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The Daily Bell
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Gold prices plunge overnight – is the rush over? … Has the gold boom come to an end? The price of gold, which has climbed for years like a blood pressure reading for anxious investors, plunged overnight to its lowest level in three months. Gold fell almost $US58 to $1,614 per ounce. It has declined 15 per cent since September, when it hit a peak of $1,907. It had more than doubled from the financial crisis three years earlier. The decline on Wednesday came on an ugly day in the stock market. The Dow Jones [...]
WASHINGTON: IMF managing director Christine Lagarde implored the United States to help back-stop debt-ridden European countries Tuesday, wading neck-deep into bubbling US political waters.
Speaking in the US capital, Lagarde said the 187-nation International Monetary Fund needed more firepower to tackle financial crises raging around the globe, arguing it was in the US interest to pitch in and help Europe.
“Americans might ask themselves: why should what happens in the rest of the world concern us? Don’t we have our own problems?” she said, according to prepared remarks.
“The answer is simple: In today’s world, we cannot afford the luxury of staying in our own mental backyards.”
“If [...]
If you’re reading this, you probably already know how you feel about Elizabeth Warren. Warren is currently running for Senate in Massachusetts, in the hopes of knocking out Republican incumbent Scott Brown. Very few first-time candidates are so well-known, or so passionately beloved.
For much of the past decade, Warren has made her name as a left-wing media star, appearing in documentaries and on progressive talk shows to advocate for the middle class against a corrupt financial system. In 2008, she was appointed to chair the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). From that position, she created [...]
From Telegraph:
“The rule of law has been treated with contempt,” said Marc Ostwald from Monument Securities. “This will lead to litigation for the next ten years. It has become a massive impediment for long-term investors, and people will now be very wary about Portugal.”
At the start of the crisis EU leaders declared it unthinkable that any eurozone state should require debt relief, let alone default. Each pledge was breached, and the haircut imposed on banks, insurers, and pension funds ratcheted up to 75pc.
Last month the European Central Bank exercised its droit du seigneur, exempting itself from loses on Greek bonds. [...]
By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Let’s face it. Dividends are nice, but they aren’t really cool.
Their very existence gives investors the assurance that they are investing in a solid, conservative institution. Think steady, non-cyclical companies like Campbell’s Soup Co. CPB -0.55% , which had its hippest moment in 1962 when its soup cans were immortalized by pop artist Andy Warhol. Campbell’s paid investors $1.16 per share in dividends in 2011.
To me, the notion of dividends, no matter how many tech companies now pay them, still brings up for some the connotation of [...]
“The best part of this book is how Allen goes through and exposes the ROCKEFELLERS’ “FOUNDATION” SCAM whereby they funnel their own money through TAX EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS back to themselves through complicated investment schemes and tax loopholes that THEIR BUDDIES WROTE SPECIFICALLY FOR THEM IN CONGRESS.
Also, Allen documents the Rockefellers’ main tool of control– the COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS (CFR)–and how they basically act as the invisible government in this country. It’s absurd how many people belong to these Rockefeller founded and funded groups who are considered to be movers and shakers in our society; it’s even scarier to think [...]
by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds
A Useful Fiction: Everybody Loves A Melt-Up Stock Market
A sudden sharp decline in stocks may not thrill retail investors, but it would be catnip for big trading desks that used the melt-up rally to get short.
One of the more useful Wall Street fictions is the naive notion that big players and small-fry equity owners alike love low-volatility “melt-up” markets that slowly creep higher on low volume. The less attractive reality is that big trading desks find low-volatility “melt-up” markets useful for one thing: to sucker retail buyers and less-adept fund managers into an increasingly [...]
Strategy of completely ignoring Congressman was a miserable failure
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Aug 17, 2011
The establishment effort to keep Presidential candidate Ron Paul out of the public conscience has failed and desperation tactics have set in.
Politico has taken it upon itself to dredge up an old and thoroughly debunked story in an attempted attack on the Congressman’s character.
“…there are reasons why Paul, and his fan base, might be grateful for the minimalist coverage that he’s received,” writes Maggie Haberman.
“… a more thorough vetting of the kind that mainstream candidates [...]
“We saw within a few days that this President was going to be heavy-handed, he was going to implement his agenda and pay back his political allies, and it just went on from there to ObamaCare and then to Dodd-Frank. It has been the most anti-business and I consider anti-American administration in my lifetime. Things that are just so anathema to the principles of freedom, and everything he has come up with centralizes more power in Washington, creates more socialist-style, collectivist policies. This president is doing something that’s so far out of [...]
From FT:
The US Federal Reserve set a higher than expected cap on debit card transaction fees, lifting the shares of electronic payments companies Visa and MasterCard.
The Fed’s board voted 4-1 on Wednesday to set so-called interchange fees at 21 cents per transaction, above the 12 cents limit the regulator had proposed in December.
The final rules, which were mandated by last year’s landmark Dodd-Frank financial services reform legislation, were considered a victory for banks and card payments companies that had lobbied unsuccessfully to delay the Fed’s implementation.
“The final rule is positive for both MasterCard and Visa as it helps to [...]
MSFT has existed within its “they have no alternative; they have to use us” monopoly defense alternate universe for decades. Its attitude is that its customer is an IT department that can source and distribute thousands of software packages (e.g., Windows, Office) or devices driven by its software (the soon to be cancelled, lamentable WinMob) to corporations. It has nothing but scorn for the individual user whom MSFT management considers a cipher.
MSFT is congenitally incapable of competing because its mentality has always been polluted by monopoly defense: secure the position of Windows and Office.
Innovation has been anathema to MSFT. Surprise! [...]
by fishhook
The overnight rally just caught fire today and ran all the way up to the 1305 area, which was the estimate for about the maximum possible up move today that I posted earlier this morning. While there wasn’t really much extreme positive tick today, the tick was positive on balance for most of the day. The funny thing about this move, and we have seen this before, is that it was accomplished with insufficient nyse tick for the magnitude of the move. The buying of the futures contract was [...]
by zh
After what seems another day of tireless brainwashing, it is always preferable to close, listening to the one man who continues to call it like it is. In today’s feature interview, which touches on virtually every currently relevant topic, Eric King speaks to Rick Santelli discussing such items as European insolvency/austerity, try to get to the bottom of the quandary where Japan (itself massively in debt) is getting the money to fund the European rescue, deconstruct the once anathema and now mainstream topic of a global ponzi system (less than two [...]
We will shop until they pry our credit cards from our cold, dead hands. We’re a nation of shopping and debt addicts who have been groomed and brainwashed over the past 40 years to believe the great American/Madison Avenue lie that we are incomplete, abject failures in life if we don’t have every house toy, electronic gizmo, fashion fad and high priced, gas guzzling automobile that gets paraded in front of us on the TV and now, most annoyingly, on the internet. As a nation, we’re a bunch of fat, lazy, narcissistic slobs who live to consume anything that’s placed [...]
The last time they printed money with abandon, it led to hyperinflation and the eventual rise of fascism. We all know how that ended. The 234-year-old US, on the other hand, thinks nothing of stealing from the future to lessen its pain today.
Depressions and recessions can probably not be avoided; at least, not as long as governments continue to insist on intervening. By doing this, they draw the pain out for much longer, or they create artificial booms that lead to stupendous busts.
Why is it so hard to trust the free market? Maybe that’s anathema to politicians. After all, ‘they’re [...]
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