Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation (Ben Bernanke on curing deflation,Before the National Economists Club, Washington, D.C., November 21, 2002 LINK)You know, I've read that speech several times and today is the first time that I noticed that he prefaced that particular passage with "like gold." Truly remarkable when you let that sink in.
We've seen today from one fundamental standpoint just why gold is going to go a lot higher in price, as it will become significantly more "scarce" in supply relative to the supply of fiat currency being printed up.
HOWEVER, largely unnoticed and distinctly not commented on or analyzed, was another key fundamental factor: the enactment of the Basel III Accord. I've written an exclusive article for www.Seekingalpha.com which explains why Basel III will unequivocally mean much higher values for gold (and silver). You can read that article here:
Gold will be de facto reasserted into the global financial system as a currency. This should add a new dimension to the ongoing bull market in gold and silver, as banks globally now have incentive to accumulate and hold gold as a valuable, liquid asset which can be leveraged as an operating asset.
Here's the link: THE BASEL III ACCORD AND HIGHER GOLD
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I think I understand reserves and the 100% value of Tier 1 and why demand would drive the price of gold up. Do gold reserves have to be physical? Can reserves be paper gold? I know that would be foolish, but we are talking bankers here...
ReplyDeleteAlso, how quickly do the higher reserve requirements get phased in? Do you expect much conversion to gold right away for current reserves? Wouldn't the first banks into gold have the most potential to gain?
I don't know if GLD would be considered that same as physical gold from banking reserve standpoint. I need to find out. My gut tells me that Central Bankers are sleazy but not stupid. For that reason I would bet Basel 3 only applies to phsyical, not paper.
ReplyDeleteI thought the elevation of gold to Tier 1 status was proposed but not yet fully approved. At any rate, I suspect that the use of paper gold as a reserve asset will only be a matter of time. The goal of the banks is to create leverage and to create the appearance of solvency not necessarily to be solvent in any meaningful way.
ReplyDeleteIt's official as of Jan 1, 2013. Some countries have already started implementing it.
ReplyDeleteAll Of My Bags Were Searched & They Were Looking For Money
ReplyDeleteCountries like Germany and others are now getting worried that they won’t get their gold back. Years ago when Drexel Burnham Lambert went under, they had borrowed 17 tons of Portuguese gold. When Drexel failed, the Portuguese never saw their gold again because their claim just evaporated.
Because of what happened to Portugal in the Drexel failure, and all of the turmoil in global financial markets, countries are starting to demand their gold back from the Fed and also from England. With governments like Germany beginning to look to take their gold out of the ‘rental pool,’ the amount of gold available to be leased out is rapidly shrinking.
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2012/12/12_All_Of_My_Bags_Were_Searched_%26_They_Were_Looking_For_Money.html
Let's Eliminate Sports Welfare
ReplyDeleteConsider stadium subsidies. When Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure dome above a sunless sea, he did not strong-arm the Xanadu County Board of Directors into funding the project by threatening to move to Los Angeles. His mistake. He wouldn’t last five minutes as an American sports owner. According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. That’s enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in today’s dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches -- three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. It’s also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen? Simple. Team owners ask for public handouts and threaten to move elsewhere unless they get them, pitting cities against in each other in corporate welfare bidding wars -- wars rooted in the various publicly granted antitrust exemptions that effectively allow sports leagues to control and maintain a limited supply of teams to be leveraged against widespread demand.
“It’s like this magic alchemy where we take all this public money and it morphs into private profit,” says Dave Zirin, author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love.” “The most egregious example of this is the Seattle Sonics going from the 14th biggest [media] market in the country to Oklahoma City, a market that has one-eighth or one-sixteenth of the per capita income. Why did that move make sense? One place offered corporate welfare and another didn’t. The NBA punished a city for not giving them hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But wait. There’s more. Bigger handouts, written directly into the federal tax code. Steve Piascik, a registered financial adviser with the NFL Players’ Association, says that when leagues donate the fines to charity -- as the NFL, NBA and others do -- offending players can deduct the expense on their income tax returns. Did you enjoy Baltimore Ravens safety Ed Reed’s recent above-the-shoulder hit on Pittsburgh Steelers receiver Emmanuel Sanders, which resulted in $50,000 fine? Hope so. In a tiny way, you sprung for it. Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service allows team owners to treat players and their salaries as both regular expenses and depreciable assets -- the same as aging livestock, or office computers -- a legal quirk that makes team rosters tax deductible in two different ways, and effectively creates a profit-hiding tax shelter. Is this quirk a legal accident? Not quite. It was created by former baseball owner Bill Veeck. A man whose memoir is titled “The Hustler’s Handbook.” A man who wrote, “Look, we play the Star-Spangled Banner before every game -- you want us to pay income taxes, too?"
Perhaps none of this is shocking: after all, the man in charge of the Salt Lake City Games was a moocher-bashing, personal responsibility-endorsing bootstrapper named Mitt Romney.
“It’s kind of a hopeless battle,” says Zimmerman, the retired Congressional researcher. “Politicians all talk about government spending being something that should provide real public services. But they vote all the time to spend money or not collect taxes for things that are not.
“Personally, I could care less if people in Alabama want to pay for what amounts to their own professional football team. Let them, if they want, through state taxes. Why should we as federal taxpayers pay for it? But we are.”
http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40595178/
Having watched the incredible paper gold action on the back of the HUMONGOUS Assignat sorry USD printing announcement am seriously thinking there must be some agreement whereby Asia gets to suck out all the phyzz at a discount to allow one more US Xmas shopping spree. If not helluva price to pay for BB's image. Stacking today!
ReplyDeleteToo Big to Jail: Our Banking System's Latest Disgrace
ReplyDeleteWhy no criminal charges? Why instead only some remedial measures and a "historical" fine that can be measured in weeks -- not years -- of earnings? It certainly wasn’t for lack of evidence. No, instead the government determined that HSBC is not only too big to fail, but also too big to jail. As the New York Times first reported, even though there were strong voices within DOJ pushing for criminal charges, the big banks' best friends within the government (the Treasury Department, of course, and other unnamed regulators) were too fearful that an indictment could destabilize the global financial system. Yes, it's 2008 all over again. In the name of systemic stability, a megabank again escapes accountability for its actions, rescued by compliant officials.
In some aspects, DOJ's surrender is understandable. Notwithstanding regulatory reform efforts in the U.S. and the UK, the largest banks are in many ways even more systemically dangerous today than when we bailed them out in 2008. This indirect acknowledgment that we have failed to fix the too-big-to-fail problem has potentially dire consequences.
One of the reasons why we have a criminal justice system, of course, is to deter criminal behavior. If you know that you will be punished for putting your hand in the cash register at your local supermarket (or illegally stripping out information from a monetary transaction that identifies the source nation as Iran), you are less likely to do so. But if the government offered a blanket waiver from criminal accountability for a certain group -- let's say all left-handed people over six feet tall or a handful of banks deemed so large and so significant that their indictment could destroy the global financial system -- we would expect that those exempted would no longer be deterred from committing criminal acts. And although lefty giants may otherwise lack a predisposition for boosting cash, in recent years the largest banks have demonstrated an unbridled zeal for pushing the boundaries of the law as part of their relentless pursuit of profits. DOJ's actions with regards to HSBC are beyond unfair: They are downright terrifying for weakening the general deterrence for megabanks, both foreign and domestic, which could rationally interpret yesterday's actions as a license to steal.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/111041/too-big-jail-our-banking-systems-latest-disgrace#
excellent interview with Olives Stone on Breaking the Set with Abby Martin
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/user/breakingtheset
This may be BIGGEST reason to own PM's
ReplyDeleteFed to keep rates near zero until unemployment drops to 6.5%
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/12/fed-rates-unemployment_n_2286328.html
You can not have a gold backed currency. No government I know of has any plan or even an idea to balance a budget. They can back their money with gold today, at some price. But what happens tomorrow when they create another 3 billion dollars of "money"? There is no new gold to back this new money. Shall a dollar be backed by one seventeen hundredth of an ounce of gold today but only one two thousandth of an ounce next year? The truth is that an honest government with a stable monetary system doesn't need to be "gold backed" and a government like ours will simply keep creating new dollars and the gold backing won't work. In fact, the only reason for the government to announce a gold backed currency is for an excuse to seize the gold, claim a gold backed currency is for our benefit, then keep the gold and issue lots more paper. But, isn't that what Bretton Woods was all about? U.S. keeps the gold and issues paper while making promises it can't possibly keep.
ReplyDeleteit very well will go up although when it finally does get let loose from the manipulation the value of the dollars used to buy it will have evaporated.
ReplyDeleteYesterday was an abject lesson in control...almost 200 tons of gold (paper) flushed within minutes of the FOMC,
IT is different....however not for us plebs.
I do not disagree with your sentiment Dave....I just think the control issue of PM's is alot more than most are willing to admit or even accept.
All that easing goes into the shadow system...never sees the light of day until someone screws up the plan.....I think the whole Knight scenario is just a ruse for placing yet another garbage pile deep within someone else's book.
They have mastered the art of perception......
On Basel III, you may not have noticed its implantation has been indie finely deferred. Rgds, kim
ReplyDeleteMatt Taibbi, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and "Viewpoint" host Eliot Spitzer react to news that the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal and state authorities have opted not to indict HSBC on criminal charges of money laundering. The British bank has reached a deal to pay a settlement of $1.92 billion.
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/qEPuGGcaiUI
Full audio of your secretary/treasurer's interview yesterday with King World News, emphasizing the confidential International Monetary Fund report obtained by GATA showing that central banks conceal their gold leases and swaps to facilitate secret market intervention --
ReplyDeletehttp://www.gata.org/node/12027
Not that practically anyone who can fog a spoon doesn't already know the war on drugs is a complete joke the latest HSBC settlement for decades of narco money laundering makes it official
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213
Thanks for sharing all of this information. How much is gold worth these days? I understand that it can a good in vestment in future.
ReplyDeleteUS Gold Bureau
There appears to be no visible effect on the POG from the new Basel III rules. I think it is a non-starter in price improvement for Gold.
ReplyDelete