphasis of the issue of currency volatility, coupled with his opinion that in late 2015 the currency crisis will peak bring to mind his commentaries on phase change.

Linking all this with his comments about floating exchange rates for currencies and we can begin to see that the increasing instability of international currencies due to the current ongoing financial crisis induces a reluctance to invest capital. This in turn has the effect similar to that of a lending strike: business finds it increasingly difficult to borrow at economic terms. There may be also a borrowing strike, as businesses may be unwilling to borrow long when short term rates are so low, long term rates are relatively much higher, and returns on investment become less likely due to the various instabilities: currency, interest rate, and the resulting demand destruction. The deflation that results is explained by Armstrong as the inability of money to increase at a rate faster than population growth.

With all this in mind we can understand the desire to attempt to develop a new and stable currency and financial system.

Cheers, TQ

p.s. Still very busy with some new interests. I hope to look in from time to time.