JustThinking.us

Not the look on his face at the exact instant he wrote these words.

For the last two years or so I have predicted we will not see an uncoordinated crash of the euro, but rather a coordinated fall of multiple currencies US$, Euro, Yuan, Pound, Yen.

They all are/were in big trouble, but none of them could act on their own unless they wanted to expose themselves as bankrupt.

If they default, the banking system collapses.

If they inflate on their own, their holdings move away, so they had to find a way to inflate at the same time, so that the currency pairs don't reveal the problem to the public & since people are convinced that inflation is about prices, it all needed to go in sync.

Now, they‘ve done the first step to coordinate their printing presses.

Essentially all the big currencies on the planet are increasing the money supply in a linked fashion, keeping the currency pairs stable, devaluing the savings, keeping the banks afloat, keeping the system running.

If this is successful, the predictions of libertarians claiming the system will destroy itself by inflation will not come true.  We shall see.   Richard Russell

No portfolio is perfect or without risk.  Yet, too often we think of risk narrowly and ignore the greatest risks of all in the form of monetary collapse, social disorder, regime change, and emergency edicts.

Warren Buffett disparages gold because it has no yield.

The reason it has no yield is that is has no risk. Yield is what you earn when you take risk.

Gold has no credit risk, no currency risk, no maturity risk, indeed no risk of any kind. It is just gold.

In contrast, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway stock when priced not in dollars but in ounces of gold has declined in value by about 75 percent since 2000 from 280 ounces per share to 70 ounces per share.

Put differently, someone who bought gold rather than Berkshire in 2000 could today buy four times as much Berkshire stock using the same gold.

There has been similar appreciation in the value of fine art. Admittedly this is a selective example. Yet it is true that over centuries it is the hard assets not the paper assets that retain value through collapse and catastrophe.

The old money knows this ... they have seen it all before.   James Rickards

I guess two things stand out to me.  The first is it’s amazing how much complacency the various central governments can buy with the liquidity they are pumping into the market. 

You have the situation in Spain, which is looking like Greece on steroids, and nobody seems to care because of the liquidity coming into the markets.”

“I’m too old to wish for chaos, but it’s coming.  I think the market’s response to situations that make otherwise rational people seem nervous, is fairly amusing.  What we are seeing right now is the rising tide of liquidity floating most ships, particularly the conventional ships.   Rick Rule

“For every one person these days who dies fighting in US wars around the world, 25 other soldiers kill themselves. Veterans are killing themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. There are more than 6,500 veteran suicides every year. That’s more than all the American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 10 years, according to a New York Times analysis. Being a veteran apparently doubles your risk of suicide. Economic conditions wrought by government policies around the world have contributed to the death toll.

 Europe is undergoing an epidemic of suicide in countries seriously hurt by the downturn. In Greece, the suicide rate among men increased more than 24% since the disaster hit. In Ireland, male suicides have shot up more than 16%. In Italy, economic-motivated suicides have increased 52%...

Life is hard enough on its own. Government makes it harder. Its recession-causing policies; its policy responses that do not work; its regulations that makes people crazy; its poverty-inducing taxes and inflation; and, most of all, its wars, have driven millions to despair. Why the state in particular? It all comes down to the sense of having control over your life. The essence of statecraft is the absence of choice and the inability to escape. Many operations of the state try to disguise these features…

The faces of people in line at the DMV, the sauntering mass in line to be screened by the TSA and even the blank stares you see in the post office lines. There is something about state policy that demoralizes us all. That takes a toll on our health and our outlook on life and even leads to tragedy.   Jeffrey Tucker

There are 240 million voting age Americans. About 130 million will likely vote in the 2012 election based upon recent voter participation results. This means that 110 million Americans don’t give a crap about who runs this country or they’ve come to their senses and realize our votes don’t matter. Between 1840 and 1900 voter participation ranged between 70% and 82% as Americans took their civic duty seriously and believed their vote counted.

Since 1913, when the politicians relinquished control of our currency to a private bank controlled by a small group of powerful men, voter participation for President has ranged between 49% and 62%. It hasn’t surpassed 57% since 1968. Now that corporations are people and our candidates are selected by a few rich men, the transformation from a republic to a corporate fascist state is almost complete…

There are high paying good jobs in America, but there aren’t many and on-line college graduates from the University of Phoenix aren’t going to get them. The highest paying jobs today require a high level of specialization and education, especially in the healthcare and technology industries. This disqualifies the vast majority of government run public school graduates…

The conversion of our country from making high quality things other countries needed to a debt driven service economy of paper pushers, hash slingers, and retail ‘specialists’ has slowly but surely destroyed the middle class. The masses are distracted by the latest technological marvel that allows them to waste another two hours per day posting how they feel about the latest episode of America’s Got Something or America’s Top Whatever. We have become a country that glories in our materialism and shallow culture while acting like a thug around the world with our unparalleled military machine…

This result is not an accident. It was set in motion by the actions of a handful of rapacious, wealthy powerful men that have been calling the shots in this country for the last hundred years. It wasn’t a planned conspiracy but the logical result of man-made inflation, a fiat currency not backed by gold, the craving of rich men to become richer, a willfully ignorant populace, and a slow devolution of our society into a corporate fascist state. We praise and honor psychopathic criminals while scorning and ridiculing the middle class workers that built this country. The American dream has become a nightmare for the millions of unemployed and underemployed. The acceleration of debt accumulation and money printing guarantees this rotting carcass of a country will go belly up in the foreseeable future.”    Jim Quinn

“A decent man is too busy — improving his business, his home, his family — to take much interest in politics.  Besides, he knows it is a flim-flam.  He’s seen how hard it is to make any real improvement at home, even when you are close to the facts and on the job full time. Imagine trying to improve things far away, where you don’t really know what is going on! 

An honest man knows better than to interfere in other peoples’ business. His own business is tough enough.  He cares deeply about the things around him...and tries to make his world better in every way he can.  But he would be embarrassed to pretend to solve other peoples’ problems.  Even if he is only offering advice, he does so reluctantly...carefully...and tentatively.

If he is smart he knows that you can’t really make things better by bullying and threatening people. An economy works best by doing the one thing that the fixers can’t allow — letting people make their own deals, find their own jobs, and solve their own problems. It’s the one thing the fixers can’t do, and the one thing every candidate regards as political suicide — just getting out of the way.”   Bill Bonner

“To the establishment media, the race for the Republican nomination is over — Mitt Romney is the presumed winner.  Every globalist on the Republican side has come out and endorsed him — including those who don’t want him as president.

This reflects the concern Republican kingmakers still have about Ron Paul, who will now make a better showing than ever at the polls, due to the anti-Romney feelings among many conservatives and the growing anti-war sentiment.  

What is disturbing to the PTB is that Ron Paul continues to rack up delegates far in excess of his showing in primaries, which were not binding. ..... Huh?.....  However, I think they will pull out all the stops to keep a brokered convention from happening and make sure that Romney wins on the first ballot at the Tampa convention.”   Joel Skousen

It is the patriotic duty of every man to lie for his country.

Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.

Man knows much more than he understands.

My difficulties belong to me!

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.

The only normal people are the one's you don't know very well.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression.  It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.

There is no such thing as talent.  There is pressure.

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest.  The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

There is a law that man should love his neighbor as himself.  In a few hundred years it should be as natural to mankind as breathing or the upright gait; but if he does not learn it he must perish.

We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal.  We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.

No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.

We must never neglect the patient's own use of his symptoms.

“The Coming Race War in America was published in 1996 by Carl Rowan, the black columnist and former ambassador to Finland...

Our racial policy has proved a disaster. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, blacks have not assimilated. They constitute a separate people having almost nothing in common with the surrounding European society. They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration…

First, on every known measure of cognitive ability, on IQ, SATs, GREs, everything, blacks average about one standard deviation, fifteen IQ points, below whites. The gap is a fact. It exists. It is reflected in performance. It has proved intractable.

In a technological civilization that rewards intelligence, the deficit sharply limits legitimate access to the higher reaches of money, power, class, and prestige. Second, blacks continue to show little interest in schooling. Exceptions and degrees, yes. Yet consider cities such as Washington, which usually has a black mayor, black city council, mostly black school board, black staffs in the schools, black parents, black students, a high per-capita expenditure—and perhaps the worst schools in the country. This is a fact, and shows no signs of diminishing. It is repeated in countless cities…

The economy has no need for huge numbers of people who read at the level of second-graders, if that. The existence of these people is a fact. When such jobs exist, as for example on police forces, better qualified whites are invariably available.

Without remedial intervention, the academic and professional worlds, the managerial ranks of blue-collar trades, would turn almost pure white, and there would be actual hunger in the inner cities.

The solution, to the extent that it can be called a solution, has been a combination of welfare and affirmative action. Each has produced its own kind of dependency. Whites in their own way depend on welfare payments to blacks in that ending welfare would send the cities up in flames. We now have dense concentrations of unemployed, unemployable blacks leading meaningless lives in rotting cities. They are angry, blame whites for their troubles, and do not have a lot to lose…

None of this improves, and it seems to be getting worse…on the web, video after cell phone video appears of pack-attacks by feral blacks on whites and Asians. These attacks often result in brain damage: the attackers are trying to hurt the victims badly, and usually laugh while doing it. Other videos time and again show black teenagers looting Seven-Elevens…

Whites are frightened of blacks. They are afraid of taking the wrong exit from the freeway and ending up in a black ghetto. They are afraid when they pass young black males in a dark neighborhood. White women clutch their purses and cross the street, try not to get into elevators with them. The fear, seldom mentioned, determines where whites live, where they go, and where they send their children to school…

Government also is afraid of blacks…The signs are ominous. Tension rises in America. Incomes fall, foreclosures rise, jobs go east, police powers increase, trust in government evaporates, and expectations for the future decline. An unfocused edginess germinates. It is not a recipe for domestic tranquility…

The response of whites to riots by blacks has always been to back away. This prudence, as it is thought to be, has been enforced by the government…

A spring is being wound.”  Fred Reed

“A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He's pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They're too busy taping it on their smartphones. That's how we heard their laughter.

The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonalds beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: ‘flash robs.’…

Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She's the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience…

There is the General Services Administration scandal. An agency devoted to efficiency is outed as an agency of mindless bread-and-circuses indulgence. They had a four-day regional conference in Las Vegas, with clowns and mind readers…

Only a generation ago, earnest, tidy government bureaucrats were spoofed as drudges and drones [zombies]. Not anymore. Now they're way cool. Immature, selfish and vain, but way cool…

There is the Secret Service scandal. That one broke through too, and you know the facts: overseas to guard the president, sent home for drinking, partying, picking up prostitutes. What's terrible about this story is that for anyone who's ever seen the Secret Service up close it's impossible to believe. The Secret Service are the best of the best…

This week I saw a picture of agents in Colombia. They were in T-shirts, wrinkled khakis and sneakers. They looked like a bunch of mooks, like slobs, like children with muscles…the journalistic story of the week, the Los Angeles Times's decision to publish pictures of U.S. troops in Afghanistan who smilingly posed with the bloody body parts of suicide bombers…

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they? And again, these are only from the past week. The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective. Something seems to be going terribly wrong.“  Peggy Noonan 

"It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. 

It is the only one international in scope.

It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people.

Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about.

It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.

Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

With regards to the credentials and resume' General Butler's stands on while making the above statement.

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.

I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.

The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.

I operated on three continents.