More On Gold And The Economy...

"These paper money addicts, who remain trapped in the fallacies of Keynesianism, are revealed as a vast intellectual Sahara. Won’t somebody inform them that overprinting caused this mess. More overprinting is obviously the wrong remedy. If a little arsenic is bad for you, then maybe a lot more is not good either.

Meanwhile, gold and silver are in long-term ‘Super Major Uptrends.’ That’s one way to protect yourself, and that’s for survival purposes, not for capital gains. Whatever happens next, sooner or later the world must return to wealth in the ground. So, I think that mining stocks deserve a place in all farsighted portfolios.”

That's a quote from James Dines in his latest interview at King World News:  LINK
 
So I guess myself and the other countless bloggers who shredded Charlie Munger over the weekend, and have previously disemboweled Warren Buffet's and Bernanke's comments about gold, are not the only ones understand the fundamental flaw in looking at gold as strictly an "investment."
 
And one has to wonder why the Becky Quicks of the bubblevision media world do not ask Munger or Buffet why China, India, Russia et al - plus many Central Banks - feel compelled to load up on physical gold and silver.  How do these investment gurus explain that?  Here's a good article not published by mainstream media that reviews the latest move by China to commence silver futures trading on the Shanghai Futures exchange:  LINK
 
Perhaps the Truth about Buffet's hatred of gold is best expressed in graph which shows the long term performance of Berkshire Hathaway stock priced in terms of gold - this is the market expressing it's view:

(Click on chart to enlarge)

 

(source:  link)

Priced in terms of gold, Buffet's wealth as represented by the price of his Berkshire Hathaway stock has declined 30.5% in the last three years and a staggering 77% since late 1999.  Did Warren or Charlie happen to bring up this little factoid at their annual shareholder soiree this past weekend?  Buffet's cult-like mush-brained followers slavishly follow him around lapping up any crumbs he might drop for them like the pied-piper, thus it wouldn't have mattered anyway...

On to the economy.  As a follow-up to Friday's employment report and it's immediate evisceration by the blog world, a lot of people are left wondering how all of the for-real unemployed people not counted as part of the labor force are feeding their families.  The answer lies in the welfare statistics.

As it turns out so far this year, nearly 1 million workers have applied to get on the Government's disability program.  More than 1/3 will eventually be enrolled, including 90,000 in April alone.  If you include spouses and children, the number of new people on welfare "disability" for 2012 is 539,000.  If you net that amount against the number of people dropped from the labor force so far this year, it represents a substantial portion of that manipulation metric.  All of a sudden the 1 million people who have applied for disability decided they were too "injured" to work?

In fact, since Obama took office over 5 million workers and their families have been enrolled in the disability program since Obama took office.  Here's the source for these numbers:  LINK  That's a lot of votes Obama has bought and paid for with Taxpayer money that Romney won't have a shot at unless he gets elected and opens the disability floodgates even more...

Who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?  Obama has been handing them out by the millions.  It's too bad most of the remaining taxpayers - those still healthy enough to hold down a job - are not aware of this fact...