JustThinking.us

So, who really has the gold?

Is it Putin?

Or the hapless imbeciles of the EU?

You now know our bet.

Apologies for the lack of posting lately.

My excuse is that I really hate my present office and keep playing at making it more workable rather than posting.

Which is sort of true.

Mostly I'm just a little tired of the relentless stupidity that surrounds us and having completed my reading, I sigh and head upstairs to see if I can get the little wiffer to put out.

So anyway and since we were already on the subject.

Sort of.

From The Mail Online, via Leari P. first and then about a dozen more of you .

As always click on the photo for the entire piece.

Wealthy Indian spends £14,000 on a shirt made of GOLD to impress the ladies (and if nothing else it means less ironing for them!) 

Shirt took a team of 15 goldsmiths two weeks to construct 

Has matching cuffs and a set of rings crafted from left-over gold

By JILL REILLY

PUBLISHED: 11:35 EST, 4 January 2013 | UPDATED: 18:51 EST, 5 January 2013

It is often said that money can't buy love.

But trying telling that to a wealthy Indian man who splashed out £14,000 (that's about $25,000 for the conversion challenged among us) on a solid gold shirt in the hope it will attract female attention. 

Money-lender Datta Phuge 32, from Pimpri-Chinchwad, commissioned the shirt which took a team of 15 goldsmiths two weeks to make working 16 hours a day creating and weaving the gold threads.

I'm thinking her lawyer is gonna just love this shirt.

We have got the stuff today as we've been collecting without a post for probably the better part of three weeks now.

So, in no particular order of importance,

Recent Natural Gas pricing offers a primer on the law of supply and demand as supply of Nat Gas drilling rigs rises and falls with the price of Nat Gas.  

Prices for Liquid Natural Gas swing wildly from continent to continent as intercontinental transport of Natural Gas remains difficult, expensive and likely dangerous.

Some people took a less serious approach to the Presidential debates than did others.

While President Obama's epic poor performance in the first debate may not cost him the Presidency it most certainly has destroyed what little confidence the country had left in the abilities of the Telestrator in Chief.

When The New Yorker is taking cover shots at a sitting Democrat President, you gotta think all credibility is lost.

Spain has moved past debate as it's rate of unemplyment moves into the mid 20s.  The real dark red in the map below is Spain for those of you who are geographically challenged.

The light blue smack in the middle of Europe is Germany, who I'm thinking would really like to stay that color.

"Recortes Son Necesarios" translates as "Cuts Are Necessary" in reference to austerity measures allegedly being implemented by the Spanish governmnent.

We trust you can grasp the meaning in the artwork.

Order yours here.

Unbelievably to us among many, the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union despite the violence captured in the photos below.

We happen to be very comfortable laying the blame for that violence directly at the feet of the European Union, among some others.

Which award following that for President Obama inspired the following special offer.

Speaking of unemployment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate has fallen from 8.1 % in August to 7.8% in September on the strength of some 870,000 plus new jobs 563,000 of which were part time.  

This number has been widely mocked as cooked.

While not evidence of cooking on the part of the Labor Department, the following chart of the September Monthly Change to Workers Aged 20-24 reveals the first and only increase in employment in 28 years.  

Each bar in the chart below represents a September of some year.

The fact is that September of 2012 is the first month in history that this age group has ever experienced an increase in employment during the month of September ...... you're gonna have to take our word on that last part as I can't find a chart that works.

As demonstrated in this next chart, the number of unemployed and underemployed people for the month of September increased from 25.8 million in August to 26.2 million in September.

I don't know what this has to do with anything, but I thought it to be interesting and saved it to whip out the next time there is an uncomfortable lull in the conversation at some cocktail party I may be attending.

From The Pew Forum.

Finally, because I'm out of both time and energy for the moment, that's it for now.

We finish today's report with the fundamental difference between Mom and Dad.

From Zero Hedge.

We posted here at JustThinking some months ago about tungston filled gold bars being discovered in Europe.

Within that post was a link to a Forbes piece in which they opined that this was a one off deal and that it was higly unlikely that anyone would go to the trouble of counterfeiting gold bars on a large scale.

After we got up off the floor from from our uncontrollable fit of rib breaking laughter, we offered the opinion that it was bars measured in kilos and up that would be of concern.

On behalf of both Forbes and ourselves.

Oopsies!

At least ten counterfeit ten ounce bars have been discovered on Manhattan Island in New York City.

Now, here's the real interesting part ... at least to us.

China Tungston is openly advertizing on the internet both gold plated tungston filled bars and coins, among other things, and has the following to say about themselves.

Notice: Chinatungsten Online (Xiamen) Manu.&Sales Corp. is a very professional and serious company, specializing in manufacturing and selling gold-plated bullion and tungsten related products for more than two decades. Our gold-plated bullion tungsten alloy product is only for souvenir and decoration purpose.We can provide all kinds of gold-plated bullion as your requirements. Here we declare: Please do not use our gold-plated bullion products for any illegal purpose.  Gold-plated bullion products offered by us are qualified.

We're not to sure what "qualified" means in this conversation.

Therefore, if you are interest in tungsten alloy golden bullion or gold-plated bullion, please feel free to contactsales@chinatungsten.com, or telephone 86 592 512 9696.

We've been collecting charts again and IMHO have done a slightly better job of adding links this time.

The first, a series of comparisons of California tax receipts, is the one you need to be worrying about ..... or not.

Make no mistake about it, California is Greece, only much, much, much, much ..... bigger.

The public is moving out of stocks as increasingly the stock market resembles a casino.

And are stampeding into bonds where ... IMHO once again ... they are about to get slaughtered ..... see that item on California tax receipts above.

Corn, Gold, Siver and Brent Crude are the best investments of the last five years.

Buy gold ... maybe farmland ..... just sayin.

Mystery solved.

We haven't quite wrapped our brains around this next one yet.

Both charts link to the methodology employed in their construction.

Among the reasons Goldman Sachs won't be facing criminal prosecution for their activities before, during and after the mortgage fiasco ..... or for anything else for that matter.

As an aside, they also own at least one former Democrat Senator and a former Governor of Massachusetts.

Two distinct points of view.

This one might be a bit obscure for those of you that don't trade, still if you can get your mind around the idea of "selling short" Gold you don't have via futures contracts or options and then buying the stuff back in order to make whole or reconcile your position, it should ... OK, Ok maybe could ... fall into place.

This set of charts first showed up as a trading strategy proffered by SK Options Trading.com.

It is now being bandied about as evidenceof manipulation of the gold markets.

The first chart from Kitco is for the daily closing price of Gold or "PM fix" from January 2002 until January 2012 on the Comex, located in New York City and demonstrates what I consider to be just a wonderful upward sloping trendline.

Starting in 2001 with an index arbitrarily set at 100, the chart below shows what would have happened to that investment of 100 whatevers if it had been used to purchase Gold daily at the AM fix on the Comex in New York City and subsequently sell that Gold daily at the PM fix again in New York City on the Comex, replicating the daily percentage performance of Gold in the U.S. intraday market.

What you need to keep in mind here is that the morning fix on the Comex is seldom if ever the same as the previous evening's fix.

This is true of most markets and every exchange.

What this chart is telling you is that had you taken $100,000 and invested it all daily by purchasing Gold to the maximum you were able at the morning fix and subsequently selling all of it back at the evening fix, beginning January 1, 2001, your account would have been reduced to somewhere around $32,000 on or about March 1, 2012.

The following chart is barely more complex.

The red line demonstrates the gains you would have enjoyed employing a buy and hold strategy if you had purchased and held some amount of Gold on Jan 1, 2001 again arbitrarily set at 100, and held it through March 2012.

The blue line demonstrates the gains you would have enjoyed had you bought gold daily at the evening fix on the Comex in New York and then sold it daily at the morning fix, again on the Comex in New York City and then sold short Gold at the morning fix and repurchased Gold to close your short at the evening fix.

Got that?

Buy at night, sell in the morning, go short with the proceeds then close your short position at the evening close and using the proceeds from that trade repeat the whole process.

Gold goes up all over the world while we sleep and goes down in New York when we're open for business.

It's a fascinating world we live in.

From ABC Bullion who wants to sell you some "safe" Gold

It seems the price of Gold has reached the point where it may be economically feasable to go to the trouble of acquiring a sizable bar, probably at least a kilo, a 5 kilo bar would be even better, drill it out, insert tungston rods and move it on out to some unsuspecting chump.

Tungston has similar properties in terms of mass and weight as does gold.

Two tungston filled bars have been discovered at different locations over the past two years.

The first at the W.C.Heraeus foundry of Hanau, Germany, the world's largest privately owned precious metals refiner and fabricator.

The second was purchased just recently by a scrap dealer in the UK.

Forbes having done a little calling around says that while it's theoretically possible to do this, it's unlikely that anyone would actually go to the trouble.

I'm thinking they need to start thinking about weeding out some dumbass staff over at Forbes.

Meanwhile, I'm over at Ebay pricing out some Tungston rod.

Costs a little more than I thought it might.

I'm thinking demand has spiked along with the price of Gold.

Ok let's see here ..... at .708 lbs per cubic inch, you get a .5"(D) by 36"(L) rod for $429 ..........

Damn, I think I can make this work.

Physical gold held by ETFs, at 2,469 metric tons, is now the world’s 4^th largest gold stash, behind the US, Germany and the IMF.

Iceland is considering adopting the Canadian dollar, “the loonie”, as its currency.

Every $10 increase in the price of crude oil reduces US GDP by 1%.

A record 46.5 million Americans are on food stamps, 15% of the US population, over 22 million US households.

TSA’s VIPR teams conducted 9,300 unannounced checkpoint and frisking operations in the US in 2011 on highways, subways, train stations, ferry terminals, all mass transit locations.

Windows 8 will have a “kill switch” that will have the capability to arbitrarily access your computer and delete “dangerous software”.

The yield on the 10-year bond issued by Portugal jumped by 70 basis points last week coming close to a 14 percent yield. The Greek 10-year bonds jumped to a yield of more than 38 percent.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), obtained hundreds of documents from the Department of Homeland Security through the Freedom of Information Act and found details of an arrangement with General Dynamics in which DHS has been paying the defense contractor to monitor social media websites and other Internet communications to find criticisms of the department’s policies and actions. The company was contracted to monitor the Web for ‘reports that reflect adversely on DHS,’ including sub-agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

From Debkafile one of the better sources for actual news anywhere.

As opposed to opinion dressed as news most everywhere.

Yes of course, the picture ... click on it.

India to pay gold instead of dollars for Iranian oil.

Oil and gold markets stunned.

India is the first buyer of Iranian oil to agree to pay for its purchases in gold instead of the US dollar, DEBKAfile's intelligence and Iranian sources report exclusively.  Those sources expect China to follow suit. India and China take about one million barrels per day, or 40 percent of Iran's total exports of 2.5 million bpd. Both are superpowers in terms of gold assets.

By trading in gold, New Delhi and Beijing enable Tehran to bypass the upcoming freeze on its central bank's assets and the oil embargo which the European Union's foreign ministers agreed to impose Monday, Jan. 23. The EU currently buys around 20 percent of Iran's oil exports.

The vast sums involved in these transactions are expected, furthermore, to boost the price of gold and depress the value of the dollar on world markets.

You should be listening to your Uncle Roany here ..... buy gold!!!!!

This "info graphic" was sent to us in response to this morning's post from the same info address that sent us the Beatles vid.

Whoever you are, keep up the good work.

The following is from Numbersleuth which is a new site to us.

The thing is a little busy maybe but jam packed with just the kind of useless information we love to whip out at parties in an effort to make people thinnk we're a whole lot smarter than we really are.

Click anywhere below for a much larger/easier to read version.

From: Number Sleuth

The following calculations were compiled or figured by R.E. Mcmaster.

I haven't checked them, but probably will to the extent I'm able to this evening.

It mostly feels about right.

There are $30 trillion in currencies worldwide.

All the gold ever mined would fit in a 62.3 ft. cube.

All the gold ever collected, panned and mined since the time of Jesus is worth approximately $7 trillion at today's price.

There are 158,000 tonnes of gold above ground, 86% of which is held by central banks, investors, and jewelry owners.

This means there are 4.8 billion ounces of gold above ground globally, of which 2.1 billion ounces, 43% is in jewelry, religious and art items, official reserves of 1 billion ounces, industrial use of 530 million ounces, and 1.1 billion ounces in private hands.

The market cap of all gold that is above ground, including central bank reserves (30,717 tonnes as to 10/11), is equal to only 1.4% of global financial assets. Combined central bank gold reserves rose in 2009 by 425.4 metric tons to 30,116.9 tons, an increase of $13.3 billion (2009 average prices), the first increase since 1988.

Central banks hold 18% of all the world’s gold ever mined.

From today's installment of Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letter.

Below are the last day of the year quotes for gold.

2000 -- $273.60
2001 -- $279.00
2002 -- $348.20
2003 -- $416.10
2004 -- $438.40
2005 -- $518.90
2006 -- $638.00
2007 -- $838.00
2008 -- $889.00 
2009 -- $1096.50
2010 -- $1421.40
2011 -- $1566.80

This year's close for gold marks the 11th year for higher year end gold closing.

To my knowledge this is the longest bull market of any kind in history in which each year's close was above the previous year.

This fabulous bull market will not end with a whisper and a fizzle. I continue to believe that the upside gold crescendo of this bull market lies ahead.

We are watching market history.

This chart was published at McMaster Online but it was constucted at Stockcharts.com.

If you like charts, and sometimes a chart is all you need, Stockcharts is the place for easy to construct financial charting.

And finally, that thing I've been sayin' now for quite some time,

BUY GOLD!!!!!!!!!